Walking Delusions

a/n: Big thanks to Miss. Curroption for her review! I'm glad you liked it and I apologize for the misspellings. I am my own beta for this story and I try to catch everything, but inevitably, I miss something. Thanks for pointing them out. I'll look over it again.

Thanks to everyone! This is the final chapter guys!

Walking Delusions
Denouement

“What?!? That's all there is?”

He shoved his nose into the air with a snort. “I think Anne's batshit nuts. That's what I think.”

I couldn't help but laugh. His opinion was shared by many others. “Don't curse like that,” I chided with a stealthy glance around the room though there was no one else present. “Or the nurses will scold me for being a bad influence again.”

“You are a bad influence,” he replied smugly and then yawned abruptly, jaw nearly cracking from the breadth of it.

I glanced at the clock. It was getting late. The sun would be setting soon and I still had to find some kind of dinner. Looked like take-out again, though my budget was getting rather low for that.

“Looks like it's time for little Sheldon's nap,” I teased as I rose to my feet, smoothing down the wrinkles in my jeans. “Guess that's my cue to leave.”

He scowled predictably and in his eyes, I saw a flash of loneliness. “I'm not little.”

“You're still just a kid to me,” I replied, ruffling his hair as I laid the book on the table next to him. It joined a stack that was waiting to be read. I couldn't help but smile at the sight of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban at the very bottom. He wouldn't be getting to it anytime soon.

Hah. Take that J.K. Rowling.

Sheldon lazily swatted at my hand as I pulled back, but shifted down in the bed anyways. “Tell them to bring me a peanut butter sandwich,” he countered with another sleepy yawn. “M'hungry.”

I was already heading towards the exit, having snagged my light jacket from the back of the chair as I passed. “Or better yet, how about my gameboy?” I asked, pausing in the doorway.

He cocked open one eye at me, dark brown swirling. “That old thing? Psh.” He closed his eye and just as I was about to leave. “Okay. But only if you have Zelda.”

We have discussed our combined obsessions with Zelda before. I laughed under my breath. “Goodnight, Sheldon.”

I didn't get a response. Not that I expected one.

I left the room, waving goodbye to Jolene, the nurse usually in charge of this half of the ward, to let her know that I was leaving. She tipped her head but didn't say much. She wasn't really sociable. It was easier that way.

I headed out of the hospital and went straight home. Visiting Sheldon always left me with a mix of hope and helplessness. I couldn't decide if I was happy or sad when I left.

It had been my therapist's idea to speak to terminally ill children as an attempt to overcome what was a life-altering experience. And she wasn't talking about Tears. No, she was referring to my attempt to wrestle a garbage truck and subsequent loss.

It was five years ago when I woke up from Tears, in the hospital, swaddled in bandages and barely able to move. I was in so much pain that I cried without knowing why, and I suffered from such an incredible thirst that my body clenched and spasmed. No one had been around when I woke up. I was alone in a darkened hospital room, my face towards a window with the blinds pulled open, the bright orange lights of a city I didn't recognize in front of my eyes. My windowsill was unsurprisingly empty of 'Get Well Soon' cards and hopeful flowers, rotting in their glass vases.

I felt the pain in my fingers before I registered I was holding anything. When I worked up the energy to uncurl the digits and peer into my palm, a startled gasp was wrenched from my mouth, sending me into a coughing fit. There, pressed so tightly it had left impressions in my pale skin, was a gem. Sapphire and cut, gleaming in the sterile light of the hospital room.

Ixion's jewel.

I laid there and I cried silently, unable to even curl into a comforting ball because of the stiffness of my joints and the lack of response from my muscles. I just stared and wept and wondered. It was an hour before someone came to check on me and found me awake. By then my sobs had dried up, but the damage was done.

I remember thinking that it must have been some horrible dream. I remember that I could recall every thing that had happened to me so clearly, as if it were a reel continuing to play in my head. I can remember asking for people that couldn't possibly exist in a raspy whisper, and feeling so damn grateful that no one could understand what I was saying.

I was so glad to be awake, so glad to be free from that nightmare.

