I think I might be demented.
It's 3:30 in the morning and I just crossed over a children's story with a not-so-children's story. One is about death and the other is about fairy tales.
Hmm…yeah, I'm crazy.
It's not likely that anyone will read this, because nobody looks for Sisters Grimm/Death Note crossovers. But what the hey? I'm posting it anyway.
If you happen to come across this story, I hope you enjoy it at least a little bit.
New York was still every bit the bustle she remembered from ten years ago. Oddly enough, she found herself missing the quiet of a rural town, but she tried not to think about it. She tried not to think about a lot of things these days. Most of all, she tried not to think of home.
She wondered if, this time of year, her family was putting away the Christmas tree and placing winter flowers on her grandmother's grave. She wondered what Daphne looked like now, and whether she was the spitting image of their mother, like so many had professed her to be all those years ago. She wondered if Uncle Jake had regained any of the old twinkle in his eye, and what Basil liked to do in his free time.
She wondered about the blond boy with the insatiable appetite for adventure, danger, and anything edible. Who was he now?
Did he miss her?
A corner of her brain that she couldn't squash down told her that she hoped he did.
The war was over. She'd heard news over the months and years (from the odd fairy venturing out of Central Park) that they'd done it without her. They'd suffered losses, of course. The barrier was said to be down. She'd continued puttering around in the little coffee shop every morning, making her minimum wage and forgetting that she'd ever been in Ferryport Landing long enough to screw things up as bad as she did.
She supposed her family was still at work - probably looking into those murder cases by the one they called Kira, who was baffling the entire human world. She supposed he had to be an Everafter – what could perpetuate the phenomenon of murder by heart attack but magic?
The morning the blond man came in, she was wearing a coffee-stained apron and smoothing her rumpled hair, barking out orders to the teenager making the coffee and arguing with a portly bald man that yes, if you ordered a low fat latte except with whole milk, whipped cream, and extra caramel, it was in fact a regular latte. The portly bald man stepped away from the counter, muttering. She looked up.
And there he was.
His hair was grown long, with straight, messy fringe around his face. Fur lined the collar of his long black leather coat, and in his gloved fingers was balanced a bar of chocolate, braced between a set of straight white teeth. His gaze was hard, fiery, and blue.
There was something about the shape of his eyes, framed by thin, pale lashes, and the perfect curve of his nose.
"Puck," she breathed, staring hard and wondering if she should be absolutely terrified or overjoyed.
"Excuse me?" the man responded.
Snapping out of her reverie, she noticed the differences. Whereas Puck's eyes were deep green, this man had eyes of pale, bright blue. A long scar trailed down the entire left side of his face, along his neck, and disappeared under his collar. How had she not noticed that before?
"No. No, I'm sorry," she said, trying to hold her (still delicate) temper at his nose upturned at her in anger. "I didn't say what you thought I said."
"Right," he said. "I asked for a chocolate chip muffin and a coffee, just black." An edge lurked under his level tone. He sounded…dangerous.
"How about a 'please'?" Sabrina retorted.
"Look, just do your damn job and -" he halted at the sight of her face growing more and more tense. "Please, alright?" he said, breathing deeply in an obviously failing attempt to keep his temper under control. "Please just get me my coffee." She could practically feel the heat of the steam coming out of his ears. The explosive temper was familiar.
"Black and a chocolate chip muffin," Sabrina shouted over her shoulder. She turned to glare at the stranger. For all that he'd set her teeth on edge and made her want to scream in only the forty or so seconds since she'd met him, she couldn't look away. Deep breaths, Sabrina. Remember. You need this job. Apologize to the man. Apologize. She looked up, inhaling deeply once more, and unclenched her fist. "I am sorry for being rude. It's just that you remind me of someone I knew a long time ago and it…it took me by surprise, is all."
A smile played at the corner of his mouth, a glint dancing in his eye. "So much that it drove you to use profanity?"
"Actually, no," Sabrina explained. "The name of this person I used to know was…it was Puck." The 'p' sound danced crisply through her pink lips, followed by the open shape of the 'u' and the clicking hiss of the 'c' and 'k'. The name felt foreign on her tongue; she hadn't spoken it aloud in a very, very long time.
The stranger's eyes widened. "That's a strange name," he said quietly.
