And we made it to the last edit!

Sorry it's taken so long—I've had to put my dog down :( So I dedicate this to my baby, Franky.

New chapters due to come soon, so I'm sure you're excited eh?

How are the edits coming? I hope you like them better—because I do, they needed massive fixing.

Anyway, enjoy!

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ELEVEN

Maybe it was a Patty Hearst thing. Stockholm Syndrome or whatever it's called when you're being held against your will but then you become sucked in and fall in love. Or, if not exactly love, you fall into something you can't back out of.

"I can't shoot a gun" becomes, "Hey, this hardly has any kick-back!"

Maybe this explains why it didn't horrify me when my mother asked me to sign the adoption papers, otherwise putting me into the custody of Dr. Freud and his unnatural family.

The first sign that things were, in fact, starting to turn around came in the form of a frozen turkey. Doctor Freud's daughter won it from a radio station by being the first caller to correctly identify a Pat Boone song.

It didn't fit in the freezer, so she had placed it in the bathtub to thaw. But there were only two bathrooms in the house and she had placed the turkey in the downstairs bathroom—the one with the shower. So instead of removing the poultry to take a shower, we all just showered with it at our feet.

Dr. Freud had a tendency to go through some very...odd phases. And when you lived in that freakshow house it was just something you had to get used to.

I would sit with Jack, upstairs on the rickety widows walk, smoking and avoiding them. Anything to distract...

"If he can be a doctor," I would say, "I should be able to get into design school."

My fixation on design school intensified during times of stress. I also wrote in my journal more. Writing was the only thing that made me feel content. I could escape into the page, into the words, into the spaces between the words. Even if all I was doing was practicing signing my autograph.

"Why don't you be a writer?" Jack had suggested one afternoon. "I bet you'd be a funny writer."

He had a habit of breaking into my journals and reading them...I had stopped trying to hide them—from him, at least.

But still, my journals were not funny. They were tragic. "I don't want to be a writer," I said, automatically, "Look at my mother."

After her divorce and bankruptcy from losing her fashion job, in her state of mind, and her quest for fame she moved into writing in the hopes of becoming the next Shakespeare or editor of Vogue.

Jack had laughed, "But not all writers are crazy like your mother."

"Yeah, but if I inherited the gene to write, I'm sure I got her crazy genes, too." I would reply, shuddering at the thought.

"Hm, well, I just don't think that you're going to be happy...drawing shoes." He'd say, the smirk that constantly frequented his face was today used with reason.

Nonetheless, that still infuriated me. I wasn't going to draw shoes. I was going to own a design empire.

"You don't understand the plan," I said, "You don't listen."

Jack had screwed up his face in disgust, "Plans shmans. Those are completely pointless, nobody sticks to them. If you've got your life all planned out, then you're going to get one hell of a surprise at the way it will turn out...anyway, I still think you'd hate it. Sitting around all day long, drawing scales and dimensions for people's dirty feet. Yuck."

I had no intention of dimensioning anyone's feet, just approving final products from behind a glass desk. A design empire was my only way out. I loved the fashion week commercials the promised, "If you don't feel good, we don't feel good."

That expressed, perfectly, my refined ability to put others first...


Sometimes I think I should really take my own advice.

I always say how no person should be surprised at unexpected turns of events that may occur throughout their life. Yet I constantly find myself being surprised at every little turn. It doesn't do any good to sit and think about what could've been, what ifs and whys...

Why, why, why? How can such a meaningless word be so...meaningful? It may very well be the most used word in the entire world. We're constantly asking questions, asking why...always needing to know the answer to things even if it's been explained to us. People need a reason to live. What their purpose is in life—as though just being alive isn't enough. We take everything for granted, and when the smallest thing goes wrong the questions start again.

So, what then? What was I waiting for? Why was I expecting to find the man I once knew underneath the man he now is?

There is a complexity to life that I often overlook. There is a depth of thinking, there is a richness. I am only skating on the surface.

I was currently sitting at the kitchen table, scribbling away at the blank page of a notebook. Soiling the pure white of the paper with angry black ink. I hadn't spoken to Jack since that night. I hadn't seen him either...

If I were anyone else I'd say that he was avoiding me, but I knew that he wasn't one to avoid anyone, and so therefore I didn't care where he was—no, scratch that, I didn't care what he was doing, wherever he was...

I was feeling incredibly angry with myself for allowing him back into my life so fast.

I had just gotten used to the fact that he had left, forced myself to be happy for my child...and the moment I see him again I don't make more of an effort to push him out.

