Chapter Text
It starts in the summer of 1967. Pete’s a kid sitting at the kitchen table covered in watercolors.
She loves to paint and draw and get dirty and play and live. Her Mama is constantly exasperated by her, but after 5 years, no longer surprised by the hellraiser that is Patricia - “Pete, Mama” she insisted one day. “Like Spiderman, we share a birthday” - Mitchell. Her Daddy thinks she’s funny, always laughing at her when she comes back from the playground covered in dirt and mud and whatever else she can find.
Her Daddy is her hero (she likes him more than Spiderman but don’t tell him that or it’ll give him a big head (or so Mama says))
He’s in the Navy and flies Planes which is so cool and yes Bobby cooler than your stupid dad and who asked you anyway?
He goes away a lot, but he always comes back and gives Pete a big hug and a kiss (and also toys but don’t tell Mama or he’ll be accused of spoiling her (or so Daddy says))
Her life is pretty great. Mama and Daddy love her more than anything and love each other just as much. Their days together are filled with laughter and joy. They’re a small family, just the three of them, but Pete wouldn’t change it for the world.
She loves her Daddy, and Mama is pretty great too. Pete’s under the impression that her Mama is the prettiest girl that ever lived, because that’s what Daddy says and he’s always right. He tells her so every time he comes home, and every time he goes away.
“I love you, I’ll be home before you know it.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep Duke Mitchell.”
“Oh honey, I’ll always come home to the prettiest girls that ever did live,” he says with a wink to Pete who’s hugging his leg in see you soon (never goodbye, he promises). She giggles up at her Daddy, who’s smiling and making her Mama blush and swat at him playfully.
It’s a perfect moment, saturated with all the love and warmth that surrounds and fills them up every day. Pete’s young, only 5, but she knows she’s lucky. Not everyone gets this, these halcyon days. So beautiful and lovely, it makes the world around her seem more vivid, more colorful and perfect.
She paints with the water colors her Daddy brought her, the last time he came home. Trying to capture her days on the pages she ripped out of an old notebook she found. Splashes of blues and greens and reds. All of it drips with the brightness of life that lives inside her.
There’s a knock at the door.
Mama stops humming, turns down the radio, and puts her sewing to the side. Smiling at Pete, she goes to greet whoever’s at the door.
Pete stops. Something has changed. Some fundamental thing has shifted in her universe and she knows that right now, she needs to stop. She needs to stop and look around her. Freeze this moment in time, capture it in her memory forever so that she can pull it out in the future, like a faded photograph and remember .
The curtains are white in the window over the sink. They flutter peacefully in the breeze. The sky beyond is an idyllic blue, it’s midday right now. Mama should be making lunch soon. The radio is playing a different song now. All You Need is Love by the Beatles fills the room.
Her watercolors have stained her hands and arms, probably her face too. Her painting is a simple one today. It’s of them, her little family. Daddy left two weeks ago, and though she’s always strong when he goes away, she counts the seconds until he gets back. Pulling her up into his strong, safe arms, swinging her high over his head, letting her fly just like he does. He promises to fly for real with her one day. They’ll be each other's wingmen, he says.
“If anyone can do it Pete, you can. You’re as good as any boy, maybe even better. It won’t be easy, but you’ll fly Pete, you were born with wings, it’d be a shame if you never used them.”
She’s staring at the watercolors, dreaming of flying, when her Mama comes back in the room to yank her out of the sky.
After that, the color drains away from her little world.
All her paintings just look muddy now. Everything is less vivid and the brightness within her has dimmed. Mama tries, until she doesn’t. Pete hears her crying at night, hears her curse God and even Daddy.
“Give him back!”
“Take me with you!”
Pete knows she’s not supposed to hear. Not supposed to know just how bad Mama is. But it’s kind of hard not to know when Mama just kinda stares off into nothing. Her once lively presence is now dull and ugly. Pete never thought she'd see her Mama as anything less than beautiful.
