Interlude Eight

Fitz.

What a little bastard. He was going to force Willow to scan their parents’ room just so he could avoid the pain. And Willow would do it, because that was who she was.

“Fine,” she said, like I thought she would. “We’re probably going to be here for a while, so prepare to sleep here.” She started walking, and I went after her.

Just being here pissed me off. Every window in the house had bars on it, making it look like the prison it was. The Jemma who did this wasn’t the one I knew when I was young. I dreaded the day I would see her again. It would be ugly for the both of us.

As we moved through the house, I saw very few pictures that were up of the family. I tried to not look at Jemma’s face. It only made me hurt. Then we stepped into her room. Willow stopped suddenly, and I bumped into her.

“It still smells like Mom,” she said as she crossed the room. “Her shampoo. Soap.” She picked up a pillow from the bed that I assumed was Jemma’s. She clutched it to her chest, and I watched her try to not cry. That woman certainly knew how to break the ones that loved her.

I put my hand on her lower back. “Do you need a minute?”

She put the pillow down. “No. I’m fine.” She looked around the empty room as she tried to spot something that would work. “I don’t know if there’s anything that they’re attached to in here.”

“There has to be something.”

She opened drawers and searched through them. She didn’t find much. A lighter, candy, pens, a box of condoms that upset the both of us.

“Maybe the closet,” Willow said as she walked to it. She opened it up, and stared at the clothes. She picked up a sleeve and buried her nose in it. Then she started looking through it for something usable. She looked up and started reaching for something I couldn’t see. “Can you help me?”

I moved over to her, and picked her up by the hips.

“Whoa. I meant for you to get it,” she said as she tried looking down at me.

“I get a better view of your ass this way.”

“Is everything about sex with you?”

“Yeah. It would be less so if I were actually having sex. It’s been so long I’m not sure I remember how to do it.”

“Can’t help you there.” She started reaching up.

“I think you can. If you think last night was good, you should try the real thing.”

“Don’t push your luck.” She pulled a gray box from the top of the closet, and I put her back on her feet.

The box looked heavy, but the size was only about twelve by twelve inches. There was a lock on the front of it that Willow was examining. She set it on the bed. “Where the hell is the key?”

I didn’t answer, but I started looking around as she did. It was ten minutes before she found it lodged in a shoe in the closet.

“Interesting hiding place,” I stated.

“Mom used to leave notes in our shoes on special occasions. It was a shot in the dark.”

Strange.

I stood next to her as she unlocked the box. She opened it, and all that was inside was a thick folder, and a small leather book that looked too thin to be an actual book. Willow picked up the folder first.

She made a sound when she opened it, and saw what was inside. If she spoke, I was too far gone to hear words. I stared at things I hadn’t seen in more than twenty years, and I couldn’t believe it was happening. I took the folder out of Willow’s hands, and looked at the pictures I drew.

The first was one of the last pictures I drew Jemma. The bottom said To Jemmy, Love, Fitz in the corner, in crayon. It was a picture of her, me, and Willow next to her tree. Willow obviously wasn’t born yet, but it was supposed to be the future. A future I never got.

“Who is that?” Willow pointed to herself in the picture.

“You,” I said numbly.

She smiled. “You drew me?”

“Yes. I told you before that I loved you back then.” I hated how that sounded, but I didn’t know how to take it back. It made it sound like I didn’t love her now.

“And you said you hated me too.”

“After.”

She shifted on her feet as she let insecurity make her blind to everything I’d been trying to show her since she came for me at the base. I was starting to think she would never see it.

“Why isn’t Dad in this?” she asked.

“Because I didn’t want him in it.” I put the file back in the box as Willow was picking up the leather book.

But it wasn’t a book. It was a photo album, and when it opened, I felt the air leave my lungs. I stared at myself as a child. The first Polaroid was of me at about five years old with a thirteen or fourteen-year-old Jemma. She was smiling as I kissed her cheek. I didn’t remember when it was taken, but I could still feel my lips on her like it was yesterday. She was always affectionate with me, like I was with her. But those days were long over.

Willow turned the page, and the next picture was of Jemma very, very pregnant. I had my ear to her stomach, and my hand next to it. The picture after that was of me with frosting all over my face from a birthday I didn’t remember.

She kept turning pages, and I couldn’t breathe at all. My chest was heavy each time I saw Jemma’s face, or mine when I was smiling. Something in my brain snapped, and I needed the pictures gone. I needed them to vanish like she did.

I took the lighter from the nightstand, and ripped the album out of Willow’s hands. I tried to light the thing up, but the lighter did nothing except hiss at my attempts. Willow was saying my name, but I ignored her calls. I wanted this all to be out of sight. If it was here, then it would only keep the lie that Jemma loved me going.

When the lighter wouldn’t do what I needed it to, I took it and threw it against the wall hard enough to make it shatter, and leave a dent behind. My body was shaking with rage, and grief that I didn’t know how to deal with.

