Remember Me

Restless

People die every day. 

It's normal. The circle of life or whatever you want to call it. Whether it's because of old age, illness, or unnatural causes, we all have to go at some point.

But not all souls leave this realm peacefully. Those who suffered an especially cruel fate often stay and cling to the living, bringing them nothing but pain in the process. They become haunting demons from the past, like the bitter taste on the back of your tongue, a horrible nightmare in the dark of the night.

They don't do it on purpose, most of them don't. 

All they want is for someone to know, for someone to tell them that it's okay. They won't be forgotten, they won't be alone.

There's a way to bring them peace, of course. But only a fraction of people are able to see those glowing, burning spheres that contain the last moments of a person's life. Even less are willing to do what it takes to set them free.

Jimin is one of them. One of the people who had seen them float all around him since he was a small child.

It's been so long since then, but he will never forget the first time he touched one of those tiny orbits. 

The first time he saw a person die.

Only years later, after countless nightmares and endless attempts to ignore the flickering lights surrounding him, did he meet Min Yoongi who was just like him. The older student had noticed Jimin's strange behavior right away. He saw how Jimin would often take a weird turn, as if to avoid something that was in his way despite there being nothing but air in everyone else's eyes. The way he would stare at some invisible object whenever he was deep in thought.

Most people would probably chalk it up to him having his head in the clouds but Yoongi knew better. After all, he saw them too. The lost ones.

Thanks to him, Jimin finally understood that those horrifying things he saw were actually memories. The leftover remains of a real person, someone who had lived and laughed, and walked the same streets as he did today.

The only way to set them free, to give them enough peace of mind to be reborn, was to share the burden they carried.

And that's their job. Saving them.

When Yoongi first invited him to work for the small group that specialized in hunting those souls down, he refused. He didn't want to see it again. The pain, the suffering, the trauma of another person that would inevitably become his own. A part of his memories, like a foreign object that was forcefully glued to his skin until he did no longer feel like himself but more like a stranger he failed to recognize in the mirror.

So what changed his mind?

Well. It was the same first soul whose death he had to witness as a nine year old child. The one that scared him so much, he refused to ever help any of them again.

To this day, he remembered it well. A tiny, flickering ball of light, yellow like beautiful Autumn leaves. His favorite color.

Of course, he couldn't resist the urge to catch it, thinking it might be a fairy that may or may not grant him a wish at some point.

When he did, the world around him slowly started to fade. Everything was drowned in pitch black.

What happened after that would be engraved in his brain for the rest of his life. The icy cold rain rushed down from the sky with so much force, it physically hurt when the drops hit his skin. The wind, the dirty path beneath his naked feet, it all felt so real. So terrifying.