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The sun had risen by the time they left the pizzaplex. Though no longer somewhere between catatonic and delirious, Vanessa was clearly exhausted and already mostly mentally checked out. It was an… interesting challenge, getting her home, but Gregory somehow managed it. Her eyes were blank and distant, her neck still bleeding sluggishly. A problem for future-Gregory, he decided, pushing her into a bedroom. She very nearly collapsed on the bed, security uniform and all.
Then, as much as he wanted to sleep too, he prowled through her nice little house and gathered up anything that could possibly send her into a tailspin when she woke up.
There’s no helping it, he remembered his dad saying as he carefully boxed up all of Grandma’s belongings. Your mom will have to face those memories at some point, but there’s no harm in letting it be on her terms. So we’ll put all this stuff away until it hurts a little less, okay?
He found supplies for, presumably, repairing the bunny suit. He unearthed a small collection of knives that, given they weren’t in the kitchen, probably weren’t used for cooking. He stared at a list on the coffee table for a long time. It was covered in names, all of them crossed out.
There was only one that wasn’t. Gregory.
(For this list to be here, for his name to be on it, she had known who he was before last night. She had targeted him. He just didn’t understand how.)
For roughly an hour after that, he stayed pressed into the corner of the room, small as he could make himself, and kept a knife clutched in white-knuckled fingers. He trembled, all fear and adrenaline and fury.
She hadn’t wanted to. That much had been painfully clear after he ripped the wires out of her neck. Vanessa had never wanted to hurt anyone, him included. And now that the wires were gone and destroyed, she was in control again and wouldn’t hurt him.
(Right? No, no, he couldn’t think like that. He decided in that moment to never let her think he feared her or hated her or blamed her. Vanessa was broken enough, and who did she have to help her? No one; her home was empty of pictures of friends and family.
Gregory would help her. He might not understand how it felt to be mind controlled, but he at least knew that it happened. And he’d gotten her to talk earlier, so she—she wasn’t a lost cause, though she probably felt like one.
He knew he had, years ago. This wasn’t something she could do alone. And Gregory knew grief, knew heartsickness, knew depression. He could help her. He would help her.)
People were already going about their days outside by the time he unfolded himself from his defensive position—he’d learned well during his brief bouts of on-again, off-again homelessness. Monsters even worse than Vanessa haunted the alleyways. She would have killed him. They would’ve hurt him in ways he could only barely imagine.
It… helped, actually. To compare them. Vanny wasn’t so scary when he held his memory of her beside those dark, cold nights. She’d been creepy, but Gregory supposed the important difference was the way Vanessa had cried when she realized what she’d done. Those other monsters would have smiled.
Gregory peeked into Vanessa’s room. Still dead to the world, crusty blood drying in her hair. Ew. She was on her own for that one.
He returned to his search. A diary with haphazard writing, a few pictures, and a scrap of bloody cloth joined the sewing supplies, knives, and list. Tracking down a lighter, Gregory started a fire in the living room’s little fireplace.
Boxing stuff up was so you could return to the memories. He doubted Vanessa would ever want these back.
Sitting before it, he fed the pictures and cloth to the flames. He flipped through the diary and tore out the entries that had clearly been written under the implant’s influence and tossed in the crumpled pages. The generic sewing stuff was spared—needle and thread, a tiny pair of scissors, a thimble. Anything clearly tied to Vanny went in.
He’d have to find something else to do with the knives.
It was only when he reached the list of her victims that he hesitated.
Gregory read each name, once, twice, three times. There were twenty-one, counting his. He didn’t know how long Vanessa had been under mind control, but if he had to guess… it was a while. Months, at the very least.
He shivered despite the warmth of the fire seeping into his cheeks. Carefully, he folded the list and tucked it into one of his pockets. Someday, he figured, she’d be ready to face it. But until then, he’d hold on to it.
• • •
Gregory figured most kids would have nightmares about his adventure in the pizzaplex. He didn’t. Not that first morning after, when he burrowed into Vanessa’s couch, a piece of gauze tapped over his cheek, a stolen banana satiating the worst of his hunger, and not now, two weeks later.
