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Entry tags:
- au,
- constants,
- cs,
- fic,
- fob,
- gabe/william,
- mcr,
- mikey/brendon,
- p!atd,
- pete/patrick,
- ryan/bob,
- tai,
- the cab,
- thecab
PATD/FoB: Constants Ficlet #2 - Gabe/William
Next Constant ficlet (can it be called a ficlet when it’s 6 pages in word?).
Psychics!
You should read the main Constants story first: Constants
Summary: Gabe, meet William, he has some issues.
TITLE: Constants
RATING: PG-13
PAIRING: Gabe/William, Ryan/Bob, Alex/Cash
AUTHOR: Melanie
SUMMARY: Psychics were few and far between. For every one there was at least 150 trained Constants (that wasn’t counting the untrained Constants that could sometimes sneak in and lure a Psychic away).
DISCLAIMER: I don’t own any of these boys and I’m pretty sure that this has never happened.
Constants Ficlet – Gabe
Gabe never agreed with the plan to drug Alex up with the Dievelin-47, he’d wanted that on record right up front. He could understand the necessity of it, traveling with a Psychic was tantamount to traveling with a neon bull’s-eye painted directly on their asses, but that certainly didn’t mean he had to like it.
And he didn’t have to agree with it, he didn’t have to say anything because Jon Walker was expressing enough disapproval for both of them.
Hell for all of them. The ones who knew who Alex was anyway.
He didn’t say anything, but he was still pretty that Alex knew his feelings on the matter regardless.
Of course it didn’t matter how they felt, didn’t matter how many times Jon tried to tell him that there was other ways, that they’d figure something out, didn’t matter at all because it was completely taken out of their hands when Joshua was killed and Alex put the needle in his own fucking arm and told them he was doing it with or without their support.
It was futile and too late, but Gabe still tried to convince the boy to just bond with him, and if he was unacceptable then any one of the other Constants they were traveling with.
Two of them were even from Alex’s group.
He’d had to try; he’d had to do something.
Alex had just looked at him, with those eyes that he’d seen on every other Psychic that he’d ever come in contact with.
Gabe didn’t like those eyes, especially not on someone that hadn’t even been a twinkle in his parents’ eyes when Gabe had already started his training.
It was that look that said that ‘I know things that I’m not going to tell you about until they’re getting ready to bite you and by extension me in the ass’.
The words that came out of Alex’s mouth were ‘there’s someone else for you,’ then he clammed up and didn’t say anything else.
Couldn’t say anything else because by then the Dievelin-47 was in his bloodstream and he was more normal then Jon.
Gabe pushed, because he’d long since given up hope that he’d get a Psychic and if there was one out there that was supposed to be his, well he wanted to know where they were and how they were and when exactly he was going to meet them.
He’d pretty much resigned himself to the fact that he would be playing baby-sitter to Constants half his age.
Precognition was one of Alex’s gifts, there was also a little bit of telekinesis thrown in with the telepathy that pretty much all the Psychics ended up with.
Gabe hadn’t realized the telekinesis was part of Alex’s package until he managed to drag Joshua’s body to them with the power of his fucking mind, while they were still under attack.
It had been pretty fucking extraordinary. Not something that Gabe had ever seen before, not something that he wanted to see again if it meant that Alex only got to use it when they were being attacked.
******************************************************************************
They reached the Mid-West Institute by the skin of their teeth. Alex had been single-minded in his determination to get them there.
“We’ll be safe there, safe there, safe there,” he kept repeating over and over again whenever he or Jon asked why there. Why not somewhere closer.
Gabe and Jon just exchanged looks and one of them made sure to remind him that his body, along with theirs, needed food and water and rest.
They got to the Mid-West Institute and they were met by a welcoming party, the Psychic they saw, but didn’t actually meet until later, Gabe could feel him pushing and prodding at the shields around Alex’s place in his mind nonetheless.
‘Protect Alex’, that’s all they had been told. That’s what Joshua had said from the very beginning. And that’s what they were doing.
******************************************************************************
He figured it was going to be Jon that cracked first under the pressure of not being accepted by these people that they had risked life and limb to get Alex to. Gabe didn’t care; if they didn’t want his help, well fuck them. He’d lie on his bed in the dorms and eat fucking chocolate and read magazines until this insanity was over.
Jon on the other hand wanted to help. Gabe figured he’d give up eventually.
Instead Jon cracked and cornered Ryan Ross alone in a room. If he’d had any idea that Jon was going nuts he would have intervened and locked Jon in their room that was their fucking cell away from home.
