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strawberrysoup · 4 years

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Let’s Review || Chapter 11

Peter Parker knew that his big sister would do anything for him to be safe and happy. She’d given up everything for him twice over already and would do it again in a heartbeat. And that’s why, when the criminal mastermind Tony Stark started inextricably following him around, he didn’t say a word. Because he knew without a doubt Penny would do whatever she had to if it meant keeping Peter safe. He had to protect her, just like she always protected him. He never considered what would happen if Stark decided both Parker siblings were worth taking. Never considered who else in Stark’s inner circle would agree. He just wanted to protect her and yet somehow, they both ended up with needles in their necks.

relationship: Steve Rogers/Original Female Character/Bucky Barnes, background Peter Parker/Tony Stark rating: Explicit/18+ warnings: Dark Steve Rogers, Dark Bucky Barnes, Dark Tony Stark, Dark Avengers, kidnapping, non-con/dub-con elements, underage Peter Parker, emotional and psychological abuse, very dark

There was a weird sense of urgency and purpose when the soldiers appeared to collect her from the kitchens. They weren’t frantic per say, but she was definitely aware of a certain energy around them. As soon as Bucky walked through the doors, he made a beeline for her and swept her up into his arms. The pair were pretty touchy feely with her as a rule, but this was different for some reason.

Most of Penny’s irritation had dissolved with the excellent meal she’d received. Chef Cohen had prepared Shakshuka, a very traditional dish that she hadn’t eaten since her mother had died. She’d burst into tears at the first bite and thanked him profusely through the meal. He was a very kind man in his late 50’s who explained that he was at her disposal whenever she was hungry, literally at any time, and would make whatever she asked for. She didn’t even have to know what she wanted specifically, all she had to do was ask for food and he would whip something up in less than an hour.

She wasn’t sure if he understood her circumstances. He never let on that he had any idea what the situation was and she was too afraid to tell him and potentially put him in danger. He was so nice, had told her about his family— she couldn’t do anything to jeopardize him. And if he did know, she decided she’d rather him not tell her. He felt like he could be a friend if not a confidant and she couldn’t ruin that.

“Did you have a good breakfast precious?” Bucky’s voice was nearly a coo, burying her into his arms and nuzzling against the side of her face, “I’m so sorry, baby, I’m so sorry we didn’t realize how hungry you were. We should’ve noticed, we should’ve taken better care of you.”

Penny didn’t get a chance to answer before Steve came up behind her, pressing against her back and wrapping around the both of them, “we’re gonna do a better job from now on, doll, I promise.”

“We’re gonna take you to see Bruce for a check up, okay?” the brunet pressed against her brushed his lips over her temple, “Peter said you haven’t been to the doctor in a while, he’s just going to make sure you’re alright. If there’s anything you want to talk to him about, we’ll step out of the room.”

For a moment, she considered not answering. She hated that they were making her do anything, that they were telling her what was going to happen instead of asking, but she hadn’t been to a doctor in nearly 10 years. In fact, her desire to go to the doctor was outweighing her irritation. The food had helped too.

“Yeah, okay,” she nodded in agreement, ignoring their mutual smiles as Bucky pulled back and wrapped an arm around her waist, tugging her close before beginning to walk back towards the elevators.

It didn’t take long to get to the doctor’s office, which was actually a lab. In the back of her head she remembered Tony saying that Bruce was a scientist that Peter liked to learn from. It would’ve endeared the man to her, if he wasn’t so fucking complicit in her kidnapping. The same thing had happened with Clint; he seemed like such a decent guy, they could’ve been friends in any other situation, and yet he wasn’t doing anything to help her.

“Hey guys, come on in, I’m just finishing this up,” Bruce called from behind a computer, gesturing towards a table that almost resembled the chair from a doctor’s office.

Steve lifted her up, setting her on the edge and giving her what was—fuck that was winning smile. She refused to let her heart race, remembering back to once upon a time in the coffee shop when she’d thought he was incredibly attractive and so, so nice. It was almost distracting. He leaned down and brushed his nose against hers sweetly, pressing a kiss there a moment later before backing away.

“Alright Penny, I went ahead and pulled your medical records,” Penny didn’t want to know how he’d done that, what an invasion of privacy, “but we’re going to need to go through a lot of it now since you haven’t seen a doctor in so long and you’re a lot older now. If at any time you’re uncomfortable answering questions in front of Bucky and Steve, all you have to do is let me know and I’ll send them out, okay?”

“Okay,” nervousness was thrumming through her a bit more now- God she hadn’t been to the doctor in so long, she wasn't sure what to expect.

An arm came around her shoulders, a metal hand settling over the top of her arm. Bucky had saddled up as close to the table as possible, trying to offer comfort through his presence. She would absolutely never admit that she leaned into his heat a little, or that the attempt was even fractionally successful.

The appointment wasn't as nerve wracking as she'd expected; there were a lot of questions about her past medical history and family medical history, her habits regarding smoking and drinking and exercise, he looked in her eyes and ears and listened to her breathing, did she have any allergies or take any medications? It was a lot of things she remembered from going to the doctor as a kid.

There was only one time when her heart felt like it might burst out of her chest: Bruce mentioned wanting to do a blood test. It was important in part because she hadn't ever had one, but also because she was Jewish and there were dozens of diseases passed genetically through the population. She knew of them of course, Tay-sachs and Gauchers and a slew of other things, but she'd never considered she could have them— there was no time.

Luckily, he'd decided it wasn't a good time since she had barely been eating. Escape had been on her mind almost constantly since waking up in Stark's home but never so critically as when she thought there would be needles involved. Penny's fear of needles had started as a child and overtime had become an overwhelming, if irrational, phobia. The kidnapping via injection certainly made it worse too.

Bruce finished up, continuing to address her rather than Steve or Bucky. It seemed peculiar for some reason, that he was being sure to treat her like her own person instead of the soldiers' property.

"Have you ever had blood drawn Penny?"

"Uhm, no," she did her best not to shift, not wanting to show weakness, "I'm sure it's not really necessary. I feel completely fine and—"

"There are certain genetically linked diseases I can test for with a blood panel. The fact that you probably have anemia is a little worrying because of your heritage. Now we can’t do the test today, you haven’t been eating or drinking enough, but we’ll keep an eye on your recovery over the next few days and schedule one. That being said, I want to hook up an IV for a few hours, you’re very dehydrated.”

“No, thank you,” Penny stood up from the table, composing her face carefully and putting her hands on her hips, “I’d rather just drink water.”

“Penny I can tell you haven’t been getting enough hydration for days,” Bruce stated, ignoring the semi-panicked looks the soldiers sent each other, “Whatever your reasoning was, it’s hurting you. A drip will rehydrate you relatively quickly and you can get on with your day.”

“I’m not in any critical danger, drinking water will be enough,” usually she wouldn’t argue with a doctor but if he came near her with a needle she would throw down.

“Doll, it’s not an option.”

God, how many times had she heard that. It’s not an option. It’s not an option. Nothing was ever an option. She’d been kidnapped, was being held against her will— fuck, she refused to list their sins against her again.

"I'm an adult, I get to decide what medical procedures I do and don't consent to."

"Baby, did you hit your head again? I think we're a little past consent."

How many times would she have to physically fight these motherfuckers before they gave up.

"I hate needles," she snapped, glaring at Steve with as much rage as she could muster, "no blood draws, no IVs, no vaccines, nothing."

Bucky stepped closer to her side, an imploring look on his face, "your health is suffering right now sweetheart, if Bruce says you need an IV, you're going to get it. We're going to take of you, Penny."

They'd done a real stand up job of taking care of her in the last several days for sure. She'd only ended up drugged, concussed twice over, half starved, dangerously sleep deprived, and enraged. The skepticism must've shown on her face because Bucky visibly winced at the implication while Bruce had to turn and pretend to cough to cover his laughter.

"Sweetheart, I understand that it makes you uncomfortable," Steve somehow managed to manifest in front of her in the blink of an eye and she startled backwards a step.

The blond was freakishly fast and Penny was beginning to suspect that everyone calling him and Bucky 'super soldiers' weren't just mocking their demeanors. Steve had been strong enough to snap the lock on the bathroom door like twig, could bodily lift her with just one arm, and he moved a fraction of an inch too fast to be normal. Bucky was similar in the strength department, plus he had that arm. But instead of nearly vibrating with restrained power at all times, Bucky was almost preternaturally still. Even when she moved in the middle of the night and startled him awake, the only way she knew was because his eyes would open. He was so still sometimes she wondered if he even had to breathe, was his heart even beating?

The brunette's arms came to wrap gently around her shoulders from behind; the way he held her was more reminiscent of a loving cuddle than a restraint but it worked all the same. If they didn't want her to go anywhere, it was going to be very hard to run off. The doors to the lab swept open abruptly, as if beckoning her to escape, but no one came through. JARVIS, always looking out.

"I'll make your lives hell," she hissed through gritted teeth, eyes locked on the blond in front of her while Bucky backed them up and sat on the exam chair, tugging her into his lap, "if you come near me with a needle I'll shove it through your eye."

"Penny, be sweet," Bucky's tone was firm, his arms squeezing around her in what she assumed was supposed to be a comforting gesture, "it'll all be okay and you'll feel so much better after."

Penny's eyes were dragged away from Steve when she caught movement, zeroing in on Bruce. He was fiddling with something in crinkly plastic and her blood froze in her veins when she realized it was a sterilized needle. He was preparing an IV despite her protests and panic began coursing through her like poison.

"W-wait, wait I don't need an IV, I swear I feel fine, I'll drink a ton of water, don't do this—"

"It’s gonna be alright babydoll," Steve cooed, understanding that her anger in this case was 100% a result of sheer terror, "Buck's gonna hold you the whole time. Bruce will give you a shot to numb the pain and—"

"No, n-no, no, no please," Penny could barely move as Bucky locked his arms in place, holding her steady while Steve moved to block her view of Bruce, who was filling a syringe with lidocaine.

"Shhhh, just watch me, baby," the blond brought his hands up to cup her face, manipulating her head to face him dead on, "don't pay attention to Bruce, just keep your eyes on mine."

Tears of panic and fear began falling from her eyes, overwhelming terror beginning to consume her. There was no rationalizing the phobia, no talking herself through the fear, all she could think was I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die. When she could hear the doctor's footsteps shift in their direction, she opened her mouth and started to scream bloody murder. Thrashing wasn't effective in the least but she did the best she could, jerking every inch of her body as violently as possible. She couldn't hear anything any of them were saying, she couldn't even hear her own screams; all she could hear was the blood rushing through her ears and the mantra, I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die over and over again in her head.

"Dr. Banner, sir is currently on his way and asks that you wait to perform any procedures until he arrives."

Bucky tensed under her but Penny barely noticed. The edges of her vision were going dark and Steve wasn't so much holding her face in place anymore as trying to caress her cheeks and jaw. She could see the doors to the lab, still open as if waiting for her to run.

Instead, Stark came through them. There was a tightness to his usual swagger and she wondered if she was imagining the irritation in the lines of his face.

"You know I thought I had sound proofed all of the labs, but I can hear my poor girl screaming from three floors away," he commented casually as he swept in, easily pushing past Steve and stealing Penny from Bucky's lap, pulling her into the cage of his arms, "now this is over an IV, correct?"

"Please, please, please—" Penny's voice choked off in a sob as she tried to tug away and make a break for the door.

"Shhhh, angel, look at me," Tony carefully manipulated her head, making her look up at him through her panic, "you're going to drink plenty of water and relax all day, understand? You're going to eat plenty and drink so much water you have to pee every thirty minutes."

"N-no needles—"

"That's right baby, no needles," he pulled her into his chest and hushed her, stroking her hair gently while giving the three men behind her a careful look, "with supervision you'll be fine without an IV, but you have to be good, do everything you're told. Can you be a good girl for me, Penny?"

Steve and Bucky watched as their girl nodded against the man's shoulder, still crying. This wouldn't be strike two, not quite since she'd gotten so upset as a result of them trying to take care of her, but apprehension was setting in. Tony was their friend, but he wouldn't put their feelings before Penny's and that was a dangerous position to be in. Especially considering JARVIS had all but jumped ship on them and was firmly on Penny's side.

"Now, is there anything else Brucie Bear? Because I think Penny here is gonna come with me to the labs and watch Peter try to make a robot."

Somehow, despite the fact that they knew Penny hated Tony just as much if not more than she hated them, he was the one who managed to get through to her. Tony Stark was her mortal enemy, the kidnapper, the pedophile, and yet he was the one holding her while she cried in distress. Bucky and Steve watched on in amazement and disbelief.

There was something about Tony that was just a touch unnatural. The way he could manipulate people was almost beyond comprehension. It showed in his friendships, the way that people who were sent to kill him were so easily turned to his side. People who didn’t want anyone, who didn’t want friends, found themselves enfolded in his presence. It was also apparent in the way that Peter had almost accepted his new situation, how he was so quickly coming to terms with the way his life had changed. Tony Stark was, as far as anyone knew, not enhanced in any way, but some of his companions had started to wonder.

They watched as the older man spirited her away, talking loudly and keeping her tucked under his arm as they walked. Steve and Bucky were left in the dust, feeling dejected once again.

“Leave it to Tony to decide he has more medical authority than me,” Bruce gave a low snort, rolling his eyes, “does he have 7 PHDs? No, he doesn't.”

“We keep fuckin’ it up, don’t we?” Bucky groaned, watching the doctor step back towards his computer system, “We’re gonna end up dead. World War II and HYDRA couldn’t kill us but Tony fuckin’ Stark sure will.”

“Hard to compete with a Goddamn witch,” Steve muttered, running a hand through his hair before crossing his arms over his chest.

“You two need to be doing what Tony is with Peter,” Bruce interjected before the super soldiers could continue to lament their situation, “he panders to him just enough to keep him happy. He can give an inch and Peter thinks its a mile. You’re strategic geniuses, master interrogators, use your strengths.”

The ‘dumbasses’ was implied at the end of the statement. In all fairness, he was right.

Steve exhaled through his nose, a stabilizing breath, before turning to regard Bucky, “A garden, to start. She had a lot of things on her Pinterest account, we’re gonna look through there. JARVIS? Can you please make sure our kitchen is stocked with plenty of kosher foods?”

“And is there anyway we can get the extra room in the apartment turned into a garden? Maybe a rooftop garden?”

“Sir has given me full discretion to green light any construction projects that will aid in Ms. Parker’s adjustment. A section of the roof can easily be cleared for a garden and greenhouse. The east facing wall of the spare room can be replaced with floor to ceiling windows and UV lights can be installed. Might I also suggest a knitting area?”

"Yeah, that," Bucky nodded, "any other suggestions JARV?"

"On her Pinterest Ms. Parker has shown interest in softball, soccer, crocheting, yoga and video games."

"Can you have everything she needs for those things sent for and brought to the apartment? And have everything set up as much as possible considering the renovations that'll be made for the garden room?"

"Yes sergeant, although I would suggest making room in your personal gym for Ms. Parker do to yoga."

“Good idea JARVIS,” Bucky felt a bit of relief that the AI was willing to help, even if it was only because it would help Penny in the long run, “I know we talked about keeping her secluded but I think we should show her the game room, introduce her to Thor and Sam so she can play video games with them.”

Steve looked hesitant. The brunet knew why; they’d waited what felt like so long to find a girl who appealed to both of them. They were possessive by nature and having so little over time, growing up in the Great Depression followed by fighting in the war, only to suffer a hellish betrayal and go into the ice for so long, meant they were covetous. Sharing their girl so soon was uncomfortable and just the idea made both of them chafe.

“Yeah, we should,” he choked after a moment, clearing his throat.

“We’re gonna build a life, Stevie,” Bucky said quietly, stepping closer to the man and putting his hands on his shoulders, “we’re going to work this out with our girl and eventually, she’ll want to be with us as much as she can. But until we get to that point we have to make some concessions.”

“But she’ll still sleep in our bed.”

“Yes Stevie, she’ll still sleep in our bed.”

