Revan Kaiser was moments away from killing himself seconds before the world ended. Pistol barrel in mouth, hammer pulled back, finger on the trigger—he meant business. It had taken him several hours to perfect his suicide note, though he secretly wondered how many days would pass before someone discovered it.
He wasn't a popular man, didn't have any friends who would check in on him. Perhaps it was loneliness that drove him to such a miserable ending. Loneliness, along with the lingering, incurable sadness he'd possessed since childhood.
The world was a cruel place, far too cruel for weak-minded men like Revan. People said depression doesn't last forever, that all moments of internal dread pass with time. "It gets better, so don't make a permanent decision on a temporary feeling," he'd heard a suicide survivor say on a news broadcast. But it's not that Revan was depressed, nor that he thought people would be better off without him. No, it was nothing like that. In fact, people likely wouldn't even notice he was gone. But Revan, over the course of several years, managed to convince himself that he would be better off in the afterlife, whether it was Heaven or Hell that awaited him.
He no longer cared whether or not this feeling would pass, though he was convinced it wouldn't. He'd been sad for as long as he could remember, dreading getting out of bed in the morning, going to a dead-end job he hated, constantly wearing a mask for the outside world. The deepest pits of Hell couldn't be any more intolerable than life on earth was.
A selfish way of thinking, sure, but it felt like the only reasonable solution to the problems he faced. He hadn't asked to be born, hadn't been given any say in how his life turned out. If anything, pulling the pistol's trigger would be Revan's first act of defiance in his entire life. Well, first and last, technically speaking. But in his mind, it was better to go out with a bang than a whimper, so he saw no reason to continue limping through life's tribulations day in and day out.
It would end here and now for him, he'd decided. He was so certain in his decision, the gun didn't even shake in his hands. They were smooth and steady, knowing the bullet within the gun's chamber would bless his brain by ending its racing thoughts and voices once and for all.
If Revan had practiced with firearms earlier in life, there was a high likelihood he would've succeeded in killing himself on that particularly unremarkable day. Yet as he went to pull the trigger, barrel pressed to the roof of his mouth, his finger met an immovable resistance. It was the first time he'd been able to laugh at himself in quite a while, cursing inwardly as he realized the gun's safety was still on. Revan would come to realize later that it was this second-long oversight which altered the trajectory of his life.
He was seated on a thrifted suede couch in his living room. He'd gone back and forth for several days over the means and location for this event. Revan lived on the eighth floor of his apartment complex and had considered jumping from the balcony, then dismissed the idea after picturing his broken body splayed on the pavement below. Such a method lacked privacy and created more problems than it solved. It would inflict immeasurable trauma on city dwellers passing by, which didn't seem fair in Revan's mind.
Popping a mouthful of pills in bed brought with it too much uncertainty. Hanging himself in the closet seemed entirely too crude. The ole' toaster in the bathtub was melodramatic as hell. And a friend of his in high school had driven her car into a tree and ended up paralyzed for life, so that was out of the question in his mind.
The television was playing re-runs of some unbearable sitcom, ceiling fan whirling overhead. Revan had lit several candles, as if he were celebrating his own funeral several days in advance. A candlelit memorial, so to speak.
But in that moment, as Revan went to flip the pistol's safety, a cold, silent chill echoed across the earth's face. The television cut to static as screams sounded from outside the bachelor's apartment. The ceiling fan lost power, its momentum ceasing as its blades slowed. The living room lights cut to black, and the candles…
Somehow, through no reasonably explainable means, the half-dozen candlewicks extinguished with the snap of fingers, leaving Revan Kaiser to sit in darkness. All alone, gun in mouth, the only noise he had to comfort him was the television's ominous, buzzing static. Static, and the desperate screams of people on the city streets outside.
He lived a lukewarm life, the sort of man who didn't believe in God yet acknowledged how miraculous earth's inception was. Revan's high school physics teacher, whose name eluded him for whatever reason, had once said that if the earth's orbit was skewed ever so slightly, or if its axis was tilted by a single degree, life on the globe never would've come into being. Portions of the planet would be plunged in darkness or scorched by direct sunlight, its weather patterns reduced to the same hellish storms that made life on Neptune impossible.
