A/N: Little Red Riding Hood. As an anorexic with multiple personalities who rooms with a guy with anger management issues and a tattoo. No, I don't know what I was thinking either, but there you go. Please enjoy.

red

Red wakes up in a white room.

She wants to throw up first, get her bearings second, but she clenches her stomach and lets the colored swirls press in on her eyelids and holds still, and the nausea passes.

Red's gotten good at that—letting the nausea pass, letting her stomach clench in on itself, until her skin was translucent and her shoulder blades poked out of her back like the folded wings of the baby birds she would find in the park, they were so tiny and so small, little fragile things—very good, because practice makes perfect, yes?

(No.)

When the room stops spinning, she looks around, and discovers that she was indeed correct: this room is very white, sort of like how light is all one color, but when you put it in front of a crystal it fractures, just like her mind, they tell her, it is all broken and in pieces. They think that's the reason she did it, her fractured white-light mind, that's why she didn't eat for days and days and days until she fell to the floor.

She thinks that she must have looked like the baby bird then, all broken and fragile on the ground, her shoulder-wings sticking out, just like that.

By the fifth day, Red has tried thirteen times to take the IV out of her arm. Each time, the alarm ringringrings and the burly nurse comes in with a needles that pokes into her arm, through her translucent glass skin, and the room swirls and dances before her eyes.

(Then she sleeps like the dead.)

Upon waking up after attempt seventeen, she finds herself looking at the bed—no, not the bed, the beds are boring and white, white, white, just like everything else—at the person in the bed, because this is something interesting. Her mother always said that she was easily distracted—she is, but that isn't the point right now, because there is a boy, and he is here, with crazy broken fractured Red.

So naturally, she gets out of bed, dragging the IV with her, and leans over until her dark long tangled hair brushes over his face so that he will wake up.

Red really doesn't know why he was so startled. After all, he's in a hospital, he must have seen crazy-girl over in that bed to the left, and it really is sane to want to talk to people, right?

(Perhaps.)

After her attempt to take back her wrist—he has a really strong grip, one that clenches, with fingernails digging into the glass skin of her baby bird wrists—that fails, she smiles.

I'm Red. Who are you?

His name is Wolf. She likes that, how he has a name that is just like him, with his muscles and the huge tattoo that stretches itself across his chest—she thinks that someday the wolf will come off his chest and prowl through the room and eat her up until there's nothing left of her white-light mind, and she likes that.

Red sits on Wolf's bed, swinging her legs, babbling: I like you. You don't have a mind like mine—you know how white light fractures when it goes through something, how it splits and splits into a billion different colors? That's my brain, all broken and crazy. But you have just one color. I think it's red.

Wolf frowns: A red mind?

Red nods: Yes. A moment passes; she hums a nursery rhyme. Where are we going, Wolf?

Another pause, as he tries to understand what this crazy-girl wants to hear: We aren't going anywhere, Red. We have to stay here.

But this place needs a name. She pouts, running her fingers along his arm.

What do you want to call it?

Once again, as she stares at the ceiling, she realizes how very white this place is. Then she turns back, her face splitting into a lopsided grin—Wolf tells her that he likes that smile, not that it means he knows her mood will change—and she jumps up.

We should call it Grandmother's house, you know, like to Grandmother's house we go, and how the girl has to go to her grandmother's; that should be it's name, don't you think?

Red spins around, and the white hospital gown billows out and surrounds her.

There is a place in Red's white light mind, a special place that she goes to when she can't stay outside anymore, when she just needs to go in, further than the inside of the inside.

Red will stay there for hours, walking around and round in the cool dark forest in the back of her head, peeking around trees and humming songs. She floats above the world, moving and talking, but not really seeing, not really hearing. A marionette, she thinks, that's all she is, just a little puppet with cut strings and the puppeteer off in crazy-land so there's nobody left to show her where to go.

A question is proposed to the trees: Am I going crazy?

(Perhaps.)

She keeps going back to the forest, away from her white-light mind and her puppet body, trying to find the way through the woods to the other side. Every time she stops floating, Wolf is staring at her, and once, she asked what he sees.

He tells her that she has empty eyes.

One day, Wolf disappears.

She wakes up in the morning, and he is gone, gone away, his bed empty – no, just full of all that white again. Screaming and pleading doesn't work, and the burly nurse just injects her while shaking his head, telling her that he doesn't know where Wolf's gone – you're lying, she babbles, you have to be lying – and her puppet body collapses to the floor.

Her forest is cool, and calming, and she spins there, lets the wind surround her. There is only darkness, and stillness, and her fractured broken mind is too far away for her to see.

But the voices keep pulling her back, keep dragging her up again and again. She begins to hate them, begins to use her translucent hands and baby-bird limbs to punch and kick and tear, because why can't she stay in her forest, why can't they just leave her be?

(You have to wake up, Red.)

She wakes up less and less, tries to pull out the IV and make the food disappear while her stomach clenches and knots itself, and without Wolf's red mind, she is shattering to pieces. Grandmother's house is so far away now, so very far away.

(You need to wake up, please Red, please, we can't sleep anymore – )

She doesn't want to wake up - not now, not ever.

Wolf has been out of the hospital for a year now. He's a prime example of the good such a place can do, because he has managed his anger and doesn't fight now, he just needed a little peace, you know.

As a reward, they let him come back to the hospital, just for a visit, just this once.

Red's room is still white, still empty, but there is only one bed now, near the window. She sits in it, glassy-eyed, the IV still in her wrist, and he realizes that her legs are strapped down to the metal frame. When he steps forward, says her name, she doesn't turn to face him, but speaks to the window.

I had a name once, you know, a real one, but I don't remember it anymore. My head's too broken for that, kind of like white light, like when you stick it in front of glass and it fractures.

Wolf steps forward again. Red?

This time she turns, and her eyes light up, just a little. I like your mind. It's just one color, I think, maybe red. That's a good color. Red.

He shakes his head a little, disbelieving, because she doesn't remember, she's too far into her forest for him to find anymore, for anyone to find. She smiles her lopsided smile, and asks him to come a little closer, please.

When she kisses him, she bites his lip, drawing blood. He jolts backwards, hand over mouth, trying to staunch the blood and his eyes widening as she licks her lips, as if considering the taste of him.

Good. I hoped you'd be real.

He steps back again, hands clenching and lip bleeding. The taste of his blood is coppery on his tongue as it fills his mouth. She turns to the window, humming a rhyme silently, something about grandmothers, and he falters.

This room is too white, you know.

FIN

Reviews would be lovely.