(no subject)
Title: Four Things a Boy Can Keep From His Mother, and One Thing He Can't
Author: wrigleyfield
Fandom: The Vampire Diaries
Characters:Tyler Lockwood, Carol Lockwood, Caroline Forbes
Rating: A Mature PG-13
Wordcount: 2728
Spoilers: Through 3x06 (haven't watched 3x07 yet)
Disclaimer: The Vampire Diaries belong to its respective creators!
Summary: Five randomly ordered vignettes focusing on Tyler's relationship with his mother.
What that red stain really is.
She's poking it with the toe of her heel again and Tyler can't help cringing. This whole siring-via-Klaus thing might mess with his capacity for morality and common sense, sure, but something still feels wrong about lying to his mother. Especially given how much she already knows.
They've always been close. Not in a clingy way, but in a way where, if someone was really jonsing to get punched, they could legitimately call him a Mama's Boy. He is, and Mama's Boys don't lie to their Mamas.
They also don't spill their meals on their mother's Persian carpets.
It's an art, pretending to care while not appearing to care too much and making her wonder why he suddenly cares so much about the state of her rugs. He half looks up from the Redskins game so that he cab see more than just the point of her shoe. Her lips are pursed and the stain is too brown against the rug to really be the red wine he'd tried to pass it off as-- and that sucked because he'd already been grounded for drinking it. Hence watching the Redskins on his couch on a Friday night instead of watching it at the Grill.
At the time it had seemed better than admitting that the rust colored stain on her expensive rug was blood. If drinking wine had him grounded for a weekend, what would she do when she do when she found out what else he'd been drinking?
It'd be at least three Redskins games. The body behind the shed in the back would probably bring him to the playoffs. (Even if that is Rebecca's fault.)
Pretending that it's the grounding he's avoiding by lying softens the blow to his manly pride. It means he doesn't have to admit that he's feeling guilty about lying to his mother, and that's better for her, because Carol's still his mother and hybrid or not, he's going to care a little.
The thing is? Klaus doesn't strike Tyler as the type who's going appreciate knowing that some mortal woman's held in a higher regard than his own.
That he's sleeping with a vampire.
Tyler knows Carol knows and Carol knows Tyler knows that she knows, but neither of them are saying anything about it. Tyler's alright with this. It saves them both from an embarrassing talk, and sneaking around is kind of fun. He's horny and the idea that they could be caught just makes it more exciting.
The fact that they both have super-hearing helps. Their limbs entwined, he still manages to flip Caroline over. He grins, straddling her as he puts his hand over her mouth and a finger to his own lips. It's three o'clock in the morning and vampire or not, Caroline has no business in his bedroom.
It's obvious that they can both hear Carol's footsteps in the hallway, padding from bedroom to the staircase. His girlfriend looks adorably guilty and Tyler can't help smirking at the expression on her face. The only thing that keeps him from actually laughing aloud is leaning forward to kiss her into silence.
“It's not funny!” she hisses past his lips.
“Shh!” The footsteps in the hallway pause on the stair landing, and when he listens he can hear Carol breathing. Despite his motions for silence, the bed gives a hearty and steady squeak for each action he'd prefer to keep private. He can practically hear her head turning, feel her eyes baring down on his bedroom door like she knows what's going on.
I was born at night, Tyler, but it wasn't last night, she'd told him when he'd tried to get away with things as a kid.
With squeaks of their own, the stairs answer in turn as Carol takes the stairs. Finally.
Caroline gasps as Tyler relaxes his arms. “A little warning next time?” But she's not really complaining as she raises her hips to meet him.
“Sorry,” he mumbles. His control lacks a little something to be desired recently, but he more than makes up for it in longevity.
They're at the point of no return by the time Carol makes her way back up, and though Tyler can hear it there's nothing he can do to stop himself. Caroline muffles some guttural noise by biting down into his shoulder and he can't help crying out when she accidentally breaks the skin.
“It's late, Tyler.” Somehow he manages to still himself inside of her at the same moment that he hears Carol come to a stop in front of his door. They're in synch down to the shuddering breaths both of them take in effort to stay quiet and calm and very much not fucking each other's brains out.
Her voice is pointed, but she's standing still. She's going to preserve all three of their dignities and remain on the other side of the heavy oak door.“You're playing Madden at three in the morning? You have real football practice in three hours.”
