In which we begin

[katzenstreu]

Author: Katzenstreu Gesicht
Date Written: September 1st, 2012
Fandom: Crossover, Dead Like Me/One Man Cleanup Crew
Rating: PG-13
Author's Notes: I don't even know where to begin in talking about this. I'm pretty sure on some level this could be seen as a straight up DLM fic, but with my version of Death involved, talking happens. Death likes to talk, for the most part. Still, I enjoyed writing in George's voice; first person is easy to write with her.

I feel like I could rewrite this a million different ways, but I'll just have to leave it as is and move on to the next prompt. Still, I was trying to convey George's own feelings about Rube combined with her still present fears, because death is the sorta thing you never stop being scared of.

Betty once told me that none of us are special snowflakes that have one singular unique quality to set us apart from the rest.

Say, like that one guy that sits next to you on the bus and tries to casually prospect his nose for a particularly large vein of boogers, and you think that’s completely gross… well, that guy is everywhere, and you, the condemner to this heinous act, are a dime a dozen, too. Silently judging.

I mean, we all do the same, everyday things as everyone else does. We get up in the morning, bush our teeth, go to work and—unless you happen to be me and are destined to die on what’s more of a lunch half-hour—go home to just repeat the process again. And when we aren’t working, we try and find others that have ten fingers and like yogurt and baseball, yet we still keep up this idea that each of us is unique.

But, without going into too much philosophical bullshit about ethnicities or cultures or whatever, when it comes down to it, we’re all doing the same thing as someone else. Originality is like chivalry; dead.

We all die, and even the way we go isn’t always so strange.

Hit by a bus? Congratulations, sir, you’re our millionth customer.

And then we all ask the same questions.

Why? Why now? Why not me? Why him? There’s a lot of whys involved in the grieving process.

I didn’t have a why question, though, more of a where. Ever since that whole Cameron bullshit I’ve been wondering where Rube went, half hoping and
wondering if Cameron had him stuffed in a morgue somewhere and that he’d eventually pop back in and everything would return to normal.

But that didn’t happen.

And after I got showered, literally, with post-its, I suspected it never would.

But like I said, we all ask the same questions. Even when you’re a Reaper what comes after the lights is as much a mystery to you as it is with anyone else, from bus-driver, prospector and temp alike. I’d like to believe Rube was in what I guess you’d call a better place, eating all the blueberry muffins and extra, extra crispy bacon he could manage.

But I wouldn’t be here if I knew that for certain.

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George had went about this more than a few times in her head, but each scenario ended in either a disastrous way or perfectly mundane and unfulfilled.

Her first plan had to been to just open the door and see what was on the other side, but a part of her didn’t really want to know what that silhouette’s shape really was when you cast light upon it, if it had a shape at all. Perhaps it was just a shadow, a void that engulfed everything. Or perhaps it was just like her; another temp not paid enough, if anything, to really give a shit about her queries.

In the end, she chose the safer way to go about it.

Death, or whatever it was beyond the door, seemed to be the originator of staying on the fringe, remaining impersonal. Ergo, it seemed the best way to beat a master of such caliber was to play at his or her own game of keeping a distance. Which, in this case, meant sliding a note under the door at the exact same time Mr. Or Ms. Mysterious slid the envelope under in their usual morning routine.

The note was simple, to the point.

‘Where is he?’

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In all honesty, I never expected an answer back.

I don’t know what I was expecting at all, but it wasn’t quite this.

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The shadow seemed hesitant, but if it was puzzled that it had actually received something under a door for itself in a long time and was taking the time to read it was another mystery altogether.

Just as George seemed ready to accept an early defeat and begin organizing today’s reaps, a little yellow post-it slipped under the door, turned over and written on the back in an elegant hand.

‘Please be more specific.’

She blinked, stunned that she had actually gotten a response, but the shock of it quickly faded. “Cheeky fucker,” she muttered back to the door, which remained silent and still as the hallway beyond it.

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Maybe, and this is a big maybe, El Creepo had a point.

There’s a lot of he’s and him’s in the world, and maybe even death forgets about its own peons in time. But the thing was, I didn’t know how much more specific I could be. I couldn’t write back ‘previous team leader’ or whatever. That’d probably get me a long essay on what exactly happens when you shove the ashes of a Reaper into space.

I never learned Rube’s last name, in all of the five or so years he’d been my boss. Rube wasn’t like Daisy or Delores that would constantly ingrain their full name into your skull every time you met them in the street.

He was Rube. Just Rube.

Not that I didn’t try to find out his last name, but he never came up in any of the digital files for people that died and were sorted by their last thoughts. And as for the completely hand-written files…

Yeah.

You can imagine how well that went.

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A few mornings after, George tried to follow the advice on the post-it as best she could. She wrote, scribbled over her words and rewrote, then crumpled and tossed it aside only to repeat the process. But ultimately, she had to settle with something.

‘Rube, guy before the guy before me, stick up his ass.’

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I wasn’t quite sure about that last part, but I guess it was better than ‘receding hairline’ or ‘likes food’ or ‘calls me peanut’. Putting something sentimental and sweet would probably get me a repeat of my last response, underlined and exasperated.

