RP Log: MOTHER'S DAY (Jeremy and his long lost mom ^_^)
Who: Jeremy and Meghan Downs (and a guest cameo from Edie Williams)
Where: Arkham Asylum
What: Reunion time. Whether Jeremy wants it or not.
Warnings: Discussions of abuse, violence and rape. Hide your kids.
Meghan Downs, tired eyes covered by a pair of large dark sunglasses, stood outside the windows that looked into the rec room of the Arkham asylum while she scanned the room carefully.
She wondered which one of the lunatics in front of her was her son.
The woman had been clean since February and instead of looking healthier she looked weak, ready to fall over by the slightest of breezes. She had always been slender but she felt like skin and bones, an appearance helped by the steady diet of cigarettes and coffee. Those were the two things that got her through the day, and though she could barely sleep anymore and walked around constantly tired, it was better than what she was like before.
Meghan thought she had spotted him - her son - but she wasn't sure with the long hair covering the boy's face.
A month ago she had gone back to Miami to try to find him. All she got was bad news - he was wanted for murder and had gone missing. Learning that, the woman locked herself in a crappy hotel room for a week, living on absolutely nothing but cigarettes and coffee, wanting to die and begging her demons to leave her alone. Then one morning there was a knock on her door and she was given an envelope. In it was a small note that said only I heard you were looking for your son and a newspaper clipping about the Gotham serial killer Jason Jones - her Jeremy - with a picture.
Meghan was on a plane later that day.
Now she was here with her son somewhere right in front of her and she needed to smoke.
***
Edie Williams had told everyone the reason she had been taking more and more shifts at Arkham and cutting down her hours at the hospital was because it paid better. Sure, it did, but money wasn't really an issue especially not with Bobby around. Edie was at Arkham so she could be by Jeremy. Of course, the girl wouldn't admit this to anyone and though she was there to be by him she had continued to stay detached from the boy. Most of the time she ignored him but if she were to be caught in conversation with him she kept things short and civil. Edie wanted to be able to cut him out of her life, like she said she was going to do, but she couldn't stop worrying about him. She wanted to talk to him, hug him, laugh with him, but she knew it would - in the long run - be better this way.
Noticing the woman with a visitor's badge standing outside the rec room, Edie skipped over and smiled, "Hi. Can I help you with anything?"
Meghan caught the streak of bubbly blonde in her periphael vision. She glanced briefly over to give a curtousy smile to the nurse before returning her gaze back to the window.
"I'm here to see my son," she said.
"Oh, that's great!" Edie squeaked, finding it very beneficial for the patients to have visitors, "Who's your son?"
Peering at the boy she thought was her son, Meghan replied, "Jeremy Downs."
Edie felt like she had just got rear kicked in the gut by an unruly stallion. Her eyes widened as she looked at the woman, staring in obvious surprise.
"You-you're Jeremy's mother?"
Sensing the nurse's shock, Meghan turned completely around to face her, pushing the sunglasses off her face and on to the top of her head.
"Yeah, is there a problem?" she asked cooly, hands coming to rest on slim hips. She didn't like the look on the girl's face. Was it too hard to imagine a serial killer having a mother?
"No, no," Edie sputtered while her mind kept telling her this is Jeremy's mother, this is Jeremy's mother, this is Jeremy's mother, "It's just that - "
"He's the one in the corner," she cut Edie off, making it more of a statement than a question.
Edie nodded.
"Thank you," she said and turned to the door to the rec room.
"No, wait!" Edie said, "D-do you think it would be good for him to see you? I mean - it's been rough for him - "
Meghan looked disbelievingly at the nurse. "He's my son, you can't tell me whether or not I can see him."
"Yes, I know, but - "
"No - " Meghan held up a finger, silencing the nurse, "He's my son."
And with that she turned on her heel and yanked the door to the rec room open. She came to a halt, a foot from the boy she thought to be her son, and she noticed, exasperatedly, that the plucky blonde nurse had followed and skidded to a stop in between the two of them.
But the nurse was forgotten when Meghan got close to the boy - to her son she had no doubt now. The last ten years swirled around in her head and her eyes filmed over with a thin layer of tears, just enough to be felt and not seen unless you were looking hard.
"Hey, Rex," she said softly, wanting to bolt from the room, "I'm your mom." The woman said her title as if she were apologizing, saying I know you deserve more but this is it.
It was her fault he was in here.
Jeremy was trying to figure out what to do with himself. Half the time he dreamt about escaping from Arkham, especially when his new doctor frustrated him, because she just didn’t seem as understanding as Dr. Quinzel had been. Then again, given that Dr. Quinzel had recently broken into Arkham to give Jeremy a knife, he was starting to question her overall competence as a therapist, even before her swan dive into madness.
He knew there were reasons to stay. Helena was on the hunt for a lawyer, and when determined she always found a way to succeed. Remus had agreed to fund the endeavor with his earnings from Adrian Veidt, a fact so delightfully ironic Jeremy just had to relish in it. But with each passing day Arkham felt increasingly like a cage he would never escape from through traditional means, even with luck on his side (and who was he kidding, it never was).
Add to this the frustration over the Edie mess (she was barely speaking to him but seemed to be around Arkham more than ever somehow) and Jeremy often felt stressed to a breaking point. He was almost wishing for the day she would leave to get married back in Kentucky so that he wouldn’t have her around as a constant reminder of how he had irreparably screwed up their friendship.
He was spending yet another listless afternoon in a corner of the rec room when all of a sudden a strange, sickly looking woman wearing a visitor’s badge marched up to him and called him a name he hadn’t heard for fifteen years, so long now he’d forgotten entirely that she’d used it. In doing so it brought a barrage of memories flooding back into his brain, their effect infinitely more potent than the meaningless phrase that followed it. I am your mother. Who was a mother to the motherless? How do you describe sight to someone who’d always been blind?
She might as well have just socked him in the stomach.
Jeremy’s head snapped up and he stared at the woman, who was growing more familiar every second: hadn’t he watched her brush out that dark hair, still wet from the shower? Weren’t those dark eyes the same ones he saw every time he looked in the mirror?
Trailing her was Edie. Jeremy’s gaze shifted to her, and for a wild second suspected a conspiracy. He’d been stupid enough to think of Edie as his mother, so she’d somehow gone out and found him the real thing, a woman he had no desire to ever see or speak to again. But Edie looked just about as distressed as he felt, so Jeremy had to assume she was trying to prevent the reunion, not enable it.
So he looked again to the woman, who was now tearing up (is that where he’d gotten the capacity to cry at the slightest rush of emotion?), eyes narrowed, and said, “No. You don’t get to do this. Not now.”
Then he stood and tried to bolt past them both, wanting nothing more than to escape back to his room to hide from this part of the nightmare.
Meghan was almost stunned silent by how much like him her son had become. For a fleeting and disappointing second the woman thought she was back in Miami, seventeen, and waitressing long shifts to make ends meet.
"Jeremy," she said as he brushed past them, almost at the same time the blonde nurse called his name too. Her eyes flick to the girl wondering if all nurses at Arkham were this protective over their patients.
"Please, Jeremy, it's never going to be a good time. What do you want me to come back in another fifteen years?" she asked exasperatedly. Meghan had not wanted it to go like this, but when you abandon your son and come to see him fifteen years later after no contact and, to add a cherry ontop of it, he's in an insane asylum after he killed some people, she expected as much.
If she was the boy she wouldn't want to see herself either.
"No," Jeremy said, turning on his heels to glare at her. "I don't want you to come back, ever. You had your fucking chance and you blew it." He realized he was still standing in the middle of the rec room and several people were watching with interest. He shook his head in disgust and continued out of the rec room, stalking down the hall toward his own.
"You're right about that," Meghan said quietly to herself as she watched her son walk - maybe run would be a more appropriate term - away from her with the nurse right behind him.
She looked around, embarrassed suddenly with so many eyes on her, and with shaking hands, pulled her shades back down to cover the tears.
Meghan would let him go today but she would be back tomorrow. She wasn't going to leave him again.
Jeremy made it to his room and leaned against the wall, sliding down it to the floor. He wrapped his arms around himself and put his head down against his knees. His chest ached something awful and he couldn't get enough breath, as if someone had kicked him there.
Edie, despite having said she would keep things discrete between her and Jeremy, could not in her right mind or heart let the boy suffer the blow of seeing his mother alone. She couldn't do that to him. He needed a friend.
She entered the room and with no hesitation knelt to the floor to join him, wrapping her arms around him.
Jeremy didn't even look up when Edie entered, but didn't have the energy to fight her hug. He just slumped against her, resting his head on her shoulder.
"I was hoping she was dead," he whispered.
Edie flinched at the boy's comment, wondering if given enough time between them, he would hope her dead too.
She gave a tight squeeze and asked, "Are you alright, sugar?"
"I don't know," he said. "I never... never thought I'd... or she'd... I don't know." He wasn't making much sense and he was aware of it in a detached sort of way.
The girl didn't know what to say to make it better, she thought there might not be anything for this situation, so she just kept her arms around him.
"Is there anything I can do for you?" she asked.
"Just stay for awhile?" he asked, his voice cracking.
Edie swallowed, knowing that she shouldn't, that it was too easy for her to fall back into this role with the boy.
But she couldn't leave.
"Sure, sugar," she said, rubbing him gently on the arm.
"Thank you," he said quietly, closing his eyes. He tried to focus on keeping his breathing slow and steady.
"Soon I won't even have you in this place."
Edie didn't say anything - what could she say? - and stayed, her arms wrapped tightly around the boy.
***
The next day, Meghan Downs was back. A part of her told her she was wasting her time, it was a hopeless cause. Then there was the part of her that had started the search for Jeremy in the first place, the part of her that had told her a couple months ago that she needed to clean up her act, the part of her that had missed Jeremy every single day since she left him in that godforsaken McDonald's bathroom. To this day the woman couldn't eat anything from the fast food chain.
There was also the conversation and shared smoke with the blonde nurse (and Meghan knew now, Jeremy's friend) that had made the woman believe they - her and her son - needed this. If nothing came of it except for closure, at least they would have that.
