Chapter one: The Mirror

The joker girl's mask falls off her face and onto the floor with a crash, breaking the delicate porcelain into millions of sparkling blue and silver pieces. She tries to hide her face, but it's to no use. The young woman is easily recognizable, even with half of her face covered in the disgusting curse she brought on herself. Everyone's eyes widen.

"...Elizabeth?"


The warm afternoon light shines in through the windows, lighting up the hallways and the offices. The hallway is completely empty, seeing as everyone is working in their offices or out on field duty. Soft footsteps echo gently as a young woman makes her way by. She is roughly about eighteen years old, but looks only fourteen. It's clear that she is stalling for time and that wherever she is heading, she doesn't want to go there. A stack of papers is held neatly in between two of her hands. She walks over to a window and puts her papers down, looking wistfully at the sky.

She is a neat and gentle looking girl, who seems to be very young and innocent. She wears a work blouse that is two sizes too big to conceal an obvious fact, tucked into her navy blue pleated skirt hangs down below her knees in a straight line. Oddly for her age, she wears no makeup, high socks and no heels, replacing them with a pair of nice black shoes. Her raven black hair is tied back in two braids. It's a beautiful colour, so black it's blue, but no one pays attention to it. Her large, double ringed yellow green eyes are framed by square wire rimmed black glasses.

The shinigami girl's name is Elizabeth, a common name for a young woman. She works in the human resources department, where she studies death rates of humans and readies to-die lists for the shinigami of the dispatch department to complete. She loves her job, and she always gets her work done, just like a certain other department head.

Elizabeth is going to see William to deliver personally the stack of papers she just finished. She takes a lot of pride in her work, and is delighted to have him look it over personally. She also worries more than she should that he won't like it, and will ignore her even more than he already does.

Elizabeth has really liked William since she met him and cares a lot about him. She wishes he'd pay more attention to her than he did. He did no more than commend her on her dedication every now and then. Otherwise he ignores her completely. She wishes she could be good enough. She wishes there was some way to take his eyes off of his work for one minute to see her.

But that will never happen. She knows this in the bottom of her heart, but still tries to impress him anyway. Elizabeth sighs and gathers her papers, and sets off down the hallway once again. It's obvious she's very nervous as she's walking towards the end of the hallway. Her steps slow down, and she bites her lip, a nervous habit.

She stops right in front of a door, and tucks in her blouse once more, and straightens her glasses before knocking on the door, three gentle taps.

"Enter" The familiar, sharp voice says. She opens the door.

"Um, sir… I-I brought you the papers you asked for y-yesterday." She stutters as she opens the door.

William raises an eyebrow. "Speak louder, Elizabeth May, I can hardly hear you."

She swallows and repeats the sentence, only just a bit more audible. William realizes that this is the loudest and most confident she is going to get, speaking just over a whisper. He sighs and adjusts his glasses.

"Thank you. You've finished a day early. If only everyone in the department worked as well as you, Elizabeth."

"T-t-t-thank you, s-sir."

"If you could please put it on my desk in the black folder, that would be lovely." He prompts, seeing as Elizabeth is still standing there blankly, a huge blush on her cheeks.

She jumps and hurries over to the black folder. In her rush, she has overturned a bin with scrapped work and papers. She squeaks at her mistake and quickly collects them. She realizes that this is turning into a big mess. She apologizes and runs out the door without being dismissed, closing it behind her.

She sighs as she walks down the corner, trying not to tear up. Why does she have to mess everything up? Is there anything she can do without disgracing herself any further? She hangs her head as she walks with her hands folded. Now she's ruined every chance she had of him even paying attention to her.

She walks back into her office cubicle, a small room with several desks with walls set around them. She works in this room along with Ronald and his new girlfriend Marian, her friend Alyssa, and seven other shinigami with whom she is acquaintances with, but does not remember their names. She sits down at her computer desk and continues her work further, seeing as she has another to-die list to prepare. She is preparing Grell's to-die right now, and will be preparing William's to-die list with names and souls in just a few days. It's hard work, seeing as souls appear on the to-die list almost on the hour.

