My first Ib fic!
This is slightly different from what happens in the actual game - Mary is in and out of Guertena's painting at the same time. I guess you could say the inspiration came from "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde. I don't think I have distorted this enough for it to be unjoyable, though...
In any case, I hope you enjoy this fic!
In a darkened room with no windows sat a young girl with long golden hair. She sat on the floor, her legs tucked under her green, lacy dress as she held a ragdoll in her lap. Its skin was a strange blue colour and its hair was thick and brown. Its mouth was sewn shut but it appeared to be smiling, the red of its eyes gleaming and bright. The walls and floorboards around the girl were pure black with bold pink borders down the sides of the walls, the only source of light coming from a few cracks in the walls that led – who knows where?
A painting of the same girl in green hung on the wall in a golden frame, shielded by a thick layer of glass. The girl in the painting stood in a garden of yellow rose bushes and she smiled down at the girl on the floor, a twinkle in her turquoise eyes. She held a single de-thorned yellow rose in her hands. Underneath the painting was a plaque that read "Mary" on it. And that was the name of the girl on the floor – Mary.
On the floor around Mary were books of all sorts. Colouring books, books with blank pages, instructive booklets on baking, flowers and embroidery books, light novels and stories for young children. Around these books were colouring pencils and crayons, scissors and scrap bits of paper; off to one side, a blank canvas stood on a wooden easel.
The girl stared down at the ragdoll, her blue eyes piercing, before she said in a quiet voice, as if she were telling a secret, 'I read that book today,' she pointed to a pink and white book as she turned the doll around so it could see the book for itself, 'But I'm not sure I understood all of it. Will you help me?'
She waited a moment before putting the doll to one side, making sure it was still sitting upright, before she got on all fours and extended her arm to pick up the book she had pointed to. It was entitled, "Cathy and Megan's Guide to Friendship". She crawled back to the doll and skipped the index and flicked through the first few pages before finding the one she wanted. There was a cartoon of two girls talking to each other.
'Right here, you see?' she sat on her knees and showed the book to the doll and pointed to the text above the drawing, 'It says here that I should be able to have a long conversation with anyone who is my friend,' she stared at the doll, as if waiting for it to say something back, 'But you don't talk,' she said sadly as she sunk down and tucked her legs back under her small body. She closed the book and picked the up the doll and held it close to her face, 'Aren't you my friend?'
And the doll said nothing. Its head dropped to one side as if questioning her, and that's how the girl took it.
''Why"? Is that what you mean?' she frowned, thinking of an answer, 'Because I want to know if you like me,' she waited. But this time the doll's head did not move. 'The book on body language said that moving your head up and down means "yes",' she waited a few moments but the doll would not move its head up and down.
Suddenly, the girl threw the ragdoll to the floor and she stood up, furious. 'You don't want to be my friend, do you?' she shouted at the doll, surprising herself with how loud her voice had become; she was usually so quiet. She had read a book that had taught her that it was unladylike for a girl to raise one's voice too loud. But who was there to see? Who was there to care? No one cared, she decided. No one.
She stared around her room, at the painting essentials and the filled in canvas' that were piled up on the floor. Finally her eyes fell on the painting of herself that hung in the centre of the wall. She walked briskly over to it and stared at her painting, studying it intently. She grabbed the frame but it would not budge – it was stuck on that wall.
'Where are you?' she shouted at the painting, 'Why are you smiling? I don't know that garden you're standing in!' tears welled up in her eyes but she did nothing to keep them from falling; her storybooks had told her that keeping emotions bottled up was bad.
'Why are you happy?' she pleaded with the painting as her fingers passed over the protective glass that kept her from it. Her vision became blurry as the tears kept falling, staining her cheeks, 'Where are you?' she cried, her voice breaking.
She lowered her head and rested it against the cool glass of the painting. Her fingers gently brushed over it. She shut her eyes and tried to calm herself down.
Suddenly a thought struck her and her eyes flew open. Alice had gone through a looking-glass into a new world. Maybe if she broke this glass, she could get inside the painting? Her head left the surface of the glass and she stared back up at her painting. Could she get inside that garden? Maybe she could even replace the girl who smiled back at her with that twinkle in her eyes. She was sure her eyes had never seemed that happy. Could she be happy if she made it into that garden?
She made a swift turn and ran quickly towards her scissors, left carelessly abandoned on the floor – no one had ever told her it was dangerous – and she ran back to the painting, clutching them tightly.
'Let me in!' she screamed at the painting as her scissors met the glass, 'Let me in; let me in!' The glass shattered and bits of it all fell about her feet, but surprisingly, even as the shards made contact with her skin, no cuts formed on her. Removing some of the rest of the glass leftover in the frame with her fingers, she asked herself why it did not hurt. It had only taken the pointy needle of a pin wheel to hurt Sleeping Beauty, so surely these bits of glass should hurt too? She frowned but turned her attention way, bringing it back to what she once had considered as her "reflection".
She touched the painting tentatively with one finger, but quickly drew it back, remembering how she used to carelessly smudge her own artworks by doing that. If she could somehow make it into that world, that beautiful garden of yellow roses, then she definitely did not want to harm it in any way. So instead she picked up her scissors and held the pointiest part to the flesh of the girl in the painting and made the smallest scratch she could manage on her lower arm, just above the wrist.
