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Life is a sculpture carved in marble and draped in cloth and gold. His bare feet press into the soil, drawing from the wellspring of nutrients held within. The pigments etched into his skin bleed into the petals of flowers that sprout from his fingertips.
The wind brushes her fingers through his hair as he breathes in the warmth of the sun. Deep within himself he searches for a seed, a single speck of dormant potential. He pulls and stretches it, molds its molten form into the shape he’s been seeking in his dreams.
Yet as with each time before that he’s tried to make this particular flower, there is still that same something missing. Life tries again to narrow down on it so it can be smoothed out. Yet it evades, taunts, slips away again at the very last moment when he opens his eyes.
Imperfect again.
He struggles not to crush the newly blossomed flower between his hands. The sunlight pouring from his palms fades and the flower wilts as he lets it fall to the ground. Another failure to be left to rot.
He steps over it and intends to let the forest roots whisk him away when a shift in the air stops him in his tracks.
“You dropped something,” Comes a voice behind him. Life stills, ice running up his spine.
When he turns he finds that it is night on the other side. Moonlight paints the hollow contours of its cheeks in silver. Gray eyes peer from between locks of tousled black hair, meeting Life’s gaze with an intensity that almost makes him shudder.
This figure would be beautiful if it weren’t rotting. The left half of its face barely clings to the bone, exposed teeth and torn scraps of flesh hanging by sinew. Its chest is an open cavity, its ribs barely containing the useless organs within, and he can see straight through to its glowing, pulsing heart. Fungi of all sorts sprout from various places on its body. They bloom out like miniature bursts, as if expelled violently from the skin they grew beneath.
It’s a sight so repulsive that Life can’t help but be enraptured. It almost distracts him from the flower cradled tenderly in its hand.
The figure tilts its head to the side and smirks, “Miss me, Goro?”
“How do you…No, nevermind that,” Life—no, Goro sneers. “It’s you, you’re the one who’s been stealing my work.”
“Stealing?” The stranger muses, twirling the dead weed between bony fingers, “I don’t think I’d call it stealing. Recycling, maybe.”
Goro half wants to snatch the flower back from him. “You have some nerve. Who are you, anyway?”
The stranger looks confused for a moment before a soft smile spreads over the intact half of his face. “Me? I’m just an admirer.”
Goro narrows his gaze and inspects him closer. There’s something familiar about him, like the way a rabbit recognizes a hare. A spirit of his caliber but not his kind.
Goro looks again at the webs of fungi sprouting at the spirit’s feet and it clicks.
“…You’re Death,” He says coldly. The spirit’s eyes crinkle at the edges.
“You can call me Akira,” Death says with what might be a wink, hard to tell with half a face, and Goro rolls his eyes.
“What does Death want with my scraps?” He asks, deadpan.
“Where do stars go when the sun rises?” There’s a purposeful lilt at the end of the phrase, as if Death expects him to pick it up and complete the metaphor.
But Goro doesn’t have a response. He waits for a more serious answer, then lets out a heavy sigh when it doesn’t come. “Well it’s not like I care what you do with it anyways. Just stay out of my way.”
And to his merit, Death vanishes from his sight without fuss.
+++
Yet once Goro became aware of Death’s lurking presence he could no longer shake the feeling of his cold touch under his heels.
He tries to mock him with petty gifts. Leaves roses with too many thorns out on rotting logs and feeds overripe wildberries to the crows. He hoards that which is beautiful and taunts Death with only his mistakes.
Each offering is reciprocated in kind. He finds ladybugs hiding up his sleeves, moths landing beside the butterflies in his hair, a magpie begins following him with a mischievous gleam in its beady eyes and occasionally drops shards of sparkling stone into his hands.
Worst of all Death chooses to show his face again in the wake of another of his dire fuckups.
It’s his own fault. His selfish urge to rush the creation process, overconfident in his ability to keep the brittle form stable. Goro grits his teeth and curses himself.
The newborn fawn can’t even stand. Its fragile breaths come out ragged through misshapen airways. Two pairs of eyes stare wide into the starry sky above.
He did this.
“You must enjoy having a creation of mine so swiftly delivered to your hands,” Goro says bitterly while Death kneels down beside the fawn to feel for its fading pulse.
“I’ve never killed a thing,” Death murmurs as he rests the fawn’s tiny, malformed head in his lap. “I’m just what comes around to pick up the pieces.”
Goro scoffs. As if there’s a difference in the end. Everything Goro makes, the beautiful and the ugly alike, all end up in Death’s grasp. It makes his skin crawl.
“Nothing can last forever, you know,” Death looks up as if reading his thoughts. Goro’s fists clench at his sides.
“I could make it if you would only keep your hands to yourself.” He could fill the world with his image, a land of perfection and beauty untainted by entropy.
“And when you run out of things to create?” Death asks.
