Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/6362.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Heroes_-_Fandom
  Relationship:
      Noah_Bennet/Luke_Campbell
  Character:
      Noah_Bennet, Luke_Campbell
  Additional Tags:
      Heroes, Underage_-_Freeform, Slash, m/m_-_Freeform, Noah/Luke
  Stats:
      Published: 2009-10-05 Words: 4421
****** Reverse Oedipal ******
by Moorishflower
Summary
     Luke started walking, and he honestly didn't care if he was murdered
     by a crazy truck driver or if he ended up hiking all the way back to
     his mother's house. The U.S. government had other plans. Underage
     warning (Luke is 17).
Reverse Oedipal
Luke couldn’t remember his father.
He had gone through six psychiatrists since he was ten years old, when the
worst of his ‘symptoms’ (as his mother called them) began to show. Four out of
these six psychiatrists asked him about his feelings on his father, and,
because he couldn’t remember, invariably he would give an answer along the
lines of ‘I love him’ or, later on, ‘I’ve got no complaints.’ But the other two
psychiatrists were canny enough to see through that, or perhaps they simply
thought he was lying (because teenagers lie, and this is a fact in the minds of
most adults), because they asked him questions like, ‘How would you describe
your relationship with the man who left you and your mother?’ or ‘Do you think
you’ve had a good male role model in your life?’ And those questions were
harder to answer and he had to think. And sometimes he even told what other
people might have called ‘the truth.’
Except he had never really lied; he didn’t remember his father. How could he
answer questions about a man he barely knew?
Which was why the fifth psychiatrist had taught him about memory/reality
separation, which was when the mind (because it was damaged or frightened or
confused) decided that a memory of something or someone was different enough
from the reality that it or they could be considered an ‘entirely separate
entity.’
Which meant that Luke didn’t remember his father, but he remembered the man his
father became.
By then he was sixteen, hating and hurting, and he didn’t like to sleep and he
didn’t like to eat, or talk with people, or do much of anything, really. His
mother was disappointed in him, might have even started to blame him at that
point, and so when the first spark of heat flew from fingertips to air he
didn’t tell her, because she didn’t need her son to be a freak on top of being
a fuck-up.
And also, for a while, it made him feel kind of special, which was new and
interesting, and he thought that if he ever came across dear old dad again he
would touch his fingers to the fine, bright ginger hairs along the inside of
his forearm, his thumb right below the crook of the elbow and his other
fingertips splayed across the pale, soft skin, and he would burn. The skin
would blister and pop and char at the edges, just like his own had, and it
wouldn’t have quite the same satisfaction as taking up smoking and doing the
same job with the cherry of a lit cigarette, but this new way was probably
healthier, and it also wasn’t addictive.
As addictive.
~~~~
They picked him up along I-95, his shoes almost worn through and him subsisting
off of meals handed out by compassionate waitresses, or mothers living by
themselves, or friendly families who just happened to see him walking by. It
wasn’t even a fight, really: the black van pulled up, the incredibly pale, bald
dude stepped out, and the next thing he knew he was shaking and his limbs were
completely useless and maybe he yelled a bit, and that was that.
And then there was darkness. And on the second day God…
No, wait. That wasn’t right. Because there was no God on the first day, and
there was still no God on the second day, so it was a moot point anyways.
(He learned the phrase ‘moot point’ from one of his psychiatrists, but could
not remember which.)
He woke up on a bed. Which was substantially more comfortable than he’d been
while he was awake, so even though he could feel somebody watching him (that
creepy, tingling, hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck feeling) he rolled over and
went back to sleep. Being tasered took a lot out of you; he thought, vaguely,
briefly, that it was even worse than getting burned, but then he came back to
his senses and remembered that nothing hurt worse than getting burned.
Nothing.
The next time he woke up was a lot clearer, sharper around the edges, and he
assumed that either he had slept for a lot longer than he’d meant to or he’d
been given some kind of stimulant. They did that on medical shows when
someone’s heart was failing, and it flooded their body with adrenaline so that
everything would work faster harder better.
Except he didn’t feel better (all his joints felt like they were brittle and
made of crushed glass), and he didn’t feel particularly energetic, so that
probably meant he’d just slept a long time.
Which was weird, because he didn’t like to sleep. Too much happened in the
world while you slept, and he didn’t like missing out on things. He thought
that was why he’d gone with Sylar in the first place: he hadn’t wanted to miss
out (get left behind again).
