a choice of deaths.

acarya

In late September, Denver begins to grow cold. The days are still long and sunny, but at sunset you begin to feel the dying of the light in a way you didn't at the summer solstice. It sears, as brilliant as firelight, burning up the sky until it sinks behind mountains turned to black silhouette.

This is what Eleanor and Richard are looking at when he asks her. They went for a hike, and at the end are sitting high on some rocky outpost of nature, wearing hoodies against the oncoming chill, wearing sturdy shoes, nothing but trail mix and Clif bars and water in their bellies. There's a reverence for the sunset that falls over most humans when they take the time to stand witness, and in that silent vigil for the ever-recurring death of the ever-returning sun, Richard asks her something that has been on both their minds, unspoken, for some time now.

Her answer is a nod. She does not take her eyes off the sunset, search his features, consider the question then and there. She has considered it for months, has been considering it since the night he first assisted with returning a man to the Wheel. She has been watching him. So when he asks, she doesn't have to think much more on it; she has only been waiting for him to ask. Eleanor just nods.

They don't discuss details until they've descended, gotten back into that new white BMW SUV of hers which looks so suburban and normal outside of her newly-built white house. They are picking up takeout just before the place closes, and the scents fill her car while she drives him back to her house, where his own mode of transportation -- be it car or bicycle -- is waiting for him to take him wherever he is living nowadays. She knows some people; they already know she has an apprentice, and this rite is sacred to them.

She has parked out by the curb, has turned off the car, and the street is dim and the car is dark when she turns to him, face losing color to shadows:

"Richard," she says quietly, but levelly, clearly, "I want you to give some thought, if you haven't already, to how you would like to die. If you're given a choice."

Richard

They've spent a lot of time together over the past almost-a-year. Enough that people within their circles know he is her apprentice; enough that people without their circles sometimes assume they must be Together in some fashion or form. What fashion or form, exactly, doesn't quite come easily to mind though. There's something platonic about their association, too heatless to be romantic, and something just a hair too formal about that same association to be friendship. Purely friendship, at least.

Still, they do many of the things friends and lovers and roommates and other-people-who-are-closely-associated do. They, for one, go hiking together. Used to be that every one of these outings was a part of his education; would be simply a way to change up the pace and the setting while they discussed Spheres, and philosophies, and life, and death, and the Wheel.

That's changed a little in the recent weeks and months. Since Vienna. Since that night he assisted with returning a man to the Wheel. Sometimes, now, they go places just to go places. Just to enjoy their fellowship, or the silence they companionably share. Sometimes they stay in one another's vicinity with only the most oblique interactions: reading in the same room, meditating in the same space.

Watching the sun set together. Bearing witness to another death, another resurrection.

He asks a question at the summit.

She asks a question at the base.

He takes a moment to think before he answers. He takes a long moment, his immense height folded comfortably into the bucket seat of her BMW. When one lives in such a body for so long, one grows used to constraints and tight spaces; stops minding them. He is looking at the window and the streets are dark, but the sky above still retains some deep-hued hint of dusk. After some time he turns to her, this apprentice of hers, this non-traditional student in every sense of the word. His eyes are large and clear in the darkness.

"Peacefully in my bed," he says, which is perhaps a cowardly answer, but a truthful one, "with people I care about, and who care about me, close by. But not in the same room. I can't stand the thought of dying with an audience, but ... I'd like it if they were close. There was a short story I read once. I can't remember who wrote it or what it was called, but it was about an old woman who lived her last day the way she would live any other day, and then died peacefully in her bed while her family laughed and lived downstairs. I read it when I was very young, and I found it disturbing but intriguing. The older I get, the more comforting it becomes. I think that's exactly how I'd like to die, if I had the choice."

acarya

Sitting outside her house, the car quiet, leaves the two of them in a protected silence broken only by softly spoken words. She watches him as he thinks of a way to answer, and his answer is... very Richard. That's the only way she can think to describe it to herself.

