Title: “Wages of Sin”
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: PG
Summary: A new ghost Colin Sparks has his first serious brush with the ominous men with sticks and ropes. Particularly the one who calls himself Anthony. [Medley Relay midquel]
Disclaimer: Being Human belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC. Colin Sparks and the other OCs belong to yours truly and![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shirogiku. Quotes from “Halfway Down” by A. A. Milne.
A/N: This is choppy, non-linear, stream-of-consciousness, minimalist and plain weird.
WAGES OF SIN
It’s a little like a Jane Austen novel if you don’t think too much about it (and eliminate all the torture of course). There is enough animosity on both sides, but there is also something else. Sparks wouldn’t bother defining it. There is probably a word for it in some language. A long, daunting word with too many letters that only complicates things. Things always get complicated if you put them into words. For example, if someone asks him why he keeps doing what he does, he will say: For the world. It’s what he’s been taught. But there is always: For me and Just because and – cue the dark shadow with a stick and a length of rope - That’s why.
The latter is the most complicated of all.
--
Purgatory is empty but full of things. His is full of stairs, and a voice says in his head, clear as a bell:
Halfway down the stairs
is a stair
where i sit.
there isn't any
other stair
quite like
it.
Sometimes something is falling, tumbling down like a sack of potatoes, but if he doesn’t look at it, it almost doesn’t exist. He has to go twelve dozen steps up to know it’s still the same room.
--
The rope is cutting into his wrists. Like he is alive. The thing towers over him, looking like a person, like it’s always been that way, and it says without actually speaking:
“Hi.”
--
There are forms to fill out, queues to stand in, coupons to show. Purgatory is bureaucratic to the point of absurd. It is a cold store and the voices are whispering but he is always alone. Except when someone stops by to say hello. He doesn’t know how much time passes before he begins to suspect it is always the same person.
--
Kevin Wells was twenty-three and had the eyes of a twelve-year-old who had wanted to be Tintin. He didn’t realize that this job was not about being great. It was about being average.
“I think he hero-worships you,” Pryce said. “You’ve been in the field for decades and you’re still alive.”
Of all the ludicrous things.
Mortality rate among the men in grey had never been too high.
“You seek them out, Sparks,” Pryce said, a hint of reproach in his voice, just barely drifting below the surface. “Bad things. Not the best example for an impressionable young man.”
He pretended to ignore the thinly veiled message: I used to hero-worship you too, but I’m older now and all I see is a tired man one step away from becoming an alcoholic.
--
He is tied to a chair in a clean, white room.
--
Kevin Wells is still twenty-three but his eyes are dead. He says: “You fed me to a vampire.”
--
He is tied to a chair in the clean, white room, and the shadowy person is looming above him, calling him the maker of dead things. He can’t tell if it’s a compliment or an insult.
“Grey things,” the shadow says. “Impertinent. Tricky. Traipse around the place like they own it. Never fill out any forms.”
It pokes him with a stick, and he can almost see a shape, and he could always almost see a shape. It’s a young-looking man with dark hair and old eyes and halfway up the stairs isn't up. He is wearing a fine-tailoured black suit that reminds Colin of his own uniform. They are all so posh. The world should be green with envy.
--
Kevin says he just wants to know why.
“I wanted to see your door,” Sparks says, coolly. There is no point lying here. (You irritated me would also be a viable option.)
“Did you?”
“No. I killed the vampire too.”
How very comforting.
--
Thud! is the sound a body makes when it falls down the stairs.
“June 5, 1942,” the reaper says in a way that suggests dates mean nothing to him. Sparks would rather they all stopped soiling this date by pronouncing it all the time.
The reaper hands him a chocolate bar.
And it isn't down.
--
After he kills Wells for the second time, he begins to forget. His name, his life, the technicalities of his job fade as if they were never there.
It isn't in the nursery.
It isn't in town.
