NOTE: I had a copyright issue that I was trying to resolve, and all my work was temporarily taken down. However, I've decided to put it back up, because regulating it would be too much of an inconvenience to some of my readers. I have decided, though, to revise all of it first. I hope this all doesn't inconvenience anyone too much. I hope to get everything back up quickly.

Title: Vicarious Pain

Author: Chantrea Johari

Rating: R

Summary: When a boy gets taken to a government-run research facility, he threatens to uncover a dangerous and possibly illegal plot. But falling for one of the employees definitely complicates things.

Warnings: This story contains slash, which means relationships and sex between two men. Which means mature content as well. Also, it contains relationships between two people with a considerable age gap. If either of those things bothers you, please, don’t read this. This is my first and only warning.

Further Warnings: Contains content pertaining to the “supernatural” i.e. many of the characters in the story are psychic. If you’re a big anti-supernatural person, then this probably isn’t the story for you. For those of you who don’t know, empathy (in the psychic sense) is the ability to sense the feelings, and sometimes thoughts, of those around you.

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Voices drifted in and out of my perception as I slipped in and out of consciousness. I had no idea where I was, nor any recollection of how I had gotten there. It seemed that my eyes weren’t working properly because I could not open them—but I could sense bright lights through my closed eyelids. Nor were my limbs working properly because I could not move them.

I couldn’t feel…there was nothing. My empathy was off. I couldn’t feel what the bodiless voices around me felt, which was surprising and disconcerting. Yet I was almost thankful for it, for the reprieve form the constant barrage of thoughts I had felt my entire life. Though even without the onslaught of the thoughts of others, I still felt an excessive pounding within my skull. It hurt—god, it hurt! I couldn’t figure out what was happening, or where I was.

I tried to struggle, but my limbs still refused to move. I felt lethargic—my arms and legs weighted down with something indeterminably heavy. I tried to open my mouth to scream, but that didn’t work either.

“Is he secured?” asked a first voice, and I struggled to identify it; yet it wasn’t familiar to me at all. The voice was male, and rough like sandpaper. The tone was severe, just leaking with malevolence.

“Yes, he is secure. We can transport him to the Center now,” returned a second voice, also male, also unidentifiable. The second voice was equally harsh, but it lacked the cruelty that the other voice had been imbued with. It was deep, but played out like in and elegant way, like a cello perfectly tuned and played by the most skilled musician.

There was a deep, exasperated sigh. “Is this all really necessary?” A female voice this time, with the slightest hint of an accent that could be English—Irish even. My muddled mind couldn’t tell.

Suddenly, my empathy opened back up—probably due to the intensity of the emotion—and I felt a wave of overwhelming rage. It hit my body like a truck, and I wished once again that I could scream; but I couldn’t even manage a whimper.

Sandpaper-voice rung in my ears again, filled with such anger that I was left with no doubt as to who the rage had come from. “Do you question my methods, Doctor?” the voice seethed. “May I remind you that you are both under my direct authority.”

“I think what she means—” jumped in the man with a voice like a cello, who was clearly not intimidated buy sandpaper-voice’s threats “—is that you could have been a little less…violent. He is just a child, after all.” Yet despite the warmth that the words indicated, the tone was cold, like a sad sonata played by a forlorn musician.

“You’re barely more than a child yourself,” the first man bit out gruffly.

There was a moment of silence, and I tried to shift due to the discomfort of constantly maintaining the same position. Still, however, my limbs seemed determined to disobey my mind, and attempting to make them do otherwise only make my head throb more fiercely.

I felt anger and indignation from the first man, sympathy from the woman, but nothing from the second man. It was as if he was not in the room at all. I would have known nothing of his presence were it not for his voice, speaking to the other two in the room.

“Be that as it may—” began the second man, but the voices drifted away so that they seemed only to be background noise. I think I slipped into unconsciousness once again.

When I came to—minutes, hours, or perhaps even days later—I groaned in protest at the pain in my muscles. However, movement seemed to come back to me and I shifted around, only to find that I was bound by some sort of leather straps, both on my arms and on my feet. There was something hard and metal beneath my back. I tried to struggle, but found my body to be too weak to do much but flail around a little. My eyes still wouldn’t seem to open.

My senses brought something else to my attention as well. From the light rumbling of what I had once thought to be a room, I could tell that we were moving—most likely on the ground. So where was I being taken? And by whom?

I cast my powers out, feeling for the presence of anyone in the area. At the very edges of my senses—which I found that I could not cast as far as I was used to being able to—I could sense the woman from earlier, the one emitting feelings of sympathy and kindness. Much nearer, though, I could feel someone else, and that person was getting closer to me.

