He didn't know what he expected from the afterlife. Not Heaven, by any means. He had spent his life conflicted about whether or not he believed in life after death but if such a greeting awaited him, he had always anticipated a fiery one. His churchgoing parents had told him he was going to Hell when he confessed he hated the body he was given. Blasphemy, they called it. His mother had sworn it was a sin to be ungrateful for God's work and assured him he was exactly the way his Creator intended. When he insisted otherwise she began to yell, and he could still remember her grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him, demanding to know what was wrong with him. She had told him to go pray.

Did Hell have such harsh lighting? He could tell even through his closed eyelids that this place was excessively bright. The surface under his back seemed too cold to be brimstone. His senses started returning to him one by one, each bringing a fresh wave of confusion. The last thing he remembered was the fire...and Will. He had collapsed when he was too weak to keep breathing. He had died, surely. He had even found peace in those last moments.

"About bloody time you started waking up."

It took awhile to realize someone was talking to him. The familiar voice was harsh but somehow comforting. He opened his eyes to a white blur, spliced by an indistinguishable human figure. He expected his vision to clear but no matter how many times he blinked he couldn't see a thing. Really, what kind of afterlife was this? His vision hadn't been this bad when he was alive, for pities sake!

"Oh yeah I guess you can't see me. That's a shame, not many people get to wake up to someone this sexy."

Something was pushed onto his nose and the world drew into focus. The blur materialized into a white ceiling with some kind of lights he had never seen before, and soon he could make out features of the person talking to him. The first thing he saw were knee high boots laced with purple ribbon, separated from a pair of shorts by a flash of pale skin. The shorts were very short.

"Thanks for hanging on to this for me," said the person, and twirled happily.

He knew that purple coat, he knew… "Alois?"

"Good morning, Reaper Sutcliff!"

Grell sat up with considerable effort. A hundred pounds of cement seemed to be sitting on each of his limbs. He raked his hair out of his eyes and stared, dumbfounded, at the young blond before him. They were in what looked like an exam room, which explained the cold metal under his back. He looked around but his eyes were inexorably pulled back to Alois Trancy. He was too amazed to ask for clarification on what had just been said.

"Is this Hell?"

Alois snorted. "I wish I was tressed up being tortured by some fine piece of demon meat, but unfortunately this is just Dispatch."

Grell searched his exhausted brain for some mention of Dispatch in the Bible but came up blank. He straightened the glasses that had been put on his face and stared blankly at Alois. The boy held what appeared to be a massive sickle across his shoulders. It had a handle of deep, metallic purple and ended in a curved blade with cruel grooves and serrations running along the side. The blade seemed to glow ice blue from within. The weapon, every bit as tall as Alois himself, looked like an upgraded version of the reaper's scythe of legend.

He was trying to process how someone he had pronounced dead was standing next to him. There had been no pulse, no signs of life, he looked back on every word of his studies but couldn't find anything to explain this. "You're alive."

Alois spun the scythe and hit Grell in the side of the head with the handle, as if to knock sense into him but Grell was just seeing stars. "Come on prodigal doctor, you're awfully slow on the uptake." At Grell's empty, dazed look, he said, "You're a reaper, stupid. Yes one of the guys in long black cloaks that carry these," he spun his scythe again and Grell ducked, "and harvest the souls of humans when they die."

"Why am I a reaper? If I'm alive I just want to go back to my life."

"Oh you think you got the shit end of the deal? I went out of my way to die! I just wanted some bloody peace and quiet and I wake up getting told I've been reborn as a grim reaper. If you commit suicide you end up in this place to atone for your sins."

Grell sat up cross legged and groaned. "Of course it's my sins. Well mother I hope you're happy wherever you are."

He swung his legs off the side of the table and stood up. He would have fallen right back on his behind if not for Alois' arm around his waist to steady him. His legs were still weak, not surprising given that he had died and whatnot. He let himself lean on the small but strong boy as they left the exam room and ventured into a wide hallway. People of all sorts passed them, all wearing suits, all with electric green eyes and glasses. He half expected to look down and see his clothing transformed but he was wearing the same thing he died in. Oddly enough it was no longer covered in blood and soot.

They reached what seemed to be a mess hall but it was distinctly not messy. Everything was black and white, and spotless. Grell looked around as Alois got them some food and led him to a table. He found that food tasted the same, if not a bit bland but he didn't think that was a matter of taste so much as Reaper Dispatch Chicken Noodle Soup leaving something to be desired. The more he ate, the hungrier he became. He drank the remaining broth and sat the bowl back down.

Alois was destroying a plate of fish and chips. He looked the same as Grell remembered with the exception of his eyes being green instead of blue, and framed with dark purple cat eye glasses adorned with ice blue rhinestones. He stood out among the reapers more than he had at the orphanage. Grell smiled; as much as Alois seemed to hate his afterlife, he was sure the boy enjoyed being the center of attention even if it wasn't in a good way.

He brushed his hair out of his eyes and paused when he found a thin chain. He felt upward and closed his fingers around a tiny skull. "These are my glasses."

"Sure are. I brought them over from the human world and had the spectacles department tweak them for you."

"Are you the one…?"

"Who reaped you, yes."

Grell absently tugged the chain on his glasses. "I thought all reapers committed suicide, I died in a fire."

"You got tangled up in a shitty loophole. I guess you ended up here because you willingly chose to stay in the building to save that ugly wench with the big baps."

Grell sighed. This was just too surreal. Since he had woken up, everything had stopped making sense. Grim reapers? The human realm? It was madness. The information he was receiving about reapers seemed familiar but he couldn't figure out why. There seemed to be someone locked away in his mind who was jumping up and down and shouting at him, but that was probably a delusion resulting from his headache. Alois' death scythe wasn't good for affectionate taps on the head.

