Chapter Text
“Look at that, Lucinda! Look what I have created!” he exclaimed to the nurse next to him.
She looked on with sad eyes at the child in the cot in front of them with his scrunched up little face that looked about ten seconds away from screaming as hard as his tiny lungs could manage. She knew what would happen to him if he stayed here. Memories of gnarled scars that littered the body of the woman who had raised her resurfaced as she looked down at the newborn. She wouldn’t let the same thing that had happened to her aunt all those years ago happen again. The man walked out of the room as the infant started to wail, likely to celebrate by getting drunk in his personal office down the hall, all the while crowing at his own genius. She was left to tend to the boy. As she soothed him in her arms, ‘Lucinda’ looked down and the faces of her cousins looked back. They had been gone for so long now and she had been so young when they went missing, yet the memory of small hands in hers, wide grins on chubby cheeks and the patter of feet following behind her were clear. With those thoughts in mind, she was absolutely certain that what she was going to do was the right course of action.
Putting the baby back down into the cot, she left what had been designated as the nursery into a small cupboard to the side of it with a cabinet containing the files and information of her boss's latest experiment. The nurse collected everything she thought would be useful and stuffed it into her work briefcase before walking back to the nursery.
It was a large room with rows of cribs waiting to be filled. The only one that was occupied was that of ECLX1, intended to be the first of many. She knew otherwise though. As she stared at his newborn blue eyes and the fuzzy brown hair on his head, she promised that he would be the only one.
That night on the 4th of June 1967, an office building belonging to Dr Curtis Andrews is burned down in a tragic fire, killing him and destroying all evidence of what had ever gone on in what is assumed to be the beginnings of a nursery for gifted children. The fire is thought to have been caused by a candle falling onto a liquor soaked patch of carpet as the man slept in a drunken stupor. It plays on the news for a day before the people lose interest, and parents who hear the story can’t help but feel slightly relieved that they had not entrusted their children to the drunkard who ran the place. On the same night, Lucinda Evangeline Morris, as the doctor knew her to be, disappears, seemingly off the face of the earth. She is never heard from again, and neither is the baby that she would have been seen fleeing the fire with, had anyone been paying attention.
Twelve days later, on the 16th of June 1967, Ruth Freedman walks through the front door of her small house on Bisby Road in Colria Valley, Illinois to find a baby, swaddled in yellow fabric, sleeping as peacefully as any infant she had ever seen. She immediately calls the local police department, but nothing about whoever left the baby there can ever be found. When the authorities offer to take the baby off of Ruth she declines, stating that she had been lonely since her niece had moved away, and it would do her good to have some company. The newspaper clipping of the event will remain on Ruth's living room wall for as long as they lived in the house. The child on the doorstep will grow up into a young boy, his eyes darkening to hazel and his hair growing longer and thicker. Every day he will look at that newspaper clipping and be reminded that his Nanna loves him. And thus subject ECLX1 will become Steffen Freedman.