Franklin Goes to School

Med bay office

Marky sat checking Damien's status after Annika gave him a large injection of nano probes. He was hoping she didn't decide he should be a drone.

"Dr. I assure you I didn't make him a drone?" Annika said scaring the shit out of Marky. "Besides, once he is healed we will be able to determine how best to help him."

"Annika, how long will it take to repair the damages to his internal organs using this technique?" Marky said knowing this would be considered a radical form of surgery.

"It will only take an hour or two at the most to fix the major damages, then we can switch to the more normal healing. Although, I could turn him into a fully repaired drone in three hours if you would like."

"No, no drones. Children should be children not drones." Marky said knowing Annika was turned at an early age.

"I was just thinking he would be fully repaired, but I do agree." Annika said smiling knowing Marky was trying to protect his charge while standing his ground with her.

"I hope they find the Bastard who did this to him." Marky said while trying to tap out a report on his pad.

Annika slowly walked up to Marky. She reached out and placed her hand on top of his arm as a gesture to calm his nerves down.

Four Eleven Cherry Street

As the transport cleared Hal had started to knock on the door but decided it might be a bad idea as Franklin aimed his phaser at the door and fired. "Find her quickly she is very weak!" Franklin shouted as he made his way through the remains of the door.

Hal entered next, followed by Grub. "Are you sure we are inside the same house?" Grub asked looking from the perfect living room and entry way to the demolished kitchen.

Bradley ran his medical scanner over the kitchen table to his disgust. "Guys, this table is covered in blood."

"Franklin, you and Hal search upstairs while we check the basement" Bradley said while pointing between him and Grub.

"Grub, you stay behind me as we enter the basement." Bradley said acting like a security officer wrapped in protective dad vest.

"Fine, I have your tail. Cause your kids would kill me if something happened to you." Grub said with a smile.

Bradley, went down the stairs slowly checking every opening like the big bad was there. Once they made it downstairs Grub walked up and grabbed Bradley, knowing he was about to lose it. "I hope they found her upstairs."

Grub, looked around the entire basement looking at all the torture racks, and other torture implementations.

"Grub, lets go upstairs and see if they have found her." Bradley said noticing the dead pets decomposing in the corners of the room.

"Go ahead and go upstairs while I catalog all of this for the record." Grub said while patting Bradley's back.

Upstairs Four Eleven Cherry Street

As Franklin entered the first bedroom he became enraged. Looking around the room everything was in shambles. What made his blood boil was the straps on the child's bed and the bloody sheet.

Hal entered the second room and found the woman they were looking for. "Are you alright?" Hal asked gently knowing she wasn't.

"Are my kids safe?" She asked without opening her eyes.

Bradley walked in as Hal informed her about her children. Running his medical scanner over her he broke in to tears. "We need to get you to the ship."

She took a small breath and opened her eyes. "My dear, keep them safe, protect them from him." she asked as she closed her eyes.

"She's dead!" Bradley gentle pulled the cover over her. Then walked out of the room trying to find Franklin.

Walking out of the room Bradley didn't have to go far. In the upstairs den stood Franklin, phaser pointed at the terrible individual.

"So, is she gone yet?" Wade asked from his desk. "I am quite surprised she was able to hold out for this long. Of all the people who've been tortured she lasted the longest."

"You sick, bastard!" Bradley yelled and started to walk towards him.

"Oh, I wouldn't come any closer unless you want to meet your maker." Wade said pointing toward the wall.

Bradley turned his head looking at the wall of explosives.

Hal on the other hand had been giving the coordinates of all the explosives, over his private channel.

Wade became startled when he heard the transporter beam but didn't see who or what was going on. He pressed down with his finger to set off the explosives, only to find the control box was missing. When he looked back up he screamed as Bradley began beating the shit out of him.

Once the man was on the ground Franklin walked up to Bradley and grabbed his arm. "Stop, don't sink to his level."

Hal tapped his badge and asked to have a Vulcan telepath come to their location to assist with sentencing. He was really hoping they would send Dustin again.

