Nicolas Flint had been dying his whole life. He liked to think he was pretty good at it now. He had a handle on the fact that once he was back, no one remembered that he had died, even if they had seen it, even if they were still covered with his bl...
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The first time Nico died, he was little. He had dropped his stuffed dog, Milo, in the street while crossing it with his mom. She had tried to grab out to him, to grab him before he ran into the street, but Nico had always been fast. Not faster than a car, mind you. Even a decade later, he could still hear his mother scream for him, but what was worse was waking up a few hours earlier and seeing his mom look at him with this confused, blank look, asking him where he had run off to. He watched as this fog lifted from her eyes, and she started yelling at him, telling him he was out way past his curfew. There was still blood on her dress from when she had run to his dying body. No one noticed it, not his sister or dad, when he finally came home.
At some point, he started to linger after each death, watching his body sit wherever he found himself; sometimes, people would react to it, calling hospitals to bury him, and other times, it would just be left to rot under his watchful gaze.
As he lingered eventually, he found himself not alone.
"You're a real pain in our ass, Nicolas Flint," a young woman once told him; she was a Reaper which Nico found easy to believe, considering he had just found himself ripped apart by a werewolf.
"I'm a pain in my ass too," he responded, "Can't you just take me? I'm right here; I'm not fighting you or anything," he said, closing his eyes when she reached for him, but he felt nothing, just the same cold he always felt when he was outside his body.
"Sorry, Nicolas Flint. It seems it's not your time," she said slowly, as if she didn't understand. "I'm unsure if it will ever be your time at this rate."
"I must have the worst luck in the whole world; why do I keep dying?" he groaned, squatting down to the ground, head in his hands. "I wouldn't mind living forever if these weird things wouldn't keep killing me."
"I don't know what to tell you. Maybe they can tell you're unnatural?" she suggested with a slight shrug, "An affront to nature."
"Wow, Tessa, you really know how to make a girl feel special." She shrugged, and Nico felt the pull on his soul before he woke up clutching his chest where his heart had just been eaten.
