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rainbowfic2015-07-30 12:27 pm
kay_brooke) wrote in rainbowfic2015-07-30 12:27 pm
Entry tags:
Aurora #13, Navy #10
Could I have a color tag for Aurora, please?
Name:kay_brooke
Story: The Prime
Colors: Aurora #13 (Typica), Navy #10 (deep sea diving)
Styles/Supplies: Canvas, Graffiti (Duck Gallery)
Word Count: 851
Rating/Warnings: PG-13; no standard warnings apply.
Summary: David walks.
Note: Constructive criticism is welcome, either through comments or PM.
Two weeks in the hospital, and they finally let him leave.
There wasn’t anything physically wrong with him, as least not that the doctors could find. There was still his memory issue, but there didn’t seem to be a physiological basis for it, and all the doctors could do was shrug and suggest he might do better surrounded by familiar things.
But to David, nothing was familiar.
The house the parents--his parents, or so they said--lived in was large, ornate, lawn stretching into the distance and a sleek black driveway like a river between carefully manicured trees. Brick and white trim, and peaked roof. Three storeys. They showed him his room, done all in blue carpeting and dark wood, his bed, his desk, his closet.
I haven’t touched it, said his mother, tears in her eyes. Not since the day you left. I knew, even when everyone else had given up, I knew somehow you were still out there.
He touched everything, looked at all the pictures, and tried to remember. Nothing came to him, nothing filled that blank space in his head, and it was like he as in a stranger’s house.
Did I really come back? He wanted to ask his mother. Is that what you had in mind when you wished I would come back?
He had been gone for more than a year, they said. Everyone assumed he was dead, they said. Some of the friends he had disappeared with had turned up dead, so they thought it applied to everyone, even if there was no body.
We had a funeral, said his sister, accusingly, like it was his fault she’d spent so much time wearing black.
He still had no words for some things, but his memory, from the moment he had woken up in the hospital, seemed to be working fine. So he learned. He had no memory of learning them before, but it wasn’t difficult, so perhaps he had. On good days he clung to this. The fleeting impression of a memory was almost as good as the real thing, wasn’t it?
On bad days, he took long walks. All the way down the black driveway, out onto the sidewalk--that was a word he had to learn--down the street, past all the other houses in the neighborhood, each one just as large and ostentatious as his parents’. One of them, he was told, belonged to the governor, but he didn’t know which one, and he was still fuzzy on what a governor was, but Jenn--Jennifer, his sister--had given him a book about politics that he really did mean to read.
He would walk until he was away from that fancy neighborhood, until the houses dwindled and the street narrowed, until the sun dipped below the city line and he was in an unfamiliar place in the dark, but his entire world was unfamiliar, so he wasn’t any more afraid than he always was.
His mother hated it--that’s a bad neighborhood to the south, you shouldn’t go there alone, you shouldn’t be there at night--but she didn’t stop him from doing it. Perhaps she thought it was helping him.
It wasn’t. But he went because it was better than staring at the walls of his bedroom, or enduring his mother shoving another overfull photo album at him, begging him to look at the pictures and remember something, anything. He went because he could pretend an unfamiliar place was just a regular unfamiliar place. I don’t know it because I’ve never been here, he would think, standing outside a shabby little convenience store or watching a small group of sullen teenagers pass around a package of cigarettes. Not because I should know it but can’t.
It rained once while he was walking, and he stopped in one of the convenience store and picked up an umbrella, but he didn’t open it because even though he knew the word he couldn’t figure out how to work it. So he just got wet instead, but that was okay because not long after the sun came out. He looked up into the sky, looking for a rainbow (he’d seen one and its physics explanation in a book), but there was, disappointingly, nothing there.
He stepped in a puddle as he gazed at the sky, and he looked down as the water rippled, and for one moment he thought he saw something other than the houses and the convenience store and the bad neighborhood reflected in it waters. He thought he saw a city, not his city, not the skyline that jutted up over the suburbs of the rich and the poor alike, but something different, something...familiar?
His heart leapt, but the water settled and it really was just the bad neighborhood after all, and beneath that the sky, already clouding over again, heavy with more rain.
