Oh my god, what is this I see? Phoenix has been finishing fanfic again! Admittedly, this is pretty short considering my other recent(ish) works, but hey, it's something actually written.

This is a little idea that I came up with while reading Sandman (which is quite brilliant), and while it required some thinking to figure out how ghosts and Death could exist in the same way, I like how it turned out.

And now onto...

The High Cost Of Living

"You see, when someone's died, mostly they're a bit shaken, or hurt, or angry, or worse. And all they need is a kind word and a friendly face.

"People may not be ready for my gift, but they get it anyway.

"The Sunless Lands are far away, and the journey is hard, and most of you will be glad of the company of a friend."

Death, A Winter's Tale, Sandman

She'd heard many stories of what dying was like, in the seventeen years she had lived. The earliest recollections of the them were Obaa-chan's explanations of their mother's death, watered down enough to be comprehensive to a pair of three year olds. Tales of a sweet world where no one was sad or lonely any more, where she was watching over them and protecting them still. Even that young, she'd felt like it couldn't be that simple; but it had comforted Subaru to believe that she was no longer hurting, and was still there, and so she believed it too.

Growing up had brought other stories in storybooks both given to her and the ones squirreled away in the nooks and crannies of her room: tales of places where if you hadn't believed hard enough in one god whose words contradicted the teachings you were supposed to follow without exception, you were sentenced to eternal punishment with no room for redemption; or a set of scales that judged whether or not your heart was eaten by a crocodile; or endless fields of ennui for those who had never stood up and done anything with their lives; or a simple bliss in darkness. If there was anything in common with all of those stories, death was an ending, a conclusion, nothing else to come.

But now she knew death, or at least the act of dying, as fading pain, brought on by the hand of a man too blind to understand the incredible things he had lurking in front of him if he was willing to seek them out.

The sakura tumbled silently around her ghost; a rich ethereal pink on the taste of her blood perhaps, if that silly story Sei-chan liked to trot out about the tint coming from a human corpse had any basis in reality at all, but she wasn't certain. Wholly disconnected from sensation, she felt empty, cold, lost.

Then, that wasn't much different then living without the other half of yourself, vibrant green eyes gone blank to hide from the brutal agony of having hope for life shredded to pieces by a lie. She couldn't begrudge him the desire to hide forever, if she could hide with him, she would have let him be. If he had shut out everyone else, and still accepted her into the shadowed crevices of his sleeping heart, she would have let him have his pain forever, as long as he lived.

And live he would, now, because there was no solace in hiding when there was no one to protect you and bring out your smile.

She wouldn't blame him if he hated her now, but she couldn't bear that horrible emptiness that was what her dear, dear twin presented to the world.

Hatred tasted so bitter, but hating them wasn't an option.

The flowers fell like too many helpless tears shed before an answer presented itself, like a skipping record hopping on the thread of a melody, repeating the same second over and over again for lack of a better thing to do, like cloaking rain.

She wondered somewhat distantly if eventually she would have to leave that one place to move on beyond Subaru, and lose the dimmest reflection of his own loss from her sight.

"Sorry for the wait." A soft voice drew her from her revery. She turned towards the sound, the tattered shikifuku whispering in ghostly shreds.

The woman now standing in her lonely sakura storm looked like she was eternally sixteen as well, whiter than alabaster with artfully disarrayed ebony hair tumbling down onto bare shoulders. Her clothes were plain and black, but a silver ankh hanging down near her heart added a hint of balance to the monochromacity of herself. The soft smile hovering on her lips made her look closer to the physical age she appeared to be- the serenity in her ancient eyes stated the exact opposite.

She couldn't say who stood before her, but all the stories of death seemed to be the antithesis of who the woman had to be.

"It's a little harder to make it to those who have the chance to wait in the land of the living for a while," the woman added cryptically with a warm smile, twirling the umbrella shading her from the fading storm of sakura flickering down around them. Sei-chan was very thorough with his illusions, but time had passed. "But once the decision has been made, in that split second..."

She didn't need to say more, and she knew it. Her eyes, wise in the fathomless depth of shadows, met hers without expectation, with patience.

