Chapter Text
He was dizzy by lunchtime.
No, if he was being honest, he was dizzy by the time he stepped off the bus, he was just biting through it with a stubborn jaw and a mind that clung fondly to the memory of the cold shower that morning. Even with the crimson that ran in coagulated clumps down the drain.
But they had woken up late, and it had been a choice between breakfast or a shower—not that he had eaten since breakfast the day before, but at the time it still seemed like the right choice. His back had throbbed with a stinging fire that rattled out in waves along his back in an electrical current.
Just like it throbbed now, screaming from the weight of the backpack that rubbed the coarse grains of his hand-me-down shirt into the raised welts. He couldn’t just carry it in one hand. Because he never did that, and as unobservant and self-absorbed as most people were, he couldn’t risk one exception to that rule noticing the change.
Even though it was doubtful—someone noticing him; the new kid, the foster kid, the kid that was tackled in flag football at least once per game because sorry coach, we didn’t understand the rules.
Just like he was tackled in PE that day, the shoulder in his spine landing like a wall against his back, like every blow he had taken from Hank the night before was laid out all over again.
Eliot hit the floor, the smooth wood grains cool against his fevered skin. His ears rang. Knees burned from the fall just lay limp against the icy ground. Icy ground against fire in his back. Fire and sweat and salt that burned every atom.
Something floated to him on the fog in his mind, voices all around through the ringing. No—not all around. In the distance, somewhere.
“You… to believe… so stupid? You’ve played this game—before Cassidy!”
Cassidy. Cassidy. Good name for a big jerk.
His eyes peeled open, blinking against the harsh light. Blurs everywhere. Blue with pupils narrowed down to pinpricks, Eliot watching from outside himself as sweat beaded on his forehead and trickled down into his eye, splitting between his lashes as they moved in a slow blink. He barely felt the sting.
“Sorry, I guess I just got excited.”
“Well do it one more time and I guess you’ll just get detention!”
Eliot chuckled. Coach was a funny guy.
Sweat pooled around him. Something warm and thick spread on his back. He didn’t think of it. The school shirts were black.
Coach was a funny guy.
“Spencer! You alright?”
Something in him snapped back into place—right before a hand landed on his shoulder. He twisted to the side, dragging himself to his feet. It was effortless at this point to paste on a quick grin, dusting himself off as if nothing happened. The pain radiating into his bones from his back was just that. Pain. Just a feeling, nothing he hadn’t survived and pushed through a million times before—he’d be fine.
“Yes sir. Just didn’t want to move so fast I missed something,” he said, with a predatory glare over coach’s shoulder at Cassidy. The brunette jock, bulked with muscle on his frame, just glared back.
Just try something, skinny, he mouthed.
He didn’t stop glaring, through the sweat-drenched hair that hung in his face. Concealing the pallor of his skin, the bags under his eyes. “I’ll be fine,” he gritted out to the coach.
“I’d feel better if I sent you to the nurse’s office, you look a little shaky.”
That got Eliot’s attention. “No sir, I’m fine! Just adrenaline, y’know that deer in headlights look after a good rush?”
Coach looked skeptical. Behind him, Cassidy looked smug. Kid had no idea that it wasn’t him that Eliot was scared of.
He was never scared of jocks. Jocks had no power. Most of them Eliot could knock down even being half their weight and having half their muscle. They were big clunking tanks with no motivation of the mind and a lot of ego.
There were far worse things to fear.
“Alright,” coach said, releasing a tension in Eliot’s shoulders he didn’t know was there. The burn on his back stayed. “But you’ll sit out the rest of this class. Go get changed.”
Eliot smirked—that was a bonus, an empty locker room. Getting changed at the start of class was complicated enough to make sure none of his torso was seen. “Yes sir.”
This time, when Eliot peeled his shirt off, some of it stuck. Worse, a quick check on the inside of the material showed far more than blood, with globs of yellow standing out amongst the red, clumps of half-dried pus.
Damn.
He shoved the shirt in his backpack, hoping he could get it cleaned before anyone noticed. Since no one was around, and he still had a good twenty minutes until the end of PE, he took advantage of the showers, cold water sluicing the sweat off his body as he contorted his arms as much as he could with a bar of soap, scrubbing his back.
Pain. Just a feeling. Just a feeling.
The room spun around him.
Just a feeling.
He didn’t remember toweling himself off, or getting changed, all that stood out to him was when he checked his back in one of the few mirrors inside the locker room.
It shouldn’t have been that bad.
He had taken beatings before, far worse than Hank dished out last night, and it shouldn’t have been that bad.
