half-life

half-life

Han guides the dead to their next lives. Leigh is so brilliantly alive. 

You do not know how long you’ve been doing this work. 

You do not know how long you’ve been here. Here, this blurry place between life and death, shallow light and shallow breaths and shallow conscience, half shadow half dream—

A long time, you think. No time at all. Time is life and a part of you has forgotten what it is to live. 

#

The dead come in an endless stream. You’ve long grown used to the crying, the anger, the fear. 

I don’t want to die, they wail. It’s not my time. I’m not ready, I need to go back. I don’t want to die.

You soothe them and hold them and try to calm their rage, their fear, the aching gash inside them that bleeds a screaming cry of I want I want I want to live--

You try. Sometimes you succeed and sometimes you do not but always you do your job: always you lead their souls across this timeless half-place; always you paint them new mortal forms and send them into their next lives. 

More and more, lately, you stay in the numb space they’ve left, this grieving limbo between living and dead, and wonder what it is to leave this place behind. 

#

You could ask Alexei how long it’s been. Alexei, record-keeper, oldest of the guides, his mind and body a library of all the years and knowledge this place holds--Alexei would know. Alexei has never been allowed to forget. 

You do not. Ask, that is. It would do no good, and anyway, you see him rarely enough as it is. 

You see all your friends rarely, since the war. There was a time there were more of you, where work was lighter and your people laughed and there was sunlight and flowers and feasting, but.

But the war. Now most of your people are gone. You cannot remember the last time you took a break. You do not know if it matters.

You are angel, psychopomp, reaper--you are not alive. You do not need food or drink or sleep, and you are beginning to forget why you need joy. 

#

When the man comes in, he is bright. 

It shocks you. Nothing here is bright, not like that, not like him--all clear edges and solidity even as the rest of the world shifts, apathetic and tired, around him. Dark skin and slanting cheekbones and beautiful eyes. High definition in a land made of mist. 

You stare at him and you do not know what to do. The dead you guide are dim, gray things. Shades, they call them, in some worlds, in some times. Shadows, ghosts. This man is standing breathing in a dead land and he is grinning, bright and grand. 

“Am I in heaven?” he asks. 

“I don’t think so.” Your own voice shocks you, not that soothing thing you use on shades but something grounded, something closer to real. 

“Oh,” he says, grin widening. “Really? And here I thought you were an angel.” 

You cannot tell if this is an honest statement or a pick-up line. You open your mouth to respond, but he’s starting to fade at the edges, going hazy like static or smoke. You point. He looks down, blinks, shrugs. 

He’s fading fast. His voice comes disjoined, broken-up. Something about a spell. Something about how it won’t hold. He turns his smile back up at you and waves; then he’s gone and you’re left standing, staring, aching with an awful mix of terror and want.

#

Angels.Valkyries. Psychopomps. Your kind has been known by a thousand names, over the years. Alexei, who remembers every title and every name, simply calls you guides. 

Reapers, the mortals called you, during the war. And what a terrible war it was. A war against death, waged by mortals from a dozen different worlds, all of them using spells to transcend the borders between lives and times; all of them breaking into the limbo, ready to massacre the guides, seeking to eradicate death. 

Madness, Alexei called it, and futile besides—there is no hiding from death, no avoiding the passage between lives. Even if the mortals had killed you all, it would only have removed all order from the process, left in your place unbalanced worlds and straggling ghosts. But the mortals couldn’t see that—refused to see it, maybe. And the war waged on. 

It was terrible and it was pointless, and at the end of it all, at the very end, seven worlds of mortals had been displaced and your people numbered less than a tenth of what you once were, choked with enough loss that your collective grief drained the sunlight from the limbo and turned everything ashen and gray.

That was when you all combed through the rubble, collecting every scrap of knowledge on how to transcend world or time, and sealed it off, never to be found again. Not by any mortal, not in any life.

Not ever, you promised yourselves. Not ever again. 

#

So it is impossible that a living man was here. It cannot be allowed. 

