Alternate title for this chapter: Growing Up Alone.

Outside of the fact that it's ridiculously long, this chapter was...really hard to write. I've had it planned for a long time, but due to the subject matter and the difficulty of conveying it through a toddler's eyes, it was a bit of a challenge. Some may view this chapter as filler, since nothing happens plotwise, but in my opinion, this chapter is important. It explains a lot of the things I've been alluding to throughout this story, particularly the mystery surrounding Frisk's mother, the story with their father, and exactly why they climbed up Mt. Ebott. Thus, despite the lack of plot-progression until next chapter, I hope you'll bear with me.

This chapter is probably the darkest of all of them in terms of content, and probably should be rated M. A laundry list of the more disturbing contents: potentially disturbing depictions of mental illness, violence, self-inflicted injury, forced miscarriage, and child neglect. There's also mentions of domestic violence, as well as heavily implied suicide and substance abuse. That said, I am not well versed in the treatment of Post-Partum Depression or emergency hospital procedures for toddlers, nor do I pretend to be. I researched a bit to try and remain as accurate as I could, but it may not be perfect or even close, and I apologise in advance for anyone bothered by that. Also, as a note, Anafranil is a tricyclic antidepressant, and while I'm not sure that it specifically would be prescribed for PPD, I know that tricylcic antidepressants in general are prescribed for it.

Please be cautious when reading this and keep the triggers in mind. The next chapter is coming as soon as I can manage it. In the meantime, here you go.

Guest review replies:

Guest: It will be okay, and there will be a happy ending. We're almost there.

The strangest part of dying is never the act itself. It's always the after.

You float somewhere empty, hanging in the balance while your life plays out before you in flashes, the most important scenes called back from the depths of memory into the light. Every person has moments that shape them. These are yours.

For the first year of your life, you have no mother.

Or maybe that's not true. You have a mother, you know you do. You can hear her sometimes, moving around in the room next to yours, her footsteps soft on the carpet but forced in their movement. The sound of her walking gets further away and then closer on an almost cyclical rhythm, like she's walking back and forth in her room all day, the same way you roll back and forth in your crib all the time because you want to get out and explore this big room but nobody lets you.

You scream sometimes when nobody comes for too long, because you start to get hungry or you need to be changed or you just want to explore. Your screams can last for hours in the day, until your throat is too raw to keep screaming, and sometimes the woman with the scared young face and the bitten off fingernails and the chopped short brown hair comes into the room, and she'll hold onto the edge of your crib and stare at you for a long time while you scream, her eyes wide and her mouth a terrified 'o'. Her knuckles are white from holding the crib too hard. It looks like it hurts.

You scream some more. She stares.

If you scream in the night, somebody will come for you.

It's never the woman with the bitten off fingernails, not in the evenings, though you don't know why. You think maybe it connects with the low voice you hear down the hallway sometimes, or in the room next door, the one that murmurs things you don't understand like it will be alright, Sarah, and stay here Sarah, I'll handle this, and Sarah, did you remember to feed Francis today? You never hear the answer, but the woman never comes in the evenings, and instead, he does.

Your father has short black hair, and his eyes are grey like the morning light that drifts through your nursery window, or the clouds on the days when it's rainy. His face is all sharp angles and youth, but there's something grown up in it too, something aged and worried when he comes into your nursery and finds that you're screaming bloody murder, and when he picks you up, you can almost feel the tiredness in his muscles when he bounces you awkwardly against him and sings off tune. You don't think he knows how to take care of a baby, but you like the way it feels when he tries, and you like the sound of his voice when he says your name and tells you to suck on your bottle and helps you the way the woman with the bitten off nails never does.

"Hey there, Francis," he says every day when he picks you up, without any kind of warning or prefacing baby talk, "You do okay today?"

When you're seven months old, your first word is Daddy. He gives you a tired smile. The woman with the bitten off nails cries.

When you're nine months old, the woman comes in to visit you again. You're standing at the edge of your crib and holding onto the bars, pulling on them experimentally and wondering if they'll fall down if you pull hard enough. You hope so. It's boring in here, but the house outside looks interesting. You know you can crawl around, because you do it sometimes in the evening when Daddy's home, but you want to try to walk like he does. It looks like fun, and it looks easier on your knees and faster than crawling, but it's hard to practice when you're stuck here in this plastic cage during the day.

You want to call for somebody to help you, but you know that if Daddy isn't home nobody will come, so instead, you decide to help yourself. You hold onto the plastic bars and try to pull yourself onto your feet, only to fall down almost instantly. It doesn't stop you, and you try again and again and again, until finally, you grow tired of trying because you're not getting anywhere and so you scream a bit because someone ought to hear that at least.

It's nearly five minutes before the door to your nursery opens, and the woman with the bitten off nails walks toward you. You're still screaming, and her eyes are wide as she approaches you. She's skittish and flinches when you yell, and so you yell a little less, and you notice that the quieter you get, the closer she'll come to you, albeit cautiously. Eventually, you stop crying altogether, and after a long time, she finally approaches the crib where you're at, and she stares at you like she's never seen you before.