And then I saw my wounds. The doctor said they were caused by my run-in with the truck. I had been dragged underneath, scraped along the asphalt, burned by the engine and numerous other injuries. My blood streaked the ground for thirty feet before the garbage truck stopped and I was freed from its hungry maw. I nearly lost an arm and a leg. I was lucky to be alive, he said. I was lucky there wasn't any permanent damage.

Funny. I didn't feel lucky in the slightest. In fact, I felt as if I had been stabbed-through-the-heart, cut-into-pieces, ground-into-dust, and scattered-to-the-four-winds in the space of a manner of seconds. I just stared at the doctor as he blathered on about what had happened to me.

I had been asleep for three months, locked in a near coma. They thought I was going to die, they were just waiting for it. There had even been talk of pulling the plug, of ending what had to be a pitiful existence. I had crashed several times during my recovery, my breath leaving me once, choking on my own blood. My heart had stopped twice and it was only the quick thinking of nurses that brought me back from the brink. Hearing what my body suffered, I honestly couldn't blame them though it had pissed me off at first to hear it. I wanted to live dammit. Who were they to decide my fate?

And then the kicker, the last stone over my grave. He was so sorry, but I had lost my baby. They did everything they could but... my injuries were simply too extensive. My body going into shock and catatonia had triggered a miscarriage. I had been three weeks along.

Three fucking weeks.

Funny thing that, since I hadn't had sex with anyone in long months before that. I brooded for a long time on that knowledge. I didn't bother to tell the doctor's that it was impossible. They thought they knew best anyways.

After I woke up, everyone was so damned happy. My aunt and uncle especially. A part of me might have been excited, too. Until I saw myself, saw the aftermath.

There were marks on my arms and chest, familiar marks. The doctors claimed they were scars and stitches and grafts. But they bore suspicious resemblance to the seals that Vincent had carved into my skin. It brought back memories of the knife scratching into my flesh, of the feeling of something trying to tear itself free. And there were other more telling injuries, things that made me question my very existence.

No one could explain Ixion's jewel. It could have come from anywhere, they said. From anyone. A secret admirer perhaps. A visitor wanting to wish me well. After all, I'd had it appraised later. It was absolutely worthless, but pretty.

I couldn't decide whether it had been a dream or not. I didn't know. There was still a mark on my neck, a hickey from the night Vincent and I had sex. The doctors thought it was a birthmark. But it was one I had never had before. There were scars around my wrists and necks, remnants of my captivity with the Ectow.

At one point, I threw myself into the bathroom, stripped down and refused to come out. I counted and cataloged my injuries, recalling with staggering breath and a pounding heart how each had happened in Tears. My left pinky finger was missing. There was a star-burst pattern scar over my sternum. Both of these were caused by Constance.

I had screamed in fear and passed out, both from moving too soon and the enormity of what I had experienced. They ended up having to get the master key to unlock the door and pull me out. When I woke up after that, I couldn't stop the words from coming.

For two weeks, I babbled about my journey in Tears, my experiences. I craved pen and paper, spent all my waking hours scribbling note after note, cackling to myself. Crying sometimes. Other moments I spent in stony silence, the only sound in the room the scratching of pencil over paper. The crack of lead. The whirr of the sharpener.

And then the subsequent scritch over paper once more. I grew to crave the scent of a newly sharpened pencil, of ink flowing onto the page. I filled up four seventy sheet spiral notebooks and still yearned for more.

I could recall every detail so clearly and they wouldn't leave me until I wrote them down, forming my fears into words. No one believed me. They kept telling me it was a dream, an illusion supplied by my mind to face the pain and stress my body was under. But how could I have known what my scars would look like? How could I have known where they were? Why did I wake up with Ixion's goddamn jewel in my hand. And how the hell could I have been pregnant!

All they said was, “Stranger things have happened, Anne.”

No one gave me a moment of belief. They thought I was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. They knew I had been a dreamer. Some even accused me of wanting more attention, that the accident hadn't been enough.

“She always was a strange one,” I heard a few whisper.

