A/N: Speaks for itself.
One would imagine that when the world ends, so would your regrets.
.
The world is dead with a flash of white light, three seconds of nothing but scorching heat, and a bunch of dead bodies littered everywhere. In fact, André was preparing a sandwich in the kitchen for his grandmother, whom he can hear hit the floor with a sick thump when the light passes.
André does not know what to make of this. The knife he was scooping peanut butter with falls from his hand, dances on the floor, casting his reflection back at him for fractions of time that feel like forever. The bread falls out of his other hand, making a scary sound so similar to his grandmother hitting the floor, André swallows back bile.
He takes slow, tentative steps to the living room, not allowing his mind to think.
.
No.
.
He doesn't know what to do. He knows it's sick, but this is sick, so he leaves his grandmother lying on the floor and bolts from the house. He runs down the streets and sees so many corpses, just lying there as if they had had a heart attack, and he just doesn't know what to do.
Tori.
He's going to try to find Tori.
.
No.
.
He leaves her (and Trina, who was holding a hair dryer that's still running, and their mother, who was stirring up some brownies, evident by the brown spilled across her shirt like dried blood, and their father, who's now in the fetal position by his chair with the newspaper still in his hands) and runs from their house.
The next logical step is Beck, because he doesn't live too far from Tori, and Beck's strong. Beck used to be-fuck that, Beck still is-André's hero. It's lame, its' gay, but André will admit that Beck is every single little thing André desires to be. Is. He better be is and not was.
.
No.
No.
.
Because like two birds knocked out with one stone, Beck&Jade Beck&Jade Beck&Jade even have to die in each other's arms.
She looks beautiful. He looks handsome.
(Looked. Looked, he reminds himself.)
.
No.
.
No.
.
He picks up Rex at Robbie's house and slings the puppet over his back. He can't make Rex's voice like Robbie does, can't make Rex ever speak again, but he looks like Robbie and has humanlike features that will keep André company. Until he realizes that carrying around a puppet is the equivalent of carrying around a corpse and throws Rex against the side of the building.
It breaks. Rex does. Because when you get down to it, Rex is an it.
.
So, of course, the next logical step is for André to find a television and watch the news. Logical, yes, but impractical, because the televisions aren't turning on and fuck-he kicks a corpse out of the way of a doorframe and thinks I am the only man alive in the world.
Panic attacks, he thinks, when his heart starts to pounding and he gets dizzy. He sits on the sidewalk outside of the television store, stares at the cars piled on top of each other in the street. The damage, the simple damage, water spewing from fire hydrants and no electricity and no nothing and fuck, fuck, fuck, his death is going to be a long, painful one, isn't it?
He slowly picks himself up and goes back to the place he will now call home. Not actual home, not Hollywood Arts, even though he stops by both of those places for all the songs he's ever written and a backpack, but to Tori's house, because even though nobody else liked her he sure as hell did. Does. Did. Does. Did. Does? Did?
.
No.
.
He has just enough time to light a fire in the middle of their living room and throw all the songs he's ever written that had the word freedom or loneliness or regrets in the fire because he was an idiot when everyone was alive who did not understand that freedom sucked, he didn't know loneliness, and regrets are nothing until you literally have nothing but the dead bodies of everybody you love, before-
.
No.
.
But the second flash doesn't take him out, either, just makes him very sweaty. He has no clue what's going on but the fire rages, aggravated by the heat, swallowing the couch whole. He high-tails out of there, a nasty burn mark wrapped around his bare ankles (Vans + Board Shorts + End of the World = Bad Idea) like fingers trying to grab onto him.
When he is securely outside, he watches the fire engulf the Vega household. Knowing that Tori and Trina and Mom and Dad are inside of there. Knowing that his music caused the fire that caused the disgusting cremation that was really caused by the end. Of. The. World.
He thinks of all of the end of the world films he's seen. They were all so dramatic, cities crumbling and giant waves swooping down like prehistoric hawks to kill the people one-by-one. Not this. No, this is not cinematic enough for André, definitely not poetic at all, no, everybody just dropped dead in a three second flash of light except for him, and he does not know why.
Maybe.
Wait.
Maybe they just nuked the U.S. or something? Whoever they are.
Maybe they just gassed Los Angeles? Whoever they are.
And so he leaves Los Angeles with nothing but regrets and an empty backpack. He feels oddly light without his music, scribbled notes and half-done choruses that are usually shoved in pockets or hidden up jacket sleeves, waiting for Tori's voice to wrap around them.
Oh, Tori.
He will miss her.
He will miss her like he'll miss Beck, except not, because he was sort of in love with Tori and sort of not with Beck. But that doesn't matter. Beck was his best friend, and he was the one they watched all of the end of the world movies with. Robbie, too, he'll definitely miss Robbie, but now he feels like he did wrong by destroying Rex. Cat. He'll definitely miss Cat. She was so sweet, so innocent, so childlike, so adorable. Everybody. He'll miss everybody in the whole fucking world, because nobody's left to miss them, so he'll do it for them. His heart reaches out to the man with wide eyes and spilled coffee who he's passing right now, the dead man who he doesn't even know the name of but knows that he's wearing a suit and has cropped black hair like a stereotypical businessman. He'll miss that man. And his wife. And his children. And his fucking dog, too. Because their friends, well, they sure as hell aren't going to miss them, because they're kind of dead!
He realizes that the people he has to miss, well, they're teenagers. He realizes his world is shallow. Was shallow. Now there is now world-there is only André and there is only loneliness and there is only that.
André grows tired. He slumps against a wall (ironically, the wall with the littered Rex parts) and falls asleep, his dreams consisting nothing but of flash after flash after flash, so bad that when he wakes up, his eyes are playing with explosions of light. He almost has another one of those panic attack things.
.
No.
.
So he concludes from the cities outside of Los Angeles that he is, indeed, the only man alive in the world. Great.
He sits down on a dusty street in some suburb and reaches over to the dead little girl next to him. She has a sketchpad and a pencil, but her sketches weren't very good, just stick figures and dandelions. Well, the dandelions were kind of excellent. He rips a beige page from the book, folds the dandelion picture, and sticks the folded-up flower picture in her hair.
Then he writes a song.
He titles it, Loneliness, Freedom, and Regrets.
And the only lyrics are,
In a flash of light, you are gone.
.
So, yeah. Everything's going to catch up eventually, and months of this pain find André with a million songs all titled Loneliness, Freedom, and Regrets, each with a different line in reference to the end of the world. He's seen so many flashes he is practically blind, but most of them were in his mind. Each one leaves him sweating, whether they were real or imaginary.
Because of the fire that he caused, most of Los Angeles was ablaze. It took all the storms, which were all surprisingly strong, for a week to kill it. He lives somewhere in Oregon, he thinks, judging by all the Oregon paraphernalia and the big signs that announce the city names adjacent to a comma and OREGON.
He doesn't know. He doesn't really give a fuck. He just dies alone and somewhere in Oregon of pneumonia, thinking about Tori and closing his eyes, when that final flash comes. The real one. The big one. The five-second one that actually takes his eyes, but he will never know if that was the disease choking him or the light stealing him away. He'll never know if he was really the only man in the world, he'll never know why they stole his soul like this, never know anything but Loneliness, Freedom, and Regrets.
.
No.
(Yes?)