Fic: "What it Means to Be" (Kuroshitsuji, Will/Grell, Grell/Madam Red, R18)
Title: What It Means To Be
Series: Kuroshitsuji
Pairing/Characters: Grell/William, Grell/Madam Red
Rating: R18
Warnings: Surgery, transgender!Grell, sex, spoilers for the end of season 2, I guess.
Disclaimer: I own none of the characters or story elements contained within. I am making no money from this.
Notes: This takes place in a more modern-day setting [under the assumption that shinigami are immortal], and is essentially about Grell undergoing gender reassignment surgery. Hence, I refer to Grell as "she", which I know throws some people off, so I'm making a note of it here.
Summary: "I could get used to this."
Let me disclaim all of my issues with this right now: it took too long, I don't know too much about gender reassignment surgery even after the research I did, I feel like I got the characters all wrong (as usual), and I completely ripped off so many of your ideas, Hannah, I'm so sorry. m(_ _)m
Full credit for the idea for this goes to neocloud9 , without whom this wouldn't be finished.
~~~
Grell spent a lot of time around hospitals. It was only fitting, given how often people died there, but she never really enjoyed it, not when the next assignment could very well have been a baby who had barely left the womb, or worse, a mother whose baby didn't even have a cinematic record to watch. Her film could have been etched with exhausting hope or jaded bitterness, but the infant's would always be blank. After all, the eyes had not yet opened and begun their recording.
One would think, after more than a century, she would get used to it. She never even came close. It started to hurt a little less, the sound of a ribbon of blades slashing through the soul became just a little less heart wrenching, but the sound of panicked doctors, frantic to try and save her, never got any less tragic. Those damned electric heart monitors just made it all worse. The first time she'd dealt with one of those, the sound of her alarm clock the next morning sent her into a panic. It wasn't even in the same pitch range as the monitors, and yet that rhythmic beeping broke her all at once. That was a bad morning, spent thrashing her way out of the sheets and slamming the noisy thing against the wall. It took fifteen minutes to kill it, the thought of simply switching the alarm off far from her mind. She barely made it to work on time that day, and when she did, Will took one look at her and gave her a day of sending messages between departments, something to keep her off the field but keep her mind occupied. On her lunch break, she bought a clock with metal bells on top.
The worst hospital she ever had to see was almost completely empty. The only sign of life once there was an operating table, standing on its wheels in front of her, its occupant still connected to the bags of IV fluid and electrode pads that would have been attached to a keening green line, had the machine still been there. There was no line, though, no flickering screen or flashing lights to remind her of the immediacy of the death. There was only stone silence, which was even more chilling than the panicked adrenaline she had expected. This one had been abandoned, brought to a long-deserted hospital with trembling hope in her heart only to have it flicker and die like the pulse in her veins. No one would find her body for weeks.
Grell cried as she watched that cinematic record, the record of Robert Reinholt, who called herself Rebecca. She watched the pretty little girl grow up in the wrong body, in jackets and trousers and short hair, painting her lips and shaving her face at night, dressing up in beautiful gowns in front of her mirror, never daring to set foot outside. Talking to a doctor in utter despair, talking of god's mistakes and wishing for death, perhaps to be reborn in the right body this time. Finding a gleam of hope, a risk all too easy to take. Money changing hands, whispered addresses and times, and the peaceful reassurance just before the anesthetic took her under.
Grell wanted very badly to burn the hospital to the ground, but settled for taking the ethanol disinfectant from the cabinets under the sink and drenching her in it, lighting a match from the book in her pocket to give the poor woman a proper cremation. She lifted the surgical cloth for a moment, just to see ("I do hope you don't mind, dear, one girl to another"), and then dropped it, throwing the match onto the alcohol-soaked fabric and running out the back of the room. When the shock of winter air struck her face, she turned and retched onto the snow-covered ground, unable to see straight from the tears in her eyes.
She fell back against the wall and mourned, her ears ringing with a voice not her own:
"After you've finished your assignments for today, would you mind taking this one? It was supposed to be handled by another section, but for whatever reason it ended up here. I'd do it myself, but you'll be closer to that part of town than I will. It's still a bit far away, though, so I would make sure to do it after your normal shift assignments are done. I'm sure you can fit it in; you're remarkably efficient now that you've got that back." A pair of shears nudged in the general direction of her chainsaw, then back up to the black-framed glasses they were so often placed against.
He had known.
---
He really hadn't wanted to do that.
When she saw him at work the next morning, he almost expected anger, but the part of him that knew Grell better than that took the squeeze to his shoulder as a sign that it was alright. He wished there could have been a better way to do it, but the fact of the matter was once Grell set her mind to something, there was no stopping her short of throwing the consequences right in her face. Of course, since Will's most fluent language was paperwork, it had taken him a tragically short time to do so.
The next time they went out to dinner, he took her hand across the table without any prompting, regardless of the fact that they were in public and she'still in her work clothes.
"It isn't that I don't think you should go through with it," he said, using all of his courage to keep eye contact with her. "It's that I think you should wait for science to catch up with you."
She twined her fingers with his.
"Thank you, Will."
---
The hardest part, besides the soul of Rebecca Reinholt, was having the means available but not being able to access them. Some surgeries were successful, she knew, but the process hadn't been legitimized, let alone perfected, and it was still highly dangerous. It wouldn't kill her like it did that other poor woman, but if her procedure went as badly as that, it could change the way she walked for the rest of her life. More than anything, though, she wasn't going to put her body into the hands of anyone she didn't trust.
Knowing this, Grell summoned every patient nerve in her body (though there weren't many), and waited. She waited for years that turned into decades, keeping one ear to the medical news reports and another to the death lists. She never had to actually collect another soul like Rebecca again, though, for which she could probably thank William. Slowly, the number of deaths during surgery decreased, and more and more news reports of people making the change successfully were reported. Every time, though, the report would be covered in words like "still in development" and "great risk to patients".
None of it made the bad days any easier. Worse than the morning with the alarm clock were the mornings, or afternoons, or evenings, or midnights when her brain would just stop all rational thought and say this is wrong, this is all wrong, this body doesn't fit and I can't take it off. Nothing would feel right on those days, sometimes not even when she painted her nails or went dress shopping to remind herself that even though her body was all wrong, her heart knew what it was meant to be.
---
It was five full decades before Grell told Will she was going in for surgery. As usual, there was no warning or leading up to it; she just tacked it onto the end of the story she had been telling like a notice to a bulletin board. It was during lunch break at work, and she had come in to water the orchids on his desk (a gift after the office was remodeled). None of the delicacy with which these things were typically handled, just "Oh, and by the way, I'll be going in for surgery this week."
This didn't surprise Will too much; gender reassignment surgery was not only a clinically standardized practice, it was also much more socially accepted. What did surprise him was that she hadn't told him she'd already found a doctor who could do it and gone through the necessary hormone therapy and counseling. That sort of thing took weeks, months, even. He knew; he had researched everything about the procedure, from the medications utilized during surgery to the recovery time necessary afterwards. He had nothing to be nervous about.
"Oh? What day?"
"Tomorrow."
He very nearly sputtered at that. As it was, he stayed silent for a good deal longer than normal, staring at the pen in his hand as though it held the secrets to life itself.
"Tomorrow."
"Of course," she smiled at him like it was the simplest thing in the world. "I couldn't have it get in the way of our date tonight. It's just the first procedure, so the recovery time would be shorter, but I still didn't want to miss our Friday dinner."
He looked up and began staring at her, then, composure fraying with each tick of the clock.
"...and you didn't think to tell me?"
As though she had expected this (of course she had expected this), she immediately walked around his desk and pulled him into a hug.
"I need to be sure that I'm doing this for myself," she whispered, "that's all."
Of course. She knew him too well; she knew that if she told him, he'd want to make sure it all went perfectly, want to know everything that happened, want to make sure she was safe. Nothing would be good enough for him, though, because nothing would be good enough for her. Not in his eyes.
He put his arms around her and gave in.
---
Sharp, artificial light began to filter through Grell's eyelids, and she didn't like it. There was an enormous space between her neck and her hips that apparently didn't exist, because she couldn't feel any of it. She could barely feel her shoulders, and they were sore where she could. She had been hit by a car once, during a very reckless night, and this felt somewhat like that, except she couldn't remember being hit by a car recently, so why on earth did she feel so wretched?
Ah, well. Sleep was sounding like an increasingly good idea, so she decided she'd figure it out later and let herself drift back down into unconsciousness.
...
Something poked her in the elbow.
...
Elbow...IV needle--hospital--SURGERY.
Grell's eyes shot open and flew around the room, trying to blink themselves into focus for want of glasses. Her teeth were chattering, she noticed, and her hand was shaking where it lay on the bed. What in god's name happened?
Right as she was about to reach for the nurse call button, the door to her room opened, and a nurse with short white hair and very good timing came in holding a thermometer.
"Alright, Miss Sutcliffe, I'm here to take your vitals--" she looked up, and her face tightened a bit with concern.
