Chapter IV :: Silence That Binds

"—oud? Cloud…?" I grunted, and batted at the hand on my shoulder.

"Umph. Just five more minutes…"

"Papa will be up soon. He'll be angry if he finds you in here." My eyes shot open, to meet the gentle stream of brightness that filtered in through the window; not yet strong enough to cast definite shadows, the sun hadn't come up above the horizon—the morning had begun less than an hour ago, and already I could feel the humidity on my skin. Marlene gazed down at me, her emotions hidden as always behind the childish façade of ignorance, of naïveté that denied her true character.

"What?" I glanced around at my surroundings—I could have sworn I went to bed on the couch in the living room… "Oh."

I propped myself up, running my hand through my hair, which had somehow picked up the pillow's smell. A grin played on her lips, and she sniffed, delicately.

"You might want to take a shower," she suggested, "before he gets a whiff of you."

"Is it really that bad?" The smile grew, then dulled.

"Papa's been really stressed out since Auntie Tifa got sick." For an instant, a look of desperation flashed in her eyes, her weakness that betrayed her age breaking through for less than a millisecond. "That's really why he wanted you here…please, help her." But it was an instant, that her front and barricade was reestablished. I considered it an honor—if an awkward, dismal one—a sign of ultimate respect, to see the child behind that guise. I returned the grin, to reassure her, and rose.

"I'll try…" My heart froze; trying wasn't good enough.

Marlene continued the conversation, not noticing any change, unknowing.

"I haven't seen her, since Papa put her in the hospital." The loony bin. Insane asylum. Crazy house. "He said I couldn't—that I need to concentrate on school. Not to worry about things I couldn't do anything 'bout, b'cause there was nothing I could do…anyway."

It wasn't the truth, and both of us knew it.

My ruffled sheets were just as I had left them, wrinkled and sweeping dirt from the floor in the parlor. They were cold as I crawled back into them, chilling me. It had been warm in Tifa's bed, comfortable… I shivered slightly, thinking about what awaited me. As much as I needed an image in my mind, even a slight expectation of what was to come, I didn't have the slightest clue—the only information that had been revealed to me was her general condition, and nothing else.

Brain-dead…

Realizing after a half hour of staring at the gradually breaking dawn that I was not going to fall asleep again, I slowly got up and did as wise young Marlene had recommended. The shower was cold, biting to wake me fully, to shed away the layers of heat and flowers and atrophy that had rubbed into my flesh while I slept. In her room. My head hurt slightly, the beginnings of a much larger migraine to come. Barret was up and about as I stepped into the hallway, stealing a quick image of the door across from me. I pondered silently whether he had any intention of showing me the inside of that room officially, openly; it wasn't so much a matter of trust as it was simply, in his mind, would I be able to handle it?

His complexion had whitened several shades in the night, and he refused to make eye contact with me until after we had left the house, and were walking closer and closer to the hospital, to Tifa.

Less than a block away, Barret stopped, standing on the sidewalk and staring at me as though I were a small child, an innocent, uninformed little boy. A boy he was not used to dealing with—a son he did not want to have to face.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" I didn't have any other choice, did I?

I nodded.

I tried not to expect anything as we entered the wide, air-conditioned building; I made furious attempts to keep my mind on the present, not the near future, as we stepped into the elevator that would take us to Tifa's floor. I didn't read the names of each level, wasn't compelled to know who else called this skyscraper home. Barret walked into the foyer, and immediately went for the receptionist who sat at a desk at the other end of the room. In an utter daze, bewildered for once by the reality of this new environment, I followed, taking in the white walls and dark grey chairs that aligned either side, without bothering to process that chairs were used to sit. When people waited, visiting. Their friends. Who had gone lost their minds. She was speaking to him, the receptionist, and he was nodding, smiling artificially. She was a young woman, perhaps slightly older than I was, and appeared as if she despised her job, wishing to be anywhere else but there. The greetings were short, as Barret introduced us. A few more words, and he had weaseled me out of the paperwork new visitors were usually required to sign. A guard opened a door I hadn't realized was there, and Barret, without hesitating, went inside.

It took me a moment to understand that I had to follow him.

If possible, the rec room was even a brighter shade of white than the foyer. I blinked, uncertain, and glanced around the room. I hadn't expected anything, yet the sight before me was something that stretched far beyond anything I could have imagined, went past everything I knew, everything I was familiar with.

This was the floor for those who were physically capable of caring for themselves. They stood or sat or lay and stared at whatever it was in front of them. As we walked, they didn't notice my captive gape, nor the fidgeting of my hands or the weakness in my legs. Only a few feet in front of me, Barret moved swiftly and silently, the wanting to get this day over with as quickly as possible emanating from him like a heavily applied cologne. Then he stopped, suddenly, and paused, in front of an occupied wheelchair. Despite the dread, and regardless of my presence beside him, he smiled, and clasped her tiny hand in his.

All I could do was stare.

She wasn't Tifa. It was that simple. The woman in the wheelchair was not the one I had grown up with, was not the one who had stolen my heart as a child. She was thin and pale, and remained ramrod still even when I moved next to Barret, in her full view. Her eyes, those that had once possessed only a love for life, were flat and emotionless—they stayed focused on the window on her left, yet she didn't see the steel of the buildings or the blue of the sky. She did not respond to his touch in the slightest, and what I thought would have been a shock for her, what should have ignited at least some of the fire that had died with me, did nothing. She gazed, and kept on gazing in spite of who kneeled in front of her.

This was what it meant to be brain-dead.

"…A lota people said I should jus' let 'er die, that it would be easier on all of us…" But it was too late for that. The news of my ephemeral journey into Limbo had attacked her without mercy, and had left nothing in its wake. Killing her would only remove the body she had left behind.

It was only a matter of time.

I wanted to close my eyes. I wanted to halt the onrush of guilt and pain that came with the image of this woman. Yet I continuously found myself searching for a glimmer of the shine that had been so dominant in her features. Where her eyes had once been the color of wine when held up to the sun, they were only brown. Her skin stretched across her bones, making it appear as though she were made out of paper maché. The hospital gown folded and shielded, hiding the hollows where there had been curves, and edges where there had been smoothness. Her hair fell flat and dull against her back. As Barret talked to this shell, this hollow doll of a woman I did not recognize, I never found her. For an eternity, I looked for consistency I had thought would always be there. For a lifetime I searched, and all my efforts were, ultimately, futile.

So sorry about the long wait! A lot of stuff has been keeping me from my computer the last few days. I had high expectations for this chapter, and it came out alright, I guess. Not perfect, but acceptable. The next chapter is going to be hell writing, 'cause it's mostly going to be a filler. I have some idea of what Cloud's going to do for the rest of the story, but I might change it, for fear of it being too…not cliché, but anti-climactic, or something like that. Meh. I'll think of something. I was also getting the idea of starting 'Paranoia' again, along with another story that's been pressing in the back of my mind, but I want to finish this before I start anything else, or I'll never finish either. Now I have to finish this one, just as a personal goal. Thanks a bunch for all the reviews I got on the previous chapter. It really helped! Raine