Eyes of the Devil

“Where are y-”

“I thought I told you to shut up already!” the centaur growled at him. “You’re here to face your judgment.” Gerard pressed his lips together to hold back a retort, not wanting to anger the strange creature any further. His temper threatened to override his decision, however.

The centaur halted abruptly, and Gerard finally chanced to view his surroundings. They had arrived at something like a castle, with iron turrets rising so high that the endless smoky gray clouds blocked them from sight. He found himself staring up at a pair of wooden doors several times his height, seeming to be stained red, as if it were an effect of the world around him. He found that his hands were shaking. Whether it was from nervousness or fear, he was unsure.

The centaur waved one hand above his head and grabbed Gerard’s arm with the other. The doors slowly creaked open, and he dragged Gerard inside, scraping his already sore body against the coarse stones forming the floor, thinly layered with gritty sand. He thought his wounds had healed, but the moment he crossed into the castle, an enormous amount of pain overwhelmed him. It was as though his injuries had returned, fresh and bleeding as if he had just been hurt again. Unfortunately, he was in no position to fight back against his captor. And he had a suspicion that the worst was yet to come.

“Welcome back, Reislei,” said a dark voice from deeper within the chamber.

“I have found him, master,” Reislei replied, curling one leg beneath himself and bowing deeply.

“Bring him forward. I want to have a look at him.” The voice was strikingly familiar to Gerard, but he couldn’t exactly place it. It was not a deep tone, but very smooth, almost quiet, and possessing a musical quality he had never heard before in anyone’s voice.

Gerard was suddenly hauled to his feet and shoved forward towards the voice. He could not keep his footing and fell, catching himself on his hands and knees and scraping their surfaces. His arms quaked beneath his own weight.

“Hm…quite less than my expectations,” the voice said again. He heard horse’s footsteps clatter on the stone as the centaur retreated. Slower, sharper steps soon echoed around him, but he barely had the energy to glance up at the source. Instead he continued glaring at the floor, feeling a few tears escape the corners of his eyes from the pain. One fell to the stone and immediately sizzled against its surface. He heard dark laughter as the voice’s owner approached him, and soon found himself looking at a pair of flawlessly polished black shoes.

“Oh, come now, Gerard. Did you honestly think this would be easy?” the man asked him. A swift kick to the chest sent a dagger of pain through the center of his injury, leaving him sprawled backwards on the ground. He did not even try to move. “Or that I would give you some kind of mercy?” This time he received a strike to the middle of his back, and he groaned in pain. “Because if you had the gall to imagine something like that-”

Gerard winced, expecting another kick or a punch. Instead, a wonderfully cool, calm feeling settled over him like a thin veil of ice, and he finally found the power to open his eyes. He was lying on his back now, and the pain was slowly being dissolved away by the strange energy. Little blue sparks covered his arms, his stomach- anywhere he had been injured. His fingers tingled from the cool feeling. He looked up.

“-then perhaps you were right.”

The strange man turned on one heel and walked back into the shadows cast by the stairs leading to the upper floor of the castle, not allowing Gerard to see his face. His vision seemed to have cleared dramatically, for now he could see in tones other than that of red. A thin beam of white light diagonally divided the room, landing atop the man’s hair and highlighting it silver. It was much shorter than Gerard’s own black, stringy hair.

“You’re no good to me if you can’t even move, after all.”

“Who are you?” Gerard finally managed to ask. His voice still held its raspy, tired quality, but he remained unsurprised. He always sounded like that. The other man chuckled.

“All in time, Gerard. All in time. For now, I have a question for you. Do you know why you are here?”

Gerard’s voice cracked when he tried to speak, so he cleared his throat and began again. “I was told I’m facing my judgment,” he said as coolly as possible.

“Did you really think that was all I brought you here for?”

Gerard’s eyes widened at these words. “I…uh…”

“Precisely.” He sighed and stepped back towards Gerard, shrouded in near-complete darkness once again. “First, I believe you owe me an apology for destroying my system.”

Gerard blinked in disbelief and scrambled to his feet. “What’d I ever do to you?!”

The man’s voice took on a more biting tone. “To put it bluntly, your music made people kill themselves. Not even simply hold a desire to do it. They actually committed suicide because of you.”

“That’s impossible!” Gerard shot back, straining his voice to its very limit. “My music saves people! It helps them get through every day of their lives!”

“You may as well have created emo for all I care,” the other man said flatly. “No matter what you might think, your songs didn’t always have the exact effect you wished for.” He began circling Gerard like a vulture, careful to avoid any light that might reveal his face. “You manipulated all those people into believing something that wasn’t true. Even though a few of them really did suffer from the things you preached.” He spat the word.