Oh, god, I'm probably in one of those stupidly short hospital gowns, and she's wondering why it says "Miss", isn't she?
The nurse - Natalie, her name tag said, came closer, holding the thermometer almost hesitantly.
Look, Natalie, I'm in no mood to have this conversation today. It took me a damn long time to get here and I don't have to explain why.
"Are you feeling alright?"
...What?
"Can you talk? Your teeth are chattering."
No, Grell realized, she couldn't talk. When she managed to open her trembling jaw wide enough, her voice just wouldn't work. The most she could manage was a shuddering breath, something more suited to a January night shift than an air-conditioned hospital room. She shook her head, looking perplexed. For a moment, she wondered why Natalie hadn't said anything about her teeth, but she supposed she ought to be thankful for that.
"Alright. Did you just wake up?"
A nod, slow and deliberate.
"You're crying; is it because you're upset?"
I'm crying? She caught sight of a mirror hanging on the opposite wall that answered her question rather quickly. "Why the hell am I crying?"
"Okay, you can talk. Let me go get Dr. Mason. I think you might have just had a bad reaction to the anesthesia."
"Ah..." She hadn't even realized she'd said that out loud. "Thank you."
With the nurse gone and Grell's hands starting to shake a little less, she looked down at her chest and marveled for a moment at the layer of bandages. The swell and curve beneath them, even though she could see where the stitches held tightly stretched skin together, felt more satisfying than even the most efficiently sliced cinematic records. It would undoubtedly take getting used to, but she was honestly looking forward to it.
---
"You're moping."
"Get out of my office, Knox."
"It's lunch time. I'm bored. You're still moping."
Will looked up from the paperwork he had so effectively buried himself in at the entirely too smug-looking blonde standing in the spot that was desperately wanting an overdramatic redhead at the moment.
"I am not moping," it wasn't the first lie Will had told himself, today. "I am working. I'm sorry if that's a foreign concept to you."
"Yeah, you don't scare me, Spears." Ronald pulled the chair from the other side of Will's office and sat in it the wrong way, arms resting on the back. "Look, it's been a week and a half. I know Sutcliffe's out of the hospital by now, and with any luck, she'll be back at work freaking out the new recruits in no time at all!"
"How do you know she's in the hospital?"
"Process of elimination," Ronald shrugged. "I know she's been looking into it ever since you got me to give you that soul from the other section, and if she was out pulling another Jack the Ripper stunt you'd be out looking for her instead of sitting here moping. I'm sure she at least told you how the surgery went."
"She hasn't called me since she went in for surgery."
"Ouch. ...Have you tried calling her? I know you couldn't visit her in the hospital, but you must know her number by now."
"....No."
"Well, why not?"
"I...presumed she would call me when she was ready."
"...Spears."
"What?"
"You can be really dumb sometimes."
---
If Will had called Grell, he wouldn't have gotten an answer, anyway, because Grell had resolutely unhooked her phone during her recovery. The painkillers they had put her on for the surgical scars had her afraid of what she would say if she picked up. Never had she been so glad to be in William's department; the amount of vacation time she had accumulated thanks to Will's workaholic nature was enough to make sure she completely recovered before she started running around with a chainsaw.
Spending this long outside of work and hopped up on painkillers, however, was rather boring. For the first two days, she just slept. After that, she finished a couple of books she'd been meaning to get to, went shopping for some new books, read those, and tried a whole number of new recipes she hadn't thought of before. Often, she would reach for the phone, wanting to call Will and see if he wanted to go somewhere, and then hear nothing when she picked it up and remember why she'd done that. She missed him horribly, but she couldn't let him see her like this, half-senseless with tape and bandages stuck to the underside of her chest. He would want to come in and worry over her and fix everything, and she couldn't have that. She could do this on her own, and she would.
Today, though, she had gone clothes shopping, because she had finally healed enough not to need the painkillers (much). There were no stitches now, just a faint white line that barely showed against her skin.
Grell stood now in front of the mirror hanging from her closet door, wearing a red skirt, her usual high heel shoes, and nothing else. She had done this three times, now, just stood staring at herself in the mirror, wondering if it was real. Her newly-created breasts were, in every way, very normal-looking. They were about the average size one would expect a woman of Grell's height to have, and they didn't have that globular shape she had seen in some other women who had undergone the same surgery. They had taken getting used to, though. She hadn't expected them to be so heavy, given their size. And wearing a bra every day was a blessing and a curse at the same time (whoever invented those was a sadistic genius). Still, though, she would find herself dancing around her living room some days, just enjoying the feeling of a body that was finally starting to feel right.
She had just as much wonderment for the skin-colored hormone patch stuck to her shoulder, because that was what made it all come together. Such wonderful chemicals, hormones. They had made the tissue beneath her breasts swell even further, making them feel more a part of her and less something foreign stitched to her chest, and she had stopped having to shave her face in the morning since she had started using it. (She was also a hyper-emotional wreck for the first two days while her brain got used to the change, but she insists that it was worth it.)
She fell back on her bed and clutched her chest, smiling so wide she thought she might die from happiness. After a minute, she picked up her phone, plugged the cord back in, and dialed on reflex. She wondered what William would do when he saw her that night.
---
William, for the record, said she was beautiful, kissed her senseless, and made love to her right there on the kitchen counter.
When they both lay in his bed that night, not tired enough to actually fall asleep but still pleasantly drowsy, he took her hand where it rested under her pillow.
"I've asked you twice now," he knew he heard her, though she wasn't looking straight at him, "and I know you said you weren't ready, but do you think..."
"Oh, Will," she turned to face him, "you know I hate doing this to you."
"I just thought, since you've done this--"
"I'm not finished. ...Not yet."
"...Alright."
She slides over and wraps her arm around him, her chest pressing to his with a softness he still isn't used to, still can't get enough of.
"I love you, William."
---
The reality of being transgender was that, no matter what sort of surgery or therapy or whatever on earth you underwent, there was a part of you that always felt incomplete.
This was what Grell resolutely decided one evening, reclining in her bathtub and sporting a weapons-grade pout. It had hit her earlier in the evening that, no matter what kind of surgery she had, she would never, could never, have children of her own, not really. There simply wasn't a medical procedure in the world that could synthesize something so delicately crafted. She could look like a woman from head to toe, have all of the curves and equipment in place, but she would never really be--
Well, that wasn't necessarily true. She toyed with a strand of her hair for a moment, reminiscing. Madame Red had been unable to have any children, and she was no less a woman for that fact. Quite to the contrary, she was the finest woman Grell had met in her lifetime. Even when her anger and regret consumed her, left her shrieking and broken and covered in freshly spilt blood, she was always the strongest, most beautiful woman there was.
Grell let her head fall back to rest on the side of the tub, heart aching for a moment, the sounds of footsteps and screaming and red drifting through her ears like the tune to an old song.
"I wonder, Madam, what you would think if you could see me now."
---
The next time Grell went in for surgery, she told William about it the day she set the appointment. This was the one that terrified them both, the one that had led Rebecca Reinholt to her death. Grell warned him that it would take more time to recover than the last one had, but promised she would call once she was able, and he understood, because this one entailed such a complex set of construction and reconstruction, turning a whole section of the body inside-out.
Still, the prospect made his stomach turn, and he wasn't even the one going to the hospital.
He drove her there, this time, counting and calculating the minutes they had until she was supposed to check in. When they got inside, he held her close, not letting to until his time was completely up.
Finally, he stepped back, gave her a quick kiss, and touched his forehead to hers.
"I'll see you when you come back."
She smiled, gave his hand a squeeze, and looked at him with frightened joy.
"I can hardly wait."
A deep breath to steel his nerves, and he let her go.
---
By the time Grell was back on her hospital bed, waiting for everything to get going, her nervousness had tapered off into a surreal sort of wonderment. That may or may not have had something to do with the injection the nurse had administered shortly after taking her blood pressure, but she didn't really care at this point. The surgery itself was far from her mind, replaced by thoughts of what would happen afterwards. How would things change, she wondered? She supposed her wardrobe wouldn't change any more than it did after the first surgery, since dresses were nothing new to her, and the uniform was the same for both genders, anyway. Oh, but it would be so wonderful now, when they went dancing, and he could spin her around like...well, like he always had, really...
The anesthesiologist had arrived by that point, not that Grell noticed, and a different injection was run through the IV in her elbow. She was looking the other way, fascinated by the light reflecting off a strand of her hair and wondering if her dress should have sleeves or not.
She decided, as the medicine took her, that she would decide another day.
-she dreamt of Madam Red, standing behind her and brushing her hair, her warm smile reflected in the glass of the mirror-
---
William desperately needed something to distract him. Being a workaholic was a lot less enjoyable when the person you were trying not to worry yourself sick about was so conspicuously absent from it. Looking up during lunch hour and seeing Ronald there instead of Grell was becoming a lot less surprising, and he didn't like it. He hadn't heard the motor of a chainsaw in six weeks, and it was driving him mad. He almost never went to the office itself if he could avoid it, and he had done more field work lately than he had since his first assignment.
