Prologue
The first thing he understood was the cold.
Concrete under his cheek, damp and gritty, and a smell like rust and standing water. His wrists throbbed before his mind caught up to why — zip ties, cutting deep enough that his fingers had gone numb hours ago, or maybe minutes, he couldn't tell anymore, time had stopped meaning anything the second the bag came off his head.
This isn't real, He told himself, the way you tell yourself anything when the alternative is worse. This is a mistake. Someone is going to walk in and apologize and untie me and I'll laugh about this for years.
Nobody walked in to apologize.
Later — an hour, a day, he had no way to know — there were hands on him again, and a voice that was almost gentle telling him to be still, this would go easier if he was still, and he believed it the way you believe anything when you're this afraid, and it did not go easier.
He didn't scream at first. He held it in his teeth like it was the only thing left that was his.
By the end he wasn't holding anything anymore. He screamed until there was nothing behind it, until his throat felt scraped hollow, until the sound coming out of him didn't sound like a person.
Nobody came for that either.
—
Days blurred into a single grey smear after that. He learned the schedule of it — food came when it came, which was rarely and never enough, a few mouthfuls of something that tasted like nothing, and he learned not to ask when the next would be, because asking cost him more than staying quiet did. His stomach stopped growling around the fourth day. He wasn't sure if that was better or worse.
He stopped trying to keep track of what day it was. He stopped, somewhere in there, trying to keep track of who he'd been before this.
—
Doubt was the wrong word for what set in. Doubt implied he still believed in two possibilities. What set in was smaller than that — the certainty, plain and flat, that no one was coming, that no one had noticed, that this was simply what his life was now, and some detached, exhausted part of him thought: of course. Of course it was him. Of course nobody would notice a foster kid with no family gone quiet for a few weeks, he was technically an adult now, but barely. He'd spent his whole life being the kind of person nobody came looking for. Why would this be different.
—
The last time they came for him, there was a folder.
His hands shook too badly to hold the pen at first, so someone held it for him, closed his fingers around it themselves, patient in a way that terrified him more than shouting would have. He didn't read what was in front of him. He couldn't have — the words swam, black shapes on white that meant nothing next to the fact of the pen in his hand and the certainty, absolute and wordless, that if he didn't sign it, something worse than anything that had already happened was going to happen next.
So he signed. Once, twice, some number of times he lost count of, in places a finger tapped to show him, his own name coming out crooked and unfamiliar, like it belonged to someone else now.
Nobody told him what he'd signed. He understood, dimly, that he wasn't supposed to ask.
—
The car ride he remembered only in pieces — upholstery under his cheek, the smell of leather and something chemical, his own breathing too loud in his ears. He was so thirsty he'd stopped being able to swallow right. Someone's hand on the back of his neck, not unkind, which was somehow the most frightening touch of all of them.
Then a voice, close to his ear, almost gentle,"This'll help."
The last thing he felt was a small, sharp pressure in his arm.
Then nothing at all.
---
Reid hit the revolving door at a jog, the folder already open against his forearm, flipping to the tabbed page as he went.
"Damian — Damian, hold up—"
Damian didn't slow down so much as pivot, phone still against his ear, murmuring something about occupancy projections to whoever was on the other end, and held out a hand without looking, already knowing what was coming. This was the rhythm of every day for the last six years. Reid produced paper, Damian signed it, the world kept moving.
"What is it?" Damian said, not really a question, phone still at his ear.
"Standard authorization, needs your signature before end of day, legal's been asking since this morning—" Reid was already flattening the page against his own forearm to give him a surface, uncapping a pen and pressing it into Damian's free hand in the same motion, the choreography of it so practiced neither of them thought about it anymore.
Damian signed without breaking stride, without breaking his sentence to whoever was on the phone, the pen moving on pure muscle memory while his attention stayed exactly where it always stayed — three things ahead of where his body currently was.
"Where am I after this?" Damian said, already handing the pen back, already three steps further toward the door.
"Board call at four, then the Meridian walkthrough—"
"Fine." The door was already swinging shut behind him. "Good?"
"Good." Reid said, to nobody, since Damian was already gone, and closed the folder over a signature Damian would not remember signing by the time his car pulled away from the curb.
---
The car dropped him at the top of the drive, same as always, and Damian was already reaching for his keys, already thinking about the four back-to-back hours still waiting on his laptop, when some old animal part of him registered the shape on the front step a half second before his mind caught up to what he was looking at.
A man. Barely dressed, skin too pale except where it wasn't, curled in on himself like he'd tried to make himself as small as possible and then simply stopped being able to hold that shape. Not moving. For one long, freezing second Damian thought dead and every other thought in his head went white and silent.
Then the man's chest rose. Fell. Rose again.
Beside him, half-tucked under one slack hand, sat a manila envelope.
Damian didn't remember crossing the last few feet of pavement. He remembered dropping to his knees on the cold stone step, remembered his own voice saying something useless like 'Hey' and 'Can you hear me?' He remembered the way the man didn't so much as flinch at his touch, too far under to surface. He remembered his hand shaking, actually shaking, as he reached for the envelope instead, some instinct telling him the answer to 'what is this?' was going to matter more than anything else on that doorstep.
Inside was a single document, his own signature already dried at the bottom of it, in his own handwriting, in ink he didn't remember lifting a pen for.
A marriage certificate.
His name.
A stranger's name he had never once heard in his life.
Damian read it twice before the meaning of it actually landed, and when it did, his first thought — clean, cold, and utterly useless in the moment — was, this cannot get out.
His second thought, quieter, and harder to look at directly, was that the man on his doorstep hadn't stirred once, not for his voice, not for his hands, not for anything — and that whatever had happened to him before he ended up here had clearly been so much worse than whatever was about to happen next.
