A/N: Just wrote this this morning, was wondering if anyone would give me their thoughts on it? It's from the Criminal AU that my fiancee has been working on so diligently - between work and a few hundred hours of GTA. Review if you have the time!
The day that Freddie's father leaves his mother locks herself in her room until five in the evening, and then emerges as though nothing is wrong, as though the mascara is not running down her face, to announce that they're taking a trip to the game shop in the mall. The car ride is filled with heavy silence, but Freddie twists the radio knob and squirms eagerly, seizing the opportunity to forget everything he'd heard, and everything that's about to change.
It's the summer of 1983 and Freddie is twelve years old, and still plays chess by himself in the corner of his bedroom like the miserable little loser that he is.
That all changes when he comes home with a brand new Atari 2600.
Freddie had never particularly liked cartoons, but he loved horror movies - something about them spoke to him, the hungry, feral part of his adolescence. Maybe it was the grim satisfaction of the kill, the blood spattering the ground. He still remembers watching it for the first time - Texas Chainsaw Massacre, nothing more than a slasher rerun on way past his bedtime, but he was seven and his parents were upstairs breaking glass and screaming until their throats were raw and having violent sex that, honestly, he didn't want to have to hear through his bedroom wall.
And now, with a gleeful twist in his gut, he got to be Leatherface.
What a fuckin' hero he was.
But Freddie had never been interested in being a hero. Fuck that. He knew better. No one gave a shit when you did things right - no one gave a shit about you, period, unless there was something in it for them.
Freddie, he doesn't particularly care what anyone thinks of him. He's sick of caring. He's sick of other people, he's sick of his whore mother and her creepy boyfriends, he's sick of his classmates taunting him.
He stops staying after school for chess club. Chess doesn't hold the appeal that it used to, anyways.
His father was a deadbeat and his mother was a whore, but he could forget all of that when he was plugged into the wall, sat in front of the glowing screen all hours of the day with controller in his sweaty palms. His forehead glistens; his pupils dilate; he chases innocent pixels around with an 8-bit chainsaw and revels in the high-pitched beeps of their agonized screams.
It's not enough. Even Freddie doesn't have the attention span to play the same game forever. It's not enough to block out the graphic noises from the next bedroom anymore, it's not enough.
Nothing is ever going to be enough to make up for his shitty childhood, anyways.
So he rifles through his mother's purse one Thursday night and the next day skips his morning classes to walk across town to the mall and purchase his very own copy of Halloween.
It spirals from there. He's fourteen and he's popping pills from the bathroom counter, from the unlabeled bottles in the medicine cabinet, from his mother's purse, from her nightstand. He's got acne all over his face and back and ass but he doesn't particularly care, as long as he's got the latest system, as long as there's blood on the screen and on his hands.
He spends his Friday nights with a box of doughnuts and sometimes a baggie of powder if he's feeling really daring, and if his mother's latest dealer has been over long enough for Freddie to get his sticky hands onto his coat, strewn haphazardly over the couch in the living room.
He doesn't know what the fuck any of it is, only that it makes his limbs feel heavy and his dick hard, and he can come without even touching himself, sometimes, or by rocking his hips up against the controller in his white-knuckled grip.
Freddie is sixteen and through a series of questionable transactions (and more than a few dips into his mother's cash stash) he gets his hand on a Nintendo, and then a copy of Chiller, which in itself is nearly enough to make him cream his jeans in excitement. He licks doughnut glaze from the corners of his mouth and misses a week of school, an entire fucking week, until finally the principal calls and his mother shoves him screaming out the door with a bag full of textbooks he hasn't cracked since he started junior year.
He doesn't actually give a fuck that he's failing - why should he? What is he going to do with a fucking diploma, anyways? He knows one thing - he ain't going to college - but he's pissed that she's figured out how to cut the power in his room. He swears in a grumble around his cigarette that he'll get that bitch back for all the shit she puts him through.
He's seventeen and he's got a dead-end part-time job flipping greasy meat patties at Burger King, and he's finally figured out where to get those pretty little pills for himself.
Freddie decides that he doesn't hate his mother's boyfriends so much. after all, because whenever they come by now he's got a wad of cash in his hand and a pocket ready, and the next day he'll have ten skinny, sweaty teenagers clamoring behind the school for whatever he'll give them, whatever the price.
The first time he actually uses the knife he'd nicked out of the trunk of his dad's shit in the attic for anything productive, he's eighteen and in way over his fucking head. There's a guy in a leather jacket jabbing him in the chest; his breath stinks, and he's spitting in Freddie's face and all of a sudden Freddie's knuckles are up against his belly, twisting the blade with the same sweaty-palmed exuberance he'd had for those stupid fucking slasher games.
There's blood on his hands, real fucking blood - real, hot, red blood, real blood, no pixels, no digital screams, just the pained grunt of a stinking, hulking, sneering man in his forties selling coke to a high school dropout.
It's hot like the controller in his hand, it's hot like the jolt going straight to his cock, and he jerks the blade clumsily free, and the creepy fuck goes stumbling back, slumping against the brick, gurgling and clutching at his wound.
"You fucking - brat-" he chokes, and makes to grab him- but Freddie's gotten a taste now, the real deal, and he jams the heel of his palm up against his chin and cuts his throat open like a fucking pumpkin.
It's all so agonizingly slow, so fucking hot, the way he convulses, the way his eyes fly open, pupils dilated, before they roll up into his skull and Freddie can't stop staring at it, twisting the knife like it's one of his games - searching for coins or points or extra lives, something, but all he gets is a dead weight falling forward into his arms, a body -
Holy shit.
Freddie feels the blood drain from his face as it comes to him. Dead, dead, dead - SHIT. He's never stopped to think about this before, never really thought he'd do it, but here he is and he's not sure how much time he's got before somebody comes looking for this guy and he's in big fucking trouble.
He has to get out of town. Soon. Now.
He's got a pocket full of pills, a wad of cash hidden in the lining of his jacket. He's got a shift tonight that he's really not planning on showing up for, anyways. He's got a dead fucking body at his feet and a knife in his bloody fist and he's never had a high like this before, and all he wants to do is find the nearest hole to fuck, something, his hand even, before it wears off.
He leaves the body where it is. His mother isn't home.
He lies back and jerks off with his blood-crusted hand and lifts a palm full of powder to his nose and God, fuck, fuck -
The chess board is folded up, dusty beneath his bed.
He doesn't pack it. He doesn't pack much of anything, not even his console, just his cash and his knife, the clothes that he can fit into his backpack.
There are kids behind the school, smoking joints, shaking for their next hit. They're going to be pissed when he doesn't show up tomorrow. But there are other kids, other junkies, other towns, and Freddie is sick of this pathetic fucking town anyways.
He knows already that he's never coming back.