𝐃𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐘, the originals

zero.

Chapter-Zero
dead girl

❝FUCK ME.❞
❝WHAT THE FUCK?❞
❝FUCK HIM.❞

ACT-1, RIBIRTH IN RUINS

           Dead bodies don't lie. They settle, they rest, but they do not lie. They can't. Even if they wanted to, even if every ounce of life that once filled them strained against the finality, tried to reshape the truth into something more palatable, they wouldn't have the strength. The bones settle too deeply into the earth for that, the skin tightens and cools, sealing away the pretense with a rigor that time itself respects. The truth━ugly, raw━has no choice but to ooze from them, slow and relentless, like a wound that refuses to close. There's something almost poetic about it, isn't there? The way the body, so pliant in life, so full of contradictions and misdirections, finds its most honest state in death. No more frantic pulses of the heart to quicken when a lie slips out. No more breath to catch in the throat, betraying an unspoken thought. The body in death is pure truth. Silent, immovable truth. It doesn't have the luxury of excuses, or the frantic scramble to cover its tracks. It simply is, a monument to what has been done, what cannot be undone.

No, dead bodies don't lie. They are the final punctuation at the end of the sentence, the last period that turns every whispered doubt into fact. They shout their honesty with the stillness of their limbs, with the cold, hard slap of their presence. Every bruise, every scar, every untouched wound speaks volumes, louder than any mouth ever could. The living might twist and turn, try to hide the truth in shadows, but the dead... the dead are a mirror held up to the world, reflecting back every ugly detail with merciless clarity.

Dead bodies don't lie. They tell the truth in ways the living never could. They surrender, utterly.

Savannah Mitchell had learned this lesson early. She was only twelve when she first saw the dead stare of her brother, his body swinging gently from the bedroom ceiling, a rope digging into his neck like a cruel hand. She was the first to find him, the first to feel the floor fall away beneath her feet, to hear the silence roaring in her ears. The memory clung to her like a stain, the image burned so deeply into her mind that even now, all these years later, she could still see the way his toes barely touched the floor, still smell the stale air of the room, tinged with the coppery scent of inevitability. It was then that she understood: the dead don't hide their truths. They present them, naked and unavoidable, to the living. They demand to be seen, to be acknowledged for what they are━final evidence to life's most brutal honesty. That day had marked her, shaped her in ways she would only come to understand years later. Death had a way of doing that━of reaching out, sinking its hooks into the living and leaving behind scars that never quite healed. It had taught her to look at the world differently, to see beneath its polished surface to the rot that festered just below. It taught her to listen, not to the words people spoke, but to the silences that lingered between them.

New Orleans━city of the dead, the haunted jewel of the South. To some, it was a place where charm dripped like molasses from the oak trees, where history whispered through wrought-iron balconies and the Mississippi's murmur. To the twenty-three year old, Savannah Mitchell, this city was more than just a collection of haunted corners and crumbling alleyways; it was the very essence of her hatred, pulsing beneath the cobblestones. And that traced back to a single moment━when she was ten, standing frozen in the doorway, staring at the lifeless form of her father. The pool of blood around him had gleamed dark and viscous, swallowing the light, much like the city itself swallowed everything she loved. What could a child hate, after all, but the things that steal away their safe places? For Savannah, New Orleans had stolen everything. Her father's death was not just an event; it was a curse that had wound itself around her soul. Why did she hate New Orleans? Not for its humid nights or the suffocating weight of its past, but because this city had been the silent witness to her loss, to the day her life shattered like glass beneath a hammer. It wasn't just grief she carried━it was betrayal. Betrayal by the city, by the very magic it harbored.