This is a special prompt, inspired by several different asks I’ve received recently. Which ones will remain unknown until the story conclusion. Walt’s background has been planned out for a long time.
BA Canon: Yes
Timeline: 1980
( Part 1 of 6 )
It’s funny how silence is.
It creeps in on you, weighing you down like a tangible substance.
Every sound becomes magnified.
A creak in the wall could be the end approaching. The quiet rustle of the curtains against the window was a threat in the still air.
The silence itself will eventually become deafening. All thought is washed away in the stillness. It is like the roar of the ocean as it wears down the shoreline.
Walt sat in silence.
His eyes remained glued on his greatest enemy. His nemesis. A construct created by humanity for the purpose of keeping things they wanted to keep. A pet, an object, not a person with a mind and will of his own. Trapped inside a steel mesh cage with wires that were thicker than his fingers. A human might hope to bend them. Walt would never be so lucky.
He stared at the lock that sat innocuously clasped around the cage door.
For days he’d sat inside the cage. Trapped like nothing more than an animal. Fed a base diet of stale crackers and water almost absently by people that couldn’t be bothered to care about the person they had snatched away from his life.
Mallory must think he was dead.
It was what he’d expect if he was the one waiting. To be caught and killed. Humans thought they were pests, after all. Rodents to be snuffed out. If the careful gathering of supplies went noticed by the humans that ran the small bed and breakfast, Trails West, mouse traps would begin to appear around the kitchen areas.
Those were dark times. The small people that lived in the walls would do their best to help their only allies in the world, the mice, find food. Everyone would have to band together, and even that was dangerous. Gathering all the families in one place would put them all at risk, make them easier to find.
But sometimes it needed to be done.
There was safety, and danger, in numbers.
Brothers Apart 