Young and Loaded

Chapter Seventeen

   "For the seventeenth time, I'm fine, dude."

   "No, you're really not."

   I huffed rather loudly under my breath, resisting the urge to roll my eyes just to piss him off. But Mikey was right. We'd just gotten to the hospital, and I was sitting on the uncomfortable gurney or whatever it was called, picking at my cuticles and chewing more harshly than some would consider normal at my upper lip. And I still felt terrible, and not even the time between riding towards the unnaturally clean and as-bright-a-white as everywhere else hospital and actually getting there had helped eased the roller coaster in my guts. At least there wasn't anything else for my body to reject left in my stomach, which provided some sort of relief.

   But that didn't change the glimpse of another world, a world in the desert far away from this bright hospital room, that had been put on display and had burned itself into my retinas.

   "Mikey—"

   "Talk to the doctor, not me, you idiot."

   "Mikey, come on, I just..."

   I shut up, trailing off as another person entered the room, eyebrows furrowing. There was no way I'd seen him before, absolutely no fucking way, but he made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. And it confused me, because he looked the same as the next person on the street, and like pretty much any other person we'd passed while I was being wheeled into the hospital (unnecessarily, of course) on this gurney thing, clutching my stomach. He had thickly framed glasses perched on his nose, an off-white coat hanging from his shoulders, a similarly colored stack of papers resting atop of a black clipboard clutched between his hands.

   But that wasn't what caught me off guard, making me trail off.

   It was his hair.

   Why his hair?

   It was fucking curly, piled on top of his head in almost messy ringlets, falling to frame his face, like it was supposed to do that naturally or something. And he looked so eerily familiar that I wanted to scream, wanted to break his face and crack it open just to make sure that he wasn't something fake, something that I'd created in the back of my head and was choosing to make the unreal incredibly real and alive right in front of me. Which was probably the scariest part. Because for all I knew, I was hallucinating this entire thing, and I was still doing a walking tour of the city with Mikey, spaced out as all hell or passed out after slamming into a pole.

   I couldn't stop my mouth from moving on its own, though. "You, I know you, you're, uh, you-" I stammered, unsure where I was going with that statement. I didn't know this guy. He was a complete and utter stranger, standing in front of me for the first time and hopefully the last time literally ever, with a rather amused but concerned expression on his face. He shrugged a little, smiling almost gently, shaking his head. Friendly. Not really, but a nicer smile than the one Mikey had half-assed. He flipped to a different page on his clipboard, read something, and let out a breath before even talking or addressing either me or Mikey. It was like he was deliberately waiting for me to finish my statement, and when that didn't happen, he did so for me. Which was kind of annoying.

   "I'm a doctor, Mister Iero."

   So he had a sense of humor.

   That was new. Especially here.

   I wanted to kill him for it.

   Mikey was quiet for the first time in a while. I curled my hand in a fist, averted my gaze from both of their eyes and into my lap, and sat there, more silent than Mikey and twice as unsettled. Where the hell had I seen this guy before? Even thinking about it made me nauseous. So I clutched my stomach with one hand, the other clasping itself over my mouth as I resisted the urge to retch what little particles of cereal left marinating in my stomach area in general, like some sort of twisted acid cookout. I was sure Mikey would just love a spoonful.

   So thinking was making me feel like absolute shit, too. Or maybe I was just pissed off and wanted out of the nauseatingly white world I'd apparently dragged myself into from the desert. The fact that I had begged for a chance at life in here, wanted in on all of this sameness, was appalling to me. Who would willingly come here? Why was everything so white? Were the pills even functional? What did they really do? Why is this the second time I throw up? I wanted answers, but I doubted either of these strangely familiar men standing and sitting in this room would be inclined to tell me what the actual fuck is going on. I doubt they knew the answer themselves, having probably been submitting pawns to the Better Living world for a while now.

   Wonderful.

   At least this doctor guy seemed responsive and less stiff than literally every person I'd met in recent memory. Besides the red-haired guy in my vignette vision, but he didn't count. For all I knew he was fake, something created and drawn into my brain straight from a poster that I may have hallucinated all together. For all I know, this is a test.

   Amazingly, I'm finding that, if this is one, I genuinely hate tests.

   "Okay, Mister Iero, I'm gonna need you to tell me what the problem is."

   Mikey jumped in. "I was about to go take him on a tour, Ray," Mikey started. Did he know this guy? And am I not allowed to talk? I was the one who experienced this, after all. "And he was looking kind of pale and sick, and I should've told him to stay inside, that we could do the tour when he was feeling better. But I didn't, and he just started running at a wall, kind of collapsed and threw up on the streets. Oh god, I hope I don't get in trouble for this, it could go on my record and then I'll get reset and—"

   "I see."

   So much for responsiveness.

   "I didn't mean to start running," I interjected weakly, shooting Mikey a look.

   The doctor, Ray, as Mikey had addressed him, looked up from the notes he was taking on his clipboard. "Then why did you?"

   "I saw the posters."

   "You mean those old wanted posters for desert criminals?" Mikey asked.

   "Wanted posters?" Desert criminals?

   "Yeah. They were taking them down, didn't you see—"

   "What the fuck?"

   Ray huffed. "Language," he hissed, making eyes at a camera in the corner of the room.

   Shit.

   I drew my knees up to my chest, shaking my head as an apology for my words. I didn't know we weren't supposed to say that kind of thing and those kinds of words. Hell, I didn't know a lot about Battery City. But apparently, I was a formerly wanted criminal and these two dudes had no idea. Maybe it was my haircut, maybe it was the way I was dressed in plain colors. But they didn't know. And I knew, I knew this now, and my entire being knew, and the only way to remove that information would be to completely reset my brain like you were refreshing a page on a computer screen.