He was just about to leave for the day when he was waylaid by a much-less-smug-than-last-time Ronald Knox, who was holding his coat in one hand and his car keys in the other.
"Spears, you are going to explode if you don't loosen up," he said frankly, "so here's what we're going to do: I'm going to come over to your place at seven tonight with a bottle of whisky, you're going to get very drunk, and then you're going to tell me what's bothering you. Afterwards, I'm going to go home and promise to never bring any of it up again, because I know you'll never speak to me again if I do."
"Knox..." William pinched the bridge of his nose. "I hope you know that if this were any other day of any other year, under any other circumstances, you would be transferred to a different city within the month."
"I know," Ronald put an arm around his shoulder and led them both to the parking lot, "but something tells me you need this."
A couple of hours and more than a few glasses of whisky later, William was feeling much less like he needed to be distracted and much more like he needed to be put to death. His head felt sloshy and his heart felt rainy, and he hadn't even known rainy was a feeling until now.
"This...is the fifth week now...we went to dinner every Friday, even if it was just at her apartment--she can really cook, you know--and, I mean, except for the Jack the Ripper thing, but I don't wanna think about that....I just...I really miss her."
"I thought so," Ronald, who (surprisingly) hadn't partaken of the alcohol, was patting him on the back and nodding slowly.
"She calls me, though...during lunch. Every day. She sounds so happy, but...she keeps telling me not to come over."
Ronald laughed at that. "Yeah, I remember that. God, the look on your face the first time she called."
"If they screwed it up, I swear..." He let his fist fall onto the table (they had somehow made their way to his living room floor, leaning against the sofa behind them). "I'll kill 'em. All of 'em. All the doctors and everything."
"...Okay, I'm only going to tell you this because I know you won't remember it, but I actually drove Sutcliffe home from the hospital, and apparently they did just fine. Doctor said it was one of the cleanest results he's had."
"...you drove her home."
"Yes."
"...good. Very good. How was she?"
"Quite a bit like you, with all the painkillers they had her on. Reminds me, do me a favor and drink this."
He set a glass of water in front of him.
"Why?"
"So you won't get hungover. I'll leave another glass on the bathroom counter for when this one wakes you up later."
"...thanks."
"No problem. Anyway, here's the thing about Sutcliffe: she's got this really romantic, theatrical kind of way about her that makes a lot of her logic seem really weird. Everything has to go according to the invisible script she's got in her head. She actually told me after the first surgery when I took her back that she didn't want you to see her all bandaged up because it 'wasn't supposed to go like that'. Really, I just think she doesn't want you worrying over her, because all that would really do is stress her out and probably slow down her recovery."
Will just stared at him over the glass with a look that would have been more intimidating if he'd been able to back it up.
"Look," Ronald continued, "I don't think this method of unwinding should be used for anything but emergency purposes, so you're going to have to find something to occupy yourself with. I know your job is your hobby and all that, but, well, look at where that's gotten you. Have you ever considered billiards, or something?"
"Yeah, I used to play," William finished off the last of the water.
"Start playing again. It'll take your mind off of things. In fact, let me write that down so you remember it in the morning." He searched the table for something to write on.
"I just...I really hope I can see her, soon. So I can give her the..." Will trailed off.
"Oh, you got her a present?"
"Mhm," he pointed to the box on the table. "Last week."
"Awesome," he took the lid off of the top, "Lemme see...oh, man."
Will nodded.
After a moment, Ronald stood up.
"Alright, I have officially done all I can do. Let's get you to bed."
A few minutes later, with William rapidly losing consciousness on his bed, Ronald gave an amused chuckle and patted him on the shoulder.
"Good luck."
---
It has taken me entirely too long to get to this point, and I am not going to let something stop me, now.
Grell was sitting in her reclining chair, stark naked, with her feet up on the ottoman in front of her and a towel spread out underneath her. To her left, a box of bottles and plastic things was sitting on the side table, its contents having been rummaged through far more than once in the past hour.
When she had first awoken from the anesthesia, her lower half completely mummified and devoid of feeling, she had just stared at the doctor when he had told her she would be ready for sexual activity in six weeks. It was the absolute last thing on her mind, the first being when she would get her brain back now that it had been kidnapped by the medicine she was on.
She had gotten a device made of pink plastic tubes that slid over one another like nesting dolls, and she was told to use the smallest one for twenty minutes each day, to let her body become accustomed to its new component. She had done this with intense dedication, hoping that, after a while, it would all stop feeling so numb.
To her utter surprise, it did. It went at a god-awfully slow pace, but the more she used it, the more feeling she acquired, as though she had been growing new sets of nerves.
When she could walk comfortably, she started calling William during his lunch hour, longing to speak with him even if she didn't want him to visit her while she was still bandaged up. He had dropped the phone the first time she had called, and Ronald had picked it up, said hello, and then put it back in his hand. She had almost been afraid the first time that he would try to come see her, but he had been patient, like he always was. They would spend the whole lunch hour talking, not a minute more, not a minute less. It was hardly a substitute for being able to see him in person, but it was so nice to be able to talk to him.
At the six week mark, she had decided to try waking up her sexual responses and gotten absolutely nowhere. By the fifth try, she was about ready to scream, and by the sixth, she actually did, pressing a pillow onto her face to avoid scaring the neighbors. On the seventh go, finally, finally, after forty-five solid minutes of trying to get a response out of unfamiliar organs, something short and fizzy had spread through her, and she had the bizarre sensation of feeling frustrated and triumphant all at once. She had tried it again, and again, and she succeeded both times, and what was more; the sensation was getting stronger.
Now, armed and ready, she was going to figure this out or die trying. Grell was nothing, after all, if not determined.
She poured some of the lubricant onto her fingers and slipped them inside, moving them in and out so it would spread. Maybe someday she wouldn't need so much, but it wasn't uncommon for women to need a little assistance, so it didn't bother her too much.
A memory came to mind, a frame of reference that brought warmth to her face.
"How does it feel? For you."
"Now, that's hardly a proper question."
"...I believe we passed the point of 'proper' shortly after we came home, Madam."
"But, why do you want to know?"
"It's a question that's been burning in my mind for so long, now. Please, just indulge me this once."
She moved her fingers in deeper, sighing softly. She still loved the feeling of being filled.
"Mmmmm, well, I can't answer you when you're holding me so close."
"Why not?"
"Because the only way to really explain is to show you."
Something warm and molten started to fill her, deep inside, beyond where her fingers touched.
"...there's no moon tonight, Madam. Should I light a-"
"I never said I was going to show your eyes. Give me your hand."
"...Madam..."
"Hush, dear, this is hardly something you haven't touched before, least of all tonight."
"I know, but...this is different."
"...Yes, it is. Now, I believe you asked me a question. Here..."
"...you're so warm."
No wonder. Grell could feel it, now, rising up inside her. So very, very warm.
"Here, right around the edge...that's where it starts."
"There?"
"Right where your fingertips are. It's a soft, heavy heat that goes up, like this, and then starts to collect here."
"This little thing?"
"Yes, that. And then it goes in, as well, deep inside, here, ah--"
"..."
She took her other hand, stroked the underside of her clitoris with two fingers, and then began to circle them slowly.
"And it stays like that, nice and warm and sweet, for a little while. And then it grows...and--nnh-"
"Please, try to tell me, Madam."
"I can't--hah--it's not easy to put this sort of thing into words, Grell. Especially in the middle of it."
"I just want to know."
There was that fizzy feeling, again, but it had more substance to it, this time. Emboldened, she moved them faster.
"I know you do. That's why I'm showing you. Now, give me your other hand..."
"Madam..."
"There it is."
"......you've never done that, before."
The only word she could think of was electric. She pressed her head back into the chair and shook softly, her muscles squeezing a bit around her fingers.
"Mmm, right, here--"
"..."
"...why did you stop?"
"You've never kissed my hand, before. I'm the one who does that to you."
"...I'll tell you afterwards. Now, keep your fingers right here, and stop thinking so much. You have to feel this."
"Nnn..." She pressed down harder, and the electric feeling spread, echoed by the pulse of her fingers inside.
"You're beautiful, Madam."
"That's the fifth time today--aah--you've said-nnnh!"
"I know. I mean it every time."
"Aaah-" She noticed, fleetingly, how much higher her voice had gotten, how much it sounded like -
"A-aanh..."
"My beautiful Madam Red."
"Haa-aah!" Something was building, right about to burst, so, so much stronger than it was before.
"Ha-a-aa-------!!"
"..."
"----nn!"
"...my god."
"Aa-ah! Ha---anh--" Her whole body was humming, exploding on itself in the most delicious way, sending warmth through her legs and shoulders and making her voice cut out completely.
"...............Grell?"
"Yes, Madam?"
"......I think I might love you."
"Hmm~"
She collapsed, trying to catch her breath. Her legs were shaking, her hands were sticky, and she was happier than she had ever been in her life. She looked up at the ceiling through her half-sideways glasses and laughed out loud.
