#god!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

He hears the lull of a television left on in his mother’s room. This is the calmest he’s felt in a while, maybe, despite the fact that coming back home always gnawed at his chest -- even when he didn’t have to see his father.

We’re so happy to see you, Isabella and Adeline say over and over to him by the end of Christmas night, their faces lit like a dream. They hadn’t seen him since the summer, considering he never bothered to return home on Thanksgiving. Gabe complies in their laughter and their warmth, but the aching in his body reminds him that he’d never have the TV-perfect family he would yearn for when he was in middle school. It’s a childish thing to want even at his age, but the sugarcoatedness of being home made him sick for some reason, as if he was begging them for something real. He wasn’t exactly wanting pain -- he wasn’t a masochist.  But as he watched the corners of his mother’s mouth raise with her dimples, similarly to how his would as a child, he knew better. Her eyes would always carry the weight of the world, or a hell, rather. One of screaming and fighting and holding your tongue during the blow. One where the guilt made it hurt to move in the morning knowing her son’s growing pains couldn’t be tended to, only that they were put through even more bruises and boiling water. Gabe was okay with this, or he pretended to be to the point where nothing would ever phase him.

He hears his father’s voice in between the sound of a newscaster and Adeline’s phone calls to family members that cared enough to call but not to visit, for the three of them were damaged things left behind by Richard Leitner’s desolation. They were that part of the family.

You better not fuck this up, Gabriel. God knows Lockwood would’ve let you in had I not been an alum. If you fuck this up, your mother would hate it, you know that? She would hate you.

This is the second to last phone call from Richard, two months prior. His most recent call to Gabe haunts him to the core, the steadiness of his voice reminding him that any calmness isn’t real -- it’s only a guard for the worst. Gabe remembers hiding his face from Ophelia, mouth shut and knuckles aching.

Gabe sees his father in himself when he clenches his jaw at the mirror, resisting his fists to swing the same way he did when he was fifteen. His veins felt like they would engulf the rest of his arm, and suddenly fear strikes him the way the sound of that crashing beer bottle did. A gash in his head, a shiner in his right eye, gravel in his mouth in front of his own home.

3:27 AM, his phone reads. He doesn’t bother with Ophelia’s texts or Lana’s snapchats, instead fumbling with the lighter on his bedside table. It flickers it on and off in his hand, and he imagines dropping it on the floor, his entire room up in flames as he watches without a word.

Fifteen minutes pass with his thumb on the lighter, a flame in and out. Gabe considers this is better than being alone in Lockwood, though at least one of his friends could barge in and distract him from the depressing nature of the holidays. He gets up in the bluish darkness tiredly and scuffles towards his mother’s bedroom. Home Alone 2 plays on the small television opposite her bed, and her sleeping figure tosses and turns as Gabe goes under the covers.

“Gabe? What is it, honey, is everything alright?” Isabella asks apprehensively, her body suddenly facing her son as she touches a hand to his left cheek.

“I’m okay, Mom. I had… a nightmare. Is it okay that I’m here?”

“Of course,” she whispers. She purses her lips and strokes his brown curls, and suddenly she him as his teenage self, vulnerable and strong-willed at the same time. He hadn’t done this in years. There came a point in his youth when Isabella stopped wondering when Gabe would come home, when she would turn all the lights off knowing that it was useless to be worried. She had too many demons of her own to worry about, and even still, this fact made the guilt inside her well up. “Is it bad today?”

“Yes,” Gabe mumbles. “But it’s okay. Let’s go to sleep.” He remembers this code speak from when he was young, when his mother would occasionally know him enough to become a peer mirroring his own struggle.

“I’m… I really missed you, Gabe. I’m so happy that you’re home.”