KH II -- Reaper
Title: Reaper
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts II
Pairing: Axel/Roxas (…-ish)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,987
Warnings: lots of language, serious morbidity, AU, brief violence
Summary: Roxas is more than he realizes, and his time aboveground is up.
Author's Note: Soooo… this is basically the prologue to a fic I may never get around to writing. It's meant to go on and include lots of epic adventures and scary stuff and shippiness; and it's always been a fic for hiza_chan, who writes the best dark!fic and the best Axel/Roxas and is, generally, the best. ♥ Since today is her birthday, I figure I might as well offer what I've got. :) Also it started out set in the South and then moved to Arizona, so… yeah, I suck. :D
REAPER
Roxas started seeing the Reaper three days before he died. He knew immediately-something about the extremely subtle bone-marrow deep-freeze and the staggering sense of premonition-who the man in the black coat was and what he’d come for, although the six-foot scythe certainly didn’t impede his interpretative skills. It was difficult to think of the man as the Grim Reaper, however, because he wasn’t particularly grim. Just… wistful. And “the Wistful Reaper” would have been terrible branding, so Roxas settled with the Reaper, and that was that.
On Wednesday night, he was working the usual shift with the usual half-committed attention. He had a huge Government test first period tomorrow, but if he could stay awake until one, that would give him two hours at home to study-if the bus wasn’t late. He glared out the front window at the bus stop to hammer that mental message home, and then his heart dropped so fast and so hard that he almost heard it smash into his diaphragm.
The three Cokes on his tray nearly did the same to the floor, but Roxas caught himself and them just before he earned the title of Universe’s Worst Waiter once and for all. Maybe the guy leaning against the bus stop pole was just a guy. Maybe he was just waiting for the bus, on his way home from something totally normal-like a harvesting implement convention. Maybe this swift, heavy, icy slither of Knowing in Roxas’s gut was wrong, even if none of them had ever been wrong before. Maybe everything was going to be okay.
“Roxy?” Annie May’s just-short-of-too-angelic face swam into focus between him and the window. Every time she called him that, his blood boiled a little, and he opened his mouth to tell her where to shove her cutesy nicknames… but couldn’t. The girl was a bit of a slut and a hell of an airhead, but she was also the nicest person he’d ever met, the best waitress he’d ever seen, and the only friend he had. “Are you okay, sweetie? You look like you saw-”
“I’m fine,” Roxas said. He didn’t sound like it, but she’d let it go. “I just thought I saw someone.”
Annie May glanced over her shoulder out the window. Unsurprisingly, the whole street was so devoid of life that Roxas expected a tumbleweed.
“You are dead-tired, honey,” Annie May said, and somehow her smile was pitying without being patronizing. The girl had a gift. “You working this weekend, or are you going to get a chance to rest up?”
“First weekend off this school year,” Roxas told her. “I have a lot of homework to catch up on, but-”
“Roxy, baby,” Annie May said, drawing a ring under her right eye with her fingertip to match the one under his, “you work too hard. You’ve got to live a little sometimes.”
“I’m more into surviving right now,” Roxas said. “Which probably isn’t going to happen if these douchebags don’t get their soda-pop.”
Annie May made the somehow-not-annoying kissy noise that always signified “see you later” and sashayed back to her latest table. Roxas did likewise, minus the sashaying, but he couldn’t quite shake the strange mental image of purple scythe blades under his tired eyes.
Thursday night, Roxas emerged from the kitchens with a laden tray to find the Reaper standing by the jukebox.
The tray wobbled, and the ice in the glasses rattled, and the plates clinked against each other; it sounded like the start of some kind of earthquake disaster movie, but he didn’t drop it. His hand steadied its weight, semi-automatic, without him ever taking his eyes off of the man(?) with one elbow balanced on the jukebox dome. It was flashing its kitschy colored lights, but they didn’t dance on the Reaper’s sleeve; it swallowed them.
