A/N: Hello, everyone! This chapter begins my new fanfic, 'The Tale of Grell the Shinigami'. The idea of specific mortals becoming shinigami when they passed away came from the fanfiction 'Fit to Wear Red' by the fabulous and creative author, Anncatz. I loved the idea and decided to elaborate on it a bit. Go check out her fanfic and give her some love for the amazing idea! I did not structure out my idea in chapters quite yet, as this was only going to be a one-shot, but I decided to draw it out longer. I can't give you an estimation on how long this fanfic will be, so perhaps you get to guess! This fanfic is rated T for minor cursing, and adult situations, including drinking and suicide.
This fanfic will be mentioning Grell's gender dysphoria, as it has been made clear to us in the manga and anime that she does not identify with her assigned gender, which would be male. While at the start I use he/him pronouns while reffering to our beloved shinigami, I will, for the majority of the fanfiction, be using she/her pronouns for her. This is because I feel as if she is taking action to present herself as female as a shinigami with the ability to change her appearance, although limited. I think of Grell as a transwoman, and you are allowed to disagree, but I would kindly ask that you refrain from mentioning what pronouns you think I should be using in reviews. If you have any questions for me regarding the subject, you are welcome to message me.
In this fanfic, Grell's actual appearance without any changes is basically what she looked like in disguise as Madame Red's butler, and this would be what she looked like all through the first chapter, and into the second chapter. You will know when she decides to change her appearance in this fanfic to look like she did in the anime OVA, 'The Tale of William the Shinigami', with the short red hair.
The general plot will be Grell and William's ventures while attending the Academy as young shinigami students.
Please enjoy, as I have worked hard to bring this to you. I have tried to the best of my ability to correct any grammar/spelling mistakes I see, with the recourses I have. Thank you!
Copyright notice, Kuroshitsuji and all of it's characters belong to Yana Toboso. There will be none of my own characters in this fanfiction, fortunately.
He'd spend months perfecting it, mindlessly tying little knots in thread when he got too frustrated to try once again to slip it through the tiny eye of the needle. He found himself tying the knot in his hair when a customer forgot to pick up their garment. The tailor tied these knots quite frequently, in ribbons and even scraps of fabric as he got up to discard them. No matter how many times he'd tied the godforsaken knot, nothing could have trained him to when he finally decided to tie it into the rope. Everything was perfect. The stage was set to kill off the character everyone hated in the play. Grell had managed to shoo away the trembling in his nimble fingers long enough to tie the rope into a noose, and attach it to the stair railing, where he could easily jump off the banister. The tailor exhaled deeply, climbing over to the other side of the railing, holding on to it for dear life. This was pretty ironic, he mused, since he was climbing to the incorrect side of the stairs in a mission to end his pathetic life. He looked down at the ground, knees wobbling in something he couldn't describe other than being enthusiastic fear.
Many times Grell asked himself why in fact he wanted to take his life. The question was not excluded to this moment, and he wondered a final time why it was so important to do this. He answered the question a long while back, a cold January day where the wind was relentless and the dress he was ordered to deliver had blown away from his clutches, destroying its own lovely delicacy, ripping up the lace and soaking through the satin skirts. He stood there, quite calmly in fact, staring down at his ruined work. He answered the question in his head so quickly it was shocking to him that he found the answer in such a short amount of time when he spent years puzzling over it. The answer was that if Grell couldn't live in a body that he belonged to, then it would be easier to die.
Every day, the petty little man hated his image, this cursed body that he had to live with day after day. This, this male body that he was trapped in. It couldn't be normal for a man to desire having a woman's body, to want men to think of him as a lady instead of the horrid redundancy of 'Mister Grell', or perhaps even 'Mister Sutcliffe.' He was terribly weak in stature, being thin and short. You could almost mistake him for a woman if his shoulders weren't so broad and his voice so deep. And then you have his personality. He believed himself to be too stupid and timid to do anything properly and he tripped over air. What use could a man be if he could never preform a task with success?
And this answer once again followed the question, as Grell held onto the handrail with one hand, and took the noose in the other. His hands shook, and he wish he could tell them to stop. But they're only hands, this was silly and he needed to just jump now or he would get caught up in the fact his hands did not have a sense of hearing.
He slipped the noose around his neck, tucking the thick rope under his chin, and held on to the banister. This was it, he had realized.
And he jumped.
The shinigami awoke with a searing pain in her chest, sort of the kind of heaviness she felt when her lungs were about to explode… She sat up abruptly, looking around the room she laid in. It was white walls and flooring, with similar colorless ceilings. Grell cursed loudly, wondering if she was in heaven, hell, or somewhere in between. The room, she noticed, was quite blurry, and she couldn't focus her eyes on anything. This was scary for the former tailor, who had the perfect eyesight needed in her field of work.
"Mister Sutcliffe, you are awake." A male voice said.
"Bloody hell! It follows me into the afterlife, in the voices in my head. Oh, what a tragic, useless being I am!" Grell cried out at the sound of hearing the blasted 'Mister Sutcliffe' once more.
