Psychic City: I'm going to do this a little bit differently. The chapters in this are going to switch on and off between 2D and Murdoc. I've been reading a lot of the writings on here and I've actually never seen one written in 2D's point of view whilst in a coma. I know, I know... a bit strange but, bear with me. I read an Irving Welsh book once where the main character was in a coma throughout the entire book. So, with that being said, I think this can work somehow.

Thanks for all the initial positive responses to this! I'm so glad that I'm motivated to continue writing this! Thanks, guys! I really appreciate the support!


Chapter Two:
Purple Haze

Stuart Pot felt a swerve of anxiety as a collection of fingers pried him up from the carpeted floor. Someone who sounded important snapped, "oy! watch his head!" and his back touched the hard mattress of what he'd only assumed to be a cloud. Stiff and rigid, another stuffy and unseen object clamped him thickly around his neck and he felt himself falling backwards. Four tiny wheels scoffed against the carpet underneath him and the bounded the stretcher upwards as it skidded against the hard pavement. A clustered chorus sound of sirens blended together and, despite the wave of nausea that suddenly overtook his half-conscious head, he found it impossible to reach forward and find his pills in the pocket of his jeans.

The drum roll of exhaustion whirled over him and he heard two doors slam before the start of a fast-paced engine. The familiar onset of a migraine came forth into his more aware senses and he screamed out, but no one seemed to hear him. What was horrifying was the pressure, the intense weight that seemed to hold him back down onto the lift. He felt a cold hand rush over his throbbing skull, felt five gloved fingers run through his greasy hair. The fingers pulled open his nice white shirt, pressed down on his torso and strapped him down, further onto the surface of Stuart's uncomfortable cloud. The direct pull of it terrified him and then, urgently, someone pried open his loose jaw and shoved a tube-like cord of what tasted like metal down his long, swollen throat.

There was a crash, a rattle, and then the doors swung open again. Someone pushed his aching body forward and the call of someone screaming danced around his head. A man's voice said over the fuzziness that enveloped Stuart's clustered brain, "Crashed right through the bloody window..."

The rattle was still there and the flash of bright white lights blinded him even behind his pair of shut eyelids. He could taste the involuntary metal in his mouth, could feel the trickle of what he hoped wasn't blood running down the entire length of his broken skull. They pushed him forward, slammed his uneasy body through a pair of swinging doors. Someone grabbed across him and he heard the clanging of metal, even felt the cold texture of it against his bruised skin. They picked up his limp wrist and dabbed away at the chilliest part of his forearm.

Pain shot through his dangling limb as the sensation of a forceful needle pressed its way through his skin. He felt the haziness of nausea, even felt the bile rise up in the depths of his throat, before he heard himself cough and moan spastically. He tried to recap everything, though realized a tinge of worry as he recalled absolutely nothing over the past couple of hours. He couldn't remember the morning, couldn't even remember waking up from his sleep the night before. He didn't remember work or the people he'd met during his shift. And as the shadowy figures of his blurry vision leaned closer in on him, he found himself completely lost when the voice of a concerned woman said shakily, "his heart rate is far beyond the usual..."

More urgent, the second voice of a sternly hostile man replied back, "we're loosing him!"

They were right; Stuart's ears only heard the fading sound of their loud tones. He could feel his eyes loll back, slink deep into his skull and darken the vision of the entire world around him. "He's not breathing!" someone shouted and it took Stu a moment to find that, once again, they were right. The pit in the center of his chest was empty. Churning violently, he felt the space in his chest clench up tightly as if his heart had gone... had completely vanished into the blackness that so overwhelmed him.

And as the second prick of a needle slammed down into his other wrist, he finally let go to the blurry darkness. The curtains of his eyes slid to a close and Stuart Pot felt nothing.


"Oh, Stu!" said a meek little voice, the cry of a plump and largely busty woman who had only just recently pushed herself through the sterilized hospital building to land down at the side of her boy's white bed. Her red cheeks supported the dripping sensation of runny mascara and her own nurse's hat had been pried from atop her head of now frantic hair. Rachael Pot, now in a state of current hysterics, surged herself forward and placed her sweaty head atop the blanketed lump that had remained of her son. His chest slowly rose and fell beneath the flesh of her shivering arms.

