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The blood collects into a little pool beneath him on the concrete. He rolls the dice around in his head to guess if it’ll anthropomorphize or not. Maybe into a small bird this time. He likes birds, the way they hop on their little claws and peck and fluff their wings.
The puddle stays still, growing larger as more blood feeds into it, like a tributary, a small river or stream that feeds into a lake.
There’s an estimated 3-4 hundred tons of waste and pollution in rivers and seas every year. Evan watches the blackened slush that circles lazily on top of his blood. Like a float in a pool.
That was inside him; it’s a part of him. He doesn’t want it. He never wanted it.
Finally, the tips of his fingers start to go numb. Evan sighs and takes two extra breaths to catch up. The moment passes where he would die, staring up blankly at the sun as he goes into hypovolemic shock.
Except he doesn’t.
Instead, Evan just breathes shakily as too much blood leaves his body and spreads across the hot asphalt. As time passes, it boils and evaporates in the sun, leaving behind faint red streaks. He puts two fingers against his neck and, unfortunately, feels a strong heartbeat. Rolling over with a low moan, he slowly pushes himself up onto his knees. He sets a hand on his stomach, and it comes away slick with darkened blood. It’s old. He’s fully exsanguinated at this point but still breathing.
Death is meant to be a constant. In this world, nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes. Not for him, though. He’s never been normal. He can’t even kill himself correctly.
Evan wasn’t sure, as he picked up the rusty bent kitchen knife near the dumpster if he would even use it. He’d been halfway to tossing the thing properly in the trash, but he couldn’t get himself to. His mind wandered back to that dark place. Sometimes, he let himself believe that it wasn’t his own voice inside his head. Most of the time, he couldn’t get himself to. He knew what the other ones sound like, how they loved to boast and brag; tell him he could be powerful and important. They’re different from the ones that tear him down and make him feel small.
The most dangerous thought is that he could be a martyr. If he could find some way to die, then the others wouldn’t be able to use him to hurt other people. No more whispering in his ear, staring at himself in the mirror and seeing black eyes staring back. It would be a mercy, not only to himself but to the world.
So Evan let himself dig the knife deep into his abdomen and then tear it out. He heard it clatter as it hits the ground, and his body followed right after.
The sky changes color twice as he lays there. A few cars drive by, but nobody notices him.
He shifts from his knees up onto one foot, then the other. With strength he physically should not have, he properly throws away the knife. After a moment of thought, he shrugs off his shirt, soaking and stiff with blood, and throws that away too. He puts on a dark hoodie from his backpack and begins to shuffle himself away from the scene.
Evan Kelmp dies from blood loss at 6:26pm.
He crawls his way back through the halfway house’s back window at 9:30pm.
It is not the first time he’d died, and it won’t be the last.
Evan Kelmp stands at the edge of a cliff.
He kicks a pebble over and watches as it sails far down and hits bottom.
It’s a pretty well-known cliff, sharp and precarious at the ends. There are about five signs he walked past warning people away, stating that the dropoff was steeper than it looks and to stay away.
There’s a house just a little ways past it. There was an older woman that lived there, Heleen. She was a nice woman, who saw him walking by. Evan was sweating in the heat, limping from a twisted ankle he didn’t have the money or regular human biology to go to a doctor to fix, and Heleen had pulled him inside, given him an ice-cold glass of strawberry lemonade and some biscuits.
They exchanged some small talk - her drawling on about her six grandchildren and Evan expertly making his life seem better than it actually is. Though, the look on her face as he said anything made him think she was about five seconds away from calling cps at any moment.
She never got the chance to.
Evan takes a small step closer to the very edge. The ledge doesn’t give, not yet. He thinks maybe this is what gambling feels like - he wouldn’t know, he doesn’t have any money, well - except what he took out of the bowl by the door at Heleen’s house.
He stomps lightly on the rock under his feet, and he can feel it shifting.
Insolent child. A voice says from inside his head, familiar and unwanted. You believe we will always save you?
I think I’m too valuable to you to lose, and if not, then you can’t hurt people through me anymore. It’s a win-win. Evan thinks back.
The voice laughs, echoing inside his head. Is this about that old woman?
Shut up. Evan thinks.
Everyone has it, but no one can lose it. It whispers.
