Categories > Celebrities > Fall Out Boy > The Car Crash Hearts
The night air was pulling at my body as I ran, my sneakers slapping hard against the wet grass. All I could hear was my heart beating in my ears, pulsing. It does little to comfort me, as always. It’s such a disgusting reminder sometimes that all I am is human. I'm vulnerable.
When I couldn't run anymore, I felt my knees go out and I fell onto the damp ground, gasping for breath that couldn't reach my lungs. This is my apocalypse.
The tears were already streaming down my face. I didn't care.
He wasn't there.
I didn't want him to see me like this.
So what did I want then? I couldn’t tell you anymore.
I curled on the ground, my thoughts slurring and I stopped feeling the freezing air of the night on my skin.
I stopped feeling everything.
Is this what you wanted?
_______________________________________
I was alone.
I couldn't feel anything, just that I was floating, like I wasn't touching anything. I didn't want to open my eyes at first, relying on my other senses, but I realized it was a useless effort. My body was numb. I slowly raised my eyelids, centimeter by centimeter.
I couldn't see much of anything, just my body, around which a soft glow emitted.
My surroundings were too dark to see past that. My mind was peacefully blank, like all my troubles had disappeared. In my view appeared a face, and not just any face. It was so beautiful; I felt a thought resounding in my head "'This can't be real,'
The face was the only thing I could concentrate on. I heard a soft resounding voice, so far away I could barely hear it, speaking, but I couldn't make out what the words were.
Suddenly, the face started to fade away. As soon as I noticed this I felt the peace in my head begin to warp into a throbbing ache. The voice suddenly became louder and louder, it seemed to be in my head. I reached out after the face as it began to move farther and farther, reaching with it, though it was like I was moving through water, I was moving so slowly. I struggled, feeling a sudden wave of desperation as it disappeared. /'Don't leave me,'/My mind pleaded as my vision began to grow dark, but my eyes were wide open. I couldn’t see.
I was alone again.
____________________________________________________________________________
I died.
Almost.
At least that's what I thought.
My second thought was 'Where am I?'
It felt like just a second, but an eternity later that I started to hear voices again. They weren’t inside my head either, and they weren’t very loud. I tried to feel my body again, down to my limbs beginning out from my torso, my arms and legs, down to my fingers and toes, and I felt myself slowly stirring. The light above my head was piercing my eyelids, and I instinctively raised my hand to shield it. It didn’t move. Horrified, I shot my eyes open and found myself blinking rapidly in the blinding white. When my eyes started to focus, I became aware that the voices around me had stopped. I glanced around as a room appeared; I was disoriented to say the least.
“Thank God!” I heard a girl cry, and she threw her arms around my neck. I was too confused to protest, instead letting her pull me close to her small frame and cry into my neck. I shifted my eyes around the room, where three other people stood, one rushing to the edge of the bed, a woman with blonde hair, and another, a man with brown hair, run to the door and call “Nurse! She’s awake!”
“Videl, we were so worried,” the girl pulling me tight gasped, pulling back at arms length to look at me. She had short, choppy blonde hair loose around her face and looked to be about 17. I bit my lip and stared back at her, still thrown out of sorts and honestly terrified. I cleared my throat, finding it extremely dry.
“Where am I?” I said slowly, glancing around at the rest of the room. "Who are you?" She gaped at me as a woman in a pair of scrubs bolted into the room, immediately to my heart monitor and IV.
My head was throbbing dully.
“The doctor said this might happen,” the nurse shot a worried look at me and then back at the others in the room. “He’ll be in in just a moment,”
By now I had of course realized that I was in a hospital, what terrified me was that I had no idea why. I should have rationally been feeling all sorts of anxiety, but my body was not cooperating with my brain. “W-what’s going on? What’s wrong with me?”
The nurse ignored this question and checked my IV, and I watched as she inserted a syringe full of clear liquid into the line. “Do you know what your name is?”
“Videl,” I answered quickly, “Videl Marquee.”
“I’m thirsty,” I managed to croak, and the nurse smiled kindly and left the room to get water.
