Colours [MASHIKYU]

22 - A Day

"I'm sorry I didn't tell you as soon as I noticed you were hallucinating, and that I let you get so deep and then you had to go through all that drama and..." Yoshinori starts rambling as soon as he walks into my room one unday. "I'm just really sorry. I hate seeing you so sad."

"Don't be sorry," I tell him. "I got myself into this."

"If it's not my fault, it's certainly not your fault! You couldn't help it!"

He says it with such enthusiasm that I almost laugh, but not quite.

"Okay, how about it's nobody's fault?" I suggest.

Yoshinori nods. "I like that."

I sigh. "I'm just... sad. I've been here all my life and, and I finally thought I'd gotten out but, no."

He doesn't respond, he stands there looking at the floor and chews his lip.

"What is it?" I ask cautiously. Is there something else wrong with me? Have I hallucinated something else that he isn't telling me? What's happened now?

"Mashi... you haven't been here all your life. You came when you were eight."

"No, I..." I trail off, because when his words sink in I realise straight away that of course, of course that must be true.

I already knew I forgot things, but I didn't know how much. A lot, as it turns out, if I don't even remember living outside of here. All those things that I didn't remember ever seeing before, the sky, the window, almost every single thing I saw in those colours and outside... I knew what they were because I'd seen them before.

I don't even bother asking questions. I've had enough of finding out things. Maybe a normal person would question and freak out a bit more.

"Makes sense."

He walks over to my bed and helps me up, then envelops me in a hug. "I love you, Mashi."

"I love you too, Yoshi."

Then he pulls away from me and smiles excitedly. "Guess what? I've been given permission to show you around the hospital."

"What?" The hospital? As in here? How much more is there to it?

"I know you don't remember, but there's a lot more to this place than just our rooms, the cafeteria and the doctor's office. We live in the back of a hospital, so most of the other things here kinda suck, but there's also some great places just for us like a games room and an indoor garden. We could also go visit the NICU, the babies there are always cute. Small and sick, but still cute. Like you," he says with a little laugh, then quickly silences himself. "Sorry, that wasn't funny."

I find myself actually laughing too. It sounds like something Junkyu would say. "No, it was. Accurate. Continue."

"Right, and we took you to all these places when you first came, but you freaked out whenever you were surrounded by anything other than white and you refused to learn colours and it was kinda weird, but now you like colours, so maybe you'll be okay now?"

I only half understand what he's saying, but getting out of my room sounds like heaven right now.

"Okay. Let's go."

He takes me to the NICU first. We look through a large window inside, where very small babies are inside glass capsules with lots of tubes attached to them and are being tended to by nurses. The nurses wear pale blue. The walls are mostly white with faint mint green swirls on them.

"These are incubators, they help the baby keep growing if they're premature, which is when they come out sooner than they're supposed to," Yoshinori explains. I listen intently, it's nice having something explained to me that isn't about my messed up brain. "It's kind of sad to look at, but babies are always adorable, so coming here comforts me a bit on bad days."

"I hope they can get out soon. Being trapped inside an incubator must be awful," I say.

"They'll get out, don't worry. The incubator will help them get healthy so they can live their best lives once they leave," he says, then sighs. "Like this place was for Haru."

Haruto. It still feels weird that he's gone.

"Anyway, games room next!"

The games room has lots of colours. The walls are crimson, machines line one side that flash all sorts of different bright and confronting colours and play music, and Asahi and Jeongwoo are already standing at a large green table with white balls that have coloured stripes across them and are holding big, light brown stick things.

"This is a pool table," Yoshinori gestures grandly, "none of us know how to play, and can't be bothered learning, so we literally just all go in there and hit the balls around and it's absolute mayhem and we crack up at it every time because we're stupid teenage boys who have nothing better to do."

I laugh for the second time today. "Seriously?"

"It's actually pretty fun," Jeongwoo says with a smile which I can tell is genuine, but there's still a deep sadness behind his eyes. That's probably what I look like. But I like it. We're not letting the sadness take us over. We can still smile and laugh.

"Wanna play?" Yoshinori takes a stick and hands me one, which I grip awkwardly. "Okay, three, two, one, go!"

All three of them lean in and start hitting balls in every direction, some even fly off the table. I join in and feel a huge smile break out onto my face, like the ones everyone else has. Even Asahi. Asahi is smiling!

"This is a mess!" I yell over everyone's laughter and the sound of the balls colliding with the table, each other, the sticks, the floor.

"We're a mess, so that works!" Yoshinori yells back.

When all the balls are off the table, and we've all laughed so much we have tears in our eyes, Yoshinori says he's going to show me the garden.

"You guys wanna come?" he asks the other two, and they nod.

Not too far away from the games room there's a staircase which leads down to something really lovely.

Cobbled brown and grey stones, rows of flowers in all different colours, a little fountain in the middle, some plants hanging down from the ceiling in pots and several benches to sit on. A small utopia that's been here the whole time without me knowing. It blows my mind to think I've been to this place before and wanted to get away from it.

"This is my favourite place," Yoshinori says.

"I like that it's secret." Jeongwoo plucks a lilac flower and twirls it around in his hand. "None of the regular hospital patients know it's here, it's just for us."

I walk along the rows of flowers. There's red roses, just like the ones that filled the field the first day Junkyu showed me a colour. Some flowers have orange centres, like the sunset, and yellow petals, like those of the sunflowers we ran on. The stems are all a fresh green, and the water of the fountain is a calming blue. The buds of these flowers are a deep indigo, those ones a lighter violet.

"I thought you might be here," I hear Diana say, and turn around to see her standing behind me. "How are you feeling?"

"Better," I say. "I'm sorry I made you so worried."

She smiles gently. "Worrying about you is my job, sweetie." She gives me a hug before saying she'll let me spend time with my friends and leaving the garden.

We stay there for hours, talking on and off, until we're called up for dinner.

This isn't an unday. This is a day.