~ 3 ~
Los Vegas, 1912
“A city of many wonders. I’ve seen better, of course, but you can’t help enjoy the finer things.”
Death donned a suit of white, the lapels and cuffs the same jet black as his eyes. The city of Los Vegas itself was a wondrous web of lights, metal, sweat, smoke and lust. To glittering dancer girls to men in taught ties, sharp suits, and crooked grins. Death had found if there was one word he could describe history it would be repetition. Time and Time again history proved to be an endless cycle. There had been cities such as Los Vegas before and there’d be another thousand before the world met its end. Of course, none of this bothered Sebastian Elliot the III.
“I understand his mother was an addict of whatever pleased her in the moment and men who can’t mind their tongues but did she really have to name him after a murderer?” Death sighed, walking beside his spectral companion and Sebastian himself.
“The Elliot’s take pride in their defensive selves that the original Sebastian wasn’t a murderer,” Booker grunted, hands shoved into the pockets of his gray suit. Death cocked his head with a wicked grin.
“So, you’re just going to pretend we didn’t watch Seb stab all those poor girls?”
“That was many lifetimes ago, Death. This Sebastian is different,” Booker insisted. To that, Death laughed. “You make some very interestingly blind assumptions about the young man. You know for a ghost you’re quite the predictable type,” He mocked.
“Oh, please enlighten me how you reached this conclusion,” Booker said, clucking his tongue to an offbeat tune.
“I’ve seen the first parents, the hundreds of millions thereafter and I’ll see the last. You’re no different. Love’s blinding, you see,” Death explained best he knew how. Blunt, with a distinct stroke of mockery.
Sebastian, just as his ancestors and certainly his predecessors would carry the sand dune hair and ocean blue eyes. He wore a crisp suit of red and pessimism upon slumped shoulders, the limestone pillar he leaned against the cold as his intentions. Death put a hand on Seb’s head and stared. Night against the ocean. As Death twisted his neck to peer into his eyes, music half-sun with static twisted from the golden horns of their gramophones and out the windows to pour into the streets
“I must admit it’s been a while since I haven’t felt the presence of fear. It’s quite sweet,” Death sighed.
“I know it’s your thing but please, restrain your creepiness,” Booker sighed, yanking Death away. As they stepped back onto the curb, they watched a woman clad in glittering crimson approach Seb. She tossed him a bullet, a name, and a life to be taken. They followed him through the neon lights and darkened alleyways and to a man whose life was for the taking. Booker deflected the bullets and washed away any threat to harm a hair on Sebastian’s head. Death’s Dog. That’s what Sebastian Elliot was known as. Some poor chump with the ability to dodge death as one might dodge a spider web they spot at the last minute.
“Is that all you see me as?” Death asked, sitting with his legs crossed on the lid of a dumpster bin.
“What?” Booker grunted, using his ghostly powers to throw the man against the concrete wall of the alley.
“You think me a spider. I see it in your eyes. Some white, long-legged thing that spins its web and catches whatever poor sod of a fly that flies up the wrong path,” Death muttered.
“You wanna know what I think?” Booker snapped, pummelling the man. Seb stood there and watched with cold, calculating eyes. He could not look upon Death nor Booker, but he trusted in the entity -
“Oh, please, enlighten me,” Death smirked.
“I think you’re a necessary evil, you’re a shit but we need you just as much as we need our mothers. But you’re so full of yourself you think yourself something more,” Booker said, letting the man slide, bloodied to the ground.
“But I am something more, yet I’m nothing,” Death sighed.
“I get it, you’re ironic,” Booker said, kicking the man one last time.
“A lot of things surprisingly are!” Death exclaimed happily, hopping off the bin.
Sebastian Elliot watched the man wheeze for breath, a curiosity in his eyes like how a cat watches a mouse.
He lifted his revolver, slow and predatory and with a gaze that crackled with glee and ice he squeezed the trigger.
It was a strange thing, a human taking another human's life. Death did not take lives, he received them. There’s an inherent difference between taking and receiving, a difference that a lot of people just didn’t understand. It was all a cycle of giving and taking and something like a life couldn’t be taken without something being given in return.
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