Mrs. Pot lifted up her head, stilling her quivering lip. Her fingers found the end of Stu's chin and she lifted it gradually. "Stu, honny," she said stiffly, not bothering to wipe away the makeup that drooled from around her oceanic blue eyes. "Stu, it's Mummy... can you hear Mummy, Stu?"

The response of her lifeless son came in the pathetic roll of his head. Half expecting his eyes to flutter back open, she reeled back, slightly appalled when his body only flopped back down onto the mattress, ignoring her blatantly. She took in the blue tint to his bruised face, saw the unsightly stitches that ran up the right side of his forehead, and winced at his pair of black and blue eyelids. Then, when she was quite certain that she had come up short of luck, she broke down into a fit of uncontrollable sobs.

"Mrs. Pot, Stuart is in a peaceful place right now. If it helps any, consider him only just... sleeping."

"Well I know he's bloody well not sleeping!" hissed Mrs. Rachael Pot, glancing up from the torso of her catatonic son and glaring at the doctor in the doorframe. "And," she interjected, "for your information, I happen to know that studies show comatose patients can sometimes hear other people speaking to them while they're under." Then, adjusting herself, she made way for Stuart's hand, ignoring the pestering presence of the man. She'd never liked him anyway. Despite being aged and gray, she'd seen the exact same doctor when Stuart fell out of the family tree all those years ago. Back then he'd told her Stuart would be fine, that the fall was, by all means, only a harmless one.

That was before the migraines. That was before his bloody hair turned fucking blue.

"Come on, Stewie," she cooed softly, despite gripping her hand even harder onto his palm, "Mummy's here..."

However, to be quite fair, Rachael Pot had actually had quite the day. She had been sleeping in her bed with her husband when she'd got the late night call from the police. They said they'd had some bad news. Some bad news concerning her son, her only son. The couple rose from their beds without hesitation. She'd run to his room to grab her son his coat and yanked open the medication cabinet to retrieve her extra stash of pain killers just in case. Her husband, David, had done most of the talking to the police. They'd said something about some man with car, something about an eight-ball eye fracture and she'd almost physically lost it.

She didn't even want to see his sullen black eye anymore. She didn't even care. What she wanted was a conscious son. She writhed her hands at the thought of one Murdoc Niccals. Once she could get her hands on that man, she'd ring his neck. Officials, however, had told her that they'd taken the man into custody and that a trail was in the works. Though this did nothing to soothe the anger that swelled up harshly inside the large chest that belonged to Rachael Pot. After she was done with him, she'd assured herself that the man would be begging for a prison sentence.

Her grip on Stu's wrists tightened and she found the ability to lift his blue hair and pull it away from his face. Delicately, she swiped it behind his ear and curled her palm under his chin. She could hear David and the police still conversing from the hallway outside the room behind her, could even hear the chatter of a news crew that had taken place outside. She felt almost sick at the sway of it, the horrible feeling that she knew almost all too well for her son. Always the protector, Rachael Pot knew that, first thing's first, she was Stuart's mother.

She heard the retracting sound of the doctor's scoffing feet slink away from her, leaving her and her son alone in the hospital room for a long while. She'd been left to her thoughts, to the lifeless vegetable of a son that lay loosely before her. A cord-like tube swirled out from his arms and protruded into his nostrils. The longest tube plummeted into his chest and she saw the bag of the castrator clinging to the end of the shiny metal bed. Grieving, her heart visibly ached for him.

She remembered years ago, after the fall from the tree and after his hair had grown out completely blue, when he'd come home from school glossy eyed and red in the face. He'd placed the blazer of his school uniform over his head like a replacement hood and flopped groggily into his bed without saying a single word. As Rachael Pot smoothed back the stray strands of her son's blue hair away from her face, she remembered climbing up the steps to his room and prying open the bedroom door to find him in a heap underneath his covers.

To him she'd said, "what's a matter, Stewie?"

And from the depths of his thick bed sheets, he had replied back, "no one at school wanted to sit with me at lunch today."

Rachael Pot had shifted her weight on the mattress of her son's bed. She glanced up at the ceiling he'd marked with thousands of little glow in the dark stars. Upon the walls were posters of various different zombie movies she hadn't really even approved of him watching. The posters were gifts from his father, of course, who'd been a bit of an enabler in her son's zombie flick movie addiction. Yet she ignored her annoyance with the inappropriate posters and returned back to the focus on her solemn son, who had not moved a single muscle from under his bed covers. "Well maybe," she'd said, reaching a hand up and placing it on top of the Stuart-shaped lump, "they're just shy."

