i. denial
It starts with his head slammed into a desk, eyes exploding into one thousand supernovas and the screaming of a choir numbering two million kick starting in the back of his head all in unison. Blind – from the impact, from the shock, from the start of jolting awake and his brain suffering from more than one sort of whiplash. Handcuffed – wrists pulling apart from one another only to find themselves locked firmly behind his back, behind the rickety chair that cries out in agony with each subtle shift of his trembling legs. A hostage – kidnapped by the law, broken by hypocrisy, held by his own guilty subconscious. For what, he can't remember, mind still reeling from the force of the blow and what he vaguely recalls as some greater tragedy further still into the past, but it's certainly there, and it's taking its sweet time tying his stomach into more knots than he could ever hope to count. Dizziness spills over him like water from the faucet, like hot breath from parted lips, and it isn't his fault that he can't find it in himself to comprehend the words dancing in the periphery of his mind; he hears the anger, but not the meaning, and he's only just realized that whoever had been spewing what was registering as little more than nonsense into the air has paused when, once again, fingers find themselves in his scalp, pulling up and into the air and forcing down, down, down toward the earth. Down, down, down toward the table. Reality breaks into focus with the attack, splatter paintings of colors behind his eyelids finally registering as the dirty interrogation room he's being held in.
Nikki's heart pauses, the rest of his body joining in to lurch to a sudden halt at the sight, but scraping his thoughts for some idea of what has landed himself in this situation (watched by the condescending eyes of the woman across the room, still at the mercy of the temperamental man grunting with impatience behind him) earns him nothing more than a blank mind. He'd press the concern further – it must be important if the police have taken him into custody, right? - but not a moment is wasted before they're talking again, asking if he'll (demanding that he) start cooperating, and he can't leave them waiting any more than he already has if he wants to spare his skull from cracking due to repeated table-related injury. As such, he nods numbly, aching head pulling itself sluggishly through the motions as it tries to focus more on what they are questioning him about than his retreating and returning vision and the camera eye watching his every move from above. They speak, words suddenly crisp against his eardrums, and the images and sounds come rushing back to him in a torrent. Oh. So it doesn't start with his head slammed into a desk -
It starts with a corpse in a habit and a man driven insane screaming through the night because of it. Mary's corpse; his own legs carrying him through Seattle's rainy streets, waking the dead hours of the early morning.
And they believe that he was the one who killed her.
Perhaps he did. The gun may have been in his hands, and it could have been his index finger that pulled the trigger to end her existence in this world. But they don't understand, because even if it was his body, it definitely wasn't his mind, so it couldn't have been his fault. "I didn't do it," he repeats in a mantra each time they ask if he was responsible for the murder of the nun, each time they ask who it was if he was not to blame. Fingers dig into the solid surface of the table before him, body quivering at a morbid slideshow of images that replay in his mind over and over again and his lip's inability to form any sentence other than the repeated insistence that he has done nothing wrong, but his relatively functioning mind is still working enough to be amazed at how long they continue to press him before realizing it to be a futile effort. (Working enough to flood with horror when he realizes that – unable to get so much as a name out of their supposed murderer – they plan to admit him to the state hospital.)
She haunts his mind, and in the early days, it's her alone. The golden tresses of her hair get tangled in his own pale mop of curls; the hymns she had loved, sang with strength pulled from false dedication, ring in his ears; the sight of her face, smiling at him when all others would have spat, burns itself behind his eyelids and throws him back into awareness with each closing of the eyes. Mary is long gone, now, off to an afterlife she had so firmly believed in (the sort that could never accept failures like himself), but he swears he can see her in the crowd as they half lead, half drag him out to his new "home" (new prison), and the nurse they assign him sounds just like she would have had the nun held as much hatred for him as everyone else in the psychiatric ward (in the city beyond). Sometimes, it's suffocating, just how much he misses her. Worse still is the cascading guilt that comes with knowing that she could have been alive if only they had not befriended one another all of those eternities ago. She should have known better than to get involved with a hitman – and he should have known better than to let her get to him.
On the nights that he's hysterical, eyes wild, arms tossing like salad in a mixing bowl, practically foaming at the mouth, he tries to solace himself as what seems like half of the entire ward seems to come in to sedate him. If she didn't ever mean anything to him in the first place, her death can't break him the way it does – the way it has. If he never loved her from the start – loved her voice, the honey sweet words, the way she forgave him where the rest of the world would have wanted him dead – then he wouldn't have found himself here at all. If only he didn't believe in love – he doesn't believe in love -
Nikki remembers her rosary in illness-inducing detail, and he wishes that he could say he didn't.
Well, well, well, long time, no see. How long has it been since I updated anything on this site? What, a year and a half? Two years? I could apologize for the lack of productivity on the fanfiction front – but let's be real here: No one was exactly waiting on pins and needles for an update from me, anyway. Largely because the only things people would want me to update are those old Pokemon and Warriors stories, most of which I find unsalvageable and worth keeping up only to cry at. That's how bad they are. ouo So, rather than writingin familiar territory, I bring to you a work from perhaps one of the most obscure fandoms you could image, and definitely the most obscure I'll ever write for (and that's even taking into consideration that I might start writing things for the Abhorsen trilogy now that I'm done with them all). Hello, friends, and welcome to the start of what will probably be a long series of Operation: Mindcrime novelizations, one-shots, and potential stories. 8D
This is actually a short story that I wrote for our high school's literary and arts magazine, split into five parts for each of the five stages of grief as you... could have probably guessed. The only reason I've split this into thousand word (give or take) chapters is the fact that this spans not only the first, but the second Operation: Mindcrime albums. This actually starts toward the end of the first – if you've listened to the original source, you've probably recognized this as the scenes from I Don't Believe in Love – so spoilers for those who haven't listened to the original source are still inevitable, but for those of you who haven't listened to the second... well, there's a sequel and I'm giving you time to listen to it. Not that it's worth it. Honestly, It's probably a bullet dodged if you pretend the sequel doesn't exist at all. (Sorry, Dio, but even your involvement couldn't save it.) For those of you who are incredibly confused and/or have never even heard of the name Operation: Mindcrime, don't feel bad. I have a strong feeling that most everyone on this site hasn't the foggiest of what it is, much less that it exists. In short, it's a studio album by the band Queensryche in which every song tells a chronological (save for the flashback) story about a drug addict who is manipulated into joining a corrupt anarchist revolution. The feels are strong in this one, and it takes less than an hour to experience the whole thing, so if you like tragic love stories and lots of mind manipulation, ten out of ten doctors recommend...
Anywho, seeing as the whole story's already written out, you don't have to worry about me not finishing this one. It's already done. Instead, you get to wait on those aforementioned (nonexistent) pins and needles for the not-so-lovely chapter two, Anger. Until then, (equally nonexistent) readers~!