Chapter Text
This is the first time Sollux has been in a hospital and he does not like it at all. It smells strange, too clean, chemicals thick and heavy in the air. The chairs in the waiting area look nice and comfy, wooden and blue, but they really aren’t. The cushion is thin and the back of the chair is curved at an awkward, inward angle. It’s cold. Sollux shivers in his t-shirt and rubs his arms. The walls are bleached in white, plain, with paper trim enamored with little sailboats running across the top. Sailboats. Why are there fucking sailboats? This is in the middle of Illinois. It’s noon. It’s a Tuesday. There are no lakes nearby, nor oceans. Sailboats. Fucking, goddamned, sailboats. Sollux thinks they should have instead chose something like corn. Corn is in the middle of Illinois. Not sailboats. Jesus Christ. Sollux leans back in the chair, the rear of it jutting out and forcing his spine to bend weirdly, uncomfortably. Sollux rests his head against the white wall behind him and looks up at the ceiling. His eyes trail over a small crack on the otherwise smooth—white—surface. He imagines scenarios on how the ceiling was split. A mad patient was thrashing around, held at the arms, his thin dress slipping off of him, his plastic bracelet swinging around his bone wrist. He threw the knife he used to eat lunch with and it got jammed into the ceiling, forcing the plaster open as if it were a snack wrap. A crazy woman barged into the hospital and took the stairs up to this floor—the seventh floor, the CCU, the Critical Care Unit. This was the floor on which her husband died, and fueled by despair and anger and delusions, she whipped out a gun and waved it around. People in the waiting room screamed and scuttled away. Patients started freaking out in their rooms, sirens wailed and machines screamed. Nurses and doctors rushed to them, needles in their hands. Security guards came, taking the stairs, and before the woman was dragged away she shot a single bullet into the ceiling. Or maybe nothing happened at all. Maybe the stress from the floor above just became too much, and a little narrow crack split. The floor above, Sollux thinks, is maternity. Pregnancy. Birthing babies. New fresh meat wrapped tight in new soft skin, and right below them are sunken people lying in beds, life ringing the life out of them.Oh, God.
Mituna.
Sollux swallows and rips his eyes away from the ceiling, from that tiny crack. He looks at the wide but blurry TV on the wall. Spongebob is playing on mute. Kid toys, building blocks and Hot Wheels, lay scattered on the floor below it. They lay abandoned and overturned, collecting dust. Sollux thinks of death and dead children, leaving their toys behind for all eternity as a yellow sponge under the sea laughs over and over.
Fucking hell.
Sollux finally directs his gaze to the floor. He fists his hands. He burns holes into the navy carpet speckled with little lines of red and brown and green. He looks at his shoes, black and white checkered Vans, at the dirt on them. His knee begins to bounce. Sollux splays out his skinny fingers and grips his knees. Relax, he reminds himself. Count to ten.
He counts to ten.
Breathe in, breathe out.
Count backwards to one.
Keep it in control.
“Here.”
Sollux jolts in his seat and snaps his head up. His father is standing there, with his short blonde hair and tired blue eyes and narrow nose and his aesthetic, young-looking face. He’s holding out a cup of coffee from the cafeteria on the first floor. He’s still in his dirty clothes, from working with the bees, hours ago: a plain t-shirt and jeans nearly turned green with grass stains.
Sollux takes the cup and it warms his hands. He drums his thumbs against the black plastic lid, staring down at it. “Thankth,” he mutters. His father sits beside him.
“No problem,” Dad says.
He says, “I put honey in it.”
Sollux looks up. The corner of his mouth quirks up in a smile. “You did?”
Dad nods. “Yeah.” He transfers the coffee to one hand and reaches into his pocket. He pulls something up, and the neck of a tiny bottle of honey glints in the waiting area’s rectangle lights. He pushes the bottle back down with his thumb.
Sollux raises the cup to his lips. “Are you allowed to do that?”
Dad shakes his head, grinning now, too. “No.”
Sollux drinks some of the coffee, the honey mixed within thick and sweet on his tongue. The coffee blisters his throat, but he ignores it and continues to drink, only because it’s something to do. He isn’t even tired. It’s noon, not two AM.
He and his father are the only ones in the waiting room, now. The visiting hours are far from over, and apparently no one else has a reason to come during this time of the day.
Sollux looks around the floor and spots a stranded, plastic, Fisher Price school bus. He taps it with the toe of his shoe, and then stretches his leg out, slipping farther down in the awkward chair with his coffee on his chest. Sollux brings the car back and kicks it again, and then again, and then again. One more time he shoves it and it bangs loudly against the chair diagonal from him.
