Death comes for us all.

The man's body laid there for seven nights, and eight days. Skin flaking, pale and ashen, decomposing onto the dirt below. The scope of their battlefield, crumbling white-plastered hospitals shaken to the ground, leaving room in the skyline for the sun to appear, red and molten, was big enough it filled an entire city with screaming corpses that begged, howled to be taken. 

Death felt the stretch of their scythe, struggling to reap so many. Their cries, each a small burden, the cloak upon Death's back grew tighter around the bones at their neck as the wails paved the way for a new song, an operatic shrill tune. They were never together, fluid and as one, each howled solely for themselves. Selfishly, humanlike.

Battlefields, no matter if they were across ships, sinking in water or dressed in boots, succumbing to soil, were not new to Death.

No, Death had been at every human atrocity. Watching them slaughter each other for a cause that would become redundant in a century's time, where it would become confined to parchment bound into entertainment and small fizzling screens, played by praised performers who tried to reenact the grossness of the period. 

Mass murder had long since become choreographed, a dance for greedy men to sink their gloves into. Death remembered the blasphemy of Hiroshima, the City of Nanjing, the men and boys of Srebrenica, even the Wounded Knee Creek, the boats rescuing Dunkirk little too late, The City of Carthage, St Bartholomew's Day Massacre in Paris, Death remembered them all like they'd occurred just five minutes ago. Now, blood had become a prosthetic, screams that once left life-long scars were deemed award-worthy, fear had become something to make money from, something to aim for. 

Death never forgot their cries, every single tear committed to memory, in tongues both common and rare, as they reached towards the scythe, hands trying to grip something they did not understand, gargling at the sight of the bones that peered out of Death's long black cloak. 

Humans caused each other pain, and then blamed Death. 

Death robbed us of them. They'd howl.

Death is so cruel. They'd cry. 

Death knocked on their door. They'd spit.

Eternal blame. Lauded from the shivering deceased, awoken briefly for reaping, panic wearing glassy eyes. They were all the same that way, few stuck after an eternity, Death had more bones in their skeletal frame than faces they remembered. 

There was once a boy, young and freckled with sandy hair. He'd raised his chubby fingers to Death, sat on top of a paper thin bed in the corridor of the hospital ward, and blubbered. The plague, Death recalled it, one that swept through the lower, sewage filled streets of England. 

"Please don't take me." He'd begged through tears, as if Death could reverse it, as if Death had the antidote for the pain that already took him. "No–no, I want my Mummy." His eyes flashed as Death peered over him, the cloak floating over the boy's shoulders, enveloping them both as one. The boy could no longer see his Mother, perched at an awkward angle in the chair, slumped forward enough that her sleep was fragile, she breathed low, unknowing that her boy had already gone during the night. 

The boy had hit small arms against Death's ribcage, hammering them violently, hoping he might hurt Death. 

He wouldn't, he couldn't.

The scythe came down after that, the boy fell limp under the blade and Death collected what was owed to them. Fragile pockets of the small boy, Edward, Death learnt as they reaped, appeared. His favourite subject in school was English, he'd grown up in a countryside estate with overgrown rose-bushes and a priest down the road that preached each Sunday. Death learned the family moved to the city less than three months ago, for his father's job, unaware of the looming disease that would enrapture the city and now? Edward lay dead and his Mother wouldn't know until morning. 

Death glanced back towards the mother, neck bent at an uncomfortable angle and knew while she would blame herself, she would also blame Death. Every single Sunday, in prayer. 

That was Edward, the last human Death committed to memory. Edward, who had died on a Tuesday, by the human's clock, over a century ago. 

Death's cloak was long enough it could be measured by three bodies, they glanced down, seeing it spread across three soldiers that all looked up at the skeletal body in despair, eyes wide and mouths quivering as they laid, dead, eyes open, scattered across the battlefield. 

But Death did not spare them a glance. For there was only one silent. Some humans lingered, some didn't and Death would be back to collect the forgettable ones shortly. 

