The Journals of Death.

Part Three

"Hello, Death," he greeted me without so much as looking up. He didn't care to turn away from the stack of papers on his desk. There was no point, I suppose. I only do what I cared to do. I only listened to what I cared to listen to. To him, it appeared as if I didn't listen at all. "Feel free to sit down," he offered.

"Sit down where?" I scanned the room, trying to refrain from clenching my jaw. Why was he asking me to sit knowing full and well there was no place for that? There wasn't a single piece of furniture in this minimalistic setting outside of his desk and the chair he was currently sitting in. Where was the Greek lifestyle now? Where were those lavish cushions of richness and grandeur? Hades, reduced to a common office worker. Didn't he feel any anger about that? The last time I was here I could've sworn he had a better setting. The more I looked around the more I realized how similar to Life's office this place was. Was Hades mimicking Heaven? How absurd. Ah, wait, now that I think about it this whole section of The Underworld is a bit like that. The marble was only here to mimic Heaven. Ridiculous.

I sighed and sat on the ground. Maybe sitting on my scythe would've been preferable to this. I could've placed the handle on the ground and balanced on the blade. It wouldn't cut me because it's basically a part of me. Never mind, that would make me look like a circus clown. I sighed again and turned my attention back to the so-called god. I could guess at what he was about to say. Something about my work ethic. That's all he ever talks about when it's just the two of us. Nay, when anyone else was around too. If Life wasn't the epitome of a workaholic, Hades came to be a close second. Ridiculous. X2.

"You've been slacking off recently," he pointed out. See? What did I say? I couldn't blame him though. I supposed that was what it looked like. A pretty little label slapped onto me. It's not that I slacked off, not in the sense others think, it's that I lacked motivation. This job didn't get me anywhere. And if I had the power to materialize these struggles, turn them into a brick, I can promise that I definitely would've slapped him in the face with them. Multiple times even.

"Haha, no, I haven't been slacking," I waved my hand in the air to discount the idea. "I've been selectively choosing my collections." That really did make it sound like I've been slacking. Maybe it's time I just admitted it to myself. I was worthless. I was meant to keep a delicate balance between humanity, but there was nothing delicate about me. I've just been slaughtering them when I felt like it. The repercussions of my actions, the consequences, weren't worth the trouble half the time. Why was I doing this? Was it because of the pain these names gave me on my skin? A sign I was still here even if I was doing something wrong. I asked myself these questions so often nowadays.

Hades looked up from his work briefly to make eye contact with me. Once he had, he looked down again, seemingly disinterested in my bogus answer. "Right," he replied. "I'm giving you an extra day to meet your weekly quota."

Haha, sorry, what? An extra day? For a quota? Why? I didn't grace him with a response. He wasn't going to change his mind even if I did respond. I simply stood up and walked out. It was time to kill some more little beasts. Maybe? Killing may have been putting it too harshly. Collect? Collect was a good word. Yeah, I'll go with that. But, seriously, Hades was always running on his own system. Never explained it to me. One day he would let me do whatever and the next he tried to reign me in, told me to get work done. I wondered if Life had anything to do with this. Did Life drop by unannounced and nudge Hades to tell me to get back out there?

The door to Hades's office slammed shut as I made my way out. The noise reverberated through The Underworld's caverns; its echo likely heard all the way up in Heaven's winding streets. Good. They deserved the extra noise. I might've pushed it a little too hard, but it didn't matter. The sooner it broke the sooner some reaper would finally be ordered to fix it. Even better if it was some angel.

I couldn't believe this. Why, now, of all times, did I have to go and find people to reap? Don't get me wrong, it wasn't like I had anything better to do, but the fact that I had been spontaneously given some magical quota to fill when he usually just let me do as I pleased was enough to irritate me. And the stairs! Think of the stairs! It would take me ages to climb that horrid winding staircase to The Aboveworld. I required eternal rest. Reaping who I wanted was a lot more fun than trying to hunt for people on the list. I wasn't required to reap, that's the normal reapers' jobs. Hades just liked to make me do this for grins and giggles.

Finding the proper amount of souls I required would be quite the predicament. Or at least, legal souls. People were always dying. That much was true. But cross checking those deaths with the lists of the people allowed to die and then checking them with the hourglasses made the process tedious. Lists and lists and lists. Reapers loved organizing humans into categories.

Theoretically, I could collect anyone that I wished. Illegal deaths are one of the main factors that separate me from an average reaper. I could commit them, but I rarely got away with it. Humans could commit crimes but got punished for them. It was the same concept. I could collect illegal souls. I did it a lot, actually, mostly to let off steam. It didn't matter in the long run. Whenever I did, Life resurrected them, saying it "wasn't their time."