Years later, when Evan tells a highly modified version of this story to Jammer, his friend says something he doesn’t understand about how that’s the best season of teen wolf.
But for now, Evan just thinks not everyone, and steps off the ledge.
He survives, he knew he would, and he lays there as his bones slide themselves back together and the voice inside his head just laughs and laughs and laughs.
It’s an accident, really. Evan had more or less come to terms with the fact that death was more of a suggestion than a rule for him. That some otherworldly being or beings plural had decided to fuck with him in particular. Contrary to popular belief, Evan was also not suicidal.
So no, this time, he did not place himself in an intentionally dangerous situation, hoping to shut his eyes and actually rest for once. This time was entirely an accident.
It’s not Evan’s fault he didn’t have any parental figures growing up to teach him to look both ways before crossing the street. It was dark, with a dim streetlight biting off way more than it could chew, and a road littered with potholes and sprigs of grass shooting up where they are not supposed to be.
Evan glanced up for a few seconds and then back down, hitching his backpack straps further up his shoulders. He trusted that dim streetlight too much, and a truck had come speeding toward him with no time to dodge.
Evan had headphones in, playing from an old Zune that a woman at a care home he had wandered into gave him. It was chock full of Elvis’ discography and a single Johnny Cash song. And it was as Hey Porter played in his ears that the truck rammed into him, launching Evan on and across the windshield, leaving a huge dent and some blood on the car.
When driving, deer can appear suddenly in front of you. Most people make the mistake of swerving to avoid hitting them and crashing into other cars or objects. The best course of action is to brake and hit the deer.
Huh, Evan thought as he died, I never wanted to be a deer.
Because fate is a fickle mistress, Evan doesn’t wake up immediately. It’s always a gamble to see if his immortality will choose to not let him die at all or if he’ll just wake up after. It seems this time it’s the second option.
Usually, not that he has that much experience with death; he wakes up pretty much after the instant of death. This time, he just wakes to the cold.
It seems like that’s all there is for a moment. Just endless chill because no part of him feels like it remembers warmth. He takes a small breath.
It’s cold, and he’s lying flat on his back against some metal, not to mention how dark it is. He goes to sit up and bangs his head on something that’s not even a couple inches away from his face.
He lifts his hands to see what it is, and he just feels endless metal surrounding him on all sides.
His heart starts hammering in his chest, and it only serves to remind him that someone alive is not meant to be where he is.
“Help.” Evan tries to yell, but his throat is so dry that it barely comes out a whimper. He swallows.
Any way he moves gives him maybe an inch of room at most, and he hates it. In a fit of panic, he starts to kick at what he assumes is where the drawer opens from because as much as his brain thinks he’s buried alive, coffins aren’t made of metal. And they certainly aren’t this cold.
“Help!” He tries again, and it comes out a bit stronger this time, echoing slightly around him.
The drawer didn’t open with the kick, but it did squeak a bit, so he kicks it again, and again, and again. There’s no room to raise his knee and build up actual strength for the kicks, so he’s more just tapping his foot against it, but it’s all he can do, so he keeps going.
It takes what feels like forever but is probably more like ten minutes for the drawer to swing open and the slab he’s laid on to shoot out. Evan rolls off of it immediately, clutching the small thin sheet around him like a lifeline.
“Holy shit. Oh my god. Oh fuck. Oh god. Oh no. I- Oh fuck.” A guy says, and Evan turns to see a young man with long hair and a goatee stumbling back. He has a big badge clipped to his shirt that reads mortuary intern.
“ You- you were alive, in there. Jesus fuck- are you - are you the second coming of Christ? Is this the rapture? Oh, fuck, my mom was right. Fuck fuck fuck. You - I sat in on your autopsy. You shouldn’t have any organs. Oh fuck. Oh god, I’m gonna -“ the guy rambles before running to the nearest sink and puking into it.
Not taking any time to process anything that happened to him, Evan takes the chance to run. It must be the dead of night because the place is empty. There’s an abandoned coat hanging from a closet doorknob that Evan steals and puts on. It doesn’t do anything to stop the cold that’s burrowed inside of him.
Would you like to be warm? A strange voice asks from inside his head.
Fuck off. Evan thinks back. Nothing good has ever come out of listening to them. You’ve done enough. You wouldn’t let me die.
Why would we? You are… unfinished.
