Notes: For Daniella, someone beautiful. Happy sixteenth.

Of Firebirds and Ashes—

Sophie didn’t much remember dying. At some point, it had all just become very fuzzy and vague, and after the plunge of colors and motion she had found it all very confusing. She had thought it out carefully, her suicide, and stuffed her shoes with lead and iron before she jumped, so she’d sink straight to the bottom.

When she woke up, it was still like that. She was damp and smelled faintly of the river water, and her feet were aching from her unbearably heavy shoes. Her throat and chest felt thick and sticky, as though she’d suffered a particularly bad cold.

“I hate people like you,” said an impatient voice to her left, and Sophie struggled upright, tottering onto her heavy feat. A dark figure shifted behind their desk, some strange mixture of light and shadow that became puzzling when she looked too closely. They—she couldn’t tell if it had a gender—leaned forward and elbows so starkly white, they appeared skeletal. “A job well done, though. I imagine you felt very little, seeing as you blacked out almost immediately.”

“I drowned?” Sophie repeated, and looked down at her slightly clammy white hands. She flexed them, quietly appreciating the mechanical genius behind their design, before again turning her attention forwards. “Yes…you’re right. That’s right. I killed myself.”

“Stupid thing to do,” the figure remarked, and she couldn’t say if its voice was low or high, “But at least you went neatly. Spending eternity with a rope burn around your neck isn’t very fun—and as for the ones who overdosed? Well. They’re just as dead here as they were there.”

“And where is here?” Sophie asked, with some mild curiosity. The memories were there, quietly pressed up against the dark matter behind her eyes, and she focused on ignoring them. She felt remarkably calm, now. There wasn’t much that could hurt her, if she was already dead.

“Wrong,” the figure remarked, as though it had read her mind, and stepped up and around their desk to stand before Sophie. She felt slightly underdressed in her worn blue jeans and garish tank top, and crossed her arms unconsciously. “You’re in the afterlife,” the figure remarked, pulling out a strange instrument and moving it towards Sophie. She had the impression of being measured, as though being fitted for a dress, “And I will be your own, personal reaper, until you’ve decided on your destination.”

“My destination?” Sophie repeated, and was actually slightly excited, anticipating the answer to the age old question that had spawned so many religions and cults, “And what is that? Nirvana? Hell? Heaven? Reincarnation?”

Her reaper didn’t even pause in their examination, “You’ll see.” Apparently satisfied with the data it had gathered, it returned to behind the desk. “Unfortunately for you, you’ve managed to totally ruin your karma at the last minute—”

“Karma?” Sophie repeated, “So Hinduism is right, after all?”

“Stop trying to be clever. Karma is just the most accurate term.” The reaper sounded slightly agitated, and Sophie wisely fell silent, when it occurred to her that antagonizing the determiner of her afterlife might not be the best idea. The reaper continued, “Despite the occasional minor mishap—shoplifting when you were twelve, the white lies, and other pettiness—you’ve led a fairly decent life. If you’d been accidentally hit by a truck a few hours ago, I would be shipping you off to your just reward, no questions asked.” Here the reaper paused, moving back behind their desk. Sophie was a little wary of the mountain of paperwork—perhaps her punishment would be making copies until she had atoned for her sins?

“Unfortunately, no. I don’t get to doll out punishments, I just enforce them.” The reaper waved a hand. How interesting. Even death had a social pyramid. “Everything has a power structure. Now, pay attention. Your suicide was a major sin—yes, good, you’re aware of it. I can’t stand excuses. But at the same time, your relatively good behavior has almost balanced you out. Sending you off to eternal punishment would be overstretching.”

“You said I had options,” Sophie said suddenly, “But now it sounds like I’m just stuck in the middle. Which is it?”

“Be more passive. You’re supposed to be a suicide case.”

“Romeo and Juliet weren’t passive!” Sophie countered, though it occurred to her that the reaper might never have heard of Earthly plays.

“No, they were just nonexistent and stupid. And of course I’ve heard of them! I kept Shakespeare around for a few years just because I was bored and he told a good story. Do I need to do the same with you?”

Sophie shut up. She thought the reaper might have been glaring at her, “What I’m proposing is one last chance. If you succeed, twittering harps and clouds. If you fail, fire and brimstone.”

“So, it’s Christianity after all.”

“You aren’t helping your case.”

“I’m sorry,” Sophie said automatically, without really meaning it. “What happens if I decide not to take this…test?”

“You become one of the fallen,” the reaper said calmly, “And then you won’t be my problem anymore. You’ll be bound to wander for eternity, until you’re either purified or corrupted. As a word of advice, Heaven’s gate’s are rarely opened. The same can’t be said for Hell.”

