Chapter Text
-one-
To be dead means to have a lump in your throat and cobwebs in your eyelashes. Swallow all you want and rub your eyes, they never go away.
It’s funny. You thought you were slipping into a coma. Lying in the crisp, cold sheets, you squeezed that warmer hand and thought, with a tinge of distant excitement, “Oh! I’ve never been in a coma before!” Then the beeping stopped, and you woke up on the side of this road. Pathway, maybe, for there are no curbs, or they’re buried beneath the dead leaves that swirl around your bare feet like eddies in a dry ocean. You kick at them. They prick the bottoms of your feet in return. You can still feel—but whoever said you wouldn’t be able to feel here? Who even warned you about here, or told you to bring a nice coat? You cross your arms and rest your chin on your shoulder to glance over it. A sparse, burnt forest, the same behind as ahead. And city spires far beyond, poking up like jagged teeth, or charred tree trunks themselves. You swallow, and swallow again.
Before you can will your feet out from the undertow of the leaves—perhaps there is somewhere you ought to be; after all, you were not properly dismissed from...but the word “hospital” is missing, and the more you search for it, the less you find yourself even able to conjure up the room it was meant to name. There was a place before this road. Of this you remain convinced. But perhaps it does not matter so much what the place was. After all, you are here now. And a parade is passing by.
You might not have noticed, for the swish of feet among the leaves is much like the stirring of the wind. But a single drummer keeps a militaristic beat, and when you turn to the sound, they are almost upon you. It is a bedraggled, poor parade. It has only one float, surrounded by a trudging crowd of—how strange! You were about to call them mourners! Surely they don’t deserve the title; though those unmasked have solemn faces, they do not look sad. You think you might, if it were you marching with no dancers nor flags to wave nor music. Foolish of the band, to stand around on the float and do nothing.
You look up, and your mockery stops at the lump in your throat. The float moves of its own accord; it is just three wooden platforms decked in foreign red flowers, but you know it is why you were left here. In a frightening moment you almost drop to your knees (an impulse the you-before-the-wood would not have recognized). Then the band sees you looking.
There are five of them, all dressed alike, in black uniforms much cleaner than anyone else in the parade—cleaner than you, for that matter. The drummer keeps his rhythm briskly, but he is as disaffected as the rest. Only the bandleader looks back at you with any intention. When the parade grinds to a halt twenty yards away, he may not have spoken, but it was as certainly at his command as one can be certain of anything here. He is fair, fair, fair, and the only thing about him paler than his skin is his hair. His turned-up nose is oddly familiar. Perhaps you had a love long ago—as a child maybe—and that child-love had such a nose. Oh. He is talking to you.
“Come here.”
You do not move. Can not? Do not, at any rate. The whole parade is watching, and you wish you were not in a silly little nightdress. Who let you go out in this weather? Who gave you the nerve to look him in the eyes and not move, like a cat that will not be coaxed? The leaves are drifting over your ankles. There could be spiders in them, if any creatures stir in this wood besides the two of you.
He extends a black-gloved hand, imperious. “Come here.”
One of the men behind him on the float shrugs, fidgets, mutters, “Poor kid,” like he can’t handle the stillness anymore, and it is that gesture that breaks the spell and drags you forward. The bandleader lifts you onto the float, one hand in yours and one hand under your shoulder blade, like a waltz. “I’m so cold,” you say instead of introducing yourself, and he breathes a laugh instead of letting go.
You see the chair at the top of the float (the throne?) just as he snaps back into charge. Energy, or its nearest counterfeit, comes over the marchers; they surge around the float as he gives orders: “Bring it—yeah, bring it here. Don’t crush them. I said—!” A young lady in a black color-guard suit hurriedly gives you a bouquet of the same dark flowers covering the float. You curtsy—how quickly you’ve learned the movements of this place! Her smile falters and she is gone in the crowd. “Look at me,” he says. It is not an order. Between his hands is a black and white sash. If you were examining the moment from outside, you might wonder why you cannot remember if you had a family but you still know that sash looks like the one the mother wears in Mary Poppins.
Your lips follow the block letters soundlessly. “Miss Black Parade.”
“Oh,” you begin. This couldn’t possibly be for me. Which is the coward’s way to say I don’t want this.
He does not let you be a coward. You are christened Miss Black Parade to a hollow smattering of applause and deposited in the chair. You wipe your eyes, then wipe them again. The parade rolls forward.
The trees grow sparer, but the scent of smoke, once just an idea suggested by the stumps, grows thicker. It lies between your fingers and in the ridges on the roof of your mouth. The youngest member of the band leans in. “It might help if you wave,” he says usefully. “You’re supposed to wave.” There has been no one in sight forever, but you wave, and you do feel a little better.
Perhaps the parade travels for miles and miles, or just round the corner. However long the journey, you do meet others on the way, other spectators drawn into the spectacle. An old man with a heavy jaw. A pair of matronly women who do not look at anyone but each other. One tiny wisp so barely-there you think it might get blown away with the leaves (this last does not have to march, scooped up by the girl with the bouquet). None of them are crowned anything or invited onto the float, and the bandleader looks upon them mildly but without interest.
At long last, the dead leaves and the dirty ground give way to a cracked street and a picture-book city crowding the foot of a high tower. Here, you think, we might get a proper audience! But no. Apparently, this is home. As the parade winds toward the tower, it sloughs off marchers like groundwater filtering through sand. They disappear and draw their curtains, and the city looks no fuller when the float rolls to a stop unaccompanied, having dropped off a hundred inhabitants, than it did from the entrance.
“Do you have somewhere to go tonight?” the bandleader says; the first he’s spoken since investing you with your dread honors.
“Of course I don’t!” A harsh, dry laugh rips from you, quite by accident.
He is not hurt. “Yeah, I thought not.” You take his offered arm. “Mama will let you stay if I ask.” The cobbled steps to the tower door are warm underfoot, which only makes the rest of you colder. He smiles. It almost reaches his hollow eyes. “Big day tomorrow.”
“Why?”
“Your second parade.”