Heaven's Door
Dedicated: To, the one with the razorblade-smile.
Disclaimer: Much to everyone's surprise, I do not own Kuroshitsuji either. Fancy that.
The candlelight sighs a greeting as she stoops to bypass the dropped ceiling. Wrapped in a scented shawl of smoke and warmth, sometimes she forgets that things have progressed, or perhaps it's just that the artificial light of incandescence feels too much like forced affection.
Oh, she's thinking again, and that usually spells disaster, but that's why she's here in the first place, isn't it? To follow as best she can, the path of ruined chaos that beckons in the jeering language of the 'after.'
She makes herself at home in the eccentric atmosphere, kicking off her heels to clatter noisily on the hardwood, was it mahogany? The pins confining her hair to its prison seemingly fall of their own accord, leaving the waves to tumble free like lava escaping to the ocean, but she knows better. She also knows the cool hands that follow the curve of her neck to her shoulders and dissolve the angry tension there, brewing up a thunderstorm in her nerves.
"It's been some time since I last saw you Grell, though admittedly, with such a pale face and exasperated expression, I think you've surpassed third rate. Tea?" he asks, adept fingers skittering away from her now half-relaxed neck to the tune of some snippet of song likely playing only in his head. She knew that too; sometimes it was Beethoven, and others, just interfering static. She wondered briefly if he knew how to change the channel when that happened. It made work rather more tedious than normal, trying to mete out unbiased judgement with only bad 'Taxi' reruns for company.
"Yes please, you underhanded cretin. Coercing a lady into subjugation through suspicious methods like that, only to undo it all with sub-par insults. If I merit, "a fourth-rate corpse," then I fear your wit must be running on empty." She smiled anyway, and watched him fill two beakers with tea and set them on the aged table.
Steam rose up in puffs of mist against her face, and gave her cheeks some colour in the chill air dancing with the flickers of candles. She sipped at her tea absently, but set it down a little too quickly in her haste to get it as far away as possible.
"Did you really have me drink, embalming fluid? I don't care what goes into your mouth, but honestly! Serving a guest swill such as this." She wore a curious expression; two parts indignation, three parts sheer disgust, and half an ounce of amusement. "I see I held a better opinion of you than you deserve in actuality." She stood to leave, forgetting her shoes, and most likely about the snow that smothered the city streets in a pristine, white mantle of sparkling lies. The snow lied to her every time. Just like he had. Promising a multitude of promises that could never be, because like smoke and snowflakes, he couldn't be caught no matter your tool or enticement. She'd tried to catch any one of them, but they escape through her desperate fingers like rivulets of sand. She can't stop time, can't ride the wind, or even catch a snowflake on her tongue. Maybe she's too impatient, or maybe she really is blind, even with her 'important,' glasses.
"You're going to end up back on my doorstep if you try to leave in this weather, especially without your shoes. I think I like them. Do you think they'd fit me?" he asks, perusing the architecture of her heels with something like interest.
Indeed, he perched at the edge of his favourite coffin, and removed his own shoes to try hers on. She watched, more than a little gobsmacked as he twirled around like a twelve-year-old girl in a gown for a ball, trying on her first pair of 'big girl,' shoes. Somehow, he wasn't stumbling half as much as she'd expected, and she sort of forgives him for nearly poisoning her.
Grell outright laughs when he performs the sorriest excuse for a pirouette that she'd ever seen. Her laughter runs amok without her permission, filling his shop with the first it's seen since those days from another time, another life. If she keeps laughing she's going to cross right on over to hysteria, but with little preamble, he's sitting next to her in those too-small shoes that make him impossibly unbalanced and thoroughly ridiculous, and suddenly hysteria is looking like a less enticing option.
The Undertaker was completely caught off guard when she launched herself into his lap and then some, like a small red rocket just waiting to singe him along the way as she exploded into beautiful coloured lights. Or, perhaps, given the fact that as they tumbled into the cushion of the coffin that seemed to be closing on its own, and was considerably roomier than any coffin had need to be, he wasn't.
She might notice that later, once she was done shoving his hair out of the way, determined to see his face, mark it with her kisses, no scar un-attended, and no laughter escaped his lips that hers didn't swallow like an exotic elixir.
She wasn't going to let him hide, when there was no one but her to see, and the dead, but they didn't count. No one ever did seem to count the dead, and that was a large percentage of humanity's problem if they'd stop to consider it, but they never would, so it was only them. Only she and he creating a level of noise hitherto unforeseen in a 'funeral' home, learning secrets and committing sighs and gasps to memory. And their memories ran deep indeed.
She all but destroyed the long, tedious things he wore, rather oblivious to the magic trick where he made her own vanish without a lick of evidence left behind. But that was neither here nor there, there was only now, and now needed to be for as long as they could make it last, which was something more than nothing, and a far cry from long enough.
But it had to be, because he knew her too well. Because this was where she came when she needed to forget, and to remember, and he provided both for a minimal fee, asking only that she return. Which they both already knew she would, because really, could she do anything else?
The last to leave Pandora's box was Hope; and if that were to leave her too, she'd truly have nothing. And that was something, she couldn't 'live,' without.
La Fin