Thread Gabel - D8 - FIN

He doesn’t even know what to make of his life anymore.

Stitch was his whole world, and now he was gone, something that he didn’t think would happen. He had made it all the way to the finale, but the amount of fire that came crashing down on him was enough to steal him from the world of the living, and all Thread could do was watch.

It crushed him, but the sight of his mother was enough for him to realize that she felt remorse too. The moment Stitch feel was the moment she turned off the TV.

She really thought that he was going to come home as well, and that excited her, not because she thought that he deserved it, but because the amount of money and fame he was going to bring home to the household. She put a lot of faith in him coming home, and watched the games almost religiously almost tasting the amount of wealth in her mouth.

Little did she know that Stitch had every intention of leaving the house if he came home

Before the reaping, he told Thread that the moment he went into the games, he was going to fight to win, and that if he did, he would bid this family a farewell as he set out on an adventure that involved him finding something else to live for. When he thought no one was looking, Thread saw Stitch pack a bag and stash it near the tree that he cared for more than anyone else in the district.

When he went off to the justice building, Thread went to inspect that bag, and in it he found various items that led him to believe that Stitch had every intention of leaving whether he was reaped or not.

Thread didn’t know how to react, but he grabbed the bag from the spot it was hidden in and brought it back home. He hid it in his room, covering it up under towers of fabric that his mother deemed too ugly to use for her work. If Stitch would have come home, he was going to have to take Thread with him if he wanted to run away.

He too knew that his mother was a lost hope, and as much as he wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, she got worse as time went on.

Their mother was nothing but relentless and pure evil, and Stitch had every right to hate her, just like Thread did as well.

---

However, after the loss of Stitch, she seemed to change her attitude just a bit. Instead of trying to focus on Thread becoming what he could never be, she simply took on more work keep herself busy.

The more busy she kept herself, the less she thought about Stitch, which gave Thread a chance to live a life that was a little more open.

He was able to go out more, which meant that he was able to experience the district in a way that he never thought he would be able too. And while he and Stitch both shared a proclivity for sewing and knitting, his mother didn’t make him work as hard as she made Stitch. She didn’t demand that he make as many garments as Stitch had too. Thread was even allowed to come and go as he pleased, regardless if he had met a quota that she had given him based on how behind in sales they were in.

It all didn’t make sense to Thread at first, but months before she started to relax, she noticed that her attitude quickly changed. She went from a tyrant to a woman who seemed to regret everything she had ever done in her life.

Thread thought it was because Stitch not being there was important, and he would have been right, until he found Stitch’s bloody scarf on the table one day. It had been wet and smelled of salt. She had been crying into it, which meant that the victor of the games must have returned it to her. Thread wished he could have seen what had gone down, regretting his choice to go out that day.

After that day, his mother changed, and so did Thread.

Thread was able to earn freedom that he didn’t know he could have, and as thankful as he was for that, he still missed Stitch more than he wanted to admit.

He needed to figure out how he was going to heal from such a hard blow to his life, and at first, Thread thought that throwing away Stitch’s things was a good start, however, whenever he tried to toss them out, he would find them back where they had belonged the next. He realized that his mother was finding and keeping whatever went missing, which made it hard for Thread to forget about the brother he cared about so much.

---

He realized quickly that letting go of him was never going to happen, because he was always told that he was the spitting image of him, something that he would try to deny as much as he could, but his mother would always remind him.

He grew to resent her every time she even mentioned his name, and while Thread knew that letting go of his brother was probably not the right thing to do, but he didn’t know how to cope with the awful things that happened to him. He wished he could have burned the world down, just like the world had burned his brother down. However, he found a way to scatter the thoughts of strife and grief by simply throwing himself into his work.

He became exactly like his mother in a way, he worked tirelessly for hours on end until he had made so many garments that he had no clue what to do with them.

Sometimes he would find his mother working out by the tree that Stitch called his second home, and there were times that he would join her.

He realized that his mother changed for the better finally.

Maybe this was his chance to change as well.

Maybe now they could be an actual family that didn’t wish each other to die gristly deaths.

Because Stitch had already done the suffering for them.