12 Of Silver Nights and Golden Sunshine

12 years ago

I knew this place.

I was in the hallway of the hospital my family always went to, wondering when my parents would come out so that we could finally go eat something. I was starving.

You see, a cousin of my father's had given birth to a healthy baby boy just three days before, and my parents had been absolutely excited to meet the newest addition to the family. My father was also the baby's godfather, so there was that too, I supposed.

They let me see the baby and even hold him for some time – admittedly, he was very cute – but in the end, I was told to wait outside for them to finish discussing boring, adult matters. I was perfectly happy to comply. My feet were killing me.

So, here I was, sitting on one of the waiting chairs closest to the room where my father's cousin was while I swung my legs like the seven-year-old I was.

I ignored the rumbling of my stomach, focusing on the sounds I could hear coming from the closed door in front of me. It didn't seem as if they were saying anything worth listening to. Something about not sleeping and babies crying…yeah. The usual, regular, baby-talk, boring stuff.

I huffed, not wanting summer vacation to ever end. August had just begun, but time always passed too quickly for my liking. I also wasn't looking forward to visiting Grandma's house. It had been quite a long time since I had seen her – I must have been three years old or so – but even though I was very young, I still remembered it as if it were yesterday, and that woman was just too weird.

Well, she could have been worse. At least she didn't treat me like a child, like most people did. Adults often considered themselves smarter than children just because they were older, and they always treated them – and consequently, me – with a condescending tone because of that, which was annoying.

My parents and teachers at school were always amazed by my maturity, as they often referred to it, but I didn't really see what was so special about it. Sure, I found most things easy to understand and I wondered why kids my age were so childish all the time, but that didn't make me special. It just made me... well, a little peculiar.

Maybe visiting Grandma wouldn't be so bad after all.

Like called to like and all that.

A sound of voices and steps of people coming towards me brought me back from my musings.

I tilted my head in confusion. Why would anybody be coming this way? The maternity ward was pretty far from the other departments in the hospital, this one even more so – my parents had a lot of money, but so did the rest of the family. After all, Grandma had wanted all her grandkids and their families to live comfortably. Odd she may be, but it was clear she loved all of us dearly. And with so much money to spare, my cousin (once removed) got the whole private wing all to herself.

Which is why I was so surprised when a bunch of doctors – because with all those white coats, what else could they be? – appeared from the hallway, engaged in what seemed to be an enlightening discussion about something or the other.

I turned my gaze towards the door of my cousin's room and blinked in confusion.

I was pretty sure the door had been white. But it was grey now.

I rubbed my eyes and looked again, as if I expected the door's color to return to what it was before. I stared at the plaque on the door and checked that the name on it was, in fact, my cousin's. It was. And I could still hear my parents talking inside.

I scratched a tingling spot behind my ear and shrugged. Whatever.

"What are you doing here alone, kid?" A man's voice asked near me, and I turned to see one of the doctors from before had stopped next to my seating spot, probably confused why a seven-year-old was staring at a hospital room door with such a dumb look on his face.

I sized the man up while I wondered if I should answer him. Mother had always warned me about talking to strangers, but this guy didn't give me any bad vibes. He seemed nice if a bit too cheerful. And flirty, if the looks some of the nurses gave him were anything to go by.

"You go on, ladies," said the man, smiling at the women and winking amidst their giggles. Yep. Definitely a flirty one.

Well, I could see why he caught their attention. The man was blond and had the bluest eyes I had ever seen. Also, his smile showed all his perfectly aligned teeth, which were so white that I had the urge to close my eyes to avoid being blinded by them. He seemed pretty strong too, even if the white doctor's coat was covering most of his body.

"I'm waiting," I simply told the man, glaring at my rumbling stomach when it decided to make itself heard again. The man hummed and threw a quick glance at the door I had been staring at.

"Is she your mom?" He asked, gesturing at the plaque, and I shook my head.

"Oh, no. She's my cousin. She gave birth not too long ago."

The man hummed nonchalantly, and after a moment of contemplation, he narrowed his eyes toward me, as if he was trying to see me better. I slightly leaned away from him.

"What?" I asked, feeling a bit uncomfortable. "Something on my face?"

"Curious," he muttered, "very curious, indeed."

I started to feel a little freaked out. "What's curious? What are you talking about?"

My stomach rumbled again, and I blushed furiously, pressing my hands on my belly as if that would quiet down the sounds.

Instead of answering me, the man looked around, and his smile brightened even more – if that was even possible – as he practically bounced toward one of the food vending machines that stood in the corridor and hummed, staring at the food options.

"Do you like chips, kid?" He asked, and I blinked stupidly at him.

"I don't have any money," I said, to which he waved his hand in clear unconcerned dismissal.

