☆WRITTEN DURING FINAL YEAR OF UNI IN 2016☆

Here is a story about the reader and Grelle Sutcliffe, as promised to Now, prior to reading this work, I'd like to establish a few things to avoid possible confusion. The reader here, unlike any of my other reader stories is a male. Do with that as you will, but I believe that Grelle, at least romantically, has made it pretty clear she likes men. Additionally, I have chosen to refer to Grelle as 'she', principally because in multiple translations she refers to herself as such. You fellow weebs will know that Japanese gender terms and pronouns work differently than in English, but I felt it more appropriate to use female pronouns for Grelle, as they've been used in the anime before. I did not use 'they' because of this same argument, but I believe it is fitting as well at certain points. There are a few times I used 'he' here, in reference to Grelle as well, but I do hope that reading the whole story will clear up confusion on that end. I have researched various arguments concerning Grelle's gender and believe how I wrote them here, at least for this story, to be respectful. Also, Yana Toboso herself has alluded to Grelle's status personally, and expressly uses female pronouns.

Well, without further to do, here is the oneshot involving you, the reader (male) and Grelle Sutcliffe.

It doesn't have a title as the other ones do, but it's based loosely off the following song, a traditional Celtic ballad called "Red is the Rose."

🌹I hope you enjoy it!🌹
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Come over the hills my handsome Irish lad
Come over the hills to your darling
You choose the road love, and I'll make a vow
That I'll be your true love forever

Red is the rose by yonder garden grows
And fair is the lily of the valley
Clear is the water that flows from the Boyne
But my love is fairer than any

Down by Killarneys green woods we did stray
The moon and the stars they were shining
The moon shone it's rays on his locks of golden hair
And he swore he'd be my love forever

Red is the rose by yonder garden grows
And fair is the lily of the valley
Clear is the water that flows from the Boyne
But my love is fairer than any

It's not for the parting that my sister pains
It's not for the grief of my mother
It's all for the loss of my handsome Irish lad
Now my heart is broken forever

Red is the rose by yonder garden grows
And fair is the lily of the valley
Clear is the water that flows from the Boyne
But my love is fairer than any
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"But Willlllliammmmmmmmmmmmn"

"Absolutely not."

"I don't see any reason why I can't!"

"First of all, he hates you." You heard a melodramatic, yet pained shriek-like gasping sound. "Secondly, he's a demon. Which means we ALL should hate him back." You scowled and snorted quietly. "Thirdly, it's disgusting that you would even want to do that! We're serving sentences so we can access paradise one day, all due to some ridiculous notion by part of the divine that suicide is a mortal sin, and you want to throw out years of hard work for some brief licentiousness with a demon? If you even think about stepping out of line, so help me I'll-"

"Will, stop. Please." You broke in, running a hand through your short, blonde hair and pushing your charcoal black glasses up on the bridge of your nose. "Don't abuse the poor girl, she's been through enough."

Will sighed heavily, but you were sure he raised an eyebrow to you when you referred to the eccentric, fiery individual known as Grelle Sutcliffe as a 'girl'. You ignored it entirely.

You knew just what Grelle was going through yourself. Being a fellow reaper you knew all too well the horrors of your line of work, dealing death as it came, much less like the Angels of the books your conservative family forced you to read while you were a young man, all that time ago, when you were wild, free and happy. Now you lurked in the shadows, calling out to a deity who seemed rather non-existent, he only came to call on you when you slashed open your veins, blood was all you could recall of your death, other than why you did it, why you, a nobleman of the highest station, with more money than you could ever want would take his own life.

You were gay. You were in love with a man you knew loved you back, as the two of you lived in secret happiness, away in Ireland each winter, and stopping to see each other in private places the rest of the year. In the springtime you'd go to the east end of London, before the heat of summer made it impossible to do anything other than sit indoors by servants paid off to move large paper-made fans from the orient against your faces, as you sat discussing money, business and futures unknown. The fall was lovely and filled with hope as winter came, castles of ancestors made perfect hideaways for your rendezvous, until one night in November, when it all came crashing down around you, and your little glimpse of heaven was gone forever, extinguished like a candle in the wind.

It wasn't your father who found you, it was his. He hated you enough to kill you but he held back for fear of his own son's personal sake, his reputation. On that night he discovered your secret, he never spoke to you again, and it was in a matter of days you found him again, this time with no love in his eyes or passion in his lips or fire in his heart: they were all gone, with his breath, as he lie covered in white roses, stained crimson with blood from a fresh shotgun wound near his left temple. His family had the decency to have a proper funeral procession, but the sickness of it all was they wanted people to see what happened to their son once people knew of his sexual preferences. They wanted the world to know he was corrupted, not born that way, and they wanted it to know who they believed did it to him, turned him like that. They wanted you to suffer.

