Death never sleeps. This is proverbial and also true. The Death of the Discworld* has a bedroom in his mansion in his dark realm of greys and blacks and stark whites, and also a dressing gown**, and he has even been known to lay his bony head upon the rock-solid black pillowcase from time to time. But he doesn't sleep. Sleep implies a cessation of consciousness and a release of the proper self to the insistent call of the human hindbrain. Death is not human, does not have the messy, drippy bits required for any brain matter, and does not require the nightly rinse out of the daily detritus *** that mucks up the human mind.
There was a time when he slept. Death spent a short time as a mortal, having been forcibly retired from his position before proving that at his advanced age **** he was still more fit for the position than his surly replacement. He found dreaming the most frightening thing he'd ever experienced.
Death does not dream. He does not desire, not really, because the glands required for such a thing do not lend themselves to hovering in a body which is mostly bones. But he wants. He wants to understand his charges, the mad and myriad little lives that he watches over as he plucks them like daisies from the garden of life. He wants to understand the importance of family, so he brought a child home and raised her. He wants to understand grief and forgetting pain, so he left his appointed work and tried to lose himself in the sand, in drink, in anonymity. He tries. Part of trying is his mimicry of sleep, with his head down and the blue sparks in his eye sockets darkened.
This is the first day of the rest of Death's life.
* A flat world floating through space on the backs of four elephants, themselves standing on the back of the Great A'Tuin, the sky turtle. The Disc's tiny sun and moon revolve around the turtle rather than the other way around, requiring Disc cosmologists to include in their equations predictions for when one elephant must lift its leg to allow a heavenly body to get on with moving. After a few pints, the cosmologists are pretty good at mimicking this motion.
** With a skull and crossbones pattern on the pocket. Death has similar tastes to a pirate cosplayer, really.
*** Not the troll. But you knew that.
**** Death is younger than the first living thing in the universe, and he will outlive the last living thing, though not by much.
Albert is in the kitchen, frying something that appears to be runny eggs and runny porridge. He nods at Death. "Morning, master."
YES. IT IS.
Death reaches down automatically and scratches behind the ears of one of the many cats loitering about the kitchen. This one, a sad-eyed ginger tom missing one ear and several toes, curls his tail around Death's bony legs until Death picks him up and carries him.
WHO'S A GOOD BOY, THEN? YOU'RE A GOOD BOY.
Albert gives him a glare, and plonks down the bowl of glop to the table, scattering the horde of cats waiting there with an annoyed swat. "Get off!" He sits and slurps his breakfast noisily, inhaling grease and carbohydrates like manna from the God of Cholesterol*.
Death's fingers are particularly attuned to giving good scritches, and he has been surrounded by these semi-immortal kitties long enough to know when to tell them to push off, or he'll be doing this forever. Literally.
I WILL BE IN MY STUDY.
"Of course, Master. I'll be tidying Binky's stall today." There's an air of annoyance, just a soupcon, as Albert never wants to try Death's patience too hard lest he find himself booted out into reality with just a few precious minutes of his life left. Still, Death knows Albert wants an extra pair of hands to help every so often, usually on Muck Day. He misses The Boy, even though The Boy was only with them for a short time, and has since grown up and had a child and been collected like every other soul. Which is why Albert never says any of it out loud.
Death walks through the halls of his mansion to the study, which is both enormous and cozy, and opens The Book. His mind, which is larger than any human mind which has ever lived, quickly and efficiently manipulates the differential calculus of life to determine which ends he must show up for today.**
With a brief stop at the hourglass room, Death is ready for the mundanity of his day.
* Oleo. Don't ask.
** Death is there to witness the fall of every life, from the largest elephant to the tiniest germ. At the same time, he only needs to be present for certain deaths, with the understanding that as long as these deaths are represented, all deaths are metaphysically represented. No-one knows why this is, but it's probably quantum.
Death believes himself incapable of mercy or kindness or justice, because these are outside of his function. He knows that the many-times grandmother on her death bed, surrounded by fifteen cats and double that number of descendants passes easily onto the next stage. He knows that the man alone in the hut by the sea, coughing out blood where none can hear or bring comfort, is grateful for the bony hand taking his. He knows that the young prince, asleep in his cot, does not even wake as the cloaked assassin creeps into the nursery, nor as the bodyguard steps out from the shadows and beheads the assassin with a quick snicker-snack of sharpened steel. But part of him, the part that pulls soggy bags of mewling kittens from rivers and leaves gifts of strange and unspeakable beauty for Susan to come upon unawares, that part is pleased.
