My arm burned as I pulled Death up the stairs. New scratches covered his face. I knew better than to search for a pulse, but looking at his overly pale face made me want to. The moment his body laid fully on the porch, unable to bear the strain on my arm, I dropped him. His head banged against the wood. I apologized, forgetting he was unconcious.

I sighed. I thought I was the one who was supposed to get hurt. A fresh surge of pain reminded me, hey, I did get hurt. That didn't change the fact I still had to find the key to the house. I knew it was in the cloak, but taking off an improvised tourniquet seemed like a bad idea. Nevertheless, it seemed to be my only choice when I couldn't get to the pockets. Taking a deep breath, I untied it. Blood began pouring down my arm. I did my best to ignore and searched through the pockets.

My hand closed around the key. Frantically, I unlocked the door. I wish  my feet would've made a sound against the floor as I dashed to the bathroom. Random bottles and tubes clattered to the floor from the medicine cabinet. I grabbed every roll of bandages and the alcohol and the neosporin. It wouldn't hurt to grab needles and stuff to stitch up the worst injuries, but it surprised me enough that Death had bandages in his house. I wrapped my wound as tight as I could before going back for Death. The pool of blood beneath him dripped between the boards.

Cawing filled the air, despite the lack of crows and any other living thing. Droplets splattered on the porch, from rain not from birds. I pulled Death inside. A trail of gold led through the house and into the living room. With some struggling I managed to get him onto the couch. I stared at him.

Sweat plastered his hair to his head. I gently tousled it, his eyes cracked open.

"Kid?"

Before I could respond, his eyes fluttered closed. I shook him.

"Leave me alone," he groaned and tried to smack my hands away. "Let me sleep."

"I'm no expert, but letting someone in your condition fall asleep is probably a horrible idea." Sure he couldn't die, but did I want to test what could be worse than that? No. Did I want to know how he was up this fast? Yes. Before I could ask, his head fell back to the cushion.

This repeated for the next couple hours with him drifting in and out of conciousness. Despite the amount of time that passed, none of the wounds began to clot. Every time I would try to dress a wound, he would wake up long enough to shove me away. I gave up after the eight time.

My body draped the arms of a chair when a load groan broke through Death's lips. He sat up and rubbed his head. "What happened?"

"Take a guess," I said, sitting up and reaching for the supplies I managed to gather. "Now take the shirt off."

"What?!"

"Death, you have booty shorts on. That's worse the taking your shirt off."

He didn't argue after that. He pulled his shirt off and tossed it to the side. I almost threw up, but thankfully some of the senseless violence and brutal deaths were beginning to desensitize me to these types of injuries. Injuries that would be fatal to anyone who didn't happen to be Death. His hand once again pressed to his stomach, Death looked like he was about to lose his lunch.

I sat next to him and dabbed at the scratches on his face.

"I don't remember getting these." He brushed his fingers against one of them, pulling them away to stare at his blood.

"You kinda fell off the banister into the bushes. Oh, hey, before I forget, can you do something about this?" I lifted my arm. Death fumbled with the bandages. After a minute, I rolled my eyes. "Death, you don't have your gloves on and these are cotton bandages."

"Decaying them won't hurt me, but it might hurt you." The pressure around my arm loosened. Death didn't bother keeping distance between my hand and my skin, instead choosing to grab my arm. He sighed and nearly fell back. "Give me a minute. Need to catch my breath."

"You don't need to breathe," I said, rolling my arm. No pain.

"Sounds better than I need to catch my power."

"Well, let me treat these then." He nodded and leaned back. He winced, sitting back up. His blood stained the the couch, and I had a feeling it would be harder to get out than wine.

Drenching a rag in alcohol, I sighed. "Everytime we get into a fight someone gets hurt."

"Kinda the point." Death hissed in pain as I pulled the rag across his chest. "You know you don't need to use that stuff, right?"

"Then why do you have it?" I asked.

"I stocked up on stuff because you're the one who keeps getting hurt every time we do something." His voice rose as beads of alcohol rolled down into the hole in his stomach. He bit his hand. His teeth dug in deep, to the point where it surprised me more blood didn't start rolling down his skin.

"You might not need it, but I don't want to take chances," I said while standing up. One of the rolls of bandages had fallen off; I needed all I could get my hands on.

"Kid, I'll be fine." Death smiled up at me, trying to mask the pain in his eyes. I walked back and he lifted his arms. "It's not like this could kill me."

"That's not what I'm worried about," I said, wrapping the bandages around his chest. Golden blood soaked through as fast as I could layer them. It got on my skin. I stared at a golden droplet, it shimmered in the light.  Wiping my hand on my pants, I went back to wrapping the bandages. I stared at the hole in his stomach. I didn't know how to deal with that.

