A Dream of No Language
Disclaimer: Nothing from the Moulin Rouge is mine.
A/N: I'm not quite sure what this is about. It's a strange, tangled-up little thing without a proper plot. A dream of two children in a hushed world. I hope you can find a way to enjoy this somehow. If not, I'm sorry.
Also, Finnish is still my native tongue, so there are probably typos, grammar and spelling errors and such. I'm sorry about them as well. Feel free to point them out.
Thank you for reading.
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When one is feverish, they may dream up silly things, dream tangled, garland-like dreams which will wither in the light of reality (that is the name of the cold morning light, the kind which brings out the edges of objects, which reveals every twilight-hushed corner and flaw). Sickness and especially fever are excellent excuses for silly dreams. Mind wanders then, the faint footsteps it leaves behind are all going in circles, and so a few foolish things must be forgiven.
Satine isn't quite certain why she demands such thorough explanations from herself. Maybe it's because she just wants to make sure she wouldn't actually dream of such things. If she did, it'd mean that what she has now isn't enough for her. Stupid, ungrateful little brat, eh? You actually imagine you deserve more – that you'd deserve this, even? (And of course, eyes are immediately lowered to the floor, 'I don't deserve this, sir. I'm sorry, I do know.') Because if she actually dreamt these dreams, it'd mean the best thing now would be a goodbye, a sudden end for everything for this will never be anything like the silly dreams, merely a mockery of them.
And this is why it's a relief that this dream is merely a creation of her fever-dimmed mind.
In the dream, there are just two human beings.
The rest of the world, of the human world, either never was at all or at least has been stilled, freeze-framed for the time being. She can tell this by the way footsteps sound against the ground, the way they echo in the air just like in the streets of Venice where the air is heavy with the resonating sound.
There are a few other creatures on the earth; a few birds in the trees above, their light skeletons making the leaves whisper against one another, a few critters beneath the surface of the ground, down where it's cool and dark and where there's no need for eyes at all, and a few slender creatures which feel like a prey even when there's no hunter around.
The grass is a little too dark, she notes, as she – here she stops the train of thought, because this girl, this child with scraped knees and a pebble in the left pocket, isn't quite her, and then again is. Anyhow, the grass is a little too dark, as if the painter had used more blue than green.
She walks to the small river crossing the forest, and on the surface sees her own rippled reflection. It's an awfully strange thing; seeing your silhouette when there's just one other human being (just one who's breathing right then) in the world right then. It feels like you are an animal, not quite sure what to make of it, not quite sure if it, after all, is someone else and not you at all.
On the other side of the river, there's a boy. He has a haunted look on his face and his hands are stained, and there's an ink splotch on the knee of his pants. He's swirling a stick in the muddy water, and when he looks up, she realizes they don't speak the same language.
Neither one says a thing, not even to test if the other might after all understand a word or two. It feels oddly comforting they don't know anything of each other's languages. In the end, words never quite mean the same thing, and that's a sad thought, to learn a common language and yet never quite mean the same thing.
He leads her to a place where it's easy to cross the river, and she does, and they both speak silence fluently.
They stand on the same shore then, on the same side, and she can't see the rocks she used for crossing the river anymore. She will never go home again, she realizes. The idea makes her smile.
Quietly, they leave into the forest, and it might be that one day they are found, and there will be headlines screaming about them, the poor wolf children found from a forest, not being able to communicate with other humans at all. And then they will be trained and examined and maybe they'll die in a test or due to stress or maybe they'll survive and become proper humans again. The end of the story isn't shown and it's better that way.
Satine inhales deeply and blinks the dream off of her heavy, tingling eyelids. Fever brings such silly things. It's an absurd dream, a dream without a point, without words, without any connection to them at all.
Secretly, she drowns the dream girl who was quite like her but not at all into the river, makes her fall from a tree like Ophelia, makes her trip and fall, drowns her until she's so tangled in the reeds that it's difficult to tell her apart from the riverbed anymore. After this has been done in secret, she feels relieved.
Then she is able to believe herself again. The things fever brings…
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fin.