Falco's eyes trailed over the short email that sat before him.
Dear Mr. Lombardi,
It is my displeasure to inform you that Falco has failed his trigonometry final exam. He has passed the course with a 68 average, but will need to retake the final next year in January.
Mrs. Puller
He couldn't believe it. After all the work he'd put in, he just couldn't believe it. He'd looked at the exam's answers. He was positive that he'd gotten a 66. He could have just scraped by. But he didn't. He just floundered and failed.
This sucks.
Falco sighed and ran his hand through his hair, pulling lightly on it. He didn't really know what to think, he didn't really know what to say or what to do. He just sat there, mouth agape, rereading the email over and over. He didn't really feel anything, just the emptiness of messing up the one thing he knew his father would've cared about.
Falco had always trusted his father. He knew that at any time he could go to his dad and his dad would tell him something that would somehow make things just a little bit better and show hope for the future. He never really felt alone while his father was around.
Which he wasn't. He was gone.
Falco remembered his father's funeral vividly. The sights, the smells, the atmosphere; all of it combined to form one lucid nightmare that reoccurred every single night in every single dream. Anything good that would happen to him would carry with it the loneliness that came from knowing that the only person who would really care about it was gone.
That was why Falco was so secluded and secretive, that was why he was so stagnant and collected all the time. Because, somewhere, deep down, every inch of Falco's body was trying desperately to stab itself in the throat to end the pain of being so alone. He never showed emotion because there were too many emotions to show. The only thing keeping him from actually doing it was the tiny ledge of hope that Falco clung to by his fingernails, that someday somebody would find him and things would be okay.
His father was always so proud of him, always so pleased with what he did, meanwhile Falco knew that it was sort of below par. He knew that he didn't care, and he knew that his father did. Now, though, there was nobody to care whether Falco failed or succeeded or passed or whatever. Nobody really cared about Falco.
But now, Falco would have to retake the exam and go through the trying mockery that would be the remainder of his high school year. He wasn't so sure he could do that.
Falco wasn't sure why he kept up the charade that his father was still alive. He also wasn't sure that anybody believed him. Maybe he believed that his father wasn't truly dead if he acted like he was still there, if he remembered and went through the trouble of keeping at least his memory alive. It was pointless, really. Marcello Lombardi was long dead, and nothing would ever change that fact.
For a while, Falco just wandered around his empty house, with a sinking feeling stuck in his stomach. It was clear that whatever it was, it was intent on staying. What point was there now? Why should he even try? Everybody he really loved was gone, nobody liked him, he was a failure in the one thing he tried to be good at….was there anything positive to pull from it?
Yeah, he was a semi-decent pilot, but that wasn't a big deal. His father wouldn't have cared much about that, or at least Falco didn't think he would. And it was only a hobby anyways, and he wasn't even flying planes legally. He just sort of snuck out there sometimes.
As Falco paced the room, trying to come up with some faint reason to be happy with life at the moment, he realized that he was being an idiot. His father would've been proud anyways; he always was and always would be. What was upsetting him was the moment of figuring out why he was the way he was, and that the reason he acted how he did was far from a sobering one. He acted the way he did because he didn't want to get hurt anymore. His brain just shut down and stopped letting anything in or out, like an isolationist country. The scariest part was, Falco wasn't so sure he could reverse it.
But, in classic-yet-not-so-classic Falco style, Falco shrugged and said, "I'll get over it," and went on with his life; bottling all the pain up in his mind until the day he had the experience to sort it all out.
Thank god my writer's block is gone! I've seriously been trying to write Last Lap, but I just have no idea where the hell I should go with it. So, for the time being, enjoy this one-shot, but I'll try to have my brain functioning properly as quick as possible.
-ThatWinchieGuy
