Chapter Text
Things move quickly in the aftermath.
It doesn’t just end for Finney and Robin when they leave that basement. It only shifts.
They become bugs under a microscope. Poking, prodding, questioning… God, so much questioning. Invasive and demanding ones, making it all sharper, more real. Details, little ones they had been able to ignore or push to the side, are brought forward and forced out into the light for everyone to see. It makes them feel ugly and small. It makes them feel like they never left the basement at all.
Robin succumbs to numerous surgeries, none of which he remembers. ‘Touch and go’ is the phrase the doctors use as he gets stitched back up like Frankenstein, leaving scars that’ll last forever. He’s out of it for the most part but eventually becomes aware again, looking at the criss cross stitching covering most of his face. Even though his mom cries when she sees this and Ernesto winces at how ugly he’s become, part of Robin feels almost glad.
Maybe now no one will want him like how the grabber did.
Throughout the ambulance ride to the hospital, Finney clings to Gwen and… his dad? It’s not cause he makes him feel safe, safety is an illusion Finn stopped believing in the second he got pulled into that dark van, but more a familiarity. His dad is at least an adult he knows won’t hurt him. At least not in that way.
A rape kit is ordered. It’s clear what happened to Finn the second they cut off his clothes and put him in a hospital gown. The markings laced across his skin tell his story for him.
For Finney, it feels just as real as it did then. To him, it’s happening all over again, only a small fragment of his mind trying to remind him he’s in a hospital. That it’s over. But he doesn’t know what to believe with hands back on him, in the same places he touched, pain and discomfort just like before. He sobs throughout the whole thing, snot and tears commingling and running down his chin. His hands grip the sheets beneath him, eyes squeezed shut as he suffers through this. He shakes so hard the bed frame rattles and, when they get to a certain point in the examination, he upheaves violently into a metal container put in front of him just in time. He vomits with such force, his spine hurts from lurching forward and his eyes sting.
“Stop, stop. I want my dad.” He whispers once the vomiting stops, still in between the hospital and the basement, scared if he says it any louder he’ll get angry and hurt him more.
They had asked earlier if he wanted his dad in there while they performed the rape kit. Finn had said no, not wanting the examination to even happen in the first place, let alone have his dad there as witness, to see him like that.
He wanted him now.
Most of the nurses and doctors don’t even hear him but one of them does. An older woman with kind eyes and blonde hair pulled back in a pony tail tells everyone to stop as she goes to get his dad.
When his dad comes in, eyes red rimmed and puffy from shedding his own tears, Finney instantly clings to him, needing something to prove it isn’t all happening again. That he isn’t back there. With his dad, it’s a little easier to be more present since he knows for a fact his dad was never in that basement. He knows this, because he remembers at times how much he wanted him to be. With his dad, he can bury his face in his shoulder, breathe his familiar scent that doesn’t smell like must and blood and something else.
Something worse.
For Robin, he’s examined but not as invasively as Finney had to be. However, once the examination is underway, he shuts down entirely. He doesn't talk, doesn’t move, and lets them do whatever they want to him. Whatever they want. While in his head he goes somewhere else, somewhere far away, detached from his physical body and what is being done to it.
His mother calls his name, sees the vacant look in his eyes. He doesn’t respond.
He can’t escape the questions as easily. Robin’s forced to be present for those, painfully in the here and now as a woman who introduces herself as a social worker begins searching for information Robin doesn’t want to give. It feels like being skinned, skin being pulled off inch by excruciating inch, exposing red and inflamed muscle, making everything worse, making everything feel exposed. A combination of stinging and burning that makes one nauseous.
At first he refuses to speak, doesn’t even so much as give her a sniffle. It feels like a betrayal to tell her all the shameful, horrible things that happened to them. Like he’s exposing some big secret only him and Finney are supposed to know. He’s worried he’ll tell her what happened and she’ll look at him like something disgusting. Like an animal carcass, already rotting and picked through to the bone and then go and tell everyone else- his mom, Ernesto- how he came back all wrong and it’d be best to just abandon him now, let some other version of the grabber have him since there’s no point in him still being alive anyway considering how dirtied he is.
She doesn’t let up.
Instead, she informs him how if he tells her all that happened to them, they could help them, help Finney. They just need to understand. She goes on to explain to Robin words like trauma and PTSD and mental health. When she mentions ‘suicidal ideation’, what happened to Finn’s mom jumps into his head.
“Will it actually help?” He mumbles, sounding so tired. He’s so tired.
“Yes.” And she looks like she means it. But he’s learned adults are good at lying.
“Plus, it might give some closure to the families of the other boys. If they know a little more about what happened.”
‘Doubtful.’ Robin thinks, but he knows in a way she’s right. Those families deserve to know what happened to their loved ones, no matter how heinous the truth is.
So he caves.
He gives her a detailed report of everything that happened. Everything that was done to the both of them in that basement, omitting nothing. He only wants to do this once. He answers all of her questions fully and with detail, delivering the information in a deadened monotone voice. He just wants to go home.
