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She arrived in all her humanity. Still beating heart, still rushing blood, still heaving breast.
At first, Death thought nothing of her, the same way he’d thought nothing of every human that preceded her, they’ve come to him since the dawn of human existence, tens of thousands of years ago. Not as the first murmur of life, nor will they be life’s last sigh. People are in the grand picture small and insignificant.
So, he thought nothing of her.
However, as he took her by the throat and leaned in to stop her breathing, halt her heart, freeze her blood, Elisabeth grabbed him by the wrist, where life would have pounded beneath his skin, had he been a living thing, and fought back. Return me, she ordered the Lord of the Underworld.
Death, who had never before been on the receiving end of an order, not since the moment when he opened his eyes, born by the shadows, someone whispering awaken in his ear, released the girl like he had been burned.
For the first time, he noticed how a living human warmed to the roar of their blood, how passion and temperature could be the same thing, how he himself felt cold and dispassionate. In comparison. He felt it where his fingertips had touched her skin. He felt it in his heart, calling out for the rhythm of hers.
Would he ever learn that beat, if he took it?
Wouldn’t it only be his, if she willingly gave it to him?
Thus, Death put the girl to sleep and did as she had commanded, returning her to the world in which the concept of him was once more merely a shadow, watching her as she awoke in the hospital bed, her whole family gathered around her, fretting. The World of the Dead was not a place to be remembered by the living, so he turned away and expected to be forgotten, but she reached for him, calling him by no name she could rightfully recognise and it was in that moment, as she held onto him in thought, that Death knew he would pursue her until the day Elisabeth herself chose him over the life he’d allowed her.
Yes, he had given her tomorrow and the days that would inevitably follow, but at the end of all days came night. The very darkness of which Death had arisen. The natural other half to life’s whole.
Surely, she wasn’t going to become his. She already was. His.
His other half.