Work Text:
It takes Mark an annoyingly long time to find Caleb. He doesn’t even fully know why he’s here wandering around the BU campus, except that Caleb “did something stupid” and wants Mark to pick him up, but he’s safe and he didn’t sound drunk on the phone and he doesn’t need to be bailed out of jail (Mark asked).
Which leaves a great big sunny field of possibilities for Mark’s imagination to run around in. Caleb could be high. He could have crashed a car. He could have broken up with Adam again like an idiot, or he could actually be hurt or in danger and downplaying it like an even bigger idiot.
Whatever is going on, though, he called Mark for help, and when Mark finally finds him, sitting on the curb with his knees drawn in and his shoulders hunched, he’s determined to prove calling him was the right choice.
“Caleb!”
“Hi.” His voice comes out low and rough, like it would have been a whisper if he’d added more air. He won’t look Mark in the eye.
“You wanna get out of here, or what?” Mark aims for chill, lighthearted. It’s a familiar routine by now: something is wrong, and Caleb knows that Mark knows it, but he’ll want at least a few minutes to pretend like nothing is happening and stare out the window and give grunts and non-answers in response to everything Mark says or asks, until he finally bursts out with whatever is bothering him.
Mark knows this dance well. Caleb seems to have forgotten his steps. He’s not muttering, “I guess” and getting up to follow Mark to the car; he’s not even half answering him; he’s not moving.
“Caleb, you gotta talk to me,” Mark tries, “are you hurt? Are you sad? Are you scared? Are you… why can’t I… tell?”
Shit. No, yeah, something is definitely wrong, because even though Caleb is sitting there looking small and guilty and scared, the only emotion Mark can feel is his own fear steadily ratcheting up.
For all the catastrophizing Mark did on the drive here, he didn’t even consider that it might be an ability-related crisis, but Caleb’s power feels . . . weird. Inaccessible. Like an electrified fence: Mark can still feel it humming somewhere beneath his skin, but he can’t get past this weird barrier and harness it.
It’s his job right now to be the adult and not panic, but every memory he has of someone’s ability feeling like this is a memory of pain: Cammille on so many drugs she barely looked human; another Tier Five inmate, a telepath—Mark can’t even remember their name, but he remembers their bloodshot eyes and full-body tremors and exhaustion. Damien, after being beaten half to death.
“Are you hurt?” he demands. He already asked, but Caleb didn’t fucking answer him.
This time, Caleb shakes his head. Says again, “I did something really stupid,” and reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out a vial with shaking hands, holds it out to Mark without looking him in the eye.
Great. Fucking perfect, Mark’s first instinct was right, he’s gone and done fucking heroin or something—he falters when he actually processes the label. None of the images his brain supplies in association with it are particularly pleasant: strapping himself into an AM chair on purpose, watching Helen smash every container to the ground, and giving Oliver his blood to try and reconstruct it over a bathroom sink are all things he would prefer to leave in the past, thank you very much.
“Shit, kid,” he says. “Fuck! What were you thinking?”
“I don’t know!” Caleb says, remorseful and defensive all at once. “I don’t know, that’s why I called you, but I can’t—”
“Okay!” Mark says, hands up in surrender. “Okay, take a breath, we’re gonna get through this, okay? Let me drive you to my place, yeah? And we’ll work this out, I promise.”
It would be an easier promise to keep if Mark actually knew what the hell he was supposed to do. He’s been Caleb’s main adult atypical figure for as long as they’ve known each other, and it’s a role he’s honored to fill, but they’re running up against the edge of his capacity for helpful “when I was your age . . .” anecdotes. When he was Caleb’s age, he was locked in a basement.
The best he can do is make sure Caleb isn’t alone. He takes him to his apartment. He makes him a cup of tea, drapes a blanket over his shoulders on the couch. Gives him a minute to chill out, then drops down next to him and says, “Okay. Spill.”
“You sound old,” Caleb tells him flatly. “You want all the deets on the hot goss?”
“Haha.” Mark pulls out the vial again and sets it on the coffee table in front of them. “Come on, don’t deflect. The fuck were you thinking, playing around with shit like this?”
“Hey, don’t act like I’m some stupid kid for this,” Caleb protests. “You took it before they’d tested it on anyone, and your ability doesn’t hurt people.”
“You don’t know what my ability has done,” Mark snaps.
Even with Caleb’s ability out of reach, Mark can practically feel him flinch back, hurt and distressed. Mark’s hard, bitter defensiveness falls away as suddenly as it appeared. He remembers, again, that Caleb called him for help because he’s scared. Mark is going to help.
