He'd done so well on his first day at school. The nice lady who'd helped him get dressed for it in his new uniform had made it sound so exciting. He'd wished his mother would wake up to see him leave but that had been okay, the nice woman had told him that his mum was just tired and that he could draw her something to bring home. So when they'd been given actual crayons, he'd spent all day drawing his mum a lovely picture of her looking happy, and he'd had a lovely school dinner. It had been a great day and he'd dashed home to give her what he'd drawn.

"Oh. That's nice. Leave mummy alone, she's not feeling well." and she'd set it aside, barely even looking at it. He'd gone back to his room where she wouldn't hear him cry.

"We'll run away from this all one day little William. Just you and me, away from all this hurt. We'll get a nice little house on a farm, where you can have friends to stay, where it's just you and me forever." He'd wanted to believe her. He had believed her. For a long time, but a dream could only survive so long.

He'd hated the men who showed up and stole her away from him, peddling her the very thing that made her so despondent. As he'd grown up he'd learned the sugar she spoke about was a drug, and that it was the root of all of their problems.

And it was more important than him.

On day in secondary school he'd been sent home, escorted by the police no less for getting into a fight with another boy and pulling a scalpel on him. When the police got him home, they'd found his mother's stash, she was taken to the cells that night along with him. She spent the whole time screaming through the cell walls at him like a crazed banshee.

He enjoyed it. For once he was more important than the drug, than the many men who called him Willy and told him to leave them and his mother alone for oh..an hour or two at a time.

After that he made it his mission to get her attention by any means necessary, and it was easier to do so with negative actions. Times where she couldn't help but pay attention to him because it meant her heroin would be taken away and she might end up locked up again for possession. As he grew she would even set his "fathers" on him. The men who liked to tell him they were his father at least, he never knew which was his real one, they liked to try and enforce their rules on him with their fists. They'd have had more response punching a wall, Rep had the ability to dissociate himself from his own pain, beyond where they could reach him, they'd give up in the end and leave him be.

And then he'd come home that memorable day, made himself a pot noodle and gone to his mother's room to make sure she was in.

She was in, but she wasn't breathing.

And he hadn't felt a thing. He'd even finished his noodles before he called the police, you called the police at a time like this right? Overdose, yes, he told them. He didn't see why they had to send an ambulance, it proved as useless as he thought. He'd sat alone that night in his house, trying to dissociate himself from /that/ pain. He found he couldn't. Women were so weak, so frail, she'd lost to a simple substance. If he'd been old enough, manly enough to see those bastards coaxing her back all the time, she might have survived.

He took the bitterness and carried it with him, still on some level feeling his crimes brought him close to her even when she was no longer there. She was cremated because he couldn't afford a grave. There was no other kin.

He scattered the ashes on a farm.

Women were weak.