<Note: original oneshot/drabble>
It’s warm. That’s the first thing occurs to her, as she sits on a cushioned chair that seems much too large for her frame. The harsh winds from outside are barred as a great wooden door closes with a soft click of the doorknob, and for some reason she wonders why it does not bang shut, like it should.
Then someone, a strange man that seems much, much older than her but still young himself is in front of her. She stares forward as a hand carefully extracts itself from a pant pocket and reaches out to tug her chin up.
She is met with piercing brown eyes, eyes that are familiar, that she’s seen before on so many, many faces, but these ones look deeper, darker but blanker than ever. Like he isn’t seeing her at all.
His mouth moves, and she seems to hear something, but she cannot understand what, because there is no need to. Whatever this man – for that was what he was to her, just a man – has to say, will mean nothing, not to her. She’s sure. If it does, it will be a lie.
His hand is still on her chin when she feels another hand pressing something small and hard into her own limp ones, and she wonders why she did not account for the second one. His gaze breaks away as she looks down to whatever it is that has been given to her.
“I got you this.” His words suddenly make their way to her ears, short and curt and void of any concern, but she notices that his hands seem to tremble as they release hers. She gazes down at the object and finds a heavy, shimmering object, with four thin points spread out. On one side, it is flat, sitting evenly on her palm. On the other is a small, blue gem, a shade between sapphire and turquoise and emerald, reflecting the artificial light above her.
“You always…” he trails off, and the uncertainty in his voice sounds wrong, like it had never been there before. “…you always used to draw stars…when you were still a kid.”
She breaks her gaze away from the mesmerizing light of the little star and stares back up at him. Somehow, the messy black hair and angular face looks familiar, and for a while it’s almost as if she can match it to a word, a name. Somehow she feels a strange hope rising in her, some kind of eagerness and anticipation for what he might say and maybe this time he’ll finally acknowledge –
His eyes light up and he smiles, and whatever strange emotion she has been feeling is lost, sucked out, because that look of wild hope and warm joy on his face is just so wrong that she knows she must’ve been imagining it in the first place. No, there is nothing, just like there always was. Wasn’t.
She does not see his look of crushed hope and defeat when she breaks his gaze, staring at nothing again. She does not hear the words he speaks as he goes into another room, promising to get her something to eat and maybe a blanket because it’s going to be cold later that night.
The only thing that she does feel is the warmth of the room, and that becomes a suffocating heat, and she feels like she is being smothered, that she can’t breathe. Because nothing is right, she feels, though she can’t find what it is that is wrong. She can’t feel anything at all.
So very carefully, she stands and makes her way to the wooden door. The only sound is that of the howling winds outside, but that is muffled when the door is closed yet again. But she is not inside, in the warmth. She is outside, with the howling winds.
<Wrote this YEARS ago, only just now found it again. Feedback is heavily appreciated.>
