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He isn’t exactly sure how this happened. And for the record, he isn’t even really sure why this happened. But it happened, and it happened, and now he’s here. With a child. In his care.
The child is a human child, her eyes wide and bright, her hair dark and curly. He isn’t sure how old she is, but she’s old enough to speak, and her questions come rapidly and assault his ears and he really just wants to know which heavenly figure decided that he deserved this torture, so he can take his revenge on them as soon as he figures out how to get rid of this child.
It’s not like he can kill her. Then she’d be with him forever, and he doesn’t think he could survive that.
He tries to tire her out by taking her to see all the sights of the Underworld. He shows her where the worst of civilization is punished, and then she cries at their misery, so he takes her to see where the best of civilization is celebrated, and then she cries at their happiness, so he isn’t really sure what to do. Eventually she does grow tired, though, and he lets her sleep on a pillow by where he sits to talk to his angels, or as she called them, “those creepy guys with the white hair.” He isn’t sure whether to be insulted or to laugh because, well, she isn’t exactly wrong.
Eventually, though, the time comes that he has important business to attend to. He pokes her until she wakes up, bleary-eyed but excited.
“I have to leave you now,” he says.
“Where’re you going?” she asks, sitting up on her pillow.
“Up,” he says. Up, to where she ought to be. He wonders how she even ended up here in the first place, but honestly, there are some questions that can be asked but never answered, and he thinks that this just might be one of them.
“Can I come with you?” And now she’s bouncing where she sits, and he would smile but then she would think that he likes her, and he doesn’t like people, he is fearsome and cruel and Death.
He smiles a little but into the back of his hand so she can’t see.
“No, you have to stay here,” he says. He would let her come with him if he knew that she would return to wherever she belongs as soon as they reached the world of the living, but given how she has been following him around like a lost puppy for the past two hours, he doubts she even knows where she belongs.
“But I could help you!” she implores, and he nearly smiles again but stops himself. He has a reputation to uphold, after all.
“My job is one that only I and my angels can complete. A human child, such as yourself, cannot do what we must do.”
She tilts her head. “What’s your job?”
He hates this question; he despises this question. There is no way to answer it to appease the living; only the dying are happy to hear his answer. Still, if he doesn’t answer it for this child, she will ask him again and again, and he really doesn’t have the patience for that today. Or any day, for that matter, but especially today.
“Do you have relatives that have died?” he asks.
She contemplates his question for a moment, and then she nods. “My cousin drowned once. We used to play together but then she was gone and we couldn’t anymore.”
He puts his head in his hands. As if this wasn’t complicated already, a child this child knew died. There is no way he won’t seem like the enemy.
“When she drowned, she didn’t die,” he says. She looks at him inquisitively and he moves his hands from his face to steeple them beneath his chin. “It wasn’t the water, per se, that killed her. Sure, it put her on Death’s doorstep, so to speak, but she didn’t die until I or one of my angels kissed her. And now she’s here, somewhere.”
The child looks at him for a long moment. “Kissing means love, though. So you killed her with love?”
He stares at her, and his face is making shapes that he did not agree with it to make. He isn’t even quite sure how to respond to her. He has been rendered speechless by a small child.
“You know,” she continues. “I think that if I have to die, I’d like to be kissed by you. You’re nice to me and you don’t say mean stuff to me. You look a little funny but so does everyone else here so I guess it’s kinda like how everyone in France used to wear those really white wigs. You just do what everyone else does. And when I tried to braid your hair earlier you didn’t hit me. You’re really nice to me and I like you.”
Again, the words seem to have left his mind. He has half a mind to disappear on the spot so he doesn’t have to think of words to use to reply to her, but something – maybe it’s the way she looks at him, maybe it’s her hesitant smile – stops him, and he gets off his chair and sits across from her.
“I will not kiss you until you are ready,” he murmurs. “And you will be ready when you are old and grey and tired, when you have lived a life full of love and light and happiness. I will not kiss you until then. This I promise to you.”
Her eyes crinkle like she might cry and he wants to be anywhere but here, but then her arms are around him and her face is buried in his shoulder, and she is so warm and alive. He doesn’t know what to do with his arms for a moment, but eventually he brings them up to wrap around her, and he leans his head into the crook of her neck.
“I trust you,” she says. “You are my friend.”
And eventually, he draws away from her and she lets him go, a smile on her face as he disappears to collect the souls of the dying.
When he returns, just as the sun is beginning to rise and the morning glory flowers unfurl their petals, she is asleep again, curled up in his chair instead of on her pillow. Her breath is soft and her hands are beneath her head, and he allows himself to smile – her eyes are closed; she cannot see – as he walks over to where she sleeps. He sits on her pillow and leans against the back of his chair, stretching his legs out in front of him, and perhaps she is the Sandman’s daughter, for he finds himself falling, falling, falling asleep to the sound of her breaths and the beating of her heart.
And when he wakes, she is gone, and he wonders at where she went, and where she belongs, but he knows that these are questions that may never be answered, and he hopes that these questions will not be answered for at least seventy years, when he goes to collect her soul.