I remember Dad telling me to not take advantage of things. To love and hold as much as I can before a time came where I couldn't any longer. In the past I thought he was just being dramatic, what, with his sudden change in morality stemming from Muhammad Ali's passing. He wasn't one to be so poetic until that fateful Friday day when his idols face popped across televisions all around the globe for the wrong reason. I suppose now I understood.

I wasn't sure when the thought popped into my mind, when his voice rang through my ears like a distant echo. But the moment I came through and my eyes snapped open, my body springing up as I take in a large, large inhale of air, my hands raising instinctively to my chest where a burning sensation slowly spread up my throat-- my eyes trail over to a familiar body lying dead on the floor and a pang of realisation struck me to my core. He was dead. 
Some part of me almost thought I was experiencing some kind of astral projection. Like it wasn't really his body I was looking down on but actually my own, the burning in my throat growing heavier by the second. I wasn't sure what it felt like to almost drown, but I guessed this was close enough: my lungs felt heavy as if I'd stopped breathing completely.

Near death experiences. I'd seen it enough in movies and tv shows to know what it entails: your skin losing its pigment, your heart failing you with each passing second. But of course, the way your life changes in just a matter of seconds. One second you're there-- tangible. The next you're simply gone. I imagined if I had one of these experiences it'd feel similar to the one Zack Efron's character endured in Charlie St. Cloud-- just barely clinging to life while he watched it flash before his very eyes, his deepest regrets and sorrows leaving him questioning all he could have done different. Or maybe it'd even be like when Bella Swan almost drowned at the end of New Moon, water slowly filling her lungs. Resuscitated back into consciousness with a heavy chest and trauma weakened limbs she realised that death wasn't what she wanted. Or maybe, more likely, it'd feel like it had in my previous life just moments before it all went dark.

I could only assume that I died in my mothers arms that day she sent me into the future. The version of me that she knew, at least. I couldn't remember much in those last few moments but the sad look in her eyes, the twinge in my chest that felt so strikingly familiar to heart-ache. And then it was lights out. Cold. Only the next time I woke up I had no recollection of what'd happened, no recollection of myself-- of her. I woke up a different person. 

It was happening again. Only instead of being someone different, I was me again.

My senses come back into focus a few seconds later and I'm finally able to take in my surroundings. It's deathly quiet, or maybe it was just the tinnitus in my ears that had me hearing null. The floor beneath me felt so incredibly cold, my legs aching from having collapsed beneath the weight of my body. Soft streams of light filtered in through the mosaic ceiling and I can't help but question how much time had passed-- if any at all. When my memories circulated through my mind like a never-ending record I could've sworn it felt like days. Weeks, even. But then my vision zeros in on that particular stream of light that first caught my attention the moment my eyes opened and my mind finally double takes.

The overseer-- this version of my father was dead. I can't bring myself to care about the the shrill ringing in my ears slowly but surely subsiding, can't bring myself to care about the way my muscles ached as if they were tearing themselves apart little by little, rearranging from the inside. That fateful morning I woke up alone in the forest, my body stricken in pain from the car crash that seemed to have never happened, no dad in sight-- I spent days in anguish that I never got to say goodbye. But somehow... Maybe I was going crazy, or maybe the past version of me was slowly taking over once more. But somehow I felt oddly at peace. My conversation with the overseer moments before the world flashed back into focus rung through my mind like a record on repeat, a mixture of emotions coursing throughout my body as if I'd spent a decades worth long of the six stages of grief in just two seconds. I wanted to say something, to reach out to the man, to talk to him, to have  a conversation-- anything! But I couldn't. In this moment now as I stand still, wide eyed with my hands on my knees, I felt completely incapacitated. It felt like there were two people inside my head, two different sets of thoughts, two different sets of memories, two different hearts.

But then a fidget at the corner of my eye snaps me out of my daze and, when my eyes latch onto a familiar feminine figure hunched by the overseers corpse, everything changes. Whatever internal conflict I was having seemed to dissipate, my senses coming back to me, my body no longer immobilised as an angry scowl spreads across my lips.

