Re: first class ; baths
Perhaps it was fitting that he encountered Death that night on the boat. Or maybe it was ironic, he had never been good at deciding whether something was or was not ironic. But the boy who lived between life and death sat at the edge of the pool, the cuffs of his trousers rolled up to his knees, bare legs in the water, and he looked up as the hooded figure approached. Dark eyes (brown if you got close enough to see) watched as Death came to stand at the edge of the pool, staring down into the water as though it held the answers to some questions, maybe even the great question as to Why Were We Here? But the boy didn't think Death knew that answer; it wasn't one for knowing, after all. It was one for discovering.
The boy at the edge of the pool hovered on that precipice between life and death. He was made of bones, white in the dim light, skeleton fingers curling around the ledge of the pool. But he was also made of flesh, warm, living flesh that would bleed if it were cut. A sliver of white bone could be seen near his jaw, along his shoulder, glimpses of what lay beneath though no gore stained the white bones or the pale skin. "Come to finish the job?" the boy asked, kicking at the water with the foot of bones, lifting his leg to watch the dark water drain through the gaps in his bones, a living sieve that held nothing but air. "Or have you come for someone else. I should shout a warning. Let them run before you can catch them."
He didn't remember how he had come to be this way, this not-quite-living-boy, and the life of the living was far away from him, a distant memory shrouded in fog. It should have worried him, this state of not knowing, but the worries and fears, the anxieites that might have plagued him otherwise, they drifted away into the darkness of the sea around them, swallowed up by the starlight and rolling waves.