Parents aren't supposed to outlive their children. Not now, not in this day and age.
The funny thing is...no, not funny. Never funny. It's only funny if someone laughs. Only funny then.
Better to say the horrid thing. The awful thing. The monstrous twist of fate that screams of irony. Better to say anything really, anything other than "funny".
Because if she had been drunk, drunk like her friends, black-out drunk in the back seat of the car, drooling onto the leather, she'd be alive right now. Her only crime was being designated driver, being a good friend. Her only crime...no, that's wrong.
She did no crime, no crime unless it was innocence and loyalty. No sin on her hands, no blood. Even though her hands are covered anyways.
None of it was her fault. Emily Jane had done everything right. It just wasn't enough.
It's not fair. Everyone says that life isn't fair, but it isn't until something like this happens that we really understand.
She had picked her friends up from a party. They had invited her to go to, they had insisted, but she had refused, citing a Monday-morning exam, and so they went without her. It was a rainy night when they called her, and they didn't want to walk back to the dorm in the downpour.
And Emily Jane didn't want to make them walk, not when she heard them slurring their words over the speaker, their tongues thick and leaden from alcohol, their laughter way too loud. She had wanted to make sure they would make it back safe, and so she went out to get them.
They had been driving back when they had been T-boned by a drunk driver.
She barely even made it to the hospital, the EMTs doing everything they could to keep her heart beating, and yet it wasn't enough. All of her friends were perfectly fine. It was just her. She was the only casualty. The only victim of circumstance. Even the other driver, belligerent in his inebriation, was alright.
It's not fair at all.
One could lay blame for another crime at her feet, poor luck. No one could guess what a girl her age could've done to have earned this level of bad karma. No one could think of anything she could've done. Poor luck, sober driver, one could add up a multitude of factors into a myriad of possibilities, and this incident, this occurrence, would still be one in a million.
It's not funny. If you could call it a joke, then it's a cruel joke, one with fists of steel in the punch line.
Pitch had not left the house the next day. He had refused to leave, refused to even open a window to let the light in, except to identify his daughter's body, supported by a small man half his size, a solemn expression that seemed out of place on a face that was meant for sly, secretive, gleeful smirks. That was only because of a small, lingering hope, a bare wisp of a notion, that it wouldn't be her.
Some other girl-child with dark hair full of curls, someone else's daughter with wry green eyes and an impish smile, another girl with an ugly monstrous father, anyone but his baby.
He shouldn't have even dared to hope.
The average male heart weighs 10 ounces. 10 ounces of pure muscle that continuously beats our entire lives at approximately 70 beats per minute, 4,200 beats an hour, 100,800 beats a day, 36,792,000 beats a year. If we assume that the person makes it to the ripe old age of 90, it will have beaten approximately 3,311,280,000 times in their life.
Emily Jane Pitchinier's heart was slightly different. As a woman, her heart was only 8 ounces. To do the same work, it beat at a rate of 78 beats per minute, 4,680 beats per hour, 112,320 beats a day, 40,996,800 beats a year. But the big difference is that it stopped approximately at beat 758,403,984; 18 years,182 days, 4 hours and 8 minutes, give or take a few hundred beats. An insignificant difference, really, when you stop to think about it. A few hundred more beats wouldn't have been nearly enough to make a difference, not when the target goal was 3,689,712,000. Give or take a few hundred. Hah. She was only 2,931,308,016 beats short. Only. If only it was that simple.
If only life was fair, she could make it to that number and beyond.
2,931,308,016. Just a few million beats more.
Sandy was the one who made the calls. Only two. His concern was not for the dead, but for the living. So he called the two people who cared the most about his old friend. Well, the most now. For Sandy has a job to do, responsibilities to fulfill, and most of all, he knows that he cannot give his old friend what he needs to get through this. But he knew who could.
