It burned. Oh, how it burned. Bubbling and boiling just inside her skin, itching to get out. She wanted the red inside her slashed across his body. She wanted a masterpiece ripped from his throat, she wanted him to feel the pain she felt.
She looked at him the way a lioness looked at a baby antelope, like it was easy prey. The tears and cries of the people around her crashed together in a see of blue and black and blinding white swirling together in an endless vortex, but he was silent. He was the deadly white waiting to be filled.
She herself was the black, it might as well have been her body being lowered into the ground. The roar in her ears as blood rushed through her just for a moment drowned the noise of the world, and she saw the red, the tee, explosive red. The volcanic death devouring everything it touched, destroying the world around it.
She was in front of him before she was aware she moved, and her hand curled into a fist. She crushed her ring covered fingers into his throat before either knew what she was doing. The force of the blow knocked him over, and she hit him over and over and god she wanted to hear him screaming but he didn't.
"It's all your fault!" She sobbed, hitting him again and again.
"I know," he whispered, and she didn't hesitate in smacking him because he had no right to be able to say anything when he drove her best friend, her other half, to suicide. She didn't stop, even when they tried to pull her off him. Her hands continued to hurt him until he stopped moving, and her sobs prevented her from seeing.
He never pressed charges.
He never got the chance to.
Two days later she had joined her best friend, leaving behind her shell, as she put it in her note.
Two deaths hung on his head, his feet dragging as he walked. His chin practically touched the dirt. His eyes hadn't looked up since the news of his sister's suicide. Even if he never said it, even if she never did, he knew everything she did to herself was because of him, and what he did. It wasn't surprising when they buried his body as well, not a month past the suicide of his sister.
No one was shocked to find that he'd hind himself in his room. He had no funeral, instead was just quietly cremated and forgotten, for centuries.
But Fate is as cruel as she is lazy. Why create a new lifeline for everyone when it's much easier to just recycle the old ones?
This time he was the first to commit, his soul once more marred by his own hand, his body destroyed by his mind.
His attacker, reincarnated as his lover, fell next. The misery never seemed to escape her soul, the sadness haunting her like the plague.
His sister, fell last this time, the order reversed. Guilt and self hatred pulled and tugged at her muscles and nerves until her fingers finally squeezed the trigger.
They meet in the afterlife, after every reincarnation, after every miserable twist Fate throws their old story, and meet with bowed heads. He does not speak, for he cannot. Death has tied his hands, taking his greatest evil and ripping it from him, he couldn't speak.
His sister couldn't hear him if he did speak. She was the innocent, and Death protected her like a child, blocking her from all the evils in the world, she couldn't hear.
Her best friend was blissfully unaware of their plights. She was the victim of Despair in every life, but in the afterlife Death protected her from the cruelty of the world, she couldn't see. So they walked together, souls entwined by tragedy, through the fields of the damned and the halls of favored.
They were not welcome anywhere. No one wanted to cripples, the rejects, no one wanted those Fate had picked to use over and over.
There were no heroes in their story, no villains either. There were no happily ever afters, no 'once upon a time' because in every generation Fate plucks their souls up and gives them new bodies and new lives doomed to the same story, same ending as always.
Fickle Fate had a sense of humor, too. How she loved to watch their souls struggle to just this once make something different, just this once make it through a lifetime. Her laughter seared their ears, and he envied his sister for being spared from it.
They were the definition of humanity though. Helpless, crippled being controlled by a higher power and governed by evil. How terrifying.
He could never tell the others his idea, but he was certain that they were special somehow. Nothing seemed real outside their triad, and no matter how many times he killed himself, he was convinced that he was unique, important.
He never learned that Fate's threads revolved around their well knit pattern.
He never figured out that they were the template for her to follow.
He never discovered the copies of himself in other souls.
He never got the chance to see what he had created in his plight.
He was too busy dying.
Drowning, currently.
Letting the waves toss him around like a rag doll.
Surrendering his body to the icy blue ocean.
Restarting the cycle.
His funeral would come soon.
Then another death.
Not long after, the final death.
They would return to the afterlife, exhausted, without energy.
He would think.
He would come so close to the truth.
But he would never quite grasp it.
He was just the basic model.
He was never intended for brilliance.