Sophie blinked, combing absently though her wet hair with her fingers, and raising the dark brown coils from the back of her neck. She would not become one of the fallen. And the reaper had said she’d led a fairly decent life before, hadn’t it? She could pass this test, whatever it was. Probably.

“Sign here,” the reaper said coolly, and held out a neatly printed paper to her with a flourish, coupled with a ballpoint pen. Sophie took them, skimming the paper.

“You haven’t told me the terms of this test,” she hedged. The reaper didn’t give her a reply, and so, impulsively, she signed. At this rate, it seemed she had little to lose.

“Kayden,” was all it took for a man to come clambering through the door just behind the reaper’s desk, relatively intact. There was a heavy red welt in the crook of his left elbow—like he’d had a needle shoved up it when he died. Sophie thought back to what the reaper had said about over dosage, and determined he couldn’t have been a drug addict, but was at a loss for some other explanation. “This is Sophie,” the reaper introduced, “Your partner.”

Even as she studied him, Sophie was conscious of how she must appear. Small and wet, with casual clothes and ridiculous, heavy winter boots crammed with all sorts of metal. Her hair was still a dripping, tangled mess, highlighting just how pale and thin she’d gotten in her last few months alive.

Kayden, on the other hand, looked about as close to alive as anything she could imagine. His hair was tousled and blond, curling over his ears and into his eyes sort of roguishly, eyes that were such a pale shade of blue, they were nearly glass. He was lean and taller than her, though not by much, and looked to be well into his twenties, putting nearly a decade between them, as she’d died only two weeks before her nineteenth birthday. He looked clever, and charming, the sort of man who had a different woman every day and cared little for any of them.

“Finally,” Kayden said lowly, “I’ve been waiting forever. You wouldn’t believe how many people choose to ghost around, seriously.”

“I don’t blame them,” Sophie said almost immediately, “They were probably intimidated. It is the Grim Reaper.” She clapped her mouth closed over her hesitant smile. She didn’t have time for this. And even if she did—this was the sort of person who wouldn’t give a plain girl like her a second glance.

“That’s cute,” the reaper said coolly, obviously unimpressed with the two of them. “Your job is to save his life, Sophie.”

“What?” Sophie repeated blankly, “But, isn’t he already—dead?”

“I’m in a coma,” Kayden said helpfully, and pointed at the welt in his arm. She realized, now, that it must have been from an I.V. Sophie looked from him, to the reaper, and slowly shook her head.

“You’re asking me to do what a whole team of doctor’s can’t?” she asked incredulously, and glanced at Kayden, “Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can—”

“So, you’ve failed,” said the reaper, shuffling some papers ominously, and Sophie felt herself straighten. She was tired of failing.

“No. No, I’ll do it.” she said fiercely, and hoped she could back up her own words. Kayden grinned at her easily. She rather resented him for that—other spirits were probably just stuck making copies, or something. Not doing the impossible.

“It’s not impossible,” said the reaper idly, and flicked a hand at the door, “Go on. You’ve got three days and ten hours, and then they’ll pull the plug on him.”

“So there must be a reason, right?” Sophie asked him, ducking through the door and into a hospital room. She barely blinked. It made sense, in a way. Kayden was studying his own body, and only tilted his chin slightly towards her when he spoke.

“A reason for what?”

“Why you can’t get back in,” she gestured, “I mean, you have tried just…just lying there and letting your soul get sucked back in, haven’t you.”

“I’ve tried.” Kayden said, and reached forwards to lay a hand on his chest, as though to demonstrate. It sank through slowly, like molasses, and Sophie had to shuffle her feet to keep the same thing from happening to her and the floor.

“Maybe there’s something bothering you,” she offered, “Like…like unfinished business.”

“Have you been studying?”

“I’m not stupid.”

“Huh,” he looked out the window, at the heart monitor, not at her. “I can’t think of anything.”

She watched the steady, rise and fall of his machine-pumped chest, the artificial lungs. “What happened to you?”

“What about you?” he gestured towards her, “No offense, but did you throw yourself off a bridge or something?”

“Yes,” she said evenly, feeling her cheeks heat up with shame, “I did.”

He snorted. “That’s a stupid thing to do.”

“Just like that, is it?” she said quickly, angrily, “You don’t even know me. You don’t even care why I did it, you just—never mind. It doesn’t matter. I just need to help you, and go to heaven and do whatever it is that angels do.”

He studied her for a moment, then smiled kind of crooked, “Alright. I’ll show you where I was when I went comatose.” He waved a hand, and turned out the hospital’s door into the hall. Without even thinking, she hastened after him.

