Whispers After Dark: chicago fire

0.1~ backstory

TW: strong language, violence, mentions of suicide.

Music inspired chapter:
'feeling like a stranger'
Song• scott street
Artist• phoebe bridgers

Third Person: flashback, 1995.

Stephanie Amber Ward had never really stayed in one place forever. Her 'parents' were always moving states and towns and cities, the longest their family had ever stayed in one county had been a month— however even then they weren't allowed outside the walls of the cheap motel or shed-like building that they had booked. Their only friends the cockroaches and other various species of insects that crawled up their walls and made home inside their bedsheets and cheaply-made pillows.

Her mother was a respected woman of STEM and her father a business man. Stephanie's house had always been busy, even before she herself was born. With sixteen other siblings, some older and some younger than her, everything was always a hassle. In the eyes of the State (that they were in at that time) they were the perfect family with the power couple who took in foster kids who needed a home. But in the eyes of Steph and her many brothers and sisters, they were living in the next 'Escape the Murder House' game.

By the time the girl was three (the winter of 1992), seven of her sisters had been murdered which left her with Lily and the boys. Lily was fourteen at the time of the incident, mama always warned them to not leave the house. She would quote herself at multiple different times in the day, everyday. Once with only nine sons and two daughters, her 'parents' decided to get more sadistic with their punishments. Many kids were starved for days or weeks for talking back or wearing fresh clothes that mama or their father hadn't issued out yet. Steph had been waterboarded, whipped, beaten and starved hundreds of times before even becoming a teenager.

At the age of ten (the year 2000), the years of abuse and neglect had finally caught up to the girl. Her body was malnourished, her teeth and hair were brittle and bruises as well as fresh wounds bled through her skin like a splotchy disease. Now with only three other siblings, only three children out of the original sixteen, she knew her chances of surviving were low to nothing. The frostbite on her fingertips and toes didn't give her any hope and the fact they had been left to their own devices for the greater part of almost a month didn't sit too well with her. Two weeks without food, rations of rainfall they used as water— two weeks alone with no one except themselves.

Hank Voight was the supervisor on their parents cases, their mother Cassandra was in legal trouble for suspected tax evasion and he had their father for multiple counts of child trafficking and kidnapping. Voights' team had been tipped off the year prior and had spent the remaining months building case after case on the criminals. The only thing he needed to seal the cases now were the bodies of the two evil people— dead or alive, he really didn't care. He knew once the two parents had entered the state of Illinois that they were all his, he just had to find them.

Although an already dirty cop, cases like these made him feel genuinely sick to the stomach, so when he found Stephanie and her dying siblings in an old barn in the middle of winter, he knew right then that he would do everything in his power to protect these poor hopeless children.

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Third Person: flashback, 2001.

The summer of 2001 was an eventful one, Stephanie Amber Ward was finally adopted. She had been saved by Hank Voight almost a year ago and she was thriving the best she could as a traumatised eleven year old girl. Hank would check up on the child every weekend before and after the trial of her 'parents' (if you could even call them that). She was safe now, with her new mother and father and two allocated brothers.