A Spine-Tingling Story - TDG Fanfic

Old, Unhappy, Far-Off Things

Perhaps if Ryan hadn't been feverish, exhausted and carcinogenically challenged, he would've had a stronger reaction to Chloe's announcement that their mother was returning.

As it was, all he did was stare at her with an indecipherable expression on his face for a few moments, before making his decision.

"I don't have the spoons to deal with this shit," he said, flopping back down onto the bed.

Chloe didn't know if she was more surprised by his lacklustre reaction or his casual use of "spoons" as if he expected her to understand. "Fine, suit yourself," she said simply, before wheeling out of the room. She knew it would properly sink in eventually - probably when he had more "spoons", whatever that meant.

In her absence, Ryan dozed off for what felt like the dozenth time that day. When you were chronically ill, sleep was something you felt like you could never get enough of, especially seeing how sleeping was difficult when it was actually bedtime. It was at times like this where Ryan wondered if a chronic illness was trying to make you nocturnal.

No one is absolutely certain as to why humans sleep, but it's clear that aside from resting the body, sleep plays an important part in many important tasks, including memory and learning. REM sleep has been shown to particularly facilitate the retention of emotionally-laden information. Some researchers even believe that the principal of sleep is to allow us to dream, which is an essential part of the process of resolving emotional issues.

So maybe that was why the information about his mother sparked a dream about her - and not a nice one.

You'd think that after years upon years of trying to repress the memory of such a tragedy, certain details would be rather vague and blurry. This was, indeed, the case for Ryan - if he truly remembered everything exactly as it had happened, he would've always known that he had never pushed Chloe and would have never carried that guilt for almost a decade - well, not to the extent that he did, anyway.

But dreams are odd. Even if his mind was filling in some of the blanks with new information, all details - true or false - were as vivid as they would've been as if he was recalling events that had happened yesterday. The tiny pink teddy bear top Chloe was wearing, scruffy and slightly stained. The huge smile on her face as she shook him awake excitedly, saying that he should get up early so they could have fun. The paper birthday card she had given to him, a crudely drawn picture of both of them standing on a sandy beach with big smiles, a big number 5 above them, drawn with wax crayons.

He remembered the stifling heat that summer's day, so his mother had left the window open before going out grocery shopping. Ryan had taken that opportunity to sneak into her bedroom and snoop around with Chloe, opening up her wardrobe and drawers to find out what "grown-up" treasures could be hidden in there - only to find a few tall, dark glass bottles stuffed into her bedside cabinet. There was even one under her pillow.

Chloe had begun to have qualms then. Even as a three-year-old, she could probably sense the bottles were slightly off. She worried that their mother would come in and find them looking around her room and ran off. Ryan, however, found too much morbid fascination in the sleek, sinister bottles to follow her.

Looking back, he'd quickly sussed out that Chloe must've been trying to see their mother through the window before she fell. Somehow, her cries of fear as she fell from the window to the pavement below failed to reach his ears (and was yet another reason why he still felt a degree of culpability for the whole incident). It was only when he heard his mother's scream that he abandoned his findings and ran to find out what had happened.

The sight of Chloe's mangled body was a sight he would never forget.

Their mother was cradling her little body in her arms - which was actually the last thing you should do when coming across a casualty with clear injuries such as broken bones - when she looked up to see the height of the fall and met Ryan's eyes as he stared down at the scene below him.