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It was the first time anyone had smiled at him in over a century.
His existence was one of deep creeping fear innate to any living creature. He was a closing book, the final page of the story, the longest winter. There was no shame in what he did. Death must come for us all. The rot and decay were just as important to a flower’s beauty as were the sun and rain. The world needed maggots and crows and they all needed him: the reaper.
He wasn’t the only one. They were everywhere, in the peripheries, waiting for signs of a life drawing to a close. The death mark assigned to him loomed over a young man in his mid-20s. For a month, he watched him from afar, waiting for the moment when he would escort him to the other side. The lives of mortals were mundane, after you’ve watched countless people, day in and day out, for centuries. This man, however, kept the reaper on his toes.
He didn’t know when, or how, or even why (there never is a reason.) His only job was to watch and wait. The raven-haired man danced with death on the daily. He carelessly walked into traffic only to be pulled back at the last moment, laughing as his friends scolded him. Even the meanest looking brutes, towering over him, weren’t enough to deter him from picking fights if he felt a friend was wronged. Stab wounds, black eyes, broken bones, and still, it wasn’t enough to take him. He had the devil’s luck.
It was mid-autumn, and the reaper kept watch closer than ever. Were he a mere mortal, he would have been beyond exhausted by the mental exertion required to keep watch over this reckless man. The raven-haired man sat upon an iron park bench, head tilted up towards the sky, watching the clouds be pulled along by the breeze. He was waiting for someone, all bundled up with a red scarf wrapped around his throat. When he finally turned away from the skies, he stared death straight in the face.
“Is it time already?” the man smiled, and its radiance put the sun to shame. Dark eyes stared back at him, full of life and light and all the things that would forever evade his touch. It had been a century since anyone had last spoken to him directly.
“Not quite,” he replied, surprised at the sound of his own voice. “So…you know?”
“I’ve been able to see you for a while now. You’ve never been this close though,” the doomed man hummed. “My friends can’t see you. You’re Death, aren’t you?”
“Do you not fear me?”
“Of course I do. Or, I should, I guess. I didn’t expect you to look so… normal,” he remarked. There was disappointment in his voice, as if he were displeased that the reaper trailing behind him was not a towering mass of ash and bone. “So do you know who I am, then? Do you know my name?”
“No… I don’t. I can only see that you’ve been marked,” the reaper frowned. “I don’t know when you’ll die. Or how. I just have to be here to collect you when it’s time.”
“I don’t really care how I die,” the man shook his head. “My name is Luffy. Do you have a name?”
It had been several centuries since anyone had referred to him by his given name. He had one, of course. All reapers had been human at some point; humans who had committed atrocities that demanded repentance before they could be granted eternal peace. When his sins were forgiven, only then could he pass from this world. He fumbled through his memories, trying to think back to the time he was alive, what name he had been called. It came back to him, but only partially. “Law.”
“Law,” he repeated, and the way it fell off his lips stole the breath from his lungs.
“You realize that me being here, the fact that you can see and speak to me, means that death is closer than ever, don’t you?” Law asked, and somehow he felt a hint of anger, frustration, something, in his voice.
“Of course,” Luffy replied and those dark doe eyes never wavered. “But you’re here now so why not get to know you?”
Law blinked back at him, floundering for the right words to say. Befriending your reaper, welcoming your own death with open arms… it was unheard of. He opened his mouth to speak, but Luffy had already turned away. A tall blonde man was jogging towards him down the garden path, waving his arm out high. My brother, Luffy mouthed to him with a sideways glance.
“Luffy! Were you waiting long?” the blonde man panted as he slowed to a stop. A thin sheen of sweat glistened across his brow; his cheeks were chapped red from the cold. “Sorry, there was just so much traffic.”
“Nope!” Luffy chirped back in reply. “It’s alright, Sabo. I was just talking to a new friend.”
His brother followed his gaze to the towering oak where Law stood beneath. Golden leaves fell right through him. Sabo looked away, frown deepening as he searched Luffy’s gaze. “You’re scaring me, Luffy.”
“Sorry, sorry. Just kidding,” Luffy snorted, cheerfully slapping his brother’s shoulder to distract from his thinly-veiled lie. “Where are we going to eat? I’m starving.”
