Bad Pennies
Title: Bad Pennies
Author: clodia_metelli.
Characters: Adam Young, Death.
Rating: PG (character death).
Book/Source: Good Omens
Disclaimer: No profit is being made from this.
Summary: Adam Young dies. Repeatedly.
Wordcount: 800
~ bad pennies ~
Adam Young was twelve when Death came for the first time. Something to do with a rotten branch and an apple hanging just too far away and Dog being not quite fast enough to break the fall. The hospital, being in Lower Tadfield, not only gleamed but was populated by kindly nurses and motherly matrons and doctors who made housecalls and had impeccable bedside manners [1], but Adam found himself standing by his own bedside looking down at his burnished curls all the same. This came as something of a surprise.
“Huh,” he said, ruminatively.
HELLO, ADAM, said the angel of Death.
He was standing on the other side of the bed. His skull gleamed in the heavy depths of his cowl. METHICILLIN-RESISTANT STAPHYLOCOCCUS AUREUS, he added helpfully. USUALLY ABBREVIATED TO MRSA. YOU MIGHT HAVE HEARD OF IT.
“Huh,” said Adam again. “Dun’t sound like something I’d catch.”
The doors at the far end of the ward were open. A pale, wizened visitor went out quietly, unnoticed by almost everyone. The ward nurse sneezed three times in quick succession and started to cough violently at her desk.
Adam grinned. Light glinted off a tooth. “Nah,” he said. “He’s retired. You put me back before I put you lot back.”
VERY WELL, said Death, rather regretfully, and everything went white.
The next time Death came, Adam was thirty. He was in a pub in London, which was not Lower Tadfield and therefore gave Adam the prickly feeling of being off his home ground, but which otherwise had nothing particularly against it. He had gone there to meet Pepper, due home from Russia that week, and for once was not the centre of attention. “Be inconspicuous,” she had hissed at him, the last time they had met up in a bar, “can’t you be inconspicuous just this once in your life?” So inconspicuous Adam was going to be, in fact so very inconspicuous that he had even more trouble than the average patron at getting the barman’s attention, although once he discovered the local price for a pint he was inclined to think this might have been a blessing in disguise. He retired with his drink to a dark corner. It was all going swimmingly until a fight broke out among a bunch of rugby players on a bar crawl.
Adam missed the start of it. He noticed when the beer bottle hurtled into the big mirror behind the bar, though. Then there was glass everywhere and barstools flying and before he could make an inconspicuous departure, a table came out of nowhere and caught him dead in the face.
So much for that. He stood over his fallen body, watching the chaos. It was January and outside the snow fell through the yellow lamplight. A dark shadow was on the threshold, waiting.
The rugby players were still brawling at the bar. Adam saw the glint of a scarlet smile reflected in a mirror-shard and shook his head. “You put me back,” he told Death. “You put me back right now. Pepper’ll kill me if she finds me like this.”
ONE DAY, said Death. The wind tossed snowflakes right through his robes, which did not stir.
“Maybe,” said Adam, conveying scepticism. “But not today.”
The last time Death came, Adam was almost eighty and had been widowed for two years. Time seemed to pass differently these days. He woke up one day and found it easier to get out of bed than he had done for years. Once he was on his feet, he saw why. The body in the bed seemed smaller than it did when he occupied it and his curls were no longer yellow. He saw with great clarity the frailty of the ancient bones beneath his translucent, wrinkled skin.
“Huh,” he said. “Which of you was it this time?”
ELDERLY MEN ARE PARTICULARLY INCLINED TO NEGLECT THEMSELVES AFTER A SPOUSE’S DEATH, said Death. WELL-KNOWN FACT, THAT. ASK ANYONE.
“Is it,” said Adam. “Right.”
He looked down at his vacated body. It did have a rather malnourished appearance, now that he thought about it.
“I could make myself young again,” he said. “No need for me to go back into that.”
Death’s robes were full of stars. Adam remembered the angel’s wings unfolding like Jacob’s ladder dropping out of the heavens. All around, the walls of the bedroom were fading into the dark haze of an endless desert.
His bed was still there, though, and his dead body in it. YOU COULD, said Death.
Adam Young thought about it.
“Nah,” he said at last and grinned at Death, who was obliged to grin back. “I know who my father was. This time, I’ll come.”
[1] Fortunately for all concerned, Adam had not been exposed to the Carry On franchise.
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