Winter Times | an ejen ali fanfic

2 | Forgotten

Ali is immortal, but he was not immune to death. Like all other Supernatural, he had a weakness. A fatality forgotten by time, a dying race hidden amongst the midst of their kind.

Alicia was almost certain that fire would be his undoing. But for weeks, she'd watch Ali start fires with no flinches, run through flames to save a dying animal. Icy blood ran in his veins, but they were not destroyed by its opposing element.

Did she want to kill him? It was her responsibility to protect mankind from the Supernatural, but what good would it do? Ali wasn't harboring any ill intentions, nor possessing the gal to even commit the slightest of crime. But he'd lived hundreds of years. He was breathing warm, fresh air, running on fertile soil before her grandparents even met.

Every crime he committed would be buried with time.

Now, watching Ali sit alone in the nights, back faced from the fires, she didn't see him as the person she thought of him to be. Not the cowardly, selfish Ali; just an immortal, who's lived through the history textbooks she read when she was younger.

"Hey, Alicia?"

Alicia looked over from sharpening her knife. She saw him staring at the Enchanted Sword, both their reflections reflecting on the icy surface. He looked up to her silhouette, basked in the warm light of the fire.

She set her knife down. "Yeah?"

"You've been studying about Supernatural, right?" Ali sheathed the blade. "Have you ever read about something called Nevermore?"

"Nevermore?" Alicia repeated, frowning. "No. Nothing's coming to mind. What is it?"

"It's nothing," Ali said. "Just something I remembered."

He remained in silence, even until Alicia finally curled up to sleep, huddled up by the cinders of fire.

When she was awake, he was still there.

And he hadn't moved one inch.

* * *

Ali could still remember the day he lost it all.

At a young age, his life was perfect. He wasn't the brightest, but they weren't in poverty, his parents dotted all over him, and he had an amazing uncle to turn to whenever he wanted to sneak out for some honey cakes.

All of that will change, but Ali was too young to notice. Now that he's older, he began to see cracks in his perfect life. His mother would return weaker and weaker, and his father began to spend more time with her. His uncle also never returned, his absence standing out during her burial.

That's when he realized something that he should've seen years ago.

No one loved him for him, only for the sake his mother.

His father left days after his mother died, abandoning Ali in the cold, silent house. He remembered waking up from his bed, shivering from the snow, searching for his father only to find an empty bedroom and an unlit chimney.

He remembered his distraught, his fear that creeped up his mind. In his desperation, he escaped the house, trudging through waist-deep snow to look for his father that would never return. He remembered his tears frozen into ice, plastered onto his cheeks. He remembered his body going numb, skin turning purple with cold, then he finally collapsed.

By some miracle, he survived. No—he did die, just given life as a new species, a new being that did not age.

An immortal that would see the world die, an immortal whose heart was frozen in ice. This was new life now, but why was he still so sad?

The sadness never left him, even as he's smiling. He met new friends, on average terms with other Supernatural. The humans thought of him as their own, and as did the Supernatural. Through the years, he'd met many of them, and seen most of them die with time, or by other means.

"What's the point of living?" he'd asked a Succubus, who's been lost for years, never yearning for the company of a man. Her name was Dos, if he could remember correctly.

Dos shrugged. She was discriminated by other Succubi for her distaste for romance and the company of men.

"This isn't living," she said. "If anything, it's surviving. Living is only when you feel as you're worth being alive."

"But what if I don't want to survive?" Ali glanced at her, who turned to meet his gaze. "What if I want to die?"

If the sentence came from a human child, most adults would have tried to cheer him up. But immortals had lived countless years, in spite of their appearance. Some may well be older than others even if they were in the shape of a child.

Dos hummed, drumming her long, sharp nails on the cliff they sat on. "Then you go to humans," she answered. "They despise our kind. Any kind of us. They will find ways to kill you without hesitation."

"They don't see me as Supernatural." Ali's expression deepened into a frown. "I look human, they said."

"Supernatural?" Dos frowned, mirroring his distressed expression. "Is that what they're calling us?"

"Only for decades," Ali confirmed. "They've started a new group to hunt us down. I think their name's MATA, or something like that."

If anything, Dos seemed to flash a paler complexion, which was incredible.

"Why?" she demanded, more frightened than outraged. "We've done nothing to them."

"They think we're disrupting nature."

"That is the single most biased thing that I've ever heard!" she raged. "We were here first. They were just too stupid to realize our existence."

"It's just humans," Ali comforted her, shrugging. His eyes were fixed onto the horizon, where a glorious forest used to be, now a growing village smelling of smoke and meat. "They'll die out someday."

Instead, humans stayed around for the next few centuries.

But somewhere, around the road, where had he forgotten he was once a human?