(An acknowledgement or two: the title for this little piece comes from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5. The characters of Destruction and Death are, of course, property of Neil Gaiman/ DC Comics. Reviews are welcome, as always.)
If the Accident Will
This is what he had run from.
"The Big Bang," he had hinted at, side-stepping a truth too huge to be told. "The loud explosions."
He walked in the ashes, the low wind ruffling his hair and making the charred remains of flesh and bone and death stir uneasily beneath his feet.
Change had always been the problem, and none of the family could see it, or (if Death was right, and when had she ever been wrong?) could not admit it to themselves.
He had not possessed the luxury of that denial, because he had been Change.
And he had not been immune to its effects.
The air was still burning, the radiation hovering at lethal levels that would have stripped the flesh from his bones had he been mortal.
Hiroshima. 1945. The ninth of March.
Had Newton ever dreamed that the light he had fractured through a shard of glass into a rainbow would lead to this?
He could have asked his brother, a little less than three hundred years ago.
No.
It was not his vocation to know the shape of events before they occurred – that belonged to Destiny. But he had seen the course early on, the way the trajectory of a car accident can be predicted from the first point of impact.
He walked untouched, invisible had there been any living eyes to see him, here at the point of impact. The epicenter. The eye of the spent storm.
He felt very alone at that moment, here in a flat plain where hours before had been buildings, shops, tenements, the pulsating life of the city now laid low… here in a plain now tiled with shattered walls, mortared with dust, bordered by frozen clocks.
He stopped then, standing stock-still, a huge man with red hair pulled back like a Parisian artist's and eyes the color of amber made gray by grief.
Why had he come here?
To pay his respects, he supposed, to the dead, to the reason he had left.
"I thought you might be here," a voice said, breaking the roaring silence cleanly.
He didn't move. "…Yes."
Death circled around and stood before him. "Hey?" she said, a hesitant little half-smile on her lips. She twisted around, forcing herself into his lowered gaze.
"Hello, sister."
There was an awkward silence, one that was frail and weak above the harsh and pure absence of sound in the aftermath of the explosion.
"So…" she said, conversationally.
"No," he responded sharply, cutting her off. She stared at him, her lips pressed tightly together. "I am not part of the family. I asked to be left alone."
"Because you knew this was coming." Her tone was not accusatory – it wasn't anything at all, truth be told.
"…Yes."
"You know," Death continued, plopping down to the ground and crossing her legs, "I didn't have a choice about being here at this point in time."
He did not look at her. "Your point…?"
"You did. And you must have known that I would be here. It's kind of a prerequisite: an atom bomb goes off in the middle of a metropolis, and people – not all people, mind you, just a lot – kinda tend to die."
Destruction sighed and covered his eyes with his hands.
"You wanted to see me," Death said quietly, watching his face intently. "I'm here now, brother. But only for a while, so if you have something to say, or something to hear, you'd better make it quick."
When had Death ever been wrong?
"I was Change once, sister," he said, hesitantly. "I worked in all parts of my life. Even… even in the family. Even to those I loved. I remember… comforting Del, when she was changing, and I remember knowing that I was responsible for that… I remember Despair, the second one, changing to fit her role… I remember… Ishtar changed… "
"So?"
His jaw was stiff, eyes hard and bright and focused stonily on some distant point.
"Why did I leave only when I knew that a world, a small, mortal, transient world, would – no, not would; might - dissolve? Why did I not care to separate the self that… that held Del, or helped Despair, from the self that caused their pain earlier? I left because I did not want to be responsible for what happened later. But the guilt I feel for what happened earlier…"
She was still looking at him, dispassionate, expressionless. "What do you want me to say?"
"Why did I leave then, sister?"
Death rested her chin on her clasped hands, staring up at him through her dark lashes. "Isn't it obvious?"
He turned his head towards her, and she saw his golden eyes dull and tired.
"You changed," she said, very gently. "That happens, sometimes."
Destruction sighed, lifted his head, surveyed the destruction that lapped against his boots.
"I need to go now," Death said, getting to her feet and dusting the white ash off her bottom unceremoniously. "People to see, all of that. You know." She smiled at him, her firm, practical, sympathetic smile. "I don't think I'll see you for a while, little brother."
"No," he agreed. "…Thank you. For listening." He faced her again, returning the smile, though weaker and wearier. " … And the family…?"
"I won't tell them," she said. "Take care of yourself, you hear?"
And she left.
He raised his eyes to the sickly yellow sky, the color of mustard gas and choking death, and thought for a long time.
Then, from the pocket of his jeans (much abused from travel, both terrestrial and galactic, weather-beaten to the point of the color fading to barely a dream of blue), he removed a coin, heavy and gold.
Two sides, he thought. Every coin has two sides.
Even me.He tossed it and the coin spun high, the gold flashing like a bright star amid the dullness and the pain.
The place he had stood was empty by the time it touched the earth and shuddered to a stop in the dust.