Chapter Text
Reigen opened his eyes.
He was greeted by a neat rectangle of sky far above him, the margin between the bordering buildings. The sky was a dusty blue, fragile clouds shifting ever so gently. A bird preened, shuffling its black wings. It was a nice sight—a pleasant surprise, considering he had been fairly sure he had died about seventeen hours ago.
Reigen watched the bird with eyes half-closed. He watched it for a long while, until it bounced into the air and vanished out of sight. He closed his eyes.
Slowly, Reigen pushed himself up. The garbage shifted around him as he moved. He felt very strange—his body wasn’t sending any signals. He couldn’t feel the chill of morning, he couldn’t feel any discomfort or aches from spending the night in a skip. He couldn’t even the blisters on his ankles that had been bothering him for weeks. He held his head in his hands and couldn’t feel his fingers.
Maybe he wasn’t dead?
The doubt wiggled through his subconscious; fuelled not by any evidence, but by the basic feeling that he very much didn’t want to be dead.
Reigen opened his eyes and grimaced. He remembered—…
Well, what he remembered could be summed up very neatly: He remembered dying.
Last night, he had been searching the garbage for an antique he had thrown away before realising how valuable it was. He had taken off his jacket and climbed into the skip, busying himself picking through black bags. At some point he had overheard voices. Two upper-classmen with shaved heads and undersized uniforms had cornered a weak-looking kid with a bowl cut and a voice too quiet to hear. Reigen had ignored them. Maybe he’d intervene if it got violent, but he wasn’t a cop. The next thing he knew, the earth was shaking like an earthquake crashing through, and he looked up to see the bowl-cut kid with shock-white eyes and a wind that whipped around him. The kid floated.
Then, the freaky kid slapped the titanium bat out of one of the thug’s hands—and it hit the skip with the force of a ten tonne truck.
And he...
Reigen ran a hand through his hair, glancing up at the slip of sky above him. He didn’t want to rule out any possibilities. He could still be alive. It could be a miracle, he thought hopefully. It was a nice thought. After all, didn’t he deserve one? His life, as of late, had been a trial. He had been fired, then his business had failed. He had lost contact with most of his old friends. He was nearly thirty and he hadn’t done much with his life—it would be cruel for it to all end now. It couldn’t have.
With that pleasant thought, he pushed himself up, and caught a glimpse of what was below him. He froze.
He stared down into identical, empty brown eyes. He couldn’t break the stare. A coldness spread through him, like he had swallowed ice. Same light, short cut hair. Same tie, same shirt, same—
Reigen regained control all at once and he reeled back, leaping out of the skip and landing unsteadily. The body’s icy white fingers peaked over the side of the metal and he slapped them back inside, leaping up to snatch the roof of the skip, bringing it swinging down. He stared at the closed lid, heart in his throat.
The skip itself was massively warped, the middle of it imploding in a swirl of twisted metal. The door didn’t fit properly any more, hanging over the mangled side. Reigen stared at it. It looked like an evil thing. Slowly, his breathing returned to normal. Breathing was a good sign, wasn’t it? And he’d climbed out of the skip, not… floated through it or something.
Reigen picked up his jacket from where he’d left the night before. It had rained the night before so the jacket looked sodden, but he couldn’t feel the water. He couldn’t feel it at all, and had to do it put it on by sight alone.
He tucked his hands in his pockets and walked quickly back to his apartment. He didn’t feel his feet hit the ground. The bone-deep tiredness that had hounded him for months had vanished, his head felt clearer than it had in years.
Reigen reached his apartment and bounded up the stairs. He hadn’t locked it the previous night, since he could see it from the skip, and the door swung open. His leather shoes shone with water but he left no tracks.
Massive neural damage, Reigen’s brain supplied. He’d heard that victims often didn’t realise they were injured until they saw their own injuries. That would explain the lack of feeling, and the body in the skip was a hallucination? Or maybe this was all a death’s rattle—a sudden burst of energy before he collapsed and died for real.
Reigen wasted no time and headed straight for the bathroom.
He came to a complete halt, staring into the mirror. His reflection stared back. From the neck up, he looked passable, but below that, through the jacket… He untucked his shirt and pulled it up. Was he just injured? Could it just be survivable damage? As if moving through molasses, he picked up an old hand mirror and held it under his stomach.
Reigen’s mind stilled and he moved very slowly, drawing the mirror under the wreckage of himself. He trailed a hand through a busted torso he couldn’t feel. Ruins of flesh which didn’t bleed. Peeking slivers of ceramic-white rib cage.
The cardinal sin of a conman was to believe your own lies. It was something Reigen had kept in check all his life.
He let the mirror slip from his grasp. It felt as if the bottom had dropped out of his world. He stared, unseeingly, at the violent angle of his stomach, at his own killing blow.
Reigen let the shirt fabric fall. There was something stirring in the depths of his emptiness. Something strong that pushed through the shock and burst into the forefront. He clung to it, every muscle in his body tensing, teeth gritting.
Anger.