Here's my entry for Mrs Bella Riddle's Flowers challenge on The Dark Lord's Most Faithful Forum.
Flowers
You have to write a fic that features a flower; metaphoric or an actual flower it does not matter it must just feature. Extra points for symbolism.
He held the flowers tight in his clammy palm. Standing there in the middle of the great, orderly white room – everybody swept past him looking busy or purposeful, and he felt completely out of place.
Bed after bed occupied the whole space, with people lying down staring into thin air. They floated there from another world, and no word he uttered could possibly reach them. Yet he walked forward like a golem, holding the flowers, pretty and perishable.
He forced a singularly painful smile on the rigid edges of his mouth. The woman he faced did not look at him. She held a tiny piece of paper, folding, then unfolding it slowly with shaky fingers, thoroughly concentrated. Her whole world lay there in the creases she smoothed over and then those she created, wrinkling the paper again and again, until it almost tore under her ministrations. Neville swallowed.
"Mum, it's me," he croaked, failing at softness as his dry throat gave way. She barely glanced up, busy with her tiny, careful, senseless work. Tentatively, he reached out and placed the bouquet in her line of sight. She blinked, peeking briefly towards his face. Her mouth opened, and she seemed dazzled for a minute, wondering. Then the moment passed and her focus slipped. She looked down, at her lap and the piece of paper there. She pushed it away.
"Neville." He spoke his own name slowly and precisely. "It's Neville, mum." One more time he hoped, and one more time it was crushed down. Alice picked at her fingernails now, frowning unhappily. She was thin and fragile and confused, but he knew he must control the urge of wrapping his arms around her, for she would stiffen and wriggle free, frightened at the foreign touch. Foreign. He brooded on the word bitterly. He was foreign to her and she was foreign to everything. Torn away, torn apart, snapped from the universe like a thin thread, the fine precious chain to which hung a lovely jewel. Her mind was shattered, her mind floated, hovered, dislocated. Old, familiar hatred seared alive again from the very pit of him.
"Happy mother's day, mum," he told her. But she knew not what day it was and she knew not she had a son. He dropped the flowers in a vase, on her bedside table. They would wither and die, and she would carry on, untouched.