Call Me Hunter
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He couldn't sleep. Despite the fact that he'd been sitting through class all day and working all afternoon he was wide awake, his mind still racing a million miles a minute as it was prone to do.
Hunter made his way downstairs in the dark and turned on the light in living room so he could search through Ben's bookshelf for something to read. The first thing his eyes landed on was a black, leather-bound book; his journal. He picked it up and leafed through the pages. He had been looking for the book for several months, since the day Michael and Ben had said that they wanted to adopt him.
He ran his fingers over the initials as he took a seat on the couch. They were his real initials now, he almost couldn't believe it. Hunter Novotny-Bruckner. James was now his middle name, and as far as he was concerned he could drop it completely.
He was officially their son and as nonchalant as he tried to come off about it the day his adoption was finalized was honestly one of the happiest days of his life.
Tomorrow he was turning eighteen.
Tomorrow he was legally an adult and legally no longer anyone's problem. Sometimes he found himself wondering why they had bothered to adopt him with so little time left, but they actually cared. Ben and Michael were talking about college and how they were going to pay for him to go. He had never even approached them with the question because he certainly hadn't expected them to put him through school. But now they had made it apparent that they weren't just going to send him out and wish him luck as he had once expected them to.
He pulled the blanket on the couch over his lap and opened the journal.
Things had changed so much. Ben and Michael were so different, such better parents than his mother had been. He'd been thinking a lot about that since he had come back to Pittsburgh.
He had been thinking about his mother and his father, and everything that had happened to him. Everything had changed when Michael and Ben took him into their home. He'd become a different person. He'd felt loved and understood, something he had never experienced before at any point in his life. Sure, they could be equally embarrassing and uncool, but they supported every decision he made and they loved him despite how fucked up he was.
He'd never, in so many words, told them that.
Sure, he had slipped up and called both of them 'dad' once or twice or said something that could be synonymous for 'I love you' but he had never once tried to express how greatly he appreciated everything they had done for him.
It wasn't fair.
They had risked a lot to help him, and he still had yet to swallow his pride and say something to thank them.
Even more than his guilt over his love for Ben and Michael, his feelings of hatred toward his own parents were welling up. Their relationship had been in no way loving, and their feelings toward him obviously left something to be desired.
Especially after viewing the relationships of this extended family that Ben and Michael had built around him he felt the shift from one part of his life to another significantly.
And now, sitting there, with the pen in his hand he just needed to get it down on paper. He needed to write about the change so that he could tell people, so that he could remind himself that there were good people out there, who cared about you regardless of how bad things got, or how many times you screwed up.
Maybe this could be it. Maybe this could be the way he showed Ben and Michael how much he loved them.
He opened to the first blank page in his notebook and simply began to write.
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A/N: Yay, a piece about Hunter. I don't think I've seen one yet on ffn, although I could be wrong because I haven't done that extensive a search. Anyway, this is definitely a work in progress that I plan to finish. The chapters will be a bit longer than most of my work so far and with going back to school I'm not sure how much free time I'll have to write but it will be worth it.
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