Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The fluorescent lights in the emergency room had a particular quality that Shannon had come to know intimately over the years—a flat, greenish pallor that made everyone look like they were already dead. It buzzed faintly overhead, that industrial hum you stopped noticing after the first hour but that worked its way into your skull anyway, settling behind your eyes like a low-grade headache that would bloom into something vicious by morning.

She had been here for seven hours.

The plastic chairs were pale green vinyl, the color of hospital scrubs faded by a thousand washings. They had been bolted to the floor in rows of four, separated by armrests that cut into her thighs no matter how she positioned herself. The seat was too shallow, the back too straight, angled in a way that offered the illusion of support while actually forcing you to hold yourself upright through pure core strength. After seven hours, that strength had given out. After seven hours, everything had given out.

She was standing now, by the window that looked out over the ambulance bay. Her reflection stared back at her from the dark glass—a woman in her mid-fifties with gray threading through hair that had once been the color of honey. She had stopped dyeing it two years ago. What was the point? Every week brought fresh reasons to age, fresh gray hairs sprouting at her temples like weeds she no longer had the energy to pull. The lines around her eyes had deepened into permanent grooves, and there was a tightness in her jaw that she could not seem to release, a clenching she carried even in sleep.

That was assuming she slept at all anymore.

Beyond the glass, ambulances came and went in the pre-dawn darkness. Red and white lights spinning, paramedics moving with that particular urgency that meant someone's world was ending. She watched them wheel a gurney through the automatic doors—an elderly man, oxygen mask over his face, his wife trotting alongside clutching a purse to her chest like a shield. The wife's hair was white and wispy, her cardigan buttoned wrong, one side hanging lower than the other. She had dressed in the dark, Shannon realized. She had gotten a phone call in the middle of the night and thrown on whatever was closest and come here to this terrible place where the lights made everyone look dead.

Shannon understood. She had done the same thing.

Her husband had called at 9:47 PM. She had been in the living room, half-watching something on television, the way she spent most evenings now—present but not present, her mind always partly elsewhere, always partly listening for the sound of Ash's footsteps on the stairs or the front door opening or not opening. Patrick's ringtone had cut through the laugh track of whatever sitcom was playing, that stupid default iPhone sound he had never bothered to change, and she had known before her hand even found the phone on the end table. She had known the way she always knew, the way mothers knew, that particular quality of silence on the other end of the line that meant the world was about to change.

His voice had been flat. Controlled. It was the voice he used in depositions when he was holding something terrible at arm's length and could not afford to let it touch him.

Shannon. It's Ash. He's—I'm riding with him in the ambulance. Meet us at St. Mary's.

He had not said overdose. He had not needed to say it. The word hung between them, unspoken, as familiar as the sound of her own heartbeat.

She had driven to the hospital in a fugue state, running two red lights without registering them, the rosary beads from the glove compartment pressed so hard into her palm that she could still feel the imprint of the crucifix in her flesh hours later. The tiny Christ figure, arms outstretched, had left a perfect indentation in the meat of her hand. She had not noticed until she arrived and tried to open the car door and her fingers would not uncurl.

Patrick had found Ash around nine o'clock. He had stopped by the house on his way home from the office—he did that sometimes, checked in, though they both pretended it was casual—and the bathroom light had been on, visible through the window from the driveway. That was wrong. Ash never left lights on. Ash lived in darkness now, curtains drawn, phone screen the only illumination in rooms that smelled of unwashed sheets and something chemical she could not name and did not want to.

Her husband had used his key. He had called out and gotten no answer.

In the bathroom, he had told her later, his voice cracking on the words. Gray. He was gray, Shannon. I thought—

He had not finished the sentence, but he had not needed to finish it.

The doctor had appeared an hour ago. A young man, younger than Ash, with tired eyes and the careful neutrality of someone who delivered this kind of news so regularly it had become reflex. He's stable, the doctor had said. It was close—another ten, fifteen minutes and we'd be having a different conversation. We're moving him to the ICU for observation.

It had been close. Ten minutes close. The margin between her son living and dying had been measured in the time it took to brew a pot of coffee, or the time it took to drive from the office to the house, or the time it took for Patrick to notice the light.

Shannon pressed her forehead against the cold glass of the window. The chill seeped into her skull, offering something like relief from the relentless fluorescent hum. Behind her, she could hear her husband shifting in one of those terrible plastic chairs. The vinyl squeaked against his suit pants, a small embarrassing sound in the waiting room silence.

Patrick worked late most nights now, later than the cases required. She understood why. It was easier to stay at the office than to come home and wait. It was easier to lose himself in briefs and depositions than to sit in the living room listening for footsteps that might not come, wondering if tonight was the night the phone would ring with the news they both dreaded.

They had barely spoken since the doctor left. There was nothing to say that they had not said a hundred times before. The words had worn grooves in their mouths like water wearing stone.

This cannot go on.

We have to do something.

What else is there?

The same conversation, cycling endlessly, for six years now. Ever since Ash had dropped out of high school three months before graduation—suspended twice, grades in freefall, the college brochures they had collected gathering dust in a box in the basement. Ever since the first time she had found pills in his jacket pocket, little white tablets she did not recognize, and he had sworn they belonged to a friend.

She had believed him. God help her, she had wanted so badly to believe.

The first rehab had been when he was seventeen.

Shannon remembered everything about that drive to Wisconsin. The way the late October fields had stretched brown and stubbled on either side of I-94, the harvest finished, the land settling into its winter sleep. The sky had been that particular Midwestern gray, low and heavy, threatening snow that never quite came. She remembered the weight of silence in the car, so thick she could feel it pressing against her chest. Ash had been in the backseat with his hood pulled up over his brown hair, his face turned toward the window, not speaking. Her husband's hands had been on the steering wheel, knuckles white, jaw set in that hard line that meant he was holding something down by force.

It had taken four hours. Four hours of watching the mile markers tick past, of listening to the hum of tires on asphalt, of stealing glances in the rearview mirror at the son she was delivering to strangers because she had failed to save him herself.

He had been a junior. Honor roll until sophomore year, when the grades had started slipping and the friends had started changing and something behind his bluish-green eyes—her blue mixed with Patrick's green—had gone dark. She had told herself it was adolescence. Just a phase. All teenagers went through rough patches. Her own mother had said the same thing, dismissive, when Shannon had called her crying after finding Ash's progress report hidden in his backpack. Boys will be boys. He'll grow out of it. You're worrying over nothing.

By the time she found the pills, he had already been using for almost a year.

The intake counselor at the Wisconsin facility had been a woman in her forties with graying hair and kind eyes and a voice like warm milk. She had led them through the admissions process with the gentle efficiency of someone who had done this a thousand times before—the forms, the insurance verification, the inventory of Ash's belongings, the goodbye that Shannon had not been ready for even though she had been preparing for it for weeks.

Thirty days, the counselor had said. Thirty days to reset. To build new patterns. Most of our clients leave here with the tools they need to maintain sobriety.

Most. That single word had given Shannon something to hold onto. Most meant majority. Most meant odds in their favor. Most meant that statistically, probably, hopefully, her son would be one of the ones who made it.

Ash had completed the program. He had come home with a thirty-day chip in his pocket—she still had it somewhere, that little bronze coin with the triangle and the Roman numeral I—and a binder full of coping strategies and trigger management techniques and phone numbers for sponsors and crisis hotlines. He had stood in the doorway of the house where he had grown up, thinner than she remembered, pale from thirty days of institutional lighting, and he had hugged her.

He had really hugged her. The way he used to when he was small, before puberty and rebellion and whatever darkness had taken root in him. His arms around her neck, his face pressed into her shoulder, his voice muffled against her cardigan.

I'm sorry, Mom. I'm going to do better.

For four months, she had believed him.

It had been four months of dinners together at the kitchen table, of movie nights on the couch, of the son she remembered slowly emerging from whatever shell he had retreated into. He had gotten a part-time job at the bookstore downtown, had started talking about maybe getting his GED, had smiled sometimes—really smiled, the way he used to, his father's crooked grin in his young face.

Then the money had started disappearing from her wallet. Twenty dollars here, forty there. She had noticed, of course. She had told herself she was miscounting.

Then there were the late nights. The excuses. The glassy eyes he swore were just exhaustion, just staying up too late playing video games, just allergies or a cold or anything, anything, anything but the truth.

Then the call from his sponsor, a man named David whose voice Shannon would have recognized anywhere. Mrs. Walsh? I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm worried about Ash. He's missed three meetings in a row. Have you seen him? Is everything okay?

Nothing was okay. Nothing had been okay for a long time.

He had not graduated with his class. She remembered that June day with a clarity that felt like cruelty—the high school gymnasium decked in blue and gold streamers, the rows of folding chairs filled with families clutching programs and bouquets of flowers, the names being called one by one in alphabetical order. She had sat in the bleachers with Patrick and watched the W's approach and felt the absence of her son like a missing limb.

Walsh, Ashton.

There was silence. No one walked across the stage. No diploma changed hands. There was just the next name being called, and the next, and the terrible normalcy of other people's children succeeding while hers was at home in his bedroom, curtains drawn, refusing to eat or speak or acknowledge that the world existed.

She still had the college brochures in a box in the basement. Princeton. Georgetown. Northwestern. University of Chicago. They had collected them together when he was fifteen, spreading them across the kitchen table, talking about the future like it was something bright and certain. He had wanted to study history. He had talked about becoming a professor, about writing books, about spending his life surrounded by the past.

All of that potential was gone now. All of those futures would never exist. They were rotting in a cardboard box next to the Christmas decorations and the baby clothes she had never been able to throw away.

The second rehab was at nineteen. A different facility, this time in Minnesota. More expensive—forty thousand dollars for ninety days, not counting the psychiatric evaluation and the aftercare program and the family therapy sessions they drove five hours each way to attend. Patrick had taken out a loan against his retirement to pay for it. They had sat across from each other at the kitchen table, the paperwork spread between them, and he had signed his name on the line that mortgaged their future for a chance to save their son.

Whatever it takes, he had said. We do whatever it takes.

Shannon had nodded, and cried, and signed her own name beside his.

The family therapy sessions had taught her words she had not known before. Enabling. The way she had made excuses for Ash, covered for him, smoothed over the consequences of his choices until he never had to face them himself. Codependency. The way her own emotional state had become so intertwined with his that she could not feel happiness or peace unless he was happy, unless he was at peace, which meant she had not felt either in years. Boundaries. The lines she was supposed to draw and hold, the limits she was supposed to enforce even when every maternal instinct screamed at her to give in.

She had practiced saying it in front of the therapist, a gray-haired woman with bifocals and a cardigan that reminded Shannon of her own mother. I love you and I cannot watch you kill yourself. The words had felt like glass in her mouth, sharp and unnatural. The therapist had nodded approvingly and made a note on her clipboard.

It had not worked. None of it had worked.

By twenty, Ash had burned through two jobs, three apartments, and most of the savings they had set aside for the college he would never attend. The education fund—she still thought of it that way, even now, that little mental category marked Ash's Future—had gone to bail when he was arrested for possession. First offense, the lawyer had said. Probably just probation.

Probably. She had learned to hate that word. Probably meant the opposite of certainty. Probably meant the ground under your feet might give way at any moment. Probably meant nothing you planned for could be relied upon.

At twenty-one, the second overdose. Narcan administered by a paramedic in the bathroom of a gas station off I-90. She had gotten that call while she was at the grocery store, standing in the produce section, holding a bag of Honeycrisp apples. She had dropped the apples and walked out of the store without paying for the items in her cart. She had driven to the hospital with the automatic precision of a body that had learned this route too well.

At twenty-two, the third overdose. This one at a party, surrounded by people who did not call 911 for almost an hour because they were afraid of getting in trouble. By the time the ambulance arrived, Ash's heart had stopped twice. They had brought him back both times—modern medicine, miraculous drugs, the determination of paramedics who refused to let a twenty-two-year-old die on a dirty carpet in a stranger's apartment.

And now, at twenty-three, the fourth. Her husband finding him gray in the bathroom, ten minutes away from being a story people told at support groups. My son. He almost made it. He was doing so well.

That was the thing about overdoses—they never came when you expected them. They came when you had started to relax, when you had started to believe the worst was over, when you had let yourself imagine a future where your son was healthy, was sober, was the person you had always believed he could be.

Hope was the cruelest thing of all.

"Mrs. Walsh?"

Shannon turned from the window. A nurse stood in the doorway—young, younger than Ash, with dark skin and braided hair and a clipboard held against her chest. Her scrubs were the same pale green as the waiting room chairs, as if the hospital had decided on a color scheme and committed to it with grim determination.

"You can see him now, if you would like. He is awake."

Patrick was already rising from his chair, the vinyl squeaking as his weight lifted from the seat. Shannon could read her husband's face the way she could read a book she had memorized—the hope and dread warring in his green eyes, the fear that maybe, this time, something would be different. And underneath it, there was the older fear. The certainty, born of experience, that nothing ever changed.

They followed the nurse through corridors that all looked the same—pale walls, fluorescent lights, the smell of antiseptic and industrial floor cleaner and something underneath it, something organic, that Shannon tried not to think about too closely. Their footsteps echoed on the linoleum, a hollow sound that seemed to match the emptiness in her chest.

Ash's room in the ICU was small and bright, everything white and chrome and aggressively clean. Machines beeped their steady reassurance—heart rate, oxygen levels, the electronic proof that her son was still alive. He lay in the bed looking smaller than he should, smaller than six feet of young man should be able to look. The hospital blanket was pulled up to his chest, thin and institutional, and an IV snaked into the crook of his arm, a bag of clear fluid dripping slowly into his veins.

His skin was still too pale. Waxy, almost, in the harsh overhead light. His brown hair—Patrick's coloring, darker than her blonde—was lank and unwashed, spread across the white pillow. His cheekbones stood out sharply, more sharply than she remembered. He had lost weight again.

His eyes opened when they entered. Shannon watched the sequence of emotions cross his face with the intimate familiarity of a mother who had memorized every expression her son had ever worn. First there was confusion—where am I, what happened, how did I get here. Then recognition—the hospital, his parents, the IV in his arm. Then something shuttered closed behind his eyes like a door slamming, a wall going up, the retreat of whatever real feeling had flickered there for a moment into some protected interior space where she could not reach him.

"Hey." His voice was hoarse, scraped raw, the voice of someone whose throat had been abused by whatever tube they had shoved down it while trying to save his life.

"Hey yourself." She moved to the side of the bed, reached for his hand where it lay pale and limp on the blanket. He let her take it, but his fingers stayed slack in her grip. There was no squeeze, no acknowledgment. Just the passive acceptance of contact he did not want but would not refuse.

"How are you feeling?"

It was a stupid question. She knew it was a stupid question even as she asked it. But what else was there to say? The real questions—why do you keep doing this, what are we supposed to do, how do I save you—had no answers she could bear to hear.

"I have been better." He attempted something that might have been a smile if it had reached his eyes. It did not reach his eyes. "Doc says I will be fine. Just need to rest."

Just need to rest. As if rest were the problem. As if a good night's sleep could undo the needle marks she could see on the inside of his elbow, the track record of failed promises, the years of watching him slip away.

Patrick stood at the foot of the bed, his arms crossed over his chest, his face set in that hard expression that had become his default over the last few years. The anger had calcified into something permanent, a shell around a grief too large to carry any other way.

"The doctor says you need more than rest, Ash."

"Dad—"

"He says this was a close call. Closer than the last one. He says if I had gotten there fifteen minutes later—"

"I know."

"Do you?" Her husband's voice cracked on the words, a fissure in the wall he had built. Shannon watched him struggle to contain it, to force the emotion back down into whatever box he kept it in. "Because from where I am standing, it does not seem like you know anything except how to scare the hell out of us."

"Patrick." Shannon's voice was soft, a warning.

"No." He shook his head, his jaw tightening. "No, Shannon, I am done. I am done pretending this is something we can love him through. I am done watching him kill himself one hit at a time." He turned to Ash, and beneath the anger, Shannon could see what it cost him—the grief, the exhaustion, the love that had nowhere left to go. "You are our son. We would do anything for you. But you have to want to get better. You have to try."

Ash looked away. Out the window, at the parking lot, at the gray February sky, at anything that was not his father's face.

"I am trying," he said quietly.

"Are you?"

The silence that followed was heavy. The machines beeped. Somewhere down the hall, a phone was ringing, an unanswered summons echoing off the walls.

Shannon squeezed her son's hand. It was still limp in hers, unresponding, the hand of a stranger who happened to share her blood.

"We will talk about this later," she said. "When you are feeling stronger. Right now, you just need to rest."

Just need to rest. The words tasted like ash in her mouth, like the lies you told when you had run out of true things to say.

Two weeks later, Ash was home again.

The hospital had recommended inpatient treatment—strongly recommended, the discharge nurse had said, with an emphasis that meant he will die if you do not do this. Shannon had made the calls, researched the facilities, found a place in Arizona that specialized in cases like Ash's. It was a good place. An expensive place. One more mortgage on a future that seemed increasingly hypothetical.

Ash had refused.

I'm twenty-three, he had said, sitting on the edge of the hospital bed in his street clothes, discharge papers waiting for his signature. You can't force me.

No. No, they could not. That was the horrible truth at the center of everything—he was an adult. He had rights. They could beg and plead and threaten, but at the end of the day, he could simply say no and walk away, and there was nothing, nothing, nothing they could do to stop him.

The law said he was competent to make his own decisions. The law said he was a grown man, capable of determining his own fate. The law had clearly never watched a twenty-three-year-old choose, again and again and again, to destroy himself.

So they had brought him home instead. Back to the bedroom with the faded posters on the walls—bands he had loved in high school, their faces peeling at the corners where the tape had given out years ago. Back to the house where he had taken his first steps, said his first words, grown from a laughing baby into a sullen stranger who looked at her with cold eyes and said you can't make me.

She had told herself it would be different this time. The overdose had scared him—she had seen it in his eyes, that moment of genuine fear when he woke up in the hospital and realized how close he had come. This time he would really try. This time he would let them help.

For three days, she believed it.

On the fourth day, she found the baggie.

She had been putting away his laundry—he would not do it himself, had not done his own laundry in years, so she did it for him the way she had done everything for him, enabling, codependent, all those words the therapists used to describe the particular pathology of loving someone who was trying to die. His shoes had been by the closet door, the old Nikes he had worn since high school, battered and stained and held together mostly by habit. She had picked them up to move them, and something had shifted inside, and she had known before she even looked what she would find.

A small plastic baggie. White powder, maybe a gram, maybe less. Hidden in the toe of his shoe like a child hiding candy.

She had stood there for a long time, holding it in her palm. Such a small thing. A few dollars' worth of poison. Enough to end everything, or enough to keep the nightmare going a little longer, depending on how the dice fell on any given night.

Something cracked inside her. Some last reservoir of hope she had not known she was still holding. It drained away, leaving her hollow, standing in her son's bedroom with his drugs in her hand and nothing left to believe in.

She had confronted him that evening. Calm, controlled, the way the therapist had taught her. She had found him in the kitchen, pushing food around his plate, not eating. He looked up when she entered, and she watched the calculation happen behind his eyes—the weighing of lies, the measuring of options, the decision about which deception might work this time.

"It is not mine."

"Don't."

"Mom—"

"Don't." Her voice cracked on the word, all the careful control shattering at once. "Do not lie to me. Not anymore. Not after—I watched them bring you back, Ash. I watched them shock your heart and pump your stomach and I sat there for seven hours not knowing if you were going to live or die. Do not you dare look me in the eye and lie to me."

He set down his fork. He looked at the table. He said nothing.

The conversation that followed was the same conversation they had had a hundred times before. The same words, the same arguments, the same desperate pleas and stubborn silences. She had begged him to go to rehab, and he had refused. She had threatened consequences, and he had shrugged. She had cried, and he had watched her cry with eyes that gave away nothing at all.

And then Patrick had come home, and the conversation had escalated, and Ash had said the words that still echoed in Shannon's mind three days later.

I'm not a little kid. You can't make me do anything.

And then he was gone. Jacket grabbed from the hook, keys snatched from the bowl, the front door slamming behind him hard enough to rattle the pictures on the wall. The photograph of Ash at eight—gap-toothed, grinning, a baseball cap crooked on his head—had swung on its nail for a long moment before settling back into stillness.

Her husband had stood frozen in the kitchen doorway, his hand still raised as if reaching for a son who was no longer there. His face had gone gray—not the gray Ash had been in the hospital, but something close. Something that scared her almost as much.

I don't know what else to do, he had said, his voice barely a whisper. Shannon, I don't know what else to do.

Neither did she. That was the truth she had been avoiding for years. There was nothing left to try. No treatment they had not attempted, no boundary they had not set, no conversation they had not had a dozen times before. They had done everything right—followed the therapist's advice, attended the support groups, read the books about tough love and enabling and recovery. None of it had mattered.

Their son was dying by inches, and there was nothing they could do to stop it.

Three days later, Ash still had not come home.

Shannon sat in the dark of the living room, her back against the couch, the carpet rough beneath her legs. She had not turned on the lights. She had not eaten since that morning—just coffee, black, bitter enough to curl her tongue, abandoned half-finished on the kitchen counter. The house around her was silent in that particular way of empty rooms, a silence that pressed against her eardrums and made her aware of her own breathing, her own heartbeat, the small sounds of a body persisting when everything else had stopped.

Patrick had gone to bed hours ago—or at least to the bedroom. She could hear him up there sometimes, moving around, the creak of the floorboards beneath his weight. Neither of them was sleeping. Neither of them had slept properly in days, in weeks, in years.

The rosary beads were warm in her palm.

She had taken them from the glove compartment when she came inside, the same beads she had clutched during the drive to the hospital, the same ones that had left the imprint of Christ in her flesh. They were old—her grandmother's, brought over from County Clare in 1952, worn smooth by three generations of women's hands. The silver chain was tarnished now, dark in the creases, and several of the beads had hairline cracks from decades of use. But they still felt solid. Real. They were a connection to something larger than herself, something that might be listening even when everything else had abandoned her.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee...

The words came automatically, worn grooves in her mind, paths her thoughts traveled without conscious direction. She had prayed this rosary countless times since Ash was born. In the hospital room after his delivery, delirious with joy and exhaustion, thanking God for this perfect creature they had made. At his bedside during childhood fevers, bargaining with the Virgin for his temperature to break. In the chapel of his high school, the day of his National Honor Society induction, pride so fierce in her chest she thought it might lift her right up out of the pew.

And now this. In the dark of a house that felt like a tomb, praying for a son who was out there somewhere doing the thing that was going to kill him. A son who had looked at her with cold eyes, who had shoved past his father like Patrick was a stranger, who had walked out into the night without looking back.

Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus...

She had called everyone she could think of. His few remaining friends—the ones who still answered when they saw her number, the ones who had not yet given up on him the way so many others had. His former sponsors, the parade of well-meaning strangers who had tried to guide him through recovery and failed, one after another. She had even called the number she had found in his phone once and memorized against her will—a dealer, she assumed, though the voice that answered had been surprisingly normal, surprisingly young, just a kid really, who said he had not seen Ash in weeks and sounded like he meant it.

No one knew where he was. His phone went straight to voicemail, the generic robot voice that meant the device was either dead or deliberately silenced. The tracking app they had installed—with his grudging permission, after the second overdose—showed only a blank screen. He had turned it off, or thrown away the phone, or both.

He was out there somewhere. In the cold February night, in the city's dark corners, in the company of people who would sell him the thing that was killing him and call it a transaction. He was using, probably. Maybe he was already dead.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners...

Was it a sin, what they had done? The enabling, the forgiveness, the endless second chances that had let him spiral further and further down? Every time she bailed him out. Every time she paid his rent when he lost another job. Every time she welcomed him back home with open arms and fresh sheets on his childhood bed and the desperate hope that this time, this time, things would be different.

Or was it a sin to give up? To set boundaries? To look your child in the eye and say I love you and I cannot watch you destroy yourself anymore?

She did not know. The theology of addiction was not something they had covered in CCD classes at St. Anthony's, all those years ago when she was a girl with braided hair and a plaid skirt and a certainty about the world that had long since crumbled to dust. The nuns had never mentioned what to do when your baby boy grew up to put needles in his arm. The catechism did not include a chapter on watching your son choose, again and again, to kill himself.

Now and at the hour of our death.

Death. She could feel it waiting. Patient, certain, standing just outside the circle of light and biding its time. Every phone call was a potential notification. Every siren in the distance made her freeze, made her heart seize in her chest until the sound faded into somewhere else, someone else's tragedy. The hour of his death—she did not know when it would come, but she knew it was coming. She could feel it the way you feel a storm building on the horizon, the way the air changes and the birds go quiet and everything holds its breath before the first crack of thunder.

Maybe it had already happened. Maybe right now, while she sat here in the dark moving beads through her fingers, her son was already gone. Collapsed in some alley, blue-lipped and still. Sprawled on a dirty mattress in a house she had never seen. Surrounded by strangers who would step over his body on their way to get high, who would not call 911 until it was far too late, who did not love him the way she loved him, desperately, hopelessly, with every atom of her being.

The thought ripped through her, and she doubled over, the rosary pressed to her forehead, a sound escaping her that was part prayer and part howl. Grief and rage and desperation, all tangled together, pouring out of her in a noise that did not sound human.

Please.

The word was not part of the formal prayer. It came from somewhere deeper than liturgy, deeper than memorized phrases, torn from the raw center of her where faith and despair had merged into something she could not name.

Please. I will do anything. If there is any other way—any way at all—

The rosary beads were warm in her palm. Warmer than they should be, warmer than body heat could account for. The silver chain seemed to pulse against her skin, a rhythm that matched her heartbeat and then exceeded it, racing ahead like it was trying to tell her something.

Please. Whatever it takes. Whatever it costs. Just—save him. Give me another chance. Give us another chance to do it right.

She did not know what she was praying to anymore. God, the Virgin, whatever force had created a universe cruel enough to allow addiction and merciful enough to allow mothers. It did not matter. She would pray to anyone who would listen. She would bargain with anything that answered.

