The first soul you harvest was that of a little girl. She was eight years old. Her clothes were tattered, her eyes were sunken in, and her body was bruised and sore all over. Her breath stuttered in her chest as she sat shivering in the cold, brown hair hanging limply and hiding her face. When she sees you her eyes light up. You don't know what she sees when she looks at you, but she kept calling you mama as you cradled her in her arms. You whisper pretty things into her hair. You whisper of castles and clouds and rainbows and princesses and queens. For a moment her pain is yours and she clings to you stronger than she had the energy to do. You ignore the tears on your face and the tears on hers. You never stop with your whispers of platitudes or the stroking of her hair.
She dies with a smile on her lips.
You hate what you are, but a part of you loves it too. You don't kill people. You never kill. You guide them. You comfort them. You hold their hands as they breathed their last breath. Some people run away from you. Some people sink into your arms, but they always know who you are. What you are. What you bring.
You fit into the world like a normal person. You drink, (You drink a lot) you have friends, you talk to people, you laugh, you smile, you do anything not to give yourself away.
Friendships are the worst and best part of your existence. You don't know how you could survive without them. You don't know how to survive without them.
And then they die. Everyone dies. This is your destiny and you've embraced it. You will always bring about death and you will always be left behind. It stopped bothering you a long time ago.
The first time you see him you barely notice him outside of the hair. He has a lot of hair. You've come for his friend. All your focus is on him. Blood is seeping from the friend's chest and there's a savage grin on his face as his head is cradled in the blonde's hands. This one isn't afraid of death. It's not uncommon, but it happens so rarely that it's refreshing. His grin widens when he sees you. You don't know what he sees, you never do, but he knows what you are. That much is apparent in his face. There's an undercurrent of dread and you're used to that, but there's no fear; just acceptance. People are crying around him and you're used to that too. People are also yelling and screaming. The crowd around him is huge and the people on outskirts are chanting, but you don't have eyes for them.
He laughs when you draw nearer and tells you, you have to wrestle him all the way to the pearly gates if you want him to go easily, to the confusion of the people around him. You don't know if there are any pearly gates. You don't know if there are any fires of hell. You don't know much of anything, but you know that you have to help, have to soothe. It's your job. It's who you are.
You go see how his friends are coping after in spirit form. It's something you always do. Out of guilt maybe, or out of sympathy, you're never sure but you go. They look sad but even more so they look angry. You try to remember the details of his death. You've never really focussed on that before. A name just appears on the palm of your hand and you do what you need to do. You don't stay for long.
Vague interest made you go back in your human form and you finally understand. The noise, the vast amount of people, the yelling, the screaming, the chanting: it was a protest gone wrong. You sit in the back while they talk and for some reason you keep going back. You tell yourself it's because you're checking up on their grief process but you know it's because you find them interesting. You still don't notice him. Later you'll realise it's because he was subdued. Quiet. That doesn't last too long.
He speaks at the next meeting and his voice is like heaven. Conviction like nothing you've ever known spits from his mouth like fire and you can't move. You can barely breathe. You don't comprehend how you didn't notice him before. His fire was the kind that burned so brightly, so purely, that everything else was destroyed in its wake. He was brilliance.
When you've gone to enough meetings that they started to acknowledge you, you play your usual game. Something about the way they look at you tells you that you don't have to, that they'd see right through it anyway. Still you play. You drink. You argue. You laugh. You speak. You mock. You pretend. They treat you like a friend and you ache for them. The friends that you will lose. The friends you will lose much sooner than you'd like if the whispers at their meetings hold any truth. Yet you stay. No wound it seems, is big or gaping enough to turn you away from the warmth of companionship.
He never talks to you and you don't let it bother you. He is love. He shies away from it so much in his personal life and his anger is so visceral that no one really sees it, but he is love itself. His eyes shine with righteous fury. There is sunshine in his hair, warmth in his heart and fire in his words. If he were a colour, he'd be red. You're different. You don't love. You can't. You don't know if it's because you're unable to or because you've never done it before but you don't know what love is. You look at him sometimes and he loves so much. You wonder what it would be to feel like that.
Your home is broken bones and dead eyes. You are death. You don't bring it about with your own hand but it's only in your presence that it can ever be completed. You are the end. The finish line. You are the stuff of nightmares. You are everyone's worst fear. You are the darkness and he is the light. So you watch him.
You watch him and one day he watches back. It takes you by surprise. Specific people felt a certain amount of wariness around you that made them unconsciously distance themselves from you. He always looks at you so briefly and with such distaste that you assumed he was one of them, but when he walks up to you and asks you to have coffee with him with a smile so shy and unlike anything you've ever seen on his face you're floored.
You've lived for so long. You've taken many lovers but you've never done this before. No one has ever wanted to. No one should ever want to. You want to refuse. To urge him to choose more wisely. You want only happiness for him and that's something you can't give. It would be selfish of you to say yes. To let him be with you when you know he deserves so much better. The selfish part of you wins. The selfish part of you kisses him with a smile, embraces him, touches him, lets him move inside you with reckless abandon. You can't find it in yourself to be guilty.
You get only two weeks of bliss before he's back to work and you are fine with it. You would take anything you could get from him.
The atmosphere in the meetings is starting to take a more serious air and you know what's coming. You want to rant and rail and warn them against it.
You don't know for a fact. You never do until the name appears on your hand, but you know what danger looks like, what it feels like and when Enjolras announces that their counter-protest will be held in two weeks, your heart doesn't break, it simply accepts defeat.
Names appear on your hand, all the way down to your wrist and you feel a weight on your chest.
They're too young to die. You want to save them but they can never be saved. No one can. Once death has come for you, there are no other options.
If anyone notices your silence, your neediness in the upcoming days they don't say a word. He kisses you on the head, on the cheek, on the lips and he is burning. He is brilliance. He burns brighter than anyone you've ever known.
You think, maybe he's death too. It's death that follows him around, whispers in his ear, make his eyes shine.
You always touch him-all of them so carefully- afraid of what might happen if you lose yourself in the moment. If you press too hard. You don't touch him carefully today.
You were wrong. The warmth of a hand in yours is beginning to fade and all you could think of as you weep is how you were wrong about so many things.
It wasn't death that he loved. It was love that he embraced. It was love that kissed him. It was love that held his hand. It was love that led his spirit to where you could never follow. Everything about him 'til the very end, would always be love.