FicWad

Chapter One

I hadn't really given my death much thought. It wasn't one of the most thought about topics on my mind. I very rarely thought about it in fact. So when the day came for me to die, it was simply....unthinkable. This mustn't make much sense too many, but when Idied... it was nothing like anything I have ever experienced before.

When I was alive I didn't think about what would happen to me. I didn't think about if there was a heaven or a hell, or weather I would just die, or if I would be reincarnated. None of these possibilities ever came to mind. I didn't think much into the future. Hell, I barely thought about what I was going to say next in a conversation. But as I was dying...I had a passing thought as to what would happen. As I was letting out my last breath that was ever to be drawn in to my body, I thought'It doesn't matter 'cause soon I'll find out.', and with that I floated off into oblivion.

When I opened my eyes I was a shock. I thought I was dead. The dead don't open there eyes. I was standing in a hallway. There was a scene going on and it all seemed unreal. Then I realized that I was watching as my friends were escorted back to their rooms and my bloody body was carried off on a stretcher with a cloth over it and that was when I knew that I was. I was a ghost. I had never thought that this would be possible, but like I said I never thought of it, death that is.

I was wearing black scrubs. I stood out compared to the many patients in white. I had lived in an asylum for many years. I had worn nothing but white within those years. I believed it was 10 years. I had spent 10 years in isolation and those 10 years had taken atoll on my skin color. Compared to the black of my outfit I was a white as the walls in this crazy house.

I had accepted that I was dead. It wasn't a hard thing for me to do. I had thought about how I wanted to be dead, but never about death itself, a couple years after I was emitted and somewhere deep in my brain I still wanted it. I was just wandering the halls, something that we were never allowed to do. We were forced to stick to the halls that only lead to places that we needed to go to. I had never seen all of the halls in my total of 10 years being here. I only took one hall from my room to the mess hall and the same hall back. I didn't have normal classes like the rest of the children here. The idiots that ran this place thought that I wasn't smart enough to have the pleasure of being taught like every other student.

Learning would also be on the list of things I rarely thought about. I hadn't even been in a regular school. However I did have some amount of education, they were nice enough to give me that. It wasn't that I didn't want to learn or that I was stupid, Ijust didn't see why an education was so important to my life. I wasn't going to do anything with my life. I was never going to have the opportunity to make something of myself. I always knew I was going to die in that retched place sooner or later. No one, myself included, would've thought that it would be sooner rather than later. I was emitted when I was 6 and now 10 years later at the age of 16 I was dead.

As I was wandering I came to a stop in front of a room. It was my room. It wasn't padded like everyone in the building thought it would be. I couldn't help but scoff. I wasn't insane, Iwasn't even crazy. I just didn't want to waste my time talking to such incompetent buffoons who didn't have a clue as to what they were talking about. I reached out to turn the door knob but found that my hand went right through the door. I gave a shrug and just walked right though.

They had cleaned out my room pretty quickly. My posters were all neatly rolled up and in a thing that one could call a pile. My sheets were gone, and the small amount of decorations that I had up were also MIA. I had never seen the room so empty, so dull, so....white. The color reminded me of bleach. Like someone had taken bleach to the once colorful walls of my room and made it just as morbid as the rest of the building.

Most of the patients in the building didn't think that white was morbid, or didn't understand how I could think such a thing about such a pure color. You would understand if you were me. Staring at the same walls for 10 years. The some color. The same outfit. Everyday and every night. It bothered me to no end. The whiteness of the walls. The pure perfection of the white paint. It enraged me just thinking about it.

I was so lost in my thoughts I didn't hear the door swing open, until a doctors voice could be heard talking to the new patient that would be taking my room. My home. I turned to face them. I looked over the doctor first. He was balding and had a pair of glasses on that took of a majority of his face. He had a black long-sleeved sweater on underneath a long white lab coat. I didn't pay any further attention to him because the boy standing next to him had a bright red head of hair. It was jelled in every which way with bangs that swooped in front of his eyes. His eyes were the color of ice and just as piercing. As he was scanning the room, Iswore that his eyes landed on me. His eyes gave the impression that they were staring deep into me or through me, and it was creeping me out.

"Hazel?" The boy turned away from me and back toward the doctor. "This is going to be your room for your stay here. The boy who had this room before had many posters and if you would like any you can feel free to take what ever you want." He showed the boy to my pile of posters before walking out of the room, shutting and locking it behind himself as he left heading back down the hall towards his office.

As soon as the doctor left the boy turned away from the pile of posters and was staring straight through me again. I tried to walk around the room, seeing if he was looking at something past me but everywhere I went his eyes fallowed. This boy was starting to piss me off with his staring and what not. I started to glare at him and I swore I heard a growl come out of my mouth. He seemed to get the hint that I didn't like him staring and gave up, going to look through my posters.

I didn't really have anything better to do so I just sat on the bed and watched to boy unroll each poster and look it over. "If you don't like people staring at you, then you could at least have the manners to not stare at people yourself."

