For longer than Abe can remember, he has known Death. Be it because of a faintly recalled dream, or an even fainter memory, he's not sure, but he knows it with a kind of familiarity that unsettles him.
He caught a glimpse of it when the Professor was killed, strewn across the floor, his body limp against the red carpet of the library.
He heard of it when Red and Liz and John all limped back to the base, bloody and ragged and in dire need of a vacation, and he saw it pass down the hall when Red was stabbed, a spearhead creeping into his heart as Liz screamed and cried and lit things on fire.
He's seen it many times, out on missions, staring at a dead agent as he hurries to get away, and he's come close himself, the memory of claws ripping through his skin a vivid one. He's seen so much, and has become so detached, that he never stopped to think about it, really.
He never pondered on Death, never shook its hand and talked to it face to face, because it was shadowy and cryptic and elusive.
But it appeared so very often, and looked at him with a passing glance thrown his way, because it was cruel and waiting and eager.
Abe, though, never thought about it until he held Death in his arms, embracing it as if he himself could offer his life in return for the elf with the smile and the dagger and the blood. He held it close to him, wrapped it within his embrace and cherished it, because he wasn't so detached after all, wasn't so distant and unfeeling to not feel the press of Death like an anvil crashing down on him, knocking all of the breath out of his lungs.
The eyes staring back at him shone brighter than the stars, and the curl of her lips was like a sky splashed with soft pink color, her cheeks as pale as snow as her heart fluttered with the struggle of beating, of trying to accommodate for the hole within it, the golden blood spurting with each movement, and Abe had never seen Death so intimately, had never touched it and loved it and mourned it.
He had only ever seen the aftermath of what Death did, what it would always do.
Not this.
Not the slow fighting struggle between bright and dim, warm and cold, alive and dead.
But oh, how he saw it.
How he gazed down at it as it smothered the very last breath out of her body, how it snuffed out the light within her, and then she was a thing, a thing lying limp within his arms, blood covering the front of her dress.
She was a thing that hadn't always been a thing and the echo of life within her shell left Abe cold, the sound of her ghosting laughter hot in his ears as he blinked, foreign tears streaming down his face. He held fast to her, to the empty body within his arms, a cold cheek pressed against his, and Death sighed with its own kind of sorrow.
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