AN: Hello, dear readers! So, here's yet another chapter that I think sucks...but never mind that. I wanted to thank my dear friend Cobainlover4ever for her support of this story; I've loved our conversations about this film!

With that in mind, I wanted to clear up what may or may not have been a point of confusion. These chapters all take place during specific scenes of the film. The first chapter, for example, took place in that scene in the accounting library; this one takes place just before and during the 'drawing of the straws' in the woods.

Disclaimer: I don't own Shallow Grave. If I did, Alex and David may or may not have been a couple. Just saying. XD

It was November eighteenth, nineteen-ninety-three, when they finally deigned to bring Hugo to his grave. Half nine in the evening when their lives changed forever, and as they stood in grim silence among icy mist and fractured light, a council of demon gods playing with Fate and Destiny like cat's-cradle strings, Juliet knew, Alex knew, David knew, without ever speaking the words- nothing will ever be the same again.

X X X

The creaking branches closed in around Alex as he walked deeper into the grove, as though trying to erase every last trace of his existence. Shivering, David pulled his jacket more tightly about himself, feeling a sudden and inexplicable chill pass through his bones that had nothing to do with the bitterness of the dreich night air. Beside him, Juliet stood motionless, her arms crossed over her chest, her eyes clenched firmly shut, her sharp face pinched in a pensive, even nervous sort of way...but that was ridiculous, wasn't it? Juliet didn't get nervous. Juliet was the blithe one, the calm one, the confident one: ever the Good Doctor, unflappable and coy and cold even as she saved the lives of those under her knife. Her soft, milk-pale hands were the ones to cut into dead and dying flesh every day; her wily mind was the one to call this whole sordid affair unfeasible, questions of morality be damned. How could she, of all people, be getting cold feet now? It was unfathomable. It was...unfeasible.

Then again...he supposed that even the strongest of them was entitled to feeling at least a bit of anxiety now, of all times. Before, all of this had seemed like nothing more than a game, some formless idea content to remain untouched in the far corners of some distant and unimagined future, but now...now, there was a plastic-wrapped corpse in a stolen van, a satchel of innocuous tools of butchery hand-picked for slaughter, and the horrid, creeping realization like ice in his veins that Death stood shrouded somewhere beside them, waiting patiently to reap whichever sorry soul drew the short straw and dashed its wretched self onto the jagged rocks of total moral depravity.

Perhaps Juliet felt the premonition, too, as she turned slightly inward to face him, bracing one trembling hand against the van's hood as if she thought she could draw strength from the low thrum of warm steel beneath her palm. David, too, edged backwards, moving further into the pitifully small circle of light emanating from the idling van's headlights. Slowly he let his eyes drift to rest upon the thick shadows trying to encroach themselves upon the circle's mist-blurred edges. Through the waves of icy terror that were taking it upon themselves to consume him with ever-growing intensity, he observed with almost clinical detachment how the faint outlines of branches and aging leaves shifted, twisted, painting in the dark autumn sky the figure of a hood, a cloak, a scythe. The flickers of lightning-bugs became eyes, red and warm and hard, meeting his own blue ones with almost an almost malevolent impassivity.

Judgement Day, they whispered, their voices a desiccated rasp ignorant of all time and light, and he shivered again, hating that Juliet was standing right there beside him deaf to the sound and blind to the sight, hating that even in this moment of such impossible significance he was left to face the demons alone, always alone…. Nothing but a game, is Judgement Day, David Stevens: the game of life, your eternally short gamble, but I always win in the end, don't I? Will you challenge me, put me off another eye-blink day? Why challenge me? Shall we end it now, end the pain and fear and cold? It's just a game, after all. Are you going to play, or not?

X X X

The sudden rustling of bushes pulled both David and Juliet from their respective reveries, and twin pairs of pale blue eyes snapped up into focus as one as Alex came traipsing through the undergrowth towards the dim circle of light. In one hand he clutched three thin twigs, cupping their ends protectively with his palm and leaving the knoblike heads, all level with each other, open and ready to be plucked, little harbingers of doom trapped in the light and airy prison of dead and unfeeling wood.

"All right, then, here we are an' this is it," Alex mused aloud, a ringing shout in the silence of the wood. The brash bravado that so often suffused that smooth voice quavered, cracked, and for a moment his young face held all of the earnest confusion and fear of a lost and lonely child set adrift in a world beyond his capacity for understanding. Just as soon as it made itself known, though, the terror was gone, the bold mask back in place, and when he looked up his clear eyes glittered like diamonds, hard and cold and oh-so-eager to play just one more role, to act the puppeteer on their macabre stage of destiny. "D'you wanna play, or not?"