This man was not either of the men whose voices I had heard earlier, I could tell, for he seemed to have a more benevolent, forgiving character. Suddenly, I heard the cello-voiced man speaking to the new presence I had sensed, and I cursed myself for not identifying the other man sooner. I attempted to weave my power into his mind, to sense him, only to find myself being cast out by strong shields. I couldn’t tell a single thing he was thinking.

Voices reached my ears, muffled as though they were on the other side of a door.

“What does Agent Richards want with this boy anyway? He’s only a simple empath,” said a voice I did not recognize, a voice that was whimsical and compassionate. I froze where I was, trying to get my power to penetrate cello-voice’s shields. These men knew about my power. They knew that I was different. Was that why they had taken me?

“Don’t underestimate an empath,” the cello-voiced man replied cryptically. “Though an empath possesses no offensive psychic power, he or she can be very useful—especially in cases of recon. He can sense the foremost thoughts on a person’s mind, as I can assure you he’s done to you as he’s just attempted to do to me.”

“He’s awake?” the other voice inquired, startled.

Fearful that I had just been caught, I began struggling against my bonds once again. I didn’t want to fall back into unconsciousness. I wanted to know what was going on.

I heard the sound of a door opening and closing and footsteps echoing across the floor toward me. “Well I’ll be,” the third mysterious man said, his footsteps stopping. “I thought you’d be unconscious until we arrived.”

I opened my mouth to bite back a reply, but found it still to be an impossible task. I managed to open my mouth, but no sound came out. I closed it again resignedly.

The man’s hand came into contact with my arm, and my mouth opened again in a silent scream as the physical contact heightened my connection to him. All his thoughts, his emotions came pouring into me, and I struggled against the touch.

I felt a pinprick on my arm and I fell unconscious once more.

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The next time I woke, I felt a soft mattress beneath me. A pair of small hands was placed on my forehead, but this touch did not assault my mind; in fact, it seemed to soothe it. I groaned contentedly at the calming feeling that weaved its way through my body, my limbs no longer uncomfortable.

I chanced an attempt to open my eyes, and this time it worked, my vision blurry as my eyes first opened. I blinked my eyes a couple of times, things swimming through my vision until I saw double—two of everything weaving around each other—before I could finally see clearly.
I found myself looking up into a pair of nearly-black eyes that regarded me inquisitively. After a few seconds, it became apparent that these eyes actually belonged to a person; a little girl with pretty blonde curls and light olive skin. She looked to be no older than ten, and wore a pale blue dress with ruffles. She smiled at me self-consciously, revealing two rows of slightly crooked teeth.

What struck me the most, however, was her aura. Every person in the world has an aura, and I can see them all, but I had never met a single person with an aura that glowed as brightly or was as readily apparent as this little girl’s. It was pale blue, almost matching her dress, save for the fact that it glowed brightly, like a giant lamp all around her body.

“Are you feeling better?” she asked shyly, her tone all innocence as she pulled her tiny hands away from my forehead.

“Yeah,” I replied, because I felt okay, but I couldn’t really remember how I had felt before to say definitively whether or not I was ‘better’. But this seemed to assuage the little girl and she smiled at me again as I sat up in bed.

“Where are we?” I asked after a second, trying to remember what had happened before. I remembered just bits and pieces; I remembered voices that spoke words I could barely recall and not being able to move. I recalled being in some sort of vehicle—a train maybe?—and somebody giving me some sort of shot.

I looked down at my arm and spotted two pinprick marks, confirming that it had not been an elaborate dream.

“Blackthorn Manor,” the little girl answered with a smile, but the name didn’t mean anything to me.

I looked around the room, noticing for the first time the elaborate decorations that corresponded to this place being called a “manor”. The walls were made of grey stone and the curtains in the room were deep red. I looked down at the duvet my body lay under to see that it was also elaborately decorated in various shades of red, orange, yellow, and gold. The bed was an old-fashioned four-poster with a matching canopy above it, though with no curtains, and there was antique-looking furniture placed throughout the room.

I was thankful, however, that the electricity seemed to be modern, despite the antique feel of everything else.

“And where exactly is Blackthorn Manor?” I asked after I had surveyed the room.

“Virginia,” the little girl answered, causing my eyes to widen. I lived in Oregon—and yet, I had somehow been transported all the way across the country against my will, and for some purpose unbeknownst to me.

I decided to change tactics.

“What’s your name?” I asked the girl, and she gave me another big-toothed grin.

“My name’s Marie. Marie Devereux,” she replied happily. “And you’re Ciaran,” she continued surely, pronouncing my name with a soft c.

“Yes, but the c is a hard c, like the c in ‘cat’,” I clarified, and she repeated my name, this time pronouncing it correctly. I was left to wonder how she knew my name, yet didn’t seem to know how to say it properly. “How old are you Marie?”

“I’m ten!” she said proudly, sounding accomplished. “My birthday was last month!”

