The New World
Copyright© 2024 by Dark Apostle
Chapter 3: Don’t Fear the Reaper
Fan Fiction Sex Story: Chapter 3: Don’t Fear the Reaper - The story follows James Smith, a man who dies and finds himself in a surreal afterlife courtroom, where his life is judged as "zero sum"—neither good nor evil, just utterly average. Dissatisfied with being consigned to eternal mediocrity, he manipulates the cosmic bureaucracy into granting him a second chance in a new world, where he is reincarnated as a child with his memories intact and perks... - edited by my lovely Steven.
Caution: This Fan Fiction Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Ma/ft Mult Coercion NonConsensual Reluctant Slavery Lesbian BiSexual Heterosexual Fan Fiction Farming High Fantasy Rags To Riches Restart Alternate History DoOver Extra Sensory Perception Body Swap Furry Magic Incest Mother Sister Politics Royalty Violence AI Generated
The door to the room slammed open, hard enough to make the hinges shriek. In strode a figure that, even in the unearthly context of the afterlife, radiated pure, ominous authority. Cloaked in robes that absorbed all light, tall as a tree, the being’s presence sucked the light and warmth from the space. But what caught James most, beyond the air of finality and doom, was the expression. This was not just Death—it was a very, very pissed off Death.
“You!” The figure stabbed a bony finger through the air, pointing straight at James. The digit was impossibly long, skeletal, and white, as if sculpted from old ivory.
“Me?” James instinctively shrank away, pressing himself into the bench as if he might slip through it and disappear. “Oh, God, is this Death?” his mind stuttered in a wave of panic. He’d always pictured Death as a silent figure with a scythe, not a bureaucrat mid-meltdown.
“I was done with you!” The figure’s voice echoed like a coffin lid slammed shut, deep and impossibly old. With a flourish of disgust, he flipped back his cowl, revealing a pale, angular face—the living embodiment of famine, sleep deprivation, and tax season rolled into one. His lips were thin and pressed tight with annoyance, black eyebrows arching over eyes so dark and deep that James felt he might fall into them forever. That face—gaunt, severe, cheekbones like razorblades—looked less like a mask and more like skin painted over polished bone.
There was a moment of silence in the room, the only sound the faint scrape of Death’s skeletal fingers as he clenched and unclenched his fists. James, frozen in place, realized he’d been staring. He couldn’t help it—Death’s presence was like a train wreck, horrible and fascinating, demanding attention.
“Uh, sorry?” James offered, voice a dry squeak.
Death just stared, black eyes boring through him, silent as judgment. For a few moments, James was sure the reaper could see every embarrassing memory and every petty misdeed: the lies, the wasted years, the panty sniffing, the nights of desperate loneliness and unremarkable vice. He felt stripped bare, more exposed than he’d ever been in life or death.
Death raised his clenched hands in frustration, emitting a long-suffering sigh that suggested he’d rather be anywhere but here. “Aargh!” He spun on his heel and began pacing, the movement of his robes stirring up gusts of chill air that made James’s skin crawl. Death gesticulated wildly as he ranted, not so much speaking to James as venting into the void.
“I can’t believe they did this to me! I’m the Reaper of Souls, not the Babysitter of Souls. Azrael, the Archangel of Death, not Azrael the Archangel of Pass-the-Buck!” His bony hands carved angry lines through the air, and his voice grew more aggrieved by the second. “I have quotas to meet, paperwork to file, legions of the newly deceased to collect, and what do they hand me? Some middling mortal who wants to play cosmic tourist! A retrial, a transfer, a bloody second chance—do you have any idea how much paperwork this creates? Do you? No, of course not.”
James swallowed. “Um, sorry again. It’s just—”
Death whirled, the cowl flaring dramatically. “Do you know how rare a hung jury is, Mr. Smith? Do you know what a mess this is going to make in the records? There are demons down there still working with quills! I have an eternity’s worth of souls to reap, and now I have to shepherd you into a new world and—oh, don’t get me started on the cross-dimensional travel waivers...”
He seemed to deflate slightly, coming to a halt with an exasperated sigh. “It’s always the quiet ones,” he muttered, rubbing at his temples with bony fingers. “Give me a war criminal or a saint, any day. At least their paperwork is straightforward.”
In a movement faster than James’ eyes could follow, Death was leaning over him and that gaunt face was just inches away from his. Shadows clung to the angles of his cheeks, his black eyes wide and wild with a centuries-old exasperation that seemed bigger than any human anger. “Do you realize what you’ve done? Do you?”
James, pinned by that stare, swallowed his fear, the absurdity of his cosmic predicament rendering him small and sheepish. “I panicked, I guess.”
The Archangel of Death stared at him, then to James’s surprise, threw back his head and laughed. The sound was thunderous, echoing off the high marble walls, somehow both bitter and delighted. “Ha, yes! I guess you did.” Death drew back, straightening to his full, intimidating height. The darkness that surrounded him seemed to recede a little, and James saw, in that moment, something like grim amusement flicker in Death’s eyes.
“What you did was give those bureaucrats a way out. A way to just sweep a problem under the rug.” Death’s shadow loomed, and then—just as suddenly—he swooped forward, prodding James with a skeletal finger to emphasize each syllable. “A way. To. Get. Rid. Of. You.”
James, finding some defensive instinct left, bristled. “Okay, I understand that I was pretty average—”
“Dead boring is more like it,” Death snapped, then grinned to soften the blow.
James scowled. “But the way that they were talking about me, it was like I was some freak accident.”
“Oh, but you were.” Death began pacing, each stride swirling his robes around him, casting shadows that seemed to shiver with every word.