Eliot tried to stop the shakes as he stepped out of the locker room, narrowly avoiding Cassidy and his gang as they entered. Lots of glares there—that he ignored, because it shouldn’t have been that bad.
His backpack felt so much heavier now, pressing against his back with a sharper pain. There was something wrong.
But it was fine. It would be fine. He had faced worse before, he had healed, he had moved on. Nothing would be different this time.
Turning towards his next class, he ignored the niggling voice in the back of his mind, the one that pointed out the weakness in his limbs, like he hadn’t eaten in a week—pointed out the pounding headache, the flush he felt in his face, the clammy feeling in his throat, the slight rattle of his inhale, the tremor in his hands, the way the room spun around him with every step.
It would be fine.
It had to be fine.
—
Another Wednesday. Hump day, life’s all downhill from here.
Yeah, right.
Marsh finished writing out the last date sequences of the Gilded Age on the board, listening to the students filing into the room, when the door slammed open.
The chalk in his hand snapped, spraying on his clothes. Gritting his teeth, he turned around, steeling himself against the instinctive reaction to snap at the student who just barreled through the door like an elephant on speed. Because no matter what these kids through at him, at the end of the day he liked the luxury of knowing he had stayed somewhat in control—of himself, if nothing else.
The teenager dragging himself away from the door was on the shorter side, with dark brown hair that had been bleached by the sun at the tips—it was long enough for it, hanging past his jawline and almost past his shoulders in the back, still wet from what Marsh had to assume was PE.
He didn’t know what Coach Ryan was doing to those kids these days, but this one looked like he had been through the ringer—face pale with a flush of red across the nose and legs that barely looked to be holding him up. The boy collapsed in a chair near the back, and even from across the room Marsh could see his grimace.
Eliot Spencer, his mind supplied, remembering the day before when he had been pulled out of the class. He had heard about what happened with Mr. Hall from the middle school. Personally, Marsh had always found him to be a giant prick, but it didn’t put points on Spencer’s board to have punched him in front of three of his life authorities. Hopefully his father had talked to him appropriately on the subject—these days, no one could tell.
What concerned him the most though, was the way the boy’s eyes lolled to the side—visible even at a distance. Drug use wasn’t as nonexistent as the school board would like it to be. Not rampant, but it was still common.
He would just keep an eye on him—right then he had a class to teach.
“Alright! Miss Stacy, please shut the door behind you. Today, we’re covering the last of the Industrialists to the end of Theodore Roosevelt’s term in office…”
Time passed quickly, as it typically did when he got to rant about his favorite topic. Much less get paid for it, as his sister constantly teased him over. Nonetheless Marsh was looking forward to the day when he could finally finish his masters, move to a college, be a professor, and have students with at least a smidge less hormonal disturbance.
But thankfully, today, disturbances were minimal. Paul Conner’s habit of passing notes was kept under control with a few pointed glares in his direction, and Sydney Renan wasn’t present for him to have to forcibly take her gum. He kept glancing at Spencer, noting the way the boy’s eyes just stared distantly at some point far past the board, unmoving. None of him was moving, except the way his shoulders were slightly more slumped, his head just a little lower every time Marsh reminded himself to check on the teen.
Drug use? Maybe it was just exhaustion. He could give the kid the benefit of the doubt, it wasn’t difficult when the only disturbance Spencer had ever caused was when he had to leave the class early yesterday—and that wasn’t exactly his fault. Overall the kid was reserved, if distracted, but respectful.
He didn’t like to put kids on the spot, but when Spencer’s head started to dip towards the desk he couldn’t help himself but snapping, “Spencer!” before he really thought.
The teen’s head snapped up. He grimaced, face just as pale as ever. “Yes sir?”
The words were slurred.
Maybe it was drugs.
Marsh raised an eyebrow. “Maybe use your free period to take a nap?”
That got a few chuckles throughout the room. He almost felt bad about it, especially when what he could only describe as exhausted panic crossed Spencer’s face. He squinted, like he was trying to read something incredibly important but couldn’t quite see it, his mouth opening and closing like his vocal tract was failing him.
“Yes sir,” he finally said. The words were clearer, now.
Marsh nodded, but hesitated to take his eyes off the boy as he turned to point to another date on the board. “Right. Another issue discovered in this era—”
“Mr. Marsh!” Stacy screamed.
It happened in slow motion. He turned, just in time to see Spencer’s eyes finish rolling up inside his skull, the teen’s limp body sliding out of his seat. It collided with the ground in a dead thud, like a lid slamming shut.
“Spencer!” Marsh rushed around his desk, pushing past standing gawkers. “Get back, give him room!”