You paint a little pink bird into the air and tell it your message; you ask it to go to Alexei, lift your hands, and let it take flight. It will find Alexei, you know, and he will find you, but--

--you have no measure of time. You do not know how long it has been since you sent your message, but by the time the man reappears, Alexei has not replied.

“You cannot be here,” you tell him. 

“But I am,” he points out. 

“Well, you shouldn’t be.”

“Can I just stay for a little while? I just need a bit of time.”

You open your mouth to say no, but--

It might be better, if he stays. Better that than he goes back to the realm of the living, where he might spread his knowledge, spread his spells, leave all of you vulnerable to another war. Alexei will respond to your message soon, and together you will figure out what to do. 

“You can’t leave my side,” you tell him. “And you can’t go back to your world until I say otherwise.” 

He grins, lowering his head and looking up at you through his lashes. “Of course. Who would want to leave your side?” 

You want to laugh. You don’t, of course--you can’t, this is too dire, this is important and you are too guarded, still, to find his flirting flattering, to respond to his charm--

But still, the urge is there. 

#

His name is Leigh and he is a scholar and even for a mortal, he is painfully, brilliantly alive. And you are wary of him, you are, you are--no one should have the knowledge he has, much less use it the way he does, but--

But he is alive, and he is bright, and he is kind. He flirts with you and marvels at your craft and nudges you in the ribs with sly, cheerful little jokes, and it’s harder than it should be to keep your guard up. It’s harder than it should be not to laugh.

#

That’s forbidden magic, Alexei’s message hisses from the throat of his familiar, which has taken the form of a little gold creature from a long-dead world. Its wings whirr as they cut the air; its scales shimmer in the dim light. He should not be here. This cannot be allowed. 

I’m on my way. Don’t do anything stupid.

“Tell him I won’t,” you say, laughing. “When do I ever?”

The little creature somehow manages to give you Alexei’s deadpan look; it seems thoroughly unimpressed. It may be right. Your heart has always been a little too stupid—too soft and too open, too prone to falling in love.

#

Your work does not stop just because you have a mortal guest. You still soothe shades; you still paint them new forms and guide them to their next lives. 

The first time a shade arrives and spots Leigh, it stares at him too long, too hungry—too clearly drawn to his life. You’re about to step into its line of vision, to pull it away, when Leigh tells it cheerfully, “Don’t mind me, I must have taken a wrong turn. I was just searching for the nearest bathroom.” He pats his stomach. “Terrible bowel control, you see.”

You barely manage to paint the shade a new form—just for you, you tell it with a wink, guaranteed IBS-free—and send it on before you fall on his shoulder, laughing so hard you cannot breathe. 

#

The thing about this place--the limbo, the Asphodel Fields, the netherworld, again named a thousand names in a thousand religions and lives--is that it is an in-between. Half-formed, half-awake. All places are malleable, all worlds shaped by their people. But this space is more easily molded than most. Belief makes change happen. Words coax things into being. Grief dulls colors and scents, turns the birds and animals in the area sluggish and slow. 

Your people were happy before, and so this was once a place of color and singing and life. You were all grieving, after the war, and more than half of you were gone, and so the birds stopped singing and scents became duller and the sky turned permanently gray.

And now: Leigh. Leigh is here and when he is with you you find scents returning, you see little flowers blooming in the grass. You have not eaten in a long time--you grew tired of eating, during the war, of putting food in your mouth and tasting nothing but ash--but one day he hands you a bright red apple and it explodes into sweetness when you take a bite. 

He laughs at the way your eyes widen. Laughs still more when you ask him where he’s gotten it, when you spread your wings and fly up to pick the ripe fruit, sitting on a branch and throwing apples for him to catch. The air up here smells like fruit, clean and sweet; eventually Leigh climbs the tree to join you, and you sit together with your legs dangling and elbows knocking and apple cores piling up on the ground beneath you, and as you watch, a flower on the branch beside you begins to bloom. 

#

“Why are you here?” you ask Leigh once. “The real reason. I won’t judge.”

