Chapter Text
It’s raining. Thunder and comic-book flashes of lightning, the perfect dark and stormy night. Victor lets it wash over him, flattening his hair to his forehead, sliding down the leather of his coat. His childhood home looks like a fortress in the dark, rather than the sanitized white McMansion it is in the day. No lights are on inside.
He considers the possibility that his parents may not be home- he’d checked to make sure they’re not on one of their tours, but a vapid holiday somewhere overseas isn’t out of the question. He laughs bitterly at the idea of him waiting in that house for them to get home like he had so many times as a child, and slams his car door shut. His cane clinks against the concrete drive as he approaches the front door.
There’s not a spare key hidden under the floormat anymore, Victor’s intended route of entry. Briefly, he scans the front walkway for a fake rock or conspicuous houseplant, but the only decoration besides the ancient metal-plated sign reading their address is one of his mother’s garden statues that looks far too heavy to lift.
Victor reaches into his coat pocket for his gun, and shoots the front door open.
Swinging the door open, he can sense nothing from within the maw of the house, no frightened nerves heading his way to figure out what all that noise was. For a moment, his mind flashes to a memory of being admonished by his father as a child, shattered pieces of porcelain on the floor beneath his feet. Hoping to cut short his criticism, Victor had reached out to pick up one of the shards and cut himself on it instead, blood welling red to the surface in seconds.
Disappointed, the male Dr. Vale had shaken his head. "You see?" he'd said "When you break things, this is what happens."
Victor stomps his foot over the threshold, fighting the ingrained urge to take off his boots. The house looks just like how he remembers it- flat and minimalist, every rare decoration perfectly arranged. The place is sterile, one part due to an extensively employed cleaning crew, and another part due to the fact his parents seem to be allergic to ever being in their own multi-million dollar house. Dragging a gloved hand along the wall and knocking a few framed pictures of the Vietnamese coastline askew, he idly wonders if his parents would find some sort of link between the state of his childhood home and his adolescent desire to become a doctor, or if his father had found interior design inspiration in the halls of the psych wards he’d worked in before he met Victor’s mother.
He makes his way through the living room, pointedly ignoring the stairs that lead to his childhood bedroom, making his way towards the kitchen. It’s just as empty as the rest of the house, illuminated only by the cool light of a plug-in wall sconce. However, unlike the rest of the place, Victor sees something here that’s out of place.
The kitchen table is covered in papers, the white of the pages blending into the tabletop itself and, in the lowlight, appearing as if the table itself has been printed with miniscule Helvetica and then marred with red pen and highlighter. Victor sees the flash of what his senior art project could have been, butchered books unfolding like the chest during an autopsy, and takes a step closer.
It takes a moment for his tired eyes to adjust to the light, but the words couldn’t be more clear. Dai and Miriam Vale are writing a new book.
Victor picks up a page at random. Scanning, it takes a moment for the overblown prose to make sense, but when it does, something twists in Victor’s stomach.
“It can be tempting, when faced with a misbehaving, unruly, or even violent child, to raise your voice, to fight back, to punish. This, in a way, is what they want- acting out is a child’s way of asking for attention, and parents are easy scapegoats for tumult they may be feeling in their personal life. In situations like these, it can be best to teach by example, not by mediation. Show your child that despite their confusing emotions, both their life and yours will go on despite it, and you, as the adult, as the role model, are not worried about it.”
Victor slams the paper down onto the table. His mother and father are writing a book on, of all things, parenting. The absurdity of the situation makes him bark out a laugh. His parents, who failed to succeed on even the most basic of parenting principles (whether he means “making sure your son doesn’t end up in prison, dead, or worse” or “spend time with your child”, he’s not sure, but certainly, they’ve failed at both) are going to be teaching a generation of new families their… “purely psychological approach to child-rearing”, as a scribbled note on one of the margins states.
Nearly growling in frustration, Victor shuffles through the mess of papers, picking up a new page. “Feelings of Failure: How To Cope When Your Relationship With Your Child Is Struggling” reads the heading. He starts to laugh again at the biting irony of it all, but a fragment of a sentence catches his eye.
“Sometimes, despite all that we have been instructed, approaching our relationships with our children through the lens of love can be the most fear-inducing part of this whole process.”
For some reason, he thinks about Sydney, standing in the dark by the Merit City Limits sign, bloody shoulder clutched in one hand. There had been rain on his face that night, window rolled down in he and Mitch’s stolen car.
He reads more.
“No fear is more crippling than that of letting down our children. We are supposed to be their rocks, the faces they can look for in a crowd or a supermarket, their defense against evil. Having to confront our own flaws, our own mistakes, is what-”
The pain in Victor’s limbs flares, and he leans against the table, clutching it for support. Hanging his head, he drops the page in his hand down to its surface. With the pain comes frustration. What kind of self-important nerve do these people have, shelling out advice on how to raise a child when their own son is here in their kitchen and they don’t know it, nerves and brain broken in a way they couldn’t even begin to understand.
