T-Bag/Maytag, Winter
Title: Under the Christmas Tree
Character/Pairing: T-Bag/Maytag
Prompt: #61, "Winter"
Rating: PG13
Summary: A not so merry Christmas or two
Author's Notes: I'm in a festive mood. One more day left before holiday break.
“Can we get a tree this year? Please?” Jason stared up at his mother with pleading eyes as she tied her apron for work.
“No.”
“Please?” he whined, fidgeting and stamping his foot a little. Scooping up her purse, his mother didn’t even look at him.
“I said no. Those things cost money. Stay out of trouble.” The door closed and locked before the final please. He sulked at the door for a few minutes, until the sound of the car disappeared and didn’t seem to be coming back. She wouldn’t be home for hours, long after he’d gone to bed.
At school, all the other kids had Christmas cookies in their lunch boxes and spent their time whispering about what presents they were getting. Sometimes Jason made up a present, but all the kids knew his mother couldn’t afford to buy him a new bike, and he’d come pedaling back in January on the same stupid girl’s bike he’d been riding since he started school.
“What’re you getting, Jason?” Danny asked. His daddy did something important, but Jason never did understand what. He always had nice clothes and lots of food in his lunch. Sometimes he’d share his dessert with Jason, until the day he dumped the pudding over Danny’s head and ran from the room.
“Dunno. Some new records maybe.”
“Do you even have a record player?” Courtney giggled. He hated her. Her and her annoying giggle.
“Yeah,” he glared, even though the closest he’d come to having one was staying at his grandmother’s for a week. The kids burst into snickers, turning back to their intense debate over what kind of cookie was the best, leaving Jason to sit and listen and scowl. They only talked to him when they wanted to tease him for not having a TV or the right kind of shoes.
When he got home, he dropped his bike in the yard as he did every day, hoping someone would steal it. They never did. His mother was gone, but she’d left a note taped to the fridge listing what was acceptable to eat. In the windows of all the neighbors were big pine trees with lots of shiny decorations and little lights. He wasn’t sure what the big fuss was about over a silly tree, but everyone else got so excited over them that there had to be something else to it. Plus, that was where the presents went. Maybe if they had a tree, there would be presents.
Trying his hardest to stay out of trouble and get to have another go at his mom about the tree, Jason sat at the window watching the old women walking their dogs and young women jogging before their husbands got home. Every now and then a group of kids would wander by, and Jason would perk up, ready to run and answer the door should they make the turn up the driveway. But none of them ever did. He couldn’t go to the arcade or the movies, so they had no use for him.
When his mother got home, exhausted from one job with just enough time to dress for the next before heading back out the door, she refused his request for a Christmas tree, just a little one, with a smack to the back of his head. Little boys shouldn’t be so selfish, she’d said.
Alone in his room, drowning his loneliness in the well worn comics he’d stolen from various other boys in his class, Jason delighted in drawing mustaches and funny faces on all the characters. He wondered what the boys would do if he slipped them in their backpacks with his new additions. Tossing the markers back in his little box of school supplies, mostly given to him by neighbors who pitied the poor boy, his eyes fell on the tiny pair of kiddie scissors. If the kids were going to ignore him ‘cause he didn’t have any of their fancy toys, maybe he could force them to notice him.
It took forever, but he finally hacked his way through the last bunch of hair, tossing it into the little pile of brown locks and admiring himself in the mirror. He’d seen pictures of hair like this when the boys with important daddies brought records and magazines to school and gushed over how neat it was. Running his fingers through the butchered hair cut, pieces stood on end in every direction. It was perfect.
Aside from giving him a verbal beating over his bowl of cereal for getting hair all over the floor of his room, his mother left for work without any mention of his new look. If the boy wanted to look like a fool, he could look like a fool.
“Whoa, Jason!” Danny beamed, hurrying over to his desk as soon as he entered the classroom. “What’d you do?”
“Nothin’. Cut my hair.” He shrugged, slouching into his seat, keeping his excitement at being noticed well hidden. All the boys in the magazines never smiled, unless it was a mean smile.
