Alright, so this literally came to me in a dream (sad, right?), I woke up at three in the morning and wrote down my dream, and this is it, in a pretty unedited form. That is what I will blame it on if you think it sucks. I will, however, take full credit if you love it. Be warned.
Disclaimer: not only do I not own it, but if you try to sue you won't get much more than a few candy wrappers, a spiral notebook, and some half-dead paperbacks.
If you read and review, not only will I love you forever, but I will read and review you, whether I have read/seen the thing it is in response to or not.
And just when I think everything's over, years after the point when I was happiest, after the explosion in my apartment, but before the explosion of a different kind, Tyler comes back. It feels like a dream, because it's like fight club again, like in the beginning, just a few guys pounding the shit out of each other.
I watch. Until the end. Until it's just Tyler and me left. He wins, of course.
After, we sit down around a table, licking our wounds, Tyler and me and a few of the fighters. It takes that long to ask Tyler why he's here.
-Ever heard of karma? he asks me, -Retribution? Well, I'm yours.
-Fuck yeah! yells one of he fighters, but Tyler stops him with a glare.
-Shut up, he says, -he's not a bad guy.
And he may be saying it to the kid, but he's looking right at me. It wasn't your fault he tells me without words. No matter who Tyler says it for, though, it's too much for the kid to take.
-Explain this to me, he demands –this is the guy who caused the deaths of all those people, who ruined our lives (and here I have to wonder exactly what Tyler told these kids), who basically killed us, and you say he isn't a bad guy.
-He didn't kill you, Tyler says –You killed yourself when you got involved. Take some responsibility. And very few people died as a result of project mayhem. As for the ones who did die in the cross fire, that was my fault. And here Tyler smiles, slow and dangerous, -He just started it all off, he says, gesturing at me.
Tyler is still smiling in that frightening way, and suddenly I am too. I'm not in the mood to ask Tyler what he meant about retribution, or to try to figure out if this means I'm crazy again, if I even was to begin with. Questions don't seem worth it at the moment. I haven't really smiled in a while.
-Tyler, I say, -I knew you would come.