Disillusionment

Mum's back is cold against mine, her feet chilled on my legs. I shudder and squirm away from her beneath the sheets. "Your feet are frozen."

She laughs. "Like my soul, sweetheart," she says playfully.

I think about this for a moment, and then move closer, press my legs against her feet: I may be small and thin and frail, but I am not lacking in warmth. Her back presses against mine, and I share the heat my body has with her. "Don't say that, mum," I say softly. "Don't let me make you cold." My words hover in the air before me, as if they are waiting to be heard, a physical thing, longing to flow into her ears.

Carefully, slowly, she rolls over and puts her arm around me. "The only thing you ever make me is warm," she says. She presses a kiss to the back of my head, and I smile in her arms.

I fall into sleep.

In my dreams, I am whole.

I am Alice, falling down the rabbit hole. Spiralling down and down and down, until I cannot tell which way is up and which is down. Chairs spiral past me: lamps of fantastical shapes and forms. A bookshelf tumbles past me, up or down, I am not sure. The books spin from the shelves and hit me, crash against my arms and legs and face and chest. But it does not matter, because in my dreams my limbs are strong.

When I fall to the ground, on my hands and knees, it hurts, but I am not broken. This is how it feels to fall. This is how it feels to land, and to not be broken.

I breathe in deeply, close my eyes and luxuriate in the feel of the fabled air in my lungs. When I open my eyes, I see bright green grass. And, when I look up, a flushed, scarlet sky. I wear the dress from my previous dream, from the formal. The petal-folds tumble across my legs to show to pale, slim feet beneath, stained by the grass below them. I wonder at what a strange, surreal image this makes: a pale girl with silver hair in an indigo silk gown, strewn across a verdant field beneath a bloody sky.

And then I blink, and a mirror appears before me, round and old fashioned, the frame made from dark, oaken wood. The surface of it gleams, spotted with age. I reach out and touch the shimmering silver with a fingertip, and it glitters brightly. And then a hand shoots out from the surface of the mirror and grasps my wrist, clad in a molten silver glove.

I open my mouth to scream, but there is no time to because the hand pulls me forwards with a strange sort of strength, and I tumble forwards through the mirror, Alice all over again.

And I am falling falling I am falling there is no stopping it. And before me is the person who grabbed me, their fingers still wrapped around my wrist, their hand gloved in silver as if the mirror is clinging to their skin.

It is a boy. He is featureless, but he is tall and lean and strong, falling above me or flying below me. And I open my mouth as I fall, but I do not scream; I whisper. And a name streams from my lips in a silent sound, but the word floats in the air before me, and I strain my eyes to see what it is. The boy smiles behind the name, his lips resolving in the blackness of the air. My hair whips across his face in a soundless breeze. I am close to seeing the word, to reading the name, I can feel it, I can almost see it. And then his fingers tighten on my wrist, and I am made of glass, and I shatter.

In my dream, I break.

When I wake in the morning, mum is already gone. I lie in bed for a moment, getting used to my body for today. It is always different when I wake: will I be weak, or will I be strong? Will I be fragile, or will I be sturdy? I can never tell, not til the moment I wake.

But there is no ache in my bones, today. No throbbing pain throughout my body. Experimentally, I shift my body, bit by bit, across the mattress. When nothing screams in pain, I sit up slowly. The point where my left palm presses against the mattress prickles with shock, and I pull my hand back, scowling slightly. So, it will be one of those days.

The shoulder of my t-shirt slips down my arm, and I push it back up carefully, making sure to use my right hand. Marc bounds into the room as I am swinging the heavy cast on my leg over the side of the bed, carefully lowering it to the ground.

"Go away," I grumble.

"Morning, sunshine," he says brightly, smiling. "Need some help?" He reaches out and takes my hand, and I flinch, pulling away. He frowns worriedly. "One of those days?" he asks.

"Yeah." I push my hair from my face with my right hand, and Marc crouches by my feet.

"Do you want me to find the places?" he asks, his fingers hovering unsurely by my ankle.

I freeze, then nod, forcing a smile. It is more real when I feel that it does not hurt. He releases a breath and gently takes my foot in his hand, running his fingers along my skin softly. When he does not feel me flinch away from his touch, he runs his hands up along my leg. I look at the wall behind him, at the bathroom door, trying to distract myself. I hate when he does this. I hate it because I like it too much.

