morning

Job

Wow.
They had gotten a job.
The interviewer was a DI Frederick Stark. He wore a black shirt and a patterned purple tie. His eyes– shadowed with dark circles, covered by brown hair – suggested lack of sleep and told tales that he had been through a lot. Stark was tall and frighteningly thin, but strong and quick on his feet. There was an unfailingly fatherly air about him. When they'd asked him in quiet tones if he would use they/ she pronouns, he'd awkwardly revealed that he was transgender. Their heart soared at this revelation. Safety. Luna had actually opened up to him about their background when he asked about their hefty criminal record.
Sat across from him as he asked them questions, they realised that despite him not being the most competent at people, with his hard stares and thick Scottish accent, he was unnervingly good at getting information out of people, an outstanding detective. After their explanation, he had hired them on the spot.
Luna had gone to countless interviews and been turned away every time. For the interviews Luna had dressed in a long gothic skirt flowing around their boots, a black shirt, and a heavy metal band pin on their left glove made them look like a singer. Their dyed brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail.
Even with the new job and a shared house with a man called Mikael, Luna knew they couldn't hide from their secrets. When Mikael was interviewing roommates, he'd probably assumed that Luna was a teen student at college who would be easy to take advantage of.
Luna knew better.
After all, they weren't ready to be manipulated again after their many years in the Troubled Childrens' Research Intelligence Centre, who had taken them in out of the goodness of their hearts (well, kidnapped) when they were thirteen. They'd been raised with a boy named Jinx.
Oh, how they missed him.
Luna had tried to escape several times, resulting in them being held in lockment parole. The lockment room had no windows (although, the whole building was like that) and was always locked. Luna would be escorted from the room, shackled, and even more psychological experiments would be performed on them. They were already an outlaw before they started running away and being violent towards the staff; their powers in witchcraft and psychic abilities were way advanced for their age.
The worst thing wasn't the chains or extra research projects. No. It was that Luna and Jinx could barely see each other when Luna was in lockment.
Eventually, after two years they both escaped, Luna and Jinx together and grew closer than ever. They found a circus and joined, but their freedom was snatched from them at the brainwashing. Despite this, they could still talk. Jinx often spoke badly of himself but Luna knew how much of a good person he was. They were perfect friends. Luna could relate to him on the dysphoric days and could make him feel better.
Then an officer from the centre found them. He'd hurt Jinx. In return, he found himself at the centre of Luna's fist. They'd nearly killed him. They were arrested and imprisoned for nine months until the Centre was exposed and the staff arrested. Luna and Jinx's foster mother was nowhere to be found, like so many others who had done them harm.
The rules in the Centre were this: you could get out once they'd gathered enough research from you. But, dear... That was never true. If you were lucky enough to get out, you weren't free, they'd just send you to another research centre somewhere else. "Here's better than a detention centre," their foster mother in the Centre had said when punishing Luna after running away.
Love, the TCRIC was a detention centre.
They wished they'd never run away from home. If they hadn't they wouldn't have been taken in those woods, kidnapped by the TCRIC. Although, they'd remind themself, I'd have been captured anyway.
After their release from prison, they hadn't been able to find their best friend, Jinx. They'd worried themself physically sick about him. What if the remaining Centre staff had followed him, found him? Jinx was valuable in his skills. Once they'd been able to think clearly, they'd realised it was much more likely that he was still out there in the woods, both of their favourite places.
Luna knew loss, and looking at him, across the desk in that office, so did DI Stark. It seemed they had something in common, but it seemed to be something more. Stark had the eyes of a man who had seen horrors, the inside of those child testing labs.
Before Luna could say a word, he'd left the office and was gone.