Was he talking to me? Could he really see me? I could feel myself smirk. I had a feeling why this kid was here.

"Well," he turned to me with and expecting look on his face, "aren't you going to apologize?" I shook my head. "Why the hell not?" I had a big grin on my face by now and I motioned for him to fallow me. I took him over to the bed and moved the mattress. I didn't bother to think why I could touch this but not the door knob. I moved the mattress enough for the boy to get a look at the wall behind it. I could see him reading each word carefully and trying to understand the meaning of the phrase: You can never tell when the mute boy screams.

I looked over the words myself. I was ten when I had written them. I wasn't sure why I wrote them at the time. I was in a fit of rage. The doctors told me that day that I was never going to be able to go home. I was so mad. I had secretly stolen a knife from the kitchen and brought it to my room and cut my arm. I wasn't trying to hurt myself I just needed ink and my body was full of wonderful red ink. I wrote those words in blood, but over time the red had turned brown but they still held the same meaning. A meaning I still was unsure of.

"So you're a mute?"

I wanted to answer. Idesperately wanted to reply. For some reason I felt that this boy was worth talking to. I cleared my throat an opened my mouth to try and speak, but no words came out. I cleared my throat again and this time I was successful. "No. Not really," I smiled. This was the first time I had heard my voice since the day I wrote my little phrase on the wall. My voice was raspy. I only guessed this was from smoking and me never talking. I let out a raspy laugh. It felt great to talk and laugh again. This boy was making me feel more alive when Iwas dead than I had ever felt when I was amongst the living.

"I don't get it. If you aren't a mute then what does it mean?"

I laid down on the bed after pushing it back against the wall, "I'm not sure to tell you the truth. I wrote that when I was young. After I wrote that I decided that I wasn't going to talk again." I was staring up at the ceiling the whole time I was talking to him. "I guess it doesn't really have a meaning now." I sat up and looked at him. There was just something about this boy that made me want to smile, and so I did.

He gave me a smile in return, but his smile faded and he looked down at the floor before sitting down in the chair at the desk that was in the room. He put his head in his heads and gave out a long exhausted sigh. He looked up, back at me, and then started to speak. "Would you mind if I asked you some questions?"

"No. Not at all. Ask away."A gave another smile and he responded with another sigh.

"How....How long have you been here?"

"10 years." He gave a nod.

"How long have you been dead?"

I looked at the clock on the wall. "2 hours." He store at me in disbelief. "I'm not kidding. I died 2 hours ago in the mess hall."

"So the being dead thing is all new for you?"

"Yup. It's weird. Like when I tried to open the door to come in here I passed right on through. Then when Iwent to move the bed it wasn't the same case."

"It's because you never really owned the door, or the room for that matter."

"What?" I couldn't help but to tilt my head slightly. It was a childhood habit I had for when I didn't understand things. I never was forced to grow out of it. So it stuck.

He let out a slight laugh at my antics and tried to explain it again. "From what other ghosts have explained to me, you can only touch things that you own. My guess is that you felt that you never really owned the door or the room. Is that why you put so many things on the wall? You owned them and it made you feel like you owned the room. It made it feel more personal, more yours."

I understood this explanation better. I could touch the bed because it was mine. I had spent so many nights crying myself to sleep in that bed. That bed held my dreams my nightmares. It was a part of me. I smiled at my memories. Sure they weren't the best but they somehow brought back a comforting feel that I hadn't had since I was little.

I was brought out of my daydreaming by the boy asking "Can you show me? Where you died that is." I nodded and stood from the bed. I was heading to the door when I remembered that it was locked from the outside. I could always try to unlock it.

"Wait here," I said, "The door is locked from the outside. I'm going to try to see if I can unlock it. If I do your going to have to be quiet because this nut house is on lock down all patients are supposed to be their rooms. Got it?" I turned my head in time to see him give a nod of understanding.

I walked through the door and stood in front of it from the outside. I never liked these doors. They were big glass door with a card swipe lock. I scrunched up my nose while looking at the door. I looked passed it to see the boy smiling at me. I rolled my eyes and walked into the wall. I don't know how I did it but I managed to break the lock without sounding the alarm. I walked out of the wall just as the boy, who I seriously need to ask the name of, walked out of his new room. We grinned at each other as I lead the way to the mess hall.

The hall that we had to take wasn't the shortest hallway in the building, but it was void of other rooms and offices. We made it to the hall without coming contact with any other being. When we came to a stop in front of the double doors there was yellow caution tape on the ground. Some one else must have already paid a visit.

I walked right through and my new acquaintance fallowed. The room was still in its chaotic state it was when I last left. There was a table flipped over and most, if not all, of the chairs were toppled over. I walked to the middle of the room where there was alarge red blood stain on the linoleum floor. I watched as my new partner in crime took in the scene of the room at the entrance before joining me to stand by what once was a pool of my blood.