“I—” wouldn’t, is what he means to say, but would he? It’s been easy to assume that the wellspring of his power is infinite, that creation itself must be limitless. That as his opposite, Death must destroy all he touches, annihilating the energies he siphons from the Earth.
Death looks at him with that unreadable expression again, “Where do you think all that life you draw upon comes from?”
Goro doesn’t respond, too busy reeling from the slowly dawning realization.
Death holds out his hand. Goro stares at it like a foreign object.
No. He won’t accept it.
He turns on his heel and storms off, leaving Death behind.
But try as he might, he can't shake it from his mind. He notices it everywhere now. Blooms of fungi sprouting from the bark of fallen trees, insects and vultures picking at carcasses, carbon pulled through the pores of leaves and exhaled as fresh air.
The roots extending so deep into the soil beneath his feet are entwined with mycelium.
+++
“Stop this,” He says when he finally can’t take it anymore. “Whatever you’ve done to me, undo it.”
He speaks to the empty air, but Death appears from nothing to answer his call regardless. The sight of him tightens the grip of the briars around his heart, threatening to spill his sacred blood.
“What do you mean?” Akira says with the softness of a moth’s burning wings. Goro reels like a flame.
“You’ve put something inside me, take it back.” He can’t bother hiding the desperation in his voice. This affliction has been choking him, burning under his skin.
Understanding washes over the spirit’s face and he looks at Goro so tenderly as he says, “I didn’t do anything to you.”
No, he refuses to believe that it’s always been there. He approaches the spirit against his better judgment.
“Then what is this? Why can’t I rid myself of you?” He crowds more into Akira’s space with every step. Death doesn’t move an inch.
This close to one another the seam between their skies blends out into a single shade of time, simultaneously dawn and dusk.
Akira’s nose is almost brushing against his. Death whispers to him, “I think you already know.”
Goro crashes their lips together.
Death takes him in as if by instinct, arms encircling his waist and trapping them together. He fits perfectly against him as if molded to the negative space of Life’s own form.
Goro bites Akira’s lips and Death’s mouth parts and suddenly the world is flipped upside down. Colors he’s never known before swim under his eyelids, forming fractals that weave tapestries spiraling endlessly into themselves. It feels like waking up, it feels like breathing for the first time.
He sees the way the universe repeats itself as it folds outwards, sowing its patterns across cosmic and atomic scales. How the conception of a newborn mimics the birth of a star and the bursting of a supernova mimics the scattering of spores. Throughout these fractals he sees himself in countless forms with another always by his side.
He pulls back to see Akira staring back at him with stars in his eyes.
“...We’ve been here before, haven't we?” Goro whispers in awe and Akira laughs. It sounds like buzzing cicadas.
“Oh, many times. We’re as old as it gets, after all.”
Goro hums, still dazed by the colors dancing behind his eyes, “How come you remember and I don’t?”
“It isn’t always you,” Akira says with a shrug, “Sometimes I’m the one who forgets, sometimes its both of us. On a rare occasion we both get to carry over.”
“You could have told me at the start,” He huffs. “We wouldn’t have had to go through all this trouble.”
“Are you saying you’d have believed me?” Akira grins and Goro is overwhelmed with the urge to kiss him again.
He doesn’t, only because he doesn’t want to reward Akira for being annoying, “Touché.”
“Plus, I wanted to try something more romantic this time.”
Goro sputters. “That was you trying to be romantic?”
“It worked, didn’t it?” Akira snickers. Nevermind another kiss, Goro wants to smack him.
But he’s right. There are memories unfolding in the kaleidoscopes still patterning his vision. Distant and blurred like he’s viewing them from behind a veil of water. There’s so much he still doesn’t recognize, that feels so alien to the person he has been.
The sound of Akira’s laugh makes Goro’s heart ache with a long forgotten fondness. He looks at Goro with so much wonder in his eyes that it feels almost crushing. He wonders how a love like that can endure so much and stay so sincere.
“How do you not get sick of having to wake me up over and over again?” Goro frowns. Akira’s eyes sparkle as he looks at Goro with that now familiar expression.
“Because I know you’ll always come home to me…” He says, so softly it barely catches on the wind. Goro aches. It feels like a knot inside him is opening, unfurling, blossoming. “That’s what you told me once, when I asked you the same thing.”
And suddenly it makes sense. The strange metaphors, the baseless allusions—Akira has been dancing his part to a melody established and built upon over the course of eons. A part of him is bitter at the fool he must have made of himself by responding out of tune.
Akira holds out his hand. By second nature Goro finds himself meeting it with his own.
His roots connect to Akira’s web of spores and suddenly everything is clear. Like lighting up the night by fireflies glow, he sees what he had been blind to before. Akira pours life into him and it tastes like returning at the end of a long journey.
The answer rises like a distant memory, “To draw a path to the moon,” He responds, breathless.
Petals unfurl between their fingers. A pearlescent white lily that Goro now knows is so much more than a flower.
He reaches up to tuck the stem into Akira’s hair and lets Death fill his lungs with moonlight again.