Coma ➷ Izzal

Chpt.5

This chapter may be a bit confusing. All the italic quotes are from the doctors' dialogue in 'Coma'.

I hope you enjoy <3
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Even in our conscious minds, illusions tend to construct within our heads, fantasies of a world indifferent to what we see before our very eyes; daydreaming. Whether being planted right amidst excitation and happiness, or smack down in depression, Axl's head never failed to conceptualize something better than where he was. And it was all adding up to his belief that there was always something else waiting.

And now, imprisoned within the medians of sleep and consciousness, Axl couldn't help but envision that there was something greater than this— something mightier, something exuding power.

Axl couldn't tell if he was awake, or dead.
In fact, he was simply existing on the fine line between the two.

He was sitting in what he concluded had to be a hospital; blanched walls surrounding him, posters nailed against them all advertising medicines and treatment plans. Beside him, Izzy had his legs splayed across the armrests of the discomforting chairs, hazel eyes following the doctors and nurses who continued to pass by them. Left, right, left, right.

"Am I awake?" Axl murmured, nudging Izzy.

The guitarist turned back to him and narrowed his eyes in confusion. "When did you fall asleep?"

Axl huffed before pursing his lips, slumping back into the chair just the way Izzy had. Yet just as he sunk into repose, his eyes captured the sight of a cohort of men and women in white coats flooding into the room. They all crowded around a stretcher, shouting a string of demands. When one doctor shuffled to the left, Axl's heart nearly sunk into his stomach as he acquired the sight of the suffering patient.

The patient lying on the stretcher was Axl.

With the same scarlet hair, and pallid skin, his body was attenuated, and his eyes were lidded with that endless sleep. Needles were plunging into his skin, chords attached to his body and connecting to machines that were all beeping out of control— and it was all reverberating through his head.

"Okay, let's get this guy in the program please, we're losing him!"

Axl watched in horror as a doctor beckoned orders like a sergeant, his hands holding onto the clone of a patient's shoulders while scrutinizing him; his hands holding onto Axl.

"C'mon, someone's gotta protect his airways! Where's the defibrillator?"

The cohort scrambled around like rats scouring for food, although they were searching for something different. They were searching for help, assistance, anything to keep Axl alive. And amidst it all, his subconscious continued to investigate in utter horror.

"Okay, respond! We're losing the guy!"

Axl nearly doubled over himself, a tightening in his chest compelling him to scream, anything to show that he was still here. He was reaching for life, clinging onto it in spite of his antecedent wishes for death. But they couldn't see him, and they sure as hell couldn't hear him.

And after all these years spent scouring for release from the world he had despised, Axl was finally experiencing that diminutive part of his soul that didn't want it to end. Death had displayed itself to him right before his wildest nightmares, warning him that his time was drawing near. And as much as Axl could anticipate it, as much as he waited for it— he wasn't prepared for it.

Axl concluded that within it all, his brain had captured that one string of realism keeping him tied to this world. He couldn't desert his bandmates, and he couldn't desert the thousands of fans who depended on his voice for comfort.