Chapter Text
Tommy didn’t have a family, not really. He used to, when he was younger, but that was all gone now. Now it was just him, Tommy vs the world. It was fine, it’s not like he needed a family anyway. He was going to be a rockabilly legend, a rock star. Rock stars didn’t need family; they needed music, alcohol and screaming fans, and Tommy would make sure he got plenty of that.
Still, he couldn’t help but miss it sometimes. He still remembered clearly what it was like when he was a kid. He remembers the smell of the apple pie his mother used to bake on rainy days, the strong scent of motor oil that clung to his dad like perfume. Things were good, for a while. They were a normal, happy family. It didn’t last, but that didn’t make it any less true that it had been real for a while.
Out of his friends, Tommy probably had the most normal family when they were kids. He had a mom and a dad who were married and lived together, a healthy nuclear family. Sure, his parents were ten years younger than anyone else from his school, but that just made them cooler. Maybe they didn’t sleep in the same room, but that was just because his dad snored. And okay, maybe they both drank more than was strictly healthy, but none of that mattered. They were there, they were together, and they were happy, or at least as happy as one could realistically be.
Tommy always felt bad for his friends. Freppa with his dad who walked out and his mom who went through a man a month, and Määnin with his dead mom and his dad who sometimes drank so much he forgot his own name. They were his best friends, his bandmates, but their lives were messed up compared to his. Tommy had two parents who loved him. Or at least two parents who were there. There was always food on the table, always someone who could give him a ride if he needed one. His dad would teach him about cars, and his mom would dance with him to old rock songs in the kitchen. Sure, if he had examined it closer, he probably would have noticed how forced all of those interactions felt, he would have seen how they sometimes looked at him like he was some kind of home invader, like they were wondering how he got there. Both of his parents spent their time staring out of the window, dreaming they were somewhere else, somewhere without him, but that was okay. They still hugged him, they still told him they loved him and listened to him talk. Really, his life was perfect. For a while.
It all started to fall apart when he was ten. He and his mom had been to Vasa to visit his grandma, but his dad had stayed behind. Tommy's dad never came with them to Vasa. He hated Tommy’s grandma, and she hated him. Grandma always said that he had ruined her daughter's life, and Dad always said that Grandma was a stuck-up bitch, it had been like that for as long as Tommy could remember. At the time, he didn’t realise why his dad had ruined his mom's life, he just thought she meant making her move to Vörå. Grandma hated Vörå, because she had bad taste.
Anyway, he was avoiding the point. The point was that when he and his mom came home from that trip, they were met with the sight of a strange woman and his dad on the couch. They had gotten home early after his mom and grandma had a fight, so maybe that was why his dad seemed so startled to see them. That had been a breaking point, and his parents stopped pretending after that.
Before they were at least trying, it wasn’t perfect, but it was something. Tommy always knew his parents didn’t love each other, he realised that young. They fought constantly, and they never had a kind word to say about each other, but he didn’t think that mattered. Who needs love? They were still happy. After that, they were not. His parents stopped talking, only communicating through screaming matches that kept him up at night.
They managed to stick it out for three more years, but when he was thirteen, they got divorced, too tired to pretend anymore. He woke up one morning to the sight of packed bags in the hallway, and the news that his dad had gotten a job as a guitarist and backup singer for a famous artist, and that he was leaving today. No one bothered to tell Tommy, no one tried to warn him. One day, he had a family, the next he didn’t.
Okay, maybe that was overly dramatic. It wasn’t like it all ended immediately. His dad would still call and visit when he could, which wasn’t often, but it did happen, and he still had his mom. His mom, who started working more and smiling less. She picked up more shifts, and then she went out after them, leaving Tommy alone most evenings. Which was fine, he wasn’t a kid anymore, he was a teenager, old enough to look after himself. His mom had been a teenager when she had him; teenagers were basically adults. Besides, it wasn’t fair that his mother never got to do any partying when she was younger, she was just catching up on lost time now that Tommy wasn’t a helpless kid anymore.
And it wasn’t like she was gone completely, at least not at first. It didn’t happen all at once. At first, they’d still have dinner together, and they’d try to talk, but eventually the dinners turned silent, and then they stopped happening. First, they still watched movies together, occasionally making comments, then they stopped. He couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment he and his mom stopped talking to each other; it just sort of happened. Maybe it was around the same time his dad stopped calling. She was still there, in a sense. They never talked, not really, and they definitely didn’t laugh together anymore, but they still existed in the same space. And Tommy was fine with being alone. He was fine with the big, empty house. He was doing great.
In his parents' absence, Tommy learned to take care of himself. He became the loudest person in every room He wasn’t some child you could push around, he was a grown man, he was confident. Tommy Tall strolled into a room like he owned it. He went to parties where he drank too much, he drove his moped too fast, and he never shut up. Tommy Tall did not think about his quiet, empty house, he was too busy living his best life. He didn’t cry when he crashed his moped and broke his ribs, he did not care when his teachers complained about his “troublesome” behaviour. When his parents forgot his birthday, he did not complain; he just partied even harder with Määnin when he showed up. Tommy was unshakable. Tommy was a god.
Of course that wasn’t really true. He wasn’t really untouchable, he wasn’t like Määnin. Määnin, the toughest man in all of Vörå. Nothing ever got to him, he was everything Tommy pretended to be. Määnin didn’t have to excuse himself to go hyperventilate in bathroom stalls, Määnin didn’t lose sleep because the stillness of his house pressed down on him like a physical weight, Määnin was perfect. Together, they were a force to be reckoned with. No one could drink as much as them, no one could fight like them, or party as hard. Without Freppa, they probably wouldn’t have made it to adulthood. Tommy did have moments, when he was lying half passed out in a ditch somewhere with Määnin right next to him, where he did wonder if maybe Määnin was just as broken as he was, that maybe they were both compensating for something, but he always dismissed the thought. They were both perfect, two legends in the making.
When Tommy's mom announced she was moving to Vasa, he did not flinch, he just calmly explained that he would be staying in Vörå. It was a long time coming, she always hated living in a small town. Tommy was surprised she’d stuck around for as long as she had. He was freshly 18, so him staying shouldn’t be an issue, it's not like he’d been seeing much of his mom lately anyway. The only problem was that her leaving meant losing the house. It was fine, he could sleep in the car. It was an old, beat-up thing, and Tommy was surprised every time it actually started, but he couldn’t afford a new one. It was the only real thing his dad had left him, handing him the keys as he walked out that faithful day. He remembers them working on it together, back when Tommy still had a family, and the moment he’d turned 18, he’d started using it. Now it housed all of his belongings, clothes packed into bags, important documents stuffed into a backpack.
The goodbye had been weird. His mom had asked him if he was sure he wanted to stay, and he insisted. Vörå was his home, even if it wasn’t hers. They had hugged. One final short, stiff hug, before she took off. She had promised she’d call, Tommy knew she wouldn’t. Honestly, he should have expected anything different. A marriage based on a one-night stand gone wrong between a teenager and a 21-year-old was never meant to last. His parents had tired, he knew that, but his mom was just a girl who wanted nothing more than to party, and his dad was just a guy who wanted to be a rock star; a kid could never fit into that life. It was always going to end like this, his parents had tried to hold out for as long as they could, and Tommy was grateful for the time he got. But now he was here, 18 years old with no family and no home, and he was fine.