For the past two years of his life, he only ever had one nightmare. No matter what happened, either he dreamt of nothing or he relived the night his parents died.
He and his parents had gone to a play put on by the local high school. It’d been a murder mystery the drama club wrote themselves, and Gregory remembered being wholly engrossed in trying to figure out the murderer.
It’d been late when they headed home. Not awfully so, but it was dark out. The car trip, as it so often did, had begun to lull Gregory to sleep, his head nodding periodically, listening to the distant background noise of the quiet radio and the murmur of his parents talking.
Maybe that was why the rest of the night had been so hard for him to process. One minute, he was more asleep than awake, caught in that hazy space before dreams could really take root, and the next, sharp pain exploded across his chest as his seatbelt locked. His head snapped forward; he cried out in shock, or as much as he could with the air punched from his lungs. A swooping dizziness soured his stomach.
The noise of it all had been secondary. The echo of a screech, the gasp from the front seats, the ear-splitting crash of metal colliding, twisting, tearing, crumpling.
The car rocked to a stop, shuddering, jarring. They’d gone from motion to stillness so suddenly that Gregory hadn’t—he hadn’t understood at first. It happened too fast, all at once, with a spine-rattling abruptness.
He started crying, fighting clumsily at the seatbelt, desperate to push away the bruising ache of it. Of it doing its job. His neck hurt, his chest hurt, and he was so confused. So confused it scared him.
The silence after the storm of noise was loud. Ears ringing, Gregory had called out for his parents. Asked them what happened, told them it hurt, wanted them. He’d wanted his mom’s hugs, his dad’s hugs, he just wanted them.
There had been no answer from the front of the car.
Bits of shattered glass twinkled above him somehow, and he almost mistook them for stars. The lights outside shone through the empty space where his window had been. The car door beside him was smushed, crinkled funny. He couldn’t get his seatbelt off.
It’d been like swimming, was the only way he could describe it later. Like everything was muted and sluggish. Thick. His tears warped his vision, contorting an already twisted world. His thoughts had come slow, his panic slower. The pain and confusion and fear dominated at first.
“Mom!” he choked.
There was shouting from outside the car. The impression of movement, of frozen headlights, of people running.
His head started to hurt, like his skull was suddenly too small, and pressure built in his nose. It was only then, somehow, that he noticed he was upside down.
That… that was when the panic set it. The glass was on the ceiling of the car, the car door was crinkled from the roof being flattened, and his parents weren’t responding.
“Dad!”
An awful noise broke the fragile stillness in the ruined vehicle. A pained, wet moan.
From behind the passenger seat, Gregory could just barely see his dad at the wheel. His dad shifted, but—the dashboard. It was wrong, it was too close to his dad. The steering wheel was practically shoved up against him.
“Dad!”
Feet appeared at his window, someone right outside yelling.
Gregory wore his voice into nothingness that night, crying and screaming and repeating his calls for his parents over, and over, and over. He never got another answer.
He fought the firefighters who broke open his door and pulled him out for the paramedics. He wailed for them to help his mom and dad, hoarse and hysterical. Just before he was loaded into an ambulance, he caught sight of someone standing up from beside his father’s window, shaking their head.
The image of the crash burned into his eyelids before the doors closed. The front of his family’s car all folded in on itself, upside down. A smoking pickup truck nearby, laying on its side, crumpled but not as badly.
He fell silent then, shock overtaking him, and he didn’t speak again for three days.
It was his last memory of his parents; it was his only nightmare.
Vanny with her little knife wasn’t enough to change that. Gregory figured nothing ever would.
His night at the pizzaplex might have been scary at the time, but it was hard to stay scared of someone who routinely accidentally poured orange juice into her cereal. No offense to her, but Vanessa was a mess. And days’ worth of new memories quickly overwrote the few encounters he’d had with Vanny.
He didn’t have that luxury with his parents.