"I've got it, don't worry."

"My mother says I shouldn't accept food from strangers," I told the man, whose eyes sparked with amusement. "Nor should I speak with them, now that I think about it."

"Smart woman," the man said, "but I'm not a stranger; I'm a doctor!" He pointed to the left part of his chest, and I squinted in confusion.

"Am I supposed to be looking at something…?" I asked hesitantly.

The man quickly looked at himself and started patting his coat down and rummaging through it while he muttered up a storm.

"I know I must have left it somewhere around here… blasted thing… Aha!" He triumphantly retrieved a small rectangular object from one of his many pockets and clapped it on his chest with a proud smile.

"Dr… Fred? Your name is Fred?" I asked, arching an eyebrow, after reading the name on it. Not that there was anything wrong with it, of course. It just sounded… weird for a doctor.

"That's me," the man – I mean, Fred – said happily. "And what's yours? I can't keep calling you kid, can I?"

I huffed and with a glance toward the room my parents were still in, I shrugged. Why not?

"Michael," I told Fred, "but I'm still not sure about the food thing. I don't know you."

"Oh, I insist! You're practically starving! And what do you mean, you don't know me? We've exchanged names already, haven't we? So we're not strangers anymore!" He completely ignored my mutter of "I don't think that's how it works" and took out a coin from somewhere to insert it in the machine.

He had to kick the thing a couple of times when it got stuck, but after that, he took the small bag of chips that fell out and threw it at me. I caught it before it could fall on the floor and simply stared at it. I was sure my gaze perfectly conveyed my distrust.

"You must be the most paranoid little person I've ever met," Fred said, sounding reluctantly amazed, and I turned up my nose.

"The man who sleeps with a knife is a fool every night but one," I pointedly told him, and he stared at me in complete disbelief.

"Scratch paranoid. You're the weirdest kid I've ever met in my life. Which is saying something."

I didn't know if I should feel insulted or complimented. I was all for embracing my inner madness, after all. I simply hummed in response and looked at the chips again. Well, I was pretty hungry, and it didn't look as if Fred had done anything bad to it. He didn't look that mischievous, but with a name like Fred, you really couldn't be paranoid enough.

"Do you have a twin named George, by any chance?" I asked the doctor, and he stared at me as if I was crazy.

"Are you comparing me to Fred Weasley?" He then asked incredulously, which was fair. I was comparing him to Fred Weasley.

"You kind of have that prankster look about you," I pointed out, and he stared at his reflection on the food vending machine as if he expected to detect said look somehow.

"I think you're mistaking me for my half-brother, kid," Fred then said, running his fingers through his hair in contemplation, "and no, I do not have a twin named George. Although it would be more of a Georgina now that I think about it. Don't tell her I said that."

I wrinkled my nose at him and finally opened the package. "You're weird."

Fred smiled. "A good kind of weird or a bad one?"

I shrugged, munching on a chip. "I don't know. Just a weird kind of weird, I guess. Want one?" I asked, holding another chip out to him.

"Sure." And just as Fred took the chip, my eyes started itching terribly, and I closed them tightly to try and get rid of the itch. When I opened them again, Fred was gone.

I sprang up from my seat and looked around wildly.

Not only was Fred missing, but the food vending machine had also vanished.

There was no one but me in the corridor.

I looked at the door of my cousin's room, and my eyes widened in shock.

Because the door was white again.

The chip package slipped from my hands and fell on the floor with a dull thud.

-------------------------------

I didn't dare tell my parents what had happened. I had a feeling they wouldn't believe me. They would probably think I'd imagined it, that I'd made it up. But I knew what I had seen was real.

And that wasn't the end of the weirdness, oh no.

I kept seeing things after that, as if the events in the hospital had removed an invisible veil from my eyes and showed me something about the world I didn't know before.

Something dangerous.

I kept catching glimpses of the impossible wherever I went.

I walked past parks on my way to school and saw little beings – fairies – flying around and gazing at their reflections in the ponds.

The trees creaked and groaned whenever I walked by them, and one even seemed to move its branches in a way that looked as if it was taking off an imaginary hat to greet me.

A child wearing a beige tunic and a brown hood actually waved at me when he saw me, smiling in excitement, while his other hand held a blue, glowing lightsaber.

But every time I blinked or looked away, they disappeared, as if they had never been there at all to begin with.

I thought I was going mad.

I was scared, and I didn't know what to do.

I was so desperate that I even considered telling Grandma everything when we went to visit her before summer vacation ended, seeing as she was… well, maybe not crazy, but she was really weird.

But in the end, I wasn't brave enough to approach her. I feared that she would react as badly as my parents surely would.