X X X

Wary gazes flicked about the circle of three, meeting and breaking again in a heartbeat's time, all guarded, all cool, all yearning to read and unwilling to be read. Alex swallowed thickly, glanced down. David blinked, glanced out. Juliet sighed, a tiny, noiseless thing, and reached out, her delicate fingers grasping the twig that sat at the topmost point of the triangle, closest to her. Slowly, achingly slowly, she drew it up and out, letting it scrape against its fellows with a grating, whining rasp. All watched with bated breath as its length became visible: one inch, two inches, three inches, four. Any longer and its tapered, rounded end would've been poking out of the curve of Alex's curled palm, and Juliet heaved another sigh of ineffable relief. Safe.

Eyes wide, full lips parted in breathless, anxious anticipation, Alex turned to David, a tremor running through his arm making the motion of holding out the two remaining twigs forceful and aggressive...a challenge. The eyes lit up, gleaming come on, then and what are you waiting for? Scornful cries of I'm not going to do it just because you won't pricked at David's mind like thorns tearing holes into the tattered vestiges of his pride, and he brought his hand up to meet Alex's in defiance of them. Challenge accepted. He wasn't some coward; he wasn't the quivering pansy that Alex so often accused him of being. Bloody hell, it wasn't his fault that he couldn't bloody do it, that his conscience screamed itself hoarse crying out wrong-wrong-wrong whenever he looked into Hugo's unseeing eyes and remembered what they were about to do to him; it wasn't his fault that he actually had a conscience! Not like Juliet, with her cool cat's eyes and the blood of a thousand innocents on her healer's hands. Not like Alex, with his childish excitement, thinking that this was just some silly game.

I can't do it. I can't do it. His fingers hovered over the thinner of the two heads and faltered, doubt seizing him suddenly and paralyzing the limbs that only a moment before had acted with such ephemeral courage. Death's scarlet gaze burned hot into his, His featureless face twisting into some terrible facsimile of laughter, delighting in His ubiquitous foreknowledge, pitying the poor little fools who fancied themselves champions of Fate. His scythe was a pinprick pain in the back of his neck, choosing him, marking him. Just a game...just a stupid, stupid game...but what if he lost? Two twigs left, fifty-fifty odds...but if he lost? The scythe would sink into him, sever his soul...God, he'd be gone, gone and unable to return and condemned to burn in Hell forever because this, all this, was wrong, it was sick and twisted and wrong, and it wasn't fucking worth it, any of it-! Not the money, not the others' approval, nothing! I can't do it! I can't do it!

X X X

Alex's eyes flickered suddenly, just a slight shift to the right and back again, but David caught it and froze. He had looked at the thicker twig...had it been a clue? Or just...restlessness, nervousness, boredom? Then again, if it had meant nothing...then why was Alex looking at him like that? A scrap of pity in his diamond blue eyes, a warm flash of reassurance. Trust me, they said, inviting and friendly and nothing like how Alex would look at him in real life. Trust this.

His fingers moved of their own accord, desperate to latch onto even that fledgling hope, the single spindly olive branch that could bring him back from the throes of oblivion, and grasped at the thicker twig. One inch. Two inches. The end so close to the top, jagged and broken and sharp like it had been snapped off. Severed. Shortened.

No, no...please, please God, please, no…and then Alex opened his palm. One inch. Two inches...three inches. Half an inch.

The scythe edged in deeper, and Alex let his eyes drift shut, his entire being relaxing as his mind's lips whispered safe. Safe. Safe.

X X X

David stared at the little scrap of twig in his palm, uncomprehending. It...it couldn't be. He had been so close, a mere hair's breadth away from salvation-! and he had let it go. Lead us not into temptation, and all that bollocks, but he had been lead, by trust, by the wish to trust a friend...and he'd been had. He had lost. His conscience cried wrong, wrong, wrong, but his mind sighed undone, undone, undone, and his conscience collapsed under the weight of the scythe that reached into him with icy hands and dragged out his faltering soul, sapping the life from it and rendering it feeble, exhausted...dead.

"I can't do it!" he cried aloud, but even his own ears were deaf to the plea, and as he cast desperate eyes out to Alex and Juliet, beseeching mercy that he knew would never come...he looked into their eyes and saw a meager flash of pity give way to Death: Death dancing, laughing, spinning manically upon the ashes of his soul and reveling in its damnation. I win, it and she and he all said, gleeful taunts of children having bested their weaker brethren at their favorite games. I win. You lose.

Then they stepped back as one, and he was alone again, always alone, in a world too cold for such distance. The echoes of his quashed conscience whispered wrong, wrong, wrong, but the echoes were only shadows now, fading to dust and leaving only joyous Death behind. I win. You lose.

Whatever game they've been playing, I want no part in it. End of story. :(