That was another moot point, though, because he’d gotten left anyways.
That weird ‘being watched’ feeling hadn’t resolved itself yet, so he lifted his
head with a soft groan of pain (even though his head wasn’t made up of joints
that felt like broken glass, too) and looked around.
He was in a small room. Luke was used to small rooms; his old room back home
was just big enough for a bed and a dresser. He liked it that way. Small spaces
made him feel more comfortable, like the room itself was giving you a hug. And
if someone was trying to hurt you, it was easier to defend yourself if you were
in a small space, because they wouldn’t be able to get in there with you. But
other than that, it wasn’t very much like his room. It was very clean, for one
thing, almost pristine. The bed looked like it was a recent addition, and
consisted of a solid frame (nothing to take apart and use as a weapon) and no
springs.
The rest of the room was bare. The walls were gray, except for one, which was
made entirely of that dark glass that you saw in murder movies, the kind that
you could only see through from the other side.
There was a man standing (leaning) by the door. He was very short, and very
pale. Luke clenched his hands as a wave of recognition washed over him, but he
stayed quiet. This was not a man he needed or wanted to impress, and he’d
learned long ago that it made his life much easier if people thought less of
him, thought him incapable or dumb. And if they were stupid enough to actually
believe that, then he only got away with more.
“You gave us quite the run-around,” the pale guy said. Luke tried to remember
how hot skin had to be before it started to liquefy. He’d done it to that
agent, but he’d been terrified, confused. He bet he could do it again, though.
“I suppose it helped that the last person to see you was Sylar,” the man
continued, and started a slow, easy pacing from door to bed, and Luke bit down
on his lip at the mention of him and continued to say nothing. “He just left
you, didn’t he? That’s what he does. He uses people, and he hurts them, and
then he abandons them, because he’s a monster. And monsters need to be hunted
down.”
Why was he talking like Luke was some little kid? Did he think Luke hadn’t
known what he was getting into? He’d been perfectly aware of what he was from
the moment they met. See, the thing was, monsters always recognized other
monsters, whether they were the product of circumstance or birth or…
“We could give your family a call,” the pale guy said, and Luke’s head snapped
up, angry and quick like a rattlesnake. The guy took an unconscious step back.
Good. Be afraid. “That is, if you’re willing to be a good boy and help us.
Luke, isn’t it? You’ve done a lot of bad things these past couple weeks.”
Luke got the feeling that this guy was not very used to working with teenagers.
Teenagers, he thought, generally didn’t like being called ‘good boys’ unless
they were naked and kneeling with a dominatrix standing over them.
Disturbing mental image. Moving on.
“All you have to do is tell us where Sylar is, and we’ll let you go.”
The pale guy waited. Luke waited, too. He could see the minute twitch of
irritation at the corner of the guy’s eye, the tight clench of his jaw, the way
he kept flexing his fingers as if itching to wrap them around something. Luke
decided he was used to carrying a gun, which meant he had to be careful if the
guy actually brought a gun in here.
He didn’t really have any illusions about getting out.
Silent minutes passed. Luke spent them debating his chances of frying this guy
and getting out of…wherever he was (not good) versus waiting it out and
focusing on staying alive (slightly better). He could tell each time another
minute passed because the guy’s eye would twitch again. Luke guessed he wasn’t
the kind of person who was used to being ignored.
It’s like having a staring contest with a mirror, he thought, and then, because
he wasn’t into this macho bullshit, he looked away. Bored. He couldn’t see it,
but he could hear the pale guy giving up.
For now.
“Fine,” he said, and Luke could hear his boots, thump thump thump as he stomped
back over to the door. “We’ll just have to see if you feel any different after
some alone time.”
Open-swing-shut. The lock clicked home with deafening finality, and Luke flexed
his hands over the thin, easily torn cotton sheets he sat on. He tried to call
up that spark of heat from the back of his mind, where all the power lived,
where he was Coyote or Prometheus and not just some loser fuck-up…
And there was nothing. His fire had been stolen.
~~~~
They let him sit for three days before they actually dared to move him.
‘Dared,’ because Luke might not have had his fire any more, but he was
desperate and he was young, two things which lent him a curious sort of
strength. The pale guy (Danko, he learned) never did come back in, but Luke
could feel him, those weird vampire-blue eyes, watching through the dark glass.
