TW: Mentions of death and vague implications of suicide, Alternate Universe

Seconds before the crash and the smoke, before the inhuman roar of colliding objects and the screech of tearing metal, Rythian's last thoughts were on the anticlimactic nature of death.

He had expected a little more theatricality. A quick runthrough of his greatest achievements, a sudden revelation on the nature of first love, a haunting but grounding realization of some greater purpose; anything but a subtle lurching in his stomach as he lost control of the wheel and the inevitable knowledge that he was going to die.

Instead the last thing he saw was the approaching off-white rivets of an oncoming semi before everything went totally, irreversibly black.

...

"Hey, buddy, you've gotta get up."

Maybe not irreversible, then.

There was a hand gently shaking his shoulder, like a person rousing him from sleep. Rythian cracked open his eyes, taking stock of his (remarkably still in-tact) extremities, and pushed himself off the pavement. A girl, redheaded and tall with wide, open features, watched him, a little amused smile on her face. "You alright," she said, and he nodded numbly.

"What happened," he asked, although he knew the answer - could remember quite clearly those last few moments of unimpressive quiet.

"You died," said the stranger, shrugging. "Nasty little crash, it looks like. Don't drink and drive, kids - it kills."

The words were laced with sarcasm, and Rythian felt sick. He turned to survey his surroundings, dreading what he'd see. Behind him sat his beloved little car, smashed to bits, the front folded up like an accordion into the side of one of those big white trucks that race along the highway delivering white bread and massive supplies of packaged goods. In the passenger seat he could see a body, and as he crept closer (creeping seemed like the only appropriate way to move, when confronted with a scene like that) he realized he recognized the face and the short brown hair, that blonde streak in the front, the long neck.

"That's you," said his companion, walking up behind him, startling him out of his shock. "I know, freaky isn't it?"

Rythian skittered backwards, thoroughly overwhelmed now, shutting his eyes tight, hoping it'd wake him up. "It's not a dream, friend," she said, and dimly he wondered if she got this reaction all the time.

"Who are you?"

"Zoey Proasheck, at your service," she said, bowing, "here to take you to beyond, whatever that means."

He blinked at her. "Beyond?"

Zoey nodded, pointing behind him. "If you'll just step through that door, we can send you on your way."

Spinning around, he saw an entrance seated in the middle of the road, right on top of the yellow stripes. It was plain, just wood, nothing fancy – again, it occurred to him that even this was less than he expected. Where was the excitement, the fire, the booming voice condemning him to hell for all eternity for his sins?

"You probably have questions," Zoey said, stepping to the door and resting a hand on the knob, "but we really should go."

He took one last look at his limp body, lying in the driver's seat, eyes still open, before moving to the door. She opened it, and inside he could see a little office – just a desk and two chairs surrounded by filing cabinets. They crossed the threshold, and as Zoey closed the door he thought he could hear the strains of time beginning again on the road behind him. Something occurred to him then, and again he felt bile rise up in his throat. "Christ, wait, what about the other guy, the truck driver? I didn't...I mean he isn't...."

"Dead? No, he has sixteen and a half more years before a heart attack gets him. Don't worry, the cheeseburger he'll eat in the hospital will be more at fault than you." She reached for one of the filing cabinet drawers, pulling it out and leafing through the stacks. "Let's see, where are the e's...Endelman....Endemar....ah, here we go, Enderborn, got it."

A thin folder was pulled out of the drawer, and she settled back down in the chair behind the desk. "Please, have a seat," she said, and he did.

"What now," he asked, eyeing the file marked in sharpie as Enderborn, Rythian.

"Now we look through your file and decide where you go."

"That's it?"

"That's it." He raised an eyebrow at her, and she huffed. "Sorry, Mr. High-And-Mighty, I don't have any brimstone for you. Maybe I can scrounge some up from the back."

For the first time, Rythian almost laughed. "There you go," she said, and even though he could tell there was a routine to the conversation, she looked pleased to see him smile. "No need to look like such a kicked puppy. Now, where were we?"

She began to flip through his file, pulling things out here and there, shuffling papers around until she had a few sheets in a pile. She placed the (now mostly empty) folder on the desk and spread her choices out for him to see. "In your file we keep records of important moments," she explained, and something in her voice reminded him of one of the ladies with the robotic sounding voices reading train schedule delays in the underground. "The ones that make or break you as a person, you know? And here," she gestured to the papers, "are all your big decisions. We don't keep everything, just a few notable things that were morally dubious, or particularly big."

Rythian frowned. "That's it? I don't get a rundown of my moral fiber? No alignment breakdown of good versus evil? Not even a personality survey?"

"Are you serious," Zoey asked, laughing. "Buddy, we have to keep a file on every person alive. Organization is already a nightmare; what kind of workload do you want to force on us?"

"Call me demanding, but I expected something a little more high tech."

Zoey shrugged. "We hired some programmers to write us something a while back, but it's hard to get people to work down here. The workload? It's hell."

"Then why are you here," he questioned, and she scoffed.

"Hey, this is my time to analyze you, not the other way around," she said, but he could detect some defensiveness behind the words. "So let's get back to looking at what makes you tick, yeah? You get a few minutes to explain each decision, and then we pick a door. Let me see...what about this one? Looks like you punched some kid named Sjin back in the fifth grade. Completely beat the stuffing out of him. What was that about?"

"That's what counts as morally dubious," he asked, rolling his eyes.

