Darker Blood

Chapter sixty-nine

'I'm so sorry, Inori.'

I could see Jin's face frozen with pain, his eyes helpless to hide the water leaking from them, while Jimin and Taehyung could only stare at me, minds blank and unable to help at all.

I have no control over the winter raging on inside my soul itself, and it was breaking down, melting away and melting me with it. I had no strength left to even try to fight it, or to hold onto my boy one last time before everything was gone.

I looked into his bright eyes, only able to murmur an almost silent 'I love you', before something in me snapped and I was pulled away from this reality, my eyes washing over with white as blinding as sunlit snow that would never fall on this earth again.

Jungkook pov~

She was gone.

Although it felt as if I've watched her die a thousand times, I couldn't accept it. Everything was numb, shocked beyond feeling while my chest ached for her to blink her eyes again, to say one more thing, to live one more day.

Is this what she felt? Being so distanced from the world that existence itself was a lie?

Existence is a lie. We are all living in our minds.

Taehyung reached out to touch her forehead to close her eyes, and I lashed out.

"Don't touch her!" I screeched, fuelled by a burst of rage hotter than the sun that had deserted us, leaving everyone to suffer with their own thoughts in the last moments of their lives.

Jin was holding me back from Taehyung, even though he had stepped back and away from her, no longer reaching out to touch an angel with the purest heart and frozen soul.

We're all fucked. We've made too many mistakes, I didn't help her enough, I didn't change anything to stop the end from occurring. I only altered time so that I could keep her all to myself, my selfishness dooming the billions of innocent people, and the little family I had left.

"I can reset the clock," Jimin mumbled, placing his right hand over the left side of his chest, where his frozen heart lay. I stood in stunned silence, watching his own gaze flicker down to the empty body of the girl I wanted to marry.

Life pities us. It might steal our humanity and turn us into monsters we loathe, it gives us a reset button. Every vampire has the option to reset time back to a certain point, but in return, they are banished altogether from the universe. They will never have even existed.

"You love her, don't you?"

"Yes," I sobbed out, my limbs tingling with an anxiety attack.

"Then you can have another chance."

"N-no Jimin, please-"

"You don't mean anything you're about to say, so please don't even start."

I swallowed dryly, my tears choking up my throat, an impossibly heavy weight preventing my chest from being able to breathe whatsoever. "Jimin, there's got to be another option, please don't do this."

Taehyung finally realised what was going on, and ran to his creator, holding onto him so tight that the bruises blossomed only for a single second before they healed over.

"No! I won't let you!"

Jimin blinked a few times to hide his own emotions, before gently prying the boy off him with a sad smile. "You need to be a good boy now, TaeTae. No stupid decisions – if the use by date was three weeks ago, don't drink the milk."

Jin walked over to one of the last members of his broken family, gripping hard onto his shoulder with teary vision.

"I can do it instead, Jimin."

The boy shook his head. "What use is that? No one would ever be able to change anything if you did it."

Jin struggled with the shaking form of Taehyung, and I helped pull him away from my hyung, stuck in absolute disbelief that he was about to do this. Jimin quirked an eyebrow at me, a last stab at emotion in his existence.

"Try not to fuck up so much this time, eh?"

"Wait, please-"

I was pushed back unwillingly by an invisible barrier around his solitary form, and he looked once more at the still body of my love before his hand closed over his heart and he chanted the spell that would steal every memory of him from this world. 

In an instant, everything expanded with light, starting from the very depth of my friends' soul, until the white reached out to touch everything, cradling him and Inori and me away from the cracking sky, the ground vanishing from below our feet as time stopped and brought us back before our destructive choices. 

I would get it right this time. For Inori, and for Jimin.

THIS CHAPTER OH MY GOD my soul hurts ;_; I think I've managed to emotionally traumatise myself with my own writing. Sorry that it's quick, quite brief, and packs a punch of devastation.