Luke was very good at telling when he was being watched, out of necessity.
So, three days, and occasionally the slate-gray metal door would open and some
dude or chick in government black would toss him a little brown bag with stuff
like sandwiches and apples in it (seriously, what was he, four? It was a wonder
he didn’t get a little fucking juice box along with his bagged lunch), and
after three days of that he was practically vibrating with the tension and the
energy, so maybe it was kind of his fault that they moved him.
Maybe a bit more than ‘kind of.’ And by ‘a bit more’ he meant ‘head butted the
next guy who tried to throw a kiddy lunch at his face.’
He didn’t get a bed after that. Which was okay, because Luke had slept in worse
places than a steel medical slab, but it was the wires and the IVs that got to
him. Luke didn’t like needles; Sylar had joked, once (in that way he had, where
you couldn’t really tell if he was deadly serious or just very, very subtle in
his joking), about tattooing ‘property of’ somewhere on Luke’s body, and Luke
had flinched away so hard he’d almost tossed himself out the car window. Sylar,
in an unusual display of tact, hadn’t mentioned it again, and everything went
back to being all right.
Until he got left, anyways. Again.
So three days turned into four days, and then six days, and then a week and a
half, and Luke was slowly going crazy because he had too much energy and too
many half-formed thoughts in his head and nothing was happening, and all of
that combined to make him irritable and itchy, which resulted in him swearing a
lot more and trying to bite anyone who got close enough.
He’d never thought about the taste of other peoples’ blood before, because he’d
kinda assumed it just tasted like his own if he accidentally cut himself
(salty, iron-tang, and too much of it made him feel sick). But the truth was,
other peoples’ blood tasted rank. So the biting stopped, for a while.
And his fire stayed gone, and Sylar didn’t come back, and the world continued
to rotate.
And Luke was alone.
~~~~
The worst part of it was the silence.
Luke could deal with how fucked-up the drugs made him feel, he could deal with
the metal cuffs scraping his wrists raw and the bright overhead lights that
made him squint, blurry and hurting, whenever someone came into the lab to
change the IVs. They’d tried three different drugs (that he knew of) in their
attempts to knock him out the way they’d done with all the others, and the
effects varied from making him sick to making him so strung-out they actually
tased him again just to get some peace, and Luke could tell that whatever
labcoats they had working on him were at their wit’s end.
He could just as easily inform them that nothing was really going to work the
way it should have. He’d been off his meds for weeks and weeks, and everything
was all unbalanced and completely wrong.
Except that wouldn’t have been quite as fun.
So for a while they made due with the cuffs around his wrists and ankles and
the IV in his arm, delivering a constant wash of glacial water to douse the
fire in him, some drug that he wouldn’t be able to remember the name of even if
he tried. He didn’t care what it was called, he just wanted it out.
And then one day some guy started visiting him.
Not the pale guy, Danko. Luke would have spit at him and tried to bite him if
that was the case, but some new guy, with short, no-nonsense hair and big fuck-
off glasses and one of those ‘manly’ chins, like Ben Affleck or Pierce Brosnan.
Luke thought (somewhat crazily) that his mom would like this guy. She was into
that sort of look.
The guy came around a couple times a day, not saying anything, not even trying
to get him to talk (the way Danko had been doing), only sitting at a nearby
desk, sometimes sipping a cup of coffee (he never looked like he enjoyed it, so
Luke figured it must have been really shitty coffee), sometimes looking over
paperwork that, no matter how he craned his neck, Luke couldn’t ever make out.
And sometimes he just sat there and watched Luke. Creepy.
It actually happened three or four times before anything changed, but it was a
big change. Sometimes the guy would come closer, get a better look at him, and
sometimes he would even touch Luke. Not anything bad, not even anything really
creepy, just little, concerned touches to the bone-deep bruises at the crook of
his elbow where the IV slid into him, to the raw, chafed skin of his wrists
where he occasionally still rattled the cuffs. Sometimes he touched the silvery
half-dollar scars along the pale length of Luke’s forearms, and he looked sad.
A couple days later, some burly dudes came in and replaced the metal cuffs with
ones lined in cotton.
Luke figured that was worth a word or two, at least.
~~~~
“I really hope this isn’t something you get off on.”
