Status: complète.
The Black Parade Is Dead!
Blood (Bonus Track) (finale.)
Beep.
“Monitor, stable.”
Beep.
“Vitals, all stable.”
Beep. Beep.
“She’s coming back to us! She’s coming back!”
I blinked.
A transfixing light flooded my disoriented mind, causing my eyes to squint in anxious protest. My surroundings began to shift into focus; the windows, the walls, and the multitude of faces peering down at me in amazement.
“Ms. Hamilton? Ms. Hamilton, can you hear me?”
The sound came some nondescript area to my right, and my vision blurred and swam before something slid back into place, adjusting my eyes with a startled blink. I tried my voice, successfully contracting a slight rasp from the depths of the drought. I shook my head slowly, blinking again to focus in on a masked figure a few feet from my bed.
“Ms. Hamilton?”
I nodded, and the man leaned down, a small smile gracing his lips. He was speaking to me, words and sentences, monologues to speeches. The words went in one ear, out the other, circling the empty space and being absorbed into my lack of ability to focus. There was buzzing, a thick white noise that tuned him in and out, in and out.
“...close call....last...medication to withhold...careful...time...”
My eyelids fluttered, willed to close. What had been so important that I had given up life? Why had I longed to be in such a state of nonexistence, of nothing? I focused blankly on a picture of a calendar on the opposite wall, depicting the gentle slope of a hill. A tree stood off to the right of the page, cut off by the rectangle’s sudden edge. The sky was a murky gray, the clouds in the atmosphere illuminated by the darkened surrounding. Yet the thing that drew my attention specifically was the outline of a figure standing beside the tree. It was colored in completely, a bare shadow beside the trunk of the tree.
It was if something was attempting to click, filter itself into images inside of my memory. Yet it hit an impermeable wall, and I was left to simply observe the picture, my jaded gaze stoic and unseeing, save for that simple image.
I became vaguely aware that he, whoever he was, was speaking again, instructing me, asking me to do something that I could not focus in on. I willed myself to blink, to look away from the wall, and up into his face, which held a strange expression that reflected both strained pity and a deep understanding. It was a look that shocked my heart into acceleration, and his eyes widened in alarm as my heart monitor nearly doubled in speed, yet I was too busy trying to place his expression to notice the sudden flourish around me.
“I need you to relax,” I heard, and I willed myself to respond that I was fine, fine, but his face...his manner was a blur of memory, like the calendar, and it was frustrating me that I couldn’t remember. “Hold still,” he said gently, holding my arm with a barely recognizable force. He kept my eyes on his face by talking to me, but I knew that the doctors around him had a needle. Yet I allowed him to distract me with his expression, the one I just could not identify, and subsequently my muscles eased, relaxed, reduced to nothing.
I allowed them to carry out actions while simultaneously dictating my own.
Well they encourage your complete cooperation...
He was saying something, mentioning to me that there were flowers beside my bed. Flowers I could not see, but he promised me they were there. I simply nodded, unable to understand why this was exactly relevant, unable to process if he was even speaking to me. The pinch in my vein was barely present, the slow removal of liquid wavering my gaze briefly. My eyelids drooped dangerously, threatening to plunge me into another restless unconsciousness, of nothing, of sleep.
Sleep.
It that what was plaguing my mind? I had been so far gone for an inconceivable amount of time. Ask for darkness and you shall receive; I received it with an overwhelming finality. Yet what had elapsed during my ambiguity was a mystery. I couldn’t even remember closing my eyes. Had it been minutes? Hours? Days or months, or maybe even years.
Years.
I wasn’t sure how many of those I had wasted, wasted in this room that I now recognized. It was slowly reminding me, not of what I wanted to know, but of the time I had spent, aching for a release. I distantly could feel the needle, still pressed against my skin, but it no longer bothered me. The state of testing was not important, nor was the man to my left, jotting down numbers, or the woman at the foot of my bed, hovering anxiously by a wire tap. What was now my central point of focus was that I had drifted from the endless night, somehow, when I was so sure that I had been about to die.
So give them blood, blood, gallons on the stuff...
What had cause my mind to reawaken? Was it fate? Some higher powers, perhaps, or a second chance. It was certainly not spiteful, as I was sure that the spite would have caused me to die out, like a dimming light. I remembered wishing to die, suddenly realizing how foolish I had been, how little I had appreciated. I could track my eventual pessimistic deterioration like a visual map in my mind, trying to see exactly where I could have succumbed to the weakness of surrender.
Had it been luck?
