Basically free from the cave wherein Thomas is African American.

Warning: it's more painful.

He pretends he doesn't hear it, how everyone is judging his parents for the name they gave him. The whispers that they don't even bother to hide behind his back.

How dare his parents, to give him this name.

How could they do that? Don't they know what everyone would think?
And honestly, he can understand them.

Why would his parents name him after a slaver when their grandparents were still born into slavery? On the downside of it, in case that wasn't completely obvious.

Thomas is only six and yet people expect him to have surpassed the man who had that name before, as if he is an insult to the name otherwise or something.

Thomas doesn't like the man. The double standards and the hypocrisy are too much for him to handle, among other things. He can't stand the man and he can't stand his name.

His parents don't even have a proper response when he asks them. It's clear as day that they have no idea themselves.

Thomas's memories return on his seventh birthday and in a way it's good that he is alone, because there is no party to postpone when he is sick.

He had actually been that other Thomas Jefferson before. And yes, he had done some pretty amazing things. That. however, didn't mean that the other things he had done were excused by that.

He had had slaves. And what he had done to Sally Hemmings, his late wife's half-sister who looks eerily like his mother does this time around, was more horrible than that.

Thomas—he wishes he had some way beside his skin to distance himself, because while that is an obvious distinction, but it is a painful one—can't even think of that without feeling the vomit rise to his throat.

How could he have justified the terror on her face? He knows how, but, well, how?

Thomas—it's really sad that it needs him being black to recognize them as equal value, isn't it—stays home for a full week of school. He can only bring himself to move to go to the bathroom and even that seems only barely worth it sometimes.

His parents, they don't actually know the full story. They only saw him sick and didn't consider for a second that he may have something other than a sickness. They can't afford to go to the doctor and their home remedies and over the counter meds don't change anything.

And in a way, he is grateful for that.

He doesn't think he would be able to handle the questioning him about his last life. They may not know why they named him as they did, but they did and that means they'll want to question him about the thing he hates himself for. No, thank you, he very much does not need that.

And that is if they even believe him, because really, why would they? He has never heard of anyone remembering a first life, so why should anyone think a seven-year-old African American is saying the truth when he claims to have been someone famous and very much white?

His situation is shitty—he's technically in his nineties, he can say all the things he wants to—enough by its own. Thomas—how he yearns for another name now—does not need his parents' comments as well.

He doesn't think he can continue like this. He doesn't want to continue like this.

So he sneaks out of the apartment and into the garden, even if he's not sure how he escaped his mother's hearing.

He climbs the ladder to the treehouse of the apartment complex. It is the highest tree he has seen pretty much ever.

And he jumps.

He found by the people heading out for work the next morning. He's not conscious, but he is still breathing, if only barely.

He's not quite dead, so his parents take him to the hospital, ready to pay any debt they may have, just for him to live.

The doctors in the white hospital—the closer one—doesn't accept him—even if there are a couple of nurses that probably would have argued had they stayed there any longer—and by the time they arrive at the other one, it is too late.

Thomas dies with a smile, which only breaks his mother's heart a little bit more.

When Martha and George look into whether or not Thomas is around again, they are quickly disappointed.

He had been around, but he had been alone and unable to cope with his memories.

Martha looked at George. "We can't let that happen again."

George sighed. "I know."

And? Did it feel familiar only more heartbreaking? Because I literally copied the original and changed what didn't fit after the first few lines.