Tyler swallows thickly before answering. “Yeah. Yeah... I know. Going to sleep... now. Soon.” He breaths in sharply. “I'm fine.”
Caroline's face is bright red and turning redder with each of Carol's receding footsteps. The air she doesn't need is hitched in the back of her throat and Tyler only hears the release when the master bedroom bangs shut down the hall.
Tyler knows that Carol knows what he and Caroline are doing behind closed doors, but if they're going to call it 'playing Madden' instead of 'having sex' the two teenagers definitely aren't going to complain.
That running away wasn't the best decision.
He's a kid who's grown up on what can be considered an estate by any normal person. Spoiled is a word Tyler bristles at, but it's apt and it's showing while he tries to live in a two room trailer that smells vaguely like old meat and wet dog. He's missing home, but admitting that would be admitting defeat and he;s not ready to crawl back with his tail between his legs.
(A few months in and the mental canine puns are getting way too easy.)
The side of the trailer is warm against his bare back, but he's too exhausted to move from the spot close to the generator. It's his third Morning After and it's not getting any easier.
“You good?”
“Not really.” But then Jules can probably see that. Tyler has no idea how she manages to look so put together on a morning after the full moon.
She sticks her hand out to help him up and he's brushing off leaves and twigs as she's walking back towards the front door-- if you could call it that. “C'mon, I'll make breakfast.”
Great, because the trailer needs to smell like more breakfast food.
“I'm not hungry.” Which is true, there's something sitting in his stomach and he's hoping it's nothing more than a rabbit. Maybe a deer at the most. At least something that humans actually eat.
Except with the way his stomach lurches as he follows behind her he's pretty sure it's something that doesn't belong there. His knees buckle before he throws it all back up on a pile of leaves to the side of the door.
Jules is rubbing his back suddenly, moving her hand in deep circles over his skin. Her hand is warm and Tyler knows it's supposed to be soothing. She's trying and he gives her credit for that, but he can't think of a time when he's wanted more to be at home, in his own bed, with his mother rubbing his back.
Sure, Carol would have wondered why he was throwing up pieces of rabbits (he's pretty sure he can see chunks of fur in the mess by his feet), but at least he would have been home.
Tyler runs the back of his hand across his mouth before shrugging away from Jules' hand. “Don't...”
When the breeze picks up Jules tosses him a shirt that's obviously been sitting on the ground. It's awhile before Tyler can force himself to stand, so he stays on the ground while he pulls the shirt over his back. It's warmer and he leans back against the side of the trailer. Almost immediately Jules slides down against the slick wall and joins him.
“Don't what? Help?” she asks, smiling slightly. “Try and stop me.”
She's not family, Tyler thinks, and she's certainly not Carol, but he's just puked up a rabbit. A he leans over onto her shoulder, Tyler knows it could be worse than Jules.
That he's a hybrid.
It would hurt her too much, Tyler decided.
Caroline keeps telling him that it's not his decision whether or not Carol should know what Klaus had done to him. Vampires and the supernatural have been in Carol Lockwood's life for longer than Tyler's been alive and she's managed to handle it all. She didn't take the werewolf thing as horribly as she could've, and well, she hadn't handled Caroline in the most gracious of ways, but everyone was past that now.
Her thumb runs across the paper thin skin and the veins that appear a mix of black and blue. “If you can't control it, she's going to find out anyway.”
“Who says I can't control it?'
“Your face.” She leans in and kisses where her thumb had been. “It's kind of obvious.”
He blinks, trying to hold everything back because she's right. Since coming back to life he can barely look at a living, breathing human being without a new blood lust rising. “She's my mom. It'd kill her.”
“You're not giving her enough credit.” Caroline sighs and turns so that she can lean against Tyler's chest. Her legs dangle off the side of the bed. “But it's nice to see you caring about something.”
“What--”
She raises an eyebrow. “You know what I mean, Tyler. It's been... I mean, I just don't get how you're taking this so well. Like it's nothing. I mean... you died and sometimes I feel like your conscience died with you. So knowing you still care about how someone human feels? Well, it's good.”
“Of course I care. She's my--”
“Your mom, yeah.” Caroline smiles gently after a moment. “You should tell her before she realises that you can't look at her without wanting a snack-- which we have like, three days to fix before school starts on Monday. Homeroom is not a buffet.”
