the small hours | j. hetfield au

0; if

   
    If this was what death felt like, he could've said he is dead. Sudden numbness, overlapping to his fingertips, obfuscated otherwise very clear mind of his and he could felt, how is all the gained power from the years of living slowly but surely leaving his body — leaving behind itself completely vulnerable, empty shell, able to maximally sloppily breathe in almost comic attempt to hold life in itself for a bit longer.

If God really wanted him to end like this, why had he even bothered with creating something so perfect as human being? Why create something so special and sophisticated as a breathing, healthy man, only to let him live for poor twenty six years and enjoy the absolute minimum that mother Earth provides? Waste. Total waste of divine energy.

Time went thousand times slower as he was laying face down in previously bright blue carpet, now stained by awfully looking crimson stain beneath him. But who cared about the carpet? He definitely did not.

Everything was in slowmotion, like in some very, very bad thriller movie. How ironic it must felt to die in a way he has always pitied. Robbed, beaten up, humiliated, stripped all of his pride in the middle of his own safe zone, plus in front of complete and constantly laughing strangers.

Laughing strangers above him were the type of people he despised the most. Constantly complaining, unusable for the normal, working world and doing nothing, but ruining other people's lives, because they're own life is irrecoverably fucked.

But this laughter coming out of disgusting mouths, which was ringing in his ears like church bells on Saturdays morning, also seemed to suddenly fade away as the main doors clicked and through the hall echoed familiar voice.

Her lovely, soft soprano voice calling his name over and over again, waiting for an equally sweet and kind response. If he was able to make a sound, he would have warned her. But he was not. He was laying in the living room, half-dead, loosing vision and contact with the real world. He was literally balancing on the edge — edge separating the world of living and the world of dead and he couldn't do a single thing to save himself. Nor to save her.

He couldn't describe what emotions started collecting in the pit of his stomach, when her soft hands touched his face, wiping off the blood streaming down his cheeks, lips and chin. What a calming effect it had - only this one, the simplest move and he felt so much better.

However, in the very next moment this temporary feeling disappeared and he was again in the same, maybe even worse misery. In a cruel reality, not able to warn his love before the dangers, that were awaiting her behind the curtains, ready to take also over her life. He could just silently watch it and suffer.

Watch as she falls down, definitely no longer self-conscious or somehow aware of her moves. With a thud, muffled by the previously bright blue carpet, she fell closely to him. Only few inches closer and he would've been able to feel her still kinda warm skin on his colder and pale skin without putting extra forth into the moves. Once again, for the last time in his life.

He tried to gather up all the remaining power in his body and to his fortune, he was able to slowly draw his hand to her cheek. The very last amount of his life power was enough to gently stroke her blood stained cheek and then just rest his hand on it, feeling as her body went colder and colder.

A few days later, he finally became famous. After the years of sleeping in the van with his band mates, TV channels were showing his face all around the United States. But not because of his talent as he always wished for.

Journalists in front of cameras were, with the purest horror in faces describing to the audience all the horrifying things he and his girlfriend had had to went through the prolix process of dying. People in front of TV screens could see their shaking hands as they were reading breathtakingly sickening practices, which were used on the young couple.

James Hetfield was dead. At least, that was what the world was thinking.