"Francis?" she whispers, and you can't tell if she's asking a question or if she knows it's you, but you recognise your name so you look at her, and when you open your mouth, little cooing noises fall out. She looks startled. "Francis," she repeats, and sounds almost scared.

You reach for her curiously, and she pulls back with a startled little noise and a gasp, and your balance is thrown off by the fact that she doesn't catch you so you fall again. You look at her in confusion, and she stares back in terror. You stay like that for several seconds, and then she moves forward and slowly takes your hand, feeling her way around the fingers like she's trying to memorise them. Her hand is cold and wet, which is strange because Daddy's hands are never anything but warm. You don't entirely like the feel of it and so you squirm a bit, but she keeps holding onto your hand until eventually, she maneuvers the fingers so they're pointing at her, and you stop because this is unusual and you think she's trying to tell you something.

Her eyes are closed, and her face is pale in the dim lighting of the nursery. Her lip quivers as she makes you point to her, and then she opens her eyes, and you can see that they're dark brown and terrified. "Mommy," she says hoarsely, and her voice cracks.

You're confused, so you shake your head like you've seen adults do when they don't agree and you make uncertain little noises. The hold on your hand tightens, and the woman nods. "Mommy," she says again.

You look at her in confusion, then open your mouth, struggling to get your lips around the strange syllables. "Mommy?" you ask, poorly attempting to mimic her, and she nods. "My mommy?" She nods again, and the grip on your hand tightens for a moment before she moves to lift you up out of the cradle and hold you for a moment, even though she's never held you before. She doesn't hold you like Daddy does, and you think she knows even less about how to take care of a baby than him, and you squirm uncomfortably in her arms until she finally shudders and puts you on the ground. You settle down instantly, crawling your way over to something that you can pull yourself up with to try the whole walking thing again.

Mommy watches for a second, her eyes following you. You feel them there, but you don't pay attention, and after a while, they disappear altogether from focusing on you, as if she's lost interest. Mommy braces herself against the wall like she's the one who needs support walking, and then she leaves the room without saying a word. You hear shuffling noises. The door down the hall closes and doesn't open again for six hours.

You keep learning to walk.

You're seventeen months old the first time Mommy gets mad. She's working in the kitchen and ignoring you mostly, and you're walking around the kitchen trying to see if there's anything interesting to look at. When you talk to Mommy, she either tends to twitch you away or ignore you altogether, so you've learned to stop doing that, and you instead focus your attention on exploring the kitchen, running your hands along the legs of the table and enjoying the texture, or feeling the cold sensation of the refrigerator. You smack the refrigerator a few times experimentally, and you frown because you don't like the noise it makes when your hand hits it.

Mommy's shoulders stiffen, and she pauses from where she's cleaning fruit in the sink. You think it's strange, but you don't know what it means, so you continue exploring the kitchen like you have been. If there's any trepidation in you, it's completely overwhelmed by your sense of curiosity, and you forget to be careful to avoid Mommy, nudging lightly at her leg to access the drawer she's standing in front of.

She snaps.

You don't know why she's screaming at you suddenly, and you don't know what the words mean, but you know she's angry because the words don't sound nice. Stop it, just stop it, stop it and go! she yells, and you recognise those words, and so you leave, crying and afraid as you run back into your room and hide behind the disassembled pieces of your crib because it's familiar to you but your bed isn't, not yet. You listen to Mommy banging around in the kitchen, and then you hear something hit the floor, and then you hear crying but you're too scared to go and check because you think you broke Mommy and you don't know how to fix her.

Two hours later, supper is supposed to be on the table but it isn't, and you're supposed to be eating but you're not. Daddy comes into the nursery and convinces you to come out from the crib pieces, and you feel the tiredness in him again when you give him a hug and he tells you it's fine, Mommy's okay, she's not broken, just tired.

"Mommy always tired," you say, and it sounds almost petulant even though you mean it as an observation. "Never wants to play."

Daddy looks at you with something almost sad in his eyes. "Mommy's got a lot going on, Francis," he says almost wearily as he runs a hand over his face. "She needs you to help her get through it."

You look at him in confusion. "Mommy doesn't want help," you say.

He shakes his head. "Not like- Not like that, Francis," he tells you. He holds your hands and looks at your eyes like he always does when he's saying something important. "Mommy needs you to help her in a different way. She needs you to be quiet, and she needs you to be patient."

You frown. You know what quiet means, but you've never heard the other word. "Patient," you say, and the words don't sound right in your mouth, the syllables tangling up in knots. You don't like this word. It doesn't flow off your tongue like other words, like Daddy and play and fun.

Daddy nods. "That's right, Francis. Quiet and patient. Can you do that for Mommy? For me?"

You don't know what patient means, but you don't want Daddy to know that, so you nod. You're sure you can figure it out later, and in the meantime, you can focus on the other word, on being quiet. You know what that means. You know how to do that.

Once, a few weeks before you turn three, you get sick.

