Title: Ceilings (or, I Have Completely Lost My Grasp on the Finer Aspects of the English Language)
Author: WolfPilot06
Pairings: None
Category: Angst, deathfic
Notes: Um. Yeah. ^^;;
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He stares at the ceiling, because he has nothing better to do.
He stares at the ceiling, because he is bound to his death with so many wires and machines. Or is it that he is bound to life?
He no longer cares. In this white hell, fine lines blur and disappear. Hate is love, and love is hate. Death becomes life, and life becomes death.
When first he came, the world was an agonizing haze of red and black, pain flickering at the ends of his sensitized nerves and threatening to drive him insane. For hours - days? weeks? - on end, he screamed, striving in some weird way as his thin body arched off the hard mattress to escape the agony that seared with every breath his weary lungs could force. Now, everything is simply black and white and gray. The pain is still there, yes, but he is used to it.
He likes to imagine that the ceiling is a story. He used to read, but the few, ragged books that rest on his nightstand have been leafed through too often to be interesting anymore. Instead, he reads the fine lines and cracks that run through the ceiling's white plaster surface. He starts in the corner. Water stains left by the leaking air conditioning are the characters, the cracks the paths they follow. Here is a little girl who plays with rough-edged dolls; there is a father watching a dusty sunset. Spreading across the broad expanse that has become his sky, they dance and weave just for him. Sometimes, they talk to him, strange, hysterical wishes for life, relief from pain, for a second chance - as if he were God. Sometimes he believes he is God. The pain and the voices - are they not signs of his overwhelming responsibility to those he has created? Those plaster figurines would have no life if not for him - they pray to him, beg him not to turn his attention elsewhere and forget the story he has written for them. But in moments of disturbing clarity, he realizes that they are not speaking to him. He realizes that he is going insane.
The insane do not realize they are insane, but do they? He knows he is insane. He forgets, though. Isn't that the equivalent of not knowing he is insane?
He hates when it is time for him to eat most of all. The nurses, smelling of soap and sanitizers, all clean and sickeningly prim, try ever so hard to make him eat. He won't, though. Not unless they feed the starving little boy above the door, who begs with his dark hole eyes for food and beseeches with his outstretched hands for sympathy. He is the little boy's God. What kindness would it be to eat when the child cannot? And so he seals his lips closed and turns his face away. Perhaps, if they were someone else -
He knows he is shockingly pale and gaunt. The doll girl's mother tells him so. She chides him with her gentle voice to eat and grow healthy again - in fact, she sounds surprisingly like the head nurse. He tells her, though, that he cannot eat - not if they don't feed the little boy. His pale hair may grow thin and limp, his hands may become weak and tremble, but he will not eat until his people have eaten.
They do not eat, though. So he will not, either.
Time means nothing in this endless void; he cannot tell if it has been a week or a month or perhaps even a year since he entered this hospital. He swears he is getting better, even if the doctors tell him otherwise. He is powerful - he speaks to his people, guides them, sympathizes with them - despite those endless tests the nurses subject him to say he is getting worse. He knows better than them. His people know of his strength, too. If only they could see...
One day, when he is sleeping, he is taken to another room. There, the people are unfamiliar. They stare at him with suspicious, dark eyes and don't speak to him, even when he beseeches them in his weak voice to do so. The silence is overwhelming, and it's driving him insane. He needs his people. He wants them, and if he can't watch them, who will help the sad man in the corner tell the pretty girl by the TV that he likes her? Who will comfort the starving little boy over the door?
But when he is finally returned to his room, he is horrified. His people - they are all gone! The ceiling is smooth and white again, the doll-girl and her mother covered by a suffocating layer of paint, the little boy no longer starving but no longer alive and he begins to scream for them, his voice breaking and cracking from agony and anger. The nurses are panicking, trying to hold his thrashing limbs down as they call for the doctor, and the pain is flaring up again, so powerful so strong and the blackness rises up sweeping through his vision taking him away from his people and he has betrayed them and and and -
When finally his body falls back against the unyielding surface of the mattress, it is empty and dead. The nurses move away, shaking their heads sadly, patting each other and saying it was finally time for the poor boy to move on, anyway. They take no notice of the thin, pale face with its staring, dull green eyes as they cover it with a white sheet. Just another one dead, they think. It's just such a pity that the boy died before he could appreciate his newly painted hospital room, far better than the dingy, cracked walls he had lived with for three years. Such a sad story, they say. Then they forget.
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The End
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C&C muchly appreciated. ^_^
**Wolf**