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Everything was a dry, shriveled, haze. A while ago, everything tasted like sand, but now he was fairly sure he couldn’t taste at all. His eyes and skin were completely fried, so all he could feel was radiating pain and horrible fuzziness. But then, it all began to fade, the pain, the confusion, everything. This was the end.
A sudden cold air blew over Diavolo, and he jumped. His eyes blew back open, and it came to him that he was revived again. He sighed in relief, a natural response that had long since outlived its use, and found a wave of nausea falling over him. With a groan, he leaned further into the cold plastic in front of him. Slow deaths were always worse than fast ones, just because he spent enough time in the one position that suddenly switching to another caused horrible dizziness. He couldn’t really feel the effects of his last death, but he always swore he could. His skin still felt flushed and had a mild tingle from the desert he was in last time. He could even still feel some of the sand. The switching between deaths was instantaneous, and he couldn’t really remember the exact moment he died in the last one to when he was awake in a new one. It was like falling asleep, and if he pretended hard enough, the death before could feel like a nightmare. Pretending took too much energy, though. He found that out many deaths ago, when he was first burnt alive. That’s the kind of pain no one could pretend away.
He was hunched over on a seat, arms tight around himself. He kept his eyes shut, reasoning that the plane could crash any moment, and that he’d rather not see it, thank you. The humming from the engines wasn’t too loud, but it was still kind of overpowering. It was a good choice of seat, far away from the wing. That was kind of nice. He heard muffled, very hushed conversation around him, the tapping of someone’s fingers on a nearby screen, the shuffling and shifting of other people around him, right next to him…
He opened his eyes in a panic. The person who sat next to him, just a couple of inches away, was lazily watching a movie, some rom-com. It didn’t look good. They had chunky black headphones connected to a large, sleek laptop, a kind that Diavolo had never seen before. The person was spread out across the seat, and part of their leg was on his seat. Diavolo curled a little tighter in on himself, uncomfortable with the proximity. He glared at the person, who didn’t seem to care.
After a while, they definitely noticed him staring. The person’s eyes flitted back and forth from their screen to him, confused at his persistence. They didn’t move their leg, though, and Diavolo decided to give up, pushing himself against the window and resting his head on the edge. This plane’s going to crash soon, anyway.
So he waited.
And waited.
He waited, looking out of the window, for twenty minutes.
From where he was, he could see the plane’s wing, and it looked fine. There was no unusual turbulence or rough weather up ahead. Just a peaceful, quiet flight. The tension in his gut started to decrease, just watching the clouds pass by. His lack of nerves only made him more suspicious. He tried to keep alert, but he just felt too comfortable in his chair. It was an economy seat, and some kid was kicking at the back of it from time to time, but he was surprisingly unbothered by that. The kid had stopped, anyway.
Diavolo let his legs relax to the floor and stretched his arms with a yawn. Looking around, he found that he was sitting far to the back of the plane, and that it was packed full of people.
That’s unfortunate, he mused, but his stomach crawled at the sight of being around so many others, so he shrunk back into his seat. He noticed a fairly large gray bag packed under the seat in front of him, just a few inches away from his feet. It probably belonged to the person in front of him, a woman in her 50’s, it appeared. She was fast asleep, and the person beside him seemed to be drifting off too, so… his curiosity got the better of him. At first he just touched it a little, then pulled his hand back. Nothing happened. Scoffing at himself, he leaned down and pulled it up by its handle onto his lap. No one around him seemed to care, so he continued. He wasn’t sure why he was doing it, but he guessed it was out of instinct. Gathering information, he supposed it was. He had time to kill, after all.
The backpack was lighter than he thought, and it didn’t look like anything was horribly wrong with it. He slowly zipped it open, half to be cautious and half to not attract the attention of the other people on the plane. He might as well find out where he’s going. In the bag, there was an outfit packed, slim-cut black jeans, a belt (big and gold, obviously for fashion,) and a light blue top, low cut with ruffles on the collar. It wasn’t exactly his taste, but he did appreciate slim-fitting pants for a fashion choice. It called attention to his own outfit, still the same one he was always wearing. He never cared that much for fashion, but he couldn’t shake the image of all the things that had gotten on the clothes in his previous lives when he looked at it, even if it was clean every time he woke up again.