Anything, she thought, and the word was a door opening, a contract offered, a line crossed in the dark. I will do anything. Just let me save my son.

The beads flared hot against her palm—not painful, but alive, thrumming with something that felt like recognition. And somewhere in the darkness of the living room, or the darkness behind her closed eyes, or the darkness that existed in whatever space lay between prayer and answer, she felt a presence.

It was something vast. Something patient. Something older than the rosary in her hands, older than the prayers she had been taught, older than the church that had shaped her faith.

It was something that had been listening.

It was something that heard.

Chapter Text

The warmth spread through her hands first.

Shannon had been holding the rosary so tightly that her fingers had gone numb, the beads pressing divots into her palms. But now—warmth. Not the warmth of friction or body heat. Something else. Something that pulsed like a heartbeat, slow and steady and impossibly alive.

She opened her eyes. The living room was the same—dark, silent, the shapes of furniture barely visible in the ambient glow from the streetlight outside. But something had changed. The air felt thicker. Charged, the way it got before a thunderstorm, heavy with potential.

You called.

The words weren't words. They didn't come through her ears, didn't form syllables she could parse. They simply appeared in her mind, fully formed, like a memory she'd always had but only now remembered. The presence behind them was vast—she could feel its edges pressing against her consciousness, too large to comprehend, like trying to see a cathedral while standing inside it.

I heard.

Shannon's breath caught. The rosary beads were hot now, almost too hot to hold, but she couldn't let go. Couldn't move. Could only sit there in the dark as something vast and patient pressed against the edges of her awareness, waiting. It didn't feel malevolent. It didn't feel benevolent either. It felt old—older than the rosary in her hands, older than the prayers she'd been taught, older than anything she had a name for.

You asked for another chance.

Yes. God, yes. That was exactly what she'd asked for. She hadn't known anything was listening—had prayed out of habit, out of desperation, the way you scream into a void just to hear your own voice. But something had been there. Something had heard.

Will you take it?

The question hung in the air—or in her mind, or in whatever space existed between prayer and answer. She understood, without knowing how, that this was real. That something had heard her desperate plea and was offering exactly what she'd begged for. A door, standing open. A path she hadn't known existed.

She also understood, in the same wordless way, that there would be a cost. There was always a cost. But the shape of it was hidden, wrapped in shadow, and the presence wasn't offering details. It was offering a choice, nothing more. Take it or leave it. Yes or no.

Will you?

Shannon thought of Ash. Gray-skinned in a hospital bed. Shoving past his father, walking out the door. Somewhere in the city right now, maybe alive, maybe not. Her son. Her baby. The boy she would die for, kill for, do anything for.

She'd meant it when she prayed. She'd meant every word.

Yes.

The word wasn't spoken aloud. It didn't need to be. The acceptance was total, complete, a door thrown open without checking what was on the other side. Whatever the cost, she would pay it. Whatever the price, it couldn't be higher than watching her son die.

The warmth flared—brilliant, blinding, a supernova behind her eyes. She felt herself falling, or rising, or dissolving into light. She felt Patrick somehow included, pulled along in her wake, though she couldn't have said how she knew. The presence wrapped around them both, vast and warm and utterly incomprehensible.

And then—

Darkness.

Shannon woke to wrongness.

The light was wrong. The angle of it, slanting through curtains that shouldn't exist—they'd replaced those curtains years ago, traded the heavy burgundy drapes for something lighter after Ash moved out. But there they were, hanging exactly where they'd hung when he was in middle school, the fabric unfaded, the pleats crisp.

She blinked. Tried to orient herself. Had she fallen asleep on the couch? No—she was in bed. Their bed. But the mattress felt different. Firmer. Newer.

She sat up, and the wrongness multiplied.

The bedroom. Their bedroom, but not—the furniture was in different places. The reading lamp on Patrick's side was the old one, the brass one with the green glass shade that had stopped working in 2019. She remembered the day it died, remembered Patrick tapping the bulb and sighing and saying they should just replace it. The quilt on the bed was the wedding gift from her mother, the one they'd finally retired after the seam split for the third time.

But that quilt was in the attic. That lamp was in a landfill.

Shannon looked at her hands.

No age spots. The skin smooth and firm, the knuckles unknobbed by the arthritis that had started creeping in at fifty-two. Her wedding ring gleaming bright gold, not dulled by decades of dishwater and worry.

She scrambled out of bed, her legs tangling in sheets that felt different—softer, higher thread count, the expensive ones they'd bought before money got tight. The full-length mirror on the closet door—that mirror, the one Patrick had taken down when he'd reorganized the closet in 2020—showed her a stranger.

No. Not a stranger. Herself. But younger. Mid-forties, maybe. The gray gone from her hair, replaced by the natural dark brown she'd stopped seeing years ago. The lines around her eyes softened into mere suggestions, not the deep grooves that had carved themselves into her face during Ash's spiral. The body she'd had before menopause, before the stress weight, before everything had started to sag and slow and surrender to gravity.

She touched her face. The skin was taut. Real.

The calendar on the wall by the door. She crossed to it in three steps, her heart hammering so hard she could feel it in her throat, in her temples, in her fingertips.

June 2015.

The picture was a beach scene—some generic stock photo they'd gotten free from the insurance company. She remembered this calendar. Remembered hanging it on New Year's Day, remembered Ash helping her line up the nail holes, his voice still a boy's voice, not yet cracked into the sullen baritone of his later teens.

Ash. Who would be thirteen years old right now.

It worked. Oh God, it worked.

She pressed her hand to her mouth, choking back a sound that was half sob, half laugh. Ten years. She'd gone back ten years. The prayer, the warmth, the presence that had answered—it had done exactly what she'd asked.

She turned, and Patrick was sitting up in bed, staring at his own hands with an expression of total incomprehension. His hair was darker—that salt-and-pepper she'd watched spread across his temples had reversed, leaving only scattered threads of gray. His face was leaner, the jowls he'd started developing gone. The belly that had formed in his fifties was flat, the arms thick with muscle he'd let atrophy during the long years of desk work and despair.

His eyes met hers.

"Shannon—"

"I know."

He looked at the curtains. At the lamp. At his own unmarked hands, turning them over as if they belonged to someone else. Then back at her, and she saw the moment it clicked—the understanding flooding in, followed immediately by something she hadn't seen on his face in years.

Hope. Raw, unguarded hope, the kind they'd both stopped letting themselves feel.

"It's 2015." His voice was hoarse, wondering. "We're—Shannon, we're back."

"Yes."

"How?" He swung his legs out of bed, stood, crossed to her. His movements were different—fluid, easy, the unconscious grace of a body that hadn't yet been worn down by years of stress. "How is this possible? The last thing I remember is—I was at the office. Working late. And then I just—woke up here."

"I prayed." The words came out steady, though nothing inside her felt steady. "I prayed for another chance, and something answered."

She told him—quickly, in fragments—about the rosary, the warmth, the presence that had asked will you and accepted her desperate yes. Patrick listened without interrupting, his face cycling through disbelief, wonder, and finally something like acceptance. He'd always been the skeptic, the lawyer who needed evidence, but standing in their decade-old bedroom in their decade-younger bodies, evidence was hard to argue with.

"And it brought me too," he said when she finished. "Whatever it was—it brought me with you."

"I think so. I felt you, somehow. When it happened. Like you were pulled along."

Patrick took her hands in his. His grip was strong, solid, real. She could feel the calluses that had faded by 2025, worn smooth by years of desk work and grief. This was the Patrick she'd married. The Patrick who still believed they could fix things.

"Ash," he said. "If we're back—"

"He's thirteen. Fourteen in October." She'd done the math instantly, reflexively, the way mothers always knew how old their children were. "He hasn't—Patrick, it hasn't happened yet. The drugs, the dropping out, the—he's still here. Still whole. Still savable."

The last word caught in her throat. All those years of watching him slip away, of trying and failing and trying again. All those nights lying awake wondering what they could have done different. Now they had the answer: everything. They could do everything different.

Patrick's hands tightened on hers. She watched his face cycle through emotions—disbelief, wonder, and then something harder. Something like determination. The Patrick of 2025 had been worn down, hollowed out, beaten into learned helplessness by years of failure. But this Patrick—or the Patrick who'd come back with ten years of hindsight burning in his chest—looked ready to fight.

"We can stop it." His voice was low, fierce. "We know what's coming. We know what to watch for. We know exactly when it starts to go wrong. We can—"

They needed to check on him.

The thought came to both of them at the same moment—Shannon could see it in Patrick's face, the way his eyes moved toward the hallway. Their son was down that hall. Their thirteen-year-old son, who might be sleeping peacefully, dreaming whatever dreams belonged to a boy that age. A boy who didn't know yet about the drugs, the overdoses, the years of slow-motion self-destruction that awaited him.

A boy they could save.

"We should look in on him," Shannon whispered. "Just to see."

Patrick nodded. They moved together toward the door, toward the hallway, toward the room where their son lay sleeping. Shannon's heart was pounding—with hope, with fear, with the overwhelming strangeness of walking through her own house in a body ten years younger than it should be.

The hallway was dark. Familiar and unfamiliar at once—the same family photos on the walls, but different ones than she remembered. Photos of a younger Ash. A happier Ash. The Ash who still smiled in pictures, who hadn't yet learned to hide from cameras the way addicts learned to hide from everything.

Light leaked from under his door. The lamp on his nightstand—the one shaped like a baseball that his uncle had given him for his tenth birthday. He was awake.

Shannon felt Patrick's hand find hers in the darkness. They stood outside their son's room, listening. No sound from inside. Just the faint glow of the lamp, and the knowledge that everything had changed.

Please, she thought. Please let this work. Please let us save him.

She didn't know what they'd find on the other side of that door. Their son as he'd been at thirteen—innocent, unscarred, still capable of being reached? Or something else? Something that remembered?

There was only one way to find out.

She looked at Patrick. He nodded.

Shannon reached for the doorknob.

Chapter Text

Ash woke up needing a fix.

That was the first thing—before he opened his eyes, before he registered where he was, before anything else. The itch under his skin, the hollow ache in his chest, the way his body was already calculating how long it had been since his last hit and how much longer it could wait. The math was automatic by now. Background noise. Like breathing, or blinking.

He'd scored last night. Good stuff. Should've lasted longer than this.

He kept his eyes closed, trying to remember. He had been at his apartment—the shitty ground-floor unit his parents paid for, the one they insisted on having keys to so they could "check on him." He remembered coming home, remembered the familiar water stain on the bathroom ceiling, remembered...

Actually, no. He had gone to Marcus's place first. Scored there, maybe used there too. The details were fuzzy. Had he come home after? He must have, because his dad had been stopping by lately, doing his whole concerned-father routine. The last few days were a blur of highs and lows and the grinding need for more.

So why did he feel so... clear?

The high should still be there, at least a little. The warm fog, the soft edges. Instead everything felt sharp. Too sharp. His head wasn't pounding, which was wrong—he always had a headache when he came down. And the bed was too soft. His apartment had a mattress on the floor, not whatever this cloud was.

Something smelled like laundry detergent. The clean kind, the expensive kind, the kind that—

Ash's eyes snapped open.

Blue walls. Glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. A poster of some band he'd liked in middle school. A lamp shaped like a baseball.

He knew this room. He knew it the way you know a recurring nightmare, the way you know the face of someone you've been avoiding for years.

This was his bedroom. His childhood bedroom. In his parents' house.

The fuck?

He sat up, and something was wrong with his body. The motion felt off—too fast, too light, like he'd lost weight overnight. His hands grabbed the mattress for balance and he looked down at them and—

They were small.

Small and smooth and completely wrong. No track marks. No scars. No evidence of anything. These were the hands of someone who'd never worked a shit job, never punched a wall, never done anything more strenuous than homework.

Okay. Okay. Bad trip. This is a bad trip.

That had to be it. Someone had cut the stuff with something, PCP or ketamine or some research chemical bullshit, and he was hallucinating. Made sense. Happened sometimes. He just needed to ride it out, wait for it to pass, and then he'd wake up on his shitty mattress with a headache and a story to tell.

He closed his eyes. Counted to ten. Opened them.

The room was still there. The hands were still small.

Fuck.

He threw off the covers—a comforter he recognized, blue with some geometric pattern, the one his mom had picked out when he was twelve—and looked at his legs. Skinny. Pale. No hair, or barely any. The legs of a kid.

The mirror. There was a full-length mirror on the closet door. He remembered it from when he'd lived here, remembered checking his reflection before school, remembered—

He got up too fast and nearly fell. His center of gravity was all wrong, his limbs too short, his weight distributed differently than it should be. He caught himself on the nightstand, steadied, and crossed the room in uneven steps.

The face in the mirror wasn't his.

It was his nose, his eyes, the shape of his jaw—but younger. So much younger. Round cheeks, smooth skin, no stubble. The haircut his mom used to make him get at the barber on Main Street. He looked thirteen, maybe fourteen. He looked like the photos in his parents' albums, the ones from before everything went wrong, before they started looking at him like he was a problem to be solved.

"What the fuck," he said, and his voice cracked on the last word.

Cracked. Like a kid going through puberty. Like a fucking middle schooler.

He touched his face. Pinched his cheek. Pulled at the skin. It was real. All of it was real.

This isn't a trip. This is something else. This is—

The calendar on the wall caught his eye. One of those free ones from the insurance company, some generic beach photo. The month said June. The year said 2015.

He was supposed to be twenty-three. He was supposed to be living his life, making his own choices, answering to nobody. He had an apartment—okay, technically he'd been evicted, but he was staying with Marcus. He had money—okay, not much, but enough for what mattered. He had freedom, the one thing he'd fought his whole adolescence to get.

And now he was standing in his childhood bedroom, in his childhood body, looking at a calendar that said he'd lost ten years overnight.

Ash's hands started to shake.

He didn't know how long he stood there. Minutes, maybe. The shaking got worse, then better, then worse again. His mind kept cycling through explanations—coma dream, psychotic break, some elaborate prank—and rejecting them all.

It felt too real. That was the problem. His trips never felt this solid, this detailed, this present. He could feel the carpet under his feet, the slight chill of the air conditioning, the ache in his muscles that came from sleeping too hard. If this was a hallucination, it was the most convincing one he'd ever had.

So what, then? Time travel? You went back in time?

Ridiculous. Impossible. The kind of thing that happened in movies, not real life.

But he was standing in a body that wasn't his, in a room that shouldn't exist, and the calendar said 2015.

He needed to get out of here. That was the only clear thought in his head. Whatever this was, wherever he was, he needed to leave. Find Marcus. Find someone who could tell him what was happening. Find—

The doorknob turned.

Ash spun around, his heart hammering, as the door swung open.

His mother stood there. Younger—that was his first thought. She looked younger, the way she'd looked when he was actually this age. Less gray in her hair. Fewer lines around her eyes. She was wearing a bathrobe, like she'd just woken up.

"Ash," she said. "Good. You're awake."

Something was wrong with her voice. It wasn't the panicked what's-going-on voice he'd expected. It wasn't even the worried are-you-okay voice. It was calm. Measured. Like she'd been expecting this.

His father appeared behind her. Also younger, also calm, also watching him with an expression that didn't match the situation at all.

"What the fuck is going on?" Ash's voice cracked again. He hated it. "What is this?"

"We need to talk," his mother said. She took a step into the room, and there was something in the way she moved—deliberate, careful, like she was approaching a wild animal. "All three of us. About what's happening."

"What's happening is I woke up in the wrong body in the wrong year! What did you do?"

"We didn't do anything." His father's voice. The lawyer voice, calm and professional, the one he used when he was about to deliver bad news. "This happened to all of us."

Ash stared at them. "What?"

"We remember too." His mother's voice was gentle. Too gentle. "Everything. The last ten years. We woke up this morning and—"

"Bullshit."

"Ash—"

"No, that's bullshit." He was backing away from them, his shoulders hitting the closet door. "This is—I don't know what this is, but you're lying. You did something. This is some kind of—"

"It's not a trick." His father again, still calm, always fucking calm. "We don't understand it either. But we need to figure it out together."

Together. Like they were a team. Like they were on the same side.

Ash didn't respond. He was watching them now, really watching, and something wasn't adding up.

His mother should be hysterical. That was her default mode when things went wrong—tears, hand-wringing, that high-pitched voice she got when she was scared. But she wasn't hysterical. She was calm. Careful. Composed.

And his father—his father should be on the phone already, calling doctors or lawyers or whoever you called when reality broke in half. That was what he did. He fixed things. He took charge. Instead he was just standing there, watching Ash with an expression that looked almost... patient.

They weren't panicked. They weren't confused. They weren't even surprised.

They already knew, Ash realized. They woke up before me. They had time to process this, to talk about it, to make a plan.

But that wasn't what bothered him. What bothered him was the way they were standing—shoulder to shoulder, a united front. The way their eyes kept meeting, some silent communication passing between them. The way his mother's hands weren't shaking anymore.

And the way she was looking at him. Not with fear or confusion or grief. With something else. Something that made his stomach turn.

"You're not upset," he said slowly, testing the words. "About any of this."

His mother's expression flickered. His father's didn't change at all.

"You're actually... you're glad." The realization was crystallizing now, cold and sharp. "This happened to all of us, and you're standing there looking at me like—"

He stopped. Looked at them again. At the hope poorly hidden in his mother's eyes. At the resolve in his father's jaw.

"Like I'm a second chance," he finished. "That's what this is to you, isn't it? A do-over. A chance to get the son you actually wanted."

Neither of them denied it.

And that was when the anger hit.

"You sick fucks."

"Ash—"

"No." He pushed off the closet door, his hands clenching into fists that felt too small, too weak. "You're actually happy. You're standing there looking at me like—like I'm some kind of fucking gift, and you're—"

"We're glad you're alive." His mother's voice cracked. "We're glad you're here, with us, instead of—"

"Instead of what? Living my life? Making my own choices?"

"Instead of killing yourself." His father's voice was flat. "One hit at a time."

The words landed like a slap.

"Fuck you," Ash said. "You don't know anything about my life."

"We know you dropped out of high school." His father counted off on his fingers. "We know you've been to rehab twice. We know you got evicted from your apartment, arrested for possession, and three weeks ago you overdosed and nearly died in a hospital bed. We know—"

"That's none of your business!"

"You're our son."

"I'm twenty-three years old! I don't have to—" Ash's voice broke, cracked, betrayed him. "What I do with my life is my choice. I'm not hurting anyone."

"You're hurting yourself."

"So what? That's my right!"

"And what about us?" His mother stepped forward, and there were tears in her eyes now. "Every time we get a call from the hospital. Every time we don't know if you're alive or dead. Every time we have to wonder if this is the day we get the news that our son—"

"I didn't ask you to care!"

The words ripped out of him, ragged and raw, and something cracked open in his chest. All those years of watching them watch him—the disappointment, the fear, the suffocating weight of their concern. He'd spent his whole adult life trying to escape it, trying to prove he didn't need them, trying to be free of the guilt that came every time his mother looked at him with those sad, hopeful eyes.

And now he was trapped. Literally trapped, in a body that couldn't run, couldn't fight, couldn't do anything except stand here and take it while they told him all the ways he'd failed.

His hand found the lamp on the nightstand. The baseball lamp, the one his uncle had given him. His fingers closed around it, and he felt the weight of it, the solid ceramic heft.

"Ash." His mother's voice, warning. "Don't."

But she didn't understand. None of it was supposed to be like this. He was supposed to be twenty-three, supposed to be free, supposed to be making his own choices even if those choices killed him. That was his right. That was the one thing he had left.

And they'd taken it from him.

The lamp shattered against the wall before he even realized he'd thrown it. Ceramic shards scattered across the floor, and the sound of it breaking was satisfying in a way nothing else had been since he'd woken up in this nightmare.

"You think I'm going to play along with this?" His voice was rising, cracking. "You think you can just pretend everything's fine and I'll be your good little boy again?"

"Ash, stop—" His mother moved toward him.

"You should be trying to fix this!" He was screaming now, his too-young voice breaking on every other word. "You should be panicking, trying to figure out how to get us back! Instead you're standing there like this is a fucking gift!"

"Ash—"

"No! You want to know what this looks like to me? It looks like you saw a chance to get your do-over kid, and you took it. Well guess what? I'm not going to be some corporate lawyer clone who joins Dad's firm by thirty! I'm not going to be whatever perfect son you always wanted!"

"We never wanted that." His father's voice was still calm. Still controlled. "We just wanted you to be alive."

"Well I AM alive! I was alive! I was doing fine until—"

"You weren't doing fine." His mother's voice was shaking. "You were dying, Ash. We watched you die for years."

"That's such bullshit." But his voice came out smaller now, some of the fury leaking away. "I was handling it. I had it under control."

"You overdosed three weeks ago."

"One time! One bad batch, and suddenly everyone acts like—"

"It wasn't one time." His father's voice was quiet. "It was the fourth time, Ash. Fourth that we know of. Probably more that we don't."

Fourth time. The number sat in his chest like a stone. He remembered the first one—or thought he did. The others were hazier, lost in the blur of years that all ran together when you spent them chasing the next high.

"You're exaggerating," he said, but the words came out weak. "You always exaggerate."

"We have the hospital records."

Something cold was spreading through him. Not anger anymore—something worse. The feeling of the ground shifting under his feet, of everything he'd told himself for years starting to crack.

He shoved the feeling down. Buried it under fresh rage.

"I don't have to listen to this. I don't have to stand here and let you—"

He moved toward the door.

His father stepped into his path.

For a moment, they just looked at each other. Ash had to crane his neck up—up—to meet his father's eyes. Even at twenty-three, at his full height of five-eleven, his father had loomed over him. Six-five and built like he still played football, the Walsh height that had somehow skipped Ash entirely—his mother's genetics winning that particular lottery, giving him her build and his father's face. A face he hated seeing in the mirror because it reminded him of everything he wasn't.

At thirteen, at five-foot-five, he barely came up to his father's chest.

"Move," Ash said.

"No."

"I said move. If you won't help me find a way to fix this, I'll figure it out myself."

"And I said no." His father's voice was calm. Final. "You're not leaving this house, Ash. Not today. Maybe not for a long time."

The cold that had been building in Ash's stomach turned to ice. "You can't keep me here."

"You're thirteen years old. You're a minor. And yes, we absolutely can."

"I'm not—my mind is—I'm an adult!"

"An adult who weighs a hundred pounds and can't reach the top shelf." His father's voice didn't waver. "An adult who can't drive, can't vote, can't buy cigarettes. An adult who lives in our house, under our roof, subject to our rules."

"This is insane. You're insane. Both of you."

"Maybe." His mother appeared at his father's shoulder. "But you're still not leaving."

Ash lunged for the door.

His father caught him like it was nothing.

One hand on his arm, grip like iron, and Ash was yanked backward so fast his feet left the ground for a second. He twisted, pulled, threw his whole weight against the grip, and went absolutely nowhere. Even at twenty-three, at five-eleven, his father had been able to manhandle him when it came down to it—six inches and fifty pounds made a difference. But Ash had been able to fight back. To make it cost something. To get in his face and make himself impossible to ignore.

Now he was a hundred pounds of nothing, and his father's grip might as well have been a steel vise.

"Let go of me!"

"When you calm down."

"Fuck you!" He swung with his free hand, a wild punch that connected with his father's ribs. It should have meant something. At twenty-three, he'd made bigger guys than his dad back off with a hit like that. At thirteen, with arms like twigs and no muscle to speak of, it was nothing. His father didn't even flinch.

"Ash." His mother's voice, still calm. "Stop."

"Make me!" He kicked out, caught his father's shin, felt a grim satisfaction at the grunt of pain. He kicked again, aiming for the knee, and—

His father picked him up.

Just—picked him up. One arm around his waist, and Ash's feet were off the ground entirely, and he was being carried like a fucking toddler, like he weighed nothing, like he was—

"PUT ME DOWN!" He screamed it, thrashing wildly, but it didn't matter. His father's arm was a steel band around his middle, immovable, and his struggles were pathetic. Useless. A child throwing a tantrum against an adult who could wait it out forever.

His father sat down on the edge of the bed. And before Ash understood what was happening, he was face-down across his father's lap, one large hand pressing into his lower back, pinning him in place.

No.

This couldn't be happening. This was—his father had never—

Even when Ash was actually a kid, his father hadn't done this. Too busy with work, with cases, with being the big-shot lawyer who brought home the paycheck. Discipline had been his mother's department, and even she had mostly stuck to groundings and disappointed looks. The last time anyone had put Ash over their knee, he'd been three or four years old, too young to even remember it clearly.

And now here he was. Twenty-three years old in his mind, face-down across his father's lap, about to be—

"What are you—" He tried to push himself up, but he couldn't get any leverage. His arms were too short, his muscles too weak, and the hand on his back was unmovable. "No. No, you can't—I'm twenty-three—"

The first swat landed, and Ash jerked like he'd been shot.

It hurt. It actually hurt, his father's hand coming down hard on his ass through the thin pajama pants. But worse than the pain was the position—face-down, ass-up, being spanked like a misbehaving toddler. The humiliation was so total, so absolute, that for a moment he couldn't even breathe.

"Stop—" His voice cracked. "You can't do this—"

Another swat. Then another. Measured, methodical, his father's breathing steady while Ash's came in ragged gasps.

"In this house," his father said calmly, "we don't throw punches."

"I hate you—" Another swat, harder. "I hate both of you—"

"That's your right." His mother's voice, somewhere above him. "But you don't get to hurt us."

Ash thrashed harder, throwing everything he had into getting free. He bucked, twisted, tried to roll sideways off his father's lap. His hands scrabbled at the bedding, at his father's leg, at anything that might give him leverage. He was going to get away. He was going to—

Another swat. And another. Steady as a metronome, each one landing in almost the same spot, building heat on top of heat until his ass felt like it was on fire.

