Mike wheeler one-shots

shutter

ALL CREDIT TO : winchestered_again

SUMMARY: mike lives in photographs

or

something written in hazes

TW:ABUSE,SUICID ATTEMPT,IMPLIED RAPE,IMPLIED SEXUAL ABUSE,SA

For as long as Mike can remember, he's lived in photographs.

Pictures displayed on a mantle, ones hung in frames on the walls, little portals of moments in slide-in books and downsized in a wallet. All of them with his face somewhere inside, telling of something he can't say in something so stationary. His face, straining smiles more and more visibly as the years pass, trying to keep up a visual he no longer believes in.

He lives in photographs because he's more palatable that way, less anger and sadness and arguments because he's more palatable as something still than breathing, than a child someone has, someone made and then tried to mold but gave up when it was too much. He forces himself to sit like a doll for her a few times a year, at least for Christmas, at least, at least, at least. After that, they go back to their old dances, Mike being the outcast problem child and Karen being the savior mother that puts up with him.

He lives in photographs because singular pictures never tell you everything, and Mike has so many words and memories stuck behind his eyes that it would be a waste of time to list them all, his parents or even friends not knowing every bullet point on his list. Mike is tired, exhausted, as time drags his bones down, stress whittling them as his appetite dwindles, everything his mother makes turning to ash because he knows they'll never actually be close like he wants so badly to be.

Mike lives in a photograph because videos are too raw, too revealing, too vulnerable, and he thinks it says something that Will owns every home video Mike allows himself to exist in. Small pockets of time where he isn't just too much, too everywhere, taking too much space in what he allows himself to experience. He is enough in what he appears to be, not the angry mess of a traumatized teenager he feels every time he goes home, locking himself in his room and only talking and acting enough they know he hasn't left, hasn't died in the same place he was born in, forever unable to escape his own night terrors and twisted beliefs.

He lives in photographs because he's sixteen when he realizes the rumors are true, his mother, for all the grace he's given her over the years, is sick. She's sick because it's nine PM on a Tuesday when she wakes him up, rambling about something that takes him a minute to figure out, but when he does he realizes she's talking about him. She says she wishes he didn't look so much like her, because if he doesn't look like her, then he can't end up like her, unwanted and repulsive with the strong smell of something on her breath that he knows she doesn't usually drink. She confesses to him something dark, something twisted and evil in her thoughts - the way she found herself thinking of him, of someone that Mike once knew, if only through someone else and a brief moment of heroism.

He lives in photographs because he realizes Max's brother hadn't been much older than he is tonight, the difference of it being that Mike isn't really prepared for it the same way. She says he sought her out, she says he talked to her like Mike's father used to, she says he asked her.

Mike didn't, he swears to God, he didn't-

She cries and begs and he cries and begs, but never about the same thing because he isn't sick in the way she is.