Chapters: Stories on Sean & Kaycee

Good Day Part 2

The doctor gave her the bullets. She asked for it when he came out to tell them that the surgery went well and that Sean was stable. Unconscious, but alive.

She didn't know why. She just wanted to have it.

Now, in the darkness of her room, she examined it in her blood-stained hand. The metallic slugs were cool to the touch. A fascinated numbness settled over her as she glared at the contrast of the silver-black bullets and the scarlet red of her hands.

“Kaycee,” A voice called from her bedroom doorway. She looked up, meeting her mother’s tearful gaze. “You need to change, honey.”

She simply nodded, feeling her body move without her consent. Laura turned on the lights, and Kaycee blinked hard as the bright fluorescent filled the room. She walked over to her closet and pulled out a fresh set of clothes, large grey sweatpants and a black tee - Sean’s clothes.

Kaycee trudged into the bathroom and surveyed the damage in the mirror.

She looked like the apocalypse. Her hair was a tangled mess, her eyes bloodshot, and her face blotched with countless tear tracks. She was a walking blood bag - shirt and shorts marred with scarlet stains, hands chalked with dried blood, and knees spattered with red drops.

Sean’s blood.

“You have always been everything I ever wanted.”

Sean’s screams.

“I am most proud of being Sean & Kaycee.”

Sean’s weak touch.

“It’s going to be okay.”

Kaycee threw up. She hurled herself at the toilet and vomited her guts out. There wasn’t much to let out since they didn’t even get a chance to eat in the goddamn diner. Then, without looking at herself again, she ripped off her bloodied clothes and discarded them on the floor. A part of her wanted to burn them on the spot, but the other part couldn’t bear it. They were marked with Sean.

She crumpled in the shower, hugging her knees to her chest as the sobs wracked through her body. It felt like drowning, but perhaps a million times worse because she couldn’t pass out, so she felt every wave of lung-crushing despair and hysteria. She pounded on her heart, begging it to stop breaking. But every time she closed her eyes, all she saw was blood. Blood and Sean.

Why?

Why?

GODDAMNIT WHY?

The blood washed off her body, leaving pinkish trails as they swirled down the drain, ridding her body of the evidence of the day’s events. But she didn’t feel clean. She felt heavy yet empty, as if someone took out all the important parts inside her and replaced them with stones.

It’s not fair.

He is a good person. The best person. He doesn’t deserve this.

I don’t deserve him.

Kaycee screamed, an inhuman cry ripping itself from her throat. If only there were words to describe the agony. If only there were words to describe the horror of it all. It was like waking up from a dream, only to step into a nightmare.

This couldn’t be real. It shouldn’t be.

It will all make sense soon, people had told her. The police would get to the bottom of things, and it will all be okay.

But Kaycee knew, deep in her soul, that it wouldn’t be. No answers, no justice, would ever be enough to make up for the fact that an innocent boy, the best boy, had been shot twice for no good reason. The fact that the boy ready to change the world with his art and his heart is now lying unconscious in the hospital.

Nothing can ever be done, and nothing can ever be said, to make up for the fact that Sean Lew almost died.

You have to be okay, Sean Lew. You promised me you would be. You have to be okay. You have to.

You need to be okay, because I have things to tell you on a good day.

---

It was a case of mistaken identity, the police said.

The guy, some high twenty-year-old, just had an awful breakup with his cheating girlfriend. She had brown hair. Hopped up on alcohol and drugs, he took out his grandfather’s gun and set out to intimidate her with it. He said he never planned on actually hurting her. He would never hurt her; he loved her. But when he saw her standing there with her new guy, he was overcome with pure anger and hate. There he was, mourning the end of their relationship like it was the end of the world. But there she was, laughing and standing in line at some diner, like it was a regular Tuesday.

But it wasn’t her.

He didn’t realize that it wasn’t her until an Asian boy jumped in the line of fire, and the girl let out a scream in a voice he didn’t recognize.

At the time of the shooting, the girl he loved was on the train, cuddling up to her new beau. Unaware that just 6 blocks down, a boy was bleeding out on a diner floor, having taken the bullets meant for her.

It was supposed to be a normal day.

Sean and Kaycee had finished up with their class for the day and went to the diner to shoot a new episode of Sean Lew Approved. They had never been there before. Sean had just passed the place a few times and thought the exterior was cool. He saw that they had some healthy options and suggested they try it out for SLA. They were actually supposed to go two weeks ago, but things came up or they were too tired, so it got pushed back until that day.

Wrong place. Wrong time.

Her best friend took two bullets in the front because they were at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and some heart-broken psycho was too high and saw the wrong thing.

That was a week ago. And Sean still hadn’t woken up.

The past week was a blur, especially the hours immediately after the shooting. Once they arrived at the hospital, the medics wheeled Sean off to the emergency room for immediate surgery. Miya and Cheuk arrived just a few minutes later, followed almost immediately by Laura and Brad. Suddenly, she had two sets of sobbing parents on her hands.

Then, the police came, directed to the hospital by the diner staff. They asked her some questions about what happened. They informed her that the shooter was almost immediately identified - it wasn’t hard to track down a guy who frantically exited a diner with a gun in hand. They came back around two days later, saying that he was going to be charged, asking if she wanted to see him. But Kaycee didn’t.

There were a lot of other people who could stand as witnesses. As much as she loathed the guy with every atom of her being, as much as she wished him a painful life, she knew that hating him wouldn’t get Sean to wake up. And Sean was the only one that mattered right now.

She couldn’t leave him; she’d never leave him.

~~~

Author's Note: Considering making this into a book after NY.