She was back outside the rec room, once again, searching for her son through the window.
The next day, Jeremy saw her through the window and almost couldn't believe she was back. He stood up and exited the rec room, glaring at her where she stood.
"What do I need to say to get you to leave me alone?" he demanded, although he was fully certain he could mention just one of the numerous horrors that had happened to him since she'd abandoned him and that would do the trick.
There was a hint of a frown on the woman's lips as she pushed her sunglasses up on top of head.
The resemblance to him - Jeremy's father, Meghan now knew for certain - was uncanny.
"I left you once," she said crossing her arms over her tiny chest, "I'm not leaving you again." It sounded almost as if she were daring him to try to get rid of her.
"It doesn't work that way," Jeremy said, crossing his arms. "You can't be gone for fifteen fucking years and then walk in and try to have any kind of authority over me."
"I'm not trying to have any authority over you," Meghan retorted with eyebrows raised, "I just want to fucking know my son."
"You don't have that right anymore," Jeremy scoffed. "You should've wanted to know me when I was five, when you left me in a goddamn bathroom in a fucking McDonalds!"
Her son had a damn good point but Meghan was trying to ignore all the reasons why she shouldn't be standing in front of him.
So she scoffed, "Don't tell me I don't have the right. When you push a ten pound baby out of your vagina without any pain killers, you get the right of being a mother for life." She sighed, "I know I fucked up, Jeremy... Jesus! I know I fucked up! I don't need you to love me or forgive me or any of that, I just need you to listen to me."
"No, you don't!" Jeremy shouted back. "Just because for whatever reason you didn't abort me, that doesn't make you some goddamn hero. And you know what? A lot of times I wish you had! That's the kind of life you've provided for me, Mother. So I don't have to fucking listen to you if I don't want to."
Meghan clenched her jaw, trying to stop herself from getting upset. Of all the things he said, it was his sarcastic mother that hurt the most. She could still hear Jeremy as a toddler in her head, running around the kitchen table, shouting Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! with a plastic dinosaur in his small hands.
"Fine, Rex," she said, pulling her arms tighter against her, "I'll leave, today. But I'll come back every single day afterwards until you give me a chance."
"Don't call me that," Jeremy snapped, although every time she used the stupid nickname it yanked him closer to her, setting lose memories long buried, when the top of the counter was taller than him and she was the only thing that mattered in the world.
The threat enraged him as well. Jeremy thought the commitment to abandonment should be complete and not wishy-washy. And why now, after all this time? Surely she knew he sliced people to ribbons for a cheap thrill, right? Who wanted to own up to birthing that when they'd been scott-free for over a decade?
"If I listen to you now, will you leave me alone?"
Meghan told herself she was going to be completely honest with Jeremy, she owed him that much.
"Maybe," she admitted. The woman didn't want to leave him alone again, hadn't she already done that and fucked up his life?
Maybe wasn't good enough, but he had the feeling it was the best he was going to do for the moment. There was still plenty of time to be completely vile to her to make her want to leave him alone for the rest of his life.
"Okay," he said quietly, turning and heading back toward his room. "Let's get out of this goddamn hallway, Poison Ivy already knows enough about me to keep her gossiping for weeks."
Meghan looked around her curiously, as if a potted plant of ivy might be sitting in a corner and her son really was crazy, before following him to his room.
"Fucking poison ivy," she added to Jeremy's comment, to agree with the boy, to let him know - despite the past - she was on his side now, potted plant or not.
The response genuinely confused him, and he looked over his shoulder to give his mother an odd look. "You know her?" Had she been in Gotham this whole time too? He was pretty sure now that he thought about it that no one outside the city would know of Ivy as a villain; it was only the big timers like Joker who got national mention.
Meghan's dark eyes widened and she blinked. "Oh no, don't know her, just saying..." she trailed off and tried giving her son a smile that she knew would not be returned.
"Oh." Trying to get on his side. That was foster care 101, and he wasn't impressed. He turned back around and continued the rest of the way to his room in silence.
It didn't occur to Jeremy until he was already there that this was his room and he was about to show it to his mother. And this was the only thing he had to show for himself... a room in a fucking mental hospital. At least it wasn't his cell in juvie... did she know about juvie? Shit. This was a shit idea all around.
Jeremy flopped down on the edge of his bed and motioned toward the chair used most often by visitors, urging her away from sitting next to him... he had no desire to be that close to her.
Meghan looked at the bed, where her son sat, then at the chair. Of course he wouldn't want her to be close to him and though the woman had wanted to hug Jeremy ever since she saw him, it scared the shit out of her. If she touched him it would make everything - the last twenty years of her life - very, very real.
She grabbed the chair and dragged it so she was right in front of the boy, the closet she could get without touching him, and sat. Resting her elbows on her knees, she stared at the boy.
He had his face and her eyes.
Meghan couldn't stop staring.
Jeremy ducked his head at her stare, blushing involuntarily. Fidgeting, he said, "Well, I'm listening..."
"Right," Meghan said, snapping out of her daze. She leaned backward in the chair, not knowing where to begin. What do you say to a son you haven't seen in fifteen years?
After a few moments of silence, she started with, "Well... I'm your mom. Guess we already established that, me coming in and telling you I was your mom and everything yesterday. And the eyes, we got the same eyes, you noticed that? It's kinda freaking me out, really." It was easy enough to tell the woman was beyond nervous.
Jeremy had noticed, although he hadn't wanted to. He'd also noticed the tendency to tear up and the way she acted while nervous. It was scaring him, honestly, how much of himself he was seeing in her.
"Fifteen years of nothing and you've showed up to talk about genetics?" he asked, glaring at her.
Meghan glared right back. She wouldn't let her son's sarcasm wound her.
"Can I continue? Or do you have more jabs you want to get in?"
"No," Jeremy said, still scowling, "go on."
The woman held his stare and then continued.
"You're named after your grandfather," was the first thing that came to her mind that the boy should know, "Well, in a way... he was Jeremiah, but when the doctors handed you to me I couldn't see such a large obnoxious name in such a beautiful little person - " Meghan smiled to herself, remembering the first time she held him, "So Jeremy it was." She looked at the boy to see if he had any questions, or maybe some more insults to throw.
He flinched as if she'd slapped him. Years of wondering where his name had come from, of having to settle with the fact that she'd just liked it for some reason. No. He was named after a grandfather. He had a grandfather to be named after. Was he still alive? Did he know what she had done to him? Did he know what his namesake had become?
"Why are you here?" he asked. "Why now? Why after... after all this?" After all the damage had already been done. His hands were shaking, so he sat on them and stared at the floor, unable to keep looking at her.
Meghan repressed a sigh.
"Because, after what I did to you, you deserve answers. If - if I had been put through what I put you through I would want to know why." She laughed then, a sad tired sound. "I know you won't believe this but I've missed you every single day, every goddamn one of them, since I left you in that bathroom." Feeling herself start to get emotional she looked down and away from the boy.
There was also the fact that she hadn't been this coherent in a long while, but she would tell him about that in time.
"But what if I don't want answers?" Jeremy asked, glancing up at her. "What if I've already got a world's worth of shit to deal with and I don't want yours too? Just so you can... can unload the guilt you've got for abandoning your own kid?"
Meghan scowled at the boy and crossed her arms over her chest.
"Unload my guilt? Listen, no amount of talking I do here will ever take that away. Maybe when you're older and have a child of your own you'll understand." Maybe he already had a child, the woman had no idea. "Any harm done to your child comes back tenfold to you and stays there, buried right in your gut and it doesn't go away. Ever." She took a deep breath and raked shaky hands through her hair. "You're right, I could give you my very own sob story, but you know what? It doesn't fucking matter. And I don't think anything that happened to me in the past is an excuse for what I did to you. It's just the facts, A to B to C. But you know what Rex? It's my past, it's my story, and I like knowing it no matter how fucked up it is. I just thought that maybe you wanted to know yours too."
"I told you not to call me that," Jeremy said, then fell silent with his head bowed, wishing her words weren't leaking into his brain like they were. He'd known they would, too, which was why he hadn't wanted to give her this chance in the first place.
Finally, he said, "Okay, fine. Why'd you do it, then? Was it Carlos? That was his name, right? The guy who brought over the drugs?" He hadn't known at the time it was drugs they were up to in her bedroom, but time and experience -- especially the smell of crack cocaine -- had clued him in.
After the boy was finished, Meghan just looked at him tenderly. It amazed her the things children picked up, no matter how young.
"I want to tell you the whole thing. My story. Because my story whether you like it or not is yours too." She looked hard at her son and added, "The truth. Do I want you, after all this, to forgive me? Yes, of course, I fucking do. Do I think you will or that you should? Not at all. If my mother walked through that door right now and apologized for what she let happen to me, no matter how sincere, I would tell her to go fuck herself and die. So if that's what you want to tell me, say it now, get it out of the way."
Her mother. His grandmother. This whole maternal hatred thing spanned generations, apparently. He looked at her, mouth twitching, and wished he could say it. But he couldn't. Not now that he was listening.
"I hoped you were dead," he said, echoing what he had said to Edie the day before. "But you're not, so... go ahead. Just say it."
The woman could feel the dull ache of disappointment at his response. She wished he would say it to her, she deserved it.
"I was eleven when my dad - your grandfather - died," she started. It was the best place to begin, when everything started to change, "One of those freak accidents that you could never have prevented. He slipped on something in the kitchen, I can't even remember what it was, water? Dog food? Whatever it was, he hit - " she motioned with her own head and hand, "his head. Bam. Dead." She looked past Jeremy then, her eyes unfocused and a small smile on her lips as she remembered, "He was a good man. Dad. I was only eleven so of course to me he looked like a saint and I'm sure he wasn't but there was something just good about him. Kinda like that bubbly blonde nurse said about you - " After the nurse had nearly taken off her head, "By the way, way protective of you. Though a little crazy, I'm glad she's looking out for you."
