Three Cheers For Sweet Seclusion {Gerard Way} Chapter Twenty-Five: Recalling the Past

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It's your fault... it's your own fucking fault... you've ruined yourself! You've ruined your life -- you've destroyed it!
The yelling. The crying.
Stop it! Stop yelling! Stop -- don't blame me.
I just want to... I just can't. It has to be done. It's not my fault. It's not my fault. I can't bear the burden. I can't...
Someone... who's calling my name?
Stop. Just stop!
Callie!
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"Callie!" Sophie urgently put her hand upon her sleeping friend's cheek, whose eyes had been fluttering slightly as her mind battled for full consciousness and now opened, fully awake with alarm. Her pupils were enormous; that she could even see the crystal blue rings around them caused Sophie's gaze became one of wide surprise. They stared at one another for seconds that seemed to be minutes. "Callie, are you okay?" she finally approached the question timidly.
The flesh of her face was ghostly white against Sophie's hand. Even her lips had lost some coloration. From the blank yet frightened expression, Sophie expected the worst and prepared for the worst, for Callie seemed not to recognize her best friend's face.
She asked again, "Callie, are you alright?" It felt awkward being stared at so blankly for such a long period of time. Finally, Callie's eyes shifted, still with a trace of alarm, absorbing the room around her in a struggle to regain her fragmented composure.
Delicately, she nodded with wide eyes, then eventually found Sophie's concerned gaze above her and just now took note of the palm against her cheek that felt deliciously warm against her chilled skin. "I'm okay," was what she meant to say, discovering that her voice had abandoned her sometime during her slumber.
Sophie interpreted the mouthed message, though, and nodded reassuringly, finally withdrawing her hand from Callie's face, which had become noticeably hollower with weight loss over the past week.
"Was I talking?" she desperately managed to scrape up a whisper and cleared her unpleasantly sticky throat afterward, fighting for authority over her own vocal chords.
Cautiously, Sophie took a seat on the edge of the hospital bed, letting her hand rest on top of the blankets very near to where Callie's lay, pale and frigid from its prolonged idleness. "A little," she answered, "but hardly comprehensible. You were just shaking your head back and forth and mumbled 'no' a couple times."
Callie moved her eyes down and stared at the cream-colored blankets over her stomach for a moment, contemplating her dream and consequently recollecting the actual events. Her dream had been scrambled and foggy, but the theme of the memories still lived all too freshly in her mind.
"Callie," Sophie's cautious voice coaxed the hospital patient's attention to her, "what were you dreaming about?"
Silence was the lingering, uncomfortable reply, accompanied by slight eye contact that only lasted a moment before worriedly falling downward. Wishing that Sophie had not inquired, Callie shook her head soon and pressed her lips together, as if sealing off her knowledge of the dream from Sophie. Sophie had been chewing on the inside of her cheek, but frowned now, although she had half-expected Callie not to explain her nightmare, quite understandably.
"Maybe later we can talk. It might help to discuss what's on your mind, you know?" she suggested as helpfully as possible with a tender tone, but Callie hardly provided any reaction.
Eyes still fixed onto a focal point away from Sophie, Callie inwardly wondered if any discussion of the sort would ever occur. Night terrors were not a choice conversation topic.
The last two years of her life had been spent withdrawing the honest part of herself from the world around her, especially Sophie, and keeping the story of her memories reclusive. It seemed that she had recently disclosed a considerable amount of the painful truth behind why she was how she was; Sophie, Frank, and Gerard all possessed more knowledge of her background than she ever had anticipated anyone would have -- anyone besides herself and the other select few who were directly involved in the described history, that is.
Yet, despite how much they knew, there was still so much about Callie they could never have predicted from the puzzle pieces of her twisted life that she had given them to fumble with. After all that she had already revealed to them regarding who she was now and who she had been then, she knew that the act of giving them the rest of the missing pieces of memory would not be the hardest part; it would be living with them afterward.