Richard doesn't need to be told that he probably won't get a choice. Most people don't. Most people do not choose to die at all, and the ones who do are often not choosing death so much as choosing something other than what plagues the life they're experiencing, be it mental illness or some other distress. Richard knows, even in this ritual, he may not be given a choice -- it was in the way she worded the question, and she doubts that he missed it.

Eleanor says nothing about it: that it says nice, that she hopes it for him, that no one gets those choices, that she's read the same story. She just nods. "Let me talk to some colleagues in the Tradition," she tells him. "We may have to travel, so let's plan for Fall Break. I'll let you know, as soon as I do, when and where we'll be going."

An intake of breath, held for a moment, exhaled in measure: "Until then, prepare yourself as best you can. Meditate on what you have learned. You'll need to fast for the day and night before the ritual, though if you choose to fast before that it is up to you."

There's another pause, a more difficult one. "I believe that you will come back from this, Richard, but the ritual still involves dying and walking outside of your body. And Fate has no concern for my faith. Do what you need to do to prepare for your death."

Richard Levasseur

Prepare as best you can, she tells him. Prepare for your death.

Richard knows, of course, the dangers of this undertaking. He knew, even before Eleanor told him, that some aspirants never make it back. They leave their bodies and they can't, or don't want to find the way back. They get lost. They wander too far. They return to the Wheel.

He knows this. Still; to hear it is something different. It gives him a moment's pause. It makes him swallow, his throat moving softly.

For a moment he wonders how one does that, exactly. How one prepares for death. He thinks back to the one and only death he has known intimately,

the death that he had a hand in,

the death that he watched his acarya dole out. How strange that that should have been his first introduction to death. Not a loved one, not a family member, not even a pet, but a stranger. A man who was, by his very existence, slowing the turn of the Wheel. He thinks about how Billy resisted death at first, how he fought it, how he raged against it and grieved and panicked. He thinks about how Billy accepted it in the end. Prepared for it.

How strange, too, to have been taught so profound a lesson by a man he helped to kill.

--

"I'll try," he says. And it is true: he will try. "Fall Break, then."

acarya

There are many reasons why the Euthanatoi aspire to purity, to austerity, to not. getting. too. close. They turn the Wheel and they walk in the shadowlands. They know that Fate does not care for their plans or their faith or their feelings and they know, most of all, that many of the situations they find themselves in are just simply dangerous. When you threaten to take someone's life, strangely enough, sometimes they aren't agreeable about it.

How do you prepare for death? Your death, your very own. There are books and all manner of information out there on how to do exactly this. There are counselors for the dying, if they are able and willing to talk to someone. You make amends. You prepare a post-mortem plan. You write a will and testament, you talk to the people who need to know that you love them and you're proud of them before you aren't there to tell them anymore.

But Richard can't do a lot of that. Not without giving something away, getting himself placed in an involuntary psychiatric hold. Eleanor knows this. But she tells him to prepare. She hints about purification, because the Euthanatoi know better than anyone that what they do to their bodies touches their souls, that what they carry in their minds will be an even heavier burden in the afterlife. You learn to hold your own emotions lightly. You learn to hold many things lightly, including,

sometimes,

your own humanity.

--

She reaches over and presses her hand on his shoulder in mute support, but then they get out of the car. He helps her unload some of the gear from her car. He gets his bike so he can head back to his place. And then the days simply go by.

One day she tells him that they'll be flying to Seaside, Oregon.

Another day she tells him that they will be meeting up with Joy Sharpe there. Joy will take them on the Agama Re sojourn.

On another day, it is the Friday evening that kicks off Fall Break, and they are flying out of DIA yet again, but this time DU isn't paying for their tickets. Eleanor is. Eleanor, who sits in business class not reading, not sipping a cocktail, just staring at the window at the darkened sky with her hands folded in her lap.