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Eri wanders the hallways of the house that she built. The floor is covered in deep, soft carpet, which is something that she likes, and is very different from the cold tile floors of the places that Chisaki keeps her in. It keeps her feet warm. She likes to knot her toes into the fibers, just because she can.
She drags her fingers across the wall, and color sunbursts out from under her fingers to turn them a bright blue. She likes this place to be colorful. It seems like good places usually are.
Eri hears a sound behind her, and the hairs on her arms stand on end. She glances over her shoulder.
The blue of the walls behind her is fading. There might be footsteps, somewhere too-close. At the end of the hallways, a solid darkness is growing.
Eri runs. She’s so panicked that she forgets she’s the one who can make doors.
Eventually, she wakes up.
.
The next time she’s in the house she built, Eri goes to her favorite room. The walls are bright yellow, and there’s a little table in the center that’s just her size, and there are crayons.
Eri really likes crayons.
She peeks out of the door to make sure that nobody’s coming, like the color-eating-dark-thing, or a doctor, or Chisaki. But her house seems safe now, so she closes the door quietly and goes to the crayons.
It’s such a good box of crayons. It has 12 whole colors. And when she’s here, she can have all the time she wants to use all 12 colors and nobody can take them away from her.
Eri draws pink flowers, which she has seen before. Then she looks at the purple crayon, which is a color she thinks is super pretty, and back to her shapes. She’s never seen a purple flower before, but she really wants to draw one. She really wants to draw one, but she doesn’t want it to be wrong.
(The color-eating-dark-thing might show up if it’s wrong.)
She draws the pink flowers happy, instead. Big smiles and waving leaves. The leaves are green, and she uses the color as much as she wants.
Eri feels happy all the way until she wakes up.
.
Eri had a bad day, and when she goes to bed she hurts so much that she isn’t sure that she’s going to be able to sleep deep enough to get to the house.
The yellow of her favorite room’s walls has dimmed, and it makes her so upset that she spends the first few minutes that she’s there concentrating really hard to make them bright again.
Her table and crayons are in the center of the room, but she doesn’t really have the energy to get there. Eri lays on the ground and she looks at the ceiling. She’s so happy that the carpet is soft.
And then Eri hears footsteps.
Oh no, she thinks. Oh no, oh no, oh no. She must have forgotten to close the door really tight. The doctor, or the color-eating-dark-thing, or Chisaki is going to get into her special room. It’s bad enough that she can’t keep them out of her house, or how much they scare her when she’s awake, and now this nice room with the carpet and the crayons is going to be ruined forever and ever and ever and everything is going to be bad.
So Eril closes her eyes and she waits and she tries not to cry.
“Oh, man,” says a voice she doesn’t recognize. “You don’t look so great, kiddo! Do you need help?”
Eri opens her eyes.
There’s a guy with lemon-yellow hair crouching next to her, eyes kind and face concerned. Eri has never seen him before in her life.
Adrenaline overrides her aching body, and she scrambles back a few feet. She looks around the room, panicked.
The door she always closes so tightly, to the hallways outside, is still firmly closed. Another door has opened on the other side of the room. It isn’t closed all the way, and Eri can see a sliver of light streaming in from the other side.
That must be where the man came from.
Nothing like this has ever happened here before.
“Hey, hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.” He spreads his hands out in front of him and smiles. “My name’s Mirio. What’s yours?”
Eri hides her face in her arms and says nothing.
“Hey, that’s alright!” The man is still smiling. “My best friend in the world isn’t very good at talking to people either. We still get along just fine.”
Eri shrinks further into herself and sniffs.
He continues, “But you really look like you’re not feeling great, buddy. Are you sick?”
Is she sick? Eri doesn’t know if being cursed is being sick, but also she doesn’t feel good right now for sure. So she nods, small and miserable, because if this man’s not hurting her and she's in her house so she might as well tell the truth.
“Well, let’s fix that!” And Eri finds herself swung up to a warm chest.
She blinks into the man’s smiling, friendly face, stupefied. His eyes were odd, but not in a bad way.
“When little kids get sick, they need to nap a lot! At least, that’s mostly what we did when Nejire’s little brothers got sick last school break. So let’s get you all snuggly under a blanket, okay kiddo? Things’ll look better in the morning.”
Eri opens her mouth to tell him that there are no blankets here, she’s never found any, it’s just her and her table and crayons and the walls which are usually whatever color she wants. But, as she raises her head off the strange man’s shoulder, there is one.