"What are you worried about?" He tried to stand up, to do who-knew-what, but he barely got off the couch before his legs gave out and he fell back onto it.

"Well, how about this is longest you've been out? Or that you can't stand up? Or how about we still don't have a key and there's only one immortal left? Or-"

"Kid."

"-how about the fact that we-"

"Kid!" Death said, raising his voice. I shut up; he smiled at me, a soft, reassuring pull of the lips. "It'll be fine. I'll be fine in a week and then we can get back to work." By work I knew he meant hunting down Clara, getting the key, and then his stuff back from Life, but my mind locked onto another detail from that sentence.

"A week? What am I supposed to do until then?"

Death rolled his eyes. "I don't know, how about be a reaper?" He pried my hands off of the bandages and took them. White contrasted against the olive skin of his arms. Those injuries were less severe, but relative to the other injuries that didn't mean much.  "I know I haven't exactly done the best job training you, but you know enough that you should be able to get the job done."

I snorted. My training involved about one day of teaching me how to use his scythe and a basic explanation on how to reap people. Death wasn't going to get a best teacher award anytime soon. Death looked at me with an eyebrow raised.

"I don't think I should leave you alone," I said, completely avoiding saying what I found so amusing. "If Life manages to get in here, you won't have a way to defend yourself."

"She can't kill me, kid. And in case you haven't noticed, it's kinda hard to grow anything in here." He gestured to a dead plant in the corner. "Why do you think the only form of plants I have in here are twigs and branches?" He sighed. "Besides, if you don't reap people, then the apocalypse is going to happen."

He was right. If I spent an entire week here, waiting for him to heal, well, he said the balance is right on the verge of failing. If I didn't do Death's job, the balance might as well never existed. His description of the apocalypse echoed in my mind. Rivers running full with blood. I didn't want that. I highly doubted the fish wanted that.

"Where's your book?" I asked. Death looked up at me.

"Just take my cloak, it's not like I'm going to get much use out of it. There should only be a few people left to reap."

"Huh?"

"Kid, did you really think I was just looking through papers that entire time? I think I'm going-"

"How do I warp back to Earth?"

"Well, first make sure you have the scythe. Then just try random stuff until you end up on Earth. It's different for everyone." He yawned. "I think of the worst things that's happened there. There's a surprising amount of Church sanctioned massacres."

"And that helps me how?"

"No idea. I'm gonna take a nap." Death laid down. With all of the bandages on him, he seemed younger. He looked like a reckless kid, only about twenty years old and with white hair. Or, well, over ten thousand years old, I guess. He cracked an eye open. "Don't do anything stupid."

The joke was on him, because that's exactly what I did. After about ten minutes of figuring out how to warp, my method happened to be similar to how I took tests look over the material once, wing it, and hope for the best, I ended up on Earth. More specifically, I stood in the middle of a forest, half inside a tree.

This is why studying is important.

Pulling myself out of the tree took less time and effort than I thought it would. Once it released me, I looked back at it. A half-person hole cut into the tree. My fingers trailed over the exposed inner wood, and I shook my head.

I pulled out the book and flipped through it until I came across name's that hadn't yet been crossed off. I frowned.

"Yeah, this is definitely a few people." Row after row of names lined the pages. I flipped and flipped and flipped, but the names never stopped coming. On the last few pages in the book, drops of gold and silver stained the corners. The gold I knew was Death's blood, and since everything else is opposite between them, I assumed the silver was from Life.

The nearest person, Jackie Willoughby, died a mile away. Luckily for me, mortals couldn't see me, so I could run. It took less than a minute to arrive next to her soul. Jackie's spirit stood beside who I assumed to be her son.

A hospital gown hung off of her frail figure. Wrinkles covered her hands and face. I took a deep breath.

"Jackie," I said, keeping my voice soft, the way Death normally did. "You've lived your span. At one point you were the latest being to enter the world, and now you are the next being to exit. It is time for your life to end." Somehow, the words Death told me seemed like the appropriate one's to say in this situation. Normally, when I reaped souls I would tell them something like 'Guess what? Time to die,' or something along those lines.

Jackie turned to face me. Her eyes widened, before going back to normal. "Hello, I take it you're the Grim Reaper?"

"I'm not very grim, but I am a reaper." Or at the very least, the apprentice to one.

"Aren't you a little young to be a reaper?"

"Probably." I shrugged. "Now as much as I would love to stand around and chat, I really need to send you on your way." I sliced through her chain. It shattered into glittering shards, before dissolving into nothingness.

Jackie stared at me with curious eyes. Her spirit glowed, turned into sparks, and vanished. The muted sound of a flatlining heart monitor cut through the veil. As the man began crying, I opened the book and watched as the names rearranged themselves so they were in order based on distance.

One down, nine hundred sixty-seven to go.

