Full Fathom Five

1.

I couldn’t tell how long I’d been held prisoner by the Algiers sex trafficking ring. In my cell in their Puget Sound complex I tried at first to track the time by meals and my condition down to ho often I had to use the bathroom. But without natural light, and with wake and sleep and meals controlled by the guards, and the use from time to time of drugs, I had no way to know if it was days or weeks.

The conditions of my own captivity were as yet a minor inconvenience relative to Dad’s. After four years in their enslavement was just a body to be exhibited and used, but for the fragment of his psych contained in a mental construct they called a White Cell. This, they explained, was his mind captured in a pivotal moment and contained in a self reinforcing prison of bleak whiteness but for one small dot of detail. His consciousness contained there was aware of everything that transpired around him, but could not emerge to control his own body.

Our jailer, Mr. Sparrow had even shown me how he communicated with Dad’s consciousness in the White Cell, through the use of his cock shaped staff and the release of neurotoxins developed by Algiers. He said wanted me to see how it was done for the day I did it myself, which I never would.

With his mind secured, his body was managed with great care. He was exercised and groomed to maintain his body per Mr. Sparrow’s standards. He said the day I met him at the complex he considered Dad his work of art and its greatness would be reached only by discipline and restraint. He was massaged, fed supplements, given rest. But he was also used. Feedings were managed with tubes down his throat. And he was regularly hooked up to the semen milking device, which cruelly sucked the seed out of him but without allowing him movement. 

This, Sparrow explained, was with the intent of breeding successive generations of my father’s genetic line, in order to enslave all his descendants as a caution to those enslaved by Algiers who would dare to oppose it. And should that fail, he said, I could be used.

Sometimes the misuse of my father, or his body, was more base. Sparrow would from time to time allow other men to use him sexually in his cell, visible to me through the glass partition that separated us. Sometimes they took him away, and I would only see the results as his worn body was returned to the cell to recover. 

One night a sling was set up, and Dad spread out in it for a series of men to take turns at him, Each used his mouth and fucked his ass and dumping their cum inside him. They had liberty to use his body as they desired, providing no lasting damage was done. All was permissible and they used him in every way to that limit, and he took every load.

How many men there were in total I didn’t know. I stopped my count at 20, knowing the tally couldn’t comfort either of us. Throughout that long night I was aware of every act, the sound enhanced on my side of the cell. Every groan of desire or discomfort followed by his eager sucking and whimpering was amplified in my ears. I knew each use both comforted him in his White Cell, and increased the indignities that made the cell, in a perpetual loop.

I was aware that this was all my fault. My own lust for my own father had put us both here. The confession of that lust four years ago, and the kiss I gave him, were the acts that made him vulnerable to capture by Algiers. The fracture they created in his psyche created the basis for the White Cell in which his mind was contained, locked away at the moment of that kiss.

I hated every one of them for their cruelty and brutality on my father. But how could I hate their lust for him without hating myself for the same? Mine was the worst, after all, both in its effect and shamefulness. I was the most unnatural in my desire, and its ill effects were obvious. 

Although I was only a prisoner on this island fueled by lusts, I knew at least in part I belonged here. I could see, in my own way, a hint at how Algiers used my father’s degradations to build walls of shame to imprison his mind in the single frame of my kiss, as I felt a cell of my own making forming around that same moment.

2.

After the long night, as on other night, I tried to talk with him through the glass partition. Although Sparrow had managed to communicate with his mind in the White Cell, using his staff and neurotoxins, I couldn’t reach him with words. He never responded or showed any physical recognition. But I knew he could hear me.

“Dad, it’s me, Will,” I said, again to no response.

I remembered how Sparrow instructed him by his first name, maybe to get his attention. Tony, his former partner in the agency and his betrayer did the same, when he brutally used my father to satisfy his lust and desire to humiliate both my father and myself.

“Cavin,” I said, “CALVIN! It’s Will. Can you hear me?”