#steve rogers x oc x bucky barnes #steve rogers x oc #bucky barnes x oc #dark!steve rogers #dark!bucky barnes #dark!tony stark #dark!mcu #let's review #let's review chapter 11

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jemej3m · 5 years

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to the moon and back (p1)

a softer high school au because i love high school aus fuck off i know ive written like ten

also, boys like you (by Who Is Fancy) is a gay vibe and is absolutely the vibe of this fic

part one | part two | part three

Andrew swung his legs from where he was sitting on the picnic table, glaring at Renee sitting beneath him. She grinned with crossed legs, pushing at his feet so they would swing.

Andrew, spiteful as ever, didn’t move unless he had to. Moving was motion and motion caught people’s attention and if Andrew gave him the chance, Kevin would continue to plead with him on refusing to join the exy team.

His brother was on it. His best friends were on it. They played a tonne of cute guys from other schools. That was Kevin’s pathetic attempt at appealing to Andrew, to which Andrew had taken his shiny, new pocket knife and stabbed it into the school cafeteria’s table by Kevin’s clenched fist.

It was only the four at this table - Renee, Kevin, Aaron and himself - who knew about Andrew being gay, and Betsy -- of course.

He’d backed off after that, but Kevin’s cool-down period for pissing Andrew off was irritatingly short. He sat, barely a metre away, looking on at Andrew and Renee silently. Aaron was texting, probably that simpering junior Katelyn. Andrew didn’t like it, but what was he supposed to do about it?

You’re just jealous you don’t have a girlfriend. Aaron had teased him the other week, when Andrew grumbled about his twin’s obsession with the girl. Andrew then sneered about probably being able to fool Katelyn into thinking he was Aaron, and then Betsy had to quell their little cat fight.

They never fought about anything seriously. They’d been thrown into the foster system together at birth, and adopted by Betsy a week after their 10th birthdays. They had fought to survive together: Logically, Andrew knew Katelyn wouldn’t put a divide between something like that. But Aaron was the logical one, and sometimes Andrew couldn’t help but let his anxiety win.

Renee tugged on his sneakers to catch his attention. “How was tutoring yesterday?”

He rolled his eyes with heightened exaggeration. “I got stuck with some kid who’s absolutely abysmal with Literature and History. He can’t drop them, because he’s at the bare minimum, so he’s practically going to be riding me so he can pass all his exams. Typical jock.”

Andrew didn’t add that Neil Josten was hopelessly attractive.

“Well, who is it?” Kevin demanded, in his usual Kevin fashion. He really had no idea how to do anything lightly.

“Neil Josten. Year below us.”

The green-eyed boy looked relieved. “Oh, thank god. Coach was going to kick him off the team if he didn’t focus more on school.”

Wait. What?

“He’s on the fucking exy team.” Andrew muttered under his breath. He couldn’t believe his luck.

“Since when were you on the fucking exy team?” Andrew dropped his things onto the table, not caring about the glowers that other students of the library sent his way for being obnoxiously disruptive.

Andrew is often obnoxiously disruptive in class, but performs extremely well in examinations. He must do a lot of studying at home to achieve that result: He might find that he would have plenty of leisure time if he just listened in class, rather than talking to other students or sleeping.

His report comments were always interesting, as were Betsy’s reactions.

Neil flinched at the noise, which was new. Then he shrugged, avoiding Andrew’s gaze. “Since I started.”

“Right.” Andrew drawled. “And you didn’t think to mention it to me, considering we’re trying to improve your grades to keep you on said team?”

“Sorry.” Neil muttered.

He paused. The boy was awfully withdrawn for an unknown reason: Neil Josten was all spitfire and burning scorn, with bouncing red curls, ice-like blue eyes and freckled cheeks, marred by horrific scarring. He told people it was surgery and acne. That was bullshit: It had to be. “I didn’t want an apology. I want a reason why.”

He shrugged again. “You hate Kevin Day. I didn’t think it would be a good idea to mention him.”

Andrew snorted. “Kevin’s been one of my closest friends since middle school. But I do hate him. He sucks all the way to the moon and back. He wont shut the fuck up about exy because we used to play together.”

“You did?” Neil shot up, the spark somewhat returning to his eye. “You play exy?”

“No.” Andrew told the one-track minded jock. “Get your work out. I’m giving up my time for a reason.”

Neil rolled his eyes. “You volunteered for it.”

No, he didn’t. He was avoiding detention. He told Neil so, but the boy still smirked.

“You still chose to tutor me that sit in a room on your own, which I thought was more your style.”

“Fuck off.” Andrew said decidedly and poked him in the cheek with a pen. Neil scrubbed it off quickly, looking worriedly at the ink coming off on his fingers. Andrew forced himself not to care.

Neil was truly hopeless with these subjects. He might be fluent in multiple others and a natural with mathematic equations, but trying to wrack his brain for anything he could remember about King Lear or the Treaty of Versailles was like getting a stone to bleed.

By the time the hour was over, Andrew’s head hurt. Despite the obvious aggravation Neil caused, he couldn’t get himself to give it up. Neil was too interesting.

When they left the library it was dark outside and the last stragglers like themselves were being shooed off campus. Andrew marched straight to his car. It was excessively expensive, due to the twins receiving their mother’s life inheritance and an extra tidbit from Betsy. They’d never met her: they just knew she was estranged from her brother and the rest of her family, which was why they’d received the money instead.

When Neil didn’t follow, he paused to call out to him. “Junkie.” He’d been dropping Neil home after every session thus far. Something had changed.

Neil didn’t look at him. “I’ve got a few errands to run.”

Andrew didn’t press it and left Neil standing alone and dejected on the sidewalk.

“Cut the shit. What’s going on?”

Andrew stayed behind the doorway, listening to the conversation. Wymack wasn’t a gentle person, but this was his compassionate side at work: Pulling his athletes aside and getting to the bottom of their problems. He claimed it was to make sure they lived up to his expectations on court, but that was bullshit. Wymack was an absolute grouch of a softy.

“I’m fine, coach.” Neil said. Typical.

“Bullcrap. You could barely keep up with Kevin this morning, and you’re usually running your little heart out, way ahead of him. What’s wrong.”

A moment of pause.

“Nothing, coach. Just a late night.”

Andrew, Wymack and Neil all knew that they could see right through his lies. Well, Wymack and Neil didn’t know he was there. But that was besides the point.

“Scram, Josten.” He said tiredly.

Andrew vanished before Neil had the chance to flee the man’s office. It didn’t need any convincing: Andrew was going to get to the bottom of the stupid, pretty-faced Exy junkie’s strange behaviour.

It was a new, perplexing puzzle to solve. Andrew stopped his jog a distance away from the coach’s office and watched the boy cross the courtyard. Neil glanced at him only once before ducking his head and running off.

Andrew was only doing this because Neil was interesting. Not because he cared. No, not at all.

“Come here.” Andrew snapped.

It was a bad day. He’d woken up in an awful mood, and nothing could improve it. Small, usually insignificant events had turned his mood from sour to volatile and he was itching to get home and into bed, turn off the lights and hide under the covers with Aaron and play on their old Nintendos until Betsy joined them with hot cocoa and marshmallows. Every gaze upon him was sickening, every noise around him making him wince.

Neil, despite his harsh words and reprimands throughout the hour, hadn’t seemed afraid of him. He looked exhausted but not scared as he approached Andrew’s hunched figure on the hood of his car.

Carefully, Neil took the cigarette from between Andrew’s fingers and looked at it, almost melancholic. When it began to wither away, he took a drag and coaxed it slowly back to life. He breathed out slowly, without coughing or choking. Then he slotted the cigarette back between Andrew’s unmoving fingers.

Fuck you. He thought, bitterly. He thought about Drake, his first boyfriend, and how he had ruined everything for Andrew. Maybe he wouldn’t be so scared to kiss Neil, if it weren’t for Drake. Maybe he’d be finally comfortable with his sexuality, if it weren’t for Drake. Maybe he would be able to go through a school day without being terrified for Aaron’s safety if it weren’t for Drake. He would never had needed to lie to Aaron and Betsy, if it weren’t for Drake.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, his mind continued. Neil was looking at him with a blank stare. “Give me one good reason not to cut your throat.”

“You called me over here.” He reminded Andrew. Andrew wanted to sneer, but he was spread too thin today. “Andrew, I’m not scared of you.”

“You’re so stupid.” He ground out.

“Maybe.” Neil agreed.

“Why haven’t you asked what’s wrong?” He demanded, stubbing out his cigarette. His back was hurting from sitting like this, but being on the car’s hood gave him a height advantage over Neil. Neil had to crane his neck up to see him, but he was still unafraid. “Everyone asks what’s wrong.”

“I already know something’s wrong.” Neil shrugged. “I don’t need to know what, or why.”

They were very different, then. Neil was complacent to exist, to have everything at face-value, to accept what he was given and never take more. Andrew was deprived of so much that he grabbed for what he could. Two different methods of coping. Two different boys.

And yet, the same sense of understanding, shared between them.

“Let me drive you home.” Andrew said.

“I can’t.” Neil replied.

Andrew nodded and dismissed him with a flick of his fingers. He watched Neil walk away and didn’t move until he was well out of his sight. Then he sighed, hopped off the car and spent the drive home thinking of an excuse as to why he was later than usual for his adoptive mother.

It never worked. He almost always told her the truth.

There were three taps on his bedroom door the next morning, a Saturday morning, which wasn’t what woke Andrew: It never was. His meds made him sleep extremely heavily, which would be sickeningly dangerous if he wasn’t living in a house with only his mother and his brother.

What awoke him was the smell of hot chocolate being brought into the room, and the shrill tone of the home phone’s end dial. He hated that fucking thing, but Betsy needed it because she couldn’t use her mobile for work-related emergencies. His eyes flickered open as his mom settled the mug by his bed.

“Thanks.” He mumbled into the pillow.

“Feeling steadier?” Betsy stroked his hair carefully, knowing that was all she was allowed to do.

He nodded. She smiled gently and offered him the phone. “A friend of yours called. He said to call him back.”

Andrew sat up too quickly, considering he’d skipped dinner. His mouth tasted like July roadkill, having not drunk any water since midafternoon yesterday and his head throbbed. It was all familiar. He snatched the phone and pouted underneath Betsy’s shrewd look. She poked his nose and left the bedroom just as quickly as she’d entered.

The only ‘friend’ Andrew had who didn’t have his mobile number was Neil - mostly because Neil didn’t have a phone himself, but also because asking to talk outside of their tutoring sessions would be admitting to his interest in Neil, which was, obviously, completely crap. Andrew couldn’t care less about him.

“Come to my Exy game.” Neil said, before Andrew’d had the chance to ask him what the fuck did he think he was doing, and how the fuck he got this number. “Ple-” He cut himself off.

Andrew almost forgot they’d had that conversation.

“That’s a lot of please’s in one sentence.” Neil remarked, looking at the practise exam questions for his lit. exam. Andrew snatched the paper off him and looked: The excerpt was two sentences from some random book he’d never heard of. He got a pen and scribbled it out with more aggression than intended.

“You don’t have to do that question.” He decided, re-centring himself easily.

“What did ‘Ballad to Impress’ do to you?” Neil snorted.

“I hate that word.” He answered. “Don’t do the question.”

The boy just nodded. “Okay.”

“Why the fuck am I going to come to your Exy game?”

“I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Just come.”

Now that caught Andrew’s attention. “One question and one honest answer.”

“Yes.” He sounded nervous. “It starts in half an hour: It’s a home game. Will you be there?”

Andrew had to admit, Neil was impossible to deny. “Yes, junkie.”

He let out a sigh of relief, as though he’d been holding it in. “Okay. Thank you.”

“Shut up.” Andrew hung up.

He threw the phone off the bed and flopped back, staring at the ceiling, his mind and heart simultaneously racing.

He definitely hated Neil Josten. So much. All the way to the moon and back.

#andreil #andrew minyard #neil josten #high school au #DIFFERENT #more innocent #i mean i intended it to be more innocent but somehow worked murder into it anyway #you cant talk about aftg without talking about murder #aftg #all for the game #david wymack #betsy dobson #the foxes #part 1 #not-so-mini fic #jem writes

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hanmemyphone · 5 years

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Bad Ending 2.1

Two requests for very similar concepts so I decided to just throw them together!

Thank you for the requests, hope you enjoy!

(also, I’m sorry for asshole!Jumin in this one D: )

You had known for a while, where he went late at night, the fact that he wasn’t at the office when you called to ask, why he had so many ‘business trips’ - you knew the answer to it all.

He thought otherwise, he thought that he was being discrete, that you suspected nothing but that wasn’t the case. The glimpses you took and the guilt you felt from ‘breaking’ into his phone due to his hopelessness with technology and inability to set a passcode all lead up to your suspicions and worries being confirmed.

Your husband, the love of your life, Han Jumin, was seeing another woman behind your back. At first, you were mad. You wanted to scream, you wanted to curse, you wanted to shout at him but as the hours ticked on with you pacing around the penthouse furiously in wait, your anger began to dissipate, to your surprise.

In the end, you had this feeling which nodded along.

I knew it all along.

It was like you were telling yourself, ”I told you so!” You always had this hunch, the annoying idea stuck in the back of your head. The fact you found out from his phone frustrated you but at the end of the day, you were oddly accepting of it. Maybe it’s because you knew you couldn’t leave him. That you wouldn’t leave him. After all, you had made this promise with him years ago when you first met.

“I promise me that you’ll never leave my side,” he asked that one day, your hands in his. You replied firmly with, ”I won’t,” and so, you were tied with him for life. You knew the moment you said those words, you wouldn’t be able to go back on them, even if he didn’t remember your promise. Even if he had forgotten, if he left you for another woman, you would try your hardest to keep that promise. You admit you were a fool but you were a fool who was foolishly in love with that man. You were determined to stay quiet, see him off when he left for work, greet him when he came back home. You were going to act normal, just like you always had but one event changed everything.

It was a day off from work, you were sitting at home watching movies and waiting for Jumin to come home- hoping for Jumin to come home. You checked the time over and over, the clock from 10pm. You had dinner on the table, already set. You wanted to talk about your day, what happened at work or what happened in the countless movies you had watched without concentrating but as the second ticked on by, you knew that he wouldn’t be coming back tonight.

A knock at the door got you excited.

Though as you opened it, it wasn’t the face you expected but in fact, his secretary. “Is something the matter?” Jaehee asked with concern on her face as you shook your head, trying your best to force a smile. “It’s nothing, I just thought it was the delivery I ordered!” you laughed, awkwardly. “But isn’t that food on the table?” Jaehee replied, the concern growing. You quickly stood in front of her in some attempt to block her sight but you knew that it was useless. Instead, you tried to distract her by asking her if she wanted a coffee but on your way to the kitchen, you stopped still and clutched the left side of your chest. You couldn’t move and quickly you fell to your knees, gasping for air and then hit the ground. Your mind was blank and saw the world in your view flicker.

Then turn black.

You woke up later that day, not to see the one you were waiting for but rather Yoosung with worry all over his face.

"Are you alright?" He asked a bit too loudly for what you assumed was a hospital room. Everything was white, the walls, the floor and your bed sheets. The curtains opened to reveal the night sky as you noticed even the moon shone brightly. You quickly noticed the oxygen mask over your mouth and the waiting IV stand next to your bed.

You sighed.

“Isn’t this overkill? I’m sure I just didn’t sleep enough,” you commented softly surprised at your inability to talk while feeling overwhelmed by the sheer amount of people attention and medical attention you were receiving. You were sure that this was somebody overreacting to a simple malnutrition problem or lack of sleep but the look on Jaehee’s face as she walked in with a doctor told you otherwise. You felt your chest suddenly sting as you steadied yourself for not so great news. “Does your family have any history with heart diseases Miss?” the doctor asked, looking straight into your eyes. You nodded and replied that it was quite common on your dad’s side yet you hadn’t experienced any symptoms. “Unfortunately you’ve just experienced a silent heart attack,” the doctor told you, Yoosung’s mood dropping visually as he shrunk in his chair, ”and I’m afraid it’s done some damage to the lower chambers of your heart.” For some reason, you lifted your hand to touch your chest asking if it was serious. “I’m afraid it is.”