The blonde seemed uncertain. Luffy linked elbows with him and practically dragged him away. As they disappeared down the path, into the cover of trees, concerned blue eyes turned back to the old oak and stared straight through him.
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He continued to watch over him for a week after that. As the death mark grew darker, Luffy showed no signs of any underlying illness. It would be a tragic accident that finally took him. Good men usually died that way, and Luffy was a good man, he came to find.
Kindness was second nature to him. There were never any ulterior motives for his actions. Often, he hardly even thought before he acted. It was quite easy to see why people flocked to him; how he touched the lives of so many without even realizing it. In his final days, with death always just a step or two behind, he never stopped for a moment to wallow in self-pity. Instead, he poured more love than ever into those around him. Without thinking, the people around him repaid his kindness by constantly pulling him out of trouble. The poor bastards, Law thought bitterly, they still won’t see it coming. Luffy’s hands gave joy, but his hands… his hands would take it all away.
Luffy occasionally spoke to him whenever he was alone (which was not often.) He would disregard the strange stares from passersby as he made conversation with the invisible reaper looming over him. His friends noticed, exchanging frowns amongst each other, whispering concerns. If Luffy had heard them, however, he made no effort to diffuse their worries. Law tried his best to ignore him; it was easier that way. Hearing the cheerful inflection of his voice day after day only served as a reminder of how lonely his existence had become over the past century. This happiness, this feeling that someone was happy to see him, could not last. Law would take him soon enough, and continue to roam the earth for centuries in search of atonement.
Being ignored never seemed to stop Luffy from carrying on by himself. Oftentimes, he talked with no real purpose other than to kill the silence. He blathered on about his friends, his past adventures, foods he wanted to try, anything. It seemed that his happiness was limitless. On one cold autumn evening, as Law followed him down the city streets, the man came to an abrupt stop in front of a small cross erected in the dirt. He knelt down and brushed away the dust, tending to the faux flower wreath with care.
“I’ve seen you once before, you know,” Luffy admitted. The perpetual grin had disappeared from his face, lips drawn in a fine line. “I didn’t understand it at the time. You were there when my brother died. You pulled him out of the wreckage, but you didn’t take me with you. It happened just right there.”
Law’s eyes followed Luffy’s gaze to the busy intersection behind them. It wasn’t often that he remembered the souls he’d taken… there had simply been too many. However, as he watched the speeding cars, he vaguely recalled the crumpled bodies of two young men amongst the burning remnants of a crash. He had pulled the older one from the debris, freeing his soul from where his body had been impaled on metal shrapnel. The other man was holding onto the empty corpse now, still dangling upside down from where the seatbelt tethered him to the wreckage. Blood was streaming down his face, sticky and black, running down into his swollen eyes. Take me instead, the boy wailed. At least take me with him.
He had assumed the kid’s words to be nothing more than grief stricken pleas to an unknown god. Luffy had been talking directly to him, begging death to take him. Now, with death on his shoulder, he stood beside the little wooden cross that should have marked where two stolen lives. It wasn’t his time then, and now, two years later, death had finally come back for him. What a joke. It wasn’t his place to decide who would be taken. He couldn’t have taken him then, even if he had groveled before him, offered his soul on a silver platter. Luffy placed a flower and uttered fond words and the brilliant smile returned to his lips. It made Law snap.
“Are you not angry? The way you felt when I took your brother… all of your friends will be forced to live it too,” Law snarled. His eyes widened at the loss of control and he bit his tongue to still his nerves. Frustration boiled up in him as the man only stared back with those gentle eyes, so full of life.
“It’s not like it’s your fault,” Luffy shrugged, and he walked on. Somehow that hurt more.
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“Good morning!”
Law had been watching from where he was seated in the open window, bathed in dawn light and the scent of crisp autumn morning. The greeting, so sudden and boisterous, nearly knocked him to the ground. He should have been used to it at this point. The mark of death loomed over him in harsh contrast to the soft sunshine. Luffy laid on his stomach, head tilted and cheek resting on his crossed arms. Law had watched him sleep before, but he usually took care to slip away before morning. Now, hiding seemed redundant.
“I’ve been wondering,” Luffy hummed as he pushed himself up and off of his rumpled bed. His eyes were dark and bright, but something about the way he approached was positively predatory. An impish grin spread across his face. “Do you think I could touch you?”