“Videl?” I looked at the doorway, seeing a young woman doctor in a white coat. “You are at St. Herman’s Methodist Hospital; you were hit by a car. You’ve been here for almost three hours, and you are going to be okay.” She stated slowly, coming to stand beside my bed and gaze at me sympathetically. “You are probably experiencing a lot of confusion. You are currently on a lot of medication and painkillers, so just rest easy and don’t exert yourself.”
The nurse had returned with a cup of water, which she held out to me but I didn’t take. She instead set it on the table beside me.
“I don’t understand,” I mumbled, the throbbing in my head starting to recede.
If I didn’t feel so drugged, I would have been demanding answers. But I laid back into the pillows and tried to control my breathing.
The doctor looked anxiously at the rest of the people in the room, who were waiting with bated breath. “She’ll be alright, she is stabilized and in good care. The confusion is a bit of an issue, we feared it might happen. Although, we’re going to have to consult a specialist on this. She’ll have to stay here overnight, and we will have the specialist see her in the morning.”
My mind was a mess. All I wanted to do was sleep. My vision felt more and more blurred and I struggled to keep my conscience.
“Until then, I’m going to have to ask the family to leave and come back tomorrow during visitation hours, as right now she is in a delicate stage and I don’t want her to strain herself or anything to trigger,”
Trigger? My mind vaguely repeated. Family?
I slipped away.
___________________________________________-
When I came to again, I found I was still in the hospital room. I fluttered my eyes open, slightly afraid of what I would see. This time the three people and the nurse had disappeared, and judging by the sunlight seeping through the curtains it was morning. My head was slightly throbbing; I shot a look to my right to observe the ever-present IV which I could now tell was responsible for keeping me pumped full of drugs, wasn’t doing its job.
I heard a throat clear and the doctor from yesterday had already appeared, somehow at the right moment, and was walking to my bedside.
“Hello Videl, I didn’t get the change to introduce myself, Dr. Lynn Lang,” she said slowly, looking into my eyes to make sure I was hearing every word.
“You were struck by a car, and you hit your head on the street pretty hard, you had a mild traumatic brain injury but it appears to have been very subtle” she explained. "We have run several scans, a SCAT2 test, but we will need to run several more," She cleared her throat and pressed her hands together, staring consciously at my arm. “Your arm was also broken in two places; they are clean fractures though and will heal fairly quickly,”
I widened my eyes at this and immediately shot my eyes to my arm. The reason for my difficulty moving it yesterday was now apparent; it was wrapped in a fresh bulky white cast. It was amazing that I hadn’t even felt any pain from it, but looking at it now I felt anxiety begin to build up in me. “At least I’m alive right,” I found myself muttering. Sarcasm has always been my safety move.
“You and the little boy you saved,” Dr.Lang interjected. “Apparently he had run into oncoming traffic and you saved him,” I narrowed my eyes at her, taking in what she had said.
“A kid?”
“Yes, a little boy. Apparently he came this morning to see you, accompanied by his older brother.”
I shook my head at her. “You must be confused, why would I throw myself in front of a car to save some random kid?”
Dr. Chover smiled. “Maybe you’re a little more courageous that you thought you were,” She mused.
I opened my mouth to protest, but a nurse materialized to check my vitals. I closed my mouth as Dr. Lang explained to me that they had pulled me off painkillers in order to observe me.
The doctor showed in another person a few minutes later, this one a man.
She introduced him as my specialist for head-trauma cases and left us to talk.
