Work Text:
Harvey is ten when his mother kisses him for the last time, a tiny peck against the top of his hair. She's not wearing lipgloss, so nothing sticks.
“Baby,” she whispers through his locks, the ones he got from her, “baby, take care.” She presses a hand loosely against the back of his neck, just a quick, dry caress, and then she's gone. Harvey is her son, but when he his body twitches to follow instinctively, a hand comes done hard against a scrawny shoulder.
Harvey Spector is her son, but this far into the airport requires a boarding pass, and he's staying in New York City.
--
When he gets home, he watches some TV. There's some kind of cartoon on, he thinks he's seen the character on one of his cereal boxes, but he couldn't remember what the name was. Twenty minutes in, he still hasn't figured it out. He switches to a sitcom, the kind with the fake laughs inserted in. He stares blankly at MTV for an hour.
In this way, the afternoon passes.
Before bed, he picks up the journal on his desk. There's half a year worth of entries written in it in pencil cursive, the loops large but neat, the earliest memories sloppier. He flips through them and read idly at whatever catches his eyes, words, sentences, small paragraphs. There's a ticket stuck halfway through from back in January for a movie he watched with his mom. He reads through the whole page.
The light spills over his desk when he turns it on. There's a sheet of math homework from last night, which Harvey stuffs impatiently into a random drawer. He turns to a new page in his journal and fills in the date, at the top of the page.
The moon is full tonight.