"Ya, know I was listening you could've just said Dustin and I would have appeared." Dustin said as Hal jumped with a start.

"Are you trying to give me a heart attack? It almost worked." Hal said running a quick diagnostic.

"No but, I might give you a headache." Dustin said with a grimace hoping Hal would take the hint.

"I'll take the report." Franklin stated with no room for question.

Bradley turned to see Franklin's hair turn completely black.

Franklin turned to see his complete team present, then turned to Wade. "You have been found guilty of the following violations of the Safe Haven Act.

Section 11.1 Signs of beating, physical restraints

Section 13.1 Use of minor children to provide sexual gratification.

Section 17.4 Parent involved in actions which place children's physical or mental health in jeopardy

Section 17.6 Failure of parent to provide stable home environment

Section 17.15 Isolation of children from siblings

Section 17.21 Punishment of children for normal developmental stages

Section 17.22 Unreasonable incarceration"

"Bradley, contact star fleet security and get him out of here. To bad we can't send him to the Klingon's for punishment." Franklin said as his mind reeled from everything he seen. "I would sentence him to death, but he would feel he was being rewarded."

Before Franklin could say anything else, Wade was gone and Bradley was hugging him. "I expect you to take some downtime tonight and tomorrow."

"I will take some downtime after you adopt your new sons and my nephews." Franklin said with a slight smile appearing on his face.

"Engineering is already working on your quarters to add more space." Hal said while looking around the room.

"We need to make burial arrangements for their mother." Franklin said only to be interrupted by Grub.

"Funeral arrangements are taken care of already." Grub stated pointing from his mic to Hal.

"Elizabeth will have a very nice funeral and hopefully the boys can start healing from this ordeal." Grub said as he checked his pad to find out Annika was helping to heal Damien's wounds.

"Lets get back to the school." Franklin said almost to thin air.

Starfleet Command a few moments later

Lt. Jameson walked with the boy to the information desk. He waited till the young man finished his current phone call. "Hello, I'm LT Jameson and I am here to see their parents." He passed over their ID's thinking this young man would need to look them up.

"Alright what did you too do now?" The receptionist said looking at them both.

"Amazing enough nothing this time." Joseph spoke while holding his hands up.

"I have already called their parents just before you walked up." The man told Jameson. "Besides, I never pass judgment on these two. Most times they are busy helping others."

"Thanks John" Dan said with a smile.

They all turned to the sound of echo of boots on the marble floor and tiled walls. "Ah, they are here now." John stated pointing to conference room one.

Conference Room One

Lt. Jameson reached the door first and held it, letting the two boys go in ahead of him.

Joseph made it three steps into the room before he stopped dead, and Dan nearly walked up the back of him. Two men were already on their feet at the far side of the long table, and Joseph made a sound that was not quite a word and crossed the room at a run.

"Papa. Dad." He hit the taller of the two hard enough to rock him back a step, and the shorter one wrapped both of them up together. "I didn't do anything wrong, I promise, we were just helping -"

"We know, buddy. Breathe." The shorter man pressed a kiss to the top of Joseph's head. "The desk called us an hour ago. Reese cleared his whole afternoon and cried the entire way here, so you are among friends."

"I did not cry."

"He cried."

Across the room a Starfleet commander stood with her arms already open, and Dan walked into them with a great deal less running and about the same amount of relief. "Hi, Mom."

"Eighteen years old and I still get the call from a Lieutenant." Commander Wills spoke into his hair. "One of these days you are going to let somebody else run toward the trouble and come home for supper."

"You wouldn't like me if I did."

"No," she agreed, and did not let go. "I wouldn't."

Lt. Jameson let them have the minute. Then he pulled out a chair, and the room settled into its seats without being told, which he noticed and did not comment on.

A woman at the head of the table had waited through all of it with her hands folded and a patience that looked well used. She wore Federation civilian grey with a small Youth Services pin, and when the room was quiet she nodded to the two caseworkers the way you nod to people you have worked beside for years.