“Don’t call Jumin, please Jaehee,” you pleaded to her, seeing her struggle with the phone in her hand, ”Please, I don’t want him to know.” “But after hearing how serious your condition now is, how can I not inform him about the situation?” she answered, visibly battling with herself. “It’s because of how serious it is, that’s why I don’t want him to find out,” you explained as you were now sitting up in your bed, the oxygen mask now off but with the warning to not move a lot,”I’m begging you, consider this my last request.” The word last struck Jaehee and she dropped her arm, her phone gripped lightly in her hand. “Don’t say that noona!” Yoosung commented from next to you, ”I’m sure this won’t be your last!” The young man’s optimism brought a smile to your face but you couldn’t help but know that there wouldn’t be much time to make another dying request. You knew how your body felt more than anybody and you knew that time was running out.

Jumin opened the door to his penthouse with a few clicks on the keypad. He hadn’t been home for a while but didn’t feel guilty at all. He knew that his wife wouldn’t complain, you hadn’t since you got married all those years ago. While he expected to see your face when he opened the door, there was only silence when he threw his suit jacket on the couch. He called out for you and walked over to the room you both shared, only to find it neatly made and no evidence that someone had been here. The home was too still for Jumin’s liking. He walked over to the kitchen, hoping to find a trace of your presence but only noticed the food on the table still wrapped in plastic wrap.

He could only wonder where you went at this hour of the night.

Another day passed without seeing your face. He went to work as usual but made a little effort to be home earlier to see if he could catch you and have dinner together. He didn’t know what he was trying to make up for with all this rushing but he thought that he should at least make it home to enjoy a meal with his wife though when you failed to show up for the consecutive night, he started to suspect something. He sat idly on the couch, brooding over the idea that perhaps you were having an affair behind his back. He tapped his foot and continued to think. Maybe, just maybe, he was beginning to feel a bit guilty for his actions.

Five sleepless nights later he was sent back early from work by Jaehee who assured him that the teams were doing their best to find you and that he was being nothing but a burden at work. His lack of sleep affected everything, his judgement, his ability to communicate and his efficiency. There was no situation where he would be making progress when he was this sleep deprived. He had declined every call from the woman he was spending nights with and just sat at home waiting for the door to open.

Jumin was breaking down physically and mentally without you by his side.

He was driven home by Driver Kim who then saw him to the elevator of the apartment complex in fears that Jumin would trip on the way. A surprising thank you was whispered before the elevator closed its doors and sent him up to the uppermost floor. When its doors opened again he took a single step out and noticed a familiar face. He felt his knees wobble as he attempted to keep his composure but seeing that face made him weak.

“Jumin...” you whispered as you stopped still, the suitcase you were pulling behind you stopping as well, ”I didn’t expect to see you here?”

He just stared at you in disbelief. Everything you were saying sounded like air. He knew you were saying something and he knew he needed to say something back but he didn’t know where to start.

Where were you? Are you staying? Why do you have a suitcase? Where are you going?

The questions were darting within his mind but he wasn’t able to say a single word. You were being patient like you always had with him. You could feel that he was conflicted. There was no way Jumin could go this long without saying something and it just prompted you to wait but your mind told you to stop. You had waited enough for this man and you didn’t have the time to wait anymore. Now that he had seen you, there was no way you could escape completely. You needed to break everything off now.

You began to walk again, toward the elevator behind him but he grabbed your arm as you walked by him. “Where do you think you’re doing?” he asked. You heard his demand but when you turned to face him, you saw the desperation in his eyes. “Don’t you think you’ve been gone long enough?” he continued as you felt his grip tighten. You instantly shook him off and used his words against him, ”Don’t you think you’ve been gone too long?” He was taken aback from the way you spoke back to him. Sure you two had your arguments over the years which resulted in snappy remarks shot back and forth but when he heard the irritation in your voice, he was silenced immediately. “You’re not cheating on me are you?” he asked with some scorn in his voice but this made you even angrier. How could he even mention that in front of you? It drove you furious. But you couldn’t snap back as you did before. You just stared at him with sad eyes as the elevator doors opened. You walked inside but held the open button hoping that you would be able his face just that moment longer but he never turned around. “I’m sorry Jumin,” you apologised softly to his back. You let go of the button and saw the doors closing.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t keep our promise.”

He didn’t know what to do. He stood there silently still while the elevator doors closed behind him. This was the first time someone had left him without his consent. He didn’t know if he was furious or just confused.

Was she cheating on me?

This thought played ping pong in his mind. One side was telling him that there was no way she would do that because she was so loyal but the other side was telling him that is was obvious she left him for another man. “This is unbelievable...” he whispered to himself, slouching on a nearby wall, ”Did she just leave me?” He replayed their last meeting over and over in his head but he couldn’t fathom the thought.

She would be back soon.

The days passed and there was no sign of you. His health had gotten worse. He couldn’t sleep at night without the warmth of someone next to him but he wouldn’t call anyone, even that woman he was spending so many nights with. He simply told her he wasn’t interested anymore.

In fact, he wasn’t interested in anything anymore.

He hadn’t been to work in days. Even Elizabeth couldn’t cure the darkness emanating in that penthouse room. Jumin just spent his days sat on the couch with empty wine bottles gradually erasing the space on the coffee table in front of him. His glass hadn’t been washed in days, nothing had been washed in days.

He was a complete mess.

He was lost without you.

He wasn’t bothered by the fact that you left him anymore, he just wanted you back. He wanted you to return to his side and had waited for you all this time. There was no more motivation to do anything so he just recounted the last moments he had with you. He still remembered the look on your face when you saw him. You looked surprised and confused but when he accused you of cheating, he remembered how your expression instantly changed.

You looked like you wanted to cry.

“Why did she want to cry?” he thought to himself, “She’s the one leaving me!” Your words finally echoed in his head as he tried to remember what promise you were apologising for.

Slamming down his last glass of wine, he got up in a rage. He wondered why you hadn’t returned yet but it didn’t matter anymore. He would venture out to find you and scold you for being unable to keep the promise. But in fact, he wanted to find you so he could apologise for his own inability to keep the promise he so ardently made.

Jumin didn’t know where he was running but he thought that if he ran to places where you two spent your days at your happiest, he would find you.

Eventually, he would find you right?

Places he had in mind were gradually being crossed off his mental list and at some point, he was just running. The night had arrived and the streets were practically empty. He couldn’t care about image anymore, he couldn’t care about time anymore. He just wanted to find you and for that purpose, he was willing to run without purpose.

Jumin ran past a woman with her head tilted downwards and with the sound of his name reaching his ears, he stopped instantly and turned around.

But she had disappeared.

He felt his heart drop and sensed that he had lost something at that moment. He found himself being unable to remember your smile and collapsed onto the ground. He suddenly began trying to wipe away tears, wondering to himself why he was suddenly crying.

Jumin’s phone started to ring over and over so eventually, he picked it up in frustration but when he heard Jaehee’s sobs over the phone somehow his anger dissipated.

Somehow, instantly he understood.

He would never be able to renew that promise ever again.

#thank you for reading till the end if you did <3 #mystic messenger #han jumin #mystic messenger scenarios #mystic messenger imagines #mystic messenger fanfiction #ask #angst

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 5 years

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Erica Heftmann breaks free from the control of the FFWPU / UC

Dark Side of the Moonies by Erica Heftmann (Penguin Books 1982)

Erica Heftmann was born in Washington, DC, in 1952. She believed she was born again in 1974 to Korean parents — the Lord of the Second Advent, Reverend Moon, and his wife, Hak Ja Han. She was deprogrammed from the Moon cult and became interested in the issue and power of mind control. In the 1980s, because of her research and expertise in that field, she was in demand as an adviser to mental health professionals, clergy, legislators, educators, legal and medical practitioners, law enforcement agencies, mind control victims and their families throughout the world.

Contents

Part I – Heavenly Deception

Part II – Free Will But No Choice

Part III – Return to Reality

Part IV – From the Outside Looking In

1 The Technology of Mind Control 2 Deprogramming Therapy 3 Judiciary, Legislature and the ‘Cryptocracy’ 4 Critical Judgement

Notes

Dark Side of the Moonies is the disturbing account of one person who gave up her own mind, her whole life to a man she thought was the messiah.

Since her liberation from the Moonies, she has come to understand the power that was used to control her. In revealing the hidden life of one cult, Erica Heftmann exposes the startling force cults are exerting in society – and the grip they have on many people.

I was a Moonie. When I regained my mind and could look back at the horror of it, I realized that my freedom was conditional. I was haunted by the need to understand how and why I had been transformed into what I hated most. Now I would be an ex-Moonie. My innocence would never return. … I had to live with the ignorance and prejudice of a public that believes I was somehow pre-disposed to becoming a cult member while they are immune. People think cults are something to laugh at, groups of religious half-wits who would never have made it in life anyway and are better off where they are. I was there … to further incredible schemes of political and economic power.

I am setting out my story and my explanations of it. I do this for the sake of others who have suffered agonies so profound as to make my cult experience seem like a holiday. I wish that I could bring voice to the countless others... I write this for people under mind control, especially those I love who are mentioned in these pages. Do not be afraid to use your own minds; you need no greater masters.

In this era we are learning about the plight of the handicapped, the minorities, those who have been denied the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We must learn about all unfortunates because we are responsible for depriving them by our failure to listen, to understand, to allow them the right to help themselves. Those who are able and refuse to help are the true unfortunates. They do not know how precious life is.

Erica Heftmann 1981

page 1

Part I – Heavenly Deception

On the last day of 1974 I nudged my way through the bustle of downtown Los Angeles with a lot on my mind. It wasn’t only taking inventory of the past year. It was the pattern I saw emerging. Breaking away, testing new ground, retreating. Every path led to the same edge and, feeling I couldn’t make it across, I would go back to find another path. I had come to know the edge pretty well.

I was surprised to hear the stories that circulated about me because I considered my life to be too ordinary. My measuring standards were not set by my peers but by the characters that peopled my books and travels.

Adulthood was edging me away from my mother and an older sister I adored. My father and brother had removed themselves from the family during my late childhood but what was left was stable. Mom was always patient, comforting, totally involved in her two girls.

I had a short romance with formal education. After two terms at university I declared myself graduated, having learned everything I felt the institution had to teach me: how to find a book in the library and how to sit down to coffee with an interesting professor.

With full sails and no rudder, I went to Europe taking every precaution not to be a hippie, annoyed that of all the times I could have been born on this planet I had to co-exist with a counter-culture that popularized doing one’s own thing. I picked my way carefully to avoid the throngs of stereotyped individuals who faced me at every turn. …

My mother was not easy to rebel against because I felt she was usually right. How could I break away and establish my own identity if there was no risk involved? She was always there to fall back on, to soften the blows. … Maybe you’ve been on your own for a few years but the world has just been your playground.

Wait a minute. Don’t be that hard on yourself. Someone puts you on a speck of cosmic dust whirling through space without asking your permission and then just as rudely and abruptly and inevitably takes you away. While you’re here you’re given a set of problems and a set of rules for solving them. Like someone leaving a kid to amuse himself with square pegs and round holes. ’Bye kid, see you in eighty or ninety years. No, Erica, I don’t blame you one bit for stepping back to take a look at it all. People are manipulating and killing each other and for what? Do they even enjoy the spoils of their exploits? Why waste your life trying to set things up for them to destroy when you have enough sense to realize that there’s something else in this existence to do?

Lonely, confused and worried about fulfilling my potential, I had escaped the forced gaiety of the office New Year’s party. Everyone making crass jokes about resolutions and getting drunk to forget them.

On the last working day of the year, all the desk calendars in the office buildings were collected and released into the wind from the roofs. They fluttered down like ticker tape. Now as I walked the last couple of blocks to the bus stop, I stared at them cluttering the pavement. Some pages had little notes jotted on them. OCTOBER 15/meet Dave for lunch. Or 2:00/REGIONAL MEETING. Giving in to a wave of melancholy, I couldn’t help but see the metaphor days lying in the gutter, accumulated so quickly and then forgotten.

A big commuter bus moved away from the kerb and blasted a clump of pages into an open drain with its exhaust. So it’s come to this, has it, I tried joking with myself.

I looked up about the same moment that I felt someone gazing at me. A pair of blue eyes much like my own. A young woman just a few paces away was watching me. She was wholesome looking, rather tall, and had a short, dark-haired young man with her.

In my memory, it is etched that I was the one to start the conversation but I know that this is not the way it happened. There was just something so familiar and so welcoming in her eyes that I felt myself reaching out to make the first move.

All I needed for an introduction was to know that they were foreigners. How well I remembered the feeling of being a newcomer to a city and how comforting it was when strangers had stopped and talked with me.

The girl’s name was Ingrid and she was from Switzerland. The one she towered over was Antonio, a Peruvian. I asked how such an unlikely combination had met They explained that they were touring with an organization called International One World Crusade. This was their last stop in America and within a week they would push on to Japan.

Ingrid had spent all of her time in Los Angeles cooped up in the kitchen cooking for the others. On her first opportunity to get out and see the sights, she was delighted to meet someone. They chatted on. Out of the corner of my eye I was searching for a coffee shop we could dive into. I made the suggestion. It was one of those magical meetings that happens when one travels and I could tell the feelings were shared all around. My bus didn’t stop running for a few hours.

‘We’d love to,’ Ingrid said, ‘But we are just on our way back for an evening meeting. Would you like to walk with us? You could see our headquarters office and meet some of the others.’

Something flickered in me, making me want to bolt, no matter how friendly they were. Something about not being on neutral turf. I noticed it at the same time I realized that I was already walking with them in their direction. …

page 187

Part III Return to Reality

Up late this morning. At 6.00 I should already be in the lodge with Paul to correct reflection books. Paul is the best assistant I’ve ever had and this is by far the most successful workshop since the old days with Alex. Yesterday Mr Kadachi gave the VOC lecture so that we could have some time to catch up on our reports but we scrambled up onto the roof of the lodge to talk instead.

I think it is important to develop a good subject-object Foundation for the Abel position we hold collectively. …

Paul is still having Chapter Two problems about his old girlfriend. I am glad he is confiding in me. I remember all the times Kathy and I kept him away from Lisa and occupied when the centres used to come up for weekend workshop. I thought Lisa’s transfer to MFT would solve a lot. They were both trying hard to overcome and by all external appearances they had but now I’m finding out that Paul is entertaining hopes of being blessed with her. It isn’t good to think about the Blessing, especially trying to second-guess Father. Paul keeps insisting that Spirit World prepared them for the Family because they had been sweethearts since high school. . He is suffering so much and so much wants to please Heavenly Father.

We must be a good combination because we’ve been having such fantastic results with our workshops. We work as a unit. Father was right that if you serve someone well enough, you make him dependent on you. He opens up to you and gradually the power shifts its balance point. If you are a good object, it is much more important than being a mediocre subject. …

I have finally learned how to handle sleep. Imagine how much time is wasted in the Fallen World. Midnight is just the beginning of the evening for me. Paul covered for me for fifteen minutes yesterday during discussion and made me sleep. On the way down the hill with the class, he whistled for me when they passed the dorm and I was out the back way and down to the lodge before them. I had only had forty-five minutes of sleep the night before and during the past weeks it has been usually two hours, sometimes three. That fifteen minutes was like a whole night I got up completely refreshed. I think I’ve finally broken through.

I must apologize to Mr Kadachi. I was so upset with him because he slept during the day and pulled staff meetings as late as 3.30 in the morning — never before 2.00. The meetings were late only because he was reading or playing with his lizards. When he had us as a captive audience he would put off staff matters and expound on some recent theory about the Restoration. I contradicted one of his theories and still feel horrible about it but it did bring the meeting to a quick close. No one else would dare stand up to Kadachi-san. …

The day sailed by with its own effortless momentum. In the afternoon I was called into the kitchen for a phone call. Mr Kadachi was pacing. I picked up the receiver.

‘Erica? I was afraid I wouldn’t get through to you. They gave me the usual runaround.’

‘Well, Mom, sometimes I’m busy and can’t get to the phone.’

‘Too busy to take a call from me?’

I rolled my eyes up. How would she like it if I interrupted her at work?

