??? [♀] __ Allie [♀]
It's quiet.
You have heard that line before, right? --Ah, yes:
It's quiet. Too quiet. Not even a breath is heard amongst the silence, for not even silence dared to usher a sigh.
Not even the clouds trickle, nor do the winds whisper; not even the sun is to be seen. There is not even white noise etching in anyone's head.
Literally, quite literally, it is quiet. Too quiet.
There is only one girl aware. One girl whose footsteps echo, whose thoughts ricochet off of the confines of her mind, whose fingers tap ceremoniously on the kitchen table.
She's currently sitting at a bus stop, wondering why her bus isn't here yet (the silly driver's ten minutes late already!), and debating whether or not to start the quarrelsome walk to the office.
But the world is not ready for her to move yet, it is not ready to hear her heels clack on the pavement that's freshly damp from the morning rain. The world is not even ready to hear the rain again. But even the world's own forces move for no one, and soon, the rain starts dribbling and her heels start clacking. The earth moans, but it is somewhere in the eastern United States, and she has no care or knowledge. The world, after all, is still silent there.
Her heels clack and clack until she finally sees the building, but right before the door stands a figure. Can't be much older than herself; quite slim, rather sickly looking, even- and in that very instant, any feelings of fear she had float away. She still has some motherly instinct left in her, even after losing what she had it for, only some months ago.
Allie was young, she was twenty-three, and she was already working a desk job. Allie was single, but not by choice, she was completely alone, but not by desire. She was alone because Death deemed it so.
She drew her scarf closer to her lips and pressed onward to the doors. The rain tickled and tapped her, as if it were some kind of effervescent reminder of the tears she'd shed. The figure she was striding towards did not move, not even a blink, until it collapsed.
Allie broke into a run, shouting nonsensical things, little dabbles;
"Are you okay?" "Miss, Miss, please...? Hello?!" "Can you hear me!?"Papers flew from her binder and eventually she dropped it (it was soaked through and useless now, anyways; in a matter of moments the office building wouldn't even be standing). As soon as she reached the girl, she placed her palm on her cheek.
It left a burn mark.
"Oh, dear me," Allie's eyes rolled all over her surroundings, the lines of frozen cars, the people stopped mid-walk, and she wondered why she hadn't noticed any of it before.
"Who you?" It was a small voice, and even a few words droned on, dragging themselves up from the ground. "Why not..."
"Shh, you're awful sick now, aren't you?" Allie's eyes flicked towards her singed hand. "C'mon, stand up, come on now, I'll take you back to my place, get you all taken care of."
As the girl slowly stood, Allie realized that she was different. Not different-different, but
different: she had red eyes that were much too large to be a human's; they were serpentine in quality, and a happy red, though throbbing. Her skin was as pale as the whites in her eyes, and her hair matched the same tone as her irises. She wore but a few tattered rags sewn together, but they were done so very carefully, as to reveal a pattern: a pattern of wings and swirls and delicate breaths.
It was almost saddening to Allie, realizing that she must be in some sort of trouble, some sort of
something to be seeing things like this.
"Why... you... awake?"
The tone snapped Allie out of her observations with ease. "Well," she started, smoothing her work skirt, now completely soaked from the rain, "I think that is a question that I ought to be asking you, right? ...Clearly I'm not the only odd one out."
The girl coughed and began to stumble towards the office doors again. "No, no, this way, c'mon, my house... Ah, err, I'm sure someone won't mind if we... No, here, we can walk, it's not that long." Allie fumbled for words and began tugging at her blouse, trying to fix the way it sloppily hung across her stomach.
"Big gray--" the girl pointed a spidery finger towards the office building, using all of her strength to lift her arm. "Going... Down, down. Fall."
Alarm immediately stuck on Allie's features, dipping the soft face into plaster, leaving little marks forever.
The office building was falling, right then, and in slow motion. Allie could feel her legs stick to the pavement, which had suddenly become sticky; the rain felt like daggers, stabbing at her exposed flesh. Her eyes quickly dashed over to the alien girl, whose eyes had grown so wide Allie thought they might consume her face.
"Stand... Away, get, get." The girl turned and stared directly at Allie, sick, disgusting teeth showing; they were huge, and they were fangs, and they were dripping with... Something. "Now, now! GET!"
Allie backed away swiftly as she could, unable to help feeling like a lost puppy for being scolded. Her heels were being swallowed by the abysmal mass of concrete. She tried not to see the cars being swallowed, or the other buildings, or the people. She focused on the only color left in the world now: the red.
"Big Gray is... Death, death of world...," The girl mumbled, words slightly askew from her teeth (which were actually growing at this point). "Death of loved, yes? Your loved, dead?"
Allie nodded, hardly positive if it was directed at her. "You're saying- you're saying that the office that I have worked at for four years is Death itself?!"
"No-o," Her speech faltered and her eyes shrunk, her palms grew, grew like elastic plastic wrap; soon they were as large as the doors, and hardly resembled hands anymore. "Y-You are Dea-ath, and I'm save. I'm save you."
"But..." Her body felt like nothing anymore, and she didn't dare look at her arms, for she feared that now she'd be wearing a large black cloak. "Why?"
The girl tilted her head. "Because," Her small, thin eyebrows shifted, and her hands began to deflate, and the building froze- no movement left in the rickety shackles. "Just because everyone else die doesn't mean, it, it doesn't mean, uh..."
She shuffled her feet on the pavement, and if she could blush, she would've.
"You special, you don't know you kill, and- and- second... Second chances!" She exclaimed the last part with victory on her tongue, for finally remembering what she had been trying to say.
"But if I'm killing everyone, why give me a second chance?"
"Who said, who, who said you wanted kill? You want--save," she said, breathing out the words. Her energy was still low and the last bursts were being puffed out with her speech. "I save you, you save huma... People, yes."
And with that, Allie could feel the rain hitting her again, she could feel the oxygen betraying her, getting caught in her throat. "How?"
Now the girl's face was devious, sly, but very attractive, if anything but. She slowly drew out her arms, and stretched them, pulled them longer. Her hands morphed into cobra heads, her arms the long, slithering bodies. She coiled her arms around the office building, heaved it over her back, and threw it into the sky.
It spun away and skittered across the clouds like a rock skipping on a pond. "We
destroy."
Stardust & Angel 
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