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English
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Published:
2026-06-25
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520
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1/1
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5
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51

nobody listens to the bearer of bad news

Summary:

Flaky remembers dying. Nobody else does.

Work Text:

Flaky was right to be afraid, more often than not.

 

It usually went a little something like this: she'd warn somebody against something risky, her warning would fall upon deaf ears, and then they'd end up dead. The next day, they'd wake up fine and well, and the world would keep turning. Rinse and repeat.

 

People looked at her oddly whenever she tried to bring it up. It didn't make sense, at first. Why were they all pretending that nothing had ever happened? Why were they acting as if it were strange to worry that it would happen again? Would nobody else at least acknowledge what was going on? It clicked, eventually, that none of them remembered it. Or, at least, nobody remembered dying.

 

What they did remember was that Flaky had once simply been shy, and it had spiraled into an all-consuming fear of the world around her and a conviction that somebody would die at every possible opportunity. And then they'd ask, Flaky, what happened with you? She would have no real answer to give, because the answer that was true was exactly what was causing people to question her in the first place.

 

There wasn't much she could do about it. The root cause of this mess, if there even was one, was somewhere out of her sight. She'd probably end up dead if she looked for it, and that was something she tried her best to avoid nowadays.

 

Death-preventing measures were what she settled on, but even those didn't help much. Nobody would listen to the warnings of those they thought were simply imagining things. But she wouldn't stop, not for as long as this continued. She imagined that this would stick with her, even if the dying part ever stopped.

 

That was the thing. Even before all of this, she had been nervous. She'd meant to work on it, but if anybody thought that dying repeatedly would give her a chance to do so, then they'd be dead wrong.

 

Sometimes, she missed the person she used to be. She missed when she could do things without being preoccupied by the fact that she might not survive the day. If she could go back and tell her past self where she is now…

 

Well, that past self would surely be confused, just as much as Flaky's friends are about the way she acts now. At least, she would be up until the point where somebody died in front of her for the first time.

 

It probably wouldn't change anything, whether she knew in advance what would become of her. Even if it did, that wasn't the version of her life that she was living. She was the version of herself that hadn't anticipated ending up here until she'd fallen further than she could climb back up.

 

All of it made sense, how being in a loop of watching herself and others die would result in her becoming a terrified shell of herself. She found that something making sense couldn't stop her from wishing it had all gone differently.

 

There wasn't anything Flaky could do about it.