The conversation itself was somewhat of a blur, but he explained to me that with incidents like moderate head trauma, sometimes the brain creates a shell for any traumatic events. It was what I was experiencing, defined as retrograde amnesia. When he asked me more questions about my childhood, I was able to answer seamlessly, and more recently living with Carmen at the group home. But the more he pressed the more I became aware that there were holes, but I didn’t want to let on that I was aware of this. I had no more answers than he was aware that there were questions to be asked, and I didn’t want them to send me anywhere for any psych evaluation or to any shrink, so I nodded along with his questions. At the end of the session he was asking me if I had anything else I needed to clarify. I shook my head, and he left. After that, there were several more scans run on me, a MRI and a CT scan, and then I was finally free to go.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
It had been almost a week since the incident, a week that seemed to pass in a blur. It wasn’t that I couldn’t remember what had happened, life just seemed to hit fast forward. I was starting school at Glenview High, which would be a welcome change after being in several public schools in the Chicago local system. This school was supposed to be pretty small, but the only thing I could be grateful for was that I wouldn’t know anyone, and they wouldn’t know me.
I sighed as I lifted a pile of clothes and stuffed them into drawers. My foster family mother, I called her Maryann, had taken me clothes shopping, much to my protest. I lifted a pretty mint-green shirt with a cross pattern all over it. Maryann had all but forced me into buying it when I had wanted to duck into a thrift store that had a vintage Led Zepplin t-shirt, in my size. We had compromised and taken both. Now I lifted it and looked in the mirror, and I had to admit the effect it had on my brown eyes wasn’t half bad. I tried a smile, something that was rare of me. “I like that one a lot,” said a voice from behind me. I was startled but I played it off by throwing the shirt onto the bed and turning slowly, acting like I was picking up more clothes from the floor.
"Ya think?" I didn’t have to look at Addie to know she was leaning on the doorway and had a smirk on her face. Addie was Maryann’s daughter. She was my age as well, also starting at Glenview. Her sarcasm was one of the best features about her, but if it wasn't for the fact that I was in such a strange predicament, I might have liked her more.
“Look,” Addie said, shifting her weight but not moving from the doorway. “If you’re gonna live here, we might as well get along, you know?”
I scoffed. “That’s what you think,” I muttered, turning to look in the mirror again. “Pretty soon I’ll be out of here, and I won’t even remember your name.”
"For not remembering me, you're still the same stuck-up brat you were when I first met you," Addie fired back. “That’s the same line you told me the first time I talked to you.”
“The real surprise is that I don’t remember how annoying you can be,” I retorted.
Addie huffed, irritated, and stormed out of the door. “If you never try, what’s gonna change in your life?”
I ignored her and she left, but I was still thinking about it. For reasons I couldn't fathom that was just my natural reaction to new things; to push them away and create a wall. I bit my lip, going back to the mirror to stare at my reflection. I looked the same as I always had; and yet, I felt like a very different person. The same almond shaped brown eyes I had gotten from my mother, whose father had been a Native American. I also had deep brown hair that fell to the middle of my back; I did know that I had never liked to cut it before. I practiced a smile again, my even white teeth showing in my full lips. It wasn't bad. I brought my arm up absentmindedly to brush back my hair around my face and found myself staring at the irritating mass of plaster around my arm. The ugly thing weighed my arm down and reminded me of something I had no memory of.
Apparently, I had thrown myself in front of car to save a kid I didn’t even know. And at this point couldn’t even remember. I can’t tell you what about it bothered me most, but it did. Certainly more than when they told me that apparently my prized guitar had been stolen, and that was the cause of this whole mess. I closed my eyes at thinking about this, chewing on the corner of my mouth. I couldn’t remember owning one, or even playing guitar. There were a lot of things I didn’t know about myself, and I was determined to find out.
Sighing, I finished putting away my clothes and went to my CD player on the nightstand, popped in a CD I had played so many times before, and pressed play.
Take me out tonight
Where there's music and there's people
And they're young and alive
Driving in your car
I never never want to go home
Because I haven't got one
Anymore
I began moving around my room, the feeling that surged through me was strange and unfamiliar, but it excited me and made me feel whole. It felt like meeting someone you have known forever, for the first time. It felt like the beginning of an end; alpha and omega; I felt dead on arrival.