“Officially? There was an epidemic in my village. People falling into comas, all that. I thought if I searched here, I’d find a cure.”

“Officially,” you repeat. 

Leigh laughs, touching the pendant hanging from his neck. A red gemstone, an impossible mirror to the blue one that hangs from your own. The similarity should be eerie; instead it just feels right.

“It’s going to sound silly. I feel like I’ve been searching for something for a long time. I thought I’d find it here.”

“And have you?”

He turns his smile up at you, beautiful eyes and warm smile and high cheekbones and he is so handsome that for a long, aching second you cannot quite breathe.

“Yes,” he says, looking at you like you are the only thing that matters in all the worlds. “I would say I have.”

#

The next few times the shades spot Leigh, they barely react. Soon enough, he’s stopped keeping out of sight when they pass through; is helping you, sometimes, to comfort and soothe and encourage, to promise them that their next lives will be good and bright and exciting, will be a life. 

(And. God. Watching him with them, you fall in love again and again. Watching his smile and his charm and his gentleness, his humor when it’s needed and his steady kindness when it’s not. Watching the way he looks at people, smiling and attentive and so clearly listening—

You’re not supposed to be this attached. You don’t know how to stop.) 

When you finally comment on how odd it is, that the shades have stopped being surprised by the presence of a mortal in this realm, Leigh looks startled. 

“Haven’t you noticed?” he asks.

“Noticed what?” You grin. “Did you draw on my face while I wasn’t looking?” 

Leigh laughs, taking your hands and turning them over in his. “No, no. Come here, look at this.” 

You frown down at your hands, and—

Oh, you think. Your fingers and palms are no longer ghostly, ethereal pale. The grass has been greener for a long time, and there is an entire field of flowers growing around your feet, but somehow you never expected this: the way there’s color in your skin; the way, when you press your hands to your neck, your skin feels warm. 

He sees the understanding in your expression and smiles. “I don’t suppose I look all that special anymore, eh?”

He does. He’ll always look special to you, the brightest thing in every place, but. 

But he’s no longer so obviously mortal, not so clearly the only living thing in a dead land, because your hands are warm and the grass is green and the sky is blue, and somehow, without you noticing, Leigh has been bringing you back to life. 

#

When Alexei arrives, you think for a moment that he is a shade. Gray skin and near-white hair, all of his colors desaturated and dull, the way everything in this place has been since the war. 

The way you were, before Leigh. 

You look at him and feel a little sick. You hadn’t realized, before, how grief had sunk through your skin and bone and breath; how thoroughly it had dug itself into the dirt and drained the color out of your world. You see that grief dulling him now and you ache to see it, Alexei a pain-hollowed thing beneath a living sky. 

He’s looking back at you and there is a mirroring ache in his eyes, as if he’s hurting for you too. You don’t understand it—through the introductions and the wary-annoyed handshake he gives Leigh, you do not understand—until he pulls you to the side and says quietly that Leigh cannot stay. 

 You knew that, of course. You’ve known that since the day Leigh arrived, but that too-soft heart of yours, the one that loves and wants and hopes and hopes and hopes, thought that maybe there could be a way—

“He can’t,” Alexei says. His voice is regretful but there’s no doubt in it. “The rules we put in place—no living being can stay here long. It’s impossible. Eventually he’ll fade out.” He looks nothing so much as tired, weighed down till it’s a wonder he still stands. “And when they return to their own world… they won’t remember any of this.”

“He remembered before,” you say. The second time Leigh arrived, he clearly remembered you. 

“He wasn’t fully here the first time. He is now.” 

You feel sick. You feel cold. You feel dead again and gray with it, you want to ask Alexei to remake the rules, to break all the protections the guides have turned into natural laws, to change everything so that you can be happy, so that just this once you can keep the person you love—

You smile, instead, and look away. “Then we’ll make the best of what we have.”