Tyler shrugs. “I know that and it doesn't matter. Klaus won't let me go hungry.” It's the little things, statements like that that make Caroline wince these days. Tyler name drops the Original as if he's just Stefan or Damon, and when it comes along with this newfound lack of care for mankind it worries her even if Klaus is nowhere to be seen. “And, I care about my Mom, Caroline. That's why I don't want to tell her. You know she's barely letting me spend a full moon alone and she had you tortured when she found out what you were.”
“She thought I was dangerous and she-- she was trying to protect you. Everyone really,” she says softly. Tyler is impressed that she can even say it at all, and it's one of the reasons he loves her. He doesn't know anyone else who would forgive like she had. The dynamic between his girlfriend and Carol is hardly perfect, but it's better than it has any right to be given the whole kidnapping and torture thing.
Caroline turns and leans in towards him and her voice contains that endless optimism that she's so well known for. “You'll tell her and she'll handle it, and everything'll be better and safer when everyone's not lying to each other.” She pauses for a moment. “Everyone mostly being you. I just want everything to be normal again. You being the caring, good person I fell in love with instead of a creepy Klaus version of a Renfield is what's normal.”
“Renfield?”
“So I'm guessing you didn't read Dracula last year?” Correcting him makes her grin again and lean forward for a kiss. He forces down the urge to respond with fangs. “Just... don't underestimate her? And don't hurt her more by letting her find out that you're lying, or losing control with no warning. Promise me?”
To be honest, Tyler feels guilty about lying. He knowingly makes a promise to Caroline that he can't keep and kisses her back, effectively ending the conversation for the both of them. There are other things to concentrate on while they make out in his bed -mainly controlling his urge to make a quick snack of Caroline's neck (and inner thighs) whenever she looks up at him from underneath her eyelashes-- and until she rolls away to get home for dinner, he's blissfully free to think about everything except his mother.
And one thing he did tell her?
He does hold Carol Lockwood in the highest regard, though. She's his mother, after all, and while she hasn't always been a dream to live with, neither has he. There was the time she'd tried to have his vampire girlfriend killed. There was the time he'd gone and turned into a werewolf.
Yeah, neither of them are perfect.
He can feel her hand stroking gently over his hair while he pretends to sleep. It's hard to keep his breathing slow and level; since Klaus turned him life is pretty much a nonstop rush of adrenaline, even when he's doing nothing more than lying in bed. The canine urges are hard enough to control without adding vampirism to it all-Tyler wonders if she notices how his leg twitches slightly as practically pets his scalp.
It's the morning after a full moon, and Carol's still got it in her mind that he can't possibly go to school after a transformation. Not with a fever (he ran high now. He couldn't help it and she couldn't understand it), not when he could barely stretch out without wincing (she refused to believe that it was football, and to give her credit it wasn't all football), and not after watching her baby transform into a monster (he hadn't expected her to come back every month and he hated making her watch him, because he was a monster).
He tries to get up when his alarm goes off at six that morning after grabbing an hour of sleep as a human, but Carol's still awake. The yellow gloves on her hands and rug cleaner at her feet tell him that the stain on her carpet is bothering her more than she'd let on. It's too early to be cleaning, and he's not just saying that as a seventeen year old boy.
She offers to make him breakfast, but only after he's slept, then she sends him back to his room. He told her the month before that if she was going to keep him from going to school, she didn't have to sit with him while he slept. Of course, she did it anyway and Tyler knew it was because she cared. Sometimes she gets it wrong, but then there're times like this when he can't keep his leg from twitching.
He rolls over in his 'sleep' toward Carol's hand, almost nuzzling into her touch. It's familiar and for a moment he can pretend this has nothing to do with vampires, werewolves, witches, or anything else that would sound batshit outside of Mystic Falls, Virginia. He can almost smell chicken soup and hear her reading Goosebumps out loud until he falls asleep.
Everything was easier in the fourth grade.
His skin is incredibly warm to the touch and he knows that worries her as her lips press lightly against his forehead before she whispers, “I love you,” and stands.
For a moment, even when she takes her hand away from his scalp, Tyler forgets Klaus and the loyalty he feels to the new 'parent' in his life.
When he cracks his eyes open it's just after 9:30 and Carol's paused in the door frame watching him sleep. His throat is dry and his stomach growls with a hunger that pancakes and bacon aren't going to solve. But for a moment, it's okay. “Thanks, Mom,” he mumbles. “Love you too.”