"Elliot. Reese. Thank you for coming so fast." She turned to the boys. "My name is Director Vance. I run the Youth Services side of what happened at Mountain Oaks today, which is to say I run the side that fills out the forms after braver people do the frightening part. Do you two know why you are here?"

Dan and Joseph looked at each other.

"To get permission?" Joseph tried. "That's all we wanted. To help carry the chairs, and stay with the ones who were scared, and -"

"You carried the chairs," Director Vance said. "You also kept two terrified boys talking while a woman you had never met walked into a house none of us wanted to see. Franklin's report used the word invaluable. I have read a great many of Franklin's reports and I have never once seen him use that word. So I looked it up twice to be sure."

She folded her hands again.

"Clan Short of Vulcan rescues children. My office is supposed to catch them afterward, put them somewhere soft, and make the paperwork mean they never fall back through the cracks. For a long time those have been two different jobs, done by two different kinds of people, who do not always speak the same language. The ones with the phasers are very good at the frightening part and very bad at the six months after. My caseworkers are the reverse." She let that settle. "Today somebody stumbled onto the piece that has always been missing. Those boys did not calm down for the captain, or the doctor, or for me. They calmed down for you. Because you are their size."

The room was very quiet.

"So I am going to ask you both something, and your parents are here for a reason. One of you cannot legally say yes without them, and the other one can, but should not do it alone." Her eyes went to Dan, then to Joseph. "The Clan and Federation Youth Services want to stand up a liaison program. Young people, vetted and trained and protected, and never once sent through a door like the one today. Your work would be the part you already did without being asked. To be there for the ones who come out. To speak for them to my office. And to tell the people with the phasers what a frightened thirteen-year-old actually needs, which is almost never what a grown adult guesses. You would be the first two. You would help us build the rest."

"There is a cost, and I will not hide it from you," she went on, quieter. "You will meet children on the worst day of their lives, and some of them you will not be able to fix. You already know Elizabeth Cates did not come out of that house. You will carry a few of those for the rest of your lives. I am not offering you a clean job. I am offering you a real one."

Dan did not hesitate. "I'm in." Then he caught his mother's eye. "I'm eighteen, so that part is mine to give. But I'd rather give it with you knowing."

Commander Wills breathed out slowly. "In. On the condition that I know where you are on the bad nights. That one is not negotiable."

"Deal."

Joseph had gone still in the way that meant he was thinking hard, and both his fathers had gone still with him, letting him get there on his own.

"Papa," he said at last. "You catch them afterward. That's your whole job. I watched you do the forms my whole life and I always thought they were boring." He looked at Director Vance. "They're not boring. They're the part where somebody decided a kid mattered enough to write it down."

Elliot's eyes had gone bright. Reese put a hand flat on the table as though he needed it there.

"I want to do the writing-down part," Joseph said. "And the sitting-with part. Both of them. Yes."

Reese found his voice, and it came out rough. "He's fifteen."

"He is," Director Vance agreed gently. "Which is why the answer is yours and not his, and why the program does not send him anywhere I would not send my own. School comes first. Nothing classified. Nothing through a door. And a counselor he can call at any hour, whether he thinks he needs one or not." She waited. "With all of that, Mr. Meadows?"

Reese looked at his son for a long moment.

"With all of that," he said, "his Dad and I would be proud out of our minds."

Lt. Jameson tapped his badge. "Jameson to the Saratoga. They both said yes."

There was a pause, and then Franklin's voice came through, and it did not sound like a boy who had spent his afternoon inside a house of horrors. It sounded like somebody smiling for the first time in a long day.

"Then tell them welcome to the family. Tell Joseph his first case is two brothers named Cates, because Bradley is adopting them and they are going to need somebody their own size who knows exactly how today went. And tell Dan -"

"I can hear you, Franklin," Dan said.

"- tell Dan that Max asked whether the tall one who ran for the wheelchairs was coming back. So. Come back."

Dan looked at his mother. His mother looked at the ceiling the way people do when they have decided not to cry in front of a Director, and Director Vance became very interested in her folder.