"What? And why are you smiling like that?"
"I know I love you."
---
Sometime during his midday phone conversation with Grell, William noticed that it was Friday, for the seventh time since Grell went in for surgery.
"It's been a while, hasn't it?" he said. "Since we went out for Friday dinner, I mean."
"I was just about to bring that up," Will can hear the smile in her voice. "It really has been far too long. I miss my William so~ What do you say, then? Would you like to go out tonight?"
Keep composure, William, keep composure.
"...I would love that."
He finished his work in half the time, went home, paced his living room for an hour, took a shower, paced for another half hour to dry off, fixes his hair five times, fretted over what to wear for a considerably longer amount of time than usual, made sure he has the right address for the restaurant (even though they've gone to this one at least twenty times before), and developed a reflex for putting his hand against his pocket every fifteen seconds.
When he went to Grell's house to pick her up at seven, his heart nearly stopped at the sight of her. Her dress, of course, was red and flowing and lovely. Her hair had been twisted up and curled, brushing her shoulders when she turns her head. Honestly, though, the truly beautiful thing about her that evening was the strength and confidence with which she carried herself, the sense of rightness in her eyes.
When they arrived at the restaurant, she took his arm with no hesitation, smiled at him with no regard for anyone around them, and spoke with a kind of reassured freedom he had never heard from her, before. She sounded and looked and acted so relaxed, as though she could finally breathe after being trapped for a long, long time.
Funny, given that he could barely remember to breathe at all.
As she finished her dessert, he tried to keep himself from having a heart attack and stood up. She blinked, looking up at him in confusion. She began to look even more confused when he doesn't move.
"Something wrong, Will?"
"No," he said, clearing his throat.
A moment, and then he dropped to his knee before he could talk himself out of it.
"Grell," he said, trying to keep his voice from shaking, "Grell Sutcliffe, I know you have told me before that you simply weren't ready, but the fact of the matter is that I cannot wait any longer. I have..." he can't even remember what he was going to say. "I have loved you since I met you, since that winter morning we spent slicing cinematic records, when I was in over my head, and you found my glasses for me."
Grell looked as though she was about to cry. Will couldn't decide if he was about to cry or laugh.
"And I don't even know how, but just when I thought I couldn't love you more, I somehow found a way... Grell, please," The ring, the ring, he tried not to drop it taking it out of his coat pocket, "will you do me the honor of marrying me?"
She's going to say no, she's going to say not yet, for the fourth time, this was such a mistake--
"Absolutely."
Before he could even stand up, she threw her arms around him. The ring was still in the box; he had to lift her up a bit to get it on her finger, hands shaking the whole time, but somehow he managed it. And then he took her right back into his arms, swearing he would never let go again.
---
Grell's dress had sleeves. It also had a train, and a veil that stayed in place by way of little crystals that twisted into her hair, and a beautiful string of roses embroidered into the bodice. It had a red ribbon tied in the back that flowed down her skirt like a river, matched perfectly with her hair and lips and nails. It had taken months to make. The whole wedding had taken months to put together, honestly. Grell supposed she could have been more cooperative, at some points, but really she saw no harm in making sure everything went the way it was supposed to. She had waited more than a century for this, so why shouldn't it be perfect?
It felt like an eternity since Will had asked her the first time. Her heart had never broken quite so sharply since that day, when she had to look him in the eye and say "I can't, yet". Perhaps it was that stubbornly romantic side of her coming to light again, but she had wanted to be his bride, in the truest, purest sense of the word. Now that she was, the stained glass church windows painting the congregation like a bed of flowers, nothing in the world could stop the wave of happiness that washed over her.
Not when she got outside the church and saw two black-clothed figures glaring at her (they must be on their hundred-something-year anniversary by now, she mused).
Not when Ronald stood up to give an impromptu speech at the reception (he was thoroughly inebriated and slurring something about "payback but not really I love you Will seriously").
Not even when Will disappeared from the party at one point and she found him outside, fighting with the taller of the two figures who had been outside of the church ("Really now, Will, I got over him ages ago").
That was when she'd had to deal with the short one shouting about her choice of location (completely missing the fact that Angelina's funeral being held there was the entire point), and it almost managed to tick her off. Almost. The only reason it didn't was Will chose that moment to mention that their scythes were, in fact, not too far away, and while he didn't condone unnecessary violence with instruments used for official business, this was technically trespassing on the demons' account, rather than their own.
Grell would have taken him up on that offer (ah, how exciting, how perfectly dramatic, the bride and groom fighting to the death against an unspeakable evil~) if she hadn't turned around and seen the fire in his eyes. Instead, she put her arms around his shoulders and pulled him back towards the party, giving a saucy, inconsequential mark. She wanted to claim that fire for her own.
It wasn't too long afterwards, in the hotel room by the airport with its champagne (unopened) and strawberries (uneaten), that they both learned getting her out of the dress was an even bigger ordeal than getting her into it, mostly because neither of them had the patience to do it properly. Finally, Grell remembered that untying the red ribbon would speed things up quite a bit, and a carefully crafted mass of white and red fell to the floor rather unceremoniously. She would need to put it back in the garment bag for their flight tomorrow (they were going to Germany), but for now she really didn't care, not with his hands on her waist...
It took her a moment to realize Will had stopped moving. She blinked up at him.
"What?"
"When," he asked, staring at the rose-red lace and satin she had been hiding, "did you get that?"
She put on her best, most devious grin, working her fingers down the buttons of his shirt. "Does it really matter?"
The speed with which he shrugged out of his shirt and claimed her mouth with his own said rather clearly that it didn't. (What he didn't need to know just yet was that she had bought it more than a hundred years ago. He never needed to know how much of a pain it was to wear it underneath the gown.)
The concept of a wedding night being a couple's first time with one another never made all that much sense to Grell. How would you know what on earth you were supposed to do? Fortunately, William's particular brand of logic lined up with hers in that regard, so they had spent their engagement getting to know each other all over again, learning what they could and couldn't do, what was different and what hadn't changed a bit. Even now, though, it all still felt so new, like learning a dance by heart and then having to do it all differently. It didn't make it any less enjoyable, but it still surprised her every time.
Now, for instance, after she had pushed him back onto the bed and made short work of his trousers and underwear, she crawled over him with the satin babydoll hanging like a curtain between them. She felt so very light, where she had been heavy and bouncy before, but her chest hung low in front of her. She really rather liked it.
She liked it even more when he flipped her onto her back and kissed his way down her neck, taking the side of her breasts into her mouth and sucking gently (that was one of her favorite parts). His hands slipped her panties off while his mouth moved down her side and around to her stomach and then-
"Aah!"
---tongue!
This. This was completely new. This was nothing short of marvelous, the feeling of his tongue sliding up and down, up and down, slow and then fast and then slow again. Grell could never manage to keep her eyes open when he did this, though she looked down once and saw William staring straight up at her, watching her face.
He stopped at the worst possible moment, not for the first time, and when she opened her eyes to give him an earful, she saw him pulling something out of his overnight bag. Oh, right.
He kissed her softly as his fingers worked inside her (his mouth tasted really weird, but not altogether unpleasant), and then outside again as he covered himself with cool, viscous gel. Same dance, different steps.
She threw her head back and sighed when he entered her, partly from relief but mostly from sheer joy. If she were given a mountain of books to draw from and an eternity to find the words, she would never be able to describe how perfectly right it felt, to be filled in a way that didn't feel awkward, to not be reminded every time they did this that she wasn't really a woman, because she was. She had always been, as Will had told her so many times, but now it had all come together like a perfect, resonant harmony.
He kissed her again, running his fingers through her half-pinned hair, and she clung to him so tightly she was absolutely sure her fingernails would leave marks on his shoulders. That was a thoroughly satisfying notion, in itself, and she raked them down around his sides so she could see them in the morning, no matter what side of him she was looking at.
She felt his fingers outside, pressing and circling, and that made her toes curl, because it meant he was close. She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him closer, taking his face in both hands and looking him straight in the eye. His hair was disheveled, his breathing was heavy and uneven, and he looked thoroughly undignified. She just smiled and brought him down for a kiss.
There it was again, that building electric warmth, the one that made her legs shake and her eyes squeeze shut. She swore, no matter how many more times she felt it, she will never get used to how gloriously intense it all was, so much fire and lightning swelling up inside her, just waiting to break and turn everything blindingly, brilliantly--
(His fingers shifted upwards.)
--red. Her back arched, she clenched around him once, twice, was she really even counting? That crackling fire spread itself up and back into her, over and over and over. She heard him shout above her, felt his rhythm falter and stop as he spilled inside of her, and god if that didn't make her shake all over again.
They lay very still for a moment, limbs filled with heavy liquid happiness, before he rolled to the side and just looked at her. Grell wondered for a moment if that was the beginnings of a smile at the corner of his mouth, but she wasn't going to be the one to ask and ruin it. Instead, she stretched herself out, cracking more than one joint in the process, and turned to face him.
