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“Can’t you be any gentler..?”
Despite the ferocity of her words, Grell’s demand was hardly louder than a ragged whisper. She laid in the rumpled, bloodied sheets of some sort of bed (at least she thought so, considering she clearly wasn’t in a coffin) under the merciful hands of a man she hadn’t quite expected to find her.
Of course, she hardly expected anyone to care for a bleeding out reaper ousted from the job. It figures though that management would send incompetent fools to deal with her. They hadn’t even killed her properly! They did a good job maiming her, and leaving her for dead, but they should know the first rule of assassination.
Never leave a job half finished.
By some miracle, she had been scooped up from the dirt and puddles of blood she had made in the aftermath. She didn’t recall who had found her, what had been said, or really where she had ended up collapsing after hastily portaling while vomiting blood, but clearly something was looking out for her at least.
Having her savior be Undertaker undercut her relief, though.
She hissed sharply as whatever needle the older reaper had been using on her pierced just a bit too far into her open flesh wound on her ribs. She swung her right leg up in response, more instinctually than rationally, to force him back from causing her even more pain and ruining what little remained of her unscarred skin.
“I’m still breathing, you know!”
Despite her snappy words, and angry kick, Undertaker only paused for a moment to catch her poorly launched leg. He looked over her bared, bloodstained skin with a touch of mirth, maybe even a bit of interest. She hadn’t been a fan of his decision to strip her of her clothes while she was unconscious, but she had little room to fight his decision for her. If he looked any further, she might try and stab him back with the needle. Maybe something bigger to make her point.
“You don’t need to breathe,” Undertaker cheekily told her. He gently ran his thumb over a cut along her inner thigh, closer to the knob of her knee, and chuckled when she tried fruitlessly to kick him once again. “Now, now. Can’t be wasting all that energy on gymnastics, can we?”
“If you keep touching me, I’ll waste whatever I need to throw you into a headlock!”
With teeth bared, she hardly looked the part of her fury while half naked, covered in wounds, and unable to even lift her head from the flat pillow under her head. The older man chuckled, that same strange broken chuckle he favored, and gripped her leg tighter.
“Ahhhh, your youth is quite entertaining. You still think you can best me, hm?”
Grell opened her mouth to argue, but her voice caught in her throat long enough for her thoughts to catch up. His arrogance and pride pissed her off, and he deserved every ounce of abuse she could spit at him in this position, but she knew that he had such a damnable ego for a reason. He wasn’t wrong that she still couldn’t quite be at his level. Old warnings bounced around in her half-delirious head, that Undertaker was a man to be properly feared, and that even her elevated strength couldn’t quite match.
Her mouth shut slowly, though her glare hadn’t lost an ounce of its heat.
“Let go of my leg.” She demanded. “I’m no whore you can keep spread open for your use.”
“Then perhaps the lady should keep her legs shut. Best not to tempt a good man.” Undertaker told her. He kept her leg just where he had caught it, held up and out from him.
“What good have you ever done in your life, old man?”
Undertaker’s eyes darkened, and his grip on her tightened further still. She bit down on her already ripped up bottom lip at the pain of his longer nails digging and tearing at her bruised skin.
“Perhaps the lady should remember that she’s bleeding out in my personal bed.” Undertaker’s voice had gone lower, rumbling like thunder in the quiet night. “Neither of us are good people, and we never will be.”
Grell scoffed, rolling her eyes. She loved a good bit of theater, but she wasn’t one for preachers.
“Save me the speech. We’re nothing alike.”
The smile that came to Undertaker’s face was haunting. Nowhere close to reaching the eyes, dripping with venom. “Nothing at all? I doubt that quite a bit.”
“What I did to Angelina is nothing like the horrors you inflicted on Ciel and his family.” Grell smiled back at him, wicked yet tired.
Ahh, the Phantomhives. The subject dried up any good will in Undertaker’s chest, going by his gaze turning a kind of furious that sent a thrill up Grell’s messed up back. After all, as far as she knew, Undertaker had all but disappeared from England after the fallout.
His experiments failed, and both twins who claimed the name of ‘Ciel’ had been wrought from his grasp forever.
Despite the anger practically radiating off of Undertaker, the older reaper didn’t act upon it. Grell stared up at him with the joy of a child having finally pushed their parents just a little too far. She was at his mercy, and if she bit at his hand any more, he might just call Dispatch on her and let the wolves eat her carcass. She might not mind that, honestly. She had nothing left there, and her actions had finally pushed her employers to action.
