Prologue

[A/N: I know, I know, it was supposed to be the end, but I couldn't keep away. And SOMEBODY wouldn't stop hand-feeding my muse. Besides, it did end abruptly, and none of the problems were formally resolved, so I prologued it. Like a boss.]

It wasn't raining. It was too close to summertime, and the spring rains had mostly passed. The ground was ashy under Peter's feet, wet and soggy and clean-smelling where it had been dug out and pushed into a pile next to the hole that the young man couldn't take his eyes off of. It was horrifying, so he managed to pry his hazel gaze away.

The first thing he saw was Gary's father. He looked stern, with a displaced kind of demanding, like everyone there was below him. He didn't portray the monster that Pete knew he was, the man who had driven his own child into an adolescent grave. His eyes were icy and had a sting to them, reminiscent of the capabilities of Gary's gaze when he was angry. There were two prison guards lingering near him.

The woman hanging off of Mr. Smith's arm was worn-looking. There were dark circles under her eyes, as though she hadn't slept in ages, the jut of her cheekbones making the sunken orbs seem almost sinister. When Pete found the courage to look into them, he shuddered visibly at the lack of substance. She was nothing more than a walking corpse, eaten away by an abusive marriage and a hatred for her children.

They looked wealthy. Everything about the funeral was wealthy; the pristine headstone, the mountain of white roses, the clothing that everyone who Pete didn't recognize wore. In the crowd, Mrs. Phillips, Jimmy, and Peter looked so out of place. They all had puffy eyes, even the boy who had tried to kill Gary on several occasions, mainly feeding off of the sorrow dripping from the small male's frame. None of the other attendants had been crying.

After Gary had drifted away on the floor of the medical center, Pete sobbed for hours in the spot he had been left in. It was an uncontrollable fit of sobs, intakes of air that were more swallow than breathing, until the orderlies became suspicious and found him. He didn't have to say anything in explanation; the way he was bleeding told the entire story, and he was taken back to the hospital.

After so long of refusing to accept it himself, he told the authorities every gruesome detail, every little happening. He wasn't even prosecuted; Gary's parents didn't want to bother to try and press charges, not when there was so much evidence stacked against them. The threat of it coming to light kept them hidden away through the entire affair.

Jimmy was released on the grounds of defense, that he was protecting Peter from his abuser, and though there was a little bit of questioning about why he hadn't told anybody, the police gave up after they realized that he was ceaselessly loyal. Nobody suspected that Mrs. Phillips ever knew anything.

There was a story about how the heir of the Smith fortune was killed in a bus crash, and it went over pretty well with the people around the school, save the occasional rumor that was so far from the truth it made Pete scoff with a secret kind of spite. He was invisible again at school, which he was thankful for, especially since Jimmy had become unbelievably protective and almost beat in the face of every bully who even looked at him wrong.

Peter's parents, after hearing about what had happened, asked him if he wanted to move far, far away from everything, but he didn't have the heart to leave. He had two wonderful friends that supported him, that loved him, that would help him as he dragged himself through the muck of guilt. He also couldn't stand the thought of forgetting Gary. It was strange, but he didn't care; nothing had to make sense if it felt right.

Things seemed to almost fall back to normal. It was like Gary was throwing a massive fit and was avoiding the dainty teen on purpose, a toddler scorned. He could feel the ghosting of presence at night, weight on his chest, tingling fingers on the parts of him that his torturer seemed to like the best, but Pete always woke up, and the illusion was gone. Gary was dead. He wasn't going to break through his door in the middle of the night to have his way. He wasn't going to "apologize" for something he had done wrong. He wasn't going to snap up next to him with terror and hate in his eyes then look for comfort. Pete needed to stop deluding himself.

Looking at the redwood casket seemed to solidify his loss, and he hadn't cried that intensely since the day it had happened, only then it was more of a horrified disbelief, a chest-tightening fear that had pumped through his veins and down his cheeks. The way he sobbed against Mrs. Phillips was different; it was feeling.

The breathtaking coffin was lowered into the ground with the whirring of machines, and Pete tried following the travesty. He fell to his knees, then to his hands, then into a fetal position on the grass dusted with specks of deep earth. Mrs. Phillips knelt beside him, not understanding why he was in so much pain, what was happening, the reason behind his choking sobs. The Smiths watched him with unfeeling eyes.

"Nobody ever loved him." Peter told the ground.

"You did, Pete. You loved him."