Work Text:
They say that books are a way for many people to escape, transporting themselves to other lives and becoming part of the reality of the characters in works that will be immortalized over time, for centuries to come. Reading is a form of intimacy; it's the way human beings can become one with every word, every sentence, and from that, strip themselves bare, no longer bear their own name, and now, adopt the identity of those whom, like a watchman in the shadows, a breeze in the air, or a whisper in unison, watch from somewhere.
Somewhere.
A handsome young man with fine features and envied for his singular charisma sits at one of the many tables in the library's reading room, enjoying a recently released series by an author considered a young prodigy, a talented one who has amassed a great fortune for his detective novels, given that, due to his unique writing style, he seems to perfectly describe past events and places that, over the years, have been changed and taken on a new form.
There were two alternatives to the man's precise descriptions of his characters, their language, their culture, the streets, and even their names, of the events that happened in a timely manner... either the man had an elderly relative healthy enough to tell him everything that happened, or he had gotten some potion or concoction that has granted him the curse of immortality.
The way the author narrated every scene, from the most shocking and terrifying to the most spicy, brought to the young reader a series of images that didn't seem to be produced by imagination, because their intensity of color, aroma... even flavor, seemed very profound, very personal, very much his own, not like Deja Vu, but like a vivid memory, the same kind of recollection evoked by smelling a perfume, tasting a dish from better times, or caressing the texture of a blanket.
With a gentle movement of his fingers, the young man turned the page, for in front of him was not just a book itself, but rather a series of letters addressed especially to him, letters written not in the dull, typical black ink, but in blood, and whose recipient was a hope, a longing, a poor expectant illusion, like someone stranded on a desert island who puts a bottle containing a message inside, leaving it adrift in the sea as if it could mean anything.
The man, who didn't even bother to introduce himself with a name to you, the reader, because as such, something as mundane, as human as a name ceased to matter to him given the number of bodies he'd passed through, the identities he'd adopted, and the lives he'd lived, that young man could only sigh and stare at the book with some suspicion, planning how to wreak some karmic justice. At first, it was entertaining, at first, it was quite an experience. Being reborn represented an opportunity, but even superbeings must rest, even if it's only for a moment.
And it wasn't fair either.
It wasn't fair to the existence of that body, and of those that came before it and those that would most likely come after it, to develop, create entirely new memories, only to, after a certain point, simply disappear, to be replaced by their previous existence as if they hadn't happened in the first place. How complicated it was to relearn his family name! Trying to adapt to what that life was like because, in his own way, he was an intruder who had entered someone else's body to steal their life and completely displace them.
He knew he was a plague that had to be exterminated.
And for the first time, after so long, he decided to let time pass. In all his previous lives, he had always met his favorite author, met that other half. He was always the one who sought him out, the one who found him, always ending, without exception, in some tragedy. In reality, he had never grown old.
For this one time, and only for this one time, he wanted to enjoy that pleasure.
So, on this occasion, he didn't even bother to finish reading and put the book back on the shelf, somewhere dark, far away, to prevent another curious one from laying their hands on it.
However, things remained the same.
He would still love him, even in another life.
But not this one.