So I tried to ignore it. I pretended I couldn't see anything weird, that everything was normal. That I was as truly ordinary as everyone else.

And for a while, it seemed to work. I stopped seeing things, and it felt like everything had returned to what it was.

But then I got sick. Really sick.

My body hurt all the time, burning with fevers so high that it felt like I was being set ablaze, my eyes itched terribly, and my head felt like it was going to split in two.

My parents called a doctor to our house because they were afraid of moving me. But he couldn't find anything.

According to the man, I was as healthy as one could be. There was nothing visibly wrong with me.

And yet, I was on my bed, completely helpless, ridden by this unknown illness.

I drifted in and out of consciousness, lost in a chaotic world of dreams and hallucinations. I didn't know where one started and the other finished. And it was in one of those dream-like hallucinations that I found myself in a garden.

I was lying on grass that felt like a velvety carpet, and I could hear tree leaves swaying in the breeze, even water flowing from a river that must have been close to me.

That didn't really solve the problem of me feeling like I was on fire, though.

I whimpered, rolling over, and tried to swat some of my red hair that had gotten stuck on my sweat-covered forehead – wait a minute. Red hair?! I was a brunette!!

Sure, my parents always said my hair looked kind of auburn when I stood under the sun, but that was a far cry from actual red!

Another stab of pain surged from my head, and I promptly forgot all about the red hair thing and clenched my fists on the grass to try to stop myself from crying.

It didn't work.

"Make it stop," I whimpered, dimly realizing that I was speaking aloud and finding that I had no energy to care, "m-make it s-stop."

Through squinted eyes, I wearily looked around. I was sure I would have appreciated the view more if it hadn't been for my current state.

It was night, but that didn't affect the beauty of the garden at all. In fact, it made it even more beautiful. It almost looked like something out of a fairy tale.

"Thank you, dear one."

The sudden voice – it felt so familiar, why did it feel so familiar? – made me flinch violently, which caused my headache to skyrocket. Someone cried out in pain.

That someone being me, of course.

"Oh, little flame," the voice said again, and I blinked tiredly as someone gently lifted me into their arms. I blushed in embarrassment – I was too old to be carried like a toddler, I was seven years old already! – feeling as if my head was on fire – or was that the fever talking? – but the person sounded so kind that I didn't say anything.

I whimpered and pressed my burning forehead to their cool neck, blinking through bleary eyelids while I tried to see who the person holding me was.

"Such a heavy burden for one so young," the woman whispered, her unoccupied hand gently brushing through my hair.

She was beautiful. She wore a simple yet elegant grey dress, and her eyes were a mesmerizing clear blue, as if tiny crystal fragments danced within them.

Her hair had a silvery-white hue, which seemed weird now that I thought about it, yet it felt strangely normal. I had no idea how that could be.

But the weirdest part was that I knew her. I had seen her before. But why couldn't I remember...?

My head started throbbing again, causing me to close my eyes and whine softly. The woman holding me shushed me gently, her cool hand brushing my forehead, which somehow eased my pain a bit.

"He is burning up, husband," she said, her voice filled with concern as she held me close.

I heard someone move near me.

"His hröa cannot withstand his fëa and all that it holds at the same time. It is burning him from within," a man responded in a dreamy tone. It made me feel as if I were half-asleep yet strangely awake.

I also felt as if I had met him before.

"Irmo," the woman suddenly spoke up after a moment of silence, "perhaps we should..."

"Nay, Estë. It is not time yet. You know this."

"I cannot bear to see him in pain... is there truly nothing we can do?"

Irmo hummed softly, a sound that made me shift sleepily in the woman's – Estë's – embrace. "I could lock away his memories. He shall remember when it is time. When he is ready to choose."

Estë hesitated, her fingers gently brushing through my hair. "What if he does not?"

"Then the memories shall fade away with him," Irmo replied, his voice carrying an air of inevitability. "Do not despair, Estë. If that is truly his choice, he will live a happy life."

I wanted to ask what they were talking about. Where we were. Why I could recognize them but not remember them. Why I had been seeing all those strange, incredible, fantastical things all around me and why I was so sick now.

But my body felt so heavy, and I was so tired that I couldn't even open my eyes.

A warm hand settled on my head, and echoes of voices whispered in my ears. They spoke of dreams and ages long past, of wishes and visions of before, now, and tomorrow.

Old yet young, mortal yet eternal.

"Fare thee well, little flame," Estë whispered to me, her soothing voice evoking a fleeting memory within me that slipped away like a wisp of smoke.

"Do not forsake kindness…"

A comforting warmth enveloped me like a soft blanket, and I was lured into a peaceful sleep amidst the darkness.

"…and it shan't forsake thee."