My Life

Chapter 13 - My Everything

Perry finally managed to find his voice even as his hold grew tighter around his son. Jack seemed to squirm as he began to feel the panicked feelings coming from his father.

"Twins?"

The calmer of the two simply pushed the jittery one to the ground. "An astute observation, Doctor," he said calmly.

"Which one of you is really Josh then?" Perry asked, his voice laced with fear.

The calm one holding the weapon shrugged his shoulders. "Does it really matter now?"

The tweaker sitting in the ground looked up at them with bird-like eyes. "Stars and lights don't need their names anymore, they're one and the same because things don't need names, just descriptions of colors and screams. Does death have a color that you can describe? Stars and lights don't believe, they don't even know…" The incoherent mumbling continued as the calmer one rolled his eyes.

"Of course, you'll have to forgive my brother," the calm one went on, waving the gun casually as he gestured with his hands in speech. "Is it so very important that you know who is who though?"

"How…why did…what the hell is going on?" Perry snapped again.

"Do you really want to hear the story, Pacing Perry?" the calmer one asked with a curious stare. "Your astute powers of observation never cease to amaze me, of course."

"Which one of you is Josh?" Perry asked in frustration again.

"I'd recommend you keep your temper, butterfly," he replied, sliding his fingers over his gun. "If you must know, he is Josh."

Josh, twitching from his seat in the grass, had begun to rock forward and back. "I'm not Josh…Josh doesn't even exist anymore; the stars let me be them now."

"Then who the hell are you?"

The unnamed one casually stood, his stance eerily calm and his smile firmly in place.

"I'm Elijah Nichols. As you've deduced for yourself, yes. We're twins." He pulled the gun and aimed it neatly at Josh's head. "This pathetic excuse of humanity lost his mind fighting a fire with our dearly departed father. They managed to find me, despite my best efforts at leaving behind the family who did little more then treat as one person."

Perry wished he could run. He knew he wouldn't get far, and bullets were faster then humans. He held Jack tightly.

"So far, you have been our most tedious pet," Elijah went on calmly. "Fun, to be certain, but most infuriating. Disobedient, temperamental…Josh is usually more careful when he chooses a victim."

"It wasn't supposed to be Pacing Perry," Josh twittered nervously from the ground, obviously distressed at his brother's disapproval. "No, it wasn't…it was supposed to be Double D."

"Double D?" Perry asked with a confused frown.

Elijah rolled his eyes. "Newbie, you nitwit. Josh has a penchant for giving his victims nicknames."

"Victims?" Perry asked, suddenly aware of what, exactly, was going on.

Still casually speaking, Elijah began to gesture with the weapon again. "Have you ever had an addict in your hospital, butterfly, who was unable to change and unwilling to put the drug down?"

When Perry didn't answer right away, Elijah held the gun so close to Jack that the toddler could have touched it.

"Yes," Perry yelped, jerking Jack away from the offending piece of metal.

"After Daddy-dearest died, they managed to find me. And I was now stuck with a crazy, meth-addicted twin who can barely discern what is real and what is not. Drugs did this to him you see." Josh whined at Elijah's words.

"Then why do you use?" Perry asked before he could stop himself.

Elijah raised an eyebrow and looked at the rocking man in the grass. "If you had to take care of that, wouldn't you?"

"I'd check him into a home."

"You don't think I tried that?" Elijah asked in a bored fashion. "He escapes, or he hurts someone, or he breaks the rules, always to come back to me. Drugs made him like this, and they made me who I am. And beyond that, he's my brother. My twin."

"Then why force it upon others?" Perry thought it best at this point to keep Elijah talking so he could think of an escape route.

"Because the weakness of humanity is simply overwhelming," Elijah replied simply. "And it's fun to stretch the bounds of mortal sanity."

This guy is completely off his rocker…Perry thought as another wave of panic washed through his body.