• • •
Hi Mom,
I know you’d be worried about me if you were here, so I want to start by saying that I’m okay. Me and Vanessa living together has “been an adjustment,” in your words, but I think we’re doing a pretty good job of making it work. She still flinches a lot, but I tried Dad’s way of helping Grandma after she lost her eyesight. Ness seems okay when I hold her hand, just so she knows I’m here without having to worry about seeing me and feeling all guilty again.
I wish I knew more about how to help her with that. All I can do is tell her I don’t blame her for anything. And she blames herself for A LOT.
It feels a little like I have a ghost for a roommate. Is that mean? She’s not very good at taking care of herself. Which is fair. I wasn’t very good at doing pretty much anything after you guys died. I try to do things that helped me, and things that I saw Dad do to help you after Grandma passed. I hope that’s okay?
She forgets to eat, which is probably the worst. I’ve been doing the same thing as the first home I got put into did. Do you remember them? They were the ones who were trained to help kids like me who kinda just gave up on everything. The volunteer from the hospital who got me to start talking again made sure I had a place there. She visited sometimes. I can’t remember if I told you that. I wasn’t writing these letters to you and Dad back then.
That home used schedules and stuff to get us back into good habits and to encourage healthy coping mechanisms. I remember them saying that. I’ve kinda taken over Vanessa’s phone and have a whole bunch of alarms set to go off every day. I know she just wants to sleep mostly. I did too. But she listens, so I think it’s working.
The others aren’t doing so well, but I’m not around them as much as I’m with Vanessa. And I don’t know how to help robots deal with guilt and grief! So I try stuff that works with Ness, and sometimes it helps, and sometimes it doesn’t.
I think Chica’s kinda like me? A new kid came to the home, and she was still really hurt from a house fire, so she couldn’t do a lot on her own. At first, I helped her because the adults asked and I didn’t have anything else to do, and I also pretty much did anything they told me to. Making choices and taking initiative is hard when you don’t care so much about living. That’s what my therapist said.
But helping with the new girl helped me wake up. I guess that’s what I’d call it. It was a medium healthy coping mechanism, apparently. I remember that really well, my therapist talking about how living for others can help us, but we shouldn’t rely on others as our reason for living. That puts too much pressure on them, and it’s not fair. But it worked as a transition for me, and I kept waking up until I could start doing things for myself instead.
But yeah, I think Chica’s like that. She helps Vanessa while we’re there, so I use it a little bit as a break. I mean that nicely. Plus, Freddy’s… really not doing well. So I end up spending most of my time at the pizzaplex with him. Not that I mind, Freddy’s great. I just wish he wasn’t hurting so much.
I don’t really know about the others. Monty avoids pretty much everyone. Roxy avoids me. I don’t blame them, though, and I won’t push them. I hated when people pushed me to heal faster than I was ready to. I’ve seen Roxy flinch a lot, so I think she’ll end up being like Vanessa. I’ll figure out another way than holding her hand like I do for Ness.
We’re taking this one day at a time. You said that back when Grandma came to live with us. Do you remember? You gave me a big hug because I was crying about Grandma not being able to see me anymore. And you said, “I know it’s scary, and it’ll take some getting used to, but it’s just one day at a time.” I try to keep that in mind so I don’t worry about tomorrow before today’s even over.
I miss you, Mom. Tell Dad I said hi, and that I’ll write to him next. I gotta thank him for taking me fishing when I was little, ’cause I complained a lot about how boring it was and didn’t like his answer about it teaching patience. I’m really, really glad he taught me patience. I’m glad for a lot of things you guys taught me. Thanks for that, even if I bet you didn’t expect this was how I’d use all that stuff.
That group home helped too, I guess. Can you imagine if I didn’t know about healthy coping mechanisms? We’d all be doomed.
Love you! I’ll write again soon!
Gregory
• • •
If Gregory was being completely honest with himself, he was only surprised that something like this hadn’t happened sooner.
One minute, he’d been playing a sedate game of soccer with some wet floor sign bots—they couldn’t move very fast, after all—and the next, his nose started bleeding. He wasn’t even hit in the face or something. Nope, just a perfectly ordinary nose bleed. Everyone got them.
Only, not everyone also spent extended periods of time with an overprotective animatronic bear. And especially not one whose programming went absolutely bonkers the moment he spotted the blood.