You don't really know what brings it on, or why you go from wanting to explore to waking up feeling awful and gross and sticky with heat, but you don't like it. You try to go back to sleep, but every time you wake up, you feel worse, and you cry for Mommy even though you know you're not supposed to, but she doesn't come and eventually you fall back asleep. It's not until the fourth time that you come to consciousness that you finally cry for Mommy long enough that she listens, and after nearly thirty minutes of you crying, she creeps to your door and slips in, like a shadow. She comes over to you and you can see she's shaking, but you don't know why, and you just feel terrible and you don't like this, you don't like this at all.

She presses a hand to your forehead and it's even colder than usual, and to your surprise, she flinches before she disappears out of your room in a frenzy, hands fluttering at her sides and eyes locked on the ground. A few minutes later, you hear her voice and you think she's on the phone Daddy, because you keep hearing his name and your name and the words help, please help, I don't know what to do again and again and again, and then you're tumbling into darkness because it's better there than here.

The next time you wake up, you're in Daddy's arms, and he's looking down at you with a sick, confused expression. "Jesus Christ, Francis," he says, "Jesus Christ," and you don't know what that means but you fall asleep again and the next time you wake up, it's in a room at Saint Mary's Children's Hospital. The walls are pastel yellow and there are fish on the ceiling and nobody comes to visit you except the nurses, but at the end of the day you get to go home, so it's all okay.

Later on that night, you're lying in your room trying to sleep when you hear the sound of people talking in the kitchen. Mommy's crying, but Daddy's the one who sounds upset. "Francis could have died, Sarah," he says, and you frown because you have no idea what died means but it sounds serious. "Now obviously she didn't, somehow, but that doesn't change the point-"

"I don't know what to do, Michael!" Mommy screams. "She just cries and cries sometimes and I don't know what she wants and even when she's not crying, I can't talk to her, not like you do, I don't understand what she's after. I don't get kids, Michael, I never wanted them, I'm not meant to be a mother, I have no idea what I'm doing here-"

"Then we need to figure it out!" Daddy's voice snaps in the silence, and you flinch because it's never been so loud. There's a brief silence, and you hear Mommy start crying, and Daddy sighs. "Sarah," he says, and his voice is quiet again, "please. Just talk to someone. Talk to the doctors, talk to the wall, talk to me, but for God's sake-" He notices his voice getting loud again, and stops, lowering it. "For God's sake, just talk about it. Please."

There's another silence. Mommy sniffles. You don't know what her answer is, but the next words you hear are Daddy telling her they should go to bed, and the lights go out down the hallway, and you hear the sounds of shifting next door, and you shift in your room to lay on your side but it's a long time before you sleep.

Three months after you get sick, you notice that Mommy changes. It's subtle at first, and you almost think you're imagining it, but as time progresses, she starts to look almost happy. She looks at you when she speaks, and sometimes she smiles, and sometimes she'll even play with you. On a good day, she takes you to the park, and when she pushes you on the swings, she doesn't flinch when you laugh.

You think it makes the bad days worse, sometimes. There are days when you'll wake up and go into her room and ask for her, and she won't respond, and you know that it's a quiet day. You know it's one of the days that you need to be extra-alert, that you need to make sure Mommy has her headache medication and is feeling okay. Sometimes, you sit outside her bedroom door for an hour or two at a time, and you repeat your address on loop under your breath in case you need to call an ambulance, just like Daddy told you to if anything ever happened to Mommy. It's a bit boring, but you're pretty sure Mommy only gets sick now because she's so happy, and since she had to get happy for you, you think it's only fair that you help her out when it makes her feel bad, so even though you don't know what ibuprofen or Anafranil are, when she asks for them, you give them to her.

You watch Disney movies with her and Daddy sometimes, and sometimes, they'll read you a bedtime story. Mommy narrates better, but Daddy does the voices, and between the two of them, you love every second. You stay up late to watch the stars once, and then another time Mommy wakes both you and Daddy up early to watch the sunrise, and as the three of you cuddle under a blanket, you think to yourself this is right, this is what family is.

You're just under four and a half years old when the happiness ends.

It's one of Mommy's bad days. She wakes up feeling gross, and when you give her the trashcan from the bathroom, she gets so violently sick in it that it startles you. You think that maybe she better eat some food just to make up for it, the same way that you always eat applesauce when your stomach is upset, but when you ask Mommy about it, she shakes her head and tells you she doesn't want any food.

The fourth time you hear her throwing up into the trashcan, you start to worry, and you look at her in confusion. "Should I call Daddy?" you ask, studying her face.

Even as she's still gasping and wiping her face off on a hand towel, Mommy shakes her head. "No," she says, "no, I'm fine, I just-" She pauses to lean over the trashcan again, and you wonder if she even has anything left to throw up, but this time, she doesn't quite start retching, and after a moment, she continues again. "I just need to go to the restroom. Can you help me up, baby?"

At not-quite four and a half and skinny for your age, you're hardly the most sturdy or helpful of supports, but you're also not one to back down from a request for help. Nodding immediately, you make your way over to the side of her bed, nudging the trash can out of the way and holding out your arm for her to take. You're surprised when she hunches over to actually lean on it this time, and you find yourself supporting her. Worry flashes across your face, and the two of you hobble in tandem over to the bathroom. Once you arrive, she grips the doorframe and smiles down at you in what's supposed to be reassurance. "I'll be fine from here, Francis," she says, and she closes the door.

