Hello, everyone. As you may or may not have noticed, my username is TAS14. This is my second posted work and my first based on the Discworld series. I tend to be horrible at finishing longer works, so I generally stick to shorter ones, and my preferred method of choosing subject matter is to find a small yet noticeable hole in the tapestry of continuity and sew a patch of fan fiction (a material infamous for being by and large greatly inferior to that which it is attached to) over it, in some capacity to introduce a new pattern to the overall fabric to be appreciated by those with the sharp eyes to spot the imperfection in the original, but mostly because sewing keeps me occupied.
As Doctor J. "Mossy" Lawn once said to a man he believed to be Sergeant-at-Arms John Keel of the Night Watch, it's amazing how far one can take a metaphor.
And now, on to the story.
The Death and Times of Reginald Shoe (Title subject to change)
"Vimes crouched behind the makeshift wall and peered through a crack. They'd snatched a few crossbows from aimless soldiers on the way here, but by the look of it Carcer's men had at least fifteen between them. And they outnumbered the lilac lads almost two to one…" (Night Watch, pp.377-8)
Reg Shoe found his current situation terribly simple. Snapcase was in power, everything was returning to normal, there had been a general amnesty, the Unmentionables were gone and yet here they were again, in Palace Guard uniforms this time, and still out to get Sergeant Keel. Ave! Bossa nova, similis bossa Seneca, he might be thinking had he the necessary grasp of dead languages. He leaned against the barricade, still holding one end of the pole for his tattered Ankh-Morpork flag in one hand and the midpoint of the pole in the other, and slid downward until he was sitting on the ground leaning against the wall with the flag over his legs. After a few seconds, he closed his eyes and began to cry.
"Reg, you ought to go," he heard someone whispering, and looked in the drection of the voice to see Sergeant Keel, gesturing for him to leave while keeping both eyes trained on a crack in the barricade. "You don't even have a weapon."
"What's the good of it, eh?" Reg asked, depressed. "You were bloody right, Sarge! Things just go round and round! You got rid of the bloody Unmentionables and here they are again! What's the point, eh? This city could be such a great place but no, oh no, the bastards always end up on top! Nothing ever bloody changes! They just take our money and mess us around!" By now his despair had mixed with anger, at Captain Carcer, at the Unmentionables, at Lord Snapcase and Lord Winder and all the people who orchestrated this so-called change and the system that put them in their positions and the machine, the whole bloody machine made of people and Guilds and thoughts and feelings and lies and bloody bastards that kept the city the way it was, kept people like Reginald Shoe from changing anything that really mattered…
Even Keel didn't have anything to say that could satisfy him. He just said "Way of the world, Reg," and continued watching through the crack. It was like the big picture just didn't matter to him. Keel, Reg realized, was a people person. He really didn't care about how things worked politically as long as he could keep people safe, like the men who'd fought on the barricades to protect their families and neighborhood mates, only all of Ankh-Morpork was his neighborhood and all the people who didn't actually deserve to hang were his mates.
While Reg had been thinking this, he'd stood up and found his own peephole, through which he could see a huge covered cart stopped near Carcer and his men, and the cart driver being held up by one of the crossbow holders. He could see in their posture and their big dumb malicious grins that they were horrible men, and they knew it, and they were backed by authority, and they knew that too. And Keel was all about people- if they threatened the driver, Reg would say there was a good chance he'd give himself up- and that would be the end of what little morality he'd brought to the streets.
"And now the bloody bastards have won," Reg moaned to himself. He didn't even hear Keel's response this time; he was too busy making the biggest decision of his life. If any of the lilac lads were going to get out of this, he reasoned, there had to be a fight. Otherwise Carcer and his men would just calmly walk around the barricade and get them in a circle, and none of them would make it out of that. So someone would have to turn this from a standoff to a fight, and in Reg's experience that took a man who wouldn't shut up. Reg was good at not shutting up. And if a man who'd lived to stop the machine didn't make any difference, then maybe a man who'd died to stop it could.
He took the flag in one hand and began waving it back and forth while climbing up the barricade with the other hand. "Yeah? You want to shoot something? Bastards!" he yelled at Carcer's men. He wanted to add something about the irony involved in their shooting a man waving the flag of the government they worked for, but the first yell was just to get attention, and these men were almost definitely too thick to understand all that anyway. He pulled himself up on top of the barricade and stood up, no longer waving the flag but holding it over his head as a banner of defiance. Now ought to come the battle cry, but as evidenced by "truth, justice, and reasonably priced love," Reg had never been any good at making those sound snappy.
Luckily, he immediately had a strange vision of an extremely different man in a very similar position. The other man was muscular and dressed strangely, with blue paint over about half his face. Feeling that this must be some sort of inspiration, Reg copied the movements of the other man's mouth, yelling out the borrowed syllables before he'd had a chance to really process them himself- "You can take our lives but you'll never take our freedom!"
There were a few moments where all the members of both groups, including Reg, paused to try and figure out what the hell that was supposed to mean. On other worlds in the multiverse, it might have made a passable rallying cry, but when it came to language the average Morporkian could spot a faulty simile a mile away, and the statement Reg had just made was far worse.
Carcer in particular was quick to dismiss it, raising his crossbow and gesturing to his men before exclaiming, "Wrong!"
There was a chorus of twanging noises as five crossbows were fired at Reg. The bolts hit him all over his chest, inducing some random shaking before he fell forward and landed on his knees on the ground in front of the barricade.
Suddenly everything seemed to stop. The world slowly began to lose focus, except for a dark-cloaked figure on a white horse that came trotting out from behind the large cart despite the fact that he hadn't been there before.
REGINALD SHOE?
