The pink and blue jail cell
A/N: This was a slightly weird idea I had about Remy having a nightmare about her Huntington's disease. Please R&R!
There Remy stood in the middle of the jail cell, its walls so small and suffocating, yet they seemed to stretch on beyond the horizon. It was pitch black but lit up by the pink and blue neon lights that made up the bars of the cell - it was more like a cage, really, since the bars surrounded her in all directions. They seemed to spin around her, not quite square but moving in all directions with no sense of which way was forward. There was a chair somewhere that did not sit on the floor but appeared to be floating in the middle - it had no shadow so she couldn't really tell. In the chair there sat a woman with the same wide, sharp eyes as Remy's, but wild, curly hair and an expression so pained and scared that Remy wanted to rip her eyes away, but she found herself frozen, unable to move, unable even to blink.
Then the woman's arm jerked as though she had no control over it and the woman cried out, her voice echoing around the cell, but the echoes did not die away - instead they got louder and louder. Remy tried to move forward to help the woman, to comfort her and tell her it would be okay, but she knew it was a lie, that this was just the beginning of the tragic fate of the woman, that one day she, too, would go down exactly the same slow and painful path that would lead her to an untimely death. The woman jerked again, and again, until soon she was writhing uncontrollably in the chair, those haunted eyes begging for Remy's help but Remy still couldn't move. Instead she felt a wave of hate and she wished the woman away for making her life so difficult. The cries became so loud that they were almost deafening, and served to fill her with an intense guilt building up inside of her for so cruelly judging the woman for the same thing she herself was destined to become.
Just shut up already! she thought desperately, and with this thought came a flash of bright light - suddenly the woman was no longer seated in the chair. Instead there was another woman, her face blurred yet uncannily familiar, but try as she might Remy could not place the figure. She was drawn as a bright outline, each line made of the same neon lights as the jail cell, but every single one of them was pink - the rest of the cell had turned blue and was beginning to fade away into nothing. The figure in the chair was the only thing left and everything else was black. She radiated intense feelings of love and sexuality and Remy knew this was the person she was destined to be with forever. Her heart cried out in anguish as she knew she would end up hurting this person, whoever they were, with her illness, but she could not bring herself to banish her as she had with her mother, no, she was far too selfish for that. Who on earth are you? she thought frustratedly, but the figure would not reveal her face - she just sat there taunting Remy, laughing wickedly at her frustration and reminding her how she'd spent her entire life hurting people.
That's not true! she argued, but the walls of the cell were closing in on her. The figure flashed away and all that was left was her and the empty chair, and the walls were getting smaller and smaller, slowly forcing her into the chair, slowly constricting her so that she couldn't breathe and was suffocating, slowly killing her just like her goddamned disease…
NO! she thought vehemently, and she jolted awake to find herself back in her bedroom sitting upright and panting heavily. She let out an audible sigh and held her head in her hand, feeling a headache coming on. A single tear trickled down her cheek but she brushed it away. Crying wouldn't solve anything, she told herself, it would only cause her to be more miserable than she already was.
It was dark but she didn't bother checking the time, knowing that she wouldn't be able to get back to sleep no matter what crazy hour of night it was. Rising, she switched on the bedside lamp and grabbed her vice from the table - not a glass of water, but a bottle of red wine, feeling awful for having kept it right there within her reach when she'd told herself that yesterday would be the last time. The promise now seemed naïve as the hard feelings came flooding back without the alcohol, constricting and crippling her sometimes to the point where it hurt so much that she cried out loud in agony. Her chest actually hurt right now: she could feel the beginnings of withdrawal symptoms, and though this made her feel guilty, the guilt wasn't enough to stop her from doing it again.
She didn't bother with a glass, just started chugging it back from the bottle, and as she did so vague thoughts of her colleagues passed through her mind. She knew they were worried about her and that she was letting all of them down by doing this, but they didn't understand. None of them were dying; none had even come close to dying, unless you counted House but he almost brought it on himself with his crazy antics; it's not like he had a death sentence hanging over his head.
Then, in a drunken haze, she cast the bottle to one side, hearing it smash as it knocked against the bedside table, and staggered into the bathroom, locking the door in order to protect herself from the outside world. It was there that she finally lost her inhibitions and, fuelled by the drink, broke down in tears, cursing God and fate and destiny and bad luck and whatever else she could think of for doing this to her - for making her out of all people in the world the one who had to suffer so badly.
"Why?" she choked, even though there was no one there to hear her. "Why me? Why?"
But there was no answer, no enlightenment or a sign from above, no voice in her head offering an explanation. There was merely silence and the echoes of her sobs bouncing off the bathroom walls, dying away into nothing. She was alone, all alone. There was no one here for her and no one she would allow to be there for her. Catching a glance at herself in the mirror above the sink, she saw the same haunted eyes she'd seen in the dream staring back at her, puffy and tearstained from crying, reaching out for help but receiving nothing but emptiness and pain.