"I could get used to this."
Series: Kuroshitsuji
Pairing/Characters: Grell/William, Grell/Madam Red
Rating: R18
Warnings: Surgery, transgender!Grell, sex, spoilers for the end of season 2, I guess.
Disclaimer: I own none of the characters or story elements contained within. I am making no money from this.
Notes: This takes place in a more modern-day setting [under the assumption that shinigami are immortal], and is essentially about Grell undergoing gender reassignment surgery. Hence, I refer to Grell as "she", which I know throws some people off, so I'm making a note of it here.
Summary: "I could get used to this."
Let me disclaim all of my issues with this right now: it took too long, I don't know too much about gender reassignment surgery even after the research I did, I feel like I got the characters all wrong (as usual), and I completely ripped off so many of your ideas, Hannah, I'm so sorry. m(_ _)m
Full credit for the idea for this goes to neocloud9 , without whom this wouldn't be finished.
~~~
Grell spent a lot of time around hospitals. It was only fitting, given how often people died there, but she never really enjoyed it, not when the next assignment could very well have been a baby who had barely left the womb, or worse, a mother whose baby didn't even have a cinematic record to watch. Her film could have been etched with exhausting hope or jaded bitterness, but the infant's would always be blank. After all, the eyes had not yet opened and begun their recording.
One would think, after more than a century, she would get used to it. She never even came close. It started to hurt a little less, the sound of a ribbon of blades slashing through the soul became just a little less heart wrenching, but the sound of panicked doctors, frantic to try and save her, never got any less tragic. Those damned electric heart monitors just made it all worse. The first time she'd dealt with one of those, the sound of her alarm clock the next morning sent her into a panic. It wasn't even in the same pitch range as the monitors, and yet that rhythmic beeping broke her all at once. That was a bad morning, spent thrashing her way out of the sheets and slamming the noisy thing against the wall. It took fifteen minutes to kill it, the thought of simply switching the alarm off far from her mind. She barely made it to work on time that day, and when she did, Will took one look at her and gave her a day of sending messages between departments, something to keep her off the field but keep her mind occupied. On her lunch break, she bought a clock with metal bells on top.
The worst hospital she ever had to see was almost completely empty. The only sign of life once there was an operating table, standing on its wheels in front of her, its occupant still connected to the bags of IV fluid and electrode pads that would have been attached to a keening green line, had the machine still been there. There was no line, though, no flickering screen or flashing lights to remind her of the immediacy of the death. There was only stone silence, which was even more chilling than the panicked adrenaline she had expected. This one had been abandoned, brought to a long-deserted hospital with trembling hope in her heart only to have it flicker and die like the pulse in her veins. No one would find her body for weeks.
Grell cried as she watched that cinematic record, the record of Robert Reinholt, who called herself Rebecca. She watched the pretty little girl grow up in the wrong body, in jackets and trousers and short hair, painting her lips and shaving her face at night, dressing up in beautiful gowns in front of her mirror, never daring to set foot outside. Talking to a doctor in utter despair, talking of god's mistakes and wishing for death, perhaps to be reborn in the right body this time. Finding a gleam of hope, a risk all too easy to take. Money changing hands, whispered addresses and times, and the peaceful reassurance just before the anesthetic took her under.
Grell wanted very badly to burn the hospital to the ground, but settled for taking the ethanol disinfectant from the cabinets under the sink and drenching her in it, lighting a match from the book in her pocket to give the poor woman a proper cremation. She lifted the surgical cloth for a moment, just to see ("I do hope you don't mind, dear, one girl to another"), and then dropped it, throwing the match onto the alcohol-soaked fabric and running out the back of the room. When the shock of winter air struck her face, she turned and retched onto the snow-covered ground, unable to see straight from the tears in her eyes.
She fell back against the wall and mourned, her ears ringing with a voice not her own:
"After you've finished your assignments for today, would you mind taking this one? It was supposed to be handled by another section, but for whatever reason it ended up here. I'd do it myself, but you'll be closer to that part of town than I will. It's still a bit far away, though, so I would make sure to do it after your normal shift assignments are done. I'm sure you can fit it in; you're remarkably efficient now that you've got that back." A pair of shears nudged in the general direction of her chainsaw, then back up to the black-framed glasses they were so often placed against.
He had known.
---
He really hadn't wanted to do that.
When she saw him at work the next morning, he almost expected anger, but the part of him that knew Grell better than that took the squeeze to his shoulder as a sign that it was alright. He wished there could have been a better way to do it, but the fact of the matter was once Grell set her mind to something, there was no stopping her short of throwing the consequences right in her face. Of course, since Will's most fluent language was paperwork, it had taken him a tragically short time to do so.
The next time they went out to dinner, he took her hand across the table without any prompting, regardless of the fact that they were in public and she'still in her work clothes.
"It isn't that I don't think you should go through with it," he said, using all of his courage to keep eye contact with her. "It's that I think you should wait for science to catch up with you."
She twined her fingers with his.
"Thank you, Will."
---
The hardest part, besides the soul of Rebecca Reinholt, was having the means available but not being able to access them. Some surgeries were successful, she knew, but the process hadn't been legitimized, let alone perfected, and it was still highly dangerous. It wouldn't kill her like it did that other poor woman, but if her procedure went as badly as that, it could change the way she walked for the rest of her life. More than anything, though, she wasn't going to put her body into the hands of anyone she didn't trust.
Knowing this, Grell summoned every patient nerve in her body (though there weren't many), and waited. She waited for years that turned into decades, keeping one ear to the medical news reports and another to the death lists. She never had to actually collect another soul like Rebecca again, though, for which she could probably thank William. Slowly, the number of deaths during surgery decreased, and more and more news reports of people making the change successfully were reported. Every time, though, the report would be covered in words like "still in development" and "great risk to patients".
None of it made the bad days any easier. Worse than the morning with the alarm clock were the mornings, or afternoons, or evenings, or midnights when her brain would just stop all rational thought and say this is wrong, this is all wrong, this body doesn't fit and I can't take it off. Nothing would feel right on those days, sometimes not even when she painted her nails or went dress shopping to remind herself that even though her body was all wrong, her heart knew what it was meant to be.
---
It was five full decades before Grell told Will she was going in for surgery. As usual, there was no warning or leading up to it; she just tacked it onto the end of the story she had been telling like a notice to a bulletin board. It was during lunch break at work, and she had come in to water the orchids on his desk (a gift after the office was remodeled). None of the delicacy with which these things were typically handled, just "Oh, and by the way, I'll be going in for surgery this week."
This didn't surprise Will too much; gender reassignment surgery was not only a clinically standardized practice, it was also much more socially accepted. What did surprise him was that she hadn't told him she'd already found a doctor who could do it and gone through the necessary hormone therapy and counseling. That sort of thing took weeks, months, even. He knew; he had researched everything about the procedure, from the medications utilized during surgery to the recovery time necessary afterwards. He had nothing to be nervous about.
"Oh? What day?"
"Tomorrow."
He very nearly sputtered at that. As it was, he stayed silent for a good deal longer than normal, staring at the pen in his hand as though it held the secrets to life itself.
"Tomorrow."
"Of course," she smiled at him like it was the simplest thing in the world. "I couldn't have it get in the way of our date tonight. It's just the first procedure, so the recovery time would be shorter, but I still didn't want to miss our Friday dinner."
He looked up and began staring at her, then, composure fraying with each tick of the clock.
"...and you didn't think to tell me?"
As though she had expected this (of course she had expected this), she immediately walked around his desk and pulled him into a hug.
"I need to be sure that I'm doing this for myself," she whispered, "that's all."
Of course. She knew him too well; she knew that if she told him, he'd want to make sure it all went perfectly, want to know everything that happened, want to make sure she was safe. Nothing would be good enough for him, though, because nothing would be good enough for her. Not in his eyes.
He put his arms around her and gave in.
---
Sharp, artificial light began to filter through Grell's eyelids, and she didn't like it. There was an enormous space between her neck and her hips that apparently didn't exist, because she couldn't feel any of it. She could barely feel her shoulders, and they were sore where she could. She had been hit by a car once, during a very reckless night, and this felt somewhat like that, except she couldn't remember being hit by a car recently, so why on earth did she feel so wretched?
Ah, well. Sleep was sounding like an increasingly good idea, so she decided she'd figure it out later and let herself drift back down into unconsciousness.
...
Something poked her in the elbow.
...
Elbow...IV needle--hospital--SURGERY.
Grell's eyes shot open and flew around the room, trying to blink themselves into focus for want of glasses. Her teeth were chattering, she noticed, and her hand was shaking where it lay on the bed. What in god's name happened?
Right as she was about to reach for the nurse call button, the door to her room opened, and a nurse with short white hair and very good timing came in holding a thermometer.
"Alright, Miss Sutcliffe, I'm here to take your vitals--" she looked up, and her face tightened a bit with concern.