"But you see, there's a method to the madness," Elijah went on. "Joshua picks the victims. Double D would have been our final victim you see. But then poor, nervous Josh simply lost the stones at the wrong moment and we got landed with you. Although I must say, you have been so much more fun then that sad excuse of a man would ever have been."

Though Perry wanted to defend him, the words wouldn't rise to the face of the gun.

"Here's the rub though; we've never killed anyone," Elijah continued. "Except of course for Joshua, who managed to kill seven children all in one go. Bravo again, Josh. Bravo."

Josh whimpered on the ground.

"You have proven most difficult," Elijah said as he backed away from Perry, dragging Joshua by the collar of his shirt. "We rarely let our victims escape. Someone special must have really cared about you, Pacing Perry. Though you have been an absolute joy to stalk into terror and paranoia until you were reaching for the needle all over again. We never kill anyone. Joshua lures them to that godforsaken crackhouse that's destroyed him from the inside out."

Elijah bared his teeth in a calmly dangerous grin of dark happiness. "They do it themselves. You as a doctor of course know that drugs affect everyone differently, even identical specimens. Joshua, my dear twin brother, became the tweaker." Elijah pressed a foot into Josh's back. "I, however, simply became stronger. My part of it is fun. I get to drive them to suicide."

Perry began to get the impression that neither man had any intention of letting him or his son go.

"But you, Pacing Perry," Elijah chuckled. "You seemed to have no ties but that precious baby, or so I thought until Double D was prepared to take three shots for you. After that damage, Joshua got to watch you destroy yourself slowly. How I wished I could've been there!"

"He wasn't though!" Perry retorted. "I was alone!"

"Oh no you weren't," Joshua suddenly tittered from the ground looking up. "Stars can hide real good in the vents and above ceilings…they let stars in all the time to clean and to work and to hide."

Elijah stroked the shaking man's hair like a cat. "Intelligent I am, Pacing Perry…a psychic I am not. Though it was most amusing when you really did begin to hear stars and lights. Have you not yet guessed what the broken man on the ground hears when he speaks of stars and lights?"

Perry shook his head.

"And I had so much hope for you," Elijah said with disappointment in his tone. "You see, butterfly, I am the lights that he fears so much. He is the stars, weakly drawn like moths to suck the energy from the stronger lights."

Wave after wave of realization dawned through his mind. Perry stared at them both, still holding his son.

"But you see, Pacing Perry, it's over now," Elijah said calmly. He reached behind his back and pulled a second weapon. "Give me the child."

Fearing for Jack's life, he carefully set Jack on the ground.

"Come here, Jacky," Elijah cooed as a father would.

Jack eyed him surreptitiously for a moment, and looked to his father for askance. Perry nodded quickly, and pushed gently on his back.

"Go on, Jack-jack, it's okay."

Jack toddled over to Elijah. Josh pushed at Jack's fuzzy head affectionately. Jack batted his hands back at him in play. "Now I'm going to give you very clear, concise instructions that I expect to be followed to the letter. Anything you do wrong, any attempt to do anything besides what I tell you will result in the rather immediate action of your son's brains being blown all over my tweaker of a brother."

Perry's heart jumped into his throat and stopped there as Elijah lowered the weapon to the back of Jack's head. Jack continued to play with Joshua, who took an interest in what Elijah was doing. Josh's face crumpled slightly as he stared at the toddler's chubby face with the barrel of a gun pointed at the back.

"Fine. I'm listening," Perry said carefully.

"Come here."

Perry stepped forward slowly as Elijah flipped the other gun so that the handle was facing Perry.

"You see, butterfly, I haven't been able to drive you mad. Apparently, you've something that no one else had."

"What's that?" Perry asked carefully.

"Whatever Newbie is to you," Elijah replied. "Take the gun."

The doctor took it with a shaking hand.

"Raise it to your skull."

Perry's eyes were fearful as he kept his gaze steady on Jack, who shot him a brilliant smile, still unaware of the dangerous weapon pointed at his head.

