Can you do Bunnymund x gn! reader who's the Grim Reaper and they're actually very compassionate and carefree?
Bunny x Grim Reaper GN!Reader | Headcanons
Bunny did not trust you at first. The Grim Reaper? In his Warren? That’s practically the opposite of spring and life. He kept his boomerangs close, ears twitching whenever you moved.
Then he realized…you weren’t brooding or menacing at all. You cracked jokes, skipped around the Warren like you had all the time in the world (which you kind of do), and you treated death as more of a natural cycle than something scary.
The first time you reassured a frightened spirit, Bunny’s chest ached in a way he couldn’t explain. He had to admit you weren’t just the “death bloke” — you were kindness personified.
Bunny calls you “Bones” as a teasing nickname, but it’s affectionate. You counter by calling him “Fluffball”.
You two balance each other perfectly: Bunny represents new life and rebirth, while you embody the natural end of things. Together, you represent the full circle.
He loves that you never take yourself too seriously. You’ll float through the Warren humming and sitting cross-legged on piles of eggs. He says you’re chaos in a cloak, but he secretly loves it.
When he gets grumpy or overprotective, you’ll just smile and remind him: “Relax, Fluffball, not even the Grim Reaper can take your job.” That always gets a twitch of his whiskers.
Bunny is very physical with his affection — ear flicks, little nudges, and pulling you into his side when he’s worried. You find it adorable since he tries to act all tough while doing it.
You comfort him after nightmares of Pitch or when he feels guilty about past failures. You’ll wrap your cloak around him like a blanket, whispering that life and death are part of the same balance, and he has done more good than he’ll ever know.
When you’re the one weighed down by the sadness of passing souls, Bunny will silently hold your hand. He doesn’t always have the words, but he’ll dig you up a flower or paint you an egg just to remind you that beauty exists alongside endings.
He’s constantly baffled by how carefree you are. You’ll dance barefoot in moonlight with a scythe in hand, and Bunny just shakes his head, muttering: “Only you could make death look like a bloody festival.”
Sometimes, you bring him little gifts from the spirit world — not spooky ones, but meaningful tokens like pressed flowers from the afterlife or glowing pebbles that belonged to loved ones.
You two make a weird but perfect pair during Guardian missions: Bunny bounding into battle with his boomerangs, and you following with serene calm, gently guiding frightened spirits to safety.
Bunny didn’t expect to fall for you, but your warmth made it inevitable. Death didn’t feel frightening with you — it felt like peace.
Your kisses are always slow and grounding, like a reminder that even eternity can pause for love.
He’s endlessly fascinated by the way you talk about the balance of life and death. He’ll sit listening with his ears forward, trying not to show how much your voice soothes him.
You once painted his boomerangs with a faint ethereal glow, a symbol of protection from your realm. He still uses them proudly.
✦ synopsis : it begins with a death that doesn’t happen. a choice that shouldn’t have been made. and a bond that should’ve broken centuries ago. but it didn’t. and now, something ancient lingers. they move through time like shadows—half tethered, half free—searching for something neither of them can name.
a/n : this is a long one ! i feel like i should have mentioned this the previous parts, but this is canon-divergent (if it wasn’t obvious already 😭) ! this is my wholehearted belief of how remmick would behave if he had a companion throughout the many centuries 🧘🏾♀️
warnings (for entire fic) : major character death, minor character death, canon-typical violence, vampirism, blood and gore, supernatural elements, reincarnation, slow burn, emotional hurt/comfort, emotional manipulation, use of gaeilge, mentions of irish potato famine, unreliable narration (due to sickness/disorientation), power imbalance, spiritual decay, sickness and recovery, period-typical societal struggles, mentions of religious themes/the afterlife, depictions of death/dying process, grief/prolonged mourning, depersonalization/detachment, memory loss, implied mass death, unusual afterlife mechanics, time skips, historical references, soulmate themes, bittersweet ending, heavy emotional themes
divider credits : @uzmacchiato
The years unfurl softly. Not like before.
