The Reaper

I am nothing spectacular.

There are plenty of fallen angels in the world.

They’re on the streets every day. They’re the ones with the sad eyes and the broken hearts. They’re the ones with the scars on their skin and the ones that can’t seem to meet anyone’s eyes. They are alone and they are hurt and they don’t know how to deal with the pain of just being alive.

I know.

I understand.

I’m just another fallen angel.

I realized long ago that I was nothing spectacular. It’s easy to believe it when I had to watch everything I love fall away from me. When I tasted my heart turn to ash in my mouth, when I watched love die, when I saw my blood for the first time. It’s easy to live when there is love.

It’s just hard to live once it’s dead.

No.

I’m nothing spectacular.

But I’m still alive. It’s all I have for now, but it’ll have to be enough. I am not yet a ghost. My wings are nothing but tattered shreds, but I am not dead. I have sins to bear, but they are my sins, and they are enough to remind me that I’ve chosen this road. I’ve chosen to be human.

Maybe it was a mistake.

But it was my mistake to make.

The cemetery is an unfamiliar place to me, but the smell of death is not.

After all, I used to be an angel of death. I used to be like the figure standing over this fresh grave, the black one with the dark wings that no one else can seem to see. I remember the feel of a scythe in my hand and the begging and the pleading of people who don’t want to go or don’t want to say goodbye.

I ignored them. I ignored the requests to live, just one more day, just one more hour.

I wonder now if he will ignore my request to die. It’s not an unreasonable thing to ask, not when the corpse being placed in the earth at this moment is the one that carried my heart in his hand. Even when he crushed it until blood seeped from between his fingers, I could not help but beat solely for him.

To put it plainly, it sucks.

So I take a breath, and I wait.

I wait until the rain has started to fall and the figures dressed in black finish their words and begin to drift away from the grave. I wait until the last remaining son leads off his crying mother and the father wanders off with his new bride. I wait until his two best friends turn their backs, barely catching my eye before they have to look away.

I wait until his lover has broken down sobbing and left her bloody rose on his tombstone.

I wait until there is nothing but the body, the reaper, and me left standing over his grave.

“What do you want, Eve?”

He asks the question in a cold voice. He’s used to the begging and crying, and he’s probably not surprised to see me there. There’s probably not much that would surprise him, and I can tell by the resignation in his frigid voice that he already knew what was coming. I would have expected the same, were I in his position.

I was. Not so long ago.

“I want to die,” I said, smirking.

“You know I can’t do that.” There’s a warning in his voice. I shouldn’t be asking, but I charge ahead anyway. I’m still breathing, even when he isn’t. I’m still breathing, even after he passed from my life, and that’s just it. I’m still alive. I still have breath and a heartbeat and I don’t want to. Not anymore.

“Take me back.” I whisper the words.

“You know I can’t do that.” He says it again, same words, some pity in it this time.

“Yes you can. Take me back. Cut me down. I don’t care. I won’t press charges.” I laugh. It’s almost a joke, but I find the laughter fades on my lips and wilts and dies and turns into something ugly. I choke it down like I choked down the shattered pieces of my heart and then I look up at him, dark and so much of what I was once.

What I would kill to be again.

“You know I can’t do that.” He says it again.

His work here is done. He should be walking away. But he doesn’t, and this confuses me. Confuses and surprises me, but not as much as what comes next. “I’m sorry,” he says, and I’ve never heard him say those words before. Never heard any reaper say those words before and then he walks forward and he is kissing me.

I don’t understand.

I’m frozen but for a moment I just feel cold lips, so cold, frozen like death, and they are brushing against mine and there is a frozen tear landing on my cheek and I can’t move because every nerve in my body is dead for a split second, dead and dying and I try to catch my breath, but I’m dead, dead, dead, dead and I can’t breath.

Then he steps back and warmth rushes into my veins again and I’m more disappointed than I should be.

I look up at him.

I don’t understand.

I open my mouth. No words are coming out but I’m not dead, I’m still alive and I still don’t want to be, but that chill, that cold, it was so much more terrifying then I thought it would be. Is that what he felt at the end? Is that what he felt when his body collapsed, the bullet wound still in his heart, like the one he put through mine?

“What did you do?” I whisper it, my voice weak.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. His fingers brush my cheek. “I wish I could have loved you.” He smirks, and it is an unfamiliar and unnerving thing. I don’t understand, and I keep thinking it and keep whispering it in my head but the words won’t leave my lips. “I wish you could have loved me.”

“I don’t understand,” and this time I say it out loud.

“You don’t need to,” he tells me and this time he is turning away and his wings are dark and tattered and I want my reaper to come back and claim my soul, but he won’t. It finally occurs to me, that it’s not that he can’t, it’s that he won’t and I wonder why and I wish I understood, but I don’t know anything anymore.

I am nothing spectacular.

At least, I wasn’t.

But at some point, the reaper did something to me.

He made me a god.