That part knows it is just as common for him to come into the bedroom of a young couple and cut the lifecord from a new mother, to come for a man only years after he has lost his legs and his eyes and his friends and his hopes, to collect in arms not suited for the task the souls of young babes who stand in the way of a crown. Death is incapable of pretending, and does not imagine it can or should be different.
Beneath him, muscles pulsing, Binky rides to their next assignation. Not all of his work is work-related, so to speak.
He lands in the clearing outside the cottage, dismounts and allows Binky to have his head. Binky is not nearly stupid enough to graze among the Herbs again.*
"'Bout time you showed," she says, as he approaches the back door.
WHEN IT IS TIME FOR YOU AND I TO HAVE AN APPOINTMENT, REST ASSURED I WILL BE PUNCTUAL.
She snorts. "Sit down. Tea's on the table. Biscuit?"
THE CHOCOLATE ONES, PLEASE.
They play. Not for a life this time, merely for pleasure, because someone you have struggled with for decades is also like a friend. He wins a hand, and she wins three, and the last is a draw.
SAME TIME NEXT WEEK?
She nods, and sipping her tea like a queen, she does not see him out.
* No-one quite knows what grows among the Herbs, although Granny has the best idea. Binky, in his younger days, nosed about them once and spent a week neighing softly at the sparkly purple unicorns in his head.
He attends a nasty carriage accident. He collects a soul in the cells of the Tanty, from a man who found a new use for his bootlaces. There's a murder in the Shades, and another on Short Street.
While he is in Ankh-Morpork, although proverbially he stalks the streets there constantly, he makes a silent, invisible visit to the tiny box on Money Trap Lane which is home to Sarah the match girl. She is growing up, and if he were given to romantic notions, he would say she was becoming a beauty, but he is not and she is rather plain, as a life living malnourished on the streets can make someone. Yet, she is alive and unharmed, because the Seamstresses keep an eye on her, and the Beggars know he is watching, and there is a place for her at many tables even if the tables themselves are nearly bare.
There is no justice, nor kindness, nor mercy. He knows this, can see into the hearts of atoms and break them apart* as well, and not a gram of any of the three could be scraped together in all the multiverse. But he also knows this child will become an adult entirely due to the benefit of imaginary concepts, and this is something that is beyond his Duty, beyond his design, and it is what the Auditors fear more than anything.
Sarah does not see him, as he grins his eternal grin at her and passes along his way, but she is another shot he has fired in the war he has not declared.
Susan is not in when he goes to see; he often goes to see. This is fortunate in that she catches him sometimes and is very stern about her opinions on embarrassing relatives showing up on the doorstep. She will be married soon, he is certain, although less certain about how that will work out. For all that Susan is not entirely human, her beau is far less so. Death hopes for but does not expect an invitation to the wedding, though he may drop by anyway if they have cheese on sticks.
* The Death of Atoms has only come into being on one world throughout the multiverse.
This is Death, following the tiny sun and the movements of the moon with its dragons over the flattened world. Starlight glitters in Binky's hooves as they move from moment to moment, from life to life. He never hurries. Death always arrives precisely on time. A man falls off a ladder in Djelibeybi, and Death catches him at the bottom. A woman in Ephebe is sadly unsurprised to once again discover her husband is not the kind man she thought she was going to spend her life with, and she takes Death's hand with a firm, unhappy, but finally relieved expression. A horse accused of kicking its master whinnies once, and Binky nuzzles the spirit-mane until it fades. From time to time, they see Rat at his own work, ushering squeaky little souls from the poisoned traps towards the Promised Cheese.
Death would say it's a life, but even his sense of humour isn't that impaired.
Night has long ago fallen, the death rattles of one o'clock in the morning have rattled, even the murderers and assassins have gone to bed. Death rides home.
Day and night have no meaning here, but Binky is mortal and needs rest, so Death puts him into his newly-cleaned stall. Albert is in the kitchen, wiping a cloth over the grease-encrusted frying pan to give the fat new parts of the pan to see. Cats are everywhere as Death sits down, and while he cannot claim to be bone-weary, he is.
"Good day, Master?"
IT WAS A DAY. A cat jumps into his laps and attempts to knead a softer spot on knees not made for kneading. WHO'S A GOOD GIRL, THEN? YOU'RE A GOOD GIRL, THEN. The tabby plops heavily and purrs. Around him, the cats mew for their evening milk. Albert putters around performing tasks that ought to be cleaning before setting down a mug of tea in front of him. Out in the hallway, he can hear the grandfather clock ticking.
He is home.
The End