You're sure she will be, but there's still something uncomfortable settling in your stomach, and it makes it hard for you to leave. You duck down the hallway for a few minutes on the ruse of finding something to drink, and then you return to outside the bathroom door, sinking down to sit right outside of it and listening in case Mommy screams or you hear her fall or something else terrible like that.

After ten minutes, you hear something you didn't expect: She's crying.

You hesitate for a moment, resting uncomfortably on your knees, then make a decision and knock. "Mommy?" you ask, and she doesn't answer. You wait another second before you quietly push the door open, and you look over at her.

She's slumped against the wall, her knees pulled up to her chest and her head in her hands as she sobs. Her fingers are knotted up in her hair, and tufts of it lie on the ground beside her. Something twists in your stomach, and you crawl hurriedly to her side. "Mommy," you whisper, and when you wrap your arms around her, she stiffens and sobs harder. "Mommy, stop."

She doesn't stop.

Daddy comes home that night and finds that Mommy is asleep on top of you, both of you still in the bathroom. You're holding her hand in a tight grip and your eyes are wide with terror, and when Daddy sees the two of you, he panics. You don't know if he's worried for Mommy or mad at you, but he half-drags you out to the car and tells you to buckle in, and you've no sooner gotten your car-seat fastened than he's laying Mommy in the backseat with you, and he tells you to keep an eye on her before driving at borderline-illegal speeds for the nearest hospital.

Mommy wakes up halfway there and throws up all over the floorboards, and then she starts screaming, clawing at her skin and her face and her hair. When you arrive at the hospital and they take her into emergency care, she's still screaming, so much and so loudly that they sedate her, and you watch her start to go slack. You can still see the tear tracks running through the blood leaking from the gouges in her face and you dig your fingernails hard into your own palms to keep them from shaking until Daddy sees and slaps your hands and tells you to stop it, that's bad.

You flatten out your hands on your legs like he asks and focus on your fingers. You can't look at his face. "What's wrong with Mommy, Daddy?" you ask.

He shakes his head, pressing his palms flat together and resting his forehead against them. "I don't know," he admits. "I don't know." He looks to you from the corner of the eye he cracks open. "What happened, Francis?"

You outline, as best you can, the events of the morning. You see something almost like recognition flash across Daddy's face, but it's gone too fast to be sure, and when you're done explaining, the lines around his mouth are tight and his hands are clasped together as if in a prayer, though you have no idea who he'd be addressing it to or what it would even be for.

"Is Mommy going to be okay, Daddy?" you ask, and your voice is small.

His tone is flat. "Yes, Francis," he says tiredly. "She'll be fine. Of course she will." He removes his forehead from where it's been resting against his hands and gestures for you to crawl into his lap. You do so willingly and rest your head against his shoulder, and he raises a hand to pet your hair back. "Get some sleep, Francis," he orders.

You keep your face buried in his shoulder, but you do not sleep.

Three days later, Mommy is released from the hospital. She has a new type of happy medicine, but she does not smile, and she stares out the window the entire ride home, her expression blank and her eyes locked on nothing. There are patches of hair missing from her head, but she doesn't seem to notice or care. When you get home, she unbuckles herself mechanically from the car and all but stumbles into the house. She doesn't even make it to her room, just collapses on the couch and stares at the ceiling and doesn't respond when you talk to her.

Daddy tells you to go to your room, so you do. You can hear him murmuring to Mommy from just inside your doorframe, but you can't make out the words and eventually you give up trying, sitting awkwardly on the edge of your bed and kicking your feet back and forth, focusing on the rhythm and the motion of it instead of the silence and the fear pounding in your chest.

An hour later, Daddy comes into your room and sits beside you. He looks at you and brushes your hair back, and you try to smile but it doesn't work, so instead you just accept it when he wraps his arms around you in silence, and you lean into the hug.

When you finally pull away, you bite your lip. Daddy says Mommy will be fine and you trust him, you do, but that's exactly why you have to ask this question. "Is Mommy sad because of me?" you ask.

Daddy looks stunned, and it takes him a moment to respond. "No," he says, "No, Francis, of course not, she's-" He pauses, struggles to find the right words, then gives up and casts you a long look. There's a pregnant silence before he speaks again. "Francis," he asks, "what do you think of being a big sister?"

A month later, you wake up to an argument.

It's the middle of the night and you know everyone should be sleeping, especially Mommy because she's still having bad days every day and cries a lot, but the light is on in the kitchen and as you creep up to your doorframe to listen closer, you hear your parents' voices, low and urgent in the otherwise silent night. Mommy sounds like she's going to be sick. "I can't do this again, Michael," she says desperately. "I can't go through this, this feeling like shit and the crying and the, the screaming and the noise and the sickness, I can't do this."

"We'll work it out, Sarah," Daddy says. His voice sounds tired.