Again, nothing. I was aware that Tony had used him, and even Sparrow had with his staff. Physical contact might be part of how to reach him, but separated in our mirror prisons this was not possible.

Though our prisons were mirrors they were not perfect reflections. Where his body was left naked but for a harness and hood, clammy with sweat and some stranger’s semen leaking from his mouth and ass, I was untouched. Where my mind was constantly agitated by the torments I was forced to witness, his was sealed away in a construct in which he contemplated a tiny flaw in the White Cell, a speck of detail fashioned into a keyhole for which there was no key.

I remembered my desire for him that started this all, years ago. He was beautiful to me, and I wanted to touch that beauty and to possess it. But what could I have imagined would happen? That he was simply kiss me in response, that we’d be lovers? That we’d set up a home together, or flee the US together and live on the run?

I was so stupid. And I’d brought us to this.

“Dad,” I continued, “I know you can hear me. And all this isn’t your fault. It’s a trick. It’s a trap. They’re using chemicals on you. They brainwashed you. But you can fight it.”

After some time I thought this was not the best use I could be. For as adult as our situation was, in most ways he was as helpless as a baby, robbed of his own agency and higher functioning. If I couldn’t free him, I could at least try to provide some comfort.

I did my best to remember the stories he read me as a child and told them back to him. I’d done this over our nights here, and was piecing together more and more of them.

I repeated the story about Max in Where the Wild Things Are, and how the wild things said, “Oh, please don't go—we'll eat you up—we love you so!” That never made sense to me when I was a boy, but it did now. I could understand the desire to consume someone and the comfort of being desired so.

I told him the story of Houdini, our chapter book, and how his wife Bess would secretly pass him a key in a kiss before being locked up. I tried to remember her sing song secret codes to her husband to the tune of Rosabelle. How I wish I’d passed Dad a key in that fateful moment, but instead I’d created his prison.

I recounted The Day I Swapped my Dad For Two Goldfish, and how the boy had to go on a series of trades to get his father back, and then promised he would never swap his dad for anything again.

I watched as his breathing slowed and his body came to rest, his chest slowly rising and falling, interrupted only by the occasional twitch or shudder.

3.

They say there is order in chaos, and even with our erratic schedule that kept me from knowing how many days I’d been a prisoner, there must have been an order because I could tell it was disrupted. 

My stomach growling was my first clue. That had not happened since my arrival, except by my early attempts to not eat. But this time it was because meals did not arrive. I felt restless, and the air felt heavy even though I knew the facility was completely climate controlled. We were not roused for exercise or any other activity.

It was Mr. Sparrow finally who came to my cell. His affect was more strained than I had seen previously, but at the same time more lively.

“Mister Miranda,” he said, looking me over, “I believe you are guilty of a grave offense against Algiers.”

I thought I knew what he meant, but said nothing. A loud crack of thunder rolled over us.

“Your father’s agency, its members, are making preparation to invade our island home, even as I speak, with significant paramilitary support.”

Fuck yes.

“We yet have operatives enough in this agency to know this, Mister Miranda. And to know you were involved. Will you insult me by feigning ignorance? This will likely be the last time we converse, you and I.”

“Good,” I said. “Fuck you and this place. You’re the worst people on earth.”

Sparrow sighed with resignation, and said, “This brings us to a final dilemma then. What to do with your father. What to do with you.” He pursed his lips and paused. “Come - walk with me.”

I half expected to be shot dead without warning. But we walked through the Algiers complex, side by side. I knew there was no point in trying to run. There was nowhere to go, too many guards, and in any event I couldn’t leave Dad behind. There was no mayhem, but there was a heightened sense of activity and urgency, a buzz, almost like a change in the air pressure. Outside I heard a second and then a third crack of thunder.

“I will leave this island shortly, to return to another base,” Sparrow said walking briskly. “I have no intent to return to this island or even this country. I am of an age, Mister Miranda, and I will not begin again.”