"Let me GO!" He was screaming now, his voice cracking and breaking. "You can't—this is—I'm going to—"

"You're going to what?" His father's voice was infuriatingly calm. "Call the police? Run away? You're thirteen, Ash. You have nowhere to go and no way to get there."

The swats kept coming. Not frantic or angry, just relentless, each one driving home exactly how powerless he was. His ass burned. His eyes burned. His throat burned from screaming.

And slowly, horribly, the fight started to drain out of him.

He didn't want it to. He wanted to keep thrashing, keep fighting, keep proving that they couldn't break him. But his body was giving out. His muscles were shaking. His lungs were heaving. And the hand on his back hadn't moved an inch, hadn't even seemed to notice his struggles.

He was never going to get away. He could fight until he passed out and it wouldn't matter.

The thrashing faded to twitching. The screaming faded to gasping. And still the swats kept coming, slower now but just as hard, and Ash lay there across his father's lap and felt something inside him crack.

"Are you done?" His father's voice, calm and even.

Ash didn't answer. Couldn't. His throat was raw, his face wet with tears he didn't remember crying, and his whole body was shaking.

Another swat. "I asked you a question, Ash. Are you done fighting?"

"F-fuck you."

Two more swats, harder than before. "Try again."

Ash squeezed his eyes shut. His ass was throbbing, his pride was in shreds, and he was lying across his father's lap like a goddamn toddler. And there was nothing—nothing—he could do about it.

"Yes," he choked out. "I'm done."

"Done what?"

He wanted to scream. He wanted to tell them both to go to hell. But another swat landed, reminding him exactly how little power he had here.

"Done fighting," he whispered.

The swats stopped.

His father's hand stayed on his back for a long moment, a steady pressure. Then he lifted Ash—effortlessly, because apparently that was just how things worked now—and set him on his feet.

Ash's legs buckled immediately. His father's hand shot out, catching him by the arm, steadying him. Ash found himself standing in front of his father, who was still sitting on the edge of the bed—and even sitting, his dad's eyes were nearly level with his own. That was how small he was now. That was how much he'd lost.

"Look at me," his father said.

Ash kept his eyes on the floor. He couldn't. He couldn't look at him after—

A finger hooked under his chin, tilting his face up. Not rough, but firm. Inescapable. Ash's eyes met his father's, and the calm he saw there was somehow worse than anger would have been.

Ash didn't want to. But the hand on his shoulder tightened slightly, and he raised his eyes.

His father's expression was calm. Not angry, not satisfied, just... steady. The same way he looked when he was explaining something important in court.

"In this house, we don't throw punches," he said. "We don't kick. We don't throw things at people. Do you understand?"

Ash stared at him. The defiance was still there, burning under his skin, but it was buried now under layers of pain and humiliation and exhaustion.

"Ash. Do you understand?"

"Yes." It came out as barely a whisper.

"Yes what?"

Oh, fuck him. Fuck both of them. Fuck this whole—

But his ass was throbbing and his face was wet and he just wanted this to be over. He just wanted them to leave so he could have five fucking minutes to think, to process, to figure out what the hell he was supposed to do now.

"Yes, sir," he muttered.

His father nodded once, accepting it. He released Ash's chin, stood, and stepped back.

Ash's legs almost gave out again. He ended up sitting on the bed, hunched over, staring at the floor. His face was wet. His ass was on fire. And his father had just spanked him like a child and made him say sir like some kind of—

"Ash." His mother crouched in front of him, her face appearing in his field of vision.

Just go away. Please. Just leave me alone.

But she didn't. She just waited, patient, until he couldn't stand the silence anymore and lifted his eyes to meet hers.

She looked sad. And tired. And absolutely, terrifyingly certain.

"I know you're angry," she said. "I know you think we're wrong. But this is how things are now. We're not going to lose you again. Whatever it takes. However long it takes. We're going to do this differently."

Ash stared at her. At his father, standing behind her with his arms crossed. At the destroyed room around him, the broken lamp and scattered books and shattered model airplane.

He was thirteen years old. He was trapped in a body that couldn't fight back. And his parents—the people he'd spent six years escaping from—were looking at him like he was a project. A problem. Something to be fixed.

"Fuck you," he whispered. It was all he had left.

His mother just nodded, like she'd expected it.

"Get dressed," she said. "Breakfast is in twenty minutes."

She stood, took his father's hand, and they walked out together. The door closed behind them with a soft click.

Ash sat on the bed, shaking, his ass throbbing, and tried to figure out how everything had gone so wrong.

Chapter Text

SHANNON

They stood in the hallway outside Ash's door, and Shannon realized her hands were shaking.

"Hey." Patrick's voice was low. His hand found her lower back, warm and steady. "You okay?"

"I don't know." She leaned into him, just for a moment. "That was..."

"Yeah."

Through the door, silence. No screaming, no crashing, no sound of destruction. Just the quiet of a boy who'd run out of fight—temporarily, at least.

"He's going to hate us," she said.

"He already hates us." Patrick's voice was matter-of-fact, not cruel. "He hated us before. At least this time we might actually save him."

Shannon closed her eyes. The memory of Ash's face wouldn't leave her—red and tear-streaked, twisted with fury. The way he'd gone rigid across Patrick's lap. The way he'd choked out yes, sir like the words were being ripped from his throat.

This is what you prayed for, she reminded herself. This is the second chance. This is the cost.

"We need to talk about how we're going to handle things," she said. "Going forward. The discipline, the rules, all of it."

Patrick nodded. "Downstairs. Let him have a few minutes."

They walked down the hall together, down the stairs, into the kitchen that looked exactly like it had ten years ago—because it was ten years ago, somehow, impossibly. The coffee maker was the old one, the one that had died in 2019. The calendar on the wall showed June 2015.

Shannon started making coffee while Patrick leaned against the counter, arms crossed.

"He's going to run," Patrick said. "First chance he gets."

"I know."

"We need to secure the house. Windows, doors. Check all the locks."

Shannon nodded, pouring water into the reservoir. "What about what you just did? Is that going to be the standard?"

Patrick was quiet for a moment. "I think it has to be. At least for now. He's not going to respond to groundings and disappointed looks. He's twenty-three in his head—he's been living on his own, doing whatever he wants. The only thing that's going to get through to him is consequences he can't ignore."

"And you're okay with that? Being the one who..."

"No." Patrick's voice was flat. "I'm not okay with any of this. But I'll do it anyway. Because the alternative is watching him die again, and I can't do that, Shannon. I can't."

She turned to look at him. Her husband—younger now, stronger, but with the same exhaustion in his eyes that she'd seen for years. The exhaustion of loving someone who was determined to destroy themselves.

"We need rules," she said. "Clear ones. So he knows what to expect."

"Agreed. Meals, bedtime, staying in the house. No drugs, obviously—not that he can get them easily at thirteen, but still."

"What about when he pushes back? Because he will."

Patrick's jaw tightened. "Then he deals with the consequences. Every time, no exceptions. If we're inconsistent, he'll exploit it. He's smart—he always has been. We have to be smarter."

The coffee maker gurgled. Shannon watched it drip, thinking about the boy upstairs. Her son. Her baby, once. The child she'd rocked to sleep and read stories to and loved more than her own life.

The young man who'd nearly died three weeks ago—ten years from now—with a needle in his arm.

"I'll make breakfast," she said. "You check the windows."

ASH

He didn't know how long he sat there.

Time had gone strange. Elastic. He was staring at the wall, at the glow-in-the-dark stars that hadn't glowed in years because the lights had been on, and his mind was somewhere far away from this room, this body, this throbbing ache that wouldn't let him forget what had just happened.

This isn't real. This can't be real.

But his ass hurt. That was real. The wetness on his face, drying now into tight salty tracks—that was real. The fact that he was sitting on his childhood bed in his childhood body wearing pajamas with a pattern on them—

He shifted, and winced. The pain flared sharp and immediate, dragging him back into his body whether he wanted to be there or not.

I didn't deserve that.

The thought was clear, certain. He'd been defending himself. He'd been trying to leave, to find a way to fix this insane situation, and they'd—his father had—

I didn't deserve that. I didn't do anything wrong.

He'd thrown the lamp. So what? It was his lamp. His room. And he'd only swung at his dad because his dad was blocking the door, keeping him prisoner, refusing to let him—

I didn't deserve that.

He kept coming back to it, circling the thought like a dog circling before it lies down. He needed it to be true. He needed to know that he was the reasonable one here, that his parents were the ones who'd lost their minds, that this whole situation was their fault, not his.

Because if it wasn't their fault...

No. It was their fault. All of it. The time travel, the body, the—the spanking, Jesus Christ, he was twenty-three years old and his father had just spanked him like a toddler—

His hands were shaking again. He looked at them—small, smooth, wrong—and felt the dissociation creeping in. That floaty feeling, like he was watching himself from somewhere outside his body. He used to chase that feeling with pills, with powder, with anything that would take the edge off reality. Now it was coming for free, his brain's last-ditch defense against a situation too insane to process.

He let himself float. Just for a minute. Just long enough to stop feeling the throb in his ass and the burn in his eyes and the tight knot of rage in his chest.

When he came back, the light in the room had shifted. Brighter now. Morning sun pouring through the window.

The window.

Ash stood up—slowly, carefully, his ass protesting—and crossed to it. The same window he'd had as a kid, double-hung, looking out over the backyard. He'd snuck out of it once, when he was fifteen, to meet up with some friends. His mom had never found out.

He flipped the latch and tried to push the sash up.

It moved about four inches and stopped.

He pushed harder. Nothing. The window was stuck, or blocked, or—

He looked closer. There was something in the track. A metal pin, inserted through a hole drilled into the frame. A window lock—the kind parents installed to keep toddlers from falling out. Or to keep burglars from getting in.

He remembered these. His parents had put them in when he was little, back when they were worried about him sleepwalking or climbing out onto the roof. He'd forgotten they existed. Hadn't thought about them in over a decade.

But they were still there. And they still worked.

He tried the other window. Same thing. Four inches, then nothing.

Fuck.

He stood there, staring at the gap—not big enough for even his skinny thirteen-year-old body to squeeze through—and felt something cold settle in his stomach.

The pins had been here all along. His parents hadn't installed them this morning. But they might as well have. The effect was the same: he was trapped. The house that had once been his home was now a cage, and every exit was barred.

Okay. Okay, fine. The windows are out. That doesn't mean there's no way.

He'd sneak out tonight. Wait until they were asleep, then slip downstairs, out the back door, and—

And go where?

The thought stopped him cold. He was thirteen. He had no money, no ID, no phone—did phones even work the same way in 2015? He couldn't remember. He couldn't drive. He didn't know anyone who would help him, because everyone he knew was either a child right now or wouldn't recognize him if he showed up at their door looking like a middle schooler.

Marcus. Marcus would—

Marcus would be, what, eighteen? Nineteen? A teenager Ash had never met, who had no idea who he was. The Marcus who'd become his dealer and his crash pad and his closest thing to a friend was still years away from existing.

Fuck.

He sat down on the bed—gingerly, his ass still throbbing—and tried to think.

He needed a plan. A real plan, not just run away and figure it out later. He needed to find out what had caused this, how to reverse it, how to get back to his actual life. His parents clearly weren't going to help—they were too busy celebrating their "second chance" to give a shit about what he wanted.

So he'd have to do it himself. Somehow.

But first, he had to survive breakfast.

The smell of bacon drifted up the stairs, and Ash's stomach growled.

He hadn't eaten since—when? Yesterday, in the other timeline? He didn't even know how the time thing worked. All he knew was that his body was hungry, and his parents were downstairs making food, and if he didn't go down there...

They'll probably come up here and drag me down.

The thought made his face burn. His father had actually—and his mother had just stood there—and they'd made him say yes sir like some kind of—

I don't deserve this bullshit.

The anger was clarifying. He wasn't going to sit here and take it. He wasn't going to play along with their insane fantasy of a do-over family. He was going to find a way out of this, with or without their help.

But he also believed, with cold certainty, that they would do it again. That they would do it every time he didn't fall in line with whatever insane rules they were cooking up. They had ten years of frustration built up, ten years of watching him "destroy himself"—in their minds, anyway—and now they finally had a version of him that couldn't fight back.

He was going to need his strength. If he was sneaking out tonight, he'd need calories. Energy. He couldn't afford to skip meals out of spite, no matter how much he wanted to.

Fine. I'll go down there. I'll eat their breakfast. And then tonight, I'm gone.

He stood up, winced, and looked around for something to wear. His drawers were full of clothes that fit this body—jeans, t-shirts, the kind of stuff his mom used to buy him. He grabbed a random outfit and changed, keeping his eyes away from the mirror. He didn't need to see the child's body that had become his prison.

The stairs felt longer than he remembered. Or maybe he was just walking slowly, dreading what waited at the bottom.

When he reached the kitchen, both his parents were there. His mother stood at the stove, flipping pancakes. His father sat at the table, reading something on his phone—a phone that looked hilariously outdated, thick and clunky, the kind of thing Ash would've laughed at in 2025.

They both looked up when he appeared.

And they were smiling.

Not big grins, not obvious happiness—but there was something in their faces, a softness, a warmth, that made Ash want to put his fist through the wall. They were glad. They were glad he was here, glad he was trapped, glad they got their do-over kid to mold into whatever perfect son they'd always wanted.

"Good morning," his mother said. "Sit down. Breakfast is almost ready."

Ash didn't answer. He walked to the table and sat—on the edge of the chair, weight on his thighs, keeping pressure off his ass as much as he could. His father noticed. Ash saw the flicker of his eyes, the slight tightening of his jaw. Good. Let him feel guilty. Let him feel like the asshole he was.

"Orange juice?" his mother asked, already pouring.

"Sure."

The word came out flat, dead. She set the glass in front of him anyway, still with that soft almost-smile on her face. Like she was handling a wild animal. Like she was managing him.

I'm going to get out of here, Ash thought, watching condensation bead on the glass. Tonight. And you're never going to see me again.

The pancakes arrived—a stack of three, golden brown, with butter and syrup. His mother had always been a good cook. He remembered that from before, from the original timeline, when he was actually this age and didn't know how much he was going to come to resent every single thing about this house.

He ate. Not because he wanted to, not because it tasted good—though it did—but because he was going to need it. Every bite was fuel for his escape.

His parents ate too, making small talk with each other. Weather. Plans for the day. Normal stuff, like this was a normal morning, like their son hadn't just been beaten in his own bedroom.

Just get through this. Tonight, you're gone.

Ash focused on his plate and waited for the other shoe to drop.

It came after the plates were cleared.

His father leaned back in his chair, coffee cup in hand, and fixed Ash with a look. The lawyer look. The let's talk business look.

"We need to discuss some things," he said. "Rules. Expectations. How this is going to work going forward."

Ash's hands tightened on the edge of the table. "I don't really have a choice, do I?"

"No," his mother said quietly. "You don't."

At least she was honest about it.

His father set down the coffee cup. "Here's how it's going to be. Meals are at eight, twelve, and six. You'll be at the table for all of them. Bedtime is nine o'clock—"

"Nine o'clock?" Ash couldn't help it. "I'm not actually thirteen. I haven't gone to bed at nine since—"

"You're thirteen now," his father cut in. "And nine o'clock is bedtime. Non-negotiable."

Ash's jaw clenched. He wanted to argue. He wanted to tell them both to go fuck themselves. But the memory of his father's hand coming down over and over was too fresh. The sting hadn't even fully faded.

Pick your battles, he told himself. You're leaving tonight anyway. Let them think they've won.

"Fine," he said through gritted teeth. "What else?"

"You stay in the house unless we say otherwise. No leaving without permission, no sneaking out, no trying to contact anyone without us knowing. You do your chores, you do whatever schoolwork we assign, and you treat us with basic respect."

"And if I don't?"

His father's eyes were steady. "Then there are consequences. Like this morning."

The words hung in the air. Ash felt heat flood his face—anger and humiliation tangled together until he couldn't tell which was which.

"So I'm a prisoner," he said. "That's what you're telling me. I'm a prisoner in my own house."

"You're our son," his mother said. "And we're going to do whatever it takes to keep you safe. Even if you hate us for it."

I already hate you, Ash thought. I've hated you for years. This just gives me a better reason.

But he didn't say it. He just sat there, weight on his thighs, ass still throbbing, and let them lay out their rules like they actually expected him to follow them.

Tonight, he thought. Tonight I'm gone.

He just had to make it until then.

Chapter Text

The hours crawled.

Ash sprawled on the couch in the living room, letting the TV wash over him without really seeing it. Some show he didn't recognize—or maybe he did, from a decade ago, before streaming killed cable and everyone started watching things on their phones. The laugh track was grating. The jokes weren't funny. But it was something to stare at, something to fill the space between now and tonight.

His mother drifted through every twenty minutes or so, never saying anything, just checking. She'd glance from the kitchen doorway, her hands wrapped around a coffee mug that said WORLD'S BEST MOM in faded letters. She was wearing jeans and a pale blue blouse, her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail that made her look younger than she was—younger than she'd been in the timeline he remembered, anyway. Sometimes she'd pause at the bottom of the stairs, one hand on the banister, watching him for a few seconds before moving on. Once, she came in to "straighten the pillows" on the armchair, which was such obvious bullshit that Ash almost laughed. The pillows had been fine. She just wanted an excuse to get closer, to see what he was doing, whether he was plotting something.

She was keeping tabs on him, making sure he wasn't planning anything.

Too late for that.

He kept his face blank, his body relaxed. He was just a kid watching TV, nothing to see here.

Around ten, his father came downstairs. He'd changed out of the clothes he'd slept in—dress pants now, a polo shirt, like he was heading to work on a casual Friday instead of imprisoning his son. The Walsh jaw was set in that familiar way, the one that meant he'd made a decision and wasn't interested in discussing it.

"Hardware store," he announced to no one in particular, grabbing his keys from the hook by the door. "Back in an hour."

Ash didn't respond and didn't look up.

His father paused in the doorway, keys jangling in his hand. Ash could feel those eyes on him—measuring, assessing, the way his father looked at hostile witnesses before a cross-examination. Waiting for some acknowledgment that wasn't going to come.

After a moment, his father left without another word. The door clicked shut behind him.

Good—one less person to watch him.

His mother appeared in the kitchen doorway almost immediately, like she'd been waiting for Patrick to leave. She'd taken off the apron she'd been wearing earlier, and Ash noticed flour dusted on her forearm—she must have been baking something. "Do you want anything, sweetheart? A snack? Something to drink?"

"I'm fine."

"You barely ate breakfast."

"I said I'm fine."

She stood there for a moment longer, her expression soft in a way that made Ash want to throw something. That look—the hopeful, careful, loving look—was somehow worse than anger would have been. Anger he could fight. This quiet concern just made him feel like a specimen under glass.

"Okay," she said finally. "Let me know if you change your mind."

She disappeared back into the kitchen, and Ash heard cabinets opening and closing, the clink of dishes, water running. Normal domestic sounds. The sounds of a normal house on a normal day, as if nothing had changed, as if the world hadn't turned inside out.

Ash changed the channel. Then changed it again. Nothing held his attention. His mind kept drifting to tonight—the plan, such as it was. Wait until they were asleep. Slip downstairs. Out the back door, assuming it wasn't locked from the inside with some kind of deadbolt he couldn't reach. If it was, he'd drag a chair over and stand on it. Not elegant, but it would work.

It wasn't much of a plan. He knew that. But it was better than staying here, playing their game, pretending to be the obedient little boy they wanted him to be.

His father came back around eleven, arms full of bags from the hardware store. Through the living room window, Ash watched him pull into the driveway in the old Volvo—the one they'd traded in years ago, the one that was somehow new again in this fucked-up timeline. His father climbed out, broad shoulders filling the doorframe as he maneuvered the bags through the front entrance. His face was set in concentration, jaw tight, and he moved with the focused energy of a man on a mission. Whatever he'd bought, it wasn't for a casual weekend project.

He didn't stop to talk and didn't even glance at Ash on the couch. He just went straight to the garage, and a few minutes later Ash heard a drill whining through wood, then hammering, then more drilling.

Probably installing more locks, Ash thought. Making sure I can't get out.

His mother emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She'd pushed a strand of hair behind her ear, but it had fallen loose again, framing her face. She glanced toward the garage, then at Ash, then back toward the garage again. Something passed across her face—concern, maybe, or just the particular exhaustion of a woman caught between her husband and her son. There were faint shadows under her eyes that Ash hadn't noticed before. She probably hadn't slept well last night either.

"Your father's got some projects to work on," she said. "Home improvement stuff."

Ash didn't respond. On the TV, someone was trying to sell car insurance.

His mother hovered for another moment, then retreated to the kitchen. The drilling continued.

He didn't offer to help. His father didn't ask.

Lunch was sandwiches—turkey and cheese, the way his mother used to make them, with the bread cut diagonally and the crusts left on. A pickle spear on the side. Kid food, the kind of thing she'd packed in his lunchbox back when he was actually this age.

"Your father's still in the garage," she said, sitting across from him at the kitchen table. "Working on some projects."

The kitchen looked different than he remembered from his adult life. Smaller, somehow. The appliances were older—that beige refrigerator they'd replaced in 2018, the dishwasher with the door that never closed right. The wallpaper was the same floral pattern his mother had picked out when they'd first moved in, before Ash had been born. She'd always talked about updating it but never had.

Ash took a bite of his sandwich and forced himself to chew slowly, deliberately. "Cool."

His mother picked up her own sandwich but didn't eat it. Just held it, watching him with those careful eyes. She looked younger than he remembered—which made sense, he supposed, since she was younger. The gray that had started threading through her dark hair wasn't there yet. The deep lines around her eyes had softened into something barely visible. She looked like the mother from his childhood photos, not the exhausted woman who'd sat beside his hospital bed three weeks ago.

Ten years from now, he corrected himself. Three weeks ago for her, but ten years from now in actual time.

The silence stretched.

"Is there anything you want to do this afternoon?" she asked finally. "We could play a game. I think Scrabble is still in the hall closet, or—"

"I'm good."

"Ash—"

"I said I'm good." He didn't look up from his plate. "I'll just watch TV."

She set down her sandwich. "You can't just watch TV all day."

"Why not? It's not like I can go anywhere."

The words came out sharper than he'd intended. His mother's expression flickered—hurt, maybe, or just resignation.

"I know this is hard," she said quietly. "I know you're angry. But sitting in front of the television isn't going to help."

"Neither is playing Scrabble."

Another silence. He could feel her wanting to push, wanting to connect, to have some kind of mother-son moment that would make this whole fucked-up situation feel normal. But she didn't. She just nodded, picked up her sandwich again, and let him eat in peace.

It was a small mercy.

The afternoon was more of the same—TV, his mother checking on him, the sounds of his father working in the garage.

Around two, his father emerged long enough to make himself a sandwich, standing at the kitchen counter to eat it rather than sitting at the table. Ash watched him from the couch—the broad back, the graying hair that wasn't quite as gray as Ash remembered it being, the way he stood like he owned the room and everyone in it. His father had always been big. Annoyingly big. The kind of big that made Ash feel like a child even when he'd been an adult, and now that he actually was a child again, the size difference was almost obscene. At 6'5", his father could probably pick him up with one hand. Had already picked him up, this morning, like Ash weighed nothing at all.

Don't think about this morning.

His father finished eating, rinsed his plate, and went back to the garage without saying a word to Ash.

Fine. I don't want to talk to you either.

At one point, Ash heard him on the phone, voice low and serious, but he couldn't make out the words from the living room. He caught fragments—"appreciate it" and "as soon as possible" and something that might have been a name.

Probably calling a shrink. Or a locksmith. Or his brother Nate, the military hardass who'd always thought Ash needed more discipline. Or whoever else you called when your time-traveling son refused to play along with your insane second-chance fantasy.

Around four, Ash's ass finally stopped throbbing. The pain had faded to a dull ache, barely noticeable unless he sat wrong. He hated that his body was already healing, already moving past the violation like it was nothing. Like it was normal.

It's not normal. None of this is normal.

He shifted on the couch, testing. Still sore, but manageable. Good. He'd need to be able to move tonight.

At five, he went upstairs.

"Where are you going?" his mother called from the kitchen.

"Bathroom."

She didn't argue. Didn't follow him. He climbed the stairs slowly, casually, like he wasn't planning anything.

His room looked almost normal now. The broken lamp had been cleaned up—his mother's work, probably—and the ceramic shards swept away. The nightstand looked bare without it, just an empty surface with a faint ring where the lamp base used to sit. No one had asked him to help clean up. No one had said anything about what had happened this morning at all.

They're picking their battles, Ash realized. Waiting to see what I do next.

He closed the door quietly and started looking.

The closet first. Old clothes, shoes that didn't fit anymore (or fit again, now), boxes of crap he'd forgotten about. And there, in the back—a backpack. Blue and gray, the one he'd used for school in seventh grade. It still had some papers stuffed in the front pocket, crumpled homework assignments from a lifetime ago.

He pulled it out and tested the zippers. Everything still worked.

Okay. Now what do I need?

Clothes. He grabbed a couple of t-shirts, a hoodie, an extra pair of jeans. Stuffed them in the main compartment. What else? He didn't have money—his wallet, his cards, everything from his adult life was gone. He didn't have a phone. He didn't have anything except what was in this room.

Fuck.

He sat on the bed, backpack in his lap, and tried to think. He needed money. He needed a way to get around. He needed somewhere to go, someone who would help him, some kind of plan beyond get out of here and figure it out later.

But he didn't have any of that. All he had was a backpack full of clothes and the desperate certainty that he couldn't stay here.

It's fine. I'll figure it out. I always figure it out.

He shoved the backpack under his bed, behind some boxes, where hopefully no one would notice it. Then he went back downstairs, heart pounding, trying to look like nothing had changed.

His mother glanced up when he passed the kitchen. "Everything okay?"

"Yeah. Just getting a book."

He grabbed a random paperback off the shelf in the living room—something with a spaceship on the cover, probably one of those sci-fi novels his dad used to read—and settled back on the couch. His mother went back to whatever she was doing.

