Memento Mori
Description
Forced into a second life, a newborn Revenant must learn to survive and control himself in a harsh world b with blood, suspicion, and uncertainty—all under the watchful (and condescending) eye of his powerful sire.
Rating: Overall with some chapters being marked as Rated M
Warning(s): Mentions of blood and gore, violence, and other mature situations
Notice: This story was originally posted by me on AO3 on October 27, 2013. Do not report this for plagiarism, as the author there and here are (quite obviously) the same author. Also, I will laugh at you. Very hard.
Foreword
On the night of his death, Jaejoong glimpsed an angel.
Lying broken on the pavement, covered in his own blood, he knew he did not deserve such a sight. He hadn’t led the best life or made the greatest choices. He was not headed for a life among clouds and other angels. He knew he was destined to burn.
Burn…burning…his arm burned. Why did it burn?
It felt agonizing. Jaejoong tried to cry out to the angel, but all that came out of his throat was a sick gurgle. Shouldn’t he be going numb? He thought death was about losing all the senses, heart slowing, vision leaving slowly; one deep breath, and a soul belonged to the everafter (or whatever awaited one after death).
He could see his wrist. His vision must have been failing, for he thought he saw a small burst of light right around his wrist, above the tattoo of the nyansapo. It burned, too. He felt as if he were on fire.
Blood trickled out the corner of his mouth, and the pain ceased. Dark shadows crept into his vision. As he lay there, Jaejoong eventually found that he could move his neck. Just a few inches, but it was enough. Breaths coming out ragged, he lifted his head, his lips moving but no words coming from him.
Cry for help. Call out. You want to live, don’t you?
A ringing sounded in his ears, and his head dropped back to the hard concrete. Above him, the angel blinked in and out—it was nothing but a neon sign against a starless sky. A goddamn neon sign would be one of the last things he laid eyes on
He would die in an alley, far from home, and rot there for days until some poor homeless man wandered upon him.
And damn whoever said things would fade to the blinding whiteness of death. He still had his senses. He smelled tar and sewage. The buildings stretched to heights that made him dizzy, even in his last moments. He could still feel the gaping hole in his chest from where the bullet tore through him.
Cats screeched and toppled trash cans, the metal lids crashing and clanging to the ground. A car honked its horn four times. Beethoven’s 9th symphony rose and fell from an open window. Jaejoong briefly wondered who would tell his parents about him, and then he died.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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