With a deep breath, James knocked on an unassuming wooden door.
Moments later it swung open slowly and the small woman with her hand pressed against the surface, holding it open and hair flowing over her shoulders in frizzy brunette waves, smiled at him. James forced one that felt brittle and harsh, inclining his head in silent greeting. She stepped back and he slipped past into the small room of pouring light and lavender. Lavender walls, cushions, candles, notepaper. The mundanity of it and the strangeness of something unique to her was actually quite comforting.
He lived in a world now black and white and anything but personalized. Everything was flat and everything was either empty or too painful to bear. This room had become an oasis.
He took a seat on the couch without a word and watched as she shuffled around the room, collecting pens and paper and - he suppressed a heaving sigh - pictures. When she finally settled down in a chair opposite his, made of warm wood and lavender cushions, she clicked her surprisingly not lavender pen and cleared her throat. James relaxed further into the welcoming cushions behind him, hands folding in his lap.
"James," she said.
"Good afternoon, Diane," he droned.
"Is it? A good afternoon?"
He shrugged. "Decent, 'least so far."
"How so?"
"Work was steady, not too many crazies, and the nightmare last night wasn't... horrible?"
"What was it about? The usual?"
"No."
"Then?"
He pursed his lips. She'd heard much worse before... more unbelievable tales... "I was... back in the war."
The scratching of her pen on paper soothed an itch in his mind. "Like a memory?"
"No, not a memory." He shook his head, running a hand through brown curls and looking down to his feet and the scuffs marking the soles of his shoes. "It was almost as if... as if I was never discharged. Like I was still required to fight and serve after..."
After Utopia.
He choked on something entirely unknown to him, something he couldn't possibly name, and cut off into silence.
For our Utopia.
For our—no no no.
No.
After a moment, her voice had lowered, softened, and Diane offered, "After your time in captivity?"
James huffed a bitter laugh, no wrinkle or smile in sight to speak for that apparent amusement. "Yeah, after that."
So simplified. So simple. So cutting and horrible. What a way to put the worst six months of his life. What a way to demean all that time he'd been held captive. How his life had never been the same since. How he became someone he never would have wanted to. Now he was glad he had.
James knew he wouldn't still be alive if he hadn't. Nor would he have seen the truths of this horrible world. And the truths in himself.
As rotten and cursed as they were.
"And how did it go?"
He clamped his lips shut and dared a glance to her expression. And just as he'd expected. Pity disguised as sympathy. But she could never know what this was like. He never wanted her to know what that was like. What it had been like to be there and to watch the world fall apart at his own hands. That dream... it made him feel like he was drowning. In himself and horror and never ending anger. It was another timeline that he would have died much sooner in. At his own hand all the same. The same cause and the same fucking answer.
YOU ARE READING
Gatsby | Wanda M.
Fanfiction"A man with no purpose is a lost man." James is a solitary man who works and then goes home. He doesn't keep friends and he doesn't want to. Besides his psychologist, there's not a single person in his life. At least not anymore. But at...