The scythe blade gleamed, as did the Reaper’s teeth as he offered a small, sad smile. His eyes were an impossible shade of green, his hair was an impossible shade of red, and he vanished the first time Roxas blinked.
Roxas set the Coke refills down on the table, one by one, grounding himself in the final, finite sound of old glass on worn wood. The plates went next, one-two-three-four; it could still have been a mistake. Sleep deprivation-that caused hallucinations if you kept it up long enough. He hadn’t really rested in weeks, what with the dreams of the thing in the dark, the slender thing with teeth. That could be it. That had to be it. It didn’t make any difference that he’d felt the resonance in his ribcage, the frigid swell of Knowing something he wasn’t meant to. He’s almost stopped acknowledging those moments nowadays. Crazy people thought they were the only sane beings on the planet. Roxas wasn’t crazy. He was just tired. Just young and tired and scared.
“Can I get you anything else?” he asked.
The father gestured to his plate of sauce-slathered wings and grinned. “A couple more napkins, I think?”
Roxas was already looking forward to cleaning those up.
He had an essay on Great Expectations due Monday.
He had to clean the kitchen when he got home before he ended up with a rodent problem.
Annie May caught him in an uncomfortably tight hug as he was putting his coat on to leave.
“That obvious?” he managed with the few square inches of his lungs that hadn’t been crushed.
“Get some darned sleep,” Annie May said. “See you tomorrow, honey.” Kissy noise.
The bus was ten minutes late. The moon was a low crescent more like a Cheshire cat smile than a scythe blade.
“Table three,” Joe said. “And… well, never mind.”
Roxas stopped. “No, what?”
Joe tapped busily at the touchscreen, which was somehow even more ornery than the system they’d had before. “Nothing. I dunno. Be careful. The guy kind of gives me the creeps.”
Joe had employed a seventeen-year-old emancipated minor who lived in the rough part of town to work the shifts with the highest percentage of drunken desert rednecks.
“I’ll watch out,” Roxas said.
He wasn’t surprised, really, but his hands were shaking all the same. He clenched the notepad, swallowed, and smiled.
“You look familiar,” he said.
“Yeah,” the Reaper said, wincing a little. “Sorry. I couldn’t hang around, but I wanted to see how you were.”
He had leaned his scythe up against the wall next to his chair. This could not possibly be happening.
Roxas’s pulse was beating hard and fast in his ears, and the pen was getting slippery. “When?”
The Reaper gave him the saddest smile yet. “Soon.”
Roxas thought it stood to his credit that he didn’t pass out on the spot.
“Can I have a Sprite?” the Reaper said.
He couldn’t exactly say he didn’t see it coming when he’d had a two-and-eight-ninths days’ head start. Most people didn’t get that luxury. Most of them would probably say they didn’t want it. Roxas hadn’t really lost much sleep over the whole thing, though, if only because he hadn’t had any sleep to spare.
Friday night, five minutes to eleven. The barfights here were almost like clockwork at the best of times, and he’d seen them get nasty before.
But he’d never seen Annie May in the middle of one.
The problem was that it was one of her old ex-men (they were a bit like the X-Men, if the X-Men’s super strength had been conferred by liquor and had been accompanied by extremely poor judgment) and a man aspiring to become the next. Hell had no fury like a woman scorned, but man had no fury like jealousy over who was boning Annie May Carter.
Roxas was having none of the fury or of the boning-or at least not while she was on the clock, and Joe was in the back getting the backup case of Coors.
“Hey,” Roxas said, trying to raise his voice in volume and lower it in pitch. It came out underscored by a bit of a growl, though he would have preferred a bark. Somehow it didn’t surprise him that he was much more of a golden retriever puppy than a German shepherd. “Cool down or get out.” He tried to call over his shoulder without ceding any ground. “Joe!”
