A/N: Here's the last chapter guys! I'm kind of 'meh' about this whole story considering it was originally going to be a one-shot, but I guess it turned out alright in the end.
I have to give special thank-yous to yiseunggi and irish d' salmon luver. Both of you not only stuck with me and reviewed every chapter for this entire story, you guys also have reviewed several of my other stories. It means so much to me that you guys enjoyed one of my stories enough to give another one a chance. You two are both sweethearts and I can't thank you enough!
Now then, on with the story.
She was crying again.
It wasn't an unfamiliar sound – she did it almost every night – but that didn't stop him from hating it. He hated the sound of her tears. He hated how she would cry by herself. He hated how she would pretend to smile whenever he came to comfort her.
But more than anything, he hated him.
He hated the one who had sent the letter.
She insisted on telling him that the one who had sent the letter was his father. He didn't believe her. In all the stories his grandma had read to him, a dad was the person who was supposed to play catch with you or ride bikes to the park with you or sneak you extra dessert when mama says you can't have any more.
Most importantly, a dad was someone who came home every night.
He could understand mama having to leave him. Grandma had explained to him that although mama was gone, she would come back for him and they would be able to spend every day together; she had told him that sometimes mommies just had to leave for a little bit.
However, dads were different. They were supposed to walk through the door every night after work and pull you into a hug. He knew; he had read all the stories, all the fairytales.
They were supposed to be there for you when no one else was.
Mama had told him the other day that the person who had written the letter would never be coming home.
That meant he couldn't possibly be his father.
No, he didn't have a father. He would make do with having only a mama; after all, it wasn't long ago that he had no mama at all. He would do everything in his power to make sure that she was happy, with or without a dad there to help him.
However, he couldn't do anything as he sat in the hallway and listened to her cry.
He wanted to run in there – he wanted desperately to comfort her, but she would just assume that he was the one who needed help. If he attempted to comfort her, it would only cause her more worries.
Instead, he sat outside her room, tracing circles in the carpet and listening to her cry herself to sleep behind the closed door. He kept watch every night, just to ensure that the tears stopped for just a little bit while her body recovered in sleep.
As he listened to her once more, it felt like each sob was a physical blow. However, she wasn't the one hitting him. No, it was the man who wasn't there; the soldier who had written the letter that made her cry; the man who would never be his father.
Another quiet sob echoed through the hallway, making his gut lurch in protest as he shut his eyes tight and put his hands over his ears. He just wanted her to stop. He just wanted her to smile and be his mama, not the woman who cried herself to sleep every night. Although he had never gone to church once in his life, he prayed to the big, nebulous idea of "god" that he had heard people talk about before.
He just wanted to move forward; he wanted to make happy memories.
With his eyes still shut, he brought about the most recent happy memory he could recall. The other day had been one of her good days. Without him even mentioning it, she walked into his room smiling, asking if he wanted to bake cookies.
She had remembered that very first letter he has written to her.
With a huge smile on his face, he instantly agreed.
It was the happiest he had been in a long time and she seemed just as happy as he was. She let him lick the beaters and, with the sweet smell of baking cookies wafting through the house, the two of them ended up in a bubble fight while doing the dishes.
With bubbles and his childish laughter filling the air, he heard something ring through the air for the first time in his life.
Maybe she didn't intend to, but she laughed.
It was unexpected and at first he wasn't quite sure that he had heard correctly. But she did it again and that was when he knew without a doubt. She was laughing, completely unrestricted and almost childish.
The moment was so normal, so mundane.
The moment was perfect.
Laughter washed away all those years she had abandoned him; it washed away the fact that he had no father; it washed away the instable predicament of their current life.
Then the moment abruptly ended.
The radio that had been softly playing in the background announced the name of some song and artist he had never heard of. A moment later, a piano piece began to play throughout the room. He spared half a second to register the change in song before he scooped up a handful of bubbles and prepared to continue the war that had been briefly paused by her laughter.
However, she was no longer looking at him.
She was no longer looking at anything.
In her hands there were still traces of the bubbles she had been throwing the moment before, but she made no move to collect more bubbles and continue their fight. Instead, her eyes glazed over and she stared at an indeterminate spot on the wall. Worry suddenly flaring in him, he tugged gently on her sleeve.
"Mama? Mama?"
The words had no effect as she continued to stare straight ahead, oblivious to the world. He tugged harder, but to no avail; wherever she was, it was some faraway place where he could never hope to reach her.
Trying to figure out what had brought about this sudden change, he tuned into the song playing over the radio and inexplicably felt his heart constrict in his chest. He had never heard the song, but somehow he instantly recognized it, as if he had heard it every day of his life.