I couldn't stand to look at it anymore so I started to walk towards the door. I wasn't sure what I was going to do but when I felt another presence next to me I figured I would lead the boy back to his room. After we reached the room we both walked in and sat on the bed.

I was thinking of how to ask the boy what his name was when I realized that he didn't know mine either. "I'm Evan, by the way." I spoke breaking the silence.

He turned to me and smiled,"Nice to meet you Evan. I'm Hazel." We both just sat there smiling at each other until I finally built up enough courage to speak again.

"So you're here because you can see dead people, right?"

He nodded his head before launching into his story. "It all started when I was younger. They were just fuzzy shapes or blurs. I was living in the country with my family. I mentioned something about funny blurs to my mother but she didn't seem very concerned. She said that as I grew up they would either go away or..." his voice trailed off.

"Or what?" I asked gently leaning forward a bit.

"She never said. She never told me what the 'or' was. My parents didn't have any siblings and their parents were dead, so when my parents died I didn't have any relatives to live with. They sent me to the orphanage in the city.

There the blurs went away. It was some years before I started to see them again. It was a couple years still until they became real people. I got freaked out, ya know? I asked acouple of my friends if they could see them and they all said I was just trying to get attention or freak them out. I didn't want to tell the adults that ran the orphanage because I knew they wouldn't understand either. Then I started to have nightmares. They were terrible. They were about the ghosts that I would see. They would be awful events that lead to their death or it was like I was standing there watching them get killed.

Soon I started to talk to them. I found that it made the nightmares lessen. This went on for about a year until one of the kids got mad at me because he though I was talking to myself. He thought that I was talking to myself so everyone would pay attention to me."He rolled his eyes but continued his story.

"He complained to the one of the adults, one of the ones that I had been trying to avoid all those years. Itold her and many others that I wasn't talking to myself, that there were really people there. I told them they were ghost, that they were dead, and that I had nightmares about them. They didn't believe me though. They all thought that I was on a one way train to crazy town. So I've spent the past 3 years moving from one asylum to the next."

He looked up at me and Istore into his icy blue eyes. I gave him a smile of comfort. I heard a lot of stories like this. Living in an asylum you hear many different stories each one with its own kind of heartache, but Hazel's made me want to cry. He didn't ask for this. He wasn't like the rest of us. He had a pure heart. He wasn't made to live in asylums. I could see in it his eyes. He was born for a greater purpose. I couldn't see what it was but I could see the greatness in him.

"What about you, Evan? Why are you here?"

"You really wanna know?" He nodded eagerly in response to my question.

I began with a sigh, "I never knew my parents. I lived in an orphanage until I was 6. It was at that age that I tried to kill another child. I was sitting on the front steps watching as families drove past in their cars, or siblings walked past holding hand on the sidewalk. I never cared for those silly television shows. They were pointless. I could sit on those steps day dreaming about what it would be like if I had a family for hours on end." I gave another sigh at my memories but continued.

"I was sitting there and aboy, a few years older than myself came up to me and pulled me off the steps. Ihad tumbled down the concrete steps and landed at his feet. He started making fun of me. He said that I didn't have a family because everyone hated me, and that no one would ever love me. He was yelling at me and I didn't understand why. This was the only life I knew. It didn't feel strange to not have afamily. In some weird way I considered the other people at the orphanage to be my family.

Then he told me that he hated me. I didn't even know this boy and he didn't even know me. Yet here he was saying that he hated me. I was so angry. I tried not to do anything but Ijust lost it. I ran at the boy knocking him down and I started to punch him. He was bloody and unconscious after a few punches but it didn't satisfy me. That's when I started to strangle him." I looked up at Hazel and he didn't look frightened so I continued.

"You have to understand Ididn't feel like myself. It didn't feel real. Like it was one of my dreams turned nightmare. Some of the adults from the orphanage came out and managed to get me off of him before anything totally terrible happened. That's when they sent me here and I've been living in this room every since." I said gesturing around us.

An awkward silence fell over us and it was filled with morbid tension. I looked over at the clock and saw that it was 10 pm and that the nurses would be coming around for lights out any minute.

"Hazel, you might want to go to bed now, or at least pretend to be. A nurse is going to come by any minute and check to see if you're asleep." He gave a nod and began to strip out of his clothes.

I watched as he took off his shirt and I got an eyeful. He had a beautiful tan body. He was toned and he had abs that you just wanted to reach out and touch. I had to turn away because Iknew I was staring. I wasn't afraid to admit that I was gay. I had grown up with out any women in my life. I guess you could argue that the nurses were women but the truth was that only a few nurses actually were women and you could hardly consider those few to be women.

When I turned back around he was in bed with the blankets pulled up to his chin. Not a second later a nurse came by and shined a flashlight through the door at Hazel's sleeping form. Ididn't want to bother him so I slid through the wall and made my way toward the nurse's station. If I was going to be up all night I might as well have some fun and pick on the nurse's.