“Cut it out, Sollux,” Dad mutters, rubbing his eyes.
Sollux huffs, his chin hitting the lid of the coffee. “Thorry.”
Dad asks, dropping his hands to his pockets, “Did Pop come out when I was gone?”
Sollux shakes his head, his chin scraping the opening in the lid of the coffee, his neck cramped against the stupid ledge of the dumb back of the stupid chair. “No.”
Dad sighs, lowering in the chair too. His legs are longer than Sollux’s, reaching far beyond his son’s. Sollux scowls. He looks back up at the crack in the ceiling and thinks of dead children, of screaming babies, of old people dying with loose wrinkled flaps of yellow skin.
He doesn’t know how long he stares at that crack in the ceiling, but he lowers his head at the sound of the double doors leading towards the CCU creaking. Dad stands up and Sollux straightens out, his elbows on his knees, rubbing his sore neck with his hand.
Pop walks through the doors with a sense of gravity. He and Dad are standing between the chairs and the toys and the yellow sponge under the sea and their youngest son, between that and the death, and the yellow skin, and the death. Pop’s wearing clothes similar to Dad. His dark brown hair is a tad longer, a little curlier, loose locks falling over his ears and onto his forehead. He and his husband talk in muted whispers, and eventually Dad collapses in Pop’s chest with a sob and Pop holds him tightly.
This makes Sollux stand up from his chair with a clatter. The coffee cup falls to the floor and the lid pops off and the brown liquid soaks into the speckled carpet. Sollux stands right underneath the crack in the ceiling. Through the ceiling, Sollux can hear the chime, a cute happy melody play, signaling new life. A baby was just born.
“Pop,” Sollux says, staring at his dad’s blonde hair underneath Pop’s fuzzy jaw. Sollux’s hands hang helplessly at his sides. He kicks the Fisher Price bus into the row of chairs and his parents flinch.
“Pop,” Sollux repeats. “What’th wrong with Mituna?”
Fuck breathing in. Fuck breathing out.
Fuck counting to ten.
Fuck counting back to one.
Fuck keeping it in control.
Pop looks up from Dad and his face is grim, his auburn eyes devoid of their usual light. He opens his mouth and the words appear, playful and teasing. At first, Sollux can’t comprehend them. More follow, an ugly and grey and weird explanation. The words and letters march across the speckled floor, around the toys left by dead children. By the time they reach Sollux he already understands, he already gets it, but he says no, he denies it, his voice rises in pitch. He thinks of the mad patient and the crazy widow. The crack in the ceiling.
Pop comes over and grabs Sollux and pulls him into his chest, and Sollux hits and spits and shouts. Pop only holds him until Sollux gives up. The boy suddenly falls slack and silent. He wraps his arms tight around his father’s torso. He glances at Dad, who stands with tears streaming down his face and his hands clamped over his mouth.
Sollux drops his head into Pop’s shoulder and begins to cry.
-
Four years later
-
Aradia once told him about Japanese mythology, and about last of the first Kami. Their names escape Sollux, but they were very long and started with an “I”. There was a man and a woman, and they were in love. They had many children who would grow into gods—Kami—and the main islands of Japan. When the woman had her last child, she died. Her husband was sorrowed and went to the underworld to see her.
When he finally found her he was shocked. Once beautiful, she was now ugly and decayed, a monster. The man ran as his dead wife chased him. The man escaped the underworld not a moment too soon.
Change was what scared him off, and death was what caused that change.
But death isn’t ever just death, a person dying. It can be the death of a relationship, the death of a family as it falls apart, the death of a home or culture.
The thing that kills us, then, is not death, but the change that follows. Change stains and deforms and rearranges and ruins and destroys. And it prospers, like a virus, like a parasite, like a cancer. Change feeds off of loss. The earth is a giant lollipop for change to suck on.
Death is the number one cause of change in the world, and the leading cause of death is change.
-
Sollux is in the same hospital in the same waiting room. Aradia sits beside him, dirt underneath her fingernails, her hair up in a ponytail. Her narrow eyes continually swivel to glance at him, but Sollux isn’t paying attention. Aradia looks down at the book in her lap, though she isn’t reading. She sits with one leg crossed over the other, wearing her long skirt, her hiking boots, and her writing club hoodie. Her massive leather knapsack sits at her feet near a little plastic Fisher Price bus, the top flap pulled back. Inside are books and notebooks, pens and pencils, pebbles and a first aid kit and more (a camera, sheet music).