Tonight, he told himself. Just make it to tonight.

Dinner was chicken and rice.

His father had finally emerged from the garage around six, sawdust on his polo shirt and a sheen of sweat on his forehead. He'd showered and changed before coming to the table—fresh khakis, a clean button-down with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, his graying hair still damp and combed back. He looked like a man ready for a business casual dinner party, not a hostage negotiation with his own son. Now he sat at the head of the table like nothing was wrong, like this was just another family meal. The patriarch in his place. The king surveying his domain.

Ash's mother had changed too—a fresh blouse, lipstick that she usually only wore when they had company. She'd set the table with the good plates—the white ones with the blue trim that usually only came out for holidays. Cloth napkins instead of paper. A pitcher of ice water with lemon slices floating in it. Like she was trying to make this feel special. Like she was trying to pretend they were a normal family having a normal dinner.

We're not normal. We never were.

The chicken was good—rosemary and garlic, crispy skin, the way his mother always made it. Ash ate without tasting it, shoveling food into his mouth because his body needed fuel and he wasn't going to give them the satisfaction of refusing to eat. He didn't talk. Didn't look at either of them. Just focused on his plate and counted the minutes until this was over.

"So," his father said, setting down his fork. "What did you do today?"

Ash shrugged. "Watched TV."

"That's it? All day?"

"There's not exactly a lot of options when you're under house arrest."

His mother winced. His father set down his water glass, the ice cubes clinking against the sides, and fixed Ash with a look that could have frozen the chicken solid.

"House arrest," his father repeated. "Is that what you think this is?"

Ash didn't answer. Kept his eyes on his plate.

"This is your home, Ash. This is your family. And the sooner you stop treating it like a prison sentence, the easier this is going to be for everyone." His father's voice was calm, reasonable, the same tone he probably used when explaining to juries why his client deserved leniency. "We're not your enemies. We're trying to help you."

Help me by locking me in. Help me by spanking me when I don't fall in line. Some help.

The words burned in Ash's throat, desperate to get out. He could feel the argument building—all the things he wanted to throw in their faces, all the ways this was wrong and unfair and completely fucking insane. But the backpack was upstairs. The plan was tonight. And if he blew up now, if he gave them a reason to watch him more closely...

He shoved a forkful of rice into his mouth and chewed slowly, deliberately, using the food as an excuse not to speak.

His father watched him for a long moment, those sharp eyes searching for something. Then he picked up his fork again and resumed eating, apparently satisfied that the conversation was over.

That's right. Think you won. Think I'm backing down.

We'll see who wins tonight.

"Did you find anything interesting to read?" his mother asked, her voice bright and forced. "I saw you grabbed a book earlier."

Ash glanced at the paperback he'd left on the coffee table. He hadn't even looked at the title. "It's fine."

"Your father used to love those Isaac Asimov novels. That one might be—"

"I said it's fine."

Silence. His father picked up his fork again and resumed eating, jaw tight. His mother pushed rice around her plate, not meeting anyone's eyes.

They let it drop. They were still doing that thing—watching him, waiting, giving him space while also making it clear he was trapped. Every glance between them carried some unspoken communication. Every careful word was calculated to avoid setting him off. He was a bomb they were trying to defuse, a problem they were trying to solve.

Fuck both of you.

His mother mentioned something about the weather tomorrow, how it was supposed to be nice, maybe they could sit on the porch together. Ash didn't respond. His father asked if he remembered a family friend named Davidson, whether they'd ever gotten that boat they'd been talking about. Ash shrugged without looking up.

When the plates were mostly empty, his father stood and started clearing the table. Ash watched him move around the kitchen, loading the dishwasher, wrapping up leftovers, wiping down the counters. That was different. In the timeline Ash remembered, his father had retreated into work by the time Ash was a teenager. He'd started coming home late, leaving early, letting his mother handle most of the domestic stuff while he buried himself in case files. But this version of his father—the one who'd come back with a decade of hindsight—seemed determined to be present.

Don't think that makes you a good person. You still hit me this morning.

His mother wiped her mouth with her napkin and set it beside her plate. She caught his father's eye across the table—one of those silent married-couple exchanges—before turning to Ash. "Ash, it's almost eight. Time to start getting ready for bed."

Ash looked at the clock on the wall. 7:47.

"It's not even eight o'clock," he said flatly.

"Bedtime is at nine. That means we start the routine now." She stood, smoothing down her blouse—the same pale blue one she'd worn all day, slightly wrinkled now from hours of housework. "Come on. Shower, brush your teeth, get changed. Then you can read until lights out."

"I'm twenty-three years old."

"You're thirteen," his father said from the sink, not turning around. "And we already discussed this."

The threat hung in the air, unspoken but clear. Do what you're told, or face the consequences.

Ash's jaw clenched. He wanted to argue. He wanted to tell them both to go to hell. But the memory of this morning was still too fresh, his ass still too sore, and the backpack was under his bed waiting for him.

Just get through this. A few more hours.

"Fine," he muttered, and went upstairs.

He didn't actually shower.

What was the point? He was leaving in a few hours anyway. He'd shower wherever he ended up, once he was free of this place. Instead he ran the water for a few minutes, let the bathroom steam up, then turned it off and changed into the pajamas his mother had laid out on his bed.

Pajamas. Like a toddler. Flannel pants with some pattern on them, a soft cotton t-shirt that was probably new—no holes, no stains, nothing like the threadbare stuff he'd been sleeping in for years.

He was sitting on the bed, random book in hand, when his mother knocked and came in.

"All clean?" she asked, that soft smile still on her face.

"Yeah."

She looked at him. Really looked—the kind of searching gaze that mothers perfected over years of catching their children in lies. And then her expression shifted, the smile fading into something harder.

"Your hair's dry."

Ash's stomach dropped.

"I dried it."

"With what?" She stepped further into the room, arms crossing over her chest. "There's no towel on the floor. And your shoulders are completely dry." She tilted her head, waiting. "You didn't actually shower, did you?"

Fuck.

He could lie. He could double down, insist he had, make up some excuse about opening the window or using a hair dryer that didn't exist. But she was looking at him with that knowing expression, the one that said she'd already figured it out and was just waiting for him to admit it.

"I ran the water," he said finally.

"That's not what I asked."

Silence. Ash stared at the bedspread—some dark blue pattern his mother had probably picked out years ago—hands clenched around the book he'd grabbed as a prop.

"Go take an actual shower," his mother said. Her voice wasn't angry, but it wasn't soft anymore either. "And brush your teeth. I'll wait."

"Mom—"

"Ash." Just his name, but there was weight behind it. Warning. "Don't make this harder than it needs to be."

He thought about arguing. Thought about refusing, about forcing her to call his father up here, about making them drag him to the bathroom and hold him under the water.

But that would draw attention. That would make them watch him more closely. And he couldn't afford that. Not tonight.

"Fine," he said, and got up.

His mother handed him a fresh towel from the hall closet—one of the good ones, thick and fluffy, probably the same ones she'd been using since before he was born. "I'll be right here."

The shower was quick. Perfunctory. He stood under the water just long enough to get his hair wet, soaped up and rinsed off without really thinking about it. Brushed his teeth with the same efficiency, avoiding the mirror. He didn't need to see that too-young face again.

Just a few more hours. Just a few more hours.

When he came out, towel around his shoulders, his mother was still there. Waiting in the hallway, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, patient as a saint. The hallway light caught the tired lines around her eyes, the slight droop of her shoulders. She looked exhausted. She also looked like she wasn't going anywhere until she'd verified he was actually clean.

She stepped closer, and before he could react, she leaned in and sniffed.

Actually sniffed him. Like he was a little kid who might have just stood under the water without using soap.

"Mom—" He jerked back, face burning. "What the hell?"

"Just checking." She smiled, apparently satisfied. "You'd be surprised how many little boys think they can fool their mothers."

The humiliation was so complete he couldn't even form words. She'd just sniffed him. Like he was a toddler who might have skipped the soap.

But he bit it back. Swallowed the humiliation. Added it to the pile.

"Thank you," she said. "That wasn't so hard, was it?"

He didn't answer. Just fell into step behind her like a dog being led back to its kennel, eager to get this nightly ritual of humiliation over with so he could be alone again.

She led him back to the bedroom and waited while he climbed into bed and pulled the covers up to his chest. The sheets were cool and crisp, freshly washed, smelling faintly of lavender fabric softener. His mother sat on the edge of the mattress, and for a terrible moment he thought she was going to try to talk to him, to have some kind of heart-to-heart about feelings and second chances and fresh starts.

Instead she just reached out and brushed the damp hair back from his forehead. Her fingers were warm. Gentle. The same touch she'd used when he was actually a child, when he was sick or scared or just needed his mom.

"Goodnight, sweetheart," she said quietly. "I love you."

The words hit him like a punch. He didn't know what to do with them, didn't know how to feel about them. She meant it—he could see that in her eyes, dark and earnest in the dim light from the hallway. She actually, genuinely loved him.

And she was still keeping him prisoner.

"Night," he managed.

She smiled—that soft, sad smile that made him want to scream—and stood up. Crossed to the door. Paused with her hand on the light switch.

"Sweet dreams," she said.

The light went out and the door closed behind her. Footsteps retreated down the hall.

Ash lay in the darkness, listening to his own breathing, and counted the minutes until he could run.

Chapter Text

SHANNON

They waited until the house was quiet—until Ash was showered and tucked in and the door to his room was closed—before they talked.

Shannon found Patrick in their bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed in his undershirt and boxers, his phone in his hand. The blue glow of the screen lit up his face from below, casting shadows under his eyes and along the hard line of his jaw. He looked older in that light, more like the man she'd left behind in 2025 than the younger version they'd woken up as. She closed the door softly behind her.

"He's going to try tonight," Patrick said quietly, not looking up from whatever he was watching on the screen.

Shannon nodded and crossed to stand beside him. She'd been thinking the same thing all day—the way Ash had been so careful to seem compliant, the trip upstairs that had taken too long, the way he'd avoided eye contact at dinner with his jaw tight and his shoulders hunched with barely concealed resentment.

He was planning something, and they both knew it.

"What did you get done today?" she asked, settling onto the bed beside him. The mattress dipped under her weight, and Patrick shifted to make room without looking away from his phone.

He set it down finally, ticking items off on his thick fingers. "I checked the window pins on every window in the house, and the ones from when he was little are still solid." He held up a second finger. "Deadbolts on the front and back doors, keyed from both sides, so he can't open them without the key—and the keys stay with us." A third finger. "And I finished the security system after he went to bed."

Shannon raised an eyebrow. "You finished it already?"

"I picked up the equipment this morning and did the exterior cameras and the ones in the garage while he was watching TV. I just finished the interior ones for the stairs, hallways, and back door." He picked up the phone again and showed her the grid of grainy black-and-white images. Their house was sliced into rectangles on the screen—the front porch, the back door, the staircase empty and gray in the night-vision display. "I put motion sensors on every exterior door and window too. If he so much as touches a doorknob after we arm it, we'll know."

She felt a pang of something—guilt, maybe, or grief for the normal family they'd never been and never would be. They had cameras and motion sensors now. They were treating their son like an intruder in his own home.

Because he is, she reminded herself. The son we knew is gone, and this one is a stranger wearing his face.

No. That wasn't fair either. He was still Ash, still their boy, underneath all the anger and the addiction and the years of damage. That was why they were doing this. That was why they had to.

"So when he tries," she said slowly, "what happens then?"

Patrick's expression hardened, the lines around his mouth deepening. "He faces consequences. Real ones, like this morning, but more severe."

"More severe how?"

"He's not a little kid who doesn't know better. He's an adult in his head, and he's going to try to escape from his own home after we explicitly told him not to." Patrick shook his head, his jaw tight. "A hand spanking isn't going to cut it for something like this."

Shannon's stomach tightened. She could feel the weight of what was coming, pressing down on her chest. "What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking we use a paddle."

The word hung in the air between them. Shannon thought of Ash—her baby, her boy, even now—bent over and paddled. The image made something twist inside her, some maternal instinct that wanted to protect him from pain, even pain he'd brought on himself.

She took a breath and steeled herself. He was a child who needed to learn that actions have consequences.

"Where would we even get one?" she asked, and her voice came out smaller than she intended.

"I've already handled it." Patrick's voice was matter-of-fact, the same tone he used when discussing case strategy at the office. "A guy on one of those local seller apps had one. It's small but thick, solid wood with holes drilled through." He met her eyes, and she saw the resolve there—no hesitation, no doubt. "I picked it up when I went to the hardware store."

Shannon remembered hearing him on the phone earlier, voice low and serious. She'd meant to ask about it, and now she knew.

"You were already planning this," she said. "Before we even knew he'd try."

"I was planning for the possibility." Patrick's jaw was set, the same stubborn expression she'd seen on Ash's face a thousand times. Father and son were more alike than either of them would ever admit. "We can't afford to be unprepared when it comes to him. He's smart, Shannon. He's always been smart. If we're going to stay ahead of him, we have to think like him."

She wanted to argue. She wanted to say that there had to be another way, that they didn't have to turn their home into a prison and their parenting into whatever this was.

But she'd tried other ways. For ten years, she'd tried gentle talks and firm boundaries and unconditional love and rehab and therapy and everything the books said to do. And he'd still ended up in a hospital bed with a needle in his arm, gray-faced and barely breathing, while she bargained with God for one more chance.

This was that chance. She couldn't waste it.

"Okay," she said quietly. "A paddle. What else?"

"We take shifts tonight. I'll stay up until two, and then you take over until morning. The system will alert our phones if any doors or windows open, but I want eyes on too." He gestured to the phone, to the grid of cameras showing their dark, quiet house. "We'll see him coming before he gets anywhere."

Shannon stared at the screen, at the empty hallway and the closed door that led to their son's room. Their son, who was probably lying awake right now, counting the minutes until he thought it was safe to run.

"And when we catch him?"

"Then I take him to his room, and he learns that running isn't an option." Patrick's voice was flat and final. "However many times it takes."

Shannon nodded slowly. She didn't want this. Every part of her that was still the mother who'd rocked him to sleep and kissed his scraped knees wanted to find another way.

But that mother had failed. That mother had watched her son die by inches for a decade.

This mother would do whatever it took.

"Okay," she said again. "I'll take first shift, and you try to get some sleep."

They settled in with books they weren't really reading.

Shannon sat propped against the headboard, a novel open in her lap, the phone beside her showing the camera feeds. Patrick lay beside her with his eyes closed, but she could tell from his breathing that he wasn't really sleeping either. His chest rose and fell too quickly, too shallowly, and every few minutes his hand would twitch toward the phone on the nightstand.

The hours crept by. Eleven o'clock came and went, then eleven-thirty. The house stayed quiet on the cameras, with nothing moving except the occasional shadow of a tree branch swaying outside a window.

At midnight, the motion sensor triggered.

Shannon's phone buzzed softly against the bedspread. She looked at the screen and saw movement on the stairs—a small figure creeping down, one step at a time, a backpack slung over his shoulder. In the grainy night-vision display, he looked even smaller than he did in person. Her child.

"Patrick," she whispered.

He was already moving, sliding out of bed with the silent efficiency of a man who'd been waiting for exactly this. He pulled on his robe—dark blue terrycloth, the one she'd bought him for Christmas years ago—and slipped his feet into the loafers he'd left by the door. When he met her eyes, his expression was calm and focused. He was ready.

"Stay here," he said quietly. "I'll handle it."

She nodded, her throat too tight for words, and watched on the phone as he slipped out of the bedroom and moved toward the stairs. On the screen, Ash reached the bottom step and paused, his head turning left and right as he scanned the dark hallway.

He's looking for us, she realized. He's making sure the coast is clear.

ASH

It was midnight.

The house had been quiet for over an hour, with no footsteps, no voices, no sound of the TV or water running. There was just the steady hum of the air conditioning and the occasional creak of the old house settling.

They're asleep. They have to be asleep by now.

Ash sat up slowly, carefully, testing the bed springs for noise. They weren't too loud. He slipped his feet onto the floor, feeling the carpet between his toes, and stood.

The backpack was where he'd left it, shoved under the bed behind some boxes. He pulled it out, slung it over one shoulder, and crept to the door.

I've done this before. I can do it again.

He had, actually. He'd snuck out of this same house, through this same door, when he was fifteen. He'd met up with friends, smoked weed in someone's basement, and came back before dawn without his parents ever knowing. If he could do it then, he could do it now.

The hallway was dark. A nightlight glowed from the bathroom, casting just enough light to see by. His parents' door was closed at the end of the hall with no light underneath.

They're asleep. This is perfect.

He started down the stairs, one step at a time, keeping to the edges where the wood was less likely to creak. His heart was pounding so loud he was sure someone would hear it, but he kept moving and kept breathing. He kept telling himself that in a few minutes he'd be outside, he'd be free, he'd be—

What, running through the suburbs in pajamas with no money and nowhere to go?

He pushed the thought away. He'd figure it out. He always figured it out. The important thing was getting away from here, away from them, away from the insane prison his parents were building around him.

Maybe if he got far enough away, whatever magic had done this would reverse itself. Maybe it was like a radius thing, a proximity thing. Maybe he just had to get out of this city, this house, this life, and he'd snap back to where he was supposed to be.

It was a stupid hope. He knew it was stupid. But it was all he had.

The stairs ended. He was in the front hallway now, with the living room to his left and the kitchen to his right. The front door was straight ahead, a rectangle of deeper shadow against the wall.

Almost there.

He crossed to the door. His hand closed around the handle, cold metal against his palm, and he started to turn it—

"Going somewhere?"

Ash's blood turned to ice.

His father's voice was calm and quiet, coming from somewhere behind him. How long had he been there? How had Ash not heard him?

No. This can't be happening.

Ash yanked the handle down and pulled. The door didn't budge. Something was wrong—the lock wasn't working, there was some kind of—

A deadbolt. A new deadbolt, one that needed a key from the inside. His father had installed it today. That was what all the drilling had been about.

He was trapped.

Footsteps sounded behind him, slow and unhurried. Ash spun around, pressing his back against the door, and there was his father. Phone in hand, the man crossed the room with the calm inevitability of someone who knew exactly how this was going to end.

"The door's locked," his father said, his tone conversational, almost gentle. "We installed a security system today. Did you really think we wouldn't be ready?"

Ash's mind was racing. A security system—that's how his father had known. There were cameras, probably, and motion sensors. They'd been watching him the whole time, watching him creep down the stairs like an idiot who thought he was being clever.

But he couldn't just stand here. He couldn't just give up.

He feinted left, then bolted right, trying to duck past his father toward the kitchen. Maybe there was a window he could break, maybe the back door had a different lock, maybe—

His father caught him before he'd taken three steps.

One arm wrapped around his waist, thick and immovable as a tree branch, lifting him clear off the ground. Ash kicked and thrashed, his legs flailing uselessly in the air, his hands clawing at his father's forearm. None of it mattered. None of it mattered at all because he weighed nothing in this body, he was nothing, and his father was carrying him the way a bouncer might haul a drunk out of a bar.

"Let GO of me!"

"No."

"You can't do this! You can't just—"

"I can, and I am." His father's voice was still calm, still measured, even as Ash twisted and fought in his grip.

They were going up the stairs. His father was carrying him back to his room, one arm locked around his waist like an iron band, while Ash's legs kicked uselessly at the air. He grabbed at the banister as they passed it, his fingers closing around the wooden railing, trying to anchor himself—but his father just adjusted his grip and kept climbing, and Ash's hands slipped free before he could hold on.

"Let me go," Ash said, and his voice came out smaller than he intended, almost pleading. "Please—"

"Not until we've dealt with this."

They reached the top of the stairs. The hallway stretched ahead of them, and Ash could see his bedroom door standing open, a dark rectangle waiting to swallow him whole. His father carried him inside and set him on his feet, keeping a firm grip on his upper arm. Ash tried to yank free and got nowhere.

The room looked different in the dark. It looked smaller. The glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling were faintly visible, casting an eerie greenish light that made everything feel underwater. The window was a black square, the curtains pulled back, and Ash could see his own reflection in the glass—a small, pale figure with wide eyes and mussed hair. Thirteen years old.

"You tried to run away," his father said quietly. "You did this after we explicitly told you not to, after we explained the rules this morning." His voice was calm, but there was weight behind it. Finality. "There are going to be consequences for that, Ash."

Ash's legs felt weak. His mouth was dry, his throat tight, and he suddenly became aware that the backpack was gone—it had fallen somewhere on the stairs, probably, left behind in the struggle. He felt very small and very young and very trapped.

"You already—this morning—"

"This morning was for throwing punches." His father released his arm but didn't step back, looming over him in the darkness. "This is different. This was deliberate disobedience, and it was planned and calculated."

His father's hand closed on his shoulder and turned him—not roughly, but firmly, irresistibly—until he was facing the corner of the room. The corner. It was the same treatment reserved for misbehaving five-year-olds, the same humiliation he'd watched other kids endure and sworn he'd never submit to.

"Put your nose in the corner," his father said. "Don't move."

Ash spun around immediately, his face flushing hot with humiliation. "I'm not doing that. I'm twenty-three years old—"

The swat came out of nowhere.

His father's hand connected hard with his backside, the sting sharp even through his pajama pants. Before Ash could react, before he could even process what had happened, his father had turned him back around with one hand on the back of his neck, positioning him firmly in the corner.

"Put your nose in the corner," his father repeated. "Don't move."

Ash lasted maybe ten seconds. Then he turned his head, just slightly, trying to see what his father was doing—

Another swat landed, harder this time. His father's hand gripped his shoulder and turned him back to face the wall.

"I said don't move."

Ash's face was burning. His backside was stinging. And his father was still standing right behind him, close enough that Ash could feel the heat of his body, could smell the faint scent of soap and aftershave that had been the same as long as Ash could remember. He was close enough to catch any movement the second it started.

This is insane. This is fucking insane. I'm twenty-three years old and I'm standing in a corner like some misbehaving kindergartener—

He started to turn again. He couldn't help it. Every fiber of his being rebelled against standing here, obedient, waiting—

The third swat was the hardest yet. Ash gasped, his hands flying back instinctively to cover his backside, but his father caught his wrists and pinned them at his sides.

"How many times do we need to do this?" His father's voice was calm and patient, like he had all night, all week, all year if that's what it took. "You can stand in this corner on your own, or I can hold you in this corner. It's your choice."

Ash stood still. His backside throbbed where the swats had landed, three hot spots of pain that pulsed in time with his heartbeat. His pride screamed at him to fight, to run, to do something—but his body had learned faster than his mind. Three swats, and he was done resisting.

Pathetic. This is absolutely pathetic.

His father released his wrists, and Ash kept them at his sides.

For a long moment, nothing happened. Ash could hear his father breathing behind him, slow and steady. He could feel those eyes on the back of his neck, watching, waiting, making sure he'd actually stay.

The silence stretched on. Thirty seconds passed, then a minute. Ash's legs started to ache from standing so still. His nose was practically touching the wall, close enough to see the faint texture of the paint, close enough to smell the dusty baseboards. He didn't dare move.

And then, without warning, there were footsteps. His father was walking away. The sound of him leaving the room.

Ash stood there, face inches from the wall, and burned with humiliation. Every instinct screamed at him to turn around, to run, to do something. But he didn't know how long his father would be gone. He didn't know if the man was standing just outside the door, waiting to catch him. He didn't know if there were cameras in this room too, watching his every move.

I should turn around. What's he going to do, add more swats? He's already going to use the paddle anyway.

But he didn't turn around. Some horrible survival instinct kept him frozen, kept his nose pointed at the corner, kept him standing there waiting for punishment.

He hated himself for it. He hated how quickly he'd learned to comply. He hated that one day—one fucking day—of this had already started to break something in him.

The minutes crawled by. Two passed, maybe three. It was long enough that Ash started to wonder if his father had just left him here, if this was the punishment—standing in a corner all night, waiting for something worse that might never come.

Then there were footsteps in the hallway. His father was returning.

"Alright," his father's voice said, calm as ever. "Come here."

Ash turned around.

His father was sitting on the edge of the bed, the same position he'd been in this morning. The lamp on the nightstand was on now, casting a warm yellow glow that made everything look deceptively cozy. But there was nothing cozy about what Ash saw in his father's lap.

It was something wooden. It was small but thick. It was dark-stained, with holes drilled through it.

A paddle.

Ash's stomach dropped. His feet felt rooted to the floor, frozen in place by the sight of that thing.

"I said come here, Ash."

He couldn't move. He couldn't think. He could only stare at that paddle, at his father's calm face, at the terrible inevitability of what was about to happen. His father looked patient and settled, like a man who had all the time in the world. His big hands rested on his thighs, the paddle lying across them, and his eyes never left Ash's face.

"This is what happens when you try to run," his father said. "Every time. However many times it takes."

Ash stood frozen, his back to the corner, and felt the last of his hope drain away.

Chapter Text

"Come here, Ash."

He couldn't move. His feet were rooted to the floor, his back pressed against the corner like it could protect him. The paddle in his father's lap seemed to grow larger the longer he stared at it—dark wood, holes drilled through, small but thick and solid.

"I'm not going to ask again." His father's voice was calm and patient and terrifying. "Come here now."

Ash shook his head. His voice came out strangled. "No."

"Ash."

"I said no." He was shaking now, trembling all over, and he couldn't stop it. "You can't—you can't do this. I'm not a child. I'm twenty-three years old—"

"You're in a thirteen-year-old body, living in my house, under my rules." His father didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. "And you tried to run away tonight. There are consequences for that."

"Mom won't let you." The words tumbled out, desperate, grasping. "She won't—she wouldn't agree to this. She's not like you."

His father's expression didn't change. "Your mother and I discussed this together."

"You're lying." Ash's voice was rising, edging toward hysteria. "She wouldn't—MOM!" He screamed it toward the door, toward the hallway, toward anywhere she might hear. "MOM! HELP ME!"

Silence. The house stayed quiet.

"MOM! PLEASE!" His voice cracked. "DON'T LET HIM DO THIS!"