 It wasn't until she turned to face me did our eyes finally meet, her usual dark browns now completely darkened into pure blackness. In this lifetime-- the life of clueless Y/N from the southern part of Seoul-- I'd only seen her eyes like this once or twice before. But the better part of me knew better. The black of her eyes were glossed over as if she was vacant, as if she was seeing something that I couldn't. Only I did.

She read my thoughts.

For a moment we just stare at each other, a look of shared shock and confusion surely mirroring across our faces. Being so close to her right now I didn't know what to do. Do I yell at her? Do I question her? Do I blame her for bringing Jennie to the overseer?  I didn't know. But one thing was certain. 

I was pissed. 

Before I can say anything she breaks the silence with a sharp breath of air.

"Y/N... I remember." I watch Olivia's eyes turn from their pitch black hollowed depths into their familiar shade of brown and just stare at her: stare at the way a mixture of emotions seem to split across her face at lightspeed, stare at the way her confused gaze turns into one of pure hot red recognition when she looks right back at me. She breathes.

"I knew it... I knew that you were special."

This time I can't help myself. With a newfound sense of confidence I suddenly lurch forward and, ignoring the ache in my knees, I send my hand across her face in a hard punch, her head falling  backwards at the shot against her nose. It was all her fault.
I never was good at dealing with death. Hell, when my old guinea pig passed away when I was twelve I didn't leave my room for three days. It wasn't until I was seventeen that dad told me the real reason little RuPaul died and, sure enough,  he was the cause; he accidentally the little guy up into the vacuum and told me he ran away. I was seventeen but it still hurt that he lied. Maybe I was a little dramatic that way, a little dramatic when I gave him the silent treatment and didn't talk to him again until he apologised on both knees. But in my defence it felt like betrayal.
The only difference between then and now is that this was real life. That real people were dying, that good people didn't even have a chance to live.
That Olivia betrayed us. That she contributed to the murder.
How dare she?

"You killed him!" My voice falls from my lips in a hoarse cry before I can stop myself. A soft groan tears from the back of Olivia's throat as she raises a hand to cradle her bleeding nose, but she doesn't bother defending herself. Yet. She looks back at me as if begging me to continue, begging me to confront her. And so I do. I snarl.

"All those soldiers, the King, the overseer-- you traitor!" I don't miss the way she flinches but I pay it no mind. Scoffing a sarcastic chuckle, I shake my head. Her previous words left a sour taste in my mouth. "You knew that I was special, huh? Is that why you did it? You felt so threatened by me that you used it as an excuse to get your best friends father killed, right? You felt so ing threatened by the idea that you might be nothing that you did whatever you could to be something. Well congratulations. Because all you are is a pathetic child that killed everyone you know in the process!--"

"--Do you think I meant for this all to happen?!" She doesn't bother biting back her frown this time. She shakes her head, a scowl twisting its way across her face. In any other situation her stoic façade would have intimidated me, but not now. She continues after a beat. "Do you think I wanted to hurt anyone? That I wanted to hurt Sooyoung?! That I wanted this to get as far as it did?"

I tsk. "Is this the conversation you keep having with yourself to sleep at night? Anything to make yourself feel less accountable, huh? Give me one reason why I shouldn't kill you right now."

"I have regretted my decision everyday since, Y/N. Do not pretend to know what I feel!"

I wasn't sure when it started. When I felt that fire pulsating through my veins, right down my arms and into my palms. With each passing second my anger seemed to grow thicker and thicker. If I was the same Y/N I was when I woke up here, I wouldn't have known what it meant. But now I do. All that energy held suppressed within me felt like it was going to burst any second now. And Olivia knew it. Her eyes dart back and forth between mine and her fists clench by her sides, but she doesn't back down yet. 

"Then why?! What could you possibly say that would make any of this okay?"

For a few