Title: Vitamin R
Disclaimer: Don't own the characters or the song.
A/N: I'm a little disturbed by the sheer amount of confusion that spread throughout the Fight Club section of over time... Almost every summary I read has the narrator's name listed as 'Jack'. Not once throughout the entire movie nor throughout the book (at least as far as I've read) has the narrator ever been referred to as 'Jack'. Sure, he's used the terms, "I am Jack's (organ/emotion)" but that was only because the name had been applied to a series of quotes in a book that he'd been reading earlier on in the movie. So why all the 'Jack's'? Strange world...
Some will learn; many do
Cover up or spread it out
Turn around, had enough
Pick and choose or pass it on
Buying in, heading for
Suffer now or suffer then
My body was a wreck.
Not that this could easily haven't been said yesterday, or the day before that, or the day before that, even. Tonight was no different than last night; my whole chest swollen and caving in on itself as I tried to breathe equally out through my copper-smothered throat. Every thirty seconds my eyes would try and catch a flake of dust gliding through the thicket of the air but every thirty seconds they'd slam into the side of my skull and a blast of thunder hit. My head was a pulse. My skin as cold as the ice in the freezer box I'd kept at my old condo.
The pain and irritation was supposed to be something I should have been used to by now. Up until about an hour ago, I thought I was used to it. The constant sharp cut of hot lightening bolts illuminating behind my eyes; the massive sounds of blood being pumped inside my ears. Tonight was different than all those other nights spent pressed back into my soggy uncomfortable mattress after a bloody animalistic duel in Fight Club. Tonight, I wasn't completely alone. But I wasn't completely conscious, either.
"In the world I see, you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center..."
His voice was a cradle for my scrambling blistered headache, a gentle thread of lullabies that lured me away from my thoughts of the car accident—the pain—and aroused my senses to the silhouette of his messy blonde hair. I could just barely make out Tyler's steadily moving lips as they gently muttered what could only have been considered a 'bedtime story' for my crackling conscious.
Like a TV set, the image of him faded in and out, prancing between static, darkness, and clarity.
It's bad enough
I want the fearneed the fear...
"You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life."
My heart wanted to sink to the darkest depths of my stomach. Bile had been gathering over the course of the night, ever since I came to, collapsed back on my box spring mattress with my open wounds patched and tenderly cared for not by myself but by someone else. Whether or not it had been Tyler who'd taken care of me while I was out wasn't questioned, even though it should have been. My lips were pressed tight. I was exhausted. Aching. But not enlightened.
"What do you wish you had done before you died? If you died right now, how would you feel about your life?"
He was trying to teach me a lesson and even after being run off the road, glass from the car's windshield jammed into the palms of my hands and metal from its roof slamming into the crown of my head mercilessly, I still hadn't learned a thing.
"Fuck what you know. You need to forget about what you know, that's your problem. Forget about what you think you know about life, about friendship, and especially about you and me."
Didn't learn anything.
Couldn't think of anything.
His words had washed over me like a tidal wave, and stupefied, all I could choke out was, "... What?"
I wondered then, still listening to those silk-smooth words in the darkness of the bedroom, if Tyler even remembered saying those things to me right before the big car incident. I wondered if he remembered. I wondered what he meant. I wondered if I would be in the right mind the next morning to ask him.
Cause he's alone...
( he has become )
... He's alone...
( he has become )
"You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower."
My eyebrow twitched on my forehead when I felt a drop of sweat start to slide into the tender skin around my eyes. Tyler's head was set downward, turned slightly in my direction as I felt his eyes meet mine whenever the clap of thunder failed to make presence inside my skull. The change that he'd gone under between the time of our argument in the car to the time, the time now, when he was whispering away his cryptic story in the heady silence, was so drastic that I almost had difficulty realizing that it was the same person. The same Tyler that had told me we weren't friends was the same Tyler lovingly whisking me off to sleep.
Lovingly?
Had I really just used that terminology?
Was there any more or less way to put it?
Warmth flooded the numb bile threatening to glide through the recesses of my throat, daring me to lurch up through the flat pains lacing my chest and abdomen and have me throwing up all over the floorboards.
