Austin Carlile is different. He has always been different and always will. He is always being poked and prodded with needles, but Austin is not sick, he is changing. Here's the thing, the needles, the serum, they are making him less human. For as long Austin knew, he didn't have a family, he grew up in dimly lit, caged rooms, but that was alright because it was all he knew.
Alan Ashby has been trapped at the BarryThorn institute for three years. The Institute acts as a hospital that contains the physically and mentally gifted, or that is what the doctors call it. Alan can manipulate dreams, he can enter and manipulate the dreams of others and himself.
Over the years, people come and go, the doctors looking for the best group of people to win the Thorn Lake War. They treat us as disposable soldiers.
March 21, 1956
It was just like any night, except there was a newcomer. The BarryThorn Institute has not had a new patient for 5 years. Normally, patients would come every 1-2 years. This newcomer was different than the rest, Austin was different, he wasn't susceptible to the doctors manipulative ways. Alan is puzzled by Austin's nature. Eventually, as they spend more time together searching for a way out of the institute, Alan finds himself starting to love Austin.
One day, during a regularly scheduled evaluation, Alan wakes up from the aesthetic and starts freaking out, his body starts convulsing, blood pooling around the posterior of his body. These are all signs that the serum has stopped working. The doctors decide to lock him away, dispose of him like the others. When Austin discovers the news, it was like something in him just snapped. Austin and other patients needed to come up with a plan to bring down the institute. As he learns more of his shape-shifter powers, it turns out those may just be the key to saving Alan's life.
Chase Michaels became a doctor on a whim - nothing more, nothing less - and the same applied when it came to choosing where to work. He decided on the Junpei Institution based on a fleeting sense of interest after seeing their ad. Most of the things he's done in life were decided in a similar "spur of the moment" way, including going to medical school in the States. This time, due to his complete lack of research, Chase finds himself surrounded by violent, testosterone-driven young criminals, the absolute worst of the worst, who only have the facility standing between them and a dissolute future of felonies and anarchy.
For a man whose adult life has been decidedly carefree, his time at Junpei threatens to overwhelm and drown him in a contracted five years of stress. His personal Hell reaches feverish heights after a certain student takes a vocal, damning interest in him, a man by the name of Luca Nixon.
Tethered to the No Man's Land that is Junpei, Chase is securely kept within Luca's perplexing hands, tossed and turned about by his every whim. And though the doctor has his doubts that the "student" is who he says he is, Chase finds himself pulled in by a confusing sense of connection, unable to shut the other man out completely. Their budding relationship increasingly threatens to break down every coping mechanism he's carefully gathered and force him back into a reality that nearly destroyed him as a child. And Luca is all too happy to guide him, hand in hand, every step of the way back into the muck.
|☆| Warning: This is a gay dark romance novel. There will be man on man action. And some violence, I guess. |☆|