Imagine waking up with a back that feels like your spinal column was wrapped in barbed wire harvested on the hottest day of summer. All your joints have the same burning feeling, only a few degrees cooler by dint of having less there to hurt. The chill of winter doesn't do anything to help; if anything, it makes the burning worse by adding the sensation of ice crystals stabbing inside of that to the mix. You'll never know if that's what it really is or if it's your sense of metaphor taking artistic license with the pain, but it sure as hell feels accurate.

Imagine this is every day of your life, in various degrees from 'survivable' to 'I wish I'd gotten into painkillers so I'd have a dealer for days like this'.

You learn to consider it a good day when your legs don't randomly give out on you, because it means that you probably won't have to go to the hospital for a new set of stitches to serve as precursor to a new scar to add to the rest of the collection. Still, you can't predict when a joint will slip out of place with that telltale pop, giving you a limp for a few hours before it slips back into position and gives people fresh excuses to call you a liar, and popping the lesser ones out of their locks ups are as ritual as most people would treat washing their hands.

It still doesn't stop the looks when you spend about a minute making sure all your knuckles are in working order.

Then, once you've gone through all that, add on mental illness. ADHD, anxiety, depression, and PTSD – now in two fresh funky flavors of hell to wake you up in a cold sweat at three in the morning. Your own brain hates you and won't hesitate to tell you, either by shoving you down the staircase of an emotional down spiral or taking away your ability to do even the simplest of tasks. There's even a good chance that the depression is actively making your body heal slower than a normal person's. There's no question that between the four of them that you're not getting any recovery time from sleep, seeing as you're living on the sleep schedule of the damned.

That's my life as a disabled person. Or at least, it was, because I'm pretty sure I'm dead now.

Actually, I'm very sure I'm dead now, not only because my head is kind of… not really looking like a head right now. More like the aftermath of those watermelon smashing things you see in anime beach episodes, but with ice chunks from the icicle that took me out scattered in between the organic stuff.

That's probably another sign that I'm dead, I suppose. Everyone else here that I'm 99.99% are still living are showing the appropriate amount of freak out for the situation of 'sudden messy death literally right next to me' while all I can do is look down at my own corpse and sigh over a video game I'll never get to play.

This is what I get for treating myself. Buy myself some video games for the first time in forever and die randomly in the street before I get to play Pokémon Moon. Nice.

I mean, dying wasn't that big a surprise. I'd been dodging bullets my entire life, except for the time I didn't, and even then, I hadn't died. Come close to bleeding out and had my heart stop a couple times, but nothing had stuck. Same time with the time I'd almost drowned and the time that I'd been left to walk home in an extreme blizzard. Bad falls, illness, beatings, starvation, food poisoning, exhaustion… hell, I'd even done the 'icicle to the head' thing before.

That was my life. I'd get hurt and collect scars, but dying… dying wasn't part of the picture. Even my own dalliances with 'l'appel du vide' had never gone anywhere, if mostly because of promises made and an inherent dislike of pain. Maybe that was the only kind of luck I had; not dying and not taking any injury bad enough to keep me glued to a wheelchair or respirator for the rest of my life.

But if it was luck that had kept me alive for the last nineteen years, it only took one look at the scene here to know that it had finally run out. One rapidly cooling corpse, sprawled in the late December slush like a puppet with its strings cut, what was left of its head twisted around owlishly while one outstretched hand still gripped the cheap plastic bag that held the new Nintendo 3DS I would never get to play.

So far as 'ghostly regrets' went, it was kind of lame but… it was also kind of funny. The first time I'd been brained by an icicle, Pokémon had been the immediate second concern after thoughts of my immediate death. Say what you would about the relative intelligence of a child willing to stand directly beneath the icicle they were trying to knock down, but dedicating what they thought were their final hours to defeating the Elite Four should have counted for something.

Now, I wouldn't even have the chance to try.

I sighed again as I sat down next to my corpse, kicking at a chunk of ice as I went. Or I would have, if my foot could actually interact with it.

So what do that make me? A legitimate ghost or the last spark of electricity shuffling through what was left of my limbic system? The fact that my 'world' was beginning to take on that bizarre high speed slowness I associated with PTSD nightmares and daylight disassociation as it lost its colors and sound – there was still something of both left, but a desaturation a few levels better than greyscale and the sound of an overwhelming bass beat from underwater wasn't exactly better than nothing – didn't exactly narrow down the field of possibilities.

And if I was a ghost, what was the afterlife going to be? Was there even one to go to? I'd lost my taste for religion years ago, but there was a small part of me that had always approached the subject with fear. Would it be hell? Would it be heaven? Would it be an eternity of that empty white waiting room that I had that nightmare about when I was fourteen?

Or would it just be nothing, a complete cessation of everything I was? A consciousness snuffed out like a candle – bang! –, gone as if it had never been to begin with?

"Thinking back on the woes of a life wasted?"

It was English – or something that I registered as English – but the voice speaking it wasn't human. No human had a voice that sounded like someone had punched out a stained glass window and assembled the shards into words that had just as much visible color and tangible sharpness as proper sound.

Take it from me; if you heard a voice like that talking to you, you would do anything to run the other way without looking back at whatever it belonged to. That's the rule for dealing with these sort of things; you never look at it. Not once, not twice, and certainly not three times.

The smart part of me told me not to turn around. Unfortunately for me, it was the stupid part that was in charge of reflex decisions.

So, like an idiot, I turned around.

It wasn't human. That had been readily apparent from the voice alone, but there's always that expectation that if you're talking to something, it's something that looks like you.