Jeremy couldn't help it; he started laughing. He wasn't sure if it was at the thought of being like a grandfather (dead, apparently) who was supposedly good, when he was currently considered the bloodiest serial killer in Gotham history, or that his mother was glad Edie was around.
"Don't get used to it," he said, "she's leaving soon to get married."
Meghan looked up at Jeremy, surprised. It wasn't because of his laughter - God knows you need to find humor in a situation like theirs to keep you from killing yourself - but his remark about the nurse.
"Funny," she said, "She told me she was in love with you." It had occurred to the woman that what the girl had told her had might not have been clear to Jeremy yet, but Meghan was not going to keep anything from her son and... she didn't particularly care.
"Yeah," Jeremy said, unfazed. "It's something she tells everyone, apparently. Not gonna stop her, from what I can tell. Moved the wedding up to next month and everything." He sat up a little, tossing the hair out of his face. "But hey, we're talking about about your fucked up life, not hers."
"Alright," Meghan said, eyes wide, holding her hands up in surrender. "So my fucked up life... oh yeah, so Dad died," she smiled sarcastically, "Two years later, your destructive alcoholic grandmother remarried. And, you know, Greg didn't seem that bad in the beginning, really. I had no complaints other than he wasn't my dad. But... he was kind of touchy," she shrugged, keeping her tone flippant, trying desperately not to make a big deal about it. It was the past, after all, she couldn't change any of it. "At first it was just like fingers through my hair, lingering touches on the leg, nothing that couldn't be argued as fatherly affection." She laughed, hating herself for telling her son this, "It got worse, I ignored it at first, telling myself that oh he had been drinking, he didn't mean it. Then - then I couldn't ignore it and I told my mother and she told me that I was a liar and an ungrateful daughter. Complete bullshit. I was fourteen when my stepfather took it too far." Meghan's demeanor changed and she shifted uncomfortably in her seat, "And I knew, after that, I had to get out of the house. Out of Connecticut. Far, far away from that fucking creep."
Jeremy didn't want to hear this. He didn't want to hear about abuse and the unwanted attention of men from his own mother. (Nor did he want her to know that he had suffered the same. It was his pain and his damage -- he didn't want anyone to share it with him, least of all the person who had condemned him to it in the first place.)
"So you ran away," he said, trying to speed it along, "to Miami." He knew nothing of Connecticut, except that it had to be colder there than in Maryland, and it seemed such a foreign place for his family -- his family -- to hail from.
"Yeah," she said, "I figured if I was going to run away might as well be some where warm," she smiled, "I fucking hated New England winters. So I got to the farthest south I could get. Miami. Can't say I'm particularly fond of Miami either," she admitted, "the only good thing to come out of that fucking city was you and your father."
Another thing in common. They both hated Miami. But if she hated it so much, and he was one of two decent things about it, why was she so quick to leave him there?
"My father," he repeated, saying the words carefully. "You lied to me. You said... said he died in the Gulf War. I looked it up." He glanced at her, licking his lips. "No Michael Downs."
"Yeah," Meghan sighed and shook her head, "I thought it might be better for you to hear something like that instead of the truth. He was Michael," the woman smiled then, a real smile, that soften her face, making the dark circles under her eyes and the tension disappear, "But not Michael Downs, Michael Harrington. I'm a Downs, wanted you to have my name though God knows why... I guess for my father, but anyway, his name was Michael Harrington. He was in the Navy, on ship leave, and found himself in Miami. Found himself in my diner. And since I'm barring it all, telling you the truth, I will tell you what I never told him. I loved him." She laughed, not the harsh bitter ones like before, but something sweeter, "It was only a month but it was a good month. Then he left. Never saw him again."
Hearing about his father, hearing how she spoke of him with clear fondness, was awful. It made Jeremy wonder if circumstances had been different, if he could have ended up with both of them, in a decent home. But he knew the what ifs could destroy you, and there really wasn't much left of him to tear down, so he had to keep hold of what little he did have.
"And... and did you know he was my dad?" It was the nicest way he could think of to ask if she'd been a slut.
Meghan smiled sadly at the question. "I hoped he was," she admitted, "Most likely, logically, he was. But there was that itty bitty chance he wasn't though I ignored it most of the time. What's five percent? It's nothing, especially against a mother's intuition. Don't let those Maury and Jerry Springer shows with those crazy ass woman yelling that she knows the one guy is her baby's father fool you. A mother knows. And look at you, you're a spitting image of him." She hesitated for a moment and then asked, "I have a picture. Do you want to see?" She would understand if he refused.
Jeremy almost asked who else she had fucked and in what capacity to account for a five percent possibility his father was someone else, but decided just in time he didn't really want to know. Especially since he apparently looked just like his dad. His real dad. Not Kurt Cobain or Dr. Grant from Jurassic Park, a marine named Michael Harrington. Who might have been a decent man, if Jeremy could trust her judgment.
"Yeah," he said softly. "Yeah, I would."
Meghan fumbled in her purse and pulled out a photograph (she had more but didn't want to overwhelm the boy since she was sure she was already doing a pretty good job at that) and handed it to her son.
It was a close up of herself - sixteen and smiling - with a young handsome man, looking quite like Jeremy, smiling also.
Jeremy stared at the picture. They both looked unbelievably young somehow. And the man did look incredibly like him, same coloration and hair, face shape and nose, even. The only real difference was the eyes, lighter than the dark brown he shared with his mother, a green or a blue, Jeremy wasn't sure which from the picture.
He swallowed hard, squeezing his eyes shut against the image, trying to will away the tears welling behind the lids. "Shit," he whispered, pressing the bottom of his palms against his eyes, the picture still in hand. "Shit shit shit shit..."
The woman, face scrunching painfully, automatically reached out to rest a hand on the boy's arm.
She hadn't been lying when she said a parent suffers their child's pain.
"No!" Jeremy shouted, smacking her hand away. "No, you don't get to touch me! You don't get to walk in here with your stories and your goddamn pictures and expect that you can fucking touch me!" He threw the picture back at her and glared, tears sliding down his face while he gathered a ragged breath to keep yelling. "You have no idea what absolute shit my life has been since you left me there. It's been one shit storm after another and I've just been expected to get down on my knees and take it like a good dog and I have. Oh, I fucking have in ways you're never gonna know because you weren't there." He broke off, leaning forward, elbows on knees and head in his hands, letting a few painful sobs shake his body.
Meghan flinched when Jeremy smacked her hand away and all the defenses she had put up came crumbling down.
Her eyes spilled over with tears as she watched her son unravel in horror.
She had done this.
Shaking her head, she cried, "I'm sorry, Rex, I am so sorry."
"Please stop fucking calling me that," Jeremy said, wiping his eyes. "I'm not that little kid. I haven't been that little kid in a long long time, when you took me into the goddamn bathroom and said, 'Wait right here, I'll be right back,' and you left. And I waited. And I waited and waited and wouldn't move no matter how fucking hungry I was because my mom said she'd be right back. And finally, finally, this lady came in and asked me where my mom was and I said, 'I don't know.' Because even then I knew you'd done it. You'd picked something more important than me and left me to the wolves." He stared at her for a few seconds, with a sudden and intense calm. "So tell me. Why'd you do it? Enlighten me, oh please just solve the biggest mystery in my fucked up, serial killing life. I've waited so goddamn long."
Meghan shook her head frantically, her whole body shaking with sobs.
She didn't want to hear what he was saying. She didn't want to hear any of it.
But she answered him, through her tears, "I thought you would be better off without me." Hearing it out loud, after what Jeremy just said, made it sound ridiculous. Just some excuse she made up. But it was the truth - the woman, at the time twenty-one-years-old and addicted to crack, thought she was the wolf that was going to devour her little boy if she didn't do anything about it.
"Bull. Shit." Jeremy shook his head, indifferent to her crying. "You couldn't even take me to like, I dunno, a convent or a fire station or something? Not a McDonalds bathroom. That's not what someone who wants the best for her kid does." He leaned closer, staring at her as she sobbed. "It was Carlos, wasn't it? I thought for years he put you up to it. Did you know he smacked me around a couple times when I tried to find out what you two were doing in your bedroom? You sure as hell didn't seem to notice at the time."
The woman closed her hands over her ears as she continued to shake her head.
She didn't want to hear this! She needed a smoke. Goddamnit, she needed a drink and few pills and all of this would go away.
Meghan had never known Carlos had laid a hand on her baby boy - she had been too fucked up to notice. If she had known, by God, he would have been dead.
"I was fucked up!" she shouted through her tears, "I couldn't take care of myself, how could I take care of you! I was in the McDonalds and I thought if I didn't let you go now I would never be able to do it and if you stayed around me any longer you could end up hurt or worse."
"Right, so foster care was so much better. I was happy as a clam there, new placement every couple months, new school, new people to call me the homeless kid while I slept on sunporches and hid from drunk foster dads and learned to steal and lie just to fucking survive." Jeremy shook his head. "Good job, Meghan. That is your name, isn't it? I was never really sure."
"I didn't know!" was all the woman could get out as she cried. Her hands were shaking so badly she had to ball them up into fists. "How could I have known?"
"Because you're my mother!" Jeremy shouted. "You should've known. It was your responsibility to know!"
He was right. He was absolutely right. She should have known, she should have tried harder...
"I should have been there!" she told him, "I should have gotten my act together and gotten you back! I should have..." But shoulds meant nothing. What she did could never be undone.
"Fucking A you should've. But you didn't. So now it's too late. It's so far beyond too late. But hey, at least I've seen a nice picture of you and Michael Harrington. Thanks for everything."
He scooted backward until his back was up against the wall and he hugged his knees. He felt spent and exhausted and, oddly, a little better now that he'd yelled at her the way he'd wanted to for fifteen years. He just wished she'd leave now and Helena would magically appear instead so he could get a proper hug from someone he knew wasn't just going to leave him again.
"You're right," she said, starting to reign in her crying. She sniffed and wiped at her eyes, "You're right. I can't change what I did to you but I sure as hell can spend the rest of my goddamn life trying to make it up to you."
"Do you have thousands upon thousands of dollars to spend on lawyer fees?" Jeremy asked. "Because if not, I doubt there's much you could do for me at this point."