He was killed by someone you'd known, a neighbor of yours, who served the men in uniform that left that same weekend to sail into the sun and sky as they headed to India to head up developments there. He'd gotten away with it, and there you were, in London, as winter approached and you had no one to hold as you woke screaming in terror night after night, until you couldn't bear it anymore.

White roses decorated the cathedral as you stood in the back of the church, a ghostly visitor to your own black parade. Your mother was crying and your father was kneeling over you as he sobbed into your casket. A hand was placed on your shoulder as you turned around and saw a young man with red hair, red glasses and an outfit to match. He smiled at you with pointed teeth and spoke softly. "I'm Grelle. Grelle Sutcliffe. I'm a reaper. We're here to take you home with us."

You sighed and looked up at him, and you sensed a bit of similarity between him and your former love, and he took your hand as you shot one final glance back at the grisly scene below, the smell of bloody flowers prickling your nose against the cold wintry evening.

It'd been years since then, and you'd come to know Grelle differently. You'd thought him to be a man no less than William T. Spears, the undeservingly bossy leader of your group, which included another young man named Ronald Knox, more recently. However, you knew quite quickly that Grelle was unlike anyone, male or female you'd met prior to that. She was captivating, and preferred to act more like a woman than a man, and that suited you just fine. It wasn't common for your lot to have relationships, but you had harbored a quiet love for Grelle for all the years you'd known her.

And here you were, again, listening to Will criticize her for liking that same demon you'd run into, Sebastian Michaelis. You'd thought him handsome enough, but didn't much care for him. He wasn't your type.

"Will, cut it out, please. Grelle, why don't you just calm down for a minute, too." You and Ronald were standing beside each other, as Will and Grelle fussed with each other, William being overbearing and cruel and Grelle acting girlish and bubbly.

"Yeah," Ronald broke in. "We've got a job to do, so let's do it. We can deal with personal matters later."

You nodded and narrowed your eyes as William and Grelle agreed sheepishly. You then pulled out a ledger booklet from your overcoat and ran your fingers down the list of names of humans scheduled to die. It was a cruel sentence, being forced to experience death over and over again. You thought when alive that God had a sense of humor but you didn't know it could be so dark. Ironic as it was, you actually relished in your work a bit. You got to see men like those who killed him, the one you lived and breathed for, die like swine, or, occasionally, you got to dig your scythe into their very hearts, as to harvest their cinematic record, and watch every moment of their past life flash before their eyes, as well as yours. That was vengeance enough on some nights.

This night, however, wasn't like that. As you ran your finger down the page, you stopped at the name of the human scheduled to die. You swallowed hard, as you read the name out loud.

"Anna Maria Shallows. Age eight. Scheduled to be assaulted and killed by a group of thieves as her parents left her by the entrance to the shop-" you stopped, "that one, over there."

Everyone's expressions became grim and dark, including Grelle's who usually cared next to nothing about the people she had to bring an end to. "She's just a child." You heard William breathe. "Still," he straightened up. "Death waits for no man. We can't plead any case for her salvation, she's eight. We couldn't find anything that'd prove her worth to the world."

You had a few tears in your eyes but you knew he was right. The four of you stood idly for a moment and then descended silently on the scene, waiting for death to come to the innocent little girl that didn't see you.

It happened so fast to really observe properly, as her hand hit the floor, a hot red liquid trickled past your feet, four men running into the night with the contents of her shopping bag, too heavy to hold in her small, doll-like hands.

It was Grelle who scooped the girl's body up to harvest her record. It was unusual for her to be motherly, or even kind. You looked up at the yellow curve of the moon and wondered why God would let this happen, but you knew you'd never receive a satisfactory answer. Your faith had been shaken down to dust and ash.

A few hours later the four of you retired to headquarters and you were content to spend the rest of the evening alone, but something stopped you. As you were pacing up to where you spent the hours between reapings, a hand caught you on the shoulder. You instantly were reminded of the gesture, as it had happened all those years ago, on the day you died. It was such a pleasant sensation, and you resisted turning around, not wanting to lose the kindness in the touch.

"[Y/N]" a strong yet feminine voice filled your ears. "I wanted to talk to you." You turned slowly around and looked into the eyes of Grelle Sutcliffe clothed top to bottom in red. "Can I take you somewhere more private, perhaps?" She seemed to be smiling with a certain secret joy behind her serpentine teeth, and you nodded vigorously in assent.

She laughed lightly and pulled you along until you reached a high, flat, plateau like roof, encircled by a low fence hedged with lavender and dark green leaves. You looked around and back to Grelle, then up at the darkening sky, as the heavens before you looked to be glistening with thousands of tiny blinking stars, a silver comet cascading its light down on the two of you as it passed over the sleeping city of London, no light to be seen below, only that of the moon, somehow fuller and redder than earlier that evening.