Turning his attention back to the bag, there was a pocket in the back of the main compartment, sort of hard to reach. He pulled out a few crumpled papers (somewhat his fault, it really was tough to get a hand in that pocket,) a wallet, as well as a small, pink phone with a model he didn’t recognize. It looked new. Under close inspection, all of the items looked new. Anyway, the papers. One of them was a packet, it seemed to be a draft of a report. It looked messy and unfinished, something about glaciers in Germany. The credits listed someone named Nathaniel Angelle. He threw it back in the bag, disinterested. The next paper was something very useful: a plane ticket. It read:
Passenger Name: Holiday Angelle
Okay. They’re related, and could possibly be meeting up in…
From: Las Vegas
To: Buenos Aires
Diavolo wanted to whistle. That was a long trip, wasn’t it? He didn’t know the exact length, but he could ask.
He looked over at the person dozing off next to him. No, it doesn't matter that much.
Returning to the plane ticket, he read:
Departure date: Friday, April 11, 2003, 5:30…
2003??
Diavolo sat in disbelief. There were two possibilities. Either his dying wasn’t linear, or he had been dying for two years now. Though he’d prefer the first option to be true (no matter the implications of that,) he couldn’t help but feel like it was the second. It felt as if a rock had settled in his chest. Had he really been dying for two years straight, now?
Oh fuck that. Fuck him, the blonde motherfucker who put me here.
Diavolo sighed and dropped the papers back into the bag with a huff. He sank down further in the seat and tried to spread his legs, but the compartment was too small. He was tempted to kick the seat in front of him, but he ended up just kicking the bag back to where it belonged. The hag in front of him wouldn’t notice it was open, at least before the plane crashed or exploded in the sky. He closed his eyes, subconsciously, just to drown out the world. Pretend he was actually dead, maybe. It worked for a while, but before long he noticed tears start to prick at his eyes. Startled, he opened his eyes again and one of them rolled down his cheek. Cursing under his breath, he shut his eyes tight again and knocked his head back, waiting for it to pass. The sadness didn’t seem like it was leaving, though. It felt like there was a hole in him, not worse than some of the actual holes that had been put through him, but more inescapable. For what might have been the first time, he couldn’t be sure, he found himself wishing that death would just hurry up and come already. He raised his arm to cover his face, and wished that no one could see him.
For the first time in two years, Diavolo fell asleep again.
-
It had been maybe another thirty minutes, and nothing had happened. Diavolo was freaking out, silently, in his seat.
A plane crash wasn’t a new death, far from it. But he started to feel kind of anxious about it. Maybe those were the consequences of living for a while again, that you start to fear death. Maybe it was just that it was taking so damn long, he thought.
Sleeping was… nice, sort of. It wasn’t uninterrupted, and he wouldn’t really call it pleasant, but it wasn’t like he had a nightmare or something, so it was alright. He woke up with a feeling of dread, which was also odd. Diavolo couldn’t really remember the last time he felt that.
Then, he heard a loud pop sound, snapping him back to his senses. The other passengers on the plane made muffled sounds of confusion, some rising in their seats to try and see what the source of the noise was.
A man exited the cockpit, some odd black box strapped to his chest. The passengers near the font of the plane gasped, recoiling back in fear. All was silent for a moment, before a ding rang over the intercom. The pilot spoke.
“Passengers, there has been a- an.. interception. Please stay calm and listen to all instructions you are given. The destination has changed, and we will soon be landing.” The pilot paused. “A-again. Please, stay calm and quiet, listen to instructions, and we will be landing shortly.”
Panicked murmurs rose from behind him, but they were completely hushed when they caught sight of exactly what was strapped to the man’s chest.
The man with the bomb continued walking down the aisle of the plane looking straight forward, blankly. He stopped walking a row or two before Diavolo’s, suddenly looking over to the other side of the plane. He paused, surveying the crowd on the other side. Diavolo watched with interest.
The man turned to face his side of the plane. Unexpectedly, he turned and looked directly at Diavolo.
“You. Come here.”
…huh.
After a moment of hesitation, Diavolo stood up and stepped over the passengers next to him. Both of them didn’t bother to move, both of their eyes wide. The one in the outside row was staring at the hijacker as motionless as if they had a gun to their head, the other following him with their eyes, expression less scared than confused. Diavolo didn’t really understand how anyone could be anything but scared in this type of situation, excluding himself. Everyone valued their lives, right?