"I don't," Meghan said, "But I know someone who does." She swallowed, the thought making her nauseous and dizzy, but if it would help her son she would do it. She would do anything for him. "My mother."
"No," Jeremy said immediately. He had no desire to get indebted to a woman who sounded even worse than his own mother; he just wanted to see if Meghan had actually been any use to him financially. "I've got it covered. Does your mom even know I exist?" he asked, hoping to change the subject.
"No," she answered, wiping the rest of her tears from her face. Meghan had not seen the woman since she was fourteen. A couple years ago she got curious and drunk and decided to see if the woman was still alive. She was. Her and Greg. Meghan never wanted the woman to know about Jeremy, if she could help it. The woman was sick and twisted and God knows she would want to take his life over and shape him into something of her choosing. "Why ask me if you already have it covered... oh, right," she said, realization hitting, "that's what I would be good for, just money."
"I was just wondering if you'd managed to get anything together in the last fifteen years," Jeremy said, shrugging. Not to mention if his mother was somehow inexplicably rich, he would've liked to take the financial burden off of Remus, who was helping out of the kindness of his heart and not a familial responsibility. But Jeremy'd figured as much, from the look of her.
"Are you still using?" He knew a junkie when he saw one. Too skinny, too frail, too obsessed with making things right after they were already fucked up to hell. She had the attitude of someone fresh out of rehab, still holding on to the virtues of the 12 steps with a crack pipe in her other hand.
"No," Meghan answered firmly. It was all coffee and cigarettes now. "But," she admitted because she told herself there would be no more lying, "I've been in and out of rehabs since I left you. Managed to do away with crack but I found a substitute for it easily enough." She let out an exhausted laugh, "Alcohol and pills, just like your dear old grandmother. Fuck, Rex... Jeremy," she flipped her hair over her shoulder and rubbed her face, "I've been clean since your birthday. Probably the longest I've ever been clean, that's pretty damn sad." The woman shrugged and looked at him, "I'm trying to get my shit together."
"My birthday," Jeremy repeated softly. "Three months. Fan-fucking-tastic. You've barely been clean longer than I have." He shook his head slowly. "I don't need this. I don't need you here, ready to fucking relapse at any second. I've got my own addictions to deal with."
The woman - even though she kept telling herself that she deserved even worse treatment - felt a little offended. Three months was a fucking long time when you were addicted to something. Then she heard what her son said and there was a sharp stab of panic at his admission of addiction. Then... it clicked.
"Killing people," she said, so tired and ready for a smoke, "Fan-fucking-tastic. My son is addicted to killing people!"
"Yeah, and I guess I have you to thank for that, don't I?" Jeremy retorted. "Addiction running in the family and everything."
"Oooh," Meghan shook her head and raised a finger, "Don't play that game with me. I don't blame my fucking psychotic mother for making me a junkie and piss poor mother to boot and I certainly don't blame her for your predilection for stabbing the fuck out of people."
Actually, now that Jeremy had said it, wasn't mental illness genetic? Weren't they all - in their own ways - fucking crazy?
"No," Jeremy said, "I don't blame you for making me a killer. There's someone else who enjoys that little privilege. It's the addiction. They keep telling me it's genetic. And trust me, if I could've gotten addicted to cutting myself, I would. I tried once. There's plenty I've tried to keep the damage inward, not outward." He shook his head. "Just couldn't get it to stick. That's no one's fault but mine."
Meghan did not want to hear about her son - her only son - cutting himself. He could kill anyone he wanted, the woman would deal with that, but she couldn't deal with him hurting himself.
"Jesus," she said, realizing that her son was a killer and she would have to be okay with that, "Couldn't you have gotten addicted to hugging people instead?"
"Yeah, because hugging rapists does the world a hell of a lot of good," Jeremy replied flippantly, before he realized what he was implying. Fuck. He looked down, gnawing his lip and hiding behind his hair, hoping she wouldn't come to the clear conclusion.
Meghan paused.
"What did you say?" She was too shocked to really believe it.
"Nothing," Jeremy said.
"No, not nothing," Meghan spoke up, a sharp edge to her tone and she straightened in her seat, "What did you say?" She could feel the anger rising, not for the boy who wouldn't say it, but for the fucking scumbag of a man who had, most likely, laid a hand on her baby boy.
"I said I robbed this kid," Jeremy said, voice hardening. "Older than me. Killed him over forty bucks in a park. Stabbed the fuck out of him. Then I got a tattoo on my neck during the resulting four years I spent in juvie," he turned his head and moved his hair so she could see the full tattoo, "so everyone would know I wasn't someone to be fucking messed with." He turned back to look at her, eyes narrowed, daring her to believe the story everyone else did and not the truth.
Meghan wouldn't. She knew what she had heard and she knew what that kind of humiliation felt like. She also knew how it could fester and take over your whole life if you kept it locked inside and silent.
She narrowed the same eyes right back at her son, ignoring the show he put on and the crappy tattoo, "Bullshit."
Jeremy continued staring at her until he was once again tearing up and had to blink.
"Wish my lawyer had said that," he said softly, wiping an eye with the back of his fist.
The hardness in Meghan's face soften and she once again wanted to hug her son, knowing he wouldn't let her.
"Tell me what happened," she urged softly. He needed to let it out.
Jeremy shook his head, sniffling. "No." He had never spoken of it in detail with anyone (even the shrinks didn't know, since it was easy to distract them with other stories of neglect and delinquency), and she was the last person he wanted to tell.
"Jeremy," she said, trying to get him to look her in the eye, "You can't keep it bottled up. The more you pretend that it didn't happen and ignore it the worse it's going to get. It wasn't just a thing that happened to you, it changed your entire life. No matter how fucked up it is, it's important."
"Is that what they taught you in rehab?" Jeremy said sarcastically, avoiding her gaze.
"No," she said simply, "It's what your father taught me."
Mike had been the first person she had ever told about her stepfather.
That statement caught Jeremy offguard and he straightened up a little, finally meeting his mother's eyes for a second before averting them to his feet once more.
"Sounds like he was a nice guy," he mumbled, sniffling again.
"And it sounds like you're switching the subject," Meghan retorted but gently.
"It was a long time ago," Jeremy said, leaning his head back against the wall and staring at the ceiling. "Five years. Long time, and he's dead. I just wanna forget about it."
"Five years isn't a very long time," Meghan commented. The woman couldn't believe it - five years - that had made her son 15? If the fucker hadn't been killed by Jeremy she would have killed him herself. "And you'll never be able to forget about it," she admitted sadly, "No matter how much you want to, no matter how hard you try." She hoped he would see that she understood how he felt - their situations were different but the outcome had been the same.
Part of Jeremy wanted to clue her in that he didn't consider the experience the worst thing he'd been through. There were worse things than being a victim. There might even be some satisfaction in seeing her reaction when she learned her son was a filthy little whore.
But he couldn't. Again, it was his damage. She might have thought they were somehow linked now, like they could bond over being abused, but he was alone. He was always going to be alone.
"It doesn't matter," he said. "If it's never gonna go away, why bother bringing it up? Especially to you?"
"For fuck's sake," Meghan gushed, eyes wide in exasperation, "It does fucking matter, Jeremy! Someone did you wrong, someone hurt you, they did it and they fucking enjoyed it. Shrugging it off like it's nothing? That's just letting him win. Yeah, he's dead, you killed him, but it looks like he's getting the last fucking laugh."
"No!" Jeremy shouted. "No, he didn't, because I enjoyed killing him more than he enjoyed fucking me!"
Meghan was almost relieved, hearing him say it, but it was only part of the story.
"You sure about that?" she prodded.
"Yes!" Jeremy said, hands clenching into fists. "Because I didn't need to hear him beg, I just did it, and the blood, all that blood, that was enough, that was incredible, and it was so quick, so fast and almost perfect, I almost got them all, I'd practiced, I..." He stopped, realizing what he was saying.
"Shit," he mumbled, shaking all over. "I'm worse than him. I'm worse."
Meghan couldn't lie, hearing Jeremy - her baby boy who used to cry if any of his toys were "hurt" (meaning she had stepped on one of them by accident) - talk about enjoying killing someone was scary. Frightening. Nauseating.
But he was her son. And she glad that bastard had been killed.
"No!" she said firmly, again trying to get him to look at her. If she couldn't touch him he needed to see she was here for him, "No you are not. That guy, whoever he was, was a fucking creep. A scumbag who took advantage of a helpless boy. He got what he fucking deserved."
"Yeah, he did," Jeremy said, eyes brimming with tears that stuck to his long eyelashes, "but then I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop... and I didn't want to... so I just... I just kept trying to find people who deserved it like he did and... and..."
He was so tired suddenly. Tired and dizzy. He lay down and hugged his pillow, pulling himself into a fetal position while he tried to keep the room from spinning.
"I just thought he wanted to be friends, you know? I was so... so lonely... you dunno how lonely it is... when they send you to the place only the fucked up unwanted kids go... so hard to make friends in a place like that... fuck."
Meghan could feel her own tears rising to the surface but she swallowed them down. She needed to be strong.
The woman scooted her chair closer to the edge of the bed, "So you thought he was your friend?" she asked softly, wanting to touch her son so badly, just a hand on his head or arm, anything.
"Yeah," he said quietly, closing his eyes and sniffling. "I'm sorry, I... I don't think I can do this... not right now..."
Meghan could only push so much before the pain in her son's eyes was too much.
"If I come back to tomorrow?" she asked cautiously.
Jeremy looked at her and took a slow breath. "Maybe?"
Meghan had no choice, she had to take it.
"Okay," she said. She got up from her seat and headed slowly to the door, not ready to leave. "I'm sorry, Rex," she said softly, turning around when she was at the door, "I know it probably means nothing to you but I really am."
"I know," Jeremy said. "I'm sorry, too."
"You've got nothing to be sorry about, Rex," she said and then corrected herself, "Jeremy."
He had plenty to be sorry about, and besides in this case he was apologizing in advance.
