BLUE LIPS [[klance 2]]

Lance.

Part 1: Yellow.

Keith Kogane once told me what it was like to die.

The rain was falling outside, this constant pitter-patter like nervous hummingbird wings, or the miniscule feet of tiny, rejoicing people. It was twilight, and the world slept a restless slumber, and around us the hospital thrummed mechnically with night life.

The glow of my butterfly lights fell upon his calm face; awash in a comfortable sleepiness, luminous and lovely as if carved from the moon itself under the star's glare, a ying-yang of shadows etched into his soft skin. His hair was braided, bangs kissing at his forehead and cheeks, violet eyes fringed with long black lashes. He spoke tactfully and with no emotion, but perhaps a low and subtle wonder. Thoughtfulness. Remorse, perhaps, if I could pick it tentavily from his tone.

I rubbed up and down his chest and stomach lightly, letting my fingertips tickle his skin as he spoke. I listened.

"I don't know," he said, voice low and laced into the humming night."The first time...There was pain, obviously. Before I blacked out. I was told it was in the ambulance, on the way here, when I. Y'know. Flatlined." He shrugged one shoulder. "I don't remember much. It's the whole trauma-thing - there are gaping holes in the first two months, and it even took some time to remember what happened before that night." He then closed his eyes and leaned his head back - chin sharp, black T-shirt loose around his collarbones etched very softly beneath his skin. "But at that moment. At that moment when I died...there was just...nothing. Until that moment, I had been slipping in and out of consciousness, and the pain was so unbearable I kept hearing this loud, drawn-out scream in my head without realizing it was me. It was like somebody had replaced all my vital organs with fire or something. Like my bones had splintered off into a million pieces still inside my body. It was the worst, and even when I would black out I could feel this dull, constant throb. The feeling of my body just breaking apart." He swallowed then, opened his eyes a little to squint blearily at the ceiling.

"Even when I was unconscious, there was just...there was something there, y'know? I can remember this...this blackness. This space in time where I knew I wasn't awake. Then, when I came to for the hundredth time, the pain felt different. It felt like my lungs and chest had been filled up with water. Just, so much water. It was weighing me down, and all the pain had kind of numbed by then...and I was surrounded by this cold silence as all the water in me dragged me down."

I touched his face. Rubbed his eyelashes with my fist.

"Then there was nothing. Just. Nothing. No blackness, no nothing. Then, what felt like less then a split second later, I opened my eyes and it was over. It felt like I had just blinked and everything was over and I was in a hospital bed. Later I was told I had died." He looked at me, blinking slowly. "There was nothing, Lance. Not blackness. Not a tunnel. Not anything. It was just nothing."

He had died twice. Once on the way to the hospital and once during a seizure. He blacked out during seizures, usually, so when he woke up again, he didn't know he had died that time.

"Are you afraid?" he asked me the same night, lying flat on his back with his head turned, so that I spooned him with my cheek rested on my hand. His voice was low, and I could hear it vibrating in his throat when I briefly kissed his neck. "Are you afraid of dying?"

I laughed it off. Plastic smile on my face as I jokingly flexed my muscles, wiggling my eyebrows.

"Scared? Nah. Lance McClain isn't scared of anything, Mullet, didn't you know that?"

He laughed. Said he did.

I lied.

I lied, because I am. Very much so.

I always have been.

I'm afraid of dying, but here's the catch. Here's the real funny part, the part where God took a nice massive dump right on me and my dumb human condition - the want to live. This inevitable thirst, this biological need to escape the inescapable. To fear death. But it's useless. It's like being afraid of the ending of a book - there is nowhere else to go, nothing else to read. There will always be an ending - and sometimes that ending might cut off too short, mid-sentence, no nice little bows on top to wrap it up the way a real story should be wrapped up.

That's what scares me, really. The mid-sentence, never-finished type story. That's what's fucked up.

So yea, you could say God took a nice shit on my life then laughed about it afterwards.

You wanna know why?

'Cause sure, I'm afraid of dying. But there's really not point.

The point is I already am.