Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
She sat and looked out the window. It was more of the same. Every day light would fade in and out, from blinding to a black. She couldn't see out of the window, which had been so cruelly fogged for their convenience, and try as she might, the chicken wire would not peal away.
Chicken wire Coops. Cages. Something clicked about that.
Whenever something clicked, she would search through her connotations. There had to be a piece to fit back, something to remember, but it was all broken. The drugs made everything stay broken, but if only she could remember the slightest thing, maybe the rest would come back. The analogy was a teacup. If she had the chip, then she could fix the cup, and everything would be alright, because oh God, she had broken something, what would he do now that she had broken something-
It had felt like progress there, for a second, before it all slipped away. So she stared out the window again and felt the cold sunlight on her face, because the light was important for some reason, too. It was almost spring, and light should be let in.
Nurse, who was Severe, called her Patient Zero, which supposedly made her the first inmate of the asylum. She, the First, liked to think in connotations. It was a way to pass the time. Asylum, here meant to mean mad house, could also be used to mean safe haven, which sounded like a sick joke. Patient Zero was another way of referring to whichever unfortunate soul had received the original strain of a plague. That might have been interesting if she could keep her mind anchored in place long enough to think about it.
She imagined, sometimes, that she was trapped repeating one day forever, one very long and very terrible day where Nurse, who was Severe, would come in and pinch her arm with the brain-numbing stuff and the woman would peer at her though the slat on the door and she would just sit and sit and sit and try to remember a day that was not today.
"Hello, Patient Zero," Nurse said briskly. She didn't like that name. She was not a plague-starter, therefore the name was entirely inappropriate, but the Nurse never called her anything else. In conversation, she never even just referred to her as 'you'. It was always, "Patient Zero, you have to be still" or "You, Patient Zero, are a very hard person to please" and on and on. She had figured out long ago that Nurse would never bother with conversation with unless it was in regards to her medicine. If she asked, say, "Is the woman coming back?" Nurse would reply, "No visitors, Patient Zero, you know that." She hated it, and refused to think of herself as Patient Zero, because Patient Zero was not a name. She had a name, somewhere. Someone knew her name.
She found herself very hung up on the subject of names, which annoyed Nurse to no small degree. She really was very Severe. She had asked, once, to call Nurse by her name, back when she was still new to the asylum (though she couldn't remember anything concrete that would have been before, so she supposed she had always been there), but Nurse just glared. Nurse did a lot of that, and snapping, and jabbing with the needles. Once, and Nurse must have been very out of character, she had referred to Patient Zero as dearie. She might have been mistaken, because she had been in and out with a high fever and Nurse had seemed rather less Severe, but she had heard it. She wondered, in the back of her mind, whether that had been her name. Dearie. She tried it on her tongue. "Dearie. I am a dearie. Am I Dearie?" No, that all felt very wrong. She was dearie to someone, but capital 'd' Dearie was not her name.
She tried to remember who it was that called her dearie, who could have possibly said that to her, but she could only remember the teacup and the chipped edge. Sometimes she fancied that she could feel the little chip in her hand, sharp, but it was never there.
Nurse walked in, Severe despite the company that the Door Woman had given her. She had the idea that Nurse worked for the Door Woman, that she was being kept despite the fact that she was very sane, defiantly sane no matter what they told her... but that sounded like paranoia, and that wasn't very good. Her suspicions were furthered by the fact that the Nurse smelled of something new, not the constant, painful antiseptic, not the usual off-the-shelf deodorant, nor strictly starched laundry, but something... different. She could smell something rather sweet, and it tugged at a memory of Shakespeare. A rose by any other name... Could she be a Rose? It might not be her name, but her old name wouldn't matter if Shakespeare was telling the truth and not being horribly obtuse for once.
