#30 Meat

They laughed at me when I told them how Gelus died.

I almost laughed along with them.

Deridovely joked that Gelus wasn't a real shinigami anyway, he was made out of scraps on the floor. He was a weakling who couldn't even fly.

Daril hissed that the only 'gami's who paid attention to what humans did were idiots like Gelus and Ryuk.

And that perked my interest. Because I knew Ryuk, wherever he went, something bad happened. Whether he meant to or not, he brought death with him everywhere.

"Ryuk's interfering with the humans?" I questioned the bejewelled shinigami.

She snorted and rolled her eyes, "He's got himself involved with some little closeted kid who doesn't know how to get rid of his frustration any other way than killin people. Ryuk says it's funny."

Deridovly smirked and swing his scythe, "What's funny about following a lump of meat with legs around?"

I laughed along with them again. Gelus was a fool, and Ryuk was a greater one, letting themselves get involved with the humans… the 'meat' as Deridovely called them. Because that's all they were…

Just pigs awaiting the inevitable slaughter.

That's all.

To see them as anything more would be stupid. They aren't like us, they don't last forever. They live out pointless existences that are so easily snuffed out.

And then I recalled the way Gelus had spoken of his blonde human.

How when he whispered to me in his croaked and cracked voice that he loved her, not for her beauty, but for how good she was. How brave she was to try to go on with her life after the hideous events that had wrenched her world into tiny pieces.

I remembered the way he touched the image of her in the viewing pit, as though he could somehow be closer to her just from the touch of her face.

I remembered how…

Just for a moment, his eyes looked alive. They weren't red anymore, they were golden. And for a moment this pitiful little creature wasn't so pitiful, and I found myself envying him. He had found something many of us refuse to allow ourselves to consider, someone to love with all he had.

And it got him killed.

I walked back to where his ashes lay and picked up his abandoned notebook. The only name in it was that of the man who should have killed his beloved blonde meat-sack.

What a mess he'd made of everything.

…She was still in the same place in that alleyway. She was too scared to move. Foolish meat. Foolish Gelus.

They were well suited.

…But she looked so sad and alone, and I thought of Gelus again. I thought of how I found him infinitely more tolerable than any of the others of my kind. I thought of his kindness and the way he had laid his own life down for this human.

I thought of Ryuk and his constant trips to the human world, which he claimed he made out of boredom. But he kept going back, didn't he? And he often stayed with one human for months at a time. And I had not yet known him kill the person he was attached to.

I thought that perhaps I would like to know what could be so fascinating about those insignificant bundles of numbers.

I looked to Gelus' note and thought of what he would have wanted me to do.

I went to the meat's world.

I would rather be mocked along with the meat than be nothing more than unfeeling bones.