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The opium addict suddenly opened his olive eyes.  He was breathing heavily and cold sweat was beading along his forehead and dripping down his cheeks.  He had had a terrible dream; the smell of fear and blood was still imprinted heavily in his nose even though the dream couldn’t have been real.  But he had been doubling doses, he didn’t even know how he had gotten home.  He lifted a hand to wipe his brow, but a sudden voice stopped him.
"I wouldn't move that arm if I were you.  If you need something, do it with the other arm, I'm working on this one now."  The voice obviously belonged to a woman and there was a soft lilt to it, like it didn’t have a care in the world, though there was an impatient undertone to it.
At first the addict didn't know what had happened, he was so out of it, so he reached up with his other hand and wiped the sweat from his forehead, pushing sandy curls from his eyes as well.  He was about to drift off back to sleep when the fact that he wasn’t alone in his room hit him like his lows.  He looked over at his arm, the one the voice had told him not to move.  A girl sat at his bedside, slowly unraveling the thread from his shirt's sleeve, or that’s what it looked like.  From what he could see her hair was black as pitch, short, and naturally spiky.  "Wh-who are you?" the young man said, completely freaked out.  He didn’t get many visitors period, so what the hell was this girl, whom he had never met, doing in his apartment unraveling his clothes?  In his opinion it was more than a valid reason to call the cops, there were two things stopping him.  One, the girl didn’t look like she was going to let him go, and two, if the police came to his apartment, they’d find a little more than a guy complaining about breaking and entering…
The girl looked up and the man had to stifle a gasp, her eyes were the same pale grey as the ice cubes in his freezer.  "Ren Si-Ang.  Nice to meet you.  Now if you wouldn't mind, I have a job to do, and you moving isn't helping," she said with a smirk.  Her voice held a slight lisp.  The man watched a moment and the source of her lisp was revealed, a safety pin periodically shot between her lips, sometimes open, sometimes closed, before returning to her mouth.
"Pardon me for asking," the man said, "but what exactly are you doing?”  That was when he realized that he wasn’t wearing a shirt.  He gulped loudly.  If it wasn’t his shirt, what was it?  Slowly he sat up, being careful not to move his arm; he didn’t want Ren to scold him again.
The girl, Ren, sighed.  "I'm not really doing anything.  You're the one dying," she said shortly.  “Don’t worry, I’m almost done,” she said nonchalantly.  She bobbed her head to a silent melody as the needle pricked at whatever it was she was unraveling.
The man sat back, shocked.  "D-dying?" he said, unable to believe the words.  What the hell was going on?  If he was dead then shouldn’t he be “seeing the light”?  Where the hell was the light!  This isn’t bad… he thought as he studied the girl a little closer deciding she was pretty good-looking.  But I was expecting the light!  Besides, I’m only 23!  …Can I really be dying?
"Yep, and for all you know, this is just a dream," Ren said with a mischievous smile.  "That stuff you took a little while ago had had some funky shit in it.  Don't trust anyone with that kind of stuff next time," she said like she knew where he was coming from.
"So," the man said, trying to break the weird silence and get some answers.  "Am I already dead?"  Ren nodded.  "Then what are you doing to me, if not inadvertently killing me?" the man asked.
"I'm detaching your soul from your body," Ren said looking up.  The man hadn't noticed the spool of silver thread beside her that she wound the unraveling thread around every so often.
As he pondered what she had just told him, he studied her a bit closer.  She was young.  She couldn’t have been older than twenty; younger than he was.  As his thoughts came to a wrap, he found that dying wasn’t so bad and he relaxed against his headboard wondering how his mom would take the news.  Ren made no attempt to hide her confusion at his willing compliance.
"Not going to scream bloody murder and try and make me stop?" she said, laughing as she pulled another thread meticulously from the man's body.  She was at his shoulder now.  Absently he wondered how much longer she had to go.
"No," the man said with a sigh.  "I can't fight fate.  If it's my time to die, then it's my time to die."
Ren smiled.  "Nice logic.  Back when I was alive, I thought the same thing," she said.  "By the way, I've got about an hour left, so feel free to talk to me and
everything.  Sakon's out on a date...normally he talks to me..." she continued.
The man nodded.  "Sakon?"  His mind reeled with questions now.  She was dead too?  Why?  How?  When?
Ren answered almost immediately.  "My partner in crime."  She smiled softly and he could tell that this Sakon character was close to Ren.
The man nodded.  "I'm Darien by the way," he said suddenly.  He figured that she should know his name...it wasn't right for her not to know...
Ren laughed.  "I know."  Darien cocked an eyebrow.  Ren saw the look and elaborated.  "I got the order to take your soul to the Dead.  The orders tell us everything really.  Cause of death, age, name, everything really..."
Darien nodded.  "Who's 'us'?" he asked after a moment.
Ren giggled.  "You sure have a lot of questions..."  She carefull took out a thread before answering.  "Reapers.  I'm a reaper and everyone else that carts wandering or dead souls around for a 'living' is considered a reaper.  Basically, after death, you can choose whether you want to rest in the Overworld, become a reaper, or be reincarnated depending on your sentence.  If you’re damned, you don’t get any choices.  You have to carry out your sentence until it expires, and some of them don’t ever expire.  I was only 19 when I died, so I wasn’t really ready to ‘rest.’  I still had so much I wanted to accomplish, you know?  I chose to become a reaper, and became one of about 1000,” she explained, trying to use the most simple of explanations.  Darien had to admit though, it was anything but simple.  She let out a long and heavy sigh.  "Normally people who die between the ages of 13 and 28 don't really want to just ‘let go’ so they decide to become reapers.  Just for the heck of it, really."
