Just... yeah.

[got_stitched_up]

I can’t sleep. Stitch cant sleep either cause I’m keeping him up.

We need to sleep, we're going camping tomorrow, for a few days. Until... I'm better, I think?

We’ve been talking. He reckons it would be good for me to write this down. God for me to be able to tell people. But I have to do it my own way.

So here we go.


Once upon a time there was a little boy who did something very very wrong. So bad was this thing that he did that he was never even told what it was. So bad that he even done it before he was born.

When he tried to be good no one noticed. He brought in flowers for his mother and put them in a vase, and watched them wrinkle and brown, watched the water go down and the leaves curl up. He drew pictures for his father, and left them in the study, and the next day he would wonder where all of his crayons had gone.

The little boy could only ever reach the bottom shelf of the fridge, so he grew up on vegetables and condiments. He read a story about a princess whose parents swapped her for a head of lettuce, he sometimes wondered if that really was a fair exchange. Sometimes if he wondered if he was the limp lettuce, and that his parents might regret their decision and want Rapunzel back.

That wasn’t the only fairy tale he read, he knew them all- the Golden Bird, The Travelling Musicians, The Frog Prince, The Goose Girl, Hansel and Gretel, Tom Thumb, Rumpelstiltskin, Snowdrop, Lily and the Lion, The Golden Goose, Snow white and Rose Red- He knew them off by heart and back to front, but soon those stories weren’t enough for him and he had to make up some of his own. He found out he was good at these stories and if he had them then everything became just slightly more bearable.

The little boy never gave up on the hopes that one day maybe he could make his mother and father forgive him of what awful crime it was he had done to them, but his father despised him more with each passing year, and his mothers touch was like ice, freezing him all up inside and chilling him to the bone. They did not care for his stories. They did not care for his imagination. They did not care for him.

He was either too fat or too skinny, he wasn’t clever enough or he was showing off, he was too soft and too rough and too strange. As hard as he could the little boy tried to please them, but it was to no avail.

But the boy soon had a new task set. If he could just be good enough to stop himself from being thrown into The Dark.

The Dark was a terrifying place where particularly naughty children were thrown to be sacrificed. Sometimes the little boy would make too much noise when he was reaching for a cup, sometimes it was because hid things from them like pencils and paints, but when he really got it was when his father had found he’d been writing those dreadful, useless stories of his.

He would be grabbed by his collar and dragged to a Big Black Door. The Big Black Door was heavy and old, it creaked in protest when it was opened and delighted in slamming shut, and leading down from the Big Black Door where the Old Wooden Steps. Beyond the Old Wooden Steps the young boy couldn’t see, The Dark lived down there, and it absorbed all of the light, gobbling it up as greedily as it might gobble up the little boy- had he ever slipped down those stairs.

That’s why if ever he was there he shad to sit perfectly still, because he couldn’t see in the darkness and if he moved he could loose his footing- and the Old Wooden Steps may have been weak from damp, and he didn’t want to fall into The Dark, because that was where the Monsters lived that would tear him limb from limb, shred his skin and drink his blood. He’d read all about them you see- Monsters. He knew what he was up against.

Every time though, that he was sent to live in The Dark, his parents forgave him and let him come back up stairs, Sometimes he would only need to spend a night down there, sometimes it was a few days, but they always forgave him, and that gave him hope still that one day, ONE day, they might forgive him that Awful thing what he done before he knew.

The Years went by, and the young boy was turning into a young man, but none less disappointing as he always had been, things were much the same as always- the young boy lived in his head and all the children that went to his school (he got to go to school now, he had been allowed since he was five, it had been wonderful- so many books! And also school was five days out of seven, so after it had started he had never been locked in The Dark for more than a few days, unless it was on a holiday when he done a bad thing) thought he was a very odd little boy. Until one day, in late September, there had been a stirring amongst his peers; a new child had joined the school, and he was different too.

This boy didn’t look as if he fitted into himself, he was all gangly and he stooped, as if he knew he shouldn’t be that tall yet, and his eyes were always lowered to the floor. His hand shook if he had to put it up in class and everyone thought he was slow, or didn’t understand them and everyone thought he was a trouble maker.

But the little boy knew. He knew it was because the Stranger came from a land far, far away, and that sometimes travelling over mountains and seas and plains could be hard work, so yes you needed a little time to get used to the new world around him, at least that’s how he felt when ever he went off to any of the other realms.

It started one day when the little boy took the blame for something he didn’t do. That was alright though, he had grown accustomed to that. The Stranger was thankful and they shared his chocolate bar the Stranger’s mother had packed into his lunch sack. The Little boy had never had chocolate before and he was glad the Stranger had been so generous. After that he began sharing lunches with the Stranger all the time, and though the Stranger was a quiet boy he liked to listen to the little boys stories and soon the Stranger wasn’t a Stranger anymore but a Friend.

The Little boy and his Friend were inseparable, and after a while the little boy stopped being the little boy and became Peter, and the Friend became Aidan, and then one horrible winters night Aidan found out Peters secret.

He found out that Peter had done that bad thing.

He had watched as Peter was sent to The Dark, and he had heard him crying, he had seen what Peter was like and now Peter knew that Aidan would hate him just as much, and he dreaded school that Monday morning more than he had ever feared The Dark.

But when he had sat down at his little wooden desk he had felt another small hand curl into his own, fingers grasping tight and nails digging in in the most wonderful way imaginable as Aidan had lent in close and whispered the first truth about Peter that Peter had ever heard.

“You didn’t do anything wrong though.”

That lunch break peter told a different story, he told the one that you are reading now, curled up behind the school kitchen between the rubbish bins, and Aidan had held him tight and Peter didn’t know why until Aidan explained that that’s what you do when someone was sad, and it was a good job Aidan had explained because the two of them would be doing that a lot in the next couple of years. Sometimes when they weren’t even sad.

Years went ticking on as they tend to do, and Aidan and Peter turned into Stitch and Sweets, and the hugs became less frequent but the bond became tighter, and it infuriated Sweets mother and father until one day, a week and two days before his 16th birthday his father decided enough was enough, this time Sweets really would be sacrificed to The Dark, and he threw him past the Big Black Door and down the Old Wooden Stairs and left him there to rot, longer than he’d ever left him down there before,  and when the door was opened it was just his mother standing behind it. She shoved paper money into his hands, and told him to run, run away and stay away, and not to ever go back, and he did.

He ran all the way to Stitches house. And he’s been running ever since.