But Daddy’s dead, and Mama’s ugly.
They exist like this - because this isn’t living, it isn’t - until Mama gets sick.
Pete’s 7 now and she’s made her peace with the world. Her Daddy lied to her, promised he’d come back, promised he’d fly with her, promised a lot of things. Her Mama is empty and hardly speaks to her anymore. Just sits in her room all day playing the song she and Daddy had danced to at their wedding. It’s awful.
Pete’s ok with it.
Mama getting sick doesn’t really change much. She’s been sick for a long time, only now it’s something the doctor can actually diagnose. He tells them she doesn’t have long, and Pete’s ok with it.
Mama loves her, in her own way, and Pete loves her back. But it’s better this way. They spend a little more time than usual together, waiting for Mama to go. Things are different, as much as they remain the same. So when the day finally comes, and Pete buries her Mama right next to Daddy (just the tombstone, they never got his body back), Pete’s ok with it.
She doesn’t cry at the funeral. She saves her tears for when she’s alone, and then weeps for the life she lost 2 years ago, on that hot summer day.
Patricia Mitchell is put into foster care at age 7, but she’s been an orphan for a while now.
Pete’s 12 now and she’s been to so many different homes she can’t remember them all. She’s a tough girl, and she isn’t stupid. She knows how dangerous foster homes are, and if she slips up something awful could happen to her. Kids go missing all the time, and no one really looks for them. Girls mysteriously end up pregnant after being alone with one of the boys, or even the foster father.
Pete sees the look in those girls' eyes, and she knows that she’d rather go missing.
But life isn’t so bad. Sure she bounces around a lot, but she doesn’t mind. She’s seeing a lot more of the country than she ever would have thought. She’s brighter now. What was once a flame is now a fire. She’s even regained a bit of color in her world thanks to one of the other kids at her current foster home.
His name is Bradley, he’s 4 and the cutest thing Pete’s ever seen. He took an immediate shine to her the moment they met, and they’ve been inseparable since. Bradley toddles after her as fast as his little legs can carry him wherever Pete goes, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.
Their foster mother is actually one of the better ones, maybe because she only has 3 kids living with her currently. Jeremy is 17, and his birthday is right around the corner. He stays in his room whenever he’s not at school or the gas station where he works. Pete’s been here for a year and a half, her longest stint yet, and she swears Jeremy has said 10 words to her maybe .
Lisa, their foster mom, gives Pete a small allowance if she does her chores, and Pete blows all her money on Bradley. She’s recently bought him a nice set of watercolors. She had loved painting when she was younger, and now with little Bradley, she feels she’s ready to start again.
Bradley gets paint everywhere the first time and it’s the maddest Pete has ever seen Lisa. After that, Pete does her very best to ensure they don’t suffer a repeat performance.
Pete and Bradley spend all summer playing and painting and thriving, and she’s finally living again. She loves that kid more than anything, and as soon as she’s 18, she’s gonna adopt him. Lisa has already promised to help her out with the process. Pete had hugged her tight and thanked her over and over again. In that moment, she was flying again.
So you can imagine her feelings when Bradley’s mom came to get him back.
Bradley’s mom, Jessie, had lost custody of him when he was 2. She had been addicted to drugs and more worried about her next fix than about her baby. A neighbor noticed her neglect and called the cops. Bradley was whisked off to foster care, and Jessie to jail. Now, 2 years later, here she was, standing on Lisa’s front porch with a CPS agent, and smiling gently like she wasn’t ripping Pete out of the sky.
Lisa was surprised, but happy for Bradley. Pete considers her a traitor.
In the end, there was nothing to be done. No matter how hard Pete begged or cried nothing changed. They packed Bradley’s clothes and toys, stowing them away in the trunk of the car Jessie had shown up in. It didn’t matter that Bradley didn’t remember Jessie, that he was scared and wanted to stay with Pete. That he screamed and cried and ran to her begging her to pick him up and hold him. The adults just sighed and took him away.
