A series of ragged breaths fill the dark corner of a sterile room, a flower withering as trembling hands clutched at pale sheets.
She's a white canvas, thin paper skin stretched over brittle bones. Rattling lungs and delicate movements, sickly with the vivid vermilion paint of her looming demise.
In her chest beats a defective organ.
In her blood runs defective cells.
Isn't it so strange how something so essential to living so easily turns dead? But she supposes that she'd had it coming for a while now.
Dying, that is.
For certainly, there was no reason left for her to live. It wasn't as if anyone was still waiting for her, any place that would complete the cracks, anything that would quell the howling emptiness. Maybe there never was. As such, this was merely the fate of the forgotten.
At the age of 26, she was suffocating in the silence of an indefinitely permanent hospital room. Or so they say, as if the factor of the unknown would comfort her. But she knows better.
Indefinitely permanent, if she survives the operations
Indefinitely permanent, if her body responds positively.
Indefinitely permanent, if she ever grows strong enough to get out of the bed.
Indefinitely permanent, as in living forever in and out of clinics, strapped to life support, aware that she might drop dead at any moment.
A perpetual tightrope walk.
She was aware, though, that she won't even make it to stage 2. She feels it already, her life, ebbing away like the tide. Sucking her energy out like the leech unto her lifesblood it was.
Her body only gets more and more tired.
Shifting her head to the side, she looked out the window by her bed(the flimsy lace curtains drawn to the sides), down at the city, the bustling people, unaware and uncaring that someone was rotting away with the day. Things look so lively down there. Occasionally, she catches glimpses of police chases or protests, everyone involved in their own lives and own problems. She's gotten use to the sound of ambulances in the night, since moving here for her 'treatment'. Too tired now to keep track of all the harried bodies, she turns her gaze to blurrily regard the small houseplant that sat dainty on the windowsill.
Weakly, her hands lift it up and bring it into her lap, being small and light enough to carry, as she's almost uncomfortably close to the window. She tenderly threads her hands through the musty soil of the pot and rolls the small grains into dust with her fingers-the first time she'd felt earth since she'd been admitted to this place. The facility that promised nothing but the relief of death.
An execution of herself, by herself.
The thick green leaves rest on her palm, baring their thin veins to the world. Motionless yet throbbing with life. Each strand running thousands of microscopic organisms, flowing and rushing, busy with a purpose.
Long after she goes, it'll remain. Staying in it's spot someone to takes her place at the rickety bed- the one that whose spring would poked her in the side of her lower back if she shifted at night-and growing it's stems as its existence continued on, regardless of whether or not she had passed. Maybe even being cherished by the new inhabitant as she once had, their singular companion in this lonely lonely room.
She feels a brief calm, acceptance in that moment, for what will happen to her.
Her nail pierces the plant, half in accident and half from her thoughts, and a small trickle of liquid sluggishly drips out. Full of countless living cells, each working properly, trying their best to help what which they had made.
In that split second, she feels a violent jealousy. It rips at her heart like forest fire and claws its way down to every corner of her body like acid.
It wasn't fair.
This wasn't fair.
The thing was a damn plant! Not even a human! A measly little creature that didn't care about the world around, that didn't understand words or people or actions. It didn't serve a purpose, other than being a nice decoration in a bare room. Why did it get the right to live?! To survive longer than her, who had thoughts and wishes and feelings?! It was shrubbery, doomed to forever sit in this prison until it too passes away-unlike her who could of had the opportunity to walk and move and choose her own life. She could've had friends! Made new family members, eat delicious food, travel to places she'd never gone before. Maybe even own a pet and buy a nice house near the seaside like she had always wanted.
There was so much in this world she hadn't done yet, hadn't experienced.
And yet, here she was. Wasting away, feeling at the end of the line while the world continued on without her.
Was the life of a houseplant more valuable than hers?
Did it ever feel like she did?! Have hope? A future?
Her hands quivered before tightly clutching at the smooth painted styrofoam of the pot. Temporarily indulging in her emotions, she angrily picks it up and braces to throw that flimsy, worthless thing against the hard ground. See it break like her heart, fling it's damn soil onto the walls, and finally bring color to this shitty monotone room. Watching as it was brought to its end with her.