He wasn't going to be here tomorrow. One way or another.
"Goodbye," he said quietly. "Meghan."
Where: Arkham Asylum
What: Reunion time. Whether Jeremy wants it or not.
Warnings: Discussions of abuse, violence and rape. Hide your kids.
Meghan Downs, tired eyes covered by a pair of large dark sunglasses, stood outside the windows that looked into the rec room of the Arkham asylum while she scanned the room carefully.
She wondered which one of the lunatics in front of her was her son.
The woman had been clean since February and instead of looking healthier she looked weak, ready to fall over by the slightest of breezes. She had always been slender but she felt like skin and bones, an appearance helped by the steady diet of cigarettes and coffee. Those were the two things that got her through the day, and though she could barely sleep anymore and walked around constantly tired, it was better than what she was like before.
Meghan thought she had spotted him - her son - but she wasn't sure with the long hair covering the boy's face.
A month ago she had gone back to Miami to try to find him. All she got was bad news - he was wanted for murder and had gone missing. Learning that, the woman locked herself in a crappy hotel room for a week, living on absolutely nothing but cigarettes and coffee, wanting to die and begging her demons to leave her alone. Then one morning there was a knock on her door and she was given an envelope. In it was a small note that said only I heard you were looking for your son and a newspaper clipping about the Gotham serial killer Jason Jones - her Jeremy - with a picture.
Meghan was on a plane later that day.
Now she was here with her son somewhere right in front of her and she needed to smoke.
***
Edie Williams had told everyone the reason she had been taking more and more shifts at Arkham and cutting down her hours at the hospital was because it paid better. Sure, it did, but money wasn't really an issue especially not with Bobby around. Edie was at Arkham so she could be by Jeremy. Of course, the girl wouldn't admit this to anyone and though she was there to be by him she had continued to stay detached from the boy. Most of the time she ignored him but if she were to be caught in conversation with him she kept things short and civil. Edie wanted to be able to cut him out of her life, like she said she was going to do, but she couldn't stop worrying about him. She wanted to talk to him, hug him, laugh with him, but she knew it would - in the long run - be better this way.
Noticing the woman with a visitor's badge standing outside the rec room, Edie skipped over and smiled, "Hi. Can I help you with anything?"
Meghan caught the streak of bubbly blonde in her periphael vision. She glanced briefly over to give a curtousy smile to the nurse before returning her gaze back to the window.
"I'm here to see my son," she said.
"Oh, that's great!" Edie squeaked, finding it very beneficial for the patients to have visitors, "Who's your son?"
Peering at the boy she thought was her son, Meghan replied, "Jeremy Downs."
Edie felt like she had just got rear kicked in the gut by an unruly stallion. Her eyes widened as she looked at the woman, staring in obvious surprise.
"You-you're Jeremy's mother?"
Sensing the nurse's shock, Meghan turned completely around to face her, pushing the sunglasses off her face and on to the top of her head.
"Yeah, is there a problem?" she asked cooly, hands coming to rest on slim hips. She didn't like the look on the girl's face. Was it too hard to imagine a serial killer having a mother?
"No, no," Edie sputtered while her mind kept telling her this is Jeremy's mother, this is Jeremy's mother, this is Jeremy's mother, "It's just that - "
"He's the one in the corner," she cut Edie off, making it more of a statement than a question.
Edie nodded.
"Thank you," she said and turned to the door to the rec room.
"No, wait!" Edie said, "D-do you think it would be good for him to see you? I mean - it's been rough for him - "
Meghan looked disbelievingly at the nurse. "He's my son, you can't tell me whether or not I can see him."
"Yes, I know, but - "
"No - " Meghan held up a finger, silencing the nurse, "He's my son."
And with that she turned on her heel and yanked the door to the rec room open. She came to a halt, a foot from the boy she thought to be her son, and she noticed, exasperatedly, that the plucky blonde nurse had followed and skidded to a stop in between the two of them.
But the nurse was forgotten when Meghan got close to the boy - to her son she had no doubt now. The last ten years swirled around in her head and her eyes filmed over with a thin layer of tears, just enough to be felt and not seen unless you were looking hard.
"Hey, Rex," she said softly, wanting to bolt from the room, "I'm your mom." The woman said her title as if she were apologizing, saying I know you deserve more but this is it.
It was her fault he was in here.
Jeremy was trying to figure out what to do with himself. Half the time he dreamt about escaping from Arkham, especially when his new doctor frustrated him, because she just didn’t seem as understanding as Dr. Quinzel had been. Then again, given that Dr. Quinzel had recently broken into Arkham to give Jeremy a knife, he was starting to question her overall competence as a therapist, even before her swan dive into madness.
He knew there were reasons to stay. Helena was on the hunt for a lawyer, and when determined she always found a way to succeed. Remus had agreed to fund the endeavor with his earnings from Adrian Veidt, a fact so delightfully ironic Jeremy just had to relish in it. But with each passing day Arkham felt increasingly like a cage he would never escape from through traditional means, even with luck on his side (and who was he kidding, it never was).
Add to this the frustration over the Edie mess (she was barely speaking to him but seemed to be around Arkham more than ever somehow) and Jeremy often felt stressed to a breaking point. He was almost wishing for the day she would leave to get married back in Kentucky so that he wouldn’t have her around as a constant reminder of how he had irreparably screwed up their friendship.
He was spending yet another listless afternoon in a corner of the rec room when all of a sudden a strange, sickly looking woman wearing a visitor’s badge marched up to him and called him a name he hadn’t heard for fifteen years, so long now he’d forgotten entirely that she’d used it. In doing so it brought a barrage of memories flooding back into his brain, their effect infinitely more potent than the meaningless phrase that followed it. I am your mother. Who was a mother to the motherless? How do you describe sight to someone who’d always been blind?
She might as well have just socked him in the stomach.
Jeremy’s head snapped up and he stared at the woman, who was growing more familiar every second: hadn’t he watched her brush out that dark hair, still wet from the shower? Weren’t those dark eyes the same ones he saw every time he looked in the mirror?
Trailing her was Edie. Jeremy’s gaze shifted to her, and for a wild second suspected a conspiracy. He’d been stupid enough to think of Edie as his mother, so she’d somehow gone out and found him the real thing, a woman he had no desire to ever see or speak to again. But Edie looked just about as distressed as he felt, so Jeremy had to assume she was trying to prevent the reunion, not enable it.
So he looked again to the woman, who was now tearing up (is that where he’d gotten the capacity to cry at the slightest rush of emotion?), eyes narrowed, and said, “No. You don’t get to do this. Not now.”
Then he stood and tried to bolt past them both, wanting nothing more than to escape back to his room to hide from this part of the nightmare.
Meghan was almost stunned silent by how much like him her son had become. For a fleeting and disappointing second the woman thought she was back in Miami, seventeen, and waitressing long shifts to make ends meet.
"Jeremy," she said as he brushed past them, almost at the same time the blonde nurse called his name too. Her eyes flick to the girl wondering if all nurses at Arkham were this protective over their patients.
"Please, Jeremy, it's never going to be a good time. What do you want me to come back in another fifteen years?" she asked exasperatedly. Meghan had not wanted it to go like this, but when you abandon your son and come to see him fifteen years later after no contact and, to add a cherry ontop of it, he's in an insane asylum after he killed some people, she expected as much.
If she was the boy she wouldn't want to see herself either.
"No," Jeremy said, turning on his heels to glare at her. "I don't want you to come back, ever. You had your fucking chance and you blew it." He realized he was still standing in the middle of the rec room and several people were watching with interest. He shook his head in disgust and continued out of the rec room, stalking down the hall toward his own.
"You're right about that," Meghan said quietly to herself as she watched her son walk - maybe run would be a more appropriate term - away from her with the nurse right behind him.
She looked around, embarrassed suddenly with so many eyes on her, and with shaking hands, pulled her shades back down to cover the tears.
Meghan would let him go today but she would be back tomorrow. She wasn't going to leave him again.
Jeremy made it to his room and leaned against the wall, sliding down it to the floor. He wrapped his arms around himself and put his head down against his knees. His chest ached something awful and he couldn't get enough breath, as if someone had kicked him there.
Edie, despite having said she would keep things discrete between her and Jeremy, could not in her right mind or heart let the boy suffer the blow of seeing his mother alone. She couldn't do that to him. He needed a friend.
She entered the room and with no hesitation knelt to the floor to join him, wrapping her arms around him.
Jeremy didn't even look up when Edie entered, but didn't have the energy to fight her hug. He just slumped against her, resting his head on her shoulder.
"I was hoping she was dead," he whispered.
Edie flinched at the boy's comment, wondering if given enough time between them, he would hope her dead too.
She gave a tight squeeze and asked, "Are you alright, sugar?"
"I don't know," he said. "I never... never thought I'd... or she'd... I don't know." He wasn't making much sense and he was aware of it in a detached sort of way.
The girl didn't know what to say to make it better, she thought there might not be anything for this situation, so she just kept her arms around him.
"Is there anything I can do for you?" she asked.
"Just stay for awhile?" he asked, his voice cracking.
Edie swallowed, knowing that she shouldn't, that it was too easy for her to fall back into this role with the boy.
But she couldn't leave.
"Sure, sugar," she said, rubbing him gently on the arm.
"Thank you," he said quietly, closing his eyes. He tried to focus on keeping his breathing slow and steady.
"Soon I won't even have you in this place."
Edie didn't say anything - what could she say? - and stayed, her arms wrapped tightly around the boy.
***
The next day, Meghan Downs was back. A part of her told her she was wasting her time, it was a hopeless cause. Then there was the part of her that had started the search for Jeremy in the first place, the part of her that had told her a couple months ago that she needed to clean up her act, the part of her that had missed Jeremy every single day since she left him in that godforsaken McDonald's bathroom. To this day the woman couldn't eat anything from the fast food chain.
There was also the conversation and shared smoke with the blonde nurse (and Meghan knew now, Jeremy's friend) that had made the woman believe they - her and her son - needed this. If nothing came of it except for closure, at least they would have that.
