Title Processing, Please Wait

2- In which Kennith is in the void

Kennith never did really believe in an afterlife. It seemed stupid to him, or maybe unrealistic is a better word. How would a "soul" go anywhere after someone died? Where would the "afterlife" in question be? If you asked him, when people died they were just gone.

Of course, that didn't explain this. He'd died, Kennith knew that he'd died, there was no way anyone could've gotten to his house before he bled out. Maybe this was just some sort of dream, his brain firing off random signals before it finally gave out. That had to be it. There was no other explanation.

It was certainly strange enough to be a dream. Kennith felt like he was floating in space. He couldn't see anything, his eyes might as well have been closed. Were they? Kennith blinked. It didn't change anything. 

The longer he floated aimlessly through the wherever-he-was, the more something felt off. Of course, everything was off, he didn't exactly go exploring strange voids a lot, and it had definitely been way longer than it would take for him to die. Or at least he thought it had. He wasn't sure of anything right now, except that something was missing. Something that was always there, to the point that no one ever noticed it until it was gone. But what was it?

"Your heartbeat." Something answered for him. It sounded familiar, but he couldn't place how. "You're dead."

"...What?" Kennith knew he sounded stupid, but this didn't make sense. There wasn't an afterlife. What was he then, a soul? Why did it feel like he had a body? Where was this place?

The voice, whatever it was, did not answer any of these questions. "And such a pity, too. You never got to see what everyone thought of your little show!"

Kennith didn't want to know what everyone thought. It wasn't even his show, he didn't want to do it, and he knew that everyone hated him for it.

"Oh, au contraire," said the voice. Could it read his thoughts? "Everyone loved you, they thought you were simply marvelous."

But that wouldn't make sense. He hurt people, he knew what he did. The voice, it was lying. Why did it sound so familiar? Where had he heard it before? Why was it lying to him?

"They wrote a song for you. No, two. They sing for you, Kennith Simmons, isn't that just beautiful?"

It sounded almost like... Evelynn? But not quite. Almost like someone had put their voice on a tape and copied it too many times.

And then came the singing. A chorus of voices mixing with one that sounded eerily like his own, each voice winking into existence as a little star in the endless darkness. Had people really thought what he did was... good? It wasn't good, it was a horrible thing to do. He hadn't even done it, not really. He was forced to. Evelynn had hypnotized him. He supposed that they didn't know that. Either way, he didn't want to be praised. He wanted death, he wanted nothingness. He wanted everyone to shut up. Everything was too loud, the sound surrounding him and blocking out his own thoughts.

That's when he saw it. The hand. The smallest bit of hope for escape tentatively slipping into the void. Desperate, he grabbed at it. He dug his nails into the skin of the hand and its arm as the world began pulling him back toward the overwhelming noise and trying to keep him here. Now all he could do was hope that somehow this slapdash plan would work.

A/N: shoutout to @Existencetbh  and @H11l1k3c00k135  for inspiring me to finally finish writing this chapter! Hope y'all like it :3