He took her to a house, painted a sweet, butter kind of yellow. She stood at his side and watched the woman within move about. She had a sweet face, with freckles and glasses and beautiful, wavy brown hair pulled back with a ribbon.

“Who is she?” Sophie asked, watching as the young woman stopped with whatever she had been writing on a pad of notebook paper and gazed out the window, her expression distant. She couldn’t say for certain, but something about her seemed very tired.

“Anita, my ex-girlfriend,” Kayden said coolly. Sophie watched as Anita stood and went to the stove, pouring water into a kettle and setting the water to a boil.

“Where were you, when it happened?”

“In the driveway,” Kayden turned from the window and walked over to the window. Sophie realized, abruptly, that she had sunk into the ground up to her ankles, and had to pull her feet out again. She followed Kayden to the driveway, noting the skid marks. So, he’d been in a car crash then.

“What happened?”

“My other ex-girlfriend, Elaine,” he quirked the corner of his mouth sardonically, “She went a little crazy, I guess. Hit the car eighteen times, from what I understand, and at like sixty miles an hour. I was a mess.”

“I bet.” Sophie raised her eyebrows, didn’t let herself look at his handsome face, “So, you’ve got a lot of exes?”

“Oh, yeah.” He admitted it casually, and she felt her stomach knot. He didn’t even have the decency to sound ashamed of himself. What a tool. “I have a system. They all get a week.”

“Do you have a stop watch, or is overtime allowed for the pretty ones?” Sophie snarked. Kayden raised his eyebrows at her, but didn’t comment. Sophie looked over her shoulder, spotting Anita almost immediately. Older than Sophie, younger than Kayden, too old to be crying, too young to be sad.

“So you’ve spent your life making a chain of broken hearts,” Sophie sighed, and ran her hands through her hair. She’d hoped this would be a bit easier, that maybe he’d hadn’t spoken to his parents in years, or something. But if what he said was true, so many girls meant there were so many chances for him to screw things up.

“So, what about Anita,” Sophie pointed, “Was she special?”

“They’re all special,” Kayden defended. Sophie rolled her eyes, and he relented, “She was nice. Cute. But—no. No, she wasn’t.”

He got very quiet then, and she knew he was thinking of someone else. Sophie sighed.

“So? Who was it? Who’s ‘The One?’”

“Shut up.” he said, and sent her a wry smile. He shuffled his feet, and she did too, when she noticed how far she’d sunk, “It doesn’t matter. It’s nothing.”

“Show me,” she ordered, and his eyes got narrow and defensive.

“It’s not really on my agenda to pop in for a visit. My puns are just getting better, by the way.”

“Why not? It’s not like she’d know you were there.”

He winced, and she bit the inside of her cheek. Great, now she’d hit upon some buried wounds.

Marissa was tiny, Asian, with a wedding band and no husband, and one child that seemed too big for her skinny arms to hold. But she did hold her son, somehow.

“You have a kid?” Sophie blurted out. Kayden actually laughed.

“Please, no. He’s not mine. She got married to the quarterback right out of high school and had some twins. That’s Sam,” he pointed to the boy Marissa held, “Gabriel is probably still asleep. He hibernates, honestly.”

“Where’s her husband?”

“Oh,” Kayden let out a whistle, “I think he died.”

Sophie looked at him, and he actually looked hurt, “Look, honestly, I’m not glad that he did. Dumb jock stereotypes aside, yeah, his GPA was like a 2.5, but he wasn’t stupid, and he was popular for a reason. He was a nice kid.”

Sophie watched the family for a moment, moving through the walls to follow them through rooms. Kayden plodded behind. After a moment, he sucked in a breath as though he were about to say something, but remained silent.

“What is it?” he didn’t answer, “Come on, who am I going to tell? I’m dead.”

Kayden laughed, then said, very casually, “He was my brother.”

Sophie stared at him, the whole situation suddenly becoming much more complicated, “Oh.”

“Yeah, oh.” Kayden grinned humorlessly, “He’d have been twenty five last month. He was just a kid. I—” he stopped, shrugged. “He was shot. Some druggie. They took his wallet and shot him so they could score another hit. They were crying when they brought him in to the station—I wanted to hate him. I did. But I don’t think I could’ve hated him nearly as much as he hated himself.”

“That’s the thing about addiction,” Sophie said lowly, her throat tight and closed, “You love it and you hate it, but more than that you just need it,” she didn’t meet his eyes, and he didn’t ask. They watched Marissa together, as she sang to her sons.

“So what’s stopping you?” Sophie asked, “You’re gone. He’s not.”