"Don't tell me we'll work it out!" Mommy hisses, and you flinch a bit. When she speaks again, her voice is flat and choked. "I'm not meant to be a mother, Michael. I can't even take care of Francis. I wouldn't have even had Francis if they hadn't been-"

"This isn't about your parents," Daddy interrupts. "Sarah, they can't make you do anything anymore, and Francis isn't going anywhere, so we can't change that. All we can do is move forward." There's a pause. "I mean, if our families could raise kids, I'm sure we can-"

Mommy laughs, but it doesn't sound happy. It sounds like she's dying. "My family disowned me and your father is in prison for beating your mother to death, don't act like our houses were healthy-"

"I am trying, Sarah!" Daddy's hand smacks down on the table, and you hear Mommy gasp. You flinch too, and Daddy pauses for a minute.

You hear him taking deep breaths and you think something might be wrong, so you slip out of your room and down the hallway, toward the light coming out of the kitchen. In the silence, you hear the exact moment that Mommy starts crying, and she mumbles something under her breath that you can't make out as you step into the light. "Daddy?" you ask.

He stiffens a bit, and his shoulders shake for a moment before he looks over to you. You don't think he looks angry, but his face is tired. "What are you doing up, Francis?" he asks. "You should have been asleep hours ago."

You look at the kitchen around you. "I saw the light," you explain simply. You don't mention hearing the voices. You don't think you should.

Daddy sighs. "Sorry," he says, and stands up. You don't miss the look he casts over at Mommy before forcing a smile in your direction as he walks over to you and turns you around, resting a hand on your shoulder. "Let's get you back to bed."

He leads you back down the hallway, and you pretend you don't still hear Mommy crying in the kitchen. When he tucks you in, he smiles a bit, or tries to, and brushes the hair back from your face.

"Is Mommy going to be okay?" you ask. Sometimes, it feels like the only words you know.

Daddy's smile flickers a bit, but he nods. "She'll be fine. Go to sleep, Francis," he says, and on his way out, he closes the door behind him.

You can still see the kitchen light for a long time to come.

Time passes. Mommy doesn't get better, and Daddy looks a little more tired every day, and some days it feels like you've wound back the clock, right back to the start of everything. Mommy's started crying when she looks at you, and she flinches when you laugh, not that you do that much anymore. You don't know what's going on, you don't understand it, but you know it's bad, and nobody tells you, maybe because they don't want to, maybe because they can't. The only thing you're sure of is that the more time passes, the more tired Daddy gets and the more scared Mommy looks.

According to the doctors, you're just shy of eight weeks away from being a big sister, but there's a part of you that wonders if you're really just shy of eight weeks away from being a Mommy. You don't think real Mommy seems very interested in it.

Her bad days get worse. One day, you wake up and she's downstairs screaming, and when you run down to see what's happening, Mommy's digging her fingernails into her arms and wailing and you don't know what she's saying but Daddy's holding onto her, holding her arms down, and he just keeps whispering her name again and again and again like it will calm her, like it's a lullaby.

He finally gets her calmed down just before he has to go to work. He can't afford to take time off now because there are still bills to pay and he's already going to have to leave work for a while to make sure that there's somebody here to teach you how to help the baby during the first week or two, so when he's standing at the door and Mommy's still crying in the bedroom, he crouches down to your level, and he takes you by your shoulders and looks you dead in the eye. "Be careful today, Francis," he says. "Mommy needs someone to watch her, but be careful. Call if you need anything, alright? I'll...If I need to, I'll figure something out." You nod, and he asks you what your address is in case you need to call someone to get you. When you reply instantly, he smiles and hugs you, and then he's gone.

You do as you're told, and you watch Mommy. She cries a lot and she scares you for most of the morning, but by the time the afternoon comes around, she seems to have calmed down, mostly. She still seems a little distant, but when she gives you that look that says she's seeing right through you and asks you to help her unpack some of the boxes in the baby's room to help her set up, you agree to it without question. Sometimes, just having something to do helps Mommy.

She doesn't let you use the scissors, and when you try to convince her that you're capable, she just shakes her head desperately and insists that she's the grown up, so you don't fight her. You don't want to make her upset if you can avoid it, and you think that she's just doing it because it's comfortable, because there's something systematic about slicing open boxes and cutting apart the tape that bound the pieces of your crib together while it was in storage. Still, you keep the phone from the kitchen behind you on your left, just in case you need it. Better safe than sorry, Daddy says.

You've just unpacked your baby clothes and are in the process of sorting through them so that some can be folded to be stuck in drawers when you notice that Mommy's stopped opening up boxes, and is instead staring through a pile of clothes, her hands laying limply on top of them.

You look at her and frown. "Mommy?" you ask, hoping the word itself will be enough to nudge her back into reality, at least a little bit.

She doesn't answer you, or at least she doesn't look at you. Instead, she picks up the piece of clothing on the top, a onesie with a green collar and little ducks printed all over it, and she knots her fingers in the fabric, staring at it in confusion as if she's never seen it before. "It's so small," she murmurs, turning it over in her hands. "Were you ever this small, baby?"

She isn't looking at you. You don't even know that she's talking to you. You answer anyway. "When I was really little, I was," you say, shrugging. "I think it was only for a little while though."

Mommy blinks. "I don't remember," she says, and there's something in her tone that makes it seem like she's almost shocked, marvelling at the gap in her recollections before eventually, it dawns on her. "It's because I didn't ever see you when you were this small, isn't it?"