Oh, god, I'm probably in one of those stupidly short hospital gowns, and she's wondering why it says "Miss", isn't she?
The nurse - Natalie, her name tag said, came closer, holding the thermometer almost hesitantly.
Look, Natalie, I'm in no mood to have this conversation today. It took me a damn long time to get here and I don't have to explain why.
"Are you feeling alright?"
...What?
"Can you talk? Your teeth are chattering."
No, Grell realized, she couldn't talk. When she managed to open her trembling jaw wide enough, her voice just wouldn't work. The most she could manage was a shuddering breath, something more suited to a January night shift than an air-conditioned hospital room. She shook her head, looking perplexed. For a moment, she wondered why Natalie hadn't said anything about her teeth, but she supposed she ought to be thankful for that.
"Alright. Did you just wake up?"
A nod, slow and deliberate.
"You're crying; is it because you're upset?"
I'm crying? She caught sight of a mirror hanging on the opposite wall that answered her question rather quickly. "Why the hell am I crying?"
"Okay, you can talk. Let me go get Dr. Mason. I think you might have just had a bad reaction to the anesthesia."
"Ah..." She hadn't even realized she'd said that out loud. "Thank you."
With the nurse gone and Grell's hands starting to shake a little less, she looked down at her chest and marveled for a moment at the layer of bandages. The swell and curve beneath them, even though she could see where the stitches held tightly stretched skin together, felt more satisfying than even the most efficiently sliced cinematic records. It would undoubtedly take getting used to, but she was honestly looking forward to it.
---
"You're moping."
"Get out of my office, Knox."
"It's lunch time. I'm bored. You're still moping."
Will looked up from the paperwork he had so effectively buried himself in at the entirely too smug-looking blonde standing in the spot that was desperately wanting an overdramatic redhead at the moment.
"I am not moping," it wasn't the first lie Will had told himself, today. "I am working. I'm sorry if that's a foreign concept to you."
"Yeah, you don't scare me, Spears." Ronald pulled the chair from the other side of Will's office and sat in it the wrong way, arms resting on the back. "Look, it's been a week and a half. I know Sutcliffe's out of the hospital by now, and with any luck, she'll be back at work freaking out the new recruits in no time at all!"
"How do you know she's in the hospital?"
"Process of elimination," Ronald shrugged. "I know she's been looking into it ever since you got me to give you that soul from the other section, and if she was out pulling another Jack the Ripper stunt you'd be out looking for her instead of sitting here moping. I'm sure she at least told you how the surgery went."
"She hasn't called me since she went in for surgery."
"Ouch. ...Have you tried calling her? I know you couldn't visit her in the hospital, but you must know her number by now."
"....No."
"Well, why not?"
"I...presumed she would call me when she was ready."
"...Spears."
"What?"
"You can be really dumb sometimes."
---
If Will had called Grell, he wouldn't have gotten an answer, anyway, because Grell had resolutely unhooked her phone during her recovery. The painkillers they had put her on for the surgical scars had her afraid of what she would say if she picked up. Never had she been so glad to be in William's department; the amount of vacation time she had accumulated thanks to Will's workaholic nature was enough to make sure she completely recovered before she started running around with a chainsaw.
Spending this long outside of work and hopped up on painkillers, however, was rather boring. For the first two days, she just slept. After that, she finished a couple of books she'd been meaning to get to, went shopping for some new books, read those, and tried a whole number of new recipes she hadn't thought of before. Often, she would reach for the phone, wanting to call Will and see if he wanted to go somewhere, and then hear nothing when she picked it up and remember why she'd done that. She missed him horribly, but she couldn't let him see her like this, half-senseless with tape and bandages stuck to the underside of her chest. He would want to come in and worry over her and fix everything, and she couldn't have that. She could do this on her own, and she would.
Today, though, she had gone clothes shopping, because she had finally healed enough not to need the painkillers (much). There were no stitches now, just a faint white line that barely showed against her skin.
Grell stood now in front of the mirror hanging from her closet door, wearing a red skirt, her usual high heel shoes, and nothing else. She had done this three times, now, just stood staring at herself in the mirror, wondering if it was real. Her newly-created breasts were, in every way, very normal-looking. They were about the average size one would expect a woman of Grell's height to have, and they didn't have that globular shape she had seen in some other women who had undergone the same surgery. They had taken getting used to, though. She hadn't expected them to be so heavy, given their size. And wearing a bra every day was a blessing and a curse at the same time (whoever invented those was a sadistic genius). Still, though, she would find herself dancing around her living room some days, just enjoying the feeling of a body that was finally starting to feel right.
She had just as much wonderment for the skin-colored hormone patch stuck to her shoulder, because that was what made it all come together. Such wonderful chemicals, hormones. They had made the tissue beneath her breasts swell even further, making them feel more a part of her and less something foreign stitched to her chest, and she had stopped having to shave her face in the morning since she had started using it. (She was also a hyper-emotional wreck for the first two days while her brain got used to the change, but she insists that it was worth it.)
She fell back on her bed and clutched her chest, smiling so wide she thought she might die from happiness. After a minute, she picked up her phone, plugged the cord back in, and dialed on reflex. She wondered what William would do when he saw her that night.
---
William, for the record, said she was beautiful, kissed her senseless, and made love to her right there on the kitchen counter.
When they both lay in his bed that night, not tired enough to actually fall asleep but still pleasantly drowsy, he took her hand where it rested under her pillow.
"I've asked you twice now," he knew he heard her, though she wasn't looking straight at him, "and I know you said you weren't ready, but do you think..."
"Oh, Will," she turned to face him, "you know I hate doing this to you."
"I just thought, since you've done this--"
"I'm not finished. ...Not yet."
"...Alright."
She slides over and wraps her arm around him, her chest pressing to his with a softness he still isn't used to, still can't get enough of.
"I love you, William."
---
The reality of being transgender was that, no matter what sort of surgery or therapy or whatever on earth you underwent, there was a part of you that always felt incomplete.
This was what Grell resolutely decided one evening, reclining in her bathtub and sporting a weapons-grade pout. It had hit her earlier in the evening that, no matter what kind of surgery she had, she would never, could never, have children of her own, not really. There simply wasn't a medical procedure in the world that could synthesize something so delicately crafted. She could look like a woman from head to toe, have all of the curves and equipment in place, but she would never really be--
Well, that wasn't necessarily true. She toyed with a strand of her hair for a moment, reminiscing. Madame Red had been unable to have any children, and she was no less a woman for that fact. Quite to the contrary, she was the finest woman Grell had met in her lifetime. Even when her anger and regret consumed her, left her shrieking and broken and covered in freshly spilt blood, she was always the strongest, most beautiful woman there was.
Grell let her head fall back to rest on the side of the tub, heart aching for a moment, the sounds of footsteps and screaming and red drifting through her ears like the tune to an old song.
"I wonder, Madam, what you would think if you could see me now."
---
The next time Grell went in for surgery, she told William about it the day she set the appointment. This was the one that terrified them both, the one that had led Rebecca Reinholt to her death. Grell warned him that it would take more time to recover than the last one had, but promised she would call once she was able, and he understood, because this one entailed such a complex set of construction and reconstruction, turning a whole section of the body inside-out.
Still, the prospect made his stomach turn, and he wasn't even the one going to the hospital.
He drove her there, this time, counting and calculating the minutes they had until she was supposed to check in. When they got inside, he held her close, not letting to until his time was completely up.
Finally, he stepped back, gave her a quick kiss, and touched his forehead to hers.
"I'll see you when you come back."
She smiled, gave his hand a squeeze, and looked at him with frightened joy.
"I can hardly wait."
A deep breath to steel his nerves, and he let her go.
---
By the time Grell was back on her hospital bed, waiting for everything to get going, her nervousness had tapered off into a surreal sort of wonderment. That may or may not have had something to do with the injection the nurse had administered shortly after taking her blood pressure, but she didn't really care at this point. The surgery itself was far from her mind, replaced by thoughts of what would happen afterwards. How would things change, she wondered? She supposed her wardrobe wouldn't change any more than it did after the first surgery, since dresses were nothing new to her, and the uniform was the same for both genders, anyway. Oh, but it would be so wonderful now, when they went dancing, and he could spin her around like...well, like he always had, really...
The anesthesiologist had arrived by that point, not that Grell noticed, and a different injection was run through the IV in her elbow. She was looking the other way, fascinated by the light reflecting off a strand of her hair and wondering if her dress should have sleeves or not.
She decided, as the medicine took her, that she would decide another day.
-she dreamt of Madam Red, standing behind her and brushing her hair, her warm smile reflected in the glass of the mirror-
---
William desperately needed something to distract him. Being a workaholic was a lot less enjoyable when the person you were trying not to worry yourself sick about was so conspicuously absent from it. Looking up during lunch hour and seeing Ronald there instead of Grell was becoming a lot less surprising, and he didn't like it. He hadn't heard the motor of a chainsaw in six weeks, and it was driving him mad. He almost never went to the office itself if he could avoid it, and he had done more field work lately than he had since his first assignment.