‘I’m here in San Bernardino and I hope you won’t give me some story about being too busy to see me today. We have a date, you know.’

Did we? It seemed that I was always trying to get out of some engagement and I kept postponing these visits with promises. Guess she finally caught up with me. Kadachi was at my side poking around in his lizardarium. I placed my hand over the receiver.

‘She says she’s in San Bernardino and wants to see me today.’

‘You have a workshop to look after. Tell her to make it another time.’

I uncovered the receiver. ‘I have a workshop to look after. Could we make it another time?’

‘Erica, I’ve driven all this way.’ She sounded a bit frantic. ‘Are you going to make me turn around and go back? I’m leaving for New York tomorrow, remember, and I want to see you before I go.’

‘She’s insisting. She says she’s driven all this way and wants to know if I’m going to make her turn around and go back. She’s leaving for New York tomorrow.’

Kadachi gave me a look that revealed nothing and turned back to his lizards. How could I be so weak as to have to bother him and get him to tell me what to do?

‘Look, Ma, I’m going to have to go now. My class is starting.’

Click

I was hardly out the door when the phone rang again. It took three calls before I was reluctantly given permission to go. I wasn’t pressuring either side, they just fought it out with me as the transmitter of information. The condition was that I be back for evening discussion. I wouldn’t have missed that for the world anyway.

By the time she and my step-father Chuck arrived, I was bathed and had styled my hair with a blow-dryer I found in the sisters’ cabin. I also found a ‘good’ set of clothes I’d never seen before. They fit and I looked very nice when I sized myself up in the mirror.

I ran down the steps of the lodge to meet them. The guard at the gate had already informed me of their arrival. After quick hellos I found myself in an argument. I wanted them to come inside and meet my friends. They replied flatly that they were not interested in coming in, only in seeing me.

‘You say you’re interested in what I’m doing. How are you ever going to find out if you don’t see for yourselves? You just keep reading those negative articles.’

They could hardly conceal their discomfort and my mother couldn’t pass the opportunity for some hostile remarks so I decided that it was better to leave right away. Then, at least, I could return earlier. Paul was thrilled about taking over for a while and I was looking forward to the meal so it wasn’t a bad arrangement after all. I told them to wait a moment on the landing. I searched for Kadachi to say goodbye. His wife told me he had locked himself in his room at his cabin. I would probably return before he emerged from his meditation.

I slid in the front seat between my parents and chattered the whole way down the mountain. I told them about Roy’s close scrape with his parents. They had tried to kidnap him but he escaped. He was sorry for hurting his father in the tussle on the ground but not sorry enough to speak with them. I usually handled Roy’s calls. They simply would not understand that he had been transferred. They thought we were hiding him. No one at camp even knew where he had been transferred to.

‘Imagine parents trying to do something like that to their own child!’ I gasped.

Chuck dropped us off at a small restaurant in town while he went to see about getting something fixed on the car. I ordered a large meal and wolfed it down. Mom didn’t touch what she had ordered. She said that she was coming down with flu and had lost her appetite. If my stomach had been able to stretch, I would’ve eaten her meal as well. We didn’t talk much. These days we had little in common. I couldn’t see the point in pretending to be interested in the Fallen World and she refused to take an interest in the Restoration. She kept glancing at her watch, obviously worried about Chuck taking so long.

When he arrived, he said he wasn’t hungry either and they wanted to beat the traffic back to town. They still had to pack for their trip. He hastily paid the bill and we went out to the car. The lot was dark and the car was at the rear of the building. I instinctively sized up the lot for fundraising. Hard habit to get over. Good thing I was going back to camp instead of out blitzing.

I was grabbed from behind and thrown forward. It happened so quickly that I was in the back seat between Chuck and a strange man before I caught my breath. My mind jammed. My mother was in the driver’s seat revving the engine and another person sat in the front seat on the passenger’s side. We took off as the doors were being pulled closed.

It was several moments before I could speak. My mind snapped into the witnessing mode. I politely extended my hand to the man on my right to introduce myself.

‘How do you do? My name is Erica.’

He reached under the seat and brought out a bouquet of flowers. Presenting them, he said, ‘Very well, thanks. My name is Dana. Here, these are for you.’

Dana! I couldn’t believe it. Dana Stevens? It must have been ten years since I’d seen him — he’d been living in Paris for that long. He was a dear friend of the family, someone I had been infatuated with as a child. Mom had told me that he had come back a few weeks before to get married.

I could not recognize him in the dark but there was no mistaking his style. I looked at the person in the front seat. A woman. She must be his new wife.

‘Mrs Stevens, do you mind if I embrace your husband?’ I threw my arms around Dana’s neck. It was totally unprincipled but my mind was jilted and I was too happy to see him to care about Principle for that moment.

My mother had the wheel gripped firmly. ‘I’m sorry, Erica. You didn’t show up at Dana’s wedding so we’re going to have another reception party now just for you.’ I believed her even though I still felt a panic. I had no time to be part of a practical joke. They would worry back at camp, especially Kadachi. I pleaded for her to stop and let me phone them at least. My mother could always out-insist me, especially when I became hysterical. I thought of leaping from the car, disregarding the danger, but I was flanked by two strong men. Roy had told everyone to carry matches with them so they could set fire to the place if anyone ever took them by force. A lot of good that would have done me. I was no longer in the mood for conversation and numbly rode the rest of the way in silence. My mind was blank as if I had been unplugged.

We pulled off the freeway somewhere in Long Beach and, after circling around some residential streets, pulled up at a modest house with several cars parked in the driveway. They surrounded me on the few steps into the house and then, with some other people, formed a corridor so that I had no choice but to go past them to the rear of the house. I didn’t know how many people were in the house or who they were. It didn’t look like a party.

I entered a small bedroom at the end of the hall. The room was tiny, carpeted and bare except for a blanket and a pillow. There was a piece of plywood covering the one small window. Through my mind flashed the story of The Collector. It was clear to me that I was going to be held prisoner for someone’s pleasure but I had no idea for what purpose.

The sight of the blanket and pillow made my heart stop. I knew this was the end of the line. When I looked up I saw half a dozen strangers standing around me. The door was shut. It was explained to me that I would have to speak with these people. Disbelief clogged my mind. They wanted to talk to me about the Movement. How could they talk to me about something they knew nothing about? I understood then that I would stay in that room until I converted them all or died — there would be no way to escape unless I could befriend one of them and gain sympathy to be set free. I wondered how that tiny room would look after the first year. I would know every crack on the ceiling, every sound from the outside. I looked for Dana. Surely he would help.

‘Can I see Dana please?’

‘I’ll see if I can find him for you. In the meantime, why don’t you make yourself comfortable?’ It was a woman who spoke. She was thirty-ish, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. She looked nervous, which gave me confidence. She left the room and two or three of the others trailed out with her.

Dana appeared at the door. His shirt was unbuttoned and he had a beer in his hand. He looked at me with mild surprise as if he couldn’t fathom why I might want to speak with him.

‘Dana, what do you think you’re going to prove with this? I’m going to be missed at camp by people who care about me. What sort of a kangaroo court do you intend to hold? You’re holding me prisoner. You can’t do that.’

Spectacularly unimpressed with my plea to his sense of justice, he suppressed a belch and scratched his chest. ‘I’m not the one who made the decision, you know. Your mother wants you here. It can’t hurt to listen.’

‘Listen? Under these conditions? Why didn’t you just arrange to have these people, whoever they are, come and meet me in a coffee shop somewhere? I would discuss anything with anyone at any time. That’s my job.’

‘Well, your anywhere and anytime and anyone seems to be here and now with these folks, doesn’t it?’

The years had changed him. I remembered the late-night talks, how, he had made my head spin with his unconventional ideas. He was the one who first infected me with the idea of breaking free. Now he had sold out like the rest of them, even getting a beer belly. There would be no point in talking to my mother. I knew how she was once she made up her mind about something. I asked to see Chuck. I knew he would not be able to conceal anything. His face always gave him away. He had always listened to my ideas with endless patience and took my troubles to heart. He supported and nurtured my individualism with pride, even the things that must have been hard to swallow. Surely he would understand me now. Yet when he came in and sat in the same place that Dana had been sitting, I wondered if I was going to come up against the same stone wall. Maybe they had some kind of routine worked out. We were no longer on the same team. God had divided us.

He didn’t give me the chance to wonder long. He took me in his arms. ‘We had to do this, honey.’ His voice broke and he cried, unable to speak for a while. ‘It’s a horrible thing to have to see you here like this. We want you to be free. I know that’s a hard thing to understand, that we’ve locked you up to free your mind. We wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t love you. All we want you to do is to listen to these people. They’re good people, honey, don’t be afraid. You know your mom would never let anyone hurt you. That’s why she wants you away from that group. We miss our girl — the one who’s so free, the one who was never afraid to stand up for what she believed.’

Now it was my turn to force back the tears so I could speak.

‘Will you stay with me?’ I was terrified of the thought of them leaving the next day for New York.

‘Of course we’ll stay with you.’ It was my mother. She must have been listening at the door. I didn’t hear her come in.

‘You aren’t going to New York?’

‘No, that was just a story to get you to come with us. We were so afraid that you would cancel again and now that we brought Sara out here —’

‘Sara? Is she that lady? The one in the shorts.’

My mother held a handkerchief for me to blow my nose as she had done when I was a child. ‘Now the other side, blow hard, you can do better than that.’ I laughed through the tears until Sara walked in with some others and my panic returned.

I decided to size up my captors. Mom and Chuck left the room. The others sat around me in a semi-circle. Danny had been in the Children of God. He said he’d been deprogrammed by Sara.

Doug had been in the Family. As soon as I learned this I tried to see the brother in him. Sometimes he revealed it but he had been in the Fallen World too long. The brother in him was only a flicker. Perhaps he would be the one I would befriend if I could convince him of Principle. He could help me escape back to Father. Would that make him my spiritual son? He did not want to talk about his spiritual parents or his missions. He said they were not important. What else could there be to talk about if we were going to talk about the Family?

Jill had been in the Family too, but not long enough to know very much.

I didn’t know quite what to make of Sara. She seemed to try to blend into the background and quite succeeded — all but those eyes of hers. Every time she caught my glance she pinned me to the spot.

Something was rattling around loose in my mind trying to find where it belonged. Maybe my whole mind was rattling around loose. I felt fatalistic — the controls were jammed on automatic pilot I felt almost... well, sportive, gay... having the burden of the destiny of mankind lifted from me temporarily. The ball was for once in somebody else’s court. A funny thought lifted the corners of my mouth. Old girl, you only get kidnapped once in life, that is, unless you’re terribly unlucky. You may as well have a good time. After all, you’ve got a captive audience.

I made myself comfortable. ‘It looks like we’ll be here for a while,’ I remarked breezily. ‘If you want to do your job properly, you’ll need some background information on me. I guess I’d better tell you about myself.’

Danny stretched out and groaned, then unclasped his hands from behind his neck and drew himself up on one elbow. ‘The only thing we need to know about you is already obvious. You’re brainwashed.’

‘You watch too many movies. Who do you think you are, Clint Eastwood? Where did you get this brainwashing stuff?’

‘Well, Queen-for-a-Day, what happened to your humility, love, understanding for mankind and all of that? If you were a real disciple of Christ, you’d be praying for me and setting a good example. I guess your dignity and integrity only work when you’re plugged into your little messiah.’

Doug shot him a look to keep quiet. Interesting. They were not united so I was bound to triumph. First rule of Principle. Unity forms the Foundation. I had the knowledge of Principle on my side, they had nothing, not even unity. Evidently Doug remembered something of it in trying to keep Danny in line.

Danny rolled onto his back and addressed the ceiling. ‘All right, go ahead and give us your testimony. I probably know it word-for-word already. I’ve heard enough of them and they’re all the same. Don’t tell me, let me guess — you went to India, came back and read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, had an abortion, became a militant feminist —’

Doug cut in, ‘Don’t mind him. Sure, I want to hear your story. It’s hard to be a Moonie. You wouldn’t be where you are unless you were a good person but don’t tell me that you joined because you realized it was the truth. None of us joined because we understood what they were teaching us.’

I began my story. To my surprise, it didn’t come out like I had planned it. It wasn’t my usual testimony. I told them about my life before, about the things I had loved and believed, things I had forgotten until then. I must have talked for two hours. Sara was pacing outside. Jill left for a while and when she came back in she asked me if I wanted anything to eat.

‘No thanks,’ I answered. ‘I had dinner with my mother.’ My mind drifted back to the camp for a moment. It seemed universes away. I wondered where I was. Whose house was this?

‘Is this Sara’s house?’

‘No,’ Jill answered. ‘It belongs to a woman named Alice.’

‘Can I see her?’

A woman was brought to the door. She hesitated before coming in. She was a friendly looking, middle-aged lady, the kind I’d seen by the hundreds on the lots, motherly, middle-class. I thanked her for letting us use her house. It seemed to me that it must have been a great inconvenience to have so many people in her home for such a long time. I indicated the boarded window. I was sorry for my being the cause of her house being turned upside-down. Tears formed in her eyes.

‘Honey, your parents love you very much. Everyone here is very concerned for you. We all want the best for you. Everything will turn out all right.’ She hesitated and phrased her question shyly. Jill says that you don’t want anything to eat. Can I bring you something else? Something to drink? How about a glass of warm milk?’

Warm milk, yech. I always hated it and gagged on it but I didn’t want to refuse her hospitality. For her sake I gratefully accepted. I was glad I did when I saw the look on her face. She couldn’t have been more happy if I’d given her a million dollars.

While she was fetching the milk, the conversation turned away from me and the kids talked among themselves. I couldn’t hate them. I wished that I could have joined in the conversation but it was as if they were speaking another language, things I hadn’t any knowledge of. Danny was sprawled out comfortably. Jill was teasing him and heaved the pillow at him. He propped himself up with it and turned to me.

‘So, this Moon is the messiah, eh?’

The devil himself couldn’t have been more satanic. What a way to talk about Father! It slashed my heart to hear him referred to as ‘Moon’. I would have to educate this guy if we were going to be able to talk at all. He would have to learn to call him Reverend Moon.

‘History will show if he is the messiah or not Reverend Moon has —’

‘I know, he has the potential of becoming the messiah but now he is in the John the Baptist position. I’ve heard it all before. Why don’t you just come out and say it. It will save us a good twenty-four hours. Don’t give me all the PR lines. I know you believe he’s the messiah.’

‘Well, I have to define what messiah means.’

‘Yeah, he has to be born in Korea between certain years — where’d you get all this information anyway? I could tell you that the messiah has to be 5’5”, have blue eyes and be born in Los Angeles in 1952. How’s that grab ya?’

‘God has revealed certain things to me.’

‘What’d He do, call you on the phone?’

‘Don’t you believe in God?’

‘Don’t try to get off the subject by attacking me. Yes, I believe in God but my God doesn’t go around talking to me. Just answer a simple question: did God call you on the phone?’

‘Don’t be absurd.’

‘Does that mean no?’

‘No, God did not call me on the phone. There, are you satisfied?’

‘Did He send you a telegram?’

Doug broke in. ‘What he means is how does God communicate with you. You said that God revealed certain things to you. How did you receive them?’

How did I receive them? I just knew. ‘I just knew.’

‘Maybe you just knew wrong?’

‘Divine Principle clearly outlines the qualifications for the messiah.’

‘Great, who wrote the Divine Principle?’

‘It was revealed by God.’

Doug looked at Danny. ‘You getting dizzy yet? I told you the Moonies have everything tied up and you can go round and round for ages without getting anywhere.’

Danny sat up and looked at me. ‘It’s no different than my group. We believed our leader was the end-time prophet Why? Because his doctrine said so. I thought God revealed it to me too.’

‘Well, you were misled. Divine Principle talks about that. You were in a cult’

‘And you are in one.’

Alice came in with the milk and my mother trailed in after her.

‘Are you getting sleepy? I brought you some things to sleep in.’ She produced a nightgown and slippers. My eyes popped out of my head. A nightgown no one had worn before. It was so beautiful, so elegant, and slippers. I couldn’t wait to put them on.