I should have pushed him away. I should have made more of an effort to protect Klaus. I should have run, damn it!

But no, I let it be, and now I'm in too deep. Now it's too late to turn back, to run away. I've brought this all upon myself and have dragged an innocent child into it with me.

I felt sick...

What sort of a mother was I? Ignoring the safety of my own child for some long-buried hopes and girlish dreams?

As if my thoughts had been jinxed, I heard a scream and a cry of pain come from upstairs.

Panicking, I dropped my pen and sprinted up the staircase, running into my old bedroom to find Klaus curled up on the floor with tears pouring from his eyes, clutching his arm to his chest. There was blood everywhere.

Pursing my lips to prevent myself from cursing, I picked him up and took him to the bathroom where the first-aid kit was.

I gently sat him on the counter and took his arm to clean.

"Klaus," I began in a soft voice, to avoid frightening him more, "What happened?"

He was whimpering as he answered and I had to strain to understand his words.

"I-I was explorin' mama, a-and, and I opened the big closet and then the sword fell on me." He managed.

I didn't correct him that the 'sword' I saw on the ground was actually a butcher's knife. There was no need to scare him even more. I was angry enough as it was.

I saw a shadow appear in the doorway and I looked up to see the source of my anger standing there, a blank expression on his face as he took in the scenario.

His eyes went to Klaus's tear-soaked face, then to his injured arm and the stitches that I was currently holding, to my own face—where he found a glower that was only for him.

Upon seeing Jack, Klaus hurriedly wiped his eyes with his free hand and exclaimed, "Mr J! Look what happened!" He yelled, looking back at the large gash on his arm that I was stitching up.

Jack raised an eyebrow and grunted something, looking completely unfazed by it.

I grit my teeth, I had a hell of a lot to say to him!

It was only when I had sat Klaus down on the couch to watch some cartoons, judging by the way he held his arm to him protectively that he was content to stay there a while—and I stormed outside, to where The Joker was, working on some sort of chart...

Beyond mad, I knocked the papers out of his hands and kicked his feet off the table they were resting on. Causing him to fall to the ground from the chair he was leaning back on.

Glowering down at him on the ground, I didn't give him a chance to yell at me.

"Why haven't you killed us yet?" I demanded, "Hm? Why? Why am I here? And why am I still alive? You have absolutely no problems at all killing someone, killing someone for so much as looking at you! So why, damn it? Why. Are. We. Here?"

He opened his mouth, but I was too angry to even want to hear his stupid reasons.

"What do you want from me? I want to know, why you've decided to come back into my life like you think you have the right to! You've turned my home into some goddamn criminal maze! I'm scared to move around in there because I don't know what the hell is going to jump out at me! You've hurt your own son! You bastard! Hiding your face behind some paint like a coward! You're a manipulative bastard and I hate you! I hate you and everything you've put me through! You can't even give me the smallest bit of peace and end my misery. You'd like nothing more than to see me slit my wrists! Isn't that right? Killing me is too easy, you want to manipulate me and sabotage everything I've ever worked for until I'm a broken shell of a person, until I have no choice but to slit my own throat!" I raged, past the point of livid. I was a hurricane of emotions, but I was so angry that one more push would turn me into Lucifer himself.

I was usually so in control of my emotions, so I suppose it's not much of a surprise to know what whenever I lose control I'd turn into a raging lunatic.

I deflated, though, either in shock or confusion, when he casually went on to ask me if I normally felt grief on all of these "sad occasions".

The question struck me as an odd one; personally I'd have been too embarrassed by having to ask anyone a thing like that. Were it not obvious enough?

I spoke in a half-lie, in my confusion and answered that in recent years I'd rather lost the habit of noting my feelings, and hardly knew what to answer.

At the same time, this howling violence freak, habitually loaded with potent intoxicants and a skull full of Beethoven-grade egomania, is studious and thoughtful, courtly and caring, curiously peace-loving in his moments, and unwaveringly generous.

Ha. Yeah right...

It was almost as if nothing in the past hour had happened at all. And while I'd normally accept that he would be in a questionably good mood and walk away to enjoy what I could of it...

Right now, I was terrified. And my fear shook me to the core and brought me upon an ice-cold wave to new heights where my own senses went into overdrive and I briefly wondered if I'd go into cardiac arrest.

And the belated thought finally hit me as I dazedly looked into his voided eyes that...I really did not know this, this man sitting mere feet from me.


Take a moment to review this situation. While Fagin will deal with the paperwork.