"I can't stay." Hokuto said at last, and was almost surprised to hear that the lack of a body hadn't changed her voice at all. "If I stay on this world, Subaru will never let go. He can't." 'And I don't want him to.' she added silently, with the faint bitterness of one being left behind.

The woman smiled still, but it had a more sympathetic edge to it, if it were possible to be more so. "It has to be hard to lose a twin, after being together for so long," she said with the weight of someone who understood intimately that yawning ache within.

The silence stretched out between them again- there were no words to fill it, and she could not yet find the strength to stand up and leave.

"Do you want to see him one last time?"

She could have said no, she should have said no, but she couldn't give voice to the better choice for once, a last little wish of selfishness before the end. She took the outstretched hand in her own, and was pulled to her feet, though she could not recall sitting. "Yes, I do."

There was the hint of elfin playfulness in that smile before the world blurred as if seen through a haze of tears.

Then- walls, bare and empty, but soaked with all the memories of a year filled with laughter and joy and love. A wooden floor that once had three sets of slippered feet padding across it in disconnected rhythms, internalizing those rhythms into a melody of life that would be remembered as long as that floor lay there. Subaru's apartment.

She froze, suddenly afraid of discovery, of facing the one person who always had the power to make or break her, but the comforting grip of the other woman's hand grounded her. "You are beyond his sight; those who have already begun to depart for the Sunless Realms are not bound by the laws of ghosts."

At the gentle glance that accompanied it, she breathed out, and took her first step in, the muddy hem of her-his shikifuku really, swirled around her feet, but left no marks on the clean floor. A second step, and she could see into the kitchen, empty and devoid of life, despite the fact that Subaru hadn't properly eaten in a month at least, and from the dust, it hadn't been disturbed in the hours since her death.

Another step, and she was being drawn on a path that she couldn't see, closer and closer to his bedroom, unable to stop, almost unwilling to continue on.

The door was open; revealing life for the first time since she'd left. The phone lay on the floor, discarded and forgotten, as if it was picked up and then dropped in horror. But it mattered not at all compared to the shape she saw crouched on the floor, paled fingers clenched against the wood as if could keep him grounded to an earth suddenly far emptier than he'd ever thought it would be.

She ran to him, forgetting all such fears of rejection, to collapse next to him. The subtle motions of his body; the patterns of uneven breathing and the tension that hunched his shoulders in grief, all of it was so brilliantly alive that she was transfixed in the sheer beauty of his life for a tiny blissful second, before the cold reality crashed around them again.

The near silenced sounds of his tears broke her heart all over again.

For one more second, she hovered on the edge of indecision, before the worn folds of the shikifuku fell around him as she tried to hug him in the closest mimic she could make, resting her arms a hairs-breath away from his body. She thought she could smell him on the wind that blew through both plains, warm and more familiar than her own body.

"I'm so sorry, Subaru." she whispered, the words tumbling free again when he was just as deaf to them as before. "I'm sorry I can't stay, I'm sorry I'm gone, I'm sorry I've left you all alone. But I can't change anything any more. This is the last thing I can do, so please live. And...and I'll see you again at the end of your life, when you've seen everything I couldn't and you'll have to tell me about all of it. I love you Subaru, I always do."

She remained in that position as long as she could, his shoulders sometimes shaking up into her arms as he grieved, and she welcomed the fresh agony of heartbreak with each silent sob, treasuring that last moment.

A touch on her shoulder startled her, and she saw the other woman looking rueful. "I'm sorry," she said, and again, what else didn't need to be said, it was so very apparent already what she meant.

It was the hardest thing she would ever do, and slowly, painfully, she stood up, the sleeves of her shikifuku pretending to catch on his hair and instead sliding through them so there was nothing to bind her down. He took no notice of her departure; even his enormous senses couldn't reach to her.

Hokuto brushed the back of one hand across her eyes to try and stem the flow of ghostly tears, but they refused to stop.

Death reached out and rested a hand on her shoulder as the world dissolved again, much more slowly, as they left for the Sunless Realms.

Thoughts?