He listened for footsteps, for her voice, for any sign that she was coming to save him from this. She'd always softened his father's edges before. She'd always been the one he could work on when his father got too hard.

Nothing. There was no rescue coming.

"She's not coming, Ash." His father's voice was almost gentle. "She knows what's happening, and she agrees this is the consequence for trying to run away. We decided this together."

The words hit Ash like a punch to the gut. She knows. She agrees. His mother—the one who'd always been softer, always been the mediator, always been the one he could manipulate when his father got too hard—she'd signed off on this. She was somewhere in this house, listening to him scream for help, and she wasn't coming.

He was alone.

"This is your last chance," his father said. "You can come here on your own, or I can come get you. It's your choice."

Ash pressed himself harder into the corner. His heart was hammering. His breath was coming in short, panicked gasps. He couldn't do this. He couldn't walk over there and bend over his father's knee and let himself be paddled—

"Alright." His father stood up, setting the paddle on the bed. "We'll do this the hard way."

"No—" Ash tried to bolt, but there was nowhere to go. His father crossed the room in three strides, caught him by the arm, and started walking him toward the bed. "No, please, I'll be good, I'll—"

"You had your chance to come on your own." His father's grip was unbreakable. "That's ten extra swats for not coming when you were told."

Ten extra? Ash's stomach dropped. "I didn't—you can't just—"

"I can, and I will."

His father sat back down on the edge of the bed, and then Ash was being pulled down, positioned, arranged over his father's lap like he weighed nothing. Like he was nothing. He kicked and thrashed and tried to push himself up—

His father caught both his wrists in one hand and pinned them against the small of his back.

"Let GO—"

"The more you fight, the longer this takes."

Ash squirmed and twisted and threw his whole body into trying to break free. It was useless. His father's arm across his back was an iron bar. His wrists were locked in place, his legs dangling uselessly off the side of the bed. He couldn't move. He couldn't escape. He could only lie there, pinned and helpless, waiting for what came next.

"Please." The word came out broken. "Please don't—"

"This is what happens when you try to run away." His father's free hand rested on the seat of his pajama pants—a warning, a promise. "This happens every time. Do you understand?"

Ash didn't answer. He couldn't answer. His whole body was trembling.

"We're going to stay here until you understand," his father said. "However long that takes."

The first swat of the paddle landed without warning.

Ash gasped. It was nothing like his father's hand—it was harder, sharper, a concentrated explosion of pain that made his whole body jerk. Before he could process it, the second one landed. Then the third.

I won't cry. I won't give him the satisfaction. I won't—

The paddle fell again and again, a steady rhythm that seemed to find the same spots over and over. His father was saying something—words about choices and consequences and running away—but Ash couldn't focus on the meaning. He could only feel the fire building in his backside, the relentless impact of wood on flesh.

He bit his lip. He squeezed his eyes shut. He refused to make a sound.

I'm twenty-three. I've survived worse than this. I've been beaten by dealers, kicked out of apartments, left for dead in alleys. This is nothing. This is—

The paddle caught him low, right where he sat, and a sob escaped before he could stop it.

No. No no no—

But it was too late. The dam was breaking. His eyes were burning, his throat was closing up, and the next swat tore a cry from his chest that he couldn't hold back.

"There we go," his father said, almost gently. The paddle kept falling. "Let it out."

And Ash did. He sobbed—ugly, heaving sobs that shook his whole body, that sounded nothing like a twenty-three-year-old man and everything like a child who'd been pushed past his breaking point. Tears streamed down his face, soaking into the bedspread beneath him. Snot ran from his nose. He couldn't stop, couldn't control it, couldn't do anything except cry and cry and cry.

The paddle paused.

"Are you sorry?" his father asked.

Ash couldn't answer. He could barely breathe through the sobs.

"Ash. Are you sorry for trying to run away?"

He tried to form words. Nothing came out except more crying—great wracking sobs that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside him, somewhere he'd kept locked away for years.

His father waited. He didn't swat him again, but he didn't let him up either. He just held him there, pinned across his lap, while Ash cried himself empty.

Finally—finally—the sobs started to slow. His breathing steadied, just barely. And his father asked again, quieter this time:

"Are you sorry?"

"Y-yes." The word came out broken, stuttered. "I'm s-sorry. I'm sorry."

"Good." His father's hand rubbed his lower back, just once. The touch was brief and almost kind. "That's good, Ash. But you still owe me ten more for not coming when you were told."

No—

The protest died in his throat. He didn't have the energy to fight anymore. He didn't have anything left.

"Ten more," his father repeated. "And then we're done."

The paddle rose and fell. One.

Ash cried. He didn't try to hold it back this time. He just let the tears flow, let the sobs shake his body, let himself be exactly what he was: a child being punished by his father.

Two. Three. Four.

Each one landed on already-burning skin, relighting the fire, pushing him further into that place where nothing existed except pain and tears and his father's implacable presence.

Five. Six. Seven.

He stopped counting. He stopped thinking. He just existed, suspended in the moment, waiting for it to end.

Eight. Nine. Ten.

The paddle stopped.

For a long moment, neither of them moved. Ash lay across his father's lap, crying quietly now, his whole body limp with exhaustion. His ass throbbed with a deep, burning ache that seemed to pulse with his heartbeat. He could feel his father's hand resting on his back—not rubbing, not comforting, just there.

Then his father released his wrists.

"Okay," his father said quietly. "We're done."

He helped Ash up—pulled him to standing, steadied him when his legs wobbled—and then, before Ash could process what was happening, pulled him into a hug.

It was awkward. Ash was standing while his father was still sitting on the bed, so Ash's head ended up on his father's shoulder, his face pressed into the fabric of his robe. His father's arms wrapped around him, solid and warm, and Ash found himself clinging—actually clinging, seeking comfort from the same person who'd just punished him.

He should pull away. He should spit in his father's face, should curse him out, should make it clear that this changed nothing.

But he was so tired. And his father's arms were so steady. And for just a moment—just one horrible, shameful moment—it felt almost like safety.

"I know this is hard." His father's voice was low, rumbling against Ash's ear. "I know you're angry. I know you don't understand why we're doing this."

Ash didn't say anything. He just breathed. He just let himself be held.

"But this is how it has to be. And it can be easier, Ash. It can be a lot less painful if you just follow the rules." A pause. "Tomorrow is a new day. It's a fresh start. You don't have to fight us every step of the way."

Ash still didn't speak. He didn't have words left. He didn't have anything left.

His father held him for another moment, then gently pulled back. He looked at Ash's face—tear-streaked, puffy, probably covered in snot. If he was disgusted, he didn't show it.

"Come on," he said. "Let's get you to bed."

His father stood, pulling back the covers, and guided Ash the half-step to the mattress. Ash's legs were jelly, barely holding him up. He collapsed onto the bed on his stomach—there was no way in hell he was putting any pressure on his ass—and let his father pull the blankets over him.

His father stood there for a moment, looking down at him with an expression Ash couldn't read.

"I love you," his father said quietly. "That's why we're doing this. We love you, and we're not going to let you destroy yourself. Not this time."

Ash closed his eyes. He couldn't look at his father anymore. He couldn't process any of this.

"Get some sleep. We'll talk more in the morning."

Footsteps crossed the room. The light clicked off. The door closed softly.

And then Ash was alone in the dark, his ass on fire, his face wet with tears, his mind a howling void where thoughts should be.

He curled into himself, pressed his face into the pillow, and cried.

They weren't the heaving sobs from before—those had burned themselves out. They were just quiet, hopeless tears, leaking from his eyes, soaking into the fabric.

I'm trapped.

The thought circled in his mind, over and over, with nowhere to go.

I'm trapped in this body, in this house, with these people who say they love me while they—

He couldn't finish the thought. He couldn't process what had just happened. His father's arm had pinned him down. The paddle had fallen, over and over. He'd broken, sobbed, apologized. He'd clung to his father afterward, seeking comfort from the very person who'd just humiliated him.

What's wrong with me?

He'd survived worse. He knew he had. He'd survived dealers who'd beaten him for being short on payment. He'd survived nights on the street in winter. He'd survived the slow poison of addiction eating him alive from the inside. He'd survived all of that.

But this—this felt different. This wasn't random violence or self-destruction. This was calculated and methodical. His parents knew exactly what they were doing, and they were going to keep doing it, every time he stepped out of line, until he became... what? The obedient son they'd always wanted? The child he'd never really been, even when he was actually this age?

They said they love me.

His father's voice echoed in his head. That's why we're doing this. Because we love you.

Ash didn't know what love was supposed to feel like. But he was pretty sure it wasn't supposed to feel like this—burned and broken and crying alone in the dark.

Tomorrow is a new day, his father had said. A fresh start.

But Ash didn't want a fresh start. He wanted his life back. He wanted his real life, messy and fucked up as it was. He wanted his adult body, his freedom, his right to make his own choices even if those choices killed him.

More than anything, he wanted to get high. He wanted to feel that warm rush flooding his veins, that beautiful numbness spreading through his chest, that moment when all the sharp edges of the world went soft and nothing mattered anymore. He wanted to check out, to float away, to stop feeling every single thing so goddamn much. His body ached for it—not just his throbbing ass, but something deeper, something cellular. The craving was a living thing inside him, coiled and hungry, and there was nothing here to feed it. No pills, no powder, no escape. Just this bed, this body, this endless fucking night.

He wasn't going to get any of that. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.

The tears kept coming, slower now, each one carrying a little more of his resistance out with it. He was so tired. He was tired of fighting, tired of losing, tired of being trapped in this small, weak body that couldn't even stay awake long enough to—

Sleep, when it finally came, was a mercy.

Chapter Text

SHANNON

The coffee maker gurgled in the quiet kitchen, and Shannon watched the dark liquid fill the pot with the kind of focus that came from not wanting to think about anything else.

It was just past six, and the house was still. Patrick was in the shower—she could hear the water running through the pipes—and Ash was still in his room upstairs. After last night, she wasn't sure how much actual sleeping he'd done.

Patrick had come to bed around one in the morning. She'd been lying awake for hours by then, listening to everything that happened down the hall.

She'd heard Patrick's calm voice, too low to make out the words. She'd heard Ash's responses—defiant at first, then pleading. She'd heard the sharp crack of the paddle, over and over, and the sounds her son made as it landed. Gasps that turned to cries that turned to sobs.

And she'd heard him call for her.

Mom! Help me! His voice had cracked on the words, desperate and young. Mom! Please! Don't let him do this!

She'd sat frozen in the darkness of their bedroom, her hands pressed flat against the mattress, every instinct screaming at her to go to him. To stop this. To gather her baby in her arms and tell him it was okay, she wouldn't let anyone hurt him, she'd protect him the way she always had.

But that protection had failed him. Ten years of shielding him from consequences, of softening Patrick's attempts at discipline, of believing that love and patience would be enough—and he'd ended up gray-faced in a hospital bed with a needle in his arm.

So she'd stayed where she was. She'd listened to him cry for her, and she hadn't gone.

It was the hardest thing she'd ever done.

When Patrick finally came to bed, she'd been lying awake, staring at the ceiling, her face wet with tears she hadn't bothered to wipe away.

"It's done," he'd said quietly, sliding under the covers beside her. "He's sleeping."

"How was he?"

He paused. "It was difficult, but he apologized at the end. He said he was sorry." He paused again. "I think it got through to him."

She'd wanted to ask more. She'd wanted to know if Ash had kept calling for her, if he'd said her name again, if he'd finally understood that she wasn't coming. But Patrick's breathing had already started to slow, and she'd let him sleep. He'd earned it.

She hadn't slept at all.

Now, in the gray light of early morning, she poured her coffee and carried it to the living room. The TV was still on from yesterday—she'd forgotten to turn it off—and some morning talk show was playing at low volume. A woman with perfect hair was interviewing a child psychologist about "strong-willed children."

Shannon almost changed the channel, but then she stopped.

"...the mistake a lot of parents make," the psychologist was saying, "is thinking that if they just love their child enough, the child will naturally make good choices. But love isn't enough. Children need structure. They need boundaries. They need to know that their parents are in control, even when—especially when—the child is fighting that control."

Shannon sat down slowly, coffee cup warming her hands.

"The parents I work with often feel guilty about being strict," the psychologist continued. "They worry they're being too harsh, too controlling. But what I tell them is this: the question isn't 'what kind of parent do I want to be?' The question is 'what kind of parent does my child need me to be?' And sometimes those are very different things."

What kind of parent does my child need me to be?

The words echoed in Shannon's mind. She thought about the first timeline—all those years of trying to be understanding, trying to give Ash space, trying to trust that he'd find his way. She'd wanted to be the kind of mother who respected her son's autonomy, who didn't push too hard, who let him make his own choices.

And he'd chosen to destroy himself.

Patrick had changed. She could see it in the way he held himself now—straighter, more present, more focused. The Patrick of the first timeline had retreated into work, had let Shannon handle the "Ash situation," had only engaged when things got truly catastrophic. But this Patrick was different, and this Patrick had installed a security system and bought a paddle and sat with their son until the lesson sank in.

He's being the father Ash needs. Not the father he wanted to be.

Maybe it was time she did the same.

She picked up her phone, opened YouTube, and started searching. Parenting strong-willed children. Discipline for teenagers. How to be a firm parent. The videos populated her screen—therapists, family coaches, mothers sharing their own stories—and she started watching, taking mental notes, thinking about what kind of mother her son upstairs actually needed.

She wouldn't be the one who let him spiral. She wouldn't be the one who hoped things would get better on their own.

Whatever had sent them back—whatever force had answered her prayer—had sent Ash back too, with all his memories, all his damage, all his adult consciousness trapped in a child's body.

That couldn't be an accident, and it had to mean something.

Maybe we're supposed to fix what we did wrong the first time. Not just save him from himself, but actually... parent him. The way we should have all along.

She sipped her coffee and watched another video. A woman was talking about natural consequences versus logical consequences, about the importance of follow-through, about how children—even difficult children, even children who fought every boundary—secretly wanted to know their parents were strong enough to hold the line.

What kind of mother does Ash need?

She wouldn't be the one she'd been. That much was clear.

Shannon set down her coffee and started making breakfast.

ASH

He woke up slowly, consciousness seeping in like water through cracks.

For one blissful moment, he didn't remember. There was just the warmth of the blankets, the softness of the pillow, the gentle light filtering through the curtains.

Then he shifted, and his ass throbbed, and everything came flooding back—the escape attempt, his father waiting in the dark, the corner, the paddle, the way he'd cried and sobbed and broken down completely and apologized like a—

Don't think about it.

But he couldn't not think about it. The shame was right there, fresh and hot, burning in his chest. He'd apologized. He'd said he was sorry, like a good little boy, like the obedient child they wanted him to be. And then he'd let his father hug him, had actually clung to him, seeking comfort from the same hands that had just punished him.

Stop. Stop thinking about it.

Ash rolled onto his back, wincing at the pressure on his still-tender backside. The morning light made patterns on the wall where it filtered through the curtains, and he watched them shift while his mind churned.

He was angry. Of course he was angry. He wanted to storm downstairs and scream at both of them, wanted to throw things and break things and make them understand that they couldn't do this to him, that he was a person with rights, that—

But there was another feeling underneath the anger, something smaller and quieter and infinitely more shameful.

It was fear.

He was afraid of what would happen if he lashed out. He was afraid of his father's calm voice and steady hands. He was afraid of the corner, the paddle, the way his body had betrayed him last night—crying and shaking and giving up before his mind was ready to surrender.

I'm a coward. I'm a fucking coward.

Maybe. But he was also lying here with a throbbing ass and the memory of his own sobs echoing in his head, and the thought of going through that again made something cold curl in his stomach.

He hated that he was afraid. He hated that one night had already started to change him. He hated that his first thought this morning wasn't how do I escape but how do I avoid more punishment.

This is how they break people. This is exactly how they do it.

The smell of bacon drifted up from downstairs.

His stomach growled, loudly and traitorously.

Fucking thirteen-year-old body.

He got up.

His mother was in the kitchen when he came down, standing at the stove with a spatula in hand. She was already fully dressed—slacks, a blouse, her hair brushed and pinned back—at six-thirty in the goddamn morning. Like she was ready for a PTA meeting instead of making breakfast for her prisoner son.

Of course she's dressed. Wouldn't want to look anything less than perfect while she runs her little rehabilitation program.

She looked up when he appeared in the doorway, and her face shifted into an expression that mixed softness and sadness with something harder underneath. Her shoulders were set, her spine straight, and there was a steadiness in the way she held herself that hadn't been there before. Like she'd made some decision in the night and now she was committed to seeing it through.

"Good morning," she said. "Breakfast is almost ready."

Ash didn't answer. He just shuffled to the table and sat down, wincing as his weight pressed on his backside. The chair was hard, and everything was hard.

His mother set a plate in front of him—bacon, eggs, toast. She sat across from him with her own plate and her coffee, watching him with those careful eyes.

He ate, not because he wanted to give her the satisfaction, but because his stupid body was starving and there was no point in fighting about food. He needed his strength. He needed to think and figure out what the hell he was going to do next.

"Your father went out to run some errands," his mother said, conversationally. "He'll be back in a few hours."

Ash's fork paused halfway to his mouth. "More errands?"

"Mm-hmm."

What else could he possibly need? More locks? Bars for the windows? A fucking moat?

"Great," Ash muttered. "Maybe he'll pick up some chains while he's out. Really complete the dungeon aesthetic."

His mother didn't rise to the bait. She just sipped her coffee and watched him eat.

When his plate was empty—and God, he hated how quickly he'd finished it, how his body had just demanded fuel like a normal hungry teenager—his mother spoke again.

"Go upstairs and change out of your pajamas."

Ash looked down at himself and saw the same pajamas from last night, the ones he'd been wearing when his father had paddled him.

"Why?" he asked flatly.

"Because you need to make yourself presentable for the day." His mother set down her coffee cup and turned to face him fully, her hands coming to rest on her hips. The morning light from the window caught the silver threads in her dark hair, and he noticed for the first time how much younger she looked than she had in the other timeline—fewer lines around her eyes, less gray, her face not yet carved by a decade of watching him self-destruct. "Get dressed, brush your teeth, comb your hair."

"It doesn't matter." He slouched in his chair, ignoring the ache in his backside. "I'm just going to watch TV."

"It matters."

"It doesn't. No one's going to see me. I'm not going anywhere. What's the point?"

His mother met his eyes with that same calm, steady look that his father had perfected.

"The point," she said, "is that this is your life now. And we're going to live it properly. That means getting dressed in the morning, taking care of yourself, maintaining standards. Even when you don't feel like it. Especially when you don't feel like it."

Ash wanted to argue. He wanted to tell her that his life was supposed to be something else entirely, somewhere else entirely, and he didn't give a shit about her standards.

But he saw the set of her jaw and the look in her eyes, and he knew that this wasn't a negotiation or a discussion. It was simply how things were going to be.

He thought about the paddle upstairs and about his father coming home from his errands. He thought about another night like last night.

"Fine," he said, and pushed back from the table.

The shower was quick, and the toothbrushing was perfunctory. He found clothes that fit this stupid body—jeans, a t-shirt, nothing special—and dragged a comb through his hair without looking in the mirror.

Then he went back downstairs and planted himself on the couch.

The TV was already on, some stupid daytime show playing at low volume. His mother was in the kitchen, doing dishes or something, and for a while Ash just sat there, watching the screen without really seeing it, thinking.

What the hell am I going to do?

Running hadn't worked, and fighting hadn't worked. His father was stronger, his mother was united with him, and they had cameras and locks and paddles and the will to use all of it.

He couldn't escape yet, not until he had a better plan and better resources—some advantage they didn't know about.

Which meant, for now, he had to... what? Play along? Be the good little boy they wanted?

The thought made him want to scream.

But the alternative—more corners, more paddles, more nights crying himself to sleep—didn't exactly appeal either.

Just survive. That's all you have to do right now. Survive until you figure something out.

He watched the TV without absorbing any of it, trying to think through their angle.

What were they actually planning here? They couldn't keep him locked up forever. At some point, they'd have to let him out, let him have some semblance of a normal life. Right?

Maybe they just want me to behave for a few weeks. Prove I can follow their stupid rules. Then things go back to normal—or whatever passes for normal when you've been magically de-aged.

He tried to imagine it. A month, maybe two, of playing the obedient son. Eating his vegetables, doing his chores, not trying to escape. And then... what? They'd realize this whole thing was insane, find some way to reverse it, send him back to his actual life?

That's not going to happen and you know it.

But what was the alternative? They couldn't actually expect him to just... live this. Go through puberty again. Go through school again. Years and years of pretending to be a teenager while his adult mind slowly went insane from the boredom and the helplessness and the constant, grinding humiliation.

He got up from the couch, too restless to sit still, and started pacing through the living room, into the hallway, trying to burn off some of the anxious energy building in his chest.

Think. What would you do if you were them?

His parents weren't stupid. They'd planned this out—the locks, the security system, the paddle. They were playing the long game. Which meant they had some kind of vision for how this was all supposed to go.

If he could figure out what that vision was, maybe he could find a way to work around it. Find the cracks in their plan.

He found himself outside his father's office door. It was open a few inches—his father hadn't bothered to close it all the way when he left for his errands.

Ash hesitated, then pushed it open.

The office looked the same as he remembered from the first timeline. It had a big desk, a leather chair, and bookshelves lined with legal texts and binders. This was his father's work space, where he'd spent most of his evenings back when Ash was actually this age, back when Patrick Walsh was more of a concept than a presence—the distant father who paid the bills and showed up for dinner sometimes and otherwise existed in a separate sphere.

That's changed too, hasn't it.

Ash moved to the desk. Papers were scattered across the surface—bills, notes, what looked like instructions for the security system. And underneath those, he found pamphlets, glossy and colorful, with pictures of smiling teenagers on the front.

He picked up the first one.

RIVERSIDE HIGH SCHOOL Home of the Wildcats 9th Grade Registration Information

He recognized it immediately. His old high school—the one he'd actually attended the first time around. Public school, looser rules, easier to slip through the cracks. The place where he'd started smoking weed in the parking lot and skipping class and beginning the long slow slide into everything that came after.

Okay. So they're enrolling me in high school. Same one as before. That's... something.

It wasn't great, but it wasn't the nightmare scenario either. He could work with this. He knew Riverside, knew its rhythms, its hiding spots, which teachers paid attention and which ones didn't. If he had to go through high school again—and apparently he did—at least it would be familiar territory.

Then he saw what was underneath the Riverside pamphlet—more paperwork, an application form half filled out in his father's handwriting, and a glossy brochure with a navy and gold crest on the front.

ST. BRENDAN'S CATHOLIC PREPARATORY ACADEMY Faith. Discipline. Excellence. 9th Grade Admissions Guide

The blood drained from his face.

No.

No no no no no.

He knew this school. He knew it because his parents had tried to send him there the first time around, back when he was actually thirteen. A private Catholic school with uniforms and mandatory mass and a discipline policy that made his current situation look like a vacation.

He'd fought it. He'd cried, begged, thrown tantrums. He'd told his mother that he'd die if she sent him there, that all his friends were going to public school, that she was ruining his life. It was classic teenage manipulation, the kind he'd been so good at back then.

And it had worked. His mother had caved. He'd gone to Riverside High instead—public school, looser rules, easier to slip through the cracks. It had been easier to start smoking weed in the parking lot there, easier to skip class, easier to begin the long slow slide into everything that came after.

They're not making that mistake this time.

The pamphlet shook in his hands. There were uniforms. There was a picture of students in navy blazers and ties, girls in plaid skirts, everyone looking scrubbed and obedient and exactly like the kind of person Ash had never been and never wanted to be.

Faith. Discipline. Excellence.

They weren't just trying to control him for a few weeks. They weren't playing out some short-term fantasy until things went back to normal.

They were planning to redo everything. Every choice they'd made the first time, every place where they thought they'd gone wrong—they were going to make different decisions. Harder decisions. The decisions they probably wished they'd made all along.

They're going to send me to Catholic school. They're going to make me wear a fucking uniform and go to mass and—

He couldn't breathe, and the room was spinning.

This was real. This was actually happening. His parents had been given a second chance, and they were going to use it to turn him into someone else entirely. They wanted some stiff, uptight kid who said "yes sir" and "no ma'am" and went to mass every Sunday without complaint. They wanted the model son—clean-cut and well-behaved, with good grades and extracurriculars and a five-year plan for his future. They wanted the kind of kid who'd never snuck out to a party, never kissed a girl behind the bleachers, never felt the rush of doing something forbidden just because he could.

They wanted the kind of kid Ash had spent his whole life refusing to be.

They wanted someone who wasn't him.

The pamphlet fell from his nerveless fingers, fluttering to the desk beside the Riverside brochure.

He would be starting ninth grade this fall, but not at Riverside—at St. Brendan's. He faced four years of uniforms and discipline and Catholic guilt on top of everything else.

Four years until I'm eighteen. Until I'm legally an adult and they can't stop me from leaving.

But four years was a long time. By then, the damage would be done. His friends from high school—the real high school, the first time around—wouldn't know him. Everyone he'd known in his actual life would have moved on, aged, forgotten about the guy who'd dropped off the face of the earth. By the time he was eighteen again, he'd be a stranger in his own timeline, starting from scratch with nothing but a high school diploma from St. Brendan's fucking Catholic Prep.

If I even make it that long without going insane.

He shoved the thought away and stumbled out of the office, back into the hallway, his legs barely holding him up.

His mother appeared in the kitchen doorway, dishrag in hand. "Ash? Are you okay?"

He stared at her, at this woman who was supposed to love him. She had always been the soft one, the one he could manipulate, and she had always been the one who gave in.

She wasn't going to give in this time. He could see it in her eyes—the same resolve that had been in his father's voice last night. They were in this together, a united front, and they were going to reshape his entire life whether he wanted it or not.

"I'm fine," he heard himself say. "Just... looking around."

She nodded slowly, not quite believing him. "Lunch will be ready in an hour."

