Chapter Text
Science says that out of all five senses, the sense of smell is the one that hits you first. For Victor, it’s the first thing that crawls into his awareness—thick, sour, unmistakable. Sweat that’s been sitting on skin for hours. Cheap beer soaked into carpet fibers. Vodka—sharp, chemical, impossible to ignore. Cigarettes burned all the way down to the filter. It’s the smell of a house that doesn’t feel like a home. The smell of nights he’s too young to understand but old enough to fear. The smell of a place where love doesn’t live anymore.
The second sense to come back to him is hearing. It’s faint at first, blurred, like someone turned the world down to a low volume. Then it sharpens. Voices. Harsh ones. A rhythm of sounds that doesn’t belong anywhere near a child’s life. Pleading. Begging. A voice cracking from desperation. A low growl of threats. Grunts that make his stomach twist. Words he knows he shouldn’t know—slut, worthless, shut up—and each one lands like a slap across his own back. He squeezes his eyes shut even though the dark behind them is worse. His ears won’t stop working. They can’t.
He recognizes the begging voice.
It’s soft even when terrified, familiar even when broken. It’s the voice that once hummed lullabies, that once promised birthdays and warm breakfasts and better tomorrows.
It’s his mother. That must means the the other sounds are his father.
The third sense is sight. Victor is back in his room, sitting on bed. well used to be one. His father broken it one night after coming home rather very anger and drunk. That means the other sounds—the snarling voice, the threats, the heavy thuds against the wall—can only belong to one person.
His father.
The third sense to return is sight.
Victor isn’t sure when he opened his eyes. One moment there’s only darkness, the next the room slowly pulls itself into shape around him. He’s back in his bedroom. Or what’s left of it.
He’s sitting on his bed… or the place a bed used to be. The frame is cracked at the bottom corner, one leg bent inward like it tried to run away and didn’t make it. The headboard is split down the middle from when his father slammed it during one of his nights—drunk, furious, tearing through the house like a storm with no reason and no warning. The mattress sags, coils poking through the thin fabric where fists or boots or both had landed.
The posters he once taped up to feel normal—heroes, cartoons, a world brighter than this one—hang crooked or torn at the edges. The curtains are half off the rod. There’s a dent in the drywall the size of a beer bottle. His clothes are still scattered from where his father had thrown them before, yelling about “ungrateful brats” and “messy little disappointments.”
Victor sits perfectly still, because movement in this house draws attention, and attention draws anger.
Then the sounds stop. Not gradually—just cut off, sharp and sudden, like someone pressed pause on the nightmare. Victor freezes, listening so hard his ears ring. For a long moment, there’s nothing. No shouting. No hitting. No begging.
Then he hears it.
A heavy, guttural snore.
His father.
He must’ve passed out—maybe on the floor, maybe on the couch, maybe right where he’d been hurting her. It doesn’t matter. Victor knows that sound anywhere. It means the danger has shifted, not disappeared. Sleeping doesn’t make his father harmless… just unconscious.
For a second, the silence is almost worse. It leaves space for everything else to seep in.
Victor hears something softer. A different sound. Fragile, like the crack in a glass just before it shatters.
His mother.
Quiet sobs, barely there at first. The kind of crying someone does when they’re trying not to exist. When they don’t want anyone to hear. When they’re too used to swallowing pain until their throat burns. Victor’s small hands tighten around the shredded edge of his blanket. He leans forward, straining to understand her muffled words through the thin wall. She’s whispering. Rambling. He can’t catch most of it.
But one word reaches him.
One word lands like a punch to his chest.
“Rape.” Victor’s breath stops.
He doesn’t know everything about what that word means—not fully, not at his age—but he knows enough. He knows it’s something you’re not supposed to say. Something you’re not supposed to survive. Something his mother should never have had to whisper in the dark while her husband snores in the next room.
He presses a trembling hand over his mouth, not to hide a sound but to keep himself from falling apart. His eyes burn, but he’s afraid to cry. Crying might mean he’s not quiet. And quiet means safe.
His room feels smaller than ever, like the walls are leaning in, like the air is too heavy to breathe. He curls his knees to his chest because it’s the only thing he can control, the only way to make himself feel smaller, invisible, untouchable.
He listens to his mother’s softing crying until even that fades to a shaky silence.
And in that silence, Victor learns what fear really is—not loud, not dramatic, but quiet, lingering, and impossible to escape.