“You look so cool.” The important daddies wouldn’t let their boys run around like that. Jason shrugged again, looking around the room at all the eyes trained on him. Courtney and her little friends were still snickering, but they were girls, and they laughed at everything anyway. Who cared what girls thought. The boys fawned over his hair and the fact he’d done it himself, all the while Jason pretended not to care and decided he’d have to steal more magazines.
With school out for the holidays, he had no one left to impress. His mother couldn’t afford to take the holidays off, and he was left to sit at the window watching the bare trees blow in the wind and heavily bundled figures trudging down the sidewalk. Before school got out, some boys had invited him over to watch tv at their house, but now they were all busy with family and vacations and hanging those shiny little decorations on those stupid trees.
He told his mother all he wanted for Christmas was a magazine, didn’t even have to be a good one, but she didn’t respond. She heard, though, he was positive. Maybe she just didn’t want to give it away, surprise him the next day. That night he would’ve put out cookies for Santa, if he believed in him. And if they had any cookies.
Instead, he sat up late, figuring out what to do with his hair for when he went back to school. His mother would give him the yelling of a lifetime if he touched his clothes, so that was out. By the time he crawled into bed, he was already imagining what it would be like to flip through all those pretty pictures and see how he could get people’s attention.
Christmas morning, his mother was gone, and the space where the tree and gifts would be was empty.
“Get up, boy.”
Teddy yawned and rolled out of bed, the floor freezing cold against his little feet. As he got dressed, the t-shirt pressed against the newest bruise on his face, and he flinched.
“What the hell you doin’?” his father glared as Teddy wandered into the kitchen, stains and dirt ingrained in the clothes he’d picked up off the floor. “It’s Christmas, go put on your church clothes.”
“But...” A warning slap to his mouth cut off Teddy’s complaint, and he quickly retreated back into his room, mumbling his hatred for holidays, Sunday clothes, and family get togethers. When his dirty clothes were kicked back into the corner and Sunday’s best pulled out of the drawer, he stopped to smooth his hair down in the cracked mirror before quietly slipping back into the kitchen unnoticed.
“There’s my little Theodore,” his grandma cooed, scooping him into a hug he didn’t return. She held him at arm’s length, ignoring the way he stared up at her from under scrunched eyebrows, that sad look on her face that always appeared when she talked about him. “You’re getting so big. Gonna be tall like your papa.”
Teddy scowled more, the constant taunts from the other boys at school having permanently reminded him how small he was. High pitched whining interrupted his thoughts of his face pushed into the mud, accompanied by paws scratching at his leg. It was his grandmother’s obnoxious little poodle. He pushed it away with his foot, kicking a little when it came right back.
“Come have breakfast, Teddy.” Just as he was taking his place at the table, more family began to arrive, arms full of packages. His plate wasn’t even on the table before he was sent to the living room to make space for the others.
He could hear laughter leaking from the room as he pushed his food around the plate. The clicking of nails against wood drew his attention to the stupid little dog that sat across the room, following the movements of his hand holding the fork with its eyes but still wary of being kicked. Teddy smiled, taking the silverware off his plate and setting the breakfast on the floor with a whistle. “C’mere, girl.”
After a moment of consideration, the dog trotted over, pulling a sausage off the plate and onto the floor. When it was half finished, Teddy smirked, kicking the dog hard enough to send it sliding backwards over the hardwood floor. With a yelp it scrambled back into the kitchen, leaving mangled meat and grease on the floor.
Teddy sighed, turning his knife over and watching the light bounce off it. More laughter was coming from the kitchen, but going in would just result in another slap before being ordered into the other room. His grandma said it was ‘cause it was all big people talk, and he wouldn’t understand it. But he heard an aunt talkin’ about how he made everyone uncomfortable. It was just as well, he didn’t really wanna hear what they were sayin’ anyway.
