The Reaper's Fifth

1 - The Mortal Tremors

Hospitals are loud in a peculiar manner, not in the loudness—though there is that—but in insistence. Machines insist just like voices insist that something can still be done. It is a place designed to argue with endings.

I did not wait for knocks... Not twice and certainly not thrice. I just entered the hospital like I was supposed to. The dying didn't wait for anyone's permission except mine, and hospitals were far too busy pretending they could outpace inevitability to notice when I had quietly spaced through their walls.

Valentine's Day was inefficient to say the least. Love made people careless—it distracted them from symptoms, from warning signs and even from the simplest arithmetic of mortality. I had just collected a soul from the hospital; lovers experimenting on Valentine's Day.

A mysterious energy jolted through me as the death scroll hovered faintly above my hand. I stepped through the trauma bay wall and into the claustrophobic emergency room reeking of antiseptic and adrenaline.

Name: Jordan Riggs
Age: 32
Time of Death: 21:13
Cause of Death: Cardiac Arrest

I glanced at the scroll again and then at the clock, leaning against the wall. I still had a couple of minutes. He was already on the table when I entered. A team of doctors surrounded him, but only one of them truly mattered. She stood beside him, her brunette hair carelessly tied up in a messy bun. Her hands were placed firmly against his chest as she counted compressions with controlled precision.

"Clear!"

The defibrillator charged the paddles with a steady rising whine. His body jolted in the air with the contact. The monitor stuttered, then flattened again into a single, unwavering line.

"Charge to two hundred," she said, her voice steady despite the tremor in her hands. A thin chain bearing a small book pendant labeled 'Death Note' glinted around her neck. It caught the overhead light each time she leaned forward.

She looked around, that's when her gaze met mine. She looked at me twice as it took a moment for recognition to settle. Most mortals do not perceive the precise shape of me. They sense a pressure, perhaps. Maybe an aura... a shift in the air. Very rarely, someone close to crossing dared to meet my hollowed stare. But she was not the one who was crossing. She was furious, heartbroken even.

"Don't you dare," she muttered through clenched teeth.

No one else reacted, her colleagues moved around her, declaring vitals, calling for another round. They thought her words were meant for the man on the table but they were not.

I waited patiently. There was no need to rush. I had stood at the edge of battlefields and nursery cribs alike. Time bent easily around me. A few seconds one way or another before I started the process meant nothing. If I was interfered with—that was a different story.

At 21:13 precisely, the black thread began to weave upwards into the air, begging to be pulled out. I stepped in closer, careful not to disturb their carefully choreographed movements of hope and determination.

She saw me move, her jaw tightening. The defibrillator fired again, his body jolted again. The thread weakened, its color flashing a mix of black and white under the shock before finally settling into its intended silver. There was a particular stillness in the air when even the soul exhausts the will to live. I had grown accustomed to it. Souls neither whined nor fought; they were less dramatic than people expected. That was the distinction between heartbeat and deathly still.

I reached for the silver thread with practiced ease. His soul separated gently as my long skeletal fingers pulled at it, but my attention remained on her. She was still staring at me as though I had personally wronged her. Jordan, on the other hand, seemed almost relieved, in a way many do once the struggle is over.