Despite recognizing intelligent life as an anomaly, Revan had never let such a worldview take hold in his heart. Nor did he stop to ponder the impossible odds required for him to be conceived. Although several thousands of years had passed before his birth, and even more generations within, it stood to be said that each and every human defied infinitesimal odds the moment they were born. A single sperm cell amongst eighty million fertilizing a single egg at a precise time, multiplied by the impossible odds of each preceding generation before them.
And Revan had planned on throwing such a biological miracle away with the single pull of a trigger, leaving behind a bloody stain on his suede couch as his only form of a legacy.
It stands to be said the pistol's safety being on was Revan's last and most remarkable miracle, because that alone gave him a moment to pause in confusion as people screamed outside. He set the gun atop his coffee table and approached the apartment's balcony door, sliding the glass pane open to step outside. It wasn't until this moment that Revan noticed the sky was dark, despite it being half past noon on a midsummer day. But it wasn't an overcast sky that blotted the sun's light, he realized as he stared at the unannounced solar eclipse above, shielding his eyes with a single raised hand.
Bystanders a hundred feet beneath him sprinted in panic like ants whose mound of dirt was destroyed by a boot's heel. In all of Revan's thirty-one miserable years on earth, he'd never seen such a perplexing occurrence. Did it have something to do with his apartment losing power? But he hadn't merely lost power, he told himself. If his living room had blown a fuse, that would explain the ceiling fan turning off, but his television screen still had static, which meant it still possessed electricity. Even stranger were the candles, whose extinguished flames couldn't be explained by a blown fuse or power outage.
The city sidewalks were filled with dead corpses, their bodies collapsed in awkward angles like murder victims outlined at a crime scene. Several dozen cars crashed, veering off the boulevard into surrounding buildings as incapacitated drivers went lifeless behind their wheels. Revan saw several drivers crumpled and motionless, their heads using the wheel as a pillow with craned necks. Because of this, car horns blared everywhere, matching the frequency of high-pitched screams echoing in the atmosphere. He saw several individuals pointing to the sky in horror, which caused Revan to look up himself.
Descending from the clouds in an unnatural angle was a commercial airplane, its nose dipping as if it were aimed directly at Revan's apartment building. It was this distinct moment, faced with the inevitable prospect of dying beneath the crushing weight of an aircraft carrier, that a spark of panic echoed deep inside Revan's soul. Though he'd planned on ending his life minutes ago, it was this spark of panic that fanned inwardly into larger flames—flames which translated into a sudden will to live. Perhaps it was a primitive, evolutionary response in the back of his mind—a fight-or-flight instinct he couldn't avoid—but Revan proceeded to act in an utterly contradictory manner in the blink of an eye.
To Revan, committing suicide was an act of defiance. Living in a world where there were so many things he couldn't control, so many malignant variables, suicide seemed favorable to him because it was his way of finally having ultimate control over his destiny. A proverbial middle finger to his wanton Creator that he didn't abide by whatever predestined plans were in store for him.
But this… Dying in a freakish plane crash… No, that wouldn't satisfy Revan's inner itch to control his narrative. In fact, it would only reaffirm the fact that he lacked control over his life, which was a thought that made him feral. He refused to let Fate get the last laugh, he told himself as he turned from the balcony, retrieved the pistol from the coffee table, and sprinted out his apartment's front door.
In only a few seconds Revan arrived his floor's elevators, mashing the button that would summon them.
"Fuck," he grunted under his breath, realizing that it wasn't only his living room that had lost power. After pressing the elevator button several times, only to find that it didn't illuminate in response, he recoiled from the doors and sprinted toward the stairs. Descending them two at a time, he practically threw himself down each floor in a manner of athleticism he didn't know possible.
Revan had never considered himself an athlete. He'd been an overweight child and oftentimes overlooked on sports teams in early adolescence. Deciding he didn't have what it took to fit in with other kids his age, Revan discontinued all attempts at physical fitness in middle school. Although he'd grown several inches during puberty, allowing him to lean out considerably, he'd never returned to the world of barbaric competition. That being said, the near-death surge of adrenaline coursing in his veins unlocked abilities he'd never accessed, his unwillingness to die overriding the burning in his lungs and legs.
Bless his heart, Revan managed to reach the stairwell's ground floor and throw himself into the apartment lobby by the time the plane made impact.
The ground shook. The world collapsed. Metal and mortar filled the air around him. Particles imploded. His feet failed him. Despite every inch of his essence desiring survival, a second chance at life, Fate won on that dreaded day, and Revan died in a manner that was utterly out of his control.