A/N: Wow, yes. What a shocker it is to see me publish yet another fic. Ha ha.

I'll update my other ones soon, don't worry!

In the mean time; enjoy.

I

"This cursed blade followed me through the gates of the afterlife. It's my companion, of sorts, and I would be an idiot to leave it behind."

Death. Contrary to what most people would think, was my beginning and not end.

I had never really 'lived' in the first place. You can ask my immediate family if you don't believe me, though I don't see how when they all died years before I. Mother to the birth of, well, me (shocker, I know, seeing as how medicine is so advanced in this day and age). My Dad used to joke to me that it was because I was such a fat shit of a baby that I ate her life force. Hardy ha ha.

Anyways. Lost him to Pancreatic Cancer when I was nineteen. No cure for that, and yet it still hurt when he passed, even though we both knew it was inevitable. Huh.

Right, 'we'. My older brother and I. He kicked the bucket five years later. How, you ask? He was stabbed. By his wife. Not really a surprise, she was a crazy bitch; I had told him that, but did he listen to me? No, he married her, instead. Not to say he deserved his death or anything, bless his soul, he was just a bit of an idiot- scratch that, a huge idiot. Dumbass wouldn't shut up about god damn Anime. But, if it wasn't for him, I wouldn't have found my love for One Piece.

I was absolutely in love with it. It being the last thing I had left of my brother. The idiot had left me his whole collection of anime in his will (who the hell even has a will at his age?!). What a reading that was. I had never laughed so hard, or cried so woefully. It truly was the best thing he could've left me. The very thing he devoted a part of his life to, he left to me.

Sorry. Got a bit off track there, didn't I?

I suppose now would be the time to tell you how I died, right? Well, it started with a bottle of alcohol, and ended with a sword- sorry, a Katana, as my brother would've corrected me- to my chest.

In a strange, sort of twisted way, I was oddly at peace with the way we both died in a similar fashion, obviously him not being as intoxicated and hellbent on revenge as I was, but who's really paying attention to the details. I mean, we've got the three major facts in common, don't we? Stabbed by the Katana hanging on the wall in his living room? Check. Stabbed by the same person? Check. Stabbed? Check.

I was twenty-seven, and a fully qualified bartender for five years running. I lived in our old house, where all three of us used to live, before dad died, and Nathan, my brother, moved out to live with his pycho-ass wife. I had a steady job at a local nightclub, and had no social life to speak of.

Sure; I was friends with co-workers, and, sure, I was nice enough to customers, but I had no one outside of work. I just preferred it that way. I lead a lonely life, but I had my brother and that was enough. Him dying did nothing but make me even more reclusive. (I won't speak about my fear of getting close to others in case they died and left me alone, because I didn't have that fear.)

Rewinding a little, I have to admit that I lied. I wasn't intoxicated, and it would honestly be an insult to my profession if I was to be so easily. No, I was over-emotional.

Why? And, I know the answer is silly, but just hear me out first, ok?

Re-watching One Piece and seeing Ace acting like, well, himself, brought back unwanted feelings and emotions I thought to have long since been buried.

He reminded me so, so much of Nathan it physically hurt. From his freckles, right down to his fucking narcolepsy, Ace was the fictional character to my brother's non-fictional one.

So I downed those two bottles of wine, and I left the episode running. I ignored the rain soaking my pajamas, the mud seeping into my socks as I ran across the grass. I fought past the numbing in my fingers as I banged on the door, and I screamed bloody murder at the woman who opened it.

That was how I died, curses on my lips, tinted a pale blue from the cold, as I lay on the muddy grass. It wasn't clean, it wasn't heroic, and it definitely wasn't honourable. I died, and the white-handled Katana in my chest could prove so.