You don't know how to respond, so you don't. There's an uncomfortable silence. You shift as you work on folding up your clothes, and focus on the fabric because you don't understand the look on Mommy's face or the way her eyes aren't smiling but she is and it scares you to look. After a moment, Mommy speaks again. "I didn't ever want kids, you know," she says almost dreamily. "I always knew I'd be a horrible mother."

You look up at that and shake your head, blinking at her. "You're a great Mommy," you protest. "You and Daddy read me stories and watch movies and look at the sky. Bad Mommies wouldn't."

Mommy laughs without sounding happy. "I'm a bad Mommy, Francis," she says. "I'm a horrible Mommy. I almost killed you once, because you kept screaming, and then again when you got sick...I didn't ever want kids."

You don't like this conversation anymore. You don't know what killed means but it sounds ugly and you can tell right away that you don't like it, and you don't like the look on Mommy's face or the tone of her voice. "You're a good Mommy," you say again, stubbornly, because it's the only thing you really know how to say to argue the point.

Mommy shakes her head. "No," she says, and this time, she sounds even stranger. "I don't want to be a Mommy," she repeats, "and I never have." Her fingers tangle up in the fabric, and then without any warning, she throws it hard against the wall.

You know fabric can't hurt you, but you're startled anyway and you jump a bit. "Mommy-" you start, but she isn't paying attention.

"I don't want to be a mother!" Mommy is screaming now, and she shoves the clothes in front of her away. You scurry to your feet, panicking as she picks up the empty box and throws it at the wall behind you, almost catching you in the crossfire. "I don't want to do this again, I don't want to do this!"

She reaches for the scissors next, and before you can stop her, she jams them toward herself, toward the bump on her stomach where Daddy said your little brother is living right now. There's a sick noise when the blade jams in, and Mommy screams as she pulls the scissors out only to slam them back into herself, then leaves them there as she falls backward, an ugly red stain spreading across her shirt and onto your clothes as she falls backward, her hands crimson and her eyes streaming and her stomach bleeding furiously, and you scream too as you reach for the phone.

Four days after Mommy is put in the hospital, when Daddy comes home from visiting, he looks more tired than ever before but when you ask about it, he brushes you off and tells you to let it go, that he wants to sleep, that he doesn't want to talk about it. You think he might be mad at you, but you're not quite sure and you're too scared to ask.

A week and a half after Mommy is put in the hospital, Daddy asks you to help him take apart the room you'd been assembling for the baby. When you ask him why, he shakes his head and doesn't answer, and after a while, you realise that like Mommy, the baby changed its mind and doesn't want to come anymore. You're a little disappointed, but you try not to cry too much because you think Mommy's cried enough for all of you and Daddy looks tired enough without you crying, but it still hurts and you still miss the little brother you were supposed to have.

Daddy burns everything from the baby's room in the backyard, and you watch from the doorway. Daddy's shoulders shake. The smoke burns your eyes.

It's almost three weeks before Mommy comes home, and even when she gets back, she's not the same. She has a lot of bandages and new happy medicine and even though Daddy's home for most of that first week back and she doesn't have to be a Mommy to two kids now, she still doesn't smile like she used to. She sees right through you most of the time, and you don't think she always hears Daddy when he speaks to her. Sometimes she's there with you, most of the time she's not. You don't like to think about it.

Daddy tells you to stay with her, to not let her be alone. You don't know that she likes it or that she even notices it, but you do as you're told. Some days you sit in her room and try to read from your storybooks, but you're not very good at reading yet and you stumble over most of the words. You try to remember how she and Daddy used to say the words and model your speaking after that, but it's been so long that the memories are blurry and you're mostly on your own. Mommy never says anything though, never.

You bring her food and she eats it numbly, but she never seems to notice who brought it. You bring colouring books, and she takes your little crayons and colours carefully between the lines, focusing on the task almost obsessively, and the look on her face scares you sometimes.

She hums under her breath and sings lilting nursery rhymes, but she never once says your name.

Things go on like that for a while. Mommy disappears for a month, and Daddy never tells you where she went, so you spend most of that month at home alone, or wandering around the neighborhood. You go back to the park because you think Mommy might be there like she used to be, but she never is, and Daddy always seems tired at home, and you don't think he really wants to talk to you either, but you know he's trying.

When Mommy finally comes home, she smiles at first, always smiles when Daddy's at home, but when he's not there, you see the smile slip. You don't like it when Mommy's not smiling, because you don't ever know what she's thinking at those times, so you always try to bring her back to smiling. Daddy asks you sometimes, how she does during the days, and you always tell him she's fine because she is, mostly, and you're afraid that if you tell him about the times when she's not fine, she'll go away again, and Daddy always seems a bit happier when Mommy's around.

She's been home for two months when she declares, on one of her good days, that she wants to make dinner. Daddy usually does the cooking, but when you bring that up to her, she just shakes her head and says no, this time she wants to cook, so that's what happens.