He walked past her, back to the couch, and sat down heavily. The TV was still playing its stupid daytime show, and the house was still quiet, and everything looked normal.

But nothing was normal, and nothing would ever be normal again.

Ash stared at the screen without seeing it, the image of that pamphlet burned into his brain.

St. Brendan's Catholic Preparatory Academy.

Faith. Discipline. Excellence.

He was going to be trapped here forever. And they were going to turn him into someone he didn't recognize.

The thought settled over him like a burial shroud, cold and heavy and inescapable.

Chapter Text

He couldn't do this.

He couldn't sit on that couch and watch TV and pretend everything was fine while his parents mapped out the next four years of his life in navy blazers and morning mass. He couldn't play along with their do-over fantasy, couldn't smile and nod and become the stiff, obedient son they were trying to create.

He wouldn't.

Ash stood up from the couch so fast the room spun. His mother looked up from the kitchen doorway, that careful expression still on her face.

"Ash? Is everything—"

He didn't answer. He just turned and walked—fast, almost running—up the stairs, down the hall, into his room. The door slammed behind him hard enough to rattle the frame.

For a moment, he just stood there, breathing hard, fists clenched at his sides.

Think. There has to be a way out of this.

He started pacing. Three steps to the window, three steps back to the door. The room felt smaller than ever, with the walls pressing in and the ceiling too low. It was a cage, a fucking cage with cheerful blue curtains and a bookshelf full of books he'd read a decade ago.

"Ash?" His mother's voice was muffled through the door. She knocked. "Ash, open the door."

He ignored her.

Think. THINK.

Last night hadn't worked because they'd been ready. They'd had the security system, the deadbolts, his father waiting in the dark. But his father wasn't here now. His father was out running errands, probably buying more supplies to turn this house into an even more effective prison.

Which meant it was just his mother, alone in the kitchen.

I could push past her.

The thought crystallized, sharp and bright. She was smaller than him—well, smaller than his adult body had been. In this stupid thirteen-year-old form, they were probably about the same size. But she wasn't expecting it. She'd be distracted, doing whatever she was doing in the kitchen, and if he moved fast enough—

"Ash, I'm not going to ask again." Another knock, harder this time. "Open this door."

He kept pacing and kept thinking.

The garage was the key. There had to be tools in there—a crowbar, a hammer, something he could use to break through a window or pry open a door. And even if the car was locked, even if he couldn't drive it, the garage door itself might be easier to open than the house doors. Maybe there was a manual release, something his father hadn't thought to secure.

I have a limited window. Dad could be back any minute.

The urgency burned through him like fire. He thought about St. Brendan's, about four years of uniforms and discipline and Catholic guilt, about four years of his parents breathing down his neck and monitoring every grade, every friendship, every choice.

Bad grades? He'd be paddled.

Detention? Paddled.

Talking back to a teacher? Paddled.

Sneaking out? Definitely paddled.

He faced four years of living in fear of that paddle, of his father's calm voice and steady hands, of being bent over and punished like a child every time he stepped out of line.

Fuck no.

He grabbed his shoes from the closet and shoved his feet into them without bothering with the laces. Then he grabbed the backpack—still under his bed where he'd hidden it, though when he checked inside, it was empty. His mother must have found it and unpacked his clothes, probably thinking she was being helpful.

Doesn't matter. I don't need clothes. I just need to get out.

He slung the empty bag over his shoulder anyway out of force of habit. It was something to carry whatever he managed to grab on the way out.

His mother had stopped knocking, and the hallway was quiet.

She's probably waiting at the bottom of the stairs. Or calling Dad. Or both.

It didn't matter. He had to try. He had to do something, because the alternative was sitting here and letting them turn him into someone he wasn't, someone he'd never wanted to be, someone who said "yes sir" and wore a tie and went to fucking mass.

He opened the door.

The hallway was empty. He could hear sounds from downstairs—water running, dishes clinking. They were normal sounds, his mother in the kitchen, probably assuming he was sulking in his room and waiting for him to cool down.

Now or never.

He moved down the stairs as quietly as he could, skipping the creaky third step and hugging the wall. The front door was straight ahead, but that was deadbolted, and the back door was too. The garage, though—the door to the garage was in the mudroom, off the kitchen.

He'd have to go past her.

Fast. Move fast. Don't give her time to react.

He reached the bottom of the stairs and turned toward the kitchen.

And there she was.

She wasn't in the kitchen. She was standing in the hallway with her arms crossed, that look on her face that he was starting to recognize. It was the look that said she'd been expecting this, the look that said she wasn't surprised at all.

"Going somewhere?"

Ash's feet stuttered to a stop. "I'm just—"

"With a backpack?" She nodded at the bag on his shoulder. "And your shoes on?"

He didn't have an answer or an excuse. He just stood there, frozen and caught.

His mother stepped forward, and her hand closed around his upper arm—not rough, but firm and unbreakable.

"Ashton Walsh." Her voice was calm, but there was steel underneath it. "Did you really learn nothing from last night?"

Ash turned to face her.

She looked different than she had this morning. She looked harder, more like his father actually—she had that same unyielding expression, that same sense that she'd already decided how this was going to go and his opinion didn't matter.

"I'm not doing this," he said. "I'm not staying here and letting you—"

"Letting us what? Parent you?"

"Control me." The word came out bitter and sharp. "You and Dad have this whole fantasy mapped out. St. Brendan's, really? Catholic school?"

Something flickered in her eyes, but she recovered fast.

"Where you go to school is between your father and me. Not you."

"So I don't even get a say? You're just going to ship me off to some fascist Catholic prison and I'm supposed to smile and say thank you?"

"Watch your mouth."

"Or what? You'll paddle me too?" He laughed, and the sound was ugly and bitter. "That's really the answer to everything around here, isn't it? If the kid doesn't fall in line, you just beat him until he does. That's some real progressive parenting."

Her grip on his arm tightened. "We are going to wait for your father, and then we are going to discuss this as a family."

"I don't want to discuss anything." Ash tried to shrug out of her grip, expecting it to give.

He blinked, thrown off. His mother's hand was like iron around his bicep, her fingers digging in just enough to make the point. When had she gotten this strong? Or had he just gotten that weak, in this stupid child's body?

What the hell?

"We are going to wait for your father, and then we are going to discuss this as a family." Her voice was even, measured, but her jaw was set in a way that brooked no argument. She was taller than him now—one of the many indignities of this body—and she used every inch of that advantage, her eyes boring down into his. The fine lines at the corners of her mouth deepened as she pressed her lips together, and her grip on his arm hadn't loosened a millimeter.

"I don't want to discuss anything." He yanked again, harder this time, putting his shoulder into it. "Let go of me."

Her grip held. "Ash—"

"I said let GO—"

He threw his whole body weight into it, twisting, trying to wrench his arm free. His mother stumbled slightly but didn't release him, and something in her face changed. The calm cracked and was replaced by something sharper.

She gasped—not in pain, but in pure maternal disappointment. It was the kind of sound that had made him feel guilty when he was actually this age. She clicked her tongue against her teeth, a sound he remembered from childhood, and then her free hand shot up and grabbed his ear.

His ear.

"Ow—what the—"

"You will NOT—" She twisted, just slightly, and white-hot pain lanced through the side of his head. "—try to shrug your mother off like that."

"Mom, that HURTS—"

"Good." She started walking, and he had no choice but to stumble along with her, bent sideways, both hands flying up to clutch at her wrist. "Maybe you'll think twice next time before you try to manhandle me."

"I wasn't—ow, ow, OW—"

"Your father is going to hear about this." Her voice was tight with controlled anger. "You tried to sneak out again, and when I stopped you, you tried to physically push past me. After everything we discussed this morning."

"We didn't discuss anything!" The words came out strained, his head tilted at an awkward angle to minimize the pulling on his ear. "You just—you just told me things and expected me to—ow, Mom, please—"

"We're going to the corner." She steered him through the living room, her grip relentless. "And you're going to stand there until your father gets home. And then we're going to have a very long conversation about your behavior."

"I'm not standing in a fucking corner like a—"

"Language." Another twist. Ash yelped. "You want to add to whatever your father decides is appropriate? Keep talking."

She positioned him in the corner of the living room—a different corner than last night, but the same humiliation and the same helplessness. She released his ear and he immediately spun around, face burning.

"This is insane. You can't just—"

"Turn around."

"No."

"Ashton." Her voice dropped, deadly quiet. "Turn. Around."

"Make me."

Her hand moved toward his ear again. Ash flinched—actually flinched—and hated himself for it.

"I don't want to hurt you," she said, and there was something almost sad in her voice. "But I will do whatever it takes to keep you safe, even if you hate me for it."

"I already hate you."

The words hung in the air. His mother's expression didn't change, but something shifted behind her eyes. It might have been pain, or it might have been just resignation.

"That's fine," she said quietly. "You can hate me all you want. But you're still going to stand in that corner."

They stared at each other for a long moment. Ash's ear was still throbbing, and his arm ached where she'd gripped it. And somewhere underneath all the anger and humiliation, there was a small, cold kernel of fear.

She wasn't backing down. She wasn't going to give in, wasn't going to be the soft one anymore. Whatever had happened to his parents when they came back in time, it had changed both of them.

He turned around.

He faced the corner and stared at the intersection of two walls, at the faint cobweb in the upper corner, at the paint that was starting to crack near the baseboard.

Behind him, he heard his mother let out a long breath. Then he heard footsteps moving away and the sound of her picking up her phone.

"Patrick? It's me." She paused. "Your son just tried to sneak out again. And when I stopped him, he tried to push past me." Another pause. "I have him in the corner. Just head home when you can."

The call ended. Ash stood there, nose to the wall, and waited.

The minutes crawled by. Five. Ten. His legs started to ache, and his ear still throbbed. He thought about turning around, about making a run for it while his mother was distracted, but he could hear her moving around the room. She was watching him and waiting.

I said I hated her.

He had, and he'd meant it. He still meant it. She was holding him prisoner, planning to ship him off to Catholic school, treating him like a child who couldn't make his own decisions. If she wanted to cry about her son hating her, maybe she should have thought about that before she decided to ruin his life.

This is her fault. All of it.

He heard a car pull into the driveway, then an engine cutting off and a door slamming.

There were footsteps on the front porch and then the sound of keys in the lock.

The front door opened.

"What's going on here?"

It was his father's voice, calm and controlled but with an edge underneath. Ash heard his mother's footsteps move toward the front hall, and then her voice dropped to a murmur. He caught fragments—"tried to sneak out" and "pushed past me"—but the rest was too low to make out. They were probably doing it on purpose, keeping their conversation private, deciding his fate without him.

After a moment, he heard both sets of footsteps move toward the kitchen. The voices became even more muffled, just the rise and fall of speech through walls, punctuated by the occasional clink of a coffee mug or creak of a chair.

He didn't turn around and didn't move. He just stood there, face to the wall, and felt the last of his hope drain away.

Here we go again.

Chapter Text

SHANNON

She met Patrick in the kitchen, keeping her voice low even though Ash couldn't hear them from the corner. She could still see him through the doorway—his narrow shoulders tense, his weight shifting from foot to foot. He was restless and defiant, even now, even after everything.

"He found the St. Brendan's application," she said quietly. "In your office. That's what set him off."

Patrick's jaw tightened. "I should have locked the door."

"He called it a 'fascist Catholic prison.' He said we were going to beat him until he fell in line." She rubbed her temples as exhaustion settled into her bones. "I don't know what to do with him, Patrick. I thought after last night... I thought he'd at least think twice before trying something like this again."

"What exactly happened when he tried to get past you?"

Shannon sighed. "I caught him at the bottom of the stairs with his backpack on and his shoes on, clearly heading for the garage. When I grabbed his arm, he tried to shrug me off."

"Tried to shrug you off."

"Three times. The last time, he put his whole body into it and nearly knocked me over." She shook her head. "I had to grab his ear just to get him to the corner."

Something shifted in Patrick's expression, and his eyes went hard in a way she recognized—the look he got when a line had been crossed. This wasn't just disobedience or defiance. It was something more.

"He got physical with you."

"He was trying to get away. I don't think he meant to—"

"It doesn't matter what he meant." Patrick's voice was quiet and controlled, but there was steel underneath. "He put his hands on his mother. He tried to push past you. That's not just sneaking out. That's a different category entirely."

Shannon watched Ash through the doorway. He was still shifting, still restless, still completely unaware of how much worse he'd just made things for himself.

"What are you thinking?" she asked.

"I'm thinking you should forget about dinner prep." Patrick met her eyes. "Pick up some takeout. Chinese, pizza, whatever. I'll handle this while you're gone."

She hesitated. After last night—the paddle, the sobbing, the way Ash had cried himself to sleep—the thought of leaving him alone with Patrick for another round made something twist in her chest.

Patrick seemed to read her mind. "I'm not going to abuse him, Shannon. I'm going to discipline him. There's a difference."

"I know. I know there is." She took a breath. "I just..."

"He tried to push past you. To get physical with his mother." Patrick's voice softened slightly. "If we let that slide, what message does that send? That he can escalate whenever he wants, and we'll just absorb it?"

She didn't have an answer, because he was right. They both knew he was right.

"I'll pick up dinner from that Mediterranean place," she said finally. "The one with the salmon."

"Take your time." Patrick squeezed her shoulder briefly. "He'll still be here when you get back."

Shannon picked up her keys from the hook by the door. She didn't look at Ash as she passed the living room and didn't say goodbye. She just walked out the front door and closed it behind her.

The car started, and the engine faded down the driveway.

And then it was quiet.

She drove slowly, taking the long way to the restaurant and trying not to think about what was happening at home. Patrick was right—Ash had crossed a line. Getting physical with her, trying to push past her, that wasn't something they could ignore. If they let him think he could use force to get what he wanted...

This is what he needs. Structure. Consequences. Someone who won't back down.

But it was hard. God, it was hard. Every instinct she had as a mother screamed at her to protect him, to shield him from pain, to find some other way.

The other way led to a hospital bed and a doctor telling her that her son might not wake up.

She gripped the steering wheel tighter and kept driving.

ASH

He heard his mother pick up her keys.

What?

The front door opened and then closed. A moment later, the car started in the driveway, and the engine faded into the distance.

She's leaving. She's actually leaving.

His heart started pounding. His mother was gone, and his father was here, and the paddle was probably still upstairs from last night, and—

Maybe he won't use it. Maybe this time will be different. Maybe—

Who was he kidding? His father had already decided how this was going to go. He didn't buy a paddle for decoration.

This is insane. I tried to leave my own house. That's not a crime.

But his father was going to treat it like one anyway.

Plus I tried to get past Mom, which she's probably exaggerating to make me sound like some kind of violent criminal.

Footsteps. His father was moving through the house and going upstairs.

Oh fuck. Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.

He was getting the paddle right now, going upstairs to get it and bring it down here and—

Run. I should run. I should—

Where? The windows were pinned, and his mother had the car. There was literally nowhere to go.

More footsteps came, this time coming back down, slower and more deliberate.

Ash's whole body went rigid. He stared at the corner, at the crack in the paint, at the faint cobweb he'd memorized over the past twenty minutes, and tried to breathe. He tried not to think about last night, tried not to remember the sound of the paddle hitting flesh, the way his own sobs had echoed off the walls, the way he'd broken down completely and apologized like a—

Don't think about it. Don't—

"Turn around."

His father's voice was calm and measured, the same tone from last night.

Ash turned around.

His father was already sitting on the couch, and there on the coffee table in front of him was the paddle. It was small and thick, dark wood with holes drilled through, just sitting there casual as anything, like it wasn't an instrument of torture.

"Sit down." His father patted the cushion next to him. "We're going to talk first."

Ash didn't move.

"Ash. Sit."

He walked to the couch slowly, his legs stiff, and sat as far from his father as physically possible—pressed against the opposite armrest, as much distance between them as the couch would allow. He was ready to bolt if a hand reached for him, not that bolting would help. His mother was gone, and there was nowhere to go.

His father didn't comment on the distance. He didn't reach for the paddle and didn't make any move toward Ash at all. He just sat there, watching and waiting.

The silence stretched.

"I want to understand what's going through your head," his father said finally. "So talk."

Ash stared at him. "Talk about what?"

"About today. About what you were thinking. About why you decided to try sneaking out again less than twenty-four hours after we caught you the first time."

Because I found your fucking plans for my life. Because you're going to send me to Catholic school and turn me into some obedient little drone. Because I'd rather die than spend four years as your project.

"I don't want to be here," Ash said flatly. "I don't want to go to St. Brendan's. I don't want to do any of this."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only answer I have."

His father nodded slowly, like he'd expected that. "And your mother? What were you thinking when you tried to push past her?"

Ash's stomach dropped. Here it comes.

"I wasn't trying to hurt her. I was trying to get away."

"By putting your hands on her. By using physical force against your mother."

"It wasn't like that—"

"Then what was it like?" His father shifted forward on the couch, forearms resting on his thighs, hands clasped between his knees. His voice was still calm, but there was an edge now, and a muscle twitched in his jaw. "Explain it to me. Because from where I'm sitting, it sounds like you decided that if you couldn't get what you wanted with words, you'd try to get it with force."

"She grabbed me first!" Ash's hands flew up, palms out, the gesture defensive and desperate.

"She's your mother. She has every right to grab your arm when you're about to do something stupid." His father leaned forward slightly. "You do not have the right to try to shove her out of your way."

"I didn't shove her—"

"You put your body weight into it, and she almost fell." His father's eyes were hard. "Is that the kind of man you want to be? The kind who pushes women around when they don't give him what he wants?"

"That's not—" Ash's voice cracked. "You're being overdramatic. It wasn't that serious."

"It's exactly that serious." His father's voice was steady and implacable. "When you put your hands on someone to get what you want, that's not a disagreement anymore. That's force. That's coercion. And I don't care if it's your mother, your future wife, or a stranger on the street—you do not get to use your body as a weapon just because someone won't give you what you want."

"She was holding me prisoner!"

"She was stopping you from making a stupid decision. There's a difference." His father leaned forward. "And the fact that you can't see that difference is exactly why we're in this situation. You think the rules don't apply to you. You think if you want something badly enough, you're justified in doing whatever it takes to get it. That's not strength, Ash. That's a toddler throwing a tantrum."

"I'm not a toddler—"

"Then stop acting like one."

"Fuck you."

The words came out before he could stop them. His father's expression didn't change—if anything, he looked almost sad.

"Fuck your moral high ground bullshit too." Ash's hands were clenched in his lap, his knuckles white. "You don't get to lecture me about how to treat women when you're literally planning to beat your own son with a paddle. What kind of man does that make you?"

His father just watched him, patient and unmoved, waiting for Ash to burn himself out like a toddler mid-tantrum.

Which only made Ash angrier.

"This." His father gestured at him—at his clenched fists, his flushed face, his whole body vibrating with rage. "This is what we need to fix. This pattern of acting without thinking, saying whatever comes into your head, escalating whenever you don't get your way." He shook his head slowly. "It's the same thing that got you into trouble in the first timeline, and it's the same impulsivity and the same refusal to think about consequences."

"There's nothing to fix." Ash's voice was sharp and bitter. "I'm not broken. I'm not some project for you to tinker with. I just need to go back to being twenty-three and living my own life, away from both of you controlling psychos."

Silence.

His father looked at him for a long moment. Then he reached forward and picked up the paddle from the coffee table, setting it on the couch cushion between them.

"We're done talking. Stand up."

Ash's heart slammed against his ribs. "No."

His father's eyebrows rose. "No? Am I hearing you correctly?"

"I'm not standing up so you can beat me with that thing."

"Last night you got ten extra for not coming to me when I told you to." His father's voice was measured, almost conversational. "Tonight it will be twenty. Your choice."

Chapter Text

Ash bolted.

He didn't think about it—didn't weigh the options or calculate the odds. The moment his father's hand closed around the paddle, something primal took over, and his body launched off the couch and toward the stairs before his brain could catch up.

The bedroom. The bathroom. Anywhere with a lock—

He made it to the bottom of the stairs.

His father's arm caught him around the waist and lifted him clean off his feet. Ash thrashed, kicked, and clawed at the arm holding him—but it was like fighting a tree trunk, immovable and implacable.

"Let GO of me—"

His father didn't respond. He just turned and carried him back toward the living room, one arm banded around Ash's midsection, ignoring the flailing limbs like they were nothing more than a mild inconvenience.

"Put me DOWN—" Ash's voice cracked, going high and childish in a way that made him want to scream. "You can't just—this is assault—this is—"

His father deposited him on his feet in front of the couch, and before Ash could bolt again, a hand clamped around his upper arm and held him in place. The grip was iron and absolute. Ash struggled anyway, twisting and pulling, getting absolutely nowhere.

"That's forty extra," his father said calmly, "for making me carry you back to the living room."

Forty extra. On top of whatever the baseline was going to be.

No. No no no—

"Dad, please—" The word slipped out before he could stop it, pathetic and desperate. "I'm sorry, I won't—"

"It's too late to say sorry." His father sat back down on the couch. "Pull your pants and underwear down."

"No—"

"You can take them down yourself, or I can do it for you. Your choice."

Ash's face burned, and his whole body was shaking—fear, rage, humiliation, all of it tangled together into something he couldn't name.

His father waited, patient and unhurried.

I have to just get it over with. I won't give him the satisfaction of—

His hands were trembling as he reached for his waistband. He couldn't look at his father and couldn't look at anything except the carpet as he pushed his jeans down to his thighs, then—after a horrible, frozen moment—his boxers too.

The air felt cold against his bare skin.

"Over my knee."

Ash's legs wouldn't move. He stood there, half-naked and exposed, every instinct screaming at him to run even though running had already failed, even though there was nowhere to go, even though—

His father's hand closed around his arm and guided him down. It wasn't rough—just firm and inevitable. A moment later, Ash was bent over his father's lap, staring at the carpet, his bare backside positioned over his father's thigh.

The paddle rested against his skin, cool and solid and waiting.

"You know why we're here," his father said. "I want you to think about what led to this moment."

Because you're a sadistic control freak who gets off on—

The first swat landed before he could finish the thought.

It was worse than last night.

The paddle cracked against his already-sore flesh, and Ash's whole body jerked. White-hot pain exploded across his backside, radiating outward and stealing his breath.

Don't cry. Don't you dare cry. You're twenty-three years old, you've survived worse than this, you will NOT—

The second swat landed on the same spot. Ash heard himself gasp—a sharp, involuntary sound that he hated.

"Less than twenty-four hours ago, we had this exact discussion." His father's voice was calm and measured, almost conversational. The paddle fell again. "I told you what would happen if you tried to sneak out again. I was very clear about the consequences."

Discussion. Like it was a fucking negotiation. Like I had any say in—

Another swat landed, lower this time, catching the curve where his backside met his thighs. Ash's hips bucked involuntarily, trying to escape, going nowhere.

"And yet here we are, because you decided that the rules don't apply to you. That you know better than your mother and I do."

The paddle fell again and again.

I do know better. I'm twenty-three fucking years old—

"But worse than that—worse than the sneaking out—is what you did to your mother." His father's voice hardened slightly. "You put your hands on her. You tried to use physical force to get past her."

Three more swats landed in rapid succession. Ash's fingers dug into the carpet, his whole body rigid, fighting to hold himself together.

Don't cry. Don't cry. Don't—

"I don't care how angry you were. I don't care how unfair you thought the situation was. You do not put your hands on your mother, ever, under any circumstances."

The paddle found his sit spots—the tender crease where sitting would press against the bruises for days—and Ash couldn't hold back the sob.

It tore out of him, raw and broken, and once it started he couldn't stop. The tears came flooding out, blurring his vision and dripping onto the carpet beneath him.

No. No, stop it, stop—

But his body had betrayed him again, just like it always did in this fucking child's form, too small and too weak and too overwhelmed to do anything except fall apart.

"And then, when I tried to talk to you about it—when I gave you the chance to explain yourself—you cursed at me. You told me 'fuck you' and 'fuck your moral high ground bullshit.' You called your mother and me 'controlling psychos.'"

Ash was crying openly now, ugly heaving sobs that shook his whole body, snot running down his face, every ounce of his adult dignity stripped away. He'd promised himself he wouldn't break like this again and wouldn't give them the satisfaction.

"And when I told you to stand up and face the consequences of your actions, you ran. You made me chase you down and carry you back here like a toddler throwing a tantrum."

But the pain was everywhere. His backside was on fire, every nerve ending screaming, and the paddle just kept coming, and he couldn't—he couldn't—

"I'm sorry—" The words came out choked and barely intelligible. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, please—"

The paddle paused.

"Are you?" His father's voice was quiet. "Have you actually learned something, or are you just saying what you think I want to hear?"

Ash couldn't think and couldn't process anything beyond the throbbing agony of his backside, the salt of tears on his lips, the absolute wreckage of his pride.

"I learned—" He hiccupped, his breath hitching. "I learned, I swear, I won't—I won't do it again—"

"You won't try to sneak out?"

"No—"

"You won't put your hands on your mother?"

"No, I promise—"

"You won't curse at us or call us names?"

"No—please—"

Silence. For one blessed moment, Ash thought it might be over. He thought he might have finally, finally reached the end.

"Good," his father said.

And then the paddle came down again.

Ash screamed, or tried to—what came out was more of a wail, high and broken and nothing like the sound an adult should make.

"These are the forty extra," his father said calmly. "For running."

Forty. Forty more. I can't—I can't—

But he didn't have a choice. The paddle fell again and again, methodical and unhurried, each swat landing on skin that already felt like it was on fire. Ash stopped trying to hold himself together and stopped trying to maintain any semblance of control.

He just cried.

He lay limp over his father's lap with his face buried in his arms, sobbing like the child his body said he was, while the paddle erased whatever was left of the man he used to be.

Somewhere around swat twenty—or maybe thirty, he'd lost count—his mind went somewhere else. It floated up and away from his body, from the pain, from the humiliation. He was still crying, still making those awful broken sounds, but it was like watching it happen to someone else.

