Death's Apprentice

22

"Do you think I care?"

I groaned softly and sat up. I blinked, trying to clear the sleep from my eyes. The thought of yelling at Death for waking me up was replaced with me wondering who he was talking to.

"You very obviously do," Michael said, his voice littered with a strange reverb. My brain recognized it as angelic dialect, but I didn't care.

"And how do you figure that?" The eyeroll was almost audible in Death's voice. Metal rattled against the counter top. A soft sigh left my lips as I decided to do my best to ignore them. Napping, when it comes to deities, was always the better option. Less chance of getting destroyed.

Just as I laid back down, I heard Michael say something that made me shoot up to a sitting position."If you didn't care about her, you wouldn't heal her. You wouldn't have tried to comfort her-"

"So you were stalking me again?"

"It's not stalking until I know what you eat for breakfast."

"What did I have for breakfast?"

"Today? Booberry."

"Stalker."

"You ate at my house!" Michael said.

"You're still a stalker."

"Death, you can't deny this." Somethinh fell over, probably a chair. "You care for her, Dad's said you care about her, and you know he's never wrong."

"Watch you wings, would you? And yeah, your dad hasn't been wrong. Except when it came to putting a tree in the middle of a garden, telling Adam and Eve not to eat it, and forgetting that Lucifer had access to the place."

"You're avoiding the topic." Michael passed in front of the door, and I flopped backwards. He didn't look back at me, probably thinking I had rolled over in my sleep. Slowly moving, I flipped which way i was laying. Despite that, I still couldn't see past his wings.

"Michael, I don't care about mortals!" Death said. "I'm the opposite of my sister! She loves them, I just like watching them struggle to avoid their fate." The distinct sound of a wooden spoon being hit clean broke his pause. I had to strain my wars to hear his next sentence. "You saw me back during the plagues, do you really think there's a single part of me that cares about this kid outside of me being her boss? All of this stuff you say is me caring is literally me avoiding getting in trouble with the worker safety organization."

I stared off into space. It made sense, why would he care about me? He told me himself that he only took me on as an apprentice because he was desperate. I told him I wished he wouldn't have. So why did that hurt so much?

"Okay, one. We don't even have a worker's safety organization." Micheal leaned against the doorway, his wings fluttered. "Two, if you're going to say this is just you being a good boss than I want hired. I expect hugs and handmade lunches."

"She- Fine, I care about her. She's the first person who I've thought would make a good apprentice," Death said. Micheal moved and I could finally see Death making food. He flipped some dough over before kneading it. "I know I own her soul, I know she's bound to this place, but I don't want to be left alone again." He sounded almost angry, but it softened as he tacked on, "It's so lonely here, Michael. The house hasn't had this much noise in it for a long time. I don't know how to take care of a mortal, dead or not. All of those emotions...it's been such a long time since I've felt anything other than guilt."

"So you're immediate reaction to caring about someone is to pretend to not care about them?"

"I'm not supposed to care about anyone, I'm Death. I'm supposed to be the great equalizer." Death threw his hand in the air. Flour flew from his hands in a white cloud. "I'm not supposed to favor certain souls over others, I don't give different people different opportunities, I take their souls and send them on their way." A loud groan tore from his chest, and he ran a hand over his face. "Once I get my scythe back, I'm letting her go. She doesn't deserve this, she doesn't deserve to be stuck with me."