I found her excitement bubbling over into me, filling my empathetic bond with unprecedented amounts of happiness. I wasn’t used to feeling happiness from other people—more often than not, the depression and pessimism in the world outweighed the happiness. That contributed a lot to do with the fact that I could not stand large crowds. So much depression in one place easily led to physical pain, to a deep ache in my head.

“And do you live here, Marie?” I asked gently. Marie nodded emphatically. “Where are your parents?”

Marie shifted uncomfortably, toying with the hem of her dress. I felt confusion and sadness coming from her, but I felt too weak to put up a my flimsy version of a shield to block it. My head began pounding once again, albeit, not as badly as before.

“My parents are dead,” she replied softly, her blonde curls falling down to frame her face as she lowered her head sadly.

I shifted uncomfortably. “Oh. I’m sorry,” I replied, not sure what else to say to the suddenly gloomy looking young girl. “Who do you live with then?”

Marie looked up at me again, her dark eyes once again sparkling. “The doctors here take care of us. They help us.”

I was unsure of whether to ask first who ‘us’ was or who the doctors were. I settled for the former. “Who is ‘us’?” I questioned.

“Me, Dante, Bryce, and Blaise,” she replied. Since I didn’t think I would get very far asking about all of those people, I switched to the latter concern.

“Who are the doctors? Are you sick?”

Marie looked at me like I was the stupidest person on the planet. “No, silly!” she replied, her voice bubbly and energetic. “Not those kind of doctors. We’re not sick, we’re special. That’s what Doctor Stone always tells me. They’re scientists,” she said, her voice getting all low and amazed and her eyes growing wide.

I raised an eyebrow. “And what do these scientists do?” I questioned warily. This was all starting to sound like some horror or sci-fi B-movie script; or worse—a soap opera. My mom watched those all the time, and I had never understood the appeal.

I thought back to my parents in Oregon and myself here, in Virginia, so far away from them. I shook the depressing thought away immediately.

“They help us,” she repeated, obviously not going any further with that information. “The doctors are nice; you’ll like them. Even Doctor Matheson, but he seems sad all the time. But the agent who always comes in here is mean. I don’t like him at all.”

My other eyebrow rose to join the first, and I shifted under the covers. I was highly tempted to just get up and walk out of this “manor” but what would I do once I got out? I was all the way across the country from anyone and anyplace I knew. There was also the fact that I didn’t really trust my legs to support me after quite obviously having been sedated by these “nice doctors” that Marie was talking about.

“What kind of agent?”

She shrugged, sitting up slightly to place her feet behind her and sit on them. “I don’t know, but I think he works for the government,” she whispered, as if she expected that she would get punished if someone heard her say it. “He’s always wearing suits, and every time he comes in here, he seems really mad at Doctor Matheson.”

I thought about all I had just heard from the little blonde girl, weighing my options. I could try to get away from here and call my parents, though I had little idea where I was past what state I was in. Or I could go to find these doctors and demand to find out why the hell they had dragged me across the county without mine or my parents’ permission—and, of course, risk the chance of being sedated again. Neither seemed to be a very attractive option.

“Can you take me to see one of these doctors?” I asked finally, making a decision. I couldn’t stand to just sit around not doing anything.

“Mmm hmm!” Marie replied, jumping off the bed excitedly, her blue dress swirling around her. I also noticed that she was wearing matching blue mary janes and a pair of white socks with ruffles on them. She looked somewhat like an oversized doll, what with her curly hair and poofy dress.

I swung my legs off the edge of the bed, trying to stand for the first time. My legs protested at my weight for a second and I grabbed one of the rods holding up the bed’s canopy until my legs felt less like jelly. It was only then that I noticed that I was dressed in a pair of sweat pants and a sweatshirt that weren’t mine.

To my surprise, my thoughts didn’t even rebel at that situation. I had been dragged across the country by some weird scientists who apparently wanted to ‘help’ me by sedating me and kidnapping me, who were apparently connected to some (probably covert) government operation, and who knew that I could read other people’s emotions and foremost thoughts, in the very least. The fact that someone had also changed my clothes, and apparently known my size, while I was sleeping didn’t seem so weird compared to all that.

I tossed my long, wavy blonde hair over my shoulder and let go of the bedpost, finding that my legs actually held me up that time. The little girl with the brightly glowing baby blue aura held out a small hand to me, and I took it, letting her lead me out the bedroom door.

Surprisingly, her touch still didn’t cause my body to rebel. It soothed me still, and I could see wisps of that strong aura fading into my hand in tendrils, mixing with my own pinkish one. It didn’t seem to be hurting her, though, for her aura was no less bright for it, and it soothed my still stiff body in ways I couldn’t explain. I started to feel like I imagined one might feel after a good massage, had I ever been able to get close enough to anybody for them to give me one. But the touch was so relaxing that I let her keep at it as she pulled me down the several hallways to a set of double doors.