“Haven’t you read Hamlet? These things don’t work out. I’d be dead within a week.” Kayden had obviously had enough, and turned to walk out of the house again, glancing back now and then, “It doesn’t matter. I never told her. I never will.”

“But, see—” she rushed after him, “That’s why you can’t get over this. You’re devoting yourself to an ideal. It’ll never let you down so you’ll never move on. You’re stuck in a loop and you’re using perfectly nice girls as temporary replacements and you have got to accept that she isn’t the only person worth living for.”

“Aren’t you the little psychologist.” Kayden snarked, and vanished back to the netherworld.

-

“Trouble in paradise?” The Reaper asked sardonically. Sophie fumed.

“It’s infuriating! How am I supposed to help someone so set on being miserable?! It’s pointless!”

Very slowly and deliberately, the reaper set down its pen and straightened its papers, before looking up at her pointedly. “You’re telling me this?”

She spent the next two days trying to convince him to move on, but to no avail. She was very aware of how little time she had left—jus five hours, for the count, and her shot at redemption lay in peril because of one man’s stubbornness.

“God, I’ll go out with you, just please get over this.”

“Jailbait.”

“I’m older than I look. Look, look, what have you got to loose? You don’t have anything with her to start off with, and secondly, it’s not like you disliked any of the girls you dated, right? They were nice! They made you happy!”

But even as she said this, she knew it wasn’t the case. There was a difference between what a person wanted, and what they knew they should have.

The two of them shuffled back to the hospital when Kayden got tired of watching her, and so stood over his body, looking at it moodily. They were down to just an hour, and Sophie could already feel herself giving up.

“I guess I’ll see you in hell,” she said glumly, and sat in a chair she’d sink through later, “Your womanizing ways must have gotten you in.”

“What do you think will happen? Will avenging angels pop out of nowhere and drag us off?” he joked, and she actually considered the question.

“Maybe we just sink. We won’t be able to jump back into the netherworld, so we’ll get tired and then we’ll just stop and sink and sink until we’re buried under the weight of the world, stuck at the core.”

She rather liked her explanation. “That sounds like hell to me.”

He snorted. They watched the clock.

“Are you in love with her?”

“Am I in love? Yes, because I am waiting.”

“That’s stupid,” she decided, “That’s stupid and neither of us will ever be happy now.”

Kayden didn’t say anything. Sophie resolved not to speak to him.

“Why did you kill yourself?”

She looked over at him blankly, and then looked away. “It’s stupid.”

“Tell me.”

At the rate they were going, it wasn’t like he’d be able to tell anyone, “It was a matter of control. All my life, I’d been told what to wear and how to speak and who to be friends with. I’d gone on dates with one boy, just one, because he was the one my parents thought I should marry, and I only applied to one college, the best, mind you, and I got accepted on the same day my boyfriend asked me to marry him. The same day I got fitted for a wedding dress. The same day I got taken in for a genetics testing so that the could control whatever children I might one day have, too.” Sophie paused, took a breath, and found she was nearly crying.

“And I just got sick of it. I didn’t want to marry him and I didn’t want children and I didn’t want to go to college and more than anything I—I really hated that dress. So I burned it. And then I…threw myself off a bridge.”

She stopped talking. Kayden was watching her, his eyes a little wide. She giggled, hands coming up to her mouth to catch and cradle it. “It’s so melodramatic.”

“Sticking it to the man?” he asked, and she laughed.

“Yeah, I guess I did.”

Kayden nodded and looked away. She listened to the clock ticking, her chest loose and free, and the air tasted like ecstasy.

“Hey, Sophie.” Kayden touched her shoulder, and she looked over at him. His hand was very pale, and faded slightly, then his elbow, and then—

“I think you’re right. I think I’m tired of running away,” he said, and smiled awkwardly, “Thanks.”

She blinked.

And then he was gone.

“You did it,” the reaper sounded impressed, “Good work. That one would have been a lot of paper work.”

“I knew this was all just a ploy for cheap labor.”

“You’re not on the other side of the door yet.” The reaper threatened, and on that note, pointed to the door behind her, the one she’d assumed she’d initially come through. It had been there, all along.

“Of course it had. It’s a metaphor for the latent goodness in all of us,” the reaper said petulantly. Sophie glanced back, studying the handle.

“What’s on the other side?”

The Reaper didn’t answer. After a moment, she stepped forwards, and rested her hands around the knob. It felt like metal and cheap polish, and she couldn’t hear any music, feel anything like a cosmic jolt. But only she could open this door. No one else could do this for her.

She spun the knob. “You should hire a secretary.”

“Interested?”

Sophie smiled, “Nor really.”

And she stepped through.