"Marky says there are cookies," Franklin added. "Marky always says there are cookies. This time there are genuinely cookies. Jameson, bring my liaisons up to the ship."

USS Saratoga

The transporter set the three of them down in a corridor that hummed under their feet, and Joseph turned a slow circle with his mouth open until Dan caught him by the shoulder and steered him before he could walk into a bulkhead.

"First time up?" Dan asked.

"I have seen pictures," Joseph said. "Pictures are liars."

"This way," Lt. Jameson said. "Marky said sickbay, and Marky said to hurry, because apparently there is a young man out here who has worn a groove in the deck plating."

He had. Max Cates was pacing a short flat line outside the sickbay doors, four steps and a turn, four steps and a turn, and he had plainly been at it a while. He looked up at the sound of them, and for one second his whole face was just a scared fifteen-year-old with nowhere to put his hands.

Then he saw Dan.

"You came back." It got out of him before he could dress it up. "Franklin said you would, but I didn't - you actually came back."

"I said I would." Dan closed the last of the distance and pulled him in, and Max held on the way you hold on when the last week has been coming apart in your hands. "How's your brother?"

"They keep saying stable. Stable isn't a word, it's a thing they say so you'll stop asking." Max pulled back and scrubbed at his face with the heel of his hand. "My mom's dead."

"I know," Dan said quietly. "I'm sorry."

"Everybody keeps saying that. You're the first one who said it like her name was a real thing and not a case number." Max looked over at Joseph then, sizing him up the way kids do. "Who's this?"

"Joseph." He put his hand out, and when Max took it he made a point of not letting go too fast. "I'm the one who's going to make sure nobody in a uniform ever calls your brother a case number where you can hear it. That's my actual job. Started about two hours ago."

Max studied him a second longer. "That's a stupid job."

"It's the best job in the Federation and I will fight you over it," Joseph said, and got the smallest ghost of a laugh, which was the whole point.

The sickbay doors opened and Marky leaned out with a padd in one hand and a plate of cookies balanced on his forearm like standard medical equipment. "Oh good, reinforcements. He's awake, he's stable - Max, stable is real, I promise you on my kit - and he is being an absolute misery about every part of it, which I have decided to read as an excellent sign." He pushed the plate at them. "Cookies. Non-negotiable. He won't take one and it is driving me slowly out of my mind."

Damien Cates was propped up in the biobed with his arms crossed over the blanket and his jaw set, a tall boy folded wrong into a space built for smaller and sicker people. He had been crying at some point and had clearly decided to be furious about it instead. When he saw who came through the door - two of the kids from the school he had spent a year making miserable - his face shut like a slammed door.

"Great," he said. "The witnesses."

Bradley was in the far chair. He started to rise, and Joseph caught his eye and gave the smallest shake of his head, and Bradley sat back down. First case. He was going to let the kid work.

"We're not witnesses," Joseph said. "Nobody's writing anything down. I already checked."

"Then what are you."

"Right now? Mostly we're here because your little brother wore a hole in your hallway and somebody needed to sit with him." Joseph turned a chair around backward and sat on it. "But since I'm here. You want to know what the real report says about you? Not the school one. The medical one."

Damien said nothing, which was a yes.

"Internal bleeding. Old. Layered. The kind you don't get from one bad afternoon." Joseph kept his voice flat and easy, the way you talk near something that might bolt. "You've been getting hurt for a long time and telling everyone you walked into a door. And somewhere in there you worked out that the only way to keep Max out of that basement was to be the loudest, meanest thing in every room the man walked into. So he only ever had one target, and you made good and sure it was you." He shrugged. "That part's not in the report. I'm guessing. Tell me I've got it wrong."

Damien's jaw worked. He did not tell him he had it wrong.

"I couldn't get her out," Damien said, and his voice split straight down the middle. "I got Max out. I could never get her out. She kept saying next year, when you boys are grown, we'll all go together." He was crying again and hating it. "There is no together. He killed her, and I was at school being a bastard to Trent, and she was in that house the whole time -"

"Hey." Dan had come around to the other side of the bed. "You getting Max out is the reason there's a Max standing in that doorway right now. You did that. Tell me how old you were when you started taking the hits for him."