Not in grief, or fury—quiet.
The kind that gathers like mist between trees. The kind that settles into your bones without asking permission.
Fires never burn too high anymore. The nights are gentler. Steps fall in rhythm across unmarked roads, your paths less erratic now, more sure-footed—even when the destination is still nowhere.
You travel east. Beyond the ports lined with salt-rusted iron. Beyond the towns where the dialect shifts mid-syllable and names don’t settle on your tongue. Villages small enough to vanish in fog. Forests thick with moss and memory, the kind that don’t appear on maps and never will.
There is no goal. There never is. But you’ve both stopped pretending there needs to be one.
Remmick walks like a man who’s no longer being chased—not by time, not by guilt. There’s a stillness in him now, a groundedness in the way his boots press into earth that wasn’t there before.
And you—you’ve stopped glancing back so often.
In the late spring of 1895, you pass through a town carved into the slope of a green hill. It smells of wet stone and flowering trees. Remmick hums as you walk along its narrow roads.
You recognize the tune. An old Irish lullaby.
One he hasn’t touched in decades.
You don’t say anything. But something in your chest shifts, just slightly, like a door creaking on its hinges.
The tune stays with you long after the last note fades.
That night, you find him sitting in the grass at the edge of a small glade, head tipped toward the stars.
He doesn’t speak.
You don’t ask. Instead—you sit beside him.
That’s enough.
But things begin to change.
Not with fanfare. Not with signs from the sky.
Just… slowly.
It begins with your hands. A faint tremor, no more than a shiver beneath your skin. So subtle you almost miss it. Then it becomes the way your breath catches when the veil stirs too near, like your lungs can’t bear its nearness anymore.
By dusk, your bones ache—not from cold or travel, but as if the very end of the day bruises you.
You ignore it at first.
You’re not supposed to feel like this.
Not supposed to change.
You are not of this world’s flesh. Not anymore. You were made of something older, something steadier.
But the signs continue.
And then, the dreams begin.
Not visions. Not callings. Not the veil.
Just… fragments.
Colors that don’t exist in this world. Rooms that vanish the moment you wake. Hands you don’t recognize brushing your cheek. A voice calling your name—not Remmick’s. Not the realm’s.
Something else.
You stop telling him when they happen.
The first few times, you whispered them at dusk. Fingers brushing his coat sleeve, voice low, heart unsteady. He listened. Always listened. But you could see the way it troubled him—something in his brow, the tight pull at the corner of his mouth.
So you stopped.
Because you don’t want him to know.
Because you don’t want to explain that for the first time in centuries, the end doesn’t feel like a door you’ll walk through.
It feels like something rotting inside you.
You’ve lived inside the waiting for so long—worn it like a second skin. You’ve feared the absence of purpose, the hollow of being left behind. But now… now you fear the thing beneath your ribs that’s beginning to slip.
The part of you that’s beginning to fray.
And worst of all:
you’re not sure if the veil will take you when it happens.
Or if it’ll leave you here.
Unraveling.
Piece by piece.
Beside the one man who was never meant to be your ending.
And yet, somehow—always was.
Still, the days continue. The two of you pass through forgotten woodlands where the trees lean like old men and the roads are little more than crumbling ribbons of stone. You follow no map. Only instinct. Only each other. Remmick has grown quieter again—not withdrawn, just quieter. Thoughtful. His questions come softer now, spaced wide like breath between heartbeats. And more and more, you catch him staring—not at you, but just beside you. As if there’s something standing there. Something only he can sense. Or something he hopes he can’t.
He doesn’t ask how you are. Not because he’s indifferent. Because he already knows. He always has.
You’re both changing. But not in the same direction.
By 1897, your steps begin to falter. It’s subtle at first—just a drag in your gait when the terrain slopes, or the way you lean a little more heavily into your turns. He sees it. Of course he sees it. And without a word, he slows to match your pace. Adjusts his stride to yours as if it’s instinctual.
