“None of it.”
“There wasn't time. The shelf was falling.”
“I'm not talking about the shelf! I'm talking about all of it!” Dustin gestured wildly. “Last night, this morning, what happens to your soul and your job and your — your entire existence?—”
“Dustin.”
“I told you!” Dustin sounded angry now. “I told you I didn't want anyone to sacrifice for me anymore.”
Greg looked at him.
Dustin's brows were furrowed and he was looking at Greg as though Greg had done something unforgivable, and maybe he had, except?—
“This isn't sacrifice,” Greg said.
“You might dissolve.”
“That's not what I mean.” Greg turned the clipboard over in his hands. “You keep saying people sacrifice for you. Your mother. Me. As if we're losing something. As if the trade goes in one direction.” He looked at the dashboard. “Before you, I was a reaper. I showed up, I collected souls, I filed paperwork. I would have done that for eternity and then I would have dispersed into nothing. No afterlife. No memories. Just... gone.” He swallowed. “And I would never have known what I was missing.”
He turned to Dustin, needing him to understand. “You took me to a diner,” he said. “And you put a burger in front of me and I didn't know what it was. Not really. I didn't know what anything was. I didn't know what a milkshake tasted like or what it felt like when someone wiped ketchup off your face or what—” He stopped. The lump in his throat made it hard to speak. “I didn't know what a kiss was. I'd seen hundreds of humans do it and I'd written it down in my notebook and I never understood what it meant until you put your mouth on mine in a motel room because you were sad and I was there.”
Dustin wasn't looking away. His jaw was tight but he blinked fast.
“I'm not sacrificing anything,” Greg said. “I gained everything. All of it. Every single thing I have, you gave me.” His voice gained strength. “Without you, I would never have…”
“Never have what?” Dustin'svoice was rough.
Greg didn't finish the sentence.
He leaned across the seat and kissed him.
It was not the best kiss, objectively speaking. The angle was wrong, the center console was between them and Greg's hands were still holding the clipboard. But Dustin's hand found the back of Greg's neck and pulled him closer.
And for a moment there was nothing else — no system, no demon, no collection windows, no dissolution. Just Dustin's mouth and Dustin's hand and the way his breath hitched when Greg pressed closer, and the word Greg couldn't say out loud because saying it would make it too small.
Lived.
Without you, I would never have lived.
Reapers didn't live. They existed. They moved through the world like a breath moves through a room — unnoticed, never changing the world around them. They watched humans fight and grieve and love and lose and they filed it all away and they never once understood why someone would hold on so hard to something that was always going to end.
But that was what made humans brave. Not that they didn't know about death — they knew. They knew better than anyone. They carried it with them every day, the knowledge that everything they loved was temporary. And they loved anyway. They held on anyway. They fought tooth and nail to keep each other alive for one more year, one more day, one more hour, not because they thought they could win but because the holding on was the point. The holding on was what made it mean something.
Greg understood that now.
He pulled back. Dustin's hand stayed on his neck, fingers pressing against his pulse.
“I can never be a reaper again,” Greg said quietly.
It was a fact, as simple and as clear as anything he'd ever known. He'd walked through a shelf to save someone he loved and he could already feel the system letting him go. He was losing the thing that had defined him, like a uniform he'd taken off and couldn't put back on.
He looked down at the clipboard in his lap.
Its edges were soft.
Just the way Greg's own edges had gone soft that morning in the motel room when he'd been dissolving.
Greg ran his thumb along the metal. It blurred slightly under his touch, like ink in water.