It was the first thing Luke had said in what must have been weeks, and his
throat felt sore and itchy and as raw as his wrists and ankles. They must’ve
been giving him all his nutrients and stuff through the IV, because he’s felt
hungry but not unhealthy. Sometimes a man or woman dressed all in black rubber
and Kevlar would come in and give him just enough to keep his stomach from
attacking itself, a sandwich or an apple. He didn’t eat, half the time. It was
(and this was a word he’d never really thought of using in the same sentence as
himself) undignified. He hadn’t ever wanted to take food from Sylar’s hand,
what made them think he would start now?
Glasses-Chin-Coffee Guy tended to start like a wild animal whenever Luke so
much as shifted. Now, though, he only looked tired.
“Define ‘this,’” was what he said as he took his usual seat, and he had a nice,
suburban house-dad voice. Luke wasn’t fooled.
“Being nice to me,” he spat, “coming in here and fuckin’ watching me. That’s
being a world class creeper, right there.”
Silence. If the guy was going to say anything then he was taking his sweet time
with it, and Luke rolled his head the other way, huffing. His skin felt too
tight, too thin, too sensitive. He never thought he’d ever miss his pills, but
hey, weirder things had happened, and he was just so sick of feeling so awake.
When he felt the hand touch his hair, soft, so soft, he whipped his head around
so fast he swore he could hear the crack of the sound barrier breaking. Glasses
pulled his hand back, like he was afraid of getting bit, and Luke bared his
teeth. Good.
“You remind me of my son,” the guy said, when’s Luke’s snarl didn’t waver.
“He’s…about your age. He says things like that, too. ‘Creeper.’ I don’t really
get it, but I suppose that’s a father’s prerogative.”
Luke was skeptical. Of course. Who the hell had kids and worked for a secret
government program designed to take down people who couldn’t even help what
they were born with? It wasn’t like Luke chose to be a freak.
“I don’t believe you,” Luke growled, and there must have been something in his
eyes or in the harsh lines of his mouth, because Glasses leaned back further,
expression carefully neutral. “And even if I did, I’m not your fucking son.”
“No,” Glasses said, “you’re not.”
And for the longest time they remained in silence, and Luke eventually,
finally, drifted off to sleep, lulled by the sound of shuffling papers and an
inhale-exhale that was not his own.
~~~~
Luke only learned the guy’s name after he spent three days marinating in a
sense of guilt so poignant and foreign that it almost made him throw up.
Guilt, because the very next morning one of the burly military types came in
with breakfast. Breakfast. It wasn’t much of a breakfast, granted, consisting
as it did of a sausage and cheese McMuffin and a banana, but it was
substantially more than he’d been getting, and he was even allowed to sit up
while he ate. He chewed as slow as he could, savoring the now-weird taste of
grease, the even weirder taste of honestly fresh fruit, and he still only took
up twelve minutes.
After that it was back into the cuffs again.
The same thing happened in the evening (Luke still had a vague sense of time,
but it was hazy and indistinct): he was brought dinner on a paper plate, given
a dull plastic fork and spoon to eat with. It was the sort of dinner you might
get out of a Lean Cuisine meal, some sort of chicken pasta with white sauce and
tomatoes. He took his time savoring that, too, and after weeks of nothing but
bologna sandwiches and month-old, tiny, school cafeteria apples he was in
heaven. He probably made some pretty indecent sounds while he ate, judging by
the look on his guard’s face.
He ate louder, out of spite, and when the guy took the flimsy little paper
plate away Luke made a show of sucking creamy white sauce from his fingers.
Strangely enough, he didn’t feel terribly gratified when the guy scurried out
with a hard-on pressing against his fly.
Maybe something was wrong with him.
~~~~
On the third day, it wasn’t a military goon who brought Luke dinner, it was
Glasses. ‘Mr. Bennet,’ from what he’d heard, and as many times as he might have
told himself not to accept the food, not to give in, he found himself sitting
up when the cuffs were unlocked anyways, rubbing his wrists where they had been
red and sore before the cotton.
“You treat all your dates to the bondage experience? ‘Cause if not, gotta say
that I’m honored.”
“I lied,” Bennet said as he held out the paper plate, the plastic cutlery.
Fried chicken and mashed potatoes, today. Luke eyed the fork warily, wondering
if Bennet would pull it back at the last second and then use it to stab him in
the neck. He wasn’t sure how hard you’d have to punch to get those little
plastic tines to break skin, but he was betting on hard.