Damien didn't answer.

"Yeah," Dan said, gently. "That's what I thought."

For a while nobody said anything, and the ship hummed, and Marky's cookies sat on the tray untouched by anyone with sense.

It was Bradley who finally spoke, from the chair, carefully, like a man setting something fragile on a high shelf. "I made you both an offer this morning. Through Franklin, because I did not want to do it standing over a hospital bed - and I'm sorry it's landing here anyway." He leaned forward, forearms on his knees. "I would like you to be my sons. Both of you. My name, my quarters, and whatever a family turns out to mean, we'd work it out as we went. I know the timing is obscene. I know I am not her, and I would never once try to be."

Damien stared at the blanket. "You don't want me. You've read the file. I'm the one who -"

"I read the file. All of it." Bradley didn't look away. "You know what the Clan is? A few thousand kids who got thrown away, and decided that once they were big enough, nobody else was going to be. I'm not interested in your file, son. I want the boy who spent years taking hits so his brother wouldn't have to. That boy is going to be someone's whole world one day. I would like a front-row seat."

Max had come to the foot of the bed. "I want to," he said, in a very small voice, and looked at his brother, terrified. "Damien. I want to. Is it - is it okay if I want to?"

And that, in the end, was the thing that did it. Not Bradley, and not Joseph, and not the report. His little brother asking permission to be allowed to be safe.

Damien reached out and took Max's hand and held it hard, the way he had surely held it a hundred times in the dark at the top of those stairs.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah. It's okay if you want to." He looked up at Bradley, and it cost him everything he had left. "Both of us. Okay? I can't - I can't say the dad word yet. Maybe not for a long time."

"Both," Bradley agreed, and his voice was not steady either. "The dad word can wait as long as it needs to."

Marky, who had been pretending very hard to read his padd by the door, made a small wet sound and shoved the cookie plate at the nearest person, who turned out to be Lt. Jameson.

Joseph took out a padd of his own and made a note - one line, the first entry in a caseload that was going to run the rest of his life.

"For the record," he said, mostly to himself, and then out loud, because it deserved to be said out loud. "Damien Dax and Max Dax. Welcome to the family."

Damien wiped his face, and almost - almost - smiled. Then it went out of him.

"One thing," he said. "Trent. After everything I said to him, everything I did - is he -"

"He's alright," Joseph said. "He's worried about you, actually. Wouldn't stop asking after you."

Damien shut his eyes. "I have to fix that. Him first. Before anything else, I have to make it right with Trent."

"Yeah," Joseph said, and made a second note. "You do. And that one I'll help you with. That's the job too."

Sickbay, a few minutes later

The doors opened again, and this time it was Franklin.

His hair had gone back to blue.

That was the first thing Damien noticed, and he could not have said why it mattered, except that the last time he had seen this kid the boy's hair had been pure black and he had been reading a man his crimes in a voice like a closing door. This was somebody else. This was a fifteen-year-old in a rumpled uniform who had clearly been crying somewhere private, where warlocks apparently go to do it.

"Hey," Franklin said. "Can I get a minute? Just me and the two of them."

Nobody argued. Dan squeezed Max's shoulder on his way past. Joseph stopped in the doorway and told Damien, "I'm right outside," and meant it as more than a location. Bradley was last, and he paused at the threshold and looked back at his sons - his sons - until Franklin gave him a small nod that said plainly enough, I have got them, and Bradley went, though it cost him.

Then it was just the three of them and the hum of the ship.

Franklin pulled the chair around and sat close, elbows on his knees.

"I was in your house today. I was the one who went upstairs," he said, no preamble. "So I need to tell you something, and I need you to actually hear it, because you are going to spend a long time trying not to." He waited until Damien looked at him. "I was down the hall when your mom died. But I'm an empath, Damien. I feel what people feel whether I want to or not. And I felt the last thing your mother ever felt."

Damien's whole body went still.