From underneath the covers, Stu had shaken his blue head back and forth. She could hear the breaking sound in his voice as he started to choke up. He had said back to her, "No body wants to. They didn't want to sit with me yesterday, either."

As a mother, Rachael Pot couldn't help but feel her cords of sympathy easily being pulled. From the moment she'd seen Stuart come out of his room with blue hair she'd predicted that there was going to be trouble. Yet she'd kept her anger exclusively to the doctor, who'd already received a hefty amount of bitter phone calls on his answering machine. However, to Stuart she'd kept her calm. Lurching forward gently towards him, she pulled off his covers and looked down at him in a messy heap underneath them. She ruffled his curious colored hair and smiled at him. Back then, she hadn't a clue as to what to say to the boy. And now, as she stared back at her unresponsive son, who lay in a coma before her, she felt the same twinge of uncertainty in the pit of her sickened stomach.

"Stu," she said, slipping the hospital sheets closer to his chin, "put on a smile for Mummy."


Sure Stuart Pot had taken a lot of medication in his day but, truly, he had never felt a fuzziness as the one he was feeling currently. He felt the trail of warm fingers run over his face and the sound of a familiar female voice that, despite everything, managed to relax him. Though now he was fumbling back, back on his cloud and hovering in the darkness. Stuart, he had not a clue as to what was happening in the outside world around him, or why he couldn't wake up. But now, he was living in the world of purple haze, of Lucy in the sky, and kelidescope vision. He was untouchable, he was untouchable, he was untouchable.

Ouch. Fuck. Perhaps not.

Something like fingernails dug deeply into his forearm and he tried unsuccessfully to jerk away. The feeling quickly subsided and the sensation of softness traveled up his head and ran through his head of greasy hair. But Stuart wasn't really sure what to think- not that he would have considered his 'thoughts' as real ones anyways. He was, by all means, simply floating. The back and forth gamble of ideas that surpassed him did so in a fuzzy and blurry sort of way, as if he were seeing something through the eyes of someone blind or hearing from the ears of the deaf.

What he could hear was a sob and for a moment he thought it was his own. A strong sense of panic overtook him. Not only could he not remember the past couple hours, but moments of the entire course of the day had now left his memory. He couldn't remember a single thing, didn't remember driving or having driven to work. And in this sense, he wanted to cry, though to his despair he couldn't find he ability to even do that. Something harsh and unholy seemed to be keeping him unsteady in the darkness of what he assumed to be a middle-ground between the dead and the living. He, Stuart Pot, was incomprehensibly stuck.

What was going on? What was happening to him? He felt a migraine that he couldn't treat begin to press through his aching temples and he braced himself for even more blurriness. The lightening strike of pain slammed through his more sensible half and made him want to double over. He could even feel the bile rise in his throat, despite the metal he also felt intruding into it. His head told him that he was going to be late for work and that Norm would fire him. He thought about the kids that would show up at the shop, ready to learn how to play the keyboard to find themselves without an instructor... He thought of Paula Cracker, the pretty young waitress at the restaurant across the street, and how he'd never get a chance to ask her to dinner...

Then he thought of his mother and how she'd worry. He wanted nothing more than to climb up the stairs of his parent's house and flop back down into his bedroom, into the room that hadn't changed for a matter of years. He longed for the zombie flick posters and whatever remained of the sticky glow stars at the top of his ceiling. He longed to wake up in the morning and see the sun that he couldn't even hardly remember.

"He's in pain, I can tell!" shrieked a voice. Another loud scatter and he could only slightly sense a new presence around him. The breath of hot air swooped down upon him instantly. Then two cold hands pried his eyes open. He could feel the pressure, but he couldn't see the light. "His painkillers," moaned the voice and Stuart tired to glance around him to locate its owner but the blackness forbid him to. "Please, just give him his painkillers..."

On impact, he felt the third horrible slip of metal plunge into his flesh. The point of a sharp needle drove through his forearm and Stuart remembered with a fluttering flash of pain that he had always hated getting shots. And then his awareness, if it could have even been called as such, slipped from him vividly.

He heard the soft beat of his own fluttering heartbeat. His head seemed to fog over even more so, creeping in through his mind's eye with an unexpected and horrible movement. He felt himself drift, farther from the two voices, farther from being able to even think clear thoughts. And, for the second time since he'd entered the blackness, felt nothing.