‘Where can I change?’ Surely I wasn’t expected to change in front of the men. I had heard that men in deprogrammings humiliated and raped sisters.

Danny and Doug stood to leave.

‘Good-night, Brothers.’

Doug said good-night but Danny couldn’t resist getting in one last little dig. ‘In case you didn’t know, we are not biologically related. Brothers is also not a common slang term — it’s a Moonie word. The sooner you stop talking like a Moonie, the sooner you’ll stop thinking like one. Do me a favour, hey? Every time you use a Moonie word and I stop you, try substituting an English word.’

‘Okay, good-night, Clint Eastwood. How’s that?’

He tossed the pillow at me.

Sara and I were alone. She was cautious but wanted to know how I felt, what I needed, what my fears and anticipations were. There was nothing about her or any of the others that would cause me to distrust them. I could see that they were sweet and honest people, just misled and being used by satanic forces. Mostly, my mind was on sleep. The opportunity to sleep away from masses of people, in clean bedding, in a quiet house, in my own nightdress, close to my parents — it was too much of a luxury to put off.

Sara asked if I would mind if she and Jill slept in the room with me. I laughed. Would I mind having only two sisters in the room with me? I was under the covers in a flash and the light was turned out. They left the door ajar. They were going to sit in the kitchen for a while and come to sleep later. Mom came in to say good-night. I made her promise me one last time that she would not leave for New York that she would be there when I awoke in the morning. I don’t remember if she left before I fell asleep.

With the window boarded over and no sunlight, I had no idea what time it was. By habit, I was completely awake. From totally off to totally on in a millisecond. I tried to fall asleep again but it was useless. I’d have to get up sometime and face the music. This was Sunday. I had probably missed Pledge. I couldn’t muster my thoughts to say a proper Pledge but I started in on a short prayer. Security and anxiety were marbled in my heart As long as we talked about Principle, I would be safe. They were not united and they did not have God’s truth. There was no way they could harm me. It would just be a matter of time. Sara came in.

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to wake you. I just came in to find my brush.’

‘It’s okay, I just woke up before you came in. What time is it anyway?’

‘Ten o’clock. Bet you’ve never had such a good sleep in the cult.’

Cult! That word hurled frustration, fear and anger at me. I stood up quickly and began to fold my bedding.

‘You want to take a shower?’

‘Yes, thank you. If I may.’

Sara showed me across the hall. What a luxurious bathroom. I felt like a princess. A fresh set of towels were set out for me and everything was spotless. A new toothbrush and a new tube of toothpaste, a hairbrush, even some cosmetics. I turned the shower on full blast. Sara yelled through the door.

‘There’s plenty of hot water. Let’s forget about the cold shower conditions, okay?’

‘Okay!’ How did she know about conditions? She obviously didn’t know very much. I couldn’t set a condition without clearing it with a central figure anyway. I stepped into the shower. Ah, I would have a hard time stepping out again. I watched the steam escape through a small window. I remembered in The Collector that the woman had thrown a note out the window in hopes that someone would pass by and read it. Maybe I could do that. But what good would it do? I was in the Fallen World now. Even if I could squeeze out the window and run away, to the police maybe, they’d just bring me back here. In Satan’s world who would help a Family member? I would have to work it another way. I didn’t have enough mental power to consider the future anyway. It was all I could do to concentrate on the present I was being bombarded with new-old sensations, the things in the bathroom, the cleanliness, the newness, the freshness, the comfort and security. I was reluctant to turn off the shower. My mother came in and talked to me through the shower door. She wanted to know if I needed shampoo or anything else. If nothing else, it was overwhelming to be with her in circumstances that seemed so normal. It was like being on holiday. Maybe I could postpone the inevitable confrontation. I felt a surge of energy and wanted to crow with pleasure. Sleeping until ten o’clock!

Mom brought me some clothes to change into, a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. It felt deliciously wonderful and forbidden to wear them. I asked permission to keep the slippers on. She gave me a queer look

The bedding was put away and the room was bare again but for one blanket and a pillow. As I dried my hair with a towel, Danny asked me what I wanted for breakfast. I wasn’t in the mood for eating. We decided on coffee.

He brought it in and went out again for his Bible. Doug carried in a small case of papers. They wanted to talk about fundraising. Fair enough. Doug had been on MFT. I couldn’t understand why he asked me questions he already knew the answers to — questions about the Economic Restoration. It was as boring as giving lecture to answer him.

They couldn’t do anything to dislodge the truth. After all, they had nothing better to offer. Nothing better than beer, cigarettes, divorce — the Fallen World. I remembered how Larry had told me that even if God did not exist and if Father wasn’t the messiah, the gathering of dedicated people giving endlessly of themselves was bound to be the best thing yet.

‘Why do you lie on the streets when you beg money from people?’ Sara entered into our discussion.

‘I don’t lie. I never did. Lie about what?’

‘Lie about where the money was going.’

‘Everyone knew I was from the Unification Church. We even wore —’

‘— badges issued by President Salonen,’ Doug. ‘But most people didn’t understand that you were a Moonie. If they ask you outright if you are raising money for Reverend Moon, you deny it, don’t you?’

‘Never! I’m proud of Father. Why would I conceal the truth?’

‘You lied to Tom Evans.’ Now my mother. Okay, I made a sales pitch in the gallery of someone who worked with my mother and by the time I realized who he was I couldn’t retract what I had said.

‘Okay, so I lied once.’

‘Once!’ Everyone cried out in unison.

I was not hurt for myself. I was trying to shield Father from their attack. Nothing they could say or do to me would worry me, but they must not blaspheme.

Sara said, You don’t even know when you’re lying and when you’re not. You weren’t like that before. Somebody taught you a little trick called Heavenly Deception.’ Danny chimed in, Yeah, we did the same thing in the Children of God but we called it Spoiling Egypt.’

Sara continued ‘And in Scientology they call it Fair Game and in the Divine Light Mission they call it something else and I call it a con game. How could you tell people the truth about where the money was going when you don’t even know yourself? What about your little 40-day condition that was extended? Where did that money go?’

How did she know about that? I told her what I had found out. The money went to buy some land.

‘That land was already paid for, honey. The money you raised went straight into Moon’s pocket for some little private business deals. Wake up, Erica, you’ve been had.’

I turned to Doug. ‘You know the importance of fundraising. It is to pay indemnity. We have to restore tribal, national and other levels.’

Doug turned to his case of papers and fished out a page from Master Speaks. He read to me from it that Father said all of that indemnity was paid already. I demanded to see the page. Master Speaks. The first thing that hit me seeing it was the format of the page. The familiarity of it energized me. He snatched it back.

‘Don’t space out on me. I know you are visually programmed. The sight of the thing reinforces your programming. Just read these lines.’

I read them. How did I know the paper wasn’t a forgery. ‘Mother, how could you want me to believe people as low as these. Look at Sara. Look at the way she’s dressed, the way she speaks.’ Sara stiffened.

‘Please don’t smoke in front of me either,’ I demanded. How satanic to fill the room with smoke. She didn’t say a word, just stubbed out her cigarette and put the ashtray outside the door.

‘I won’t smoke in front of you if it bothers you but I’ll tell you this, you spoiled brat, it’s not the smoke that bothers you. It’s this holier-than-thou little goodie-two-shoes routine of yours. Why don’t you come back down to earth with the rest of us mortals. You can’t even answer simple questions. How thin your perfection is when you’re outside your self-centred cult. You think you’ve become more God-like? Is God so arrogant? You think you’re saving the world with Moon’s money? What do you know about responsibility? Do you tend the sick, the poor, do you ever pay income tax?’

‘I’m a missionary without income. I have nothing to pay tax on.’

‘Maybe, but you have to file every year with the government anyway. When was the last time you filed?’

‘Okay, so I didn’t file last year, big deal.’

The morning dragged on. They kept talking from man’s point-of-view. I kept talking from God’s point-of-view.

We broke for lunch and, while we ate at least, the crew eased up on me. As soon as I put my plate down, Danny looked over at me through narrowed eyes.

‘So, Moon’s still the messiah, huh?’

I had to fight to keep the food from coming back up. There was just no point going on like this. We could discuss until Satan’s restoration and they still wouldn’t make sense.

‘You can say what you want but you’ll never make me lose my love for Father.’

‘Erica, when we point things out, just assess them as they are, at face value. If the Bible says one thing and Doctrine X contradicts it, then that doctrine is wrong if it claims to be harmonious with the Bible. You click off when anything threatens Moon. You have no ego, no mind of your own. You’ve got two possibilities: a) Moon is the messiah, b) Moon is not the messiah. If it helps you, let’s not say Moon, we’ll say Mr X instead. Now, he’s either the messiah or he’s not. He can’t sort of be the messiah, agreed?’

It took us a long time to get on equal footing. Finally he got me to accept, for the sake of argument, the hypothetical.

‘If he is the messiah, we can all pack up and go home. If he’s not the messiah and has claimed to be, then what is he?’

I couldn’t fill in the blank.

‘If he’s not the messiah and he’s claimed to be, then he’s a fraud. Now, how can we determine if he is or not? Glad you asked that question, folks. Let’s make it really easy on him and not even use the acid test. We’ll just let him cut his own throat. He says that God is eternal, absolute and unchanging, further that he is the second Christ. It follows, seeing as God doesn’t change His mind, Moon must jive with what the first Christ said about Christ’s mission.’

This was not so difficult to accept as the initial point. Once he got rolling, I could follow him after a fashion. As soon as he pulled out the Bible to substantiate what he said, to prove that Jesus and Father did not agree, I was hopelessly lost again. Every time he made a point, I would do a quick scan through Purpose/Fall/Restoration.

I was aware of the binary functioning of my brain. Each question entered and was shuffled off down yes/no corridors until it met the proper answer or a dead end. Something like a pinball machine. I worked the flippers like mad but the balls just rolled down the chute. Danny would send the ball shooting out again and I made the same scan through Principle with the same result. Sometimes a phantom answer would appear but it would vanish either before or after the question passed through. I couldn’t hold both a question that didn’t compute and a phantom answer that didn’t compute. One of them faded as I concentrated on the other.

Danny was well versed in the Bible. If only Kadachi or Alex could have been with me. Surely they would know the answers. There had to be Divine Principle reasons why the Bible was wrong, I just didn’t know them. After a while my attention scattered. When we talked about the Family, I felt my mind become agile again but as soon as Danny started up with his Bible, my brain felt like cotton and my eyelids started to droop.

Some people came in the room quietly like they were entering a theatre after the show had started. I felt like I was on the operating table in an arena for medical students. Bright lights and someone saying, ‘Here we see the soul exposed, badly lacerated. The heart is bleeding and the mind is twisted. Some of this will be corrected through surgery but the patient will probably never be healthy again.’

One of the visitors, a middle-aged man with a kind face picked up Danny’s Bible and leafed through it. I braced myself for a raging born-again argument ‘You believe you’re doing God’s will, don’t you?’ Probably next he was going to ask me if I knew God’s will by telephone or telegram. I set my jaw. It’s too long a story to explain — if I told you that I know God when I see Father, you’d never understand.

‘You’d do whatever Moon asked you to, wouldn’t you?’ ‘He would never ask me to do anything that was not the will of God.’

‘What if he asked you to kill your mother?’

‘ — ’

‘Why don’t you answer me?’

‘ — ’

‘Forget about answering that question. Your silence tells me what I really wanted to know: you actually have to sit and think about whether or not you’d kill your mother if a man told you to. A man, Erica, not a god, and you are under his control.’

He snatched up the Bible. The sound of the turning pages was like trees falling in the forest.

‘“If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his own family, he has disowned the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” The Bible says to help the poor, to help other people. Jesus didn’t tell his followers to give Him their possessions. He told them to distribute them among the needy. Do you believe that is a good thing to do?’

I nodded.

‘Well, then, that makes you better than True Father, doesn’t it? You want to give to the poor and your messiah only wants to take everything for himself.’

I was too weary to begin to explain to him the meaning of the Economic Restoration. When Jesus was on earth, it was the mission of the messiah to serve mankind. For the Second Coming, it became the duty of mankind to serve the messiah.

He wouldn’t let go of that point. That makes you a better person than your Master of the Universe, doesn’t it?

‘You have more compassion than he does. You don’t see anything wrong with him keeping everything for himself?’

I thought back to Father’s visit that had left me so desolated. I remembered that the brothers and sisters from the centres drove through the night to get back to their centres and sleep only an hour or two before having to drive back for Father’s morning address. Meanwhile, Father was sleeping in silk sheets. He could have at least let them sleep in the garage. One driver fell asleep and his van had gotten into an accident.

I began to cry. The man holding the Bible was looking at me waiting for an answer. I couldn’t speak. He put the Bible down and cradled me. So long I had been giving, giving, giving everything I had. He rocked me gently and whispered, ‘Don’t worry, baby, we’re right here. Don’t be afraid. We’re all going to see you through this, doll.’ He didn’t try to hush me, he just let me cry. I tried picturing True Father in my mind but I could not see him comforting me like this. I couldn’t believe that even in the Spirit World he was beside me. All I knew was the here-and-now of things and their realness. Fear gripped me — so this is how Satan would win me — with confusion, with trying to soften the warrior in me.

I heard myself make the man promise he would come back the following day. When he went to the door, I got up and extended my hand, Moonie-style, to shake hands with him. He grabbed me in a bear hug and ruffled my hair, ‘You’re gonna be all right, kid.’

With the others, discussions went on without either side gaining. I retreated under the blanket. Only my head showed, propped on the pillow. Doug and Sara and Jill continued. They would go through a point and ask me to clarify my side of it. I had just not studied enough, not read enough Master Speaks. There were answers to these things but I did not know them. The things they asked me didn’t matter. I believed in Father.

Sara asked me, ‘What I want to know is why you need so much proof to get out of the group. Lord knows you didn’t need any proof to get into it If I ask you if two plus two is five, do you need to look it up? No! You just use the common sense you had as a child. So why, if I show you things that don’t add up by Moon’s system, can’t you see it?’

Danny came over and ripped the blanket off me. ‘It’s the dead of summer, you know. The rest of us are sweating. What are you, a foetus? Sit up and join the human race.’

I grabbed the corner of the blanket and we each tugged our end of it. ‘Well, I see you have enough strength to fight for your baby blanket, don’t you have enough strength to fight for your mind? We’ve been sitting here hour after hour force-feeding you. Where’s your interest? Some disciple you are. Let’s assume that Moon is the messiah and we’re satanic. Don’t you have a lot to learn from us? You should be picking our brains for all we’ve got, go back to your cult and show them the blueprint of the opposition. You’re a lousy Moonie, I’ll say, and you’re not much of a human being. Your brain doesn’t work. We ask a simple question and you either space out or tell us something Moon said. I think we might as well just cover you up with this blanket and stick you six feet under, babe.’

He smiled. ‘But it’d be a shame, ’cause I know you’re in there, somewhere. I know because I’ve been through it. I’m only tough on you because someone’s gotta do it, otherwise we’d sit here playing games. Honest, I’m really a decent guy.’ We both started laughing. ‘We drew straws to see who would play the part of the heavie. Doug and I were arguing about it, weren’t we bro? We both accused the other of getting the part last time. I’ll tell you what, you think he’s sweet? He can be a worse son-of-a-bitch than I.’ That was signal for them to start rough-housing. We all needed a break. I went to the bathroom.

I closed the bathroom door. I’d had chances to be alone for a few moments like this in the Family but it wasn’t the same. I was never alone-alone. I looked at myself in the mirror, something I so rarely did that I knew Father’s face better than I knew my own. I noticed my locket. It had been given to me by Maria and was engraved: ITPN. In True Parents’ Name. Kadachi-san explained to me that it was blasphemy to abbreviate Parents’ name even in that much-used phrase that we signed our letters with. I wore it with some embarrassment but refused to take it off because it was given to me by my spiritual child. Maria got kicked out of the Family. Dr Baum ordered me not to talk to her anymore, even when she called up desperate to be allowed back into the Family. She was so exhausted after Yankee Stadium that she had stayed in bed for three days and Dr Baum turned her out for a problem of attitude. It tore me in two to have to refuse to come to the telephone when she called up pleading.