Elijah smiled brilliantly. It was, perhaps, the first time that the smile wasn't eerily calm or terrifying in its darkness. "Now you're going to pull the trigger, or the kid dies."

Joshua looked up at that, the slight jerky movements he had been making the entire time falling still. They'd never killed anyone yet.

"Pull the trigger, butterfly." Elijah aimed the gun more properly at the back of Jack's head. "I'm not afraid to kill a child. Joshua's killed seven after all. How do you think I keep him in line?"

Fear raced through Joshua's body as he watched Pacing Perry cock the gun he held to his own head.

"Are you going to pull a trigger or am I, butterfly?" Elijah asked, his voice losing some of the happy edge. "Either way, I will make you kill yourself. We're all dead on the inside as it is."

When Perry still hesitated, Elijah cocked the gun pointed at Jack's head.

"You're going to pull the trigger when I say one."

The fear turned to anger and nausea as a panicked chill suddenly brought Joshua to a consciousness he hadn't been in years.

"Three."

Perry felt tears stinging his eyes, images flitting in front of his mind.

"Two."

Joshua slowly moved, his head feeling oddly calm as the fear left his body all together. His face changed from its nervous bird-like appearance to the point having Elijah's same, eerily calm look. If either man had seen it, they might have paid more attention.

"One."

The gunshot rang heavily through the air, a sound that, for all the emotions and tension running through the air, might as well have been heard around the world.

They say your life passes before you in an instantaneous moment that continues to stretch forever as the conscious mind leaves the physical body to explore other planes of reality and existence. They say the moments drift into eras of time that represent lives instead of mere minutes.

The regrets of life eventually fade into the skies, and the sad moments that could not be changed drown within the seas. Stars fade and die out, only to be replaced by newer brighter ones that continue to revolve around a greater force until suddenly, they themselves are a greater force.

Jack looked up in wide-eyed fear at the loud noise as something wet splashed against his small face and he immediately let out a howl of terror.

XXXXXXXX

A knock on the door surprised Jordan nearly out of her skin and clean off the couch as she ran for it to fling it open.

She screamed in both horror and relief, in exulted joy and dreaded fright.

Jack sat on the floor alone, blood splattered over his face and clothing. His face was streaked with tears, but he remained otherwise unharmed. He reached up immediately for his mother, who wasted no time in grabbing him desperately to her body as she fell to her knees.

"Oh, Jack-jack…" Jordan whispered as tears streamed down her cheeks. She checked him for wounds, and finally deduced that the blood drops all over her boy were not his.

"Isn't that Dr. Cox's cap?" Elliot asked in a hoarse whisper.

Jordan jerked back suddenly and felt something claw inside of her chest. It was indeed Perry's baseball cap. Like Jack, it too was spattered in blood and grass. She also noticed the small backpack on Jack's shoulders, but then Elliot was behind her a strangled scream filled the air.

Just behind Jack, a body lay on the floor. The almost neat bullet hole in the side of the head indicated quite pointedly that he was dead.

Jordan yanked Jack away, struggling to cover his eyes from the horrific site. Elliot stepped forward slowly, and pushed fingers over the neck, even though she expected to feel nothing.

Even so, she fell back on her knees as she began to sob.

Jordan jerked the phone from the charger's base to call the hospital.

The dead man lying in the hallway wasn't her ex-husband.

XXXXXXX

JD sat nervously on the hospital bed. No one had called him yet; why hadn't they called him? He leaned his head back on the pillows, tired of the sick feeling in his body as he continued to pray to a god he wasn't even sure was there.

And then the bedside phone rang shrilly. JD snatched it from its base.

"What's happened?" JD demanded.

"He's safe, Jack's okay," Jordan sobbed into the phone.

JD gave a sigh of relief as he relaxed slightly. He frowned as he heard another voice say "he's dead" in the background.

"Who's dead? Jordan, what's going on? Who's dead?"

Jordan sighed as she hugged Jack closer to her. "The psycho bastard, whats-his-name?"

