Tissues and the Silver String (Inanimate Insanity Fanfiction)

Tissues and the Silver String

"Your favorite color! What's your favorite color?"

"I don't really like to play favorites," Tissues answered, with a grouchy look off to the side. "So long as it's not green, I'm good. I see TOO MUCH green. Ugh, I HATE that guy..."

★★★

Tissues didn't always see the colors - usually just when he sneezed so hard that he could feel his brain rattle. But when those big sneezes did happen, he could see more than just green, drawn like strings between everyone around him. They linked different people, transcending doors, windows, even the walls of Hotel OJ and the great distance beyond - intangible, but always real.

He distinctly remembered the first time he'd noticed them. It was sometime the day after he was freed from that wretched closet. Which wasn't even that bad, Tissues had asserted, if you thought that was bad, just try staying in the hospital all the time, guys.

Some were tied around his own wrist, even. The one linking him and Cherries was vibrant green, like the color of grass. So was one linking him and OJ (this was pale green like the inside of a girl-scout cookie).

Things got much more interesting when he realized the colors had meaning that changed depending on who was linked. He could only guess that it had to do with what the connections between them were.

If that were true, green obviously meant disgust. That was the color of most of Tissues' strings. But putting together what all the other colors even were, figuring out what they could possibly mean, was an adventure of its own, undertaken with the same leisure of reading a summer novel.

★★★

His first epiphany came sometime after the next resident showed up.

"Wait, how's this a prank again?" Cheesy asked.

He and Cherries thought Tissues couldn't hear, from their conspiratorial little whisper-circle, but he was only deaf after he ate shellfish, guys.

One of the Cherries snickered while the other said, "Yin-Yang will catch the butterflies, and when we tell him to release them... Wooooosh!" The other cherry gestured for emphasis. "Trophy will have something new to take pictures of!"

Cheesy hummed and nodded. "That's a real winning idea," he answered with a playful grin. "You could say that it soars, like a butterfly! Ah...?"

"Heh heh, nice one!" Cherries and Cheesy high-fived, causing their sky-blue string to swing wildly.

"You realize I can hear everything you're saying, right, guys?" Tissues said, but Cherries didn't even look at him and Cheesy just grinned in his direction.

"Eavesdropping? What's your tissue?" He slapped his knee. "Geddit? Because you're Tissues?"

Tissues suppressed a laugh, trying to look unimpressed. "...That's not even funny, I could do much better, I'm hilarious-"

Then Tissues got up and left to tell Yin-Yang.

Blue represented friendship, camaraderie. That was a common color.

★★★

"Aaaah-CHOO!"

"AHHH- SHUT UP!" Yin-Yang shouted at him, with enough force to knock him onto his back, "Go be sick somewhere else!- That is to say, we're so sorry for the trouble."

Tissues remained laying flat on the floor and sighed, "I'm already in enough trouble, don't even tell me about trouble, guys. I'm a total bad boy."