This was partially inspired by the beginning of You Could Be Anywhere, by Butterfly Bandage.
It is seriously the saddest thing I have ever written. But I was inspired by Butterfly Bandage's story, and I need to finish a few other things that shouldn't be this depressing, so I'm going to try to get this story down first.
He woke up, his head pounding. The walls around him spinning. And he wondered why.
Looking for the call button he was far too familiar with, he pressed it in a panic. He was alone. He had woken up in hospitals more than once, but always surrounded by friends and family.
He heard a long beep as if from a car horn before feeling the impact. And everything went black.
He shook his head, trying to get the image out of his mind. It couldn't be a memory, could it?
Before he could figure it out, a doctor appeared, a sad look on his face that improved slightly when he saw the teenage boy sitting in bed awake. "Thank God! I thought we would lose you too!"
The impact of what he had just said hit him and the boy at the same time. He silently cursed himself for his slip. The boy looked panicky and heartbroken.
"Who died?"
"Do you remember the crash?"
He shook his head, impatient. Who had died? Where was his mother? Where were his friends?
"You were on the way to a concert. All of your band was in the limo, with your family and Gustavo Rocque and his assistant. You were hit by an eighteen wheeler. You've been in the hospital for a few hours. You are – "
And he interrupts the doctor before he can finish, because the fate of his loved ones is far more important than his own.
"I don't care right now! Where are they?"
The doctor looks sympathetic. "Your mother, Mr. Rocque, Miss Wainwright, and your bandmates were pronounced dead on arrival."
His heart stopped. Practically everyone who had mattered to him, dead.
And then he remembered. "Is Katie okay?" And he puts his whole heart into the sentence, maybe all is not lost.
"We stabilized her. She's in a coma, with almost no brain activity. She probably won't make it."
His heart finally broke, and he sobbed.
Two weeks later, when he was released from the hospital, Jo and Camille wheeling him out, he was still in the same half-shocked, half heartbroken mood. And the fact that, of the three people he cared about who were still alive, one lay in a vegetative state where he could not see her did not help things.
He retired to 2J, the apartment which he was sure he would get kicked out of soon. He had missed the funerals of his mother and best friends due to a grumpy doctor who kept postponing his release day. It was Katie who was the topic of his thoughts now.
He desperately hoped that she would somehow recover, despite her doctor's assurances that she would not.
He spent three more days on the couch in 2J. Jo halfheartedly tried to cheer him up before resigning herself to a place next to him; together with Camille enough tears were shed to fill an ocean. The Kendall Knight who never cried was gone. He was replaced by a boy so close to his breaking point that anything could push him over the edge.
Anything came in a call telling him to get to the hospital immediately.
He arrived and was quickly ushered to a room in intensive care. His sister lay upon the bed, quite obviously seriously ill.
A nurse approached him. "She's dying. We thought you should be here." He pulled a chair to her bedside, grasped her hand and glanced at her heart monitor, showing a gradually slowing heartbeat.
He was there for thirty minutes when she breathed her last. He stood and kissed her on the forehead. "I love you, Katie."
Memories spun through his head.
At five, looking down at the baby in his arms. "I'll always take care of you, Katie. I promise."
At seven, when his dad hit him instead of her because he threw himself in front of her as his mother frantically dialed 9-1-1.
At eleven, when it was Daddy's Day at school and he proudly accompanied five year old Katie.
At thirteen, as she chastised him for being so protective.
Two months ago, as she hugged him and told him to stop being a superhero.
Singing her to sleep the night before the accident.
His voice broke as he stood and began to cry. "You can't be dead! You can't!"
On the last word he turned and ran from the room, past Jo and Camille standing at the door, past the doctors waiting to talk to him, through the waiting room, and out of the hospital. In fact, he ran until he reached 2J, until he reached his mother's bedroom, until he reached the table where he knew that there was a loaded gun. He didn't bother with a note – they would know why he did it.
Raising the gun to his head, he put his finger on the trigger. As memories flashed through his head of the people he had lost, he began to cry anew. And lowered the gun.
He replaced it safely in the bedside table. All the people he had lost had dreams – James wanted to be a popstar, Logan a doctor, Carlos a policeman, Katie a manager. He shuddered at how his friends would act if they knew how close he had come to ending his own life.
Kendall had a chance to live his dreams, something his friends and family were robbed of. And he would live his dreams.
For them.
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