#Obviously this is a VERY young version of Billie. She’s missing 300 years of character development here

[castielmacleod]

You are a reaper, and every day you harvest the souls of the unwilling. Those who have died of illness or in accidents or otherwise had their lives woefully cut short—these are your duty. You reach for their souls even as their bitterness and sorrow and fury rolls off of them in waves. Even as they direct said bitterness and sorrow and fury at you. Some of them scream and cry and beg you not to take them. Some of them scream that they hate you. And at first you tried to explain it, tried to help them see that it wasn’t you who dealt them this blow. “For what reason would you hate me?” you would ask them. “I am merely a reaper. I have done nothing.”

“You have come to take me away from here,” they would answer, inevitably. “That is why I would hate you.”

Thus it did not take long before you realised that it truly didn’t matter to humans whether you’d done something or not—they’d hate you still. You may not be the Pale Rider, the String-Cutter, the Ultimate Arbiter, but you are their implement. You are the Hand of Death, the Keeper of their Order, and you are received as such.

So you deal with it. You do your job. You shoulder their hatred, you drag their souls to heaven or hell, and then you do it all over again. You are a reaper, and you are thankless.

There comes a day where you receive your latest assignment, and already something is different. There’s some poor miserable bastard, Death tells you, about to take his own life. And of course, you knew this day would come. There were only so many reapers, after all. Eventually, you were going to receive an assignment for a death that you could not understand.

Sudden deaths, accidents, terminal illness—these you recognise. Such is simply fate, the order of things. And when your memories swirl with so many agonised faces, souls who would have done anything, anything not to leave their world behind, it is nearly impossible to conceive of a soul that wished for death enough to deliberately hurry it to them.

You ask Death why a human would ever want such a thing, but they cannot tell you. All they can tell you is his name, his location, and that his soul is bound for hell.

You find him sitting at a desk in a workshop, surrounded by sheets of fabric and half-finished dresses. He’s pale-skinned, fairly dressed, and his flame-coloured hair is pulled back into a low ponytail that falls between his shoulder blades. His face is emotionless. The flickering lantern-light glints across his glasses, obscuring his eyes. He’s spinning a flintlock on the surface of the desk with one finger. 

You watch him. You don’t know for how long. You’re not sure how much time it takes before the spinning stops. You watch him lift the flintlock from the desk and you watch him fall from his chair afterward.

His soul sees you, then, as his spectral form sits up from the floor. He doesn’t ask who you are, or what’s happened. He doesn’t gawk at his corpse. He doesn’t panic or shout or beg. And so things are unusually silent as you reach out your hand. Things are usually calm as he gives you his. And he looks up at you from his knees with his misery-stricken face and death-shattered gaze, and it’s nothing you haven’t seen before until you place his broken expression as not misery, but relief. A relief so palpable you swear you can feel it too. You stare at him as though he were some alien creature as he breathes two words: “Tapadh leibh.” Thank you.

He’s thanking you.

For a moment you can’t even react, even as he rises from his knees. In theory you knew of these words, of this sentiment, but not once have you ever heard them yourself. Not once, not ever, have they been spoken to you, much less in absolute sincerity.

“For what reason would you thank me?” you finally ask. “I am merely a reaper. I have done nothing.”

“You have come to take me away from here,” he answers simply. “That is why I would thank you.”

Such a statement only brings you more questions than it does answer the one you asked. Should you ask why he wished so badly for death? Does he not know where he is headed? You aren’t sure if such inquiries are even appropriate—you have never had cause to wonder before. Never have you met a human soul quite so perplexing as this one.

“You are not saved, Fergus MacLeod,” you remind him. “I am have come to take your soul to hell.”

“Tha fios ’am,” he replies. I know.

And so you lead his soul from the mortal plane toward the Gates of Hell, and he goes willingly alongside you. The further you get him from his old life, the more he starts to open up—and talk. (“Do you fancy yourself a lad or a lass?” he asks. “I am a reaper,” you tell him. “What’s it like, hell?” he asks. “Worse than you could ever hope to comprehend,” you tell him. “Hell won’t make me into a demon, will it?” he asks. “Only if they break you,” you tell him. “Who’s they?” he asks. “The demons,” you tell him. He sets his jaw at that, and falls silent thereafter.)

When the Gates come into sight is when he starts to balk somewhat. That’s something you’re not surprised by. The mere sight of the Gates did this to every hell-bound soul you ever reaped, and even he was no exception.

“This is where I leave you,” you explain. “I will not enter the Gates. You must proceed by your own will, or the demons will come and drag you in—whichever happens first.”

“Aye, alright,” he answers with what sounds like barely restrained horror. You watch him face the gates and visibly steel himself for just a moment, before falling back to his initial posture and turning to you. “Just—before I go. I didn’t catch your name.”

“I am a reaper,” you answer plainly. “I have no name.”

“Well, that won’t do. I need at least a name to give you a proper farewell,” he insists. “Er… what about Agnes? That’s something of a nice name.” He squints at you from behind the spectral manifestation of the glasses he’d been wearing. “If you don’t happen to mind a lass’s name, that is. Maybe you’d prefer… I don’t know, William…?”

You stare at him. Once again you have no idea what he’s doing or why he’s doing it.

“Is it too formal for you? William, I mean,” he adds. “Billy? How’s Billy? I kind of like the sound of that—Billy. I could see you as a Billy.”

Could you see yourself as a Billy?

The thought comes before you can stop it, but you effectively push it from your mind before you can say something unbecoming about it. “I am a reaper,” you reiterate. “But… you may call me whatever you’d like.”

“Then… until next time, Billy,” he says, with something of a smile.

“We will not meet again,” you point out. “You will never leave hell, and I will never enter.”

“…I see,” he replies. “Well then.” He glances into hell and back to you again. He keeps his smile on. “Let’s just hope they torture me so senseless I start to enjoy it.”

You don’t particularly know how he can say that while smiling. You don’t particularly know why he came here willingly at all. Why he did what he did. Why he would ever give up what all those souls before him would have killed for. He starts to walk away and finally you can’t take the confusion anymore.

“Fergus MacLeod,” you say, and he turns back to you. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“This was not the order of things,” you say. “You would always end up here, that much was written, but you had time left. Years. I want to know why you did what you did.”

He looks you dead in the eye, backlit by the flames of the pit, and says, “Because least in hell, I’ll feel something other than my own misery. At least in hell, maybe the new pain can distract me from the old pain. At least in hell, I can simply let myself wither away until I’m nothing, and dear god—” He gives a harsh laugh. “The sooner the better.”

With that he turns away and vanishes into the Gates and for a moment all you do is stand there. You are a reaper, and you are not created to feel. But you would swear his words had chilled you to the bone.

And you didn’t know it then, but this was not the end of something. It was a beginning.