But I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe Rube.

He could be nice, but it sort of fluctuates between this weird parental sort and a business-like persona at times, or maybe it was just with me. He’d never forego the chance to call Mason or Daisy fuck-ups, but then again, when I first became a Reaper, he told me I fucked the pooch a bunch of times, too.

Which I did, but that’s not important.

When I say parental, though, that’s not to say I’d describe him as a second dad, because he wasn’t all like the dad I remembered having as a kid. We didn’t have special lunches or even brunches on a Sunday morning, and he didn’t read me sonnets. Well… not always. He did buy me a bike once and a couple of slices of pie.

And he made me fly straight when I tried to go too close to the sun.

But, again, I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe what Rube was to me, or even why it bothers me so much to know what happened to him.

There just isn’t enough room on a post-it to say all of this.

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With a flutter, the little yellow note returned, and now it was George’s turn to hesitate. It couldn’t truly be that easy, could it? Most things as a Reaper were treated on a need-to-know basis, and most of the time, she was told she didn’t need to know. But even so, she found the courage to pick the note up and read the following:

‘Promoted.’

“That’s not what I was asking,” she huffed, and tossed the note away.

But then it seemed as if a vacuum came from the other side of the door to suck the note back under, and George could only stare and mutter, “The fuck?” to herself. After what felt like an eternity, the same note came back with an addition made to it.

‘Then please do not waste my time if you cannot present questions properly.’

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Now, I’m not sure if what was on the other side of the door was death, y’know, of different sort than a Reaper, but if it was…

Well.

Remember how I said Frog was an asshole?

Death was an even bigger turd.

Still, they say the third time is the charm.

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George had learned better, or so she thought. No more beating around the bush, just get straight to the heart of the matter. She wrote simply what she wanted to know and prayed she wouldn’t get shut down for it.

‘Where did he go after being promoted?’

She did not have to wait long for a response.

‘Classified information.’

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I might’ve overreacted.

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“Are you fucking serious?” The post-it was crushed in her fist. “I do your bullshit community service for over five years and you don’t even have the common decency to give me a straight answer? What, because of classified information? Yeah, I know that whole spiel about rules and regulations and I’ve tried to be a good, rule-abiding Reaper, which is a lot fucking harder than you’d imagine. But I did it, and you or whoever’s in charge must think I’m good enough to lead the team, so don’t you think I have enough goddamn clearance or whatever to get something more than ‘classified information’?”

By this point she was no longer in the same position she had been in for several mornings, on the floor with her back to the door. She was eye-to-eye with a wooden door dented from when a tenant long ago had punched it, and punctuated the end of her rant with a good kick at the door.

The moment after that hung in the air, with her anger still burning and her foot still aching.

Then, an explosion of post-its of all the colors of the rainbow came out from underneath the door. It reminded her of when she was a child and switched the vacuum to reverse. But this time there was no Joy to yell at her for the mess.

The post-its fell in such a way that they could be read to one end and pick up where it left off without much trouble at the one next to it.

“Only mildly impressed,” George said as she tried to find the beginning.

‘Life is what you make of it’, said what appeared to be the first post-it, toxic green. It was continued by the next one, purple. ‘So, too, is the afterlife, and what is after that.’

After that was teal. ‘If you believe in greener pastures, then there is one.’

And after that a sort of pinkish-red. ‘If you believe yourself fit for hell, then so be it.’

The familiarity of a yellow one was a small comfort, written in smaller letters to fit all the words. ‘I cannot give you answers for each one is different and contradicts its predecessor constantly. That is what happens when you try to compensate humanity for their mortality.’

Finally, there was orange. ‘Or rather, perhaps it is compensating a foolish Frog and Toad for breaking a jar full of Death.’

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That was the first time I heard about Frog and Toad.

…I don’t know what that person beyond the door was trying to say with their fancy post-it tricks, honestly. I think they were, though, trying to give me a semi-decent answer to things.

Here’s what I managed to string together from it:

Betty was right. We aren’t special, and even if we fool ourselves into thinking we are, we still agree on wanting the same thing; family, food, a nice car, a house and maybe a smoke. In life, at least. After that, we just want rest and sleeping on clouds all day, or a room full of virgins. Take your pick.

Maybe Rube got what he wanted, and maybe so did Betty if she didn’t get obliterated for breaking some cosmic law. Maybe the whole thing bugged me because sometimes when I wake up in the morning I don’t feel dead, or rather, un-dead. I’ve still got that fear everyone has, about what happens after death. And it bugs me even more how even the Reapers are so nonchalant about it, about a fellow Reaper moving on. I was really the only one back then that truly talked about Betty, and now I’m doing that all over again.

I never was really good at the whole acceptance part of the five stages of grieving, but I guess that’s what El Creepo was saying. Believe what you want to believe, and don’t worry about it. Things work themselves out, even death. Big heavenly chess game, I guess.

But that’s not to say I still didn’t yell ‘cocksucker’ at it, because that still wasn’t the answer I wanted.

But I don’t know what I wanted.

Maybe a little lie. Maybe for it to say hi to Rube and tell me how things were in heaven or whatever.

Still.

I guess you can’t complain when you’re dead like me.