Yeah, so he barely had time to realize Freddy was charging at him before he was being firmly but gently tucked into Freddy’s chest cavity.
Freddy’s body didn’t do much to muffle sounds or anything, and it seemed like someone witnessed Gregory’s… abduction?… based solely on the near-instant uproar from outside. Gregory rolled his eyes and wiggled to get comfortable. His only regret was not having any tissues or napkins with him. He could feel the blood dripping onto his shirt and slowly soaking into the fabric.
Now that he thought about it, though, this was his first time being back in Freddy since the night they met. He forgot how cozy it was. And hey, better enjoy it now while he was still small enough to fit inside.
Gregory waited tentatively to see if any bad memories might come back. They did that sometimes, the jerks. He’d been inconsolable the first handful of times someone tried to get him into a car after his parents died. And poor Vanessa frequently spiraled from her ever-growing list of triggers. He wished—for her sake, mostly—that there was a way to figure them out before she had a panic attack. Some things could be guessed, sure, but the carrots had admittedly taken him by surprise.
So this was the moment of truth. Would being back inside Freddy be one of his?
Mm. No. It didn’t particularly inspire feelings of panic, and it wasn’t like he’d been claustrophobic the first time he crawled inside. If anything, he felt nice and safe in this nifty little hiding place. Like before, nothing and nobody could get him in here.
That seemed to be a bad thing at the moment, though. Someone was demanding he be released, and he could kinda make out Freddy babbling about needing to keep Gregory safe.
Okay, the level of worrying going on outside seemed wildly disproportional to the situation. They knew this was safe for him, right? Like, they knew he wasn’t in pain or anything, right? Or maybe they thought this would be a trigger for him.
Wait, was it triggering them? Was seeing him disappear into Freddy like that bringing back memories of when he’d been running from them?
Gregory groaned and slumped further down. Do you have any idea how complicated it could be at times, trying to keep track of who reacted poorly to what and who still flinched (all of them, save Freddy) and the best ways to help each of them? Or how frustrating it could be, knowing that giving them space was about all he could do most of the time?
His nose scrunched up from the ticklish feeling of blood dripping from it, so he gave up his shirt as an unfortunate sacrifice and used the hem to wipe his face. Great, that’d probably freak everyone out, too.
Maybe he should just take a nap.
Voices started to raise, Roxy chief among them, believe it or not. “You can’t just lock him in there!” she nearly shouted.
Should he just holler that he was okay? Or would that make things worse? Would Freddy release him when he was ready and less panicky, or was Freddy aiming for long-term?
Ugh, so many questions.
It took some contorting, but he managed to wiggle his phone out of his back pocket without dropping it into the unfathomable depths of Freddy’s body. He went straight to the messaging app and texted Freddy.
you okay? cuz i’m okay. i’m super okay, promise.
Then he went to Vanessa’s contact. He wasn’t sure if she had her phone on her, but it couldn’t hurt to try and calm everyone down before punches could be thrown. Gregory would very much like it if no punches were thrown, thank you, especially not at the animatronic he was currently inside.
everything all right out there?
Out here? How about in there? What happened?
all good in here :)
nose bleed. note to self: Freddy doesn’t react well to blood
Why are you so calm?
it’s not my fault i’m a chill little dude
besides
why shouldn’t i be
Because that’s what a normal reaction would be?
to…?
You just got forcibly stuffed inside an animatronic.
What about that isn’t terrifying?
uh
the part where Freddy’s my friend
and wouldn’t hurt me
and also. not to talk about That
but this was literally the safest place in the pizzaplex for me
You make logical sense but my heart is still racing.
well, i feel relaxed enough to take a nap, soooo
sounds like a you problem
hey, tell everyone not to panic cuz i am haha
very covered in blood
WHAT
nose bleed minus tissues equals mess
It was then that Freddy seemed to come back to himself enough to respond to Gregory. Only, instead of texting back, he called.
“Gregory,” he said when the call connected. He somehow managed to sound apologetic and relieved and panicked all at once.
“Hey, Freddy. Are you okay?”
