Disclaimer: I do not own Black Butler. If I did I would be rich, which I, sadly, am not.
Warnings: Serial killing, prostitutes, mental illness, canon character death, fighting, violence in general, references to sexuality and drugs, Grell being Grell
AN: My first stab at writing for the Black Butler fandom. Now, for this fic I use the feminine tense to refer to Grell, as Grell obviously considers herself to be a female. It is also the way the author refers to Grell when discussing her in interviews. With that explained, please enjoy the story!
Harvest Time
There was an old human saying that Grell had always found amusing. It went something like, "You reap what you sow." She found it oh so delightfully ironic because grim reapers like herself never reaped what they sowed. In fact, that was pretty much their entire job description. They did nothing but reap, cutting down souls when they ripened and bringing home the bounty of their memories. The fruits of their labors were seeded by another, some unknown being who did all the dirty work of tending to that finicky crop called man, only calling the grim reapers in at the very end like hired farmhands in the autumn. She was quite thankful for that, since if she was that unlucky schmuck in charge of caring for all of humankind there was no doubt in her that she would snap. Grell had seen more than enough of the human condition, glimpsed through years and years of life and spools and spools of Cinematic Records, that she was quite certain that her job was vastly superior. It was much better to skip right to harvest, when all she had to do was collect. No muss, no fuss, no mucking about with such inferior filth.
Those beliefs changed when Grell met Angelina Durless, that beautiful woman drenched in crimson passions who swept her off her feet with a glance of those cold burgundy eyes. The Madam brought color to her dull, boring existence, like rose petals scattered on a wedding bed or blood splattered across dirty grey cobblestones. Oh, together they painted the town such glorious shades of red, using blades as their brushes and whores as their palettes. Sure, Grell continued to dislike humans, now more than ever in fact, but Madam Red wasn't like any of the other member of her lowly species. She was like a wineglass spiked with poison, completely unobtrusive unless one partakes of it. And oh, Grell partook. She got absolutely drunk on that deadly woman of claret and hebona, bending to her whims as easily as a harlot bends to a john. Who else would she willingly play the meek, humble servant to? Not William T. Spears, that's for sure.
Alas, the curtain must fall on even the finest of plays, the tragedy of Jack the Ripper being no exception. However, as Grell gave her parting monologue and divested her fallen Madam of that lovely red coat, she couldn't help but feel the slightest twinge of ugly black regret. She had connected with Angelina, felt legitimate empathy with someone for the first time in her timeless existence, and it had ended in the woman's death. She had sown her hopes and dreams and insanity in Angelina's fallow fields, only to have the crop be harvested by her own hands.
Grell couldn't contemplate it further since that sexy beast Sebastian Michaelis started seriously trying to kill her at that point, but it was a sobering concept for her blood-drunk mind to contemplate and she hated it. As she twirled gracefully along to the danse macabre with the hunky demon leading, she felt the last dregs of red fading from her system. Even as she spewed her usual rhetoric of love, lust, and obsession, she came down off the high that had been clouding her thoughts for two years. Or was it three years? Or more? It got a bit hazy at times. After a while the seemingly endless stream of servile days and cerise nights just seemed to blend together like newsprint in the rain.
It was that clouded state of mind that nearly killed her. Since Grell couldn't concentrate on the fight properly, her dearest Sebastian managed to jam her scythe and thus was able beat the absolute shit out of her. William ended up saving her, thank God, but not after taking out his frustrations on her beaten, bleeding body. By the time she was hauled by her hair back to their home realm she could hardly see through her blackened eyes and every breath felt like her ribs were being stabbed through her lungs, which quite honestly might have been the case. Neither Sebastian nor William pulled their punches, so she would be surprised if she could get out of bed within a week. Her only distraction from the agony was Williams's muttered rant about how she screwed up big time and was going to get seriously punished, occasionally breaking from his spiel to talk about how she was the absolute sorriest excuse for a grim reaper to ever wield a death scythe. That last topic actually hurt a little. She was perfectly aware of what was going to happen to her, had been from the beginning, but listening to her longtime crush spew such vitriol towards her crushed her heart. Of course, that might have been her now obviously broken ribs' doing.
"You know, William," she slurred past puffy bruised lips, "You reap what you sow."
He scowled at her. She giggled at him, a tad hysterical at that point, but quickly petered off into a groan at a particularly vicious hair pull.
"What an idiotic phrase," he scoffed, which only made her laugh harder.