Rehab

Armin looked up in horror at himself, as he, the other he, raised the pistol to his face.  Armin stared down the barrel of the gun with panicked fear. He knew what happened next. He rembered.

But there was more to his fear. A rich milieux of terrors swept about in his mind. His wife, how would she survive? Their child, who would be there to help raise it with him gone? His family, his friends, all cut off from him in an instant.

He opened his mouth to speak, but the memory of silence caught in his throat and he found he could not. He could only gaze into the black hole that was the barrel of a pistol held in the other him's hand.

"Sorry mate. Nothing personal." He said. The other he. The he that he used to be. And just as Armin remembered, he pulled the trigger while he said one final word.

"Business."

And there was a roar, and a flash, and an instant pain, and everything that he had worked for and loved was gone in an instant.

When he opened his eyes he was back in the room. The white room, with the table and two chairs. He was sitting in one of them when he remembered that he never had a wife. Or a child.

Or many friends, for that matter.

And it dawned on him. Not his friends. Not his wife.

HIS friends. HIS wife. The man that he had killed, in cold blood, eight years ago. Without a thought. Without a care. Because it wasn't personal.

It was just business.

But it had been personal to him.

Lucifer, the Morningstar, appeared before Armin with ruined wings and a sad expression. He took a seat quietly.

"Incarceration is not punishment. It is a rehabilitation." He placed a clipboard gently on the table. "You are here to learn. To see why you did what you did, and to see how it hurt. How it hurt those around you. How it hurt yourself."

Armin wanted to speak, to protest. To shout that it was all a dream. But even he could see it was too vivid. To real.

Too deserved.

"There is no fast track here, Armin. No shortcuts. When you are ready, you will know. You will see. And we will wish you well." Lucifer smiled at him a patient smile. Grandfatherly, was the word that came to Armin.

"But that's not today." And he rose from his chair,tattered wings trailing as he made for the door. As he left, Lucifer turned once more and nodded knowingly to Armin.

"Good luck."

And he closed the door, and Armin was elsewhen, staring down a different barrel.

Proper Currency

" 'Ow hard ees it to get buried wit' a decent cigar, ees all I am aks-ing." The Baron demanded. He was leaning over the top of his cubicle, looking but not really seeing into Charon's little corner of the afterlife. He let one hand dangle into Charon's cube and played with the other Psychopomp's toy boat. "De ones we got up 'ere are terrible, I tells you." He bemoaned.

Without taking his wild eyes off his new client, Charon deftly took the toy boat out of Baron Samedi's hand and placed it on his desk.

"One moment please, Madam." He apologized to his client.

"At least de rum is not so bad." The Baron's other hand came up from behind the wall, bearing an over full tumbler of rum that he began happily to sip.

Charon sighed, and rolled his mad eyes eyes to look at the pallid, skull like face of Baron Samedi.

"What do you want, Baron."

"Noting!" He replied innocently, swirling his drink around and leaning heavily on the cubicle wall. "Noting, dat is, that you shouldn't want yourself mon ami." And he grinned wickedly.

"I am not going out drinking with you again, Baron." Charon stated coldly, before adjusting his rust-coloured tie.

"Awww, come now... We won't drink so very much dis time, I swear..." The Baron gestured eagerly with his drink before realizing the irony and putting it down on Charon's filing cabinet. "You are such a great wingman, Charon... I need you, mon ami!" And he opened his arms wide, eyes pleading.

"Absolutely not. The last time I went out for an evening with you, Baron, I wound up spending two weeks in the Diyu. Alone. No thank you."

"Ahh, but dis time I promise not to abandon you for some qualitee time wit' Hausos." The Baron looked at Charon's client, a clearly confused young woman, and gave her a wink. "Even eef it was totally worth it, I assure you."

Charon's wild gaze bore in to Baron Samedi with renewed ferocity. His face was a statue of contempt.

"So yes den?" The baron asked, eyebrows high.

"No."

"Hmm." The Baron looked crestfallen, but not not defeated. "Are you sure there ees nothing I can say to sweeten the deal, wingaman?" And he began to crack the knuckles on one hand using only his thumb.

"Certainly not." Charon stated firmly. "Now if you don't mind, I have a fair amount of paperwork to get through here so..."

"Nothing... at all?" The Baron smiled and produced, seemingly out of thin air, a single Obol. He rolled the ancient greek coin across the backs of his fingers, letting it flash in the fluorescent light.

Charon was transfixed. "Where did you get that?"

"Oh, I been hanging on to dis for a while now, wingman. Shall we say seven o'clock?" He grinned, holding the coin out to Charon.

Angrily, Charon snapped it out of his hand and examined it. He turned it this way and that, felt its weight. He slumped slightly. Definitely authentic.

"Fine." He growled at the Baron. "Until then, could you kindly shove off."

"Sure, sure." The Baron cackled, retreating back into his cubicle. Just as his top hat was about to dissappear (much to Charon's relief), he popped back up. Charon slumped.

"Forgot my drink, mon ami." He grabbed his rum from the top of Charon's filing cabinet. "And since I'm in such a good mood..." He casually flipped a second coin to the young woman waiting to be processed by Charon. "Make sure you get a nice afterlife, eh madam?" He winked at her, and vanished back into his cubicle.