Could it possibly have just been luck, the fact that I had opened my eyes to the world again? I wondered if it was really all the doctors who I had to thank, for their indentured service to my shattered being. It was possible that they had put all their effort into saving me, or whatever it was that they had ended up doing. And as I felt the needle finally slide from my vein and a pressure on the inside of my elbow, a warm gratitude flooded my stomach, and I think I even managed a smile at the doctor, though I could not be certain.
The only thing I was certain of was that I was alive, and I relished in it.
They can fix me proper with a bit of luck...
He was speaking again, wrapping a purple bandage around my arm and patting me lightly on the shoulder. I barely felt it, could partially place the feathered touch he placed on my skin, and he walked away, gesturing to most of his companions, who immediately followed after him like lost dogs. A handful remained, occasionally darting between machines to check noises, endless noises, yet all was quiet.
But it wasn’t quiet. It was getting louder, starting from nothing, and I heard it.
A heartbeat.
It was continuous, a steady pulse, a throb, almost. It held a pattern that most likely reflected my own activity, but it carried another meaning; a deeper, more prophetic message. It continued, now thundering in my ears like a cannon, like it was screaming to be recognized. I closed my eyes, allowing myself to sink into a semi-conscious state of thought, the heartbeat continuing to shatter my attempt at a clear channeling of ideas. I was expecting it to simply fade away as I tried to relax, as I willed myself to retreat into my mind, and was perpetually shocked when the sound simply shuddered to a halt.
I didn’t open my eyes, the black eerily still in the sudden silence. I waited, waited for something to happen, for the heartbeat to resurface, but all was still.
All was quiet.
Quiet.
Still.
“I told you I would be waiting.”
My eyes tried to spring open, but I found that they would not. My heart rate increased frantically, climbed as the echos of the velvet-tranced tone caressed my eardrums and faded, though it was like hundreds of wires had simultaneously ignited and sprang together. Image after image replayed themselves in front of my mind, colors blended and faded and died and came again. It was every time, every chapter of my time under, and in every chapter was him. It was as if I was watching through someone else’s eyes, watching as he brought me through memories, through time, into the mass of undead and as his lips crashed upon mine on the beach. I saw his own past, blurred in the velocity at which it passed, saw our final farewell and his final regret. And my eyes tore open, the lights surrounding the hospital bed burning into my retinas. My eyes were glued to the opposite wall, back to the calendar facing me. The previously silhouetted figure was now defined, clearer than anything else in the picture, though equally frozen in time.
“Ms...Hamilton?”
I didn’t dare look away, could not tear my gaze from the picture. The stature was so regal, so familiar, that it was like someone had taken a snapshot of my memory and copied it onto the page. I could feel the people flitting around the edges of my bed nervously, but it was the image, his image, that kept my scrutiny. Black fuzzed at the edges of my brain, yet the longer I looked, the more real it seemed. It was as if he was returning my gaze, surveying me with the hypnotic hazel that had so distracted my attention. And I heard his voice, one last time, before a shaking sedation needle pushed though the skin of my left arm.
“You will forever have my heart.”
I’m the kind of human wreckage that you love.
“Monitor, stable.”
Beep.
“Vitals, all stable.”
Beep. Beep.
“She’s coming back to us! She’s coming back!”
I blinked.
A transfixing light flooded my disoriented mind, causing my eyes to squint in anxious protest. My surroundings began to shift into focus; the windows, the walls, and the multitude of faces peering down at me in amazement.
“Ms. Hamilton? Ms. Hamilton, can you hear me?”
The sound came some nondescript area to my right, and my vision blurred and swam before something slid back into place, adjusting my eyes with a startled blink. I tried my voice, successfully contracting a slight rasp from the depths of the drought. I shook my head slowly, blinking again to focus in on a masked figure a few feet from my bed.
“Ms. Hamilton?”
I nodded, and the man leaned down, a small smile gracing his lips. He was speaking to me, words and sentences, monologues to speeches. The words went in one ear, out the other, circling the empty space and being absorbed into my lack of ability to focus. There was buzzing, a thick white noise that tuned him in and out, in and out.
“...close call....last...medication to withhold...careful...time...”
My eyelids fluttered, willed to close. What had been so important that I had given up life? Why had I longed to be in such a state of nonexistence, of nothing? I focused blankly on a picture of a calendar on the opposite wall, depicting the gentle slope of a hill. A tree stood off to the right of the page, cut off by the rectangle’s sudden edge. The sky was a murky gray, the clouds in the atmosphere illuminated by the darkened surrounding. Yet the thing that drew my attention specifically was the outline of a figure standing beside the tree. It was colored in completely, a bare shadow beside the trunk of the tree.