Later, after Pete had stood outside long after Jessie’s car, and little Bradley had disappeared from view, did she finally go inside. She didn’t respond to Lisa’s questions, she couldn’t even look at her. The anger and hurt inside Pete was still too raw. She ignored Lisa and went upstairs to the room her and Bradley had shared.
It was like he had never been there at all. All his clothes were gone, his toys, the few he had, were all with him and Jessie, going to who knows where. All Pete knew was that he wasn’t here .
Anger and grief welled up inside her so fast it would have concerned her any other time. All she could see was red, all she could do was cry. The room seemed to spin, the ground seemed to sway. Pete opened her mouth to scream, to cry, to beg, to rage, she didn’t know, she didn’t care.
Then she saw it, and she stopped. There, on Bradley’s side of the room, on his dresser, was the one thing of his that still remained.
They had left his watercolors behind.
Pete hounded Lisa for any and all information she could get on Bradley, which admittedly, wasn’t much. She didn’t stop painting like she had last time she’d been torn out of the sky. No, Bradley was still out there, and she’d see him again one day, she knew it. And when she did, she’d show him all the watercolor paintings she’d made.
Life wasn’t great, but it was ok. Pete was ok.
11 months after Bradley left, Pete had turned 13 and was dreading the start of school. She didn’t do well in a school environment (she had a hard time sitting still, to the surprise of no one). Pete was out in the yard tinkering with Lisa’s car, it needed an oil change and Pete was actually good with machines, understood them better than people sometimes, when Lisa came out and called her inside.
“Pete, I- I’m so sorry, I don’t know how to tell you this.”
In the time Pete had known her, she’d never seen Lisa cry, So the sight of her breaking down into sobs was alarming to say the least.
“Jessie, she- well she fell off the wagon, she went out and got high and left Bradley alone…he went out for help after a while they think, and got into an accident. Pete, oh god I’m sorry, he’s gone sweetheart. Bradley’s gone.”
Pete wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come. Bradley, little Bradley, with his big brown eyes and cute little dimples and chubby cheeks was dead. Gone in a fucking instant because his drug addict mother had left him alone and got him killed. She and everyone else had come into Pete’s life and ripped that little boy out of her arms and said it was better this way. Well now he was dead, gone, snuffed out. He had probably been scared, had wondered where his mama was, where Pete was, and had gone looking. He had probably been hungry and cold, when he should have been with Pete, here in this house with her and their watercolors.
Distantly, Pete recognized that she was moving. Up the stairs, into her room and over to her dresser. She gently went and picked up her watercolors, then turned around and went back downstairs to the kitchen, where Lisa was still sobbing.
Pete threw the fucking watercolors in the trash.
Lisa cried harder.
Pete couldn’t find it in herself to give a fuck.
Pete considered running away a couple times over the years. She hated Lisa. Hated how she trusted her, how she had given Bradley away, hated the way she cried when Bradley died, as if it wasn’t her fault. Most of all, Pete hated how she didn’t hate her. For a while, Pete had, she honestly had. But Pete wasn’t stupid, and she knew it hadn’t been Lisa’s fault. That she had no choice. So Pete had forgiven her, even when all she wanted to do was hate her.
So yea, Pete was a mess, and had wanted to run away from everything, From Lisa, from this house, from the watercolors Pete had dug out of the trash the same night she threw them away, from the memory of Bradley, from herself .
But she stayed. She toughed it out and planted her feet and fucking stayed. She had a new mission in life.
Bradley was dead and never coming back, but she’d never forget him. She loved him as much as she did the days she'd lost him. And she was going to go out there and live for him. For her father, for her mother, for herself. She was going to see and do everything they never had the chance to.
She’d take them with her, through life. To the sky and beyond.
Watercolor tears and all.