This – this thing had taken that expectation and twisted it. Sure, it had the approximate look of a human, but it was like an extradimensional being's first exposure to humanity had been a Jhonen Vasquez comic and had built its avatar off of those specifications.

The result was something too thin and too pale to be human, with fingers that curved and curled like talons and dark clothes that hung off of its body like it was an undersized fashion dummy. The hair might have passed for a semi-standard goth look on anyone else, but the inky black with the purplish highlight didn't play well with the paper tones of its skin and mask, only adding another level to the unreality of its appearance.

If there was a face behind that blank smiling mask, I didn't want to see it. Not when the needle-like black teeth glistening in the 'mouth' were parted in the sort of anticipatory smile I associated with starving dogs.

It flung out its hands, letting the black webbing hanging from its wrists fly out to the sides. "So how's life after death treating you, Delainey? Having fun being free of all that pain?"

It stretched the syllables of my name, putting a special emphasis on what was supposed to be a silent 'e' and my fist clenched involuntarily. I hated that particular mangling of my name, especially in the mouth of someone who clearly knew that fact.

"Ooo, angry. Angry is good, angry means you're still moving," it said as it stepped to the side with only the slightest tap of its 'shoes' on the pavement. No interaction with the slush or the snow, but I doubted we were really there anymore. "Well, not literally, seeing as you're dead."

Anger finally overrode uncertainty. "What do you want?"

"What does anyone want?" It closed the space between us in all that time it took me to blink, its mask suddenly pressed up against my face, providing a view of its empty eyes that I'd never wanted. "To be entertained."

I stepped back and it giggled.

"And now it's back to being the quiet one. See, that's why I did this. You need –"

And now anger was back. "What. You did this? This?" I pointed down at my corpse. The blood around it had faded to a snow-paled pink, but it was still a piece of color in this faded world that didn't belong to the creature. "You killed me for kicks?!"

"Of course. I got bored of you and, really, you were nothing special in the grand scheme of things," it said as casually as someone would have explained why they had thrown away an old toy. "Think about it; you don't do anything. It's just day in day out, grey grey grey slice of life. If I wanted that, I'd just watch an anime. Be more colorful at the very least. But then I was like, 'why not try something new with this, since I own the rights?' I suppose you could consider it a reboot. Like when Marvel turned Patsy Walker from teen rom-com into a superhero."

"Nobody owns me–!" The thing made a gesture and my mouth clicked shut against my will.

It leaned back against thin air like it was a wall and gave me what was clearly an unimpressed look despite not altering anything more than the angle of its head. "Really? You want to argue with a being that can erase you with a thought? Credit for spine, but a mark down for brains."

It came closer, this time at a slower, almost sauntering pace that would have worked better on a body not completely composed of hard angles.

"But, since you're so insistent, I'll make you a deal," it purred. "You're dead. I can make you not dead. Not a zombie – at least not right away, I'll have to consider it for a future event – but properly alive, pulse and all. Heck, I'll even throw in some bonus features as we go along. But there will be certain requirements on your end."

"First, you do things. Anything that remotely would qualify as entertainment. No coasting along unless you're on a boat. Adventure, intrigue… I'll even take filth if you can keep it fresh, but I really don't think you're the type." A fingernail scraped down my cheek, rasping against my skin as it went. "You take relationships too seriously to want anyone even remotely like me near them. Quite telling that you don't have that many, in that respect."

"Second, you don't give up when you have a good reason. I know you don't like to play games you can't win, but I'll give you enough reasons not to lose."

That wasn't reassuring.

"It wasn't meant to be," it replied to my thought. "Anyway, you're free to say yes now."

My jaw finally released, but my stubbornness didn't. "What if I say no?" I asked. "What happens to me then?"

"Nothing."

That seemingly harmless word could only be the lead-up to something nasty.

"Seems like I've picked a savvy one. Yes, nothing will happen to you… ever again." It waved at the faded world around us. "Just this. Forever. Didn't you have nightmares about this exact situation?"

Hah. There was no question that the asshole knew the answer to that question was 'yes'. "Got any other tricks beyond ripping off the Q-Continuum and the White Guardian?"

Its smile turned sharklike with only the slightest incline of its head. "A few. Pray that you never see them... but you might as well be ready for them anyway."

I could have thought about it. I could have weighed my options more carefully. But what was there to weigh? The certainty of this… empty world or an uncertain future that might not be the stuff of nightmares?

I stretched out my right hand without the slightest tremble. He who hesitated was lost.

The smile of its masklike face cracked around the edges to show a wider, even less friendly grin as it completed the handshake.

"Now, let's jump right to it," it said as my washed-out world fell apart like a broken glass, revealing nothing but darkness beyond it.

Somehow, I knew in that moment that I'd made a massive mistake, but before I could get anything more than a stab of regret, I lost consciousness.

Author's Notes

Even the prelude got rewrote! Aah! Now it's twice as long and even more dramatic (and hopefully better quality).

Chronic pain and mental illness both suck – confirmed by person with both.

L'appel du vide – the call of the void, less literally; intrusive thoughts, particularly of the self-destructive variety. See? You learned some French today. Now, instead of 'omelette du fromage', try the grammatically correct 'omelette au fromage'

*Author does not actually speak French. Author simply acquires random bits of trivia like a sticky tape acquires bugs.

If you really want to knock down an impressively sized icicle in one piece, here's protip: do not stand directly beneath it. It hurts and if you survive, you stand an excellent chance of being concussed, mentally rattled, momentarily blinded, or temporarily rendered dumber than you were before you started. The last might lead to breaking into your own house and putting your wet boots on furniture you weren't supposed to wear wet boots on, leading to contention with adults/roommates/asshole parents who probably should have taken you to the hospital instead of yelling at you.