"It wasn't pain, and it wasn't fear, and it wasn't him." Franklin held his voice very level, the way you carry something full to the brim. "It was the two of you. That was all that was left in her, right at the end, and she spent every bit of it on her boys. Bradley heard her say it out loud, and it matched what I felt to the letter. Keep them safe. Protect them from him."

Damien made a sound.

"I know you think you failed her because you couldn't carry her out of that house," Franklin said. "I felt you thinking it from the corridor. And you have got it exactly backwards, so I am going to turn it around and I am not going to let you turn it back. Your mother gave one instruction with the last breath she had. Keep them safe." He looked from Damien to Max and back again. "You are on a starship. You are in the care of a man who would walk into a warp core for either of you. Your brother is three feet away and there is no one left in this universe who can lay a hand on him. Her last instruction is being followed to the letter. You did not fail it, Damien. You are the reason it can be kept at all."

Max had started to cry, quietly, and Franklin reached over without looking and laid a hand flat on the boy's back. Something passed through the room like a warm current, and Max's breathing came loose and easier.

"Sorry," Franklin murmured. "I can't fix a feeling. I can just turn the volume down for a second so you can find the floor under it. That okay?"

Max nodded.

There was a soft heavy sound at the door, a padded thump, and a tiger the size of a small couch put its head into the room and considered the three of them out of enormous gold eyes.

Damien flinched. "Is that -"

"Sparkles," Franklin said. "He does what he wants. Mostly what he wants is to find whoever in a building is hurting the worst." The tiger crossed the sickbay without a sound, ignored Franklin completely, and lay down along the side of the biobed with his spine against Damien's leg and his great head settled into Max's lap, and let out a sigh like a furnace banking for the night. "Huh," Franklin said softly. "He picked both of you. He doesn't usually split himself."

Max had both hands buried in the fur, and his face was doing something young and complicated.

"Is he real?" he whispered.

"He's real when it counts," Franklin said. "Which is the only kind of real that has ever mattered to anybody."

For a while none of them said anything, and the tiger breathed, and it was the quietest that room had been all day.

"Okay. Housekeeping," Franklin said at last. "Bradley is my clan-brother, which makes me your uncle, which means you are stuck with me, and I am the fun one, and I will hear no argument on the point." He got the corner of a smile out of Damien. "And I heard you before, about Trent. You're right. You do have to make that one right, and it is going to be one of the hardest things you have ever done, because he is going to forgive you a great deal faster than you are going to forgive yourself." He stood and put a hand briefly on Damien's shoulder. "Joseph will walk you into that room when you're ready. That is what he is for now. You do not have to do the hard things alone anymore. That part is genuinely over. It just will not feel like it for a while."

Damien looked up at him, wrecked and seventeen. "Why are you being kind to me. I was -"

"I know exactly what you were. I felt every inch of it across that lunchroom, and I put a tiger on your chest anyway. Remember?" This time the smile came, small and caught off guard. "You were a kid in a burning house who worked out that the only way to keep the fire off his brother was to go stand in it himself. That is not a bad person, Damien. That is the bravest kind there is, aimed the wrong way for a while by a man who should be very grateful the Klingons are not allowed to have him." He crossed to the door. "Rest. Both of you. Uncle's orders."

He stopped at the threshold.

There was one more thing, and it was not theirs to carry, so he did not say it. Trent's sister had been gone three weeks now, longer than anyone would count out loud. She was not in a house with an address on it. She was not on any world an away team could kick a door down and walk into. Some children fell through cracks you could reach. Some fell through the other kind, the kind with a whole world on the far side of them.

Franklin was already writing the message in his head as he stepped into the corridor. It would take Dustin, because it always took Dustin when the door stood between one world and the next. And before Dustin could follow her, it would take someone who could hear a single voice across all of that dark, and hold onto it, and not let go.

He knew exactly who could do that.

He just had to go and ask.

 

Authors Note:

Please excuse this author from writing this week. He currently has a cold and doesn't need to spray the monitor with snot every time he sneezes.