“Every time I stop by,” the reaper says in a featureless voice that carries someone else’s intonations, “your place is sterile as an operating theatre and you’re impeccably dressed and smelling of toothpaste and,” he grins, “gin.”
It’s supposed to mean something.
--
“Oh my God,” May laughed. “Someone needs a haircut.”
She tugged at his unruly hair that was beginning to curl like it always did if he allowed it to grow out. He let her do whatever she wanted and listened to the quiet snip-snip of the scissors.
“Would you call me a nag?” May asked.
“What?”
“Just something John said.”
(John, her husband. He will forget that later.)
“He’s a lawyer,” Colin said, chuckling. “If anyone’s a nag in the family, it’s him.”
(He does miss her. It’s just not always relevant.)
--
“I’m here,” he says, and shudders at how little I means now. “I don’t know why, but I’m here. I need to… to speak. I need to hear the sound of my voice. To prove that… I’m here.”
The reaper is nowhere to be seen. For a moment, he begins to doubt the creature was ever here.
--
He kills Wells because the spirit attacks him. Moreover, oblivion is better than going full on vengeful, which is what is about to happen. He kills him in self-defence. Part of it is mercy kill.
If he repeats that several times in a row, he will almost believe it. Until the day he almost forgets it.
--
“Boys miss you,” May said.
They don’t know me, he thought. He was Uncle Colin who brought birthday presents six months late.
“Oh,” he said. “I’ll stop by.”
“You’d better.”
But then he died.
--
“Do you have a name?” he asks the reaper.
It’s been approximately four hours since his previous visit. He’s been counting, and the count is well over fourteen thousand.
“What’s in a name?” the reaper asks quizzically. Great; he must have tortured Shakespeare.
“Everything. My name is Colin Sparks.”
He concentrates on the sound of it, rolls the words in his mouth to reacquire the taste. The reaper gives him a look that spells: so?
“My name is Colin Sparks. I was born in London in 1936. My mother’s name is Christina. My father’s name is Edward. I have a sister, May, and a brother, August. I am a man in grey. I died on May 2, 1973.”
He takes a step towards the reaper and starts again. And again. Until it’s a pop tune that is stuck in his head.
“Useless,” the reaper says and hands him a clipboard. “Sign a waiver.”
Sparks grabs the lapels of his jacket that almost feel like real fabric.
“You think that’s enough? You think you can just talk to me and I’ll fade away?” He laughs. “Well, if I do, you will at least remember me.”
“We don’t–.”
“Speak to me in your own voice!” he bellows. “You are but one of them.”
--
He is tied to a chair in a clean, white room.
“Anthony,” the reaper says and winks at him. “Don’t tell anyone.”
--
Jones has been his mentor for almost a year now. Jones has a century worth of experience and most of the answers.
“What are those men with sticks and ropes?” Sparks asks.
“They are what you would call reapers. Only they are not angels. At least I don’t think they are.”
Sparks recollects his regular visitor. Jones told him he had been gone for four weeks. Time doesn’t mean anything in Purgatory. Neither does identity. But he remembers the reaper’s steely, curious eyes and the derisive curve of his lips and the Don’t tell anyone like they are co-conspirators, and he imagines tearing him out of the canvas as if plucking a chunk of meat off bones. He wonders if the wound would bleed.
“They run the place,” Jones explains. “No one knows where they come from or if they can be killed. No one knows how many of them there are. But you have to take them into account. Always. They are not harmless.”
He already knows that.
“We are strangers in a strange land. Their land.”
--
A reaper’s rope is a living thing as much as any thing can be living on the other side. It crawls up to Sparks and coils tentatively around his calf like it knows him.
“It shines,” the reaper says. “The grey thing shines. When it runs away.”
It’s a shadow in the twilight of the corridor but he is certain it’s the same reaper that kept him tied to a chair.
Funny thoughts are running through his head.
The reaper murmurs:
It isn't really
Anywhere!
It's somewhere else
Instead!
--
Like he said: it’s complicated.
