Chapter Text
1.
“I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species and have the same defects. This being you must create.”
- Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
2.
A reaper’s memory of their human life is foggy at best, but, somehow, Grell has always been certain that her death involved a warm bath, a knife, and an awful lot of blood. More than once she’s caught a glimpse of her wrists from out the corner of her eye and been startled by the lack of scars. The sight of the pale, unblemished skin there makes her uneasy, if she thinks about it too hard.
How fitting, then, that it seems she’s going to die of blood loss once again.
Through sheer, stubborn force of will, Grell has managed to drag herself to Madam Red’s grave. It seems like as good a place to die as any - they say one ought to go surrounded by loved ones, but Grell doesn’t have many of those, these days. Angelina had loved her. She just...loved the Phantomhive boy more, that’s all.
With the last of her strength, Grell slumps against the cold headstone, leaning all of her weight on it. She can’t sigh so much as wheeze with a worryingly wet, rasping noise.
Nobody had been happy with the outcome of the Phantomhive affair. Well, perhaps that’s not true - Sebastian had certainly been pleased to get his meal, after all that effort, and she supposes the little human gave himself to oblivion gladly. It was a disaster for the reapers: Eric and Alan are both long dead. William is more cold and distant than ever, furious that the London division neither saved the boy’s soul nor apprehended the deserter. Ronald hasn’t been the same since The Campania - he keeps talking about transferring overseas, but he can’t bring himself to get on a boat again. Othello returned to his labs. The last she’d seen of the Undertaker before he disappeared was the old reaper howling with grief, broken and miserable.
And Grell…Grell didn’t mean to kill again. She really didn’t.
William had always been so careful with her assignments after the Ripper case. Although he was quite happy to give her the bloodiest deaths available, there had been a notable lack of prostitutes and babies. She was strictly forbidden from collecting any soul whose demise related to infanticide or abortion. But whether by accident or distraction, one had slipped through at the end of an already miserable decade, and Grell had been so angry, watching that newborn’s little cinematic record flutter through her fingers, not five minutes in the world before it was smothered by its ungrateful mother.
By the time she’d come to, Grell was covered in blood, and the wrong record was playing out in front of her.
One slip of the scythe turned to two turned to seven in a matter of weeks. Once remembered, it was near impossible for her to forget just how good it feels, being Jack instead of Grell, free from the neverending punishment of reaping for just a few blood-splattered minutes. And she was careful this time - she tidied up after herself! She left no pattern, widening the net from prostitutes and undeserving mothers to the kind of men that made her human life so miserable, the scum that would lynch a man for buggery, the molly hunters and the molly fuckers. The humans never knew their Ripper was back.
Turns out, though, that murder is much harder to hide from Dispatch without a human accomplice. Just the one might have earned her a slap on the wrist and another stay in the psych ward. Seven souls turning up before their time, each with Grell’s name written in neat copperplate somewhere by the cause of death, earned her an unexpected visit from middle-management. Six grim fellows several levels above William in the Dispatch Association’s hierarchy cornered her in the mortal realm an hour ago to terminate her personally and permanently.
Their mistake was to ambush her while out on collections; she still had her scythe.
Now there are five members of middle-management dead because of her, and if two mortal murder sprees weren’t enough to seal her fate as a fugitive, that certainly will be. Grell huffs to herself weakly; not that she’ll live long enough for it to matter. Despite her monstrous strength, six reapers against one was always going to be a challenge. The last fucker slashed her clear across the throat. She thinks she might have disemboweled him in return, but she didn’t stick around long enough to find out, escaping through a clumsy portal across London to Angelina’s cemetery. She’s been bleeding out rapidly since.
Somewhere in front of her, Grell hears footsteps.
The click of hard soles on the stone slabs paved between the graves has her half-expecting William, come to finish her off for good. A shadow falls over her, blocking out the dim light of the moon. It takes a monumental effort, and energy she doesn’t have, to raise her head again, but Grell is determined to look her end in the eye.
Fighting through the agony, she lifts her chin - but when the spots in her vision finally clear, it isn’t William looking down at her.
It’s the Undertaker.
