They heard her singing her last song.
(The Lady of Shalott, Alfred Lord Tennyson)
Dylan looks beautiful in white.
She's wearing a lace dress, today, and is running through the sand on the beach, stopping to pick up shells, and throw them into the waves, satisfied with the resounding plunks that they make; sometimes, she likes to throw stones into the water, and hear the echoes of their ripples. Her expression is sometimes confusion, but most of the time she's calm.
To Chris, she's the only real thing in the world.
For days on end, he watches her from a distance, hiding behind scraggly bushes and trees, admiring how she moves so gracefully, her movements the farthest from perfection, but he doesn't even care. He likes her lopsided smiles, and the way that the dimples on her face come out the most whenever she's alone, how she still likes watching the Powerpuff Girls on the week-ends; it's the flaws that make her even more beautiful.
It's raining outside, but Dylan's still at the beach, ignoring the yells that she gets from her mother, calling her back into the house.
She climbs up a self-made tree-house; it's makeshift at it's best, and for the first time, she really sees Chris Plovert. Of course, Dylan's seen him thousands, millions of times, whenever she's with the PC and the Briarwood Boys at school, or at the newest red carpet movie premiere down at Hollywood, but this is the first time that she sees him as more than a person.
Dylan cherishes the moment, before walking away.
::
It's raining.
The weather is anywhere from a drizzle to a downpour, and the water droplets fall down from the sky above, barely making a sound in Westchester's ancient-styled courtyard's firebreak, where the rain is absorbed, soaked through the clear patch of land in the center of everywhere.
To Dylan Marvil, the rain is screaming.
"Petunias and lilies are quite atrocious," she murmurs to her doctor. She stands before him; Dylan likes to play make-believe, and thinks that she's always flying, never falling. Today, on this ugly March morning, she knows that she's Dorothy.
At night, Dylan goes traipsing through the sienna woods.
For hours, she walks on and on and comes to a clearing (she doesn't know where she is) in the woods. Dylan moves across the stones, little frantic jumping movements, her burning feet eager to succumb to the whims and fancies of a fairy-tale.
There's a storm above, whirling in circles -beautiful concentric congruence-. But, the rain is still sad; the sky is crying.
Dylan holds her arms up, letting the rain take her joy.
[Dylan is patient 15, Ward 3, Westchester Asylum]
::
It's sunny.
The sun peeks out out of the horizon, silently greeting the world with another brand new day. Dylan blinks, expression neutral, "Bad morning," she says, tying her robe together, and pulling it down, to cover her ankles, which suddenly feel bare. She turns around, suddenly, and Dylan Marvil doesn't know where she is.
Her fingers seem as though they're translucent at times; Chris grabs them, as though it's the only thing left that's real, her paper fingers.
The two of them sit in silence. "I'll show you the Library," Dylan remarks, toying with a piece of Chris's hair, and deciding to stand up.
The Library smells like a new beginning, to Dylan, and Chris silently nods his agreement; though he's the most popular, and one of the most talkative boys, back at Briarwood (only normal kids go to school), he can't find a single word to say around her. If his friends even knew about this, whatever this was, Chris would never hear the end of it from his friends, or his girlfriend, Kristen (Kristen's also Dylan's best friend). Dylan doesn't seem to realize that Chris's in love with her.
She gropes for an answer, or at least something to say; for some reason or another, Dylan's speechless.
That night, Dylan takes a sleeping pill, one of those narcotics that's supposed to just let you lay down and fall into a "spell"; she lays down, on her pillowed heart-shaped mattress, in her best fuschia-salmon dress (she's always wanted to look beautiful when she died) with a thorny rose in her left hand, resting upon her fragile heart.
Prince Charming doesn't come.
Her doctor says that that the sleeping pills supplied to Miss Marvil were fakes, and Dylan screams. For days, she doesn't stop. Deep down, Dylan knows that Prince Charming would have come if the sleeping pill had been real.
::
The world is falling apart.
There's something wrong; the world that's waiting for her, and for him, and for all of them, has suddenly developed into some sort of messed-up place, where's nothing safe anymore. It's just frantic movements now, and running, screaming, curses, and oh my my, Dylan just wishes that everything could fall back into place, and be the way that it was before, but what would be the fun in that?
a/n: for clarification, this is a drabble series (this "part" is unbeta-d)