Evan stumbles out of the hospital through a staff-only side door and runs as far as his legs will take him.
Turns out it’s pretty far, and he finally falls to his knees next to a Dunkin Donuts dumpster. He gives himself a minute and a few deep breaths before fishing out a glazed donut and half of a breakfast sandwich. He wolfs them down far too quickly for a near-dead body to process and upchucks them right back into the dumpster.
He wonders how traumatized that mortuary intern is gonna be. Then he wonders how long it’ll take before he gets warm again.
It’s not until the extreme heat strikes him that he realizes he’s not going to.
In late-stage hypothermia, the vasoconstriction - the blood vessels contracting to prevent heat loss - gets too exhausted to continue. This means that when you’re about to die of cold, you feel yourself burning.
Would you like to be warm? The voice repeats.
I’m dying next to a Dunkin’ Donuts dumpster practically naked. There’s nothing left of me to really save here, my guy. Evan replies.
Let me in. It growls, defeated.
Catch you in the next life, buddy.
Evan dies from hypothermia with his eyes open, and they sting like a bitch when he comes back to himself half an hour later.
Honestly, Evan was expecting to die the minute he stepped on the train to Gowpenny.
He’d died from the flu once, he didn’t have enough money for medicine, and at the time his flu shot wasn’t up to date because he was technically on the run from cps and couldn’t risk anything medical, not that he had the money for it anyway.
The point is, Evan had fully died from little things before. And now he’s in Scotland heading to a school for wizards. It’s all very Harry Potter, and everyone in those books should have died thrice over, so Evan’s not confident about his survival rate, especially once they tell him he has to wait to get exorcised.
He’s not angry, though. Evan takes that time for granted because he’s never had anything to take for granted before, and he’s jumping in the deep end with both feet. There are three whole people his age that like him and are his friends. It’s insane, and he’s pinching himself every second.
He doesn’t die, though, not right away. His blood is talked down by Sam, and his shadow hasn’t found him yet, and nothing else seems threatening enough for him to worry about.
Except maybe the fiery 10-foot monster thing with a student inside of it.
Dream was calming the thing with her…singing? Whatever it is, it gives Evan time to just plunge his hands into the thing and pull the kid out.
Evan’s used to thinking without consequences, for himself at least, and it’s only at the last second that he thinks maybe because the fire is magic, it might hurt him, and he’s very correct on that front.
He’s lucky that it’s a push-through death and not a restart; otherwise, he’s not sure how he’d explain it. His arms are covered in ash, and they don’t burn exactly, but he can feel the heat trapped underneath his skin and thinks maybe his blood is boiling - literally. It’s not as painful as burning to death should be, and Evan wonders if maybe leaning into the magic thing is pleasing the beings inside him, and that thought makes him shudder.
You are ours. The voice whispers, and he can’t tell if it’s a memory or the beings actually speaking to him.
Fuck off. He thinks back, just in case.
Evan is curled up on a couch in the Chimeron common room, K is lying on his chest, holding their phone up so both of them could see. They were on the fifth video essay, though Evan wasn’t entirely sure what it was about because he just kept getting distracted by how cool having a screen on a phone was. There was an endless amount of content you could watch! You could just click on something and watch it! It was amazing.
Evan was used to just catching whatever sports game or commercial was on display in stores. He’d sat in a Bestbuy once, just marathoning the snippets of shows they had on at the TV section and playing the demos in the video game console aisles. That had been one of his best days before he came to Gowpenny.
Now, he’s cuddling with his partner, watching youtube. Every so often, he hears Sam from the other side of the room leading her class. Usually, she makes him join in for the affirmations part, but she’d taken one look at them today, yelled “Cute!” and then left him alone. Jammer’s floating somewhere around because Evan can hear the clink of weights, and Jammer had pretty much taken on being the personal trainer for every single person in Chimeron.
The voices hadn’t come back since Sam banished them. He’s not sure how long that’ll last. He is certain that he’s mortal and able to die while they’re gone. That should scare him, especially now that he has things to live for, but it just makes him so happy. Evan will never be normal, and maybe he’ll never be good, but he’s surrounded by not-normal, and he’s got friends that will help him balance that evil that’s still inside him.
So for now, he kisses K on the top of the head and focuses on what they’re watching.