(Backdated September 19th, 2015)

Word Count = 2,261

Amazing how fast time could pass, wasn’t it? Hitch kept checking the time on his phone, counting down the hours, minutes, and finally seconds, and then in the blink of an eye the moment had passed: Exactly one year ago today, his mother had taken her last breath. Not on her own. She’d had machines helping her do that, making sure each painstaking breath she took counted. But she’d made them promise no life support, and when her lungs finally gave out, that was it. In the blink of an eye, Logan Hitchcock was alone in the world. It felt like a joke, honestly - when they showed him the body, it didn’t even look like her. Without her smile, her laughter, her vibrance, what he saw was just a shriveled, sunken husk of a person that barely seemed human at all. How long had she been that thin? How long had her cheeks sagged like that?

This was one of the first times he’d ever been glad to see Tolliver go, to hear he wouldn’t be back until later. Some kind of plans, something to do with Fritz - he hadn’t pried too hard. As far as his boyfriend knew, he was going to be at work - Tolliver couldn’t have known he’d taken this day off months ago. Or that now, he had nowhere to be in the mornings at all. That when he took off for ‘work’ in the early hours of the morning, Hitch was spending those hours walking around the city on foot, trying to ignore how people stared at the scars on his face and the cast on his hand as they told him there just weren’t any openings right now.

Hitch was trying to be more open, he was - he had a promise to keep, that he’d try, that he’d do his best to let his lover in and be honest with him. But lately he’d been faltering, hard, especially now, especially today. This day, it - it was something he wasn’t ready to share yet. He didn’t want Tolliver to see him sitting there on the edge of the mattress, the bottle of bourbon between his legs and staring off at the varied photos of his mother scattered throughout the apartment. None of them were from when she was sick. She’d stubbornly, proudly refused to let him near her with a camera, not even his phone. He didn’t know why she’d been so worried - he never wanted to catch her like that, struggling with her hair falling out in patches.

He used to talk to her pictures a lot, back when he first moved in - now, since Tolliver, he’d been quieter. Hitch barely spoke to her at all anymore, and he knew why. “You must hate me, right?” He took another swig of the bourbon, shuddering as he felt the heat course through his body, and set the bottle back down onto the floor again with a small ‘thud’. He’d only meant to drink a glass. One to honor her and remember her. But it hadn’t done what it usually did; one glass of bourbon with Tolliver left him happy, laughing, passionate and free. One glass alone with his mother’s face staring back at him did something else entirely: It made him think. It made him think all the thoughts he’d been trying to keep buried since Tolliver had stormed back into his life and changed everything. He didn’t want to think; he was no more ready to face it now then he’d been that first night they’d spent in each other’s arms. One glass had turned to two, and somewhere down the line he’d just picked up the bottle instead. It wasn’t about the memory anymore; it was about trying to forget. About money, about how his encounter with Cinnabar had changed him forever, most of all about her. But the more he had, the more he thought, and the more he thought, the more he had.

“You do, right?” He wondered if she ever looked in any more, or if he even believed that she did in the first place. Sometimes he wanted to believe there was something more… no, there was something more. It just wasn’t what he wanted. It was a world full of danger and talking cats, negaverse and senshi, of youma and travel to space. He would have traded all of that in an instant for a world where the dead gained clarity, where they got a chance to make peace with the people they’d left behind.

His mother had never gotten that. The sicker she’d gotten, the more the disease had warped her. She’d gotten angrier. More spiteful. Paranoid. Sometimes his mother would come back, but more often it was someone he didn’t even know anymore. Yet it still didn’t feel real when she was gone. He still sometimes opened his eyes and expected to see the room he’d grown up in, his drumset tucked in the corner and his walls covered in band posters, with his mother in the kitchen throwing together a bowl of cereal before her shift at the hospital. She’d ask him about his day, sit with him for at least a while, kiss him goodbye before he went to school no matter how much he grumbled about it. She told him all the time how important school was - even if he’d had to do it, she’d still been devastated when he’d dropped out. He’d never forget the look on her face.

Just like he’d never forget the look when she stumbled across him and another boy in each others arms, lips pressed together. Like Fritz, she wasn’t supposed to have been home. He didn’t know it then, but she’d already been struggling with the sickness - she’d collapsed and been sent home in spite of her protests. No matter how exhausted she might have been, he had never seen her so spiteful, so angry, and more than anything, disgusted. He still remembered the how her ring had cut his cheek when she’d slapped him, but not as vividly as he remembered the burn on his shoulder when she’d thrown her half-smoked cigarette at him. The reaction had been so violent, so hateful, so unlike his mother who otherwise loved him dearly.

Sure, she pushed certain stereotypes hard: no dolls for boys, don’t do girly s**t, don’t walk like that, sit like a boy not a girl. But that didn’t make her a bad mom. She’d always done her best by him, and he still loved her. That’s why when she gave him the ultimatum, he didn’t hesitate to follow her rules: to stay in the house, he had to stop that ‘disgusting’ nonsense and find himself a nice girl. Be normal. Be a ******** man. A long string of ever increasing rules had followed: don’t stand too close to other men. Don’t get changed with them. No staying at their houses for any reason. Most of his friendships had dried up on the vine that way, between the spiraling list of rules and eventually him dropping out. But he didn’t argue. He was all his mother had, and when it came down to it, she was all there was for him too.