“I… yes. I am sorry. I do not know what came over me.”
“You saw blood and freaked. It’s fine, I get it. And it’s just a nose bleed, not an injury. Promise.”
“You are not hurt,” Freddy said. Gregory almost mistook it for a question before wondering if he was trying to tell himself that.
“I’m not hurt,” he repeated anyway. “It’s pretty much stopped, but I do have a lot of blood on my shirt.”
Freddy made a very unhappy noise. Gregory patted the inside of his stomach.
“I—I will not panic again,” Freddy said.
“I’m not mad, and I won’t be if you do. I think Vanessa brought a sweatshirt, so I’ll go put that on. You cool letting me out now?”
There was a long pause, but Gregory didn’t rush him. He had hated when people kept repeating their question or demanding an answer before he was ready to give one. He wasn’t stupid, he didn’t need to be spoken to all slow and simplified.
“Yes,” Freddy finally said. “I can do that.”
It still took another minute before the hatch opened, and he only hung up when it did. The others were all still hanging around, and no one immediately flinched or turned away at the sight of him.
That… was interesting. Gregory wondered if any of them even noticed. He didn’t say anything, just hid a little smile as he ducked his head to examine his shirt.
Yup. Just as he thought. Not worth saving. It was worse than when Vanny sliced his cheek open.
Shrugging, Gregory turned to Vanessa. “Can I borrow your sweatshirt?”
She snorted. “Yeah. We can try to get that out when we get home, if you want.”
He held the sticky fabric away from his chest. “If you want the challenge, sure. I won’t miss it otherwise.”
“Up to you,” Vanessa said. “Now go change before Freddy has another conniption.”
“I will not,” Freddy protested weakly. He was staring, tense, at Gregory’s face, which was probably grossly smeared with blood.
“Stop looking at it, geez,” Gregory said, reaching out to take Freddy’s hand. He made sure to angle himself away. “Can we watch a movie when I get back?”
“I wouldn’t mind,” Chica said after a moment’s hesitation. The others nodded their agreement, but Monty and Roxy were already starting to shrink in on themselves.
“Awesome,” Gregory said. “You can pick, Chica.” Gotta offer positive reinforcement. He was personally a big fan of brownies as a reward, but dessert wasn’t much of an option with a bunch of robots.
He led Freddy away, pleased when he heard the others whining good-naturedly behind them.
• • •
Hey, Dad!
Sorry for how short this will be, but I just have to tell somebody! I can’t make a big deal out of stuff like this around the others or they’ll feel bad about recovering too slowly or some crap like that. It’s barely been a month, geez. They need to cut themselves some slack.
Anyway! Roxy’s getting better! I mean—she’s making an effort to get better! That’s so awesome of her! She actually CHOSE to sit with me and Freddy the other day, and she only flinched a little when she looked at me, but otherwise, she seemed pretty okay! And she keeps coming back!!
I think you’d be real proud of her! You and Mom, of course, but I’m using a lot of your methods, so yeah, I think you’d be super excited for her.
We’re doing good. Mostly. As far as I can tell. C’mon, I can’t watch them all at once! I still wish Vanessa could see, y’know, a professional. But I think the thought of talking about this stuff with a stranger terrifies her, almost as much as bringing up memories from her mind control days does. I can’t really blame her for that.
I also really wish you guys were here. I mean, I always wish that, but like, I wish I could ask you and Mom for advice. Half the time, I feel like I’m not doing anything right, or I’m not doing enough, and I have to keep reminding myself that it’s not! My! Job! And that I’m doing this to help, and I’m doing my best, but I still just.
Haha, ignore those tear stains. You should be very proud of me. I still use my therapist’s Battle Tactics, and bad feelings are no match for those. Eh, I mostly just took a break and stepped back from the thing that was upsetting me (this lefter, not you!!). I listened to music that made me happy and I also definitely didn’t steal a snack. I am a good child who doesn’t eat Cheetos Puffs before dinner. :)
Anyway! No more distractions or bad feelings here! I wish you guys could give me advice because you’re both old farts who have a lot more experience with life than me. I might know more about animatronics, but like, what the heck am I supposed to do with an alligator with grief-based anger management issues? I haven’t learned about that! It wasn’t a problem I had!
