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Kravitz draped his arm across Taako’s chest as he slept, his cool hand resting gently on the side of the elf’s warm neck. He could feel the rise and fall of Taako’s chest under his arm, his gentle pulse throbbing slowly under his fingers. Sometimes, in moments like this, Kravitz found himself marvelling at this simple fact: that Taako was alive. Of course, Kravitz breathed too, and his heart beat in time with Taako’s, and that was a miracle of its own, but this was different. Taako was alive because he’d survived, because somehow, against all odds, he’d refused to accept death at all.
Of course, Taako had died before. Kravitz knew the exact number of times Taako had died, even if Taako himself didn’t keep track anymore. It was Kravitz’ job to know, after all. Kravitz had known, before he knew anything else about Taako, that the elf had died eight times already, even if he hadn’t understood how at the time. And that number had more than doubled after his visit to Refuge. His death count was now at nineteen. Nineteen times Taako had died, nineteen times his heart had been stopped and his breath had been stolen from his lungs. And yet Lady Fate never ceased to be on his side, and here Taako was, miraculously, alive.
Taako was too flippant about death most of the time. Maybe it was a result of having survived death so many times already, maybe it was because he was in love with the Grim Reaper, perhaps because his own sister and brother-in-law were undead themselves. Truthfully, it was probably a bit of all of that muddled together. Kravitz tried sometimes to remind him that death was permanent, that his past experiences with death had been incredibly abnormal, that he wouldn’t get another chance at life again when he died for a twentieth time, that dying wasn’t a magical reset button anymore, but Taako didn’t seem to care. Sometimes he’d jokingly beg Lup to “Kill me now!” when things went wrong, or he’d tell Kravitz to “Just go ahead and reap me, Death Man” if Lup wasn’t around. Taako insisted it was a joke, but every once in a while Kravitz thought he noticed a hint of sincerity under the humor, and it was unnerving.
Sometimes Taako was more forthright about death though, and usually that was at the end of a particularly bad day. He’d spend the day in silence, usually putting himself to bed alone much too early. Later he would talk. He’d wonder why he’d survived the Glamour Springs incident - it wasn’t luck, he’d insist, it had been stupidity. Or he’d quietly marvel at how close he’d come to dying in Wonderland. One more bad spin of the wheel and he would have been done for. If Merle hadn’t been so quick on his feet, he would have been sucked into the Astral Plane during his reckless rescue attempt. (Sometimes Kravitz wondered about that, too, what might have happened if he’d suddenly found his new boyfriend drowning in the Hunger alongside him. He would remember the awe and wonder he’d been filled with when he found Taako alive in Phandalin, and wondered if he would have been filled with rage and spite if instead he’d found Taako dead beside him in the Sea of Souls. Not anger at Taako for dying again, of course, never at Taako, but instead at the Hunger for daring to touch him again.) Those days Taako would argue that he didn’t deserve to still be alive, that Fate shouldn’t have interfered, that he should be dead by now. It was days like that that Kravitz really worried about him.
And mornings like this always followed. Maybe not the following morning, maybe not even that week, but they always came. Mornings when Kravitz looked at Taako again with the same awe and wonder he’d felt before, but not this time because Taako had battled the Hunger and won - this time because Taako had survived. He’d faced another one of those bad days and stubbornly come out of it alive. And that might not sound like much, not after everything Taako had already done, but to Kravitz it was everything. That Taako continued to live even after days when it didn’t seem worthwhile - that was what Kravitz admired. And it was on these mornings that Kravitz would touch him gently as he slept, taking comfort in the rise and fall of Taako’s chest and the gentle thrum of his heart, and he would quietly marvel that Taako was here, with him, alive.