///~///~

Chapter 16 - There You Are.

“Hey, Daph. It’s me,” Justin stated as soon as the call was answered. “My parents let me use the landline to call you so they could eavesdrop and make sure we didn’t discuss anything other than our English project.”

“Hallelujah!” Daphne rejoiced facetiously. “I was worried that, as soon as he got you home, your father would murder you, dismember your body, and we would never find where all the pieces were buried.”

“Ha ha,” Justin replied without any humor at all. “You’re not far off.”

“You’re okay though?”

“Yeah. For the time being,” Justin answered curtly.

“Okay, well, what can I do?”

“I can’t talk for long, Daphne. I’m still on lockdown in my room.” Justin glared sideways at his mother, who was nervously waiting for him to end his phone call. “I just wanted to ask if you would take over on that section of the TEXT I was working on earlier today. Then I’ll follow up with the next part tomorrow, when I have access to a computer at school again.

“Text?” Daphne questioned, obviously confused at first. Luckily, the girl was a quick study, and caught on only a few seconds later. “Oh, you mean the text you sent to Brian using my phone, right? You want me to text him and let him know you’re okay?”

“Exactly. And just keep an OPEN MIND about the next part of our project.” Justin made sure to emphasize the words ‘open mind’ so that Daphne would twig onto the fact that the phrase had special meaning; hopefully she would understand and transmit those words to Brian along with the rest of his message. “We can follow up tomorrow with whatever needs to be done next.”

“Got it. I’ll pass that along to Brian,” Daphne promised. “In the meantime, don’t let your dad get to you, Jus. He’s just itching to find more reasons to punish you and you don’t need to egg him on more than you already have.” Justin huffed a small mirthless laugh at that warning - not that he didn’t agree with his friend. “And also, you’re gonna need to watch your back tomorrow at school. Hobbs was pretty fucking furious after your little display in front of school this afternoon and, judging by the rumors I’m hearing, he’s on the warpath for you. I still can’t believe you announced to everyone and their brother that you gave him a hand job last fall. You’re either absolutely insane or have the biggest balls of anyone I’ve ever met.”

“Yeah, well . . . whatever.” Justin didn’t exactly know how to respond to his friend’s grudging respect - at least not with his mother hovering around the way she was. “We’ve got bigger things to worry about right now anyway. I’ll deal with that topic later. But, for right now, we just need to CONCENTRATE and fix the problem with this current subject. That’s the most important thing, right?” Justin again emphasize the word ‘concentrate’ and hoped his friend understood the veiled reference that he wanted her to relay to Brian in her text. “I guess that’s it for now, Daph. Hopefully, I can work on this more tomorrow.”

Justin hung up the phone and gave his mother a nasty look before grabbing a can of Pringles out of the pantry and a soda out of the fridge. He ignored her plaintive, ‘Justin, honey, please . . .’ as he marched back up the stairs to his room. He was done with her useless sympathy. As long as she was unwilling to stand up to his father, it meant nothing to him. 

At least he hadn’t had to listen to his father’s ongoing lectures for that long. Craig had fumed silently the entire drive from the school to the house and then, after a brief, angry explanation to Jennifer about Justin’s additional transgressions, had left for some important business dinner. However, Justin could tell from his father’s unspoken but roiling emotions that he wasn’t going to completely escape the inevitable fallout from the afternoon’s events; his real punishment was just being put on hold for the time being. 

Craig left after giving his wife strict instructions that Justin wasn’t to be allowed out of his room for ANY reason. Justin had been forced to plead for a good fifteen minutes just to be allowed to make that one short phone call to Daphne about their ‘English Project’. He sensed that even that small concession was making Jennifer very anxious. She just wasn’t comfortable going against her husband’s direct wishes, no matter how much she loved her son. Justin wasn’t going to be able to sweet talk his mom into taking his side this time. He realized he was on his own and would have to figure things out for himself. Hence, the cryptic message sent to Brian by way of Daphne.

Now it was time to see if Brian was willing to give Justin’s theory a try.

Justin returned to his room and set his snacks aside on the desk. Then he turned off all the lights except for one small, blue-tinged, LED reading lamp he kept on his night stand. He kicked off his shoes and laid down on the bed, pulling the quilt his grandmother had made for his birthday up as far as his chest so as to fend off any possible chill caused by the cold outside. And, once he was situated as comfortably as possible, he began to systematically relax his body, concentrating on one body part at a time, starting with his feet and proceeding up through his legs, his torso, his chest, his back, and his arms, breathing deeply and steadily all the while, till his entire being was completely at ease and tension free. 

Finally, when his body felt so heavy and warm that it seemed like he was sinking into the mattress, Justin opened up his senses and reached out towards the consciousness of his lover, Brian Kinney.