"And if you're a reaper, you still have a body?" Darien said, trying to clarify everything.  He was a bright kid, so everything she was telling him was making sense…sort of...but the body question totally baffled him...
Ren made a face.  “Not really…” she said.  "It fazes in and out of existence depending on where I'm at and what I'm doing."  She paused.  "Have you ever seen Bleach?" she asked.  The relationship between her and her 'body' were very similar to Rukia and her gigai.  As well as the relationships between souls in the Underworld and Overworld.
"No..." he said blankly.  Bleach…?  I think my sister watches that show…amine?  Amino?  Anime, maybe?
Ren sighed.  “You’re not a kid at all are you?  Well, you know how you're not supposed to be able to touch ghosts or spirits?"  Darien nodded.  "Well, it’s kind of like…like beings can touch and interact with like beings.  But if a soul, like reapers, have a temporary body, they can interact with unlike beings.  Complex much, I know, but do you get it?" she said.  “There really isn’t an easy way to explain it…”
Darien chewed over the new data and nodded.  A short silence followed and Ren moved up to his neck.  "So," Darien began again.  "Is the Underworld like Hell, and the Overworld like Heaven?"
Ren shrugged.  "Not really.  Hell is a part of the Underworld and Heaven is a part of the Overworld.  Souls that have decided to stay dead pass between the two quite frequently, unless the soul's been damned, then they have to stay in the Hell part of the Underworld.  The Under and Overworlds aren’t much different actually, malls, and everything, shops, markets, people to talk to, to love and so on...it won't be that different from here."
Darien winced as a thread was suddenly pulled.  Ren started.  "If you can feel anything I'm doing, you're beginning to cross over.  See that?  Your soul is separating from your body."  She pointed at a shimmering mass tugging at his body, just beginning to separate.  Darien watched amazed for a moment before asking, "So what happens to the souls that don’t want to stay?  Are they recycled or something?"
Ren grinned.  "That's where the River of Rebrirth comes in.  It's the Eternal Resting Place.  If you want to 'rest' you go there, and your soul is purged and cleansed, meaning all of your memories are erased and then you're implanted into a new baby and you begin life all over again.  But when you die again, you don’t remember anything of your past life."
Darien nodded.  "So where am I headed?"
Ren looked at him quizzically.  "The Underworld to be Judged.  All dead souls go there and then if your soul is pure, you can go to the Overworld, and if it hasn't then you have to stay in the Underworld to carry out your sentence.  Duh."
Darien chuckled nervously.  "That wasn't what I was asking..."
Ren sighed with comprehension.  "Oh, you were asking if you were damned."  Darien nodded.  Ren shrugged.  "I don't know.  You haven't murdered or raped anyone, you've been relatively pure aside from your opium addiction, and you seem like a pretty decent guy.  So I really can't tell you anything right now.  Fate works that far in advance, but I have no access to that info."  She pulled out a final strand and stood.  "Time to go."  She reached out her hand to him.  He took it, his body completely out of his control and lifeless beneath him.  It was weird, looking at his body from a different point of view.  He could barely recognize himself.  His lips were blue and his skin ashen…
Ren squeezed his hand gently.  “Let’s go,” she said softly.

Ren Si-Ang of Nacht, the God of Night's, Charge was fidgeting from her post in the balcony of the court room.  Her apprentice, Gutterflower, stood at her left side, watching her 'older sister' curiously.  Ren's ringed fingers clutched at the rail.  For some reason she wanted Darien to become a reaper.  She had a feeling that they had a lot to talk about.  Seth looked bored at his stand at the center of the court.  Seth was the God of Judgment.  Sarem, the God of the Damned and Lord of the Underworld watched impatiently from his private box.  WoZ of Seth's Charge also sat impatiently, but of course that was because she wanted Seth to be free...  A clerk was reading off Darien's life story in a very condensed version, and he was nearing the end...  Ren was nervous.  She hoped he wouldn't be damned.
Apparently Seth had noticed Ren's fidgeting from the top box and shot her a look, asking what was wrong.  He was a good friend of Ren's, though it was sort of a secret.  Ren hoped her eyes looked pleading enough, even though she knew that Seth was bound by his god-ship to judge fairly.
"On the 8th of October, year 2110, Darien Harris died of opium poinsoning.  Ren Si-Ang was the reaper at the scene," the reader finished.
Seth sighed, turning his eyes languidly back to the man in front of him.  Ren chanced a look at Darien.  She laughed softly.  "He's just as nervous as I am..."  He was clenching and unclenching his fists sporadically, shifting from foot to foot, and biting his lip.
"Darien Harris, I sentence you..."  Ren's heart dropped.  He was damned.  Seth only began with that when he damning someone…  Now she could only hope that his sentence wouldn’t be too severe…  "...to become a reaper under Nacht's charge."  Ren's heart stopped before soaring.  She bit her lip to prevent a yelp of excitement from escaping.  Seth's gavel slammed down on his desk and that was that.  From his side, WoZ grinned and hopped up onto the bench with him and kissed him soundly.
Ren catapulted over the balcony and hugged Darien.  "This is going to be so much fun!" she exclaimed.
Seth broke from WoZ's kiss early and said, "Yea, Ren, you get to show him around..."  And then his face was turned back to WoZ's roughly and he was caught up in another kiss.  Ren rolled her eyes.  Stupid woman…
Ren didn't let that get her down though.  "Come on, you have to meet Nacht, he's our boos so to speak, and then I'll show you around the Underworld and the Overworld, 'kay?" she smiled.  She extended her hand and Darien smiled as he took it, fully embracing his death.