That figure was completely made up of course. I didn't have time to sit and count every single name left in the book, I barely had time to reap them. There were about a dozen within several hundred feet of me, so I took it to mean this was either a major hospital or they were having a bad day.

Those reapings didn't take long, with only one person trying to fight me, and she was a woman with two small kids in the room so I couldn't blame her. Only after the hospital did I start having problems. Souls would manage to hit me, despite my best efforts. The pain faded quick, but when one of them broke my nose it got annoying. The soul who did that ended up going to Hell, so I couldn't be too upset, but you could bet I was going to kick him into lava the next time we were there.

I wish I could say that was the worst part of my day. It wasn't. Things kept going downhill like I was on either the best or worst rollercoaster of all time. Somehow someone stabbed me, I had no idea how that happened but ghost scalpel maybe? After that I got kicked by a horse, outside of the hospital thankfully, kicked by a cow, bit by a dog, scratched by a cat, and chased by a duck. Turned out the whole thing about animals seeing ghosts thing was true, and it also turns out they'll attack you if you aren't visible to mortals.

Really wish I would've figured that out before I had to reap someone who broke their neck when they fell into a tiger enclosure.

I collapsed onto a bench, trying my best to ignore all the bruises and bites and all the other injuries. Well, on the bright side, Death wasn't prepared for no reason. On the downside, I was losing a lot of blood and I still had a lot of people to reap.

My fingers left gray stains on the pages as I flipped through. The words began to swim. I shook my head. I couldn't pass out, I needed to do this. I needed to reap people. If I didn't the world would end. No matter how many times I reminded myself of that, the world became no more focused. I never realized how helpful it was to have Death be able to heal me, even if he only does it at home.

Forcing myself continue hurt, like things tend to do when you've been attacked by a big cat, small cat, dog, and other animals. Still, I managed to do my job. Hundreds of people later, and only one name remained with a distance beside it.

I couldn't get enough concentration and energy together to run. I settled on limping through the streets, random thoughts and hopes drifting through my mind. One in particular was hoping Death wouldn't be too mad about his cloak. The tattered fabric had several more holes. Dirt and blood caked it, along with something I wasn't exactly sure about.

"Lester, now is the time for you- hold on a second." I leaned against the door frame.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah, yeah. I'm fine. Just a few animal attacks."

"Aren't you, like, Death? Couldn't you just kill them?"

"I may work for the guy, but that doesn't mean I have all the same powers. Do you know if there are any bandages here I could steal?"

"Uh, probably in the bathroom. I know Carmen keeps a first aid kit in there. So are you supposed to take me to the afterlife or what?"

"You'll get there just fine. Thanks for the help." I tapped his shoulder with the scythe as I walked away. Unlike cutting through the chain, his soul dissolved first, complete with painful screams.

True to his word, I found a first aid kit in the bathroom. I wrapped bandages around the worst injuries, doing my best to stop the bleeding. I sat on the tile for longer than I'd like to admit. I didn't have anyone else to reap, so there was no real hurry.

How does Death do this day in day out? The animals would attack him too, wouldn't they? Unless they can sense that he's Death and stay away from him. Even then he still has to deal with mortals, people who have done things despite the obvious risk. I wondered if Life had any part in that, if Death did, or if humanity was really just like that.

The clocked chimed twelve.

The book grew warm in my pocket. I took it out and looked inside, only to see a fresh list of names. Thousands of them. I groaned. No way was I going to be able to do this on my own. No way could I, a teenager, handle something that Death has had millenia of experience and practice to master.

I stood up, my scythe in hand. I focused before swinging it, picturing the bright light and golden streets. I disappeared from the bathroom, and I reappeared outside the large gate to Heaven.

"Death, why?" A guy hit his head against a large book. "This is like the fourth time you've shown up uninvited."

"Are you seriously keeping track?"

He lifted his head. "You aren't Death." I rolled my eyes and pulled down my hood.

"What gave it away? My voice? My height? The fact that I'm not wearing gloves? Or how about that I'm a girl?"

"Do you have an appointment?"

"No, but I need to talk to someone."

"And where's Death at?"

"Last I checked he was taking a nap on the couch. He kinda got stabbed by an immortal."

"And what happened to you?" His brown eyes focused on one of the visible bandages.

"Animals. Can I go in or not?"

"Who do you need to talk to?"

"Preferably God, but I'll take one of the archangels if they're available."

"Is it important?"

"Right now I'm the only available reaper. Death can't stand up, and I cannot handle this. I'm pretty sure it's important."

He sighed and pulled a key off of his belt. He inserted it into a lock and turned it. "I unlocked the small door. Don't cause trouble."

Chapter: 3,164

Book: 63,815

Am I hyper fixated on this book? Yes. Did I almost not sleep last night working on this chapter? Also yes.

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