Some Semblance of Normal

Chapter 1

A/N: I know there was already a whole chapter of a warning before this, but that was dead serious. This book doesn't just mention the trigger warnings listed. Keep reading if you're comfortable with reading it.

~Wilbur POV~

Wilbur was 9 years old, and he was sitting in his room that he shared with his little brother, Tommy, who was 6. Tommy was also there, and they were sitting together. This picture would've been perfectly fine, perfectly happy, perfectly normal, if it weren't for the loud, uneven footsteps that were unsteadily growing closer. This would've been a perfectly happy picture if the two small, unnaturally thin boys weren't shaking like leaves, terrified of the man growing closer.

A perfectly nice picture, like the ones hanging on the walls around the small house. The ones that deceived the world, the ones that drew everyone's eyes away from the horrors that resided inside the walls.

Alas, no one noticed, no one cared. So the boys sat there when the father walked in. Wilbur watched as his little brother was yanked away from him, screaming, as he was shoved in a box, and that box shoved inside the closet. His screams became almost inaudible, due to the room being practically soundproof to the outside. 

The father smiled and walked towards Wilbur, who was frozen. The father roughly pushed him down on the bed, stripped his clothes, and promptly began tying Wilbur's wrists and ankles to the bed. Wilbur didn't fight back, he lost the strength to while ago. He quickly fell into the rhythm of his own breathing. He didn't feel anything.

He could've blinked when his father was gone. He was still tied to the bed, but no one was in the room. Blood covered the bed around him. He was still in excruciating pain. He managed to wiggle one of his hands out of the knot and untied the rest of his limbs. He slowly got all of his clothes back on and stumbled over to the closet, where Tommy was. He opened the door to see the see through box with the child inside of it, passed out. Wilbur opened the box and carried his brother out. He laid the blonde down on the small blanket that was kept in the corner of the room while he slept.

Once Wilbur made Tommy as comfortable as possible, he stripped the bed sheets and tiptoed over to the laundry room. He put them in the washer and left them there. When he got back to his room, Tommy woke up, and was shaking violently. Wilbur quickly went to him and hugged him, as much as he hated it. Tommy closed his eyes and calmed down, but was always tense. They both were. They had to be.

They sat there for what could've been hours, but never fell asleep, when it became dark. Wilbur and Tommy were just waiting for when their father would come up the stairs, for one reason or another. 

As if they had spoken the words out loud, He came through the doorway. Sometimes, his footsteps were almost silent. That was when he was most terrifying. 

"Get in your beds," the cold man ordered gruffly. The two boys hesitated, not wanting to leave each other. The man started unbuckling his belt. "Now." The boys quickly complied, one getting in at a time.

Wilbur scooted the plastic box to the side, to when it was about in the middle of the closet. He opened the door to the large dog cage that was in the closet on the right side. It had a thin blanket on the bottom, and that was it. 

Wilbur shook worse than he already was as he climbed into the dog cage and curled up. He closed the cage, where his father put a padlock on it so Wilbur couldn't open it. The door slid closed in front of him, which caused Wilbur's breathing to pick up a bit. He heard Tommy climb into his cage and have the door locked, when the second half of the door was slid closed.

Wilbur immediately began having a panic attack as he became disoriented, not knowing what was where. His hands and feet pressed against the sides of the metal, it seemingly disappearing from his touch. He resisted the urge to strike out at these walls, more fearful of his father than the dark that was pressing around him, suffocating him.

At some point, he passed out from the stress, because when he woke up he was still in the dark, but there was light coming from the bottom of the door. He could barely tell, because his eyesight was so blurry from that far away, but he could still tell. Wilbur was still extremely stressed and it was hard to breathe, but it was enough for him not to panic.

The closet door suddenly opened, his father staring down at him. He was wearing what seemed like a sick smile and held a some type of collar in his hand. Wilbur stared at him with wide, blurry eyes. He shoved the collar through the little gaps in the netting. Without a word, Wilbur shakily strapped what he could now see was a shock collar around his neck. Immediately the father shocked him, the electricity shooting through him painfully. 

The father finally bent down and unlocked the gate door and dragged Wilbur out. He wrapped the brunette's wrists together above his head. He then picked a dark, bloody bag off the top shelf of the closet and plopped it on the ground. 

The bag was filled with all sorts of metal devices he used to torture the boys, all having years old dried blood on them. The father took the tools out of the bag and laid them down on the ground.

He began with punching the young boy, then using his belt as a whip. Then he stared making shallow cuts, saying disgusting things as he did. He used a lighter, a hammer, even a pair of pliers to pinch him to the point of blood spilling. Every so often he would shock Wilbur as to keep him from disassociating. 

He felt every drop of blood that was spilled. Every lash of the belt, every blister that rose. Wilbur's legs eventually gave out, which definitely wasn't good for his already shallow breathing, but soon enough Wilbur's father was gone, and Tommy was crawling out of his cage. Wilbur looked at him with tired, half closed eyes, before he collapsed to the ground, his wrists freed. 

He wasn't very conscious while Tommy tried his best to clean his older brother's wounds, or to comfort him. Well, it was actually making Wilbur uncomfortable to feel Tommy touching him, but he wouldn't tell him that. He was trying to keep as much as a semblance of normal for his brother. He knew none of this was normal, he did still go to school.

Tommy didn't though, so he never told him. That precious blonde, who was the only light in his life of crushing darkness, the only reason he still had a sliver of a will to live.

The boys' father walked through the door, once again, very upset that Wilbur was down from his constraints. He stalked towards them, his belt now in hand. As he raised his arm, a sound echoed through the house.

The sound of a doorbell.