Lovingly.
I was surprising myself more and more often every day.
Well if they're making it
Then they're pushing it
And they're leading us along
The hassle of all the screaming fits
That panic makes remorse
"And when you look down..."
Tyler's eyes flashed in the darkness. There was a passive feeling of suspense, almost lost inside the invisible crowded box inside my chest, as I waited for him to finish what he had been saying. I was hurting everywhere. I was going to pass out at any second. My cheeks were flushing, heated from both the bleating storms flowing through my senses and the slight airlessness left behind by the previous use of the word 'lovingly'. But I wanted to hear him out. I had to hear him out.
"You'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned super highway."
Tyler's silhouetted lips curled into a crooked smile, while I, meanwhile, failed to connect the dots of his words that I knew should have meant something to me. I felt as though I was letting him down again. Not making sense of that wisdom, that honesty. All this time I was above all the other men in Project Mayhem, I was above them not only in their eyes but Tyler's, also, and I still couldn't reach out and take in the power he was offering me.
I wanted to.
I tried to.
Involuntarily, my hand, quivering with pain slid out from my side and glided over the sheet of rot covering my mattress, reaching just ever-so-slightly out to Tyler as he stood and patted me on the head. He said something, something distant, something along the lines of 'feel better', or 'get better', but my conscious refused to give me any longer to take it in. The last thing I saw was that growingly 'infamous' crooked smile that Tyler offered me as he turned to leave.
My hand stayed where it was.
Reaching out.
Wanting desperately to just be taken and held.
After all, what the point?
Course levitation is possible
If you're a fly; achieved and gone
There's time for this and so much more
It's typical—create a word, a special place of my design
To never cope or never care, just use the key
The next morning, the sunlight felt unforgiving. It was almost as though it was cursing me. Beating my headache repeatedly with a fury that only could have been associated with the fury I'd felt the other night during my fight with Angel Face. Slamming golden lights into my skull like I'd slammed my fists into that poor kid's face; blood everywhere, teethe in broken pieces all over the dirty ground. Power and hate clumping up in the air so that no one, not me, not my opponent, not our audience, could breathe.
"I felt like destroying something beautiful."
The broken splinters of the chair that Tyler had been seated in glimmered in timid pieces, catching my attention once my eyes finally managed to pull themselves into the daylight. No Tyler, though. Just an empty seat. Worn. Dilapidated like the rest of the house.
Like me.
Like the people in it.
Somehow, through the grogginess, the heat, the sweat and the general physical hurt that was crowding my chest, I did manage to pull myself out from under the itchy off-colored sheets to a stand in the damp bedroom. My dirty plaid bathrobe laid abandoned on the floor where I'd dropped it a while back. A spider scurried along the sleeve, but I didn't even bother knocking it off. I just picked the robe up when I felt that it wouldn't hurt too bad to do so. Put it on.
The second I left my room, I knew that something was wrong.
And it wasn't the spider that had found its way onto the skin of my wrist.
Cause he's alone...
( he has become )
.. He's alone...
( he has become )
"Tyler?"
Silence.
The whole upper floor was completely void of human life other than my own.
If it wasn't for the occasional stumble and rise of voice from the lower part of the house, I would have been able to hear my own heart beat echo off the walls that brought my room, the bathroom, and Tyler's room together. I became aware of the fact that I was suddenly feeling panic.
My first instinct, something that had almost become routine from my days of living in that broken down house, was to first check Tyler's room for a sign of him being awake and making breakfast or still lazing about in bed as he prepared for the day's events.
He wasn't in bed.
He wasn't on that floor.
His room felt cold, bare, untouched.
My heart lurched.
Downstairs, the men in Project Mayhem scurried about with their duties. Wouldn't utter a word on Tyler's whereabouts. Anyone I asked countered with the same, redundant responses. "The first rule of Project Mayhem is to not ask questions, sir."
An emptiness grew inside of me when I realized he was gone.
Tyler was no where to be found.
Memories of his cloudy, gentle story from the night before filled my gut, then drained it. Filled, drained, filled, drained, filled, drained.
I am Jack's broken heart.
Over and over, a slave...
( became )
... over and over...
A slave