Paroxysm
She was an uncaring, bored girl who treasured laughing. He was once a grim reaper. She's a dead woman. He's a traitor-turned-undertaker-turned-fugitive. And they might have a story together, but only for a short while. – Undertaker/Claudia Phantomhive, head canon.
The first time he sees her, it is her visiting grandmother whose soul he reaps. The old woman suffered a heart attack thanks to a stray cat that the cook had a soft spot for, and she is fated to not make it through the night.
He gives her the usual stab, watches the Records and then harvests her soul, and another name is stamped off the list.
Next to the now-fresh corpse, she sits keeping company and when he removes his scythe from what was her grandmother not too long ago, she merely gives him a brief, bored look before standing up and calling for a maid in a mild tone.
The maid reacts in the usual human manner (hysterics and tears and all). The girl merely nods, but her face is composed to the point of apathy.
A spark of interest, but then he heads back.
.
The second time, it is her cousin. A young one, too – only fifteen – but he is rash, and slated for a death by an accident caused from sheer stupidity.
He waves aside the frantic horse and stares for a moment at the boy, wondering just how this immature moron has managed to get his neck impaled on the decorative (but sharp enough) spikes of the garden's fence when the hairs on the back of his neck prickles in awareness.
Someone is watching.
Almost immediately his rational mind dismisses the idea. Preposterous. That is nothing but paranoia and ignorance speaking.
He turns around anyways, and sees – on the manor's balcony – a lady with her head tipped slightly to the side in curiosity.
He turns right back and slices the gurgling boy with just a bit more force than necessary. The records get no attention paid to them, and another soul is collected.
.
The third time, she speaks to him. "What came first, the chicken or the egg?"
He had just finished collecting the soul of one of the maids (poor thing, sneaking back into the mansion through the kitchen door after a secret meeting with her lover only to slip on the freshly mopped floors and break her neck), and, as usual, stood with the scythe in his hands.
And she asked him a question.
Of all the questions to ask –
She sees the expression he makes and bursts out laughing, right next to what used to be the girl who helped her into tight, troublesome shoes (he saw the records). It is brief and unladylike; it is a bark and a howl; but it is bright, as if she has no cares in the world, and such a contrast to the bored faces he's seen so far.
He's struck in curiosity at this girl, who seems desensitized to death. Despite her demeanor, though, she seems to laugh genuinely, purely.
What he'd give to see her records right now.
She gestures at him to follow, and he does, climbing up stairs and walking down richly furnished hallways until they enter a room. She reaches around him in an embrace that does not touch to close the door, and he stares down at the top of her head. She wears a light scent.
"So what came first?" she asks again, sitting heavily on a bed. This, he realizes, is her bedroom. "The egg, or the chicken?"
This had nothing to do with his job. He was done his duties here, so he should have headed back.
Had the question been phrased any differently, had it been logical and had it made sense he would have just left.
But his curiosity was peeking out of the sea of ennui that was his personality, and so he stayed to listen to her explanation on first the philosophical question, and then her reasoning for that particular question.
"Is it your presence that causes deaths?" she asks bluntly, almost uncaringly. "Or is it that you come when someone will die?"
He tells her the truth, because why not, this is a change from the same old, same old.
She surprises him by laughing, again. They talk, and the topics range from death to irony to revenge and then back to death.
"Thank you for making me laugh," she says when he gets up to leave. It is dark outside, she's sent away the butler (because the maid couldn't come) to refuse dinner despite her grumbling stomach and he should head back.
He nods, not expecting her to continue.
She does, throwing his expectations as usual. "That's enough payment for information, I think," she says, not making sense at all to him. What payment?
Then, she introduces himself. "My name is Claudia."
.
The fourth time he switches assignments with another reaper. He takes on extra work, and he comes early so he can talk to Claudia before reaping a faithful servant's soul. He does not tell her this.
"I'm getting married," she tells him when he inquires what is new in her life.
He notes that she doesn't seem to care, very much.
Claudia only shrugs, not a girl but a maiden nearly womanhood. "I don't."
Her skin is as pale as wax, lacking the touch of sun and the outside air. She hates having to go outside, where there are so many lies and bothersome things that make her irritated.
A month later he takes leave and visits her wedding. Her skin is only a shade darker than her white dress, and someone has managed to paint her face in a way that disguises her usual boredom. She keeps her sharp tongue sheathed as her last name is changed to Phantomhive by marrying the Queen's Watchdog.
.
Despite moving homes and changing her name, death still follows her. In fact, her new family calls death to its members and he sees her often.
.
The gardener and groom of the Phantomhive family get in a fight over the new maid (who is really more interested in the cook) and the gardener ends up stabbing the groom with a pair of gardening shears.
