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Charlie opened her eyes to find herself sitting on a sofa in a pristine white room. “Everything is fine!” was written on the wall across from her in bright green letters. Regardless, it was a pretty concerning situation to be in.
Her mounting panic was crushed down by a white-haired man with a kind face peeking his head out of a door that she hadn’t noticed before. “Charlie? Come on in.”
Charlie didn’t consider herself naive. A lot of other people did, she knew, but there was a difference between naivety and choosing to be trusting. She knowingly took risks out of the hope that the other person would prove that she was right to put her trust in them. Every time it happened, she became a little more certain that her people weren’t as far gone as everyone liked to see.
Admittedly, it didn’t happen very often. She didn’t mind. The little hurts, betrayals, and accusations of naivety were worth it for those moments where she got to see the good in the condemned.
Choosing to follow the man into his office was a little bit of that. It also more than a little because she was confused, disorientated, and he was the only thing that looked liable to give her answers. She was trusting him to give her answers though, so it felt like it should count.
The office was a lot nicer than the first room. It wasn’t as clean, but it felt homey. She could look at the clutter covering an… interesting amount of little tables and know that a real person lived here. More importantly, when she looked at the warm smile of the man sitting at the also-very-cluttered light brown desk, she knew that it was a kind person.
That was nice. She could use a little pleasant interaction after the…
How did the extermination end?
Charlie sidestepped her slowly mounting anxiety by focusing on her present company. With a friendly smile, she said, “You have a very nice office.”
“Oh, thank you!” the man exclaimed, jumping to his feet and clapping his hands exuberantly. “I’m very proud of everything I’ve put together, especially the paperclips. Oh, Charlie, do you know paperclips!?” He gestured excitedly at a bowl sitting on one of the many tables. Upon looking at it a little more closely, she saw that it was, indeed, full of paperclips.
…Okay. So he was a little odd. She could handle odd. Plenty of wonderful people were odd!
“I do!” she said, turning back to him. “Are you a… paperclip… enthusiast?”
“Absolutely! I’m enthusiastic about everything human!”
Charlie’s smile fell. Her gaze remained locked on the perfectly normal looking man before her. The prickling of the hairs on the back of her neck became harder to ignore. “Everything… human?”
“Ah, right. I guess it’s time for us to have this conversation, because if I’m not human, and I’m obviously not a sinner or angel… Well I guess you’d have to be pretty confused, huh!” The man sat back down and gestured at the seat across from him with a chuckle. “Why don’t you take a seat?”
Charlie sat down.
The man offered her a smile that was a little too reassuring for comfort. “Alright, so…” He took in a deep breath and clasped his hands on top of the desk. “You, Charlie Morningstar, are dead.”
“…What?”
The floor fell out from under her so suddenly that she could barely hear her own voice. It was the sort of unreal sensation that made her feel like this must be a dream. If it wasn’t, then she had to be misunderstanding. If that wasn’t happening, then the man in front of her had to be a liar. It wouldn’t be the first time that someone had betrayed her trust. Any of those explanations would do.
So why did she feel so certain that he was telling the truth?
The man reached out across the desk. Unthinkingly, she held her hand out in turn. He grasped it with a gentle smile. “I know it’s a lot to take in. The gist of it is that the extermination went a little sideways. The awful Head Exorcist got even more vicious than usual and… I’m sorry, Charlie, but you didn’t make it.”
“But— how—?”
“No, I think it’s best to leave it there. The important thing is that you’re here now.”
“Here?”
The man gave her hand a tender squeeze. “You’re in the good place, Charlie. I’m Michael, the architect of your neighborhood. It’s my job to make sure that your afterlife is absolutely perfect.”
“My af—” Charlie shook her head. “No, there must have been a mistake. I couldn’t have died. I— I was just in Hell. There’s nothing after that!”
“You all thought there was nothing after that. Well, surprise!” Michael released her hand to hold his own up and wiggle them dramatically. “Welcome to the afterlife after the afterlife! You’ll be glad to hear that Hell isn’t forever. We’ve been watching the entire time. When you end up with us, we make sure that you get what you deserve. What you really deserve, not that whole… righteous angels and irredeemable sinners mess.”
Charlie’s breath caught in her throat. She completely stopped trying to wrap her head around the whole ‘you’re dead’ part of the conversation. What this man had just implied, the hope that he had lit in her heart, was far more important than her own life could ever be. “You mean…?”
“You were right, Charlie. Redemption is possible. Maybe not in the life you just left, not while you were alive, but you know what? You put things in motion for that to change too.” Michael stood up and extended a hand to her once again. “You did your part, and you did a better job than anyone else possibly could have. It’s time for you to get your reward.”
