[ WP ] What if Death found a reason to live ?

# #'' The Collector'' 
 
 `` Lovely day, is n't it?'' 
 
 `` Yes it is, Joanne,'' I said without looking back at her, as I sat on the park bench during a day that was cloudy without managing to be gloomy. I stared out at the park, watching the cold, rushing wind blast the long, uncut grass back like so many strands of green hair. Out of habit, I reached to my side and into my already-open backpack, and took out a sketchbook and a piece of charcoal. 
 
 `` You remembered!'' she said, and through her voice, I could hear her face light up. 
 
 `` I always do.'' 
 
 I felt her step closer to me and lean over my head. Her long, black hair dangled downward, brushing against my scalp, as she reached down and took hold of my hands with her own. Gently, she guided my left hand, still holding the charcoal, along the paper, drawing intricate patterns -- transferring them from the fabric of her mind to the fabric of my sketchbook, with me as her instrument -- and within minutes, those patterns, variously geometric, tribal, and something in between, resolved themselves into human forms that were at once brilliantly stylized and uncanny in their realism. 
 
 These meetings were the only times I ever got to create. Pleasant as it was, it could never offset the destruction that weighed so heavily on my mind that it altered my very posture. 
 
 `` There,'' she breathed into my ear. `` Finished.'' 
 
 `` It's beautiful. You're a good artist.'' 
 
 `` I could n't have done it without you, Warrick.'' 
 
 `` Why are you here?'' 
 
 `` Where else would I be?'' 
 
 `` In the background, floating in and out of my head. Watching from the sidelines.'' 
 
 `` Maybe I'm tired of watching you. Maybe I want to watch *with* you.'' 
 
 `` Maybe.'' 
 
 I looked up from the sketchbook and stared back out at the park. I heard the sounds of birds chirping, kids playing, and Joanne walking around the bench. I felt the cool breeze blow through my long hair, and the warm sunlight shine down on my face, and Joanne's pant leg brush against mine as she sat next to me. I looked out at a tree still missing its leaves after shedding them last winter, and watched as a bird carefully constructed a nest of twigs and dead blades of grass. 
 
 `` You plan on ending it,'' Joanne said to me. I was surprised by the lack of fear in her voice. 
 
 `` I do.'' 
 
 `` If you do that, we'll be gone.'' 
 
 `` You're already gone.'' 
 
 `` We're gone from the world, but we're not *gone. * We still exist.'' 
 
 `` You're figments of my imagination.'' 
 
 `` Can an entire mind be a figment?'' 
 
 I did n't answer. I kept staring at the park, watching as kids kicked a soccer ball back and forth across a large patch of mulch. One of them kicked the ball too hard, and it smacked a small girl right in the face. She fell to her knees and began to cry, but it was not entirely out of pain. I could sense that there was something else that had been weighing on her mind -- something she had been keeping inside -- and in my gut, I knew I would have more work to do soon... but the sight was soon eclipsed by Joanne's face, as she leaned in front of me and forced me to confront her. 
 
 `` How do you think Sara will feel about this?'' she asked, and there, at last, was the fear. 
 
 To my right, I heard a voice ask, `` Someone say my name?'' I turned to the tree I had been gazing at earlier, and saw Sara step out from behind it. She certainly had n't been standing behind it earlier. Even from a distance, and at an oblique angle, she saw something in Joanne's face, and hastily stepped over to us, taking a seat next to me. 
 
 `` Warrick plans on ending it,'' Joanne told her. 
 
 `` What?'' Sara asked, shocked. `` Why? He's been... He saved us!'' 
 
 `` I'm not a savior,'' I told her, my voice remaining level. `` I'm a collector. I have a type.'' 
 
 Their silence could have filled endless tomes with the most meaningful blank pages in the history of literature. The three of us sat there, listening to nothing but the rush of the wind through grass and barren branches, and the alternating laughter and howling of children, and the whispers, at once soothing and concerned, of their parents as they attended to playtime injuries. We sat there in silence, Joanne fidgeting and twirling her hair around her finger out of unnoticed habit, and Sara slowly and absentmindedly rubbing the side of one bare foot against the top of the other -- her newest tell -- and in that silence, more was said between us than in our entire history of voiced conversation. 
 
 A hint of disgust crept into my tone as I broke the silence: 
 
 `` Your souls are among the few I did n't throw in the dustbin. When you first passed, I did n't know you. I did n't care about you. I liked the way you looked. That was all.'' 
 
 Sara reached over and gingerly grasped my left hand in hers. She turned my palm face up, and ran fingers from one hand along the folds in my skin, while using another hand to estimate lengths, comparing my palm to my fingers. 
 
 Amused, I asked, `` Are you trying to palm-read Death?'' 
 
 Still grabbing and groping at my hand, she looked up and into my eyes, letting her thousand-yard stare meet my conscious gaze, before speaking with the voice of a woman deep in thought and concentration and not entirely aware of her surroundings. `` You did n't care at first, but you do now. You try to deny it, and hide it, and cast yourself as something worse than you are... but I can see it. In life, I saw many things.'' 
 
 `` You did n't see your death.'' 
 
 `` No,'' she said, unfazed, `` but I see Death now. I see that he's a loner.'' 
 
 `` No point starting something when you know how it ends.'' 
 
 `` You started a friendship with me, with Joanne.'' 
 
 `` I do n't like seeing beauty go to waste.'' 
 
 `` It'll go to waste if you end it, Warrick.'' 
 
 She was right. I may have picked them for their looks, but I quickly came to admire them for who they were. Joanne, the devoted artist who did n't let death stop her; on the contrary, she used Death to continue her work. Sara, the reader who believed in everything and nothing, falling for her own psychic lies even as she remained aware of them, and all the while supplementing them with dead-on intuition. Both of them fiercely independent even as I tethered them to me, and both of them capable of surprising me with their resolve and their insight. 
 
 `` You do n't like seeing beauty go to waste,'' Sara said to me. 
 
 `` I do n't.'' 
 
 `` So why not go to the roof of the building directly behind you, to meet a beautiful woman? She's heading up the stairs as we speak...''