June 24, 2012
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: PG
Summary: A new ghost Colin Sparks has his first serious brush with the ominous men with sticks and ropes. Particularly the one who calls himself Anthony. [Medley Relay midquel]
Disclaimer: Being Human belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC. Colin Sparks and the other OCs belong to yours truly and
shirogiku. Quotes from “Halfway Down” by A. A. Milne.A/N: This is choppy, non-linear, stream-of-consciousness, minimalist and plain weird.
You and I have memories
Longer than the road that stretches out ahead.
The Beatles. “Two of Us”
It’s a little like a Jane Austen novel if you don’t think too much about it (and eliminate all the torture of course). There is enough animosity on both sides, but there is also something else. Sparks wouldn’t bother defining it. There is probably a word for it in some language. A long, daunting word with too many letters that only complicates things. Things always get complicated if you put them into words. For example, if someone asks him why he keeps doing what he does, he will say: For the world. It’s what he’s been taught. But there is always: For me and Just because and – cue the dark shadow with a stick and a length of rope - That’s why.
The latter is the most complicated of all.
--
Purgatory is empty but full of things. His is full of stairs, and a voice says in his head, clear as a bell:
Halfway down the stairs
is a stair
where i sit.
there isn't any
other stair
quite like
it.
Sometimes something is falling, tumbling down like a sack of potatoes, but if he doesn’t look at it, it almost doesn’t exist. He has to go twelve dozen steps up to know it’s still the same room.
--
The rope is cutting into his wrists. Like he is alive. The thing towers over him, looking like a person, like it’s always been that way, and it says without actually speaking:
“Hi.”
--
There are forms to fill out, queues to stand in, coupons to show. Purgatory is bureaucratic to the point of absurd. It is a cold store and the voices are whispering but he is always alone. Except when someone stops by to say hello. He doesn’t know how much time passes before he begins to suspect it is always the same person.
--
Kevin Wells was twenty-three and had the eyes of a twelve-year-old who had wanted to be Tintin. He didn’t realize that this job was not about being great. It was about being average.
“I think he hero-worships you,” Pryce said. “You’ve been in the field for decades and you’re still alive.”
Of all the ludicrous things.
Mortality rate among the men in grey had never been too high.
“You seek them out, Sparks,” Pryce said, a hint of reproach in his voice, just barely drifting below the surface. “Bad things. Not the best example for an impressionable young man.”
He pretended to ignore the thinly veiled message: I used to hero-worship you too, but I’m older now and all I see is a tired man one step away from becoming an alcoholic.
--
He is tied to a chair in a clean, white room.
--
Kevin Wells is still twenty-three but his eyes are dead. He says: “You fed me to a vampire.”
--
He is tied to a chair in the clean, white room, and the shadowy person is looming above him, calling him the maker of dead things. He can’t tell if it’s a compliment or an insult.
“Grey things,” the shadow says. “Impertinent. Tricky. Traipse around the place like they own it. Never fill out any forms.”
It pokes him with a stick, and he can almost see a shape, and he could always almost see a shape. It’s a young-looking man with dark hair and old eyes and halfway up the stairs isn't up. He is wearing a fine-tailoured black suit that reminds Colin of his own uniform. They are all so posh. The world should be green with envy.
--
Kevin says he just wants to know why.
“I wanted to see your door,” Sparks says, coolly. There is no point lying here. (You irritated me would also be a viable option.)
“Did you?”
“No. I killed the vampire too.”
How very comforting.
--
Thud! is the sound a body makes when it falls down the stairs.
“June 5, 1942,” the reaper says in a way that suggests dates mean nothing to him. Sparks would rather they all stopped soiling this date by pronouncing it all the time.
The reaper hands him a chocolate bar.
And it isn't down.
--
After he kills Wells for the second time, he begins to forget. His name, his life, the technicalities of his job fade as if they were never there.
It isn't in the nursery.
It isn't in town.