No one had touched him for centuries. Luffy reached for him, his fingers ghosting down the contour of his chest, slipping through where the reaper’s heart had once been. A disapproving hum fell flat from his lips.
“I don’t think it would be a good sign if you could touch me,” Law reminded him. “Humans don’t usually reach for death.”
“I just thought you seemed lonely,” Luffy remarked. He raised his palm, and waited on Law expectantly, as if he should have known what to do. “Put your hand up. Come on.”
The reaper clicked his tongue in annoyance. He knew the man couldn’t touch him regardless, so he raised his palm, simply entertaining a dying man. Luffy steadied his hand parallel to Law’s, and held it hovering in this air. An entire dimension separated them, yet the space between them, so paper thin, gave him the illusion of touch. He wondered if his hands were warm. The cold stone of his heart, wherever it was in this world or the next, fluttered softly.
“This is just as nice, right?” Luffy chuckled. “For now.”
“For now?” Law echoed. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the space where their hands would meet, utterly entranced.
“Yeah. When I die, then I can touch you for real, right?”
He made it sound so simple. His fingers curled forward as if to entwine with the spectral hand. Expectantly, they closed around nothing but air.
“I don’t understand. Are you not sad?”
“Of course, I’m sad,” Luffy laughed with a cheerful tone that only added further confusion. “There’s so many things I still want to do. I want to try lots of different foods and travel the world. But you’re here now, and I did all I could do. I met some really great people who love me. I don’t have a second to waste feeling sorry for myself. I’ll make it a good life, right up until the very last second.”
“You’ll never see them again,” Law pointed out.
Luffy just stared back at him with vague amusement and shook his head.
“I have a feeling I’m going to be just fine.”
Something that he couldn’t understand stirred deep inside the reaper; like there was a word on the very tip of his tongue, the ghost of a memory just beneath the surface. He watched Luffy as he soaked in the sunshine for what could have been the very last time. Those words haunted him all morning and into the evening. I have a feeling I’m going to be just fine. Just fine. He remained in his thoughts for the rest of the day, ruminating on how those words could cut him so deeply.
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He trailed behind Luffy as he went about his final day, and it was so painfully mundane. He bought groceries with his brother and unloaded them in the fridge. A full gallon of milk was placed on the shelf and Luffy seemed to relish in the irony that he wouldn’t be around to witness its expiration date. He ate lunch with friends as they laughed over shared memories and drank one too many beers. Law couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow they all knew. Luffy returned home just before sunset. The streetlights were beginning to turn on as he ascended the stairs of his apartment complex.
There was an underlying note of melancholy in the air, like the smell of rain just before a storm. The low drone of voices below became apparent as the two of them emerged from the final flight of stairs. Luffy’s apartment unit was on the fourth floor, overlooking the street. Law noticed her only seconds before Luffy: a girl perched on the railing, wind whipping at her hair as she swayed on her bare feet. The people below were pleading with her now, begging her to reconsider. The police had been called, someone shouted. Luffy acted before he could think. Kindness came naturally to him, after all.
Law saw him, a dark blur past the corner of his eyes, and he reached out to stop him. He watched his hands slip through the man’s back helplessly, fingers closing on dead air. He could see it. The girl was not marked, but Luffy? His death mark was darker than ever. He yelled for him to stop, but the crowd had reached a fever pitch, a collective wailing from the people below. Law reminded himself, he had to, that he didn’t get to choose who lived or died. He could only collect them when it was time.
The girl stepped off the balcony, left foot first, and Luffy lunged, threw his arms out for her. He wrapped the stranger in a tight embrace and twisted like a cat in the air so it was his back facing the ground. Law watched. He had watched so many deaths before. He’d stood beside the elderly as they passed in their sleep. He had seen gruesome accidents and bodies twisted into ghoulish positions. He’d seen people take their own lives in all manners of ways. Luffy hit the pavement with a smack, a loud crack, a pop, something wet. Why did this time hurt him so much?
Luffy held her: one hand steadying the girl’s head, the other pressing her close to his chest, cushioning her from the fall. She stirred against him after a moment, too stunned to remove herself from the dying man below her. It must have taken all his strength to give her a comforting pat. His arms, his shoulders at least, had to have been broken. The girl’s body shivered, then pitiful sobs wracked her body as she reciprocated the touch.