The brightly colored packages under the tree caught his attention, and he knelt down to the presents, reading each tag carefully. Lots for his grandma, some for papa, the aunts, uncles, cousins, none of them said Teddy. He frowned, pushing his knife experimentally into one of the boxes. It hit glass and wouldn’t go in any farther. Curious, he tried another. Felt like a sweater. His cousin whose hair he liked to pull out got a doll. He couldn’t wait till she opened it and saw the hole in its head or stomach or whatever part he hit.
His father’s biggest box was about to be brutally stabbed when one of his older cousins walked in. “Hey, you know your boy is in here wreckin’ all the presents?” he shouted, silencing the laughter in the other room. His father was through the door in an instant, face deep red and eyes blazing. The expression only got worse when he saw the neat little holes in half the boxes.
“What d’you think you’re doing?” Grabbed roughly by the warm, Teddy’s feet barely touched the ground as he was dragged into his bedroom and thrown inside so hard he fell over himself and hit the floor with a thud. “I ain’t got time for this,” his father muttered, hitting the boy across the face again, a promise of the punishment he could expect once the family had left.
The door slammed, and Teddy sat on the floor against his bed, indifferent to the whole event. Wasn’t much difference between sitting alone out there or in his room. He smiled when he noticed his father had been too angry to remember to take the knife away, and he set about carving pictures and words into his floor.
The last dead stick figure, labeled with his oldest cousin’s name, was just being completed when there was a soft scratching at his door. Stupid dog. With a wicked grin, he climbed to his feet and quietly pushed the door open just enough to let the animal slip inside. It jumped on the bed and sat down, staring at him expectantly.
“Whadda you want? Ya lonely, girl?” He approached slowly, getting in front of the little dog and blocking its escape. His free hand gently stroked the animal, scratching behind its ears and getting a happy tail wag in response. As it flopped over on its back, begging for a tummy rub, Teddy licked his lips and tightened his grip on the knife. With as much precision as he’d mutilated the packages, he plunged the blade into the dog’s chest, feeling it snap past bone and muscle as the animal writhed and bled onto his hands and blankets. He watched in fascination until all movement stopped, and the little bundle of stained red fur laid dead.
With childlike excitement, he gathered the body in his arms and carefully opened his door, leaving bloody fingerprints on the knob, and tiptoed out to the living room. The adults were busy drinking and joking in the kitchen, and he took his time kneeling beneath the tree before sneaking back to his room, leaving the corpse in the spot his present should have been.
“Hey T-Bag,” Maytag grinned as the man returned to their cell.
“Hm?” His eyebrows raised slightly, though he made no other acknowledgment of the boy’s existence.
“Tomorrow’s Christmas.”
“Sure is,” T-Bag thumbed through their reading material, horribly bored with it all. When Maytag didn’t continue, he looked up. “And?”
“And,” Maytag’s smile grew, “I got somethin’ for ya.” T-Bag was visibly surprised, perhaps even shocked, as Maytag dug deep under his mattress, pulling out a small flat bundle of brown paper held together with a piece of tape. He thrust it in T-Bag’s face, who took it slowly and just stared.
“What is it?” Maytag rolled his eyes, leaning against the bunk as T-Bag examined the package.
“Open it.”
Pulling up the tape and unfolding the paper, a long slender piece of steel rested in the center. It was rough and in need of work, but it had great potential. “The hell did you get this?” T-Bag looked from Maytag’s face back to the glinting metal in front of him.
“It’s a secret. I can’t tell you where your Christmas present came from.” T-Bag laughed, the only reaction he could manage, as he folded the bundle back up and shoved it under his mattress. “Like it?” Nodding slightly with a shrug, T-Bag stared up at the peculiar boy watching him with big, hopeful eyes like he’d just given him a hand made card with maccaroni and glitter instead of the deadly weapon it was.
“Yeah, I like it.” He shook his head, leaning back and laughing softly to himself. Maytag frowned a little.
“What?”
“Nothing. You’re just one messed up kid. What’re you doin’ getting me a Christmas present?” Maytag shrugged.
“Why not? Everyone should get a Christmas present.” T-Bag considered this for a moment, licking his lips as a different smile spread across his face.