This man, his body still above the ground after seven nights, was not forgettable. Death had almost missed him, singular among many, not wailing out, not crying to be taken. This man was still. His eyes, forest green, languidly followed Death as they moved around him. Death wasn't sure of the colour of his hair, coated in gunpowder and grime, becoming one with the ground beneath him. He looked content, like death had already reaped from him, his soul quiet and steady as loved ones put him to rest. 

They never looked composed when Death got to them. Still, this man merely blinked and lifted his hand in a half-wave. 

"I wondered when you might appear." He spoke, voice rough with a week of decomposition. "I was worried you would forget about me altogether."

If Death could laugh, they might have. Stupid, misunderstanding Humans. Death did not forget.

"But you're here."

Death cocked his skull, bearing down the lack of attire covering the man, there was no soldier's uniform worthy of being upon the battlefield ground. Instead the man wore a pair of denim jeans and cork sandals. A civilian then, a civilian who seemed to be at ease with his own demise, caught up in an act he had no part in. Death felt a stirring, something tugging their curiosity for the first time in a long time.

"I know why you're here." The man pushed himself up now and Death found the line that cut across the entirety of the man's chest, deep and jagged, victim to a blade. "And I want to politely decline."

Death paused, the thousands– millions of each reap looming over them held their breath and they considered, 

"Decline?" Death asked, voice low and gruff with a millennia of silence. The man flinched at the sound, both ancient and celestial, booming without being loud. 

"I know you're here to reap my soul, or whatever." The man continued, despite the flinch, despite the fear. "I'm not scared to die, but I don't want my soul to be sucked out, you know?"

The man spoke fast, like he had been rehearsing his words all week, laying in his own decomposition, and had to release them before they became forgotten, like him. 

"Not soul." Death shook his skull, "Memories."

"Oh." The man still flinched, but his eyebrows furrowed together, "You want my memories?"

Death nodded, scythe falling into their bony grasp, the man scuttled backwards, despite his assurances he wasn't afraid, 

"Why?" He asked, as if Death had time to stand here and negotiate, like there weren't bodies scattered as far as the eye could see, each raising arms towards Death, a chorused hymn of souls that wished to rest. 

But the man wasn't wailing, his silence was a sanctuary from the eternal noise and Death thought that just this once, they would give the man a small mercy. 

"Humans cannot keep all of themselves." Death raised a bony finger, long and slender, towards the man's temple, he closed his eyes tightly, waiting for a pain that did not exist. "You are already dead." Death said simply, and let their finger rest gently on the man's temple, a softness Death had not afforded any human in centuries, because they were foul and greedy, they took and took, and they blamed. 

But here was a man, who neither worshipped or feared, and Death felt a small pang of heat where there shouldn't have been, because the man should have been as glacially cold as Death was. 

"You are dead, you will lose them," Death pressed the finger against the man's temple, "Death keeps them safe."

"You keep them?" The man repeated, the dullness of the forest within his eyes loosening into a brightness that belonged in canopies of trees billowing in the tropical south. Death felt that twitch of intrigue again, battling against the weight of their scythe, out and ready to reap because a dead man should not be a man intrigued. "For what?" He continued, seemingly forgetting the skeleton beneath the cloak, the hollowness of eye-sockets and the long blade, "Is it like a library, do you have the entirety of the human species up there?"

"Yes." Death answered simply, there was not any breath that would be able to explain such an overwhelming space to a human, the infinite amount of memories that is for Death to hold, to retain, to keep, so that long after this race had fallen, they would still be alive somewhere. So, in sorts, yes, very much a library.

The man's eyes sparkled, "Cool." He huffed out, hand absentmindedly coming to cover his deep gash that had bled out a week ago, rubbing against it. "So who have you met? Wait, did you reap Freddie Mercury? Princess Diana? Attila the Hun?"

Death racked through millennia of blurred faces, and a catalogue of memories that would have required them to find a ladder, and climb a shelf taller than most skyscrapers to dig through the memories of the humans he spoke of. The man wouldn't understand that Death forgot most faces, most names, on purpose and accidentally in the same stretch of time. They supposed the man wouldn't know Edward from Shropshire, or Laita, a stockbroker from Miramar, Havana. 