Charlie slowly stood up, but didn’t move to take his hand. “But what about—?”
“All of your questions will be answered soon. I have a really nice presentation planned in about two hours! I have to give you a tour of the neighborhood before that though, a nice personal touch before you get to know your neighbors.”
Charlie continued to hesitate. “What about my friends?”
“Don’t worry, Charlie. Everyone’s going to get what they deserve from now on, I promise. Now, why don’t you let me show you what Heaven’s supposed to be like?”
Michael’s smile contained a world of warmth and comfort that put even Emily’s to shame.
Charlie took his hand with a smile of her own.
*
Michael’s tour of the neighborhood was really nice. There was a… honestly kind of weird amount of frozen yogurt places, but that was okay with her. She liked frozen yogurt! Every shop had more flavors than she could wrap her head around. As if that wasn’t enough, each of them had different options. It felt like it would take an eternity for her to try them all.
Which she now had.
An eternity with the same three hundred or so people who had been selected to mesh with her perfectly, no one new to ever come or go. People who all looked perfectly human, including herself. Michael had explained it when she caught a glimpse of herself in a window. A lot of the souls here had come from Hell, and no one wanted to look like a demon, so he had fixed it.
Like Hell had never happened at all.
The neighborhood was brightly colored too! The houses came in a bunch of different styles, each designed to be a perfect home for its designated soul. Every single thing in this not-heaven was perfect. The places, the people, it was all just…
It was the exact opposite of Hell. Hell, which Michael had assured her she didn’t deserve. He swore that no one who deserved it would be there forever. All good souls would be plucked from desolation and given the afterlife they deserved.
He told her not to worry about what happened to the bad ones.
With so many different sights dancing before her eyes and a heart that was already trembling, she tried very, very hard not to worry about it.
The presentation made that impossible.
Charlie had thought that the neighborhood was a little small. Not in the sense of space; Michael had assured her that whenever they reached the edge of the neighborhood, it would expand so that they could explore forever if they wanted. It would have been an absolute miracle in Hell.
This place had pulled off an absolute miracle, yet only three hundred something people lived there.
The question lingered in the back of her mind throughout the day. She tried her best to bury it along with all of the other things that she had to bury to keep smiling for a little while longer. However, as she watched Michael explain the points system, she found it rising from the grave.
This second afterlife was what Michael called the good place. The architects were extremely selective about every soul who ended up in the good place.
Every single action taken in the first afterlife was assigned a numerical value to denote how good or bad it was. Those numbers were then added together to determine how good or bad the person themselves was.
"Only the best of the best make it to the good place,” Michael finished. “The rest of them…” He paused for a moment, smile stiffening, before brushing it away with a wave of his hand. “Don’t worry about them. What matters is that you’re here now, safe and happy for all of eternity.”
Charlie bolted to her feet with a cry of, “Excuse me, Michael!?”
He turned toward her with a polite smile. “Yes, Charlie? Is something wrong?”
“No,” she said. “I mean, I don’t think so. Probably not? I was just wondering… How many is ‘the rest of them’?”
“Hmm…” Michael tapped a finger against his chin. “If I had to guess, I’d say that one in a thousand souls makes it to the good place!”
“One in a…”
“Yeah. Try not to think about it too much. The good souls that come our way make the bad ones worth it.”
“But the ones in the… umm… bad place get another chance, right?” Charlie asked. “They get another shot at the good place in the third afterlife, or they can get better down there, or—”
“Oh, there’s nothing like that,” Michael interrupted. “This is the last stop on the train of existence. Once you get off, that’s it. All point counts are final.”
The backs of Charlie’s knees bumped against her chair as she took a step back. “You mean…”
“It’s not as bad as you think!” Michael said. “The point system isn’t all wonky like those other two places. It’s objectively correct every time. The people who end up in the bad place are there because they deserve it. And they already got their shot at redemption, y’know? You were right about second chances, but when you start giving out thirds and fourths… Well, that’s when people start getting hurt.”
“You mean…” Charlie tried to swallow through a dry mouth. It only made her insides scream all the more. “It’s… fair? Everyone gets a chance and you… you know that everyone in the bad place is never going to change?”
Every soul can change, from the evil to the strange.
“Charlie, would I lie to you?” Michael asked, soft and kind. “You have the best of intentions — really, the best out of anyone here! It’s incredible! — but there are some people who will never change. Those are the ones you need to give up so that they won’t hurt any more innocent people.”
“I…”
“The system is fair. Every single soul is judged exactly the same.” Michael paused. “Well, everyone except for the exorcists.”
