Tommyinnit Oneshots

Death is not Kind

A screech came from their left and she turned her head just in time to meet the terrified eyes of a school bus driver, mouth open in a scream that she couldn't hear.

There was a crashing sound and crying. Then darkness.

---

The night of the accident, as Tommy drifted in and out of consciousness, he saw those eyes for the first time. Doctors had left him alone for the night, saying sleep would help everything, but they hadn't given him anything to help him get there. He was too young and his body too fragile, and besides, the pain meds would do the trick without anything extra, they said. They were wrong.

So he was left staring at the shadows of his hospital room, wondering if his mother was okay. If she was alive.

While staring, he met those eyes for the first time. They blinked in the darkness, reflecting the moonlight streaming through the window in grey irises that peered at him, unjudging.

"Hello," Tommy said softly, tiredly. 

"Hello," a deep, rich voice replied.

"Who are you?" 

"It doesn't matter. You'll meet me soon enough."

---

His mother was alive, albeit with a broken arm, two broken ribs, and a concussion. But she was alive. As soon as she was cleared to walk, Tommy received a visit from her. She sat down in the chair next to his bed and held his hand loosely between both of hers. Neither of them said anything for a while.

"I don't think I was meant to live," Tommy eventually said to the blanket draped over the bottom half of his body, refusing to look up. If he looked up, he'd see the heartbroken face of his mother staring down at him, with the blue-purple-yellow-green surrounding her eyes and her bandaged head.

"Don't ever say that," she whispered from above him, grasping his hand tighter. "Things are hard right now, I know, but please don't ever say that. Have hope. The world will recognize how great you are, Tommy, and then you'll know that you were saved. You were never meant to die. You were meant to live."

But Tommy couldn't muster up a smile for his mother this time to reassure her. He just kept staring at the hospital blanket, ignoring the pain all throughout his body.

---

As he recovered, the pain in his bones faded. His bruises healed, his cuts scabbed over, his muddled brain cleared a little bit. Enough for him to be able to pretend, at least.

His mother and father had sent him to a psychologist, who had diagnosed him with PTSD from the crash, along with severe childhood depression. He didn't know what that meant, just that it made his parents very sad to hear, and that they always looked at him differently after that.

After his diagnosis, he meant with a therapist regularly. He liked her office; it had toys and fidgets she would let him use. There was a basket of plushies in the corner, and he could pick any one he wanted to cuddle with if he felt like he wanted to. He usually felt like cuddling the shark plush, who he dubbed 'Sharky'. 

She said he could tell her anything and she didn't have to tell his parents what he'd said. She said she wouldn't judge him for whatever he said, she said he wouldn't be punished for saying the wrong thing. She even said that in her office, there was no such thing as saying the wrong thing. And if he thought it was wrong to say something, she would help him figure out how to communicate his thoughts in another way. 

So he told her what went through his head on a daily basis. He told her about how tired he was, about that project that he couldn't finished from Miss Bourdle's class. She asked him why, and he told her what he'd told his mother in the hospital that day; he simply wasn't meant to make it that far.