But then, she stops.
The leafy vegetation is carefully returned to it's spot on the windowsill.
Tears burn in her eyes.
She exhaled deeply. It's the afternoon, and the last tendrils of the sun stretch into the sky, like hands grasping for salvation in the face of the endless night.
There's another siren in the distance.
The monitor screamed.
Outside of the room, a doctor arranges a cremation. No living relatives and no friends that needed to be alerted.
The next day, the bed is empty. The sheets are stripped clean, the bottle of water sitting half-empty on the counter is thrown away, and a nurse opens a window in hopes of chasing out the smell of decay.
On it's shelf near the window, the philodendron sways its heart-shaped leaves in the faint breeze.
The midwives whisper like ghosts. A young woman passing through town that evening had decided to take a rest at the inn for the night before promptly entering labor right in the middle of being escorted to her room.
It was a small village, Hanatsuki, that is. Located somewhere remote in the Land of the Frost, it was named after the person that first settled on that small plot of land, or so the folklores say. Some claimed that it was a man, a reverend shi-no-bi from Shimogakure, their hidden village, that had decided to find life outside of his mythical endeavors and live there. Other believed their founder to be a yuki-onna, a snow woman that had fallen in love with a traveler and tricked him into staying(before, eventually, 'dying' herself after her true identity was found out). However, after so many generations of spiraling storytelling, it was hard to know for sure-not that the villagers particularly minded. Due to the size of the small town, everyone knew everybody else fairly well, and the stories were simply stretched and molded to fit whatever situation needed.
The weather in Hanatsuki was mostly unpredictable, as the lived further from the heartland of the country, yet closer to the ocean and the border of Kumogakure. That week had been one of the periods of reprise they got from the frequent snowstorms.
However, due to the place's size, it only held one doctor and two nurses who mostly spent their time in their homes near the borders of town until aid was required.
When help was called for the woman, screaming and crying on the nearest bed, three nearby previous mothers came to assist in her sudden birth while they waited for help.
It was a completely and utterly brutal birth, and by the time the doctor had arrived, the baby had already been delivered and the traveler woman was dead in a pool of her own blood. It was unnaturally swift, faster than any villager, midwife or otherwise, had ever seen before. In the roughly a hour it had taken to call the healer, the unnamed woman pushed out a child with screams that echoed through the village and proceeded to pass away, still profusely bleeding, a wispy voice struggling to convey a name that never left her lips.
(-It would take six hours to wash all of the red out)
Suddenly, there was an orphan child in the room. An infant, newly born. Belonging to no one, belonging nowhere. A small little girl that was born with fluttering lungs and a shallow beating heart.
The doctor gave her a few days to live. A week at most.
But at the end of that week, she was still alive.
And at the end of the next week, she was still alive-(and every morning when the nurses went to check up on her, they'd think she died overnight from her stillness. And every time, they'd lean into the cradle and they see her chest rise faintly and feel the soft breaths of air her mouth would expel).
By the end of the week, with the report declaring her most likely deficient, she shyly opened her eyes, dark lashes gently detangling from each other like a butterfly unfurling its wings for the first time.
In the black of the room, contrasting from her inky tufts of hair and framed by similarly tinted features, her eyes gleamed bright gold.
Wide.
Luminous.
Alert.
"Is it time to check on her again? I'm tentative to say this, but at this point it might as well be a relief if the kid died.." Voices came from outside her isolated room, slowly growing closer. Still blurry and adjusting, her eyes meandered around the room, hearing but still unable to see the approaching nurses. The same ones that always came.
"After all, it would probably put her out of her own misery. And then we could also stop wasting time and resources trying to keep her alive."
Her voice dropped to a whisper.
"I heard that babies born so quick aren't only incapacitated...but also bad luck…"
Another voice retorted, stern with experience and blatantly irked, "Enough tales, Reiko-chan. Regardless of your superstition, as long as the baby's alive, we have to check on her."
Their tones rose back to normal, nearing the girl's room.
"I haven't taken care of my own kids in days because we have to keep constant watch on this brat!" The door slid open, punctuated by the same nurse's fervent cry.