#

You don’t measure time. But now that you’re on a countdown, you think, fuck it. Fuck the rules and the time limit and the fact that Leigh will be gone and forget you, fuck the fact that you’ll be alone again—you want to forget. You want to be with him, you want to be happy, and so in the short time you have with him you go all in. You tell him what’s going to happen and you tell him you love him and he smiles and he kisses you and he tells you he loves you too. 

It feels like an eternity of laughter and love and joy, of his hands in your hands and in your hair and on your body, of exploring together when you have time and him helping you with work when you don’t. An eternity of nights with your bodies curled into one another’s and his legs tangled with yours, of touching and loving and being loved in the feverish, desperate way of knowing that this is all you get, knowing that this is all going to end. The sky is blue blue blue and you try not to look out into the distance, where you can see it fading to gray. 

It’s an eternity. It feels like a heartbeat. Then you’re kissing one last time and there are tears on your cheeks and his hands are holding you like he wants to keep you forever, and he’s fading out of the world like static, like smoke—

Then you’re alone, and you’re crying, and the world is cold and you don’t remember how to breathe.  

#

Everything is heavy, for a while after. 

The grass goes back to gray. The flowers die. The sky is dark. Some days you wonder if it’s going to come down around you, just slowly droop over the horizon until it blankets everything in black. Some days you think it would be nice if it did. 

“I’m sorry,” Alexei says. He’s staying a while, making sure you’re not alone. Cían’s taken over his duties while he’s here; you’ll have to check in, sometime, to make sure Cían doesn’t run himself ragged. 

You look at Alexei, his hands stuffed into his pockets, his shoulders heavy, always, with an impossible weight, and you think--

You think about the war. You think about the desperation you saw in his eyes back then, the fury that curled at the edges of his mouth, the ragged, raging helplessness to it. The way you found him, once, looking over the graves like a broken thing, and the words he told you then. 

If the mortals had any chance of succeeding, he said, I might have joined their cause. 

And you thought you understood it then but you understand him now, that fury and rage and helplessness. That endless screaming ache. That desire to break all the rules and take it all apart and do anything, everything, anything at all, if it meant the people you love could stay. Because you are tired and it hurts and you keep losing and losing and you want it to stop. Anything, to make it stop. Anything to make them stay. 

You nudge his shoulder with yours. “It wasn’t your fault.” 

He looks down, mouth twisting. The irony of it: Alexei has the power to break the rules. He has magic enough to make his will manifest. But the rules exist for a reason and Alexei knows the way the universe must work and so he can but he can’t. 

“I’m sorry anyway,” he says. 

“Don’t be.” You force cheer into your voice. “You take too much responsibility for things that aren’t your fault.” 

“This isn’t about me.” He exhales a small, tired breath. “Han. You don’t have to be happy for my sake.” 

“I know that.” 

“Then let yourself grieve.”

You gesture at the black sky, at the dead grass and dead flowers and silent birds, at all the things you let die because you could not get it together, because you could not make yourself be happy enough. Your laugh feels like it cuts the inside of your throat. “Isn’t this enough?” 

“It feels like it should be, doesn’t it?” His voice is so gentle. “But it’s not.”

A whole world to paint your grief into, and it’s still not enough. The hurt feels fucking endless and you do not know what to do with yourself. 

“I miss him,” you whisper. “I wanted--”

Your voice breaks. Maybe it’s for the better: you don’t know, anyway, what you would have said.

“I know,” Alexei says.

“He won’t even remember--he’ll find someone else and--” and he won’t remember and it’ll be like you don’t matter, like you never mattered, all that laughter and all that love gone in an instant and you feel so fucking meaningless that you can barely stand being in your own skin.

“I know,” Alexei says. Of course he would. Alexei the librarian. Alexei of the eternal memory; Alexei of a thousand lives. Alexei who doesn’t much care what world he’s born into or which time period he lives in, because at the end of it all people still leave, people still forget, people still die.

“How do you stand it,” you ask. Your voice is ragged and hoarse.

He gives you a sidelong look. 

“You’re my friend,” he says simply. “I find that it helps.”

#

Black sky and dead grass and no flowers and lethargic birds. You paint a smile on your face and paint the shades new bodies but you cannot seem to paint light back into your sky. 