‘For Finney.’ He repeats to himself. ‘This is for Finney.’ Even though when he tells her the stuff that only happened to Finn and the fact that Finn was the one to kill the grabber, guilt sits heavy in his stomach. He’s starting to get used to its weight.
At the end of his long explanation she excuses herself. Robin could see she had begun to cry. Again, the weight of guilt makes a fluttering kick and he feels as though he has done something wrong. He’s not surprised, he hasn’t been able to do much right lately.
They attempt to question Finney, but for the entire first few months out of the basement he doesn’t say a thing. Not to the police, not to his dad, not even to Gwen or Robin. The basement had taught him that his words don’t matter. Words, the power of them, had lost their meaning down there. It’s not that he doesn’t want to talk or scream or cuss, it’s just that he can’t. Anytime he tries, a lump forms in his throat, solid and unmoving, and his words can’t seem to get around it. In the basement he had talked. He had begged. He had said no.
And he had been ignored.
Deep in his bones he remembers this, how it had meant nothing down there. Why would it be any different now?
Eventually they both get to leave the hospital and go home. Their first nights back in their own beds they sleep like rocks. The nightmares haven’t started yet, and Robin’s mom and Finney’s dad stay next to their child’s beds all night, mesmerized by their breathing, the way their eyes flutter in their sleep, watching as their small hands clench and unclench, noticing any little twitch.
‘They’re safe. They’re safe. They are alive and they are safe.’ They repeat to themselves, amazed at the fact that it’s true. That after everything, their sons are home.
It’s not long after that the reality sets in. Robin and Finney are home, but it's far from over. The road to recovery is bumpy and paved with varying obstacles and setbacks.
Wendy enrolls Robin in therapy she can barely afford nearly right away. It’s expensive, and puts more stress on her financially, but it’s worth it. When Robin had been in the hospital, she had done her research, learned how trauma can impact a child, and she knew her baby boy needed more help than she could give.
Ernesto treats Robin like an alien from another planet, unsure whether to give it space or succumb to his curiosity. He can’t look at the large scar taking up half of his brother’s face. He can’t look away. The scar scares him a little, and he’s ashamed to admit that. Robin scares him a little now. So he doesn’t really talk to him, worried he’ll upset him, say the wrong thing. He no longer asks him to play (does Robin even still like to play?) or go to the park with him which means no park at all since no way is their mom letting either of them go anywhere alone ever again.
Robin catches all this, tries to pretend his little brother’s persistent staring doesn’t bother him. He knows it’s his scar, the one on his face, the one everyone’s eyes are instantly drawn to anytime they see him now. It runs all the way down from his hairline to his chin on the right side of his face, scar tissue swollen and puckered and, once the stitches get taken out, stark white against his olive toned skin. He knows it makes him look scary and he leans into this, staring right back at anyone whose eyes linger too long on him. When people say he’s the one that killed the grabber, like it’s something he and Finn had done together, he doesn’t bother to correct them. He wants people to think of him like that. As ruthless and tough.
The glasses don’t help.
Turns out, an axe to the face isn’t very good on the eyes. The doctors tell him he’s lucky he can still even partially see out of his right eye even if, without the glasses, it makes half of everything blurry, so he has to wear them. Show a weakness or actually have a weakness, those are his two options in terms of the glasses, and he figures the scar and rumors are enough to secure his image.
Still, they bother him, and at night, when he gets to be alone in the bathroom, he’ll run the shower so no one disturbs him and just stare at the scar for hours, trying to recognize this new face of his. His fingers will delicately trace the raised skin, the one on his stomach too, and his mind will replay the feel of it, the bright pain and the stickiness of the blood. There had been so much blood…
He doesn’t know this new person in the mirror. He doesn’t know if he wants to.
Finney’s family try to give Finn space since they don’t know what to do with him. This silent, broken boy now scared of his own shadow. It’s okay though, space is what he wants… isn’t it?
For Gwen, the brother she had known better than her own self at times she now has to relearn. His triggers, foods he won’t eat (eggs, she learned, were a hard no for reasons she couldn’t even begin to fathom), read his body language since words were nonexistent now, and how to get him to breathe again (in moments when panic would grip him). It was a difficult game but one she was grateful to play considering the alternative, considering the very near possibility it had been to never even have gotten him back at all.
For Terrance it’s harder. He hadn’t been close to Finney in years and, even more than that, hadn’t been a gentle parent in even longer. And right now, all Finney could seem to handle was gentle. He’d never seen the kid such a… wreck. An asshole thing to think, but true. The poor kid looked nearly strung out- always on edge, flinching at any sudden sound or movement. He was a delicate vase, one already cracked and glued back together, that Terrance and Gwen treated as such.
Time continues to move on around them. Eventually, the rest of the world does too. They go from the headlines to a small blip in the news and then return to nothing. They grow bigger, taller, changing physically, growing up, as the time passes. However the stares continue- at Robin’s scar, at Finney- and the whispers never fully stop. Their reputations forever marred by the grabber, forever tied to him. A dark shadow cast over their heads.
They’ll always be known as the boys who lived when others hadn’t.