Work Text:
He sold his sister’s life for two hundred dollars.
Well, okay, if you wanted to be a little more realistic about it (and less overly-dramatic), it hadn’t happened quite like that. But it was the way he chose to remember it – to remind himself of his crime, the one that started them all: he’d brought home the flyer for that stupid science experiment.
It wasn’t like flyers were uncommon for science experiments; he’d seen tons of ads recruiting for test subjects, but they almost always asked for participants that were 18 years or older – a deal-breaker when, at best, he could pass for 16 (damn baby face).
But this was the first one that was looking specifically for children. And it promised to be a simple experiment – over the course of one afternoon, the two siblings would undergo a few easy tests to assess the possibility of telepathic communication between siblings. “Ganzfield experiment,” the paper read, although the name meant nothing to the young boy clutching the paper in grimy fists.
The most appealing part was the compensation. A hundred dollars per sibling for one afternoon’s work – his mind was almost on overdrive, mentally calculating how this addition would affect their budget, how he could maybe afford to splurge and buy his sister something nice on a day that wasn’t her birthday or Christmas. They’d burnt through his college savings over the five years they’d been on their own, and he refused to break into hers, so money had gotten kind of tight recently. And if they were willing to do weekends, he could even avoid missing one of his shifts, so they’d have that day’s wages on top of everything else.
He never would have guessed the cost that such a seeming blessing would have.
(Then again, he wasn’t the one who could see the future, was he?)
He never spent those two hundred dollars.