“What a fucking surprise,” he said cautiously, and when no attack was
forthcoming he snatched the plate close, as if it would be taken away from him
if he wasn’t quick enough.
Bennet only smiled. Creepy.
“You don’t remind me of my son,” Bennet continued, and Luke stuffed his mouth
with potatoes to keep himself from saying something stupid. “You remind me of
myself, when I was your age. I was in a bad place until the Company found me.”
“Company’s gone,” Luke mumbled. “Sylar told me. Something about his ma. Or some
lady pretending to be his ma. Listen, are we going to do this shrink routine
all night? ‘Cause I’ve seen better.”
“It wasn’t one of Angela’s wiser decisions, no,” Bennet said softly. “I’ve
always told her that Sylar was too dangerous to make an asset out of him. That
man is more touched in the head than you or I will ever be.”
Luke frowned, looking away. Talking about Sylar, listening to people talk about
him, hurt, and hurt badly. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know you’ll be eighteen in two months. And I know that that’s the only thing
that’s been keeping Emile from putting you down like a stray dog.”
Emile. So pale dude had an awesomely girly name to go with his freakish vampire
face. If Luke ever saw him again he was so going to call him on it.
“It doesn’t really matter,” he said, his frown finally smoothing out into numb
blankness. “Sylar left and my mom’s pretty sure I’m the spawn of Satan. Where
the hell else is there to go but further down?”
“Your father?”
“I don’t talk about my father.”
“Luke, you don’t deserve to die, and if you give me a name I might be able to
contact – “
“I said I don’t talk about my father.”
And Bennet fell silent.
Finally, he’d gotten the picture.
And then, “I see,” he said, and pulled off his glasses. He folded them with
slow, precise movements, the half-conscious action of a man who had worn the
same pair for years uncounted. The lenses were pocked with tiny scratches, and
there was a thumbprint in one corner. The frames were that strange reddish-
black color that only showed dark spots when light shone through it.
Luke could tell because Bennet was getting closer. Not suddenly, not fast, like
he meant to hit or hurt, but the way his mom had gotten close, back when dad
was still around and she still cared, when she’d wanted him to hold still so
she could clean the dirt out of a cut, pull the glass from his arm or his leg.
Put burn ointment at the crook of his elbow, were needles now emerged like
weird sea serpents in the lake of his flesh and blood.
“There’s a reason for that,” Bennet said, and when he lifted his hand Luke’s
automatic response was to flinch away, because even with Sylar his first
instinct had been to escape. He was still small, for a guy. He probably always
would be, and he didn’t relish the thought of getting smacked around any more.
Excepet Bennet didn’t roll his eyes or scowl or anything. Instead he fucking
froze, like he was the one about to get smacked, and they studied each other
with all the wary intensity of cornered animals.
Luke could hear Bennet breathing.
He wasn’t sure who moved first, or even if they moved at all (because maybe
there was some weird natural force that propelled them forward like opposing
magnets, it could happen), but he was sure that all of a sudden there was a lot
less space between them, and Bennet’s hand was carding tenderly through his
hair like he was his Valentine or his date, and Luke’s mouth opened underneath
chapped and tired lips that were still softer and wetter and hotter than
anything he’d ever done with his closed fist and a mirror, thirteen years old
and practicing making out with his hand.
And Luke had the luxury of blaming his rampant hormones for the erection that
suddenly tented the front of his weeks-old, unwashed jeans, but when he lowered
his hand, just to touch, just to see, Bennet had no such excuse, the soft bump
up of hips and the strange sensation of another guy’s dick rubbing against the
heel of his palm.
And, okay, Luke was also willing to admit he didn’t have the most experience in
these sorts of things, but he gave, and gave, and gave, until Bennet was
breathing harder and the prick under his hand was straining and both their
mouths were darker, swollen. Luke probably looked like he’d just been sucking
on a cherry popsicle. Bennet looked mildly flushed.
“You’re like fucking James Bond, dude,” was what eventually came out of Luke’s
mouth, and shit but Bennet could do that eyebrow thing, the one raised eyebrow,
and for whatever reason it made Luke’s hips jerk up, a strangled whimper trying
to escape his throat.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Yeah,” Luke said, “now, if we’re done discussing my daddy issues, are you
gonna let me outta these things or not?”
Bennet hooked his fingers through his pocket, pulling out a set of keys.
Luke grinned.
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