"Come on, nobody's going to put you to work on your first day. I imagine you want a shower."

"We have showers?" Grell cried with delight.

Alois narrowed his eyes. "No, Grell, we clean ourselves with magical sparkly reaper dust."

Still unsure this whole thing was real but happy nonetheless, Grell pulled Alois into a tight hug. "I missed your intolerable, vain, foul mouthed, arrogant self."

"Don't lay it on too thick there," Alois muttered, but he was nuzzling into Grell's arms like a kitten. For as long as Grell could remember he had loved affection from those he saw worthy of giving it to him. Grell had always seen the flamboyant, sassy child as a kindred spirit. If anything good could be said for this ordeal it would be that he was reunited with at least one person he loved.

They walked together from Dispatch. Grell was curious about the realm he would now call home, but he was occupied with a more inward struggle. All his memories before the fire were hazy. He could recall his early childhood and his final moments as a human but everything in between was a muddled mess. He had been a doctor, he worked at an orphanage, those memories had become clearer the longer he talked to Alois. He remembered grieving the child. He remembered Will, sort of. He could see in his mind's eye stubbornly mussed dark hair and a bored expression, and with that image came a warmth in his chest. Will had managed the orphanage. After that, he was drawing a blank.

It looked as though Alois had a couple roommates but they weren't home. It was a spacious flat for a young boy. Grell hung his rumpled vest over the arm of a chair and stepped out of his black and red boots. He was sure they had been ruined in the fire, but they looked good as new. If nothing else, being a reaper was going to do wonders for his wardrobe.

He could have stayed in the shower for the rest of his afterlife. With the water beating down on his skin he could forget how insane this day had been, just like he had seemingly forgotten the rest of his human life. Human life...he paused in washing his hair. Dr. Grell Sutcliff was dead. That person went up in smoke with his mortal body. He ran his hands down his chest and flat stomach, the very same one he had died with. It was exactly the same but he knew his real body had to be a lump of charred flesh.

He fought the urge to retch at the thought of his corpse. It was all too much to process. He finished rinsing his hair of the flowery smelling stuff that could only belong to Alois and stepped out of the shower. In the full length mirror, a blurry red reaper stared back at him. He put his glasses back on and examined himself. Distantly he could see hands running down this body that did not belong to him, but he didn't know whose they were.

"Why?" he whispered to the mirror. The longer those ethereal green eyes stared back, the angrier he became. "Why, why, WHY?" He struck the glass and shattered it out of its wooden frame. Pain seared down his arm, but his tears were not from physical discomfort as he sunk down the wall into the floor.

"Grell!"

Alois ran into the room and looked at his arm. Seeming unfazed by the other man's nudity, he began picking glass out of his skin. Grell sniffed and pulled away. "Stop it, I'm supposed to be your doctor, remember?"

"You were and I used to stand by your door all the time watching you work. So let me help you, I learned from the best."

His words brought on another body wracking sob. Grell tried to pull himself together but it was too much. He had spent over twenty years trying to figure out why he had been given the wrong body, being told he should be ashamed for feeling that way, and now he was trapped in the wretched thing for what? Eternity? That was the worst punishment of all for his sins, being condemned to spend both his lives a stranger to his own skin.

"I'm sorry," he said when his tears finally dried.

"S'alright, I had me a good cry before I slit my wrists." Alois cleaned the cuts on his arms and wrapped them with strips of what looked to be a white shirt.

Grell pulled his knees against his chest, covering the most indecent part of his naked body. "I would have helped you."

"No one could have helped me then. I hated myself, I hated the body that had been defiled by old man Trancy. I didn't think anyone would ever love me. I understand how you feel, sort of. I decided since I had been reborn that I got a second chance with this body. It's clean, and mine."

Grell smiled. Alois had possessed none of this optimism in his human life, even his cheerful personality had always been shadowed by his cynicism and unpredictable tantrums. He pulled a towel around himself and stood up. His hair, that was well past his waist when wet, was steadily making a puddle on the floor. He began to dry it with a second towel.

He had calmed down by the time he cleaned up the mess he made of the bathroom and followed Alois into his bedroom. They sat across from each other on the bed and started a conversation that wouldn't end until the early hours of morning. He found out that time worked a bit differently in this realm, and for Alois it felt like he had been dead far longer than it did for Grell. That was why he already had his own scythe and spectacles, the mark of a fully qualified reaper. He told Grell about some of the other reapers and the amazing library full of cinematic records. Grell didn't know what a cinematic record was, which Alois explained as well.

Hours later he faced away from Alois as the boy braided his hair. He was struck with deja vu. "Why don't I remember you doing this before? My memories of you came back after I had been awake for awhile."

"That's kind of how it works at first. Your memories will come back on their own with time but if you encounter someone from your past life, you'll regain your memories of them. Anyway Mr. Spears used to do this for you. I thought it would be nice."

"It is...thank you."

William Spears. He closed his eyes as the hands in his hair became those of a man from his past. He could see himself kissing a tall, handsome man on the cheek. There were older memories dancing just out of his reach that he couldn't quite grasp. He was getting the mounting impression Will had meant more to him than a mere supervisor. Every time a memory of him surfaced, his internal organs did somersaults.

"I'm missing so much," he said with a sigh.

Alois yawned and fell back against the pillows. "I'm sure you've got plenty of time to get it all back. Reapers do need sleep though so you should get some beauty rest. You can stay here with me, for tonight."

Grell heard the plea inside the offer and situated himself next to the young reaper. Alois rolled over into his arms. "Goodnight, Doctor Grell."

"Goodnight, Alois."