One night, when your hands won’t stop trembling long enough to light the fire, he does it for you. No commentary. No concern etched too loudly across his face. He just kneels, arranges the kindling with a quiet reverence, and strikes the flame to life. You sit, unmoving, watching as the fire blossoms—orange and low, licking up from the wood like a lullaby.
When the warmth brushes your face, something inside you slips loose. Not enough to break. Just enough to give. You don’t cry. You haven’t done that in decades. But you do close your eyes. And for the first time in centuries, you let him look at you—not from the corners of his gaze, not under the veil of guilt or remorse, but fully. Gently.
You let him watch over you. You don’t acknowledge it. You pretend not to notice. You’ve become good at that. But he knows. Just as he always has.
By the time winter sinks its first frost into the hills of western Gaul in 1899, he can’t hold it in anymore. The air is glassy that night, the wind scraping along the stone outcropping where you’ve made camp. The fire is little more than an ember glow, and your breath comes shallower now—less from cold, more from whatever is blooming inside you, slowly warping the shape of your stillness.
He watches you across the firelight. His hands are clasped in his lap, unmoving. His shoulders tense, like he’s bracing for something he can’t name.
“You’re not… as you were,” he says at last, voice barely more than a whisper. Not an accusation. Not even a question. Just the truth laid bare in the stillness between you.
You look up. Slowly. Your gaze meets his, but you don’t speak. You wait.
He studies you. Eyes soft, mouth drawn tight—not unreadable, but struggling to say the right thing without unraveling.
“I thought it was time, at first,” he says, as if to himself. “I thought maybe… the tether was weakening. That the realm was calling you back. But it’s not, is it?”
You open your mouth. Then close it again.
He waits.
“I don’t know what it is,” you say, finally. The words feel strange on your tongue. Too soft to be shaped by certainty. “It’s not constant. It comes and goes. But it always returns.”
Your gaze drops to the fire. The flickering light paints your features in long shadows, like memories drawn across skin.
“It feels like something new. Like a thread tugging loose in a place no one sees. Something unraveling that shouldn’t be touched.”
You flex your fingers in your lap—once, twice—then still them.
“I used to believe that nothing could change me. Not time. Not pain. Not even you.”
That lands harder than you mean it to. You see it in the slight falter of his expression, the way his gaze lowers to his hands.
You go on, quiet but unflinching.
“But now—” you swallow, voice drying in your throat, “—now it’s like something is growing inside me. Not like life. Not like death. Just… wrong.”
The fire gives a sharp pop. Sparks scatter upward, swallowed into the dark.
“I’m not supposed to feel this way.”
He lifts his head. His eyes find yours across the flame, not demanding, just listening.
“Does it hurt?” he asks, low.
You meet his gaze, steady. Not afraid. Just… honest.
“Not always.”
A pause stretches. The night presses close, and still you do not look away. The embers between you glow hot and low, and the weight of your truth lingers in the smoke.
“But when it does,” you say, your voice thin, trembling slightly at the edges, “it’s like I don’t know where I am. Like I’ve slipped out of time. Out of place. Like I’m—” your words falter, your gaze tightening as if bracing against something just beyond the firelight, “—breaking. Slowly. From the inside.”
He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t move.
But something shifts in him. Not dramatically. Not visibly. Just a tightening beneath the surface. The kind that changes the air between you.
He leans forward, elbows resting on his knees, and the flames draw golden veins through the low red shimmer in his eyes. They don’t shine like they used to. Not with hunger. Not with violence. Just… with something worn. Something worried.
“I thought you were unchangeable,” he murmurs. “Like stone. Like the veil itself.”
You huff a sound—too sharp to be a laugh, too soft to be a sob. “So did I.”
Then nothing more is said.
And two years pass.
Not in strides. Not in moments worth measuring. But in that slow, slippery way water pours through cupped hands. Always moving. Always gone before you know how much you’ve lost.
The turn of the century arrives, but you don’t feel it. There are no clocks out here. No bells, no calendars nailed to doors, no newspaper boys crying out in the street. The world beyond swells with industry, with wires and steel, with lights that hum into the dawn. You feel it—at a distance. Like a storm just offshore. But it never quite touches you. Not fully. You and Remmick continue to drift just outside the thrum of the living, half-buried in places time forgot.