We arrived at what he called his library, the laboratory. He withdrew the frozen racks of my father’s preserved semen, depositing the glass tubes in a case he carried in one hand, his staff in the other. He then led me back through the complex, exiting to the outside.

“It would not do to bring you, individually or with your father, along. It would hamper my departure, and that cannot be risked. And so in my remaining time here I must do something to bring your father’s account to a close. Tell me, Mister Miranda. If you were in my position, knowing what you know, how would you dispose of his debt?”

“Kill us, is the obvious answer. But I don’t think you’re interested in the obvious answer, or you wouldn’t ask, would you?”

“It is a conundrum indeed, Mister Miranda,” he responded with a wry smile. “Your father owes Algiers a debt that cannot be repaid but by his life in slavery, as he was born to, and the enslavement of all his line thereafter. Anything less is an affront to the dignity and the reputation of Algiers. 

“Option one is to slay you both and flee. But this is a pyrrhic victory. It is a plainly a frustrated attempt to collect some portion of your father’s debt, but not the debt in whole. Algiers is not to appear frustrated. This will not do.

“Option two is to simply flee, leaving you both with the debt your father owes. In this case, the debt remains unsatisfied. We could seize you and your father again at a later date. But this cat and mouse game makes Algiers petty. This also will not do.”

Sparrow led me outside, where the air was electric. A dark storm swelled in the sky, rare in the Puget Sound with its frequent but low-key rains. Lightning flashed in the distance and clouds gathered like the angry fists of gods. Sparrow took a moment to observe, and then led us on, away from the compound.

We hurried along a narrow path to a raised platform, overlooking the water below. The usually placid seawater of the Puget Sound churned in anger, crashing up against the shore and the raised platform. 

“But I have thought of a third option, Mister Miranda. It is ingenious, in its way. Do you care to speculate what is?”

I nodded no.

Sparrow reached into his case and taking the samples of Dad’s semen in is his hands threw them by the handful over the side, into the swirling sea water. I watched each carefully preserved tube fly from his fingertips into the hostile waters, lost forever. 

After the last sample was sent to its end, Sparrow looked out and sighed. I wondered for a second if he intended to throw himself in as well. Instead, with one great thrust he threw into the Sound his own staff. We watched it wash away and vanish under the waves. Knowing how he used it on my father, I felt something had ended.

He then turned to me, empty handed, and said “The third option is to forgive.”

4.

“Forgive?” I asked.

“Forgive, Mister Miranda,” said Sparrow, turning on his heels to retreat into the compound as the sky grew yet darker and rain pelted our backs.

He hurried us back through the Algiers complex where I could see guards moving in an orderly but brisk fashion, preparing to evacuate I guessed, sorting what they would take or destroy, from what they would leave.

“To kill your father, or to simply flee and leave him, leaves the debt unsatisfied,” continued Sparrow, “But if I forgive the debt, it is wiped clear, and I….”

“Then you’re the big man?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.” He smiled, self-satisfied.

“I think there’s another reason you’re doing this,” I said, hurrying to keep pace with his stride.

“And what would that be?”

“Your obsession with him – it’s more than just a grudge. It’s like - ” I stopped suddenly, and Sparrow too broke his stride. “You’re in love with him.”

Sparrow took a moment to size me up, and said simply “We must make haste.”

He spun on his heel, moving fast through the compound hallways, but never running.

“Can you fix him?” I asked, “Can you get him out of this trance thing?”

“Ah who is in the trance, Mister Miranda. I have wondered often of late. Is it not passing strange how we have all come together, our string of coincidence, just so, and so many implausibilities? Almost as if we are a dream or a fiction, a parable, rather than flesh and blood. And if so, whose is the dream, who is the story teller? Am I? Are you? Is your father? Are our little lives bound in the margins of a page? When the story ends do we fade to nothingness?”

“I don’t understand.”

“An old man’s fancy and too much idle thought,” he answered, stopping at last, “think nothing more of it.” 