Because that act right there was just asking for Bob Bryar to kill him. Gabe had only seen them a couple of times but he’d figured out pretty damn quick that Bryar was nothing if not almost psychotically protective of his Psychic.
Gabe could understand that, he’d heard the rumblings of what Ryan had gone through prior to coming to the Mid-West Institute. He half-wondered if Alex hadn’t really wanted them to come to this Institute in particular because, Ryan, who’d already been dosed with Dievelin-47 and made it out the other end sane, was there.
******************************************************************************
Alex had taken to Ryan quickly, that wasn’t a surprise. They had the whole drugged thing in common and Alex just liked him.
On the other hand Gabe was surprised on how quickly he’d managed to attach himself to Bryar though, and that Bryar apparently reciprocated.
He wouldn’t have thought Bryar would have time for anyone that wasn’t Ryan.
But he made a little pin-hole of time that was all Alex’s and watched over him like a nervous new father who was half-afraid that Alex was going to manage to get himself killed going to the bathroom.
It was highly amusing to watch. Not that Gabe would say that, or even think it in a room where Psychics would grin at him knowingly and Bryar would undoubtedly find out.
******************************************************************************
Alex finding Cash let them take their first easy breath since they’d come to the Mid-West Institute.
It was a sign that things they’d been forced to do might not be completely and utterly unrepairable.
It was hope that they’d made a decision that they didn’t like, didn’t approve of and weren’t sure that they could make again… and that things were going to be okay anyway.
******************************************************************************
Gabe met William Beckett because he was told by Pete to go with Bob.
He’d learned a long time ago that you didn’t fight with Psychics when they had that look on their faces.
Bob was silent and Gabe didn’t need to be Psychic to be able to sense the urgency flooding off him.
Bob wanted to be with Ryan right then and there, Gabe wholeheartedly approved of this endeavor because if something happened to Ryan, Alex was going to have a fucking fit.
Not to mention Bob and Cash and Pete and Spencer and Brendon.
They ran, Gabe keeping even strides with him the whole way.
He saw Ryan, then he saw William.
He’d asked Victoria once, she been the one chosen from their group to be Nate’s Constant, what it had felt like. To see and know that this was your Psychic.
She’d just looked at him and screwed her face up in a thoughtful expression and was silent for a really fucking long time, then she’d just shrugged and said, ‘you just know, you just look at them and you know’.
He saw William then and he knew, it felt like a sucker punch in his gut and he made a noise, he knew he did, he’d deny it if anyone said anything but he was pretty sure that the only one paying attention to him at that moment was William.
He saw Bob reach out and yank Ryan to him, when he wrapped his hand around William’s wrist and tugged, it felt like he’d been zapped by an electrical storm.
William looked at him, expression blank and dazed and suddenly there was two of him.
A William looking at him in bafflement and another one, in his fucking head, staring at him in disbelief.
Of course then all hell broke loose.
******************************************************************************
“I can’t have another Constant,” William said. He sounded firm and unbending.
Mikey Way just looked at him and rolled his eyes. He looked bored with the whole conversation, as well as intensely amused. Gabe wasn’t even sure what he was doing there.
“Apparently you can.”
******************************************************************************
Brian got him uniforms; Patrick helped him find a room.
They moved Gabe in and then Pete and Mikey dragged William there.
When they shut the door behind them, Pete smirking and Mikey still rolling his eyes (Gabe thought he just might not have ever stopped), William glared at him mutinously.
Gabe arched a brow at him and relaxed a little bit more into the sofa.
******************************************************************************
“There’s going to have to be some rules,” William announced over breakfast, Gabe had made his coffee just the way he liked it, eggs over easy, toast lightly brown smothered in butter and jam.
William was glaring at him over his fork but in his head he was smiling softly and looked sort of soft and inviting. It was entirely disconcerting trying to figure out which one of them was putting on an act.
He was pretty sure it was the one that was currently shoveling food into his mouth, but he’d been known to be wrong on occasion in the past.
“Rules,” Gabe said. He sipped at his coffee and waited.
“You can’t just barge into my room in the middle of the night,” William said decisively.
“You would rather wake up Patrick and Pete with your screaming instead?” Gabe asked.
******************************************************************************
“William’s first Constant was a girl,” Mikey said, Brendon was hovering around his shoulder. Every so often Mikey would reach out and squeeze his hand. “Her name was Marie.”
“Okay,” Gabe said slowly.
“They were very close.”
“Lovers?” Gabe asked. Because as much as he didn’t want to know, he had to know. So he could figure out what exactly he was up against.