She was back outside the rec room, once again, searching for her son through the window.
The next day, Jeremy saw her through the window and almost couldn't believe she was back. He stood up and exited the rec room, glaring at her where she stood.
"What do I need to say to get you to leave me alone?" he demanded, although he was fully certain he could mention just one of the numerous horrors that had happened to him since she'd abandoned him and that would do the trick.
There was a hint of a frown on the woman's lips as she pushed her sunglasses up on top of head.
The resemblance to him - Jeremy's father, Meghan now knew for certain - was uncanny.
"I left you once," she said crossing her arms over her tiny chest, "I'm not leaving you again." It sounded almost as if she were daring him to try to get rid of her.
"It doesn't work that way," Jeremy said, crossing his arms. "You can't be gone for fifteen fucking years and then walk in and try to have any kind of authority over me."
"I'm not trying to have any authority over you," Meghan retorted with eyebrows raised, "I just want to fucking know my son."
"You don't have that right anymore," Jeremy scoffed. "You should've wanted to know me when I was five, when you left me in a goddamn bathroom in a fucking McDonalds!"
Her son had a damn good point but Meghan was trying to ignore all the reasons why she shouldn't be standing in front of him.
So she scoffed, "Don't tell me I don't have the right. When you push a ten pound baby out of your vagina without any pain killers, you get the right of being a mother for life." She sighed, "I know I fucked up, Jeremy... Jesus! I know I fucked up! I don't need you to love me or forgive me or any of that, I just need you to listen to me."
"No, you don't!" Jeremy shouted back. "Just because for whatever reason you didn't abort me, that doesn't make you some goddamn hero. And you know what? A lot of times I wish you had! That's the kind of life you've provided for me, Mother. So I don't have to fucking listen to you if I don't want to."
Meghan clenched her jaw, trying to stop herself from getting upset. Of all the things he said, it was his sarcastic mother that hurt the most. She could still hear Jeremy as a toddler in her head, running around the kitchen table, shouting Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! with a plastic dinosaur in his small hands.
"Fine, Rex," she said, pulling her arms tighter against her, "I'll leave, today. But I'll come back every single day afterwards until you give me a chance."
"Don't call me that," Jeremy snapped, although every time she used the stupid nickname it yanked him closer to her, setting lose memories long buried, when the top of the counter was taller than him and she was the only thing that mattered in the world.
The threat enraged him as well. Jeremy thought the commitment to abandonment should be complete and not wishy-washy. And why now, after all this time? Surely she knew he sliced people to ribbons for a cheap thrill, right? Who wanted to own up to birthing that when they'd been scott-free for over a decade?
"If I listen to you now, will you leave me alone?"
Meghan told herself she was going to be completely honest with Jeremy, she owed him that much.
"Maybe," she admitted. The woman didn't want to leave him alone again, hadn't she already done that and fucked up his life?
Maybe wasn't good enough, but he had the feeling it was the best he was going to do for the moment. There was still plenty of time to be completely vile to her to make her want to leave him alone for the rest of his life.
"Okay," he said quietly, turning and heading back toward his room. "Let's get out of this goddamn hallway, Poison Ivy already knows enough about me to keep her gossiping for weeks."
Meghan looked around her curiously, as if a potted plant of ivy might be sitting in a corner and her son really was crazy, before following him to his room.
"Fucking poison ivy," she added to Jeremy's comment, to agree with the boy, to let him know - despite the past - she was on his side now, potted plant or not.
The response genuinely confused him, and he looked over his shoulder to give his mother an odd look. "You know her?" Had she been in Gotham this whole time too? He was pretty sure now that he thought about it that no one outside the city would know of Ivy as a villain; it was only the big timers like Joker who got national mention.
Meghan's dark eyes widened and she blinked. "Oh no, don't know her, just saying..." she trailed off and tried giving her son a smile that she knew would not be returned.
"Oh." Trying to get on his side. That was foster care 101, and he wasn't impressed. He turned back around and continued the rest of the way to his room in silence.
It didn't occur to Jeremy until he was already there that this was his room and he was about to show it to his mother. And this was the only thing he had to show for himself... a room in a fucking mental hospital. At least it wasn't his cell in juvie... did she know about juvie? Shit. This was a shit idea all around.
Jeremy flopped down on the edge of his bed and motioned toward the chair used most often by visitors, urging her away from sitting next to him... he had no desire to be that close to her.
Meghan looked at the bed, where her son sat, then at the chair. Of course he wouldn't want her to be close to him and though the woman had wanted to hug Jeremy ever since she saw him, it scared the shit out of her. If she touched him it would make everything - the last twenty years of her life - very, very real.
She grabbed the chair and dragged it so she was right in front of the boy, the closet she could get without touching him, and sat. Resting her elbows on her knees, she stared at the boy.
He had his face and her eyes.
Meghan couldn't stop staring.
Jeremy ducked his head at her stare, blushing involuntarily. Fidgeting, he said, "Well, I'm listening..."
"Right," Meghan said, snapping out of her daze. She leaned backward in the chair, not knowing where to begin. What do you say to a son you haven't seen in fifteen years?
After a few moments of silence, she started with, "Well... I'm your mom. Guess we already established that, me coming in and telling you I was your mom and everything yesterday. And the eyes, we got the same eyes, you noticed that? It's kinda freaking me out, really." It was easy enough to tell the woman was beyond nervous.
Jeremy had noticed, although he hadn't wanted to. He'd also noticed the tendency to tear up and the way she acted while nervous. It was scaring him, honestly, how much of himself he was seeing in her.
"Fifteen years of nothing and you've showed up to talk about genetics?" he asked, glaring at her.
Meghan glared right back. She wouldn't let her son's sarcasm wound her.
"Can I continue? Or do you have more jabs you want to get in?"
"No," Jeremy said, still scowling, "go on."
The woman held his stare and then continued.
"You're named after your grandfather," was the first thing that came to her mind that the boy should know, "Well, in a way... he was Jeremiah, but when the doctors handed you to me I couldn't see such a large obnoxious name in such a beautiful little person - " Meghan smiled to herself, remembering the first time she held him, "So Jeremy it was." She looked at the boy to see if he had any questions, or maybe some more insults to throw.
He flinched as if she'd slapped him. Years of wondering where his name had come from, of having to settle with the fact that she'd just liked it for some reason. No. He was named after a grandfather. He had a grandfather to be named after. Was he still alive? Did he know what she had done to him? Did he know what his namesake had become?
"Why are you here?" he asked. "Why now? Why after... after all this?" After all the damage had already been done. His hands were shaking, so he sat on them and stared at the floor, unable to keep looking at her.
Meghan repressed a sigh.
"Because, after what I did to you, you deserve answers. If - if I had been put through what I put you through I would want to know why." She laughed then, a sad tired sound. "I know you won't believe this but I've missed you every single day, every goddamn one of them, since I left you in that bathroom." Feeling herself start to get emotional she looked down and away from the boy.
There was also the fact that she hadn't been this coherent in a long while, but she would tell him about that in time.
"But what if I don't want answers?" Jeremy asked, glancing up at her. "What if I've already got a world's worth of shit to deal with and I don't want yours too? Just so you can... can unload the guilt you've got for abandoning your own kid?"
Meghan scowled at the boy and crossed her arms over her chest.
"Unload my guilt? Listen, no amount of talking I do here will ever take that away. Maybe when you're older and have a child of your own you'll understand." Maybe he already had a child, the woman had no idea. "Any harm done to your child comes back tenfold to you and stays there, buried right in your gut and it doesn't go away. Ever." She took a deep breath and raked shaky hands through her hair. "You're right, I could give you my very own sob story, but you know what? It doesn't fucking matter. And I don't think anything that happened to me in the past is an excuse for what I did to you. It's just the facts, A to B to C. But you know what Rex? It's my past, it's my story, and I like knowing it no matter how fucked up it is. I just thought that maybe you wanted to know yours too."
"I told you not to call me that," Jeremy said, then fell silent with his head bowed, wishing her words weren't leaking into his brain like they were. He'd known they would, too, which was why he hadn't wanted to give her this chance in the first place.
Finally, he said, "Okay, fine. Why'd you do it, then? Was it Carlos? That was his name, right? The guy who brought over the drugs?" He hadn't known at the time it was drugs they were up to in her bedroom, but time and experience -- especially the smell of crack cocaine -- had clued him in.
After the boy was finished, Meghan just looked at him tenderly. It amazed her the things children picked up, no matter how young.
"I want to tell you the whole thing. My story. Because my story whether you like it or not is yours too." She looked hard at her son and added, "The truth. Do I want you, after all this, to forgive me? Yes, of course, I fucking do. Do I think you will or that you should? Not at all. If my mother walked through that door right now and apologized for what she let happen to me, no matter how sincere, I would tell her to go fuck herself and die. So if that's what you want to tell me, say it now, get it out of the way."
Her mother. His grandmother. This whole maternal hatred thing spanned generations, apparently. He looked at her, mouth twitching, and wished he could say it. But he couldn't. Not now that he was listening.
"I hoped you were dead," he said, echoing what he had said to Edie the day before. "But you're not, so... go ahead. Just say it."
The woman could feel the dull ache of disappointment at his response. She wished he would say it to her, she deserved it.
"I was eleven when my dad - your grandfather - died," she started. It was the best place to begin, when everything started to change, "One of those freak accidents that you could never have prevented. He slipped on something in the kitchen, I can't even remember what it was, water? Dog food? Whatever it was, he hit - " she motioned with her own head and hand, "his head. Bam. Dead." She looked past Jeremy then, her eyes unfocused and a small smile on her lips as she remembered, "He was a good man. Dad. I was only eleven so of course to me he looked like a saint and I'm sure he wasn't but there was something just good about him. Kinda like that bubbly blonde nurse said about you - " After the nurse had nearly taken off her head, "By the way, way protective of you. Though a little crazy, I'm glad she's looking out for you."
Jeremy couldn't help it; he started laughing. He wasn't sure if it was at the thought of being like a grandfather (dead, apparently) who was supposedly good, when he was currently considered the bloodiest serial killer in Gotham history, or that his mother was glad Edie was around.