Author: wrigleyfield
Fandom: The Vampire Diaries
Characters:Tyler Lockwood, Carol Lockwood, Caroline Forbes
Rating: A Mature PG-13
Wordcount: 2728
Spoilers: Through 3x06 (haven't watched 3x07 yet)
Disclaimer: The Vampire Diaries belong to its respective creators!
Summary: Five randomly ordered vignettes focusing on Tyler's relationship with his mother.
What that red stain really is.
She's poking it with the toe of her heel again and Tyler can't help cringing. This whole siring-via-Klaus thing might mess with his capacity for morality and common sense, sure, but something still feels wrong about lying to his mother. Especially given how much she already knows.
They've always been close. Not in a clingy way, but in a way where, if someone was really jonsing to get punched, they could legitimately call him a Mama's Boy. He is, and Mama's Boys don't lie to their Mamas.
They also don't spill their meals on their mother's Persian carpets.
It's an art, pretending to care while not appearing to care too much and making her wonder why he suddenly cares so much about the state of her rugs. He half looks up from the Redskins game so that he cab see more than just the point of her shoe. Her lips are pursed and the stain is too brown against the rug to really be the red wine he'd tried to pass it off as-- and that sucked because he'd already been grounded for drinking it. Hence watching the Redskins on his couch on a Friday night instead of watching it at the Grill.
At the time it had seemed better than admitting that the rust colored stain on her expensive rug was blood. If drinking wine had him grounded for a weekend, what would she do when she do when she found out what else he'd been drinking?
It'd be at least three Redskins games. The body behind the shed in the back would probably bring him to the playoffs. (Even if that is Rebecca's fault.)
Pretending that it's the grounding he's avoiding by lying softens the blow to his manly pride. It means he doesn't have to admit that he's feeling guilty about lying to his mother, and that's better for her, because Carol's still his mother and hybrid or not, he's going to care a little.
The thing is? Klaus doesn't strike Tyler as the type who's going appreciate knowing that some mortal woman's held in a higher regard than his own.
That he's sleeping with a vampire.
Tyler knows Carol knows and Carol knows Tyler knows that she knows, but neither of them are saying anything about it. Tyler's alright with this. It saves them both from an embarrassing talk, and sneaking around is kind of fun. He's horny and the idea that they could be caught just makes it more exciting.
The fact that they both have super-hearing helps. Their limbs entwined, he still manages to flip Caroline over. He grins, straddling her as he puts his hand over her mouth and a finger to his own lips. It's three o'clock in the morning and vampire or not, Caroline has no business in his bedroom.
It's obvious that they can both hear Carol's footsteps in the hallway, padding from bedroom to the staircase. His girlfriend looks adorably guilty and Tyler can't help smirking at the expression on her face. The only thing that keeps him from actually laughing aloud is leaning forward to kiss her into silence.
“It's not funny!” she hisses past his lips.
“Shh!” The footsteps in the hallway pause on the stair landing, and when he listens he can hear Carol breathing. Despite his motions for silence, the bed gives a hearty and steady squeak for each action he'd prefer to keep private. He can practically hear her head turning, feel her eyes baring down on his bedroom door like she knows what's going on.
I was born at night, Tyler, but it wasn't last night, she'd told him when he'd tried to get away with things as a kid.
With squeaks of their own, the stairs answer in turn as Carol takes the stairs. Finally.
Caroline gasps as Tyler relaxes his arms. “A little warning next time?” But she's not really complaining as she raises her hips to meet him.
“Sorry,” he mumbles. His control lacks a little something to be desired recently, but he more than makes up for it in longevity.
They're at the point of no return by the time Carol makes her way back up, and though Tyler can hear it there's nothing he can do to stop himself. Caroline muffles some guttural noise by biting down into his shoulder and he can't help crying out when she accidentally breaks the skin.
“It's late, Tyler.” Somehow he manages to still himself inside of her at the same moment that he hears Carol come to a stop in front of his door. They're in synch down to the shuddering breaths both of them take in effort to stay quiet and calm and very much not fucking each other's brains out.
Her voice is pointed, but she's standing still. She's going to preserve all three of their dignities and remain on the other side of the heavy oak door.“You're playing Madden at three in the morning? You have real football practice in three hours.”
