A/N: Warnings for this chapter: hmm…nothing really. Just a line that sums up the much more graphic description in the first chapter if that counts any.

Enjoy. :D


Drowning in the Dark
3. Wipe

His picture of his mother's gotten a little dusty he thought, and he grabbed a cloth and started rubbing at the picture-frame glass. It's a mindless task, but right now those sorts of tasks seem like the only ones he can occupy himself with, because otherwise other things creep in and he loses a little more of his life trying to climb away from those slippery sloping walls.

And that picture was something old and familiar to him. It didn't go out of focus or change because he'd learnt something new about her, because he'd been told almost ten years ago she'd died of some chronic illness and he was told just days ago the same thing. The only thing that changed was the time: wasted time because he'd never met her, never seen her, never talked to her…

He just had that photo, that picture of his mum that was already looking a little peaky under the sad quality of the photograph. He'd kept it in that frame for the nine years he'd had it, but that didn't stop the ageing process. That didn't stop it becoming a little more washed out by the day, even if he didn't touch the picture itself, just the glass that protected it and the frame that held it all together.

That didn't stop his mother from having wasted away like that, regardless of when it had happened because he could muster up as much of that anger that had leaked away from him as he wanted but it wouldn't change a thing. His mother having been alive all those years didn't change a thing – except he now had a grave to go to.

A grave he didn't think he could go to, because that wasted photograph was about all he could tolerate right now. Because the image of his mother slowly becoming whiter and pinker instead of all those darker colours like deep red and navy blue. And he was sure he'd hate that later, but at that point he was still unsteady on his feet and in his dreams and ordered to stay at home – and he didn't really care about that order because there wasn't anywhere else he wanted to be anyway.

And he could stare at that photo of his mother all he wanted, stare at it and forget that other death, that other face he couldn't stare at properly because he didn't know how it should look. Not like him: he wouldn't accept that answer whether someone said it to him or not. Not like him, otherwise his own face would become an unbearable thing: bloated and blue and foaming in the mirror's depths.

But it was impossible to lie so easily, and he'd always been a bad liar. That's why he'd hid behind anger. That's why he was a badly sown patchwork quilt without the pins, since the pins were gone.