It took a while. Justin’s mind seemed to know exactly WHERE to go to find Brian, but it felt like every time he’d get near his target, he was redirected elsewhere. It was as if he was hitting some invisible barrier and then sliding off. But he persisted, continuing to recalibrate and redirect his efforts, returning again and again to knock against the wall of Brian's closed off mind. 

Justin imagined himself slowly chipping away at the tough outer shell of his target. Trying to bore a permanent hole through the protective casing surrounding Brian. Trying to penetrate the barriers Brian had erected around himself. Prying and poking and chiseling away, brick by brick, piece by piece, atom by atom even, envisioning himself slowly gaining ground in his assault against the emotional wall separating them. Until, finally, Justin began to sense a glimmer of something tangible leaking out from behind those shields and he knew he was finally in.

All of a sudden, Justin felt like his body was suffused with a warm, greenish-gold light. He noted a quiet elation matching his own. His body was no longer heavy; he was lighter than air and felt as if he was floating. His heart began to beat in time to the pulse of energy coming from the other end of the connection. They seemed to fit together perfectly. It was like he’d just found the other half of himself or maybe some part of himself he’d forgotten about and just rediscovered. The rush of relief at having found that heretofore missing piece washed through him and strengthened the connection as it filled him up from within, giving him more power than he’d ever had before. 

‘There you are!’ Justin thought to himself, receiving an echoing thrum of acknowledgment from Brian’s end of the connection, almost as if Brian could understand the inflection of his thoughts even over the distance that they were physically separated. 

The overwhelming sense of peace and comfort from their first joining didn’t last long, though. Brian’s distress over his son’s situation bled through the connection after only a few seconds. The feeling was so strong that Justin flinched when it hit him and their link flickered for a second or two before he was able to stabilize it. But the minor glitch scared him enough that he remembered the purpose of this exercise and decided to move on with the real agenda before he lost the connection for good.

‘Hang on. Don’t let go. Don’t pull back.’ Justin projected the words at his unseen companion, hoping their import made it through the dubious connection.

Justin concocted an image in his mind’s eye of one of Brian’s beautiful, slender, sensitive hands and imagined his own smaller hand grasping it tightly. Then, hand-in-hand, Justin turned his awareness outward, dragging Brian along with him, searching through the emotional ether for Gus’ kidnapper. Justin sensed several connections leading away from Brian in various directions. They appeared and disappeared from his inner vision, like strings tying Brian to the people he was associated with in real life, some more substantial than others, each one tinged a different color and glowing with its own intensity. It was as if Justin were seeing the auras of each separate relationship. And, for a brief instant, Justin saw an image that couldn’t possibly have come from his own memory, in which two boys were playing a game with tin cans attached to a long piece of cord, pretending the cans were telephones. The visual analogy made Justin smile and somehow he could feel Brian smiling in the background as well. 

Justin tried to use his empathic skills to sort out the many strings, feeling along each with his mind, and attempting to suss out which one was the right string to follow. He quickly passed over a translucent periwinkle blue strand, a dull lavender strand, a vibrant purple strand, and a pale green strand that reminded Justin of new leaves in the springtime. None of those felt like the right vibe. 

Eventually, though, Justin dug deeper, feeling out the more tentative strands and the ones that seemed less used, until he came across a group of connections that felt uncomfortable and threatening. When he looked at these strings, they were all tinged a dark red and shaded with black shadows around the edges. These were not happy connections. There was violence and anger and pain attached to each one of these connections. Justin could sense Brian trying to pull away from him as he examined this particular group of strands but Justin held tighter to the imaginary hand in his and refuse to let go. 

Finally, in the darkest recesses of Brian‘s psyche, Justin found the connection he was looking for. It was a relatively weak link, as if Brian hadn’t had need of that avenue of communication for some time. But it was tinged an angry, dark, purple-red, and lined with spiky, jagged, black edges up and down its length. 

Justin instinctively knew that was the connection that would lead him to whomever had taken Gus.

When Justin started to follow that monstrous strand, Brian began to fight him. There was a rush of panic that washed over them both and it was almost enough to paralyze the poor empath. But Justin simply refuse to let go of Brian. He refused to give up. He knew that this was going to lead them to the person they’d been seeking for the past several days. He also knew that if he let Brian shrink from this task now, the fear and loathing would probably prevent Brian from ever reaching out like this again. This was their only and best shot of finding the child and Justin wasn’t giving up yet.

That being said, Justin also understood that Brian wasn’t ready to tackle whatever confrontation this might lead to. So, without letting go of either Brian or the link to the kidnapper, Justin used his own strong sense of self assurance to shield his lover. In his mind, he saw himself wrapping Brian’s consciousness with a soft, gemstone-blue cocoon of protection; it dampened their affinity a tiny amount but it would keep Brian safe, which was a fair trade off as far as Justin was concerned. And, once he knew Brian was adequately sheltered from whatever might come, Justin dove down the rabbit hole of that angry link, descending into the kidnapper’s mind once again.