She gave birth to a daughter. She will have to host a party, and of course she can do it – she just doesn't want to, because what's the point? And no, she hasn't told her husband her opinion. He's always locked up in his study or roaming around the country at the Royal Orders (this is said bitterly, and he is surprised at the thought of her caring).
At the party one man gets too drunk and 'accidentally' falls down the stairs, and the famously effective servants can't (don't) make it in time to save his neck from being broken. He dies.
She's pregnant again. She hasn't told her husband yet – she has yet to see the doctor to confirm it, but she knows – but she tells him, a grim reaper. A god of death. A being that collects souls.
The second assassin that month trips on one of the traps, and the servants end his life before he can untangle himself from the cutting wires.
She listens to his hesitant complaints after having chased out the children in the room through some excuse. Some dam inside of him that he hadn't been aware of bursts open and the floods come pouring out.
It appears that the ennui he felt wasn't boredom or apathy, but rather frustration. Why does death have to be the absolute end? Why do all of those wonderful stories have to come to a devastating end, and sit in boxes collecting dust?
Claudia listens, letting the raging waves of complaints wash over her until they subside in time. He leaves, eventually, and feels quite light.
.
"Aren't you curious?" he asks her one day, claiming he needs time to decide whether the Head of the Phantomhive family deserves to die. The date is scheduled to be a week later, and he really doesn't see why the old bastard should live longer, but it is a suitable excuse.
Claudia knows what he's talking about. "About when I'll die?" she asks with a smirk, hiding in the dark of her room. Her curtains are drawn to block the light of the sunny, beautiful day. Candles light up the room suitably enough for her to read radical, blunt essays she cajoles her husband into getting for her.
He waits for her answer.
"I am not in the best of my health on good days," she tells him. "I've given birth twice. I never get exercise and fresh air. I don't eat enough. Phantomhives in general have extraordinarily short lifespans. I don't expect to live long."
She seems to be resigned to her fate, he notes.
She shrugs. "From what you've told me, everything ends when you take my soul," she says. "The End. Nothing more. It all seems rather pointless, to me."
He makes her laugh as a goodbye gift but wonders if it is his fault for her uncaring attitude to death as he returns for more assignments after reaping the head's soul. Her husband becomes the new Earl of Phantomhive, and he can tell that Claudia couldn't care less through the congratulations she offers him. He only wonders how her husband – a sharp man – cannot see his wife's true feelings.
.
At the next assignment he receives, he nods at the address – Phantomhive Mansion, a fortress often under attack from assassins and thugs – but drops the paper in shock when he sees the name.
Claudia Phantomhive.
He should have known it was coming. Her health had been declining in the last times he visited, after all. She is human, and for all mortals there was always an end. No matter how odd or extraordinary the story, the cinematic records would have a definite end. The conclusion could be stalled, but that was it.
And for the wife of Earl Phantomhive, there would be no stall. She estranged herself from society, and her husband didn't love her enough to change the foundations of the world in her name after her death.
She would die. And he would collect her soul.
He considers deeply, but does not ask for a trade in assignment.
.
Claudia has always been smart, if not eccentric. She knows when he is here for her, looking the same as he did when they first met.
She looks pale, drawn, thin and tired, but he sees the apathetic girl in the sick and dying woman. He knows how to look, after all.
They won't be disturbed by the servants or her family members, in fear of contagion, and her final moments are to be spent with only him.
He makes her laugh with a bawdy joke he picked up from the memories of a sailor he reaped a few hours ago, trying to distract himself from the inevitable, trying to forget by immersing himself in his duty. "I suppose I must pay you back for the laugh," she says, and then makes a prophecy to make Cassandra weep in its simplicity. "You've changed, and you'll continue to change."
He laughs unbelievingly, but she merely smirks in a completely unladylike manner before offering him the palm of her hand. A part of him is tempted to make this as blunt as his usual kills – and it is a rather large part – but compassion grown and tended to in him wins out, as do the memories of the good days. He nicks her thumb, watching memories burst from the tiny cut with the dotted blood, and absorbs the records like a man dying of thirst would drink water. He engrosses himself in her (admittedly rather short) life for that split second.
She did not care as a child. She found no interest in clothes, in studies, in flowers or in love, and didn't bother telling lies. She learned to care as she grew older, but not very much.
She did not live as others did, wreathed in greed and longing and envy. She found no need to care about it all, and kept to herself whenever possible.
She did not love her husband. Their marriage was one arranged, and there never was room for love. She respected and supported him, but didn't love him.
She loved her children, in a way only she could. She loved them, strongly, encouraging her daughter to learn how to fence and her son to do as he wanted, but always wondered if it was the maternal desires and instincts speaking. If she was acting in accordance to the society she found ridiculous (which irked her to no end).
She had always thought that she would be killed by one of the assailants aiming to kill the Phantomhives, and so the news that she would die of consumption had amused her greatly. She had only stopped laughing when the pain in her lungs got too great for her to burst out laughing at the irony of it all.