"Don't get used to it," he said, "she's leaving soon to get married."
Meghan looked up at Jeremy, surprised. It wasn't because of his laughter - God knows you need to find humor in a situation like theirs to keep you from killing yourself - but his remark about the nurse.
"Funny," she said, "She told me she was in love with you." It had occurred to the woman that what the girl had told her had might not have been clear to Jeremy yet, but Meghan was not going to keep anything from her son and... she didn't particularly care.
"Yeah," Jeremy said, unfazed. "It's something she tells everyone, apparently. Not gonna stop her, from what I can tell. Moved the wedding up to next month and everything." He sat up a little, tossing the hair out of his face. "But hey, we're talking about about your fucked up life, not hers."
"Alright," Meghan said, eyes wide, holding her hands up in surrender. "So my fucked up life... oh yeah, so Dad died," she smiled sarcastically, "Two years later, your destructive alcoholic grandmother remarried. And, you know, Greg didn't seem that bad in the beginning, really. I had no complaints other than he wasn't my dad. But... he was kind of touchy," she shrugged, keeping her tone flippant, trying desperately not to make a big deal about it. It was the past, after all, she couldn't change any of it. "At first it was just like fingers through my hair, lingering touches on the leg, nothing that couldn't be argued as fatherly affection." She laughed, hating herself for telling her son this, "It got worse, I ignored it at first, telling myself that oh he had been drinking, he didn't mean it. Then - then I couldn't ignore it and I told my mother and she told me that I was a liar and an ungrateful daughter. Complete bullshit. I was fourteen when my stepfather took it too far." Meghan's demeanor changed and she shifted uncomfortably in her seat, "And I knew, after that, I had to get out of the house. Out of Connecticut. Far, far away from that fucking creep."
Jeremy didn't want to hear this. He didn't want to hear about abuse and the unwanted attention of men from his own mother. (Nor did he want her to know that he had suffered the same. It was his pain and his damage -- he didn't want anyone to share it with him, least of all the person who had condemned him to it in the first place.)
"So you ran away," he said, trying to speed it along, "to Miami." He knew nothing of Connecticut, except that it had to be colder there than in Maryland, and it seemed such a foreign place for his family -- his family -- to hail from.
"Yeah," she said, "I figured if I was going to run away might as well be some where warm," she smiled, "I fucking hated New England winters. So I got to the farthest south I could get. Miami. Can't say I'm particularly fond of Miami either," she admitted, "the only good thing to come out of that fucking city was you and your father."
Another thing in common. They both hated Miami. But if she hated it so much, and he was one of two decent things about it, why was she so quick to leave him there?
"My father," he repeated, saying the words carefully. "You lied to me. You said... said he died in the Gulf War. I looked it up." He glanced at her, licking his lips. "No Michael Downs."
"Yeah," Meghan sighed and shook her head, "I thought it might be better for you to hear something like that instead of the truth. He was Michael," the woman smiled then, a real smile, that soften her face, making the dark circles under her eyes and the tension disappear, "But not Michael Downs, Michael Harrington. I'm a Downs, wanted you to have my name though God knows why... I guess for my father, but anyway, his name was Michael Harrington. He was in the Navy, on ship leave, and found himself in Miami. Found himself in my diner. And since I'm barring it all, telling you the truth, I will tell you what I never told him. I loved him." She laughed, not the harsh bitter ones like before, but something sweeter, "It was only a month but it was a good month. Then he left. Never saw him again."
Hearing about his father, hearing how she spoke of him with clear fondness, was awful. It made Jeremy wonder if circumstances had been different, if he could have ended up with both of them, in a decent home. But he knew the what ifs could destroy you, and there really wasn't much left of him to tear down, so he had to keep hold of what little he did have.
"And... and did you know he was my dad?" It was the nicest way he could think of to ask if she'd been a slut.
Meghan smiled sadly at the question. "I hoped he was," she admitted, "Most likely, logically, he was. But there was that itty bitty chance he wasn't though I ignored it most of the time. What's five percent? It's nothing, especially against a mother's intuition. Don't let those Maury and Jerry Springer shows with those crazy ass woman yelling that she knows the one guy is her baby's father fool you. A mother knows. And look at you, you're a spitting image of him." She hesitated for a moment and then asked, "I have a picture. Do you want to see?" She would understand if he refused.
Jeremy almost asked who else she had fucked and in what capacity to account for a five percent possibility his father was someone else, but decided just in time he didn't really want to know. Especially since he apparently looked just like his dad. His real dad. Not Kurt Cobain or Dr. Grant from Jurassic Park, a marine named Michael Harrington. Who might have been a decent man, if Jeremy could trust her judgment.
"Yeah," he said softly. "Yeah, I would."
Meghan fumbled in her purse and pulled out a photograph (she had more but didn't want to overwhelm the boy since she was sure she was already doing a pretty good job at that) and handed it to her son.
It was a close up of herself - sixteen and smiling - with a young handsome man, looking quite like Jeremy, smiling also.
Jeremy stared at the picture. They both looked unbelievably young somehow. And the man did look incredibly like him, same coloration and hair, face shape and nose, even. The only real difference was the eyes, lighter than the dark brown he shared with his mother, a green or a blue, Jeremy wasn't sure which from the picture.
He swallowed hard, squeezing his eyes shut against the image, trying to will away the tears welling behind the lids. "Shit," he whispered, pressing the bottom of his palms against his eyes, the picture still in hand. "Shit shit shit shit..."
The woman, face scrunching painfully, automatically reached out to rest a hand on the boy's arm.
She hadn't been lying when she said a parent suffers their child's pain.
"No!" Jeremy shouted, smacking her hand away. "No, you don't get to touch me! You don't get to walk in here with your stories and your goddamn pictures and expect that you can fucking touch me!" He threw the picture back at her and glared, tears sliding down his face while he gathered a ragged breath to keep yelling. "You have no idea what absolute shit my life has been since you left me there. It's been one shit storm after another and I've just been expected to get down on my knees and take it like a good dog and I have. Oh, I fucking have in ways you're never gonna know because you weren't there." He broke off, leaning forward, elbows on knees and head in his hands, letting a few painful sobs shake his body.
Meghan flinched when Jeremy smacked her hand away and all the defenses she had put up came crumbling down.
Her eyes spilled over with tears as she watched her son unravel in horror.
She had done this.
Shaking her head, she cried, "I'm sorry, Rex, I am so sorry."
"Please stop fucking calling me that," Jeremy said, wiping his eyes. "I'm not that little kid. I haven't been that little kid in a long long time, when you took me into the goddamn bathroom and said, 'Wait right here, I'll be right back,' and you left. And I waited. And I waited and waited and wouldn't move no matter how fucking hungry I was because my mom said she'd be right back. And finally, finally, this lady came in and asked me where my mom was and I said, 'I don't know.' Because even then I knew you'd done it. You'd picked something more important than me and left me to the wolves." He stared at her for a few seconds, with a sudden and intense calm. "So tell me. Why'd you do it? Enlighten me, oh please just solve the biggest mystery in my fucked up, serial killing life. I've waited so goddamn long."
Meghan shook her head frantically, her whole body shaking with sobs.
She didn't want to hear what he was saying. She didn't want to hear any of it.
But she answered him, through her tears, "I thought you would be better off without me." Hearing it out loud, after what Jeremy just said, made it sound ridiculous. Just some excuse she made up. But it was the truth - the woman, at the time twenty-one-years-old and addicted to crack, thought she was the wolf that was going to devour her little boy if she didn't do anything about it.
"Bull. Shit." Jeremy shook his head, indifferent to her crying. "You couldn't even take me to like, I dunno, a convent or a fire station or something? Not a McDonalds bathroom. That's not what someone who wants the best for her kid does." He leaned closer, staring at her as she sobbed. "It was Carlos, wasn't it? I thought for years he put you up to it. Did you know he smacked me around a couple times when I tried to find out what you two were doing in your bedroom? You sure as hell didn't seem to notice at the time."
The woman closed her hands over her ears as she continued to shake her head.
She didn't want to hear this! She needed a smoke. Goddamnit, she needed a drink and few pills and all of this would go away.
Meghan had never known Carlos had laid a hand on her baby boy - she had been too fucked up to notice. If she had known, by God, he would have been dead.
"I was fucked up!" she shouted through her tears, "I couldn't take care of myself, how could I take care of you! I was in the McDonalds and I thought if I didn't let you go now I would never be able to do it and if you stayed around me any longer you could end up hurt or worse."
"Right, so foster care was so much better. I was happy as a clam there, new placement every couple months, new school, new people to call me the homeless kid while I slept on sunporches and hid from drunk foster dads and learned to steal and lie just to fucking survive." Jeremy shook his head. "Good job, Meghan. That is your name, isn't it? I was never really sure."
"I didn't know!" was all the woman could get out as she cried. Her hands were shaking so badly she had to ball them up into fists. "How could I have known?"
"Because you're my mother!" Jeremy shouted. "You should've known. It was your responsibility to know!"
He was right. He was absolutely right. She should have known, she should have tried harder...
"I should have been there!" she told him, "I should have gotten my act together and gotten you back! I should have..." But shoulds meant nothing. What she did could never be undone.
"Fucking A you should've. But you didn't. So now it's too late. It's so far beyond too late. But hey, at least I've seen a nice picture of you and Michael Harrington. Thanks for everything."
He scooted backward until his back was up against the wall and he hugged his knees. He felt spent and exhausted and, oddly, a little better now that he'd yelled at her the way he'd wanted to for fifteen years. He just wished she'd leave now and Helena would magically appear instead so he could get a proper hug from someone he knew wasn't just going to leave him again.
"You're right," she said, starting to reign in her crying. She sniffed and wiped at her eyes, "You're right. I can't change what I did to you but I sure as hell can spend the rest of my goddamn life trying to make it up to you."
"Do you have thousands upon thousands of dollars to spend on lawyer fees?" Jeremy asked. "Because if not, I doubt there's much you could do for me at this point."
