Analyzing Dystopia
Title: Analyzing Dystopia Fandom: Kuroshitsuji.
Author: write_rewrite
Rating: G.
Pairings: William/Grell.
Warnings: Implied deaths.
Notes: Another piece of cheesy, saccharine bullshit. I am struggling today. This displeases me. Set later than the anime - mid eighties. Somewhat wooden and meant to be entirely different.
Summary: There's been an attack, and Grell is reading while William feels like he's dying.
It was a bright cold day in May and the clocks were striking one.
Grell sat in what had once been the back garden, reading a thin paperback on a half-broken stone bench. The twisted, knotted boughs of an oak tree spared that pale complexion from the sun - which was precisely Grell's reason for sitting there - and provided respite from the crisp and summery afternoon. All over London, the clouds were gathering, but not here.
William moved slowly past the crumbling ruins of the Eastern wing and sat down by Grell's side. The scent of burning was everywhere.
"What are you reading, Sutcliff?" he asked, purely to put his mind in another place.
The attack had come in at eight in the morning. There had been no warning. Some Reapers were still missing.
"Nineteen Eighty-Four," Grell said, and William choked out a laugh - of course. Only Grell would read a silly fictional horror in the midst of very real horror.
"Useless," he accused, his white-knuckled fingers stiffening on the shaft of his blade, and a very small part of him tried to point out that he was only attacking Grell because, well, there was nothing else to do, while the larger part said: he should be upset, he should be angry.
An emotional Grell was better than one that did not care, and read while the bodies of his friends and colleagues turned to ash behind him.
Grell lifted his eyes what seemed like ages after, and stared at William's unmoving shoulders. "Clearly, panicking should be the task I should presently be engaged in," a page turned slowly, "but underneath the circumstances, and in an effort to prevent your blood pressure from sky-rocketing, I thought it best to abstain."
"You're mocking me," William decided, dully and without emotion, "you just sit there and read your bloody book while someone could be desperately hurt beneath those rocks, don't you worry your pre-"
"It'll be alright. Reapers aren't Reapers because they break easily, William."
Grell reached over, and grasped his hand, and William only pulled it away because it was making something shudder in him, and not out of disgust.
"Why Nineteen Eighty Four? I thought you only read love stories."
"It is a love story. A tragic one."
The wind sifted ash and blood towards them, and William scratched absently at his covered fore-arm, at a wound gashed deep and narrowly into his arm. Bits of fabric still stuck to his flesh.
"Nineteen Eighty Four is not a love story."
"Every story is a love story in some little way," Grell corrected, with a little smile. "Even Nineteen Eighty Four."
"He sold her to the demons, and she dies at the end. That's not a love story."
Maybe their version of love is different, but William had always been of the opinion that love - when found - was eternal and constant and a gigantic pain in the arse, but a needed one, like an alarm clock to wake you up for work, or the Director of General Affairs. Love was like reaping.
That reminded him of their anniversary. He'd spent the night on the balcony. Grell had spent the night in their bed, alone, with Hamlet.
"I know - underneath the spreading chestnut tree..." Grell trailed off, and William picked up seamlessly, continuing with: "I sold you and you sold me."
Grell laughed, and snuggled up nicely against his side, pulling at William's arm. The other Reaper did not give into his silent request, but huddled further into himself, trying to blank out the memory of that awful, jarring sound, like the world had been torn in two, tried to shake how the building had trembled out of his mind.
It did not work so well, so William nudged Grell's side lightly, and tried to lose himself in the Reaper's voice, instead.
"They only survived as long as they did out of love, and it made life bearable in the end." A rock settled behind them - for one horrifying moment, William half-rose, because he could've sworn he'd heard someone cry out in terrible pain, but it was merely the wind through the branches of the oak tree.
Grell's small, warm hand clasped onto his wrist, and pulled him down again, forcefully. "The same thing happens in 'The Handmaid's Tale'. A horrible situation, made easier because she was loved. She didn't want escape any more, at the end. She just wanted to stay with him."
Something like admiration, and pride, and honour, was in Grell's voice.
He can see the black clean-up van rolling up, skidding unnecessarily on the narrow, rickety roads.
"Why is that a good thing?" he asked, "why do you admire her for putting the two of them in unneccessary danger - if Julia had not taken Winston out, they would not have died. If Offred had left Nick alone, they would have survived."
"They saved one another. Don't you see? Love isn't this commodity, this... accesory you can take out when there's people around. It's a very real, very strong, thing. It's something that gets inside you, like nothing else can - like patriotism, or saluting the queen, except love is infallible when it's true, and doesn't have a chance of failing because of a stronger love or a better bloke."
Grell stood up, and William's long fingers tightened about the redhead's wrist, to keep him there. The black van rolled closer and closer - behind him, the pile of rubble and ash and bodies waited.
"That's why it's so amusing when you worry if I stay late at the Undertaker's, or flirt with that Italian one. I've waited so long for you to love me back - to... save me. To let me save you. And now you have. That's all I wanted."