“Thank goodness,” he said, and he smiled: all teeth and gums and blood oozing. Brilliant and dazzling and doomed. Law remembered what it was that had stirred inside of him that morning.
The word on the tip of his tongue.
The ghost of a memory.
He remembered when the cold stone of his heart once beat for someone: a young man, ravaged by war, bleeding out on his operating table. The soldier whom he’d spent many late nights with, chatting until dawn in the men’s bunkers about all the things they’d do when the war was over, and how they would do them together. The way that the surgeon had found home in the soldier. The soldier who, still so young, so full of life, lay before him as the blood drained from his body.
They had run out of anesthetics, and so his men poured whiskey down his throat as he coughed and sputtered. Law’s scalpel glided through flesh, searching for the bullet lodged within, as the young soldier grit his teeth. The bleeding wouldn’t stop; he couldn’t find the source. A nicked artery, maybe? His chest was torn open wide: dark cherry red and glistening gore and heart beating on full display for the world to see. His hands trembled with frustration and fear, and it was the soldier’s still-warm hands that steadied him.
“You did your best,” the soldier grinned up at him: white and pink and dark cherry red. “Don’t worry... I have a feeling I’m going to be just fine.”
He passed on the table before Law could even think to respond. Just another body destined for the burn pile. Many men had passed under his knife. A scalpel and sutures could only do so much in times of war. He had seen men shredded by shrapnel, bisected by swords, torn apart by bullet wounds… Oftentimes, his services were only a formality. Most of the patients ended up in a heap, piled atop each other and burned until nothing but bone and ash remained.
He had lost so many, but it was the young soldier with the deathbed smile that destroyed him. Whoever lay on his table next, he couldn’t have cared less. He laid down his scalpel for the final time. No longer would his hands ever give life; his were only for taking.
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Someone helped the girl off of him. She was paralyzed by shock, devastated by grief and guilt, but she was alive. But Luffy… Luffy was splayed out on the concrete, bones shattered like glass beneath his battered skin. Bloodstains bloomed where sharp bone punctured through flesh. The medics were late. The police could do nothing but wait. No one dared touch him, only forming a small circle to shield him, promising that help was on its way, murmuring kind words and comfort. It didn’t matter either way. The bleed was in his brain now and his vision was fading to black.
Luffy paid no mind to the small crowd gathering around him. Their voices were all jumbled, blending together like radio static. He could see the reaper clear as day. Law sat next to him and he wanted to reach out but it wasn’t time. Not yet. Luffy deserved the kindness of a quick and painless death, but his soul clung on stubbornly until the end, until little by little the color drained from his face.
“I couldn’t save you,” Law lamented. Again, he adds to himself.
“I was the one that jumped,” Luffy choked out in small gurgling gasps, an attempt at laughter. He shouldn’t be talking. He should be closing his eyes, surrendering to the pain quickly and quietly, not comforting his own reaper. “I’ve been thinking. We knew each other once… didn’t we?”
“It’s divine punishment that we meet like thise. Atonement for my sins,” Law asserts, practically spits. “For all the people who died on my table. For you, you died on my table.”
“You said it yourself. You don’t get to choose who lives or dies,” Luffy laughs. “All this time, that’s why you were still hanging around? Don’t you think it’s time to forgive yourself?”
The medics loomed over him now, mumbling words of reassurance, and no one believed a second of it. They would take him and leave only a red stain on the concrete. His brother would come home to yellow tape and teary eyes and flashing lights. He would rush upstairs to ask his brother what happened, and he wouldn’t find him there. Just clothes strewn across the floor, the ghost of his scent on his sheets, a full gallon of milk in the fridge. He would call Luffy’s friends, and they would spend the rest of their lives wondering, what if they had all stayed for just one more drink? None of it mattered anymore.
Luffy reached out for him. Their cold hands entwined together, sparking in him a warmth that he’d deprived himself of for centuries. The chaos surrounding them melted away like snow in spring, and it was just the two of them: the soldier and the surgeon. The reaper and the first man who had ever been happy to see him. Their fingers fit together just as they once had hundreds of years ago, and neither dared to let go.
“Can we go together this time?”