More than that, there’s a whole little bed tucked into the corner of her room now. It looks like a pink sailboat, and the blanket pulled over the mattress is a bright red.
She’s gently deposited in it before she can think about it too much. The lemon-headed man pulls the red blanket up to her chin, and then reaches under it to pull out a book.
“Do you like this one?” he asks, and Eri doesn’t know the right answer to that question because she doesn’t know what that book is, but she wants the strange man to continue to be kind and so she nods.
She spends the rest of her time in the room that night listening to the man read, and clutching the bright red blanket to her chin.
.
Eri doesn’t always remember what happens in the room when she’s awake. Once, when one of the doctors was feeling a little nicer, he answered her question and said that it was normal for most people not to remember many of their dreams at all.
Eri remembers impressions of the house she built, like how nice the colors and the soft floors are. She knows the color-eating-dark-thing is something she’s afraid of. And she remembers the outline of the man with the lemon hair.
He’d been so nice. As her wrist is secured to the arm of the chair, she misses him.
.
The bed is still in her favorite room, the next time she goes there. It stays there after that, too.
Eri likes taking the red blanket from it and wrapping it around her shoulders. It’s very soft, and it’s warm, and she likes it.
Moving with it around her shoulders makes it feel like she’s going even faster, which is fun, and on days when she’s in her room and feeling good, she dashes from one end to another, letting the blanket fly behind her. It’s not a game she’s ever played before, like coloring, or hide and seek, but it’s a fun game anyway.
She’s doing that the next time the bright door appears, and someone else shows up.
“Oh!” says a boy with lots of green curls and big, big eyes, “Are you playing heroes?”
Eri is frozen on the other side of the room. The boy had walked into the room wide wide, amazed eyes, stopping short when he saw her after looking around like he’d never seen anything as cool as her house.
(Eri agrees. She thinks her house is the best thing in the entire world.)
The boy smiles, a kind and fragile thing. He’s kinda scrawny and tired-looking. “Well? Are you? Heroes was my favorite game when I was little.”
“I-I don’t,” Eri bites her lip. “I don’t know how to play that.” Eri’s never even heard of that game before — usually, when she hears Chisaki say that word, he sounds real mad.
“Oh. Well, that’s alright,” says the boy. He walks farther into her room, and takes a moment to admire the yellow of the walls, which makes Eri trust him at once. “Do you want me to teach you?”
Eri, despite being a little scared still, nods. She thinks this is very brave of her.
The boy smiles so bright that it makes the yellow walls even more pretty.
Heroes, as it turns out, is a game with a lot of chasing each other while wearing capes. The hero boy pulls his own blanket-cape, this one blue, out of thin air and tosses it over his shoulders. Eri keeps her red one.
While they chase each other, the hero-boy narrates a whole big story, about a hero duo and saving the city and rescuing everyone’s moms. It’s a very fun story, and a very fun game, especially when the boy notches his hands under her arms and lifts, to help her jump real high so she can get to the villain.
By the end of the game, they’re giggling and breathless, and they fall to the ground in a heap. Eri ends up with her head on his knee, and that suddenly feels very, very safe.
“That was fun,” says Eri in amazement.
The hero-boy says, “I’m glad!” and reaches under his cape to pull out something which wasn’t there before.
It’s a little stuffed doll of a funny man in a blue-yellow-red jumpsuit. He plops it into her lap, and Eri wraps her hands around it.
“He’s my favorite,” says the hero-boy, so Eri hugs the doll and snuggles into the hero-boy’s side and waits like that until it’s time for her to wake up.
.
The blue blanket-cape and the doll of the funny man stay in her favorite room, just like the bed did.
.
After that, people popping up in the house that she built becomes a regular thing for Eri. It’s still strange, and it still scares her a little bit, but all the people who show up are very nice.
She can’t quite remember them when she wakes up, but the haziness of kind dreams is enough of an anchor to clutch onto, on days when Chisaki decides she needs to be taken apart and then put back together again and again and again.
The lemon-headed boy shows up when she feels too bad to move, to tuck her into the sailboat bed and read her stories. The books always stay behind, the next time she visits. Eri likes to thumb through them, look at the pictures. Wonders at what the words say.
