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Ren couldn’t forget.
He still had an itch in the back of his neck, where the blade hit him, where the zombie bit. He had to fight off the urge to glare whenever he saw certain people.
(Were they people? What even defines a person anymore? Were they ever human to begin with?)
Every death flashed behind his eyes, taunting him, dancing around his mind just barely out of reach of his claws. Scenes across his life across the many, many death games he either joined or even started (void knows why, he knew what would happen) settled into his heart and refused to leave, sinking deep into the depths of his soul and taking him with it. It was easy to be overwhelmed with such a curse; hell, it felt more like a curse than his actual ‘curse’ did. Ren claimed to have gotten used to it- he had been living with it for years, he could barely remember a moment that wasn't covered in a dramaticized font, of course he could handle it! He barely even noticed it anymore!
That was what he claimed, to both himself and others.
And, yet, as if he was thrown out to sea with an anvil around his feet, Ren drowned (Drowned in the past, in things that were long forgotten, in things that nobody could forget). He drowned, seeing others floating, swimming, relaxing in the tides that felt oh so violent to him, but enjoyable to them. Ren had gotten used to drowning, to the cold rush of water against his skin. Nobody could save him because everybody thought he was simply a fan of the water.
(Victory was right in his grasp, so close and bright he was blinded by its glow. He still got the chills sometimes, remembering his gray skin, the cold feeling from leaping out of the water now glued to his soul. Nobody likes the smell of a wet dog.)
Rendog, despite the many roles he took up, refused to take up the role of a quitter. He would treasure the moments of peace that he could- embrace life to the fullest, because he didn’t know how to do anything else.
He sat in a sunflower field, staring up at the stars. The Queen has fallen. Winter is over. The Resistance has won.
A buzz from his comm interrupted his thoughts;
[GoodTimesWithScar fell from a high place]
Ren grinned. He remembered when a message like that was much more disastrous.
Ren was never one for forgetting, after all.