I unlocked the chain. That same chain had once held the cross given to me by Father Peter. Reverend Kropf made me remove it because the cross was a symbol of Satan’s victory. Inside the locket were pictures of Father and Mother. I looked at them.

I had heard that deprogrammers were likely to deface pictures of Parents and nothing could be worse, but I liked them all — even, perhaps especially, Danny. Deprogrammers could torture brothers and sisters but we had to protect Parents to the death. I removed the pictures and swallowed them to save them from harm. Everything was out of focus in my mind. As we talked in the room, the obvious Principle answers were in my mind. They were my mind. But at some point, I don’t know when, a second answer started to appear, a phantom that would hover and then disappear like the tiny stars you can only see if you look slightly away from them. The two answers would passively cancel one another and only the question would remain until I could no longer remember it. I looked at the locket in my hand. I was of two minds, two hearts. It seemed a millstone around my neck. I left it on the toilet tank.

‘Let’s talk about this messiah of yours,’ Sara. ‘Do you know anything about his past?’

I did. He had seen Jesus when he was sixteen, had been in prison before he began his ministry.

‘Did you know that the university where he claims to have gotten a degree in electrical engineering has no record of him? No record by either name. His real name isn’t Sun Myung Moon, you know. He changed it from a name that means shining dragon — sounds more like the Beast than the messiah. He’s been married before, arrested for indecent acts. He’s a common thug, a businessman, a criminal. He’s a pimp and he’s got kids like you out on the street hustling for him. He even claims to be a Jew, doesn’t he?’

‘Well, a descendant of the House of David. I guess that would make him a Jew.’

‘Funny since he claims that the Orientals are descendants of Japheth and the Jews of Shem. How do you feel about him saying that the six million who died under Hitler died because it was God’s will. This coming from a Jew.’

‘You answer that yourself. You’re the guys who claim to have all the answers.’

‘Sit up,’ Sara urged. ‘Come on, don’t cop out now. You should be defending your faith. There’s nothing wrong with thinking about things. Think! If you’re trying to find the answer in the DP, you won’t find it because the answer is just not there. Two and two will never equal five.’

My mind was elsewhere. I looked at the stack of papers. The reverse of an article we had just read was on the top of the heap. It showed a reproduction of a painting of Jesus on the cross. It was exquisite. It reminded me of the fresco I used to study in the Greek Orthodox cathedral Jesus of infinite tenderness and dignity, Jesus who by His deeds gave meaning to life. Across the stack on another part of the floor was a picture of Reverend Moon. His pudgy, glistening face peered up at me. My eyes went from one to the other, from Jesus to Reverend Moon and back again.

Sara and the others seemed at a standstill. Sara picked up the Bible and leafed through it. She stopped at a page in Genesis and handed the book to me. ‘Read that. Start with Genesis 2:24.’

I read aloud: ‘Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Now the serpent was more subtle than any other —’

‘Stop right there,’ said Sara.

I looked up at her.

‘Don’t you see it? Adam and Eve were husband and wife before the Fall, not brother and sister; husband and wife, one flesh. They did not fall because they had sex before becoming perfect. And further, Lucifer fell before them because it says that Eve was tempted by a serpent, not the Archangel.’

I looked back at the page. My vision sharpened with an almost audible click. My face burned, my blood was pounding through my body. I looked back up at her. Sara was waiting.

What happened next happened clearly, frame by frame, but was all contained in a split second.

What was spectacular was not the question nor the answer but a total sensation that I had to acknowledge and identify. Doubt, I called it. Doubt. Perhaps I could entertain the possibility that what they were saying was true. I felt myself peering over a cliff. The abyss was so without light and without bottom that the shock weakened me. I feared I would fall and equally feared remaining on the edge. But no sooner did the shock seize me than I found myself on the opposite side.

The split second came as I was handing the Bible back to Sara. ‘Well, then, what was the Fall?’

‘I’ll tell you my interpretation but there are many. Everyone in this house would tell you something different and some don’t even have an opinion or couldn’t care less. That’s all okay. That’s what life’s about.’

It never occurred to me that people could have different opinions or no opinion at all. I was sure that these people would try to destroy the Divine Principle and then unveil their truth. Subconsciously, I must have believed that it would be the antithesis of goodness and that ... what a totally astounding idea that I could choose what I wanted to believe. This last idea came as Sara explained that there was no rush on truth, that I would have the rest of my life to think about things. Still, most of my mind believed that the non-Family force had the scoop on the Fall.

Sara handed me back the Bible and pointed to Genesis 3:5. It read: ‘For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’

She stated simply, ‘If you are tempted to place yourself in the throne of power you lose your innocence and you learn the true nature of good and evil.’

At dinner-time my face was still burning. The message came in from the kitchen to find out what I wanted to drink with dinner – milk, juice, water, coke.

‘Make it a gin and tonic.’

‘Getta load of her,’ Danny nudged Doug. ‘Queen-for-a-Day is having herself a drink. Hey, no drinking on the job.’

‘Well then, we’ll take a break — and while we’re at it we can call a truce until dinner’s over. What do you say? I won’t call you Clint Eastwood and you won’t ask me if Reverend Moon is the messiah.’

I felt frisky and in a mood for celebrating something but I had nothing to celebrate. I didn’t want to cope with anything. I concentrated on my dinner.

‘Compliments to the chef!’ I called out. ‘Must’ve been you, Mom, no one cooks like you.’

Different sensations were rushing me, things I’d never known could be sensations — like spontaneity. Not checking the catalogue in my brain before or after a thought or action. Sara sat next to me with her plate.

‘Yeah, your mom is a great cook. I’ll tell you, she’s a great lady. Sure it was easy for you to make the choice between your family and the cult because you never lose your family so it’s not a real choice. You can cut them off, mistreat them, but they always love you. Moon wouldn’t know you if he tripped over you. You couldn’t get through to him on the phone now if you wanted him to come and rescue you. But your real parents? They’d go through anything to rescue you and believe me, they already have. I know you couldn’t have looked your mother in the face and told her that Mrs Moon is your True Mother. You’ve got a lot to learn about parenthood. You know how Moon is always saying that his members are more loving than anyone else and they have ‘Parental Heart’ — honey, you could never fathom what real caring is. You’ve been in a make-believe world. Moon used you. Your parents never stopped caring, never gave up on you.’

My tears were hot They had nothing to do with what she was saying. The thought of my mother’s love made me feel that I could love myself, forgive myself, cleanse myself of the never-ending guilt I had felt in the Family. For once I could feel that I had given of myself, that I was a good person. No matter what Sara said, I was not a spoiled brat. I was sincerely trying to do the best thing. I felt the two of me, one pitiful and the other pitying.

Doug joined us. He had a VOC lecture book in his hand. ‘You know, what really gets me is how you went on and on so self-righteously about Moon being against communism. What do you or anyone else in the group really know about it? Did you know that Moon uses the identical methods of indoctrination? You have the world so sharply divided between Satan and God, black and white. Do you think that fascism is any better than communism? Was Hitler any better than Stalin? I can see the Moonies on trial saying, “I was only following orders”. What about democracy?’ He paused and fished in his case for some papers.

‘You need only one error in the Divine Principle to make it false. We’ve shown you hundreds. It’s a strange thing about mind control — if you demolish most of the doctrine and leave just a tiny bit standing, the mind hangs onto it.’

Evening brought another guest. Mom had been talking about a young man who had been deprogrammed from the Divine Light Mission. She was glad that he had been able to arrange the time to come and talk with me. He talked about his job, asked how I was feeling, stayed away from heavy subjects. It was hard for me to remember how conversations were supposed to go. By the time he got to the end of a question, I had forgotten the first part of it. He sensed that I was bleary.

He set up a tape recorder for me to hear a speech by his former guru. A man with a funny accent was saying something like: when you have evil thoughts, push them out of your mind. Because your mind troubles you, give it to me. It won’t trouble me.

The young man rolled his eyes ceiling-ward. We all laughed yet it was a frightening tape. How could you be told what and what not to think? Imagine someone telling people not to use their —

Father ‘I am your thinker. I am your brain.’

Lectures: Have no give and take with negative thoughts.

It suddenly wasn’t so funny. Change the accent a little and —

The young man nodded when I looked up at him with this realization spilling out of me. The room was filled with people. Such a small room, so many conversations like a cocktail party. No one noticed the crucial understanding in that exchanged glance. It didn’t matter. In the Family everything had to be noticed, examined, accounted for and nothing belonged to me. It was always public knowledge, any private thought. This understanding was for me alone, accountable to me, a me exists. In the Family everything was given equally ultimate significance. Things do have different values. So no one noticed me. So what.

I was resting my head in my mother’s lap and she stroked my hair distractedly. She was engrossed in a conversation with Doug. Jill and Sara were laughing about something in the corner. The others were getting up to go into the kitchen. The young man from the Indian cult stretched out between my mother and the wall.

Why hadn’t Father told us about these other groups — so many of them? Sara had read me the testimonies of people I thought were all ex-Family members. Turns out they were from several other groups. All else aside, Father should have explained to us the truth about cults and mind control for our own sake.

‘Would you like to go out with me sometime?’ The young man had a nice smile.

I laughed. ‘Under the circumstances, that’s a very tempting offer.’ The escape I had wanted. I was surprised when I found myself telling him to call me at my mother’s house to arrange a date. Would I be living there?

‘Wherever you are, I’ll find you. All the employees where I work are going to Disneyland for an evening, you know, when they close the park down for a private party. Would you like to do something like that?’

Be anonymous again? Be a part of life with no one looking over my shoulder? Laugh at simple things?

How had it happened? It seemed that as soon as I entertained the possibility of something other than Principle, my prison vanished. I was free. Confused but free.

What about True Parents? I loved Father and could see him accusing me of being Judas. I pictured the photos from the locket. I visualized the image of Parents deep inside me. They would stay there until I dealt with them later. I would deal with everything later.

Before I fell asleep, Jill came in. She sat down where I was snuggled under the covers. ‘Know what I did the other night? I went down to the ocean. I kicked off my shoes and walked along the shore. I found a place to sit and I just sat there feeling the wind on my face, listening to the waves, smelling the salt air, letting the feeling of the sea surround me. I thought to myself: I am free. I can think anything I want.’

I was jealous of her. How wonderful to go to the sea. To sit at the shore and belong to no one. That most sacred and private place between me and me had been violated. I wanted the salt air to cleanse me, renew me.

What do you do when a huge section of your life is spliced out and the two ends fit neatly back together as if that time had never been — when you wonder where that lost time went but you’re still in it like a phantom — when you wonder who that other person in the time spliced out was but at the same time realize that that other person is the most familiar core of what you are made of — when you are relieved to the point of euphoria and terrified at the same time (both for no apparent reason and for endless reasons) — when you can’t go back to being that old self at the past end of the splice and certainly aren’t the self you haven’t been yet at the future end — and the reality of the matters at hand is so crushing that it requires the equivalent of a session of parliament in your brain to decide if you want a cup of coffee and when none of that really matters because everything emanates a calm like the warbling of birds after the bombing has stopped and you know the bombs will never fall again.

Another good night of sleep. In the morning we breakfasted and talked. I was aware that I no longer had any opinions about anything. I was blank. The blast had taken everything out by the roots. I was amazed that Danny and Doug disagreed on various things. The outside world was now my world and it was not united. Doug was talking to me about switching over from my absolutist frame of mind. He said that the doctrine wasn’t so important but the way I thought. Not which things were painted black and which were painted white, because these varied from cult to cult. All ex-members, he said, had to get away from thinking in black-and-white terms and start looking at the shades of grey. I was miles ahead of him. I was dealing with technicolour. Let out of a dark hole into the blazing sunlight, the eyes of my mind winced closed.

I didn’t want to leave the deprogramming room for the time. I didn’t feel deprogrammed. I was to learn that deprogramming only starts the mind thinking again, asking questions. It doesn’t provide the answers.

I was brought into the living room. The team was relaxed, limbs draped over the furniture, every comment followed by a soft round of chuckles. The world had never looked so wholesome, so inviting. It seemed that milk and honey, or sunlight or some tangible substance of peace was flowing out of everything.

Dana and his wife stopped by. They were on their way back to France. Dana told me a little bit about the concerts he was doing. His wife told me about her dress when I admired it. Alice showed me pictures of her children. Tears still formed in her eyes when she looked at me and several times she put her arm around me to say what she couldn’t find words for. She promised me that I would have a wonderful life. I hoped I didn’t look to her like someone who needed a glass of warm milk. The drifts of conversation carried jokes and casual swearing I found offensive. It was all too much for a mind that was racing nowhere fast. I wandered back into the deprogramming room and curled up on the floor with the pillow. Danny followed me in and plunked himself down.

‘Wanna talk?’

‘Sure.’

I didn’t, really. I just wanted to absorb the racing.

‘Spit it out.’

It wasn’t a matter of spitting, it was a matter of running to all the vast frontiers of my brain at once with a sieve to catch evaporating thoughts. It came out something like this:

‘Dan, I want you to watch me. I think I might be too clever, like I might be fooling you — or me — or something. I want to be deprogrammed or not deprogrammed. Maybe you know what I mean.’

‘Sorry, lady, I know what you’re going through but I can’t help you. You have to do this one alone. The ball, as they say, is in your court.’

‘What did you do after you left the Children of God?’

‘Why, so you can do the same? Sorry, I ain’t gonna be your new messiah. Besides, I don’t think you’d want to do what I did. When I found out that Moses David wasn’t the end-time prophet, I got sick. I just started to vomit. I was in bed shivering and sweating and Sara stayed up with me. It was a long time before I could go back and understand what had happened. I floated a lot. Floating means when you snap back into your programme. You’re probably not far enough out to snap back into it but when you do — it’s an eerie feeling —’

‘Like being back in the cult but not being there? Like phantoms?’

‘Like phantoms.’

Danny stood up and moved for the door. ‘Piecing things back together takes a long time. You have to learn to be patient with yourself — like when you get your leg out of a cast, you can’t run on it right away.’

I could hear the others laughing in the living room. I stared at the carpet. My senses were like bees out of the hive. I could see the carpet. The blue was so intense I could almost hear it. I could take the feel of it under my hands. I could feel my heart beat. A few moments, a few precious moments of awareness. I would have a lifetime of them. Cradling myself I thought no one, no one can ever take this away from me. Yet hadn’t someone already done that? Yes, I would have to have patience even to find the place to begin again.

‘Honey?’ My mother was standing at the door. ‘Can you come here for a minute? We want to ask you something.’ In the next room Chuck was sitting on the bed. Mom shut the door. The floor was piled high with a tangle of clothes spilling out of half-open suitcases. My mother sat on the edge of the bed, choosing her words gingerly.

‘How do you feel?’

‘Like Lazarus. Whatever the question, the answer is probably going to be “why not”?’

‘Erica, we have to decide what you’re going to do now. You know that you have all the time in the world and that we’re always here for you but Sara thinks it would be a good idea for you to go home with her for a while. Some time to rest and learn some more. She has answers we simply don’t have. There is so much more you have to sort out for yourself.’

The thought appealed to me. Of course, just like the ladies in nineteenth-century novels who took a cruise or sojourned at an auntie’s when they were grieving. But on the heels of this came an image of Sara’s house. So many new things to cope with. She would have friends visiting. The thought of having to face anyone new was staggering. Of having to fill my time. If only I could hide away, but where? I didn’t want to see anyone I knew, not even my sister, until I was better. Before I could finish the thought, a tidal wave of tears tore everything loose. They were not tears of self-pity, frustration or grief. They were not tears of relief. They were tears I was born with. I wanted to cry to the bottom of them so I would never have to cry again. I don’t know how long we were there, Mom and Chuck crying too before Sara poked her head in the door.

‘Mind?’ she abbreviated.

Mom and Chuck exited. Sara curled up on the bed.

‘Enough clothes for the first six months, eh? I’ll say. It’s been what, two or three days? You sure don’t travel light ’ I found a sleeve of something to mop my face with.

‘Coming to New York with me?’ Sara never cut any fancy footwork, never introduced a subject. She searched my face. The invitation was sincere.