The old deserter is staring at her with wide, haunted eyes. How strange, that the sight of him makes Grell want to laugh. Her mouth twitches in an attempt to smile. Here he is, in this graveyard of all places, as she dies again. He looks fucking terrible; his once lovely silver hair is knotted and unkempt, complexion pale and sallow. The bags under his eyes are pronounced enough that they may as well be bruises.
Then again, Grell probably doesn’t look much better. She can barely keep her head up.
'Well?' She wants to demand, impatient. 'Are you the one that reaps the reapers?' But the only noise that comes from her ruined throat is a sickening gurgle, a fresh wave of blood dribbling from both her lips and the slash across her neck.
The Undertaker looks at her like some sort of long-lost treasure.
“Finders, keepers,” he whispers.
Vaguely, she knows that those words should terrify her. But she doesn’t have enough blood left in her brain to register the feeling. Instead, as he tenderly picks her up with one arm around her back and the other under her knees, just before the pain of being moved makes everything go black, her only thought is how romantic it is, that she gets to die in someone’s arms this time.
3.
She dreams that someone is singing her a lullaby. The words make no sense, and the voice keeps changing.
She dreams that her head is in Madam Red’s lap. The singer is Angelina now, and Grell is missing her body. There’s blood leaking from her decapitated head all over Ann’s skirts, but they’re red anyway, so it doesn’t seem to matter. Angelina keeps singing.
She dreams of long nails brushing through her hair. They scrape over her scalp in repetitive, soothing motions. Are these Angelina’s hands? Ann had short, round nails. It made surgical work easier.
She dreams of being just a body, wandering around in search of her skull. It’s so dark; she left her eyeballs in her head. William is going to scold her for being so careless. She keeps searching anxiously.
She dreams of a room with creaking wooden beams that hold up the ceiling. It’s dim, save for a fire burnt down to weak embers, and a table lit by candles next to a bay window. There’s someone at the table.
She dreams that there’s a wedding ring on her little finger. It’s too tight. It’s cutting off her circulation. It’s on the wrong finger. Where is her husband? It hurts.
She dreams that someone is singing to her again. She’s certain that it’s a man this time. His voice is sad and warbling, and not particularly good at holding a tune, but it’s comforting in its familiarity nonetheless.
She dreams that the Undertaker is sitting by her bed. His arm is raised at an odd angle above her; blood flows down from a tube in his wrist to the cannula at her elbow. She can’t feel it. She can’t feel anything at all. It frightens her.
She dreams of the room with the creaking wooden beams, over and over. There’s someone at the table. Sometimes they’re looking out the window at the rain. Other times they’re bent over something red and fleshy, and the candlelight bounces off the scalpel in their hand. There’s someone at the table.
She dreams, and dreams, and dreams.
4.
Grell returns to life just after midnight during a rare London thunderstorm.
(This is an irony she will not appreciate once the first Hollywood ‘Frankenstein’ adaptation is released in 1931. Her future husband will make jokes about her reanimation for decades afterwards.)
5.
Roused by flashes of lightning outside the window, Grell comes to slowly. It’s unclear to her how long she spends fighting her way back to full consciousness. Time is a slippery, oily thing that seems determined to evade her grasp, but at long last, there’s no mistaking that she is indeed awake.
She blinks, disoriented, trying to clear the crust and sleep from her eyes. The room around her with its wooden beams and bay windows is familiar - she’s dreamed of it often enough, lately - and yet, she has no idea where she is, or how she got here. Everything hurts. Every bone in her body seems to ache with a dull, underlying throb. Her muscles feel so stiff that she’s afraid to move lest something snap. And she’s still so, so tired.
But the discomforting sensation of waking in an unknown place is persistent enough to keep Grell from falling back asleep, and so, careful to move only her eyes, she strains to examine her surroundings. She finds herself lying in a half-canopy bed, upper body propped up at an angle by pillows. There’s an intravenous drip connected to the inside of her right elbow, clear liquid steadily oozing through the cannula. The room is just as dim as she remembers it being in her dreams.
There’s someone sitting at the table by the bay window. Now that Grell is conscious, though, she recognizes him immediately - the Undertaker’s shaggy mane of silver hair is unmistakable. He hasn’t noticed that she’s awake yet. The sight of the older reaper bent over something pink and wet doesn’t make sense to her at first. It takes a long, groggy moment for Grell to realize that he’s preoccupied with dissecting some kind of organ.