“I didn’t-”

“But the sad fact of it is that the majority of them simply followed the crowd. They hung on your every syllable. You commanded them to jump and they never even stopped to ask how high; they just did it!” He was shouting by now, directly into Gerard’s shocked face. “You told them to blow their brains against the ceiling, and they listened!” His words hung in the air for several seconds. Gerard barely managed to get his thoughts straight after the other man’s rant.

“What the fu-”

“None of that, thank you,” the man said in a short, clipped tone. “I’m attempting to run a dignified establishment here, and I can’t have you and your loose tongue destroying that as well. Now, are you going to apologize?”

“How can I?” Gerard asked weakly, honestly. “I didn’t know about any of that. I don’t know how it affected you. In fact…” He paused, tilting his head sideways a half inch. “I don’t even know who you are.”

“You will learn that soon enough. Don’t get off the subject,” the man said sharply. He continued slowly circling Gerard. “You knew you had that kind of power,” he said in a more accusing tone. “Many died because of you.”

“But you’re…you’re the Devil, aren’t you?” Gerard asked in a moment of realization. The man did not respond. “So when people die-”

“I have no reservations about humans facing death,” he interrupted.

“Then what’s the problem?”

“The problem is that you are at fault.”

“I’ve never killed anyone,” Gerard insisted. “I never fired a gun at someone’s head or- or tied a rope around their neck and hung them from the ceiling!”

“Did you ever take the gun from someone’s hand?” the man asked quietly. “Or have you stopped a boy from leaping off the edge of a skyscraper?” He was closer now, standing directly in front of Gerard. “Did you ever snatch the razor away from the ever-cliché teenage girl?”

Gerard looked at the floor. A single tear rolled from his eye, and he struggled to keep his voice steady.

“No,” he admitted. “Maybe I never helped any of those people, I mean really helped them.” He backed up one small step, his voice dropping in volume. “Maybe I did ruin their lives and send them to their deaths. I’m no savior.” Gerard fell to his knees, still looking at the floor. “I’m no hero. I’m just a man.”

His voice dropped to a low murmur. “No, I’ve never stopped someone from committing suicide. But I did the only thing I could.”

He felt a hand on his shoulder.

“And that, Gerard, has made all the difference.”

“What do you mean?” he asked softly, still refusing to look up at the man. He was pulled to his feet unwillingly and stood completely still.

“Well, now that you’ve admitted what you’ve done, you can have a choice. Though I’d advise you to remain where you are,” he added quickly. Gerard stared towards him in confusion, still unable to see much of anything in the darkness. “It’s simple, really. Hell or Heaven?”

“Uh…doesn’t everyone want to go to Heaven? I mean, generally speaking?” Gerard asked slowly. The man sighed in annoyance.

“You wouldn’t want to if your wife was in charge of it.”

“Your wife?” Gerard asked in disbelief. “You’re married?!” The man lifted a hand toward the blade of white light, and Gerard saw a thin gold ring gleaming on one finger.

“It’s not that I don’t love her, but we’re not usually on very good terms,” he stated. “We disagree about nearly everything.” Gerard could hardly decide what to say. “You couldn’t relate to me, though. Not much at all.”

“I have a girlfriend, you know,” Gerard said flatly. To his surprise, the other man let out a dark laugh.

“Kat? You cannot honestly think you’ll be with her forever,” he said cruelly. “No, your relationships will be much more volatile than that.”

“What are you talking about?! I love her!” Gerard shot back angrily. The man only laughed more heartily.

“For now, perhaps. But it will take a few tries to find the right match for you. We’re similar that way.”

“You’re wrong,” Gerard said bitterly. “I’m nothing like you. I’m not evil.”

“We’re more alike than you may think,” the man answered. “We think alike, if you’ve not already noticed. We also speak the same.”

“That’s not true,” Gerard snapped.

“Ah, but it is. Our language is nearly matched.” The man turned and walked away from him, passing through the line of light as he did so. “There is one major difference between us, however.”

“And what, dare I ask, might that be?” Gerard asked curtly, folding his arms. The other man snapped his fingers, and flames sprung up around the edges of the room, filling the chamber with dancing light and intense waves of heat. He suddenly realized just how huge the room was as the flames shot down the sides, disappearing from his view. The light flickered across pale faces, hundreds, no, thousands of them.

His attention was drawn to the one standing directly across from him. The man wore what looked like a jet-black military uniform, accented with silver that glowed in the firelight. His hands were gloved. However, what caught Gerard’s attention the most was the man’s face. His thin lips were curled upwards in a sneer, matching the downward-pointed line of his dark eyebrows. Thick lines surrounded his eyes, setting them off from his strange, pale hair.

“The difference between you and I, Gerard,” said the man, “is that I created the Black Parade.” He raised his arms outward as he said this, stretching his sinister smile even further. “And yet…as intelligent as you are…I can’t believe you haven’t figured it out yet.”

“Figured out…what?” Gerard asked meekly. The entire sight still amazed him.

“That we are one and the same.”