Loneliness

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By Kittyluvver
==Author's Note==
Loneliness is a short story I wrote at a workshop over the summer, and recently submitted in a writing competition. Note: It wasn't originally Wings of Fire oriented - I just made a few edits in order to pass it off as a dragon fic. I hope you enjoy anyway!
Update: Loneliness won the writing competition I submitted it in! Yay! :)
==Loneliness==
The whine of automatic doors, the whimper of soft carpet under callous heels. A cold breeze creeps into the room in my wake, come on small, hushed feet, shy and cautious as a lost dragonet. It is anxious to escape from the desolation of the empty street outside, and brings with it a gust of the city; rain, concrete and cigarette smoke. But the lonely breeze isn't wanted here, not in these sterile white halls, and it is quickly whisked back out the door into the night from whence it came, to meander under the grimy glows of the streetlights once more.
The lobby of Pyrrhia General Hospital is dull and barren; the absurdity of bright and cheerful decor only serving to amplify the blankness rather than to alleviate it. A constant antiseptic tang hangs in the air, turning each breath into a burden. The occupants of the lobby sit, stand, and survive under a pall of oppressive silence, silence so thick and heavy that it hangs in the air and makes it impossible to draw breath. The silence is not merely the absence of sound. Rather, it is a living entity, a malevolent consciousness within the very air that reaches down throats stealing words off of tongues and life out of lungs.
An impressionistic red and orange painting hangs on the wall above the nurses' desk. It is the kind of painting that turns up in hospitals and hotel rooms and yard sales, the kind that tries its best to masquerade as real art, and yet I know that it is something made in a factory, fabricated and framed without an artist’s loving paw to give it life. It was something meant to be bought and sold, something to fill space, a body with no soul, a blasphemy of true beauty. The distorted blotches laid on canvas are somehow diseased, visceral, cancerous. Before my very eyes the painting contorts and deforms - burlap canvas becomes bruised flesh, acrylic paint becomes taut skin. Sickly yellow blemishes and flecked crimson blisters morph into colloidal spores, canker sores, tumorous growths.
I swallow and look away, vaguely nauseated. This is a place of malaise and suffering.
"How are you today?" a pockmarked SeaWing nurse at the reception desk asks me. The sterile green of her scrubs and scales strike a harsh, sickening contrast against the lurid hues of the painting over her head. The oily frames of her thick-lensed glasses gleam with the reflection of the computer screen in front of her. Words and numbers, lines and figures all pool together in a bright hallucinogenic glow, and I cannot see her eyes. Her simpering smile is fabricated, false; nothing more than a splaying of overripe lips and baring of crooked teeth. My smile in reply is equally forced.
“I’d like to go up to room 221b," I say, feigning nonchalance with determination even as my eyes flicker and my paws falter at my sides.
"Just wait a moment," the nurse replies, pursing discolored lips and disappearing behind the counter. I watch her horns bob up and down as she rummages within her desk. Then, after a few strained moments, she reappears over her desk, holding a bright orange visitor's pass hooked on a long, polished claw. The saccharine color matches the diseased hues of the lurid painting over her head, and I shudder with disgust. I take the visitor's pass, pinching in gingerly between thumb and forefinger, quickly clasping my paws behind my back to hold it firmly out of view.
Did she even get my name? Wasn’t she supposed to ask?
"Thank you,” I murmur, my throat dry, my chest tight.
She does not respond nor even look around; she has already turned to the next dragoness in line. For a breathless minute I stand still in the middle of the hallway, dazed and displaced. I have strayed from the societal current; I am caught in a brief moment of stillness as the chaos of life buzzes and blooms all around me. A dragonet runs past, calling out to his mother ahead. A white-coated NightWing doctor wheeling an empty chair steps around me, as if I am nothing more than an obstacle in his path.
For a moment, I am a stubborn stone resting in the midst of a torrential river. I watch the flow of life break around me. I see others drift gently past, to be lost in the fading distance.
But the flow is undeniable. The invisible current catches me and clutches me, propels me towards the elevator on the far side of the lobby. I remember the bright magenta visitor’s pass still clenched in my clammy paws, and, as if by instinct, I heed the unspoken command that it gives.