Suddenly afraid that the flesh on the table is her own, she starts breathing again just to let out a frightened gasp.
Undertaker startles, attention snapping towards her immediately. In his haste to turn around, he drops the scalpel in his hand with a noisy clatter. He pays it no mind, fixing his ghostly green irises on the younger reaper.
“...Grell?” Undertaker ventures softly.
She opens her mouth to reply.
His eyes widen with alarm, a warning forming on his lips, but Undertaker isn’t fast enough to stop her - the moment the first aborted noise leaves Grell’s mouth, a pain rips through her throat so severe that the shock of it is enough to white out her vision.
She hears the mortician talking to her in a sort of out-of-body echo; layered over the agony, he sounds strange and far away.
“Do not speak,” Undertaker commands needlessly. “I know it hurts, my dear, but don’t make any noise at all, if you can help it.”
It all comes back to Grell then: middle-management. Gardening shears slashing through her neck. Undertaker standing over her corpse in a cold, moonlit graveyard. When the pain recedes enough for the bright spots to clear from her eyes, the ancient reaper is looking down at her from above once again, pale eyebrows knit in a worried frown. Grell manages to resist the impulse to continue breathing - she suspects that any air she draws into her lungs will only be forced back out in a panic attack she doesn’t have the strength for.
Sensing that Grell is no longer about to scream or pass out, some of the tension leaves Undertaker’s posture.
“This is the fifth time you’ve woken up,” he tells her, with the sigh of someone who’s had the same conversation several times verbatim. “Do you rememb- no, don’t move your head. Try to mouth a yes or no for me.”
Grell makes an attempt to move her lips in the form of a ‘no’, but even moving her jaw that much pulls at her neck uncomfortably. She eventually manages the shape of an ‘o’, but not the gritted teeth of an ‘n’.
“...No?” Undertaker guesses, seeming unsurprised. “Well. Let’s see if you can stay awake long enough to answer some questions for me this time, hmm?”
He leaves to fetch something from the other side of the room while Grell frowns, trying to process this through the sludge in her brain. She doesn’t think she has any answers right now; only a hundred half-formed questions of her own. Why is she here? Why did he save her?
Undertaker returns with a rectangle of cardboard covered in squiggles that Grell guesses must be writing, but no matter how hard she squints, the letters won’t resolve themselves into words. He sits, perching by her side on the edge of the mattress.
“This is something I used to do with my dolls,” Undertaker explains. Instinctively, something in that sentence fills Grell with alarm, but she’s too tired and confused to decipher the feeling. “I ask you a question, and you point to the answer, you see?” When she just continues to stare at the board in front of her blankly, Undertaker presses on. “Let’s start with something simple - how are you feeling?”
Terrible, Grell thinks wearily, obviously. With a question like that, she supposes the words on the board must be adjectives. There’s one that might be “thirsty”, but for all she knows it could just as easily read “sleepy”. She reaches out weakly - not for the cardboard, but for the older reaper’s hand in his lap. Left arm trembling with the effort of moving it, Grell traces a fingertip over the back of his hand in wobbly but deliberate shapes.
Undertaker frowns down at her finger. “...What? What are you...oh!” He quickly sets the board down, rearranging their hands so that Grell can rest her arm on the bed. The only thing she need move now is her index finger. “I missed it - I’m so sorry, my dear. Can you try again for me?”
This time, it’s much easier to form the shaky lines of letters on his skin.
“B, L…U? R…blur?” Undertaker guesses, concentrating hard. His eyes light up in understanding. “Blurry! Of course, silly me - you’re a reaper, after all.” He moves the board a few inches from her nose. “Better?”
Worse. Grell smacks it away from her face weakly.
Undertaker’s mouth screws up in a confused pout, sitting back. Which actually is better - she gestures for him to keep going with a few limp flops of her hand.
“...Back? Really?” He sits up straighter, scooting back obligingly. Without her glasses it’s still not perfect, but once he reaches the foot of the bed she can just about read the collection of words on his board: sore, tired, hungry, thirsty, agony, itchy, hot, cold, dizzy, confused, and so on. Underneath is the alphabet in blocky capitals, along with numbers, ‘yes’, ‘no’, and ‘maybe’, like a child’s summoning game.
