Anubico Oneshots based on prompts

"If you'll have me."

Prompt 1: A soulmate AU where everyone has bracelets on their arms that start a dark colour and lighten as time passes and they grow closer to their soulmate and when they meet each other it falls off? Except there's a malfunction with Anubis' and Nico's and theirs stay black (which indicates death) so they're pretty much depressed all their lives until they meet and their bracelets fall off?

Prompt 2: Nico's death and he becoming a god.

A/N: I took some serious liberties with this one.

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Anubis really despised the whole soulmate ordeal. Not only were Egyptian gods not supposed to have soulmates, so he was the only one who'd ever gotten a bracelet. And to top the shitty cake of shit, his bracelet was black, which meant that his soulmate was dead.

He'd had the bracelet for as long as he could remember, the pitch black mocking him for over five thousand years.

During the first thousand years he'd been sad, cursing the powers that had let his soulmate die. After that he got used to it and started to loathe the black band. He'd considered cutting it off, but he valued having two hands more than he hated the accursed bracelet.

Needless to say, he'd never searched for his soulmate. It hadn't really stopped him from pursuing the company of others. He wasn't too picky about genders, none of them stuck around long enough to matter anyway. Humans had such short lifespans. They either died of some illness or other, or old age, which was not even comparable to Anubis' lifespan.

Even though he might enjoy the physical company of others, he never felt any sort of attachment to them, or romantic feelings. And they didn't seem to like the fact that he had a dead soulmate, staring at the black bracelet as if it offended them. He didn't care, only seeking the physical sensations to fill the empty hole where his soulmate should've been (it was never enough).

He had been hanging around in the duat for way too long at this point. He sometimes missed the simple humans, because they too had soulmates. None of the Egyptian gods could ever understand how he felt.

He kept to his duties, chaperoning the souls to the Hall of Judgement. He always reverted to his cold, indifferent self when he was the Lord of Funerals and Embalming. He did sometimes guide those that had black bracelets. He had to comfort them at times when they realised that their own death meant that they would never meet their soulmate. It was especially bad with the young souls that had so much longer to live, and then realised that their other half would live their entire life with a black band.

There were also the old souls that had lived their lives with a black band, and Anubis couldn't bring himself to feel sorry for them, their lives were so much shorter than his, they knew nothing of that kind of pain.

He was supposed to collect another soul and guide them through the duat. He had travelled to their grave, surprised to find it in Venice. He usually waited a few days after they were buried to collect them, but for some reason he was heading there the day after they'd been buried.

When he arrived, he immediately noticed the presence of the soul, because they felt odd. He could feel the hairs on his arms rise as his eyes focused on the soul.

It was a teenager. He looked to be around eighteen.

Anubis frowned as he took in the boy's behaviour. Normally the souls were confused, but this one seemed to be self-aware. He looked distressed, twisting some cold coins in his hands.

As he walked closer, the god could hear the muttered curses, was that Ancient Greek?

The boy whipped his head around to stare at him when he drew near. He frowned at him.