____________________________________________
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
Hello again, hope you all don't want to, er, lynch me. Sorry for the cliffhanger in the last chapter, didn't mean to give anyone a heart attack. Although I am thrilled at the responses so far for this story. PLEASE REVIEW/RATE. It'll mean more frequent updates, I promise. Right now I have them to a pretty steady weekly flow, I have quite a few more chapters already prepared, just polishing them up for yall. Thanks guys :)
xoxo Videl
When I couldn't run anymore, I felt my knees go out and I fell onto the damp ground, gasping for breath that couldn't reach my lungs. This is my apocalypse.
The tears were already streaming down my face. I didn't care.
He wasn't there.
I didn't want him to see me like this.
So what did I want then? I couldn’t tell you anymore.
I curled on the ground, my thoughts slurring and I stopped feeling the freezing air of the night on my skin.
I stopped feeling everything.
Is this what you wanted?
_______________________________________
I was alone.
I couldn't feel anything, just that I was floating, like I wasn't touching anything. I didn't want to open my eyes at first, relying on my other senses, but I realized it was a useless effort. My body was numb. I slowly raised my eyelids, centimeter by centimeter.
I couldn't see much of anything, just my body, around which a soft glow emitted.
My surroundings were too dark to see past that. My mind was peacefully blank, like all my troubles had disappeared. In my view appeared a face, and not just any face. It was so beautiful; I felt a thought resounding in my head "'This can't be real,'
The face was the only thing I could concentrate on. I heard a soft resounding voice, so far away I could barely hear it, speaking, but I couldn't make out what the words were.
Suddenly, the face started to fade away. As soon as I noticed this I felt the peace in my head begin to warp into a throbbing ache. The voice suddenly became louder and louder, it seemed to be in my head. I reached out after the face as it began to move farther and farther, reaching with it, though it was like I was moving through water, I was moving so slowly. I struggled, feeling a sudden wave of desperation as it disappeared. /'Don't leave me,'/My mind pleaded as my vision began to grow dark, but my eyes were wide open. I couldn’t see.
I was alone again.
____________________________________________________________________________
I died.
Almost.
At least that's what I thought.
My second thought was 'Where am I?'
It felt like just a second, but an eternity later that I started to hear voices again. They weren’t inside my head either, and they weren’t very loud. I tried to feel my body again, down to my limbs beginning out from my torso, my arms and legs, down to my fingers and toes, and I felt myself slowly stirring. The light above my head was piercing my eyelids, and I instinctively raised my hand to shield it. It didn’t move. Horrified, I shot my eyes open and found myself blinking rapidly in the blinding white. When my eyes started to focus, I became aware that the voices around me had stopped. I glanced around as a room appeared; I was disoriented to say the least.
“Thank God!” I heard a girl cry, and she threw her arms around my neck. I was too confused to protest, instead letting her pull me close to her small frame and cry into my neck. I shifted my eyes around the room, where three other people stood, one rushing to the edge of the bed, a woman with blonde hair, and another, a man with brown hair, run to the door and call “Nurse! She’s awake!”
“Videl, we were so worried,” the girl pulling me tight gasped, pulling back at arms length to look at me. She had short, choppy blonde hair loose around her face and looked to be about 17. I bit my lip and stared back at her, still thrown out of sorts and honestly terrified. I cleared my throat, finding it extremely dry.
“Where am I?” I said slowly, glancing around at the rest of the room. "Who are you?" She gaped at me as a woman in a pair of scrubs bolted into the room, immediately to my heart monitor and IV.
My head was throbbing dully.
“The doctor said this might happen,” the nurse shot a worried look at me and then back at the others in the room. “He’ll be in in just a moment,”
By now I had of course realized that I was in a hospital, what terrified me was that I had no idea why. I should have rationally been feeling all sorts of anxiety, but my body was not cooperating with my brain. “W-what’s going on? What’s wrong with me?”
The nurse ignored this question and checked my IV, and I watched as she inserted a syringe full of clear liquid into the line. “Do you know what your name is?”
“Videl,” I answered quickly, “Videl Marquee.”
“I’m thirsty,” I managed to croak, and the nurse smiled kindly and left the room to get water.