“How curious,” Undertaker murmurs, mouth twitching into a ghost of a smile. It doesn’t reach his eyes. “I did always wonder why you wore your glasses halfway down your nose, you know. They say our terrible eyesight is one of the Almighty’s nasty little jokes - short-sightedness to reflect our short-sighted decision to end our lives. It’s rare for a reaper to be long-sighted; for you to have been reborn that way, you must have been one of the few of us to look out at the rest of your life and see only misery, rather than just your present gloomy circumstances.”
Grell does her best to follow along, she really does, but the more he speaks, the more the words turn to soup in her head. She stares at him blankly.
“Ah…perhaps it’s too soon for philosophy, hm?” Undertaker huffs with only the barest hint of a laugh. Something about that, too, is strange, but she can’t place why. Setting the board aside, the older reaper shuffles closer, putting his hands within reach again. “Here - this seems easier for you.”
One word floats to the top of the soup. GLASSES, Grell spells out next.
Undertaker goes eerily still under her trembling finger; she feels it in the back of his hand when his mood sours abruptly.
“You won’t be needing your glasses any more,” Undertaker informs her. He looms over Grell menacingly, smile cold as ice. “I left them on Madam Red’s tombstone. Without them, that’s all Dispatch will ever find of you - a pair of glasses and a puddle of blood.”
And all Grell can think is: thank god.
She responds with a weak smile that’s considerably warmer than his own. Undertaker falters, frowning again - clearly it isn’t the reaction he was expecting, but the relief Grell feels is overwhelming. She closes her eyes, secure in the knowledge that she’s safe from middle-management here; nobody knows how to hide from Dispatch better than the Undertaker, after all.
He says something else, then, but Grell doesn’t hear it, falling into a dreamless sleep.
6.
The next two weeks of Grell’s afterlife are spent in a feverish haze.
It’s been decades since she was last ill. Her most recent stay in the infirmary was years ago, when both she and Ronnie needed their lungs drained of salt water following their ill-fated voyage on The Campania. Reapers are immune to most human diseases - they’d have a hard time collecting souls if the same illnesses that killed their assignments could infect them too - but even a reaper’s body struggles with scythe wounds, and coupled with the amount of blood Grell lost that night, her supernatural healing falters under the strain.
Being truly sick after so many years is a novel and deeply miserable experience. She’s too hot; she’s too cold. Her neck itches. Her neck burns. Swallowing hurts, and her mouth alternates between too wet and too dry. Her eyes roll up into her head incessantly. The sheets are soaked with her sweat. The long, endless dreams from before are over, replaced by short, confusing snatches of sleep between the pain in her throat waking Grell again and again.
She begins to hallucinate that there are people in the room with her. Sometimes it’s William, and Grell silently begs him for help, but he only stares down at her coldly. Ronald, when he appears, is furious with her for betraying Dispatch. How could she leave him again? Her poor little junior will be all alone. Sometimes the people she’s killed crowd around her bed, come at last for revenge, and Grell thrashes to the point of exhaustion trying to get away. Once, she believes that Eric and Alan are there to welcome her into the arms of death, and she tries to sit up to take their outstretched hands. A firm palm on Grell’s shoulder forces her back down into the pillows.
The only constant as she slips in and out of consciousness is the steadfast presence of the Undertaker. He wraps and rewraps the bloody bandages around her neck. He mops at her clammy brow with cool, wet flannels. He spoon-feeds her tiny sips of warm broth and tucks chips of ice under her tongue. He speaks to her, often, as he works, but Grell can’t always understand or remember what he says. She hates it when he moves her to change the sweat-soaked sheets; it hurts so much to be lifted out of bed that she tries to bite him, gnashing her teeth at whatever she can reach.
Eventually, her endless fever starts to try even his legendary patience.
“It’s no good dying on me, my dear,” Undertaker tells her testily, during one of Grell’s more lucid moments, although it’s unclear if he knows she can hear him. “I’ll only bring you back again. You may as well save us both the trouble and stay alive.”