Marie knocked a sound pattern into the door, and a voice from within called out, “Come in!” I recognized the voice as the one I had heard when I was partially conscious, the one that reminded me of a string orchestra.

Marie opened one of the doors and led me into a room that looked kind of like a library and a study combined. The walls were all covered in bookshelves, filled with leather-bound volumes that I knew must have resided in the manor for years. My eyes were drawn immediately to a desk on the other side of the room, appearing as antique as the rest of the furniture and most of the books in the library.

A man looked up from a paper he was reading to regard the pair of us, his face an emotionless mask. “Marie, thank you for bringing Ciaran to me,” the man said flatly, putting down the pen he was holding. The man looked to be tall, though he was sitting, was broad-shouldered and had short black hair and golden brown eyes. He was a direct contrast to me, in that I was short and slender with long blond-brown hair and blue eyes. He looked to be at least ten years older than me; in his late twenties at least. He was very clearly attractive, and I imagined that he must have tons of women after him.

“You’re welcome, Doctor Matheson!” she said happily, her giggle bringing a smile to my lips once again. Doctor Matheson’s expression, however, didn’t alter in the slightest.

“You can go now; I think that I should speak to Ciaran alone,” he said after a second.

“Okay Doctor Matheson!” she replied, letting go of my hand and skipping out of the room without another word.

The doctor then turned to me. “Ciaran,” he said cordially. “Perhaps you should sit down.” He indicated a chair across the desk from where he sat.

“Sure,” I said warily, dropping down into the chair and eyeing him distrustfully. The older man’s features remained calm, placid.

“I’m sure you’re wondering why you’re here.”

I rolled my eyes. “Among other things,” I replied sardonically. I cast out my senses for the first time since I had woken up in this place, and probed at the other man’s mind—which was still shielded.

“Don’t try to get into my mind, Ciaran,” Doctor Matheson said warningly, his eyes razor-sharp but expressionless still. “I don’t appreciate it. This will be the first and only time I’ll warn you.”

“Okay,” I found myself replying, without any real consent from my brain. I found my attention being drawn instead to his aura, which was surprisingly just as bright as Marie’s had been, but not vibrant; his, instead, was a kind of dull shade of grey. I remembered once, when I was seven, that I had caught a lizard and put it in cage; the aura of that tiny animal had glowed the same color, though nowhere near as brightly, before it had died not a few weeks later. I shivered, though it wasn’t cold in the room.

“To put it simply, Ciaran, you are here because of your considerable psychic abilities. This manor has recently been converted into a research center into psychic phenomena. You, like the other children, have been brought here in hopes of cultivating your gifts,” Doctor Matheson explained.

I felt anger surge into me, my mouth now working without full consent of my brain. “What about my parents? I’m sure they didn’t agree to this!”

The older man eyed me stalwartly. “Your parents did not object to this arrangement,” he said dispassionately, exuding an aura of control I could feel even without being able to read his thoughts. I had never understood what people who weren’t empathetic meant when they said they could ‘sense’ something about a person—now I was beginning to understand it.

I stared at him in disbelief. I couldn’t believe that my parents would ever let me be taken to some research facility across the country. Especially not without even talking to me about it beforehand. This was all crazy, and the doctor sitting across from me was obviously lying.

“That’s it, I’m leaving. I’m going to go call my parents and get out of this place!” I exclaimed, standing up.

“Sit down Ciaran,” Doctor Matheson commanded, and despite my better judgment, I found myself complying. I had no idea why I didn’t just get up and do what I had intended. “You can’t just leave the facility, Ciaran. There is a powerful psychic shield keeping you from doing so, and no one but the other doctors and I have access to outside phone lines without my express consent.”

I stared at him angrily. “So you can keep us in here like caged animals to study us like lab rats?” I demanded furiously.

“I’m sure if you speak to the other children here, you will find that none of them feel like lab rats. I assume you spoke to Marie, and surely she didn’t express such a sentiment.” The man’s arrogant tone made me want to punch him in the face. With much effort, I managed to suppress the urge.

I was tempted to suggest instead that he and the other doctors simply brainwashed them, but I changed my mind at the last moment. “Fine,” I bit out instead. I knew that if I wanted to find a way around this shit, I’d have to keep my mouth shut. Luckily enough for me, my curiosity took over and I found myself able to change the subject. “So…are all the kids here…you know…psychic?” I asked. I thought that I was putting up a pretty good show of nonchalance, but Doctor Matheson’s impassive features neither supported nor refuted that thought.

“Yes, they all are,” Doctor Matheson answered simply.

“So what can Marie do?” I asked, thinking back to the little doll-like girl I had met when I woke up.

“Marie is a powerful psychic healer.”