He called Jack from Koz's phone. At first the young man nearly hung up when the quiet voice identified himself, a voice unused to speaking. But something about the rough voice convinced him to stay on the line. In a way, he almost regretted it.
Sandy paged Anna next, waking her up from a sound sleep next to her big sister, limbs tangled together in a way they hadn't since they were very young. Before Elsa was sent away to school. Before the distance had formed. A perfect moment, shattered neatly by a loud buzz. Anna had mumbled, smacking at her beeper a few times before it sunk into her sleep-sogged brain that she was being paged. She glanced at it, and saw Koz's number, and so she had carefully untangled herself from her sister, sparing a moment to touch Elsa's cheek. Warm, finally. The older sister stirred a bit, but didn't wake as Anna tiptoed down the hall and called back.
When Jack found out what had happened, the smile was wiped off his face, and he asked to be left alone for a bit. No one knows what he had done in that time; something in his voice had persuaded everyone to leave him be.
When Anna found out, she collapsed against the wall, sliding down it until she sat on the floor. The heat from the blanket fled abruptly, leaving her wracked with chills that ran up and down her arms, raising goosebumps as it went. She wanted to cry, as she raised her hands to her face. But all she could do was hiccup, a lump so thick in her throat that she could barely even do that. She stuffed her hands in her mouth, doing her best to muffle the hiccups that bubbled out of her throat, because she couldn't wake Elsa. She couldn't, just couldn't. At least one of them should get their rest tonight.
Jack left the hospital soon after, checking out with the promise to come back the next day for a check-up. A stone-faced Anna was there to give him a lift to the nightmare mansion. She escorted him up the windy staircases, and through the dank and dim hallways. Neither paused to check the dark rooms, neither hesitated in reaching their destination.
They walk up the stairs until they get to Emily Jane's room, the tower room. She had used to pretend that she was a princess in a fairy tale, with her good-natured (yet apparently menacing in appearance) father playing the part of the villain. She grew out of the fairy tales, but never out of the love she had for that room in particular. They had rigged up a series of tubing from this room to the kitchen so that Pitch could summon her for meals, especially waffles, her favorite, without having to scale her tower. Much more respectable than yelling throughout the house trying to make themselves heard.
And more fun, as the fairy tales evolved into spy stories, into pirates, into stories of adventure where she was the hero, and her father played both her mentor and her villain. Her helper and the obstacles in her way. The genius inventor and the monster. He could almost still hear her laughter echoing throughout the rooms.
Anna sits on the steps, as close as she was allowed to come. Jack is certain that Anna's soft heart wouldn't help his mission. To his surprise, she had agreed, but refused to wait in the car. She insisted on coming as close as she could, and promised that she wouldn't enter until she was told to.
Pitch is in there now. He sits on her, Emily Jane's, bed, holding her favorite stuffed piglet in his hands, an iron grip that makes the often-repaired stitches strain as the puffy cotton pushes against the seams, begging to burst out. A couple of long spider-like fingers stroke the torn ear while his thumb touches the regularly kissed nose, kissed until the soft plush fabric was spotty, and significantly less fuzzy than it was on the day he bought it for her. He does not cry. He feels as though his tears have all been used up. His face is sticky with dried tears, but he doesn't move to wipe the residue away. He just leaves it be.
The door creaks, but the man doesn't hear. Kozmotis does not hear the soft padding footsteps as they enter the room, he does not hear the creaking of the door as it is closed once more with a violent slam, designed to shock and startle. Needless to say, it failed quite sorely. He does not hear the clearing of the throat, he does not see his patient turn on the lights, even as his body forces his eyes to blink in response, giving his pupils time to shrink. And he does not see Jackson Overland standing in front of him with a look of steel in his eyes as he prepares himself for the worst.
"Get up." Pitch doesn't react. His eyes still look forward, unseeing. Pale blue eyes peer into dark shadowed ones, "Where ARE you anyways?"
Nothing. He just keeps stroking that ragged ear, rough pets, each motion threatening to finish it off, to rip the stitching once more.