We entered my father’s cell, where he lie in a sling, blindfolded as he was so often. Sparrow and I stood beside him, and his body shifted in recognition of the presence of his master.

“The debt is hereby forgiven,” said Sparrow. “Mister Miranda, your father is forgiven, as are you, and your association with Algiers is severed.” Thunder boomed over us. “The storm is on us, and it brings the men and women who will take you home.”

“Wait!” I said, “you haven’t told me how to wake him up – how to bring him back.”

“Ah that I cannot say, because I do not know. It took years to confine him in his White Cell. I fashioned the cell, assembled the lock, but I am not the key.”

“Is this why you brought me here? Is there something I need to do?” I asked.

Sparrow tenderly smoothed my father’s hair against his head. “He is very beautiful, is he not? For all the good it’s done him.”

“Mr. Sparrow?” I asked. “Please?”

“‘Full fathom five, thy father lies,’” he replied, “Whether you can transfigure him I do not know. But it was your kiss that saved his mind at just this point, and if he can be saved from it now I suspect it is only you who can do it.”

He leaned into me very close, nearly whispering. “Your agency men and women will be here within a half hour or so. He will be taken into custody, and your access will be limited. They will of course attempt to help him, but they are not up to the task. They will never indulge in the… unorthodox means necessary to truly free him from the White Cell, if it is possible at all. He will live out his days in a pitiful state, making a sad misuse of my work.” He stepped back and said clearly, “If you are to free him, Will, you must do it now or never.”

“But how?” I asked.

“I crafted the lock, Mister Miranda. But you are the key.”

He kissed my father on the head and turned to take his leave. The sky rumbled over us as the door closed behind him.

5.

Dad, oh Dad, I thought, how do we get out of this?

He was spread out in his sling, oblivious to the tempest swirling around us. I ran my hands over him, the first physical contact since the night he went missing. As Sparrow said, he was so beautiful, for all the good it did him.

I said his name, Calvin, I called him Dad, but as before he did not respond.

I tried to remember what Sparrow had showed me, about how to reach him. He’d said it was for the time I would need to do it myself, and though I swore I never would, here I was. But he’d used his staff, and neurotoxins, and the staff was gone, thrown into the Sound.

He used the staff because Dad was conditioned by penetration, he said. Sparrow did it with his staff, but I saw Tony do it too, with his dick. 

I had so longed for him, but not like this. 

I pulled down my pants and stroked myself to a full erection, hampered by my anxiety about the short time in which to pull off a miracle. I smeared it with spit and positioned it against Dad’s exposed hole. At the touch of it against his anus, he reflexively grabbed at his ass to pull it open and take me in. 

"Oh fuck,” I moaned as I slid the head, then the full length into him. His hole was so yielding and heated. My eyes took in the full sight of his beautiful body, his rising chest as he inhaled as I stretched him open. 

His body came to life as I filled him up. His breathing changed and even his skin seemed more electric.

“Dad,” I said, “DAD!” His head rolled slightly and I thought he might show some recognition, and I stroked into him harder.

“It’s me, Will,” I said, “I came to rescue you.”

He nodded no, even as his hole gripped hard on me.

“I know where you are, in your White Cell. But I know you can hear me.”

He made no sound but I knew I had made contact by the shifts in his body.

“Dad, they’re coming to get us out now. I did it. They’re getting us off this fucking island to go back home, but I have to get you out of this thing in your head. I need you to help me.”

I slowed myself down, it was so hard to not cum because he was so beautiful and this place had me so fucked up. I ran my hands over him softly, knowing he’d been treated harshly but wondering if he’d ever been treated tenderly. 

“Dad,” I said, “We need a Houdini move here.”

He offered no response but groans of pleasure. His own cock was at full erection, shades darker than the rest of his skin, and his legs spread wide.

“Dad, remember Houdini? Remember how his wife Bess would sneak him a key in a kiss?”

No response.