He remembered the old ex-not his name, since he hadn’t been around the restaurant much, and he’d only brooded silently when he had been, but the thick, low brows and the gleaming eyes buried in the blunt-angled face were enough to identify the guy. He looked like an angry animal backed up against the bar, the newcomer angled challengingly towards him, with Roxas between them trying to push Annie May gently aside.
“Make me,” the new guy said. “Make me get out, kiddo.”
“Allow me,” Old Ex said with all of the deft and subtle sarcasm a drunk hick could muster of a Friday night.
“Don’t make me start something in front of the lady.” Future Ex bared his unimpressive teeth.
“The lady’s just trying to do her job,” Roxas cut in, “so can we both leave her alone and let-”
Old Ex found the empty square-edged bottle of Jack waiting behind the counter to go out with the recyclables. “You start it, I’ll finish it.”
“Joe,” Roxas called, louder this time, giving Annie May a rather less-gentle shove.
Old Ex smashed the bottle on the edge of the bar and lunged towards Future Ex, who surged forward unarmed, and Roxas dove between them, not sure what he was shouting, conscious only of the fact that he would not be letting somebody die in his place of employment in a stupid altercation over a girl who could be so much more than a catalyst if she’d do up two more buttons of her shirt-
His first sensation was the jolt as he collided with something disconcertingly forceful; his second was the warmth on his chest; the third, as he looked slowly down at himself, was the pain mounting towards agony as the jagged end of the whiskey bottle dug deeper into his flesh.
Everything went still, and then the bewildered rush of sound and movement into the vacuum spun around him, distant like he was in an aquarium-some glass cage. It stayed disconnected from him, somehow; the only reality that would solidify in his mind was I guess this is it.
He was on the floor. Damn it; he had just mopped that this afternoon. What a pain. Speaking of pain, there had never been so much, and it made him so queasy that he couldn’t tell whether the room was swimming because he was crying or because he was going to pass out. Both? Likely. They really needed to get one of those Swiffer things that looked like a Dr. Seuss tree and wipe the cobwebs from the ceiling. Annie May looked like she was sobbing, and when both Exes shook out of their stupor and moved to comfort her, she screamed at them-something that made them cower; he’d never seen her like that before.
He would never see her like that again.
Oh, God. Oh, shit. Oh, no.
A hand with long, cool fingers stroked through his hair, and then there was a strong arm cradling him. The Reaper’s eyes were so sad it was like he was the one dying on the recently-mopped floorboards, broken and bleeding out.
“Not like this,” Roxas said. There was a sharp tang of blood in his mouth. “Not in a barfight.” Sad, sad eyes. “Jesus, you’ve got to be kidding me. Can’t I-can’t I have one moment of dignity? I don’t want-please-”
“I’ve got you,” the Reaper said, and held him as the pain crested and became unbearable and plunged the universe into a well of dark.
Then everything seethed back into place like someone had been banging on the television set.
Except that Roxas’s body was on the floor, dead, and Roxas was standing up… also dead.
Annie May was inconsolable, and her eyeliner was running so that it looked like she was crying ink. A few regular patrons that Roxas recognized despite their stunned expressions were holding the Exes back-and, by the looks of it, holding them there until the police arrived. Joe had dropped the whole box of Coors, leaving a mess of cardboard and shattered brown glass in a puddle of beer, and was letting the Exes have it. This was worse than when he’d caught Sophie embezzling. It was like they’d killed someone.
Exactly like that, since they had.
The Reaper’s hand was on Roxas’s shoulder now.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I’m afraid the separation is always like this. Sometimes it’s good, though-for closure.”
“I’m dead,” Roxas said.
“Yes,” said the Reaper.
“I’m a fucking corpse,” Roxas said.
The Reaper swallowed. Weird. “I wouldn’t put it in quite those terms-”
“I would,” Roxas said. “What the fuck does a corpse care about closure?”
“We can go if you’d like,” the Reaper said carefully. “Until we get to the river, this is your show.”
