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daredevilkink2015-07-13 09:00 am
ddk_mod) wrote in daredevilkink2015-07-13 09:00 am
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Prompt Post #5
HEAD OVER TO PROMPT POST #6.
Keep filling prompts on this post! Make sure to link any new fic on the complete or work in progress fills posts so it doesn't get missed.
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FILL: The Price of a Soul (8/?)
(Anonymous) 2015-08-25 09:11 pm (UTC)(link)"Frankie?" she asked quietly, so as not to disturb anyone in the rest of the house.
He was muttering to himself and intensely focused on the screen in front of him. As she approached the living room, she could see books strewn across the coffee table and a mug balanced precariously near it's corner. Next to the mug was a bottle of pills, although Anna couldn't make out what exactly they were.
"Frankie, sweetheart, what are you still doing up?" Anna asked. "Don't you have school in the morning?"
Finally, the boy looked up at her, jittery and alert. "Don't worry about it, Anna. I'll be fine. I have to get this done."
His hands twitched with the desire to press his fingers back onto the keyboard, to keep going. His right leg moved restlessly up and down.
"It's 4am," Anna told him. "You're a growing teenager. Believe me, you need to sleep."
"I said don't worry about it, Anna. It's none of your business, alright?" Franklin told her angrily. He had no intention of listening to her. She sighed and went to the bathroom, resolving to talk to Eddie in the morning about his son's night owl tendencies and the bottle of pills that she'd seen.
The next morning, Anna observed Franklin carefully. He woke at his usual early hour, and seemed to be behaving normally as he got his things together to go meet his car and head to school. He didn't seem tired at all.
"Aren't you going to eat anything, Frankie?" she asked him as she saw him move towards the door.
"Huh?" Franklin said absentmindedly. "Oh, I'm not hungry." And he left.
Anna took a moment to try and remember the last time that she had seen her stepson eat. He had stopped sitting down for dinner with them, preferring instead to cook his own meals and eat in his bedroom at his desk. She could tell that he had lost weight, and he seemed to be constantly on edge, nervous and under pressure. It worried her.
"Eddie," she asked her husband as he sat down at the breakfast table. "Have you noticed anything strange about Frankie lately?"
"That kid's always been strange," Eddie said. "Too much like his mother. You know that."
Anna sighed. She wished that Eddie wouldn't compare Franklin to his mother so much. It added to the distance between them and made the situation worse than it had to be. "It's more than that. Has he been eating? I caught him up at 4am last night working on his schoolwork. There was a pill bottle out. I'm trying to remember what the warning signs were for drug abuse that Candace's school did that presentation on? He's been pushing himself so hard and I'm getting very worried. You should talk to him."
"And say what exactly?" Eddie said. "You know he doesn't listen to a word I say."
"So you're just not even going to try?" Anna asked him. "Eddie, he's your son. You need to do something. What if he's in some kind of trouble? Or having difficulty at school? We're his parents. We should know these things."
Eddie sighed. "Alright," he said. "I'll talk to him. I can't promise it'll do any good, but I'll try."
Franklin came through the apartment door exhausted. His prescription for his Adderall had been waiting to be refilled and he hadn't been able to find the time until he'd run out, and so he'd finally had to have Reynaldo run him to a pharmacy on the way home from school. He'd taken them, but they hadn't kicked in yet, and he was waiting for that rush to come on so that he could spend the night studying for his calculus exam in the morning.
He should have felt more prepared than he was and he knew it. But Marci's 16th birthday had been the weekend before, and so all thoughts of studying had fallen away in favor of a two-day bender spent high on MDMA with Marci at his side, the two of them barely leaving the bed in her mother's tiny apartment. It was a consolation prize to make up for the weekend that he didn't get to have with Rosalind, the third in a row that she had cancelled. He understood. She was involved in a long and difficult trial defending one of Boston's most notorious Irish organized crime heads, finally apprehended after a 12 year manhunt. But it still stung that the only way he had been able to see his mother in the last two months had been by watching the trial coverage on CourtTV. She wasn't even taking his calls and he was tired of talking to her through David.