Ughhhh. I hate being the adult. I’m definitely about to be promoted to Junior Night Guard soon, though, thank you very much, because I am CLEARLY the best one for the job. But otherwise, being responsible SUCKS. I don’t know how you did it full time. Ew.
But ~someone~ has to be. And it ain’t Vanessa, not on the days when she accidentally puts SALT in her COFFEE. She didn’t even FLINCH, Dad. Just kinda… narrowed her eyes at the cup like it wasn’t the taste she wanted. No DUH it wasn’t. I can’t believe she didn’t notice me staring at her in absolute horror from across the table. My roommate’s a freak, Dad, for this reason and this reason only.
I guess I’ll try Google. Maybe I can chuck one of those stupid “repeat after me” tapes at Monty. Those have, like, breathing exercises and stuff, right? Do you think he’d like yoga? Does yoga even help with anger? Or is that meditation? Is there a difference???
See, I bet you guys would know the answer to that. I bet you guys would have helped them heal so much more by now. Wait, no, stop that. See, I’m not going down that road. I’m doing my best and that’s all anyone can ask of me. And they don’t even ask that much of me.
I’m kinda thinking about suggesting us getting a pet to Vanessa. Not only would it do her some good, I’m pretty sure, but also, I want one. So there. But I think I’ll wait to bring that up until I’m reasonably confident she could actually take care of a pet herself. She should be extremely grateful that I came house trained, because she sure wasn’t helping on the “basic necessities” front for a while. I had a lot of microwave foods and grilled cheese. But hey, so did she. Actually, that might be why she woke herself up enough to start managing better meals. Hm.
I said this was gonna be short, didn’t I? Oh well, guess I’m a liar. :) Thanks for listening, Dad! Tell Mom I said hi, and I love you both a whole bunch.
Later alligator! ;P
Gregory
• • •
“Mom, Dad,” Gregory said, sitting cross-legged in the soft grass in front of his parents’ shared headstone. “This is Vanessa. I’ve told you about her before. She’s taking care of me now.”
“You’ve got that the wrong way around, munchkin,” Vanessa said, rueful. She stood behind his left shoulder, hesitant.
“Fine. Mom, Dad, this is Vanessa. I make sure she eats. She provides the credit card.”
Vanessa snorted. “That’s not any better!”
“Ugh, so picky. Mom, Dad, this is Vanessa. We take care of each other.”
She sighed, but it was the fond kind that made him hide a sly smile. Without protesting this one, she merely handed him the bouquet of flowers they’d picked out together. Gregory fluffed them up a bit—they’d gotten a little smushed on the bus—and carefully laid it down in the grass.
When he first grabbed it in the shop, he hadn’t noticed the thorns. Fresh scabs dotted his thumb, and he picked at one until it began to bleed. An old, familiar habit of his.
She hadn’t been surprised when he said he wanted to visit his parents today. She had been surprised that he wanted her to go with him.
The cemetery was mostly empty today. Peaceful. He’d always kinda liked it. No one ever bothered him here.
“I was really close with my parents,” he said, fiddling with the flowers, careful not to get them bloody.
“Yeah?”
Gregory nodded slowly, eyes tracing the letters in their names, side by side. “They always knew how to help me when I needed it. I write ’em letters now. My therapist suggested it, and I… I like doing it. Makes me feel closer to them. They’re still really easy to talk to.”
He heard her shuffle her feet, but she didn’t respond.
“The first time I ran away from a foster home, it was because I found out they were planning on transferring me. It wasn’t anything personal. Transfers happened all the time. But they wanted to send me out of the city, over an hour away.” Gregory shrugged, more to himself than to her. “I panicked. All I could think was that they wanted to send me away from my parents.”
Again, it had felt like. He’d barely survived the first time. He’d been so mad. So scared.
Vanessa finally kneeled down beside him. “So you left.”
“Took four days for me to be caught and taken back.” He snorted. “It was an awful four days. I didn’t know how to live on the streets back then.”