“This was never my show,” Roxas said, starting for the door. “It never has been.”
The Reaper trailed, tilting his head. Roxas could see that in the window; he wasn’t about to turn and make sure Death was following like some kind of hungry puppy.
“You’re not what I expected,” the Reaper remarked. “But I like you.”
“Hallefuckinglujah,” Roxas said.
The sirens careening into the parking lot stopped him from saying anything else.
It was a dark night, but disappointingly un-stormy. The stars were clearer than the metropolis usually allowed.
“If there’s anywhere you want to see,” the Reaper said from a few steps behind, “I’d be happy to go wherever you like. And we won’t have to pay for public transit, of course.”
There was a throbbing in Roxas’s head-did it still even count as a head? Was he even fucking corporeal? He wanted to know but couldn’t bring himself to address the Reaper yet-that resolved itself into iambic pentameter. The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes. He would be the first to admit that he wasn’t regal enough to earn a meteor shower, but couldn’t he at least have had some goddamn thunder? Just-something. Anything. A farewell from a world that had never really noticed him smeared all over the treads of its collective shoe. Well, it sure was nice spitting in your face, Roxas; enjoy being dead.
Roxas walked to the place where the road curved along the bluff. There were safety railings, but he was dead. He sat on one of them. The lights of the now-silent sirens still flashed halfheartedly, reflected in the dusty steel. Roxas looked down to where the land fell away, dropping a hundred feet almost straight down before it bottomed out. At the start of his shifts, you could see all the way to the place where the scrubby sprawl met the horizon, and when the sun set, the world went red. Now, though, the dirt and the clay and the stubborn cacti were muted silhouettes, and his sightline didn’t stretch very far before the empty desert folded into the dark.
The Reaper had hesitated behind him, the better to hover nearby without intruding too much. Roxas had always assumed that Death was a douchebag who enjoyed his occupation.
No. Roxas had never personified death. Roxas had figured that it was just the end of conscious existence, which rendered everything that preceded somewhat meaningless.
He slid off of the rail and dusted off his pants legs. He had died with his work apron on. He supposed there were worse things to die in, most of which probably established themselves in Vegas.
“Let me guess,” Roxas said. “I can’t take anything with me.”
The Reaper shook his head.
“Then let’s go,” Roxas said.
“The River Styx is not the Rio Grande,” Roxas said, because if that was true, he was going to die again and hope for a better universe next time.
“Not specifically,” the Reaper said, moving carefully down the slippery bank. “All rivers are the same river, and that’s the river that we need.”
Roxas put his hands in his pockets and looked at the sad, silty excuses for waves lapping at the sand. “What if I refuse to go?”
The Reaper glanced back. “Then I’ll take you by force.”
There was a pause.
“That sounded really dirty,” the Reaper said.
Roxas discovered that his mouth had fallen open and snapped it shut.
“Do you have a name?” he asked.
“I did once,” the Reaper said.
Roxas planted his feet. “Yeah?”
“Axel,” the Reaper said. “Like in a wheel, except… not. Not really.”
“Was there a qualifying test for this position?” Roxas asked.
The Reaper smiled. “Yes. I failed. But I was the only candidate, so they took me anyway.”
Roxas ran a hand through his hair. Neither his scalp nor his hand felt warm.
“This is fucked up,” he said.
“Amen, brother,” Axel said. “Are you coming, or do I have to make more dubious statements about bringing you?”
“Hold your skeletal horses,” Roxas said, and clambered down the bank.
He slipped at the water’s edge, and Axel caught his shoulder to steady him. With his feet in it, the water was still chilly somehow.
“That’ll fade,” Axel said, seeing his surprise. “Hold your back straight and close your eyes.”
“Jesus Christ,” Roxas said. “I’m dead. Dead. Finis, curtains, no encore.”
He did what he was told, and Axel lowered him into the water like a baptism-except that he wasn’t going to come back up.
