Author: Emmie
Title: Blind
Fandom: Chuck Palahniuk/Haunted
Rating: PG-13
Continuity: Pre-Haunted.
Author's note: I felt seriously out of my league writing this, and pretty much despise it, but it wouldn't get out of my brain. MY BRAIIIN. Also, I really really wish I had my copy of the book on hand to check a couple things, but alas, it's sitting in my drawer at work, so let's hope whoever's operating this photographic memory of mine remembered the lens cap.
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters and am making no money off of this. All characters are fictional, and any eerie resemblance to certain parts of my life are entirely due to my subconscious unintentional.
Summary: The dying thoughts of Cassandra Clark.
Did she think I didn't notice? That she was being sneaky as she ever so carefully ground the pills, slipped them into the oatmeal with her back turned to me, as if that hid anything? I scuffed my foot slightly in the doorway, alerting her to my presence. I'm sure she thought that was accidental. As she spun, too quickly, smiling, too brightly. Ushering me to the table, placing the bowl before me. That was normal enough; she'd been frantic lately over how much I'd been eating, or rather, how much I hadn't. I stared down into the bowl, light-blue flecks like robin's eggs among the brown lumps. Did she think I couldn't see? I picked up the spoon, poked at the sticky mess. Not enough water.
And then I raised the spoon to my lips and began to eat.
I could hear her thinking it, you see. Hear it, and see it on her face. The daughter she wanted was one who smiled and laughed and ate. Who went shopping and out with friends. That was her concept of happiness, the only one she could understand. My concept of happiness no longer existed in this world.
Life, they say, is pain, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. I understand that better now than anyone outside of a handful of people. Still, I couldn't put my mother through that. Not when she was giving me such an easy choice. I couldn't see that look in her eyes anymore. That look that I'd put there by not laughing, not singing, not dancing. Not eating, because it didn't matter.
Until it did. I couldn't live for her, because life didn't matter, but I could die for her.
Life is pain, but death by way of overdose is relatively painless. Sleeping pills take effect quickly when you weigh only slightly less than nothing. When your stomach is empty, except for the thick brown paste holding the pills together, keeping you from vomiting them straight back up before they can do their job. Everything goes fuzzy very quickly. Very quickly, and the next thing you know, you're lying on a bed of dead and crunching leaves, mind spinning slowly, like a carnival tilt-a-whirl coming to its final stop. Vision coming and going, blurring the surrounding leaves to a wash of colors, a rainbow in a blender, black spots dancing through for accent. Thinking that this isn't a bad last sight. Isn't a bad place to die. For her.
Did she think I couldn't see?