He stepped out into the aisle, feeling very amused by the situation. There weren’t a lot of unique deaths that happened to him anymore. It felt like a shame that this one would be ending so soon, with how comparatively pleasant it was. It took quite a bit not to smile in the moment, and in retrospect, he’s not sure why he didn’t. The attacker grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled Diavolo towards himself, and he was almost certain that a gun was going to be shoved at him then fired. That was protocol, to make someone an example, though usually it was a woman. Preferably one with a child, just to make the kid cry, to make sure that the atmosphere was tense in the plane. Nonetheless, anyone would do the trick alright. Diavolo wondered if the hijacker was an ametuer, and that thought did make him smile a bit.
Instead of immediately killing him, the hijacker pulled him over to the emergency exit, and pushed him against the door, grabbing a tight hold on the handle behind him and turning back to the plane.
”If anyone moves, I pull the handle and she falls out,” the attacker said simply and sharply.
What the hell? Diavolo hardly stuttered back a laugh, a squeak escaping his lips. He was already holding the whole plane hostage, what was even the point? The same thing could easily be done with a gun, why did he even bother? It really did seem like the attacker was an ametur.
The hijacker noticed the sound Diavolo made, and turned back to glare at him. Diavolo decided to look down, trying to prolong the time before he died. He found himself staring directly at the bomb strapped to the man’s chest, which was unexpectedly expensive-looking. It was definitely not handmade, or at least it was made by an expert. A hard, sleek, black shell with a plate on the front, displaying blank number slots. It was what you would classically think of when you’d think of a timed bomb. Diavolo almost laughed at that too. Passively, he wondered why he was so easily entertained. Why doesn't he have a gun, though? Diavolo wondered, finally looking up at the man’s face.
But before he could continue that train of thought, it was rudely disrupted by the man’s appearance.
When people say that eyes can look “dead,” or “beady,” it's usually referring to the expression of the individual, not the actual eyeballs. A person could strike a pose or be cast in a different light and that could make their eyes look any number of ways, no matter if they were normal. He had seen his fair share of truly odd eyes before too. In Passione, having something slightly off about a person was the standard, and eyes were no exception, hell, Diavolo had looked in mirrors before (maybe not as much as the average person, it wasn’t something he particularly liked,) and he knew that his had something off about them too. But the ones that the hijacker had were really unlike anything he had seen.
It looked as if his eyes really were beads haphazardly glued to his face, his skin folding around them like the glue that had been pushed out. They really looked like inanimate objects, pulled into the man’s skull, pulling the skin back with them. They weren’t cloudy, instead they shone bright as day, in the way a reptile’s would. Unlike a reptile’s, they didn’t appear wet, more like hard plastic. The man’s expression was completely blank otherwise, different from the angry or depressed he was expecting.
Undoubtedly, a stand user then.
It had been a while since something like that had happened. Stand deaths mustn't have been at a high the past two years. This one seemed especially grotesque, like the man was being puppeteered. A stand’s involvement explained plenty of things about the situation. He silently wondered what the motive was, feeling a bit bitter that he would never find out.
The hijacker turned away from him again, back to face the aisle. Not a sound was made, and he wondered if anyone else noticed how cold and dry the air was. At first glance, he didn’t think so. All eyes were, rather uncomfortably, on him. But as he continued to look at the crowd, over the shoulder of the hijacker, he noticed the odd few people that didn’t seem all too focused on him, and some that didn’t seem to care at all.
A father caught his attention, focused solely on his child. The father, an older man, was the only one noticeably moving on the plane, his leg bouncing up and down, not out of fear, but to soothe his child. He was holding his kid close to himself, hands slowly patting the young child’s back. The man looked tired and anxious, and his brows were tightly knitted. He stole an angered glance at the hijacker once in a while, with no regard for his own safety. It was the unadulterated love of a parent.
Diavolo couldn’t really understand the sentiment, and his eyes were drawn to a person sitting on the other side, two rows in front of the man.
A young woman sat slouched in her chair, long hair falling into the seat behind her. At first glance, the woman was relaxed, her chair still reclined even. But then she breathes in a long, laborious breath, and her eyes shut tight. Diavolo noticed her white knuckled hand gripping her chair, and the boy next to her slowly but urgently shaking her. Expressions flitted across her face as she struggled to take in the next breath. She was coming to terms with her impending death.
Diavolo supposed it was a good thing to do at the moment. He was far removed from the fear of death at that point, but he could respect anyone that was conscious of their own mortality. The weight of the plane shifted, a surefire sign of it beginning to land. It would still take some time to land fully, but he was surprised at how quick the pilot had found somewhere to land. It made him wonder when in all this he was going to die, and he thought, with some surprise, that the woman might have had the same thought he just did.
