We cancelled the tour.

You can’t go on tour when your front man was… not… present…


I decided to finally get my own apartment. It was down the street from the… Fuentes brother’s household… and I had finally concluded that I needed to be in my own place. I didn’t particularly enjoy sleeping alone, but it hurt like hell to be in that house. The amount of pain and misery that existed within the walls of that damned place was incomparable. Mike didn’t know what he was going to do with the house, yet; it has only been three days since…


I cringed. I thought that I was broken after what had happened with Spencer, but this was much, much worse. Things with the Spencer situation were easy compared to the way things were with the Vic situation.


Even thinking his name was like a stab in the chest. This was real. This was all too real. Everything that had happened that day was real. This was not in my head. This was not my imagination.


I stared at my reflection in my bathroom mirror, lightly tracing the bruises on my neck. There were four severe bruises on the left side of my neck and one severe bruise on the right, just below my chin, indicating where Drew Sanders’ fingers had gripped me.


The combination of numbness and pain was unbearable. I didn’t understand how I could feel everything and nothing simultaneously. I didn’t get nightmares anymore because I never slept. I’d like to say that having Spencer back in my life was helping, but I could barely acknowledge that because everything was turned to shit, anyway. I also didn’t get terrifying visions during the day anymore, because that terrible vision had turned into a reality. Vic being… gone… was a huge… wake up call. I had been deteriorating from the inside out, horror and terror was everything that I had been becoming, but then this hit. It knocked me out of my agony over a girl, over loneliness, over stupid nightmares. Because this was the real fucking nightmare. It was so real and horrific; it was such a slap in the face: it reminded me that there were so many other people hurt, and that I couldn’t be the only one depressed. I just wished that I could have taken Vic’s advice in the first place; I just wished that I didn’t need this as my wake up call. Maybe if I had been more openly appreciative for him, this wouldn’t have happened…


The only good thing that has come out of this was the revelation the Drew Sanders was real. Yes. He was real; he had only tricked Spencer into insanity. This was good for her and for me because she was going to be discharged from the mental hospital and acquitted of all charges, and then she would be with me. She would move into my new apartment with me, and we would face this new battle together.

In an ideal world, I guess that would make me happy.


But this was far from an ideal world.


Drew Sanders was indeed real, and that was good. The problem with that, however, was that it wasn’t really a good thing. Him being real created a plethora of different problems. Now we knew how easy he could slither away from the law; hell, he has been doing it for over twenty years. I hated to say that things were almost easier when he was just in Spencer’s head… when Spencer was the real killer. Because then this wouldn’t have happened. Vic would still be here…


I tried my best not to be sour towards Spencer, but I couldn’t help but be bitter to myself. Had she been worth all of this? I internally kicked myself for this thought, because, besides Mike and Tony, she was all I had left.


I choked on my own sobs. Life was terrible. Life did terrible things. It ripped away the person you knew you couldn’t live without. And then it gave that person back again, only to tear away someone else just as important. I could never win in life. Nobody could ever win.


Because for all we knew, Vic was dead.


Dead.


Burnt to a crisp. Ash in the insignificant Earth. Smoke rising into the toxic atmosphere.


I dragged myself out of my apartment. It was a chilling building, and I knew I wouldn’t be comfortable here until Spencer was with me. I shook my head again, thinking about the bitch known as life. Things were going to be so good with Spencer, everything was going to be okay, and then BAM! Another terrible thing happens. A thing so terrible, it almost destroyed life itself.


The fans lost an inspiration. The band lost its lead singer. I didn’t even want to contemplate the future of the band because, fuck, there was no future without him. We could and would never go on as Pierce the Veil without the man who came up with the name itself. It wasn’t right. Nothing was right.


My legs had made their way to the Fuentes’ house. My legs did that a lot; they took me to places without me having to think about where I was going. I just sort of existed. Not really thinking or feeling. Except I thought a lot and felt a lot, too. I guess I could blame my pills for this effect.


Everything was just so fucked up.


“Hey,” Tony nodded at me when I walked into Mike’s house. I smiled weakly. Mike didn’t acknowledge me, but I didn’t expect him to. Mike was a statue. He never moved. I don’t think he ever blinked, either. He just stared into space in the same spot on the couch all day for the past three days.


I didn’t blame him.


“Did they call yet?” I murmured to Tony, sitting down next to him. He shook his head. We were expecting a call from the San Diego Police Department; they were going to give us the details of the forensics report of the burnt van. It was hard to identify remains amongst the ashes, so they wanted to be thorough, and we wanted to know every finite detail.


We sat quietly for several minutes. We didn’t really need to say anything. All of us were thinking the same thing. Speech was unnecessary. That was why I was utterly surprised when Mike opened his mouth to talk.


“It should be me,” he moaned.


“Mike, what are you talking about?” I furrowed my eyebrows.


“Yeah, seriously, dude,” Tony mumbled.


“I was the one who was digging. Vic just reported back to Spence because they were closer… I should be the one who’s fucking ashes is—”


“Mike, no. Please don’t say things like that,” I cut him off, pleading him not to put things like that in his head.


“You don’t understand, Jaime,” he accused.