They no longer bothered to do a visual checkover from a distance due to her lack of mobility, but the moment they peered into her crib, both froze in their tracks.
The baby blearily locked eyes with one of them, blinking to try and clear her vision.
Oh yes, the child was still definitely alive. And capable, by the looks of the conscious activity and reactions she had in following the nurses' movements.
It was…(disturbing, creepy, unnatural, inhuman-) strange.
Not really that she had managed to show signs of motor function. Not really that the color of her eyes were a striking juxtapose against the darkness of her hair. Not really her rigid features or the way she seemed to lay oh-so-still.
No, it was the pure awareness.
A lethargic baby that had barely moved for the past weeks was now watching the world around her with a fervid understanding that no bumbling newborn had or should have. When the girl's eyes moved, they moved with a purpose. A reason- coherent words and ideas strung into actual thoughts that weren't born of anything a regular prematurely-born-death-baby did.
It was uncomfortable, and there was only one thing worse than it: the hollowness.
Those sharp amber orbs lacked the glimmering innocence of a child. There was no reassuring sparkle, no joy or lazy curiosity or the bright light of interest, even when it was time to feed(little did they know, she really was curious- she was just tired first).
They were simply...empty.
Like a thick veil, it hung over her eyes, the indifference. Her pupils were endless pits, grabbing and pulling the unfortunate onlooker in with their depths(like the eyes of Matsuoka's dead fish after you look at them for too long).
It was uncomfortable for people to take care of her, and any hopes of finding a foster home for the child was instantly shattered after they took one glance at her face and decided that they didn't want the responsibility or liability that came with raising a 'dead' child.
Rumors of her birth didn't help the matter.
When she was deemed stable enough, the baby was hurriedly sent to the orphanage.
(Meanwhile, at the room that she previous occupied in the house of the younger nurse, lavender was hung up in every corner of the room and salt scattered across the floor so thick that the original flooring could barely be seen. Supersticion deemed it a reliable way of dispelling bad auras and spirits, such as those from hell-)
But then, much to the people around her's chagrin, the freaky child started doing freaky things.
Talking, for one. Not pointless babble, but actually trying to say things when she thought no one was there. Repeating words she heard and practicing the way it twisted foreignly in her mouth.
The first time she heard such focused rambling through the walls of the nursery, the head matron of the very small(as most parentless children were quickly adopted by close friends and relatives before meeting that fate) orphanage had instantly froze in terror and very nearly had an abrupt bowel movement right there on the floor.
After that, the girl was moved to a different room, slightly in fear that she'd infect the other children, slightly because they thought isolating her would stop her eerie actions in some way, but mainly so that the child would be further away from them.
Demon, they started to call her behind her back. Whispering about bizarre behaviors and drawing sticks to take determine who was to care of her that day. No one wanted to get near, and the ones that had too always made sure that fellow workers were there as backup.
At first, she wondered why people acted so strangely around her. At the sudden silence whenever footsteps approached her room and fluttery movements whenever she's bathed. As far as she had known, all she had done was watch the people around her in this new curiosity(-she hadn't died! Or if she did, she was in another life. Another start-another chance-a chance to explore and make friends and learn and be human-). Driven by the encouragement and relief at new life, she found herself wishing to experience it soon, in all of it's supposedly touching moments. Too bad the people around her seemed reluctant to be her friend.
And, as she starts to pick up on the new language, she begins to understand why.
In fact, once one of the younger matrons had actually called her names to her face. A big haughty sneer tearing her lips, thinking she couldn't understand the taunts. But when the woman turned around from grabbing a towel, her eyes zero in on the wide, crazed, and knowing eyes of the wide-awake child. The blood drains from her face, before practically scrambling to get out of the room at a small giggles that follows.
No, she's not a demon.
The devil herself only smiles.
By the time I'm one, I had taught myself to walk.
What else did you expect me to do with all that free time, stuck in that tiny room and confined to my crib? It wasn't as if anyone actually dared to let me outside, fearful that I would burn down their building with my hell fire or something else equally stupid as that. So I had resolved to help get myself out of the room, because no freaking way was I gonna be stuck to a bed again. Ever. Besides, there was so much fun in moving.