“Well then, you’ll get yours tonight.”
Character/Pairing: T-Bag/Maytag
Prompt: #61, "Winter"
Rating: PG13
Summary: A not so merry Christmas or two
Author's Notes: I'm in a festive mood. One more day left before holiday break.
“Can we get a tree this year? Please?” Jason stared up at his mother with pleading eyes as she tied her apron for work.
“No.”
“Please?” he whined, fidgeting and stamping his foot a little. Scooping up her purse, his mother didn’t even look at him.
“I said no. Those things cost money. Stay out of trouble.” The door closed and locked before the final please. He sulked at the door for a few minutes, until the sound of the car disappeared and didn’t seem to be coming back. She wouldn’t be home for hours, long after he’d gone to bed.
At school, all the other kids had Christmas cookies in their lunch boxes and spent their time whispering about what presents they were getting. Sometimes Jason made up a present, but all the kids knew his mother couldn’t afford to buy him a new bike, and he’d come pedaling back in January on the same stupid girl’s bike he’d been riding since he started school.
“What’re you getting, Jason?” Danny asked. His daddy did something important, but Jason never did understand what. He always had nice clothes and lots of food in his lunch. Sometimes he’d share his dessert with Jason, until the day he dumped the pudding over Danny’s head and ran from the room.
“Dunno. Some new records maybe.”
“Do you even have a record player?” Courtney giggled. He hated her. Her and her annoying giggle.
“Yeah,” he glared, even though the closest he’d come to having one was staying at his grandmother’s for a week. The kids burst into snickers, turning back to their intense debate over what kind of cookie was the best, leaving Jason to sit and listen and scowl. They only talked to him when they wanted to tease him for not having a TV or the right kind of shoes.
When he got home, he dropped his bike in the yard as he did every day, hoping someone would steal it. They never did. His mother was gone, but she’d left a note taped to the fridge listing what was acceptable to eat. In the windows of all the neighbors were big pine trees with lots of shiny decorations and little lights. He wasn’t sure what the big fuss was about over a silly tree, but everyone else got so excited over them that there had to be something else to it. Plus, that was where the presents went. Maybe if they had a tree, there would be presents.
Trying his hardest to stay out of trouble and get to have another go at his mom about the tree, Jason sat at the window watching the old women walking their dogs and young women jogging before their husbands got home. Every now and then a group of kids would wander by, and Jason would perk up, ready to run and answer the door should they make the turn up the driveway. But none of them ever did. He couldn’t go to the arcade or the movies, so they had no use for him.
When his mother got home, exhausted from one job with just enough time to dress for the next before heading back out the door, she refused his request for a Christmas tree, just a little one, with a smack to the back of his head. Little boys shouldn’t be so selfish, she’d said.
Alone in his room, drowning his loneliness in the well worn comics he’d stolen from various other boys in his class, Jason delighted in drawing mustaches and funny faces on all the characters. He wondered what the boys would do if he slipped them in their backpacks with his new additions. Tossing the markers back in his little box of school supplies, mostly given to him by neighbors who pitied the poor boy, his eyes fell on the tiny pair of kiddie scissors. If the kids were going to ignore him ‘cause he didn’t have any of their fancy toys, maybe he could force them to notice him.
It took forever, but he finally hacked his way through the last bunch of hair, tossing it into the little pile of brown locks and admiring himself in the mirror. He’d seen pictures of hair like this when the boys with important daddies brought records and magazines to school and gushed over how neat it was. Running his fingers through the butchered hair cut, pieces stood on end in every direction. It was perfect.
Aside from giving him a verbal beating over his bowl of cereal for getting hair all over the floor of his room, his mother left for work without any mention of his new look. If the boy wanted to look like a fool, he could look like a fool.
“Whoa, Jason!” Danny beamed, hurrying over to his desk as soon as he entered the classroom. “What’d you do?”
“Nothin’. Cut my hair.” He shrugged, slouching into his seat, keeping his excitement at being noticed well hidden. All the boys in the magazines never smiled, unless it was a mean smile.