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts II
Pairing: Axel/Roxas (…-ish)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,987
Warnings: lots of language, serious morbidity, AU, brief violence
Summary: Roxas is more than he realizes, and his time aboveground is up.
Author's Note: Soooo… this is basically the prologue to a fic I may never get around to writing. It's meant to go on and include lots of epic adventures and scary stuff and shippiness; and it's always been a fic for hiza_chan, who writes the best dark!fic and the best Axel/Roxas and is, generally, the best. ♥ Since today is her birthday, I figure I might as well offer what I've got. :) Also it started out set in the South and then moved to Arizona, so… yeah, I suck. :D
REAPER
Roxas started seeing the Reaper three days before he died. He knew immediately-something about the extremely subtle bone-marrow deep-freeze and the staggering sense of premonition-who the man in the black coat was and what he’d come for, although the six-foot scythe certainly didn’t impede his interpretative skills. It was difficult to think of the man as the Grim Reaper, however, because he wasn’t particularly grim. Just… wistful. And “the Wistful Reaper” would have been terrible branding, so Roxas settled with the Reaper, and that was that.
On Wednesday night, he was working the usual shift with the usual half-committed attention. He had a huge Government test first period tomorrow, but if he could stay awake until one, that would give him two hours at home to study-if the bus wasn’t late. He glared out the front window at the bus stop to hammer that mental message home, and then his heart dropped so fast and so hard that he almost heard it smash into his diaphragm.
The three Cokes on his tray nearly did the same to the floor, but Roxas caught himself and them just before he earned the title of Universe’s Worst Waiter once and for all. Maybe the guy leaning against the bus stop pole was just a guy. Maybe he was just waiting for the bus, on his way home from something totally normal-like a harvesting implement convention. Maybe this swift, heavy, icy slither of Knowing in Roxas’s gut was wrong, even if none of them had ever been wrong before. Maybe everything was going to be okay.
“Roxy?” Annie May’s just-short-of-too-angelic face swam into focus between him and the window. Every time she called him that, his blood boiled a little, and he opened his mouth to tell her where to shove her cutesy nicknames… but couldn’t. The girl was a bit of a slut and a hell of an airhead, but she was also the nicest person he’d ever met, the best waitress he’d ever seen, and the only friend he had. “Are you okay, sweetie? You look like you saw-”
“I’m fine,” Roxas said. He didn’t sound like it, but she’d let it go. “I just thought I saw someone.”
Annie May glanced over her shoulder out the window. Unsurprisingly, the whole street was so devoid of life that Roxas expected a tumbleweed.
“You are dead-tired, honey,” Annie May said, and somehow her smile was pitying without being patronizing. The girl had a gift. “You working this weekend, or are you going to get a chance to rest up?”
“First weekend off this school year,” Roxas told her. “I have a lot of homework to catch up on, but-”
“Roxy, baby,” Annie May said, drawing a ring under her right eye with her fingertip to match the one under his, “you work too hard. You’ve got to live a little sometimes.”
“I’m more into surviving right now,” Roxas said. “Which probably isn’t going to happen if these douchebags don’t get their soda-pop.”
Annie May made the somehow-not-annoying kissy noise that always signified “see you later” and sashayed back to her latest table. Roxas did likewise, minus the sashaying, but he couldn’t quite shake the strange mental image of purple scythe blades under his tired eyes.
Thursday night, Roxas emerged from the kitchens with a laden tray to find the Reaper standing by the jukebox.
The tray wobbled, and the ice in the glasses rattled, and the plates clinked against each other; it sounded like the start of some kind of earthquake disaster movie, but he didn’t drop it. His hand steadied its weight, semi-automatic, without him ever taking his eyes off of the man(?) with one elbow balanced on the jukebox dome. It was flashing its kitschy colored lights, but they didn’t dance on the Reaper’s sleeve; it swallowed them.
