Chapter Text
The first thing Y/N learned about Vought was that crying only made them stay longer.
He was seven years old, and he was screaming.
“Don’t leave me! Mom, please don’t leave me!”
His small arms were locked desperately around his mother’s waist, fingers twisted tight into her coat as hot tears poured down his face. He could feel her shaking, could hear her quiet sobs, but she wasn’t fighting back. His father’s strong hands gripped his shoulders, prying him away with grim determination.
“Son, let go,” his father whispered, voice tight. “We have to do this.”
Y/N clung harder, face buried against her stomach. “Don’t leave me here! I’ll be good, I promise! Please!”
His mother turned her face away, shoulders trembling, unable to look at him. The Vought representatives stood nearby in their polished black shoes, watching with polite, patient smiles. One of them checked his watch. Another adjusted his clipboard.
His father finally succeeded in pulling him back. Y/N’s hands slipped from his mother’s coat as strangers in white coats stepped forward to take him. He reached out desperately, small fingers stretching toward them as they simply stepped back.
The steel elevator doors closed with a soft, final hiss.
And just like that, they were gone.
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The underground facility was hell dressed in sterile white.
Endless corridors stretched beneath harsh fluorescent lights that buzzed like angry insects. The air reeked of bleach, antiseptic, and the faint coppery tang of blood that never quite washed away. Children screamed behind thick reinforced doors — raw, broken sounds that echoed through the halls at all hours. Some cries cut off suddenly. Others went on for hours until the voices grew hoarse and finally fell silent.
Y/N learned very quickly that resistance earned pain.
The first time he fought back during a blood draw, they strapped him to a cold metal table and pumped him full of something that made his veins feel like they were on fire. He thrashed and screamed until his throat bled, but the scientists only took notes. “Heightened pain response,” one of them muttered. “Increase dosage next cycle.”
They broke bones to test healing rates. They burned skin to study regeneration. They injected compounds that made children convulse on the floor, foaming at the mouth, while doctors calmly timed how long it took for their hearts to stop racing. Some kids never got back up. Their bodies were wheeled away on gurneys while the rest of the children watched with wide, hollow eyes.
Y/N stopped fighting after the third time they nearly killed him.
He became quiet instead. Watching. Learning. Surviving.
By the time he was eight, the headaches started.
They were violent, blinding things — like someone was hammering nails into his skull from the inside. The first time it happened, blood poured from his nose and ears while he vomited onto the pristine white floor. The doctors celebrated. They restrained him to a chair and ran test after test, needles piercing his scalp, electricity jolting through his temples, until he was sobbing and begging them to stop.
They didn’t.
The thoughts came next.
Not his own thoughts. Other people’s.
Fear. Hunger. Rage. Pain. The minds of the other children leaked into his like open wounds. He heard a girl three rooms down silently praying for death. He heard a scientist wondering how much more Compound V a child’s body could take before it simply ruptured. He heard an orderly fantasizing about hurting the small boy strapped to the table in front of him.
It was too much.
For weeks he thought he was losing his mind. He would press his hands over his ears and rock back and forth, whispering his own name like a prayer just to stay grounded. The scientists pushed harder. They wanted results. They wanted control.
When tiny thoughts trickeled from his brain
*Look away.*
*Forget I spoke.*
*Leave me alone.*
Vought of course became ecstatic. A psychic supe. Marketable. Valuable. Useful.
Executives started appearing more frequently during evaluations, watching him through observation windows while speaking in hushed excited voices. One executive described him as “a demographic goldmine.”
Y/N was too young to fully understand the sentence. Old enough to hate the way it sounded.
Then one night, shortly after his ninth birthday, a new voice slipped into his head.
*Please…*
It was small. Scared. Childish.
Y/N sat up in his narrow bed, heart pounding.
*Please help me…*
He hesitated, afraid it was another hallucination, but the voice felt different. Real. Desperate in a way that mirrored his own pain.
“Who are you?” he thought back, tentative and afraid.
A long silence followed.
Then, soft and wondering:
*You… you can hear me?*
Y/N’s breath caught. For the first time in years, something warm bloomed in his chest — fragile, childish hope.
*They know you can hear me?* the boy asked quickly, fear sharpening his thoughts.
“No,” Y/N replied inside his mind. “I don’t think so.”
Another pause. Careful. Hopeful.
*My name is John.*
And just like that, in the cold, endless white hell beneath Vought Tower, Y/N was no longer completely alone.