It was a song about people that never came back; a song about those left behind; a song about trying to pick up the pieces and failing to recover; a song about life after the letters stopped.
A song about abandonment.
A song about his mama.
The realization was shattered by the sound of chocked sobs and knees slamming down onto the cheap, linoleum tiles of the kitchen. He watched her as she buried her face in her hands, heedless of the bubbles that smattered her hands. For a moment, all he could do was stare and listen.
The tears seemed to amplify and complete the song in some inexplicable way. Without the tears, it was a heart wrenching song; with the tears, it became the ignored lament of one woman who had dared to try and lead a happy life.
Reality rushing back in, he ran to her side, the memory of her laughter already evaporating from his mind. She smothered him in her arms as he listened to the rattle of her chest. Held so tightly and desperately in her embrace, he couldn't help but wonder what she was crying for.
The soldier who had died? The future she had lost? The world that had taken everything from her?
He had no answers. As she held him in his arms and continued to cry for a reason he couldn't begin to understand, he only knew one thing for certain one.
He hated the song.
The two of them embraced until the screech of the kitchen timer announced that their batch of cookies was done. Hastily detangling herself, she gave a shaky smile and went to retrieve the cookies. Before she made her way to the oven, he watched her deliberately stop at the radio and turn it off with a definite click. She spent the rest of the day trying to erase the moment of weakness she had allowed to slip through the cracks.
But not matter how many smiles she gave, she never laughed again. Without the laughter, she wasn't able to erase the hate that bubbled up inside him.
As he sat in the hallway, keeping guard over his mother once more, he began to count all the things he hated. By the time he got to twenty, he stopped.
When had he started hating so many things?
The answer came to him instantly; he had started hating so many things when his letter came.
Before that day, he had loved the idea of letters. They were a way to reach out to people you couldn't see – a way to obtain the unobtainable, like a magic spell. Letters had been his passageway to a mother that wasn't there.
Every day he would sit down with his pencils, pens, crayons - anything that he could write with, and he would write to her. Sometimes he would include pictures, sometimes grandma would have to help him with his spelling, but it was always his own words and his own feelings. He was the magician casting his magic spell that would allow him to find mama.
Then the letter came and everything came crashing down.
Now when he thought of letters, all he could think about was the sound of mama crying.
There was no way that man could be his father; a father didn't make his son hate something he had once loved.
Yes, it was all his fault.
It was all the fault of his letter.
He stopped tracing circles in the rug as a simple fact dawned on him. It had been so simple, so obvious, that he was surprised he hadn't thought of it before.
All he had to do was get rid of the letter.
If the letter was gone, all the bad memories would evaporate.
If the letter was gone, she would have nothing to cry about.
If the letter was gone, he wouldn't be forced to live with the ghost of the man who pretended to be his father.
All he had to do was get rid of the letter.
He began to count the seconds as they raced into minutes. With each minute that passed, the crying behind his mother's door got quieter and quieter. He counted out a full three hundred seconds before he stood from his place on the floor and stood in front of her door.
It wasn't locked – she always left it open in case he needed her in the middle of the night. He took the cold, brass knob into his hands carefully and slowly placed his weight on it, allowing it to turn slowly in his grip. Every sound the door made sent his heart rate skyrocketing, but he knew that she had tired herself out with crying and wouldn't be waking up till the morning.
To him, it felt like an agonizingly long time before the door creaked open and he peered into her sparsely furnished bedroom. Moving swiftly now, he headed towards where his mother lay in the bed sleeping. He knew exactly where the letter would be; she kept it in the same place every night.
On the empty half of the bed where he would have slept.
Tiptoeing away from his mother, he headed to where he knew the letter would be. It lay innocently on the pillow, its corners bent and blunted from her holding it so many times. Even from where he was standing, he could see the place where the paper crinkled up, stained with her tears.
With hatred driving his every action, he snatched up the letter and ran out of the room, no longer heading how quiet he was being. He didn't stop running until he reached the salvation of his room.
Slamming the door shut behind him and hastily locking the door, he rushed to his bed and threw the letter down as quickly as if it was a live coal. As he looked at the letter lying innocently on his bed, he couldn't help but feel a sudden wave of guilt wash over him.
The guilt quickly fled as he remembered how much the letter made his mother cry.
Suddenly filled with courage, he picked up the letter and ripped it in half. The sound of paper ripping did nothing to calm his anger, only making the hatred run like blood through his veins.
He took the paper in his hands and ripped again.
And again.
And again.