“But you learned?” she asked, and she sounded so sad that he couldn’t bear to look at her. He knew what he’d see, and he wasn’t in the mood to cry.
“Yeah. I didn’t tell them why I left. Maybe I should’ve—probably should’ve. But sometimes… not knowing is easier than hearing an answer you don’t like. I was scared they’d say it didn’t matter, that I’d just have to live with not being able to visit my parents anymore. By the time I was brought back, someone else had been sent instead, so I was safe. For a while.”
His first home had—well, they’d practically worked a miracle with him. After everything they’d done to help him, to teach him how to take care of himself mentally, how to avoid slipping back into the worst parts of his mind, and he went and ignored it all out of paranoid fear.
Gregory stared down at his hands, tracing over a faint scar at the base of his thumb. It was smeared red from the thorn cuts, as if it was fresh again. He’d gotten it in the crash, and it had taken months for him to allow the small wound to heal, to stop picking at it until the blood welled up again.
“I kept thinking it would happen again. Being sent too far away,” he quietly continued. “And I got it into my head that if it did, I’d have to take to the streets. So I started… I dunno, practicing. I’d pick an alley and stay the night. I’d work on finding ways to get food and stuff. I looked up videos on how to use knives. I snuck out a few times just to practice escaping and avoiding being found.”
“Gregory…” Vanessa whispered. He still couldn’t bring himself to even glance at her.
“The practice paid off,” he rushed to get out, wanting to finish the story before the lump in his throat made it too hard to speak. “I got transferred again, and I waited until we had got to the new house before I split. That way, they’d be looking for me in the wrong city. Took me a week to get back here, and I slept on my parents’ grave the first night I did.”
The anxiety about leaving his parents, the paranoia of something happening to the grave if he left, the inexplicable terror of losing it forever—he had finally realized later that it all started happening the month leading up to the first anniversary of their deaths. Gregory remembered wishing he was back in the first home, wishing someone could help him figure out how to make it stop.
It had faded, all the wrongness, but only after the anniversary passed in a haze of delirium, tears, and panic attacks. He’d been furious with himself over backsliding so badly.
He’d been a street rat since, up until he invited himself into Vanessa’s home.
“You’ll fail at some point, like all your progress just up and vanished,” he said. “And you’ll hate yourself for it, as if—as if you chose to.” His eyes were burning with unshed tears when he finally looked up at Vanessa. Her cheeks were wet, and she silently tucked him against her side. “You can’t let it be the end of you, though.”
They sat in the quiet of the cemetery for a while, warm from the sun, watching the breeze ruffle the petals and leaves of the bouquet.
Vanessa sighed, her shoulders losing some of their tension. He felt her rest her cheek against the top of his head. “I’m glad you didn’t let it be the end of you,” she whispered.
Gregory closed his eyes and slumped against her. “Yeah. Me too.”
• • •
Vanessa,
Someday, I’m going to give you this letter. Obviously, if you’re reading this, that was today. I don’t know when it’ll be, just that I’ll only give it to you once I know you’re ready to read it. I’m eleven right now, and we’ve been living together for six months, so who knows. Maybe I’ll be fifteen or twenty. Maybe you’ll be old and wrinkly. Maybe I’ll barely be twelve. I can’t see the future, so I have no idea!
There’s a lot I don’t tell you. Didn’t? Whatever, doesn’t matter. My point is, from day one of us meeting, I kept a lot of secrets. I didn’t tell you how scared I was when we got to your house. I didn’t tell you that I was terrified some days that you’d give up, give up. The permanent kind. I didn’t tell you that I was tired and worried and unsure, that I didn’t know what I was doing, that everything I did to try and help you and the others was based on stuff I was taught. And not everyone learns the same! I didn’t know if I was even helping half the time!
I didn’t tell you that it was hard. That it was hard to pull you out of the grave you were so determined to put yourself in, that it was hard to keep us both alive and well, that it was hard to find the right words to say sometimes.
My parents died when I was nine. I was put into therapy afterwards, and I’m really, really grateful to the people who saved me from myself back then. My point is that my therapist had me try writing letters as a way to express my emotions, particularly the ones I either couldn’t or struggled with showing.
