Ahaha... well, um... yeah I have no excuse for this one. I started writing it earlier yesterday, then TCM: A New Beginning was on last night... so I got inspired to finish it. My mom refused to stay up till midnight to watch it with me, so I viewed Tommy's chainsaw by myself. Missed the first 15 minutes though, which was what I REALLY wanted to see because it explained Tommy's earlier life. Like his childhood and all. :( Oh well, some is better than none I suppose.

All the info about Thomas was taken from the Leatherface page on Wikipedia, as it states. Not lying about it. XD He WAS diagnosed with neurodegeneration, which is brain cell death, at age 12, and also has a skin disease. As everyone probably knows, but I'm explaining a bit. They neglected, however, to tell us which specific disorders he had. So Maya is trying to figure it out.

Enjoy and review!

On the surface, Maya Kelly was a normal woman. She was a quiet person, kept to herself, didn't go above or beyond the call of her duty. She was a fairly respected neurologist; her days were spent diagnosing patients and then sending them to the guy who worked the MRI machine. She didn't usually visit them, but if a case interested her enough she might venture down the hospital wing to see how they'd made out.

Nobody would expect it from her, but her squared glasses hid a secret. A dark secret it was: she was a total horror movie junkie. Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street (either version would work, but she preferred Robert Englund playing Freddy Krueger to anyone else), Hellraiser, Halloween, Silence of the Lambs, the Child's Play movies, The Birds, The Thing, Psycho, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Children of the Corn, Candyman, all of the Saw films, The Ring, Dracula, and any of the Goosebumps series that had been made into specials. Yep, Cartoon Network was good for something, at least.

But although she loved all of these movies, and more, there was one she loved above all the others. Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Of course she respected the classic one, the first, but her favorites and the ones she loved most were the 2003 remake and the 2006 prequel. She felt the first movie, as well as most of the others, hadn't gone far enough into Leatherface's past. None of the other films had given him a proper name, or delved into why he was... well, how he was. Why he wore the mask, why he was afraid of new people, why Luda Mae was so protective of him, why Hoyt was an asshole.

... Okay, well, that question still hadn't been answered. But there was progress in this remake movie and its prequel.

Lord knew how many times she'd watched them. She stayed awake on weekends, her eyes glued to the screen. When it ended, she'd hurry and pop the prequel in, then continued the cycle. She always had her notebook on her lap, and she never tore her eyes away from the movies except to write in her book.

That notebook, in fact, was the very reason she lived. She had written on the front, quite plainly, Leatherface Study. First of all, so nobody would go sticking their noses into it. It was her business and her business alone. Nobody else needed to know what was in there. Second, that was exactly what it was.

She was analyzing Thomas Brown Hewitt, right down to every last detail. Every move, every expression, every sound he'd ever made and every kill he'd ever accomplished. Every mask he'd ever worn, every weapon he'd ever wielded, every look in his eyes.

Spare time after work brought more research on Tommy. She hit the internet, reading everything she could get her hands on about him. She scrutinized the remake section of the "Leatherface" article on Wikipedia, using that site as her starting point. Then she expanded her horizons, searching for the official Texas Chainsaw Massacre Wiki. After all, who in the world would lie about Leatherface, especially the Thomas Brown Hewitt version?

Disappointed by the lack of content on the official Wiki and on other pages on the net, she simply copied down the information from the actual Wikipedia page. Born with a deformity, Thomas was also mentally retarded. She became intrigued when she read that a doctor had, at one point, diagnosed Thomas with neurodegenration. As it was her profession, she looked through every medical book she could get her hands on about neurodegeneration, as well as sifting through her own experiences.

What type of neurodegeneration did he have? None of the websites she searched on were that specific. "Neurodegeneration" was just an umbrella term for dozens of types of cell death in the brain. Nothing she found ever stated which disease Thomas had; she didn't even know what his skin disease was called. Each of the two disorders could be anything.

She was sitting up again this Friday night, surrounded by textbooks and notes she planned on adding to her Leatherface Study notebook later. She had the soundtrack from TCM: A New Beginning playing in the background as she studied.

"Definitely not Alzheimer's," she mumbled, yawning and turning the page. She crossed that off her list of possible diagnoses. "He's too young - he can't be in his forties, and even that's a little young for Alzheimer's. If he was born in 1939, and all this happened in the 1960s... he'd have to be in his early- to mid-twenties. Twenty-five, twenty-six? Well, maybe he's almost thirty. They say the stuff in Beginning happened in 1969, but the tech doesn't seem as advanced. He's gotta be younger than thirty, even if just a few years. Symptoms don't fit anyway, and I doubt Sloane was a carrier, if it was early-onset."

She swiveled her neck to look at the other book, where she was doing her research on his skin condition. "Psoriasis?" she scoffed incredulously. "As if. None of the types fit." She scratched those off the list and briskly flipped the page. "He doesn't have the white parts present in plaque psoriasis. Erythrodermic psoriasis would make him itch, and it's usually fatal so he'd be dead by now. Any type of pustular psoriasis, and we'd see oozing. Ah... inverse psoriasis, they couldn't show us where most of that would be. And guttate psoriasis... well, that wouldn't show up on his face." She crossed out that one too.

She looked over at her other book. "Parkinson's? No way, that's another one that affects the elderly. Tommy's definitely not in his fifties. Even if he's almost thirty, cases like that are way too rare to even be considered. Not to mention his walk is relatively normal... well, except for the one time he tripped chasing Erin. Poor guy cut himself with his own chainsaw! Ah..." She swept a line through that diagnosis.

She went back to the book on skin diseases. "Dermatitis? Well, I suppose it's possible. It's unlikely though. Contact dermatitis would mean he'd have to be exposed to an allergen, and once he wasn't around it anymore the marks ought to clear up. But they're always there. Eczema's possible, but that tends to flare up. Tommy's is always the same. Rosacea is more common in children and women, Tommy's not either. Herpetiformis only happens with celiac, which he doesn't have. And... atopic is more in low humidity, and Texas is hot as hell. And seborrheic... occurs in people with AIDS, and I don't think... Tommy's..."

She laid her head down, yawning again, twice this time. "Huntington's...? A connective tissue disorder...? ALS...? Fordyce's spots...?"

The song switched and Maya's head fell forward a little more. Her arms were now spread out in front of her on the table, one hand resting on a skewed stack of textbooks, the other clutching her Leatherface Study notebook.

"I just wanna..." she mumbled, her glasses being pushed up a bit on her face as she shifted her head to rest her cheek on the table. "Know Tommy... figure him out... I just wanna know him..."

Little did she realize, she was about to get her wish.

Thanks for reading!

All the information I got came from pages on Wikipedia, soooo... if I get anything wrong, BLAME THEM. :D

If you read, please review! Thank you~ ^^