This is my life now. This is what I am. A kid who gets spanked by his daddy when he misbehaves.

The thought should have made him angry. It should have sparked some fire of rebellion, some determination to fight back.

Instead, it just made him cry harder.

The paddle stopped.

For a long moment, nothing happened. Ash lay there, draped over his father's lap, crying into the carpet. His backside throbbed with every heartbeat—a deep, pulsing agony that seemed to radiate through his entire body.

A hand rested on his lower back. It wasn't swatting, just there.

"We're done."

Ash couldn't respond and could barely breathe through the sobs still wracking his body.

His father let him cry. He didn't rush him and didn't demand he pull himself together. He just sat there with his hand on Ash's back, waiting.

Eventually—minutes later, maybe longer—the sobs started to slow. The tears kept coming, but the desperate, gasping quality faded into something quieter, something exhausted.

His father's hands guided him up—gently, carefully—until Ash was standing between his father's knees, swaying slightly, his jeans still pooled around his ankles.

"Pull your pants up."

Ash reached down with shaking hands and tugged his boxers and jeans back into place. Even that small movement sent fresh waves of pain through his backside, the fabric dragging against swollen skin.

His father held up a tissue. Ash took it automatically, wiping at his nose, his eyes, the mess of tears and snot covering his face.

"Look at me."

Ash looked up. His father's expression was serious but not angry, not cruel—just firm.

"You will always respect your mother." The words were quiet but absolute. "I don't care how angry you are. I don't care how unfair you think something is. You do not put your hands on her. You do not try to push past her. You do not call her names. Do you understand?"

Ash nodded. His throat felt too raw for words.

"When she gets home, you're going to apologize to her. And I expect it to sound sincere—not because you're scared of another spanking, but because you actually understand that what you did was wrong."

He nodded again. What else could he do?

His father reached out and pulled him into a hug.

Ash stiffened—for just a moment—and then something in him crumbled. He sagged against his father's shoulder, fresh tears leaking from his eyes, his whole body shaking with exhaustion.

"I love you." His father's voice was quiet and close to his ear. "That's why I do this. Because I love you, and I'm not going to let you destroy yourself."

Ash didn't have an answer for that. He didn't have anything except tears and exhaustion and a pain that went deeper than his bruised backside.

His father held him for a long moment, then released him and guided him back to standing.

"Go stand in the corner until your mother gets home. I want you to think about what you're going to say to her."

He walked to the corner, the same corner his mother had marched him to earlier—the one with the cracked paint and the faint cobweb.

He pressed his nose to the wall and waited.

Behind him, he heard his father move around the living room. He heard the soft clink of the paddle being set down somewhere, then footsteps moving toward the kitchen.

Ash tried to think about what he was going to say to his mother.

But all he could think about was the throbbing in his backside, the tears still drying on his cheeks, and the way his father had said I love you like it explained everything, like it justified everything, like love was supposed to hurt this much.

I'm sorry, Mom. I'm sorry I tried to leave. I'm sorry I pushed past you. I'm sorry I disappointed you.

The words felt hollow and rehearsed, exactly the kind of thing his father would want him to say.

But I'm not sorry. Not really. I'm just scared—scared and trapped and so fucking tired of all of this.

He didn't say any of that and didn't say anything at all.

He just stood in the corner, staring at the crack in the paint, and waited for his mother to come home.

Chapter Text

SHANNON

The house was quiet when she pulled into the driveway.

Shannon sat in the car for a moment, the bag of takeout warm on the passenger seat, trying to prepare herself for whatever she was about to walk into. The Mediterranean place had taken longer than expected—almost an hour and a half by the time she'd ordered, waited, and driven home the long way.

An hour and a half. That was more than enough time for Patrick to handle things.

She gathered the food and walked to the front door. Before she could reach for her keys, it swung open—Patrick standing there, his expression calm but tired.

"How is he?" she asked quietly.

Patrick stepped aside to let her in. She caught a glimpse of the living room as she passed—Ash in the corner, nose to the wall, shoulders hunched. He didn't turn around at the sound of her voice.

Patrick gestured toward the kitchen.

She followed him and set the takeout bag on the counter. The kitchen smelled faintly of coffee—Patrick must have made a pot while she was gone.

"He tried to run," Patrick said, keeping his voice low. "He made it to the stairs before I caught him, and I had to carry him back."

Shannon closed her eyes. "Of course he did."

"I added forty extra for that."

Forty extra, plus whatever the baseline had been. She didn't ask for the total.

"How was he after?"

"Broken down and crying." Patrick's jaw tightened. "He apologized and said all the right things. I told him he'd be apologizing to you too, and that I expected it to sound sincere."

Shannon nodded slowly. She started unpacking the takeout—salmon, rice, roasted vegetables. The motions were automatic, and her mind was in the living room, on her son standing in the corner, waiting.

"Do you think he means it?" she asked. "The apology?"

Patrick was quiet for a moment. "I think he means he doesn't want to be spanked again. Whether he actually understands why what he did was wrong..." He shrugged. "That's going to take longer."

They set the table together with three places, three plates, and three glasses of water. It looked like a normal family dinner, if you didn't look too closely.

"I'll get him," Patrick said.

ASH

He heard the front door open.

His mother's voice was low and worried, and his father's response was too quiet to make out. Footsteps moved toward the kitchen.

Ash stayed in the corner and didn't turn around or move.

It's almost over. Just the apology, then dinner, then bed. I can do that much without fucking it up.

His backside throbbed with every heartbeat. Standing had helped a little—better than sitting would be—but the pain was still there, deep and constant, a reminder of exactly how much trouble he was in.

He could hear them talking in the kitchen, the rustle of bags and the clink of dishes. They were setting up for dinner like this was a normal evening, like their son wasn't standing in the corner with a bruised ass and tears drying on his face.

God, I'm so tired.

Footsteps approached, and his father's voice came from close behind him.

"Turn around. Your mother's home."

Ash turned.

His father's face was unreadable—not angry, not satisfied, just calm and waiting.

"You know what you need to do."

Ash nodded. His throat felt tight.

They walked to the kitchen together—his father behind him, a hand on his shoulder, guiding him forward. His mother was standing by the counter with her back to them, arranging food on plates.

She turned when they entered.

Ash made himself meet her eyes. She looked tired and worried, and somehow she looked ten years older than she should—lines around her eyes and a weight on her face that didn't belong on a woman in her mid-forties. The last two days had carved something into her features that hadn't been there before.

I have to say it. It has to sound real.

"Mom, I..." His voice cracked. He swallowed and tried again. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry for trying to sneak out. I'm sorry for pushing past you and for what I said."

The words felt hollow in his mouth, rehearsed. But underneath them, something else was stirring—something that might have been genuine, or might just have been exhaustion.

"I shouldn't have done any of that," he continued. "I was angry, and I took it out on you, and that wasn't fair."

His mother studied his face for a long moment, and he couldn't tell what she was thinking.

"Thank you for apologizing," she said finally. Her voice was quiet and measured. "I know this is hard for you. All of it. But you can't lash out at us every time you're upset."

"I know."

"Do you?" She stepped closer, and for a moment he thought she was going to hug him. Instead, she just reached out and brushed a strand of hair from his forehead.

He nodded, not trusting his voice.

"I hope so, sweetheart. I really do."

The gentleness in her touch made something twist in his chest. He looked away.

"Let's eat," his father said. "The food's getting cold."

Sitting was agony.

Ash lowered himself onto the kitchen chair as slowly as he could, but there was no way to avoid the pressure on his bruised backside. He bit back a hiss as his weight settled, and pain flared through his entire lower body.

Neither of his parents commented. His mother passed him a plate—salmon, rice, vegetables. It was healthy and balanced, the kind of meal she used to make when he was actually this age, before he'd started refusing to eat anything that wasn't pizza or fast food.

He picked up his fork and started eating.

The food was good. He hadn't realized how hungry he was until the first bite—he'd skipped lunch in all the chaos, and breakfast felt like a lifetime ago. He ate without really tasting it, just getting it down.

His parents talked around him about nothing important—the weather, something his father had seen at the hardware store, whether they needed to call someone about the gutters. It was normal conversation, family dinner talk.

Ash didn't contribute and kept his head down, focused on his plate. When his mother asked him to pass the salt, he passed it. When his father asked if he wanted more water, he nodded. Otherwise, there was silence.

It was easier that way and safer.

By the time he finished his salmon, his backside had settled into a dull, constant ache. It wasn't as sharp as before, but it was impossible to ignore. Every shift in his seat sent a fresh reminder through his body.

This is what happens when I fight them. This is what I get.

He pushed the thought away and focused on his rice.

"Ash."

He looked up. His mother was watching him, her expression soft.

"After dinner, I want you to go upstairs and get ready for bed. You're getting an early bedtime tonight—I think you need the rest."

He didn't argue and didn't have the energy to argue. He just nodded and went back to his food.

The bathroom mirror showed him a stranger.

Ash stood there, toothbrush in hand, staring at the thirteen-year-old face that stared back at him. His eyes were red-rimmed, his cheeks were blotchy, and the ghost of tear tracks was still visible on his skin.

Pathetic.

He brushed his teeth and washed his face.

The shower was next. He was supposed to shower—that was the routine, the expectation. For a moment, he considered just running the water like he had the night before, letting it heat up and steam while he stood there, pretending, buying himself a few more minutes before he had to face whatever came next.

But after everything that had happened today, the thought of getting caught in another lie made his stomach clench. He stripped off his clothes and stepped under the water, washing quickly, not letting himself think too much.

When he finished, he changed into the pajamas his mother had laid out on his bed—soft flannel pants and an old t-shirt, the kind of thing he would have refused to wear a week ago.

He turned off the bathroom light and went to his room.

His mother was waiting.

She was sitting on the edge of his bed with her hands folded in her lap, that same tired expression on her face. She looked up when he entered.

"Come sit with me."

Ash walked over slowly and sat on the bed beside her, wincing as his weight pressed against the mattress. Even the soft surface hurt.

His mother was quiet for a moment. Then she started rubbing his back—slow, gentle circles, the way she used to when he was sick as a kid.

"I know you're angry with us," she said. "I know you think we're being unfair and that we're trying to control you."

Ash didn't respond. What was there to say?

"But everything we're doing—the rules, the consequences, all of it—it's because we love you. Because we've seen where the other path leads, and we can't..." Her voice wavered slightly. "We can't watch you destroy yourself again. We won't."

Again. The word hung in the air between them.

"I didn't ask for this," Ash said quietly. "I didn't ask to come back. I didn't ask to be thirteen again."

"I know, sweetheart." Her hand paused on his back, then resumed its slow circles. "But we're here now, all of us, and we have to make the best of it."

The best of it. Like this was some kind of opportunity. Like being trapped in a child's body, subject to his parents' every whim, was something to be grateful for.

He didn't say any of that. He just sat there, staring at the floor, feeling the ache in his backside and the hollowness in his chest.

"Get some sleep," his mother said. She stood and guided him to lie down, pulling the covers up over him like he really was thirteen. "Tomorrow's a new day."

She kissed his forehead, and her lips were warm against his skin.

"I love you, Ash. No matter what."

She turned off the lamp and walked to the door. She paused in the doorway, silhouetted against the light from the hallway.

"Goodnight, sweetheart."

"Goodnight," he whispered.

The door closed, and the room went dark.

Ash lay there, staring at the ceiling he couldn't see, feeling the throb of his bruised backside against the mattress.

Two days. It had only been two days since he woke up in this body, and he'd already been paddled twice, marched to the corner three times, and cried more than he had in the last five years of his adult life combined.

And tomorrow it starts all over again.

Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes, and he didn't bother wiping them away.

I'm trapped. I'm completely, utterly trapped, and there's nothing I can do about it.

He turned onto his side—carefully, wincing at the movement—and curled into himself. The tears kept coming, silent and steady, soaking into his pillow.

Eventually, exhaustion won out over misery.

He slept.

Chapter Text

Ash didn't want to wake up.

He'd been somewhere else—somewhere dark and quiet, where nothing hurt and nothing mattered. But consciousness was dragging him back to the surface whether he wanted it or not, and with it came the weight of his body, the ache in his backside, the crushing awareness of where he was.

I'm still here. Still trapped and still a fucking kid.

He kept his eyes closed, trying to hold onto the nothing. But it slipped away like water through his fingers, leaving him stranded in his childhood bedroom with the blue curtains and the bookshelf full of books his mother had picked out for him a decade ago.

The memories of yesterday surfaced one by one. The paddle. His father's voice, calm and measured, listing his failures while the wood cracked against his skin. The tears. The corner. The apology he didn't mean.

I can't do this for four years. I can't do this for four days.

He rolled onto his stomach, burying his face in the pillow. His backside throbbed dully—better than last night, but still there, still present, a bruise that would fade eventually only to be replaced by another one the next time he stepped out of line.

And there would be a next time. There was always a next time.

He willed himself back to sleep.

"Ash. Time to get up."

His mother's voice came from somewhere above him, and her hand settled on his shoulder, shaking gently.

He didn't move.

"Ash."

"I don't want breakfast," he mumbled into the pillow. "I just want to sleep."

"You can have a nap later, but you need to get out of bed. Come on."

He tried to burrow deeper into the mattress. Maybe if he just lay still enough, she'd give up and go away and let him disappear into the darkness behind his eyelids.

The hand on his shoulder tightened.

"Ash. I'm not asking."

She wasn't going to leave. She was never going to leave. She was going to stand there and shake him and talk at him until he gave in, because that's what they did now. They didn't give up. They didn't back down. They just kept pushing and pushing until he broke.

He let out a long, shaky breath and pushed himself up onto his elbows.

"There we go." His mother's voice was gentle but firm. "Stand up for me."

His legs felt like they were made of lead. He swung them over the side of the bed, wincing as the movement pulled at sore muscles, and forced himself to stand. The carpet was soft under his bare feet, and the morning air raised goosebumps on his arms.

His mother handed him a bundle of clothes—jeans, a t-shirt, underwear. She was already dressed, her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, fine lines visible around her eyes in the morning light. She looked tired. She looked like she hadn't slept well either.

"Get changed. I'll walk you to the bathroom."

He didn't argue. He didn't have the energy to argue. He just shuffled after her down the hall like a zombie, clutching the clothes to his chest.

The bathroom mirror showed him the same red-rimmed eyes, the same hollow expression. He brushed his teeth without really registering the mint, the bristles scraping across his gums. He changed his clothes without looking at himself, pulling the t-shirt over his head and stepping into jeans that hung loose on his hips. He went through the motions because the motions were all he had left.

When he came out, his mother was waiting.

"Breakfast," she said.

He followed her downstairs.

The eggs sat on his plate, slowly going cold.

Ash poked at them with his fork, moving them around, occasionally lifting a bite to his mouth. The yolk was runny the way he used to like it, the whites perfectly set, but he couldn't taste any of it. His mother sat across from him, her own plate mostly finished, watching him with that concerned crease between her eyebrows.

"You're not eating much," she said.

"I'm not hungry."

"You need to eat, Ash."

"I'm not hungry."

He let his fork drop against the ceramic with a soft clink, resting his head on his hand. His eyelids were so heavy. The kitchen was warm, sunlight pooling on the tile floor, and if he just closed his eyes for a second—

"Ash."

He blinked. His mother was still watching him, leaning forward slightly in her chair.

"I'm fine," he said. "Just tired."

She didn't look convinced. But she didn't push either—just watched him pick at his food until he'd managed a few more bites, then cleared the plate without comment. The scrape of ceramic against the granite counter seemed very far away.

The TV was on, playing something colorful and loud that might have been a morning show or might have been cartoons. Ash wasn't really watching.

He was curled up on the couch, head on the armrest, his knees pulled toward his chest. The leather was cool against his cheek. The noise washed over him, sounds blurring together into a comfortable hum, and the darkness behind his eyelids was soft and welcoming, and—

He jerked awake to the sound of applause. Some game show was playing now, a woman jumping up and down, confetti falling around her like colored snow. How long had he been out? Minutes? An hour? The light through the window looked the same, slanting gold across the hardwood floor.

His mother was in the kitchen now, her voice a low murmur. She had her phone pressed to her ear and was pacing the way she always did when she was worried about something, her free hand gesturing at nothing. She was probably talking to his father. She was probably talking about him.

Oh well. What are they going to do, paddle me for being tired?

He let his eyes drift closed again.

The next time he surfaced, the TV was playing something quieter—news, maybe, or one of those home renovation shows she liked. His mother was dusting the bookshelf across the room, her movements methodical and unhurried, a rag in one hand and furniture polish in the other. She didn't seem to notice he was awake.

He watched her through half-closed eyes. The way she stretched to reach the top shelf, rising onto her toes, her blouse pulling taut across her shoulders. The way she paused to examine a photo frame before wiping it down, tilting it toward the light. Normal mom stuff. Like everything was fine. Like her son wasn't slowly dissolving into the couch cushions.

His eyelids were too heavy. He stopped fighting them.

When he opened them again, she was at the other end of the couch, a laundry basket on the floor beside her. She was folding towels, matching socks, sorting his father's work shirts into neat piles on the coffee table. Her hands moved automatically, the same motions she'd made a thousand times before. She glanced over when he stirred, and something flickered across her face—concern, maybe, or just exhaustion.

She didn't say anything, so neither did he.

He closed his eyes and let the fog take him again.

The fog was comfortable. It was safe. In the fog, he didn't have to think about St. Brendan's or the paddle or the next four years of his life. He didn't have to wonder what cosmic force had yanked him out of his real life and dropped him into this hell, or why it had decided his parents deserved a do-over more than he deserved his freedom. He didn't have to feel anything. He could just float.

"It's lunch time, sweetheart."

Ash blinked up at his mother. He was still on the couch, still curled in the same position. His neck was stiff and his mouth was dry, his tongue thick and cottony.

"Come eat."

He shuffled to the kitchen table, his socks sliding on the tile. She'd made soup and a sandwich—tomato and grilled cheese, the comfort food she used to make when he was sick as a kid. Steam curled up from the bowl, and the bread was golden-brown, butter glistening on the crust. He stared at it.

"Eat." His mother's voice was firmer now. "At least half."

He picked up the sandwich. He took a bite, the bread crunching between his teeth, cheese pulling in strings as he pulled it away from his mouth. He chewed and swallowed. The food sat heavy in his stomach, foreign and unwelcome.

"More."

Another bite, and another. He managed half the sandwich and a few spoonfuls of soup before pushing the bowl away, the spoon clinking against the ceramic rim.

"I can't."

His mother studied him for a long moment, her jaw working like she was biting back words. Then she sighed, her shoulders dropping.

"Alright. You can go lie down in your room for a bit. A real nap, in your bed."

He was off the chair before she finished the sentence.

His bed was soft. The pillow smelled like detergent and something faintly floral—his mother's choice of fabric softener, the same scent that had followed him through childhood. He curled onto his side, pulled the blankets up to his chin, and let himself sink into the mattress. At least here he could escape.

Somewhere far away, he could hear his mother's voice. She was on the phone again, it sounded like, talking to someone about something. He caught fragments through the floor—"...worried about him..." and "...barely eating..." and "...he wasn't like this before..."

He didn't care. He couldn't bring himself to care.

Sleep pulled him under, and he went willingly.

"Ash. Dinner."

He opened his eyes. The light in his room was different now—dimmer, orange, the sun setting somewhere beyond the window. He'd slept for hours.

His mother was in the doorway, silhouetted against the hallway light. And behind her—his father. Home from work, still in his dress shirt and slacks, his tie loosened at the collar. Both of them were looking at him with identical expressions of concern, their faces shadowed and unreadable.

Oh, great. A united front.

"Come downstairs," his father said. "We need to talk."

Ash dragged himself out of bed and followed them down to the kitchen. The table was set for dinner—some kind of chicken, vegetables, rice, the smell of rosemary hanging in the air. A normal family meal. A normal family conversation.

He sat down. The chair pressed against his backside, still tender, and he shifted uncomfortably, trying to find a position that didn't hurt.

His mother reached over and pressed her hand to his forehead, her palm cool and dry against his skin.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm checking if you have a fever." She frowned, her brow furrowing. "You feel normal. Are you feeling sick? Headache? Sore throat?"

"I'm fine. Just tired."

"You've been sleeping all day," his father said, leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed over his chest. "That's not tired. That's something else."

Ash shrugged, the motion small and listless.

"And you're barely eating." His father gestured at the untouched plate in front of him, the chicken growing cold, the vegetables congealing in their butter. "That's not acceptable, Ash. You need to eat. You need to stay awake during the day, like you'll be expected to at school."

Ash stared at the chicken. His father's voice was starting to blend together, the words losing meaning, becoming just sound. A low, rhythmic droning that made his eyelids heavy...

His father snapped his fingers right in front of Ash's face.

Ash jerked back, blinking, his heart stuttering in his chest. The kitchen came back into focus—the oak table with its worn grain, his father's broad shoulders filling the chair across from him, his mother's hands frozen mid-reach toward her water glass. His father's jaw was tight, a muscle twitching near his ear.

"Ash." His father's voice was sharp now. "Stand up."

Ash looked to his mother, hoping for some intervention, some softening. Her expression was unreadable, her lips pressed into a thin line.

"What?"

"Stand up."

Ash pushed back from the table and stood, swaying slightly on his feet. His father remained seated, watching him with that stern, assessing look—the lawyer's gaze, the one that took everything apart and weighed it for weakness.

"You're going to stay awake for this conversation," his father said. "Standing. Since you can't stay awake sitting down, you'll stand."

Ash wanted to argue, but he was too tired to fight. So he just stood there, in front of his seated parents, and waited.

"Here's how this is going to work," his father said, his voice flat and final. "You're going to eat three meals a day, and I mean real meals, not just a few bites. You're going to stay awake during the day and sleep at night. That means no more napping on the couch, no more sleeping through lunch."

"I can't help being tired," Ash said. "I can't help not having an appetite."

"You can help whether you try to meet the expectations we set for you." His father's voice was firm. "You're not going to fade away on us, Ash. You're not going to sleep your way through the next four years like this is some prison sentence you can wait out. That's not how this works."

Ash didn't have the energy to explain that fading away sounded pretty good right now. That sleeping through it all was the only way he could imagine surviving it. But what was the point? They'd already decided how this was going to go.

"Starting tomorrow," his mother said, her voice gentler, "we're going to have more structure. That means wake-up times, meal times, activities. Things that we think will keep you engaged."

"Great," Ash said flatly.

"This isn't optional," his father added. "And it's not negotiable. You're going to participate in this family, even if you don't feel like it."

Ash stared at a spot on the wall behind them, unfocusing his eyes until the paint blurred into nothing. His father's voice kept going—something about expectations, something about consequences, something about this being for his own good. The words washed over him like water, barely leaving a trace.

When the silence stretched long enough that it seemed like they were waiting for a response, he blinked.

"Can I go to bed now?"

His parents exchanged a look. Something passed between them—concern, frustration, resignation—communicated in the slight tilt of his mother's head, the tightening of his father's jaw.

"Yes," his mother said finally. "You can go to bed."

Ash turned and walked toward the stairs.

"Ash."

He paused, not turning around.

"Put your pajamas on," his mother called after him. "Don't just sleep in your clothes."

He didn't respond. He just kept walking.

In his room, he changed into his pajamas—not because he wanted to, but because he knew she'd come up and make him do it anyway, and he didn't have the energy for that fight. The flannel was soft against his skin, worn thin from washing.

He crawled into bed and pulled the covers up to his chin.

The house settled around him—the creak of floorboards, the murmur of his parents' voices downstairs, the distant hum of the refrigerator. Tomorrow there would be structure, activities, expectations. Another day of fighting to stay awake, fighting to eat, fighting to pretend he was okay when he was anything but.

But that was tomorrow.

Tonight, he could sleep.

He closed his eyes, and the fog swallowed him whole.

SHANNON

She gave him twenty minutes before going up to check on him.

The hallway was quiet, the light under his door already off. She pushed it open gently, half-expecting to find him lying awake, watching the shadows move across the ceiling.

He was asleep. His pajamas were on, the blankets pulled up to his shoulders, his breathing slow and even. At least he'd listened about that much.

She stood in the doorway for a moment, watching him. He looked so young when he slept, his face slack and peaceful, all the tension gone from his jaw. He looked so small in that twin bed, curled on his side with one hand tucked under his chin like he used to when he was little.

It was hard to reconcile this with the boy who'd been a ghost all day. The boy she'd had to physically drag out of bed this morning, walk to the bathroom, coax through every bite of food.

She closed his door quietly and went downstairs.

Patrick was in the living room, tie loosened, a glass of whiskey in his hand. The amber liquid caught the lamplight as he swirled it. He looked up when she came in, his eyes tired.

"Is he asleep?"

"Out cold." She sank onto the couch beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched. "At least he put his pajamas on."

"Well, that's something."

She let her head fall back against the cushions, feeling the leather creak beneath her. The day replayed in her mind—Ash on the couch, eyes half-closed, drifting in and out like a boat losing its mooring. The phone call with Patrick at lunch, both of them worried, speaking in low voices even though Ash was too far gone to hear. The dinner conversation that had gone nowhere.

"Do you really think he's just trying to fade away?" she asked. "Like you said at dinner?"

Patrick was quiet for a moment, swirling his drink. The ice clinked against the glass. "I think this is the first day since he's had to actually accept that this is real. That he can't escape, can't run, can't fight his way out." He took a breath. "For almost a decade, he did whatever he wanted with no rules, no structure, no one telling him what to do. And now he's here, and he has to live with that. I think today was the weight of it hitting him."

"So he's shutting down."

"Maybe. Or maybe he's just...grieving in his own way."

"He barely ate anything today. He slept through most of it." She turned to look at him, studying the lines around his eyes, the gray threading through his temples. "Patrick, even for a teenager, that's not normal."

"It's been three days. Three days since his whole world turned upside down." He took a sip of his whiskey, wincing slightly at the burn. "Maybe we need to give him a little time before we panic."

"I'm not panicking. I'm worried."

