DUBIOUS CHILDHOOD FLASHBACK
Dubious was thirteen, maybe fourteen, when the walls of his home stopped being a home and became something else... a fortress. His mother, already silver strands showing early, moved like a shadow through their compound, her eyes darting to bolts, to hinges, to latches. Every sound outside made her freeze. She had rules for everything: shoes aligned at exact angles, doors locked at all hours, curtains drawn precisely to the edge.
There was no warmth in her touch. No soft word, no lingering embrace. When she looked at Dubious, it was not as a mother looks at her son but as a guard studies a prisoner, ensuring compliance. His smallest mistake , shoes muddying the floor, a cupboard left half-closed brought punishment swift and merciless. Sometimes it was silence so sharp it hollowed him, sometimes it was words that cut deeper than any cane.
And then there was the whispering. At night, as Dubious lay awake listening, he could hear her voice low, frantic, speaking not to him but to herself. "They mustn't get in. They mustn't. Lock it again. Five, two, three, nine, seven…" The numbers became her lullaby, repeating, muttered like prayers against an invisible enemy.
Dubious began to feel that he was not being raised, but trained bent beneath the weight of her paranoia.
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The night it all snapped, Dubious remembered forever. A storm outside, the wind clawing at the shutters, trees slamming against the roof. His mother thought it was intruders. He saw it in her eyes wide, unblinking, filled with terror that bordered on madness.
She grabbed him by the wrist, dragged him into her bedroom, and bolted the door three times. Then, not satisfied, she pulled out the strange devices she'd been installing extra locks, makeshift codes, small metal contraptions that clicked and beeped when she pressed numbers into them.
"Stay quiet!" she hissed. Her breath smelled of fear, her hands trembling but determined as she locked cupboard doors, window frames, even drawers, tapping codes as if demons themselves would burst through the hinges. "They want to come in. But they won't. Not if we keep the sequence. Not if we remember."
Dubious sat on the floor, knees pulled to his chest, as his mother muttered numbers over and over, pressing the same sequence again and again, the five-digit rhythm like a spell cast against unseen foes. Hours passed. The storm ended. But she didn't stop.
That was the night Dubious realized his mother's mind was no longer hers. And worse — he realized he was trapped inside it with her.
Unlike his mother, Dubious began to understand the kind of man his father, Moretti, really was. Moretti was not cruel in the obvious sense. He didn't shout, didn't strike. Instead, he watched, always watched, his presence pressing down like a weight Dubious could never quite escape. It was the kind of quiet that made a boy second-guess every thought, every glance, every word he spoke.
Moretti had a way of teaching without teaching. A small mistake, a dropped book, a stammered sentence would earn a glance that felt heavier than a punishment. "Strength," he said once, his voice calm, almost soft, "is not what you hold, but what you make others believe you hold." Dubious didn't understand it fully then, but the words burrowed inside him, slow and insistent, like seeds taking root.
Some nights, Moretti would leave him alone in the house, turning the empty corridors into tests. Shadows moved strangely in the corners, creaking floors whispered secrets, and every sound became a potential threat. At first, Dubious wanted to cry, to run, to call for his mother but he didn't. He learned to breathe slowly, to measure his steps, to feel the fear and use it to sharpen his senses.
And then there were the moments Moretti appeared without warning, watching him silently as if seeing straight through his skin. It was terrifying and yet intoxicating. Dubious realized that survival wasn't enough. To survive in Moretti's world, he had to anticipate, manipulate, and sometimes betray even the people he loved.
By fourteen, Dubious carried both his parents inside him. His mother's paranoia, the constant scanning of the room for threats, the whispered warnings of enemies everywhere melded with his father's precision and patience. Fear became a tool, observation became a weapon, and Dubious learned to hide the tremor of his own heart behind a calm, unshakable face.
In those long, tense years, he stopped being just a boy. He became something sharper, quieter, more calculating. A boy who knew that one day, the world would test him—and he intended to bend it before it could ever
break him.
His mother's fear grew too vast for their home. With family money and influence, she gave her paranoia walls, gates, and armed order. She built a hospital or so she called it. A place meant for "healing," but in truth it was her fortress perfected. Facility 9, they named it.
The staff thought it was a place for the broken, but every corridor, every keypad, every bolted door was her doing. Patients were locked in not just for treatment, but because she believed the world outside was poison, waiting to seep in. The five-digit code...her mantra, her obsession became the master password to the hospital's exit, known only to her and etched so deeply in her mind that she repeated it until it became the only song left in her fading memory.
As she aged, her body weakened though her paranoia never did. Dubious watched her decline: her hair turned white, her legs failed her, and yet the numbers never left her lips. She became a prisoner in her own creation, a figure wheeled through corridors she had once commanded.
Dubious inherited the empire not because he built it, but because she bound him into it. Facility 9 was his legacy, not chosen but forced. a kingdom born of fear and ruled by silence and codes.
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