At first, I had just watched my body move with wonder, amazed at all the things I could do. Flop around? Hell yeah. Actually getting up? You betcha! Crawling to the edge of the crib, using the wooden bars to help me learn how to stand? I almost fainted at the exhilaration.
Then, of course, it turned into a rush to see how much movement I could make, what walking without feeling like your organs were about to collapse at any moment felt, how soon before I could run with legs that wouldn't break at holding my weight, feel the fresh wind stream through my hair.
To my joy, one of the matrons actually screams when she sees me toddling around about the creaky halls of the old house six months later, inky hair swirling around my head like wraiths and bright amber eyes fixed on all my surroundings.
I could still hear all their curses despite the way conversation hushes up anytime I appear.
Of course, it hadn't been easy, walking that soon. The only reason I had been able to, I think, was because I was aware of this new...sensation in my body. Molten energy, I would call it, something that when I closed my eyes and tried to tug at it, it sluggishly followed, trailing after my persuasion like a particularly old dog(I missed Momo. I hope he's doing better now, and happier). I found out that if I lured the energy to my legs, it gave me the support my still-weak bones needed to stand. It took concentration, though, which meant baby(ha!) steps as I worked my way to a constant walk. As well, when I had first done it, I felt immediately tired and had to take a nap. The strain it put on my mind and body and the energy itself was exhausting.
But it was all worth it. Every day, I got better at moving, and honestly, it was a bit fun to play with the people around me.
It was amusing, their reactions. The way they expressed terror, they way their bodies moved when they froze and slowly tried to back away(or flat out run for it), and my mischievous side came out in the form of pranks and dramatic staged effects to make me seem more inhumane. I found myself indulging in my imagination, doing things from childishly slipping hot sauce into tea to refining my skills at appearing at the head of beds in the middle of the night, ketchup smeared gruesomely across my mouth and tiny teeth bared into an open grin that was sure to make any matron shriek for her life.
Yes, I was definitely a terror, and in some ways I felt bad, but at the same time, it was too fun to stop.
My reign of fear was quite well known before I finally decided to crank it down a little in worry that people might start getting really serious and try to murder me in my sleep or something(I had seen the glares they've been giving me, and it's only gotten less friendly). In fact, I was just glad that they kept feeding me. I quite like eating, thank you very much, even if the carrot mush and milk wasn't exactly the peak of cuisine(in fact, it reminded her too much of the soupy mixtures they would force her to drink after surgeries, but she knew that her digestion could only handle so much at the moment).
It had been fun to indulge in immature actions, as I never really got a chance to experience childhood, but there was a limit I could tell I was toeing, and I would really like to enjoy this lifetime before facing death again.
So, as a distraction, I took up some new hobbies, like wandering.
First, I let my feet lead me into every single room the orphanage had to offer(which...really wasn't a lot. The place seemed big, but then again, I only reached the kneecaps of most people). There were a small pile of children's books that I found in the corner of what looked a bit like a lounge. The edges were worn and some of the words faded almost to the point of extinction, but the pictures were nice to look at, even if I couldn't read. There were images of frogs and dragons and bears, all done in what looked like a very traditional style. The text, too, was something I was not used to. I think it was some sort of Asian language.
Other than that, all I found was some paper and worn-down nubs of crayons. I tried to do some drawing, but...well, hand-eye coordination wasn't really the skill of any baby, and the crayons were hard to use as well. Unlike the smooth color of the crayons I had used as a child in my old life, these left much paler streaks, and the wax seemed harder to drag across the paper. As a result, I was left with very faint lines that I had to go over a few times to get anything I could even remotely see from a distance. It really didn't help that me trying to overlap the lines usually ended up with it looking more wobbly or finding an endpoint somewhere else.
That was a venture I quickly gave up on, leaving a few sloppily folded paper cranes there instead.
I wasn't usually under supervision, half from hope that I might somehow accidentally fatally wound myself, and half from nobody wanting to watch me go around(an appearance far too young to even begin to comprehend the things I do deemed unnatural and hellish to them), so I found myself easily escaping outside. Well, I guess not really escaping, you would need actual regulations to escape something, but perhaps escaping as in leaving the rotting wood smell of the orphanage. The first thing I notice though, is the chill.
