Eighty-two years on this earth. What effect could such a long time have on a child? They could grow up, fall in love, fall out of love, become a mess and dig a hole and stay there for ten years, wake up and realize you’d rather sleep in the comfort of your own home, and come back renewed and content, allowing her heart to open once more and finding love again, only this time it stays, on and on until age sets in and Death comes knocking every now and then. One such visit took her husband, and now she lay neither living nor dead, hooked on machines that beeped and glowed even at night. Sometimes her children visits, and sometimes their children would tag along, gentle rubs and innocent questions asked for her to answer with the smallest of voices and the faintest of grips she could muster on whatever hand grabbed her own.
And now she could see the angel of Death himself, waiting for her very last seconds to pass. His eyes peered at her from many places, even on the walls where his wings clipped through seamlessly like smoke. He was by her side, a pair of arms clasped in prayer while another reached out to her body and beyond, to grasp at her soul and pull, like thread upon the weave. But before that could happen, a hand shot out and stopped the angel from going any further, said hand belonging to a boy not much older than five. He grinned and pushed away the angel, who remained silent but now stood at the ready, wings pulled close and a weapon on each hand. A battle seemed unavoidable, except then a command came through to the angel from up on high, from the only authority that mattered. Within a breath, the angel of Death was gone.
“I waited and waited, and still you did not come. All this time and still tardy as ever. Have you no shame, Mallory Nivin Evergrand? Must I drag you from the bed as well? Come on, up and up!” In the blink of an eye, the spitting image of Mallory as a child became instead Mallory as a thirty something adult, with the fashion sense to match. He leaned forward until Mallory could feel her breath coming back to her from his face, while he didn’t breathe at all. The old woman waited for herself to become panicked as she has been prone to doing in these twilight years of hers, but nothing came about. She instead felt calmer than she’d ever felt in years, and with that calmness her lungs eased into breaths which felt at last like actual lungful ones instead of the half-choking, asthmatic wheezes which always felt like she was drowning from the air itself.
“I-I thought you weren’t real. I thought you were just an imaginary friend I made up one day.” Mallory muttered. “What do you want now? Why are you here? You’re too late. Far, far too late, child.” Mallory felt a sudden urge to sob as memories of her childhood days came to the forefront, especially the ones where her mother was still alive and well. “I am old and frail, and if you had not come, I would have been claimed for My Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ? Are you the Devil in human form, come to tempt me one last time from the path of eternal salvation?”
“The Devil? Who, me? Whatever could give you such an idea, my dear? I am shocked that you’d put me on the same level as the trickster, that liar, that no-gooder banned from everywhere save here, where it’s dark and comfortable to hide from the light. And I have no intention to tempt anyone to anything save for a good time, no, an exceptionally fun time. I can tell that you are in desperate need of that, ‘Nivin’, or do you prefer to go with Mallory nowadays?” The man gave her his best smile, which convinced Mallory even further that this man was in fact the Devil in disguise.
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“Are we to play games, Prince of Lies? Then get to it before the angel comes back; I need to muster once more the resolve I’d gathered to die which you so carelessly dispelled like a wet towel upon a fire.” Mallory huffed and turned her head away from the man, which given her current condition, really just amounted to her moving her focus away as best she could and keeping the Devil at the edge of her sight. The man moved, and Mallory rolled her eyes to the other side, which he responded by simply splitting into two. With all avenues of escape cut off, Mallory found herself forced to stare at the man’s face, or rather, her face. To say it a weird experience would be understating things.
“You’ll get used to this as you got used to your own reflection.” Nivin-homme spoke as though it was a foregone conclusion that he and Mallory had more time to spend together. “So shall we go and leave this dreadful place? I can sense him working everywhere, almost around the clock. It is cruel how much one being can be stretched so, especially in the name of duty.” A hand was stretched towards Mallory, who remained still as she wondered how much longer this near-death dream would last.
“If you must know, my name is Di’at, Ma’am. I figured you would rather trust someone you know than a stranger with no name.”
“I trust my Lord, devil. And if it be my time to meet his angel, then I will gladly wait however long I have to wait until we meet again once more.” Mallory huffed and tried to cross her arms, only to remember that she pretty much had no more strength left in her body. But time crawled, and she realized it was only crawling because this man, Di’at, was around. It was only this compression which enabled her usually frayed mind to recollect and bear an echo of the sharpness it once held, with what would happen if the man were to leave becoming painfully obvious as well.
“I do admire this side of you; this willingness to stand for what you believe in so. But again, Mallory, I bear you no ill-will. I am no Devil, nor am I of the demons which harms your like most willingly. But I am no angel either, for my will is my own as your will is your own. I will leave, as I had done so before, should you wish it. But I beg of you,” The man grasped one of Mallory’s hand with the tenderness of one touching a child. “, Mallory, to at least give me the chance to show you what I’ve always wanted to show you all those years ago. A place like your childhood, when all was well and happiness was abound.”
Mallory was tempted to throw the offer right back at that man’s face and proclaim her faith once more, but a tiny sliver of her aging heart leaked the longing she had repressed over the years, coming out now in a near-whirlwind of emotions and memories. They, once faded with time, now renewed in heart-wrenching detail put the old woman into a loop of paralyzing wants and needs. She was young and she wanted to have fun, and now she is old and only wants out. She was Nivin, and she is Mallory, but for this next part, whom should she become?