“Fuck, Dad. I know you know.” I raised my voice to be sure he could hear. “Dad, I have a secret: I have the key. I HAVE THE KEY. And no one knows. Not Sparrow. Not the guards. Not Tony.”

God it was so hard to not cum being so close in him. 

“It’s in my mouth, on my tongue. It’s a tiny gold key, like Houdini’s, like in the book,” I grunted, “I have to give it to you now and you have to take it.”

I dropped my face next to his, and whispered, “With a kiss I pass the key,” the words from the story he read me so many times, the pressed my mouth to his and slid my tongue in. 

He was open and receptive, but then and our lips locked, and our tongues curled around each other. I imagined a small gold key passing between us, the only secret left in this place that knew everything else about us, passing from mouth into his, and then it was gone.

“Dad, you have,” I grunted as I continued to fuck him harder now, “You have the key in your mouth – take it, take it!”

I couldn’t hold back any more and began to pump into him from the deepest pit in my body. I shuddered violently as I filled him with my cum and his back arched, taking it all in wordlessly.

I dropped my weight onto him, the sling holding us both. In my minds eye I imagined him in featureless white room, taking from his mouth a tiny gold key, the only item of color or feature in the void, and considering it.

“Dad,” I whispered, “use the key. Open the lock. I need you. I need you.” 

My eyes closed and I listened to his heart, pounding hard from the fuck, then slowing, but then picking up again, beating harder, then racing.

I lifted my head to look up at his face, to see if anything registered, when I felt myself jerked off of him suddenly, and thrown hard against the solid glass wall.

Disoriented, I looked up from my half seated spot on the floor. It was Tony. And his fist was coming right at my face.

6.

There was a crack and everything went dark. Bolts of pain shot through me. My hands flew to my face and my fucking nose, oh my God it hurt so bad. When I could finally open my eyes I was sideways, and could make out blood on my hands, blood from my own face still seeping out of my now broken nose.

Dad lie in the sling, and Tony stood above us both, his jaw furiously moving side to side and his fists trembling.

“You little SHIT!” he shouted, and kicked me. “YOU DID THIS!” 

Even through the pain of my broken nose and my side where he kicked me, I managed a laugh.

“Guess you’re not here to rescue us?” I asked, fighting to keep a sneer on my throbbing face. I wanted to get at him with anything I had, which now amounted to just laughter and derision.

It got harder to keep up the smile after he pulled his gun out.

“Think you’re so smart, just like your dumb old man,” he said, taking the safety off his gun. “So here’s what we’re gonna’ do, Will. I’m gonna’ shoot you point blank in that fucking head of yours. Then I’m gonna’ put a bullet through Cal’s brain here, what little is left of it. And then I’m gonna’ put one through my head too. And your fucking mother will be left to wonder what the fuck was going on with the three of us here, for the rest of her miserable cunt life.”

“Fuck you,” I said, wiping away blood and mucous from under my nose and my mouth. “I did do it, I’m ending this shit hole.” 

I started laughing, despite the pain and the gun, and what I figured was the last minutes of my life. I could see the end of us, but also the end of Algiers here, at home, no matter what happened elsewhere.

“DAD!” I shouted, my bloody nose bubbling, “DAD! Do you hear that? We’re ending this place, you and me. We did it.”

And then as suddenly as I started laughing I was crying. Even though I was glad we were ending this thing, that they couldn’t hurt anyone anymore, at least not here, I was sobbing and wishing we could have made it out. 

“Aw FUCK!” groaned Tony, and then kicked me again hard. “YOU!” Kick. “STUPID!” Kick. “SON OF A BITCH!” Kick. Kick. Kick.

I was curled up trying to protect myself, struggling to breathe as the pain ripped through my ribs and chest. I tried to grab his foot, but he was too strong and fast and I was already hurt. I could feel myself going down, and thought He’s going to kick me to death. This is where I die. My vision blurred as a strap of black leather hit the ground across from me.