Tyler swallows thickly before answering. “Yeah. Yeah... I know. Going to sleep... now. Soon.” He breaths in sharply. “I'm fine.”
Caroline's face is bright red and turning redder with each of Carol's receding footsteps. The air she doesn't need is hitched in the back of her throat and Tyler only hears the release when the master bedroom bangs shut down the hall.
Tyler knows that Carol knows what he and Caroline are doing behind closed doors, but if they're going to call it 'playing Madden' instead of 'having sex' the two teenagers definitely aren't going to complain.
That running away wasn't the best decision.
He's a kid who's grown up on what can be considered an estate by any normal person. Spoiled is a word Tyler bristles at, but it's apt and it's showing while he tries to live in a two room trailer that smells vaguely like old meat and wet dog. He's missing home, but admitting that would be admitting defeat and he;s not ready to crawl back with his tail between his legs.
(A few months in and the mental canine puns are getting way too easy.)
The side of the trailer is warm against his bare back, but he's too exhausted to move from the spot close to the generator. It's his third Morning After and it's not getting any easier.
“You good?”
“Not really.” But then Jules can probably see that. Tyler has no idea how she manages to look so put together on a morning after the full moon.
She sticks her hand out to help him up and he's brushing off leaves and twigs as she's walking back towards the front door-- if you could call it that. “C'mon, I'll make breakfast.”
Great, because the trailer needs to smell like more breakfast food.
“I'm not hungry.” Which is true, there's something sitting in his stomach and he's hoping it's nothing more than a rabbit. Maybe a deer at the most. At least something that humans actually eat.
Except with the way his stomach lurches as he follows behind her he's pretty sure it's something that doesn't belong there. His knees buckle before he throws it all back up on a pile of leaves to the side of the door.
Jules is rubbing his back suddenly, moving her hand in deep circles over his skin. Her hand is warm and Tyler knows it's supposed to be soothing. She's trying and he gives her credit for that, but he can't think of a time when he's wanted more to be at home, in his own bed, with his mother rubbing his back.
Sure, Carol would have wondered why he was throwing up pieces of rabbits (he's pretty sure he can see chunks of fur in the mess by his feet), but at least he would have been home.
Tyler runs the back of his hand across his mouth before shrugging away from Jules' hand. “Don't...”
When the breeze picks up Jules tosses him a shirt that's obviously been sitting on the ground. It's awhile before Tyler can force himself to stand, so he stays on the ground while he pulls the shirt over his back. It's warmer and he leans back against the side of the trailer. Almost immediately Jules slides down against the slick wall and joins him.
“Don't what? Help?” she asks, smiling slightly. “Try and stop me.”
She's not family, Tyler thinks, and she's certainly not Carol, but he's just puked up a rabbit. A he leans over onto her shoulder, Tyler knows it could be worse than Jules.
That he's a hybrid.
It would hurt her too much, Tyler decided.
Caroline keeps telling him that it's not his decision whether or not Carol should know what Klaus had done to him. Vampires and the supernatural have been in Carol Lockwood's life for longer than Tyler's been alive and she's managed to handle it all. She didn't take the werewolf thing as horribly as she could've, and well, she hadn't handled Caroline in the most gracious of ways, but everyone was past that now.
Her thumb runs across the paper thin skin and the veins that appear a mix of black and blue. “If you can't control it, she's going to find out anyway.”
“Who says I can't control it?'
“Your face.” She leans in and kisses where her thumb had been. “It's kind of obvious.”
He blinks, trying to hold everything back because she's right. Since coming back to life he can barely look at a living, breathing human being without a new blood lust rising. “She's my mom. It'd kill her.”
“You're not giving her enough credit.” Caroline sighs and turns so that she can lean against Tyler's chest. Her legs dangle off the side of the bed. “But it's nice to see you caring about something.”
“What--”
She raises an eyebrow. “You know what I mean, Tyler. It's been... I mean, I just don't get how you're taking this so well. Like it's nothing. I mean... you died and sometimes I feel like your conscience died with you. So knowing you still care about how someone human feels? Well, it's good.”
“Of course I care. She's my--”
“Your mom, yeah.” Caroline smiles gently after a moment. “You should tell her before she realises that you can't look at her without wanting a snack-- which we have like, three days to fix before school starts on Monday. Homeroom is not a buffet.”