Grell doesn’t want to be brought back. First as a reaper, then one of his monsters - why will nobody just let her die? Angry, she tries to scream; she manages less than a second of sound before the awful sensation of something tearing in her throat makes her pass out. She briefly wakes to Undertaker cursing black and blue, covered in her blood up to the elbows, a needle and thread between his long fingers.
“You rip those stitches again and I’ll sew you to the bed,” he threatens two days later. Between the fever and the hallucinations, it’s difficult not to reach for her neck - it feels as if the bandages are alive and trying to strangle her. The fifth time she tears them off, Undertaker straps her wrists to the mattress with leather belts.
Grell can tell when her condition deteriorates by the way his anger cools to worry.
There’s a wet, rasping noise that Grell eventually realizes is coming from her - at some point she’s started breathing again just to pant, struggling for air. She can’t seem to open her eyes on her own anymore, even when she’s awake. Undertaker parts her eyelids with two fingers, peering down at her in concern with those piercing, uranium irises. He’s so handsome, even black-eyed by fatigue, she thinks woozily; if Undertaker is the last thing Grell ever sees, she really wouldn’t mind.
He sings to Grell when she writhes and rolls, in strange, lilting rhymes: poure and litel art thou made, uncouth and unknowe, pyne and wo to suffren heer for thyng that nas thyn owe. She understands now why the songs in her dreams never made sense - all of Undertaker’s lullabies are in Middle English, words as old and ancient as he is. Lullay, lullay, litel child, sorwe mythe thou make; thou are sent into this world, as thou were forsake.
“Don’t you leave me too,” Undertaker pleads quietly one night, and he sounds so heartbreakingly sad that, in her delirium, Grell begins to cry. He seems to think her tears are from the pain; he shushes her, carding his long nails through her hair soothingly. Grasping blindly about the sheets, she finds his free hand, squeezing it weakly in her own clammy palm.
At five AM on a dim and cloudy morning, the fever finally breaks.
7.
For the first time since Undertaker stole her away, he isn’t there when Grell wakes next.
The chattering of her own teeth pulls her from the dead sleep she’d fallen into once her fever broke. She’s freezing despite the heavy quilts piled on the bed - she doesn’t think she’s been this cold since she…since…
…Since she first died, Grell realizes with dread.
Did she really die again by Angelina’s grave? Or did she pass away here, in bed? Did Undertaker have to resurrect her? Is that why she’s so cold? It’s difficult to say when breathing was already optional, and her pulse is a lackadaisical thing at the best of times.
The pillows behind her are piled high enough that, with strain, Grell can push herself into sitting upright. It’s darker in the room than usual; the candles at the table have been snuffed out, and only faint embers remain of the fire in the hearth. Heavy, gray curtains are drawn around the windows, but there’s an icy draft coming from somewhere nonetheless. Despite the gloom, Grell can see just fine - she still has the night vision that a reaper’s double-irises affords her, monster or not.
Where is Undertaker? Has he given up and left her for dead? Maybe he finally succumbed to his own exhaustion - she can’t have been the easiest patient to care for these last two weeks, and Grell has no idea how long he’d worked on her before that.
Another shiver wracks through her frame, and she decides that it’s too cold to stay here in bed. Wrapping one of the quilts around her shoulders, Grell shuffles off the edge of the mattress in search of warmth, if not the Undertaker himself. He appears to have left her dressed in some kind of nightgown, long enough for the hem of it to brush her bare feet. It takes a few wobbly steps for Grell’s legs to cooperate, stumbling along the length of the bed like a clumsy, newborn calf. One thigh twinges with protest, more painful than the other, but by steadying herself with the furniture, she limps over to the bay window to part the curtains.
Outside, the night is pitch-black and moonless. She discovers that she’s on the first floor of the building, and below the window is an empty street backing onto the brick walls of a cemetery. Between the trees she can make out crowded clusters of tombstones; not the same graveyard that Undertaker found her in, then. The headstones in Angelina’s cemetery are neatly spaced out.
There are only three doors in the bedroom. The first leads to a tiny bathroom with an old, copper bathtub and an incongruously modern toilet. The second opens to a cluttered, walk-in wardrobe stuffed with a century’s worth of possessions. The third door shows the most promise, revealing a short landing at the top of a steep wooden staircase. Grell doesn’t quite trust her legs yet, so with a silent grunt, she sits on the top step, scooting down the stairs one by one on her arse like a toddler.
