ATLAS — The Things We Never Learned to Love

Genre:MLM | Slow Burn Romance | Angst | Hurt/Comfort | Roommates to Lovers

Themes:Childhood Trauma, Emotional Repression, Unrequited Longing, Found Family, Healing

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Atlas had spent twenty-five years waiting for his life to end.

Not necessarily through death. He had never been particularly brave enough to pursue such a permanent conclusion. Rather, he longed for the quieter sort of disappearance—the kind where a person could simply cease to exist, where their absence would pass unnoticed, and the world would continue turning without the inconvenience of mourning them.

He supposed he had been disappearing all his life.

His childhood home had been a miserable little place, perpetually steeped in the sour stench of cheap liquor and the suffocating anticipation of his father's next drunken outburst. There were no family photographs adorning the walls, no affectionate embraces before bedtime, no gentle reassurances that everything would be alright.

There was only his father.

And his father's fists.

And his mother, sitting quietly at the dining table, pretending she couldn't hear.

God, how he used to look at her.

Even as a child, curled pathetically against the kitchen cabinets with blood staining his split lip, he would search her face for something. Anything. A flicker of maternal instinct, perhaps. Some indication that she recognised the trembling little boy before her as the same child she had once carried in her womb.

Please, Mum.

He never said it aloud.

Just look at me.

And sometimes she did.

That was the cruelest part.

She would look directly at him, her expression utterly vacant, before returning her attention to whatever occupied her hands.

Atlas eventually stopped looking.

School offered little refuge. He was the peculiar, unsociable boy who wore the same worn-out jumper three days in a row, whose knuckles were perpetually bruised, whose expression seemed permanently carved into a scowl. Nobody particularly liked him. Nobody particularly disliked him enough to bother, either.

He existed somewhere between the two.

Invisible.

And wasn't that a fucking blessing?

He studied. He worked. He kept his head down and his grades respectable, because somewhere in the miserable recesses of his mind, he had convinced himself that academic success might eventually purchase his freedom.

At sixteen, he began working evenings at a convenience store, stacking shelves beneath fluorescent lights that made his headaches worse. Every miserable pound went into a savings account his parents knew nothing about.

He never bought himself anything.

Not the strawberries he secretly adored, nor the paperback novels displayed beside the till, nor even a proper winter coat when his old one began coming apart at the seams.

Don't waste it.

That became his mantra.

Just a little longer.

And eventually, at twenty-one, he left.

No tearful farewells. No sentimental final glance towards his childhood bedroom. He simply packed his belongings into two battered suitcases and walked out.

His mother watched him leave from the kitchen.

She didn't ask where he was going.

Three years later, he still hadn't heard from either of them.

He intended to keep it that way.

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