“Surely, I can’t be the only person to end up doing equal amounts of good or bad at the end of their life.”
“Oh, no, you’re not.” Death didn’t even break his stride. He began ticking off invisible points in the air, as though he’d had this lecture bottled up for millennia. “But the last time someone drew a zero sum, mankind was still in the Bronze Age. Can you imagine that? Back then, a zero was just a rare clerical error—a blip in the system. Now? Now it’s supposed to be impossible.”
“But how—” James started, feeling more and more like the world’s worst student.
“Because they rigged the system. That’s how they’ve avoided zeroes.” Death stopped and looked at James with a withering, almost pitying gaze.
Death must have seen the confusion still flickering behind James’s eyes, because with a long, phantasmal sigh, he elaborated. “Originally, the list of do’s and don’ts wasn’t very long at all.”
“I’m guessing there were ten?” James quipped, though his voice trembled with the effort to keep it light.
“Even fewer.” Death’s mouth twisted into something not quite a smile. “Anyway, in the beginning, the rules were pretty clear and uncomplicated. However, like all legalistic systems, the bureaucracy grew, and as it grew, they began creating even more rules, resulting in its own set of problems.”
James couldn’t help it—his mind flashed with a surreal image: heavenly filing cabinets stretching off into eternity, row after row of creaking drawers stuffed with parchment and memos. In his imagination, a queue of lawyers in powdered wigs, priests in gold vestments, bishops, popes clutching quills, and kings and queens with crooked crowns all jostled and elbowed their way to the front, each one trying to get their new law, loophole, or moral amendment stamped by the cosmic clerks. “No eating fish on Thursdays.” “Don’t covet your neighbor’s donkey unless it’s raining.” “Redemption forms now require three signatures.” With every century, new layers were added, until the bureaucracy itself became its own labyrinth, clogging the metaphysical works until eternity groaned under the weight.
Death must have sensed James’s dark amusement, because he gave a weary snort. “You can imagine the backlog. Half the rules on the books were written to fix problems caused by the last set of rules. We had a golden age, once—now it’s all paperwork, loopholes, and technicalities. And you, Smith, just found the mother of all loopholes.”
“Such as zeroes?” James, despite himself, found the absurd logic compelling. “We have that problem back on Earth. With bureaucracies, I mean. Our country’s laws were originally pretty simple, but politicians kept on adding more and more laws to the books. It got to the point that it was almost impossible to not break some sort of law or policy. More laws resulted in more law breaking, not less.”
“Yes, you comprehend the problem perfectly!” Death spun on his heel, nearly gleeful at the rare chance to vent. “The more laws the bureaucracy created, the more non-conforming results—such as zeroes—they got. So they finally created arbitrary rules that nobody could avoid and weighted them in such a way that would make it impossible to avoid falling on one side or the other. And in case someone did fall through, they rigged the Jury.”
James, a little more at ease, muttered, “I was wondering about that...,”
“And it worked for over a thousand years.” Death stopped in his tracks, fixing James with a look that was both incredulous and, begrudgingly, impressed. “But then you showed up with a zero and hung the jury.”
James stared at Death, feeling for a moment like he was seeing behind the curtain of the universe’s grand illusion. “So ... what happens now? Am I like, some cosmic glitch?”
Death snorted, collapsing into a nearby chair with all the weary weight of someone who’s spent centuries dealing with the fallout of other people’s incompetence. “You’re more than a glitch, Smith. You’re a bureaucrat’s nightmare. You’re going to be the topic of memos and interoffice jokes for eons. Azrael, the punchline to every afterlife staff meeting.”
He ran his bony hands through his hair—what little, shadowy suggestion of hair he had. “I was supposed to be done with you! I had your paperwork finished. I was looking forward to a nice, uneventful eternity of plagues, famines, and righteous smiting, but no, now I have to babysit you across the Multiverse. Do you know what the approval forms look like for inter-dimensional transfers? They’re in triplicate. In four languages, some of which haven’t been spoken since Pangea split.”
James tried to offer sympathy, but Death wasn’t finished. “And don’t get me started on body selection. Heaven and Hell both want to sign off on it? That’s never happened before. You’ll probably end up in the body of some teenager with a destiny complex or a goat, if they have their way. I have to shepherd you through that, too.”
He threw his arms up, dramatic as a Shakespearean villain. “All because you couldn’t be bothered to sin with conviction or do something—anything—heroic. Just a life of perfect, uninspiring balance. It’s the most infuriating kind of existence. You’re the cosmic equivalent of a man who pays his taxes on time, never speeds, never jaywalks, never kisses anyone he shouldn’t. And you have the nerve to show up in my office asking for a do-over? It’s enough to make me envy the horsemen; at least they get action.”
It became clear to James why the Court and the Counselors were so willing to accept his proposal. He wasn’t a precedent, or a legend, or even a problem worth solving—he was an embarrassment, a sticky bureaucratic conundrum they desperately wanted off the ledger. “I was an embarrassment, so they needed a way to deal with me.”
Azrael opened his arms and looked heavenward in what James could only interpret as the most sarcastic benediction ever offered by an archangel. “Precisely.”
“And like all bureaucrats, if they can pass the buck, they’ll do it.”
Death pointedly appended James’ statement, voice bone-dry. “And they did.”
The reality settled on James with a weight he hadn’t expected. He’d spent his entire existence on Earth avoiding risks and commitments because it seemed easier, less messy—less likely to get noticed. In trying to sidestep trouble, he’d managed to create a singularly unique kind of cosmic mess, not just for himself but for others. Particularly, one Archangel of Death who clearly hadn’t signed up for this level of administrative headache.
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