“Videl?” I looked at the doorway, seeing a young woman doctor in a white coat. “You are at St. Herman’s Methodist Hospital; you were hit by a car. You’ve been here for almost three hours, and you are going to be okay.” She stated slowly, coming to stand beside my bed and gaze at me sympathetically. “You are probably experiencing a lot of confusion. You are currently on a lot of medication and painkillers, so just rest easy and don’t exert yourself.”
The nurse had returned with a cup of water, which she held out to me but I didn’t take. She instead set it on the table beside me.
“I don’t understand,” I mumbled, the throbbing in my head starting to recede.
If I didn’t feel so drugged, I would have been demanding answers. But I laid back into the pillows and tried to control my breathing.
The doctor looked anxiously at the rest of the people in the room, who were waiting with bated breath. “She’ll be alright, she is stabilized and in good care. The confusion is a bit of an issue, we feared it might happen. Although, we’re going to have to consult a specialist on this. She’ll have to stay here overnight, and we will have the specialist see her in the morning.”
My mind was a mess. All I wanted to do was sleep. My vision felt more and more blurred and I struggled to keep my conscience.
“Until then, I’m going to have to ask the family to leave and come back tomorrow during visitation hours, as right now she is in a delicate stage and I don’t want her to strain herself or anything to trigger,”
Trigger? My mind vaguely repeated. Family?
I slipped away.
___________________________________________-
When I came to again, I found I was still in the hospital room. I fluttered my eyes open, slightly afraid of what I would see. This time the three people and the nurse had disappeared, and judging by the sunlight seeping through the curtains it was morning. My head was slightly throbbing; I shot a look to my right to observe the ever-present IV which I could now tell was responsible for keeping me pumped full of drugs, wasn’t doing its job.
I heard a throat clear and the doctor from yesterday had already appeared, somehow at the right moment, and was walking to my bedside.
“Hello Videl, I didn’t get the change to introduce myself, Dr. Lynn Lang,” she said slowly, looking into my eyes to make sure I was hearing every word.
“You were struck by a car, and you hit your head on the street pretty hard, you had a mild traumatic brain injury but it appears to have been very subtle” she explained. "We have run several scans, a SCAT2 test, but we will need to run several more," She cleared her throat and pressed her hands together, staring consciously at my arm. “Your arm was also broken in two places; they are clean fractures though and will heal fairly quickly,”
I widened my eyes at this and immediately shot my eyes to my arm. The reason for my difficulty moving it yesterday was now apparent; it was wrapped in a fresh bulky white cast. It was amazing that I hadn’t even felt any pain from it, but looking at it now I felt anxiety begin to build up in me. “At least I’m alive right,” I found myself muttering. Sarcasm has always been my safety move.
“You and the little boy you saved,” Dr.Lang interjected. “Apparently he had run into oncoming traffic and you saved him,” I narrowed my eyes at her, taking in what she had said.
“A kid?”
“Yes, a little boy. Apparently he came this morning to see you, accompanied by his older brother.”
I shook my head at her. “You must be confused, why would I throw myself in front of a car to save some random kid?”
Dr. Chover smiled. “Maybe you’re a little more courageous that you thought you were,” She mused.
I opened my mouth to protest, but a nurse materialized to check my vitals. I closed my mouth as Dr. Lang explained to me that they had pulled me off painkillers in order to observe me.
The doctor showed in another person a few minutes later, this one a man.
She introduced him as my specialist for head-trauma cases and left us to talk.
The conversation itself was somewhat of a blur, but he explained to me that with incidents like moderate head trauma, sometimes the brain creates a shell for any traumatic events. It was what I was experiencing, defined as retrograde amnesia. When he asked me more questions about my childhood, I was able to answer seamlessly, and more recently living with Carmen at the group home. But the more he pressed the more I became aware that there were holes, but I didn’t want to let on that I was aware of this. I had no more answers than he was aware that there were questions to be asked, and I didn’t want them to send me anywhere for any psych evaluation or to any shrink, so I nodded along with his questions. At the end of the session he was asking me if I had anything else I needed to clarify. I shook my head, and he left. After that, there were several more scans run on me, a MRI and a CT scan, and then I was finally free to go.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
It had been almost a week since the incident, a week that seemed to pass in a blur. It wasn’t that I couldn’t remember what had happened, life just seemed to hit fast forward. I was starting school at Glenview High, which would be a welcome change after being in several public schools in the Chicago local system. This school was supposed to be pretty small, but the only thing I could be grateful for was that I wouldn’t know anyone, and they wouldn’t know me.