I was sent to a counselor and therapist for a year. At first, I kept up my story. I told them about Tears. About Ryou and Ivory and Melath and Vincent. How I killed them all. About Ixion inside of me. About the games the gods play. They listened and they nodded and they wrote notes, watching me with pitying eyes and fake sympathy.

And then they asked me about my feelings. Did I feel my family loved me? Was I self-confident? Did I like my life? Over and over. They didn't really hear what I was saying to them. And then they would recommend more appointments. They kept saying, 'I think you're getting closer to understanding reality, Anne. Pretty soon, you'll realize that Tears is just a figment of your imagination.'

After a while, growing weary, I started to lie. I was sick of the doctors and the tests and the stares. I hated the whispers behind my back, the barely concealed sympathy for the girl-gone-crazy.

I agreed with them, saying it must have been fake. That I was just dreaming and wow, didn't I have a vivid imagination? Maybe, on some level, a part of me wanted to believe it. But there was another part of me that clung to that delusion. It was the only piece of myself that I felt was real anymore, especially with all the untruths pouring so easily from my lips.

Those professionals, those college-trained, degree-wielding professionals, they never even seemed to notice, so well did I blend the truth and lies. I made my realizations slow to come, the change taking the rest of the year. They later declared me cured, that I would be able to function in normal society again. Che. Who really defined normal anyways?

I quickly learned to keep my stories to myself.

There was one therapist though. The only one I actually liked. She would look at me with these knowledgeable gazes and she never asked about my feelings or my family. She just wanted to hear the stories. She asked me about my dreams, how I felt then, what I liked, what I feared. She asked me about the people I shared my adventures with. I told her what I thought.

That Ivory had been in love with Ryou but wouldn't say it aloud because she didn't want to admit the weakness of feelings.

That Melath was only as strong as those that surrounded him, that he hungered to live with more desperation than anyone I had ever met.

That the only thing that terrified Vincent was losing Melath, to me, to death, to anything.

That whomever Ryou killed, probably deserved it. And that he didn't deserve anything that happened to him. His goddess, Babel, was an utter crock. I should know. I created her after all.

She convinced me to compile my notes and write a novel, something to share with the world. She said my story was something that needed to be told, to be heard by others. If anything, those with the desire to go to other worlds, might find themselves second guessing their wants.

It was because of her that Walking Delusions came to be.

It wasn't a bestseller by any means. Not even making it into the top fifty books that year. I only found a publisher because she helped, introducing me to someone willing to publish the sordid details of my delusions. It became a cult classic.The novel gained notoriety only by word of mouth, passing from one hand to another.

Hell, it was banned from a lot of schools. Some libraries refused to put it on their shelves, despite the fact I knew Kama Sutra guides were just a few rows over.

In any case, I left the ending ambiguous on purpose.

Was it real? Was it a dream? I didn't know. I couldn't answer. I knew that was the main question people had when they finished. Did Anne destroy the world? What happened when she woke up? Was she dead? I didn't have the answers and I refused to make them up to satisfy an ending.

I still didn't know.

Sometimes, I slept and found myself remembering them, all four of them. I thought of sweet Ryou and angry Ivory. Of a love that struggled to be between Vincent and Melath. I remember arguments and fights. I remembered my first kill, my first taste of blood. I thought of the gentle eyes of the Great One, and my hand in Lahli's death.

I'd like to think that I didn't miss Tears but sometimes... sometimes I wondered.

In the end, nothing changed in my life. I went back to University, got my degree in Botany and then went back home. I picked up where I left off at the local supermarket, making less than ten dollars an hour and ordering around snotty teenagers who didn't even really need their job. I dated and lived, played video games and watched anime. I dreamed. I wrote. I laughed and cried. I went to Thanksgiving dinner with my family and opened presents on Christmas.

No one commented on my scars. No one ever mentioned my accident. As if to bring it up would set me into insanity again. The pins and needles my friends and family walked on eventually disappeared. Things became normal. Relatively speaking.

I went to my friend's graduation from University, congratulated her on her position at a consulting firm to begin in a few weeks. I moved out of the house. I dated some more. I got a promotion. I filled up more spiral notebooks with musings on Tears.

I remained alone.