The scythe blade gleamed, as did the Reaper’s teeth as he offered a small, sad smile. His eyes were an impossible shade of green, his hair was an impossible shade of red, and he vanished the first time Roxas blinked.
Roxas set the Coke refills down on the table, one by one, grounding himself in the final, finite sound of old glass on worn wood. The plates went next, one-two-three-four; it could still have been a mistake. Sleep deprivation-that caused hallucinations if you kept it up long enough. He hadn’t really rested in weeks, what with the dreams of the thing in the dark, the slender thing with teeth. That could be it. That had to be it. It didn’t make any difference that he’d felt the resonance in his ribcage, the frigid swell of Knowing something he wasn’t meant to. He’s almost stopped acknowledging those moments nowadays. Crazy people thought they were the only sane beings on the planet. Roxas wasn’t crazy. He was just tired. Just young and tired and scared.
“Can I get you anything else?” he asked.
The father gestured to his plate of sauce-slathered wings and grinned. “A couple more napkins, I think?”
Roxas was already looking forward to cleaning those up.
He had an essay on Great Expectations due Monday.
He had to clean the kitchen when he got home before he ended up with a rodent problem.
Annie May caught him in an uncomfortably tight hug as he was putting his coat on to leave.
“That obvious?” he managed with the few square inches of his lungs that hadn’t been crushed.
“Get some darned sleep,” Annie May said. “See you tomorrow, honey.” Kissy noise.
The bus was ten minutes late. The moon was a low crescent more like a Cheshire cat smile than a scythe blade.
“Table three,” Joe said. “And… well, never mind.”
Roxas stopped. “No, what?”
Joe tapped busily at the touchscreen, which was somehow even more ornery than the system they’d had before. “Nothing. I dunno. Be careful. The guy kind of gives me the creeps.”
Joe had employed a seventeen-year-old emancipated minor who lived in the rough part of town to work the shifts with the highest percentage of drunken desert rednecks.
“I’ll watch out,” Roxas said.
He wasn’t surprised, really, but his hands were shaking all the same. He clenched the notepad, swallowed, and smiled.
“You look familiar,” he said.
“Yeah,” the Reaper said, wincing a little. “Sorry. I couldn’t hang around, but I wanted to see how you were.”
He had leaned his scythe up against the wall next to his chair. This could not possibly be happening.
Roxas’s pulse was beating hard and fast in his ears, and the pen was getting slippery. “When?”
The Reaper gave him the saddest smile yet. “Soon.”
Roxas thought it stood to his credit that he didn’t pass out on the spot.
“Can I have a Sprite?” the Reaper said.
He couldn’t exactly say he didn’t see it coming when he’d had a two-and-eight-ninths days’ head start. Most people didn’t get that luxury. Most of them would probably say they didn’t want it. Roxas hadn’t really lost much sleep over the whole thing, though, if only because he hadn’t had any sleep to spare.
Friday night, five minutes to eleven. The barfights here were almost like clockwork at the best of times, and he’d seen them get nasty before.
But he’d never seen Annie May in the middle of one.
The problem was that it was one of her old ex-men (they were a bit like the X-Men, if the X-Men’s super strength had been conferred by liquor and had been accompanied by extremely poor judgment) and a man aspiring to become the next. Hell had no fury like a woman scorned, but man had no fury like jealousy over who was boning Annie May Carter.
Roxas was having none of the fury or of the boning-or at least not while she was on the clock, and Joe was in the back getting the backup case of Coors.
“Hey,” Roxas said, trying to raise his voice in volume and lower it in pitch. It came out underscored by a bit of a growl, though he would have preferred a bark. Somehow it didn’t surprise him that he was much more of a golden retriever puppy than a German shepherd. “Cool down or get out.” He tried to call over his shoulder without ceding any ground. “Joe!”