“No,” Mikey shook his head. “They were just friends. Though if they’d been together longer… well the higher ups would have started pushing them to sleep together, keep the lines pure and all. Breed more little Psychics and Constants for them to control.”
******************************************************************************
“She’s dead because of me,” William said. Gabe looked up from where he was lounging across his bed reading to stare at William shifting in the doorway to his bedroom.
“How do you figure?” Gabe asked, he shut the book. He’d read it like fifteen times, he didn’t need to know where he’d been in order to pick it up again.
“If she’d been with me, with us, she might still be alive.”
“Might,” Gabe said. “Might still be alive, and she might still be dead and if she’d been with you your shields would have been completely down, your mind completely open to her and when she’d died she would have taken you with her.”
William stared down at the floor, crossed his arms over his chest.
“You don’t even care that she’s dead,” he muttered.
“Well no,” Gabe rolled his eyes. He knew he didn’t sound sympathetic in the least, he couldn’t really figure how to be when he’d gotten something that he’d wanted for most of his life and the only thing keeping him from having it completely was some dead girl that he’d never met and didn’t know anything about. “If she was still alive you wouldn’t be mine; if she’d been with you, you’d both be dead, with Mikey dead alongside you and you wouldn’t be mine and Brendon would be alone.”
“You don’t know that,” William said, his tone sounded uncertain and he didn’t look up from his studying of the floor.
“I do,” Gabe rolled off the bed, walked slowly to the doorway. William didn’t bolt, just stood there, staring at the ground like it was going to disclose the meanings of the universe if he waited long enough. Gabe touched his cheek, forced his head up so that William would have to look at him, would have to see him.
“Think about it,” he said, softly, quietly. “You know I’m right.”
William looked at him, tilted his head to the right and tears leaked slowly from his eyes.
******************************************************************************
William was already up the next morning. Sitting at the kitchen table, in uniform already and a cup in his hand.
He looked tired and pale, but determined at the same time.
Gabe sat down across from him.
“Her name was Marie,” William said softly, barely a whisper. Gabe folded his hands together on top of the table and waited.
“She was… I chose her because I’d eliminated everyone else and Mikey had already eliminated his entire group of potentials. The Institute was afraid they’d lose their funding if one of us didn’t choose somebody… So, so I chose Marie, she was pretty and smart and she knew that it wasn’t the way things were supposed to be but we dealt with it.”
William set his cup down, wrapped his hands around it. Wouldn’t look up to meet Gabe’s eyes.
“Our bond was never as strong as it should have been, we could get stuff done but we had to really focus, concentrate on each other, like there was a wall between us that we couldn’t breach. The day that she died was the first time, the only time that I heard her clearly in the entire time we were bonded.”
******************************************************************************
Psychics!
You should read the main Constants story first: Constants
Summary: Gabe, meet William, he has some issues.
TITLE: Constants
RATING: PG-13
PAIRING: Gabe/William, Ryan/Bob, Alex/Cash
AUTHOR: Melanie
SUMMARY: Psychics were few and far between. For every one there was at least 150 trained Constants (that wasn’t counting the untrained Constants that could sometimes sneak in and lure a Psychic away).
DISCLAIMER: I don’t own any of these boys and I’m pretty sure that this has never happened.
Constants Ficlet – Gabe
Gabe never agreed with the plan to drug Alex up with the Dievelin-47, he’d wanted that on record right up front. He could understand the necessity of it, traveling with a Psychic was tantamount to traveling with a neon bull’s-eye painted directly on their asses, but that certainly didn’t mean he had to like it.
And he didn’t have to agree with it, he didn’t have to say anything because Jon Walker was expressing enough disapproval for both of them.
Hell for all of them. The ones who knew who Alex was anyway.
He didn’t say anything, but he was still pretty that Alex knew his feelings on the matter regardless.
Of course it didn’t matter how they felt, didn’t matter how many times Jon tried to tell him that there was other ways, that they’d figure something out, didn’t matter at all because it was completely taken out of their hands when Joshua was killed and Alex put the needle in his own fucking arm and told them he was doing it with or without their support.
It was futile and too late, but Gabe still tried to convince the boy to just bond with him, and if he was unacceptable then any one of the other Constants they were traveling with.
Two of them were even from Alex’s group.
He’d had to try; he’d had to do something.
Alex had just looked at him, with those eyes that he’d seen on every other Psychic that he’d ever come in contact with.
Gabe didn’t like those eyes, especially not on someone that hadn’t even been a twinkle in his parents’ eyes when Gabe had already started his training.
It was that look that said that ‘I know things that I’m not going to tell you about until they’re getting ready to bite you and by extension me in the ass’.