He came in to find Anna cooking dinner at the stove. "Hi honey," she said.
He just dumped his bags on the kitchen floor, fell into a chair and lay his head down on the kitchen table with a groan.
"Tired?" Anna asked, ruffling his hair. "I guess so. You were up late last night."
"Well, yeah," Franklin said, lifting his head to scowl at her. "I have exams."
"Still," Anna said, "Being tired won't make them any easier."
He didn't respond. He didn't feel like he could move.
"A letter came for you today," Anna said, pointing at the pile of mail on the table. "It looked very official."
Franklin looked up at her, not comprehending what she was saying, and so she handed the letter to him. He took it, and his eyes widened.
"Oh, God," he said. "My SAT scores. I thought for sure Rosalind would have had a way to find out the scores before they came to me."
"Well..." Anna said, "How did you do?"
Franklin didn't want to open them.
"Awww, are you nervous? I bet you did well," Anna said. "You're so smart. And you studied so hard. What are you nervous about?"
Franklin gulped as he remembered how hard he had studied. Anna and his dad didn't even know about all the extra hours he'd spent at the public library when they thought he was out with friends. He had gotten tired of hearing them tell him that he needed to pace himself or that he didn't need to worry so much.
They didn't know about the sleepless nights, the dizziness and faint feelings that overcame him when he went long hours studying without eating or stopping.
And they had no idea that he'd spent the morning of the test vomiting in the school bathroom, or that he'd sat through the entire test barely able to read what was in front of him because his vision was blurred and he worried he was going to pass out. He was barely able to even get through all the questions in front of him within the allotted time. He'd choked. He knew it.
Slowly, with trembling fingers, he opened the envelope and unfolded the paper inside. His heart sunk as he read the number there. 1260. The bottom 25%. Goodbye Ivy League colleges. Maybe goodbye to college at all. Everything he'd been working for meant nothing.
In his head, he heard Rosalind's angry diatribe as she told him how disappointing he was, how much of a waste of her time, energy, and money he had been all along. "I shouldn't have expected any better," she said. "You're your father's son after all. I don't know why I bothered."
He felt wet tears trying to escape the corners of his eyes, and he stiffened and told himself he wasn't going to cry. It wouldn't do any good at this point.
"Oh sweetie..." he heard Anna say with pity in her voice. "Is it that bad?"
"Don't talk to me," he told her. "Just don't..." He threw the letter on the table and ran to the bathroom as quickly as he could, sobbing as his empty stomach heaved up bile and pills.
He felt Anna move behind him. She put her hand on his back and rubbed it gently, but he bristled. "Fuck off, Anna!" he yelled, his throat raw. "Get the hell away from me!"
She left.
By the time he came out the bathroom, Anna was gone. But his dad was sitting at the kitchen table with a tense look on his face. He was holding the letter.
"That's mine," Franklin said.
"The words you're looking for are 'I'm very, very sorry'," said his dad.
"I know the scores are bad. So bad. Apocalyptically bad," Franklin said, his voice drained of all emotion.
"You really think that's what you should be sorry for?" his dad asked. "You made Anna cry, Frankie! She's been really worried about you lately and you treated her like she was dirt underneath your shoe. You don't get to talk to her like that."
"Are you for real right now?" Franklin asked. "I got a 1260 on my SATs. I know that you don't give a shit about my education or my future, but do you even understand what I'm going through right now? Boo hoo. Anna's upset. My life is over."
"Oh, kid, you are pushing your luck," his dad said. "Your life is not over. You are 16 years old, and you'll land on your feet. Hell, you can take the test again next year! What matters is that you can't walk around acting like you're the most important person in the universe! Where the hell did you learn that it's okay to treat people like that? Oh, wait, I know exactly where you got it from."