Just like Daddy told you, you don't let Mommy use the knives to cut the vegetables. She either doesn't notice or doesn't care, and you think she may not even notice that anybody's wielding the knife at all, that she may think the vegetables are cutting themselves. Mommy sings quietly under her breath as she works on making the cheese sauce for the casserole, and when you look over a few times, she's almost smiling, though you don't know what she's smiling at.

It's on one of those occasions when you look over that you wind up cutting your hand. It's nothing major, just a little slip up with the knife because you were too busy looking at Mommy to be paying attention to the zucchini, but it hurts and you wind up letting out a little yelp when it happens, dropping the knife to cradle your hand, watching the blood well up and as tears sting your eyes.

Mommy jumps when you cry out, and she drops her spoon on the stove-top as she spins around. She sees you at the table where you've been using the cutting board, and her eyes widen when she sees the blood. In an instant, she's by your side, pulling the chair out and lifting you up to sit on the table, right beside the half-cut vegetables. "Francis?" she asks, and you think she knows it's you because she's looking at you this time, but you nod anyway. "Francis, baby, your hand, what happened to it? Oh my God, baby, you're bleeding."

There's panic in her voice, so you intentionally keep yours steady, fighting to keep the tears out of it as you bite your lip and nod. "Sorry, Mommy," you say. "I didn't mean to."

Mommy isn't listening. She doesn't go to reach for a towel to clean up the blood, or tell you to wait while she grabs a band-aid. Instead, she just presses you against herself, hugging you while you sit on the table, and you can feel her hands shaking as her fingers dig uncomfortably into your back. Your face is pressed against her shirt too tightly for you to breathe. "I'm so sorry," she whispers, "It's my fault you're hurt, baby, it's my fault. I'm so sorry."

Her grip on you shifts, and you quickly move your head to the side to get some air, resting against her shoulder. "Not your fault," you mumble, even though your voice is still quivering. You clamp your eyes shut, accidentally squeezing out the tears that had been hiding just behind them.

You can feel her shake her head, and she holds you tighter for just a moment before her grip loosens. "Of course it is," she says hoarsely, "of course it's my fault." Her voice is shaking, and one of her hands falls away from your back. "It's all my fault, Francis, all of it." You hear something move behind you, and very very quickly, you realise how uncomfortable you are. "I'm so sorry, baby. I'm gonna make it all better." There's something in Mommy's voice as she brushes your hair down with one hand, and it scares you enough to open your eyes just in time to see her grip tighten on the knife.

You scream, and you jerk away quickly. Mommy doesn't expect it, so you escape her grasp easily, and the knife she'd just been plunging toward your back grazes a long scratch down your arm instead as you lose your balance from on the table and crash to the kitchen floor. You don't waste time laying there though, instantly scurrying backward until you hit the wall, your arm aching and oozing red onto the floor and your clothing and between your fingers when you hold the stinging cut with one shaking hand.

Mommy's eyes are wide. "Francis, what-?" she begins, and then she looks at herself and sees the knife in her hands. Realisation dawns, and she gasps, dropping it as her hands fly to her mouth. She looks at you with something not unlike horror on her face. "Oh my God," she whispers. "Oh my God. Francis, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry."

You don't respond. She takes a step back. Then she runs.

Daddy comes home twenty minutes after you call him in tears, and when he slams open the front door to run inside, the first thing he finds is you, blood everywhere as you curl up on the kitchen floor. Something flashes across his face, and in his eyes, you think you can see something break. "Jesus Christ," he says, and then everything blurs for you.

You wind up with eleven stitches in your right forearm. You don't tell the doctors where it came from. Mommy doesn't come home.

Daddy spends a lot of time on the phone, you notice, always talking to somebody. You don't know who it is, but you think they have to be important, or at least smart, because they ask a lot of questions and Daddy tells them a lot of things that have to do with Mommy. He asks to be told if they find anything, but the phone never rings and nobody ever finds anything to say, or so it would seem.

Not even Daddy has much to say these days. He brushes off your questions a lot, tells you to just go to sleep and let it go. You don't want to let it go, you want to know where Mommy is, but you don't want to make Daddy mad when he already seems so upset, so you don't ever ask, and you spend a lot of nights laying in your room and watching the ceiling in the darkness.

A week and a half after Mommy disappears, Daddy comes home with a six-pack of something you don't recognise that he won't let you drink, and he smells a bit funny when he sits down on the couch. You don't really like the smell of it, but it's Daddy, and you trust Daddy, so you don't mention anything when you climb onto the couch beside him as he flips through channels. You can almost feel the exhaustion leaking out of him, and you want to help but you have no idea how.

After a while, Daddy switches off from the Disney channel and goes over to the news. You don't like the news much since it seems scary most of the time, but Daddy likes watching it so you let him, and tonight, you pay attention too because the first thing you see as he turns the volume up is a picture of Mommy on the screen. You straighten up in surprise, mouth falling open. Beside you, Daddy stiffens, his hand tightening on the bottle he's holding.

