what happened to your soul? » multipsycho

Chapter 2

It was dinner time, we were sitting in one of the long tables. Dandy was talking to the guy sitting in front of us, he had a really grunge-like appearance, my first thought when I saw him was that he died in the earlier 1990s.

— Jerome, this is Tate. Tate, this is Jerome.

He smiled softly at me, he didn't seem like talking, and I didn't want to bother him, so we didn't talk anymore.

I lost track of time, I didn't know how many time we spent eating; minutes, hours, days or weeks...it was like going insane all over again.

I understood why Dandy tried to calculate how many time passed between everything that we did, it was his way to keep himself from going insane.

I looked around at all the people sitting with us. Some of them were like echoes, ghosts obligated to die all over again for the rest of eternity, lost souls without a choice, just wandering around.

—It's sad, isn't it?– I turned around, Tate was talking to me. — All this people here, they were all psychopaths while they were alive, some of them still are. Poor souls.

I nodded as I finished my food. He seemed like a normal teenager, but so did I, and I wasn't pretty much innocent.

After dinner was over everyone went back to their dormitories without saying a word.

I woke up the next morning, I didn't see Dandy or Tate during breakfast, so it was pretty much boring.

When I finished eating I stood up and started walking toward the therapy wing.

I knocked on the door that said "Jerome Valeska" in it. The door opened by itself and I walked in, there was a chair in the middle of the room, but nothing else, so I sat on it. Suddenly I was trapped there, I couldn't move. I felt something penetrating my skull, kind of like a tube. I started screaming from the top of my lungs, as the feeling of them filling with fire got stronger and I passed out on the chair.

I woke up in another place, it wasn't the hospital. I was at the circus. I turned around as I heard a kid crying. I walked toward him, until I realized, it was me.

— Why are you crying, Jerome?

An old man slowly walked out of the shadows, it was Paul.

— It's my birthday...and my mom and the snake guy are beating me...

— This world doesn't care about you, or anyone else Jerome. Better to realize that now.

Paul and the "young version of me" turned into dust, just as the rest of the place. I started screaming again, as I fell to a big black empty nothing.

I woke up again, but this time I was sitting on the same chair as earlier. I slowly got up, I could feel the tears running down my cheeks, disappearing on my neck.

The door opened by itself again, and I ran out of the room, Dandy was waiting for me outside.

— Sorry, I should've told you what therapy means to this people.

— It's okay, it's not like I'm going to die again.

He laughed quietly as we walked to the living room. I could still feel the fire inside my lungs, I supposed it was because of the screaming. I sighed, I was never going to get used to this place.

Once we made it to the living room, we sat in the same spot as the last time, but this time Tate was sitting with us.

— So, Jerome. How was your life while you were, you know, alive?

— Well, I lived my whole life on the circus with my mom. We never really did anything thrilling. I think the most exciting thing that ever happened to me was meeting this girl, Arabella, when I was 13, she was really cool. But then, you know, I kind of became a psycho and everything changed.–he seemed really interested about my life, but I didn't care, sometimes it was good talking about things.— What about you?

— My life was quite...normal, you would say, despite the fact that my father abandoned us, that my two siblings had visible "physical defects", and that my mother was ashamed of them, though she wasn't ashamed of me, I was the only one without "physical defects", but I was fucked up the other way, let's say.

His life seemed hard, I wouldn't blame him for going insane, I would probably go insane too if I had to go through that.

We talked until it was dinner time again, it was barely my second day in that place, and I was already bored of it. It was like we were destined to just do the same thing for the rest of eternity, like a punishment for loosing control over our souls. At least that was what I thought at the time. And, oh my, I was wrong.