I wrote a couple really nasty ones to the driver who hit us. Like, REALLY nasty. Put Vanny to shame kind of nasty. I cut them up with scissors afterwards and burned the scraps, so no one’s ever read those. And they helped. It was all the things I wished I could say to the guy but couldn’t. And definitely shouldn’t, yikes.
I still write to my parents. I probably always will. I tell them about things I’ve done and seen, about how much I miss and love them, about how I’m still alive. I like to think they’re proud of me for that, and that maybe, somewhere, they get to see what I write. A kid can dream, y’know?
This is my letter to you. Right now, you’re making dinner. Chicken alfredo, which isn’t complicated exactly, but it’s a proper meal that isn’t toast or soup or take-out, and it’s really good to see you care and put effort into that kind of thing. It's practically common now. I’m happy about that.
I’ve already mentioned how hard it was. How hard it maybe still is, who knows. But I also need you to know I don’t regret it. It looks like you’re going to be a pretty decent roommate by the end of all this, and I can’t regret meeting Freddy. All of us—you, me, the dogs, and the animatronics—we’re not quite a proper family yet, but we’re getting there. And, I dunno, I guess that makes it all worth it to me.
I’m glad I chose to help you. To follow you home. I’m glad you let me help you. You could’ve ignored me, I know that. And what could I, a kid, do if you refused to listen? Squat, that’s what. You and Freddy (and maybe the others, I suppose) get this look on your faces sometimes, when I say it’ll be okay, like you just can’t believe me. Or like you wish you knew what I saw that made me believe that.
You listening. That’s what I saw. As self-destructive as you were in the beginning, I knew you weren’t ready to quit yet because you let me drag you out of bed, and you ate what I gave you, and you kept going to your job when I pushed you out the door. You didn’t recognize it in yourself at the time—and that’s okay, because I didn’t either, when I was in your place—but there was some part of you that was still willing to fight to live. To get better. Even when the going got tough, and BOY did it get tough sometimes, you just kept going.
Thank you for that. No matter how hard it was, I’m so glad you’re here. That we’re roommates, and friends, and maybe family someday. I’m so glad we met. I hope you believe me when I say that. The circumstances might not have been great, ha, but I wouldn’t change it.
Included with this letter is a list. I found it, that first day, after we stumbled our way home. I searched your house to find Vanny stuff, and this list was one of the things I found. It has the names of the kids who died. It has my name.
I’m not giving this to you as punishment. I’m giving it to you because you’re ready, now. If you’re reading this, you don’t flinch when you see me. You can say Vanny’s name without breaking. You can talk about what happened without having a panic attack. You’ve reached a point in your life where you have, finally, forgiven yourself.
I forgive you, y’know. I hope that doesn’t need to be said, but there it is. I forgave you the same night Vanny tried to kill me.
This list is just about all that’s left. There’s still the matter of the suit, but maybe we’ve already taken care of that by now. I want you to have this, to see the names, and know that the list never continued. Never grew. That my name was the last to ever go on it. That Vanny never came back, that you have been free from the moment those wires left your neck. This list is the beginning and the end.
Burn it, keep it, I don’t care. Give it back to me if you want. But only after you’ve read those names. We can’t always forget our pasts, but maybe that’s okay. Our pasts don’t define us, or whatever that saying is. We learn, we grow, we change. The past is part of that.
This is the sixth version of this letter. The first two were mostly incoherent. I couldn’t figure out exactly what I wanted to say in the third. The fourth was too fancy; I used a thesaurus too much. The fifth was mostly okay, but I wanted time to sit on this junk before sealing it up for you. So that’s how we got this. Lots of editing, lots of erasing, lots of thesaurus-ing, and lots of super deep contemplating.
It’s more effort than I’ve put into anyone else’s letter. You’re worth that.
Across all those drafts, I never quite figured out a good way to end this. You’re stuck with me now, I guess, if you haven’t figured that out already. I hope that’s as reassuring as it is threatening. Time for dinner.
Gregory