It was if something was attempting to click, filter itself into images inside of my memory. Yet it hit an impermeable wall, and I was left to simply observe the picture, my jaded gaze stoic and unseeing, save for that simple image.
I became vaguely aware that he, whoever he was, was speaking again, instructing me, asking me to do something that I could not focus in on. I willed myself to blink, to look away from the wall, and up into his face, which held a strange expression that reflected both strained pity and a deep understanding. It was a look that shocked my heart into acceleration, and his eyes widened in alarm as my heart monitor nearly doubled in speed, yet I was too busy trying to place his expression to notice the sudden flourish around me.
“I need you to relax,” I heard, and I willed myself to respond that I was fine, fine, but his face...his manner was a blur of memory, like the calendar, and it was frustrating me that I couldn’t remember. “Hold still,” he said gently, holding my arm with a barely recognizable force. He kept my eyes on his face by talking to me, but I knew that the doctors around him had a needle. Yet I allowed him to distract me with his expression, the one I just could not identify, and subsequently my muscles eased, relaxed, reduced to nothing.
I allowed them to carry out actions while simultaneously dictating my own.
Well they encourage your complete cooperation...
He was saying something, mentioning to me that there were flowers beside my bed. Flowers I could not see, but he promised me they were there. I simply nodded, unable to understand why this was exactly relevant, unable to process if he was even speaking to me. The pinch in my vein was barely present, the slow removal of liquid wavering my gaze briefly. My eyelids drooped dangerously, threatening to plunge me into another restless unconsciousness, of nothing, of sleep.
Sleep.
It that what was plaguing my mind? I had been so far gone for an inconceivable amount of time. Ask for darkness and you shall receive; I received it with an overwhelming finality. Yet what had elapsed during my ambiguity was a mystery. I couldn’t even remember closing my eyes. Had it been minutes? Hours? Days or months, or maybe even years.
Years.
I wasn’t sure how many of those I had wasted, wasted in this room that I now recognized. It was slowly reminding me, not of what I wanted to know, but of the time I had spent, aching for a release. I distantly could feel the needle, still pressed against my skin, but it no longer bothered me. The state of testing was not important, nor was the man to my left, jotting down numbers, or the woman at the foot of my bed, hovering anxiously by a wire tap. What was now my central point of focus was that I had drifted from the endless night, somehow, when I was so sure that I had been about to die.
So give them blood, blood, gallons on the stuff...
What had cause my mind to reawaken? Was it fate? Some higher powers, perhaps, or a second chance. It was certainly not spiteful, as I was sure that the spite would have caused me to die out, like a dimming light. I remembered wishing to die, suddenly realizing how foolish I had been, how little I had appreciated. I could track my eventual pessimistic deterioration like a visual map in my mind, trying to see exactly where I could have succumbed to the weakness of surrender.
Had it been luck?
Could it possibly have just been luck, the fact that I had opened my eyes to the world again? I wondered if it was really all the doctors who I had to thank, for their indentured service to my shattered being. It was possible that they had put all their effort into saving me, or whatever it was that they had ended up doing. And as I felt the needle finally slide from my vein and a pressure on the inside of my elbow, a warm gratitude flooded my stomach, and I think I even managed a smile at the doctor, though I could not be certain.
The only thing I was certain of was that I was alive, and I relished in it.
They can fix me proper with a bit of luck...
He was speaking again, wrapping a purple bandage around my arm and patting me lightly on the shoulder. I barely felt it, could partially place the feathered touch he placed on my skin, and he walked away, gesturing to most of his companions, who immediately followed after him like lost dogs. A handful remained, occasionally darting between machines to check noises, endless noises, yet all was quiet.
But it wasn’t quiet. It was getting louder, starting from nothing, and I heard it.
A heartbeat.
It was continuous, a steady pulse, a throb, almost. It held a pattern that most likely reflected my own activity, but it carried another meaning; a deeper, more prophetic message. It continued, now thundering in my ears like a cannon, like it was screaming to be recognized. I closed my eyes, allowing myself to sink into a semi-conscious state of thought, the heartbeat continuing to shatter my attempt at a clear channeling of ideas. I was expecting it to simply fade away as I tried to relax, as I willed myself to retreat into my mind, and was perpetually shocked when the sound simply shuddered to a halt.
I didn’t open my eyes, the black eerily still in the sudden silence. I waited, waited for something to happen, for the heartbeat to resurface, but all was still.
All was quiet.
Quiet.
Still.
“I told you I would be waiting.”