And then she was gone, and that was it.

At least until --

“You’d like him y’know, “ he murmured, his words slurring together - but it wasn’t enough, and he took another swig from the bottle, gasping as he pulled it away and set it back down again. His gaze was on the floor, a sort of hollow smile on his face and a glazed look in his eyes. “No… no, you wouldn’t.”

She’d hate him. She’d hate him for his leg. She’d hate him for his smile. She’d hate his beautiful tattoo and his pierced tongue. She’d hate him for the way he bit his lip and blushed. She’d hate him for the way her son looked at him. She’d hate him for loving Logan most of all. If she’d been alive, she would have done everything in her power to ruin their passionate, fledgling relationship before it ever began. Really…

Really...

The only reason their relationship had been allowed to grow and flourish at all was because his mother was dead.

The realization, although it should’ve been obvious, shook him down to the pit of his stomach, and it lurched violently in response. Hitch slapped a hand over his mouth and stumbled his way towards the bathroom, kicking over the bottle of bourbon along the way among other things. At least one of the pictures of him and his mother clattered to the ground with a glass shattering tinkle. He was aware of it, but he couldn’t stop, and he barely fell in front of the toilet in time.

He was shaking as he pulled himself up again, coughing and sputtering, furiously wiping his mouth with the sleeve of one of his flannels. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of himself in the tiny medicine cabinet mirror, smaller than his head and chest together. His skin pale and fishy, his hair hanging all around his in a tangled mess, his nose running and his eyes rimmed a vibrant, angry red. They matched the scars on his face, still so fresh and vivid, taking some foul and making it fouler. There was nothing appealing in that reflection, nothing he thought anyone should see in it. But somehow Tolliver did. He made him happy, the only beacon in what’d been a darkly dismal existence of just ******** scraping by, but --

‘You’re only happy with him because your mother’s dead.’

That was the boy in the mirror. That was him. He felt sick again, he felt trapped, he --

‘You’re glad she’s dead. Aren’t you?’

Anger was such an easy hat to slip on, familiar and worn. The face in the mirror twisted with it and howled with rage, and then the image was shattered and gone with a dull, crackling thud -- except it wasn’t, because that image was him. He gasped, realizing a little too late what he’d done, and drew his hand back fast, too fast - bits of glass tinted red, like stained glass, fell into the sink with an almost musical tinkling. His fragmented reflection stared back at him from between the jagged lines of the shattered mirror, his eyes wide and his face growing paler ******** finally looked down at his hand and saw nothing but a mess of red around his knuckles. He’d split his knuckles before, punching walls and cursing up a storm. This was not that. He felt distant, removed, and still too very present, like a vivid, lucid dream. But it wasn’t. <********> The first thing he thought to do through the haze of alcohol was turn on the sink and shove his hand under the water, thinking it’d be better to try and clean out the glass.

He regretted it instantly. “s**t, “ echoed like thunder through the apartment, the pain of what he’d done registering for the first time in a rush of ice cold water. He gritted his teeth and tried to stick it out, cursing and groaning and trying hard not to actually look at his hand because he knew , even drunk, that it was a goddamn stupid thing to do. Finally, it was more than he could take anymore. He shut the water back off again and grabbed some of the gauze left over from dressing his back. It was a crudely dressed wound at best, and crimson began to seep through the white in hardly any time at all.

By then, he’d discovered he’d stopped caring. He felt heavy, sick with all the swirling thoughts in his head, bogged down months of grief, guilt, and desperation that’d gone unsaid, lacing back and forth through the back of his mind like packs of rabid wolves waiting for their opening. And finally, they’d gotten it.

Hitch had already broken out into a cold sweat by the time he’d left the bathroom, and the entire ******** room reeked of bourbon by the time he got there. His stomach lurched again, so he just gave up where he was, pressing his back against the wall and slowly sliding down onto the floor, legs outstretched and his abused hand sitting in his lap. With his other hand still in a ******** cast, he fumbled to pull out a pack of cigarettes that held his lighter, and somehow managed to make it work - the cancer stick dangled from his lips as he stared off vacantly towards the other side of the room, of the place that was his and Tolliver’s, and he saw on the floor the broken picture frame of him and his mother smiling together, the glass cracked and webbed like the mirror in the bathroom.

It started with a sniff, a burning in his eyes. Abruptly, with a howl of pained rage, Hitch lashed out, smacking the doorframe hard with his cast, clutching the cigarette between his teeth so hard he nearly bit it in half. Then he slumped again, pressing the same hand over his eyes and blocking out the light - because what the ******** else could he do? Nothing. There wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do anymore. It was already ******** over.

The reflections of his mother’s image stared back at him, smiles etched forever onto their paper faces.