(Author's Note: Please abandon your concepts of reality and definitions for impossible before reading this story, they will do you no good here.)

(Sorry About Dresden)
(Chapter I)(Swimming Lessons)

Once upon a time there was a girl who was so miserable it began to affect her physical appearance. She awoke one morning to find herself lying in a puddle of her own color, all the pink in her skin having dripped out her fingertips to stain her bed sheets and leave her whiter than innocence. Her flesh was grayscale, nothing more than a charcoal rendering — a reminder of what she used to be.

Every day she would walk to the park and sit on the bank of the lake, digging her toes into the muddy shore and watching the happy couples float around in their little wooden boats. They would recite sappy poetry back and forth to one another and she would plead her mantra to her own invisible lover.

"I wish I could disappear." Roses are red. "I wish I could disappear." Violets are blue. "I wish I could disappear." Everyone's disgustingly happy. "I wish I could disappear." Except for you.

"I wish I could disappear!"

As the words clicked off her tongue like the rhythmic beat of a metronome, the color in the ground where she sat became horribly frightened and decided to put a good five and a half feet of distance between itself and the unpleasant girl. It didn't know what she was doing there; the lake was for happiness and love, two things she obviously did not possess.

Neely didn't know why she came either. She didn't like it; looking at everything she didn't have just made her even more miserable. At first she'd come to sketch and practice her drawing skills, but now she returned simply out of habit. The lake held no real appeal for her — she couldn't even swim.

That's not to say she never tried. She had a theory she tested at night when no one was there to see her fail. Wading into the water, the folds of her dress clinging to her knees, she hypothesized that if she could learn to swim, then perhaps she could learn to be happy.

But that simply wasn't true.

She often sat with her chin in her palm, fingers pushed into the flesh of her cheeks, trying in vain to convince the corners of her mouth to rise. These attempts at smiling failed just as her attempts at swimming had. Such tactics had never come close to working and that just made her smile less.

And so it would be fantastically repetitive to say that Neely frowned at her current thoughts as she stared at the happy lovers of the lake, because Neely always frowned. Today was as much an always as todays had ever been.

Well, at least that was true for the moment.

Neely allowed her elbows to sink into the softness of her cotton sundress, thinking how odd she must appear to strangers. Weaving stiff blades of grass between her toes, she marveled at her own colorlessness, imagining herself as a curious girl who seemed to have stepped out from an ancient black and white film where all the women were beautiful and all the men were gentlemen. Five and half feet of celluloid landscape even accompanied her, flickering at the edges like projection light skipping across the surface.

Were it possible, this daydream might have made Neely smile.

Except she knew no gentlemen and nothing, not even a woman like her mother, was beautiful in her life. There was just the lake with all of its wooden boats filled with their annoyingly happy couples and—

And?

There was an and?

Indeed, there was an “and” and there was also an unusual boat floating around with a peculiar little boy in it. In all the days Neely had spent watching the boats here, she had never seen anything except couples in them. But here was a tiny boy peeking over the side at the depths of the water, looking for fish or lake monsters beneath the shining surface.

The solitary boy had wonderfully red hair, a flaming contrast to the murky blue of the water, wisping about his face in a halo of curls that was either glowing or reflecting the sun with fantastic strength.

Neely was caught in a state of miffed fascination. She didn't really enjoy that he was there without explanation, but he was an interesting variation to her normal routine.

He must have felt her stare because his head jerked up to look at her and as he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose to get a better look, Neely became hypnotized.

She had never known brown eyes could be so pale and vibrant and able to travel such distances as entire lakes. If she didn't know better she might have believed he'd taped two shiny copper pennies to his closed eyelids.

The boy cautiously lifted his hand to wave at Neely, a smile infecting his pale lips. He began to wave with a furious sort of energy, acting as though he knew her and as though he liked that her knew her.

That would be different.

Before she knew it he was squirming around, jumping as much as one can jump in a small boat, desperate for Neely's attention. Caught in shock as his energetic flailing caused his glasses to somersault off his face and into the water, Neely's thoughts stumbled in confusion. Pulling herself to her feet to try and figure out what was causing his behavior, her jaw dropped as he lost his balance and the boat flipped, holding him beneath the surface of the water.

Neely's eyes flicked from boat to boat, but none of the people in them seemed to notice the boy, as vibrant and eye-catching as he'd been. Without realizing it, she found herself racing into the water, discarding her inability to swim, because she was the only one who realized that this odd little boy needed saving.

Evidently Neely — the girl who couldn't swim — was to be the one to prevent his drowning.

And since she couldn't swim, she ran. Taking a deep breath and sprinting into the water of the lake, she traveled the more difficult road across the muddy floor instead of skimming across the surface, her bare feet plunging into mud that fought to prevent her from her goal. Small fish looked at her curiously before making the connection that she was heading in the direction of the boy.

She was heading in the direction of the child that was so beautiful even the fish had fallen in love with him.

So fish after fish began to help her along, their slick noses nudging her towards the boy with the renaissance curls until he was within her sight, peacefully suspended in the water like a holy ghost. His eyes were closed and he was smiling, seemingly content with his situation, waiting patiently for Neely until the fish had carried her within arm’s length.

