Cooper Laithmore took a bullet to the head on 57th street, 5:32 PM on a Tuesday.
Nobody watching bothered with an ambulance. It would've been a waste. They called the police, then the morgue.
They ruled it as manslaughter, said that the guy who did it wasn't in his right mind. No clear motive. He'd pulled a gun on a woman and started babbling about vengeance and justice, but as best as the police could tell she'd never done anything to him.
Cooper had been passing by on the way back from work. The man who did it had been walking front of him. The kind of thing you get no warning for until someone's already screaming.
And the people around him had just... moved along. Crossed the street. Tried not to make eye contact.
The guy who did it didn't stick around to watch afterwards. He dropped the gun, so they ended up finding him pretty quickly. The girl made it out fine.
There was a mess after that, but Cooper wasn't around for any of it. He lasted longer than he expected. He'd fallen in the fight, and the shot went clear through the top of his head, down through his throat, but somehow though he totally stopped moving he could still see for another ten minutes. Didn't make a difference. All he saw was the pavement.
Still, he didn't mind. Though it felt like a bad hand to be dealt - and damn, he felt stupid for ending up shot from that angle - nobody'd died except him.
In his final moments, he'd found something to live for, and something to die for. He'd done something good.
Really, that was all he'd ever wanted.
---
He dreamt that he was dead.
He was suspended alone in space, surrounded on every side by stars. The perspective was wrong. Some of the stars were so close he could reach them; others so far that he couldn't imagine he'd get to them, not in a thousand years.
It didn't matter. He couldn't move.
He felt like he was floating. Or... that was wrong. He wasn't moving, but it felt as if he were falling both upwards and downwards, and if he focused on one it would become *only* that, and a *pit* would form in his stomach.
There were lines between the stars. They looked like constellations, though the connections didn't seem to mean anything. They just made it obvious that wherever he was, it wasn't real.
So it probably didn't matter.
He lived through a thousand years in a second. The stars moved; the constellations changed. He was only barely aware of any of it happening, though in some sense he felt that he could *predict* where they'd end up. For a brief and delirious moment, he wondered if he might have momentarily become a god.
But he was dead, and what he thought didn't matter very much.
That was the only part of it that he remembered. There was more to being dead, he was sure - things before and things after - but when he woke up all that he could remember was the stars.
That and a single word, spoken by a god whose face he forgot.
"Unite."