A/N: Ironically, this chapter was finished really early in the week and it was all ready to be posted on Friday, and then I fell asleep and forgot to post it. So, sorry about that, but it's here now.
This is the penultimate chapter to Colourless and I'm still kind of in disbelief. The next chapter should hopefully be finished by Friday considering I only have to into school on Wednesday next week for my last exam and even then it's not for the whole day. Long story short I'm going to have a long time to mull over the last chapter and make sure the conclusion to Colourless is exactly how I want it to be.
Anyway, enjoy this chapter, and don't forget to vote or comment if you did c:
Conor never did understand why he always went crawling back to his parents. In that position, any of his friends would have just got on with their lives and completely disconnected from them by now, but he couldn't seem to be able to. Things hadn't always been like that. Conor didn't always want to get away from his parents.
When he was younger, they would tell him to listen to the bullies that picked on him, and they would play catch with him in the garden. They were caring enough for him, so he never saw a problem. His parents were ignorant, though. They always had been. After all, why should they care about something that didn't involve them? Mental illness had never involved them. For a long time, they were living under the assumption that it was just something made up for attention, or at least something that people should hide. Then their son told them about his bipolar disorder and they couldn't accept that they were wrong.
In their opinion, they'd tried everything to get him to snap out of it, but that was their mistake. It angered Conor to think that they believed that he could do that, that he could just decide he wasn't bipolar anymore. For the longest time, he thought that was something he should be able to do.
His parents never separated him from the bipolar disorder. They were too busy trying to cover it up before the neighbours found out (which, considering their invasive ways, inevitably didn't work) to realise that Conor was still Conor. They didn't want a bipolar son. They wanted a child who could beat the neighbours' child at something, anything that wasn't how messed up in the head you could be. They couldn't separate their son from the idea that he had failed because he couldn't keep up with the children on the street.
He wasn't even a child anymore, but they acted like it was primary school, when all the parents secretly made comparisons and bets on what they would be like when they were older.
For the longest time, Conor couldn't separate himself from that idea either. It was toxic, because his mental illness wasn't his fault, but they made him feel like it was. But even with all that in mind, Conor didn't want to completely erase his parents from his life.
"They're basically strangers," he said to Kitzie as they sat outside in the open, "but I don't want to pretend they don't exist."
Kitzie didn't say anything. She was gazing out through the gates, brows furrowed together in thought. "I don't understand," she said. "After everything they've said to you - they called you worthless, for god's sake - and you still want them in your life."
"They're my parents," Conor said quietly, "without them I don't even have a life."
"That doesn't mean you owe them anything," Kitzie told him.
"Well, what am I supposed to do without them?" Conor asked her.
"The same thing you've been doing ever since you got to Dalacine, making it on your own," she said to him, giving him an encouraging nudge.
He looked doubtful. "It's not really on my own, though, is it? I have nurses and counsellors and you guys to make sure I'm doing okay."
"Making it on your own doesn't mean that you have to disconnect from everyone," Kitzie said quietly. "Just disconnect from the ones who make you feel bad."
