A/N: As always, I only own the computer that I wrote this on and the bed that I was sitting on whilst. Liz is pretty out of character but she's not all that prominent. Rory'll be introduced soon

It started when he was thirteen. His mom had some random guy over and they were going at it in her room, something no thirteen year old kid should hear his mom doing, and he was alone in his room. With nothing on TV, he went to make something for his dinner. Jess remembers the day like it was yesterday, remembers how normal it felt when the knife touched his bony wrists.

Jess steps into the cluttered kitchen wearily, trying his best not to stand on anything and break it. This guy that Liz is with right now, Alan or something, always gets mad whenever he breaks anything. He doesn't understand what his mom sees in the guy. Sure, he isn't a total uggo or anything but she could do so much better. He's seen her do so much better.

There's old mac and cheese sitting in the cooking pot, days old. Much too lumpy to even touch now. He scolds himself quietly for not emptying the pot as soon as he was done eating the other night, remembering the distraction of his current read, To Kill a Mockingbird, sitting in his room, waiting to be opened. He cleans it out as much as he can and decides to just heat up a can of soup instead.

When reaching for the can opener, Jess spots a small knife. Not a butter knife, but not much more. Not blunt, either way. Without thinking much of it, he takes it out of the drawer, along with the can opener, and sets it down on the counter.

His soup is cold and tasteless, or maybe that's because Jess is too focused on the knife sitting on the counter, waiting to be picked up and used for reasons it should never be used. Once it's done and he's cleared away his dirty dishes and washed everything up, instead of going to read some more like he normally would, Jess finally has the courage to take the knife into his hands. He rolls his sleeves up and stares at his pale white arms. They look too much like something he's not, or something he doesn't want to be, or something he wants to be but never will. He's not exactly sure, but in that moment, he just wants to make a mark. He feels like Picasso, making his first mark on a blank canvas. It's stupid and he'll regret it, he already knows. Maybe that's why he decides to go along with it.

Breathing in sharply, Jess slowly presses the knife down on his wrist. He waits a second before gently dragging it across. It's painless and barely makes a mark, so he does it again and applies more pressure. The faintest of lines appears on his wrist, but no blood comes out. Once again, he presses down even harder and drags with more force, and he repeats this one action until there's blood oozing out of him. He feels alive, in a twisted way.

He does it until Liz's door opens and he can hear her footsteps in the hall, so he quickly wipes off the knife with a towel and shoves it back into the drawer. His arm, still dripping with blood, is really, in no other words, unavoidable. He decides quickly that he'll have to lie to his mom about it. Protect her from the truth. Which is just totally shitty that he feels the need to do that considering how bad of a parent she actually is.

"Jess, sweetie, what happened?" she asks when she sees her son's bloody arm, playing the doting mother for once.

"I was making myself some soup and I got cut on the can opener," he spins quickly, using the first lie to come to mind.

There's too much blood. There's far too much blood for that to be true, Liz notices as soon as he says it. There are cuts everywhere, all over his skin. All over his pale, pure little arms. Her baby. Her little baby Jess. He cut himself. Oh, God. Her baby cut himself. Because of her, she bets herself. Because of her. Her baby cut herself because of her.

She doesn't say anything, but she hugs him. He gets blood all over her favourite shirt which is sure to stain, but she hugs him even closer when she realises. She just wants to hug him and feel his bony body pressed against hers to reassure her that she can make him okay again, even though he never really was okay if it came to this.

He looks down at his wrists. The scars, although faded, are still there. Everywhere. All over his milky white wrists. It's scary to think that he hadn't really known what he was doing back then, just cutting anywhere and everywhere. Nowadays, he knows where exactly he needs to cut so that his mom won't find the scars and if he doesn't pay much attention, neither will he.

"You're staying with your uncle," Liz says to him one morning, thrusting a couple of suitcases towards him. "I can't handle you anymore. Come on, he lives in Stars Hollow, it's kinda far."

"What the hell is Stars Hollow?" Jess asks, ignoring the aching feeling he gets when he thinks about the fact that his mom is really, actually, properly kicking him out.

"It's a small town in Connecticut. Real sweet. Where I grew up. C'mon, we have to hurry."

They get in the car and drive silently to this Stars Hollow place. Jess reads a book with an unmemorable title and Liz listens to the radio, clamping down on her lip to refrain from singing out the words with a grin on her face like she would of done when she was Jess' age.

They finally arrive outside of some diner with a sign that says Luke's, and the name rings a bell in Jess' mind. Big brother Luke. The bell rings when they walk in, and Jess' mind screams kill me now. "I do love you," Liz says when she drops him off.

The first night, his blades lie untouched. Jess isn't sure how it happens, because there's a lot of thoughts swirling around in his mind that would usually drive him straight to them, but he somehow manages to stay grounded, for some reason scared of what Luke will think if he catches him. It takes everything in himself to not touch them, to stay clean for one day. The first day in months.

Don't get him wrong, he's tried to stay clean. So many times has he sat there, counting away the days since he flicked a lighter against his skin, or dragged the razor down it, or took out his favourite pair of scissors and cut away slowly until his skin was in shreds. But it would always end the same way; with a bottle of alcohol and the instrument of his breakdown.

Stars Hollow blows. This becomes evident on his second day there, his first day at school, where he's made fun of for the way he looks and the known fact that his mother was a slut. There's nobody interesting in his classes and his uncle just wants him to feel at home, he can tell, which unsettles him because he's so used to not having an authority figure give a damn. He isn't used to anyone giving a damn.

That woman, Lorelai something, hates him already. She sees him as the bad kid who fell into the wrong crowd and smoked behind the bike sheds to look cool, and as the kid who would kiss random girls and not call them back. Who would spend their Saturday nights with a girl who's name he doesn't know, unaware that he's that kid that spends his Saturday nights with a bottle of whisky, bleary eyes and his favourite lighter.

He gets through the second day without a cut or a burn or a scratch or any form of self harm again, and he's not even really proud of himself, because he sees the inevitable happening. He's going to pick up those blades, doesn't matter when, and slice his skin open again. There's no point in saying that it won't happen; it will.