Title: Shades of Red - Epilogue
Author: Robbie
Spoilers: None.
Disclaimer: John Wells promised me he'd only screw with them for a little bit longer before handing them back over to their rightful creator and owner – erm, I mean – they aren't mine.
Authors Notes: The snow at end is for Sara, because once when I first started writing this story, late at night, she wanted it to snow, though it was the dead of summer. Thanks to all the readers who read and reviewed the story. Enjoy the epilogue.
***
Her room is on the sixth floor – the maternity ward. All around her, new mothers are filled with a joy that she will never get to feel again. The sight and scent of their new babies overwhelms her, widens the hole in her heart; leaves her feeling empty and violently ill. As if she could possibly even vomit anymore. Every part of her is empty, vacant. Her bare arms ache to hold her child; the perfect, innocent little baby girl that she wanted so badly and will never get to see or hold or touch. The ache simply can't be filled.
Her private room sickens her. The rosy pink walls seem to close in on her, trapping her inside the pinkness that was such a part of her life. But she can no longer be a part of that beautiful pink that she so loved. The very walls of the room whisper this to her, scream it in her sleep so that she wakes up tangled in the pink flowered sheets under the thick pink comforter, trapped and screaming, drenched with sweat after yet another nightmare.
But this isn't a nightmare, and she can't wake up. This is her life. This is the pink that is no longer hers to enjoy and revel in. Her baby girl is gone – no more than a beautiful lingering figment of her imagination; perhaps only an ethereal and perfect apparition from a dream that she longed to live, but can't.
She longs for a proper, white room downstairs. White, so she can be alone with her vacant feelings, so full of anger and terror and deep, deep sadness; resplendent with remorse at what she has lost. White to match her feelings; a cold, blank color that won't shine them brightly back at her, grinning guilelessly like a perverted Cheshire cat.
White where she can silently nurse her tears; fat and clear – devoid of color so that they represent the terrible void of emotion and feeling that rips violently through her body every time she draws a breath. A shuddering new reality that she will have to live with for the rest of her life.
Pink is everything that is tender and warm and motherly. The smell of her little girl, wrapped up in a towel after her bath, the warm feeling of the pudgy little pink fist that eagerly clutches her mother's finger while innocently sleeping. Everything that is this room; that was hers but is no more.
The tears fall and she sits, hardly noticing the powdery white snowflakes that fall outside the pale crimson pink curtains that clothe her window. She feels as if her life has been reduced to some sort of game where she is inexplicably trapped within the shades of red. A spectrum of blinding happiness and love, expectation of that pure weightless joy that the arrival of her pink bundle will bring, and on the other end, an equally blinding array of pain and sorrow and despair that the color red brought to her. Pink is the color of life – the color of her daughter and her happiness and her life. And red is the horrible color of death that took it all away.
He holds her trembling body in his arms, gently rocking her. He has no more words for this occasion, no more apologies or reassurances or pleas. Here they sit, among the pink; she cries and he rocks. His own tears melt, un-noticed, in the smooth brown tresses of her hair. On the wall, a clock ticks, slowly and unobtrusively marking the passage of time. The minutes fade into one another, and they rock.
The minutes will turn to days and eventually, the dark scarlet tearstains she leaves in the sheets will fade to pink. And just maybe, someday – the cycle will begin anew as a new lighter shade of red graces her life.
Fin.