"I know." He reached over and squeezed her hand, his palm warm and rough against hers. "Me too."

They sat there in the quiet, the house settling around them. Somewhere upstairs, their son was sleeping—again, still, always sleeping. Like consciousness was something to be avoided at all costs.

"Tomorrow will be better," Patrick said. "We'll get him up, keep him moving, make sure he eats. We will use structure and employ a routine. He will adjust."

Shannon wished she believed that. But she'd spent all day watching Ash drift through the house like a ghost, and she couldn't shake the feeling that something was very, very wrong.

"I hope so," she said quietly.

Patrick finished his drink and set the glass down on the side table, the ice settling with a soft clink. "Come on. Let's go to bed. Tomorrow's going to be a long day."

She followed him upstairs, pausing outside Ash's door to listen. She heard silence, just the soft sound of breathing.

Please be okay, she thought. Please let this just be adjustment. Please let tomorrow be better.

She went to bed, but it was a long time before she slept.

Chapter Text

Light flooded the room.

Ash groaned, pulling the pillow over his head. It was too bright and too early and too everything.

"Good morning, sweetheart." His mother's voice was aggressively cheerful. He could hear her moving around the room—the scrape of curtain rings on the rod, the snap of blinds being raised. "Time to get up."

He burrowed deeper into the mattress. Maybe if he didn't move, she'd give up and go away and let him sink back into the comfortable darkness where nothing hurt and nothing mattered.

The blankets were ripped off him.

"Hey—"

"Get up." His mother was standing at the foot of the bed, his sheets and comforter bundled in her arms. Her hair was already pulled back, her face washed and alert. "You have five seconds, or I'm getting the wet washcloth."

She wasn't bluffing. He could see it in her eyes—that particular brand of maternal determination that meant she'd absolutely follow through.

He groaned again, louder this time, and dragged himself upright. His body felt like it was made of lead. Every muscle protested as he swung his legs over the side of the bed, the carpet rough against his bare feet.

"There we go." She set the bedding on the dresser. "I need you to go to the bathroom, brush your teeth, and get dressed. These are your clothes for today."

She handed him a folded stack—jeans, a t-shirt, underwear. The same routine as yesterday. The same routine as probably every day for the rest of his fucking life.

Welcome to prison. Population: one pathetic excuse for a twenty-three-year-old.

He shuffled after her down the hall, the hardwood cool under his feet.

The bathroom mirror showed him the same hollow-eyed kid he'd been avoiding looking at. He brushed his teeth without registering the mint, ran a comb through his hair without actually trying to fix anything, and changed into the clothes she'd picked out. The jeans were stiff, new-smelling, and the t-shirt had some logo on it he didn't recognize.

This is like the worst parts of prison combined with the worst parts of rehab.

When he came out, she was waiting. Of course she was waiting. She was always waiting.

"Breakfast," she said, and he followed her downstairs.

The chair didn't hurt as much today.

That was something, at least. He could sit without wincing, without that sharp reminder of exactly how much trouble he'd been in. The bruises were fading—still there, a dull ache if he shifted wrong, but not the screaming agony of the first two days.

Great. Just in time for them to add fresh ones.

His mother set a plate in front of him. Scrambled eggs, two strips of bacon, a piece of toast with butter already melting into the bread. A glass of orange juice sweating in the morning light.

"I want you to eat everything on that plate," she said. "All of it. That's what 'finished' looks like today."

He stared at the food. His stomach churned at the thought of eating, but he knew better than to argue. She'd made the rules clear yesterday—three meals a day, real meals, no exceptions.

I'm a fucking prisoner of war. That's what this is. They're trying to break me with forced feeding and sleep deprivation.

He picked up his fork and started eating slowly, the eggs rubbery on his tongue, the bacon too salty. Each bite sat heavy in his stomach, but he forced it down anyway because the alternative was worse.

When the plate was finally empty, he set down his fork and closed his eyes. The kitchen was warm, sunlight pooling on the tile, and if he just sat still for a moment, maybe he could drift off right here at the table—

"Ash."

His eyes snapped open. His mother was watching him with that look—the one that said she knew exactly what he was doing.

"Today we're starting your schoolwork."

Fuck.

"I've printed out diagnostic tests for each of your core subjects." She stood and walked to the counter, returning with a stack of papers that made his stomach drop. "Math, English grammar, reading comprehension, history, and science. Each one should take about forty-five minutes, so we're looking at roughly four hours of work."

Four hours. Four hours of taking tests designed for incoming freshmen, sitting at this table like a good little boy while his mother graded his work.

The stack of papers landed in front of him with a soft thwap. Freshly printed, neatly stapled. A cup of sharpened pencils appeared beside it, along with a pink eraser.

He stared at the materials in horror.

"Mom, come on." He tried to keep his voice reasonable and calm. "This is ridiculous. I'm twenty-three years old. I don't need to take diagnostic tests for high school."

"You dropped out of high school," she said evenly. "You failed most of your classes before you dropped out. I have no idea what you actually retained from your education, so we're starting from scratch."

"I retained plenty—"

"Really? What's the quadratic formula?"

He opened his mouth. Closed it.

"Explain how the three branches of government check each other's power."

"There's Congress, and the President, and the Supreme Court..."

"How do they check each other?"

He fumbled. "The President can veto things. And Congress can override it?"

"And the Supreme Court?"

He had nothing.

"What's the difference between a simile and a metaphor?"

"They're both comparisons, and one uses 'like' or 'as'..."

"Mitosis or meiosis—which one produces identical cells?"

He had nothing for that either.

His mother raised an eyebrow. "That's what I thought. We're doing the diagnostics."

"This is insane." He pushed back from the table slightly, letting his shoulders slump. "You can't just ignore that I'm an adult, Mom. I've lived on my own for years. I've had jobs, I've paid rent, I've dealt with landlords and bills and all the stuff that actually matters in the real world." He gestured at the stack of papers, letting his voice go softer and more tired. "None of this is going to help me with any of that."

Something shifted in his mother's expression. A flicker of hesitation.

Got her.

He looked down at the table, letting his jaw tighten like he was holding something back. "I know more about surviving than any of these tests can measure." His voice wavered—just slightly, just enough. "I've been through things that—" He broke off, shaking his head, pressing his lips together like he couldn't bring himself to say it.

"Ash..." Her voice was quiet and almost gentle.

He looked up at her through his lashes, eyes wet—not from real tears, just from staring at the table without blinking. "Please, Mom. Can't we just find a different way?"

She was quiet for a long moment, studying his face. Her arms were crossed over her chest, one hand gripping the opposite elbow.

Come on. Come on.

Then her expression hardened.

"No." Her voice was flat and final. "I know what you're doing, Ash. The sad eyes, the wavering voice—you've been pulling this since you were five years old."

The victory evaporated.

"It's not going to work on me anymore."

His jaw tightened. Fuck.

"And because you tried," she continued, "we're going to start the morning with fifteen minutes of exercise. We need to get your blood pumping. Jumping jacks, push-ups, squats—your choice of order."

"You can't be serious—"

"I can, and I am. You can do them now, or I can tell your father about this conversation when he gets home and he can supervise your exercise routine himself."

The threat hung in the air. His father. The paddle. The last two nights of crying himself to sleep.

Ash got up from the table.

"We'll start with jumping jacks. Fifty of them."

His mother stood in the living room, arms crossed, watching him with the same expression a drill sergeant might give a particularly disappointing recruit.

"Fifty?"

"Would you prefer a hundred?"

He started jumping.

His body hated it immediately. His legs were stiff from three days of doing nothing but sleeping and shuffling between rooms. His arms felt like wet noodles, flopping at his sides with each jump. By the twentieth jumping jack, he was already breathing hard, his heart thudding against his ribs.

This is humiliating. This is absolutely fucking humiliating.

"Thirty-two, thirty-three..." His mother was counting out loud, like he was a child who couldn't be trusted to keep track himself.

Because that's what I am now. A child. A fucking child doing jumping jacks in his living room while his mommy watches.

"Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty. Good. Now push-ups—I want twenty."

He dropped to the floor, already sweating. The carpet scratched against his palms as he lowered himself down, arms trembling. His mother's feet were visible at the edge of his vision, her painted toenails a soft pink.

"One, two..."

He'd done push-ups before. Back in his real life, he'd gone through phases of trying to get in shape—usually right after some particularly bad bender, when he'd convince himself that exercise would fix everything. It never lasted more than a week.

"Seven, eight..."

But that had been his adult body. This body was weak and untrained. By the tenth push-up, his arms were shaking so badly he could barely hold himself up. Sweat dripped from his forehead onto the carpet.

"Eleven, twelve..."

I hate this. I hate her. I hate this entire fucking situation.

"Fifteen, sixteen..."

He collapsed on the seventeenth, face-planting into the carpet. The fibers pressed into his cheek, rough and smelling faintly of vacuum cleaner.

"Three more."

"I can't—"

"Yes you can. Three more, Ash."

He pushed himself back up, arms screaming, and forced out three more wobbly, pathetic excuses for push-ups. His elbows bowed outward, his back sagged, but he got through them.

"Good. Now squats—thirty of them."

Just kill me. Just fucking kill me now.

He stood on shaking legs and started squatting, his thighs burning on the way down and his knees popping on the way up. His mother counted steadily, her voice even and unhurried. By twenty, his legs felt like jelly. By twenty-five, he wasn't sure they'd hold him.

By the time his mother finally said "Thirty," he was drenched in sweat and gasping for air, his t-shirt clinging to his back.

He collapsed back into his chair at the kitchen table.

The fog was gone, burned away by the exertion and replaced by the unpleasant clarity of being fully, unwillingly awake. His muscles trembled. His lungs ached. He could feel his pulse in his temples.

His mother set a glass of water in front of him. "Better?"

He glared at her and didn't answer.

"You can start with math." She tapped the top packet. "I expect reasonable effort. I'll be grading these when you're done, so I'll know if you're not trying."

She moved to the kitchen counter, pulling out a cookbook like she was planning to start lunch prep. Casual and unconcerned, like she hadn't just made him do jumping jacks in the living room like a five-year-old.

Ash stared at the math diagnostic. The first page was simple stuff—basic arithmetic, fractions, percentages. Kid stuff, the kind of thing he definitely knew once and probably still knew if he actually tried.

What are my options here?

He could refuse and just sit here and stare at the paper until she gave up. But she wouldn't give up—she'd made that clear. She'd call his father, and then there'd be consequences, and he was really, really tired of consequences.

He could half-ass it and just scribble random answers and get through it as fast as possible. But she said she'd be grading it, so she'd know. And then there'd be consequences.

He could actually try. He could actually engage with this bullshit, answer the questions, prove he wasn't as stupid as they seemed to think.

But why should I? Why should I play along with their little fantasy that I'm actually a kid who needs to prove he's ready for high school?

His pencil hovered over the first question.

Solve for x: 2(x + 3) = 14

He stared at it. The symbols were familiar—he'd seen equations like this before, back when he actually went to class. But that felt like a lifetime ago. He'd been high for most of sophomore year, skipped more days than he attended junior year, and dropped out completely three months into senior year.

When was the last time he'd actually done math? When had he actually sat down with a pencil and paper and worked through a problem?

He couldn't remember.

Okay, think. Two times something plus three equals fourteen.

His brain felt rusty, like a machine that hadn't been used in years and was grinding reluctantly back to life.

Do I divide both sides by two first? Or distribute the two?

He wrote a tentative x + 3 = 7 and then stared at it, not entirely sure if that was right.

Whatever. Close enough.

He wrote x = 4 and moved to the next question, already dreading the rest of the packet.

This was his life now—diagnostic tests and jumping jacks and his mother watching him eat breakfast. He was a prisoner in his own childhood, serving a sentence for crimes he hadn't committed yet.

Four years. Four years until I'm eighteen and I can get the fuck out of here.

He kept writing, each answer more uncertain than the last.

Chapter Text

The math diagnostic was forty-five questions long.

By question twelve, Ash had already looked up three times to stare out the window, twice to examine a crack in the ceiling, and once to count the number of tiles on the kitchen backsplash. There were forty-seven, in case anyone was wondering.

I just need to focus.

He dragged his eyes back to the paper. Question thirteen was something about finding the area of a triangle.

Base times height divided by two. That's the formula, I think.

He wrote down a number. It was probably wrong, but whatever.

Question fourteen was about percentages. What is 35% of 80?

His pencil tapped against the table in a staccato rhythm. His knee bounced under the table, his heel drumming against the tile floor.

35 percent. That's like a third, maybe a little more than a third. So 27? 28?

He wrote 28 and moved on.

Question fifteen was next.

A fly buzzed past his head. He watched it land on the windowsill, cleaning its legs with that weird rubbing motion flies do. Why did flies do that? Were they actually cleaning themselves, or was it some kind of nervous tic? Could insects have nervous tics?

"Ash."

He jerked his attention back to the paper. His mother hadn't even looked up from her cookbook, her finger tracing a line of text.

"I'm working," he muttered.

Question fifteen. Right. What was question fifteen again?

He read it three times before the words actually registered. Something about a train leaving Chicago at 60 miles per hour while another train left—

God, I hate these problems. Who cares when the trains meet? Just check the schedule like a normal person.

He scribbled down a guess and moved on.

Forty-five minutes later, he was only on question twenty-eight.

"I need a break."

"You've been working for less than an hour." His mother still wasn't looking at him. She was doing something with a chicken—rubbing seasoning into the pale skin, her fingers glistening with oil. The smell of rosemary and garlic was starting to fill the kitchen. "Finish the math section, then you can take ten minutes."

"My brain is fried—"

"Then un-fry it. You have seventeen more questions."

He slumped in his chair, his head falling back to stare at the ceiling. A water stain spread across one corner like a faded map of nowhere.

Seventeen more questions. Seventeen more exercises in pointless bullshit. Seventeen more reasons to hate my life.

"If you're not working, you're doing chores. Those baseboards aren't going to clean themselves."

He picked up his pencil.

By question thirty-one, his pencil had somehow ended up in his mouth. He was chewing on the eraser without remembering when he'd started. The pink rubber tasted like chemicals and regret.

That's disgusting.

He set it down, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and stared at the question.

If a rectangle has a perimeter of 36 inches and a length of 10 inches, what is its width?

Okay. Perimeter. That was all the sides added together. So if the length was 10, and there were two lengths...

His eyes drifted to the window again. A bird was hopping around on the lawn, pecking at something in the grass. Some kind of sparrow, maybe. Did sparrows hop or walk? Some birds hopped and some walked. What determined which one they did?

"Ash."

"I'm thinking!"

"You're watching a bird."

He gritted his teeth and looked back at the paper.

Two lengths of 10. That's 20. 36 minus 20 is 16. Divided by 2 is 8.

He wrote 8 inches and felt a small surge of triumph. At least that one he was pretty sure about.

Question thirty-two came next.

A car drove past outside, its engine humming. Red, maybe a Honda. His neighbor Mr. Patterson had a red Honda. Was that Mr. Patterson? It was Thursday—didn't Mr. Patterson work on Thursdays? Maybe he was taking a long lunch. Or maybe he got fired. Could you get fired on a Thursday? That seemed like a weird day to—

"Ash." Just his name, spoken quiet and patient, which was somehow worse than yelling.

"I'm working—"

"You've been staring at the wall for two minutes."

Had he? He looked at the clock on the wall, its second hand sweeping past the six. She was right. How had two minutes passed?

Fuck.

He finished the math section at 11:47.

His mother took the packet from him without comment, flipping through the pages with quick, efficient movements while he slumped in his chair. His back ached from hunching over the table, and his writing hand had a cramp forming between his thumb and forefinger.

"How did I do?"

"I'll grade it later. Take your ten-minute break, then we're starting English."

He didn't move. His legs felt like they weighed a thousand pounds each.

"You can stretch in the living room and walk around. Get the blood moving." She glanced at him over the top of the papers. "Stay where I can see you."

I can't even go outside. I can't be trusted to walk in my own backyard without making a run for it.

To be fair, he absolutely would make a run for it. But still.

He hauled himself up and shuffled toward the living room, his mother's eyes tracking him the whole way.

Ten minutes wasn't enough.

Ten minutes was barely enough time to remember what fresh air felt like before his mother was calling him back to the kitchen, pointing at the chair, sliding the English diagnostic across the table toward him.

"Reading comprehension and grammar. Take your time."

Take my time. Right. Like time is something I have any control over.

He started reading the first passage, something about the California Gold Rush. The words swam in front of his eyes, rearranging themselves into meaningless patterns.

Concentrate. Just concentrate.

He read the first paragraph three times, then four times. On the fifth time, some of it actually stuck—something about miners and panning for gold and the population of San Francisco exploding.

The first question asked about the main idea of the passage.

The main idea is that this is boring as hell.

He circled an answer and moved on.

Somewhere around the third reading passage—this one about the life cycle of butterflies—Ash noticed his mother writing something.

She wasn't cooking anymore, wasn't reading her cookbook. She was writing in a small notebook, her pen moving in quick, deliberate strokes across the page.

He watched her for a moment, curious despite himself. She wrote something, looked at the clock on the wall, then wrote something else. Her handwriting was neat and compact, tilted slightly to the right.

"What are you doing?"

"Hmm?" She didn't look up.

"The notebook. What are you writing?"

His mother finished whatever she was writing and set the pen down, her fingers resting lightly on the page. "I'm taking notes."

"Notes about what?"

"About you." She met his eyes, her expression calm and matter-of-fact. "How long you stay focused before getting distracted. What kinds of things pull your attention away. How often you need to be redirected."

His stomach dropped.

"That's—you're—" He couldn't find the words. "That's creepy. You're studying me like I'm some kind of lab rat."

"I'm gathering information." She picked up her pen again and made another note, her eyes flicking briefly to the clock. "Your average focused stretch was about four minutes. Your longest stretch was seven minutes, and your shortest was forty-five seconds."

He stared at her. "Why are you doing this?"

"Because when I call Dr. Okonkwo's office tomorrow, I want to be able to give him specifics."

Everything in Ash went cold. His hands gripped the edge of the table, knuckles whitening.

"No."

"Ash—"

"I said no." His hands curled into fists under the table, his nails digging into his palms. "We already did this. I already told you and Dad I wasn't taking pills anymore."

"You were fourteen. You didn't understand—"

"I understood plenty! I understood that you wanted to drug me into being easier to deal with. That's all it ever was—you and Dad wanting a perfect little robot son who sat still and got good grades and didn't embarrass you in front of the teachers."

"That's not what this is about."

"Bullshit!" The word exploded out of him, and he shoved back from the table, the chair legs scraping against the tile. "You know what those pills do? They turn people into zombies. I've seen it—kids at school who were on that stuff, walking around like their souls got sucked out. Everyone knows it. The meds are just to make you feel better, not me."

His mother's expression didn't change. That infuriating calm, her hands folded on the table in front of her, her posture relaxed and open.

"Everyone knows it," she repeated slowly. "Is that what you think? Or is that what you heard from other kids who didn't want to do their homework?"

"It's what I know—"

"You never even tried the Vyvanse we suggested. You decided it would make you a zombie before you took a single pill."

"Because I'm not stupid. I did research—"

"You read some forums and decided you knew better than your doctors." Her voice was still quiet and still even. "And then you spent the next nine years struggling. Failing classes. Dropping out. Unable to hold down a job for more than a few months."

The words hit him like physical blows, each one landing in his chest.

"That wasn't—that was different—"

"Was it?" She leaned forward slightly, her elbows resting on the table. "I just watched you spend an hour and a half on a test that should have taken forty-five minutes. You weren't goofing off. You were trying. I could see how hard you were trying."

"So I'm a little distracted sometimes—"

"Fifteen times in one hour. You couldn't help it, Ash. And that's not a moral failing—it's just how your brain works. But pretending it's not a problem doesn't make it go away."

"I could focus if I wanted to—"

"Then why didn't you?"

He opened his mouth. Closed it.

Because I—because there was a lot going on, and—because the questions were stupid, and—

He had nothing. No excuse that didn't prove her point.

"The medication isn't about making you a robot." She stood slowly, not approaching him, just rising to her full height. "It's about giving you a fighting chance. Right now your brain is working against you, sweetheart. You're struggling, and you don't have to. The right medication can help you be the best version of yourself."

"Oh, fuck off with—"

"Ash." Her voice dropped low, quiet and warning. "Think very carefully about what you're about to say."

The words died in his throat.

Because suddenly he was very aware of his father—his father who wasn't here right now, but who would be home in a few hours. His father would absolutely hear about this conversation, and his father had made it very clear what happened when Ash pushed too hard.

He swallowed the rest of his sentence and sat there with his jaw clenched, hating himself for backing down.

I'm pathetic. Absolutely pathetic.

But his ass still remembered what the paddle felt like. And apparently that memory was louder than his pride.

His mother watched him for a long moment, her eyes searching his face. Then she nodded slightly.

"We don't have to decide anything today," she said. "But I am calling the doctor tomorrow. And you are going to think about this instead of just reacting."

Something sour churned in his stomach.

They're getting in my head. I stopped because I'm scared of what Dad will do. That's not me. That's not who I am.

But it was, wasn't it? It was who he was now. A kid who had to think twice before mouthing off because consequences were real and immediate and hurt.

His mother slid the English diagnostic back across the table toward him.

"Finish the test. We'll talk more about this later."

He picked up his pencil, but the words on the page were just shapes now, meaningless squiggles that refused to resolve into anything coherent.

They're winning. They're actually fucking winning.

He forced himself to read the next passage, something about butterflies, chrysalises, and metamorphosis.

Fitting, he thought bitterly. They're trying to turn me into something else too.

Lunch was sandwiches.

Turkey and cheese for him, some kind of fancy salad thing for his mother. They ate in silence, which was fine by Ash—he didn't have anything to say to her anyway. The bread was soft and fresh, but it tasted like cardboard in his mouth.

His brain was still churning over the ADHD conversation. The medication. The way she'd been watching him, documenting him, like he was a science experiment.

The way he'd stopped himself when he thought about pushing back. Like a trained dog that flinches before the shock collar even goes off.

"After lunch, you're going to help me with some chores," his mother said, breaking the silence. "The floors need sweeping, the dishes need washing, and I could use help with dinner prep."

"Oh good, child labor." He took a bite of his sandwich. "Is this how you're paying for my room and board?"

"This is how you're contributing to the household." She didn't take the bait, her voice mild and unruffled. "Everyone who lives here helps out. That's how families work."

We're not a family. We're a warden and her prisoner.

He didn't say it out loud.

Sweeping was boring.

Sweeping was mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly boring. He pushed the broom across the kitchen floor, watching dust bunnies accumulate in pathetic little piles, and tried not to think about how this was his life now. The bristles scratched against the tile in a rhythmic whisper.

His mother was at the counter, chopping vegetables for dinner. The rhythmic thunk-thunk-thunk of the knife against the cutting board was the only sound besides the swish of his broom. She worked with practiced efficiency, her hands moving quickly, the pile of diced carrots growing steadily.

In my real life, I never swept floors. I lived in shitholes where the floors were so far gone that sweeping wouldn't have helped anyway.

That was definitely better. At least in the shitholes, nobody made him do chores.

"You missed a spot by the fridge."

He gritted his teeth and swept the spot by the fridge.

The dishes were worse.

His mother washed, and he dried. It was an assembly line of domesticity that felt like it belonged in a 1950s sitcom. Steam rose from the sink, carrying the scent of dish soap.

"Dry thoroughly," she said, handing him a dripping plate. The water was warm where it splashed against his wrist. "If you leave water spots, you're doing it again."

He dried the plate with exaggerated care, holding it up to the light from the window to check for spots. The ceramic was white with a thin blue rim, part of a set he vaguely remembered from childhood.

"Are you satisfied?"

"For now, yes."

Dinner prep was actually almost bearable.

His mother put him on vegetable duty—washing, peeling, chopping. Basic stuff that didn't require much brainpower. His hands moved automatically, the peeler stripping long curls of skin from a potato, while his mind wandered.

Four years. Four years of this. Four years of sweeping floors and washing dishes and taking pills that turn me into their perfect little boy.

That's what they wanted. That's what this was all about. Not helping him—fixing him. Making him into the son they'd always wished they had, the one who sat still and got good grades and didn't cause problems.

They don't want me. They want a version of me that's easier to deal with.

He chopped a carrot with more force than necessary, the knife thunking hard against the cutting board.

"Careful with your fingers," his mother said mildly.

He slowed down, but only a little.

I wouldn't want to damage the merchandise.

At 4:30, his mother wiped her hands on a dish towel and nodded toward the living room.

"You can watch TV until your father gets home. But no sleeping—if I catch you dozing off, we're doing more exercises."

"Yes, drill sergeant." He gave her a sloppy salute, his hand flopping against his forehead.

The corner of her mouth twitched, but she didn't say anything. She just went back to whatever she was doing with the chicken, her hands disappearing into the roasting pan.

Fine. Don't engage. See if I care.

He shuffled to the living room and collapsed on the couch, the leather cool against his bare arms. He grabbed the remote and the TV hummed to life, and he flipped through channels without really seeing any of them. His body was tired. His brain was tired. Everything was tired.

But he kept his eyes open and focused on the screen, watching some stupid game show where people won prizes by guessing prices.

The price is wrong, idiot. That rice cooker is at least forty bucks.

His eyelids started to droop.

He forced them open.

The contestant on screen was freaking out about a car, jumping up and down and screaming, acting like winning a Hyundai was the best thing that had ever happened to her.

Must be nice, having something to be excited about.

His eyes drifted closed again.

No. No sleeping. If I have to do another squat today, I'm going to jump off a bridge.

He sat up straighter, pinched his own arm hard enough to leave a red mark, and stared at the screen with grim determination.

I just have to stay awake. I just have to stay awake until Dad gets home.

The clock on the wall said 4:47.

How is it only 4:47?

He was going to die of boredom before his father even got home. That was how this was going to end—death by tedium, right here on the living room couch.

At least then he wouldn't have to do any more diagnostic tests.