The words in front of him start to blur, turning into a pathologizing soup of childhoods and mistakes and masturbatory advice. It makes him sick, thinking about the story of his childhood being taxonomized like this, sold on grand scale so his parents can… what? Afford their retirement a third time over? Pay off student loans he didn’t take out on the education he never finished? Pay some talented publicist to hide all records of their son’s arrest, so their loyal book and webinar buyers will never know the ways they failed, the way he failed?
Victor wonders if that’s something Mitch could have potentially done, erased their criminal records, given them a clean slate, but before he can even finish the thought of what they would even do with that fresh slate, he’s shaking his head to dismiss the thought. Legal records aren’t the facts of what he’s done, and the truth is some hands are too bloody for even Mitch’s expert computer work to make clean.
Besides, the two of them got arrested far back enough that there must still be paper records, papers like the ones in front of him now, papers begging for a black sharpie to deface them, papers that can be turned to ash by a gifted blue lighter or a can of gasoline, like file folders or girls.
The hand not clinging to the table forms a fist, and he drags it through the piles of paper, sending it all down to the floor in a storm of white.
He wonders what it would be like if that could happen, computer records expunged and birth certificates burned. If he could have never existed.
His reverie is broken by movement at the front door, the creak of hinges and whispers of hushed voices.
Finally, somebody’s home.
Victor takes his gun from his coat pocket and undoes the safety, holding it idly by his side. With his other hand, he picks up his cane. He retraces his steps, walking slowly but purposefully back into the “family” room, back into the hallway.
His parents have aged. He shouldn’t be surprised, he knows, being that the last time he saw them face to face was years ago, before the stretching years of his solitary confinement, but seeing the lines on their faces turned into valleys by the moonlight, he can hardly recognize them.
His father holds out an umbrella like a weapon, and they’re dressed like they’ve been out, perfectly steamed and pressed and ironed. His mother carries a large paper carryout bag from a restaurant he vaguely remembers. They’re both shorter than him now. They almost look like children.
“Victor?” Miriam Vale asks, “Is that really you?”
He smiles, and spreads his hands, still holding on to his gun. “In the flesh.”
"What are you-" his father starts. Victor can see that his black hair is steadily going grey.
"Come on. Don't you want a visit from your only son? This could be a homecoming, if you wanted it.”
The words are thick with venom. He knows that's the last thing his parents, so ashamed of him and his failings, would ever want.
"We thought you were dead," Miriam says, voice defensive. "Or at least, long gone… we'd heard rumors, but we could never be sure."
Dai nods, mouth a straight line. "Nothing was ever a fact."
Victor throws his head back, and laughs. "Is that why you felt like you could write another book? Because no one could look you up and link you to me? Because you could tell the story the way you wanted and no one could argue if there was no one there?"
His parents exchange a look. "You read it?" Miriam asks, voice trembling.
"Of course I read it. You two left it on the kitchen table where anyone could see."
"In our own house, you-" his father starts, then closes his eyes, taking a deep breath. No doubt employing some move he's shelled out to thousands of hopeless people. In that moment, Victor hates his parents more than anyone he's ever known. More than Eli, more than dozens of useless doctors, more than himself.
"How could you delude yourselves like that?" he asks, voice verging on hysteria. "How could you think you're even capable of telling other people how to raise their kids when your own child is just a problem to be solved?"
"Victor…" Miriam says. "You're clearly upset about something."
He tries to run his hands through his hair in frustration, but his fingers get tangled into a knotted strand, stopping him in his path. He yanks at it, hair snapping away from his skull, and his parents just watch, pity in their eyes.
If you don't want to be treated like a child, stop acting like one, he remembers himself saying. When was that? How many deaths ago?
He straightens, and aims the gun at his parents.
"Enough," he says, willing finality into his voice.
"What do you want from us?" his father asks.
Victor gives his best heartless smile. "Money. And then to never see you again."
He says the words, but something inside him feels hollow, broken. Has he always felt like this? What does it feel like, when he’s not this worthless black hole of a person?
His parents look at each other, and one of them sighs.
“We still keep the safe upstairs.”
Victor raises an eyebrow in surprise. Old fashioned, even after all this time. In his teenage years, he’d sometimes entertained himself while alone in the house by trying over and over to break the code to the safe, laying on the ground with scribbled number combinations surrounding him. He’d never gotten it, but that wasn’t the point.
He keeps the gun trained on his parents, and gestures for them to walk upstairs first. It’s nothing he hasn’t done before, but tonight the grandstanding and the threats feels less like his own actions, and more like something he’s watched in a movie. Maybe he has seen something like this before, half asleep on the couch while Mitch watched one of his classics. He lets the thought echo through the hollow of his chest, and follows his parents through the blank space of the stairwell and down the hall.
Dai and Miriam are nearly in the home office containing the safe, but Victor is paused once again. He stands in the doorframe of his childhood bedroom, staring blankly at it. It’s too dark to see inside, but he can tell things are just the way he left them. He wonders if there was ever a point in his life where he could have become anything but this.
Once again, he wishes to wipe his slate clean. How had he described Sydney’s powers, again? A second chance?
He was wrong when he said that, because this is no real second chance. All he has is a never ending continuation.
He hears his parents whispering to each other, and he breaks himself from his reverie. Slowly, he steps out of the doorway, and back in to playing his part