Summary: Before Freddy Krueger was the Springwood Slasher, he was just a frightened little boy. But he was the Bastard Son of a Hundred Maniacs, after all, and there's no escaping something like that. No matter how good his intentions may have been in the beginning, they were squeezed out of him, and he was left sick and twisted – and he changed, from Little Freddy Krueger, Son of a Hundred Maniacs, into something much, much worse.
Author's note: Welcome to my crazy attempt at Camp Nanowrimo! Please bear in mind that it was written in the space of two weeks and is largely unedited, and I've never attempted writing for the NOES fandom before. However (as I'm sure you all know), as a writer I essentially live for feedback, and I would love to hear what you thought worked, what you didn't, whether you liked it, whether it was awful, etc. I can use this for when I go to rewrite, or when I'm writing future stories!
This story does start off quite slowly, dealing with Freddy's childhood, but it follows him through into adulthood as well and picks up.
You do not need to be familiar with NOES canon to read this fic, as it is just backstory. I apologise for any details I may have gotten incorrect; like I said, I've never written for the fandom before and I'm just going by what I could pick up from the movies and the Wiki. ;)
WARNING: For those of you who are unfamiliar with the canon and have somehow stumbled upon this, this story deals with a number of dark themes. Main warnings are for rape, self-harm, murder, implied paedophilia and all sorts of abuse, though various other dark and sensitive subjects may come up.
DISCLAIMER: Freddy is messed-up, and this story expresses viewpoints that I do not in any way, shape or form condone. Also, I don't own him.
Anyway... Enjoy!
Flesh Wounds
part i: the belt
Freddy could hear Mr Underwood stomping about upstairs, and it frightened him. Mr Underwood had been drinking, and Freddy knew that drinking was a bad thing. It made people change. The television had shown him so. But when the people on TV got drunk, they stumbled about comically, and said silly things and talked in slurred voices. Mr Underwood wasn't like that. When he got drunk – and he got drunk a lot – he got angry, mostly with Freddy. When the drunk people on TV got angry, they usually ended up having fights and yelling, smashing glass on tables and throwing themselves at one another, but Mr Underwood wasn't like that when he was angry. He was angry in a quieter sort of way, though he did yell a bit. But mostly he just yelled for Freddy to "get over here now!" or else to "get away from me, boy!"
Freddy understood anger. He understood that a person could be angry all the time and not show it. He certainly was. He was angry at Mr Underwood all the time, even when Mr Underwood wasn't yelling at him. But he wasn't allowed to get angry or yell back or tell Mr Underwood that he was wrong and that he, Freddy, was being good. Yelling was for grown ups, and Mr Underwood had done a Good Thing by taking Freddy in, and it was now Freddy's job to repay him by making him coffee and cleaning his shoes and taking out the trash and cleaning the kitchen and all manner of other jobs. Freddy knew that Mr Underwood could have very well done this by himself, but he didn't, for some reason. When Freddy had been little, he had thought that it was all right – because Mr Underwood was the grown up, and he knew what should be done and by whom and when. But Freddy was bigger now – nearly seven – and he realised now that Mr Underwood did not understand what he was supposed to be doing. He was too drunk all the time to know, and too full of hate to care what Freddy thought.
Freddy could have told him that he didn't want to do as he was told, but that would have earned him a slap with the Belt. If there was one thing Freddy hated more than his foster father, it was his foster father's Belt. The Belt was big and black and made of leather, and it was wide and had a big buckle on the end. Sometimes, when Mr Underwood wasn't particularly drunk, he would use the leathery end, the one with the little holes, to beat Freddy with. But sometimes, when he was too hammered to see straight, or when Freddy had done something particularly bad, he would use the other end, the one with the buckle, and that was what Freddy lived in fear of. It was hard and cold and left deep purple welts on his back and his legs, and sometimes he couldn't walk right for a week after he was hit with the buckle. He didn't get hit with the buckled end very much now. He was good now; he knew just how Mr Underwood liked his coffee, and not to disturb him with such trivial things as 'nightmares' when he was trying to unwind with his poker buddies at night.
Freddy didn't know quite what Mr Underwood needed to unwind from, because he didn't have a job, but he supposed it must be something very big and very important and very Grown Up to make Mr Underwood so angry all the time. Mr Underwood didn't sleep much, either. He drank until he passed out on the couch, and then when he woke up, usually in the afternoons, he cursed Freddy for not waking him up sooner. Freddy didn't even try to make him understand any more that he had tried, he really had, but Mr Underwood simply couldn't hear him. When he woke up in a bad mood, it was usually, he said, because of a Hang Over (whatever that was) and he stomped around the kitchen groaning and pounding his fists against the wall. Then he would have another drink. Drinking, Freddy understood, made the Hang Over go away.
When Mr Underwood wasn't drunk – or too drunk, anyway – he would leave Freddy alone. Freddy didn't mind that. Sometimes he got lonely, playing out in the garden by himself, but he preferred it to Mr Underwood's constant threats. There weren't many other children on the street on which he lived, and the ones that there were tended to stay away from him. He had overheard one of their mothers telling them to do so, once.