JD felt the tension slide from his shoulders instantly. "Where's Perry?"

"Not here," Jordan replied in a shaking voice. "But Jack's wearing his baseball cap. He's got a backpack too."

"What's in it?" JD asked, a numb feeling beginning to creep within his body.

"Hey, blondie, get this bag off of him," Jordan snapped, suddenly feeling very much like the small knapsack was a horrible object that needed to be taken from her son this very instant.

Elliot grabbed the phone from her as well. "He's safe, Jordan," she said quietly, though her voice was still thick. She slipped the knapsack from Jack's shoulders.

Jordan sat down on the floor without a care as her mother came over to inspect Jack for herself as well.

"What's going on?" JD yelled into the phone when he only heard noises in the background.

"Calm down, JD. It's Elliot," she snapped into the phone as she opened the backpack. Almost immediately, she recognized the dark brown hoodie that Perry had been wearing when he left the hospital. It was spattered in blood droplets and grass. Folded into it were two envelopes.

"What's going on?" JD asked again, real fear lacing his voice as the possibilities of what could be stuffed into a knapsack came to mind.

"There's a brown sweatshirt and a couple of envelopes," Elliot finally said when she snapped out of her daze. She cocked the phone between head and ear to flip them over to read. Like everything else that had come in with Jack, they were also spattered with blood.

"Yeah?"

"One's addressed to Jordan," Elliot said, and turned the other over. "And the other one's for you."

JD shut his eyes tightly as the numb feeling began to spread throughout his entire being. "Alright. Call me if anything else happens, alright?"

"JD, are you…"

He cut her off and swiftly hung up the phone. A few minutes later, he picked it up again and left it off the hook.

JD stared out the window where angry, dark storm clouds were rushing towards Sherman Oaks. He'd thought it was going to rain today.

As it began to drizzle and then pour, JD wished he could curl up when the sobbing began and didn't stop.

Carla came in a few minutes after he'd unhooked the phone when Elliot had called the nurse's desk. "Bambi?" she asked carefully.

"Carla, can't you just leave me alone right now?" JD asked.

Taken aback by the pure ache in his voice, Carla still approached the bed.

JD lay with his arms crossed over his eyes.

"I'm not leaving you alone," Carla said more firmly and sat on the side of his bed. "What did you hear?"

"Jack's okay," JD said after a moment, voice hoarse and numb. "Josh's dead. And Perry didn't come back with Jack."

"Bambi, I'm so sorry."

"Yeah. Me too," JD said after a minute in a voice that seemed to hold every emotion man could feel at once.

Carla sighed as JD no longer cried, and only stared out the window at the cold rain that fell outside. "Do you want to talk, JD?" Carla asked gently, touching his shoulder.

"Don't touch me."

She jerked back then. Carla sighed and walked out of the room.

JD watched the rain drip against the windows, remembering once when he had watched Perry counting them.

Drip.

Feeling his chest cave in on itself, JD wondered how long it would take him to get over this. Then the memory of the white fear he felt for the parking lot slammed into it, which rather made him feel like his chest and stomach had decided to have it out around his sternum.

Drip.

Closing his eyes tightly, JD struggled to block out what had to be the worst pain he'd ever felt. The memory was clear in his mind's eye, their faces flushed with recent sex and the grinning that had passed between them.

Drip.

And he remembered knowing that there was no way Perry would disappear again. But he still had. The blood spatters against everything Jack had touched wasn't encouraging either.

Drip.

When Elliot showed up an hour later with Jack and Jordan in two, JD sat up and gave a tired smile. They asked him how he was doing.

He declined to answer.

Elliot sighed and recognized the numb look on JD's face, but sat down on the bed anyway, clutching something in a bag.

"Jack had these…" she trailed off. "When we found him outside the door."

JD took the bag from her and dumped it on the bed. A brown hoodie still stained with blood poured out and the envelope with Perry's familiar, near illegible handwriting on the front.

But it didn't read JD. JD smiled despite himself and a harsh, shrill laughter escaped his mouth until the tears started again.

