Here's the last real chapter of this fic, there's an epilogue and one other thing coming, but this is really the end. It's been really great writing this and I'd like to thank everyone who has been reviewing and talking about this. It really means a lot.
Disclaimer: I do not own Yu-Gi-Oh or Yu-Gi-Oh GX.
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They said that I had been talking in my sleep for sometime now. They were just about to lose hope when I began to talk. They said that at first, it was only one word. I could guess what it was. Then I began to talk about my childhood, God only knew where that came from. I talked about my family and my days at Duel Academy. Then I talked about being the Kaiser, and about Alexis. Then I was back to talking about Claire. They were just glad that I had memories. They were afraid of what they would get after I woke up.
They told me that I was lucky to be alive, but that wasn't the first time I had heard that. And it wasn't the first time that I didn't believe that. For me, being alive was someone's cruel, sick joke.
I really did think that I was dead. The problem was that I couldn't think. I was apparently in a coma, a really deep one. They were pretty sure that I'd never wake up. I was in it for a month, less than many, but it didn't mean that they were less worried. It wasn't the hard stab that Dieter had given me in the arm that had sent me into it; it was the heart attack that followed. But I was alive now, I'd be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life, a fate that I thought I would avoid, and I'd never duel again, but I was alive.
It was the worst thing I could ask for.
In the coma, though I hadn't been able to think, I dreampt all the time. Sometimes I saw nothing, sometimes I felt like I could see everything. I couldn't tell if I was in heaven or hell. I wanted to get out so badly, but I wanted to stay even more, but the feelings would just flip-flop over and over again. They were the most confusing things that I've ever whitnessed, but somehow, they were also the least confusing.
I saw her a lot in the dreams.
I couldn't really help it.
I hoped that if I was dead, which I was pretty sure I was, that they would all forget about me. I had been in this position before, in the Dark World. I knew that if I were to die, I would have wanted them all to forget about Zane, forget about Hell-Kaiser, forget about me. I hadn't achieved my goals. I wasn't the best, I wasn't memorable, I wasn't anything. I was just another passing moment in the clock of time, soon to be forgotten. And the sooner the better.
I didn't want anyone to mourn for me; it wasn't worth the time. I just wanted to disappear. I wanted all of the memories of Zane Truesdale to disappear as well. I just wanted to be forever more some person that no one remembered.
--
Apparently Alexis and Atticus had visited me; that was surprising. They left me a note, a lot of people did. Of course Alexis hated me, I didn't blame her, but Atticus said he was willing to forgive me if I woke up.
Part of me thought he hoped I wouldn't.
My brother and his friends had all come and left words that wished me well. I wasn't sure why. I had never been particularly kind or even sensibly nice to any of them. Many of them probably hated me. But yet they wanted me to wake up.
Human emotions were never my specialty. Even as a child I was more grown-up and cynical than most. It seemed to really scare Syrus the most, he was never a fan of when I acted like someone in the real world rather than the fun-loving and easy going brother that he wished that he had.
But the one thing that I never really grasped about human emotions was love. Of course I felt something for my parents and my brother. That was a given. But I never thought that I loved them properly, as I should. I don't really think that I knew what love even was until the fatal moments before this all happened.
In the beginning I didn't love Claire. It was really more of something that Hell-Kaiser would have done, instead of me. I saw something I couldn't have, but wanted it nonetheless. I was like a child whose parent's wouldn't buy them a lollipop that the parents knew the child would hate in the end. My lollipop was Claire. She was the unattainable; the piece of candy that I would never be able to get no matter how hard I tried. But once I realized that what I had done to her was wrong and when I really did get to know her, I did fall in love with her.
I just hadn't noticed.
For me, love was something out of a crappy teen movie. You had it at the end of the movie, but what would come after that? You knew that the high school sweethearts wouldn't be together in a few years. She would go off to art school and he would be off to college and they would either break-up due to lack of communication or he'd get drunk one night and end up sleeping with some random whore on his dorm floor.
I never thought that love was real.
But there it was, staring me in the face, and I didn't realize it.
I didn't really, truly know what love was until I blocked her from the dagger and gave up my life for her.
They told me that it was a day after Claire came when I began to talk.
The Doctors told me how she cried when she saw me and how she begged me to wake up. She had been there for the entire time she could possibly visit, just talking to me and trying to wake me up. They wouldn't let her touch me, but she would have shaken me awake if she had gotten the chance. That's what they told me. Aster hadn't come in; he had waited outside for her. He apparently wished that I wouldn't wake up. I could relate to him more than I could to Claire.
But I did wake up. And when I did, I knew that I'd have to find a way to live on with life.
Of course I was stuck in the wheelchair now, and I wouldn't leave the hospital for another three months, at least, but I found ways to live.
Then again, living without her wasn't much of a life at all.
But life went on, the world kept turning and new things kept happening. I managed to block her out of my thoughts during the day; to ignore the nagging thoughts of her in my head, but at night I let myself think of her; to dream of her.
She taught me new ways to dream.
--
"For you I bleed myself dry."
-Coldplay, Yellow