Lately I read a novel about writing, and it kind of made me want to try my hand at it again. I'm really rusty and out of practice, so a lot of this probably sounds crazy. I just let it write itself, whatever weird combination of KH, Dead Like Me, and 70's rock it is. At any rate, I hope it's worth your time. Cheers! - Penny

Disclaimer: I do not own Kingdom Hearts, "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin, nor do I own Dead Like Me. This is fanfiction, so shut the hell up. :D

Stairway to Heaven

by Penny S Lane

Mayonnaise, pickles, Louisiana Hot Sauce, half a carton of non-dairy creamer and a lime.

Blue eyes weighed the options set before them. Then, slowly they turned their ponderous gaze upon the cupboard to the left.

One sixth a bag of angel hair pasta (only mostly broken), an unopened pepper shaker, and a rubber-banded bag of Swedish Fish that had been there since Hyne-knew-when.

Roxas bit his lip.

At this point what it really came down to was how pathetic he would feel eating broken pasta in hot sauce versus how pathetic he would feel walking twenty-five minutes through town at going-on-three in the ay-em to the supermarket with but fifty cents to his name.

With a heavy heart, he closed the fridge door and gathered his keys and wallet.

Outside the wind bit at his cheeks making the air seem much colder than it really was. He zipped his jumper up as far as it would go and made his way ironically up the hill towards downtown. The streets were predictably empty, bars being closed and students now safely home and puking in their own hampers. Vaguely, Roxas wondered if any of his friends were among that raucous lot, home nursing hot coffees and water and dreading the head-pounding onset of tomorrow morning.

Or at least Roxas assumed that's what hangovers were like; he didn't drink much.

He didn't have many friends either.

Stopping at the corner, he stared vaguely at the tar black of the street in front of him. A deep black river seemed to cross before him, bending in a jagged curve around a large, rainbow-coloured net—a stain of gasoline across the asphalt. It was large like a deflated parachute but with fingers out-stretching, like a pentacle of pollution, yet oddly pretty.

The light changed and he stepped forward, out over the black sea like Jesus upon a tar pit. The pentacle reached closer and then gathered him in from the toes up like a star fish.

And that was when the car hit him.

Everything was dark and someone was talking. Not yelling, just talking. There was no desperate cry for him to 'Dammit to Hyne, wake up!' or 'Don't die on me boy!', just typical, medium-toned talking in a vaguely mid-western accent. As though he was supposed to be listening or something.

"So we just gonna' lay here all night or what?" The voice seemed to finish at some length.

There was a sigh and a cool breeze blew over him without sound.

"I know you can hear me, so if you would just open your eyes, we could get down to business here."

Open my eyes? He wondered if he even had eyes. After a moment, he felt something stir and his eyes opened. Probably.

"Good morning, sweetheart." A large red blob hovered at him.

'Sweetheart' frowned at it. He had had no idea that heaven would be so blurry.

"Come along then," the amorphous red thing—an anemone perhaps—extended a slender pale tentacle, and he found a pale tentacle of his own lifting without question.

Oh look. Their tentacles had little small tentacles as well. Heaven was an odd fish tank.

He felt himself being pulled effortlessly upward towards the absence of light, or what he assumed to be the direction of 'upward'. Then all of a sudden the hazy film dispersed and the world became clear around him. The intersection on the corner of downtown, halfway up the hill towards the old brick clock tower and his favourite record shop run by the pretty girl with the blond hair—"Hullo, Roxy," she would always twinkle in his direction.

Rox. Roxas. He was Roxas. He blinked slowly into the haze of his mind, unable to believe he had forgotten. Then he remembered his hand, held up and wrapped in the long-fingered grip of a pale, red-haired stranger.

When he met his gaze, green eyes were watching him inquisitively from atop interesting little triangular tattoos.

"Um, hi."

"Hello." The redhead drawled back and broke into an uncomfortable grin. He proceeded to shake the hand already in his grasp with a lazy tug of his elbow. "You must be Roxas." As if they had mutual friends.

"Uh, yea. What—?"

"—happened?" The man supplied unnecessarily.

"Yea. I was just—"

"—crossing the street and got hit by a car."