As she reached out to him, she realized that he had already come to life, intertwining his hands with hers, a broad smile rampant across his pale lips. The molecules of water surrounding them shuddered in anticipation, sensing a moment of change.

Transfixed, Neely felt her blood flutter in wonderment as he began a metamorphosis. The strands of his flawless ringlets unwound and grew as smooth as the water's subtle current, their copper color tarnishing to black as his pale skin turned transparent and made his body appear as if it were a shimmer made of the water that held him. With each blink of an eye, he seemed to age, years passing like moments as the young boy shed any resemblance to what he had been only seconds before and became a young man.

Fish began to congregate around them, fascinated by the pair. Neely became fascinated as well — fascinated with her lack of oxygen and how little she cared. All that mattered to her were the hands woven into hers and the lips that had found their way to her mouth.

The kiss ended as quickly as it had begun and she gasped in objection; suddenly the fish weren't the only ones infatuated with him — or that could breathe. Instead of her lungs being filled with lake, they found oxygen as he began to speak—

"You came to save me even though you cannot swim.” Neely blushed gray as the underwater angel pulled her closer to him and brushed a translucent finger against her cheek that sent a shiver across her skin. "You would have died."

The quietest hint of bittersweetness lay hidden in the crook of his lips as his mouth softened into a smile and their eyes locked into one another’s. His eyes were endlessly dark and she found herself unable to distinguish his irises from his pupils, their blackness rippling dangerously like rabbit holes beneath the water.

A sense of his former purity and innocence had been retained in his quiet features, but they were shadowed with a darker edge — as if the blackening of his hair and eyes had burned a warning into his body. Despite this, she found herself helplessly captivated, overcome with the realization that he had transformed into something from her world — a being of black and white.

They were simultaneously similar and opposite, Neely's longer white hair and vacantly pale eyes a starkly demure inverse to his ominous appearance. Nonetheless, she examined the palms of their hands, linked by intertwined fingers and flawlessly colorless skin, and marveled at how precisely their complexions would mirror one another were it not for the lake water.

The young man continued to grow transparent until he disappeared entirely into the water of the lake. Neely found herself numb from the voice out. Gasping at his departure — not from shock, but through objection that he wasn't with her anymore — her lungs filled with water and she sank back to the lake's floor, aching from sudden loss instead of the pain of drowning.

The fish, remembering she was in this situation from trying to help the boy they'd come to love, swam beneath her, amassing until their numbers could push her to the surface. Knitting their bodies into a gathering dense enough to carry her, they propelled her upward and away from the realm of sea creatures and back into the world of humans.

As Neely broke the barrier between air and water, she inhaled — not for the oxygen, but in hopes that she was still beneath the lake and breathing despite it all. Seeing her lack of will to save herself, the fish righted the boy's wooden boat and tossed her into its safety.

There she lay for hours, longing to see him again — desperate for another moment with the only other person she'd ever seen who was like her. The boy who existed somewhere within her black and white movie had made her blood flicker with something like hope for the first time she could remember.

Raising her arm to look at her hand, she pretended his fingers were still intertwined with hers and attempted to will the air to transform into him. Imagining particles of sunlight into bones, she wove the dust of twilight into his muscular system and built his skin from her own breath.

Inhaling with deep concentration, she blew the air up her arm to her outstretched hand, snapping out of her daydream with shock as the brush of air caught on the skin of her inner forearm and peeled a layer away like the shedding of a snake or onion skin. Examining her arm, she saw no scar or visible explanation for what had happened other than the fragile fragment of skin resting on her belly.

Picking it up, it seemed foreign to her body, as if it were made of impossibly thin glass, but with the flexibility of paper — or skin, she reminded herself morbidly.

Written across it like a tattoo in beautifully handwritten cursive were the words “One-Way Ticket To Happiness.”

(Author's Note: I'm rather nervous about whether or not any of this will make any sense to anyone but me, so... review, please? I've been feeling rather discouraged about my writing/stories lately and considering this one has been in the works for a very effing long time, I'll be intensely thankful for any feedback you lovely people would be willing to share with me.

—A Perfect Sonnet

P.S. — There are character pictures on my profile if you're into that kind of thing.)

(5.20.09: With the help of my lovely beta effervescent-sentiments, I've been editing/doing some slight rewrites to these first three chapters before I post new ones. This is my "this is the edited version of the first chapter" note. The edits for chapter two and three should be up soon, as well as the shiny new fourth chapter.)

(A Pre-Made Review For The Lazy)

To the weird writer behind the FictionPress screen—

You're story was quite (fill in the blank). I enjoyed the part where (fill in the blank), but think you need to work on (fill in the blank). I hope you're better about updating than you have been recently, as the ridiculously long wait for your last update on a story was enough to make your readers shun you. In any case, I think Neely is kind of (fill in the blank) and that boy she 'saved' was really (fill in the blank).

Sparkles, unicorns and best regards,

(Your name here)