"The walls start breathing, my mind unweaving, maybe it's best you leave me alone." ~All American Rejects
He breathes in, a burst of freezing air needling at the inside of his throat. His toes have long since gone numb against the metal of the balcony, his legs covered in goosebumps that shiver as he does. He is wearing a thin white shirt, the fabric clinging to his thin chest. His boxer shorts are airy, and every time the wind gusts on this seventh-story fire escape a new shudder racks his frame.
Deuce stares out at the city, a lonely boy waiting for the sun to rise on another winter morning. The morning streaks gray-pink across the horizon and his eyes strain against the dimness as the sun, a boiling and simmering ball of yellow fire bursts into existence at the very edge of the city. Skyscrapers stand out in thick silhouette, dark against the life-giving light of the star.
Deuce leaves the sun to launch itself into orbit and make its way about the world, slipping back through the window and into the now-stifling heat of his bedroom, which always has the lingering smell of smoke. The revolt of his body is full now, shakes coursing through it in a feeble attempt to warm itself. He glances into a mirror, sees a shadow of the boy he was on the face of someone new.
His stepmother snores in he next room over, in bed next to his father, and his little stepbrother sleeps in a crib across the hall. Deuce shakes the last of the chill from deep within his bones and dresses himself, his hands moving of their own accord and buttoning seven buttons down the front of a white dress shirt. The other two at the bottom he leaves open, the opposing sides of the shirt parting like the spikes of mountains that seem to cleave the very sky, stark against a pair of black pants, dark jeans worn smooth with many washes.
He finds his own eyes in the mirror again and sighs, brushing his hair back. Today is just another day; he will take her flowers and get all teary-eyed when he tries to talk, tries to tell her he loves her, something he hasn't been able to verbalize in years.
He, of course, rides the earliest train over, through the city, eager to get where he's going in time. He gets off a block earlier than he really should, so he can feel the breeze lift his eyes from the dirty street. The chill isn't quite biting when he gets there, the gates shining, and he takes a deep breath, the cold air shocking into his lungs and snow beginning a soft fall onto the inch or so already there.
The snow drifts in little piles around stones and in the tips of little grassy hills are barely visible by the time he's there, face to face with her, because she's always out this early, every day, though he's only there when he wants to meet her.
The breeze today is not enough to lift his eyes from the pavement turning white. He cannot look at her, the face that's set in stone, wings protruding from her upper back, extended in a heavenly reach, her hand trying to grasp something it never will.
There is an angel on her tombstone, an angel with her face (damn the sculptor, he even got her crooked nose right) and he has never been able to look it in the face. It has been eight years, and he is seventeen now, but the loss of a mother isn't something you just walk away from; he's been trying for what seems like forever, throwing the ball before realizing the chain is wrapped around his ankle.
All he remembers of her is sickness, an odor heavy and cloying. There is a flower in his pocket, a delicate pressed lily-of-the-valley that he's saved for her, knowing it was her favorite. Deuce stands alone, a boy with the weight of the world on his shoulders, alone in the near stillness of the hour just past dawn. Soon his father and the imposters will be waking, and he will be there, the slumping and shambling teenager they expect him to be when he sets the bar low no one is surprised much.
Wreaths line row after row of graves, marked and unmarked, but the owner of the cemetery has removed the one from his mother's at Deuce's request. Deuce stands the clump of bell-shaped blossoms at the foot of the stone, the dried white flowers shot through with the brown of death. Snowflakes light the green stalks almost immediately, and soon they will be covered. Deuce raises his left hand to his forehead, salutes the air, his silent tribute to his mother, their old joke.
He cries all the way home, and is pleased when no one gives him a second glance on the subway. Tears streak one after another down his face, carving trails that took years to begin formation.
Deuce wipes the hot salty tears from his face with one hand, unaware of the single drop that sprayed onto the pavement, alighting between a tattered notebook and a dried piece of chewed gum. This tear is nothing to him, a wasted moment, a product of love, which doesn't seem to mean much anymore.
There is a reversal, the contrast, a happy-looking individual until you peel back the layers- Cece Jones, the spunky redhead. She will assure Rocky that everything is fine, she can do it alone. That night she will go farther than she thought she could, watching the last slivers of light leave this part of the world. As the sun sets, she will watch it die, feeling the hope shrivel inside of her as he felt it did when the burning ball of gas rose.
The same graveyard, oddly enough, is the first step in the Universe's great plan to bring them together- their respective parents are buried yards apart, but by the time she reaches the cemetary his dried flowers will be soggy underneath a layer of snow. Cece will buy two hot chocolates and set one in the snow, leaching the heat from the other into her mittens as the first burns holes in the white fluff like the sun burns holes in the sky. After she leaves, a paper cup will lie seemingly abandoned in the field, a chocolate syrup ring around the edges of the bottom.
She will speak only in her head, a feat Deuce is still not capable of- he cannot bring himself to say the word 'mother'.
When Cece passes through the nightlife of Chicago, the beast rearing its head at her feet, Deuce will lie awake in bed and pretend he isn't as unhappy as he was last year. Material things don't mean anything. This is how the imposter (he's forced into thinking of Coraline's Other Mother) will try to win him over, but this is something he does not allow. The child is half his father, dark eyes hair, but half its mother too, and the difference between it and Deuce are startling- their face as different as night and day, the stepmother's child with an innocence while Deuce's eyes are dark with a deep throbbing loss.
Cece will squeeze her eyes shut in an attempt to rid herself of the warmth welling up- it will not work. She will flee the feelings in a rush, but one drop will escape- it defies all logic, all laws of the Universe, and surely one touch of fate is accident (two dead parents on a giving day) but two are meant to be. The intersection, the mingling of saltwater will draw the two together and they will find a solace that they weren't able to give themselves, together somehow.
In one year, the two of them will buy a pizza and eat it four ways, ghosts of parents past taking up half of a picnic blanket and weighing it down with a heaviness that many people do not recognize. Somehow these two will find each other and heal, a truly miraculous feat of the human soul.