Anthony DeMartino wrestled with the child-proof safety cap furiously, until finally, he managed to twist it open. He shook four of the little pills out onto his hand, popped them into his mouth, and dry-swallowed them. He pushed his hands to his ears in a futile effort to block the strains of Cyndi Lauper coming from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and waited. Finally, after ten minutes of the siren's voice calling him, it began to fade out of existence.
After all, the song wasn't coming from within the cabinet, but from his own head.
He sat up, drenched in sweat, panting heavily, and went into the bathroom, now that it was safe. He eyed himself in the mirror for a moment before stripping off and getting into the shower, making sure the knob was set at the coldest setting. As he washed himself, he siletly prayed.
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Towel wrapped around his waist, Mr. DeMartino (years of teaching had robbed him of thinking of himself as Anthony) opened the medicine cabinet and gazed at the jar featured prominently in the center.
The dentures rested at the bottom, as they had for over a decade. They sat in water still just a little foggy with the color red, as they had when he had ripped them from his mouth that horrific night in 1987. The pills he had taken before his shower ensured that they did not sing to him...at least, for the time being. His eyes began to water as he stared unblinking at the false teeth he had made himself, back when Lawndale still had a shop class and he was its instructor. It had never occured to him, not being a connoisseur of spy flicks, but the teeth had more than a passing resemblance to the prosthetics Richard Kiel wore in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker.
Finally, he managed to shut his eyes and close the medicine cabinet at the same time. He gritted his teeth - professionally-made dentures, made for him after he had been shuffled from shop to sewing - and suppressed the urge to vomit. After a moment, he forced his eyes wide open again - if he left them closed too long, images of that night in 1987 came swimming back.
This time, opening his eyes were no respite; he could still see the star quarterback crawl away from his car, his throat torn out, blood spreading everywhere, until finally he ceased his struggle and died.
His cheerleader girlfriend never made it out of the car. Her face was covered in bites - in some cases, the bites had been hard enough to crack the skull open.
Mr. DeMartino screamed, spat into the sink until his mouth was dry (the vision was so detailed he could still taste the blood), lunged into his bedroom, seized up the bottle of whiskey, and drank half of it down in one go. His psychologist had strongly advised him against mixing alcohol with his anti-psychotics, but his psychologist had yet to prescribe a better treatment for flashbacks to the grisly murders he had committed than distilled spirits could provide.
After a few minutes, the booze had the courtesy to hit his system, and he sat down on the bed, rubbing his eyes, pretending he wasn't crying. His thoughts returned to the quarterback he had mauled - the young man had made fun of the lisp Mr. DeMartino had acquired due to a lack of teeth, and that was the only reason he had been targeted. In his mind's eye, the quarterback even looked like Kevin Thompson (except with a different hairstyle - the only distinctive thing about the young man DeMartino actually retained). Mr. DeMartino wondered if it was because the two were related somehow, or (more likely) it was just his brain putting Kevin's face on the older student's body because they were both stupid. Before his brain could go any further along that path, he introduced it to the other half of the bottle of whiskey, and within five minutes he lay sprawled across the bed, passed out.
His last conscious thought was a snatch of song: "When the wor-king day is done, Anthony DeMartino...just wants to kill some-one...Oh, DeMartino just wants to kill some-one..."
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I've always wondered why nobody ever did a 'Metalmouth is real' fic, especially since Legends of the Mall pretty strongly suggested it at the end, what with the dentures hanging off the door-handle and all. This is what flowed as a result of that speculation.
I might follow this up with some more exciting stuff later. (Not that I don't have plans, it's just that I don't have a stellar reputation at actually finishing the stuff I start. I really should work on that someday).