Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing--yada yada yada-- I don't own the song "Family Portrait", it's Pink's and she can do whatever she want with it. She can stick it up her ass or someone else's for all I care, but it's my favorite song, and it cultivated ideas in my brainwashed mind. I'm using it. Not claiming it. 'Nuff said.
Title: Family
Portrait
Chapter: 1
Lyrics: by
Pink
Pairings: None
Warnings: AU ~ Angst ~ Violence ~ Abuse
Author: Kentra Shinataku
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Chapter 1
Daddy please stop yelling,
I can't stand the sound,
Make Momma stop crying,
'Cause I need you around.
My Momma, she loves you,
No matter what she says, it's true,
I know that she hurt you,
But remember, I love you too.
"I don't care if you're sorry! You screwed me over again! Can't you see things are getting so hard?"
"Shut up!"
"Get out of my damn life!"
No! Not again! Wufei's mind was screaming, Make them stop!
"Fine, I will!" shouted a man's voice. A door slammed, hard enough that a book fell off of Wufei's top shelf.
He pressed his face deeper into his pillow and reprimanded himself as tears began spilling out from beneath his clenched eyelids.
Backgrounding his own sobs, his mother's heaving cries rang inside of his ears.
He sighed as he slowly pushed himself up from his raggedly clothed mattress.
He turned the loose rattling doorknob and brought his head slowly out into the upstairs hallway.
He combed his chin length black hair behind his ear with his fingers and tried to make his face appear less flustered from tears.
He brought his nine year old body around the broken mess in the upstairs hallway, carefully maneuvering his small bare toes around discarded towels, clothes, broken glass; everything was a mess. Nobody cleaned anything up; it always ended up getting thrown on the floor again anyways.
A short, very thin woman knelt at the bottom of the stairs, head against the wall, forceful sobbing shaking her small body.
Her hair lay in disarray and a sizeable bruise marred her left forearm. Wufei stood next to the kneeling figure, and reached out to touch his mother's shoulder.
She flinched at the contact, Wufei noted as he sharply retracted his unwelcome touch.
"Momma?"
She looked at him, eyes filled with anger as she pushed away a crystalline tear from her chin, where it had abruptly stopped its course and come to rest.
He looked so much like his father...that bastard of a man who was leaving them here.
Alone. Leaving them unprotected.
"Daddy's gone again, isn't he." Wufei struggled to keep his voice steady. Steady.
Far from what he was feeling now.
"Don't mess with things that don't concern you," she voiced icily, picking up her body from the floor, a job done with more effort than it should have taken.
"It is my concern," he returned just as icily, "What happened this time?"
His mother walked past him, headed towards the couch in the living room.
"Didn't I tell you to stay out of it?" She said forcefully, and gave him a rough push, sending his back to meet an old broken cabinet.
The cabinet door fell in, it's rattling hinges finally giving way as it should have done long ago.
There wasn't much in the house that was new. Most of it was old and used. And broken.
His mother was young; she didn't have a job to afford new things. She had never had a chance to attend college because she had bore Wufei so early, and his dad was never around much to support him, though they suspected he had more money then he let on.
Wufei brushed himself off, his hand resting on his bruising elbow. He gave up on trying to find out what happened.
It didn't matter much; his father would be back, sooner or later. Right now, there were too many more things to worry about.
Wufei walked over to his mother, now lying on the couch, to attempt to get her to speak to him in a civilized way.
"Momma, what are we going to eat?"
She didn't have a car, and there was no food left in the house. Not to mention, she didn't have the money to buy food if she did have a car.
Wufei's last meal had been over two days ago.
"Go away, 'Fei," she said turning over on the couch so she wouldn't have to meet his hungry eyes, and his starving small body.
"Momma, I'm so hungry..."
"Then go make something," she replied flatly.
"You know that we don't have anything."
Silence. Wufei accepted that he wasn?t going to receive any reply from the thin women....Was she really a women, or merely a child?
She wasn't really more then a child at 21 years old, taking care of a 9 year old by herself.
The silence was broken as his stomach erupted with the force of a long suppressed growl.
His mother dismissed the sound, uncaring, or too troubled in her own mind to notice.