"Oh." Roxas nodded unconsciously, trying to process. He supposed it made sense to feel somewhat absent after a nap like that—I must have been out for hours.—but this felt somehow different. Like instead of struggling to navigate through a sleepy fog, his mind had become a barren shelf upon which he was struggling to reorganise all of his items which had fallen to the floor in some bizarre east-coast earthquake.

Let's see, what was there—night. It had been night. Well, yes obviously, since it still is. There had been pasta. And hot sauce? Uneaten candy from years ago. The supermarket!

"I was going to the supermarket!" He exclaimed suddenly as though he had solved the mystery.

The redhead nodded quietly, the orange glow from a nearby streetlamp cast a catlike gleam on green eyes.

Roxas frowned, unable to pinpoint why he had expected why he had expected more of a reaction from the other man. Who was he again? He stood there facing the man for another moment in a long, awkward silence before moving his gaze elsewhere.

There was something else he was missing.

Up the hill the clock chimed Three and Roxas's eyes went wide, turning immediately to the road beneath his feet.

There beneath him lay a boy, hardly more than a sack of bones on the pavement. The impossibly small frame seemed to be drowning in a large black jumper, limbs resting in awkward angles beneath the thick sheet of wool. Stringy hair that seemed almost blond was matted with red like the side of the gaunt little face. Roxas thought he could see the outline of the skull beneath deep, hollow eyes.

The wind felt colder than ever suddenly and for a moment he felt something sting at the corner of his eyes, "Is that—"

"—me?" The redhead finished quietly. "Yes, it is."

A feeling like a flower blossoming blood and pain in his abdomen and Roxas shuddered, "No. No. No-no-nonononononono." He looked down to his feet, oddly disappearing into the area of what he assumed to be the dead him's upper-thigh-slash-knee, and made to step away but—

"Ah! Don't move!"

Roxas froze, half in a panic about standing in his own dead body and half at the warning in the redheaded stranger's voice, "What?! I'm already dead! What could possibly happen next?!"

"Options." The stranger supplied easily.

The blond raised his head, "Huh?"

"Options."

"What are you talking about?" Somehow it was more of a comment than a question.

The tall man before him rolled his eyes, "Post mortum options. Got it memorised?" He cracked his knuckles and tilted his head back like an elderly man who loved to hear himself tell young children stories about using your enemy's helmet as a latrine during trench warfare.

Roxas sensed this might take some time.

"Hurry it up, Axel, I'd like to get back to the party." A slightly shorter man appeared seemingly out of nowhere.

"Zexion. It's literally like you haven't been here the entire time. I was just getting to it."

Zexion frowned tightly, "Well get to it faster."

"Get to what?" Roxas bit out irritatedly.

"The options!" The two men chimed.

He felt more of an itch than ever to move as far away from his own dead carcass as possible. The smell of blood and urine now seasoned the air. He vaguely wondered if it was really his own.

"Alright," The stranger Axel began and pulled out a newspaper seemly from nowhere, supposably the same nowhere that Zexion had appeared from a moment ago. "Now since you were lucky enough not to move from your human vessel, I'm assuming you have been afforded a number of interesting ones here." He flipped through the pages almost jovially.

At his side Zexion looked tired.

Roxas caught sight of the front page of the bizarre publication and balked, "Is that—Is that me?!"

It read:

THE MOMENTLY MORTUUM

Tuesday 31 December 1979 2:58AM

Then beneath that:

SHOULD'VE HAD THE PASTA

Followed by a decidedly unattractive photo of his dead body heaped upon the pavement.

Roxas quickly scanned the vicinity for cameras.

Axel hummed an affirmative without a glance. Finally finding the page, he pulled it back a bit as though adjusting his eyes (obviously he was far-sighted) and began, "Roxas Perseus Strife—"

"Oh Hyne." The blond cringed.

Zexion eyed him strangely. "Perseus?"

"—well done on reaching the end of your road as safely as could be expected. No pun intended." Axel chuckled in Roxas's direction as though the boy would even possibly find this remotely humorous. "Upon the end of our journey it is natural to question what lies on the road ahead, aside from our own dead remains." The chuckle was directed toward Zexion this time, "That Magda cracks me up."

"Continue please." Zexion responded tonelessly, seeming to gesture motionlessly at the clock behind them.

