Disclaimer: The only thing I own is the story idea and only some of the witty remarks. I own so little; so please don't steal.
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'Somnia
The nightmares start on the ship and make it hard for Jack to sleep. He closes his eyes, his head hits the pillow, and he sees the fire again, and the moving bodies, and the sharp points, and blood. He arrives on land with sunken eyes and protruding ribs; he doesn't eat because he is too tired and he is too hungry and agitated to sleep. His parents rush to embrace him at the port, but he sees them hold back, because he is dirty with the island and they do not want to see him because they send him to the hospital, along with the rest of the boys.
They get their own ward.
Jack gets his own room.
They bandage him and stitch him up and wash the paint and mud off from underneath his fingernails but they cannot get to what really ails him. They can heal his bones and close his sores but he still sees them. He still sees the green tendrils coming out from the darkness to take him, grab his limbs, and drag him into nothingness.
He is fourteen, just on the cusp of fifteen, and he still cries at night because he can't go to sleep.
He spends nights lying awake, wide-eyed because the images won't let him let go, and he has memorized every crack on the ceiling, and none of them resemble a rabbit. No nurse comes in and he does not get a doll house. He does not have eleven friends that file in lines. He can't remember where those lines come from, but he remembers something like that in a story. And a girl with red hair. She had it nice.
Instead, he gets a room with water spots, dark and brown on the ceiling; he gets a doctor that comes in sometimes and tries to make him take some sleeping pills but he cannot seem to swallow them even with water – he chokes on their shape and the bitterness takes over his mouth; he does not get a magazine, because he saw one and he got flashbacks; his 'friends' do not come in, but he sees Ralph sometimes, walking down the hall with a nurse. His hair is shorter, and he is better off than he is. Jack thinks he always knew Ralph was better off than he was. He sees Roger sometimes, in a wheelchair, slumped and defeated. Maybe one time the two boys passing by were the twins. Jack doesn't think he remembers anymore.
He doesn't have it nice.
Sleeplessness gives him hallucinations. He has learned not to call out anymore, because they don't exist. The first were crawling tentacles, purple and black, that poked at him from either side of the bed. The second are maggots on his hands that he cannot remove even how hard he claps his hands. His eyes are heavy but when he closes his eyes he must open them again.
He cries to himself, but never to sleep.
Jack fears. He fears never being able to sleep again. He fears his parents will stop visiting every other day. He fears he will never leave the hospital. He fears he will never recover. He fears he will go crazy. The fears cycle in his head and make it impossible for him to think of anything else. On the rare occasions he can free himself, he is an empty shell. A nurse dropped a ceramic cup near his bed and he screamed.
He thinks he didn't feel this way on the island because he was doing it to survive, and when the survival instinct is gone, he can't find what he used to have.
The hallucinations are getting realer and realer. On some days, he thinks he sees a boy with black hair standing at his door, barefoot with a blue hospital gown. His eyes are hazy, but he thinks he remembers the face from choir. He laughs one time, and the boy disappears. Jack tries to stop, but he can't until his breaths come in hiccupping gasps and he wants to sleep, but he can't.
It is one-fifty-five in the morning and Jack can't sleep.
The light glow from the hallway outside the ward is the only thing Jack can see right now. The curtains are closed and the dim parking lot lights can't get through. He might be afraid, but he hears doctors outside, and nurses, and gurneys. He hasn't left this bed in weeks, he figures. He has seen snatches of the other boys, but never longer than a few seconds.
The boy with black hair appears at the door again. He is a bit a distance away and his eyes look like black voids in his face. Jack feels the fear choke him, but he doesn't call out. It isn't real. The boy leaves the doorway and walks over to the bed, and his shoulders barely reach the side of the bed. Jack watches, because his eyes are trained to follow movement. They are no longer black voids, but they are not filled with stars either.
"Simon," Jack croaks. The boy says nothing, only stares at him. There is a thick white bandage covering one side of his face. There is a thick scar down the side of his face, reaching down his neck and below the collar of the hospital gown. I struck him there, Jack knows for sure. He wants to reach out to touch it, but it isn't real. He sees red slashes all across the boy's – the dream's – arms, and he can't see it, but he's sure his legs are the same. How much of Simon's blood did he wash off his own hands? Has he gotten it all off?
The boy's hands appear, reaching over the bed. Jack thinks, for a second, He's going to strangle me, and he feels a slow yet firm grip on his neck. He sees it in his mind's eye: the boy is on tiptoes to reach, his small hands trying to squeeze the life out of him. Jack lets out a bark-like laugh. How perfect to die this way. The boy never constricts the air out of his lungs, and after a thought, the hands appear back at his sides. The figure walks away from the bed, to the doorway, and into the hall.
Jack speaks to the nurse for the first time, and she jumps when he talks as she's checking his stats. "Is there a boy here?"
"Yes," she says, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, looking matronly in white but irritated like a teenager not yet reached adulthood. "There are many."
"With dark hair," Jack says, the ceiling refusing to reveal its secrets. "Small. Sings."
The nurse stares at him.
"I'm crazy, aren't I?" Jack asks, and finds humor in this. He closes his eyes and drifts off into a dreamless sleep.
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The doctor has a stethoscope that is cold whenever he presses it to Jack's chest. Jack doesn't really get it. Why does the doctor have to keep checking that he is still breathing and his heart is still beating? He's here, isn't he? A couple hours of sleep will do that to you. "You're starting your path to recovery," he says.
