She dreams of her previous deaths.

Hands on her throat, squeezing until her soul is choked out. Knives in her ribs, twisting in her lungs until she coughs out blood. Fire at her feet, her knees, her chest, her mouth, as she twists and twists and twists, agony in flame.

She… likes it.

She goes through life, chest too stuffed with feeling to breathe. Then she remembers the way their hands, calloused and rough, felt scraping across her neck, and it suddenly gets a whole lot easier to take a breath, air slipping down her throat like sweet vermouth. Sometimes, it’s not enough, and she has to bring up her own hands, pudgy and soft, to the column of her neck until her fingertips are white, white, white against the red, red, red of her strangled face.

Blades slipped between bones can kill, and she doesn’t want that yet. Blades sliding against skin, just barely grazing, feel too impersonal, like a cool stranger trying to pry into her organs to find her secrets. Instead, she uses her nails. Brushed with the prettiest nail varnish she can find, all her favorite colors dancing across her hands like pretty feathers. The welts they leave behind are pink with raised blood, or red with dripping blood. Blood, blood, blood, the constant.

She doesn’t play with flame. Too many fires in history have burned her wise, and so she never indulges in even a candle, especially when the new lightbulb came into existence. But if she touches a radiator until her fingers scream, or leaves a laptop on her knees until it whirs itself scorching…well. That’s neither here nor there.

She’s died so many times.

Sometimes, she wonders if it’s all a dream.

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Mortals have gray hairs heralding the trumpet of death.

Where’s the milestone of her end?