He remembered the old ex-not his name, since he hadn’t been around the restaurant much, and he’d only brooded silently when he had been, but the thick, low brows and the gleaming eyes buried in the blunt-angled face were enough to identify the guy. He looked like an angry animal backed up against the bar, the newcomer angled challengingly towards him, with Roxas between them trying to push Annie May gently aside.
“Make me,” the new guy said. “Make me get out, kiddo.”
“Allow me,” Old Ex said with all of the deft and subtle sarcasm a drunk hick could muster of a Friday night.
“Don’t make me start something in front of the lady.” Future Ex bared his unimpressive teeth.
“The lady’s just trying to do her job,” Roxas cut in, “so can we both leave her alone and let-”
Old Ex found the empty square-edged bottle of Jack waiting behind the counter to go out with the recyclables. “You start it, I’ll finish it.”
“Joe,” Roxas called, louder this time, giving Annie May a rather less-gentle shove.
Old Ex smashed the bottle on the edge of the bar and lunged towards Future Ex, who surged forward unarmed, and Roxas dove between them, not sure what he was shouting, conscious only of the fact that he would not be letting somebody die in his place of employment in a stupid altercation over a girl who could be so much more than a catalyst if she’d do up two more buttons of her shirt-
His first sensation was the jolt as he collided with something disconcertingly forceful; his second was the warmth on his chest; the third, as he looked slowly down at himself, was the pain mounting towards agony as the jagged end of the whiskey bottle dug deeper into his flesh.
Everything went still, and then the bewildered rush of sound and movement into the vacuum spun around him, distant like he was in an aquarium-some glass cage. It stayed disconnected from him, somehow; the only reality that would solidify in his mind was I guess this is it.
He was on the floor. Damn it; he had just mopped that this afternoon. What a pain. Speaking of pain, there had never been so much, and it made him so queasy that he couldn’t tell whether the room was swimming because he was crying or because he was going to pass out. Both? Likely. They really needed to get one of those Swiffer things that looked like a Dr. Seuss tree and wipe the cobwebs from the ceiling. Annie May looked like she was sobbing, and when both Exes shook out of their stupor and moved to comfort her, she screamed at them-something that made them cower; he’d never seen her like that before.
He would never see her like that again.
Oh, God. Oh, shit. Oh, no.
A hand with long, cool fingers stroked through his hair, and then there was a strong arm cradling him. The Reaper’s eyes were so sad it was like he was the one dying on the recently-mopped floorboards, broken and bleeding out.
“Not like this,” Roxas said. There was a sharp tang of blood in his mouth. “Not in a barfight.” Sad, sad eyes. “Jesus, you’ve got to be kidding me. Can’t I-can’t I have one moment of dignity? I don’t want-please-”
“I’ve got you,” the Reaper said, and held him as the pain crested and became unbearable and plunged the universe into a well of dark.
Then everything seethed back into place like someone had been banging on the television set.
Except that Roxas’s body was on the floor, dead, and Roxas was standing up… also dead.
Annie May was inconsolable, and her eyeliner was running so that it looked like she was crying ink. A few regular patrons that Roxas recognized despite their stunned expressions were holding the Exes back-and, by the looks of it, holding them there until the police arrived. Joe had dropped the whole box of Coors, leaving a mess of cardboard and shattered brown glass in a puddle of beer, and was letting the Exes have it. This was worse than when he’d caught Sophie embezzling. It was like they’d killed someone.
Exactly like that, since they had.
The Reaper’s hand was on Roxas’s shoulder now.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I’m afraid the separation is always like this. Sometimes it’s good, though-for closure.”
“I’m dead,” Roxas said.
“Yes,” said the Reaper.
“I’m a fucking corpse,” Roxas said.
The Reaper swallowed. Weird. “I wouldn’t put it in quite those terms-”
“I would,” Roxas said. “What the fuck does a corpse care about closure?”
“We can go if you’d like,” the Reaper said carefully. “Until we get to the river, this is your show.”