She loved him. In a manner. She loved him because he wasn't there most of the time, and the moments with him brightened up the otherwise mostly gloomy memories. He was different, interesting in what she considered a rather boring life.
But mostly, she wondered if she was insane. She couldn't care; she couldn't quite love properly; she couldn't react correctly; she never cried because of goodbyes when everyone else bawled their eyes out; she laughed too much, too loudly; her mind was ugly; she saw and talked to a grim reaper; she didn't doubt the existence of the grim reaper she saw and talked to; she wasn't scared at the thought of being insane; there were so many reasons and her chaotic mind was the only witness to her odd thoughts.
When he is done watching them he closes his eyes before taking her soul. When he opens them, what used to be her lies in the bed, eyes glassy and looking content.
He reaches out to close the eyes, but hesitates and draws them back at the last moment.
Claudia Phantomhive, age thirty-six, Friday, July 13th, 1866. Died of consumption.
.
It's a gross parody of her wedding day, or perhaps it is irony. The fineries are present, as is the face paint that skillfully hides the boredom naturally present in her countenance, and he has taken leave for a few hours to grace the ceremony.
While the pastor drones on and on about life, and just how good of a mother, woman and wife Claudia was to the sea of black-clothed mourners who never knew her, he remembers her life's story, both from what he observed and what he learned by watching her records.
What would Claudia think about the ceremony? She would be bored – even at her own funeral, that woman would find a way to be bored – and would probably make an excuse to sit down or go home early. She had done exactly that, and gotten away with it at her own wedding.
Would she make a rare joke? Something about a funeral being the most important event in a lady's life, perhaps. Or maybe not. In one scene from her records she told her children to live hard for the future – something her strict husband undoubtedly said – but also to always live in the moment when laughing. In that scene she smiled and she was almost normal.
He watches the coffin get lowered into the dug grave. Such fineries in the resting place of the dead, the soulless corpses. It's no longer her in there, he supposes, but what used to be her. What used to hold her soul. And this isn't even the end - the end was when her soul left her body and her records, her story came to an end. No sequel, no returns, no continuations.
He watches the first dirt get sprinkled onto the top of the grave, by the husband, the daughter and the son. When the family's finished paying – showing – their respect to their dead mother, he throws some dirt.
Funerals. She wouldn't have cared. But then again, she never cared. About anything, or anyone.
He wants to rage.
Why didn't she care? She was mortal – definite – and she of all beings should have known the importance of enjoying the spark of a short life. She acted as if she was immortal, as if her soul and life was a burden.
Why?
.
One day, he finds it too repulsive to reap the souls of humans anymore. He refuses to end all these stories so callously. It is disenchanting, sickening, and he wants to find a way to make it different.
But to do that goes against everything he is a part of. To do that requires denouncing his identity as a grim reaper, and to desert the organization.
Once, even as he was bored, he would have been loyal. He would have adhered to the rules because it was all he knew.
Now he just can't quite care. And there might be more to it all. Whatever all is.
He abandons his glasses, and finds a way to see fine without them (the way hurts, and there are scars on his face but that's alright). His scythe provides a slight pause in plans – he doesn't have the right to wield a grim reaper's blade anymore – but then he decides to ignore the rules because he's already breaking half, so why not break them all while he's at it?
He sets up shop in the dirty alleys, and builds up a reputation as a creepy man with absolutely no sense of shame, fear or manners. He sleeps in his coffins, dreaming of stories that do not have the abrupt ends he hates so much. He welcomes his soulless guests, and opens them up in hopes of finding a way to let them continue their stories.
But there is only so much research he can do on his own, and he is oh-so-effective in so many different areas as well. He establishes networks with the lords of the underground, the 'evil noblemen'. He provides information – good information – and always delivers on his promises.
Provided that he is paid.
Initially his customers make mistakes, and try to pay him as they would like to be paid. But what need does he have for money, for lands? No, the only currency worth taking in this pointless world is laughter for the moment.
Live in the moment.
He laughs until he cries when Earl Vincent Phantomhive comes to make contact with the Undertaker. The man is bemused, but they make good contacts. Whenever he comes, the earl manages to give him a first-rate laugh.
(But then again, he is his mother's son. He must be used to making people with bizarre senses of humour laugh.)
.
He abandoned his name when he abandoned his glasses. He is the Undertaker – he will treasure souls as they deserve to be treasured – and that is enough.
Undertaker dons a rumpled black silk hat, and rubs his corpse-white palms together.
AN: I'm actually more of the belief that the Undertaker warned Claudia of holding souls dear, and that he deserted far before meeting her, but I was going for an Alice-in-Wonderland AU story with them together (Even had the summary and everything - "he was Alice in Wonderland, she was the Mad Hatter and when she was dead he took her hat for his own"). And then the story just changed. Oh well.
Thank you for reading.