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For the next several days I lost myself in my work. I ignored Thanos and Adrienne and even the other Reapers, for the most part. If they had a question I would answer it but other than that I stayed to myself. I still found myself thinking about what Damir had said and because I was so focused on it I noticed so many different things about myself that had changed. It was nothing physical, not really. Sure my hair had gained a few more black streaks but other than that I still looked the same. It was on the inside that I had changed and that was strange to me.
When had it happened? I had felt like myself up until...until the day that I saved Thanos by healing all the Resurrectors as well. The change had to have happened then, maybe when I was losing myself into the darkness. I felt myself slipping away and I had accepted that I was dying. Strangely enough I was prepared for death and the fact that I would have died saving the lives of so many was a fulfilling feeling. But then I had been jolted back into existence and that left me to do what? How do you move on after an experience like that? Things were different and change was not something I wanted to accept now. I had been at peace with my life and my death, even if I had left some things unanswered, but if I had learned anything as the Angel of Death, it was that none of us got to choose when our lives ended. I just didn’t know how to react to being given another chance at life and it was changing everything. It seemed the most logical solution.
I let out a deep breath and tried to push aside all other thoughts as I opened up my scroll to find that my list had exploded to a near full capacity. It was definitely not a sight I had expected to see, not with having the Reapers around to share the workload. Over the past week I had gotten used to only having maybe twenty or thirty names on my list at any one time but now it seemed as if I had at least a hundred. Add to that the fact that I could see that most of those names were fated to go at the same time and I was left with one opinion of it all; there was going to be a huge and tragic accident.
This was not something to be handled alone, even if it was possible I could do it all myself. Trying to handle too much could lead to a soul slipping through the cracks of the system. I was not about to let it happen, to let a soul disappear and have to travel the world without knowing what was going on. A lost soul would start to go insane and those feelings would slip into anyone who happened to be around, which was one of the most dangerous ways of twisting Fate and throwing off the Balance. That was one of the main hazards of the job and there was no way I was going to allow that to happen to me. When it came to work I knew I was a perfectionist. I needed everything to work out properly and to be done exactly right. Failure had never been an option for me. I was used to working under pressure and getting what I wanted when it came to work.
I headed for the study and after a few steps inside I found that Thanos was not there. It shouldn’t have been a huge surprise, but I was still disappointed. He had been spending a lot of his time avoiding me. It was likely that he was focusing on his work too. That was how we were and we both knew it. See, that was a reason why I thought we could work. It didn't matter what was going on in our lives. When it came to work, we both put that first...well, except when the other one was in danger. Then we became crazily obsessed. We needed to work on that and to do that we actually needed to spend more time together. I needed to track him down, but it would have to wait until after I had dealt with this enormous Reaping.
"Hey Thanos, I wanted to talk to you about..." Adrienne walked into the office and froze when she saw me. "Oh, Tamesis. I didn't see you there. Is Thanos around?"
As much as I wanted to, I couldn't just ignore her. She had asked me a question directly and it would have been incredibly rude not to answer. "No. I think he's out working."
Adrienne nodded. "Well, I just had a bunch of extra names pop up onto my list and I thought that maybe it would be a joint operation."
That made sense. Of course someone else would have the list too. That happened with events that involved a lot of souls. And because she brought it up and Thanos wasn't around I had to deal with it all. That was my responsibility as Angel of Death. When Death wasn't around I was in charge. That had unintentionally become the way everyone saw it, seeing as how I had been in charge during the time that Thanos had been imprisoned. I still did not like being in charge but it was something I was trying to work on being more comfortable with. "The names showed up on my list too." I paused, my mind racing as I tried to think of any other way to handle the situation so I would not have to deal with Adrienne for longer than necessary.
I could handle it myself; I was confident in my abilities and I had handled large accidents before, but as I stood there looking at Adrienne, I realized that was no way to handle things. Perhaps that was why Damir thought I was different. I had drifted farther away from everyone else and withdrew into my own little world. There was one thing I could do now that would be a step in what I considered the right direction, to starting to work in a team, even if I usually preferred to work alone. "We should handle it before something else happens."
Project Death: Resurrection Page 38