“This was never my show,” Roxas said, starting for the door. “It never has been.”
The Reaper trailed, tilting his head. Roxas could see that in the window; he wasn’t about to turn and make sure Death was following like some kind of hungry puppy.
“You’re not what I expected,” the Reaper remarked. “But I like you.”
“Hallefuckinglujah,” Roxas said.
The sirens careening into the parking lot stopped him from saying anything else.
It was a dark night, but disappointingly un-stormy. The stars were clearer than the metropolis usually allowed.
“If there’s anywhere you want to see,” the Reaper said from a few steps behind, “I’d be happy to go wherever you like. And we won’t have to pay for public transit, of course.”
There was a throbbing in Roxas’s head-did it still even count as a head? Was he even fucking corporeal? He wanted to know but couldn’t bring himself to address the Reaper yet-that resolved itself into iambic pentameter. The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes. He would be the first to admit that he wasn’t regal enough to earn a meteor shower, but couldn’t he at least have had some goddamn thunder? Just-something. Anything. A farewell from a world that had never really noticed him smeared all over the treads of its collective shoe. Well, it sure was nice spitting in your face, Roxas; enjoy being dead.
Roxas walked to the place where the road curved along the bluff. There were safety railings, but he was dead. He sat on one of them. The lights of the now-silent sirens still flashed halfheartedly, reflected in the dusty steel. Roxas looked down to where the land fell away, dropping a hundred feet almost straight down before it bottomed out. At the start of his shifts, you could see all the way to the place where the scrubby sprawl met the horizon, and when the sun set, the world went red. Now, though, the dirt and the clay and the stubborn cacti were muted silhouettes, and his sightline didn’t stretch very far before the empty desert folded into the dark.
The Reaper had hesitated behind him, the better to hover nearby without intruding too much. Roxas had always assumed that Death was a douchebag who enjoyed his occupation.
No. Roxas had never personified death. Roxas had figured that it was just the end of conscious existence, which rendered everything that preceded somewhat meaningless.
He slid off of the rail and dusted off his pants legs. He had died with his work apron on. He supposed there were worse things to die in, most of which probably established themselves in Vegas.
“Let me guess,” Roxas said. “I can’t take anything with me.”
The Reaper shook his head.
“Then let’s go,” Roxas said.
“The River Styx is not the Rio Grande,” Roxas said, because if that was true, he was going to die again and hope for a better universe next time.
“Not specifically,” the Reaper said, moving carefully down the slippery bank. “All rivers are the same river, and that’s the river that we need.”
Roxas put his hands in his pockets and looked at the sad, silty excuses for waves lapping at the sand. “What if I refuse to go?”
The Reaper glanced back. “Then I’ll take you by force.”
There was a pause.
“That sounded really dirty,” the Reaper said.
Roxas discovered that his mouth had fallen open and snapped it shut.
“Do you have a name?” he asked.
“I did once,” the Reaper said.
Roxas planted his feet. “Yeah?”
“Axel,” the Reaper said. “Like in a wheel, except… not. Not really.”
“Was there a qualifying test for this position?” Roxas asked.
The Reaper smiled. “Yes. I failed. But I was the only candidate, so they took me anyway.”
Roxas ran a hand through his hair. Neither his scalp nor his hand felt warm.
“This is fucked up,” he said.
“Amen, brother,” Axel said. “Are you coming, or do I have to make more dubious statements about bringing you?”
“Hold your skeletal horses,” Roxas said, and clambered down the bank.
He slipped at the water’s edge, and Axel caught his shoulder to steady him. With his feet in it, the water was still chilly somehow.
“That’ll fade,” Axel said, seeing his surprise. “Hold your back straight and close your eyes.”
“Jesus Christ,” Roxas said. “I’m dead. Dead. Finis, curtains, no encore.”
He did what he was told, and Axel lowered him into the water like a baptism-except that he wasn’t going to come back up.