"You are not entirely useless, as it proves you were very skilled in tailoring. You would have to have precision and accuracy to be able to sew garments the way you did." The same deep voice reasoned.
"I'm trying to comfort myself with this stupid voice in my head. Why can't I just be dead? Oh, bother!" She wailed, burying her eyes her palms, rubbing them as if she would open them to be somewhere entirely new.
Two hands pulled her hands away from her face, and pushed glasses up her nose. Although the glasses were crooked, her vision returned to normal and her eyes focused on a man, quite gorgeous, in fact.
"You're real?" Grell puzzled, fitting the spectacles to her face.
It was hard to imagine that he was. Grell thought beautiful men only lived in her imagination. He was tall and slender, with beautiful green eyes and neatly combed hair. The man sat up straight and seemed very dignified. What was he doing, talking to a lowly tailor? She looked around the room, noticing that is was quite plain, without any greenery or decoration to spruce it up.
"Of course I am. My name is William T. Spears and I was assigned to work with you, as I woke up from my death only three weeks ago." The man said flatly.
"I woke up from being dead? Oh, this is truly troublesome!" The shinigami sighed, shaking her head.
"You woke up to be a shinigami. You are still in the afterlife, but you have a new purpose to living." William explained.
"As if there was a purpose for living in the first place!" Grell hung her head, despising the new situation she landed herself into.
"You actually did serve a marvelous purpose, however, you cut your life short. I was told that you would have grown to a high status, tailoring for royalty, if you'd only stayed alive long enough. You are without a doubt impatient." He kept the same unmoving, unemotional stare.
Grell's eyes grew wide. "I cannot believe this. This is absolutely ridiculous!"
"You'll have to get used to it. From now on you will be in training at the Academy to graduate to a professional shinigami status to work on the field as part of the Shinigami Dispatch Society in reaping and recording souls. Your fir-"
"Shinigami?! As in, grim reaper? Reaping souls?"
"Your reaction was at least two seconds too late. Perhaps you should focus on reflexes before anything else." William suggested.
"So you mean to say that I, a silly tailor, is to be a shinigami, reaping souls?" Grell processed the information in her mind, settling down as she tried to accept what William was saying.
"Precisely. And, might I add, you are no longer a silly tailor. You are now a student at the Academy, and I will now walk you to the dorm you will be sharing with me." The man stated, getting up and smoothing wrinkles from his black suit jacket.
All Grell could manage to do was nod and follow him out of the room, which appeared to be a hospital room. They turned right down a long hallway, lined with more doors leading to rooms exactly like the one Grell had woken up to. Everything was plain white, without any spark of color. Name tags hung on the doors. The new shinigami looked back to look if her own door had her name on it, and it did. 'Grell Sutcliffe' in bold letters. At least they didn't spell it wrong. There was no other way to go but to follow William, unless she wanted to run back in the room and hide under the covers or jump out of the window directly left of her room. So, she looked ahead and nervously followed William around two more corners leading to identical halls, until they came across two metal doors, with a two yellow glowing lights next to them, one with an arrow pointing up, and the other with an arrow pointing downwards. The man pushed the lower button, and the two thick, heavy looking doors pulled apart to reveal a small room hidden behind them.
The tiny room was just as modern and bland as the rest of the place. How was Grell ever going to get used to the lack of color? And more importantly, why was the tiny room sealed off with those dense metal doors? Cautiously, Grell stepped into the room after William, and the doors sealed shut behind her. She whirled around and placed her hands on the cold metal, as if they would open. To her surprise, they did, and two men shuffled into the little room. William pulled Grell over to make room for the other men, with the same green eyes and neatly combed hair as himself.
The shinigami's eyes settled on a panel of similar glowing lights, numbered up to twenty-two. The tall man next to her pressed a light that had a star in the center of it, and the men to the other side of her nodded in agreement, or was it a greeting? Grell couldn't tell, but neither of them smiled, so it wasn't a very warm welcome, if it even was. The small room shifted slightly, and began to go down. The floor didn't move and the wall's didn't stretch out so that the ceiling was any further above them, so Grell figured that the little room as a whole was moving within the building.
"It's an elevator, Sutcliffe." William said, setting his jaw to a blank expression.
"What does it do?" She asked, confused and seemingly interested.
"It moves up or down a shaft to take us to a higher or lower floor in the building. It's a quicker and more efficient alternative to walking flights of stairs," was the explanation she received.
"Is it witchcraft?" Grell gasped, looking up to the ceiling.
"Hardly. It's pulled up and down by looping the cables it's connected to around a sheave and pulling the cables down or loosening the cables to pull the elevator up. It's a pretty simple mechanism, but a little challenging to understand at first." The man to her left said. "You must be new, seeing as elevators have not yet been invented in the human world. It must be around mid-1700s by now."
"Actually, it's 1758, to be exact." Grell mumbled, allowing the concept of elevators and shafts and cables to leave her mind as quickly as it entered.
