Chapter Text
The first thing that he becomes accustomed to is the constant pain. It’s hard to stand, to walk, even to breathe. It feels like there’s fire and knives in his gut at the same time. Early on, he tries to resist the urge to reach for his stomach, protecting it the way he’s done before, but he gives up. Eventually, he hunches over it most of the time.
It goes away if he’s at Mom’s side again. He’s fully aware that he should stay away, but when he stays away it hurts, and his body screams at him to find his mom. She’s so close, it tells him, and he can’t help but listen. All it takes is being next to her again. You need her. You need her. You need her.
That’s what lands him close to Mom more often than not. She gets annoyed by it. He doesn’t care. It turns the biting pain into a dull ache, and that he can live with. Well—not live, because he’s not living. Something he can exist with is probably the better way to say it. Something he can bear.
You don’t need me, Mom tells him one night. He wants to believe it. Really, he does. But it’s not the truth. He does need her. Or if he doesn’t need her, he needs someone. He hasn’t found who that someone is yet.
I don’t know where I’m supposed to go, he answers, feeling helpless, feeling small, feeling like a child. Like her child.
You’ll need to figure it out.
So he tries. He tries. It’s the hardest thing he’s ever done. It’s not the mental hurdle, though that’s a problem in and of itself. He can work through that, he thinks. Maybe. The real obstacle is the physical one.
It hurts.
Sometimes, when it gets bad and he’s nauseous from the tightness in his stomach, he forgets. He forgets that he’s trying to keep himself separate from Mom and he panics when he notices she isn’t there, when he reaches out instinctively for her and finds empty air. Anxiety overtakes him in those moments—he can’t breathe, he can’t see—before reality crashes into him like a brick wall. She’s not there. She hasn’t been there for days.
He doesn’t notice how dependent he’s gotten on her until he tries living without her. It’s not that he thought it was just a one-way feeling, with Mom depending only on him, but he didn’t know that he was this accustomed to leaning on her when he needed it. He hadn’t had to think about the pain in his gut whenever he was without her, because he made sure he was never without her for too long. Maybe some of his need to be close to her came from the subconscious urge to get away from that pain, to minimize it as much as he could. He’d been in pain so much when he was alive, and his body didn’t want that ever again.
The second thing he becomes accustomed to is the weight on his shoulders.
He doesn’t know what it’s from. He doesn’t know how else to describe it, other than that it’s heavy and freezing cold and sometimes reaches down from his shoulders to his heart, or wherever his heart should be, to squeeze it and keep him from breathing correctly. To be fair, he can’t really breathe. Or have a heartbeat. But the sentiment stands. He mimics breathing, at least. And his lungs and chest struggle with this new heaviness across his back.
Staying around the Goodman house in the hopes that will ease things doesn’t work. If there are any residual traces of his mother there, they aren’t enough. He’s desperate enough to try Walton Way, even though he knows that won’t change anything. If their current house won’t work, then their old one won’t either. And it also burned down—another thing he’s done wrong. The house was rebuilt. There can’t be the memory of anyone he knows in its halls, let alone Mom.
One night, he sits with his legs dangling off the side of a bridge, his arms resting on the railing, and does some thinking.
It hurts when he thinks. It would sting a bit before, but when he’s not so connected to Mom it’s a lot worse. He wonders if he’ll disappear soon, if he’ll fade away without anyone to follow. It’s hard to form thoughts of his own, but he manages it, feeling dizzy and sick, cold and warm all at once.
The conclusion he comes to is this: He needs to find someone else, and quickly.
Well, he could let himself go away. He wants to, somewhere inside. He wants to be let go, to move on, to never have to think again. But when has he ever agreed to that? When has he listened?
So he won’t leave. He’ll find someone else. The only problem with that is, he has precious few people with strong enough ties to try that with.
Dad won’t look at him. As much as he wants it to be Dad, as much as he wants to play that game, it can’t be him. If he wasn’t focusing on the way his stomach was being torn into pieces, he would be smiling at the prospect of winning his father over. It would be so much sweeter if it took longer. But he dismisses it. Time was something he had an excess of before. He isn’t afforded the same luxury now. He’s too desperate for a quick solution, for an end to the pain he feels.
He thinks of Henry for a while, wondering if it could work, before dismissing that idea too. He doesn’t think he’d last that long with Henry. It’s not that he doesn’t like him, but he doesn’t have the right groundwork.
That leaves one person.
It makes him want to throw up, for some reason. It brings almost a full stop to his train of thought. Begrudgingly, he concedes that might have been the point. His body finally gaining some sense when he can’t and protesting in the only way it knows how. You don’t want that, it tells him as he vomits over the side of the bridge. There’s no substance to it, just bile and stomach acid. He can’t eat, after all. He feels empty all the same. You know you don’t want that.
But I don’t want to be left behind, he thinks weakly.
You don’t want to drag her with you, either. Do you?
He stares down at the river below the bridge, holding the railing tightly. The truth is that no, he doesn’t want to drag Natalie with him, but has that ever mattered? It never did before. Why should it now?
His gut twinges with pain again. He closes his eyes.
I won’t do that to her, he promises himself. I’ll let her go. I’ll let all of them go. I won’t hurt Natalie like that. I’ve done enough.
He breaks that promise within a week.