Author's Note: I've cribbed some words and style from one of my other stories, but this one goes in a different direction. I'm not sure if this is a one shot or if it'll continue; it stands on its own pretty conclusively, but I also have an alternate ending dreamed up, which may or may not ever get written. Also, I'm thinking of writing a longer chaptered AU future Literati fic, but need a beta reader to bounce ideas off of, so PM me if you're interested.
If ev'ry man could weave a dream
To keep him from despair.
To each his Dulcinea...
Though she's naught but flame and air!
--The Man of La Mancha
Every book he has written since he was twenty-one is dedicated thus, "To my dulcinea," acknowledging the ridiculous devotion he still holds for the fantasy version of her living in his imagination. He is ever the foolish knight errant, tilting at windmills in dedication to an idealized lady who cares not. His friends all make fun of him for being a hopeless romantic; it's the sort of gesture that misleads women into thinking he might enjoy candlelight dinners and want 2.5 kids in a suburban house surrounded by a white picket fence. They eventually leave when they finally realize the brooding quiet that initially passed for mysterious and sexy turns out to mean "LEAVE ME ALONE" in giant, blinking, neon lights. He doesn't care much. Sometimes he doesn't even remember their names after they're gone from his life, whether they stay a night or three months.
In his mind she is perpetually eighteen, the wide-eyed angel who whispers that she believes in him when no one else would. The lovely china doll who entrusted him with her delicate heart, only to have him smash it to smithereens when he stumbled out of town. Oh, the idiocy of his defiant youth, preferring uncertain loneliness to certain shame. He had thought she wouldn't stay with him anyway; twenty-two-point-eight miles might have been light years away for an Ivy-bound princess and a high-school flunkie. He has spent too many nights tossing and turning, haunted by what-could-have-beens--the most tantalizingly cruel of them all--that she could have forgiven him for anything but leaving like he did. Though he stopped dreaming about a future with the brittle, high-maintenance woman she grew up to become years ago, the specter of her innocence lingers still, driving pen to push against paper on nights he cannot sleep.
The last of his Truncheon suitemates is getting married, and he is moved out of the cramped apartment upstairs. After years of hard work, he is leaving Philadelphia, a legitimate four-book contract from a renowned publisher in hand. At twenty-eight, he considers himself an independent adult. He has been careful with his money, and his advance covers the mortgage for a one-bedroom in New York City. He's ready to have his own place back in the city he always called home, and he knows how lucky he is to make a living perfectly tailored to his loner literary tendencies. Perhaps, he decides, it's time to move on, to lock away his memory of azure blue eyes and open himself to the possibility of a yet undiscovered inspiration. Waiting for him is a fresh start, maybe even a new love.
Alone in his Manhattan apartment for the first time, he writes not of the dystopic worlds and corrupt governments that typically drive his novels, but from the bottle of anger and despair that filled his core as a teenager. Enough time has passed that he can safely liberate the emotions he once sealed up to protect himself, if only by means of scrawling in spiral-bound notebooks. Having gathered the shards of broken hopes from within himself, he purges them from his system in midnight blue ink on yellow lined paper, his right hand aching dully from incessant writing. Is this what they call catharsis? He wonders as words pour out of him like blood from a gaping wound, flooding the pages until his work is complete.
The clicking of his keypad is nearly in rhythm to the Distillers blaring over the speakers as he types. Briefly, he ponders how the transfer from gut-wrenching scribbles to a document in Times New Roman, font size twelve, can be so utterly devoid of emotion. Perhaps he really is done with her, with them. After several days of weary typewriting, he prints out two hundred sixty-three double-spaced pages, seals up a copy of the manuscript with heavy tape, and overnights the package to his editor. On a loose leaf of paper, he has prepared one last dedication to his dulcinea, only with one additional word tacked onto the end—goodbye.