The Ghost Of You (boyxboy)

[1] Have You Heard The News That You're Dead? [Pete's POV]

I had never really spent much time talking to Mikey's brother Gerard. He was a strange kind of kid, morbid and painfully reclusive. And he had always been obsessed with death. He covered the walls of his rooms with these drawings of different theories as to what would happen when you died. Rough sketches of the Grim Reaper, hellish landscapes, black abysses, vampires, zombies, everything imaginable. And of course, everyone's favorite was a sketch of a parade, and his theory that when you die, death comes for you in whatever form would make you the most happy and allow you to step willingly into death's embrace.

I suddenly wanted to talk to Gerard Way, for the first time in my life. Not that I hadn't talked to him before, but all of our conversations had been awkward and had occurred simply because he was there and he was my boyfriend's weird older brother.

But now, I really wanted to talk to him. I wanted to tell him the truth. I wanted to tell him he was fucking wrong.

All of his outlandish theories, fantasy worlds, glorification of death, were nothing but fiction. And I knew this from personal experience. Death was no big deal.

Because one moment, I was driving with my boyfriend and everything was good and happy. And then the next, I was in sudden excruciating pain, in a flash of light and a wave of sound. But the pain didn't last longer than a minute, and I felt my body go numb and shut down. I felt like I was detached and floating through nothingness. And then, I was back, as if nothing happened.

Except something certainly did happen, because I couldn't feel my own body. It was bizarre, because spatially, I could tell something was there, but I didn't feel the temperature of the air around me or the ground beneath my feet. It was as if I was completely numb. And I was terrified.

Maybe that was because I couldn't feel my body. Or maybe it was because I could see my body, lying a few feet away, dead. I knew I was dead, because not only was my body distanced from my place of consciousness, but I could also see shards of glass protruding from my limp figure, blood still oozing from wounds all about my corpse. It was gruesome and unbelievably off putting.

But somehow, the dead body wasn't nearly as upsetting as the boy standing a short distance away from it, dried blood caked on his face and body, staining his clothes with deep red that would fade to a rusty brown. I could deal with being dead. It wasn't nearly as bad as I had expected. The part I couldn't deal with was Mikey Way, and his tear streaked face that was still incredibly beautiful as he stared at me as if it was him lying dead on the ground instead of me.

I was struck by the disturbing realization that I was grateful that I was dead. This gratefulness stemmed from the fact that it easily could have been Mikey who died instead of me, Mikey's limp body on the ground slept growing cold with the absence of life while I sobbed alongside him. I wouldn't be able to survive, knowing that Mikey Way had died while I lived.

I walked over to my boyfriend, still disturbed by the way I couldn't feel the ground beneath my feet, even though it supported me and didn't give way beneath me. "Mikey?" I asked, shuddering at the way my voice didn't echo against anything, instead just falling out into the space around me, a lump of limp, dead sound. And Mikey didn't look up; it was as if my voice was nonexistent, only in my head.

"Mikey," I yelled this time, hearing the volume of my voice fall at my feet with no response from the person who I was shouting at or any of the other people around him; police officers, doctors, confused bystanders. None of them seemed to register my existence. I jumped up and down, waving my arms frantically and screaming, screaming Mikey's name, screaming insults at the police, screaming just to reassure myself that I was there. And honestly, it wasn't working.

My body, which was still lying on the ground, was rather disconcerting. I walked over to it and crouched down so as to better look at myself. I ignored the way I couldn't feel the ground beneath my knees, and studied my corpse, the many bruises and wounds. I was scratched up and bloody from numerous shards of glass, and the blood flow had slowed to a trickle from the injury on my temple. At least, I noted as I glanced at my face, my eyeliner was still on point.