Work Text:
The reaper stumbled into the room. It was night – always night – but the shadows seemed to have deepened, groaning from the corners with a bodied emptiness, like static eating away at sight. Black blood dripped after him.
“Friend,” he said, and fell to his knees. The fireplace was barely within reach, and he reached out still, trembling fingers gloved in black rasping at the fireplace’s lip.
“Friend.” Again, more urgently. This was not his first time returning home in such a manner, but this time the thought of being left alone in the dark filled him more than ever with shapeless dread. His other hand kept up the pressure on his wound. The undead had got him with an axe, worse than he expected. His blood, tarry and lukewarm, was soaking through the glove.
Like a great exhalation, the fireplace roared up. It opened like a star in the empty little room, sucking oxygen in instants, and the very air seemed to implode toward it in a whoosh. The shutters shook. Their quiet rattle subsided as a golden light seeped into the dark.
The sight filled the reaper with a twisting relief. He wasted very little time – feeling atop the mantle until something bent and metallic clanged to the ground.
The fire warmed the flat tip obligingly. In seconds the metal shone with an oily luster, and the dark red core gleamed, smoking. The reaper worked away his intervening coat, fingers sticking with blood, and with a strained but steady hand, seared the wound. He hissed a breath.
The fire watched over his effort. Shaking and in pain, a curled-up shape throwing a gangly shadow in the firelight, he did not feel much like a reaper at all. He did not know what he would do without his friend. As the fresh pain subsided, he crawled closer. He brought the instrument to the fire again. The blood on the instrument charred in the flames, and flaked into no more than curls of ash, swallowed in the brilliant body of the fire.
His friend did not speak to him. But the reaper found himself arranging himself in the hopes that it would please his friend, that these things would be sufficient to make the fire return more often and grace this cold place with warmth, even if for a moment. He never could tell what difference it made. And such wishes were dangerous.
The reaper worked quietly and efficiently through the night. Although illogical, he hurried in fear that the fire would tire of this and withdraw. For now, the flames burned and rippled, searing the air with a pervading warmth, leaving no ash.
When his wound was treated and sealed, he sank back, the floor cold and hard even in all the layers of his winter coat. The brightness of the fire so close set the edges of his sight wavering white. Or it could have been the blood loss. One side of his trousers were soaked through with it, and the black blood seeped over the floor. He would need to clean that up. Just... in a while.
He half-crawled, half-dragged himself closer to the fireplace, wanting its warmth as the burn of urgency faded, and he began to shiver. His duty tonight had been fulfilled. In a moment, he would get up and clean this all up in the dark, and pass the silence until his next mission in the usual toneless fashion.
But he was so tired. Was it of all this, he thought, dimly, as he gathered himself tighter at the foot of the fireplace and waited for the shivers to pass. His head lolled fractionally sideways. So close, the fireplace warmed him like it was pushing it directly into his bones, bypassing physical enamel and bone altogether. Some otherworldly threads of hollow warmth reaching into him, like hot air flowing through. It burned, but soothed him like nothing else that could exist in this dreadful Place.
“Thank you, friend,” he whispered. He felt nearly comfortable like this, but the words felt dredged up from the dark pit he secreted deep inside, that in spite of the years – perhaps because of them – only opened more inescapably wide and hopeless than before – and there was, again, no answer from the fireplace save its steady crackle.
He did not mean to, but he drifted off to the sound of the wind and dust that blew through this Place. He dreamed of nothing.
When he awakened, it was to a thin darkness, the streetlights beyond the windows lending the shadow an eerie, shifting hue. Smoke wafted from the vacant fireplace. Stale blood clung to his side as he unfolded his legs and shakily stood, gripping the side of the fireplace. More work to do. It was dark out, eternally so, and the cold already creeping back in.