   Had they done just that when I had initially begged to be let in?

   Was that even true? Had I begged to get in, or had I been forced in?

   Nothing felt real anymore.

   Nothing except the glimpse of dark, buzzed hair and a deadly pixie nose through the sliver of the open curtain of the sectioned off emergency room we were currently situated in.

   Ray was talking again, saying something about keeping me here for the night to monitor my condition and taking a couple of blood tests to make sure I didn't have some weird disease that I can't pronounce without choking on my own spit and laughing like a drunk idiot. But next thing I knew, I was shifting my position on the gurney thing, sitting and trying to peer through the same little portion of the curtain, eyes wide. Mikey didn't even seem to notice, too focused on Ray talking to glance my way, probably thinking about changing jobs so he didn't have to deal with wackjobs like me. Even Ray seemed too enveloped in his own words to see me slowly getting up and tearing back the curtain, my eyes on the man I'd seen in the poster next to mine.

   Except his hair was black.

   And he was wearing the Better Living Industries emblem and a blindingly white version of what he had been wearing in the poster like it was a symbol of pride.

   "Watch it, asshole," I heard him mutter, the doctor working on his arm a nervous wreck. They looked like they were about to spontaneously combust if they happened to make a mistake, evidenced by the way their bottom lip trembled whenever the guy drew in a sharp, pained breath.

   From my angle, I could only see the blood running down his arm as the doctor moved, cutting off his jacket and dabbing at the bleeding wound as carefully as if the man was made of glass and would shatter at any second. I felt kind of bad, but I wasn't worried about the doctor. I just wanted to look at him. The man on the poster, the man with red hair. Which was now a deep, silky black.

   Who the fuck is he?

   Mikey and Ray still aren't stopping me, or they just don't care. Or they think that I'm living a fever dream and literally do not care either way. So I take advantage, waiting for the doctor to momentarily scurry from the room, half-heartedly shutting the curtain before I crossed the floor of the hospital, only just realizing I was barefoot and stopped right outside the half-drawn curtain surrounding the man. The floor was freezing, but that was the least of my concerns.

   "What do you want?"

   How did he know...?

   There was no point in questioning it, I suppose. Or lying about my intention.

   "I just thought... thought you looked familiar."

   He seemed to hesitate, pulling back the plain hanging fabric a little, looking at me. I took it as an invitation to step forwards into his line of vision and cornered off curtain room, noticing how he used the arm that wasn't wounded as he looked me up and down. Like I was something strange. New. Foreign. No form of recognition seemed to flash in his eyes. There was just an even, programmed cruelness underlying his unusually green, almost olive-colored eyes, much like the consistent looks that the officials of the city held. And it was unnerving.

   "Familiar... how?"

    "I saw you in a.. dream, of a sort. Except your hair was, well. Uh. Red."

   Panic.

   I saw it the moment it entered his eyes, replacing the coolness and the smooth and controlled emotion that he looked used to pulling. I glanced at the messy wound on his arm, and back at his face and then at his hair, about to say something else. But he shut me up with a single look, shaking his head. I think he assumed he'd figured me out or thought he had, or was telling himself he did. But it's never that simple, is it?

   "You're delusional. You need to be reset."

   "Maybe. But I still saw you."

   He hissed instinctively, expression darkening. "You don't know what you're talking about. You don't know who you're even talking to, idiot."

   My back stiffened as everything lined into place. He was a Scarecrow, wasn't he? That explained the detailed clothing and emblems everywhere on the fabric. It even explained the nervous doctor and his over-confident attitude. But weren't they supposed to keep us safe and not be complete and total pricks?

   "Then tell me your name."

   "Tell me yours first."

   "Frank Iero."

   "Gerard Way. Now get the fuck out before I shoot you in the skull."

   I clenched my fists, my face screwing up. He wasn't reaching for his gun yet, so I took advantage. He could give me answers. "Are you kidding me? I just want to know if, if you, I don't know, you know me! I think something's going on, and I don't know what it is, and you ca—"

   "Iero," he stopped me, leaving me stunned. "You don't know a thing about me, and you don't ever need to. Now shut up and get the fuck out of here."

So I did, despite the utter unfairness that he got to say the fuck word and not me.

   Mikey and Ray were still talking when I sat back down on the operating table bed thing. Ray made the assumption that the reason I was throwing up might be a virus of a sort, but they wouldn't know for sure until they got the blood tests back. And that meant, that for the time being, I was going to be stuck in this damned room on a gurney for the rest of the day and night while they stuck an IV drip into my arm and Gerard Way sat across the way from me, right there in the next room.

   What was weird, though, is that the two of them also decided to stay in there with me, Mikey seated in a chair and Ray moving around, occasionally coming in to check on me and treating other emergency patients. His work shift didn't end until the next morning, apparently, and he was surviving solely on caffeine pills distributed to the doctors, energy chews a buddy had sneaked out of the Draculoid training center, and mint gum. Which kind of sucked for him, but it gave me time to stare at him and try to figure out just where I'd seen him before.

   Same with Mikey. Same with Gerard.

   Same with myself.

   I expected that to be the only thing occupying my thoughts the entire day, reading trivial magazines as we waited for the blood test results and I tried to eat food (only to throw it up again on the pristine floor). What I didn't expect, however, was a little note to slip under the curtain when Mikey had dozed off and I was walking around to stretch, landing at my feet.

   Frank;

   Bathrooms @ midnight. Meet me there.

   Please.

   We need to talk.

   x GW.