Charlie’s heart skipped a beat. “The exorcists?”
“Killing one person is a one-way ticket to the bad place. Souls whose entire existence is dedicated to a yearly genocidal rampage? Oh, forget it.” Michael did not look like he was capable of disgust. Charlie could have sworn that she saw it flicker across his features now. “There’s no point in keeping score for people like that. All exorcists go straight to the bad place. And hey!” he spread his arms out wide, smile returning in full force. “Who isn’t happy not to see those jerks anymore!?”
A chorus of cheers rang out from the audience.
“But what about the ones that change!?” Charlie shouted.
Michael’s smile fell. “Charlie, you’re kind. Incredibly kind. But you need to understand that they are too far gone to ever be good again. There are some things that can never be forgiven. The good place is for good people. A lot of them came from the same place you did. They deserve to be protected from the people who hurt them.”
“Redemption isn’t about—”
“You’ve had a long day. We’ve already gone over everything important, so why don’t you take a nap? I just know you’ll feel better when you wake up. Ooh, then I can introduce you to your soulmate!”
“Michael, I—”
Michael snapped his fingers.
Everything went black.
*
Charlie woke up on a feather bed that was softer than anything that she had ever felt in her life.
She couldn’t care less.
For the first time since she ended up in this place, she knew what she needed to do. She wouldn't let herself get distracted by the perfect neighborhood or smiling places or promises of eternal happiness. Michael might have said that everything was better, but in truth, nothing has changed. The teams were switched, but the game remained the same.
That meant that she still had work to do. Even if she had to do it on her own.
Charlie swung her legs over the side of the bed and marched out of the bedroom. She tried to march into the living room, but was stopped by the acute absence of stairs connecting the living area and three-foot-tall platform that the bedrooms rested on. A short, futile search saw her awkwardly climbing down. Then she resumed her quest, looking around the h–oh gosh, there were a lot of… lovely clown paintings in that corner–looking around the house for the architect.
He was nowhere to be found, but Charlie didn’t believe that he would knock her out and abandon her. Michael might have been a little misguided, but he wasn't cruel.
“Michael?” she called. “Are you around here somewhere? I really need to talk to you!”
Just as she anticipated, a head of snow-white hair poked in through the front door. “Oh, Charlie! I’m so glad you’re awake! I need to talk to you!”
“Great! Because I really think that we need to have a conversation.” She clasped her hands in front of herself, wringing her feelings together, and tried for her very best smile. “I know that you think you’re doing the right thing here, and you’re definitely trying really hard, but–”
“Thank you!” Michael chirped. “Oh, it is so nice to be appreciated! And guess what? I’m about to make your afterlife even better. Remember how I mentioned soulmates earlier?”
Charlie wanted to keep going. The bout of nauseous rising up within her refused to allow it. “Yes?” she tentatively says.
“Well, it’s time for you to meet yours!” Michael turned his head toward the doorway. “Come on in!”
A man stepped through the door.
“This is the best thing about the good place. Every soul here has a true partner, the only person in the entire universe who completes the other half of their soul.”
Michael was talking. Charlie couldn't hear a word that he was saying.
“Now, I know that it’s a lot to take in–”
She was perfectly safe. She could feel the pressure on her throat as her windpipe gave out, taking her life with it.
“–but I promise, you are going to love each other.”
He had been stripped of everything that marked him as himself, but even without the mask, she could never forget the heartless gold of those eyes.
“Charlie, this is your soulmate, Adam.”
Michael threw an arm around Adam’s shoulders. He tensed at the contact, eyes flicking wildly between Charlie and the general direction of the door behind him.
Oblivious to both of their discomfort, Michael cheerfully continued, “He was a human rights lawyer who dedicated his life to getting inmates off of death row. He worked so selflessly, never asking for praise or payment… oh, he died without a penny to his name.”
“...I see.” Her mouth felt dry, her heart was beating so hard that it may well combust, and her entire body felt cold, but the words came out regardless. “So Adam helped save innocent people’s lives?”
Michael shook his head with a warm scoff of laughter. “Oh, no, they weren’t innocent at all! But Adam here’s a big believer in second chances, so he took one look at the people who had been deemed the scum of humanity and did everything he could to give them a shot at redemption.” He gave Adam a gentle shake and pulled him in closer.
For the first time since Charlie was cursed to meet him, the first man looked terrified.
“Anyway, I’m sure you’ve got a lot to talk about, so I’ll go ahead and leave you guys to it. Go ahead and call me if you need anything!” With that, Michael shoved Adam toward Charlie and hurried away.
Adam stumbled forward. Michael was gone by the time he caught himself, but Adam still looked between Charlie and the door that he disappeared through, panic worsening with every glance.