He lost track of the amount of times he tore the paper apart but when he stopped, the paper lay in tiny shreds on his bed. Now that he had done the deed, he wasn't sure what he had expected to change, but his hatred had not abated. In fact it only seemed to glow strong in his chest.
"Why can't you just leave me alone! You're not my daddy!"
As he screamed, he pounded his fists into the bed, sending the scraps of letters fluttering across the room. When he regained his breath, he looked up at the mess he had made and felt his eyes go wide in surprise. One of the pieces of paper had landed right next to his foot, close enough that he could read it.
Printed prominently on the front of the sheet of paper were two words.
"Our son".
Not 'your son' or 'the child'; our son.
For the longest times, all he could do was stare. It felt like he was staring at a letter from someone else. There was no way this was the letter that made his mother cry.
…Was it?
Curiosity suddenly killing off his hatred, he began to gather the pieces of paper like tiny flecks of gold. Once he managed to find them all, he hurriedly went to his bed and made it his workshop, painstakingly placing the letter back together. It was a long process and he was pretty sure he nodded off a couple times, but he finished reassembling the letter just as light was beginning to leak through his closed blinds.
He leaned down next to the letter and began to read the man's tight, closely packed handwriting. The first part was all about him saying farewell to mama; he was letting her know that he would always love her, but he wanted her to move on with her life. He mentioned something about how mama had died in the past, but that made no sense to him, so he skipped past that part.
"To our son…"
He felt his heart skip a beat as he realized this part of the letter was addressed to him.
"To our son…sorry, it's kind of odd for me to think that I have a son. Not that it's bad; in fact, it's a wonderful thing and I just want you to know that I'm proud of you. You may not understand this until you're older, but I've been a terrible father and husband; I only told your mom I love her a few days before I had to go off to war; see what I mean by terrible? I guess I just want you to know that if you're reading this letter, it means that I never got to see you, never got to hold you, never got to watch you grow up. While all this is true, I want you to know one thing; I love you. If you forget everything else about me, please remember that one thing."
He was shaking as he pulled back from the letter. His entire body felt numb as thousands of emotions ran through his system. He sat still for about five second before his hands flew to his nightstand drawer and he pulled out a crayon and paper.
Previously the drawer had held the paper he would use to write to his mother every day.
Today it would be used for a very different purpose.
His crayon began to scratch out angry, large, childish letters as he wrote to the man that would never be his father.
"You are not my daddy. I am not your child. Mama told me you would never be coming home and you said that in your letter so you are not my daddy. Daddys always come home. They always come home to make sure that their wife is not sad and crying. I'm gonna write you a letter every day until you come back. Mama said there is no way we can reach you but if letters can reach Santa, they can reach you. You said you love mommy but you're not coming home. If you love her come home. If you love me come home. You will not be my daddy until you come home."
Huge drops of water fell onto the paper, blurring the young boy's eyesight. The water surprised him, causing him to raise his eyes to the ceiling, looking for a hole in the roof. Suddenly, he realized he was crying.
The tears wouldn't stop.
He worked himself into the fetal position as he cried for the first time since mama had picked him up from grandma's house. He wasn't sure what he was crying for, but he couldn't stop his small frame from racking with chocking sobs.
Before long, he fell asleep, his cheeks still wet with tears.
When he woke up in the morning, both his letter and the letter the man had written had been taken away. He made his way hesitantly down to the kitchen, but he found his mama standing in the kitchen quietly cooking eggs. When she turned around to look at him, she had a soft smile on her lips.
"Good morning. Would you like some breakfast?"
For a moment, all he could do was stare dumbly. He had destroyed the letter; she should have been angry with him. Instead, she was smiling gently at him as she waited for his response. He found himself giving a slow nod of his head. She responded with a slight lengthening of her smile as she turned once more to tend to the eggs.
He watched her for a few seconds more before he rushed upstairs and grabbed a piece of paper and crayon from his nightstand. When he returned downstairs once more, he sat down at the table and began to write.
"Who are you writing to?"
He looked up to see his mama looking down gently at him as she placed his breakfast on the table.
It was as if a magical spell had been cast; a magical spell had been cast by the letter.
The moment was so normal, so mundane.
The moment was perfect.
He looked up at her and gave a wide grin.
"I'm writing to daddy. I know you said he's not coming home, but letters can reach Santa and letters reached you, so I'm sure they can reach him, right?"
Surprise registered in her eyes before it melted away to be replaced with warmth.
"That's right. I'm sure daddy will love to receive all these letters from you."
So he wrote to him every day.
The letters served as a connection between a father and son that had never met but loved each other all the same.