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Three years later, she’s still not dead.
Casper’s been trying. He’s been at this since the last guy died—unfortunate, but an occupational hazard—and he just can’t figure it out. That girl isn’t supposed to be alive. Casper’s supposed to be the best of the best, but even he can’t figure it out.
There are no records of something like this. It’s not like he can just ask his boss—he’d be met with a raised eyebrow and a “Make it work, reaper,” like that helps anything. Or, worse yet, someone else will take it over, and they’ll figure it out. Casper just can’t have that. He has a reputation to uphold. What else does he have? It’s just him and Azrael in this cruel, cruel world.
It would be easy to kill her. That’s not the hard part. The hard part is making sure others don’t die before their time—caught in the crossfire of trying to return the world to its rightful path. Lesser reapers would scoff at the challenge, convinced some casualties are necessary. Not Casper. No, he’s better than that. He has more finesse. That’s why he’s the best.
So for years it’s just this: their unending game of cat and mouse.
It doesn’t take long for him to know everything. He knows her name, her day-to-day schedule, the name of her cat. He knows she’s a programmer at some big company, one he’s sure mortals clamber over themselves to buy from. He finds her social media profiles, most of which are empty—except for one, which is cluttered with pictures of her. Group photos, mirror selfies, travel shots. It’s like a catalog of memories, and he can’t make himself go through the photos. It feels too personal—too intimate.
Like that matters. He’s already watching her movements from the moment she leaves the house to the moment she gets back. There’s a system to it: he collects all the other souls he needs as fast as possible, crams them into the few hours before his mandated half-hour break, so he can go back to watching.
Honestly, it’s kind of pathetic. But he can’t admit that to himself. This is his life’s work. Not only that—it’s what he was born to do. He can’t be having some—some upstart mortal thwarting him at every turn. But there are some lines even he won’t cross, and maybe that’s what’s holding him back.
It’s hard. This job—the watching, not just the reaping—makes him wonder if it’s worth it. He watches one day as she goes out to lunch with some guy from work and something constricts around his heart. Does that guy think he knows her better than Casper does? Casper lives to catch her. That guy is nothing.
It doesn’t help that she leaves that encounter scrubbing at her eyes—no tears fall, but he gets the impression that she’s not the kind of person to give into those emotions easily, always hiding behind a smirk or a mocking expression. He gets the sense she wouldn’t even know how to talk about the things that bother her, not really. And he feels this weird sense of attachment to that. Who does he have to talk to? Maybe the two of them are the same. Maybe there is no one out there for either of them.
Not that he knows anything about her relationship to this guy. This is the first time Casper’s seen him. But over the years he sees others. A girl with tight pigtails and what seems like an obsession with people who wear sweatpants. A guy who doesn’t know how to talk about anything but the one Women’s and Gender Studies class he took in college. Another guy with big arms who didn’t seem to know right from left.
This goes on for about a year. Casper can’t tell if she likes any of them; she always has that unreadable half-smirk on her face, those eyes glimmering with mischief. He knows, somehow, that she’s tearing them apart in her head, and she’s only saying the nicest quips she comes up with. He’s heard her with her friends; he knows her viciousness. These people can’t handle her.
(And Casper can?)
He gets a twisted kick, sometimes, out of ruining those dates. One time he makes her choke on her coffee, and she somehow brute-forces herself into coughing it back up. Another time he has the ceiling of the bakery collapse only where they’re sitting, and she manages to roll not only her but her date, too, out of the way. (Casper says he tries to avoid collateral, but maybe in some cases he’s just as bad as those other reapers.)
Other times, he just leaves. He can’t watch. There are only so many times he can watch the same get-to-know-you conversations, the same types of people convinced they’re worth her time, the same inevitable ending. She never goes on a second date. Every time he sees her smile go from genuine to bored a little part of him wilts. It’s painful to watch—for more reasons than he’d like to admit.
After a year, though, she stops meeting up with strangers, and goes back to her old schedule of work, home, work, home. With, of course, the occasional pit stop to the cafe near her house, the grocery store, the pet store.
Casper’s there when she gets the cat. He’s there when she gets the plant, too, mumbling to herself about thumbs and proper watering practices. He’s there when she gets the promotion at work that ends up with more work for not much more pay, and he’s there when she stops in the middle of the street with her head down, hiding her face. No cars come down that road—there was emergency construction just up the road—if asked, Casper will never admit to it.
Now, three years later, there is nothing to say but she vexes him. What is he supposed to do? There must be something keeping her alive, something keeping him from finishing this godforsaken job.
He remembers the strangers. Dating apps exist, right? So he just needs to make… something like that. A chatroom. Something like that. He’s watched those online meet-cute dramas. He knows how those go. It’s all he’s got.
And, of course, there are no ulterior motives. (Though, to be honest, if there were, even Casper wouldn’t know. His emotions are inaccessible to him at the best of times. Is he even allowed to have them?)
Two days later, he’s made a chatroom. He’s ready. There are no other options—he has to come clean. Expose himself, as it were. (She’d make a joke about that turn of phrase, wouldn’t she?) The straightforward approach. He’s never done this before, but there’s a first time for everything.
Her firewall was pathetic, by the way. Barely put up a fight. He wormed his way into her world so easily—if he hadn’t messaged, she would’ve never known.
He hits send.