She glances in the mirror, where her own eyes are staring back at her. She sighs and looks back down, only to gasp and glance back up. She stares at her reflection with wide eyes. Her image in the mirror is smiling. She is not. It's not her smile; it's a crooked smile with one eye pushing up more than the other, and her thin eyebrows pull down to form a menacing grin. She is not the one smiling.

Elizabeth screams and throws her ink bottle at the mirror, which smashes into a million bits, taking the twisted reflection with it. Alyssa looks over in shock, peering over the edge of her office wall and into Elizabeth's.

"Lizzie? Are you all right? Lizzie?"

She is still trying to catch her breath, pointing with a trembling finger at the mirror. Something in her mind clicks, and she realizes how twisted and farfetched her story will sound to Alyssa. Even though they are best friends, she somehow feels like Alyssa doubts her too much.

"T-t-t-t-there was a-a-a spider on the m-mirror… it was h-h-h-huge…" She says, stuttering even more than usual because of the lie. However, Alyssa misinterprets it as fear.

Alyssa relaxes and shakes her head at Elizabeth. "Honestly, girl, you need to get your head together." Elizabeth's excuse has worked. Alyssa knows that Elizabeth is deathly scared of spiders, to the point that before she goes to sleep, she checks in the corners of her room to see if there are any spiders hanging on the walls, and if there are, she kills them instantly with her death scythe, a needle-thin sword with a blade the length of her forearm that looks almost like a fencing foil, only razor sharp and not bendy. Since the HR department and the dispatch work hand in hand, sometimes HR reapers are required to come onto field duty as dispatch reapers if said department is shorthanded. So they all have death scythes as well. She doesn't even need to attack the spiders. They die just by being in the presence of the death scythe.

Elizabeth rather dislikes the dispatch uniform. She is required to wear pants and a tight fitting dress shirt and suit jacket. It makes her self-conscious. She prefers to wear baggy clothing for a reason, to conceal the fact that she has a beautiful, thin hourglass figure that most women would sell their souls to have. She doesn't like it, however, and still manages to find a way to hide it. So every time she is sitting there on dispatch duty, she sits there and fiddles with the swirling pewter coloured designs on her death scythe hilt that make a cage around her hand, not meeting anyone's gaze.

Alyssa turns back around and goes back to work, leaving Elizabeth to clean up the broken shards of the mirror. She takes a deep breath and looks into one of the shards. Her own face is staring back at her, white with shock and fear. She relaxes. She has no idea what she just saw a few minutes ago, but it seems to be no longer there. Perhaps it was merely a figment of her imagination, conjured by her brain because of all the stress, anxiety and disappointment she's been feeling in the past little while. It's highly possible. So she pays no attention as she throws out the mirror shards into the trash.

However, the little pieces of reflective mirror still retain light in the trash can from the fluorescent lights overhead, twinkling as the light bounces off of them. Unknown to Elizabeth, her reflection still lingers in the mirror, though it should have been erased.

In the mirror, Elizabeth smiles, her eyes glowing brightly as she fades away into nothing, and leaving the mirror fragments to sparkle innocently in an environment where all should be calm.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: feel free to skip until after the story. :3

Hey everyone, it's darkironprincess17~! I'm finally back! At long last! Hope you all had a lovely holiday, happy new years!

I have been incredibly busy as of late, and which is why I have retreated into the safety of my house and have not uploaded ANYTHING. My extreme apologies. Due to my incredible amount of piled up work (I'll have to work overtime yet again =-=) I will not be able to upload at my speedy-gonzales pace as I usually do. Either way, this story holds some importance to me as of the content, and I have been working really hard to find a way to incorporate this into the story. My usual readers will note that my writing style differs a bit here as well, another thing I wanted to try. The story might be a little boring at first, but please do read, I guarantee that you will not be disappointed.

~anyway, look forwards to the next chapter!