The Devils Coat, overview

[Originally posted at The Slacktiverse.]
[The idea's been in my head for years, telling about it came from the question of whether or not a story where the ones left alive are pitied is psychologically realistic.]

I had a story in my head once called The Devil's Coat, as I recall, because it began with the devil negotiating with someone to get his coat (it was the devil's favorite type and vengeful angels, restricted from doing direct harm until the Apocalypse, took it upon themselves to destroy every instance of said coat and the factory in which it was produced when they learned that she liked it, they only missed one) and then things went wrong and, to prevent him from dying before they could close the deal (she really wanted that coat) the devil offered coat-haver a job as a reaper, ferrying the souls of the dead to the afterlife.

Him taking the deal provided a loophole through which she could save his life where otherwise she could not.

Naturally the souls he ferried were damned but this was a setting where Hell was good and Heaven was... not necessarily evil as a whole but extremely exclusionary and tending toward militant, so that was actually a good thing.

At some point someone asked said reaper of souls if his job, dealing with newly dead people, got him down and his response was that it did the opposite. He listed off a litany of triggering situations he'd encountered and pointed out that it was his job to tell the person that just exited one of said situations that this is when the hurting stopped, and then deliver them into a situation where they'd be cared for, loved, and subject to some of the best psychological care ever to exist. (Not to mention really good music.)

I could see people in that story pitying those left alive. Especially since the dead trying to help the living would have triggered the Apocalypse, which Hell is trying to indefinitely postpone (they can't cancel it, that would throw the ball into Heaven's court, but they can evaluate the situation every five years and, at every evaluation, decide to push it back to "ten years from now.") because at that point they'd be wiped out and that would be bad.

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