Well, former employers.
Undertaker released her leg, planting both hands onto the bed to lean down over her. Caged beneath him, she had little room to move from underneath him. A literal trap she had crawled into.
“And yet,” Undertaker’s voice had dropped to a whisper. “We are both slaves to our grief toward them.”
Grell’s eyes strayed from Undertaker’s, seeing just barely through the curtain of his grey-silver tresses. Hanging up just beyond the boundaries of the bed was none other than her beloved red coat.
It had been flawlessly sewn back together after having been hacked apart in her attempt to flee. All except for the hasty, black threaded lines on the back of the coat. Her own work lovingly preserved…
She turned her face away from him.
“...your breath smells awful.”
For a moment, silence bridged between them.
Then, a giggle.
From a giggle, to a chuckle, and then to full blown cackling. Rearing back from the force of his laughter, Undertaker laughed uproariously at the grumbled accusation.
Grell hardly found it funny, but who knows what the old bag of bones found entertaining after so many years. She frowned at his continued amusement, especially when she saw him move to wipe tears from his eyes from the sheer amount of laughter.
“By all means, choke on your own air.” Grell rolled her eyes. She could be more mad, but the exhaustion from bleeding out wasn’t doing her favors. “Ridiculous manchild…”
The laughter died out, thankfully, leaving Undertaker straddling her just as he was before this ridiculous circus show they were playing. Staring down at her with newfound amusement and mirth, seemingly entertained by even the sight of her furrowed brow and firmly planted scowl. At this rate, she’d end up just another corpse he could style for display in his coffins, and she was not about to let some wild-eyed immortal play dolls with her body. She made to open her mouth, and to shout more foul curses at him, when she stalled at the sight of the withered old bag pushing back his overgrown bangs.
It was no secret to her now that the strange hairstyle was his key to hiding his eyes, the only clear tell to anyone not human that he was one of many specters of death roaming the world. It was no secret to her that the moment he pushed back those bangs, and revealed the whole of his face, he looked thirty years younger. Handsome, unmarred by time even with the jagged scar that cut across his face, he was still a sight to behold for a reaper of his age.
“Well, I was sampling some embalming fluid before operating on you.”
Grell’s entire face wrinkled at the strength of her grimace. “That’s absolutely disgusting!! Are you a masochist too, poisoning yourself before trying to help out the dying woman in your home? Do you want me dead or not!?”
The laughter she roused from Undertaker that time was much more gentle, endearing more so than mocking. He reached out to gently move the hair from Grell’s face, moving around in the bustle they had caused. The touch hadn’t been something she had expected, momentarily flinching (and then cringing in pain) at the approach of his fingers. Yet, he did not move to harm her.
“If I wished you dead, my dear, I would have left you there.” He told her softly, continuing his soft touches to free her gaze from the bedraggled strands of crimson hair. “Dispatch surely would have found you again once those fools realized they didn’t come back with your corpse. And that wouldn’t do now, would it?”
“It’s their fault for sending second stringers to kill off their best field agent during patrols.” She scoffed. The pain from her involuntary movements was catching up to her, but the dull buzz of it was nothing she hadn’t faced before. Or recently, for that matter.
“...why did you save me then?”
She looked back up at him at last, baring open her wounded heart to ask him the question of the century. If he had not wished to end a reaper with his own hands, a reaper that had helped personally to stop his crusade alongside the dead he created to keep alive a legacy for a family long doomed to destruction, then what did he want with her? She had a few terrible ideas floating around in her half-working brain. A once in a lifetime chance to bury a reaper instead of a human, a new start to his failed experiments, or perhaps even a half-hearted attempt to bargain with Dispatch to get any scrap of memory back from his precious Phantomhives?
Undertaker’s expression had always been so highly guarded, both on account of his bangs, and the centuries under his belt wrestling with the pains of being dragged back to humanity in their state of pseudo-mortality.
Yet at that moment, Undertaker looked down at her with his heart on his sleeve.
“Why does anyone save the dying?”
Undertaker’s voice is low, rolling like gravel as he spoke with uncharacteristic gentleness. His fingers trail down her face, along the ridge of her jaw, and pausing to gently press against a wound beneath her bottom lip.