Jack reached for him. He was cleaned up, the soft layer of fuzz that Josh had left over still damp from his recent bath.

"An' Cawol!" he shouted petulantly at his mother. "Down!"

Reluctantly, Jordan let Jack down onto JD's bed. JD scrubbed at his face furiously in an attempt to look somewhat happy for the child, who, for all the world, didn't seem to look traumatized in the least.

Jack sat up on his knees and pushed his hands over JD's cheek, forcing his mouth into a fish face.

"Dun worry, be happy," he giggled at him and clapped his hands.

Elliot bit at her fingernails as Jordan picked up Jack again.

"God, just leave me alone," JD whispered to Elliot. "Tell Jack I love him."

Elliot nodded and whispered something to Jordan. Jordan gave her a look that clearly implied she wasn't pleased about leaving JD to his own devices, but Elliot lay a hand on her arm and whispered something even angrier that had Jordan sighing and leaving the room in a huff.

Sighing, Elliot reached to touch JD's shoulder. "JD…"

"Don't touch me."

The vehemence in his voice struck her hard, and she backed away immediately to join Jordan in the hallway.

JD clutched the hoodie to his chest. It still smelled like him. Staring at the envelope in front of him, he suddenly found that the tears wouldn't come to him. His eyes were almost painfully dry, and his chest tightened uncomfortably.

Some part of him yelled that he was far too young and in good enough health to even be thinking he was having a heart attack.

As he stared at the scrawling on the front of the envelope, he knew at any age that a heart breaking felt much the same way. His chest was closing in, with shortness of breath. His head hurt slightly, and if he closed his eyes, he could see stars. It might've been the stars that kept him from crying; remembering how they had seemed to be the only other thing Perry had ever listened to when he'd been high.

Scratched across the front of the envelope, Perry got to have some sort of last laugh. He hadn't written JD, nor had he chosen to write John or even Doctor.

He'd written Newbie.

XXXXXXXXXXX

"Bambi, are you sure you're ready to really get back into it? It's only been a month and a half since your surgery," Carla asked with worry evident in your tone.

JD gave her a withering look. "Hey, do I ask you if you're good to work while you're a month pregnant? Na, I didn't think so." He grabbed his backpack and slammed the door behind him.

Carla sighed as she placed a hand over her stomach. She wasn't getting big yet at all, of course, but she was already planning for the maternity scrubs she'd have to wear later.

Turk walked out of the bedroom, toothbrush sticking out of his mouth and his green scrubs top hung over his arm. He asked her something, but it was completely inaudible with the toothbrush still in his mouth.

"Turk," Carla snapped and yanked it out of his mouth.

"That hurt, woman, damn!" Turk yelped at her, rubbing his jaw. "I asked you if JD already left."

"He just took off," Carla sighed as she refilled her travel coffee mug. "I don't think Bambi should go back to work yet."

Turk shrugged. "JD knows what he's doing, Carla. He's been pushing really hard to get back as soon as he could." He pulled his top on and rinsed his mouth over the kitchen sink. As he turned, he frowned. "He forgot the cane the doctor told him to use for the next month."

"Of course he did," Carla muttered. "Like I said. I don't think he's ready to go back to work yet." She popped the top back on her mug. "He isn't talking to you, is he?"

Turk shook his head. "Just let him do his thing, Carla. He'll be alright."

Carla didn't press the issue any further. JD still hadn't opened the envelope that Perry had left behind. She knew because every morning, she always checked the box that he'd kept it in (with some of his other more important documents).

"You know him best then," Carla said in a defeated tone.

When Turk finally managed to corner JD in the hospital, his friend was standing over a bed and talking to the same asthmatic patient who now, instead of showing the early signs of emphysema, actually had it.

JD shoved the chart beneath his arm and crossed them over his chest. "Now, ya see, Ms. Patterson…this is exactly what I was talking about. Still haven't quit, have ya?"