"Fine, fine. Anyway, good job, yadda yadda yadda… Aha!" He followed the text with his finger like a housewife reading from a recipe book, "Right, so option number one, you may be reincarnated as either a fern, a ficus, or a perfectly adequate gardenia blossom." He looked up to assess Roxas's opinions about his first selection.

The blond stared back blankly, pausing to see if the tall redhead would laugh again, as though maybe this were some sort of joke. After a moment when he didn't, he turned to regard the shorter man.

Zexion was now staring concentratedly into a small glowing box.

"Are you serious?" Roxas turned back to Axel, unable to hide his incredulity.

"Quite." The redhead responded, "But if you ask me, the fern isn't your best choice. Cats tend to eat them and it ends up not being quite as interesting as you would expect."

"Uh." Roxas was starting to feel ridiculous, "I don't want to be a plant."

The redhead nodded and moved on, "Option number two, you may rematerialise as the replacement of Zell from the hit boy band 2D, however you will die again in six months time after being violently trampled by fangirls at a signing event."

"Uh… no."

"Really?!" Red eyebrows lifted in surprise, "That sounded like a pretty good deal to me."

"No." Roxas bit out, frustration somewhat overshadowing his disbelief.

Beside them Zexion seemed to be somehow rapidly transmitting messages on the small glowing device with small electronic "woop" sounds.

"Fine," Axel found his place again on the page, "Option number three, you may…" He drifted off slowly and continued reading silently. After a moment he looked up and eyed the blond boy quite seriously. He wordlessly tapped his companion and passed him the paper.

Zexion took the paper and read briefly.

Then he read it again.

Then he looked uncomfortable and read it one more time.

"What is it?" Roxas watched the two of them awkwardly, feet still sinking in his stinking self.

"Option number three, you may here forth become a death attendant and live upon the earth until you have either fulfilled your quota or received admission, whichever should come first."

The three men quietly stared at one another.

Somewhere nearby a bird chirped rudely.

"Is that what you guys are?" Roxas was surprised at the hesitation in his own voice.

You're joking. This is not real. There is no way this is happening.

Axel nodded quietly.

The blond took a breath and licked his lips slowly, "Pass."

"What?!" Surprisingly from Zexion.

Roxas shrugged, looking towards Axel again, "What else have you got?"

Axel regarded him ruefully and snatched the paper back. He scanned down the page and frowned for a moment before looking up, "That's it. Those are your options."

Zexion's eyebrows drew together, "Really?"

The redhead ignored him and watched the blond, "So what's it gonna be, Roxy? Are you a ficus, a pop star, or one of us?"

Roxas frowned, "What about heaven? Hell? Purgatory and the whole after-life shabang?"

"Yes, Axel. What about that?" Zexion had turned to the redhead, looking vaguely accusing.

Axel did not move his green-eyed gaze from the blond before him, as if sizing him up for something. Like a nice new corduroy suit.

Despair did not begin to describe the feeling inside of his gut. Hemorrhaging might have been more accurate, but that also might have had something to do with him having backed up at some point during this casual discussion about his current career possibilities into the part of his corpse that was his former abdomen. His eyes drifted again to the black tar river of the street beyond.

The street around him was quiet. How long would it be before someone discovered him? Who would it be? A bus driver on his first morning commute to the nearby university? A dentist out on his early morning jog? A flock of hungry cats?

So that was it. No heaven. No hell. No Hyne.

"I'll be a ficus."

When he looked up again Zexion was gone and only Axel stood there, regarding him with a heavy gaze, "Is that your final decision?"

Roxas bit his lip, feeling his hands clenching into nervous fists at his sides, inside his entire body was clenching and tightening such that he felt it would soon start crack-crinkling like a crushed soda can. "No…"

He wasn't certain but it seemed that something—maybe just the orange light of the street lamps again—seemed to flicker through green eyes, "Death attendant it is then."

Surprising even himself, the blond didn't protest.

Axel held out his hand to the boy, guiding him slowly from the wreckage of his former self, and as he stepped away he felt it fall away from him, like standing up from beneath a blanket. The wind blew cold, but this redheaded stranger's hand was warm.

Silently they walked away, out of the colourful pentacle, only their footsteps echoing quietly along the pavement.

To Be Continued.