"What's your name? You know, since it obviously isn't Puck." She prided herself on sounding completely calm, when in fact this person was making her heart speed up.
"You can call me Mello," he replied.
She stifled a giggle. "First of all, you're one to talk about strange names. And second of all, you're anything but."
The grin playing on his lips grew a little wider. "M-E-L-L-O. Not like the adjective."
"Ah," she nodded. "I'm Sabrina."
"Hey," a woman with an impossibly glossy bun hissed. "You're holding up the line. People are waiting."
Sabrina shot her a death glare and, on a whim, handed her order-taking pad to Cassie, a college student who usually worked the frappe maker but right now seemed to be doing nothing but looking bored, despite the fact that it was morning rush hour. "But it's my break," the girl complained. Sabrina shot her a death glare too, scooting out from behind the laminate counter and beckoning to Mello to come sit at a booth in the corner. She wanted to talk to him longer, to see if he was anything like the boy she used to know so well. He definitely wasn't as easygoing; she'd established that much.
"Please," she said. "Tell me about yourself."
He looked taken aback, blue eyes widening as he brought the chocolate bar back to his lips (his arm seemed to be locked in a default position of bringing that piece of chocolate back to his mouth).
"Please," she said. "I've been in New York, working here, for almost three years. I don't have a single person to really talk to, and you…" she felt her brow scrunch up. "Let's just say you look like someone I need to talk to."
His hair fell forward to shadow his face, making him look even more intimidating. "I'm twenty years old," he said finally.
She nodded. "I'm nineteen." She rested her head on her intertwined fingers.
He hesitated, looking out the window at the rising sun. "I grew up in an orphanage in Britain."
Her hands came to rest flat on the table. "I spent a lot of time in foster care as a child," she said. "My parents disappeared. We…found them, eventually, but the damage was done."
He nodded. "I'm not sure what happened to my parents. I'm sure I've been told, but I never really thought much about them."
"What do you do?"
He paused. "I suppose you could call me a detective of sorts. Or an…agent, I guess." He looked uncomfortable.
"Really? I come from a whole family of detectives. I used to be one, too." She looked down at her ragged fingernails, gazing intensely and remembering the days she would spend poring over books to narrow down whole lists of possible suspects.
"What kinds of cases did you work on?" He looked glad to remove the focus from himself, receding into the shadow of silence (and of his hair).
"Crimes," she said simply. "But a lot of it was just bookwork, and sitting around and theorizing."
"It is for me too," Mello said, laughing darkly. "But I prefer taking action to sitting around. I like to be proactive."
"I never much liked the business," Sabrina said dryly. "I stayed in it for my family, and for…" she grew quiet, lost in thought.
Mello tapped her hand with a gloved finger. "I think it's time for me to go."
She jumped, startled. "Why?" Stupid question, Sabrina. Stupid. Just let the poor man go about his business.
He wore a peculiar expression. In that moment, she was caught off guard by the similarities in his curved mouth and the other blond boy's, between the crinkled brows of the two. It nearly floored her. "If you must know," he said, "I have to go…pick something up. From…an acquaintance of mine."
"No, I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to pry. I just lost control of my mouth for a moment. Hey, you never got that coffee and muffin, did you?"
He looked funnily at her for a moment, as if he were considering something. Then he placed his hands on either side of her face, ducked in towards her, and kissed her. His lips were dry and warm.
He pulled away, leaving a faintly sweet smell in her nose and surprise in her eyes. "Goodbye, Sabrina. It was…nice to meet you."
"You too, Mello. Will I see you around?"
There was a gleam in his eye, something that looked suspiciously like sorrow. "No," he said. "I don't think you will."
She nodded, biting her lip. "Thanks anyway."
He saluted her with two fingers, then loped out of the door.
She hadn't even asked about the scar.
She waited till he was a good ways away before she stepped out the door, bell chiming overhead. She forgot to care that she would probably be fired for taking an impromptu break, or that Cassie was taking the tail end of the rush by herself when she was supposed to be on break.
She pulled out her cell phone from her pocket and untied her apron, letting it fall to the cement and revealing her ratty Pink Floyd t-shirt. Her hand shook as she dialed the numbers to a house she'd known as a jaded little girl.
"Hello?" she said, trying to still the trembling in her voice. "Puck? Yeah, this is…this is Sabrina."