The news lady looks sad as she speaks and takes over for the news man. There's flashing red and blue lights in the background from where she's standing, and they make you squint. "Such a sad story, Dave," she says, shaking her head. "Police have finally identified the body of a young woman killed in a car accident earlier this evening and are currently searching to find her family. Witnesses say that twenty-two year old Sarah Cohen was speeding down the highway when she lost control of her vehicle, causing it to crash into the roadside barrier and flip. The car then rolled three times before coming to a stop with Cohen still inside. An ambulance was called immediately, but she was pronounced dead on-scene. Authorities are currently looking into if alcohol or drug overdose may have been involved..."

You hear a noise from beside you, a horrible noise that you hate instantly, and when you look for the source, you flinch. Daddy's face is crumpled with shock, and he's shaking his head. His grip tightens on the bottle, then very suddenly, he throws it at the screen, and he screams.

Three days later, you're dressed all in black and you're standing in a funeral home. There aren't many people here, but Daddy's crying and so are the others, and so are you, though you're not entirely sure why. You don't know what killed or dead or died means or why everyone keeps applying the words to Mommy, and nobody is letting you in on the secret. You think it means something bad though. You think it's really bad.

The casket is open, and it looks like Mommy is sleeping. She looks peaceful though, a lot more peaceful than she did when she was sleeping at home. You don't know why, but you still don't like it, and you think back to a Disney movie the three of you watched once, Sleeping Beauty. You think Daddy should just kiss Mommy to wake her up, but you don't think he's in the mood for listening to suggestions right now, not with how hard he's crying, so instead you stand at the side of her coffin and stare at her, holding onto the edges like she used to hold onto your crib. "Wake up, Mommy," you whisper, "please wake up."

The people who hear you cry some more. Mommy doesn't wake up.

Two months later, you get tired of waiting on Mommy to wake up, and for Daddy to explain why all her things are boxed up and collecting dust, so you decide to just address the point after Daddy gets home from work. He's been tired a lot lately, not very talkative, and you don't know if he's mad or just feels like being quiet. Either way, you miss him, miss the Daddy that used to love you and pick you up when you were screaming and take you to the hospital when you were really sick. You miss the Daddy who did the voices while Mommy read the stories, the Daddy he was before everyone started calling Mommy dead.

You walk up to him one night and ask if Mommy's ever coming back. It's the first time he hits you. You never ask again.

You wind up walking yourself to school most days. The first week or two, Daddy drives you, then you learn the route well enough to take yourself, and you think it's best that way because Daddy hasn't wanted to talk to you much since Mommy died. It's like he and Mommy switched places, and where you once had to try and make yourself scarce to make sure Mommy didn't get upset, now you have to make yourself scarce to make sure Daddy doesn't get upset.

He brings home girlfriends sometimes, new Mommies to replace the old one, and you learn quickly that even though none of the new Mommies ever stay long, he hates it when you interrupt his conversations with them. It hurts a bit (it hurts a lot, actually), but you respect his wishes and you stop speaking altogether for the most part. He seems to like it better that way.

At school, your teacher tells you that dead means 'gone for a long, long time.' It's that explanation that makes you finally start piecing things together, and slowly, you begin to realise what it all means, why Mommy is dead. How it's your fault that she left for a long time, because she scared you and then you scared her and then she ran away. You know that she was happy with Daddy, and Daddy was happy with her, and you realise that when people leave for a long, long time, they disappear.

Mommy's dead, left because of you. Without her around, you don't think Daddy will miss you. But there's a mountain near where you live that makes anyone who climbs up it disappear, and maybe, just maybe, if you disappear, you think Mommy will come back, and Daddy will love you again even though you'll never come home.

You don't know that you like the plan entirely, but things don't get better at home. One night, after one of the Mommies leaves, Daddy's especially angry, at the whole world and the Mommy that left and especially you, and it's his anger that decides it for you. It makes you realise that you're alright with disappearing if it will make Daddy happy again, so you leave home and you climb the mountain and you fall down, ready for this to end, ready to disappear.

Except you don't disappear.

You wake up, and there's a voice in your head that talks to you and tells you that the world is made of pain and love is fake and if you don't hurt others, you'll get hurt instead. You pretend to yourself that it's your little brother you never had, and you tell the voice it's wrong, and then you decide to prove it, and while you're proving it, you learn an awful lot about other people, and about yourself too.

You meet friends, find a family. You learn how to cook with passion and how to dance on a reality TV show. You learn the power of having friends, what it feels like to not stand alone, learn just how powerful it is to have the will to talk to people and spare them instead of fighting them. You learn that the voice in your head once wanted to disappear too, that it had died to save everybody but hadn't succeeded, and you learn that you are not alone in this whole messy, horrible, beautiful world. You learn that you are strong enough to survive, and to save everybody like the voice tried to do, and for the first time ever, you know you're not alone, that your family and friends are here, fighting with you, fighting for you, every bit as determined as you are to get to the surface and to a happy ending.

After years and years of crying in cribs and closets and waiting while nobody came and your father never stopped grieving and nobody ever saw you, finally, everybody comes.

And you know, as surely as anything, that they will always come for you whenever you call, again and again and again.

As you hang in the balance, there's a tremor of fear that runs through you, followed shortly by a pulse of something warm and strong and comforting that wraps itself around you and doesn't let go.

Knowing that your family is always there for you fills you with DETERMINATION.

You load your save.