"I've never seen this place before." You breathed. "It's beautiful." You were wearing a dark navy colored coat with brass buttons over a white shirt and blood-orange vest. Your blonde hair fell in ringlets over your face, and the smallest shadow of a beard indicated that you were a man when you died, but just barely. You remembered being complimented by him on a night like this one, him telling you you looked like the Angel Gabriel. He of course, was more beautiful. His hair was blonde as well, but it literally shined like the sun. Even when he was dead, he was like a little star, swallowed up by the darkness of the world. As you looked at Grelle, so different from him, from the only man you'd ever loved, you noticed a silence like any other in her. She wasn't hyped up like a jack rabbit or a locomotive, but was staring up at the stars, her red hair blowing slowly and softly in the wind. You stood beside her and looked for a few moments, too.

"You know, in all honesty, you're a lucky man." She mentioned flatly.

"What? How?" You raised an eyebrow and she turned to look at you, a faint smile creeping back up to her lips.

"You knew love. Truly. Somehow you managed that in this wicked world." She looked back up at the silver tail of the comet, and she sighed. "We may not think about it openly, but all of us reapers offed ourselves. That's why we're all here. We deny it but that's brought us together. Maybe the ultimate irony in it all is that suffering is the only way to live a life with meaning in it."

You laughed and tilted your head back so your curly hair bounced back off your face. "That's pretty masochistic, Grelle."

"I am a masochist, if you haven't picked up on that, darling." She laughed. "It's no fun to be all serious constantly. That's what I believed once, and I do now, too!" She clapped her hands and called out into the darkness. "I never want to leave here, you hear me?" You had no clue who she was screaming at, but you thought it rather cute. "I LOOOOOOOOVE being a master of" she held her hands together in a familiar motion. "Death!" She chuckled and turned to face you. "How about you, lovie? Isn't this a bit more fun than you'd thought?"

"I suppose it beats what my father told me would happen if I killed myself. Hellfire, being poked through the ass by Satan, being drowned in lakes of sulfur and steam." You winked. "You know, the usual riff raff about the other side of heaven."

She laughed loudly and for a while, but you somehow weren't uncomfortable. "What was that second thing you said, dearie?" She clutched her side, she was laughing so hard.

"Poked in the ass by Satan?" You laughed as well.

"That wouldn't be too horrible now would it?"

"It depends entirely on the context."

"Well," she began, "I can expect it'd be pretty sadistic either way."

"Oh, absolutely." You moved closer to Grelle, and before you knew what was happening, she'd wrapped her arms around you and you were kissing her. The sharpness of her teeth was a bit painful as she forcefully pressed her lips to yours, but after a few minutes you were into it, and you kissed her back with a fervor that matched hers. She broke the kiss momentarily to laugh and took her glasses off, as they snapped down around her neck and dangled lightly against her chest. You smiled as your eyes met hers, and within a few more minutes you were laughing and biting her back. The stars glistened off of the purple flowers surrounding you and the redness of her clothing complimented the moonlight's gleam off your blood-orange vest, as the coat you were wearing was now off to the side of your shoulder, clinging wildly to its clasp as the wind rustled through your golden hair.

The lilies that lined the windows around the common room of headquarters blew softly in the evening breeze as William and Ronald shuffled through papers. The two of them seemed annoyed with the heavy work load, but were determined to get through it.

An attractive female member of the team was busy adjusting a bouquet of red roses outside your office, happily hoping you'd return soon to speak with her, never realizing, as everyone else did, that you'd never be interested in her like that.

Down below in the streets the nearby river moved slowly and strongly in towards the shipyards, out to the channel and to the depths of the seas, and you took one final breath before kissing Grelle again, under the light of a thousand stars and the amber glow of the midnight moon. You wanted to speak to her, to know more about her, how she died, how she lived, you wanted to possess her, to protect her, this crazy, wild heart so like your own.

You saw a bit of him reflected in Grelle Sutcliffe, a bit of your youth lost forever to an angry God you once thought cruel.

Yet now, as you stood here, looking into the sky, you thought perhaps the world might have been cruel, but it was also very beautiful.

You didn't have the answers for why you were there, but you did know one thing: love wasn't something you could choose, any more than your sexuality, or Grelle's true feelings as a woman. It was something you had to accept for yourself. Regardless of what the world said, what religious principles governed it at various times in history, love was not a choice, but a gift, and you only had to accept it to learn why life, even in death, is worth living, and there is some good worth fighting for in such a beautifully wicked world.
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Well, that's it then, for now. This one was a bit shorter than my other one shots. I totally got the last two quotes from Attack on Titan and Lord of the Rings, and if you understood those references, I love you.
Well, until next time, everyone. I'll get started on the Sebastian Michaelis x Reader story ASAP. Be on the lookout for it, and feel free to send me some more of what you'd like to see next.

Again, with love,

- Britta 🌹❤️