Eventually, Alexei has to leave. He insists that you visit, and you promise that you will. 

#

You used to wonder why all the guides stayed. This place is different from the other worlds: everyone here knows that death is not the end, just a passing into another life. It would be so simple for you to paint yourself a new body or for Ansura to strum himself an entryway to another world. It would be so easy for Alexei to write himself into a new life. 

And yet. You all stayed. Through the years of joy and the years of pain. In sickness and in health. Every guide stayed. You used to wonder why. 

It’s self-selection, I think, Alexei said once, and refused to elaborate further. But once you’ve gotten yourself together a little more, you go visiting your old friends. Cían welcomes you with open arms and a bright smile, birds singing loud and off-key in his blossoming trees; Nadya offers you a glass of home-brewed wine, and drinking it with him you find you’re able to savor the taste. Vivien greets you in a field of plants blooming a blazing, fuck-off red, the flowers growing tall and fierce in defiance of his grey sky. 

Looking at them, you think you understand. Cían with his endless, determined warmth; Vivien with his defiant care. Alexei who’s lived and lost and lived and lost and who still writes stories of love and beauty and happy ends. 

Self-selection, indeed. The ones who know that there are a thousand worlds out there and that any one might be kinder than this; who know and who still hope and hope and stay, wanting to make this place better, wanting to make what change they can. You think those are the ones who become guides. 

“Maybe we’re all optimists at heart,” you tell Alexei the next time you see him. He looks at you like you’ve lost your mind, but he’s wearing a new hair tie that’s a shade brighter than everything else around it. You’re pretty sure it was a gift from the new guide he’s training--Adonai--so his baffled expression just makes you laugh and laugh and laugh. 

#

Leigh will pass back through this world eventually--all the dead do, in the end--and when he does, you want to greet him beneath a blue sky. Even if he doesn’t remember, you want to hold his hands and show him that he doesn’t need to worry, that you’ve been doing well. You want his final passage to be bright.

More than that: You want to be happy. You want to paint this world with your joy; you want to live in a place that is alive.

#

You design a spell with your friends, something a little like teleportation, something that allows you all to stay in closer contact. So it doesn’t surprise you when Alexei shows up with Adonai, one day--but the way he’s smiling, that gives you pause.

“A new guide arrived,” he says. “I’d train him, but I already have my hands full with this one.”

Adonai laughs behind him, resting one hand lightly on Alexei’s shoulder. You notice, with a distant sort of glee, that Alexei does not flinch. 

“I could train the new one,” you offer. “I could use the company.”

“You might as well.” Alexei is smile is so fucking warm, you don’t know what to make of it. “You were halfway through it the last time he was here.” 

You don’t understand, and then you do. And your heart’s skipped about twelve beats, and you’re telling yourself that you’ve misunderstood, because it can’t be and you can’t let yourself hope but--

But Adonai is pointing, and you turn, and Leigh is standing there, the brightest thing in this place. The brightest thing in any world. 

“Hey,” he says, laughing. “Should I call you teacher, now?”

You smile, helpless and aching because it sounds like he remembers but there’s no way he can-- “That’s right. And you’re not allowed to leave my side.” 

He looks at you through his lashes, and his smile is so familiar and so fucking knowing. “Why would anyone want to leave your side?” 

You’re laughing. You feel halfway to tears--a whole world to paint your joy into, and it’s still not enough. There’s still too much to hold. “You remember.” 

“It seems I do.” 

“How?” 

“Well, I forgot while I was in my world. But now that I’m back, all bets seem to be off.” 

“And you’re here to stay.” 

He laughs again. “As long as you don’t fire me, I suppose.” 

You grin at him, and he’s so handsome and so bright and you have been waiting for so long--your control breaks, and you’re grabbing him by the front of his shirt, dragging him in for a kiss. Leigh’s smiling against your mouth, and he’s kissing you back, and you can hear Alexei gagging and Adonai laughing and in the distance--

In the distance, a bird begins to sing.