Macabre

Jade/Beck

He is dead.

He is dead, they tell her; the words echo in the hollows of her mind, carving out a home. No other three words have altered the course of her life so significantly except when he said 'I love you' to her the first time. (But never again.)

A flurry of words fly from her lips – can't you do something anything he CAN'T be dead he just can't – and they combine with death threats, because if she can't have her life back then certainly they can't have theirs.

Instead of comforting her, they drag her from the room, fastening her flailing arms behind her body. She can't fight, not anymore, and this is the weakest she has ever been. Her mind aches, her body shakes, and why is she even alive –

"Jade," someone whispers into her ear, and she is thrust back into her cold reality.

They try, she'll give them that much. They offer her smiles in the hallway and save seats for her at lunch. The first week, Andre even carries her books for her. But he is not alive and she is still alone.

The nightmares began the night after his death. It is one of the cruel side effects, because it allows her to relive the worst day of her life but there is still nothing that she can do to stop it. It becomes a cycle, like a bad song stuck on repeat, but she has no idea how to stop it.

Sometimes her brother will come and sit with her when she is having yet another of her nightmares. Sometimes he will rest on the bed, one hand on her knee, and tell her that it was just a dream, that Beck's been dead for a month now (has it really been a month?). Most of the time she just nods, her head bobbing up and down as if it is automatic. Then she will drift back off into an uneasy sleep and the nightmare will just begin again.

She dials his number sometimes in the middle of the night, hoping that maybe he will pick up. Ring, ring goes the phone, but never does she ever get a response and she reminds herself that she never will.

Gone. He is gone.

The hours fade into days, days into weeks, and yet she is nothing. She cannot feel, cannot think, cannot function. It becomes harder, then easier, then harder, and she hates the cycle that she's somehow driven herself into.

The horrendous screams echo in her head. A gunshot, she remembers that clearly, a gunshot and then a scream, a torturous scream that haunts her nightmares. She'd never seen him so terrified, so filled with pure and absolute fear, as he was at that moment. They'd held a gun to his head, told her that he was going to die, that this would be the last time that she would ever see him. It hadn't quite registered in her brain then; she had always imagined her life with him at the center of it – Beck and Jade, Jade and Beck. One entity, never separate. Now he is gone and she is one.

She remembers staring at him, trying to take in every detail. He'd reached forward and stroked her cheek, being more gentle than she can ever remember him being, and told her the three simple words that had altered her life so long ago – "I love you". She had squeezed his hand and –

She can't go on.

She cries.

The funeral is one of the hardest things she has ever done. She tries her best to pretend like everything is normal, like she is fine. She dresses up in a black outfit and does her hair. To show him that she is still making an effort for him, she adds just an extra bit of makeup. Then she looks in the mirror.

All she sees is a ghost of who she used to be.

People speak, but she hardly hears a word of what they say. Their words run together until all she hears is his name over and over again and it hurts.

What she does hear is hardly an accurate representation of him. They speak of how he was a good guy (who enjoyed making a jealous fool of his girlfriend, she adds mentally) and of how he meant the world to them (she can tell by their stoic expressions that they don't know the definition of 'meaning the world to someone'). She makes bitter comments under her breath, and she laughs when Tori and Andre shoot her looks that clearly ask what the heck she is doing.

Then they form an orderly line to look at the body (such a morbid custom, she thinks). She, along with Tori, Andre, Cat, and Robbie, stands at the back of the line, watching as various acquaintances and family members make their way through.

Tori tells his dead body that she misses him and that she used to have a bit of a crush on him, but that it was clear from the moment they met that he preferred Jade. She also says she doesn't regret anything but that she never got to tell him goodbye. After that, she presses a kiss to the dead boy's cheek. Tori doesn't seem to appreciate Jade's comment about necrophilia.

Andre tells him that he was a good friend to him and that he's really sorry that he had a crush on Jade back then. For once, he doesn't even turn to see Jade's reaction. Instead, he just continues on, thanking him for all the favors he has done and saying that he misses him a lot. Then he leaves.

Cat tells him that he was the best friend ever and that she misses when he used to bring her chocolate bars on Wednesdays. Robbie tells him that he looked nice in his jeans and that he was always nice to Robbie, so Robbie really appreciated it. Then it is her turn.

She walks up and, disregarding her comment to Tori about necrophilia, places a kiss to Beck's frozen lips. Then she straightens up, combing through her waves. "I love you," she says to him. "I miss you. You always talk about doing the impossible, right? So come back, come back to me, do one more impossible thing and come back from the dead."

Of course, there is no response, so she breaks and she runs and she doesn't know if she'll ever come back.

The hardest part is that she is the only one to speak of him in the present tense.

The nightmares keep coming, night after night. She sees him, sees his corpse, hears the gunshot, smells the cold hospital, yet when she wakes up it was simply a dream. It becomes all the more haunting as time passes. She can nearly feel him, but every day she wakes up to find that he is not there.

They take her to a counselor, and said counselor diagnoses Jade with PTSD from seeing her boyfriend have a bullet blasted through his brain. The people at school stare at her now as if she is from another planet. She might as well be.

She begins to talk to the hallucinations that have began to appear during the daytime. They're close enough to him, to her source of life, and as time goes on it becomes all the more evident that she cannot live without him. She had always imagined that they would spend their lives together, grow old together, and now even the thought of that is painful.

It takes two weeks before she musters up the courage to visit her grave, and it is there that she has a total and complete breakdown. She sobs, placing her head against the cold tile, pressing her fingers to the letters that spell out his name – Beck Oliver, Beck, Beck, BECK. This makes it all the more real.

"We were supposed to get old together," she reminds him (or what is left of him). "You and me forever, don't you remember? You loved me; you love me! That's what you said!"

Then her head collides with the hard stone of the grave, again and again, because this is all she has left of him. She cries until she can cry no more, until her body is so tired from the effort of crying that it gives out, and she drifts off into a solemn, tearful sleep. It is only around him that she is able to act like this; around the rest of her 'friends', she has to keep up the pretense that she is absolutely fine and nowhere near mentally unstable.

When she wakes up, she is tucked into her bed with a nice box of her favorite chocolates by her bedside table and a note with just five words: I'm sorry. I love you.

She breaks.

He is dead... right?

A/N: Idk so basically I am in a bad mood and I wrote and I came up with this and I can't be bothered explaining. The whole not-dead thing is partially inspired by Reichenbach for any Sherlock fans. Also Jade went sort of insane, obviously. I miss Bade, so soon enough you're going to see a long, epic Bade coming from me, just you wait. (Though it will be angsty. Can't resist.)

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