The building I stood in wasn't exactly airtight, which meant that I would get drafts of cold in the orphanage as well. I've began to get used to pink noses and toes, and the occasional shiver that would wrack my body, opting to spend most of my time curled up on my bed until I warmed up enough and saved up the energy to move again.
However, standing there with only the protection of the door at my back, I gaped.
The entire landscape was blanketed in white, with more slowly falling from the sky. They all radiated that sucking cold, but I reached out anyway, watching with awe as a snowflake landed on my finger, sitting for a second before melting away.
I...have never been in snow before.
Sure, I had seen it many times, on television and out the window, pressing my hands against the bite of the glass to get a feel of the temperature, but I couldn't recall a time I had ever touched it for myself.
A grin split my lips, and I took a few steps back before pouncing into the white fluff happily. Instantly, the chill latched onto my skin like a parasite, sinking in deeper and deeper- I jerked out violently, scrambling back to the steps of the orphanage, shivering and baffled. I looked at my hands, completely red now, feeling numb yet painful, like someone was pushing tiny pins into them.
I don't think I like the feeling very much.
Glaring at the imprint of my tiny shape in the snow for wronging me, I retreated back into the slightly warmer environment of the building, making sure to shake off all the snow in the hallway before crawling back to the mass of blanket in my crib. Wrapping them tightly around me and snuggling into the scratchy cloth, I willed the weird energy inside me to spread to across my entire body from where it began in my core, starting from my head and lingering on my hands and feet.
Soon, I fell into a nap, the nip of the cold no longer bothering me.
A few months passed that way. I soon learned how to regulate the energy so that it would wrap around my hands when I stepped outside, allowing me to craft shapes from the snow without feeling that unbearable sting. When it got too cold, I would let the energy go, circulating it through the rest of my body to mellow out my temperature.
To my glee, soon most of the snow all around the orphanage was sculpted into some shape or another. There were at least seven snowmen, two igloos, nine...whatever those were supposed to be(animals, they were suppose to be animals, but now even she can't remember what their intended form was suppose to look like) and about twenty snow angels.
The people of the village remained as distant as ever, though they were less ansty now that I've (mostly) stopped bothering them. However, some days, I would find a few of my creations wrecked, obviously intentional. Sometimes, they even left behind little razors(I realized this when I was trying to crawl into one of the igloos, as I liked the shelter it provided from the wind and how the light coming in through the ice, and accidently cut my hand on a piece of shiny metal buried in the snow. Luckily, it wasn't deep, but I was quite sad as that was one of my better ones and I really didn't want to pick all the shrapnel out). Usually, it was quite easy to tell who's been where as their boots left prints in the snow, too big to belong to me.
Many times, I tried to read the books in the 'living room', wanting desperately to understand what they said. But there was no one that was willing to teach me(not that many of them themselves were literite), and no way I could learn just by staring, so I had to give up on that fairly quickly.
It occasionally got boring in this life, I admit, even with functioning limbs. There were only so many things you could do with snow, after all, and it seemed to never stop snowing here. Or, well, some days it would stop, only to resume after a short rest.
I longed for the warmth of the sun, the bright yellow disk in the sky, but all I saw from here was a pale light, hidden by the constant clouds. The sun had no power here, in the land of the moon.
That didn't stop me from craving a taste of sweet spring, a colorful array of flowers at my feet, everything lush and brimming with life, to hear the birds sing in the morning like how television shows always depicted to me. But until I was sure I was sturdy enough to support myself in traveling, I was stuck here, reduced to drawing pictures in the snow.
The fact that there was nobody around to talk to me didn't help.
It was only when I was nearly a year old that I was exposed to the world outside of our tiny village for the first time, and it began with the blood-curdling scream of Hanako, the seamstress that lived four houses down.
Yes, I know I shouldn't be starting another fic, but the brain juices!
I rated this fic M for future references, as it'll get a bit gory later on. And I would like to think that this fic would have a darker undertone, though I haven't planned all of it out yet.
Also, I kinda wrote this fic in a hurry, so constructive criticism is welcome!