Lonelinolium

Art Trade A - Fanfiction

There were plenty of things that Chrona found more difficult than being lost. There weren’t quite as many, but there were still things that he found even harder than being lost and alone. Being lost and alone in a hospital, however, without mommy there to tell him what to do or where to go, was the single hardest thing he had ever dealt with so far. It made killing bunnies seem so easy, because at least then he had a direction, he knew what to do even though he didn’t want to. But now he was lost, he was alone, and he hadn’t a clue.

The hallways of this building were some of the whitest and cleanest he’d ever seen. Even the people wore white coats and greenish outfits and white gowns, and it was all so… sterile. It was scary how clean it was, because there was an icky, tangy smell in the air as well, sort of like that stuff mommy rubbed on his skin whenever Ragnarok beat him hard enough to break it. The stuff that stung so bad he often cried. Even though she made him cry a lot, and even though she hadn’t even noticed when she was walking too fast for him to keep up, she was still his mommy, and he still needed her to come here. To get him out of the scary place.

And that’s when he saw it. A doctor, a grownup, coming towards him, looking right at him! He was not in his safe circle right now. He needed a corner. He needed a dark corner where nobody would see him, a closet, yeah! A closet would be perfect. He quickly turned to the first door he saw, assuming it to be his light-free safety zone, and walked in as quickly as he could, without even looking first.

He hopped up on his tiptoes and peeked through the glass window on the top half of the door, to see if the danger was gone. The big scary doctor, luckily, kept walking right on past. After he was out of sight, Chrona let out a sigh of relief. It was safe now, and quiet. There was nothing to be afraid of. It was a bit light in here for a closet, though… and roomy…

“…K-konichiwa?” a voice behind him asked, causing him to startle and bang his head on the doorknob. Instead of yelling about it, like mama always warned him against, he just grabbed his head and slumped to the floor.

“A-aah! D-daijobu des"” asked the voice, which had been cut off in mid-sentence by a coughing fit. Chrona winced, blinking away his tears, and looked up at the source of the sound.

Apparently, he wasn’t in the closet. There was a big bed in the middle of the room, and a little blue-haired girl in it. She looked like she was as old as he was, or maybe a bit older. But the most noticeable things were the bandages and the sickly pale appearance. She had bandages completely covering one of her eyes, which only caused him to wonder further if she was okay. She hadn’t stopped coughing, and it didn’t sound too good. It was sort of like that one time, when his mama told him to put the knife in the bunny really slow, and it wouldn’t stop making that coughing noise every time blood came out…

“Daijobu desuka?” the girl asked, once her coughing had ended. He blinked.

“Wh-what…?” he said, curling into his little ball. He didn’t know how to deal with strangers, especially not girls. And even more so, not girls who were sick. That was what hospitals were for, right? Sick people getting better? That was what mama had told him, but with Ragnarok in his blood, he had never needed one before.

“Um…” the girl mumbled, then turned, rooting through a bag of some sort. After a moment she pulled out a book and showed it to him.

“W-what is i-it?” he said, very quietly. The girl didn’t seem to be able to hear him, so he scooted a bit closer and repeated himself. She shook her head and looked through it for a moment, as though looking for something.

“My… nahm… is… Hisoka,” she said, slowly. That was the first thing she said that he understood, but he still didn’t know how to deal with it, so he hid his face in his knees. He didn’t have to talk to her"to Hisoka. Mama would come and take him back eventually. So this time, not only did he not know how to deal with something, but he was actually able to just not deal with it at all. It made the girl frown, though, and she started looking through the book again. “What… is the wrong?” she asked.

“N-nothing,” he muttered, “Just w-w-waiting for m-mama.” She didn’t seem to understand, and held out the book to him. He didn’t want to go take it, really, but it would be rude not to so he had to. It took him a bit to work up the nerve to stand up and walk over, though.

“Th-thank y-y-you,” he said, taking the book with shaking hands. She smiled a little bit, though she showed a little sadness behind the eyes as she did so. That caused him to frown. He didn’t like it when girls were sad. As soon as he looked over the book, he saw that it wasn’t just any book"it was a Japanese/English translation dictionary. Was that why she had talked weird? She had been speaking a whole different language? Now he felt stupid. This whole time, he had thought that this girl was teasing him or being weird, but no, that was just the way she talked. It caused a pinch of guilt to stick inside of him.

“S-sorry…” he said, looking down as he flipped through the book. “G-gomen-n-nasai…?” Whatever he said, it must have been wrong, because it made her frown and take the book away. He hung his head in shame.

“Do not be sorry…” she said, then handed him the book back. He looked through the book for the words he wanted to respond with.

“D-doush-shite?” he replied, handing her back the book.

“Be… because you did not wrong,” she said. The book passed hands again.

