After Everything (A Starkid Fan Fiction)

Prologue

-I think all of us have a hero and a villain in us. ~Anson Mount-

Prologue

"After everything we've gone through, after everything I've done to you, I know that I have to fix it. I can't fix what I've done to you, I can't change who I've become in the last year, but I'm willing to try. I really do hope you know that I'm sorry, Alex."

As I walked through the halls of the dimly lit hospital, the words I'd recited to Alex Rose were the ones that pounded in my head over and over again, replaying like an old recording that wouldn't shut off. My brain tumor, pressing on my frontal and my temporal lobe had caused me to change since my parents had died. I didn't notice it for the longest time. I never got the headaches, I never got the sickness or the feeling of being drowsy or sick. All I got was the change in my personality. It changed me, my entire self.

It took me a long time to realize that I needed help, and when the police came knocking on my door, I had lost control again. When they were testing me, they found the tumor. The tumor that could have possibly kill me if I hadn't found it in a few more months, even weeks. Somehow, for some reason, Alex showed mercy on me. She dropped the charges, only if I got the help I needed.

That's what I was doing, I was getting help. I didn't want to be that way, having a second voice in my head telling me what to do, telling me to hurt Alex and then making me forget ever doing anything to her. When she told me everything, when the lawyer's told me what I'd done, I still couldn't remember and I hadn't managed to control the voice in my head. The doctors said that the tumor was changing my personality, and if I didn't have any work done soon, I was going to die. The tumor was already big, and I was lucky, because I had a larger chance at surviving than dying. I was still afraid though, of dying. Who wouldn't be afraid? Death was scary to me, and I didn't want to die yet. I didn't want to die like my father died of stomach cancer, and my mother of a broken heart. I was only 24 years old, I wasn't ready to die yet.

"Jeff Blim?" The doctor asked me when I walked into the room, hearing the clang of the gate behind me - to help ensure patients don't leave the psychiatric ward - and the sound of a key going into the lock. I looked over at Rachael Soglin, my best friend, who smiled up at me slightly.

"That's me," I manged to say to the doctor. "I'm Jeff."

"Okay well, I see that everything's in order here. We're here to give you chemo and radiation, then try to remove the tumor that's been sitting on your brain for a year now? I'm surprised it didn't grow quicker, most people don't usually last this long."

"Yeah," I said half-heartily. "Lucky me."

"I see that you're here also on the grounds of the court, that you...oh. Umm, okay."

That's how it had become. Whenever someone saw in my files what I had done during my, I guess you can call it "Second Personality", they would stop short, or look at me differently. That's how Doctor Leer looked at me in that moment, staring at me like I was some horrible person. Which he should have, because I was a horrible person, and I deserved it. Doesn't mean it didn't hurt any less.

"Okay so..." He cleared his throat. "Here's what's going to happen. Tomorrow we're going to start you on the first round of chemo, and you're going to be on it for seven days. Then after that we're going to monitor you, keep track of how the process is going, make sure that the chemo is working, and so on. The tumor is pretty big according to our x-rays, so we're hoping that we didn't catch it to late and can still save what we can of the brain. Now because of the...plea you gave, you're obligated to stay here in this facility until we deem you stable enough to return to your daily life. It could take six months at the least, five years at the most. We don't know when it comes to tumors, because they can be tricky. But what we do know is that we're going to do everything in our power to help you, and fix your problem."