The hero-boy usually shows up when she feels better, and they get to play, and he makes her even more little toys of heroes and tells both of them stories to act out. Soon, the room has toys strewn about everywhere, from where she plays with them when the hero-boy isn’t there. That makes him smile, when he sees it. Eri doesn’t know why.
Those two are her most common visitors, but she’s pretty sure a few others show up, too, at least once or twice. A lady who leaves bright pink handprints all over the walls and helps Eri fly, actually fly, all the way up to her ceiling. Some boy with sharp teeth who smiles a lot but doesn’t stay long. A different lady with green hair and odd hands who makes Eri tea.
They all make Eri want to cling to sleep, to stay in her house with her kind visitors and soft carpet. Even her fear of the color-eating-dark-thing has lessened, since people started showing up.
It’s almost like, since she’s gotten less worried, it’s gotten less strong.
.
There are still some nights, though, when she feels terrible, and the lemon-headed man doesn’t show up, and she doesn’t have the energy to play with the toys the hero-boy conjured for her.
On those nights, Eri still has her crayons.
She still doesn’t know if purple flowers are allowed, so she goes with pink again. She doesn’t have it in her to draw them smiling, though. She makes them frown, pressing a little too hard with the black crayon as she does. Then she takes the red crayon, and she gives the sad flowers blood-tubes running out of them as well, so that she and them can be sad for the same reason.
“Why am I dreaming in kids now?” says a voice that she does not recognize. “If this is what being a teacher is like, I want out.”
Eri’s head snaps up. There’s a grown-up in her room.
All of her other visitors were big , but not grown-ups. This man is a grown-up, and he has a lot of dark hair, and Eri isn’t sure she likes any of that.
And then he sits down at her tiny table, heedless of how awkwardly he needs to fold to get into the chair. He pulls a piece of paper over to himself, and then picks up a black crayon.
“Are we drawing?” he asks Eri, addressing her for the first time.
Shyly, Eri nods. After another moment, when the man still does nothing but sketch, she picks up the pink crayon again.
She and the strange man draw together for a while, in silence. It’s weird.
“Can I borrow that color, please?” Eri looks up, and sees the man pointing to the pink. “I need it to finish my drawing.”
Slowly, Eri slides it over to him, and watches as he uses it to color in something small. He hands it back to her.
Carefully, Eri peeks at his paper.
He’s drawn a little black cat. It has a pink nose and a little green color, and is standing in front of a big blue food bowl.
It is very, very cute. Eri stares at it.
Then the man says, “Can I see your drawing, too?” and Eri is so surprised and embarrassed about being caught that she shows it to him without thinking.
The man frowns at her ugly, sad flowers, with their ugly, sad blood-tubes, and Eri wants to cry.
She sits, tense, waiting for his mockery of it, some kind of cruel laughter. Instead, he carefully slides it back to her, and then turns his attention back to his picture.
He adds a few purple flowers.
Some time passes.
“Hey, kid,” says the man, “are you safe?”
That question guts something deep inside of Eri, and she doesn’t know why. She feels her chest tighten, her heart rate speed up, and she’s about to say something when something throws itself against the door of her room.
Eri knows it’s the color-eating-dark-thing, and she lets out a little sob.
The man’s face goes all worried and scared, and he turns from her to the door, and then the door is knocked down by the dark thing and his eyes go wide and —
Eri wakes up to the doctors.
.
The next time she goes back to her favorite room, it’s been ransacked.
Eri sits in the middle of the room and cries over it, how the hero-boy’s blue blanket is ruined, and all the picture book’s pages have been ripped out, and all her crayons have been broken. She cries about it for a long, long time.
When she finally gets up and sorts through all the rubble, the only things she can find which are undamaged enough to keep are the red blanket, the doll of the funny-yellow-hair-man, and the drawing of the cat.
.
She doesn’t get any more visitors, after that. She imagines the walls into the proper shade of yellow, and does her best not to be sad.
.
Their faces fade from Eri’s mind, as time passes. She doesn’t remember much about them when she’s awake. She wanders the halls of the house that she built when she sleeps, and is grateful that at least there’s no doctors there, even if there’s Chisaki, sometimes.
She misses them, but Eri is very well-versed in not having things she wants.
Still, though. On a day when Chisaki is moving her, when her arms are aching, her feet are sore, her heart is bleeding, she sees two heads of hair at the end of an alleyway.
One is lemon-yellow, the other is green.
Eri doesn’t stop to wonder, she just runs towards.