"You can bloody well bugger off," Reg replied without missing a beat. "I'm not done yet, and besides I'm damned if I'll go out on my knees."
The world came back into focus.
The sound of the world didn't.
At first, Reg thought this had to do with his being recalled to life by sheer force of will, but after a second or so he realized, looking around, that it was actually quiet, all those present watching in awe as he planted the end of the flagpole between two cobblestones and used his grip on it to help pull himself back upright.
As soon as he was standing there were three more shots. He looked down to find three more crossbow bolts sticking out of his chest, but after the first five, he reasoned, what were three more going to do? He forced his body forward, first one step, then the next, and then, with a yell, was charged by a crossbowman who'd dropped the bow and drawn his sword instead. Reg swung his arm out in front of him reflexively, and for some unknown reason wasn't entirely surprised when the man went flying about six feet horizontally before he hit the ground.
Suddenly, however, he wasn't the only one fighting. A Watchman, perhaps with a lilac, perhaps not, had taken out two bow holders with his sword, and the man who'd held up the cart driver was running back, and suddenly Keel yelled to attack and men with lilacs poured out around the barricade any way they could to join the fray. Reg simply kept walking, using the flagpole as a cane at first and then dropping it to the cobbles, ignoring anything that managed to hit him and improvising with his bare hands blows that would have been a great improvement on anything Mrs. Goodbody at No. 8 Easy Street could have sold him. At one point he was lucky enough to see Keel fighting; the man was a whirlwind with swords, ducking and weaving and slashing and hitting so quickly that he made the other fighters look as slow as Reg himself.
Within a minute, perhaps two, Carcer and his remaining men- less than half of what he'd had before- were retreating, leaving only one corpse with a lilac and many more without. Reg didn't get to see who they were before his hindbrain caught up with the rest of him and had him declared legally dead, the official cause being over fifteen accumulated crossbow bolts in the chest at last count. His body collapsed back against the barricade, and the world went out of focus again…
This time, however, the fading went all the way; within seconds, there was just Reg, and Death on his white horse, and around them… nothing.
REGINALD SHOE? Death asked again. ARE YOU READY THIS TIME?
"I suppose so," Reg shrugged. "So is this the second death, or what?"
NO, said Death. UNLESS YOU'RE A RAT OR AN UNDEAD, AND I WOULD KNOW IF YOU WERE, I AM THE ONLY DEATH YOU GET. ONE PER CUSTOMER, AS IT WERE.
"But then what was the last time?" Reg wondered. "When I told you to… go away?"
AH, THAT. Death nodded. THAT WAS WHAT MORTALS CALL A NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE. YOU ALMOST DIED, I HAD TO PAY ATTENTION TO YOU FOR A WHILE, YOU HAD A REVELATION, AND YOU GOT BACK TO YOUR LIFE. YOU WENT THROUGH THE PROCESS QUICKER THAN NORMAL.
"Revelation?" Reg wondered. "Oh, I see. Mind over matter, eh?"
SOMETHING LIKE THAT.
"So what happens now?"
WHATEVER YOU BELIEVE.
"Really?"
REALLY.
"I believe a lot of things."
THAT IS GOOD. NOT MANY PEOPLE DO. WHICH DO YOU SUPPOSE IS RELEVANT?
A number of precepts ran through Reg's mind. He believed that things could be much better than they were- would that get him some sort of heaven? He believed that he ought to be able to make a difference- would that make him a ghost? He believed a lot of things…
Suddenly he remembered another one, and, thinking about it, realized that it was the root of all the others, sooner or later.
"I am responsible for everything I do," he said quietly.
IN SOME CAPACITY, I SUPPOSE.
"I control my own destiny," he added, slightly louder.
YES.
"No one can make me do anything I don't want to," he rephrased again, back to a normal level of volume.
TECHNICALLY UNTRUE, BUT IT'S YOUR BELIEF. WOULD YOU MIND GETTING TO THE POINT?
"You can't make me do anything I don't want to."
AH, I SEE.
"And I don't have to be dead unless I agree to be," Reg reasoned. "And I'm not going to."
YOU ARE SURE?
"Yes."
THEN I WILL SEE YOU AGAIN, Death replied. GOOD LUCK, REGINALD SHOE.
And he was gone, replaced only by darkness. Reg reached out his hands and hit wooden planks not two inches in front of his face. He reached out again, and found the same on either side, above his head, and behind- no, under him. He realized he was lying down, and then worked out where he was. Using the same will-powered strength that had aided him against the Unmentionables, he thrust one hand upward, shoving it between the boards and even further upward, until, his arm fully extended, he felt fresh air around his hand. He repeated the process with the other hand, then grabbed at the dirt around them and pulled himself up.
He stood up to find himself in the cemetery at the Temple of Small Gods. Looking around, he realized he'd been buried in a row with six other casualties of the same day. At the center, with a larger tombstone and an extra line of text on it, was the grave of Sergeant-at-Arms John Keel. All seven had flowers, he noticed, but in addition someone had given Keel what he'd been hoping for- a hard-boiled egg.
He leaned over to read the extra line beneath Keel's dates of birth and death: "How Do They Rise Up, Rise Up, Rise Up," and he thought to himself: how do they? More like, why don't they?
At this point he became aware of someone else in the vicinity. He turned to see young Sam Vimes, with a stripe on hi shoulder to show he was a lance-corporal now.
"Reg?" Sam wondered. "But you're- you were… dead…"
"Yeah," Reg shrugged, "but then I decided not to be. I'm surprised more people haven't done it- it's fairly simple…"
He paused for a moment, then turned to face the cemetery in general.
"You heard me! Up you get! All you have to do is not die!"