“Sollux,” Aradia says, looking up from her book again. Sollux doesn’t look back at her.
Aradia sighs. In her bag, her phone vibrates. Aradia leans down and shuffles through it, eventually finding the bland flip phone. Aradia opens it and sees a text message from her older sister.
Aradia’s shoulders slump upon seeing her sister’s name. Her sister’s relationship with the family is still in the process of being rebuilt.
The girl quickly enters a reply and closes her phone, dropping it in her bag, where it lands with a clunk.
Sollux still isn’t paying attention.
Across from them sit Sollux’s fathers, Dad bloodied and bandaged and Pop holding his hand. They look at the floor, dazed and confused, as if in a trance, and Aradia feels uncomfortable even looking at them. She feels sad.
She knows, too.
“He’ll be okay,” she mutters, picking at her dirty fingernail. “He’ll be okay,” she repeats, to Sollux, to all of them, to herself, to no one.
She twirls a permed curl around her finger. She leans forward and rifles through her bag. She swaps her book for a notebook and pen and she opens notebook to a clean page. She writes the date in the top right corner.
I think that calling it a waiting room is a bit strange, and a bit cruel. Aradia pauses, considers crossing out “strange” and “cruel”, but doesn’t.
She continues, Or maybe it’s just a type of brutal honesty. Because in waiting rooms you do wait. And you wait. And you wait. And it feels like dying. It feels like your skin is flaking away, and every once in a while you rub your arm or your neck. You pull your fingers back and stare at them, and marvel at how chunks of flesh aren’t slipping away. It feels like you’re falling apart. And maybe you are. Maybe you really are.
I have grown up seeing people waiting. People looking at the sky and waiting for someone to come back, or to follow that loved one, wherever they believe they go.
Again, Aradia pauses.
I have waited too. I have waited for the lie which is my mother’s health. And when that didn’t come, I waited for her improvement. And when that didn’t come I waited for hope. And it came, but it went away, just as many things do. And when it went away and when improvement was gone and when there was no hope left, I began waiting for my mother to have a peaceful death. And today, I am still waiting for this.
My old teachers and peers believed I was strange. Other adults thought my parents were wrong in their work, were wrong for raising us, my sister and me, around it, around death, around dead people, around sorrow and loss. I’m not sure if that was exactly wrong or right, but I am thankful for them doing so.
Knowing death at an early age when other parents try so hard to shelter their children from it. I think it made me more mature. I think it made me more enabled to deal with sadness and tribulations. I think it made me realize death is a natural part of life. I am not scared of death, personally. I was once, but that was a while ago, and since then I have changed. I am still changing.
I identify as an atheist but I believe in reincarnation, for I think that is the most logical reason for death there is. I believe that death is merely an intermission between roles, between plays, and I think the goal everyone is looking for is, creating a masterpiece while you are on stage. Give your best performance before the curtains close. And if you are successful you will be remembered. You will be remembered as an artist of life.
Growing up around death made me appreciate life so much more, and with everything that has happened to me growing up and still today, I am very thankful. I am happy to sit in this brutally honest waiting room because it means that I am alive, that I am still on the stage. This is just a sad scene. And sad scenes always pass. I know this.
Aradia pauses, letting her pen rest on the paper as she works at her sore fingers. She picks up the pen again and considers her next words. She decides on writing what is in the forefront of her mind.
I hope Mituna doesn’t die.
He has so much to live for.
I hope Mituna doesn’t die. I know Mituna will not die.
I’m waiting.
Just as Aradia closes her notebook—not sorrowful and teary eyed, but with a wise, dry face—Sollux says, looking up at the ceiling in a distant voice, “The crack.” Aradia holds her notebook and pen in her lap and looks up to the ceiling. Across from her Sollux’s fathers sit still.
Sollux says, “The crack ithn’t there anymore.”
Aradia blinks, looking to where Sollux has raised his hand and is pointing at. The crack.
“Yes,” she says. “They must have covered it with plaster, or something.”
“Why?” Sollux asks. His voice shakes. “I liked it there.”
“It’s been four years since you saw it, Sollux.” Aradia lowers her head and looks at Sollux, and tears are falling from the corners of his eyes down his temples. Aradia lifts her thumb and wipes the salty water away.
“Someone must have noticed it eventually,” Aradia says. “Someone must have fixed it.”
The double doors creak.
Aradia is the only one who looks.