Too many people keep talking about this possibility (one person here on this site, and another one of my friends on msn), and I don't want to do homework, so this was born.
Written really quickly (I timed one hour), and ... well, let's just say the sporadic grammar in the fic is on purpose. It's sad how easily it comes to me.
Natsume Yuujinchou Shi should be coming to an end soon, shouldn't it? I'll watch it all in one go later. It's bound to generate plot bunnies. San created five fics on its own.
Also, yay, shortest fic to date.
White Noise
The walls were white. White. Snow. Blizzard. Dancing snowflakes. Dancing foxfires that flickered through the dark forest—
No, he shook his head, those weren't real. Those had never been real.
What was real was what was logical.
(It wasn't what he could touch, because he'd been knocked over by imaginary beings before. It had hurt. Everyone just commented on how clumsy he was. They said he had "suicidal intentions" and that he needed to be kept under close watch.)
Logical meant what made sense. Buildings, people, cats, dogs, birds, trees, clouds, skies, lakes. His hands. His reflection in a mirror.
He could see his veins if he stared just so. They stood in stark contrast, blue against white, like markings. Markings like those he'd seen on—
No, don't go there.
Markings, like face paint. They were carved into his hands, too, and he could stare for hours on end at the intricate patterns, twisting this way and that and through and over.
The doctors always said that he should talk about what he saw. They said that, and he at first he obeyed. He didn't want to because even he felt the things he saw were ludicrous. But they were scary, and they were always there, even when he turned away and shut his eyes and counted to ten with all his heart. When he opened them, they were still there.
A "hallucination," they'd said. Visions provided by a troubled mind.
What he was seeing wasn't real.
And they weren't, because how could they be? How could monsters and beasts and humans with too-long limbs and too-sharp teeth exist?
He didn't like the medicine. It tasted bad. The pills choked his throat. But if he didn't eat them, they'd end up down his throat anyways, so it was just a lot easier to just eat them.
He didn't like what they did to him, either. It was like a part of him was missing.
And the visions didn't go away.
Sometimes he'd see foxes with tails too long, twined with strings and bells, chasing each other playfully, and he'd want to join in. He tried once, but that only ended up with him getting a strong lecture from his nurse.
Another time he saw-but-didn't-see a hopping foot. Just that, a foot. And that was when he decided that things that didn't make sense just didn't exist.
They were solid, but they didn't make sense, so they didn't exist. Because if they made sense, everyone else would be seeing them too, and that was what counted.
He was tempted to stop listening to the doctors. The stupid nasty-tasting pills did nothing anyways, but there were eyes on him, so he kept taking them.
He stopped telling the doctors what he saw and he started lying.
He was a very bad liar, but if he tilted his head and looked just so, the adults would think that it was because of the meds. Which was half true, but only half.
They said he was a good patient. If only he didn't see things, if only he didn't have a tendency to throw himself into oncoming traffic or down rivers, or if he just stopped getting injured (but he didn't know why, because the things injuring him weren't real, had never been real).
If only he was normal, he could have had a normal life.
They said he was so young, much too young to be closed in here. Perhaps one day, once he'd shown signs of more improvement, they said, they'd let him out, but only if he kept taking the pills.
A whole life ahead of him, outside the white walls.
He wanted out. He hated white.
It was a white car that had almost hit him, when he was thrown (not "something threw him," because what threw him didn't exist, so passive tense was perfect), a perfect arc through the air like the perfect pitch of an ace pitcher. It was a girl in a white dress, pure and unsoiled and pretty (it must have been new) who called the ambulance and them come.
It was a white _ — just white, the color white, that had appeared in the hospital, and he had started yelling because he was twelve and twelve was an age to be scared of white-shadowed things that shouldn't be there.
So he screamed, and yelled at his "imaginary friend"-monster, and when his parents – his "parents" – came for him, the doctor talked to them and they had a long conversation.
He didn't understand much of that talk. The words were too complicated and it really was very long.
He did understand what happened after, though, because the next day he was moved to a hospital that wasn't the one he'd been staying in. He wasn't going back to his "family." He wasn't surprised. They didn't like him very much.
The only difference now was that this time, he wasn't moving to a new "family." He was going to be "fixed" at a hospital.
Which was all very good and well, because he didn't want to be thrown into oncoming traffic anymore.
Though now, several years later (he'd lost count. He'd have to ask one of the nurses later before he leaves) he wasn't very much fixed.
He was good at chanting "they're not real, they're not real" to himself, though, and that helped more than the drugs did.
Either way, he was leaving, and he'd have to find some way to live on his own, probably. They said that his old "family" had long moved away and because of his age no one could take care of him anymore. Or at least, they could, but he'd have to find them himself.
Prescription in hand, they set him out the door, and they hoped they'd never him again (and he them), but two steps and he almost got sent back immediately.
He would've if he hadn't choked down the hysterical laughter threatening to breach through his throat.
Because the first thing he saw when he turned left from the gate was a white-robed thing that didn't exist.
No Nyanko in this fic, which is too bad because Natsume needs someone to cheer him up.
Then again, this fic's Natsume would probably just freak.
Unlike with Possibilities or Deception, I'm disinclined to write a continuation for this because it's so dang depressing.
Poor Natsume. Nothing in this fic makes sense.