I sighed as I lifted a pile of clothes and stuffed them into drawers. My foster family mother, I called her Maryann, had taken me clothes shopping, much to my protest. I lifted a pretty mint-green shirt with a cross pattern all over it. Maryann had all but forced me into buying it when I had wanted to duck into a thrift store that had a vintage Led Zepplin t-shirt, in my size. We had compromised and taken both. Now I lifted it and looked in the mirror, and I had to admit the effect it had on my brown eyes wasn’t half bad. I tried a smile, something that was rare of me. “I like that one a lot,” said a voice from behind me. I was startled but I played it off by throwing the shirt onto the bed and turning slowly, acting like I was picking up more clothes from the floor.
"Ya think?" I didn’t have to look at Addie to know she was leaning on the doorway and had a smirk on her face. Addie was Maryann’s daughter. She was my age as well, also starting at Glenview. Her sarcasm was one of the best features about her, but if it wasn't for the fact that I was in such a strange predicament, I might have liked her more.
“Look,” Addie said, shifting her weight but not moving from the doorway. “If you’re gonna live here, we might as well get along, you know?”
I scoffed. “That’s what you think,” I muttered, turning to look in the mirror again. “Pretty soon I’ll be out of here, and I won’t even remember your name.”
"For not remembering me, you're still the same stuck-up brat you were when I first met you," Addie fired back. “That’s the same line you told me the first time I talked to you.”
“The real surprise is that I don’t remember how annoying you can be,” I retorted.
Addie huffed, irritated, and stormed out of the door. “If you never try, what’s gonna change in your life?”
I ignored her and she left, but I was still thinking about it. For reasons I couldn't fathom that was just my natural reaction to new things; to push them away and create a wall. I bit my lip, going back to the mirror to stare at my reflection. I looked the same as I always had; and yet, I felt like a very different person. The same almond shaped brown eyes I had gotten from my mother, whose father had been a Native American. I also had deep brown hair that fell to the middle of my back; I did know that I had never liked to cut it before. I practiced a smile again, my even white teeth showing in my full lips. It wasn't bad. I brought my arm up absentmindedly to brush back my hair around my face and found myself staring at the irritating mass of plaster around my arm. The ugly thing weighed my arm down and reminded me of something I had no memory of.
Apparently, I had thrown myself in front of car to save a kid I didn’t even know. And at this point couldn’t even remember. I can’t tell you what about it bothered me most, but it did. Certainly more than when they told me that apparently my prized guitar had been stolen, and that was the cause of this whole mess. I closed my eyes at thinking about this, chewing on the corner of my mouth. I couldn’t remember owning one, or even playing guitar. There were a lot of things I didn’t know about myself, and I was determined to find out.
Sighing, I finished putting away my clothes and went to my CD player on the nightstand, popped in a CD I had played so many times before, and pressed play.
Take me out tonight
Where there's music and there's people
And they're young and alive
Driving in your car
I never never want to go home
Because I haven't got one
Anymore
I began moving around my room, the feeling that surged through me was strange and unfamiliar, but it excited me and made me feel whole. It felt like meeting someone you have known forever, for the first time. It felt like the beginning of an end; alpha and omega; I felt dead on arrival.
____________________________________________
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
Hello again, hope you all don't want to, er, lynch me. Sorry for the cliffhanger in the last chapter, didn't mean to give anyone a heart attack. Although I am thrilled at the responses so far for this story. PLEASE REVIEW/RATE. It'll mean more frequent updates, I promise. Right now I have them to a pretty steady weekly flow, I have quite a few more chapters already prepared, just polishing them up for yall. Thanks guys :)
xoxo Videl
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