She held the weighty, ancient coin in her hand. It was silvery, and had an engraving of an insect on it. When she looked up, Charon was eying it hungrily.

He cleared his throat, and with a sweep of his arm slid the huge pile of paperwork he'd pulled out for her to complete into the trash. He pulled out a single sheet, without taking his eyes off the coin, and asked her a single question.

"So, do you prefer penthouse, or ground floor terrace?"

Paperwork After All

"Oh!  Oh!  And, uhh.. in... I want to say third grade?  I'm pretty sure it was third grade.  I gave Bruce Wilkins my pudding because he didn't have a lunch.  So... you know... that's pretty good.  Of me.  That makes me a pretty good person, right?  I mean, with all the other stuff?" The banker sputtered, clutching at verbal straws.  He sat in an uncomfortable, government issue plastic chair wearing an increasingly sweaty suit with his tie hanging loose around his neck.  In front of him was a desk, across which sat the main reason for his growing fear and discomfort.

In the much more comfortable chair across the desk sat the ibis-headed ancient Egyptian god Thoth.  He was wearing a crisp white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and had a nice silver tie on.  Nothing ostentatious, just... nice.  He was rifling through a set of papers in a drawer, not really listening to the man before him.

"Mmmhmm, yes, yes... that's nice." He muttered.  "Ah!  Here we go." He pulled a form out of his desk, and handed it across to the nervous banker. "Can you fill that out for me while I take care of the measuring?  That'd be great."

"Um.  Uhm" The banker shakily took the forms from Thoth, not taking his eyes off the bird-head that was busily ignoring him in turn.  "Do you have a.., a pen I could use?"

"Hmm?  Oh, a pen.  Yes of course." Thoth indicated to his arms, as a magician would to indicate there was nothing up their sleeves.  He then turned his hand upside down, and when he brought it upside right once more there was a pen in his palm.  He offered it to the banker absent-mindedly.

"Thank you..." He took the pen out of the god's hand, and examined it carefully.  It seemed like a normal, cheap Bic pen.  He frowned at it, and drew a line.  All normal.  He looked at Thoth once more, and shivered slightly.  Thoth was bent over behind the desk, apparently untangling something.

The banker flipped the forms over, and frowned.  "Hmm." He intoned.

Thoth looked up from behind the desk.  His body was bent fully over, but his birdlike neck stretched up without trouble, bringing his whole head above the line of the desk. "What?"

The banker held up the forms to show the god.  The ancient deity looked at the forms, then back at the banker.  "What?"

"It's in hieroglyphics."

"Yes, it's a 637-B form."

"I can't read hieroglyphics."

"You didn't say you were illiterate when I asked you at the beginning of the interview."

"I'm not illiterate!" The banker replied, ruffled.  "I can read and write english perfectly well, thank you.  Nobody uses hieroglyphs anymore!  Not for... thousands of years!"

Thoth sighed.  Humans.

"Oh yes, because that language lasts so long..." He muttered under his breath, which due to his long bird-beak was quite apparent.  "Here you go, I've switched it out for the 637-BeS, the simplified english form.  Just in case."

The banker looked at the forms again, and they were indeed english.  And... written in crayon.  He frowned at the bird-headed god again.

The questions were all about what kind of person he thought he had been in life, who he had wronged, what kind of conquering he had done, what he would likely have been buried with.  All very unsettling, but the cold, emotionless governmental style way in which everything was written really took the soul out of it all and he found he had little problem filling everything out.  When he looked up from the form after double checking all of his answers, he saw Thoth looking at him, and a small set of golden scales on the desk.  The kind you see on courthouses, or more commonly on shitty lawyer office ads.

"All done?  Great!  I'll take that." Thoth placed the form in the 'out' box on his desk. "You like the scales?  They're antique.  Won them in a bet with Justice.  For a blind lady, she's usually better at cards."

The banker just nodded slowly.  He was trying to figure out what they were for.  The last time he'd seen a pair was when he went to visit his dealer in person, up in the Hamptons... But Thoth didn't seem the type, somehow.

"Alright, now that the paperwork is out of the way, we can get to the important stuff. I know, it's a little unsettling. Don't worry, happens to everyone. A little anxiety before the big moment.  Judgement... scary stuff!  But don't let it get to you.  Everyone goes through here, or somewhere like here."

"Uhhhhh..."

"Tell you what, maybe I can help you calm down.  You like magic tricks?  Everyone likes magic.  So... tell me...." Thoth waved his hands in the air, fingers splayed out, and then clasped them together, as though around a ball.  "Is this your heart?" and he opened them, to reveal a beating, bloody, human heart.

The banker went white, and clutched at his chest.  He felt... an emptyness.  But what was more unsettling was what he didn't feel.  His heartbeat.

"Haha, don't panic!" Thoth said. "You want to hold it for a minute?  It's pretty strange, I know."

The banker shook his head vigorously, eyes like dinner plates.  He continued to clutch at his chest, expecting at any moment to keel over.

"Oh come now, calm down. Don't forget, you're already dead." And Thoth gave what the banker assumed was a smile, although beaks don't lend themselves to the motion.  "That's not the worrisome part, trust me..." And he placed the heart on one of the scales, watching it tip back and forth.

"This is."