"Don't you go near that house," she had said, as she straightened his jacket before sending him off down the street to catch the school bus. Freddy was lurking just around the corner. The ball he had been playing with had rolled across the street and he was only there to get it back. "There's a man who lives there, a very sick man, and I don't want you getting hurt. Now have a nice day at school, I love you." And she had kissed his cheek and sent him on his way.
Freddy had pondered this later. Mr Underwood wasn't sick, was he? Freddy had heard about people getting sick. A girl in his class at school's grandfather had caught something called Cancer, and from what Freddy had gleaned, that was the worst thing that could happen. That was the sickest of the sick. If you caught the Cancer, there was no coming back from it, and you would die. It was the same with other sicknesses, too, only most of those you could get better from, like the flu or the measles. But Mr Underwood didn't have the flu or the measles. Freddy wondered if he had a worse sickness, maybe like a sort of Cancer. He wondered if Mr Underwood would die. And that scared him, because he thought he would like that. But he had to berate himself for thinking it, and he rubbed sand from his sand box into his eyes to punish himself. He shouldn't be thinking things like that. If Mr Underwood knew, he would do much worse to him, and Freddy didn't want that. He didn't want Mr Underwood to think he was ungrateful to him. Mr Underwood had taken him in out of the kindness of his own heart – he didn't need to, and he certainly didn't want Freddy. No-one wanted Freddy, Mr Underwood made sure Freddy knew that. If Mr Underwood was gone or dead, Freddy wouldn't have a home, and he wouldn't have anyone to look after him, and he might have died himself, and he didn't want that at all.
But he didn't really like spending time with Mr Underwood, either, and Mr Underwood didn't like spending time with him. Although Mr Underwood said that everything he did was for Freddy's own good – he was giving him his Medicine, he said, to help him be a better person – Freddy wasn't sure he liked it. But sometimes, Mr Underwood said, people don't like the things that are good for them. Freddy wondered if he was sick, too, but he decided he must have one of the lesser illnesses, not something he could die from. If he was taking medicine, it must be all right. But the Medicine didn't really seem to be working; no matter how much of it Mr Underwood administrated, Freddy always seemed to need more. So Freddy tried to avoid Mr Underwood as much as possible – he realised, now, that there was a correlation to the amount of Medicine Mr Underwood claimed he needed, and the amount that Mr Underwood drank. Perhaps, thought Freddy, neither he nor Mr Underwood were sick at all, but it was all in Mr Underwood's head. But he did not allow himself to think this for very long, because he wasn't supposed to question Mr Underwood: he was supposed to Do As He Was Told.
When Mr Underwood left him to his own devices, Freddy, being largely ignored by the other children in the neighbourhood, would play on his own in the back yard. He had a tree and a sand pit there, which he very much liked. He didn't have very many toys – Mr Underwood didn't believe he deserved them – but he had a baseball bat and ball that he had found at the park one day, and other bits of discarded and broken toys that he had found as he walked to and from school. Sometimes he found them by the side of the road, or lying on the floor of the long tiled corridors at school. It didn't count as stealing, he reckoned, because they didn't belong to anyone any more, and they were unwanted, and he was just taking them in, rather like Mr Underwood had done for him. But he was nice to his toys, because it didn't make sense for him to give them Medicine when they hadn't done anything wrong. But then again, Freddy wasn't sure he had done anything wrong either. He knew he made mistakes, but he tried. He tried not to steal, and he tried to get the coffee right, and he tried not to made a mess on the kitchen floor with his muddy sneakers. He tried. He tried to be a good boy. If he had children, he knew, he would be the best daddy in the whole world.
It wasn't that Mr Underwood was a bad daddy; Freddy would never have thought that. At least, he would never have admitted to thinking that. But Mr Underwood wasn't his real daddy, and Mr Underwood didn't allow Freddy to call him 'Daddy'. Mr Underwood was a Foster Father, and Freddy had learned in school that that was what they called the people who took in the kids that nobody else wanted. A boy in his class had told him so.
"You only live with him because your real parents didn't want you," said the boy, who was bigger than him. "He only looks after you because he's paid money by the President."
"Hush, now," said their teacher. "That just isn't true. I'm sure Mr Underwood cares for you very much, Freddy."
Freddy was sure it was true that Mr Underwood cared for him (why else would he spend so much time giving him his Medicine?), but Mr Underwood didn't love him, not in the way a parent should. He insisted on being called 'Mr Underwood', or 'Sir' at all times, never 'Daddy'. Some of the other kids in Freddy's class knew this, and when they decided that he was the kid they'd be picking on for the day, they usually started with that.
"My mommy and daddy are broken up, but my daddy comes round every weekend and he always brings me candy and he takes me to see the movies," said one little girl, whose name was Alyssa and whom Freddy despised. She had long blonde hair that was always in pigtails and those forget-me-not blue eyes that everyone coloured in pictures and that all the grown ups said were so pretty. They said she looked like an angel. Freddy loathed the sight of her. "Where's your daddy, Freddy?"
"He comes to see me every other weekend," Freddy invented. "He's... a movie star, so he's really busy."