For a few seconds I dare to think that I am alone in the elevator. With a chirp the doors begin to close, sealing me between four walls of unbroken steel, punctuated only by the glowing amber button bearing the number 2. Then, at the last possible second, a paw is brazenly thrust between the closing metal jaws. For a fraction of a second my heart leaps to my throat, and I imagine the callous metal slamming shut, severed digits falling to the ground and rolling like so many discarded pencils. Then the chastised doors jerk to a halt and clatter open once more. I raise my eyes as the doors admit the paw’s owner, a single SandWing doctor clad in a mask and surgical scrubs. I dare a glance at him and see nothing but sterile blue cloth, nothing but a pair of lined and wrinkled eyes - the rest of his face is hidden from me.
He does not spare a glance for me, nor I, for him, as the doors judder shut once more. We both peer numbly at the drab walls, the cratered ceiling, the scuffed floor of the elevator - anywhere but at each other. We are consciously oblivious to each others' presences, and for that I am glad.
In another life, he might have said hello. He might have smiled at me from behind his blue mask, the corners of his eyes pinching and turning upwards like the edges of twisted paper clips. He might have asked what I was doing here. And I would have been ashamed, because no words would crawl to my dry, deaf-mute mouth. So I took comfort in the heavy silence, wrapping it around myself the way a little dragonet crawls beneath the warm blankets to keep the shadows at bay.
The elevator ascended with the leaden creak and rattle of an old dragon being made to stand. I remember reading something somewhere about hospital elevators being slow so as not to jostle a patient in delicate condition. Now, more than ever, I wish I had taken the stairs. To keep my eyes busy I study the scaly, scabrous floor under my feet with feigned interest; blistered and cratered, it is like a face scarred by a pox.
Time passes, each minute a lingering eternity filled with agony and anticipation. Then, at long last, a pleasant chime breaks the dusky silence, and I startle, walking forth as if caught in a waking dream. Elevator doors open and shut silently behind me. I pass others - other dragons, other living, breathing souls - as I step quietly through the sterile hospital halls.
Room 221b. The tiny number on the white door shatters my dreamless stupor. The handle is cold as ice against the flushed scales of my palm, and I feel as if I have forgotten how to breathe.
And there she is, lying in the mouth of the cavernous expanse of the hospital room. Fluorescent lights flicker and stare at her, at us, painting her face pale and wan beneath their harsh eyes. Shadows pool on rumpled bedsheets - dark, heavy, malevolent shadow that the tawdry glow of the lamps does nothing to dispel. The silence that permeates the lobby crowds her room as well; it is a choking mass that gathers in my throat and coats my tongue. It tastes bitter, like pain and bile. Like moonlight coalesced.
From the depths of the pillow she turns her head towards me and transfixes me with luminous blue eyes - my eyes. Deep and bottomless, those overcast pools; blue at the edges and eclipsing to blackest night at their brilliant centers. She has the eyes of one who has seen the soul of the world, in all its light and shadow and misguided fortune. Her eyes have known sorrow, grief, and pain, and yet still hold courage and hope tenuous within.
My mother’s brow is smooth, pallid and empty, framed by fisted blankets closing like curtains across her face. Her cracked lips creak open soundlessly, then drift shut once more, clammy and hard as elevator doors.
I remember seeing her strong and well, sound and whole, racing through glorious, endless days and laughing through the winter nights when we kept the shadows at bay with laughter and song. And now sorrow wells in my heart to see her cast down so cruelly. Her scales are pale and scabbed, and in her face I see the blistered face of the moon. I remember the sunlit days when she had grasped my paws and smoothed the hair from my face, the time she had helped me pick dandelions from the cracks in the sidewalks, the time she taught me to fold paper birds. I remember the day when the letter dropped to the ground, and the words pancreatic cancer, stage four became smeared with dust and helpless tears.
I walk forwards. I want to say so many things.
“I miss you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I love you.”
“How are you today?” I ask, the words falling heavy and hollow from my deaf-mute mouth. My eyes fall downwards with shame. My smile is fabricated, false; nothing more than a splaying of lips and baring of teeth. I am a coward, nothing more.
cracked skin and canker sores.
For this is a place of malaise and suffering. I, a silent stone, watch the flow of life break around me. And I see her drift gently past, to be lost in the distance.<noinclude>
Category:Fanfictions
Category:Fanfictions (Fanon)
Category:Content (Kittyluvver)
Category:Fanfictions (Completed)
Category:Genre (Tragedy)