The young redhead in question didn't look up from her crossword book. "No. You got a lighter handy?"

Turk grimaced at that, but JD's face didn't change from its warily annoyed look.

"I'm ordering a lung biopsy," JD finally went on as he scratched the order in the woman's chart. "If you're lucky, it'll come back negative."

This time, the woman did look up. "If not?"

"Call your lawyer so he can draw up your will." JD stalked out of the room with the limp still apparent in his step.

"Hey, JD," Turk called, catching up to him.

"Yeah?" JD answered absently as he finished writing in the chart and laid it on the counter for a nurse to file away.

"You forgot your cane." Turk produced it.

JD eyed it thoughtfully at first. Then he picked it up and walked back into Ms. Patterson's room. "Here. You'll need this for the trip down the stairs." He left it in her room and shut the door behind him.

Turk sighed and caught up with him again. "Man, are you sure you're okay?"

"Don't worry about it, Turk. I'm fine, and I got a plan. My knee's fine, I'm fine, my hip's fine, and if not, I've got plenty of Tylenol in my pocket." He waved and walked off with a roll of his eyes.

Carla was at the nurse's station when she heard it. The sharp whistle hurt her ears to hear, and her head came up immediately at it.

"Yo, Joker 1, Joker 2, and Useless. In the smallest of possibilities that I may not know what I'm doing here today, I've gotta ask you something. Is it just me, or can you three be doing anything less than taking up space? Scoot off down the hallway, children and get some work done. What the hell are you waiting for, Judy? Scoot!"

Carla leaned her head to stare down the hallway as JD came down it, still with no cane. "That was…different," she mentioned to him.

JD raised an eyebrow at her. "Things change." He picked up another chart and walked off down the hallway, grabbing his sweatshirt as he went. "If anyone's looking for me, tell them I called in dead."

XXXXXXXXX

His hands and wrists were tied again. The restraints didn't bother him now as much as they normally would have. He wasn't cold, and Josh-the real Josh-had grabbed the duffel bag from the back of Perry's car before they'd left in a rental vehicle down the road with Elijah's body in the trunk and Jack giggling in front.

Perry shifted uncomfortably. Joshua hadn't said anything yet about what would be happening, and somehow, the silence was worse then anything Elijah had ever done.

The silence indicated thought, which equaled intent.

But Jack was safe. And JD would know how he felt. And with Elijah dead and Joshua within Perry's sight, no one would be coming after the people he cared about most anymore.

XXXXXXXX

When JD reached the roof, he pulled the beaten, worn brown hoodie over his head to ward off the cold. His knee ached in warning of a last cold blast coming in, and he wondered idly if it would snow or not.

The crime lab had used the DNA from the hoodie to indeed prove that it belonged to Perry. The criminalist he had spoken with seemed confident that it wasn't enough blood to imply death. JD hadn't bothered to scrub the stains out of it.

Standing near the ledge, JD surveyed the clouds. They looked like flat glass, and were the color of the gray shirt he wore underneath his scrubs top. JD for his part recognized snow clouds when he saw them. Maybe it wouldn't rain today after all. To emphasize his point, an icy white flake landed on his nose, followed by one against his ear. The smile was weak on his face and the cold gripped his heart in a tight, painful hold.

JD let the cold air rush over his face, letting it sting against his cheeks and burn his eyes until they watered. No matter how much the rational side of his mind kept telling him to give up, there was still some small part of him that simply couldn't.

After all, he'd promised.

Quick now, here, now, always - a condition of complete simplicity (costing not less than everything) and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well when the tongues of flame are in-folded into the crowned knot of fire and the fire and the rose are one.

-T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Author's Notes: Thus ends My Life. I'll get cracking on My Reality. Once again, I would like to reiterate how strongly that no one's going to die (well…Elijah did, but he was the uber-crazy sociopath guy that everyone wanted dead anyway). I hope you've enjoyed the story so far, and I'll catch ya in the last installment of the series.

xxFINITOxx