Roses. Roses were important. She tried to remember something about roses, or rather rose, singular. She could almost feel the stem in her hand. Nurse asked the usual question of how was Patient Zero feeling today. Rose replied that she was fine and held out her arm. She let Nurse believe she was Patient Zero, because Nurse was too Severe to look upon a name with any kindness. She was mulling over what little she knew about roses when the drug hit her. Something was wrong- different. In the place of constancy, there was something new. Rose closed her eyes and encouraged the drug for the first time
She opened her eyes and looked down at her hand. It was like looking at two pictures through the light of a window, where one will overlap the other if they are held up to the sun. She could see her hand holding nothing, and felt nothing. She could also see another hand which was her own, holding a rose with a too-long stem, and could feel the prick of thorns. The rose hand seemed to take the empty hand with it, and her eyes and senses tried to keep up with both worlds.
Everything seemed to be moving on rails, which was wonderful, because Rose wouldn't have been able to keep her empty hand moving in time with the rose hand. She felt her body, the one trapped in stone, move in accordance with one somewhere very far away from a long time ago. A voice bubbled out from her lips, speaking words she didn't understand, and heard the voice that had once called her dearie. She couldn't hear the words, which was frustrating, maddening, and would have driven her to an asylum if she hadn't been in one already. She tried very hard to hear the words as she watched the ghost hands of hers clip the end of the rose and place it carefully in a vase. Her eyes flicked up from her hands to look at the one who called her dearie, but she couldn't see him. He was there, yes, but she couldn't see his face. He was close enough to touch. If she could only touch him, then maybe she could remember his face. The ghost world, the memory world, started to fade. She tried to clutch at it, but that world wasn't hers and she didn't have any right to the man who was kind, or at least, not Severe.
Rose found herself touching her palm, sitting in the middle of her room. There was a small scratch, one that hadn't even broken through to the dermis, just enough to be sensitive. It wasn't unlike the sort of scratch a rose thorn would make.
Rose sat in the room, surrounded by the thick walls which did nothing to close out the sounds of of crying, and tried to remember the man who called her dearie.
She believed, sometimes, that she was someone different. She had heard of past lives, of course, it was the sort of thing that people wished was true so that they wouldn't have to feel like their lives were such wastes. Well, that life sucked, I'll just try again. Respawning in three, two one.
Rose knew she was different, which might have been the reason that she was in the dungeon in the first place. But she could remember things, now, if she really tried. Dungeon, for instance. She had always remembered someone taking her down into the earth and telling her that this was her room, then admitting that calling it her room was just nicer than calling it a dungeon, then laughing. If nothing else, Rose could remember that laugh. High and tittering, it almost made a person want to laugh along for how absurd it was, except for the knowledge that the laugh was aimed at you. There was an irony in that, Rose knew. A dungeon there and a dungeon here, what the hell had she done?
Rose knew that the laughing man could tell her. As frightening as his laugh seemed, there was something attached to the memory of it that... inspired a certain fondness. She held on to his laugh, the Laugh, and stared out the window some more.
Rose wasn't sure why things suddenly seemed to be changing.
She could remember, sometimes, the feeling of being watched, which was not quite the same as the feeling she had in the asylum. In the asylum, Nurse watched her with an air of annoyance, as if she had better things to be doing than attending her wards. The Door Woman watched her with an air of pride, the sort that people give their butterfly collection after all the life has been sucked away and the body lies cold, behind glass. Then there was the way the Laughing Man would watch her.
Rose didn't have a real name for him yet, but she would find one, eventually. She might even remember his true name, because his seemed so much more important at the moment. Well, no, not the moment. The exact instant she had remembered the Laugh, she knew that she would have to work as hard as humanly possible to remember him.
There were small things that Rose could remember about him. She coveted them, hid them away, as though Nurse might try to take them. Rose listed the facts that she could remember like this:
1-He Laughed.
2-He was lonely.
3-He called her dearie.
4-He liked to gesticulate. A lot.
5-He was a coward.
She couldn't remember why he was cowardly, or why that was one of the strongest things she remembered about him. She could remember that she had called him this, and that he had probably been called this very often in his life by the way he had reacted. Rose couldn't remember the way he had reacted. She remembered only the facts of the ordeal, the most vague gist of things, which made her want to rip her own hair out.