David gripped his closed umbrella and started for home.
Name:
kay_brookeStory: The Prime
Colors: Aurora #13 (Typica), Navy #10 (deep sea diving)
Styles/Supplies: Canvas, Graffiti (Duck Gallery)
Word Count: 851
Rating/Warnings: PG-13; no standard warnings apply.
Summary: David walks.
Note: Constructive criticism is welcome, either through comments or PM.
Two weeks in the hospital, and they finally let him leave.
There wasn’t anything physically wrong with him, as least not that the doctors could find. There was still his memory issue, but there didn’t seem to be a physiological basis for it, and all the doctors could do was shrug and suggest he might do better surrounded by familiar things.
But to David, nothing was familiar.
The house the parents--his parents, or so they said--lived in was large, ornate, lawn stretching into the distance and a sleek black driveway like a river between carefully manicured trees. Brick and white trim, and peaked roof. Three storeys. They showed him his room, done all in blue carpeting and dark wood, his bed, his desk, his closet.
I haven’t touched it, said his mother, tears in her eyes. Not since the day you left. I knew, even when everyone else had given up, I knew somehow you were still out there.
He touched everything, looked at all the pictures, and tried to remember. Nothing came to him, nothing filled that blank space in his head, and it was like he as in a stranger’s house.
Did I really come back? He wanted to ask his mother. Is that what you had in mind when you wished I would come back?
He had been gone for more than a year, they said. Everyone assumed he was dead, they said. Some of the friends he had disappeared with had turned up dead, so they thought it applied to everyone, even if there was no body.
We had a funeral, said his sister, accusingly, like it was his fault she’d spent so much time wearing black.
He still had no words for some things, but his memory, from the moment he had woken up in the hospital, seemed to be working fine. So he learned. He had no memory of learning them before, but it wasn’t difficult, so perhaps he had. On good days he clung to this. The fleeting impression of a memory was almost as good as the real thing, wasn’t it?
On bad days, he took long walks. All the way down the black driveway, out onto the sidewalk--that was a word he had to learn--down the street, past all the other houses in the neighborhood, each one just as large and ostentatious as his parents’. One of them, he was told, belonged to the governor, but he didn’t know which one, and he was still fuzzy on what a governor was, but Jenn--Jennifer, his sister--had given him a book about politics that he really did mean to read.
He would walk until he was away from that fancy neighborhood, until the houses dwindled and the street narrowed, until the sun dipped below the city line and he was in an unfamiliar place in the dark, but his entire world was unfamiliar, so he wasn’t any more afraid than he always was.
His mother hated it--that’s a bad neighborhood to the south, you shouldn’t go there alone, you shouldn’t be there at night--but she didn’t stop him from doing it. Perhaps she thought it was helping him.
It wasn’t. But he went because it was better than staring at the walls of his bedroom, or enduring his mother shoving another overfull photo album at him, begging him to look at the pictures and remember something, anything. He went because he could pretend an unfamiliar place was just a regular unfamiliar place. I don’t know it because I’ve never been here, he would think, standing outside a shabby little convenience store or watching a small group of sullen teenagers pass around a package of cigarettes. Not because I should know it but can’t.
It rained once while he was walking, and he stopped in one of the convenience store and picked up an umbrella, but he didn’t open it because even though he knew the word he couldn’t figure out how to work it. So he just got wet instead, but that was okay because not long after the sun came out. He looked up into the sky, looking for a rainbow (he’d seen one and its physics explanation in a book), but there was, disappointingly, nothing there.
He stepped in a puddle as he gazed at the sky, and he looked down as the water rippled, and for one moment he thought he saw something other than the houses and the convenience store and the bad neighborhood reflected in it waters. He thought he saw a city, not his city, not the skyline that jutted up over the suburbs of the rich and the poor alike, but something different, something...familiar?
His heart leapt, but the water settled and it really was just the bad neighborhood after all, and beneath that the sky, already clouding over again, heavy with more rain.
David gripped his closed umbrella and started for home.
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His memory loss was deliberately induced, so he's not exactly a traditional amnesiac. No one knows that, though.
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