"Yes." Death said anyway, because they would have, they reap all. 

"So do you know if her death was a hoax?"

Death stared down, the emptiness within their eyes, the broken city behind them a mirror to the man asking bizarre questions with an excited look to his face. 

"Right, sorry. Stupid question" The man shook his head, "So you're not here to take me to eternal damnation?"

If Death was able to scoff, they might have. "No."

"I still have to politely decline." The man smiled now, it stretched unbothered onto his cheeks, "I think I want to keep my memories."

"You do not keep, you lose, I keep." Death's grip tightened on their scythe.

The man held up a hand, as if to say, stay back. "I get that, I really do but I'd rather my memories stay with me, well my body, just for me."

Death stepped closer, despite the hand, their cloak unfurling to cover the man. A last act of decency, something Death adopted after Kenya, after Nataruk. Reaping one person in a field, only wheat and sun for company was fine, moral. Reaping a person when others are laid similarly, all reaching out, watching that person's last breath of themselves for all to see had left a bitter taste in Death's mouth. They did not make that indecency again.

The man didn't push against the cloak, he surrendered easily, body folding but his mouth? It still ran. 

"I don't want my memories to be with someone else, everybody else, lost with the rest of the world."

Death enveloped them both, scythe raised. "Saved, not lost."

The man's voice broke, "I want them to be lost." And finally took on a shake like the rest of the deceased often did, "If you take them, then you'll know forever, like you know everybody else's, and then they will become lost. Because others are far more interesting. If they stay with me, become lost with me, then I go in comfort knowing only I could know about me."

Death often didn't understand humans, despite knowing each one intimately, despite walking in their shadows for eons, despite watching hunters with spears become bankers with pens, despite watching them enjoy sitting in the rain or burning under the sun. But Death did understand loneliness, being one of many. They looked down at this man, who simply wished to be left alone. 

Their scythe came down, instead of reaping, Death did something they'd only done once before, they sliced through the man's gash and watched him become limp. Alone, rested and void of the life he once knew. 

Death's library did not expand, and Death knew they would spend another eternity wondering about the man below them. Why he ended up where he ended up, why he wore sandals during a genocide, why he was so unbothered to be greeted by Death. His name, Death stood for a moment on the battlefield, souls crying out to them and simply looked at his limp body, Death had not even known the man's name.

The cries won out, at what time, Death did not know, because time was a fickle concept born for mere mortals to track their life, Death was not linear like them. Death collected their debts, slinking around the battlefield until the rest of the choir's memories had become harvested. They did not pay the shrillness any mind, because Death had not known a human's name, for the first time ever. 

When death's slow, fractionally, Death decides to do something they haven't done in a while, they go back into their library and look for the man through others. Tracing memories from humans who had been close to him, to any other being it would have been arduous, long, perhaps painful but for Death, it felt like seconds, to turn the page until he found a cousin and then a brother, and then him. 

Karim. 

Death didn't look much further, electing to close the book on Karim in the library, because Karim, like Death, wished to be left alone and Death would grant him that. It did not stop Death from seeking out the man's family, from watching his funeral deep in the shadowed forest, the casket lowered into the ground. 

A group of people, dressed in their finest black silks, mourn while the rest of their country ignores the fallen, continuing to choreograph murder. The lowering of Karim's body was the most gentle act of the day in their landscape. 

"Death came for him." The mother said, hanky to her eye, nose red and swollen. "It took him before he wanted to go."

Death could scowl, but they wished to in this moment and left quickly after the words spilled over the casket because humans were all the same that way, looking for something to blame, something to label a monster, something to hate. Death had become accustomed to it, the shadowy monster that came for people in the night, the sad outcome of every life. 

Death left the event with a flourish, allowing the clouds that had been sat at bay to roll over the funeral home, casting a hollow grey over the casket. 

Curiosity never ended well, Death knew that and they had fallen for it again. They were all the same, humans, and Death vowed to never give small mercies again. Not to Edward's, not to Karim's and certainly not to any human who continued to blame Death for their own misgivings. 

Death decided to give up their watch, the ticking time human invented gone and crawled back into an entity of nothing.