He was just about to leave for the day when he was waylaid by a much-less-smug-than-last-time Ronald Knox, who was holding his coat in one hand and his car keys in the other.
"Spears, you are going to explode if you don't loosen up," he said frankly, "so here's what we're going to do: I'm going to come over to your place at seven tonight with a bottle of whisky, you're going to get very drunk, and then you're going to tell me what's bothering you. Afterwards, I'm going to go home and promise to never bring any of it up again, because I know you'll never speak to me again if I do."
"Knox..." William pinched the bridge of his nose. "I hope you know that if this were any other day of any other year, under any other circumstances, you would be transferred to a different city within the month."
"I know," Ronald put an arm around his shoulder and led them both to the parking lot, "but something tells me you need this."
A couple of hours and more than a few glasses of whisky later, William was feeling much less like he needed to be distracted and much more like he needed to be put to death. His head felt sloshy and his heart felt rainy, and he hadn't even known rainy was a feeling until now.
"This...is the fifth week now...we went to dinner every Friday, even if it was just at her apartment--she can really cook, you know--and, I mean, except for the Jack the Ripper thing, but I don't wanna think about that....I just...I really miss her."
"I thought so," Ronald, who (surprisingly) hadn't partaken of the alcohol, was patting him on the back and nodding slowly.
"She calls me, though...during lunch. Every day. She sounds so happy, but...she keeps telling me not to come over."
Ronald laughed at that. "Yeah, I remember that. God, the look on your face the first time she called."
"If they screwed it up, I swear..." He let his fist fall onto the table (they had somehow made their way to his living room floor, leaning against the sofa behind them). "I'll kill 'em. All of 'em. All the doctors and everything."
"...Okay, I'm only going to tell you this because I know you won't remember it, but I actually drove Sutcliffe home from the hospital, and apparently they did just fine. Doctor said it was one of the cleanest results he's had."
"...you drove her home."
"Yes."
"...good. Very good. How was she?"
"Quite a bit like you, with all the painkillers they had her on. Reminds me, do me a favor and drink this."
He set a glass of water in front of him.
"Why?"
"So you won't get hungover. I'll leave another glass on the bathroom counter for when this one wakes you up later."
"...thanks."
"No problem. Anyway, here's the thing about Sutcliffe: she's got this really romantic, theatrical kind of way about her that makes a lot of her logic seem really weird. Everything has to go according to the invisible script she's got in her head. She actually told me after the first surgery when I took her back that she didn't want you to see her all bandaged up because it 'wasn't supposed to go like that'. Really, I just think she doesn't want you worrying over her, because all that would really do is stress her out and probably slow down her recovery."
Will just stared at him over the glass with a look that would have been more intimidating if he'd been able to back it up.
"Look," Ronald continued, "I don't think this method of unwinding should be used for anything but emergency purposes, so you're going to have to find something to occupy yourself with. I know your job is your hobby and all that, but, well, look at where that's gotten you. Have you ever considered billiards, or something?"
"Yeah, I used to play," William finished off the last of the water.
"Start playing again. It'll take your mind off of things. In fact, let me write that down so you remember it in the morning." He searched the table for something to write on.
"I just...I really hope I can see her, soon. So I can give her the..." Will trailed off.
"Oh, you got her a present?"
"Mhm," he pointed to the box on the table. "Last week."
"Awesome," he took the lid off of the top, "Lemme see...oh, man."
Will nodded.
After a moment, Ronald stood up.
"Alright, I have officially done all I can do. Let's get you to bed."
A few minutes later, with William rapidly losing consciousness on his bed, Ronald gave an amused chuckle and patted him on the shoulder.
"Good luck."
---
It has taken me entirely too long to get to this point, and I am not going to let something stop me, now.
Grell was sitting in her reclining chair, stark naked, with her feet up on the ottoman in front of her and a towel spread out underneath her. To her left, a box of bottles and plastic things was sitting on the side table, its contents having been rummaged through far more than once in the past hour.
When she had first awoken from the anesthesia, her lower half completely mummified and devoid of feeling, she had just stared at the doctor when he had told her she would be ready for sexual activity in six weeks. It was the absolute last thing on her mind, the first being when she would get her brain back now that it had been kidnapped by the medicine she was on.
She had gotten a device made of pink plastic tubes that slid over one another like nesting dolls, and she was told to use the smallest one for twenty minutes each day, to let her body become accustomed to its new component. She had done this with intense dedication, hoping that, after a while, it would all stop feeling so numb.
To her utter surprise, it did. It went at a god-awfully slow pace, but the more she used it, the more feeling she acquired, as though she had been growing new sets of nerves.
When she could walk comfortably, she started calling William during his lunch hour, longing to speak with him even if she didn't want him to visit her while she was still bandaged up. He had dropped the phone the first time she had called, and Ronald had picked it up, said hello, and then put it back in his hand. She had almost been afraid the first time that he would try to come see her, but he had been patient, like he always was. They would spend the whole lunch hour talking, not a minute more, not a minute less. It was hardly a substitute for being able to see him in person, but it was so nice to be able to talk to him.
At the six week mark, she had decided to try waking up her sexual responses and gotten absolutely nowhere. By the fifth try, she was about ready to scream, and by the sixth, she actually did, pressing a pillow onto her face to avoid scaring the neighbors. On the seventh go, finally, finally, after forty-five solid minutes of trying to get a response out of unfamiliar organs, something short and fizzy had spread through her, and she had the bizarre sensation of feeling frustrated and triumphant all at once. She had tried it again, and again, and she succeeded both times, and what was more; the sensation was getting stronger.
Now, armed and ready, she was going to figure this out or die trying. Grell was nothing, after all, if not determined.
She poured some of the lubricant onto her fingers and slipped them inside, moving them in and out so it would spread. Maybe someday she wouldn't need so much, but it wasn't uncommon for women to need a little assistance, so it didn't bother her too much.
A memory came to mind, a frame of reference that brought warmth to her face.
"How does it feel? For you."
"Now, that's hardly a proper question."
"...I believe we passed the point of 'proper' shortly after we came home, Madam."
"But, why do you want to know?"
"It's a question that's been burning in my mind for so long, now. Please, just indulge me this once."
She moved her fingers in deeper, sighing softly. She still loved the feeling of being filled.
"Mmmmm, well, I can't answer you when you're holding me so close."
"Why not?"
"Because the only way to really explain is to show you."
Something warm and molten started to fill her, deep inside, beyond where her fingers touched.
"...there's no moon tonight, Madam. Should I light a-"
"I never said I was going to show your eyes. Give me your hand."
"...Madam..."
"Hush, dear, this is hardly something you haven't touched before, least of all tonight."
"I know, but...this is different."
"...Yes, it is. Now, I believe you asked me a question. Here..."
"...you're so warm."
No wonder. Grell could feel it, now, rising up inside her. So very, very warm.
"Here, right around the edge...that's where it starts."
"There?"
"Right where your fingertips are. It's a soft, heavy heat that goes up, like this, and then starts to collect here."
"This little thing?"
"Yes, that. And then it goes in, as well, deep inside, here, ah--"
"..."
She took her other hand, stroked the underside of her clitoris with two fingers, and then began to circle them slowly.
"And it stays like that, nice and warm and sweet, for a little while. And then it grows...and--nnh-"
"Please, try to tell me, Madam."
"I can't--hah--it's not easy to put this sort of thing into words, Grell. Especially in the middle of it."
"I just want to know."
There was that fizzy feeling, again, but it had more substance to it, this time. Emboldened, she moved them faster.
"I know you do. That's why I'm showing you. Now, give me your other hand..."
"Madam..."
"There it is."
"......you've never done that, before."
The only word she could think of was electric. She pressed her head back into the chair and shook softly, her muscles squeezing a bit around her fingers.
"Mmm, right, here--"
"..."
"...why did you stop?"
"You've never kissed my hand, before. I'm the one who does that to you."
"...I'll tell you afterwards. Now, keep your fingers right here, and stop thinking so much. You have to feel this."
"Nnn..." She pressed down harder, and the electric feeling spread, echoed by the pulse of her fingers inside.
"You're beautiful, Madam."
"That's the fifth time today--aah--you've said-nnnh!"
"I know. I mean it every time."
"Aaah-" She noticed, fleetingly, how much higher her voice had gotten, how much it sounded like -
"A-aanh..."
"My beautiful Madam Red."
"Haa-aah!" Something was building, right about to burst, so, so much stronger than it was before.
"Ha-a-aa-------!!"
"..."
"----nn!"
"...my god."
"Aa-ah! Ha---anh--" Her whole body was humming, exploding on itself in the most delicious way, sending warmth through her legs and shoulders and making her voice cut out completely.
"...............Grell?"
"Yes, Madam?"
"......I think I might love you."
"Hmm~"
She collapsed, trying to catch her breath. Her legs were shaking, her hands were sticky, and she was happier than she had ever been in her life. She looked up at the ceiling through her half-sideways glasses and laughed out loud.