“You look so cool.” The important daddies wouldn’t let their boys run around like that. Jason shrugged again, looking around the room at all the eyes trained on him. Courtney and her little friends were still snickering, but they were girls, and they laughed at everything anyway. Who cared what girls thought. The boys fawned over his hair and the fact he’d done it himself, all the while Jason pretended not to care and decided he’d have to steal more magazines.
With school out for the holidays, he had no one left to impress. His mother couldn’t afford to take the holidays off, and he was left to sit at the window watching the bare trees blow in the wind and heavily bundled figures trudging down the sidewalk. Before school got out, some boys had invited him over to watch tv at their house, but now they were all busy with family and vacations and hanging those shiny little decorations on those stupid trees.
He told his mother all he wanted for Christmas was a magazine, didn’t even have to be a good one, but she didn’t respond. She heard, though, he was positive. Maybe she just didn’t want to give it away, surprise him the next day. That night he would’ve put out cookies for Santa, if he believed in him. And if they had any cookies.
Instead, he sat up late, figuring out what to do with his hair for when he went back to school. His mother would give him the yelling of a lifetime if he touched his clothes, so that was out. By the time he crawled into bed, he was already imagining what it would be like to flip through all those pretty pictures and see how he could get people’s attention.
Christmas morning, his mother was gone, and the space where the tree and gifts would be was empty.
“Get up, boy.”
Teddy yawned and rolled out of bed, the floor freezing cold against his little feet. As he got dressed, the t-shirt pressed against the newest bruise on his face, and he flinched.
“What the hell you doin’?” his father glared as Teddy wandered into the kitchen, stains and dirt ingrained in the clothes he’d picked up off the floor. “It’s Christmas, go put on your church clothes.”
“But...” A warning slap to his mouth cut off Teddy’s complaint, and he quickly retreated back into his room, mumbling his hatred for holidays, Sunday clothes, and family get togethers. When his dirty clothes were kicked back into the corner and Sunday’s best pulled out of the drawer, he stopped to smooth his hair down in the cracked mirror before quietly slipping back into the kitchen unnoticed.
“There’s my little Theodore,” his grandma cooed, scooping him into a hug he didn’t return. She held him at arm’s length, ignoring the way he stared up at her from under scrunched eyebrows, that sad look on her face that always appeared when she talked about him. “You’re getting so big. Gonna be tall like your papa.”
Teddy scowled more, the constant taunts from the other boys at school having permanently reminded him how small he was. High pitched whining interrupted his thoughts of his face pushed into the mud, accompanied by paws scratching at his leg. It was his grandmother’s obnoxious little poodle. He pushed it away with his foot, kicking a little when it came right back.
“Come have breakfast, Teddy.” Just as he was taking his place at the table, more family began to arrive, arms full of packages. His plate wasn’t even on the table before he was sent to the living room to make space for the others.
He could hear laughter leaking from the room as he pushed his food around the plate. The clicking of nails against wood drew his attention to the stupid little dog that sat across the room, following the movements of his hand holding the fork with its eyes but still wary of being kicked. Teddy smiled, taking the silverware off his plate and setting the breakfast on the floor with a whistle. “C’mere, girl.”
After a moment of consideration, the dog trotted over, pulling a sausage off the plate and onto the floor. When it was half finished, Teddy smirked, kicking the dog hard enough to send it sliding backwards over the hardwood floor. With a yelp it scrambled back into the kitchen, leaving mangled meat and grease on the floor.
Teddy sighed, turning his knife over and watching the light bounce off it. More laughter was coming from the kitchen, but going in would just result in another slap before being ordered into the other room. His grandma said it was ‘cause it was all big people talk, and he wouldn’t understand it. But he heard an aunt talkin’ about how he made everyone uncomfortable. It was just as well, he didn’t really wanna hear what they were sayin’ anyway.