“Go-gomenas-sai… w-w-watashi wa Ch-Chrona.”

When he passed her the book, she smiled, and he felt just a little bit safer. He didn’t know why. “Nice to meet Chrona.”

“O-okaasan wo m-ma-matteimasu…” he said, checking over in the window of the door again. Just in case mama was waiting for him out there. He didn’t like it when he kept mama waiting, he always got hit for that.

“…So am I…” she said, her voice sadder this time after translating. Why was she sad? If she was waiting for her mama, then everything was going to be okay. Mamas could be mean, but they took care of things that their little ones didn’t know how to deal with. He didn’t know how to deal with being lost, maybe she didn’t know how to deal with being sick?

“Wh-where is she?” he asked in Japanese.

She shrugged. “I am not knowing,” she replied, in English. His eyes grew a bit wider, and he scooted slightly closer to her.

“Are y-y-you also lo-lost?” he asked, again speaking in her language as best he could. This felt strange. She was close to his outer circle, not too close but getting there. For some reason he didn’t mind this. He had never really talked to anybody but mama before, except…

“No, I here for… eye doctoring…?” she said, a bit unsure of the English word. She pointed to her bandaged eye. “It is broken.”

Chrona looked down a bit at that, fiddling with his hands. He didn’t need to read the book to know how to apologize in her to Japanese"he had read that before.

“Why you always so sorry?” she asked, tilting her head as she read out of the book.

“B-because… I’m in-intruding a-a-and mama always s-says not t-t-to talk to s-strangers…” he replied, taking quite a while with the book to find all of those words. “Sh-she’ll come a-and take me home s-soon…”

“…D-demo…” she said, quietly, looking at her legs. She said something in Japanese again that he didn’t understand, then started looking in the book for it. “I… no often have c-company… and talking to Chrona i-is nice… feel good…” her voice started sounding strange as she said it, like her lungs were getting tighter. She didn’t hand him back the book that time, and instead started looking down at her lap. Her hair was hiding what her eye looked like, but even from his safety distance, he could tell she was starting to shiver and tremble.

“..H-Hisoka..?” he asked, slowly approaching her, carefully, as if she were a dangerous and wounded animal that he wanted to save as well as run from. He tried to see her face, to tell what was wrong. Mama always said that when a person was upset, it was written all over their faces, like an open book.

“A-ah…” she said. Her voice was shivery and a little pained. “Ow… owowowowooowwww…” Her voice had started sounding more and more pained, and louder. “Owowow! Ow! Aaah!”

Chrona flinched away. Why was she yelling? It was just so loud, someone was going to hear and come and, and he wasn’t supposed to be here, he’d get taken away from Hisoka"

“Chrona?” came a cool, irritated voice from the other side of the door. Chrona had his ears covered because the girl was still yelling in pain, but he could still hear it. He always heard mama’s voice. Always. The door opened and Medusa stepped in, her stride as calm as always, but he could tell she was angry. She always kept calm on the outside, but when she was angry, he could feel it trembling in his bones.

“Come on, Chrona. Stop screwing around. We’re going.” She jerked his arm away from his ear and all but dragged him out of the room. As he was being pulled from it, he got one last look at Hisoka’s face. It looked not only like it was in horrible physical pain, but like something had just broken her heart. Down the eye he could see, he saw a tear"leaking through the bandage of the other, he saw a drop of blood. He reached out to her, though he knew it was pointless. Mama was taking him away again.

***

“If you behave like such a nuisance again, I’ll put you in the room and tell Ragnarok to keep you from sleeping,” she said, once they were back on the roof. He rubbed his cheek, which had grown red with the impact of her hand. It brought tears to his eyes, but he hid them. Always had to, or else he’d get smacked again until he stopped. She simply stood there, looking boredly at her black-painted nails with one arm crossed under it.

“Well?” she asked. “Are you going to explain your disobedience? Or are you hoping it’ll go away?”

“I…” he said, stumbling over his words. “I j-just got lost. I d-d-didn’t mean t-to hurt he-her…” his eyes went down from his mother’s to his shoes, which bent inward.

“Stop caring,” she said, and folded her legs, hovering up into the air as a vector slipped out from behind her, wrapping around Chrona. “And I don’t ever want to see you interacting in such a way with a girl again. Understood?”

“Y-yes, mama,” he said quietly, looking back at the door to the inside of the hospital as the vector lifted him off of the ground and away, with his mother. And as Hisoka watched from her window, seeing only the blurry outline of a small purple-haired child being flown away, she felt saddened. Why were mommies so cruel? She didn’t understand it. There really was nothing like a moment of company to make her feel the loneliness so much worse…

Author's Note

I own nothing in this story.
Hisoka belongs to Imagination
Chrona and Medusa belong to Soul Eater