Tear Drops to Earth

A/N: Yes, I know. Everyone is waiting to see what is going on with that other story, but I am a fickle creature brimming with plot rabbits that refuse to abort their young and absorb them back into the recesses of my tangled mind. I will eventually get back to that other crossover that everyone is wondering about. I haven't abandoned it. I just left it in a boat with a case of wine coolers. It'll be fine.

So here's another crossover that came to me in, no pun intended, my dreams. Though I am very certain only 3 out of the 7 people who bother to read these drabble-ish things will actually understand the context.

Disclaimers:

Black Lagoon and its characters © Rei Hiroe

The Sandman and the Endless © Neil Gaiman, Vertigo

POSTPONED ADVENTURES

"Who am I? Just a friend. Sometimes. Maybe. Sorry I couldn't help you any. Be seeing you..."

Facade, Volume 3: Dream Country

- 0 - 0 - 0 -

People usually expect one of three things when they die. They expect to see a golden gate laden with pearls surrounded by clouds and cherubs with trumpets. Some think of brimstone, lava pits and goat men dancing about with pitchforks. Others expect nothing, an empty blackness and then, silence.

Frederica Sawyer saw none of those things.

She remembers the glimmer of moonlight on the blade. She remembers the spray of scarlet red on the wall and a searing agony in her neck. She remembers the darkness of an alleyway and the sticky sensation of blood soaking through her clothes as she collapsed on the ground in a crimson pool. She remembers pain, horrific pain, then drowsiness. She remembers looking into a starless sky and closing her eyes.

Then she met her.

She remembers the pain fleeting away, a smile on black lips and a pale face. The darkly lined eyes and ankh about her neck shined and she—it? The way the black gothic tank and black leather pants hugged the curves, it certainly looked like a she. Who, or what, was this apparition before her? Her origin was unknown, but one thing was certain. She was beautiful, and a foreign emotion engulfed Frederica. It was a sensation of calm and security, a comfortable warmth in her chest. Was this love? Not romantic love, but something of fierce dedication and welcoming. What was bringing all these feelings to surface? She had never seen this woman in her life, but she felt in that very instance she had known her before her own birth.

"Hmm, I wasn't expecting you so soon," she tittered and held her chin in between her forefinger and thumb, the other hand falling on the swell of her hip. The eyes of Ra and Horus looked down at what was Frederica Sawyer. The young adolescent's body was highlighted with a ghastly glow in the moonlight, curled into a ball as ghost-white hands gripped a denim dress. Frederica turned away in horror upon seeing the massive gash across her neck.

"It is a nasty sight, I agree with you," the mystery woman in black said, moving to Frederica from behind. She gingerly placed her hands on the young girl's shoulders. "Not so fatal, though. You're stronger than you look. It's not time for me to take you along on an adventure yet."

"An adventure?" Frederica asked with wide eyes, looking over her shoulder at the ankh woman.

"Something like that," the woman explained slyly. "As I said, you still have a lifetime. The adventure will have to wait." She went to lift her hands, but Frederica desperately grabbed at a wrist.

"Don't leave me!" she pleaded. She didn't want to lose her warmth. "What's going on? Who are you?"

The mystery woman placed a hand gently on top of the one that had gripped her wrist. She looked deeply into Frederica's eyes with a tender smile.

"An old friend," the mystery woman reassured.

At that moment, Frederica understood.

Then she blinked, and she found herself in a hospital bed with stitches in her neck. There was no mystery woman in black, no warmth, and no comfort. There was only the cold, sterile air of the hospital and a burning soreness in her throat.

Sawyer "the Cleaner" never told anyone about her experience with Death, or how deeply she still wished for her warm embrace. In her earlier years, she had futile attempts in her depressive fits to meet her friend again, to end the heartache and melancholia, but the woman in black never came. Her suicidal feats were only met with more visits to the hospital and bouts of loneliness.

As the teenager grew into a woman, she moved on from the razor blades and substituted them with a chainsaw, her wrists replaced by a thief's hands and a squealer's head. She wore surgeon scrubs and did business in an abattoir for work. In her leisure, she donned gothic dress and applied dark liner to her sapphire blue eyes to emulate the mystery woman from so long ago.

Sawyer says and tells herself that those she "cleans up" and packs away in crates are flesh, empty vessels, disregarded. She gives the assumption to others that she is clinical, cold, detached from those she disposes. Yet, in truth, what she unknowingly or maybe willfully hides from herself is: she envies those bodies in the boxes. She envies the thug in the suitcase and the screaming drunkard in the alleyway, the hapless prey of the bounty and the health inspector in her slaughterhouse. For as they met their gruesome ends to an engine with carbide teeth, she knew in her heart that her friend would be there to meet them, with her tender smile and warm eyes.

Frederica Sawyer likes her life as it is now. She likes her life in Roanapur, the tropical crime capital of the continent. She likes the buildings that blend with the palm trees with a sunset in the backdrop. She likes being able to work in the meatpacking plant at night. She likes settling down by the side of a pool on a hot day. She likes her Taiwanese freelancer friend Shenhua, and enjoys hunting with her even more so. She likes her weird, handsome friend Rotton and playing video games with him for hours on end. Life, despite some occasional criminal mishaps, was good to her.

But Sawyer still misses her old friend, her first friend, and she patiently awaits the day they will meet again.

A/N: You know it's not a fic by JAS unless Sawyer is the lead.

A goth obsessed with Death. So edgy. Very clever. Much cliché. Wow.

Coming up next, somebody gets to be a little delirious.