A brief drabble in my head that wouldn't go away. Also, my first time writing for this fandom, so please don't hate me forever.
If she could remember one thing about her life, she would choose to remember Death.
Her father had disappeared before she was born, and her mother's face she knew only from the smiling photo on the family altar.
She remembered nothing before her mother died.
It had been sudden. A heart failure, the doctors had said, unexpected in one so young. She could not remember her mother's expression as she seized up, could not remember the moment she fell to the ground in a broken heap one summer's evening.
But she remembered the date. Friday, June 3rd. Her mother's old calendar had named it a Butsumetsu day, almost as if it knew of her tragedy.
She remembered staring, wondering why there was suddenly two of her mother, one lying crumpled on the black-and-white tiled kitchen floor, the other standing just beside her, staring down at the body.
Death had come then.
She didn't know how she'd known, but the instant Death had stepped into the room, she realized who he was. Death had arrived in silence, and moved in silence, but she was drawn to his presence.
She remembered Death with all the collected clarity that she couldn't muster for her mother. She remembered the swish of his black robe, his straw sandals on the tiled kitchen floor, the odd triangular shape of the sword he carried on his back.
But most of all, she remembered his red hair.
She stared at him, waiting until his tawny brown eyes made contact with her own. Death had looked surprised, which confused her. Could Death know who she was? She didn't think so, but she also had never thought that Death would have hair quite that color.
Then the look turned to something else, something it would take years for her to identify, though she would see that look many times on the faces of those around her.
And then, Death spoke.
"Is she your mother?"
She nodded, words failing to form on dry lips that refused to move. The look in Death's eyes strengthened.
"I'm sorry."
Whether he was sorry for her mother's unexpected passing, for her own loneliness, or for something entirely different, she would never know. But she accepted his apology all the same, allowing it to encompass everything she felt and burying Death's words deep within her heart.
Her voice found the strength to speak.
"Are you going to take her away?"
"Yes," Death replied.
She nodded again, the thousands of questions forming in her mind remaining unspoken as Death guided her mother into the blue light from which he'd come.
When the men had come to take away her mother's body, she was also sent away from the only home she knew to the house of her lost father's sister and her family. They had said she was creepy, refusing to play, respond, or smile. She was seldom fazed. They blamed it on her mother. She knew they were wrong.
Nothing could bother somebody who'd spoken with Death.
She took to looking for him wherever she could, peering around every corner and beneath every bridge, hoping and praying for a glimpse of that red hair.
She couldn't understand her own obsession. Finding Death wouldn't bring back her mother, not that she wanted someone she couldn't recall anyway. Death also wouldn't take her away from her aunt's wary glances, the critical gazes of other adults or the feeling of being judged by everyone and everything.
She'd once been asked what she wanted to do with her life, by a friendly elementary school teacher, one who expected her to want to become a ballerina, an astronaut, or something equally a childish fantasy.
At the time, she hadn't understood why the teacher had all but screamed when she'd replied, "I want to find Death."
Her school years passed without instilling any feeling of enjoyment. She graduated high school, her goal still unaccomplished. She chose to join the police, and became an officer in the Violent Crime division. She saw many cases of death, but not Death himself.
Her dream was unrequited, her quest unfinished, while she lived her life as if on strings, her limbs moving in a gawky fashion as she tried to move forward, but found she couldn't. After all, where was there to go in life when one was hell-bent on finding Death?
With her resolve hardened, she began the climb. Where she was climbing to, she didn't know, be it a rooftop, cliff, or bridge. All she concerned herself with was preparing for the fall.
But staring over the black chasm that was the precipitous drop before her, that shade of red flickered in the corner of her eye. Turning, the armful of papers she carried through the police station halls nearly spilling across the floor, she found herself meeting a pair of tawny brown eyes that surely could belong to only one being.
He was older, there was no denying that, but she was as well. And it was with the same voice she remembered when he asked an innocent question.
"Are you all right?"
She nodded, feeling every bit the child with her frozen lips that refused to speak in reply.
Something flickered in the eyes of the man before her. He was familiar, painfully familiar, but at the same time, not at all the same. He was Death, and yet he wasn't.
"Just a bit stressed," she said finally, not wanting this encounter to end, full of the simple desire to just watch those eyes as they shifted to an expression intimately familiar to her.
Smiling, the sympathy in his gaze strengthening still, he said, "Don't work yourself too hard. We wouldn't want you to fall."
With a parting wave, the man who was Death to the point of it being an impossibility left her there, standing motionless in the hall with her arms full of papers as her head rang with his unspoken words.
We wouldn't want you to fall.
She could imagine those tawny eyes emanating disappointment as easily as she could picture their overwhelming sympathy. And if her life's dream turned the same look on her that everyone else in her life once had, she didn't think she could bear it.
If even Death wanted her to live, than live she certainly would.
Yeah. I don't really know where that came from.
Thank you if you read this far, and I hope you got some enjoyment or... I don't know what, exactly, out of reading that. I haven't the faintest idea what I was thinking when I wrote it, because it's such a deviation from the attitude of my current Hetalia story, so... yep, I'm stopping now.
If you have the time, don't hesitate to tell me how confused you are in a comment or review.