He takes a breath, in and out as slow and steadily as he can. “I’m being an asshole,” he says. “I just want to know what happened.” He nods at the serum again. “Where did you get this? I can’t imagine Joanie signed off on it, if this is how it’s going. Or did you go straight to Oliver? God, I’m going to have to kill him—”
“Don’t kill Oliver,” Caleb says. “Alice got it for me.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” Caleb sighs. “You know how the AM just lets people take it now, if they need it?”
Mark nods. To say he has mixed feelings would be an understatement. Helen had a point, admittedly, in being skeptical about handing the Atypical Monitors, of all people, the power to rip abilities away on a whim. Helen also tortured his sister. He can’t regret trying to stop her from hurting more people.
Not to mention that he’s seen what Alex’s ability does to him. He deserves a body that doesn’t try to burn him alive.
But Alice Michaels, as far as Mark knows, loves her ability.
“But there’s all these regulations,” Caleb goes on, “and you’re right, Dr. Bright definitely wouldn’t have been cool with letting me have it, and I don’t think Jackson would be either, and even if he was, he would have told her, so . . . Anyway, Alice is eighteen now, so she didn’t need our parents for it or anything, but she still had to go through a bunch of evaluations and stuff.”
Mark nods again. “How’d she swing that?”
“She said she missed being able to do team sports without cheating or hurting anyone—it was an important part of her life, you know? And some stuff about being really worried about breaking more things, and bad joint pain—I’m pretty sure that part is true, too, but she never wants me to like, take it seriously when she complains about it? She just wants to shrug it off like it’s not actually fucking concerning, but she’s—I worry about her, you know? Not like our parents worry about us, but . . .”
“I know.”
“Yeah. So anyway, she talked to Jackson and her psych about all that, and they got her a prescription, and they made her take the first dose right there, to make sure she can do it safely, right? And she did. Because she’s a really good sister, and I suck.”
“You would have done the same thing for her,” Mark says gently.
“Yeah. I would have. And I didn’t—I didn’t make her do it, I swear.” Caleb snaps his head up to look at Mark, abruptly desperate to defend himself against an accusation nobody made.
“I know you didn’t,” Mark reassures him.
“We talked about it all over the phone,” Caleb says. “It wasn’t my ability, I couldn’t have done anything to her.”
“Caleb. I know.”
“Okay,” Caleb says. “Good.” He goes quiet, pulling up tiny fabric pills from the couch and rolling them between his fingers.
“So Alice got a couple doses of the serum for you,” Mark prompts.
“Right, yeah. So then I just took it in my apartment—Alice gave me the like, instruction sheet on how to do it, and it’s not that complicated, anyway. Sadie wasn’t home, so it didn’t really feel like anything. And then Frankie wanted to go to this party, and it seemed like as good an opportunity as any to test it out.”
“Sure.” It doesn’t, really—Caleb hates parties, and if anything had gone wrong with the serum—well. Something did go wrong, apparently, because Caleb is here, and Mark can’t imagine being out around a bunch of wasted frat boys helped the situation much. It doesn’t seem worth pointing out, though.
“And it’s . . . god, it’s so weird,” Caleb says. “Even just walking over with Frankie, I think he could tell I was kind of off, because I’m that fucking obvious, and yeah, I guess I don’t know how to be normal with him without knowing how he feels. I’ve never really . . . not known. With him.”
“Right.”
“And it just got worse, like, the more people I was around, the more aware I was that I couldn’t feel anything, and I just felt so—alone, and isolated, and I don’t, like—I’m just so used to it, I don’t know how to deal with things like this without my ability. Which is stupid, because not having my ability is the whole thing. But whenever it’s weird, I try to get some space, or I try to find my people and focus on them, you know? And I couldn’t find Frankie, even if he was standing right next to me, I couldn’t find his feelings and it just fucking made me spiral.
“And it was so stupid! I should have known better, I did know better, because I’ve fucking thought about it before, back when it was just a stupid hypothetical, and I said that getting rid of my ability would feel like cutting part of my brain out, I knew that, but I fucking thought I could handle it but I can’t; I don’t know how to be normal anymore and I don’t even feel real when I can’t feel anything and I can’t handle it.” Caleb’s breaths between sentences come out shaky, ragged. “But I have to; I have to learn to live like this some-fucking-how, because I’d rather deal with this than keep forcing emotions onto people, and I’d rather fucking kill myself than end up like Damien.”
The blood in Mark’s veins turns icy all at once, rushes cold fear straight to his heart. “Caleb.”
“I’m sorry,” Caleb stammers, eyes wide. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that, I don’t—I’m not gonna do anything, I wouldn’t, I—I promise.”
His reassurances are enough to keep Mark from having a goddamn heart attack, but not enough to untwist the knots in his stomach, definitely not enough to make him willing to drop the subject. “You want to, though?”