“Every time I stop by,” the reaper says in a featureless voice that carries someone else’s intonations, “your place is sterile as an operating theatre and you’re impeccably dressed and smelling of toothpaste and,” he grins, “gin.”
It’s supposed to mean something.
--
“Oh my God,” May laughed. “Someone needs a haircut.”
She tugged at his unruly hair that was beginning to curl like it always did if he allowed it to grow out. He let her do whatever she wanted and listened to the quiet snip-snip of the scissors.
“Would you call me a nag?” May asked.
“What?”
“Just something John said.”
(John, her husband. He will forget that later.)
“He’s a lawyer,” Colin said, chuckling. “If anyone’s a nag in the family, it’s him.”
(He does miss her. It’s just not always relevant.)
--
“I’m here,” he says, and shudders at how little I means now. “I don’t know why, but I’m here. I need to… to speak. I need to hear the sound of my voice. To prove that… I’m here.”
The reaper is nowhere to be seen. For a moment, he begins to doubt the creature was ever here.
--
He kills Wells because the spirit attacks him. Moreover, oblivion is better than going full on vengeful, which is what is about to happen. He kills him in self-defence. Part of it is mercy kill.
If he repeats that several times in a row, he will almost believe it. Until the day he almost forgets it.
--
“Boys miss you,” May said.
They don’t know me, he thought. He was Uncle Colin who brought birthday presents six months late.
“Oh,” he said. “I’ll stop by.”
“You’d better.”
But then he died.
--
“Do you have a name?” he asks the reaper.
It’s been approximately four hours since his previous visit. He’s been counting, and the count is well over fourteen thousand.
“What’s in a name?” the reaper asks quizzically. Great; he must have tortured Shakespeare.
“Everything. My name is Colin Sparks.”
He concentrates on the sound of it, rolls the words in his mouth to reacquire the taste. The reaper gives him a look that spells: so?
“My name is Colin Sparks. I was born in London in 1936. My mother’s name is Christina. My father’s name is Edward. I have a sister, May, and a brother, August. I am a man in grey. I died on May 2, 1973.”
He takes a step towards the reaper and starts again. And again. Until it’s a pop tune that is stuck in his head.
“Useless,” the reaper says and hands him a clipboard. “Sign a waiver.”
Sparks grabs the lapels of his jacket that almost feel like real fabric.
“You think that’s enough? You think you can just talk to me and I’ll fade away?” He laughs. “Well, if I do, you will at least remember me.”
“We don’t–.”
“Speak to me in your own voice!” he bellows. “You are but one of them.”
--
He is tied to a chair in a clean, white room.
“Anthony,” the reaper says and winks at him. “Don’t tell anyone.”
--
Jones has been his mentor for almost a year now. Jones has a century worth of experience and most of the answers.
“What are those men with sticks and ropes?” Sparks asks.
“They are what you would call reapers. Only they are not angels. At least I don’t think they are.”
Sparks recollects his regular visitor. Jones told him he had been gone for four weeks. Time doesn’t mean anything in Purgatory. Neither does identity. But he remembers the reaper’s steely, curious eyes and the derisive curve of his lips and the Don’t tell anyone like they are co-conspirators, and he imagines tearing him out of the canvas as if plucking a chunk of meat off bones. He wonders if the wound would bleed.
“They run the place,” Jones explains. “No one knows where they come from or if they can be killed. No one knows how many of them there are. But you have to take them into account. Always. They are not harmless.”
He already knows that.
“We are strangers in a strange land. Their land.”
--
A reaper’s rope is a living thing as much as any thing can be living on the other side. It crawls up to Sparks and coils tentatively around his calf like it knows him.
“It shines,” the reaper says. “The grey thing shines. When it runs away.”
It’s a shadow in the twilight of the corridor but he is certain it’s the same reaper that kept him tied to a chair.
Funny thoughts are running through his head.
The reaper murmurs:
It isn't really
Anywhere!
It's somewhere else
Instead!
--
Like he said: it’s complicated.
June 24, 2012
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