Work Text:
It was white.
Everything but the sky was always white. The walls the ceiling the bed sheets the flowers. They were all white. Pristine, luminous. Mocking. The brightness burned her eyes, made her loathe the days she spent here. But there was one splash of color, one dusting of blue and green and pale rose on the table by her small bed.
She sat in her white chair, mindlessly staring out the open glass window to the blue of the sea that rocked and flowed and crashed together. The light and salty ocean wind blew strands of limp brown hair away from her face.
“Yuna.”
Dull eyes flickered, barely responding to the silken sound coming off of a tongue. She knew who it was, of course— Doctor Guado. He had seen to her ever since her admittance to the asylum. He was the only one who dared interact with her, the other doctors and nurses too unnerved by her silence and her dead eyes and her still, dry hands.
(Hands that once exhumed, once healed once fixed what was broken until they themselves were too far gone.)
People don’t speak about the cost of magic; it was taboo to even dream of using it. But she did. She dreamt in reality and lived in fantasy, until it finally destroyed her, clawed away at her grey heart and tore her mind and broke her stone resolve. All for caring and loving and curing. She learned from her father— her wonderful, self-sacrificing idiotic father. She watched him disintegrate and waste away until he had become nothing but a shell, his life energy spread so thinly in blood and bodies and hope that it was too late to even think, to dream, about saving him.
But that didn’t stop her. Instead, she followed her father like a fool and also spread herself thin with blood and bodies and hope until it was too much and she landed herself here, in this white and clean and ugly place.
“Yuna.”
He was behind her now, his large hand lightly running through her hair, playful and teasing and warm. It was the only heat she knew now, the summer air doing nothing, her sheets doing nothing, her clothing doing nothing. So she relishes in the heat he brings her, allows it to encompass her and fill her to the brim with pale hope.
(Hope that she could breathe, that she could see and feel and touch and live again.)
“Yuna.” A whisper, an exhalation, a prayer, a name.
Her name.
He was the only one to say it, the only one to remember it, the only one to revere it. Her lips slowly ghosted over his name, feeling each silent letter and syllable.
Seymour.
A smile attempted to paint and curve itself to her flat lips; her eyes tried to see, her lungs longed to breathe and her chained heart tried to leap. Nothing changed, her face stayed blank as blank as her eyes and her heart, her lungs, remained still.
Yuna knew what she wanted to feel, what he felt— she knew what she should feel. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t feel or see or live or bleed.
So she simply sat in her white chair, held her own dry hands, and longed for breath. His hand simply lay in the crook of her neck, fingers caressing the skin over her pulse. It did not falter, did not flutter at his touch, did not change its pace. He wished it would.