I grinned. ‘When do we leave?’

pages 228-236

When you hurt yourself somehow, fall down or get in a fight, you walk away thinking you’re feeling pain until you wake up the next morning and the soreness has set in and you puff up and turn every colour of the rainbow. I was going along for a while thinking, jeez, there’s not much to this when the shock wave returned from its journey of reverberation and smacked me. I was so bottomed-out physically that I didn’t get to the mental problems for a long time.

Most of the first month I slept I’d get up at ten and be back in bed by three in the afternoon. It was hot and humid. I shared Sara’s bedroom, a converted attic. There were windows at both ends under the eaves and the heavy summer wind passed through the room. Whenever I closed my eyes and put my head on the pillow, I felt I was falling into a thick darkness with such a strong force that there was no way to hold back. Sleep locked me into a blackness violently swarming with images. I would wake up screaming or imagining that I had screamed. No matter where she was in the house, Sara would hear me make the slightest stir and would appear at my side to put on the light, smooth down the covers and listen to me until I was quiet again.

It was during that time that I became familiar with a nightmare that recurred for years. A black ocean devoid of life. No matter how far inland I was, the waves would find me and suck me out to the depths. It was not the water that frightened me because I could breathe in it. It wasn’t a fear of sharks or sea monsters. Not even a microbe lived in the sterile inkyness. It was the power and vastness of it.

I was extremely sensitive to light and sounds. Crowds made me dizzy; the faces would blend and I’d grow faint. My memory and attention spans were useless. I couldn’t read or converse for more than a few minutes without getting completely worn down and needing a rest Reading a newspaper article could take an hour. How would I ever catch up on the world since my Rip Van Winkle sleep in the cult? I even had to learn about the things I’d not been isolated from but merely blanked out of my perception like the changes in clothing styles.

Sara had to keep reminding me to think for myself, to not look to her for opinions, to not soak up whatever I heard. But she had little trouble getting me to try new things. Boating, skating, concerts, dancing, water-skiing — but not all things came easily. Remembering how I had served Kadachi-san and all the guests at headquarters house soft drinks and had never been allowed to drink something so fine myself, I swore I’d drink the stuff until I burst In the cult I had served from bottles and didn’t know that drink cans had since changed and were manufactured with pop tabs. I saw the cans in the fridge and balked. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to figure out how to open one and didn’t venture to try for several months. I never knew when I would excel and when I would fail, when the next step would be on rotten floorboards or on no floor at all. I glossed over with what I hoped was a sophisticated appearance by remembering things from the old Erica.

Sara read me as if I had neon signs flashing what I needed. When something needed to be resolved, she never hesitated to draw me into discussion but dancing the polka at Polish weddings, sitting on the front stoop eating watermelon, taking a martini break from a shopping spree, washing the dog and chasing each other around the yard with the hose — these did more for me than years of psychotherapy ever could have.

I shuddered to think if I had been institutionalized instead of deprogrammed I would have been in a hospital for years getting worse. Sara knew what she was doing. She had first gotten involved when her brother fell prey to a nomadic cult and disappeared. He got arrested hundreds of miles away and when they went to claim him, they found a total stranger who spoke in Bible verse, wore a long robe and had been surviving by scrounging food from garbage tins. After straightening him out, handling a Moonie was a piece of cake.

She took me out to meet people — seemed like she knew everyone in the whole state. We gave talks about mind control. We’d pull into a small town, talk to the school kids, the local paper, the service club luncheon and then have the whole town turn out in the evening to hear us speak at the church. What a welcome to the Fallen World! Total strangers listening to me with tears in their eyes, pinching my cheeks, giving me their addresses in case I ever needed them for anything. The warmth and attention were wonderful but I started to feel like a circus exhibit.

Sara started doing deprogrammings at home. It was my turn to say: I’ve been in your shoes. Every time I watched a deprogramming, another huge burden was lifted. They didn’t all break out of mind control in the same way. Kara from Ananda Marga let out screams that shook the house and Billy from The Way calmly balanced his Bible on his knee, took off his spectacles to wipe them and observed, ‘Well, it certainly appears that I’ve been deceived.’ Some said nothing but flushed in stunned silence. It was always miraculous to see the real person suddenly rush into the robot shell.

We worked together on floating until each person learned to handle it alone. We recognized the symptoms in one another instantly and instinctively. Sometimes the eyes would glaze over or the person would drop out of conversation. My own mind was like a minefield. I never knew when I’d trip an explosion. Sometimes I’d catch it like a contact high from one of the others, sometimes a phrase, a snatch of a song, maybe an unresolved bit of doctrine and always parking lots. Going to stores was a trial. I’d automatically check the lot for the flow, for the clues from Spirit World. If no one else was around, I’d work myself into a panic. I’d think what if, what if. If they are right, I’ve been deceived by Satan. My mind would start pacing and sniffing its old haunt, Purpose/Fall/ Restoration, and I’d snap back, or only half snap back and be spread between here and nowhere.

The thing to do was trace the floating back and resolve the problem that had triggered it In the cult they told us to cut off doubt Sara encouraged it Challenge, weigh, delve, decide. In the cult they told us that everything about the other world was evil. Sara told us not to destroy our good memories and benefits from the cult, people we loved, things we had learned and overcome.

Floating was only the punctuation, not the constant

The constant was exhilaration. The intensity of it was sure to illuminate the rest of my life. Every time I encountered something, I considered it as if I had never known of it before. There is an essence one can sometimes feel for a quiver of a moment when he looks at the stars. I felt that all the time. The smallest thing was not without its glory. Being able to sit down without permission, without guilt Buying a postage stamp with my own money and being able to send a letter of my very own thoughts to anyone. Feeling the wind, seeing the buildings, smelling the earth, letting my imagination run free. And being able to say no.

This expanding, more than anything else, combated floating. I simply could not fit back into that narrow mental slot. When I realized that, I knew that even though I was not completely healed, it was time for me to get back into the world.

I was prepared to enter society at the bottom rung, having been used to meeting handicaps that I never knew I had until I found myself in a situation for which I was not equipped. It took me a long time to realize that part of my handicap at this stage was being too advanced. By having met my weaknesses and shortcomings I had become stronger and wiser than most people who simply refused to admit to human frailty. I kept thinking I was wrong because I didn’t fit in but it was still the same old world that didn’t make sense.

There were practical problems that hit me left and right How to explain that blank in my resume when applying for a job. Say that I was off on independent study in some remote place or tell the truth and risk losing out on the job? Getting a driver’s licence, opening a bank account, getting references to rent a flat — meeting new people, especially dating, I always wondered if I should tell the story or not If I didn’t tell it, I would remain a stranger and if I did, I’d have to tell the whole thing knowing that when I’d finished, the person was not likely to have changed his view that cults are harmless groups of people who are better off where they are. When I was speaking to groups in New York, the people had been friendly because they pitied me. Now I was learning that no one really understood.

One of my old friends invited me to a high school reunion party. I mingled: a singer, a local politician, a craftsman, a journalist One woman arrived late. The talk quieted down as she made her entrance and hellos. ‘Sorry I’m late, guys. You’ll never believe what held me up. I stopped at a gas station and some Moonie came up trying to sell me flowers!’

The whole room burst into laughter. I looked down at my drink. The girl I’d been talking to turned to resume the conversation. ‘And what have you been up to since I last saw you, Erica?’

The thing that got me most upset was when people asked why I had become a Moonie and then didn’t notice at all how uncomfortable I was in answering. They’d never think to ask in casual conversation, tell us about how you became a quadriplegic in your motorcycle accident or tell us about watching your best friend get blown to bits in Vietnam and, oh, pass the chips, won’t you?

I found out that my brother had tried to foil the deprogramming. He thought my mother was over-reacting and shouldn’t treat me like a baby by bailing me out of trouble. He thought it was a fad, a phase I’d pass through. He wanted to phone me at the camp to tip me off to get out before she came to get me. Luckily, he wasn’t motivated enough to follow through. When I saw him, I asked him about it He scoffed at the idea that I had been brainwashed. Okay, big brother, what if you are right and I had just happened to, say, be into self-mutilation and your little plan had worked? He was unmoved. According to him, my great failing was that I just hadn’t been cool, hadn’t been doing the in thing, something I was still guilty of. I decided, after a time, to put my thoughts to him in a letter. The letter came back to me. He had scrawled across it ‘I’m rubber, you’re glue ...’ from the rhyme we used to taunt each other with as children ‘… anything you say bounces off me and sticks to you’. Welcome home, sis.

Surely someone would understand. I went to speak to a rabbi who reduced me to tears by ridiculing me for having toyed with Christianity and then to a minister who said I would have never become a Moonie if I had studied Christianity better. Father Peter was too embarrassed to discuss it I was barking up the wrong tree. It wasn’t a religious problem but a psychological one.

I finally came across a lukewarm article on the subject in an obscure publication and wrote to the author. He referred me to the only person he knew who had any knowledge of cults. I went to see this professor and gladly consented to having our talk taped for use in his book. A totally misleading sliver of one of my remarks later appeared in a Moonie PR book. I then heard that this professor was on Moon’s payroll as a functionary at the annual international conference that a Dr Moon with eyeglasses hosts for eminent scientists.

After the Jonestown tragedy, an informational hearing was called in Washington, DC. The Moonie campaign to have the event cancelled did not succeed but they pressured enough that the Moonie president was called to testify and ex-members were not.

Hundreds of Moonies had the place mobbed by dawn. A friend, fearing for my safety, got me into the hearing room before the doors were opened to the public. First the press came in, bright lights, scuffle, equipment being set up, the sound of people filling up the room behind me and then a peculiar and familiar stench. That smell I could never get rid of on the fundraising team. I turned around and saw the entire hall filled with Moonies. As people stood in turn to give their presentations, the Moonies jeered, stomped their feet, hurled insults. Security guards, panelists, press all stiffened at the unpredictability of this confrontation. Wasn’t it the right of a governing body to gather information after the assassination of a congressmen and the death of over 900 others? How many were the Moonies willing to sacrifice to protect themselves? One of the ex-cultists prevented from testifying who had lost her tiny son in the suicide-massacre shook like a leaf when the Moonie president spoke in her stead. The Moonies rose as a man with a deafening cheer.

I wasn’t going to hang around. I pushed my way through the knotted crowd towards a side exit. Almost there but someone was blocking my path. I tapped his shoulder to move him aside. He spun around and faced me. Baum.

‘Erica, it’s-so-good-to-see-you, we’ve-been-so-worried-about-you.’

Yeah, so worried you’ve been losing sleep thinking what deprogrammed fundraisers will do to Moon’s bank account. I tried to step past He kept talking so fast he was spitting.

‘Listen, Sister, I-know-that-you-think-I’m-possessed-by-evil-spirits and we-think-that-you’re-possessed-by-evil-spirits, but-that-doesn’t-mean-that —’

‘Bob,’ I luxuriated in the heresy of addressing him like that and putting my hand on his shoulder, ‘I don’t believe in evil spirits.’

‘What?’ He took in a sharp breath and seemed to grow visibly larger with disbelief and indignation. ‘Well... don’t you believe in God?’ He had on a red and white pinstripe shirt that had an odd optical effect of making him seem to vibrate all the more.

‘You mean a person can’t believe in God without believing in little invisible things running around that make people open their wallets and fall asleep on the highway?’

I still love you, Bob, but not in a way you could understand. Not because doctrine says I must, not to show how super-spiritual I am.

‘I know you weren’t one of those jeering and stomping your feet You were always dignified and knew to turn the other cheek.’

His smile caught me off guard. Then I checked the eyes. They were blazing. ‘Oh, no. Oh, no.’ His head bobbled. ‘Things have changed. The time has come. The course has changed from a passive one to one of aggression. We’re on the offensive now.’

All the times Moon had spoken about military aggression. All the times we listened with our lids fluttering closed, as he droned on in his hypnotic way, punctuating with militaristic words, of battle, of enemy, of charging and crushing, defeating, subjugating, annihilating, of taking over the government, the United Nations, the whole world. Baum had me by both arms. I looked toward the door, searching wildly for a face I knew. Two friends spotted me. They flanked me and moved me through the door into an empty corridor. Baum ran after me, shouting, dancing to himself, trying to pry one of the men loose.

‘Leave her alone, Baum, can’t you see she doesn’t want to talk to you?’

‘Never mind that. You have to answer to a few things, Erica. What about this article in Newsweek? Why did you lie, Erica? Why are you saying things about us that you know aren’t true? You can’t do that, you can’t get away with it.’ He had his lips peeled back, lunging forward at every question. What did he intend to do about it? The press had already gone for the story about suicide training in the Moonies, about members being taught how to slash their wrists. Ex-members everywhere were crawling out of the woodwork. I wasn’t the only one talking.

Off the corridor behind one of the endless unmarked doors we stood. We’d ditched Baum. I was shaking. I sank into a chair.

I was shaking because I knew that but for a flick of fate, Baum and I could have traded places.

And by that same fate I had once been a model Moonie, a hard-liner like Baum. Would I not have made a model Nazi? Had not both the victim and the victimizer lived within me? Was I not now cast out forever from the innocence I once enjoyed? Moon had held out the forbidden fruit and my eyes had been opened to know good and evil.

#FFWPU #Family Federation for World Peace and Unification #Moonies #Unification Church #Sun Myung Moon #Erica Heftmann

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chibinightowl · 6 years

Text

Bakery AU, Part IX

One more chapter to go...

Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII

~*~

“Tell me what?”

Tim’s heart starts to race, a last ditch effort by his body to give him the brainpower needed to get the words out of his mouth. He takes hold of Jason’s hand and removes it from his chin, but he doesn’t let it go. “I know you’re Redwing.”

To his credit, Jason doesn’t even flinch. “Right,” he drawls. “Tim, I think you’re a little sleep deprived.”

“Oh, I am,” Tim agrees. He forges on. “But I know I’m right.”

“Really? How so?”

“Because I figured out that Dick Grayson was Robin when I was nine years old.”

Jason’s grip on his hand tightens, the only sign his words are affecting him at all. “Okay, suppose I buy this tale. How did you figure it out?”

Tim launches into a story that has never once passed his lips. About how as a young boy he went to the circus with his parents and met an acrobat who promised to do a quadruple somersault just for him. He spoke of how that night ended in tragedy, with the acrobat’s parents falling to their deaths when their ropes snapped. “I kept tabs on Dick after I heard Mr. Wayne took him in. Sometimes I saw him at society events it was okay for kids to attend. When I was nine, I caught a clip on one of those paparazzi TV shows of Robin. They were running a brief segment on local urban myths. The video was absolute crap even if they did try to clean it up, but it wasn’t the person I recognized. It was what he did that struck me the most.”

“What did he do?” Jason prods when Tim pauses to gather his thoughts.

“He did a quadruple somersault. There’s only person in the world who can do it. Dick Grayson. After I figured that out, the rest was easy.” Tim bites his lip, stopping the flow of words.

There. He’d done it. No going back now.

Jason places his hands on Tim’s shoulders, holding him firmly in place as he stares intently at him. “Are you telling me a nine year old boy figured out one of the most closely guarded secrets on the planet?”

Tim nods. “If you’re referring to Batman, yes. He goes to great pains to hide it. Superman on the other hand…a pair of glasses? Really?”

A heavy hand covers his mouth faster than Tim can blink. “I think that’s enough tonight. You’re tired and obviously getting to the point where you’re not thinkin’ straight.”

What? Tim stiffens and jerks himself away from Jason. “You think I’m making this all up? I’m exhausted, but I’m not stupid. Jason, I have never, ever, spoken about this to anyone before. If you don’t believe me, fine. I was trying to be honest with you, because if you want whatever this is between us to work, then you need to be honest with me.”

“I don’t think this is the time or place to be having this conversation. You don’t have a door right now, remember?”

Tim’s mouth snaps shut. Son of a bitch. Had he been speaking too loudly? He doesn’t think so, but Jason is right. All that’s keeping the rest of the world out of his little shop is a piece of plastic. “Sorry. Sorry, you’re right. I’m just…”

“You’re tired, Tim.” Jason hauls him back in and plants a tender kiss on his forehead. “Go take a nap. I’ll finish cleaning this up.”