"Well, then you will find many things are different here." He smiled, and the elevator doors opened up once more to a bright lobby, with many windows and rows of desks.
A rug ran down the middle to two big wooden doors, separating the desks into two sections on both sides of the room. A loft hung over the wall they faced, but you couldn't take an elevator to get up to them. You had to use one of two set of stairs on each side leading up to the garret. Grell figured that there were more desks up in the loft. Women sat at the desks, moving their fingers over a device that held paper at the front, with a keyboard of buttons with letters on them. Levers stamped the letter that the ladies pressed onto the paper. Perhaps this was a quicker way to write papers? It was all very confusing.
"It's a typewriter." William said, softly enough for everyone else to simply ignore.
Grell nodded, noticing that this new invention was easier to understand then the elevator.
They made their way out of the doors and into a sunny day, without any glimpses of clouds. The pair descended a set of marble steps to level ground. Grell stepped back and looked up at the towering building. On the outside, it looked quite business-like indeed, with smooth white pillars and matching tiling. Buildings similar to the one they stepped out of circled around a center of cobblestone ground and marble benches, with a fountain in the middle. There was an empty space where another building should have been.
"What's over there?" Grell asked, pointing a finger over to the large space.
"Well, that is where we will be going, so you will find out soon enough." The shinigami replied.
She once again followed William over to the empty space, passing by men and women with green eyes and neat hair and straight backs. Everyone here was the same, and how could Grell possibly fit in? She had messy brown hair pulled back into a ribbon she hastened to tie back her long hair with, and a slumped, discouraged posture with a feeble personality. It must be a mistake for her to be a shinigami. She had no real talents, and didn't even believe in a higher being in her mortal life. Grell pretended to walk with her head high alike the others, but it hurt her head to strain her neck. She rubbed her chest and grimaced.
"You may have chest and neck pain, and perhaps trouble breathing for the next month, since you were suffocated as means of death. When your body struggled to breathe even after you went uncontious, it placed a strain on your lungs, which carries into this life. You may even develop asthma." William explained, noticing her gesture.
Grell cursed for hanging herself.
"How did you die, William?" The shinigami asked.
"I was murdered. In my mortal life I had a successful business, and lived comfortably in the middle class, although I had inherited the business and money from my parents. Apparently somebody wanted me dead." He replied.
As they approached the lot, it grew clear to Grell that it was a large bridge. The whole area, in fact, was located at the edge of a cliff. They moved across the bridge, and the new grim reaper ducked over the side to see the water, bright blue and crashing against the cliff face, surprisingly calm. She couldn't see any waves moving across the water. Grell found that there wasn't even a breeze that would push the water into waves, either. The heat wasn't overwhelming, but it was flat and hung in the air. The salty ocean air was a nice change to the muggy, polluted air amid the London buzz.
William finally answered her. "Yes, I was informed that you may be unstable."
"That may be an understatement." Grell forced herself to find humor in the statement, but instead of laughing, she just sighed.
"The Academy is across the bridge. This is where we will be training. The dorms are directly across from the school. You will find that the whole campus is quite large. Even I have not gotten used to how big it is. The Library where all the cinematic records are kept as books is on top the hill, there," William gestured to a building further away from the Academy, where there seemed to be a path from the campus to get up to it. "You will probably not be visiting it for a long while."
Grell nodded, and stepped back onto the cobblestone walk as the bridge ended. The buildings on campus were brick. Students studied on benches and had their noses in books. It reminded Grell of when she attended an all-boys catholic school. There wasn't anything to do other than study, but her grades never got her anywhere.
"We will be staying in dorm room 42b. That is, building four, floor two, room 'b'." William said.
Building four had no elevators, only stairs that trapped heat low to the ground. Grell thought that it would be bothersome in the sort of heat here. After a flight of stairs to the second floor, they came across a hallway with linoleum flooring, and vents circulating the air so that at least it was cool in the halls. Bricks lined the bottom half of the walls, and the upper half was painted white. The room the two were to share was the first room on the left, directly across from room 'a'.
"At least the brick serves a nice touch to the dull white I've seen everywhere else." Grell exclaimed.
"I believe that the design of the buildings matter not to our ability to learn, unless of course, you are just ignorant and picky." The other shinigami said, pushing his round glasses up on his face.
"You are utterly dismal yourself, Mister Spears!" She frowned, shooting him a glare.
"Mister Sutcliffe, perhaps you should take a long look at yourself before you declare others to be a nuisance. You are the one who decided to end your pitiful life, and maybe even a clumsy tailor shouldn't be given the chance to redeem himself as a shinigami." William retorted.
It was obvious even to an idiot that it would take a long while to get used to this man, and this place. Grell could only pretend this was a nightmare she would wake from, and soon, at that.
A/N: I hope you enjoyed this pilot chapter! Please review and tell me how I did! As always, thank you very much.
Just a fun fact- to explain how an elevator worked, I read an interesting article on the site 'How Stuff Works' and it explained two ways that elevators are constructed, one method using water, being the Hydraulic method, and the other method being with the sheave and cables.