“Imagination is the only weapon against reality” 

-Lewis Carroll


“Mirana?” Rose’s voice brought me back to reality “Mirana?”

“Rose?” I asked sleepily with my body still dancing between the valley of dreams and the shifting sands of reality “Ace…?” I began to ask as my throat closed completely.

“Wait,” she handed me a glass of water carefully and helped me to sit up completely, “Ace is fine, she was discharged this morning, his wounds were superficial.”

“She’s fine,” I whispered relaxing every muscle in my body.

“Your parents went to buy them an ice cream,” she murmured carefully, “you and your mother took the brunt of the impact but they will be fine.”

“The worst part…?”

“Your mother was left in a wheelchair Mirana” she softened the impact by carefully stroking my bandaged head “you got a punctured lung and four broken ribs….2

“But are they all right?” I asked again ignoring my new battle scars.

“Yes,” she spat again, “They are.”

“How long have I been here?” I asked drinking from the glass of water

“You arrived here because of the sun exposure on 10 November,” she said after a quick glance at her calendar, “You’ve been here for a week.”

“I’m going to sleep some more,” I asked exhausted.

“All right Ana” Rose smiled, forming little dimples full of sweetness, “Have a good night’s sleep.”

“I hope so…” I murmured until I felt the arrival of those clouds of sleep.

...

“Finally you wake up,” a hoarse voice flooded my mind as I tried to focus my eyes, “You snore, you know that?”

“What…?”

“I didn’t know such a small and frail person could make such disturbing sounds,” he snorted, rolling his eyes, “you have too many nightmares…”.

“Sebastian,” I muttered as I opened my eyes fully and found him on the couch in the hospital room with a notebook in his hands. Dressed all in black, he looked like a brief cloud in my universe of joy and magic, he looked like a cloud of reality. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here,” he replied matter-of-factly before turning his gaze back to his small, scarred notebook.

“You don’t live here,” I retorted in anguish, “you live with your brother.”

“My brother is a child of God,” he replied sarcastically, “he would never agree to live with a child of Satan,” he phrased the last sentence as if he had been verbalising it all his life.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Your sister isn’t much better,” he mocked without meeting my eyes, shifting his gaze between his disorganised notebook and my face, my hair, my hands….

“Don’t speak ill of my sister,” I warned, sitting up, feeling exposed as I exposed my hospital gown that couldn’t be improved, not even by my impeccable imagination, “she’s a great person.”

“Where is she now?” he asked as an answer

“She’s not here now but….”

“What I said,” he shrugged, putting his pencil aside to hold his eraser, “did anyone ever tell you that you have the most symmetrical face?” he asked out of the blue “it’s surreal”

I blinked, standing still in place as I registered his words.

Being surreal was the best compliment I had ever been given.

“Thank you,” I smiled, blushing, smoothing out what could be the blouson of an empress, “no one has ever noticed before.”

“It wasn’t a compliment,” he twisted his face.

“Your words can be whatever I want them to be,” I commented, hugging my knees as I was nourished by his peace as I watched him trace on his blank page.

“And I’m the crazy one…” he murmured with a half smile. It was the first time I had ever seen him smile.

“You’re crazy,” I affirmed, earning a bright look as our eyes met, “That’s why I find your company pleasant.”

“I don’t get it,” he whispered in disbelief as he put his little notebook down on the bedside table, “I don’t understand why I don’t scare you.”

“Some people label the extraordinary as madness, because they don’t understand the need to live in a parallel reality, they don’t understand that madness is where dreams are born” I explained with some admiration as I caught a glimpse of one of his drawings “Can you show it to me?” I asked

“Some people say that I am the son of the devil,” he said in reply, waiting for a sign of fear in me.

But I wasn’t afraid.

“Too bad I’m one of those who thinks that evil is born of good just as good can be born of evil,” I smiled, holding his notebook as my arm brushed his.

I didn’t know when, but he had ended up sitting next to me on that cushioned bed.

“I like to draw things that others don’t pay attention to,” he murmured, sliding one of his red-hot fingers across his perfectly illustrated full moon, “the most beautiful things that go unnoticed by the human eye.”

“Dreams,” I replied, feeling my insides light up with the charcoal light of his drawing, “you draw dreams,” I smiled.

“Explain”

“Things that have always been there” I whispered with my gaze fixed on his drawing, feeling his gaze on me “things too extraordinary to be praised by an eye as common as the human eye” I nervously adjusted my hair as I felt his breath “you draw dreams.”

“Yes” he nodded turning the page “dreams.”

“But…” My gaze shifted to the ashen-haired artist as I found a portrait of myself, it was me, but at the same time it wasn’t. 

He drawn me with a glow similar to my favourite satellite with glints of stars in my eyes, hair soft as a cloud of imagination and the sweetness of a fantasy being.

“I thought…” I swallowed dryly, “I thought you were just drawing things that went unnoticed, things that….”

“I know,” he whispered only to cause me to free fall deep inside me, causing me to hold only his heterochromatic eyes, making me swim in his crystal clear waters, breathing his breath. Every part of me had been made complete by every part of him.

“Sister, you don’t know how ha…!” Ace’s voice brought me back down to earth and Sebastian out of my padded hospital bed “Mad Man?” she asked looking at him with pure surprise “You shouldn’t be here…”she denied scanning him with her eyes as she realised that he wasn’t paying her the attention she was used to “If you came to see me….”

“Get better, Mirana,” he muttered, giving me one last look before walking out the door, skirting my little sister as if she were a poisonous plant.

“Hello?” Ace’s shout roared down the hallway before focusing on me for the first time, “Is he mute as well as crazy?” she asked.

“No,” I let out a small laugh, “He’s just mad.”

Extraordinarily mad.