She gasped and dropped the scissors when a sudden burning sensation came over her own left arm, just where she had harmed the girl in the painting. Mary stared at her lower arm and watched interestedly at how the red drops trickled slowly down her wrist and her fingers before dropping to the ground.
'So this is physical pain,' she thought. Clutching her wrist and curious, she tasted a drop of it, but quickly recoiled and stuck out her tongue.
She stared at the scratch in amazement. In all her life, she had never felt pain before, and although she had read about the cold, the heat, the wind and pain, she had never felt anything different from the warmth of the gallery she lived in, the hard feelings of walls and floorboards, of paintbrushes and frames, and the softness of her dress and of her little blue doll.
She glanced around the room and quickly grabbed a spare piece of paper and mopped up the drops of blood. There had not been a lot since the cut was not deep, but whenever people got hurt in stories, they always tried to stop the blood-flow. She wondered if it would heal. She went steadily back to the painting and stared up at the girl. There was a tiny scratch on her lower arm, but she was still smiling. The twinkling in her eyes was not wavered.
'Alice just… walked in.' Mary murmured to herself, and she extended an arm and, to her amazement, found she was able to take the yellow rose from her figure's hands. She pulled the rose out and as she withdrew it, it changed scale. There were no thorns on it, and she felt the stem curiously. Her fingers moved to caress the delicate petals of the rose.
'They're soft…' she whispered.
Holding the rose as if it were the most precious thing in the world, she took a few steps back from the painting; confused. And as she did so, she trod on the glass and heard it crunch under the weight of her shoes. She gazed down at the shards and kicked some away from her – they looked sharp. Even though the glass had not harmed her before, she still did not want to run the risk of hurting herself again. She had felt physical pain for the first time just a few moments' ago, and interesting as it was, she was not eager to re-find the strange sensation.
As she stared back at the painting of herself, her hands moved carefully over the stem of the rose she now held. Could she possibly get another one, she wondered? She extended a hand to reach into the painting again, this time trying to retrieve one from one of the rose bushes, but this time she found the painting hard to the touch. She frowned, tried a new place in the painting, but she found she could not.
She looked back at the doll that she had thrown on the floor earlier and hung her head as she walked back over to it. Holding the rose delicately in one hand, she picked up her ragdoll in the other.
'I'm sorry I got mad at you,' she apologised to the doll, 'It's not your fault you can't talk,' she hugged the doll close before breaking the embrace to show her ragdoll the rose.
'Look at this,' she said as she sat down cross-legged on the floor, 'This is a rose. Isn't it pretty? Yellow is a pretty colour, isn't it?' she smiled at the doll and moved her fingers carefully so the doll would nod his head, 'You think so too?' she laughed, 'I think my book said it was a happy colour, so let's be happy, okay?' she smiled sadly, 'Though, I would like to talk to someone. Wouldn't it be good if I had more friends? Then you could play with them too! But you know I wouldn't forget you, right?' she grinned, 'You've always been here with me!'
She talked to the doll some more minutes before finally deciding she would go back to the painting. She felt she had apologised enough to it by now and in any case no longer felt guilty for throwing it earlier. Her eyes gazed over the plaque. How many times had she stood before it, wondering why this girl in the painting was allowed to look so happy when she could never muster enough enthusiasm to be so? She was sure that whoever the artist was had done a bad job of portraying her, if he meant to portray her at all.
Because that was another problem that had been posed to Mary for as long as she could remember; was she a person? Or was she a painting? In truth, she was not sure. She had emotions like a person, and was definitely different from all the other paintings in the gallery; they weren't nearly as smart as her and did not care much for companionship. They didn't get lonely like she did. They did not read or paint or draw. So was she different? She could not feel pain like a person… not until now. But she had been born in the gallery just like the other paintings. Unlike people, she had no family. Was she just strange? Or was she human?
'Human.'
The word sounded wonderful on her lips. She had read about the human world in her books, where you could go swimming and meet new people every day and walk through a field of flowers. Where you could see the sky and feel the wind in your hair and the earth under your feet and smell fresh air. Those were just some of the things that Mary longed for, but what she yearned for most was the promised warmth of friendship.
She walked back over to the doll and sat down cross-legged next to it again, bringing it to sit on her lap. A tear trickled down her cheek, 'It's very pretty,' she told her doll, showing the rose to it once more, 'But what am I supposed to do with this?' she held the rose out in front of her exasperatedly; 'My books say you should share good things with friends, but I have no one to share with.'
As her thoughts piled in, her tears flowed faster until they rolled down her cheeks and onto the rose. 'I just wish there was some way I could go to the human world.'
She brought her legs closer towards her, the doll brought up against her stomach and legs. She clutched the stem of the rose tightly as she screwed her eyes shut, allowing her sobs to fill and echo throughout the room. But something made her open her eyes again – a strange, pale light. Her rose was glowing!
To be continued!
Thank you for reading this far.
Constructive critisism is always welcomed, as well as any other comments~