WHO: Cadence Bone & Eddie Spencer WHAT: Eddie tries to warn Bone, but it doesn't make a difference after all. PROMPT: NONLINEAR NARRATIVE WHEN: Before, during and after Bone's kidnapping in May/June. WHERE: Various! WARNINGS: Talk of kidnapping.
It had been exactly eight days since Portia Huntington had been arrested. Eddie knew this because the date stuck out in his head like it was the birthday or anniversary of a loved one. A little twisted maybe but when your Talemate went and reenacted her tale in the creepiest way possible … well, it wasn’t the sort of thing that just flitted out of your mind when the first distraction came along.
Eddie’s walk home was so worn and tired that half the time he just walked along on autopilot, lost in a cloud of thought. His eyes refocused several times before he took in what they were actually seeing. Once again, his mouth didn’t feel like waiting for his brain to process a single thing. “HEY, hi, Bone?”
The sound of his name made the young man turn around, eyes flitting around quickly, nervously, before settling on who’d called for him and finally relaxing — at least a smidgen.
“Hi Eddie,” he said, stopping to wait up for him, and offered him a smile that looked somewhat off. Tight, or shaky, or nervous: it was unclear. “I, uh, long time no see.” There was no non-awkward way to greet people when you’d been kidnapped for a month. It was these little things that Bone was learning these days.
“Hi,” he repeated the word again, uselessly as he half walked and half ran to catch up. Eddie paused when he was a few steps away from Bone. “Ah,” the sound tumbled out of his mouth as he stood paralyzed for a few seconds, unsure of how exactly to respond to that. “Yeah.” He had of course, seen the place where Bone had been but that was neither here nor there at the moment. “How --uh -- how are you now?”
The taller boy shrugged with one shoulder, bonier than before. He didn’t know how to answer that. Nothing he said seemed right. “Just glad to be here,” he muttered after an awkward moment, and searched for something else to say to hide his discomfort, to not make Eddie think that it was because of him. Because that was a conversation he absolutely didn’t know how to start. “And — you?”
It had been a dumb question, Eddie could instantly tell, but what else were you even supposed to ask in these situations? No one made ‘Sorry you were kidnapped!’ greeting cards, he’d checked. “I’m fine, I mean, I can’t complain, like. At all.” No one could, not right now. “I’m just glad you’re not -- you know -- dead.” A stupid thing to say, but whichever fairy handed out tact had never bothered to bless Eddie with any.
“Me too,” he replied, a little wry. Luckily he wasn’t the sort to be offended, or upset. Shifting the strap of his messenger bag over his shoulder, he let the silence linger for a second, as he tried to figure out how to say what he wanted to say. I don’t blame you, you know that? combined with I wish I had listened poorly, and the only thing he managed to say was, “It’s over now.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Eddie was quick to agree. He wasn’t sure what else there was to say now. There was no script for this kind of situation. “Anyway, it was … good seeing you.” He finally offered awkwardly as he took a step back.
“Yeah,” Bone echoed, but offered a half-smile, and it was genuine, “good seeing you too.”
In the little hut where he was kept, he had no sense of time. There were no windows and no clocks. Every day — though he could only assume that it was a day — two things happened, and they were the only two things that gave any meaning to time.
One: Portia came. It wasn’t during the day — there would have been light streaming in from the door when she opened it and slipped in. She said nothing, only placed a tray of food on the empty bookshelf and waited. Waited for him to change, and when that was done, waited for him to pick up the potion from the tray, which he always did, and drink it down.
Two: His mother called, in pulses. A few times the first day, then speeding up to intense, staccato bursts that had him near clawing at the walls to get to her, and later settling in a desperate rhythm. He had no response other than to bear it, the constant need followed by the stab of it, imagining her blood dripping off of her hand.
For the time between those markers, though, there was nothing to do. The only thing he had was his own thoughts, but even those were muddled by whatever Portia was giving him. Among his delirium there came pockets of coherence, and in those pockets sometimes he thought of Eddie. Eddie, who had seen him. Here. Who had tried to warn him. When had he seen him? Was it these moments, that he had seen, the ones happening right now? Was it yesterday’s? Would it be tomorrow’s?
The thought that it could be now, what the younger boy had seen, that Eddie-of-the-past could be seeing him right now, was an odd sort of thing to latch on to. But Bone grabbed onto it nonetheless, and it helped him keep himself together.
He was getting really sick of hearing it: It’s not your fault.
That bullshit line only led to an emotional breakthrough if you were Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. Eddie had pointed this out countless times at varying degrees of volume but that hadn’t stopped people from saying it.
As if it hadn’t occurred to him. As if he hadn’t already examined the idea and found it lacking.
Because there were lots of little ways that he could make the statement false if he really wanted to. There were plenty of things that he could have done in hindsight.
He could have been a thousand times more irritating, he could have kept bothering Bone until he promised to do something to prevent the vision. He could have bypassed the older boy altogether, taken the information straight to the WPD instead of waiting until after Bone was missing to report the dream.
There was, of course, one major problem with all of the “could haves” and that was the fact that the dream itself had been lacking. He couldn’t ascertain a location, a date, a captor. He couldn’t see anything useful.
And he could have tried to control his power earlier, he could have put in a little effort beyond the desperate attempts to stop the dreams altogether.
But he hadn’t. He’d had more than ten years and he hadn’t bothered to try.
So maybe it was his fault.
On an otherwise regular day in an otherwise regular week, Bone first heard about the windowless room.
A hand fell on his shoulder, which, at an earlier time — or a later — would have had him jump, but on that day he just looked up, and turned around. His face was calm, impassive, but relaxed into something friendlier when he saw who it was. “Hi, Eddie. What’s up?”
“Uhh,” this was always the awkward part and even though he’d practiced what to say all morning the words never seemed to come out the same way. “Hi. So. I had this dream, and you were there…” except this wasn’t The Wizard of Oz. Eddie shook his head. “I couldn’t get a read on when or where but it was … you were being held? Like in someone’s house? Like … kidnapped or something.”
Bone’s hand was gripping the strap of his backpack, and it tightened, uncontrollably, at the word kidnapped. But otherwise his expression stayed blank, though his eyes darted across Eddie’s face, looking for something or other.
“Oh,” was all he could say at first. He knew about Eddie’s power, but had never actually been on this end of it. He wasn’t sure what to say. Paranoia rose thick in his throat, but he swallowed it back down. He’d been getting better at this, at not seeing a kidnapper around every corner. He didn’t need to go backwards. “Do you…” but he’d already said he didn’t know when or where. Instead of finishing his sentence he shifted the weight of his bag on his shoulder, uncertain. “Thanks for telling me.”
“Sorry,” Eddie mumbled. He hated these kinds of visions, it would have been so much easier to tell Bone he was going to win the lottery or ace the final he’d been worried about. “If I uh -- if I see it again and there’s more detail I’ll let you know. I just figured … I should tell you right away so.”
“Yeah,” the taller boy replied. His mouth felt a little dry, but he told himself that there was probably nothing that could be done about it. That maybe, maybe it wouldn’t even happen at all. “That makes sense. I’ll… I’ll keep it in mind.”
He wouldn’t, not if he wanted to keep his sanity. He couldn’t. He was getting better.