The words that came out of Alex’s mouth were ‘there’s someone else for you,’ then he clammed up and didn’t say anything else.
Couldn’t say anything else because by then the Dievelin-47 was in his bloodstream and he was more normal then Jon.
Gabe pushed, because he’d long since given up hope that he’d get a Psychic and if there was one out there that was supposed to be his, well he wanted to know where they were and how they were and when exactly he was going to meet them.
He’d pretty much resigned himself to the fact that he would be playing baby-sitter to Constants half his age.
Precognition was one of Alex’s gifts, there was also a little bit of telekinesis thrown in with the telepathy that pretty much all the Psychics ended up with.
Gabe hadn’t realized the telekinesis was part of Alex’s package until he managed to drag Joshua’s body to them with the power of his fucking mind, while they were still under attack.
It had been pretty fucking extraordinary. Not something that Gabe had ever seen before, not something that he wanted to see again if it meant that Alex only got to use it when they were being attacked.
They reached the Mid-West Institute by the skin of their teeth. Alex had been single-minded in his determination to get them there.
“We’ll be safe there, safe there, safe there,” he kept repeating over and over again whenever he or Jon asked why there. Why not somewhere closer.
Gabe and Jon just exchanged looks and one of them made sure to remind him that his body, along with theirs, needed food and water and rest.
They got to the Mid-West Institute and they were met by a welcoming party, the Psychic they saw, but didn’t actually meet until later, Gabe could feel him pushing and prodding at the shields around Alex’s place in his mind nonetheless.
‘Protect Alex’, that’s all they had been told. That’s what Joshua had said from the very beginning. And that’s what they were doing.
He figured it was going to be Jon that cracked first under the pressure of not being accepted by these people that they had risked life and limb to get Alex to. Gabe didn’t care; if they didn’t want his help, well fuck them. He’d lie on his bed in the dorms and eat fucking chocolate and read magazines until this insanity was over.
Jon on the other hand wanted to help. Gabe figured he’d give up eventually.
Instead Jon cracked and cornered Ryan Ross alone in a room. If he’d had any idea that Jon was going nuts he would have intervened and locked Jon in their room that was their fucking cell away from home.
Because that act right there was just asking for Bob Bryar to kill him. Gabe had only seen them a couple of times but he’d figured out pretty damn quick that Bryar was nothing if not almost psychotically protective of his Psychic.
Gabe could understand that, he’d heard the rumblings of what Ryan had gone through prior to coming to the Mid-West Institute. He half-wondered if Alex hadn’t really wanted them to come to this Institute in particular because, Ryan, who’d already been dosed with Dievelin-47 and made it out the other end sane, was there.
Alex had taken to Ryan quickly, that wasn’t a surprise. They had the whole drugged thing in common and Alex just liked him.
On the other hand Gabe was surprised on how quickly he’d managed to attach himself to Bryar though, and that Bryar apparently reciprocated.
He wouldn’t have thought Bryar would have time for anyone that wasn’t Ryan.
But he made a little pin-hole of time that was all Alex’s and watched over him like a nervous new father who was half-afraid that Alex was going to manage to get himself killed going to the bathroom.
It was highly amusing to watch. Not that Gabe would say that, or even think it in a room where Psychics would grin at him knowingly and Bryar would undoubtedly find out.
Alex finding Cash let them take their first easy breath since they’d come to the Mid-West Institute.
It was a sign that things they’d been forced to do might not be completely and utterly unrepairable.
It was hope that they’d made a decision that they didn’t like, didn’t approve of and weren’t sure that they could make again… and that things were going to be okay anyway.
Gabe met William Beckett because he was told by Pete to go with Bob.
He’d learned a long time ago that you didn’t fight with Psychics when they had that look on their faces.
Bob was silent and Gabe didn’t need to be Psychic to be able to sense the urgency flooding off him.
Bob wanted to be with Ryan right then and there, Gabe wholeheartedly approved of this endeavor because if something happened to Ryan, Alex was going to have a fucking fit.
Not to mention Bob and Cash and Pete and Spencer and Brendon.
They ran, Gabe keeping even strides with him the whole way.
He saw Ryan, then he saw William.
He’d asked Victoria once, she been the one chosen from their group to be Nate’s Constant, what it had felt like. To see and know that this was your Psychic.
She’d just looked at him and screwed her face up in a thoughtful expression and was silent for a really fucking long time, then she’d just shrugged and said, ‘you just know, you just look at them and you know’.
He saw William then and he knew, it felt like a sucker punch in his gut and he made a noise, he knew he did, he’d deny it if anyone said anything but he was pretty sure that the only one paying attention to him at that moment was William.