"I don't," Meghan said, "But I know someone who does." She swallowed, the thought making her nauseous and dizzy, but if it would help her son she would do it. She would do anything for him. "My mother."
"No," Jeremy said immediately. He had no desire to get indebted to a woman who sounded even worse than his own mother; he just wanted to see if Meghan had actually been any use to him financially. "I've got it covered. Does your mom even know I exist?" he asked, hoping to change the subject.
"No," she answered, wiping the rest of her tears from her face. Meghan had not seen the woman since she was fourteen. A couple years ago she got curious and drunk and decided to see if the woman was still alive. She was. Her and Greg. Meghan never wanted the woman to know about Jeremy, if she could help it. The woman was sick and twisted and God knows she would want to take his life over and shape him into something of her choosing. "Why ask me if you already have it covered... oh, right," she said, realization hitting, "that's what I would be good for, just money."
"I was just wondering if you'd managed to get anything together in the last fifteen years," Jeremy said, shrugging. Not to mention if his mother was somehow inexplicably rich, he would've liked to take the financial burden off of Remus, who was helping out of the kindness of his heart and not a familial responsibility. But Jeremy'd figured as much, from the look of her.
"Are you still using?" He knew a junkie when he saw one. Too skinny, too frail, too obsessed with making things right after they were already fucked up to hell. She had the attitude of someone fresh out of rehab, still holding on to the virtues of the 12 steps with a crack pipe in her other hand.
"No," Meghan answered firmly. It was all coffee and cigarettes now. "But," she admitted because she told herself there would be no more lying, "I've been in and out of rehabs since I left you. Managed to do away with crack but I found a substitute for it easily enough." She let out an exhausted laugh, "Alcohol and pills, just like your dear old grandmother. Fuck, Rex... Jeremy," she flipped her hair over her shoulder and rubbed her face, "I've been clean since your birthday. Probably the longest I've ever been clean, that's pretty damn sad." The woman shrugged and looked at him, "I'm trying to get my shit together."
"My birthday," Jeremy repeated softly. "Three months. Fan-fucking-tastic. You've barely been clean longer than I have." He shook his head slowly. "I don't need this. I don't need you here, ready to fucking relapse at any second. I've got my own addictions to deal with."
The woman - even though she kept telling herself that she deserved even worse treatment - felt a little offended. Three months was a fucking long time when you were addicted to something. Then she heard what her son said and there was a sharp stab of panic at his admission of addiction. Then... it clicked.
"Killing people," she said, so tired and ready for a smoke, "Fan-fucking-tastic. My son is addicted to killing people!"
"Yeah, and I guess I have you to thank for that, don't I?" Jeremy retorted. "Addiction running in the family and everything."
"Oooh," Meghan shook her head and raised a finger, "Don't play that game with me. I don't blame my fucking psychotic mother for making me a junkie and piss poor mother to boot and I certainly don't blame her for your predilection for stabbing the fuck out of people."
Actually, now that Jeremy had said it, wasn't mental illness genetic? Weren't they all - in their own ways - fucking crazy?
"No," Jeremy said, "I don't blame you for making me a killer. There's someone else who enjoys that little privilege. It's the addiction. They keep telling me it's genetic. And trust me, if I could've gotten addicted to cutting myself, I would. I tried once. There's plenty I've tried to keep the damage inward, not outward." He shook his head. "Just couldn't get it to stick. That's no one's fault but mine."
Meghan did not want to hear about her son - her only son - cutting himself. He could kill anyone he wanted, the woman would deal with that, but she couldn't deal with him hurting himself.
"Jesus," she said, realizing that her son was a killer and she would have to be okay with that, "Couldn't you have gotten addicted to hugging people instead?"
"Yeah, because hugging rapists does the world a hell of a lot of good," Jeremy replied flippantly, before he realized what he was implying. Fuck. He looked down, gnawing his lip and hiding behind his hair, hoping she wouldn't come to the clear conclusion.
Meghan paused.
"What did you say?" She was too shocked to really believe it.
"Nothing," Jeremy said.
"No, not nothing," Meghan spoke up, a sharp edge to her tone and she straightened in her seat, "What did you say?" She could feel the anger rising, not for the boy who wouldn't say it, but for the fucking scumbag of a man who had, most likely, laid a hand on her baby boy.
"I said I robbed this kid," Jeremy said, voice hardening. "Older than me. Killed him over forty bucks in a park. Stabbed the fuck out of him. Then I got a tattoo on my neck during the resulting four years I spent in juvie," he turned his head and moved his hair so she could see the full tattoo, "so everyone would know I wasn't someone to be fucking messed with." He turned back to look at her, eyes narrowed, daring her to believe the story everyone else did and not the truth.
Meghan wouldn't. She knew what she had heard and she knew what that kind of humiliation felt like. She also knew how it could fester and take over your whole life if you kept it locked inside and silent.
She narrowed the same eyes right back at her son, ignoring the show he put on and the crappy tattoo, "Bullshit."
Jeremy continued staring at her until he was once again tearing up and had to blink.
"Wish my lawyer had said that," he said softly, wiping an eye with the back of his fist.
The hardness in Meghan's face soften and she once again wanted to hug her son, knowing he wouldn't let her.
"Tell me what happened," she urged softly. He needed to let it out.
Jeremy shook his head, sniffling. "No." He had never spoken of it in detail with anyone (even the shrinks didn't know, since it was easy to distract them with other stories of neglect and delinquency), and she was the last person he wanted to tell.
"Jeremy," she said, trying to get him to look her in the eye, "You can't keep it bottled up. The more you pretend that it didn't happen and ignore it the worse it's going to get. It wasn't just a thing that happened to you, it changed your entire life. No matter how fucked up it is, it's important."
"Is that what they taught you in rehab?" Jeremy said sarcastically, avoiding her gaze.
"No," she said simply, "It's what your father taught me."
Mike had been the first person she had ever told about her stepfather.
That statement caught Jeremy offguard and he straightened up a little, finally meeting his mother's eyes for a second before averting them to his feet once more.
"Sounds like he was a nice guy," he mumbled, sniffling again.
"And it sounds like you're switching the subject," Meghan retorted but gently.
"It was a long time ago," Jeremy said, leaning his head back against the wall and staring at the ceiling. "Five years. Long time, and he's dead. I just wanna forget about it."
"Five years isn't a very long time," Meghan commented. The woman couldn't believe it - five years - that had made her son 15? If the fucker hadn't been killed by Jeremy she would have killed him herself. "And you'll never be able to forget about it," she admitted sadly, "No matter how much you want to, no matter how hard you try." She hoped he would see that she understood how he felt - their situations were different but the outcome had been the same.
Part of Jeremy wanted to clue her in that he didn't consider the experience the worst thing he'd been through. There were worse things than being a victim. There might even be some satisfaction in seeing her reaction when she learned her son was a filthy little whore.
But he couldn't. Again, it was his damage. She might have thought they were somehow linked now, like they could bond over being abused, but he was alone. He was always going to be alone.
"It doesn't matter," he said. "If it's never gonna go away, why bother bringing it up? Especially to you?"
"For fuck's sake," Meghan gushed, eyes wide in exasperation, "It does fucking matter, Jeremy! Someone did you wrong, someone hurt you, they did it and they fucking enjoyed it. Shrugging it off like it's nothing? That's just letting him win. Yeah, he's dead, you killed him, but it looks like he's getting the last fucking laugh."
"No!" Jeremy shouted. "No, he didn't, because I enjoyed killing him more than he enjoyed fucking me!"
Meghan was almost relieved, hearing him say it, but it was only part of the story.
"You sure about that?" she prodded.
"Yes!" Jeremy said, hands clenching into fists. "Because I didn't need to hear him beg, I just did it, and the blood, all that blood, that was enough, that was incredible, and it was so quick, so fast and almost perfect, I almost got them all, I'd practiced, I..." He stopped, realizing what he was saying.
"Shit," he mumbled, shaking all over. "I'm worse than him. I'm worse."
Meghan couldn't lie, hearing Jeremy - her baby boy who used to cry if any of his toys were "hurt" (meaning she had stepped on one of them by accident) - talk about enjoying killing someone was scary. Frightening. Nauseating.
But he was her son. And she glad that bastard had been killed.
"No!" she said firmly, again trying to get him to look at her. If she couldn't touch him he needed to see she was here for him, "No you are not. That guy, whoever he was, was a fucking creep. A scumbag who took advantage of a helpless boy. He got what he fucking deserved."
"Yeah, he did," Jeremy said, eyes brimming with tears that stuck to his long eyelashes, "but then I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop... and I didn't want to... so I just... I just kept trying to find people who deserved it like he did and... and..."
He was so tired suddenly. Tired and dizzy. He lay down and hugged his pillow, pulling himself into a fetal position while he tried to keep the room from spinning.
"I just thought he wanted to be friends, you know? I was so... so lonely... you dunno how lonely it is... when they send you to the place only the fucked up unwanted kids go... so hard to make friends in a place like that... fuck."
Meghan could feel her own tears rising to the surface but she swallowed them down. She needed to be strong.
The woman scooted her chair closer to the edge of the bed, "So you thought he was your friend?" she asked softly, wanting to touch her son so badly, just a hand on his head or arm, anything.
"Yeah," he said quietly, closing his eyes and sniffling. "I'm sorry, I... I don't think I can do this... not right now..."
Meghan could only push so much before the pain in her son's eyes was too much.
"If I come back to tomorrow?" she asked cautiously.
Jeremy looked at her and took a slow breath. "Maybe?"
Meghan had no choice, she had to take it.
"Okay," she said. She got up from her seat and headed slowly to the door, not ready to leave. "I'm sorry, Rex," she said softly, turning around when she was at the door, "I know it probably means nothing to you but I really am."
"I know," Jeremy said. "I'm sorry, too."
"You've got nothing to be sorry about, Rex," she said and then corrected herself, "Jeremy."
He had plenty to be sorry about, and besides in this case he was apologizing in advance.
He wasn't going to be here tomorrow. One way or another.
"Goodbye," he said quietly. "Meghan."