"What? And why are you smiling like that?"
"I know I love you."
---
Sometime during his midday phone conversation with Grell, William noticed that it was Friday, for the seventh time since Grell went in for surgery.
"It's been a while, hasn't it?" he said. "Since we went out for Friday dinner, I mean."
"I was just about to bring that up," Will can hear the smile in her voice. "It really has been far too long. I miss my William so~ What do you say, then? Would you like to go out tonight?"
Keep composure, William, keep composure.
"...I would love that."
He finished his work in half the time, went home, paced his living room for an hour, took a shower, paced for another half hour to dry off, fixes his hair five times, fretted over what to wear for a considerably longer amount of time than usual, made sure he has the right address for the restaurant (even though they've gone to this one at least twenty times before), and developed a reflex for putting his hand against his pocket every fifteen seconds.
When he went to Grell's house to pick her up at seven, his heart nearly stopped at the sight of her. Her dress, of course, was red and flowing and lovely. Her hair had been twisted up and curled, brushing her shoulders when she turns her head. Honestly, though, the truly beautiful thing about her that evening was the strength and confidence with which she carried herself, the sense of rightness in her eyes.
When they arrived at the restaurant, she took his arm with no hesitation, smiled at him with no regard for anyone around them, and spoke with a kind of reassured freedom he had never heard from her, before. She sounded and looked and acted so relaxed, as though she could finally breathe after being trapped for a long, long time.
Funny, given that he could barely remember to breathe at all.
As she finished her dessert, he tried to keep himself from having a heart attack and stood up. She blinked, looking up at him in confusion. She began to look even more confused when he doesn't move.
"Something wrong, Will?"
"No," he said, clearing his throat.
A moment, and then he dropped to his knee before he could talk himself out of it.
"Grell," he said, trying to keep his voice from shaking, "Grell Sutcliffe, I know you have told me before that you simply weren't ready, but the fact of the matter is that I cannot wait any longer. I have..." he can't even remember what he was going to say. "I have loved you since I met you, since that winter morning we spent slicing cinematic records, when I was in over my head, and you found my glasses for me."
Grell looked as though she was about to cry. Will couldn't decide if he was about to cry or laugh.
"And I don't even know how, but just when I thought I couldn't love you more, I somehow found a way... Grell, please," The ring, the ring, he tried not to drop it taking it out of his coat pocket, "will you do me the honor of marrying me?"
She's going to say no, she's going to say not yet, for the fourth time, this was such a mistake--
"Absolutely."
Before he could even stand up, she threw her arms around him. The ring was still in the box; he had to lift her up a bit to get it on her finger, hands shaking the whole time, but somehow he managed it. And then he took her right back into his arms, swearing he would never let go again.
---
Grell's dress had sleeves. It also had a train, and a veil that stayed in place by way of little crystals that twisted into her hair, and a beautiful string of roses embroidered into the bodice. It had a red ribbon tied in the back that flowed down her skirt like a river, matched perfectly with her hair and lips and nails. It had taken months to make. The whole wedding had taken months to put together, honestly. Grell supposed she could have been more cooperative, at some points, but really she saw no harm in making sure everything went the way it was supposed to. She had waited more than a century for this, so why shouldn't it be perfect?
It felt like an eternity since Will had asked her the first time. Her heart had never broken quite so sharply since that day, when she had to look him in the eye and say "I can't, yet". Perhaps it was that stubbornly romantic side of her coming to light again, but she had wanted to be his bride, in the truest, purest sense of the word. Now that she was, the stained glass church windows painting the congregation like a bed of flowers, nothing in the world could stop the wave of happiness that washed over her.
Not when she got outside the church and saw two black-clothed figures glaring at her (they must be on their hundred-something-year anniversary by now, she mused).
Not when Ronald stood up to give an impromptu speech at the reception (he was thoroughly inebriated and slurring something about "payback but not really I love you Will seriously").
Not even when Will disappeared from the party at one point and she found him outside, fighting with the taller of the two figures who had been outside of the church ("Really now, Will, I got over him ages ago").
That was when she'd had to deal with the short one shouting about her choice of location (completely missing the fact that Angelina's funeral being held there was the entire point), and it almost managed to tick her off. Almost. The only reason it didn't was Will chose that moment to mention that their scythes were, in fact, not too far away, and while he didn't condone unnecessary violence with instruments used for official business, this was technically trespassing on the demons' account, rather than their own.
Grell would have taken him up on that offer (ah, how exciting, how perfectly dramatic, the bride and groom fighting to the death against an unspeakable evil~) if she hadn't turned around and seen the fire in his eyes. Instead, she put her arms around his shoulders and pulled him back towards the party, giving a saucy, inconsequential mark. She wanted to claim that fire for her own.
It wasn't too long afterwards, in the hotel room by the airport with its champagne (unopened) and strawberries (uneaten), that they both learned getting her out of the dress was an even bigger ordeal than getting her into it, mostly because neither of them had the patience to do it properly. Finally, Grell remembered that untying the red ribbon would speed things up quite a bit, and a carefully crafted mass of white and red fell to the floor rather unceremoniously. She would need to put it back in the garment bag for their flight tomorrow (they were going to Germany), but for now she really didn't care, not with his hands on her waist...
It took her a moment to realize Will had stopped moving. She blinked up at him.
"What?"
"When," he asked, staring at the rose-red lace and satin she had been hiding, "did you get that?"
She put on her best, most devious grin, working her fingers down the buttons of his shirt. "Does it really matter?"
The speed with which he shrugged out of his shirt and claimed her mouth with his own said rather clearly that it didn't. (What he didn't need to know just yet was that she had bought it more than a hundred years ago. He never needed to know how much of a pain it was to wear it underneath the gown.)
The concept of a wedding night being a couple's first time with one another never made all that much sense to Grell. How would you know what on earth you were supposed to do? Fortunately, William's particular brand of logic lined up with hers in that regard, so they had spent their engagement getting to know each other all over again, learning what they could and couldn't do, what was different and what hadn't changed a bit. Even now, though, it all still felt so new, like learning a dance by heart and then having to do it all differently. It didn't make it any less enjoyable, but it still surprised her every time.
Now, for instance, after she had pushed him back onto the bed and made short work of his trousers and underwear, she crawled over him with the satin babydoll hanging like a curtain between them. She felt so very light, where she had been heavy and bouncy before, but her chest hung low in front of her. She really rather liked it.
She liked it even more when he flipped her onto her back and kissed his way down her neck, taking the side of her breasts into her mouth and sucking gently (that was one of her favorite parts). His hands slipped her panties off while his mouth moved down her side and around to her stomach and then-
"Aah!"
---tongue!
This. This was completely new. This was nothing short of marvelous, the feeling of his tongue sliding up and down, up and down, slow and then fast and then slow again. Grell could never manage to keep her eyes open when he did this, though she looked down once and saw William staring straight up at her, watching her face.
He stopped at the worst possible moment, not for the first time, and when she opened her eyes to give him an earful, she saw him pulling something out of his overnight bag. Oh, right.
He kissed her softly as his fingers worked inside her (his mouth tasted really weird, but not altogether unpleasant), and then outside again as he covered himself with cool, viscous gel. Same dance, different steps.
She threw her head back and sighed when he entered her, partly from relief but mostly from sheer joy. If she were given a mountain of books to draw from and an eternity to find the words, she would never be able to describe how perfectly right it felt, to be filled in a way that didn't feel awkward, to not be reminded every time they did this that she wasn't really a woman, because she was. She had always been, as Will had told her so many times, but now it had all come together like a perfect, resonant harmony.
He kissed her again, running his fingers through her half-pinned hair, and she clung to him so tightly she was absolutely sure her fingernails would leave marks on his shoulders. That was a thoroughly satisfying notion, in itself, and she raked them down around his sides so she could see them in the morning, no matter what side of him she was looking at.
She felt his fingers outside, pressing and circling, and that made her toes curl, because it meant he was close. She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him closer, taking his face in both hands and looking him straight in the eye. His hair was disheveled, his breathing was heavy and uneven, and he looked thoroughly undignified. She just smiled and brought him down for a kiss.
There it was again, that building electric warmth, the one that made her legs shake and her eyes squeeze shut. She swore, no matter how many more times she felt it, she will never get used to how gloriously intense it all was, so much fire and lightning swelling up inside her, just waiting to break and turn everything blindingly, brilliantly--
(His fingers shifted upwards.)
--red. Her back arched, she clenched around him once, twice, was she really even counting? That crackling fire spread itself up and back into her, over and over and over. She heard him shout above her, felt his rhythm falter and stop as he spilled inside of her, and god if that didn't make her shake all over again.
They lay very still for a moment, limbs filled with heavy liquid happiness, before he rolled to the side and just looked at her. Grell wondered for a moment if that was the beginnings of a smile at the corner of his mouth, but she wasn't going to be the one to ask and ruin it. Instead, she stretched herself out, cracking more than one joint in the process, and turned to face him.
"I could get used to this."