REINCARNATE

39: The Irony of Life

A/N: I, apologize in advance.

Also, this chapter is sort of graphic so you got that mild gore warning.

Y/n inhaled sharply as fear rippled through her stiff body, her eyes squeezed shut and her hands clammy as she warred with the torrent in her mind.

'Wake up'. She clenched her teeth, biting down hard enough to draw blood from her lips as she fought but fear had her deep in its clutches.

Her skin tingled with the sensation of chilling, needle-like rain and her ears howled with wind that wasn't really there. Sweat beaded her forehead as she stifled her cries and suppressed the churning sickness in her stomach. Nightmares were unique to y/n, they haunted her waking mind like vengeful ghosts seeking closure. She only ever saw the same people, heard the same voices; felt the same pain.

"Why did you get to live?" A chorus of voices sounded in her mind, angry and accusing.

Trembling, y/n opened her eyes, the quicker she played along the quicker it would be over but no matter how many times she attempted to acclimate and adapt to the storm the bolt of terror and guilt tore a fresh wound through old scars relentlessly. Tears began to wet her cheek as she forced herself to face them, their broken bodies displayed like taxidermies in a museum.

"I'm sorry." Her lips moved without sound but the plead was loud and clear in her expression as mocking laughter responded.

"It's okay." Mae's sickly sweet voice cooed, her face wide and blank as streams of thick mud flowed from her lips. Her neck was twisted grotesquely, the clear indicator of how she met her end.

"You may have lived but you still pulled the short straw." Osamu cackled, his hair oddly silver instead of its calm gray. His body was crushed in half, long legs limp and dangling as his toothless mouth lay wide open in raucous laughter.

"You're the one who's alone in the end, even Kenta left you." Atsumu ran his hand through his gold bangs, his right arm and left calf missing as y/n cowered from his spiteful gaze.

"Help me." She tried to scream but no words came. Her deepest fear was not having to face those she'd already lost, but losing the people who were with her now. Seeing their faces take the ones who'd been ripped from her life frightened her more than she was willing to admit.

"Why don't you just give up?" Ayano crowed teasingly, her voice echoing from a bloody stump where her head used to be. She reached out with cold pale hands and tried to touch y/n but the latter backed up quickly.

"You promised us." Their voices protruded her thoughts as her breathing began to shallow into rapid gasps.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry." Y/n begged over and over but they were merciless, their hands clawed at her back, her clothes, her skin, trying to steal away the life she harboured within.

Though, strangely enough, Rintarou never appeared. By this she meant both Suna and Nakamura. Their faces have never plagued her dreams but she wasn't complaining, if anything she was grateful her ghosts spared her from facing the one who'd given his life for her.

But it was a difficult struggle nonetheless, because how was one expected to resist when they themselves could feel the pulse of vitality slowly leeching from their body? 

"Do you know the irony of life? It's that no matter how much effort you put into living, it never lasts. In the end, no one escapes the finale that is death."

So forgive me.