Arcane AU: Croak x Death My Oldest Friend fanfic
Plot Summary
Fifteen-year-old Powder Purnell has set off her last glitter-paint bomb at the police station. Fed up with her delinquent behavior and punkish attitude, Uncle Vander ships her off upstate to spend the summer with Uncle Benzo.
The eccentric and fairly mischievous (for his age) man lives on a small farm in the Adirondacks, and it’s Uncle Vander’s hope that “a few months of dirty farm work will screw her head back on straight and whip her back into shape.” Like it did to her older adoptive brothers, apparently, whom she hasn’t seen in a full year since Vander shipped them away (Powder had merely assumed they were dead).
She leaves behind her twin sister, Pomme — who never sank into delinquent behavior like Powder did — and her best friend, Ekko. Ekko (real name Wyeth) is her partner in delinquent crime and the subject of a (VERY MINOR) crush. When he smiles, she feels like she can accomplish anything.
Except cope with the fact he’s been lying for almost a year; he’s not just some scrawny little boy, no, he’s Death. As in the Grim fucking Reaper himself, stupid fucking hooded cloak and scythe and all. And Uncle Benzo? He’s the mayor of Croak, a town full of “Grims.” Her older brothers have spent a year here already, learning the family business — and now it’s her turn.
Along the way come several more life-shattering revelations, as Powder begins to regain memories and abilities of another life while she quenches her ever-present craving for death — and a question that never quite leaves her mind:
Why does Ekko look at her like she’s some long-lost love of his, when they’ve only been friends for a year?
🪦🦉⏳🐦⬛
Croak is a series about Grim Reapers in the modern day, an entire secret society called the "Grimsphere" that exists in every major region in the world.
Grims work in total secrecy from the rest of the world, and sharing information about the Grimsphere's existence is a one-way ticket to being exiled; your memories are erased and you're giving an entire fake history, then dropped in a random place and left to fend for yourself.
Grims work in pairs to ferry the souls of the dead to the Afterlife, arriving in the "yoctosecond before death" to "Kill and Cull" the soul of the victim: a process where the "Killer" Grim extracts the soul from the deceased individual and the "Culler" Grim inserts the soul into a "Vessel" made of black widow spider silk.
The Grims facilitate this by "Crashing" to each victim: swiping their scythes in the air and traveling through the "Ether" to their targets.
The souls are taken to the Afterlife where the dead acclimate the newly-deceased to the facts of their death and new "existence."
Character Info:
The main character of Croak is Lex Bartleby, and we follow her journey through all three books.
Lex's love interest is Driggs and they have a very timebomb-coded dynamic, which is interesting given they were written years before Ekko or Jinx even existed in League lore. I could yap about Lex x Driggs for hours (and have).
Lex's mentor figure is Uncle Mort, an eccentric man she knows almost nothing about and an absolute menace. He's most accurately described as an older Lex, just a little less murder-y.
It's primarily through these three that we get the plot of Croak, though the story sticks to Lex in 3rd person POV.
Death My Oldest Friend (take me away) is a Timebomb Arcane fanfic on AO3 that I fell in love with and think about all the time. I realized the fic could compliment Croak extraordinarily well and it's now become my entire personality, and I decided to write a crossover fic after yapping endlessly about it.
Additional Info:
- Powder is Lex from Croak.
- Ekko is basically Driggs but if Driggs was the personification of Death himself.
- AU Powder (Pomme) is Cordy, Lex's twin sister.
- Benzo is Uncle Mort