The other students huddled back as he slammed down next to the kid, pushing thick hair away from his neck to check his pulse. He didn’t even look up when he spoke.
“Liam, go get the nurse, now! Conner, call 911!”
Marsh growled, panic clenching his chest at the faint sputtering heartbeat of the kid sprawled prone in front of him. Liam had already left—the door slamming open and his sneakers squeaking down the hall at a fast pace. Conner was slower—the emergency phone was in the corner, but it wasn’t long before he heard the teen’s shaky voice rattle off an address.
It was only then that he remembered the other students—the low murmurs throughout the room, shuffling movements in a panic.
“Everybody, out—go to Miss Renald’s class. Now!”
He ignored the scrambling mass of students, leaving fast enough that it might as well have been a fire. His attention, his world narrowed down to the boy who’s heartbeats he kept counting, as he waited, praying that he wouldn’t have to do CPR.
After the students left, before the nurse came, the paramedics, everyone else, and Marsh was shoved out of the picture, a stillness fell. It settled over the room, broken only by Marsh’s shaky breaths and the boy’s shallow rasps.
That was when he saw it, past the strands of the boy’s hair scattered across his shoulders—the puckered bit of flesh that poked out from under the kid’s collar. It wasn’t two seconds later that the first crimson bud bled through the black of his shirt, like glistening oil.
Eliot was unresponsive, oblivious, when shaky fingers tugged up his hem, exposing his back to the cold air of the classroom.
Marsh gagged, clamping his mouth shut to swallow the bile threatening to shoot from the knots twisted in his stomach.
Welts layered upon welts upon scars, broken skin ruptured from the damage lined with pussing sores, oozing slow yellow onto his inflammed back. Skin mottled the darkest purple, black across his spine. Almost every welt ended with a rupture—a rupture lined with upraised swelling in a half-circle. A buckle.
The macabre painting wrapped itself around the boy’s body like it was a broken canvas, the lines of paint soaking deep through flesh down to bone. Bones that stood out like raised bumps on a blind man’s book, skin stretched across them with little padding. So tight that Marsh could see where the shafts of his ribs didn’t align. Three of them, clumped under the skin in bulges that had swollen outward and looked near rupturing. One that already had.
He didn’t know how long he stared, heartbeat all but forgotten, before the nurse came. Before the paramedics came, before the nurse half-lead him down into a seat while professionals crowded around the vulnerable body, throwing words far over Marsh’s head as they worked in tangent to load him onto a stretcher. Face down.
He didn’t see it when Eliot’s eyes flickered open. Didn’t hear the murmured, half-panicked Parker that slipped out of Eliot’s mouth. As movement in front of him kept blurring out of frame.
But hell, if he didn’t hear it the second time. The name coming out as broken and cracking as the boy who said it, just as he was lifted onto the stretcher.
He jerked against the hands that held him, panic rising, flinching away from the cold teeth of scissors stripping away his shirt—the last rip of the cloth tearing away vibrating through him as foreign hands brushed his skin. Gloves. Didn’t touch.
“Park… Parker!” the scream flayed his throat, his voice the last part of his body to betray him, the rest of it already had; lying limp, unresponsive to his cues to push the hands away, his face twisted in pain, water running across his nose, his temple, into his hair. “Stop…”
“You’re gonna be okay, kid—what’s your name?”
A light shined in his eyes. Blinding him. He flinched back, panting hard.
“Stop—”
“You’re alright,” the voice was calm. Too calm. Too calm and belonging to one of the hands that touched him. On their side. Not his. He was the piece of meat. “We’re gonna take care of you. But I really need you to tell me your name.”
“P…Park…” he squeezed his eyes shut, flinching away from a cold touch against his lower back. Piece of meat.
“Parker?”
“Sis… sister. Please, Parker—not… safe. Not safe.” More tears fell—helpless ones. Because he couldn’t move, couldn’t stand, couldn’t fight—and the deal was off. “Please… ssshe’s not—”
“Alright, alright—we’ll get your sister.” The voice was the only thing he could make out, in the dark, amongst the hundreds of other sounds, other words, that roiled together in an ever-turning fog blocking out everything else. “I need your name. To get your sister, I need your name.”
He pressed his lips together, heat washing over him in a wave. Hatred burned in his chest, breaking out of his throat in a half-sob. “Eliot.”
“Eliot.” The touch on his shoulder then, was different than the rest. It was calm, soothing, a grounding point in the chaos and all the other touches and the movement and the pain ripping through a body he could hardly feel, hardly move.
“We’re gonna take care of you, Eliot.”