His hands stop at mid-thigh, and then move to the next leg. For a moment, I focus on the thought that I need to stop wearing only a long t-shirt to bed. I wait as his touch spreads across my skin, wonder at the fact that he can still inspire this feeling in me, this electric shock that is a different sort of pain.

"Anything?" he asks, and I start as his fingers press against my knee above my cast. His mouth pulls up at the side. "Knee on broken leg, and left palm, then," he says.

I make a mental note, and focus on it as he kneels and puts his hand on my shoulder, feeling down along my arm. His touch is probing, I remind myself. Cautious, testing, impersonal. Clinical. Meaningless.

"Done." He taps at my waist teasingly, and I curl in on myself. "There, too?" he asks, rising from the ground and peering down at me through his hair.

"No. Just ticklish," I tell him, holding out my hands to him.

He gently grasps my wrists and lets me pull myself to my feet. "Still? Pity I can't do anything about it."

"Pity I'm so breakable," I joke, pulling free of his grasp and slowly making my way to the bathroom.

"Pity," he murmurs, and I feel fingers brush my waist. I hold my breath. And then the door of the bathroom is closing behind me and I am grasping at the bar that runs along the wall and I am trying to convince myself that it did not happen but it did. I can hear the sound of his voice, and there is something strange in it, something new and different. And, for a moment, I let myself think that he feels the same way that I do. That his feelings towards me are more than brotherly and overprotective. That he wants me.

But then I pull myself over to the mirror, and I look into it, and I am pallid and thin and sickly. And I let my looks convince me that I am wrong. That I imagined it. That, as well as the sensitive spots of skin consistent with severe fibromyalgia, I am plagued with delusions. That he did not mean what I think he meant. That no one could ever want me.

I look away from the mirror and wash my face, pat it dry softly with a towel. That is how I figure out that, along with my knee above my cast and my left palm, my right cheekbone is also rather sensitive. Quite sensitive. Painfully so.

My muffled scream of pain brings Marcus crashing through the door, a frantic look on his face. "Syl?" he asks. I grip the sink, the towel on the ground where I dropped it, my face downturned. "Syl? Are you alright?" Marcus sounds panicked, frightened.

I wait for the pain to ebb, and then raise my eyes to meet his. His darken with concern, and he reaches out with soft, careful fingers that hover over the skin but do not touch it. I know what he is seeing: a rapid-spreading bruise, dark and threatening and melancholy, most likely only serving to make me look closer to corpse than human.

His hand drops to his side, and the other comes up, gently cups the opposite side of my face. "I should have checked," he says.

I force myself not to lean in to his hand. I smile weakly. "Left palm, knee and cheek. I am a giant, walking bruise."

"I am a giant, walking idiot," he says, dropping his hand from my cheek and stepping away, as if by standing too close he will hurt me, when him being further away only makes me ache inside of my chest in a way I know no medicine can help.

"You are pretty tall," I say, trying to make him smile.

He just shakes his head and runs a hand across his face. Careless. Not even requiring thought for the motion. Every movement of mine is carefully thought out, planned in my mind, action and reaction. It makes me see how stark the differences are between the both of us. And only solidifies this thought in my mind: even if I did hear what I thought I heard, feel what I thought I felt, even if he does feel the same way as I do, it is not right. I cannot want it. It would be wrong for me to. Because he is whole and perfect and strong, and I could never give him everything he wants, everything he deserves.

If Marc touched me without thinking, even held my hand a little too roughly, I could break bones. I could shatter.

I think of my dream, and the boy with no face, lips slowly resolving. Liquid silver dripping from his fingers, coating my wrist where our skin touched. I think of how strong I felt, then, yet how weak in his grasp. Able to stand against him, but also able to fall. The word, a name, hovering between us in the air, a delicate cutting of space and time.

I force a smile. Take his hand, carefully. "You are also sometimes an idiot," I allow, and he smiles grudgingly, meeting my eyes. "But I wouldn't survive without you. Now prove yourself worthy of that statement and find me some food."

After a moment, he grins, and I allow him to slip an arm around my waist and walk slowly with me from the room, down the corridor. I let him pretend I am more breakable than I am. Because I love him, and because, for some reason, he needs this. This thing we have, this friendship. And I will give it to him. Because I will give him anything he wants.