"I never needed saving." William managed, and let go of Grell's wrist when the first clean-up man - a tall and thin man in a heavy, oily-looking trench coat, with a plague-mask hiding his unremrkable face - got out from the back. He waved to William, his cheery grin grotesque with the mask aligned as it was. "I've never messed up."
Grell took the insult in stride, and bent at the waist to kiss William very softly on the lips, angling himself to hide it as a whisper, "No. You've always been my hero," he said, but laughingly, like a joke. "You've always needed to save me, haven't you?"
"I have." William waited a moment, waited until Grell gathered up his book and turned, and then called after him, "... but I'd never sell you beneath a chestnut tree."
Flashing a pretty smile, the redhead disappeared past the black van, and William stood up, his scythe over his shoulder, and his back iron-strong.
Whomever was beneath the rocks would need him.
Something told him that he would need Grell, at the end of the day, but he didn't listen to that.
. . .
He did need him.
It wasn't a voiced, wordy need, but animal-dumb and painful and beyond all definition. It wasn't even 'need', per se, as it was a bone-deep, throbbing sore somewhere smack dab in the middle of his chest, behind the barricade of skin and muscle and bone, beneath the still and frozen heart.
William's death scythe trailed in the dust on the floor of Grell's flat and disturbed three spiders from their tangled, silvery house into three dark corners. He stared, for a very long time, at the brass number 13 (painted red, but chipping) without moving an inch.
So many. There had been so many.
And he knew all of their names.
Alex. Timothy. Mariana. Laura. Jasper. Joanna. Ronald.
Some had been dead, and some had been near dead, and some had been terrifyingly awake and prone and still, and had started crying the instant they'd been found - crying like children, mere children, out of pain and terror.
Ronald Knox had had a mouth full of blood when they'd found him, and it had dribbled down his jaw when he'd tried to say 'thank you'.
Alan had remained beneath the rubble, prone and still and panting harshly, while someone extracted an unconcious Eric from above him.
The door opened with a sharp ringing of bells, and William stepped over the threshold and into the hug.
A warm smell of cinammon and biscuits lingered here, mixed in with over-scented shampoo and that perfume so popular nowadays (it smelled like honeysuckle and sex), and there was music at a whispering pitch, something with violins and pianos and white noise. The radio was no good. Grell had been asking him to buy a new one for a week.
"We had to leave. It got too dark. We couldn't see. There might still be some."
Grell didn't say a single word, and clung to him on the threshold, straining up on the tips of his impractical, spiky heels, swaying imbalanced against the other Reaper. On a muffled curse, William turned his face into the softness of Grell's neck, and pushed him back into the flat.
The door slammed shut behind him, and he felt his grip on the scythe loosen, heard it clang as it dropped.
"I tried to - the ones we saved were barely alive, Grell, and there were so many dead. You couldn't see for the dead. I could've stopped it."
"You're not everyone's hero," Grell mumbled, and it sounded less petulant and more practical, "just mine. William, you couldn't possibly have known what would happen. Nobody knew what would happen. We don't even know how they got in, let alone what purpose this served."
William made a low and unhappy sound, a tightly-clenched whimper, as Grell drew him to the living-room, and helped him down on an over-stuffed couch. Immediately, he sprang up to pace, knocking his knee against the coffee table, and spilling a row of books like dominoes.
Grell pushed him back down, and left to go to the kitchen.
It was the longest five minutes of his life, and the moment he heard Grell's heels on the steps, William stood up again and turned to face him and said: "I have to go and see them. In the hospital."
"In a while, I've not finished baking yet. Drink this. Irish coffee."
"Whiskey in it?" William was not a man who drank, but this needed something stronger than coffee.
"Straight from a Dublin brewery," Grell promised, and watched the division leader place the delicate china cup to his lips and throw back the steaming liquid like a common shot. "Good boy."
William set the cup back down, the wrong way up, on the accompanying saucer, and placed both on the table. His tongue was burned, and his throat smarted, and his hands couldn't stop moving - he couldn't figure out where to place them, or what to do with them, and his mind kept circling that one horrible possibility of Reapers still lying beneath the rocks and dust, waiting for help that never came.
"They could be hurt."
"Then we'll look for them," Grell hurried off, and fetched a lantern from the closet (with much cursing, which normally amused William, and today didn't do so much as get a flicker of a smile), "all night, if we have to. My scythe can cut through stones easier than yours can."
"I'll sign off on it, but be careful, don't cut anyone."
Grell stepped closer, and another whiff of perfume stung William's eyes, it was so strong - that was the only reason why his eyes watered the way they did.
"I know their names. Every one of them. I thought I didn't, but I do."
Then, he was hugging the smaller Reaper, and hiding his face in his shoulder like a child, and clinging to him and holding him, and seeking out the heat of his mouth, the softness of his fingertips, trying to drown in Grell's perfume, and maybe he was crying, he couldn't rightly say, but he felt safe here, right here, safe and strong and capable. Grell smelt of perfume, not of ash and dust, and he was living and alright, not in pain and gasping. There was comfort in that, and in Grell's embrace, and in Grell's kisses.