There was a swirl of confusion. A whirl of random shapes and colors spun around him for what felt like an hour or more, but was probably only seconds drawn out by the uncertainty and turbulence around him. Then, slowly, the tangle of images he was seeing coalesced into real shapes that he could identify. 

It had worked. He was there, in that tiny, dark room. Only this time the connection was sharper and more clear. Except for a bit of blurring around the edges of his vision, he could actually see the room in much more detail this time. It was obviously a small bedroom, decorated rather sparsely, with a rickety, old wooden bunk bed pushed up against the left-hand wall, behind the door, a closet on the right, it’s sliding door ajar allowing a cascade of clothing to spill out onto the floor, and wedged between the two, an old, dented, and scratched tallboy dresser against the far wall. There were no windows. The overhead light fixture was dimmed by a beige-frosted shade that was so dirt-encrusted that barely any light made it through. What little of the floor was visible was adorned with a matted and worn, olive-green, shag carpeting. And there, on the floor in front of the dresser, was Gus, lying in the top drawer of the dresser, which had been pulled out and set up as a make-shift crib for the baby. 

Gus was no happier now than the last time Justin had caught a glimpse of him. Despite the images he was seeing being crisper than ever, it seemed that sound didn’t communicate as well, so the noises Justin was getting were still a bit muffled and distant, but that didn’t prevent him from hearing the caterwauling infant. The baby was wailing, his arms and legs waving weakly in the air, his chubby cheeks colored a bright, unhealthy red, and lined with the salty tracks of partially dried tears. It broke Justin‘s heart seeing the boy like that. He longed to reach out, scoop the infant up in his arms, and comfort him. But the kidnapper wasn’t feeling nearly as charitable towards the baby. The emotion coming off the person whose eyes Justin was seeing through was one of disgust and annoyance. Even as Justin was mentally leaning forward, trying to compel his host in the same direction in order to comfort the baby, the kidnapper stepped backward, pulling the door to the room closed, thus shutting off Justin’s view of the child.

Justin could sense a surge of rage coming from Brian in the background of his mind. Due to the shielding he was still maintaining, he wasn’t sure how much was getting through to Brian, but it was obviously enough that the distraught father had caught a glimpse of the piteous condition of his son. Justin didn’t blame the man for his anger, but he was worried that any backlash might destroy the connection before they figured out who the kidnapper was, so he tried to absorb as much of the negativity coming from Brian as he could, blocking it from getting to the target of their surveillance. And, meanwhile, Justin followed the abductor’s point of view, letting the person carry them all down a dingy hallway, around the corner, and into a grubby, cramped, little kitchen.

The artist in him laughed at the sight of that kitchen. It was like looking at a time capsule from the 1970s: there were faded sunflower orange appliances, dark walnut cabinets, harvest gold formica countertops, and even an avocado and mexican sand-flecked linoleum floor. It was the perfect palate of 70s colors. And, damn, was it ever ugly. Even the homey touches that the owner had tried to add - like the little handmade curtains fronting the upper cabinets or the collectible china plate set offered up as wall decorations - simply added to the clutter and disharmony. Justin was glad he hadn’t had to suffer through that decade. The mere sight of this kitchen offended his artistic sensibilities. 

While Justin was internally giggling at the astounding decor, the person he was linked to walked to the coffee maker and began to scoop out grounds into the coffee machine. He sensed a heavy fatigue coming from the person. Which made sense if Gus had been crying and raising as much of a fuss as he seemed to have been for the past four days; nobody could sleep through that. 

“I swear to the Sweet Lord Almighty, if you don’t shut that brat up, I’m gonna have a nervous breakdown,” a scratchy, parchment-thin voice from somewhere behind Justin’s host complained.

In a weary, disgusted tone, the voice distorted by a yawn, the kidnapper replied, “I promise you, I would if I could. But short of smothering the obnoxious little parasite with a pillow, I don’t know what else to try . . .”

At which point, despite all Justin’s attempts to shield Brian, the impassioned father emitted such a roar of outrage that whomever they were linked to seemed to sense the watchers. The perspective of Justin’s host jerked backwards, as if the head of whomever's eyes they were looking through had raised up abruptly, and then their line of vision was jerked rapidly from right to left. All the while, though, Brian was screaming and cursing and making threats, his sentiments so strong that Justin could almost hear the words themselves. And the kidnapper was obviously getting some bleed through of that rage as well, because Justin could feel their emotional connection being shut down, piece by piece, their view of the tiny kitchen becoming tunneled and more distant until, in the end, the whole scene disappeared into a tiny pinhole of nothingness. 

In reaction, Brian’s anger segued into despair. Before he knew what was happening, Justin felt Brian wrenching away from him. Before Justin could stop him, Brian was gone and the blank wall of nothingness Brian normally hid behind was back in place, stronger and more impenetrable than ever.

Leaving Justin alone, feeling empty and bereft, as if he’d lost something precious that he wasn’t sure he could ever get back.

///~///~