"Right," Franklin said, "because that's always what it's about, isn't it? I remind you of her. I remind her of you. It's always you or her. And it's never me. Never what I'm going through. You hate that I love her more than you. You hate that you can't give me the things that she can. Well whose fault is that? Maybe if I hadn't had to spend time I could have been studying worrying about your store or watching your daughter or if I'd had my own room to study in, I wouldn't have done so poorly. You have no idea how much I put up with living here, how much I hate it. How much I hate you!"
"Well why don't you just go live with your mother then? Oh, now I remember. You can't. Because Saint Rosalind, the woman who gives you so much, doesn't want you. Never wanted you. Everything you have is there because I forced her in a court of law to give it to you," his dad said. "She loves showing up and playing the hero, buying your love with her money, but at the end of the day where the hell is she, Frankie? Why would she let you live here, if I'm really so terrible? You wanna go live with her? That's great! You go do that! Because we don't want you around any more than you want to be here at this point."
"Yeah?" Franklin asked, furious. He ran to his room and pulled his suitcases out of the closet, began throwing clothes and other items into them.
"Hell yeah!" his dad said. "Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out! Just don't be surprised if she sends you right back though. She's not who you think she is, kid, and if you want to have to learn it the hard way then be my guest."
"Fine, then!" Franklin yelled. "I'll tell you the same thing I told Anna. You can fuck off. I'm so done with this!" He grabbed his school bags and tore down the stairs to the street, suitcases thumping on every step.
Thankfully, Rosalind's doorman recognized him immediately when he arrived at her New York City apartment. The cab driver helped him unload his things and the doorman let him in but told him that he was going to have to alert Rosalind that Franklin was there. Franklin told him that it was fine. He'd already tried to call Rosalind in the cab, but had gotten her voicemail. He'd left a message telling her that he and his dad had fought and that he was heading to her place to stay.
The adrenaline of the situation carried him all the way to Rosalind's uncomfortable white leather sofa, where the enormity of everything that had happened finally hit him and he collapsed, laying there struggling to breathe as the panic overtook him.
He was so tired. And so angry. And so anxious. His body trembled and he felt hazy from the powerful stew of contradictory and overwhelming emotions flooding through him.
His phone rang. It was David.
"Hello," Franklin said.
"Franklin, it's David calling from your mother's office," he heard. David always said this, ever the professional, even though Franklin had caller ID and knew who he was.
"I'm calling to let you know that your mother is in court for the next three days and so she'll be unavailable to address your unfortunate situation," David continued. "However, she's asked me to tell you to stay at her apartment and finish your exams. There's no groceries currently, but your mother has a standing delivery order with Direct to Home groceries that I'm going to place for you tonight, so expect that to be there by tomorrow afternoon. You can use your AMEX to order delivery tonight. I've already let Reynaldo know that you're not at home so he'll pick you up from there in the morning. I've booked you a 10am flight out from JFK to Logan Airport on Saturday morning. A driver will pick you up. After that, you are welcome to stay at her apartment here until she's able to find the time to make other arrangements with you. Does that sound alright?"
"Yeah," Franklin said. "That sounds great, David. Thank you."
"Just doing my job, kid," he said. "Do you need anything else?"
"No," Franklin said, "I'm good."
David hung up and Franklin sat up and looked around. He hadn't lied. Suddenly, he did actually feel good. Great, even. Because it occurred to him that maybe this was a fresh start. He could live with Rosalind. And he could explain to her that this poor SAT scores were his dad's fault, and retake the test his senior year. And he could be who she wanted him to be, who he wanted to be, for the first time.
It felt like everything might actually be okay. So he popped another Adderall, and he pushed the pang in his chest that felt bad about hating his dad and Anna, that missed his sister, away. He had to. They didn't want him anyway.
Re: FILL: The Price of a Soul (8/?)
(Anonymous) 2015-08-26 01:42 am (UTC)(link)