A Million Deaths

-Immortality isn't always so beautiful to you, is it?-

I. The First

The mortal way, you'd chosen that subtle gleam of a dagger and tore it into your veins, ripping the blood and tissue and ensuring your death would be swift as it was painful. You'd gone up the river instead of across and it'd worked, you supposed, though by the end of it, in between the healing of your fatal wound and the questions running through your head, you couldn't tell if it hurt more to be saved or to experience true death for just that one second.

II. The Second

The pills.

Those tiny pills that you swallowed at once to see if it hurt more, because this was enough and you wanted to just go to sleep and die already. You hadn't felt anything at all, just a drowsiness that swept you away so close and yet never close enough. You'd grasped blindly for that darkness even as the light kept on pulling you back, always pulling you away from where you longed to be. You'd cursed and screamed and struggled to stay dead even as your body revived your heart, set your veins filling with blood.

III. The Third

The axe had been painful, coming down on your neck and snapping it clean off. You thought it would've been impossible for your body to recover, and it would've been had Watari not interfered with his science and sewed you back together again.

Sewed like the puppet you were to Muraki.

IV. The Fourth

Suffocated under those shadows that buried you, smothered you and it felt so much like how it should've been. With nothing but darkness and cold empty space. But your lungs refused to collapse and your brain refused to shut down. It should've been you in that hospital, should've been your heart they were trying to pump faster…

Should've, but wasn't because Tatsumi exhausted himself trying to kill you.

You hated him, for not being able to finish his job and for piling that guilt on you.

V. The Fifth

Didn't exist, because you just couldn't die.

Couldn't erase the heartbreak and the pain and the sight of those amethyst eyes being consumed by a raging fire.

So you live, if only just to spite the man who deserted you for death.