Tyler shrugs. “I know that and it doesn't matter. Klaus won't let me go hungry.” It's the little things, statements like that that make Caroline wince these days. Tyler name drops the Original as if he's just Stefan or Damon, and when it comes along with this newfound lack of care for mankind it worries her even if Klaus is nowhere to be seen. “And, I care about my Mom, Caroline. That's why I don't want to tell her. You know she's barely letting me spend a full moon alone and she had you tortured when she found out what you were.”
“She thought I was dangerous and she-- she was trying to protect you. Everyone really,” she says softly. Tyler is impressed that she can even say it at all, and it's one of the reasons he loves her. He doesn't know anyone else who would forgive like she had. The dynamic between his girlfriend and Carol is hardly perfect, but it's better than it has any right to be given the whole kidnapping and torture thing.
Caroline turns and leans in towards him and her voice contains that endless optimism that she's so well known for. “You'll tell her and she'll handle it, and everything'll be better and safer when everyone's not lying to each other.” She pauses for a moment. “Everyone mostly being you. I just want everything to be normal again. You being the caring, good person I fell in love with instead of a creepy Klaus version of a Renfield is what's normal.”
“Renfield?”
“So I'm guessing you didn't read Dracula last year?” Correcting him makes her grin again and lean forward for a kiss. He forces down the urge to respond with fangs. “Just... don't underestimate her? And don't hurt her more by letting her find out that you're lying, or losing control with no warning. Promise me?”
To be honest, Tyler feels guilty about lying. He knowingly makes a promise to Caroline that he can't keep and kisses her back, effectively ending the conversation for the both of them. There are other things to concentrate on while they make out in his bed -mainly controlling his urge to make a quick snack of Caroline's neck (and inner thighs) whenever she looks up at him from underneath her eyelashes-- and until she rolls away to get home for dinner, he's blissfully free to think about everything except his mother.
And one thing he did tell her?
He does hold Carol Lockwood in the highest regard, though. She's his mother, after all, and while she hasn't always been a dream to live with, neither has he. There was the time she'd tried to have his vampire girlfriend killed. There was the time he'd gone and turned into a werewolf.
Yeah, neither of them are perfect.
He can feel her hand stroking gently over his hair while he pretends to sleep. It's hard to keep his breathing slow and level; since Klaus turned him life is pretty much a nonstop rush of adrenaline, even when he's doing nothing more than lying in bed. The canine urges are hard enough to control without adding vampirism to it all-Tyler wonders if she notices how his leg twitches slightly as practically pets his scalp.
It's the morning after a full moon, and Carol's still got it in her mind that he can't possibly go to school after a transformation. Not with a fever (he ran high now. He couldn't help it and she couldn't understand it), not when he could barely stretch out without wincing (she refused to believe that it was football, and to give her credit it wasn't all football), and not after watching her baby transform into a monster (he hadn't expected her to come back every month and he hated making her watch him, because he was a monster).
He tries to get up when his alarm goes off at six that morning after grabbing an hour of sleep as a human, but Carol's still awake. The yellow gloves on her hands and rug cleaner at her feet tell him that the stain on her carpet is bothering her more than she'd let on. It's too early to be cleaning, and he's not just saying that as a seventeen year old boy.
She offers to make him breakfast, but only after he's slept, then she sends him back to his room. He told her the month before that if she was going to keep him from going to school, she didn't have to sit with him while he slept. Of course, she did it anyway and Tyler knew it was because she cared. Sometimes she gets it wrong, but then there're times like this when he can't keep his leg from twitching.
He rolls over in his 'sleep' toward Carol's hand, almost nuzzling into her touch. It's familiar and for a moment he can pretend this has nothing to do with vampires, werewolves, witches, or anything else that would sound batshit outside of Mystic Falls, Virginia. He can almost smell chicken soup and hear her reading Goosebumps out loud until he falls asleep.
Everything was easier in the fourth grade.
His skin is incredibly warm to the touch and he knows that worries her as her lips press lightly against his forehead before she whispers, “I love you,” and stands.
For a moment, even when she takes her hand away from his scalp, Tyler forgets Klaus and the loyalty he feels to the new 'parent' in his life.
When he cracks his eyes open it's just after 9:30 and Carol's paused in the door frame watching him sleep. His throat is dry and his stomach growls with a hunger that pancakes and bacon aren't going to solve. But for a moment, it's okay. “Thanks, Mom,” he mumbles. “Love you too.”