She wished she had a mirror (but there was something important about mirrors) so that she could see if she were moving her hands like he did, with an odd sort of grace. She had tried to laugh the Laugh, but she didn't speak often enough to be any good at it. Besides, she could hear others laughing through the walls often enough, they didn't need any encouragement.
Sometimes she wondered if she wasn't in the original dungeon, the one with the rough stone walls that reminded her of castles, rather than the horrendously perfect asylum where she had broken her nails off so many times in an attempt to pry a cinder block free. Maybe she was being punished by the Laughing Man, or maybe she was just having a nightmare and he would wake her soon. Rose hoped it was the latter, though she wouldn't have completely doubted the former. She wasn't sure why that was, why each of the options seemed to reasonable. No, Rose thought, he wouldn't have done this to punish me. This brought her to another conclusion for her list.
6- He loved her.
She wasn't sure how she knew that he did (though she knew for a fact that she had loved him, truly), because she couldn't remember any instance where he said it out loud.
Rose began to dream of him shortly after her memories came trickling back. The dreams had his face, his Laugh and sometimes even his touch, but whenever she awoke, happiness was fleeting.
Rose fancied, sometimes, that she could see him, though faceless, or hear him, though voiceless. Sometimes, when the drugs were kicking in and none of her neurons knew exactly what they were doing, she could hear him Laugh as if he were next to her. It was ridiculous, the sort of giggle that would draw a laugh out from the listener, or else make them shiver. It always made her laugh, except for when things began to get mixed up. Sometimes, when the drugs were just beginning to take hold, when the Door Woman would show up with the smile that meant only bad things and with eyes that looked at her like she was a butterfly trapped under glass, the Laugh would belong to the Door Woman. Then she would dream that the Laughing Man had put her into just another dungeon, but it hurt like there was fire and burning-
She would wake up to the feeling of free fall, and relief. She would touch her skin. Smooth, cold, clammy. Not burned, the only marks being those of needles and bruises which had ceased long ago to bother her. Rose would try to sleep again, for a little while, but everything would always be too sharp inside of her head. She would always end up next to the window, because it was never too early to watch the light change.
Rose had found the chalk in her bed one day, hidden in the metal works that made the frame. She began to draw on the walls, and write things that almost made sense to her, things like One day my Beast will come, or else she would make a valiant attempt at making a spinning wheel. She had tried to write in gothic script once, the way the first letter of a story will be formed in a child's story book, but her hands shook too much for them to be as beautiful as they deserved.
Rose tended to write under the bed where no one could see, with her legs sticking out as she used the precious chalk to try and remember his name. She wrote the alphabet on the wall beneath her bed and tried out each letter on her tongue to see what might jog her memory into place, what might fit into the chip of her teacup. After much trial and error, all she could come up with was a single letter: R. It wasn't very much help, and she wasn't even sure if R was the correct letter, because she had run through every name that started with R that she could possibly think of. Raymond, Roy, Ronald, Rodney... nothing. If his name did start with an R, then it was one that she couldn't get by guessing. It would have to be long, and complicated, and probably unique. Rose wrote the biggest, finest capital R that she could manage through shaking hands, but she still called him her Laughing Man.
It wasn't often that Rose tried to talk to Nurse, but she had a two lists on the occasions that she did.
The Fine List:
-Nurse, my head hurts.
-Nurse, is it that time already?
-Nurse, who is the Door Woman?
Nurse would purse her lips at the first and adjust the dosage. At the second, she would only say condescendingly, "Yes, Patient Zero, it is." Nurse never told her who the Door Woman was, only saying it was someone coming to check up on her.
Then, there was the other list, full of things Not Fine.
The Not Fine List:
-Nurse, I can remember things now.
-Nurse, why am I here?
-Nurse, let me out. I'm not crazy and you know it, just let me go, please.
-Nurse, my name is not Patient Zero. My name is Rose.
The Not Fine List went on and on and basically contained all things not under The Fine List, but these were the most outstanding. To the first, Nurse might give her a higher dosage, which would be fine with Rose because it only served to help her remember now, but Nurse might also change the medication to something that would only muddle her again, and Rose knew that she would rather die than go back to that. To the second on the List, Nurse would only cluck her tongue and tell her she was crazy (Rose had never gathered the courage to truly ask, but she didn't want to have to hear it out loud). To the third, Nurse would only call for one of the large and scary security men to restrain her again, and Rose remembered that little fiasco perfectly.