She shot him a bemused look before bending over to read from the paper. "Two broken ribs...a snapped nose...internal bleeding..."

"Okay, okay, I get it. He was trying to separate me and a friend. Kept taunting me about how inferior I was to him because he wanted me to stop hanging around the guy. One day he went off on me about my family and I just, Christ, I don't know, I guess I snapped."

Zoey nodded, and there was no judgement in her eyes. "Revenge bullying. Well, that's pretty straightforward. Overkill, but not particularly evil. And what about here? Ran away from your mother's place and never came back?"

"I lived in a house that was bigger than all my friends' combined, painted entirely white and shades of grey, and the only person I had to share it with was my mother, who was either never home or dressing me up to parade around in front of parties of upper class friends like a shiny toy. You would have run away too."

"Yeesh," she said, "I wouldn't last a day. So that's fairly simple, too." She shifted the sheets to the side, so there was only one left in front of her. "This last one says you burned down a building, a school science lab. That's a biggie – probably why you're here. Beating people up and running away from emotionally abusive parents are generally not enough to land you in my office."

He raised an eyebrow. "Are you saying this is special treatment?"

"In a sense. You think everybody gets a shot at redemption? Some things you just can't come back from, you know. I get all the special cases. We're a post-mortem judicial branch, only I don't get federal holidays off. Now, the building?"

He was quiet for a moment before answering. "It was to save everyone. That friend I mentioned, Lalna? He and I, we used to do these experiments. We'd go in at night to use the labs at school – I stole cash from my mother's cabinets and paid the janitors to let us in. We'd spend all our extra time playing around with the equipment; our school brownnosed a lot of top tiered scientists into coming to work there, so we had a lot of high-tech stuff."

Zoey propped her elbows up on the table and stared at him. "Okay, so I get that, but how does that lead to burning a building down? You build a bomb or something?"

He shook his head. "Not exactly; we built something worse. We started getting into the study of diseases. Lalna was determined to discover the cure for something big, to be famous for figuring something like that out while still young; he was obsessed with it. Sometimes he'd bring in Sjin, but we all knew I was a better match for Lalna, plus I had access to money. One day we thought we were close to what we believed was a cure for the generic diseases we had – instead, what we made was a solution that rapidly accelerated it. I refused to work on it anymore, because Christ, we were so young, why were we advancing biological warfare? But Lalna wouldn't stop. I don't know how the military found out about it, probably Sjin, but I knew I couldn't let them get at what we had made, so I tried to burn it all. Lalna knocked the lighter out of my hands and lit the whole place on fire. He got a commendation from the dean for pulling me out of the flames, I got a burned face and a permanent ban from setting foot on campus ever again."

There was a brief pause, and he could see Zoey processing. "You know, yours is a simple case. You're not evil, you're just sad, and maybe you need to calm down a bit on your melodramatic definition of revenge."

He eyed her. "No need to sound so blasé about it."

She shook her head. "There is, though. I have people in here day and night who try to explain why they murdered their ex-wives or robbed banks or committed terrible crimes; only about half of them have any real reasoning, and only half of that half's stories check out. You created something that scared you and tried to fix it. That's not evil, that's human nature. You want my rundown of your moral character? There it is."

Maybe that should have made him feel better, but something inside him wanted more. A condemnation or a reassurance or something besides the knowledge that even his tragic past wasn't particularly tragic, in the grand scheme of things. "Why is it your rundown to make," he asked, and he knew his voice sounded more bitter than he really felt.

"Because I decided my fate for myself a long time ago, and now I have to sit in a room and decide yours."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

Silence hung over them again, and he sat back in his chair. Zoey began to put the papers back into the folder, tapping it against the desk in a brisk, business-like fashion. "Well, that basically settles that. Take this," she said, handing him the file, "and go through the door on your left. You're certifiably not evil, and now you get to go to wherever you go next. Have fun."

He took it, and they both stood up. "Do you know what that's like?"

"How would I?"

He looked at her, at her office full of filing cabinets, and briefly he imagined her sitting here, round the clock, talking to crooks and serial killers and handing out judgements. On the file she'd written 'approved' in messy scrawl – he could walk out right now and go onwards. And yet-

"Hey, Zoey," he said, and she looked up from a clipboard he could just barely see was full of names to stare at him, confused. "Have you ever thought about taking an apprentice?"

Her eyebrows knit together. "Look, I just handed you a free pass to paradise. Just go through the door and let me get back to work, Rythian."

Instead, he sat back down, feeling more sure of himself with every step. "No," he said, pressing now, "look, I know you just said I'm not evil, and I know that gives me some kind of stamp of approval, but what about you? Why don't you get one? If you can't come with me, at least let me stay. You said you needed programmers – I can do that. Somebody has to."

She continued to give him a doubtful look, but something in her face was beginning to lift. "I suppose I could ask, but it's not like you- I mean, it's never been done before, so-"

Rythian dropped his file back onto the wood of her desk. "If you're not going through that door, than neither am I."

She paused, gears turning in her head, before-

"Fine, but sit down. I guess I have someone I need to call." There was barely concealed excitement in her voice as she picked up the telephone sitting in a corner. Rythian leaned forward, confidence that this was the right thing to do pooling in his stomach. "Hello? It's Zoey," she said to whoever was on the other side of the line, "I have an interesting proposition to make."

Credit to onlyshipleftstanding on tumblr