“No. Maybe. Not really, and I really wouldn’t do that to you guys, I swear, but I just . . . I don’t want to be alive like this. I don’t want to be like him, I can’t—”
“You’re not,” Mark says. “Damien chose to hurt people.”
“Yeah, well, I’m choosing not to,” Caleb mutters.
“Caleb—”
“I can’t control this all the time. I’m trying so fucking hard, and maybe I’m getting better, but no matter what, I’m always gonna slip up sometimes. I’m always going to make someone feel something or–or do something, just because I want it, and that’s not—I’m not okay with that. It isn’t okay.”
Mark breathes in, about to speak. Caleb stops him. “Don’t try to talk me out of that.”
“Okay,” Mark says. “You’re right. It’s a fucked up situation, and you’re doing the best you can with it, and the serum, it’s . . . for all the downsides there, I get it.”
“You weren’t acting like you got it,” Caleb grumbles.
“Because you fucking scared me, Caleb! That’s what I can’t get behind here. You’re supposed to go through Joan’s evaluations for this stuff for a reason. You’re supposed to talk to your friends for a reason. And if you were worried we were all gonna try to talk you out of it, maybe there’s a reason for that too, hey?”
“You don’t know my ability better than I do.”
“Maybe not,” Mark says, “but I know you. And I know you’re just trying to do the right thing here, and I know you don’t want to hurt anyone, but you hurt people when you make choices like this without keeping us in the loop, too.”
“Great,” Caleb says, “So I’m just fucking everything up no matter what I do, then.”
“Oh my god, would you stop that?” Mark snaps.
“Stop what?”
“Stop acting like a fucking child! You’re not in high school anymore; use your words like a goddamn adult. If you want my help, listen to what I’m actually saying, don’t just—twist it into whatever lets you feel like a victim, jesus.”
Caleb’s mouth drops open, and he weeps. There’s no build up, just one horrible choked noise and he falls straight into gasping sobs that make his chest heave and shoulders shake.
Mark hasn’t seen Caleb really cry since he broke up with Adam. He reaches out a hand, tentatively lays it on his trembling shoulder. Caleb melts into the touch, messily tangles the hem of Mark’s sweatshirt in his fist to tug at him to come closer, until Mark is holding him in a proper hug.
“I’m sorry,” Caleb gasps. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”
“Hey,” Mark says. “I’ve got you. You’re okay. I’ve got you.” Caleb shudders against him. Mark pulls him even closer, and repeats his reassurances until Caleb’s tears slow and his breathing steadies.
Caleb lifts his head up off Mark’s shoulder, sniffling hard. “Fuck. I didn’t mean to cry all over you. How’s that for childish?”
Mark doesn’t have it in him to laugh, but Caleb manages to elicit half a wry smile with that.
Caleb pulls the rest of the way away from their embrace. He swipes at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I’m sorry. For real. It’s not fair for me to lash out at you like that when you’re helping me. And I’m sorry for. You know. Needing your help in the first place because I did something so dumb.”
“I know,” Mark says. “And I do understand, okay? God, I’m the last person who should ever come after you for doing something reckless and self destructive.”
“I wasn’t trying to self-destruct.”
“No, I know you weren’t. You were trying to do the right thing, in some circumstances that make the right thing really fucking complicated.”
Caleb sniffs again. “Yeah. You were right though, I shouldn’t have done it without talking to anyone. I mean, shit, not telling him about stuff like this was half of why Adam and I—” Caleb’s eyes go wide. “Fuck. I have to tell Adam.”
“You do,” Mark agrees. “But it’s late. You wanna get some rest first? Adam will still be here in the morning. And so will I.”
Caleb looks for a long moment like he’s weighing every option. Finally, he nods. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good idea.”
“He loves you,” Mark reminds him. “He’ll want to be there for you. You just have to let him.”
“Yeah,” Caleb says. “Thanks, Mark.”
“Anytime,” Mark says. “I mean that. And you know I love you, right?”
“Of course,” Caleb says. “I love you too.”
Mark hugs him one more time before pushing himself to his feet and patting him on the shoulder. “Couch pulls out into a bed. I’m gonna grab you some sheets, okay?”
It takes Mark longer than it should to find the sheets. Oliver keeps moving his shit around and refusing to label anything because his system just makes so much intuitive sense that Mark shouldn’t need to be told where his belongings have been hidden.
By the time he steps back into the living area, bedding tucked under his arm, Caleb has already passed out on the couch. Mark wouldn’t dream of waking him, not after the day he’s had. Not when he finally looks something close to peaceful, the worried, angry lines of his face smoothed out in his sleep.
Mark sets the stack of bedding at the foot of the couch, just in case Caleb wakes up and decides he wants to set things up properly. He ruffles Caleb’s hair as he passes him, and heads to bed himself.