Work Text:
Goodhope hadn’t intended to grow close to the boy, to care about him so deeply. But, regardless of thought or intention, the boy was his responsibility now.
In all his forethought, Goodhope had spent very little time thinking about what would happen to the others, the 10 other Projects. He already knew the fate of Nocturnus, he had heard through the grapevine, years after the fact, of the death of Project Sanguis. He had felt, bone-deep, that they were all cursed. When he realized that the Cuckoo Project had continued, that more children, just like him, were found, he was filled with an all-encompassing sense of dread, lighting a fire in his blood that told him that one day, they would find him and drag him back, take away his name again, until he would somehow become that same 15-year-old boy from 1966 who nearly burned himself to death in an attempt to escape.
But as he had flitted around in time, he became aware of someone new.
He can vividly see the afterimage of the boy, years older than the one he knows now, standing resolutely before Jane, not in a form of supplication, but in defiance, eyes aglow. Lying between them was his own body, older too, pale, bloodied, beaten, dead.
That’s why he didn’t worry much about him. He saw what his older self would succumb to. Goodhope wasn’t exactly avoiding the boy, but in the back of his mind, he knew as soon as he saw him for the first time, that his own end was drawing near.
The face he saw in the mirror became closer to the face he saw in that room with the passing of each day.
But then Candlewood got to him, they got to that boy. Evidently, both the third Director Everett and Mr. Bright had a hand in his arrival into the fold.
That’s when he realized why his body was in that room, that’s when he realized he’d have to stop running, hiding in those increasingly scant pockets of baseless time. It was time to accept his fate.
The night he first introduced himself to the boy, the sky was on fire.
Leonel Beau Justise was 11, nearing in on 12, and slightly tall for his age. His grey eyes distrustful. His every action guarded.
Goodhope had this unsettling feeling of looking at a reflection of his own youth. He was barely older than the boy before him when he had arrived at Candlewood. Nor was he much older, when he, Project Peregrinans, was assumed dead - when Project Nocturnus was lain prone - when little Project Angele hardened into Jane Everett, heir apparent to the misery of the Candlewood Institute.
He had felt, in those years following his erstwhile escape, as he barely survived in the ruins of Magnus as it was thirty years before his own birth, that the weight of the whole world was on his shoulders. That everything that occurred after his so-called disappearance was his fault.
This boy has that same look in his eyes.
He’s facing away from the fire that lights up the Kings Fall Radio building, silhouetted by the bright red heat of the blaze.
He measures his voice, flattens it down so he doesn’t falter, he can't falter now, he can never falter again:
“Hello Leonel, my name is Emil Goodhope.”