"Wow, I didn't think you have it in you to be sorry. Your heart's pitch black, isn't it." Perhaps cruelty will work, but again there is no response.
Jackson's eyes narrow. Fine, if that's the way he wants it, then Jackson'll play along. He grips Pitch's shoulder in an icy grip, and forces the older man to look him right in the eye.
"So you're just going to quit. There's no need for you to be working anyways. It's not like you need the money. You can stay here for the rest of your life until you waste away!"
Nothing. Not even a twitch.
But Jackson does not yell. He only moves closer, his voice growing colder as he speaks to his doctor, his teacher, his friend, willing him to hear him.
Hear his words.
Hear Jackson Overland talking for the first time since he died all those years ago. For when a dead man speaks, even to another dead man, people listen.
How can they not? Dead men don't lie. They tell no tales. Honest as the grave that spat them back out again, too tough for the maggots to break them down back into the filthy dirt from whence they supposedly came.
And so Jackson speaks, his words cold and dark as the grave that he had crawled out of when he realized he was needed, willing the dead man in front of him to hear and make his own way out. Not to forget, never to forget. Not even really to move on, because who can move on from something like this?
But to be alive, to live once more.
It's what she would've wanted.
But he's wasting it just sitting here.
"Run away, Koz. Just keep running. Run away, until you finally manage to outrun the people who still care about you, until you leave them in the dust! Life's rough, it's a pain. Mistakes happen. You're too good of a man for you to let yourself get bogged down by stuff you can't help. And that's what KIDS do. I'm not telling you to forget, I'm not telling you to forgive, I'm just telling you to stop killing yourself by wasting away!"
A blink, as Kozmotis slowly comes back to himself. He looks at Jackson. The man has never looked healthy, not in all of the time that Jackson had known him. His grey skin, yellowish eyes, sunken face...let's just say there was a very good reason that a young Jackson had called him the Bogeyman.
But looking at him now, it is quite easy to tell that before he had been the very picture of health. His previous grey pallor had been more silvery...no, not quite the full color, but with a lively sheen to it. It's truly impossible to describe, but he looked healthier, damnit! A corpse looks healthier than this for god's sake! Now he looks like death warmed over, as blue tones overtake it, deepening the shadows. The shadows are almost deep enough for the man to hide in.
But that is what Jackson is here to prevent.
"Why can't you just lie to me like everyone else?"
Jackson sits on the edge of the bed, on Koz's other side, his own face ancient with weariness, "Is a beautiful lie really that much better than the ugly truth?"
Kozmotis looks away, "Don't use my words against me, boy." But for his voice breaking on the final word, he almost sounded like himself again.
"You're evading."
"Do as I say, not as I do, Jackie-boy."
"You stop that, you hear me?" He's getting mad now, he can't help it. Seeing his doctor, his own personal Bogeyman like this, well, it hurts. It hurts that he can't think of how to pull him out of this depression. "You stop all of this. You've got to live, Koz. This," he gestures at the older man, "This isn't living."
"I cannot do it any other way."
"Then I suggest you TRY HARDER."
Kozmotis blinked, and suddenly he has a realization. "Jackson..."
"If you're not going to say something productive, then don't talk at all. Now come on, Anna's waiting outside. She's worried sick."
"I don't want to see her."
"What did I say about being un-productive? This is what happens when you disappear off the face of the Earth. Who's the rational responsible adult here again?"
Kozmotis doesn't respond. But he does stand up, making Jackson grin. It's strained, and doesn't meet his eyes, but it's there. It's present on his face. Jackson Overland has not grinned in years. And both of them know it.
"Welcome back to the land of the living, Koz."
A/N: So, it's been a while. Sorry about that. Let me know what you think of this chapter, please. In pharmacy school, so I can't promise exactly when the next chapter will be. I'm sorry for that, but I hope you all can look past that.
Thank you for reading.