She’s unsurprised to find that they lead to a funeral parlor on the ground floor.
Exhausted by her efforts so far, Grell sits on the bottom step and gazes about the place while she catches her breath, pulling her quilt closer. It’s not the same shop she visited as Madam Red’s butler - this one is much smaller. There’s a fireplace to one side with a fire burning down to gray coals, and a ratty old armchair in front of it with ripped and faded upholstery. The coffins and specimen jars lining the walls are familiar, but the scent of the room is not. Undertaker’s old shop smelled like fresh sawdust and formaldehyde; this one smells like ash and rot. There’s a thick layer of dust and cobwebs over everything, disturbed only by the mortician’s boot-prints tracking to and fro on the dark wooden floor.
Compelled by curiosity, Grell pulls herself upright using the banister and shuffles her way across the dusty floor to the front windows of the shop. Half of them are boarded up, but a few gaps remain where the wood has been torn off and stolen as fuel for fire. The glass is as dirty as everything else. She has to press her face to the panes to see anything outside. In the middle of the night, the street on this side of the building is as quiet as the one out back, save for a few drunks and vagrants huddled in doorways to keep warm. The sickly light of gas lanterns illuminates the grime of what is unmistakably East London; by the size of it, the graveyard she saw must be Bow Cemetery, then.
“Trying to escape already?” A tired voice asks.
Grell lets out a little yelp of fright. She immediately regrets it - her hand flies to her mouth as if she can stuff the noise back inside and prevent the way it stabs like knives in her throat, but the damage is already done.
Once the pain has passed, she turns to find Undertaker sprawled in the armchair by the fireplace. The ancient reaper looks as exhausted as she feels. He watches her with dark, hooded eyes, the unnatural glow of his irises dim and dull, one elbow planted on the armrest of his chair to lean the weight of his head on his fist.
“You won’t get far from me in this condition,” he tells Grell, deceptively softly.
She doesn’t know what he’s talking about. She also doesn’t particularly care - standing around in the chilly funeral parlor has her teeth starting to chatter again.
Grell stumbles towards him. Undertaker watches her tottering steps wordlessly. Without much energy to begin with and the cold sapping her limited strength, she only just about makes it across the room, dropping into a shivery heap at his feet.
COLD, she writes on his knee.
Undertaker raises one unimpressed eyebrow. “Should’ve stayed in bed then.”
Grell manages a scowl. COLD UPSTAIRS.
“Upstairs?” Undertaker repeats to himself, brow creasing. Sitting up straight, he glances at a clock on the mantelpiece. He has the grace to look guilty at whatever he sees there, letting out a soft, breathy ah.
He stands with a sigh, bones clicking in protest. “My apologies,” he says, bending to gather Grell into his arms. Swaddled in her quilt, Undertaker lifts her as easily as if she were a baby. It’s embarrassing. “Time tends to slip away from me, these days,” he adds as he takes her back up the stairs, sounding so forlorn that Grell stamps down the urge to flail and squirm, reluctant to trouble him any further.
In the bedroom that takes up the majority of the first floor, Undertaker gently places Grell on the mattress before tending to the fireplace. With his back turned, she can see that his silver hair remains knotted and tangled - such a terrible waste of his long locks. She has the strangest urge to tackle him to the floor and take a brush to it. What does her own look like, Grell wonders?
At that moment, she realizes there are no mirrors in the room. Now that she thinks about it, there weren’t any in the bathroom or the shop, either. How very odd.
Once the excessive number of wooden logs he’s piled in the hearth are set alight, Undertaker returns his attention to his patient.
“Let’s see your neck, then,” he orders wearily, kneeling in front of the bed. “May as well check your stitches while you’re awake.”
Grell lets the quilt slip from her shoulders. The mortician unwraps the bandages around her throat with practiced hands, making quick work of removing them. It stings a little where the gauze has stuck to scabs; the material comes away spotted with brown patches of dry blood, but it’s nowhere near the soaked mess it was when she first arrived.
Still, Undertaker seems displeased with what he finds. Grell watches him frown at her throat critically, mouth set in a grim, flat line.
