FicWad

Something woke me up in the middle of the night again. I felt incredibly weak since I had only been asleep for a few hours. I managed to lift one hand to my forehead, and it almost burned me. I had never had a fever this bad before. 'This couldn't have just been food poisoning,' I thought. 'Someone did this to us on purpose.'

I hated whoever it was. I wanted to find the person responsible and strangle them for taking away my hearing, and Gerard's voice...our music...our lives.

I wanted to play my guitar so badly. It had been at least three days, probably more; I had given up on trying to keep track of how much time we had spent in this desolate, dead room. It was black at night, not just dark. Completely hidden in shadows, as if we were already dead. The moonlight was comforting, though. It made me feel like I wasn't completely alone.

I looked at my hand in the still-bright moonlight, seeing something dark on the ends of my fingers. I shifted slightly and felt some kind of liquid near my left ear. Frowning slightly, I sat up halfway and looked at the pillow. I gasped sharply at what I saw.

There was blood everywhere, dark, crimson...and fresh, still warm but quickly growing cool as air passed over it. I could feel it running down the sides of my face, cold, slowly trickling downward with the flow of gravity. I raised a shaking hand to the right side of my face and felt it there, already beginning to dry and stain my pale skin like ink. I nearly screamed, but I caught myself before it happened. I couldn't wake up Gerard. He needed sleep more than I did. I carefully cleaned out my ears with the end of one finger, feeling blood caked inside them already. It flaked off in little already-dead sparks of red.

Then it hit me. My ears had been bleeding.

This time I really did scream.

I felt a powerful vibration next to me and looked over at it. Gerard was kneeling on the floor, face in his hands. From the way he was shuddering I could tell he was crying. He suddenly pounded his fists into the floor in agony, again and again. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and tried to stand, but I crumpled to the floor almost immediately. I hadn't tried to walk or stand in almost four days.

He looked up at me, eyes shining with bitter tears and midnight black hair slightly messed up. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but didn't. Or if he did, I didn't catch it. I gently embraced him, feeling him cry into my shoulder. He was unnaturally cold, as if his body had already given up on life and embraced death. He seemed to have transformed into a pale corpse that only moved out of habit rather than with the spark of life. This was too much. We weren't just sick. We were broken. Broken souls.

And I had a feeling we weren't going to survive.