This fic isn't new, exactly; I wrote it a few months back after an anon on tumblr asked 'why did Death bother to have a second son if the first was a fuck up?' It isn't related to any previous work; Death has his own little headcanon-verse I've fleshed out and would like to eventually write out. Maybe some day.

Second Son

"I'm sorry."

The bag doesn't move. Nothing moves down here, in the sealed room - Ashura's resting place, where he has slept for hundreds of years - and nothing ever will move. The place is a dead zone. It has been ever since Death first created it, all those centuries before.

Ashura lives, though, and he radiates hatred and fear and bitterness at his father.

Nothing can change that. Nothing ever will.

He slides through the halls of his Academy and watches the children run past, the children who come to him to learn - those bright and smiling faces, the endless happy chatter and life that surrounds him. They are young now; in time they will grow old and pass on just like generations before.

The endless cycle. He stays distant, never truly part of their world.

He can't be.

He sees families walks through the city streets, and perhaps that is what hurts the most - parents and children and the love they share and it hurts to watch them, physically hurts, because he was once a parent and he too was once loved by a child . . . and that came to a tragic end.

Because he failed.

(He once had been a child himself, long long ago, but he had never been loved - not how a child should be loved - he knew nothing of it. Perhaps that was why he had failed Ashura so miserably.)

In his study that night he stares blankly at the book he's supposed to be reading and thinks instead of how empty the Manor is, how the silences are his companion, how there is nothing else there. How much he cares for the children of his school, and how little he can do to show it.

The loneliness tears at him, as it is often wont to do. He has millenia of this to look forward to, of loneliness and his own bitter thoughts and the mask and playing the comic fool until he loses all sense of self - this is his destiny, and he hates it. He has books for company, the creaks of the manor, the silences.

The people who will grow and die and pass him by, the bright stars he cannot touch.

Ashura had been born when the Reaper himself had been young - barely a teenager in shinigami terms- an act of slow suicide. He didn't want to live then, had looked forward to passing the torch on and finally going to rest, away from his past and the memories it held and the constant bitterness and solitude that were his companions.

That hadn't worked out.

Now . . . now he understands better what it is a child needs. Love. Attention. Interaction. To live and grow among the fragile humans he will protect, instead of staying so separate from them. It's too late for him - he is too jaded and broken to be fixed - but for another . . . maybe he can do it right.

Raise a child who won't have to know only memory and silence as companions. Who can reach out and embrace the fragility of humankind. Who can actually live.

A child he himself can love with everything in his heart, all the love he has repressed over the centuries- he can nurture the child and make a real shinigami.

(And maybe, finally, give the world the Reaper it deserves. He is so very tired.)

Smiling a bit to himself - it hurts to smile, he hasn't done it in so long - he pulls a scrap of paper to himself and begins to plan.