I'm Not Insane (Heaven Help Me)

He hadn’t even realized. Mikes stood up still wrapped in Gee’s blankets and waddled over to him. He sat down beside him and wrapped his long arms around his brother’s shoulders. “I love you Gee…” “Love you too Mikes.” Ray, Bob and Frank chose that very moment to burst through the door, scaring both the guys out of their wits and disrupting the hug in the process. The newcomers looked shocked. Frank broke the silence first. “Sa…Sav…Savanna…” Mikey cut him off with a small quavering voice. “Is dead…” He lifted his head to look into Frank’s eyes. “I know.” Frankie, thankfully, didn’t ask how or why they hadn’t told him. Gerard didn’t have answers for any of these questions. Neither did she. She had seen them come into the room, seen them pick up the notebook. She had tried to talk to them, to move, to figure out why they were so sad. Then she remembered. Savanna was dead. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t speak or move but she understood whom she used to be and that she was dead. All she could do was lie there with so many questions stuck in her throat and no way and no one to ask them. When she looked down at herself she found that her chest was drenched in blood still. Her pen had been picked up from its place on her notebook and ground into her chest by one invisible hand as the other constricted her windpipe. Then suddenly she was dying again, reliving those drawn out moments of slow pain. Except this time … it was different…the hand stabbing her own pen into her former body was not invisible…neither was the one that choked her. She could see him yet she did not want to. The last person, well…ghost, she wanted to see was her father. Yet there he was, the grin he wore on his face was not a happy one. There was a hole in the side of his head and blood was still drip, drip, dripping from it. She saw him but he saw only how he had killed her and she was forced to relive it. His once invisible fingers were drenched with her blood and he shoved them into her open mouth. That is why she had tasted blood as she slowly drifted away just as before… And then she was back to now. With the hole in her chest and the pressure still on her throat. It felt as if her father’s fingers were still grasping the pale neck that used to belong to her. The only difference from her now and the way she was when she died was that in death she couldn’t stop moving, writhing, struggling to get free in spite of herself. Now she was weak and limp and couldn’t move anything except her eyes. She found she didn’t need to blink or breath. She looked as much as she could while still being unable to move but couldn’t see anyone … except herself. Ray, Bob, Frank, Mikey, and Gerard sat in silence in the common room. No one sat in “Sav’s corner” as it had been dubbed. Gerard still carried the bloody notebook with him after being assured by his doctor and the staff that it was ok. He had to turn it over for examination by the police but they gave it back to him after discovering that it had no relevance to the investigation of this very confusing death. This young girl had been stabbed, beaten and choked but the security cameras only showed her entering the room and no one left it after the death before the nurse found her. The building was to tall for the killer to have jumped out the window and besides there were bars there. The girl named Savanna Griffin had entered the room in emotional distress but there was no question of suicide as her own blood had been shoved down her throat as she died. The police would have to release the story as a suicide as it was getting news coverage already but the private investigation would go on, as this death seemed utterly impossible. The notebook was no help so the police gave it back to one Gerard Way after being advised by the doctor that he would be distraught without it. So it had found it’s way back to Gerard who carried it always. It was in his jacket pocket as they sat there in silence. Only Mikey knew he had it. He took it out without thinking but Ray, Bob and Frankie gasped which showed that they recognized it immediately. Gerard made no explanation. He only set the notebook down and started to flip through the pages, the bloody, bloody, pages. The guys crowded around it. All of them smiled for the first time in days when they saw her self-portrait but Bob stopped Gee as he tried to turn the page and show them the wolf/lady. Bob pulled out a pencil stub and took the notebook in his big hands. He played with his lip ring as he drew something in on the picture. When he set it back down again the smiles returned. He had drawn in Sav’s lip ring and written her name on the edge of the page. The smiles only grew as they went on through those bloody, bloody, pages. Frankie fucking beamed when they came to his shadowed picture. They lingered on this particular detail looking from the page to the real thing and back again just as they had when they had first seen it. Gerard hadn’t dared look past his own eye when he opened the notebook before. Now Bob grasped his shoulder as if her knew what Gee was feeling and he suddenly felt empowered. The next page was of Mikey’s glasses and her own face reflected in them. Gee looked into his brother’s face and saw his own face in his brother’s shiny glasses, the same way Savanna had. He saw why she had wanted to draw it. They looked at the page and specifically at Sav’s face but Mikey looked past the glasses and saw his own eyes just as Gerard had seen his. The pages following were all of them. Some were of just one of them. Others were scenes that they recognized from their own memories like those long talks in the cafeteria when Savanna would say almost nothing but listen and draw. The faces they were confronted with were their own and sometimes their friend’s. Bob was not an incredibly emotional person but it only took one page in particular to make him cry. This page was half finished but it was… indescribable. It was a collage of their faces in different states of emotion. Savanna had not seen them in most of the stages she drew but they were mirrors of the people that she obviously knew so well. Her faces on the page were full of life. It was as if she was watching them from the book and smiling at them. The page was almost done but for some reason Sav had never finished it. Frankie hugged Bob and asked him if he was ok. Of course he wasn’t but he had to ask. Bob just hugged Frank back and said, “Of course I am you little bastard!” Small laughs echoed in the room. Frank bit Ray’s hand as it tried to ruffle his hair. “Ow!” “Fuck you!” Frank’s indignant reply made Mikey laugh even more. But Savanna wasn’t laughing.