"Oh, yeah?" said Alyssa. "What movies has he been in? What's his name? I've seen lots and lots and lots of movies, I'd probably know who he is."
"Uh, he's... Charles Krueger," said Freddy. "My middle name was named after him."
"I've never heard of him," said Alyssa, wrinkling her nose and flicking her pigtails over her shoulder. "I bet he wasn't in any good movies."
"He was," said Freddy frantically, and his eyes fell on a magazine on the desk near Alyssa. They had been using them earlier as part of an arts and crafts project, cutting out pictures of people's eyes and lips to use in a montage. It was part of the Fun Friday lessons. "He was in lots of good movies. That's him there." And he pointed to the man on the open page of the magazine. He wasn't distinctive at first glance; he was what was considered good-looking in the movie industry, but he was rather forgettable – a straight nose, pleasantly shaped lips and thickly-lashed brown eyes and hair.
"Oh," said Alyssa. "Well, I haven't seen them so they can't be that good." And she flounced off, taking her pigtails and forget-me-not-blue eyes with her.
Freddy watched her go, and was miserable about the fact that what she said was true. He had no idea where his father was, or why he didn't seem to want him. He knew that his mother was dead, and he understood that she wasn't coming back. He liked to think that she had wanted him when she was alive, more than anything in the world, he thought, before they were torn apart. But he didn't know who his father was, or why he didn't come to see him every weekend and bring him candy and take him to the movies. For all he knew, that man in the magazine could very well be his father.
So he tore that page from the magazine – it wasn't stealing; they were going to cut it up anyway – and he folded it and put it in the back pocket of his jeans and he carried it with him everywhere. A part of him knew it was silly, but a part of him really wanted to believe that it was his daddy, and that he was out in California making movies, and he was really busy right now, saving the world from aliens and being in magazines, but one day soon, when he was finished being busy, he would come to Springwood for Freddy. And then Freddy and his daddy would be just like all the other families, and Mr Underwood wouldn't need to look after him or give him his Medicine any more, and Freddy and his daddy would drive a red open top car along the Californian coast licking ice creams and life would be good.
That was one of the things Freddy invented, anyway, when he was playing alone in the garden. He invented lots of things, though, and the stories about his daddy sometimes played a part in them. He would take out the crumpled piece of paper and place it up against the tree, sometimes with a little rock to hold it in place if it was slightly windy that day. Most of his games involved the broken doll he'd found, and a small plastic dinosaur. The doll was bigger than the dinosaur, which was small enough to stand in his palm, so he had to get creative, and pretend that the dinosaur had been hit with a shrink ray (like he saw in sci-fi movies when Mr Underwood left the TV on) or that the woman had been hit with an enlarging ray (same business). They had a car – a black Jeep – that they travelled in, though the doll was really too big to sit in it and sometimes the dinosaur got lost under the seats. One of the wheels was missing, anyway, so it didn't really matter too much as they couldn't use it for travelling. The picture of his 'daddy' watched them, and sometimes Freddy made him play a part in the games, too. He gave him a deep, gravelly voice – a manly sort of voice, the sort that Freddy thought a father should have, not a growly voice like Mr Underwood.
Mr Underwood didn't really like Freddy playing in the garden, and sometimes he would call him inside even if there wasn't anything he wanted Freddy to do. He said playing in the garden was a bad thing to do because it made it seem as though Freddy didn't care about the jobs that needed doing. It showed a bad image to the neighbours, Mr Underwood said. It made Freddy look like a Waste of Space (which he was), and that meant he needed to take his Medicine. It helped him to be a better person.
But when Mr Underwood just left him to his own devices for a while, he was happy. Mostly. He was happy in the garden, where he had the picture of his daddy and his toys. But when Mr Underwood told Freddy to leave him alone, that usually meant he had to go up to his room. Freddy hated his room. He wasn't allowed toys in the house, on account of Mr Underwood thinking they were dirty. So when he was in his room he was completely alone. All he had was the picture of his daddy, and he couldn't really play much with it on its own. He couldn't do the voice, either, because Mr Underwood would hear and he would get cross. Mr Underwood didn't like to be disturbed when he was watching TV or playing poker, so Freddy had to be very quiet. It was very lonely in his room, and at night, it got very dark, because there was no light bulb in his lamp. The only light came from the streetlights outside, and that wasn't very bright at all, and it made the shadows dance in funny ways.
All Freddy could see or hear some nights were the funny dancing shadows (which weren't really funny, though he tried to laugh at them) and the sounds of men yelling and laughing downstairs. When he fell asleep, sometimes those things bled through, and he had horrible nightmares, about dinosaurs and strange men who claimed to be his father and wanted to take him away to 'look after him', and Mr Underwood chasing him with the Belt.
But he still preferred being alone with the nightmares to being with Mr Underwood, because he knew the nightmares weren't real, but Mr Underwood and the Belt were, very, very real. He didn't trouble Mr Underwood with the nightmares any more, because Mr Underwood didn't seem to think they were important. Everyone has them, he'd told Freddy, and Freddy's nightmares weren't anything special.