“Fitz,” Willow said as gentle as the wind. “Calm down.” She took one of my shaking hands, and touched my face, trying to bring me down again. She sat me down on the bed while she stood in front of me. “I’m right here, okay?”

I couldn’t look in her eyes. Not right now. I stared at her stomach, because it was neutral. “I can’t breathe,” I forced the words out of me. Willow hushed me, and held my head to her chest. She was pure grace, and care as she gently held my head and rubbed my back.

I gripped her hips tightly so she couldn’t leave me too. I knew it was hurting her, but I could force my fingers to loosen.

“Just try and calm down. Think of something that relaxes you. Try and breathe, or you’ll hurt yourself,” she begged me with sorrow in her voice.

Something that relaxed me? I had nothing. My records on occasion brought me peace, but it didn’t last. Not anymore. All I had was Willow, and her voice to calm my soul.

I felt myself crumbling over a woman who hadn’t given me a second thought in two decades. This box meant nothing, and I knew that because I meant nothing to her. I meant nothing to anybody. Every time I let myself love someone, they let me down in the end. I was forever met with unfaithfulness. They couldn’t love me like I loved them. Even Willow.

I did something cruel to Willow without meaning to. But that was me. Doing cruel things to the one person I cared about. “Why didn’t she want me?” I asked a question she couldn’t possibly answer.

She kissed the top of my head, and I felt her own head rest on mine. “I’m so sorry, Fitz. I’m sorry that any of this happened to you.”

The only thing I could do was not cry. I held on as hard as I could to that one little thing. If I cried, then I cared. And I just couldn’t care.

“What’s wrong with me? Why was I worth so little that she could pick up and go?”

Softly, Willow said, “There was nothing wrong with you. This is my fault, not yours.”

“She could have taken me if she wanted to. She chose to leave me behind.”

“She thought you’d be safer.”

“I could have been safe with her. She didn’t want me around. I was part of a life she didn’t want anymore.”

There was a moment of silence before Willow tilted my head up. There were tear tracks running down her face, and her beautiful midnight blue eyes were broken over me. “I want you around. She might not have, but I do. You’re my family now, and nothing is going to change that. Tell me you understand that.”

I stayed quiet.

“Say that you’re wanted.”

“Nobody wants me, Willow.” I was just another Lost One.

“I want you, Fitz. I need to hear you say it, so I know you can hear me. Don’t let something selfish my mother did to you make you hate yourself. I can see how badly you want love, and I’m so sorry that you didn’t get what you needed. You deserved so much more than what life gave you, but that’s what life is. It screws you over and over again, and you have to keep going anyway. You lose more than you ever win, but when you finally do win, sometimes it’s worth the hurt you got along the way.” Her voice was shaking, and her eyes were so full of tears that I doubted she could see me. “So please,” she begged again. “Please tell me that you know I want you.”

I knew what she meant. She didn’t want me in the way I wanted her to, but she wanted me in the way I needed her to. A way that no one else wanted to give me.

“You want me?”

“I do. Say it again and try to believe it.”

“You want me.”

I went from cruel to selfish as I let go of her hips to pull her face down, because I knew she would let me. She wouldn’t push me away. Not when she knew I needed this. To feel close to someone. To her.

The girl was kind enough to kiss me back like she meant it. That was when it happened. I felt a tear betray me as it leaked out of my closed eye, because in the end, I cared and I knew it.

When the kiss was over, Willow wiped the tear from my face. She didn’t look at me like I was pathetic for crying over this. She just took care of me, because that was the person she was. Always showing me all of the reasons I fell in love with her, as if I needed more.

“Come on, I think you should sleep. We can do this tomorrow.” She locked up the pictures, and handed me the key. “This is yours to do with what you want. If you want to destroy it, that’s fine. If you want to keep them, then that’s fine too. I think you should.”

“Why?”

“It’s part of who you are. If you get rid of the things that hurt you, it makes you less of who you are. It’s just you trying to hide. Don’t let what she did take away the love you felt for who she used to be.”

I put the key in my pocket, not sure of what I would do in the morning.

Willow led us to her bedroom, and she tucked me in like I was a child, though I didn’t mind the kindness. She was giving me the care that she knew I craved. Somehow I didn’t hate her seeing me as vulnerable as I was. She was the only one who was allowed to know this part of me. The crumbling, broken, worthless part of me.

She took my shoes off, and tossed them in the corner along with hers. “Do you want me to go?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Please don’t leave me.”

She looked like she had been hit, but she crawled into bed with me anyway. It was too small for both of us, but I wasn’t about to let that keep us apart. I laid my head over her heart, and she held me.

“Will you sing me to sleep?” I asked as I looked up at her.

She smiled, and nodded her head before she started singing to me. Her fingernails tickled the side of my neck as the words to Wildwood Flower quietly filled the small room.