"Slow start," Jack says. The doctor looks at him. The faculty here are treating him like he has never spoken before – which, he guesses, he hasn't since he's been admitted. They act as if they say or do anything, he will stop and break and they won't be able to put him back together. Someone will have to do it; he can't get the lid off the glue, much less slide the pieces back together.
One day, Jack sits up, and he feels his spine. He's known its existence, but when he pulls himself up, he feels his muscles and his bones snap into place. His backbone; he reaches a hand back and feels it. It sticks out from his body. Suddenly he is aware he is hungry. He calls the nurse and she gives him the hospital food.
When she leaves with the dirty dishes, he wants to get out of the room. He has been recycling the air he is breathing. He wants to have something new. His legs still work. He swings them over the edge and he lowers himself gently to the floor. Jack tests his weight, and gravity overwhelms him and he lies in a heap on the ground.
The ceiling looks different from the ground. It is cold and refreshing, different from the starchy, stiff sheets. Jack feels he needs a bath. Sponge baths aren't the same.
The boy appears at the doorway again, except it doesn't stand there. It looks in, and rushes to his side. Jack blinks slowly. Simon's face; it's there, in all its heavily scarred glory. He feels a calloused hand on his face – it's real and solid.
"Did you come back?" he finds himself asking. Stupid question.
"I never left," Simon says. He kneels next to Jack and strokes his hair, like the way his mother does whenever she visits. She just sits there and strokes his hair, sometimes quietly, sometimes whispering prayers. How long has it been since he last sang? Does his voice still work? He probably can't reach C-sharp anymore.
The sun from the windows glares into his face and he sees something white and glowing behind Simon, but it can't be wings, because he is in a hospital and he isn't dead. If he were dead, the ground would not be hard against his bum. Heaven is no place for him. He is suddenly struck with the fact that the comforting hand on his head is gone. The next moment, the doctor and two nurses rush into the room and carry him back to the bed.
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"Where's Piggy?" Jack calls when he sees Ralph wander past his door. The blonde boy doubles back and looks into the room. He looks relatively well. He has something wrapped around his arm.
Ralph doesn't look like he knows who he is.
"Where is he?" Jack asks, hoping frantically that this is Ralph and not a random boy he summoned. It's Ralph, isn't it? He knows a Ralph, doesn't he? He has been sleeping, he knows, but he still has bags under his eyes. The dreams are still there, but they come and go, like a flashing pain. He hopes they ebb away.
Jack is going to ask again, but Ralph answers. "He's dead, Jack. You killed him."
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He knows Piggy is dead. He knows it as well as he knows that without taking the orange pills they give him, the pain that shoots up in his left leg is going to kill him. One time, he defies them and hides the tablets under his pillow. In less than an hour, he struggles to reach the water jug because if he doesn't swallow those damn pills, he is going to have to cut off his leg, it hurts so damn much.
He knows Piggy is dead, because he knows no one can recover from that sort of head injury.
But he also knows Simon is dead. Isn't he?
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Eventually, with a combination of sleep and food, in intertwined intervals, Jack can stand up without falling. His incompetent body remembers how to walk. He waits until the nurse in charge goes away before he leaves his bed and wanders the ward, like Ralph has been prone to doing.
He discovers that Ralph's room is empty. The boy has been discharged.
The twins are also gone.
Roger has been transferred to the psyche ward. But his friend is not crazy, Jack knows, as his feet hit the floor. Roger was never crazy. He was only doing it to survive. These doctors and nurses would do the same in his position. They would also sharpen sticks. They would also try to destroy the things they decided were threats to their existence. In the end, it was just about defense and running away from sudden death.
He needs to get out and stop being so philosophical.
He reaches a room that is not empty. There is a single bed, and in it, a single boy. The body is still and asleep. Jack looks down the hallway and goes inside. There is a file at the end of the bed, and he glances at it, the letters Sim peeping up at him with the rest of the words disappearing past the manila folder.
The boy had black hair and scars, and sleeps like he's been doing it for years. Jack watches him, the calm breathing.
He's killed this boy before. Before the island, on the island, after the island. Over and over. For the faints, for his voice, for his insecurities. He thinks he is old enough to stop killing others. At least, he really, really wants to believe he is.
Now he understands; Simon has been his dream catcher. He has come again to siphon the darkness away. He is indeed a Christ figure. Jack wonders if he is delusional. He watches the boy for what seems like hours before a nurse comes to take him back to his room. Simon does not wake up once.
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"Now," says the man with the various framed degrees on his walls and a lumpy couch, "how does that make you feel?"
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Jack stands in the empty room for a long time. Longer than he did for his own room; because he knows every nook of his own room. He does not breathe the stale, depreciating air. He is still worthless, but that does not mean he has to stay that way. He is still unforgiven, but there is nothing he can do about that. He still has yet to meet with Pygmalion's parents, but he is still running. The doctors pronounced him completely cured.
He has a long way to go.
The nurse who is there to escort him to the waiting room to his parents stops at the door. Jack glances at her, then back at the bed, the sheets fresh and clean enough for him to see his reflection of gangly red hair and blue jeans in. She watches him watch the bed before speaking.
"He's moving, you know." She lets it sink in. "His parents want a change of scenery."
"Where is he going?" Jack asks. Maybe through him, Jack can know where he himself is going too.
"He requested not to disclose that information from anyone in this ward," the nurse said. "His parents thought it best." She stands there for a minute more. "Come along, now."
Jack stands in the room. He does not dream now. He does not think he will ever dream again. The island has stolen his dreams. Every single one.
He thinks he might be happy about that.
Jack Merridew turns around and leaves.
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Note: I was wondering, would any of you be interested in a fan-made soundtrack of my AUs? Thanks for reading.