There isn’t anything Tim can do but nod. He’s blown it. He knows he has. Goddammit, why did he say it? Had he really misread things so badly? What’s going to happen now? Jason would be fully within his rights to never see him again after this little bomb. Fuck.

Tim lets Jason direct him into the kitchen and, under his watchful eye, gets his blanket and pillow out of the storage bin. Jason doesn’t comment about it, which says a lot about where this is all heading. He makes a little pallet under his desk and lays down. Through bleary eyes Tim watches Jason turn off the light and close the door, leaving it open just a crack. This is the last time he’s going to see Jason, he knows it. It hurts so bad that he doesn’t want the same thing as him.

So much for that gamble.

As Tim falls into a fitful sleep, he swears that he hears the low tone of Jason’s voice speaking to someone. “B? You won’t believe what I just heard…”

~*~*~

The next day Tim decides is quite possibly one of the worst he’s had in a while. Jason is gone when he wakes up to the alarm the man apparently set for him. No note, no nothing, not that Tim expects anything after the mess he made of things last night.

Stephanie tries to get the story out of him when she arrives an hour later with breakfast and coffee, but he refuses to say a word other than that he and Jason had a disagreement. This isn’t something Steph can help with. It’s all his fault.

“Do I need to call him and tell him to stop being an ass?” the blonde asks pointedly.

Tim loves that her loyalty is unwaveringly with him even if she doesn’t know all the details. “No, I’m pretty sure this is all on me.”

“Oh, Tim.” Steph wraps her arms around him and holds him tight. “Are you guys done then?”

He sighs into her freshly washed hair. God, he has to stink to high heaven at this point. “I don’t know.”

Steph squeezes him, then draws back, hands still on his arms as she gives him a serious look. “You know what’s going to make you feel better?”

“The ability to rewind the last twelve or so hours?”

“A shower. Go home, Tim. Get cleaned up, and for God’s sake, brush your teeth.”

Tim laughs weakly because what else can he do? He put himself out there and got rejected.

This is why he doesn’t date. It always hurts when things fall apart.

The rest of the day passes in a blur. It takes a few phone calls to get someone out on a Saturday to replace his door, and as soon as that was done, Tim calls it a day. He and Stephanie already have a plan in place to get things back up and running tomorrow, even if it will take at least a week to get a new display case. That’s fine, they can still take the truck out and Tim can set out a tray with a single cupcake of each design for any walk-ins to choose from while keeping the rest in back. They can make this work. Gotham and a broken heart are not going to keep Tim Drake down.

As he walks home in the late afternoon sun, Tim decides to allow himself one night to wallow in his misery. He deserves that much. A quick stop by the store gets him a six pack of his favorite microbrew and he swings by a Chinese restaurant that makes what he swears are the best noodles in town. Literally, since they make their noodles right there.

Properly fortified, Tim brings his prizes home. Another shower and a change of clothes later, he settles onto his sofa to binge watch Netflix. There are some shows he needs to catch up on.

He does not think about Jason. Much.

Three hours later, he’s finished half his stir-fried noodles and three bottles of beer. Sleep sounds like a great idea, lightweight that he is, so Tim manages to put away his food before returning to the sofa where he puts on a BBC nature documentary to fall asleep to.

He cuddles under his afghan and is out in under a minute.

~*~*~

It’s late when Tim wakes up. He feels like he should still be asleep, but something has drawn him out of that sweet oblivion where he doesn’t think about Jason. Everything is quiet, so he decides it must be his faintly hurting head that woke him. Some headache meds and water will fix that, as will sleeping in his bed rather than the living room.

Tim opens his eyes blearily as he sits up. Then he opens them wider and jerks upright, the afghan pooling around his waist.

Standing in front of his muted TV is Batman, outlined by the glow of the screen behind him.

Oh, shit. Why…Oh. Oh. Jason must have told him everything. Of course, he would, the little bomb Tim dropped on him last night impacts everything his family works so hard for. God, how could he have been so thoughtless?

His inner fanboy cowers in the corner of his mind, wailing in fear even though Tim is reasonably certain Batman won’t actually hurt him. Scare the crap out of him, yes. Intimidate him, hell yes. This is very intimidating, yup. Babbling seems like a stupid thing to do right about now, so Tim keeps his mouth shut and waits for Batman to say something.

And waits.

Seriously? Is he waiting for Tim to speak up first? He has not had enough sleep for this. Tim shoves the afghan off his lap and swings his legs to the floor. “Would you like some coffee? If you’re just going to stand there, then I’m going to need some.”

Batman doesn’t move. If anything, he frowns harder without even moving his face.

Now there’s a trick Tim would love to learn. He makes his way into the kitchen and flips on the overhead light by the sink to see by. Coffee prep is something he could do in his sleep, so while the little pot is brewing, Tim takes two mugs out of the cabinet and sets them on the counter.

“Do you take cream or sugar?” he calls out, not really expecting an answer.

He doesn’t get one.

Black it is.

Tim pours two cups and returns to the living room. He doesn’t try and hand Batman his cup, but he does place it on the coffee table in front of him before sitting back down on the sofa. This is by far the strangest interview he’s ever been part of. It must be a neat trick, using your reputation to get everything you need to know out of a person without having to say a word.

This could go on all night. “What do you want to know?” Tim asks eventually.

“Start from the beginning.” Batman’s voice is a low growl, one that makes Tim’s throat hurt just listening to it.

So Tim starts there, telling Batman how he met Dick, the promised quadruple somersault, and the tragedy that occurred later. He tells him about how he kept tabs on the former acrobat through the news, that he just wanted to be sure the boy was happy. Then he tells him what happened when he was nine… “I’m not sure there are many people who could have made that connection,” he admits slowly. “I mean, sure, the people at the circus probably can if they ever happen to see Robin, or Nightwing now, do that. But outside of there? I don’t think I would have if I hadn’t been there that night and saw it myself.” As well as everything that happened after, but there’s no need to rehash that again.

“You were very young.”

Tim nods. “I was almost four. My mom always said I have a mind like a steel trap. That when something goes in, it’s not coming out. I think that’s part of the reason why I didn’t forget. I couldn’t, even if I’d wanted to.” He sips his coffee, debating about the next part. This is where he could get into some serious trouble.

Well, this is supposed to be a confession of sorts. And it does feel good to get everything off his chest after holding it so close for years.

“When I figured out who was under Robin’s mask, I decided I needed to see Dick in action again for myself. We lived in the city, and Mom and Dad were never around much, so it was easy to sneak out…” Tim tells Batman about how he used to map his and Robin’s patrol routes, how he would hide and wait half the night for even a glimpse of his hero. As he got better and grew more confident, that was when he started bringing a camera.

If Batman was rigid before, then those words made him even more so.

“Those first photos were horrible,” Tim admits with a wry shake of his head. “It took a lot of practice to learn how to shoot at night, just as it took a lot of trial and error to learn to develop my own pictures because these were not something I wanted to take to the convenience store and have just anyone see. But I got better and by the time I did, there was a new Robin.”

Jason. The Robin he got all the best photos of.

“I took my pictures for a little over three years,” Tim continues. “And then my parents were murdered in a botched kidnapping. My life was turned upside down for a time, but when it became clear that I was going to end up in foster care since I had no family to take me in, I knew I couldn’t keep any of those pictures. I couldn’t risk it, even if no one knows the faces beneath those masks.”

“What did you do?”

“I took them up to the roof of my parent’s townhouse and burned them. Each and every one.” It still hurt, even after a decade and more having passed. But it hurt like ripping off a bandaid hurt, and no longer tore at his soul. “All my negatives, I soaked in bleach.”

Batman gestures to the pictures hanging on the walls. The black and white photos are taken from various angles high above Gotham. “You didn’t stop taking pictures completely.”

Tim shakes his head. “No, but I didn’t take those until I’d graduated from culinary school and had my own place. I like photography, it’s something I’m good at. But it’s a hobby now. A skill I can put to use in my shop for my website.”

“You understand the concerns I have.” It isn’t a question and Tim doesn’t pretend to take it as such.

Still, he knows he’s expected to answer. “I do. Honestly, I wasn’t planning to say a word about this to Jason at all. Until last night, I thought what we had was just a mutually beneficial arrangement between two consenting adults. He’d never given me a reason to believe otherwise.”

“Until last night,” Batman states, echoing Tim’s words. “Why did you tell him this?”

Tim hedges and sips his coffee as he tries to gather his thoughts. For all that opening his mouth had been a mistake, the reason why he did hasn’t changed. On that one fact, he still feels like he’s on solid ground.

“Because last night he said he cares about me. That what keeps him coming back is me.” No need to mention the frosting part. Nope. “I’ve known for a little while now that I like him more than what our arrangement calls for. I figured that if he wants a real relationship, then he has a right to what I know so that he doesn’t have to lie to me when the shit hits the fan or he gets all battered and bruised and needs to cancel plans we’ve made. I can’t imagine it’s easy for anyone who tries to date one of you guys.”

“It isn’t. Especially for someone like you who cannot protect himself.”

The implication is clear as day. Tim tightens his fingers around his warm mug. “I know I’m putting myself in harm’s way if Jason and I keep seeing each other. I know I can be used against him or as a means to hurt him. I know all of this. But isn’t it up to us to decide if that’s a chance we want to take?”

“Yeah, B, stop stickin’ your nose in our business.”

Tim almost spills his coffee as Jason comes striding around from behind the sofa in full Redwing regalia. It’s an impressive sight, from the battered leather jacket to the dark gray uniform underneath that fits him like a glove. How long has he been here? Oh, shit, what has he heard? Tim tells himself to get a grip. Everything he’s said to Batman is stuff he plans to tell Jason, if the other man ever gives him a chance.

He’s here though, so that has to mean something. Right?

Batman doesn’t move, but it’s clear when he turns his attention on his son because that weighted gaze no longer sits like a ton of bricks on Tim. “I am trying to ascertain what this man’s intentions are towards all of us.”

Jason snorts incredulously. “No, you’re trying to be a dad for a change and scare away a potential boyfriend. B, Tim knows and hasn’t said a word to anyone. Do you have any idea how much easier this makes things for me? I don’t have to fucking lie for a change.”

Tim clutches his coffee mug, afraid to make even the slightest of noises for fear of interrupting what is clearly a very important argument. Inside, his heart sings with joy because Jason is fighting with Batman for him. If that’s not a sign from the heavens, he doesn’t know what is.

“What happens if it doesn’t work out?” Batman says to Jason. “Think about the damage Tim can do in a single moment of petty spite.”

“I’d never do that,” Tim interrupts. This is something he has to speak up about. “What you guys do is so much bigger than anything I deal with. You’re important. You all mean something to the world. For however long this lasts between Jason and me, I’m glad to be able to support him in whatever way I can. And when it ends, well, I’ll at least know that for a time, I made him happy. Because I can’t imagine you guys get that a lot.”

Both men turn and stare at Tim, heavy and weighted and wow, this must be the same feeling that makes bad guys quiver in their shoes. But Tim holds firm and doesn’t drop his gaze.

“B, you’re done here,” Jason finally announces. “You got what you came for. Tim won’t spill the beans. Now get out.”

“Redwing—”

“Get outta my business, B. I can either air dirty laundry about you and Catwoman or toss you out that window. Take your pick.”

Batman looms over his son, but Jason is clearly having none of it as he just stares him down. All the long years of exposure must make him immune. Tim finds that impressive because wow. Just wow.

That heavy gaze settles back on him for a moment before Batman walks away without another word, brushing past the sofa towards the window leading out to the fire escape. Tim feels a faint rush of cold air on his neck and then nothing. He turns around to look, just to be sure. The only thing he sees is the faint movement of his cheap window blinds.

“So that’s what being interrogated by Batman feels like.”

Jason snorts and picks up the coffee Batman never even touched. “Sort of. There’s usually a lot more punching and getting tossed off the side of a building involved.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” Tim feels faint at the thought. Although jumping off the side of a building doesn’t sound too bad if he’s with the right person…kind of like skydiving perhaps.

An awkward silence falls over the room, neither of them seemingly able to start the conversation that needs to happen. Tim fiddles with his mug and steals glances at Jason, who seems lost in thought as he drinks the not-so-warm coffee. What’s going on in his head? How does Jason feel about all this? He apparently likes the idea of him knowing who he is if his statement to Batman was legit.

Tim takes a deep breath and breaks the ice. “How much of that did you hear?”

“All of it. I followed B here and snuck in through your bedroom while he loomed over you like a creepy fuck until you woke up.”

“How long did that take?”

Jason chuckles quietly. “About half an hour. Color me impressed.”

“I may have had a few beers earlier tonight.”

“Lightweight,” Jason teases, but there’s a fondness to it. “You were quite the little stalker once upon a time, weren’t ya?”

Tim nods, feeling steadier now that they’re talking about his past. “I guess you could call it that. At the time though, I was so incredibly lonely that sneaking out for even a glimpse of my heroes was enough to negate the creep factor.”

Jason walks around the coffee table and takes a seat in the recliner. Under the jacket, Tim can just make out the stylized red bat on his broad chest. “You’ve mentioned before that your parents were never around that much.”

“No, they weren’t.” Tim takes a sip from his mug. It’s almost empty. “I had a hard time mourning for people who were never there. I got lucky when I was placed with Grandma Ives. She gets kids in a way I’d never seen before. Probably because she had six of her own, plus over a dozen grandkids. She helped me figure out what my grief was really about and gave me something constructive to do while I worked my way through it.”

“She the one who taught you to bake?”

“Yes.” Tim has many fond memories of Grandma Ives. Perhaps one day, he can introduce Jason to her.

“Did you really take all those pictures of me?” The question seemingly comes out of left field, but Tim has a feeling it’s a precursor to something bigger.

“I did.”

“Is it… Is this the reason you want to be with me?” Jason gestures to his uniform, to the mask he’s still wearing.

Tim is shaking his head before Jason finishes speaking. “No. Not at all. In the beginning, I was shocked that someone like you even spared a glance in my direction. I kept telling myself not to look too deeply into it, to not get attached, that we were both getting something we needed. But when we went out for dinner to that bar, it felt like a date. I wanted it to be a real date so badly that I had to keep reminding myself it wasn’t.”

Jason sighs heavily and leans forward, his solid arms resting on his thickly muscled thighs. “I think of that night as a date. It was all so clear in my head what I was doing, sweeping you off your feet and romancing the crap out of you, but in hindsight, I can see why you believed what you did.” He sounds defeated, which no. No. Tim is not letting this happen.

Standing, Tim sets aside his coffee and kneels in front of Jason, resting his hands over the man’s gloved ones and forcing him to look at him. This close, the lenses in his mask are disconcerting, but Tim knows Jason’s eyes are on him. “We’re both idiots,” he pronounces. “Doing everything ass backwards from the way we should have.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve fucked up,” Jason tries, but Tim shushes him.

“Me neither. But I think we have a good reason to want to do this right. If you want to, that is.” Tim trails off, his momentary boldness tapering into uncertainty.

Jason grabs hold of his hands, holding them firmly in his gloved ones. “I want to. Christ, I want to. But the risks…Tim, already the thought of something happening to you hurts like hell. If we go further…”

Tim raises their joined hands and presses a kiss into the material of Jason’s gloves. “I understand. Just know that I’m willing to take those risks. But really, the choice is yours, not mine. What you do, who you are…it’s all so much bigger than just me.” His confidence shocks him, even if it is nice to know he can bring it out when he needs to, despite the less than stellar circumstances.

“I need some time to think.”

“I respect that.” Tim tries to stand, but Jason rises along with him and draws him in close, pressing his forehead against the top of Tim’s head.

“Tim, this isn’t good-bye. I will let you know what I decide. And in person because you deserve that much, even if it’s not what either of us want.”

It’s more than Tim can reasonably expect. “I appreciate it.”

Jason pulls back a bit and runs his fingers over Tim’s cheeks, seemingly memorizing the planes of his face. “I’ll see you soon.” He leans in and presses a brief kiss against Tim’s mouth.

And then he’s gone, vanishing into the night.

#chibinightowl writes #Tim Drake #Jason Todd #Bruce Wayne #JayTim #Bakery!AU

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