The brightly colored packages under the tree caught his attention, and he knelt down to the presents, reading each tag carefully. Lots for his grandma, some for papa, the aunts, uncles, cousins, none of them said Teddy. He frowned, pushing his knife experimentally into one of the boxes. It hit glass and wouldn’t go in any farther. Curious, he tried another. Felt like a sweater. His cousin whose hair he liked to pull out got a doll. He couldn’t wait till she opened it and saw the hole in its head or stomach or whatever part he hit.
His father’s biggest box was about to be brutally stabbed when one of his older cousins walked in. “Hey, you know your boy is in here wreckin’ all the presents?” he shouted, silencing the laughter in the other room. His father was through the door in an instant, face deep red and eyes blazing. The expression only got worse when he saw the neat little holes in half the boxes.
“What d’you think you’re doing?” Grabbed roughly by the warm, Teddy’s feet barely touched the ground as he was dragged into his bedroom and thrown inside so hard he fell over himself and hit the floor with a thud. “I ain’t got time for this,” his father muttered, hitting the boy across the face again, a promise of the punishment he could expect once the family had left.
The door slammed, and Teddy sat on the floor against his bed, indifferent to the whole event. Wasn’t much difference between sitting alone out there or in his room. He smiled when he noticed his father had been too angry to remember to take the knife away, and he set about carving pictures and words into his floor.
The last dead stick figure, labeled with his oldest cousin’s name, was just being completed when there was a soft scratching at his door. Stupid dog. With a wicked grin, he climbed to his feet and quietly pushed the door open just enough to let the animal slip inside. It jumped on the bed and sat down, staring at him expectantly.
“Whadda you want? Ya lonely, girl?” He approached slowly, getting in front of the little dog and blocking its escape. His free hand gently stroked the animal, scratching behind its ears and getting a happy tail wag in response. As it flopped over on its back, begging for a tummy rub, Teddy licked his lips and tightened his grip on the knife. With as much precision as he’d mutilated the packages, he plunged the blade into the dog’s chest, feeling it snap past bone and muscle as the animal writhed and bled onto his hands and blankets. He watched in fascination until all movement stopped, and the little bundle of stained red fur laid dead.
With childlike excitement, he gathered the body in his arms and carefully opened his door, leaving bloody fingerprints on the knob, and tiptoed out to the living room. The adults were busy drinking and joking in the kitchen, and he took his time kneeling beneath the tree before sneaking back to his room, leaving the corpse in the spot his present should have been.
“Hey T-Bag,” Maytag grinned as the man returned to their cell.
“Hm?” His eyebrows raised slightly, though he made no other acknowledgment of the boy’s existence.
“Tomorrow’s Christmas.”
“Sure is,” T-Bag thumbed through their reading material, horribly bored with it all. When Maytag didn’t continue, he looked up. “And?”
“And,” Maytag’s smile grew, “I got somethin’ for ya.” T-Bag was visibly surprised, perhaps even shocked, as Maytag dug deep under his mattress, pulling out a small flat bundle of brown paper held together with a piece of tape. He thrust it in T-Bag’s face, who took it slowly and just stared.
“What is it?” Maytag rolled his eyes, leaning against the bunk as T-Bag examined the package.
“Open it.”
Pulling up the tape and unfolding the paper, a long slender piece of steel rested in the center. It was rough and in need of work, but it had great potential. “The hell did you get this?” T-Bag looked from Maytag’s face back to the glinting metal in front of him.
“It’s a secret. I can’t tell you where your Christmas present came from.” T-Bag laughed, the only reaction he could manage, as he folded the bundle back up and shoved it under his mattress. “Like it?” Nodding slightly with a shrug, T-Bag stared up at the peculiar boy watching him with big, hopeful eyes like he’d just given him a hand made card with maccaroni and glitter instead of the deadly weapon it was.
“Yeah, I like it.” He shook his head, leaning back and laughing softly to himself. Maytag frowned a little.
“What?”
“Nothing. You’re just one messed up kid. What’re you doin’ getting me a Christmas present?” Maytag shrugged.
“Why not? Everyone should get a Christmas present.” T-Bag considered this for a moment, licking his lips as a different smile spread across his face.
“Well then, you’ll get yours tonight.”