“Iodine,” he mutters to himself, wandering to the dressing table on the other side of the room to collect a bottle, cotton swabs and fresh gauze. She hisses between her teeth at the first dab of antiseptic, but does her best to remain still, allowing him to clean the wound in peace.
“Good girl,” Undertaker murmurs distractedly. “Almost done. Stitches are a bit weepy, but you haven’t torn anything tonight.” Grell grimaces in response. Gross.
Soon enough he has her neck mummified in clean cotton bandages again. The wrappings make it hard to move her head; she supposes that’s intentional, but knowing it’s for her own good doesn’t make them any less uncomfortable.
Shaking out the pile of sheets and quilts, Undertaker tucks Grell back into bed without a word. It almost seems as if he forgets that she’s not one of his dead customers. Perhaps he’s so used to his patients being unresponsive that, in his fatigue, he’s simply working on auto-pilot, treating her like just another corpse. She liked it better when he sang to her.
Her theory is confirmed when he badly startles at Grell’s hand snatching out to fist in his shirt.
Undertaker blinks down at her. “What?” he asks.
Grell gives him a weak tug, then pats the bed beside her.
He frowns, perplexed by this. “You want me to lie with you?”
Grell nods, shuffling back a bit to make more room. Undertaker narrows his eyes at her suspiciously - but, finding no reason not to, and perhaps too tired to argue, he eventually gives in with a little ‘hm’. He pulls back the covers and climbs in, boots and all.
Outraged, Grell kicks at his shin.
“Stop that,” Undertaker grumbles, settling down. “Your feet are filthy too after walking around the shop barefoot like that. I’ll change the sheets again tomorrow, just go to sleep.”
Whose fault is it that they’re so dusty? Grell thinks irritably, but the thought of spelling all that out on his hand seems like far too much effort. Instead, she burrows closer to him, trying to leech off some of his body heat. She traces out the letters for COLD again in explanation on the part of him nearest her fingers - it happens to be the space over his heart.
Undertaker presses the back of his hand to her forehead, checking her temperature. “Hmm…you are, too,” he agrees. It does nothing to soothe her earlier unease. He tugs Grell closer, bundling the covers more firmly around her body in an effort to warm her up.
Steeling herself for the answer, Grell writes on his chest: DEAD?
“We both are,” Undertaker replies tiredly.
Grell huffs through her nose. Apparently she needs to be more specific to get answers from the man. Pressing her finger to him firmly, she spells out: DOLL?
Undertaker looks down at her consideringly, though his face gives nothing away.
“Would you be able to tell, if you were?” he muses. “Your heart doesn’t need to beat. Your lungs don’t need to breathe. You can’t die of thirst or starvation. What makes a reaper different from one of my dolls? If you can think and feel independently, does it really matter whether I resurrected you or not?”
Grell swallows anxiously. Past the gash across her throat, it feels like choking down broken glass. By his reluctance to give her a straight answer, she can only assume the worst. She racks her brains, trying to remember everything she learned about his horrible experiments fifteen years ago. Does she still have a soul? Unhelpful; she doesn’t know what happens to reapers’ souls in the first place. They wake in the Marble Mausoleum after dying and get shuffled off to the Academy for training immediately. Is she still Grell Sutcliff? Her memory seems as intact as can be expected after taking a scythe to the throat.
Something she thought was only a dream comes back to her suddenly. GAVE ME BLOOD, she writes with mounting horror, remembering the enormous amounts of stolen blood his dolls required.
“Mm. I did,” Undertaker confirms sleepily. “Several times.” He reaches for a lock of Grell’s red hair, smoothing it between his fingers repetitively as he speaks. “I gave my blood to a human, once, to see what would happen. It didn’t work; the blood of the dead is poison to the living. What if the opposite is true, too? You’d already lost so much when I found you. It had to be my own. I couldn’t risk any other donor.”
He raises himself up on one elbow to lean over her, phosphorus eyes bright in the dark.
“You are my final masterpiece, Grell Sutcliff,” Undertaker murmurs, brushing his lips over her forehead with the lightest of kisses. “Sebastian stole the last Phantomhives from me; neither Dispatch nor demon will take you. I’ll make sure of it.”
Grell shivers, but it’s not from the cold.