“I could have overlooked you in that alley, and simply accepted you as yet another squatter near the shop. But even the desolate deserve kindness in their last moments on this earth.”
His fingers continued to move. Sliding down over her chin and across her neck, tracing imaginary lines around the scars and wounds over her skin. His hand settled there on her barely covered chest, pressing down just hard enough to feel the unsteady beat of her heart.
“Thrown away by society a second time, left to die a second time. So few truly can see the pain we hide so flawlessly behind makeup, violence, and madness.”
Grell held her tongue, refusing to speak as he monologued on. There was something almost unsettling in his kindness, knowing him for everything but this kind of softness and vulnerability. Perhaps losing his last hope had finally broken him, or maybe he wasn’t quite lying about drinking his poisonous concoctions used on cadavers after all. She listened, despite her best interests being in using his kindness to let her escape. She listened, relaxed under his hands, and let down the walls she had so carefully built up around her for just a moment.
Undertaker continued his gentle touches, moving from her heart and down the slow, bumpy road over her ribcage. His nails steered back to the open wound he had been sewing up, still weeping blood down her pallid skin and onto the sheets beneath.
“Maybe this old man… is quite sick and tired of being a slave to these endless years of grief.”
His voice finally cracked. Tears filled his eyes, and dripped down his cheeks. His fingers covered up her flesh wound, hiding it out of sight as he chuckled brokenly through his tears.
“And perhaps I thought you might feel the same to follow in my own steps like this.”
Grell shivered as Undertaker’s fingers lifted away from her wounds, trailing small drops of blood in his wake over her stomach. He hardly cared for the presence of blood on his fingers as he half-heartedly wiped away at his tears, smearing the precious red across his cheeks, and overall making just more of a mess of himself.
There was nowhere left for her to go, and she knew it well. She could perhaps escape out of London, return to her old human stomping grounds in Yorkshire, but what would that get her? Perhaps more of a reason to remake the scars on her wrists, or to haunt her crumbling family home left abandoned, but would it accomplish anything?
Haunted by the years of grief. It was an apt description of what her life would become now, as a deserter.
The what-if of the future could wait a few more years, she decided.
For now, she was here at this moment. Laid out in a bloodied bed not her own, straddled by a reaper she had once sought to destroy and break down, watching that very reaper reveal the countless overlapping wounds on his own heart from these long, long years. A man who had longed for companionship, for purpose, beyond the endless collections and patrols.
A broken soul seeking out an answer amongst the endless grief of watching all he loved, and cared for, and desired, die around him.
“...is that your way of offering me a place to stay?” She asked gently. “Now that I’m but a helpless vagabond on the run from the law?”
A man she maybe wasn’t so different from after all.
Undertaker’s eyes widened in surprise, before that familiar broken laugh escaped his lips. Perhaps it was a touch watery from his tears, but it didn’t matter much.
“If the lady wouldn’t mind an old bag of bones as a housemate.” He replied, a smile breaking across his face.
“No more drinking formaldehyde, and you have yourself a deal.”
Undertaker narrowed his eyes in suspicion before leaning back slightly, rubbing his chin between two fingers mockingly as he thought on her request.
“But how will I know I’ve mixed it correctly? It would be quite bad for business if I messed up such an important tool!” He bemoaned, looking left and then right, hemming and hawing over the matter. “Sure, it might burn a bit on the way down, but-”
“Absolutely no buts!” Grell tutted, shaking her head. “I will not have it one bit, no sir! I can tolerate your horrendous breath right now, but every day at your side? You’ll know hell alright if I have to deal with that!”
The pair shared a chuckle over the ridiculous demands, at least until Grell laughed just a little too much, shifted a little too much, and immediately regretted it with a hiss of pain. Promptly dropping boneless back onto the bed, Grell allowed herself that moment of weakness and suffering, especially at the delicious sight of Undertaker’s concern. Hands moving again over her chilled skin, he plucked back up his abandoned needle from its place stabbed into the bed.
“...will you be gentle now?”
She can’t help but ask once again. Compliant, she allowed the older reaper to move her around just a smidge so he could see the full length of the wound. She bit down on the bursts and pops of pain all over her side and ribs, just for that moment.
For all of his sharp edges, Undertaker had quite a gentle touch when he needed it. With needle rethreaded, and disinfectant nearby, he set to begin his work sewing her back together again.
“If the lady so wishes it, then I shall.”