Swan Lake - Larry Stylinson Ballet AU

Act XIV - Bone Cancer

"There was once a little bluebird, in a bluebird's nest."

He walked to the drawer, and slipped the key in the lock, coughing when it clicked.

"There was once an angry cuckoo, who thought that she was best."

He opened the drawer, watching Mother. She didn't flinch, nor did she open her eyes.

"All the bugs and bees told mother blue to hide."

Louis looked down at the drawer. Spoons, forks, and knives stared back.

He ignored them.

He felt to the back the drawer, and found a needle and thread. Retrieving it, poking the thread through the hole of the needle, he continued to speak.

"They did not want the baby birds to be devoured alive."

He walked up to Mother, and said, "Your eyelashes are pretty, can I do your makeup?" She nodded at him. "I'll put bracelets on you, too. Don't peak, you can see them afterwards."

Louis bent down to her wrists, and using two of her own belts that had previously been hidden around his waist, he tied them to the chair. "Don't move, I'm going to do your eyelashes. Be very very still."

He gave Mother a kiss on her cheek. If she were to try and move her wrists now, his whole plan would fail. So he continued his poem, voice cracking, fear in his heart, yet he did what he felt obliged to do.

Picking up the needle, he said, "One day, the cuckoo laid an egg, in that nest of blue. It was larger than the rest, and it was heavier, too."

Louis moved to her left eye.
His love for her made his hand tremble.

He could barely speak, but he continued. He pushed the needle through mother' skin, just above her top lash line, and she was so numb from drugs that she did not feel a thing. "Mother blue raised the stranger egg, and did not notice flaws. She even raised it as her own, when the cuckoo was born."

Louis watched his Mother. To speak right now was, by far, the hardest thing that he'd ever done. He watched the thick thread go through her eyelid, top lash line to bottom, outer corner to inner, and it hurt that she trusted him. She never tried to resist, never tried to move her hands that were strapped to the chair, and never doubted her son's love to her. She trusted him, and he did not.

Perhaps that he was the worst of them both, after all.

His voice trembled properly now, he couldn't hide it. He couldn't stop the tears streaming down his face and the pain in his heart from making him bend over and clutch it. He was doing something terrible, and to a person that he would risk his life for. But, despite of it all, he recited the poem, and he did not stop from what he was doing.

He snapped the thread while placing a forceful kiss on her cheek, and moved to her other eye.

'I don't know what you mean to me,' He thought to himself, 'I hate you, but I love you so much. If I didn't, then why would I be crying like this, right now?'

He laughed a little, wiping his cheek on his shoulder. "You look beautiful, Mother." He commented, and then he began to cry truthfully. Large tears fell down his face, dripping onto her dress, onto his shirt, and onto the floor. He couldn't betray Mother like this, but he didn't want to stop. He just couldn't bare to see those blue eyes in so much pain again.

"The little-The little cuckoo did not like his friends and wanted each gone. He pushed them all from the nest-from the nest-until there was... but one."

It was then, when his voice cracked, that Mother opened her eyes.

Yet the left one was bleeding, sewn shut with thick black thread. the pale blue of her eye could be seen moving frantically beneath the lid.