My eyes tried to spring open, but I found that they would not. My heart rate increased frantically, climbed as the echos of the velvet-tranced tone caressed my eardrums and faded, though it was like hundreds of wires had simultaneously ignited and sprang together. Image after image replayed themselves in front of my mind, colors blended and faded and died and came again. It was every time, every chapter of my time under, and in every chapter was him. It was as if I was watching through someone else’s eyes, watching as he brought me through memories, through time, into the mass of undead and as his lips crashed upon mine on the beach. I saw his own past, blurred in the velocity at which it passed, saw our final farewell and his final regret. And my eyes tore open, the lights surrounding the hospital bed burning into my retinas. My eyes were glued to the opposite wall, back to the calendar facing me. The previously silhouetted figure was now defined, clearer than anything else in the picture, though equally frozen in time.
“Ms...Hamilton?”
I didn’t dare look away, could not tear my gaze from the picture. The stature was so regal, so familiar, that it was like someone had taken a snapshot of my memory and copied it onto the page. I could feel the people flitting around the edges of my bed nervously, but it was the image, his image, that kept my scrutiny. Black fuzzed at the edges of my brain, yet the longer I looked, the more real it seemed. It was as if he was returning my gaze, surveying me with the hypnotic hazel that had so distracted my attention. And I heard his voice, one last time, before a shaking sedation needle pushed though the skin of my left arm.
“You will forever have my heart.”
I’m the kind of human wreckage that you love.
♠ ♠ ♠
Well, there you have it. And yes, this the extremely super long author's note in which I rattle on like an emotional pre-teen. Enjoy.I started writing this story in May of my senior year, and I remember when I had finished the first chapter I felt really different about it. I had never written a story like this, nor do I think I ever will again. It had a weird darkness to it, which excited me, and it revolved entirely around symbolism and metaphor. It was a new ballpark for me, and having finished it now, I'm proud of it. Because no matter how many times over the past year and a half I wanted to throw it out a window, or light it on fire, I stuck with it (granted, with huge gaps in between chapters).
I would first like to put out a thank you to, oddly, my mom, who helped inspire me to write this story. We were sitting around our living room one afternoon watching an obscure television show, and she happened to ask what I thought happened during a coma. We bounced around the idea of an alternate universe, and how maybe it was our decision whether or not we ever woke up. So thanks, mom, for our bizarre discussions on rainy weekends.
Second...gahh, I had to consult my list of people I needed to thank because I can't remember them all off the top of my head. Second I would like to thank Holly. At the time I posted the first few chapters of this story, Holly also had a phenomenal Gerard story titled 'Burn All The Empires' going with a similarly dark background. We happened to find each other's stories around the same time, and she's been with me ever since. It has thus been abandoned, but she eagerly encouraged me to continue with mine when I was about to scrap it. She helped me through hours of fighting with the plotline, days and weeks of not updating because I was too annoyed. She always commented when I asked her to, she always read something and edited it for me when I needed her to, and for that I am eternally grateful. She was with me through every stage of my bitchy writer alter-ego; thank you, Holly, and I know you're reading this because I just asked you to. Love you.
My third thank you goes to, of course, my best friend. She blessedly made me the banner for the cover of this story when my creativity was at an all time low. I also have her to thank for collaborating with me to spark the idea for chapter nine, which still remains to be my favorite chapter in this story. Felix, I love you, baby, and this past year has been absolutely wild. But we got through it together, and it'll always be that way, no matter what. I love you with all my heart, and one day we'll get that dramatic airport hug, just like we've always wanted.
For those of you who have managed to make it this far into the author's note, I applaud you and thank you for your tolerance; this one's for you guys. Every one of you who have taken time out of their lives to read this story of mine; thank you. I would be absolutely nowhere without you. I've gotten to know some of you through comments, through just simple exchanges of thank yous, and I cannot express to you how much all of them mean to me. For those of you who have been with me since the very beginning, you rule. For those of you who came in at any other point, YOU rule. You all rule so hard and I love each and every one of you. Never be afraid to come chat with me, because I'll always be here if you need me.
Finally, I'd like to give a weird and obscure thank you to Gerard Way. Gerard, I know there have been times where I have hated every hair on your body, but you will always be one of my biggest inspirations. So thank you for writing 'The Black Parade', and for being such a fucking excellent character to write.
And with that, I take my leave for the last time in this story. Thank you all again so much for reading this; live life, enjoy everything, and carry on.
xoxo,
Sophia
PS) Because she's whored me out so much in her stories, I will now return the favor. My lovely friend ScantilyClad is currently writing an absolutely brilliant Killjoy story titled 'The Viper's Bite'. Just so you all know, I hate Killjoy stories with all my heart, and the fact that I am so enthralled by hers should mean something to each and every one of you. It is definitely on a whole different level. You will not be disappointed, I promise you that. xo