Finally, he settled on Charlie and said, “So… Hey, babe. This might come as a bit of a surprise, but someone in this cosmic shirt–” Adam stopped, blinking in bewilderment. “What the fork is– Why the fork can’t I say fork!?”
“You can’t swear in this neighborhood,” Charlie numbly said. It wasn’t what she wanted to be saying, but her mind hadn’t caught up with her eyes well enough to know what she wanted to be saying.
“Well that’s forking– You know what? Fine. Whatever.” Adam offered her a strained smile. “So, let’s go ahead and say that theoretically, maybe, these ashholes forked up a bit and I was actually–”
“The man who murdered me?”
Adam’s smile fell. He jerkily forced it back into place and let out a laugh that clearly took far too much effort to be casual. “Y’know, this would go a lot more easily if you pulled that stick out of your party and pretended that you don’t recognize me. Blank slate and all that shirt. Whaddya say?”
There was a maelstrom of words in Charlie’s mind. She couldn’t focus on any individual one of them. However, when her lips parted, she heard a voice that sounded nothing like her own asking, “How many people died, Adam?”
“Uh…” He took a step back, smile stretching and stiffening into the grimace of a man trying to look anything other than terrified. “You’re gonna need to be more specific, babe,” he lied.
“How many people died in the battle?” Charlie took a step forward. He met it with another step back. “I remember you killing Pentious now. I felt you kill me. Who else died? How many of my friends did you kill?”
Adam let out a loud, uneasy laugh. “Y’know, I don’t actually remember?”
Charlie’s insides had felt numb ever since he stepped into the room. Now, however, she felt something distinct and undeniable: anger. It forms into venom of the sort that she hardly knew she was capable of as she spat, “Because we mean that little to you?”
“No!” Adam cried, shuffling another step back.
Charlie stepped forward. Her horns were gone, her powers left behind in the kingdom that she had been stolen from, but she could have sworn that she felt the fires of Hell burning within her as she stared her murderer down.
Adam lifted his hands up. “Alright, fork, yes! You want the pure, good, sinless truth!? Yes! I wouldn’t remember which of your friends we killed even if I tried! But I’m forking trying, okay!?”
“Try harder.”
“I can’t! Your forking dad started pounding my ash into the ground the second you dropped! I’m sorry, but I was a little too busy dying to pay attention to the rest of the fight.”
“You aren’t sorry.”
“Uh, yeah I am? I wasn’t suici—”
“How many people have you killed?”
“Huh?” Confusion had always been enduring on Vaggie’s face. Angel Dust, Pentious, her father; she had always seen an opportunity to learn when they didn’t understand her. On Adam, all she saw was the emptiness of a man who couldn’t be darned to even try. “Are you a dumb bir— I mean, do I need to say it in another way? I couldn’t pay attention to what was going on beca—”
“Not in the battle,” Charlie snarled. “How many people did you kill in the exterminations? They might not have mattered to you, but I know you remember the number.”
Kill counts were a point of pride for exorcists. Vaggie had told her as much when she confessed her own sins with a shame so thick that it sounded like it could choke her. Remorse had all but radiated from her.
She couldn’t envision Adam in her position no matter how hard she tried.
His slowly mounting fear did absolutely nothing to make up for that fact. It did nothing to temper her ire when he shook his head and, more quietly than she had ever heard him before, said, “I don’t think you want to know that.”
He probably wouldn’t be able to give her an accurate number even if he tried. He was the leader of the exorcists, the man who had started them in the first place. Didn’t that mean that the blood of every sinner who had died in the exterminations was on his hands? Who could even begin to keep track of something like that?
Charlie’s hands clenched into fists.“I don’t need to. This has gone on for so many years… You must be the worst mass murderer in the world. We could have put an end to this, and you—” She didn’t know if it was a sob or a scream that got caught in her throat. Her breath hitched as she swallowed it back and forced herself to say, heartless as the man before her, “Give me one reason not to go find Michael and tell him the truth.”
“…Because I asked you not to?” The edge of dismissive laughter in Adam’s voice sounded an awful lot like a tremor. “It would be a pretty big dish move to send your soulmate to the bad place, y’know.”
Charlie did not shout. She was far, far too upset to shout. Anger, grief, the broken sort of love that came with knowing that you had failed the ones who meant the world to you: she did not know what to call it, but it pushed her to the edge of tears and held her back at the same time. “I asked you to help me stop the exterminations. You wouldn’t have had to worry about going to the bad place if you had still listened to me then. We would both still be alive. We would all still be alive!”
Charlie took another step forward.
