Chapter 53
Word Count: 600
Timeline: pre-series
Warnings: speculation, attempted Psychology FTW
Author's Note: Phew. I'm baack. Yikes while I was gone Stuff Happened! The new FFN layout is weird-looking! This fic needs a cover image now, but I'm not sure what it should be. Ideas anyone? Also have you seen Chapter 497, oh em jee.
The boy shivers. Cold doesn't seem to affect him, but hunger, sickness, and human cruelty do. So he crawls into small, abandoned places and his little body shivers reflexively as he curls himself into a tired ball.
The boy dreams of dragons.
He remembers a big, glossy book of them, and a fluffy bedspread high enough for him to sit on with his feet dangling way above the floor. He remembers someone else's long hair falling into his face, a female voice reading out the tiny printed words as her slender hands slowly turn the pages.
Sometimes he wonders if she, and the book and bed and all the rest of that other world, are just something else he dreamed up one night. But – "That's your life," they've told him, those few who will actually speak to him here. "Those're your memories, from before. They'll fade; best to let them go."
He must have looked different "before," he surmises, because she never struck at him or called him a demon child. She just laughed a lot and called him Shiro-chan and stroked his hair the wrong way.
And it was her who showed him the border where history meets imagination, taught him to love the stuff of myth. She had little worn books of tales, hardbacks printed to look like encyclopedias with meticulous illustrations – and of course, the big new volumes you don't really read, just look at the pictures.
He knew by heart every story in those books and some straight out of her mind, even a few out of his own. He thinks he dreamed of dragons back then, too, dragons of fire and water and ice –
("What is an 'ice dragon,' Shiro-chan?"
"It's like a water dragon but it lives on the ice instead. I mean ice is just frozen water, right?"
And she laughed and said he should write his own book of dragons when he grows up.)
He thinks he might never grow up now, not since he –
died. I died and now I'm dead. And I think the afterlife is trying to kill me all over again.
So in his personal corner of life-after-death, the boy puts his head down and lets his dreams run whatever course they choose.
And in his dreams he returns to that half-remembered world where there are warm arms around him and a book heavy on his lap – and farther, straight inside the pages, where the world is raw, elemental, uncomplicated. What would it be like, a world like that? He thinks of skies that go on forever, or flat plains with a clear horizon in every direction. On the edge of his mind's eye, familiar shadowy figures growl and beat their leathery wings. (Strong wings that could surely carry him until this whole rickety, miserable world is clear out of sight.…)
He thinks of standing on the clouds and screaming into the wind, and most of all of flying.
He thinks of these things, and he wants.
Truly, of course, he wants more than an escape into a fantasy world. He doesn't even want the world in his memories, because he's a smart boy who knows that one is every bit as remote as a world of dragons. Frankly he doesn't care what kind of world he lives in now, as long as there's a place in it where he doesn't have to hide and lose himself in dreams.
But he is young and tired, and for now this is the only desire he can form:
I want to be a dragon too.