Sometimes, I still woke up screaming from nightmares. I felt the cold rasp of a blade against my throat. I could smell Constance's onion breath against my face. I remembered the burning scrape of rope around my wrists and the choking pull of a collar around my throat. I traced scars from a knife, supposed binding spells.

I jumped at noises in the dark, small sounds like the decades old refrigerator kicking on or the air conditioner shutting down. I attacked people if they approached me wrong, too quickly or out of my line of sight. I was pretty sure that nothing would ever be the same in my life.

But nothing changed.

I lie awake at night, sometimes yearning for a world that might exist. I could still smell the forest of the Great One. I tossed and turned on a mattress that still felt as if there were rocks beneath a thin blanket. There were times I wanted to die. There were times I wanted to live. And there were worse times when I felt neither, when I wanted nothing.

I wondered if it was all a game in the end, for deities that desired entertainment. I wondered, if it truly happened, then for what purpose. Why would someone, something, do that to a person? If it was all just a dream, a figment of my imagination, why had it been so damn real? Why couldn't I just forget?

I wished often that I had chosen different in my waking delusions. Then maybe, I wouldn't be suffering quite so much.

In my ears echoed their screams, their curses. I saw the disappointment and sadness etched into Ryou's face. I remembered the madness and the urging in Dainichi's eyes.

It all built up inside of me, growing and swirling until I felt I was choking on them. It seemed so real yet everyone was telling me it was a lie, an illusion. I didn't really know what to think or believe anymore.

Later that night, after I choked down take-out from a nearby Chinese delivery place, I crawled into my bed in my one-room apartment. I laid for several hours, staring at the twirling fan and watched shadows that could be reaching claws dance on my ceiling. I heard the whirr of some machine rumble on and off, sounding vaguely like the clash of heavy weapons in battle.

It was then that I understood. I knew what I have to do.

I thought a part of me had always known that, even when I wasn't aware.

It was so strange.

My body felt cold, and yet my arms burned. The knife's blade felt like a sheath of ice against my skin, even brighter white than the visible scars. I could breathe but I couldn't, each inhalation like a gasp.

I wondered how they would find me in the morning. I wondered if anyone would come to check, if they would worry when I didn't arrive to open the store hours from now.

Next to me, a few drops of scarlet staining the cover, a stack of papers bound by a staple read, “The Final Chapter.” On top, just below the title perched a small scarlet gem. Essentially worthless but valuable all the same.

Lights from passing vehicles traveled across my ceiling from a gap in my blinds. I watched them with a transient interest. Someone yelled outside, laughter rising to meet the shout. A wash of cold air hit my skin, ghosting over the slick fluid coating everything around me, the air conditioner kicking on.

In my eyes, echoed a world that never existed. Or maybe it did. On my lips, painted a sad smile.

“Miss Anne?”

His voice.

“I think that you are kinder than you give yourself credit.”

“There's nothing wrong with wanting to live.”

Yes, well... there was nothing wrong with wanting to die either.

Fin

a/n: Yes, the ending is purposefully ambiguous. I wanted my readers to pick what they think happened, based on what they read of the characters and what they understand of Anne. That may seem like a copout for an authoress who didn't know how to end the story, but honestly, I've had this ending planned from chapter one.

Did she destroy the world, or did she save it? Did death find her, or did someone care to check? Those are questions I can't honestly answer.

I wanted a fic that sort of blurred those lines between reality and fantasy, making the reader question it themselves. I'm not quite sure if I accomplished that but I had fun writing it nonetheless.

There will eventually be a series of ficlets related to this story, called "Crossroads", it will be a series of oneshots that depict how certain characters met and bits of their lives prior to the storyline presented here. I don't know when it will be out, but keep an eye for it.

I'm contemplating posting another fic, but I don't think it's aff suitable. There's plenty of blood, gore, and torture, but no sex. I dunno. Is there some rule that says there has to be sex in it to post it on aff?

Anyways, I do hope you enjoyed. I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to read this and leave reviews. I wouldn't have continued without your support.

For more of my writing, feel free to visit my website at http://dracosdebauchery.tripod.com . Sign up for the update list, or even sign up my guestbook.

Thanks again!