Adam didn’t move back this time. He simply stared at her, the last shreds of his bravado falling away to reveal a terror that he must not have felt in a long, long time. She might have been a little sympathetic if he hadn’t spent that entire time inflicting that very same terror on her people.
“I’m going to ask you one more time,” she breathed. “Why. Should. I. Keep. Your. Secret.”
“…Because I’m asking you to,” Adam whispered. Slowly, he sank to his knees. He would have looked for all the world like a man praying for his life if he weren’t looking directly up at her with golden eyes that had begun to shine bright with tears.
…She didn’t think that Adam was capable of crying.
“‘Any soul can change’,” he recited, no longer able to dress the tremor up as anything other than what it was. “That was what you were trying to tell me, right? You tried to fight off a forking extermination because you thought that bad people could get better. You—you died for them. So why not me?”
“Why not you?” Charlie numbly repeated.
Adam’s voice rose up into something edging in on hysterical. “You heard what that guy was saying out there, right!? His system is objectively right. A few perfect sparkly souls get paradise and the rest of sad fudgers can go rot forever. But it’s fine, they deserve it. There’s no point in thinking about them because they’ll never forking change. You shouldn’t feel bad because we all deserve whatever the fork they have planned for us. We’re—” A horrible sound caught between a laugh and a sob escaped his lips. “We’re so obviously irredeemable, there’s no forking point in even keeping track. He wrapped it up all pretty and shirt, but how the fork is that any different from what I told you?”
With that, Charlie’s outsides went numb again. The hellfire was still there, somewhere deep inside, but it was quieted by the questions that filled her mind. They were the very same ones that had given her the fantastical dream of redemption in the first place. For the first time, she didn’t want to listen to them.
She couldn’t help it.
Hadn’t she been thinking the very same thing not too long ago? Hadn’t she gone looking for Michael fully intending to make him see just how unfair it was to condemn every single exorcist without giving them a chance to prove they could be better?
That was because all exorcists went to the bad place. She had been thinking about Vaggie and others like her, the ones who could and maybe even wanted to do better, but were held back by Heaven and the threat of divine punishment if they disobeyed. Adam sure as fork wasn’t among their number.
Adam was still a human soul. He was right, she had been the one to say that any soul could change. Who was she to mark him as uniquely evil? She couldn’t even be said to really know him.
She knew enough. He was right, but so was she. She had come to Adam with her idea, he was the one who refused to listen. His own decisions had gotten him killed, along with a whole lot of people who didn’t deserve it. He already had his second chance, why did he deserve a th—
“The people who end up in the bad place are there because they deserve it. And they already got their shot at redemption, y’know? You were right about second chances, but when you start giving out thirds and fourths… Well, that’s when people start getting hurt.”
Charlie squeezed her eyes shut to hold back the tears that were fighting so hard to fall. “You’re only saying this because you’ll go to the bad place if you don’t,” she hissed.
“So?” Adam asked, not quite able to muster the challenge that she was sure was supposed to be there. “Most of the guests at your hotel only would have been there because they’re selfish ashholes who want to get up to Heaven. How’s it different when it’s me?”
“You can’t seriously be asking that.”
“I seriously am. I don’t forking want to, but—”
Michael didn’t have the right to deny people the opportunity to change because he had decided that they were too far gone. How was it different when it was Charlie?
“…Please,” Adam whispered. “I’m asking you. Please, help me.”
Charlie forced her eyes open. The tears had not fallen, but she could tell that they were still there. It brought her no comfort to see that Adam was in the same state.
“I wasn’t going to open my doors to sinners without asking them for anything,” Charlie rasped. “If I don’t tell Michael who you are, will you actually try to become a better person?”
Adam tried to chuckle. It sounded more like a croak. “Do I get a choice?”
Charlie’s lips twisted into a snarl.
What little spark that Adam had mustered faded in an instant. He moved his lips, but ultimately had to look down to murmur, “I thought I got into Heaven because I was a good person. They let me in because I forking deserved it. Ending up here and having some dishwad tell me it was a mistake… I don’t want to be wrong about who I am.”
It would have been easy to say that it was a lie.
She wanted it to be a lie.
She had never been so sure that someone was telling the truth.
“…One more chance,” she whispered. “You get one more chance, Adam. If you show me that you’re willing to earn your place here, I’ll help you.”
Adam scrambled to his feet. She looked away before she had to look at his face and turned around before he could say anything.
“Leave me alone for a little while, please,” she murmured.
As she walked away, she almost missed his strained response of, “Okay. But hey, uh, for what it’s forking… worth… I’m sorry.”
Charlie paused for the barest of seconds before continuing back to her room.
It was a start.