I waited.


“After Spencer’s, well, you know…” Mike began. I haven’t heard him speak this much in over forty-eight hours, so I let him continue. “You were really bad, buddy,” Mike looked at me sadly. “You weren’t yourself. And, hell, we missed her, too.” Where was he going with this? “I was stubborn and overbearing. I was right, but I was stupid. I knew she wasn’t who she thought she was… so I did some research.”


“By some research, he means a lot,” Tony added.


“Yeah, well the bastard is good at clearing his name,” Mike muttered. “I’m not going to go into the details, because they don’t matter now. But basically, Jaime, I wanted to see you better, and I wanted Spencer to be free, so I figured out that Drew Sanders was an actual person. I sent Vic to her to talk to her about things. It took several visits for her to be convinced, which resulted in her being terrified for us once again. For good reason, too,” Mike explained, his tone sour at the end. “It was a giant mess. But that was why she was doing so well! Because she knew she wasn’t really hurting us. She didn’t even kill her own family. Drew Sanders did, making it look like an accident. And the night Spencer had her really bad fit before trying to commit, he had drugged her. I searched her medical records, which Drew Sanders had tampered with, of course, and saw that they had found so much shit in her system,” he said extremely enthusiastically. He sounded like a little kid, but also very serious. “And we were going to tell you… the day Vic took you to see her… and then…” Mike’s voice failed him at this point, but I understood what he was trying to say. They had worked hard to try and relieve Spencer, which would, in turn, relieve me…


A terrible, excruciating sensation of guilt overwhelmed me. They were digging to try and help Spencer for my sake. Everything went back to me, and it was killing me slowly. I just wish the killing part would speed up a little.

My thoughts were interrupted with the home phone ringing. Mike sat rigid, and Tony was the one who jumped up to answer. I guess you could say that Tony was the sane one of the group. He was the one who kept the peace. He was the one who would always remind all of us of our jobs in the band (back when the band… existed…?). When I would slip deeper and deeper into depression, when Vic would anguish over trying to help me, when Mike would fuck around being himself, Tony was there to the rescue. He always reminded us what really mattered. He always brought us together. And, now, with Vic gone, he made sure to keep us alive. He made sure that no one else went down.


The phone rings dragged out painfully, like everything was in slow motion. I carefully studied Mike. His hands were shaking. Well, so was his entire body. I knew he needed a cigarette to take the stress away, but he wouldn’t dare go near a lighter. We all wouldn’t. We all cringed at the smell of smoke. We all clenched our eyes shut at the sight of fire.


“Hello?” Tony finally answered, putting the phone on speaker. My heart beat out of my chest.


“Hello, is this the Fuentes residence?” a professional voice sounded on the other end of the line.


“Yes, this is,” Tony said.


“Hi, I hope you are doing well,” the man said politely. We all scoffed. “My name is Dr. Overui, and I am calling to inform you of the results of the various forensic tests that we analyzed involving—”


“Go on!” Tony interrupted. We were all impatient. Impatient and sick. We just wanted to hear what we already knew and be done with it. Besides, we had a fucking funeral to plan. We didn’t have time for introductions.


“Yes, sir. To our surprise, we actually did not find a mass of human remains in the debris,” the man said.


“What does that mean?” Tony asked carefully. Mike perked back up, and we all leaned on the edge of our seats, intensely trying to decipher what this man was talking about.


“The problem was that there was not a sufficient amount of human remains to verify a body,” he said. Our hearts sunk.


“So…?” Tony probed.


The man sighed into the phone. “Here are a few percentiles: The results of the analysis show us that there was only a thirty percent match of the remains to anything human. This thirty percent includes various pieces of hair that is irrelevant to the case, meaning the calculation is not very accurate. We cannot effectively match that thirty percent to one human body. Then, fifty percent of the remains are mere mechanical, which involve the structure of the van, obviously.”


“What about the other twenty percent?”


“Room for error,” the man said blandly. “Bottom line, we don’t know if this was murder or just arson. Meaning there may or may not have been a body in the remains of the van,” he explained.


“How do we find out?”


The man sighed into the phone again. “I’m afraid that I am just a doctor. The police will have to answer that question. In the meantime, Victor Vincent Fuentes has been reported to Missing Persons until further investigation. Have a good night,” he said, hanging up the phone.


Tony slowly set the phone down onto the couch next to me while we all stared at each other in wonder.



There was one thing that we didn’t know: Was Vic alive, or was he dead?


And then there was one thing that we did know: Drew Sanders was up to some serious shit, and it was going to hurt. Everything was going to hurt until he stopped breathing himself.


===========

A nasty taste filled my mouth as I imagined the latter option of what we didn't know. If Vic was dead... if he was confirmed dead... I don't even know what we would do. I guess we would live everyday in his memory, trying our best to remember him, to never forget him. That was what you were supposed to do, right?

"And if you don't find me on the front page, find a way to say that you saw me.
And if you don't find me in a movie, find a way to say that you knew me"

========

Notes

So, do you guys hate me yet? >:)

wHaT iS gOiNg To HaPpEn?

So I was listening to PTV while I was writing this, and I felt rather morbid. Oops.