Death is My BFFLAD Rewritten (Book 2 of the Rewritten Death Chronicles)

Chapter 21: Cradle to Grave

HI, REAPERS!!!!

SCREAM IF YOU'RE HAPPY TO SEE ME!!! <33333333

Sorry for the slow updates, I've had so much college work and life has been really hectic lately. It's hard to get back into the swing of things when I haven't had a lot of time to write, but I'm trying for my babies! Love you!

Got a really cool edit from a fan for DIMBFF. It's attached to this chapter, sorry if you can't watch it!

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There was a humming in my ears. The air was as thick and humid as a rainforest, choking the oxygen from my lungs. I ran through the twisting forest stained with dark blue. I was being chased. It felt like it was a monster.

            A shadow appeared to my right. It ran alongside my desperate strides and then raced ahead of me. It was on all fours and black. Its muscles were thick and they shifted underneath its fur like smooth waves. It looked like a jaguar, or a panther. It disappeared into the distance with a snarl. Foliage moved past me in green smudges and my bare feet bled tracks in the ground. I spotted to a body of water ahead and stumbled as I came to a quick stop.

            I didn't hear the sound of anything dropping to the ground behind me, but I felt it. When I whirled around, my chest tightened and I instantly backed up a step. There was a man larger than life a few paces ahead of me. His skin was mostly bronze, perhaps from constant exposure to sunlight, but was also patched with black discolorations, which seemed to move along the surface of his skin in intricate designs, before dissipating all together at the center of his chest. His body was ripped and coiled with muscle.

             He wore a perfectly fitted, brown leather belt with plated designs along the buckle and a leather quilt with golden fragments, which hung in straps down half his groin and his right, powerful thigh. A loincloth covered the tops of his thighs and his privates that would otherwise be exposed by the quilt as he walked. On his right shoulder, he wore a intricate shoulder plate, which hooked across his chest and back and wrapped under his other armpit. The plate had leather pieces attached to it, which snaked down his thick arm in straps and hooked on to the plated bands around his right wrist. He had a matching band on his other wrist, too, as well as other arm cuffs tight around his biceps, and bands on his ankles. 

            And then there were the two short chains draped over his shoulders, each with a piece of raw meat dangling from it. They bled down his drool-worthy, wide chest, down the ridges of his torso, in dark red streaks. I wondered what those were for. Maybe that wild cat, I guessed, but I didn't understand why. Although, he did look like he was hunting. His chest heaved as he took in hard, but silent breaths from exertion. He had shoulder length, tangled hair that was too dirty to be determined as blonde. It hung in wet tendrils over the facial features I knew belonged to Death.

            The man pushed his hair back, verifying my thoughts. It was Death all right, with those mismatched eyes trapped between a serpent and a cat, but there was an air about this version of him that was vastly different than his current self. For starters, he was clean-shaven, which was a shock in itself. His lack of facial hair drew attention to his full lips and lethal jaw. Oddly, it didn't make him look younger. His eyes were too wise, too stained with an old, lingering storm to allow it. His bronze skin was a blank slate, besides the scar over his eye and the other ones scattered here and there. I was used to his skin being practically concealed by permanent black, intricate markings. But his expression was the most significant difference. He looked haunted by anger, but that anger was not yet so entrenched into him that it plagued outwards like an invisible force, making others feel a little angry at the world, too. This wasn't my Death.