Identity [Gerard Way] *Completed*

¿

There was no memory of waking up, you only existed and there was no before or after, there was only now. No memory of when your eyes closed or how, how they managed to open, or how you found yourself laying on your back, unwillingly viewing the ceiling as it hazed in and out of focus.

You were just you, and you had no holy clue on why the air smelled of a left-behind family barbeque, smoke tinging the oxygen, or why your left leg was numbed. Or how the ceiling was mostly rubble, a staircase of broken structure. You saw the greyhound sky above, but only a preview, and then the sounds surfaced through it.

No, there was a world before you woke up. But it would've been better if there wasn't.

You remembered the sound of a siren swelling through the rain, starting small and then roaring louder, but you also knew the roar bared no teeth. You remembered, with your mid-section buried in the debris of your burning house, the cowardice behind the siren's call. Your cowardly lion of a city, how it had just trembled away, until it perished in the fire those helicopters started.

You were a nobody in that war. Absolutely no one and even though you had a name, you didn't. Why? Because you were a star-standing-solitary admist a universe of constellations and you never put your life out on a wire like the others did. You never ran from those backwards policemen and their blue-green car lights while they threatened to strip you of your very essence, or watched the people turn a blind eye your way because of rules. Rules born in cowardice.

You fit perfectly into that city. Admit it. You just watched, didn't you? You did. You just watched those two run and suffer the consequences of their reality but you never lived it. You stared your pupils dry at that screen, but you never left your confines to face it.

You were a bystander, you thought you could stay that way. Hidden in your home until the end of time. The most unfunny thing about that was, you couldn't, not forever, and when the helicopters hailed from the sky and the fire hit your home, you would be one of the first to go.

Where you were. You remembered where you were. Laying-crumpled underneath the remains of the roof, in the room where your bed used to be. Swimming inside your cabinet of memory was the swelter of the fire, the intrusion of smoke through the doorway. Your sharp inhalation of breath like an impaled balloon. Then nothing.

You grit your teeth. You surely remembered it now. You had tried to hide from the revolution, but it eventually came for you with its swords pointed. Swords in the form of helicopters. Swords in the form of heavy brick-and-mortar on your legs, squeezing the circluation out until blood just gathered in your head, because where else could it go?

The last thing on your mind before you dived into the eternal was those two. They were the ones who started it all, somehow. Vague memories of their faces on the screen meandered through, those memories you truly thought abandoned you forever. Those two. Where were they now?

No matter. You were dying. The miserable wail of the fear-born siren, drifting in through the hole in your ceiling, was the last sound you'd ever know.

Maybe some people seem better on their own... but they're not.