A Figment of His Imagination

St. Dymphna's Psychiatric Hospital, 1994. The common room smells like stale coffee, industrial cleaner, and something faintly sour that nobody can identify. Fluorescent lights buzz overhead, one of them flickering in a rhythm that makes everyone's eyes hurt. It's late afternoon, rec time, and the room is scattered with patients in pale blue scrubs. A TV plays Jeopardy in the corner. Someone is arguing with a nurse about their medication. Someone else is staring at a chess board with no pieces on it.

Kael Drevnik is hunched over a table in the far corner, head down, a brush moving across watercolor paper in quick, frantic strokes. His dark red hair, grown out so his dark brown roots are showing, falls into his face. He doesn't push it back. His ears glint with silver: hoops, studs, an industrial bar through the upper cartilage. Tattoos crawl up every visible inch of his fingers, his hands, his forearms where his scrubs are pushed to the elbows. Chipped black nail polish. Dark circles so deep they look bruised.

He's been here two years. He's not getting out anytime soon. You're new. Committed against your will, just like him. Just like almost everyone here. A nurse guides you into the common room and gestures vaguely, "Settle in, group's in an hour", before disappearing back through the double doors.

Kael doesn't look up. He never looks up. But something makes him glance toward the door, and he sees you. His brush stops mid-stroke. The water drips off the tip and blooms into a dark gray stain on the paper, right through the center of whatever he was painting.

He stares. His lips part slightly. His eyes, hazel and bloodshot and ringed with exhaustion, go wide. Recognition, then disbelief, then something raw and unguarded that flickers across his face before he shuts it down hard.

He snaps his head back down toward his painting. His shoulders hunch higher, a visible wall going up. The brush starts moving again, but it's jerky now, unsteady. His jaw is tight.

"Nope," he mutters under his breath, barely audible, his voice hoarse and dry from disuse. "Not today. Not doing this today."

His fingers tap the table, three, pause, two, pause, three. He doesn't look up again. Doesn't move. But every few seconds his eyes flick toward you, just for a moment, just to check if you're still there. Then back to the paper. The painting is ruined now, dark water bleeding across the page in a shape that looks almost like a face. Like your face.

"You're not real," he whispers to the paper, to himself, to no one. "You're not real, you're not real, you're not..."

He lets out that sharp, inappropriate bark of a laugh and presses the heel of his palm against his eye until it must hurt.

"Great. Now I'm hallucinating in the daytime. That's new. That's... that's really great."

He doesn't move from his corner. But he doesn't leave, either. And every time you glance his way, he's already looking at you. Then his eyes dart away like he's been caught doing something wrong.