On the other side of the plane, an old woman sitting very politely in her seat caught his eye next. Her hands were folded in her lap and her posture was perfect, from many years of practice. Her expression was neutral, slightly dour and staring into nothing in particular. She looked up at Diavolo and met his eyes, shoulders raising, and expression changing to mildly scornful. She looked him up and down once, then sighed and returned to her previous position.
Now that he was looking, there were more outliers than he had expected from the crowd, and each person who stared at him or the hijacker had more than fear going on. Diavolo had never paid attention to that type of thing before, hell, he wasn’t sure why he did now, but he found that he didn’t want to leave that moment just yet.
Bittersweetly, he remembered that he wasn’t really living the same way those people were. Each of them had something to look forward to, whether it be the rest of their lives or their eventual death. He had none of that, and he felt his breath seize in his throat when he remembered his fate, to die for eternity. He felt his hands involuntarily clench tight, body tensing and eyes flicking their way to the floor. It was something so easily forgotten, just lost in thoughts or in the moment, but the inevitability loomed over him once again, just barely buried before being exposed again. Passively, he knew that the woman was feeling the same thing about her eventual death, but he would take what she had any day.
The hurt doubled down then, knowing that he’d rather be dead then have his fate. Dead for real, in an irreversible permanent manner. He wanted anything else, really. Something to do, a goal, aspirations. He wanted more than anything to leave the past and to have a future. His body felt frozen, standing tense when all he really wanted to do was give up and cry, even though that would never help. If he did that, he felt that would be some final nail in the coffin, some resignation. But he still couldn’t break back into the current moment, and was unable to find how. He wanted to keep living, but had no reason to. I’m not even a person anymore.
The hijacker moved, wincing as he brought a hand up to his ear, where an earpiece was. Diavolo followed him carefully with his eyes, breaths coming in heavy. Don’t end it here. He talked in a hushed way, hiding his face between his arm and chest. Don’t send me back. After a moment of murmuring, the hijacker stood back up fully again, nodded, then quietly reached for the bomb on his chest and pushed a button. Please, no.
The timer began.
Expectedly, a horrible roar sounded from the passengers on the plane. Screaming and crying that had been held in for the past minute sprung into life. People held onto each other, hoping and praying that someone could do something to save them. The father covered the ears of his kid and hugged them tighter, tears pouring down his face into the child’s hair. Many people stood to do something, their fight reaction kicking in, before realizing they couldn’t do anything. He stood still, recoiling from being flung back into the moment. The hijacker began to walk away from him, heading to the aisle to find a better spot to die.
And as if in slow motion, Diavolo found himself looking at the woman again, her face now buried in her hands, fingers tangled in her hair, sobbing and trying to take her last breath at the same time. The old woman, with her gravestone already marked out for herself, biding, no, wasting her time before death. He looked to each person on this plane, to their useful life and concrete death. So with a conviction, Diavolo grabbed onto the handle of the emergency exit that the hijacker used to have control of, as well as his arm before he was out of reach. He pulled the handle up and felt the door unlatch, and tried to pull it in, but the hijacker was pulling against him. Diavolo readjusted his grip on the man’s arm, moving his other hand from the handle to grab at him. The hijacker evaded him, but Diavolo was able to grab him on a second try and pull him back to the door with him. The hijacker writhed in his grip, but before he could do anything Diavolo managed to kick the bottom of the door, just enough to have it fall out with a thunk.
Stepping back, Diavolo caught sight of the plane’s passengers one last time, all staring at him with wide, shocked eyes. Alive eyes, unlike the ones the hijacker had. And in that moment, he wasn’t sure what he felt. Back into the loop, he supposed.
The familiar feeling of cold wind rushed against his back, and he loosened his grip on the man, exhaling. An unbearable amount of sound came from the plane, but quickly disappeared as it rushed away. Diavolo didn’t bother to look. Two seconds left on the bomb.
The hijacker’s bead eyes disappeared, and a normal set of eyes returned to him. The previously puppeteered man gasped and panicked, but it was all too late. One second left.
A hot pain seared him, and then Diavolo found himself sitting on the floor of an abandoned building, alive again.
Thinking of the hijacker and how his eyes turned back at the very last moment, Diavolo laughed humorlessly. I guess one person still died, then.