Rose wasn't sure how Nurse would respond to the fourth. It might be the last straw, and then the Door Woman might enter.
Rose was curious about the Woman, but not crazy. Not that kind of crazy. Even through the drugs, she knew bad things when she saw them, and not many things could be much more evil that the Door Woman's eyes.
Rose wondered if the Laughing Man had come through to the same world as she had. Whether he had changed. Whether he still loved her. Whether he still measured up to the list of things she had remembered, whether he was worse or better or the same as she imagined him to be.
She wondered if he had the same lips.
Rose could remember the kiss, almost as vividly as his teasing, calling her Dearie, or his Laugh. Rose couldn't manage to wrench out what had started or ended the kiss, but she could feel his lips against hers, tentative, almost afraid, but the whole thing was almost... magical. And not corny magical, with rabbits coming out of hats or women being sawed in half, but magical as in true magic, and three little words burned themselves into her brain so that she could never forget again: True Love's Kiss. She wrote that on the back of the door, half as defiance and half as convenience because the cold of the floor made her shudder when she had to lay flush against it to draw the spinning wheel. She could see it from where she lay on her bad, trying to sleep through the light changing to black, watching as the letters faded into darkness.
It was also funny to see the Door Woman's eyes watch her from over those three little words. Rose had the idea that the Door Woman was unhappy and had only the mission of making everyone else the same way. How dangerous, how ironic for the Door Woman to be keeping her watch on Rose over the promise of a happy ending. Rose always turned to the window when the Door Woman would come, but now it was to hide a smile rather than trying to shirk the weight of the Woman's gaze. It was like the Door Woman's power was breaking, though nothing had really changed. Rose had to believe that things would, though. Things would change and she could find her Laughing Man and they could share True Love's Kiss again, and then they could live happily ever after.
But then she remembered the words under the bed, One day my Beast will come and realized she didn't know whether it was meant to be a promise or a threat. Rose smiled and hoped it was both, a promise for her to keep and a threat for Nurse and the Door Woman, one that should keep them up at night.
Rose knew that books fit somewhere in the whole mess of her brain, so she wrung it for more connections and connotations. She forced her mind to dwell on books for the entire day, and woke the next morning with the barest glimmer of comprehension from her dream: she used to read to him.
Rose lay on her belly, braving the cold cement long enough to chalk out the picture of an open book beside the poorly done spinning wheel.
It was there, on the floor, that she made another connection: bravery. The rose was part of the bravery conversation, that was what the faraway words had been about. She scribbled the word brave between the doodles and clambered onto her usual roost because she could hear feet tapping their way down the corridor what were not made by Nurse's shoes of practicality. They were the clacking of heels, worn to give height over one's opponent and to intimidate. Rose hid the chalk back in the bed frame and curled under the window, looking up. She heard the small hatch open and fought to keep her smile in check. I'm not afraid, Rose mused. I'm brave.
I shall forget, to have thee still stand there,
Remembering how I love thy company.
-Shakespeare
AN: Hey all, NunsNBagels here. I haven't written anything in a very long time. Sorry about that if you're mad at me for being gone; I'm also sorry if you never wanted me to come back, but here I am anyway. I have learned my lesson about trying to write more than three chapters- not that this will go on for any longer than it is, because I don't have any plans for it at the moment.
Anyway, just some quick notes before I get out of here. The Nurse is capital 's' Severe because in the credits of 'Skin Deep', there was an actress credited for playing the Severe Nurse, and it stuck in my head as something 'Rose' might call her. Onto the subject of 'Rose', this name has been given to her by me (this would be a good time to mention that I do not own Once Upon a Time in any way shape or form), and will be changed if she acquires a Storybrooke name. Reviews, critiques both story-wise and technical, (hell, I'll even take a flame or two, I'm bored) are appreciated.