HIM

A/N: I sincerely apologize for this and any other works that will hit me over the head. I flipped to the page where the confrontation occurs, and the names "Wensleydale" and "Death" just kinda grabbed me kicking and screaming over to the keyboard. Please don't shoot me.


**HIM**

Warnings: erm, discrete slash of the unusual variey and CHARACTER DEATH (in a nice way). Pairings: Wensleydale/Death, Wensleydale/OMC




Wensleydale was forty-seven when he first met Him. When He spread his wings and disappeared, Wensleydale felt a stab of something that he didn't understand. He could have sworn that something winked at him.

When Wensleydale was forty-two he met a nice girl and got engaged. The night before his marriage he stumbled out of the house and into thin, cool arms. When he woke up the next morning, it was in the cemetery and he was both cold and so very, very warm. Brian had slapped him on the back and joked about the whiteness of his face.

Four years passed, and Wensleydale was thirty-eight. His wife had left him for a man with a golf course and wicked green eyes. He had gone to the mirror and stared into blood-shot hazel eyes. They found him the next morning with smashed mirror pieces around him and enough blood to drown a cat. He was sleeping as deeply as a baby, and his arms were as unmarred as a snow-white shroud.

On his thirty-third year, twenty-eighth week, fourth day, tenth hour and sixteenth minute, Wensleydale walked into a bar and sat down with four bottles piled on the counter. The pile that was Brian underneath the tree that they used to climb said nothing. Adam had said nothing. The shadow that he had screamed at had said nothing. The next morning, the ordinary brown-eyed man with ordinary brown hair and ordinary tan skin had said nothing either.

It was in the middle of his thirty-third year, twenty-eighth week, fifth day, eleventh hour and forty-ninth minute when Wensleydale went to work in his office. The shadows no longer bothered him, and he had forgotten about dark wings and deep eyes and far off stars.

Twelve years disappeared in a blink of an eye, a blur of cold desks and colder customers. Wensleydale was twenty-one and was never seen without his tie and dark suit. One summer day he sat down to eat his lunch and when he looked up, He was there. It was like a flash of a dying star. Later, the reporters said that the gas line had a leak, and the stove's single spark had blown the block to kingdom come. The only shop that was unscathed was a tiny bookshop next to what had been Intimate Books. Wensleydale took a cab home and got drunk. He dreamed of a smile like cocaine and pineapples and a stone with two dates and a name.

Wensleydale was seventeen when he sat in the doctor's chair and sobbed. The paper and its sterile characters were unforgiving and the plus was the cross that Christ hung upon. The thin, thin man with the deep dark eyes that were neither dark enough nor deep enough had left one morning, a letter on the table that he had burned, the smoke stinging his eyes, and giving him an excuse to let the tears fall.

The cottage was just as he had remembered it. He gestured to the nurse, compassionate and capable and hair still red as a flame, to sit by him, and to speak, just speak. Her strong, freckled hand with its sensible nails seemed so much more alive than his, clearer and more translucent by the day. He was just fourteen.

When Wensleydale was twelve he died. Pepper had whispered that he looked happier than he had ever been. Adam had looked at the smooth, hairless crown, the deep-sunken eyes, the skin of glass stretched over ivory bones , the smile that was both radiant and horrific. And nodded at the neat young man with hazel eyes and a matching grin standing in the corner.

Death's smile widened. HE IS HOME.




********

As I pleaded before, don't shoot me. I would prefer to die an honorable death of hemlock, if there is such a death for villains like me. Urk.