When the kicks stopped I looked up expecting a gun in my face, but instead I saw Tony jerked back hard, the gun knocked from his hand, and his whole body spun around to face my rescuer. Standing on his own two feet, my father, eyes open and angry jaw jutting out.

“Get. Off. My. Son!” he said, his voice gravelly from disuse, and with one blow his fist cracked Tony in the face, blood spewing from Tony’s nose.

Tony should have been able to fight back, and because he was built like a tank he should have been able to hold his own. But he was still with shock, and Dad stood like a risen demigod, lean muscles rippling and the ichor of righteous rage burning in his veins. His fists crashed like cresting waves in a storm, liquid and brutal. A second punch, a third, a fourth. Then Dad spun Tony toward the glass wall and in a sudden move smashed his face into it, loud as thunder. He pulled him back by the collar, and smashed his face again into the thick glass wall. Again. And again. When he let go, Tony slid down to the ground, perfectly still, leaving just a bloody streak straight down the glass wall that had separated my father and me.

That’s my Dad, I thought, bloodied and beaten, unsure whether this was real or hallucination as I lost consciousness. 

Then he knelt to pick me up, and in the middle of our gore he held me tight.

7.

The agency raid took place as Sparrow said it would. Paramilitary forces invaded, and the Algiers men surrendered without a fight, no doubt at Sparrow’s instruction. He was gone, after all, and it would be beneath his dignity even in his absence to fight a losing battle.

I set it up. 

Before Tony and I came to the island, I established a series of messages to my dad’s friends in the agency. The messages explained everything – what I knew, where we were going, to the degree I knew, and they were timed so that if I was not home in week to deactivate them the messages would send.

I assumed in a worst-case scenario my emails would be monitored. But I hoped not my mom’s. So I set up sub accounts in hers, without her ever knowing.

I figured even if it was too late to save us, at least there’d be a way to let Mom know what happened. I couldn’t just disappear and have her never know what happened. At long last, after every betrayal, I couldn’t do that to her.

When he went missing the guys from the agency promised me if I ever needed them they’d be there for me. They were good on their word. 

Tony had of course obscured their investigation for years, helped Algiers counter them. But the news that Dad was still alive and had been held captive, and their growing understanding that Tony was working against them, triggered whatever was necessary to act.

Of course we were brought in for observation. Dad clung to me, so we wouldn’t be separated. In the end they yielded and let me sleep in the same bed with him in the medical unit. After all, he was a hero who took out the local front of an international sex trafficking ring, and I guess I was too.

In the dark we held each other and kissed. He stroked my cock with his hand, and whispered “I want you in me.”

“Not that I don’t want to,” I said in a low voice, “but do you really, or is this – you know, what they did to you?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, “I just do.”

I slid into him, and for a second time fucked him, but this time both present, both free, and not in that place. We were home, or close enough to count. When I came in him he moaned out loud, as if he was about to cum. But he didn’t. He wasn’t ready to do that yet. As I held onto him, and kissed his beautiful chest, I ran my finger over his small third nipple, and thought maybe he was not all the way back, not yet. 

In the days that followed I was reunited with Mom. She cried so much, and I can never know how she felt about Tony, but it seemed her happiness to have me back outweighed whatever anguish she felt over that.

When she stopped crying she held my face and studied it.

“Your nose,” she said, observing the slight bend from its break under Tony’s boot.

“Broken. Like a boxer,” I said.

“You look more like your dad now,” she replied, and we both laughed.

He had bad times, especially in his sleep, racked with nightmares. In daytime I was attentive to his pauses and moments of anxiety, and tried to counter them. What was manifested over four years could not be undone in a moment, in a week, in a year. But he did it before as a child, and could do it again, I was certain.

A few weeks later I received a card, postmarked from Milan, on fine cream paper with simple single gold S on the front. Mr. Sparrow, it seemed, was not quite done with us. It read:

“Let us not end, young prince. But dream better dreams. Tell better stories. Yours, S.” 

THE END (?)