He saw Bob reach out and yank Ryan to him, when he wrapped his hand around William’s wrist and tugged, it felt like he’d been zapped by an electrical storm.
William looked at him, expression blank and dazed and suddenly there was two of him.
A William looking at him in bafflement and another one, in his fucking head, staring at him in disbelief.
Of course then all hell broke loose.
“I can’t have another Constant,” William said. He sounded firm and unbending.
Mikey Way just looked at him and rolled his eyes. He looked bored with the whole conversation, as well as intensely amused. Gabe wasn’t even sure what he was doing there.
“Apparently you can.”
Brian got him uniforms; Patrick helped him find a room.
They moved Gabe in and then Pete and Mikey dragged William there.
When they shut the door behind them, Pete smirking and Mikey still rolling his eyes (Gabe thought he just might not have ever stopped), William glared at him mutinously.
Gabe arched a brow at him and relaxed a little bit more into the sofa.
“There’s going to have to be some rules,” William announced over breakfast, Gabe had made his coffee just the way he liked it, eggs over easy, toast lightly brown smothered in butter and jam.
William was glaring at him over his fork but in his head he was smiling softly and looked sort of soft and inviting. It was entirely disconcerting trying to figure out which one of them was putting on an act.
He was pretty sure it was the one that was currently shoveling food into his mouth, but he’d been known to be wrong on occasion in the past.
“Rules,” Gabe said. He sipped at his coffee and waited.
“You can’t just barge into my room in the middle of the night,” William said decisively.
“You would rather wake up Patrick and Pete with your screaming instead?” Gabe asked.
“William’s first Constant was a girl,” Mikey said, Brendon was hovering around his shoulder. Every so often Mikey would reach out and squeeze his hand. “Her name was Marie.”
“Okay,” Gabe said slowly.
“They were very close.”
“Lovers?” Gabe asked. Because as much as he didn’t want to know, he had to know. So he could figure out what exactly he was up against.
“No,” Mikey shook his head. “They were just friends. Though if they’d been together longer… well the higher ups would have started pushing them to sleep together, keep the lines pure and all. Breed more little Psychics and Constants for them to control.”
“She’s dead because of me,” William said. Gabe looked up from where he was lounging across his bed reading to stare at William shifting in the doorway to his bedroom.
“How do you figure?” Gabe asked, he shut the book. He’d read it like fifteen times, he didn’t need to know where he’d been in order to pick it up again.
“If she’d been with me, with us, she might still be alive.”
“Might,” Gabe said. “Might still be alive, and she might still be dead and if she’d been with you your shields would have been completely down, your mind completely open to her and when she’d died she would have taken you with her.”
William stared down at the floor, crossed his arms over his chest.
“You don’t even care that she’s dead,” he muttered.
“Well no,” Gabe rolled his eyes. He knew he didn’t sound sympathetic in the least, he couldn’t really figure how to be when he’d gotten something that he’d wanted for most of his life and the only thing keeping him from having it completely was some dead girl that he’d never met and didn’t know anything about. “If she was still alive you wouldn’t be mine; if she’d been with you, you’d both be dead, with Mikey dead alongside you and you wouldn’t be mine and Brendon would be alone.”
“You don’t know that,” William said, his tone sounded uncertain and he didn’t look up from his studying of the floor.
“I do,” Gabe rolled off the bed, walked slowly to the doorway. William didn’t bolt, just stood there, staring at the ground like it was going to disclose the meanings of the universe if he waited long enough. Gabe touched his cheek, forced his head up so that William would have to look at him, would have to see him.
“Think about it,” he said, softly, quietly. “You know I’m right.”
William looked at him, tilted his head to the right and tears leaked slowly from his eyes.
William was already up the next morning. Sitting at the kitchen table, in uniform already and a cup in his hand.
He looked tired and pale, but determined at the same time.
Gabe sat down across from him.
“Her name was Marie,” William said softly, barely a whisper. Gabe folded his hands together on top of the table and waited.
“She was… I chose her because I’d eliminated everyone else and Mikey had already eliminated his entire group of potentials. The Institute was afraid they’d lose their funding if one of us didn’t choose somebody… So, so I chose Marie, she was pretty and smart and she knew that it wasn’t the way things were supposed to be but we dealt with it.”
William set his cup down, wrapped his hands around it. Wouldn’t look up to meet Gabe’s eyes.
“Our bond was never as strong as it should have been, we could get stuff done but we had to really focus, concentrate on each other, like there was a wall between us that we couldn’t breach. The day that she died was the first time, the only time that I heard her clearly in the entire time we were bonded.”