This short is set after NQK wakes up at the end of chapter 116. It does not contain spoilers beyond the fact that she A) woke up from her dream in the hospital, and B) seems to have developed powers over dreams in some capacity.
The theme of this short is "secrets and lies," to play with the overarching theme of this entire collection.
Day 31: "Pile Up"
Upon the tray table lying across my hospital bed, I built a house of cards.
I'd never actually made one before. First time for everything, I guess. But out of sheer, desperate boredom I'd begun its construction, propping up row upon row of cards, formation carefully constructed piece by piece, arrangement fragile and delicate. A single whisper out of place or even the smallest off-kilter gesture would wreck it all. I knew this in my bones, and I whispered a prayer that no nurses would disturb me as I worked.
Despite never having built a card castle before, I proved pretty good at the task. In no time I'd built it up three layers high. I may not have had experience, but I was intimately familiar with the delicacy of a house of cards. It was a concept that had defined my entire life—until recently, at least.
As of recently, when I became unable to keep my secrets any longer.
Row by row, stack by stack, I built the castle higher. The sun shifted outside my hospital window, shadows growing longer as the hours and minutes passed. The cards felt cool and smooth and brittle beneath my gentle fingertips. I dared not shift in my bed. I dared do nothing but stack, stack, stack, pile up the cards higher and higher, then even higher still, breath held tightly inside my chest—
Knuckles rapped briskly upon my door.
My hands jerked; my breath hissed out on a gasp, tension snapping like a rubber band.
The castle came tumbling down.
"Hi, sweetie." The door creaked open, admitting my mother to view the wreckage on my tray table. "Oh, oops. Are you all right? Can I get you anything?"
"I'm fine, Mom."
"You're sure?"
"Yes, Mom." My smile mollified her worried eyes. "Nothing to worry about."
This was a lie, of course. And it, like so many others, had rolled off my tongue so easily.
I waited for my mother to leave before glancing down at my ruined cards. Then I just looked at them. I stared at their scattered pile for a long time before sweeping them toward me, off the tray and onto my lap, where I gathered them each in turn and slotted them again into a neat deck.
Hands held steady, I picked two cards off the top and propped them against each other, their planes forming a neat triangle.
Fitting, having to restart this castle of cards so soon after telling a lie. My first lie of many to come, I was certain—a new secret, the first I'd dreamed of keeping in a long while, and the start of my new house of cards.
Yay, extended metaphors. The prompt here was too perfect to resist.
While I ended up running behind at the end (life gets in the way at the oddest of times, and FFnet did me no favors by making me unable to post chapters), I'm still proud of this collection. It's more thematically cohesive than my previous collections of shorts and is set during a more focused time period within the LC canon—it even ends where LC currently ends, which is a nice bit of cohesion. Plus the installments here are all much longer than in past collections, too. Only running behind by a few days seems like quite a victory in light of that.
Enormous thanks to everyone who's kept up with these "secret"-themed prompts throughout the month. Your support truly did keep me going. My love for you should be no secret at this point, I hope! Thanks again, endlessly, and see you in the next chapter of Lucky Child.