And within you, the sickness spreads.
It doesn’t consume you all at once. It lingers, like rot behind a painted wall—patient, methodical, cruel. At first, it was waves. You remember that. A sudden tremor in your spine, a pulse behind your ribs, a coldness so deep it felt like the marrow of your bones had turned to ash. Sometimes you’d wake in the in-between—neither dream nor waking—gasping, your hands clutching at a body you barely recognized as yours.
But now, it’s worse.
Now it circles you.
Stays close.
Some days, it recedes entirely. It gives you mercy, thin and temporary. You move easily. You laugh, once or twice, without wincing. You walk beneath trees and forget, for a few blessed hours, what it feels like to fall apart. You almost believe it’s over. That the thread has rewoven itself. That you’ll be whole again.
But then it returns.
Always.
When it comes back, it comes sharper. Hungrier. It carves behind your knees, sets your hips to aching. It presses against your ribs until you can’t breathe right. The veil—once a gentle hum at the back of your senses—now recoils from you when you near its edges. Old thresholds, once so easy to cross, now make your knees buckle. The spirits—flickers of them, phantoms of wind and memory—blur your vision when they pass too close.
You cough more often now.
Ragged. Dry.
It sounds like something old and breaking loose from the center of you. You don’t tell him that sometimes, when you wipe your mouth after, there’s blood on your palm. Not much. Not every time. But enough. Enough to know.
Something unnatural has taken root in you.
And Remmick? He knows.
Of course he does.
He doesn’t speak of it every day. Doesn’t make a habit of voicing things neither of you knows how to fix. But he’s there. Always.
When it gets bad—when your knees give out behind a tree, when the ground lurches and you collapse into the snow or the soil or the stone—he doesn’t rush. Doesn’t panic. He simply comes. Quiet as dusk. Steady as grief. He kneels beside you, not to catch you, but to bear witness.
To stay.
When your vision finally returns, when your fingers stop twitching and your skin feels like it belongs to you again, he doesn’t ask if you’re all right.
Because you’re not. And neither of you needs to pretend otherwise.
In 1903, you settle—briefly—in a lakeside village near the northern edge of Italy, where the hills fold gently around the water and the air carries the scent of dry stone and woodsmoke. The village is quiet, untouched by the speed of the century unfolding just beyond the horizon. The people are kind, but distant in a way that comforts you. They nod when you pass. Offer bread without asking questions. They know how to mind their own ghosts.
You take a room above a weaver’s shop, where the windows face east and catch the light off the lake each morning. The woman who owns it doesn’t speak much. Neither do you. But she always smiles when you pass her in the stairwell, like she knows something about sorrow and stillness too.
You stay for three weeks.
Longer than anywhere you’ve lingered in decades.
And the quiet begins to work its way into your bones. You stop dreaming. Not because the sickness has faded, but because the stillness has pressed the visions down—tucked them into corners you can’t reach anymore. You don’t know if that’s a mercy or another sign of unraveling. But it brings you sleep. And for now, that’s enough.
Remmick, on the other hand, begins to shift. Not wildly. Not in anger. But in subtle ways that you can’t unsee once you notice. He rises earlier than usual. Paces more. Stares out at the lake like it’s keeping secrets from him. And when you’re near—especially in the hours when your limbs ache and your breath comes shallow—he watches you with a tension that doesn’t belong to a man ready to let go.
It isn’t pity.
It isn’t even dread.
It’s mourning.
Like somehow, without either of you saying it aloud, he’s already begun to grieve you.
Like he’s bracing for a kind of loss neither of you were supposed to endure.
Because perhaps… perhaps it’s not him who will leave after all.
By the spring of 1905, the cracks begin to widen. You start forgetting names—not his, never his—but others. Towns. Spirits. The weight and shape of certain faces you once carried across the veil without effort. You forget where some of the gates used to open. You forget the last soul you guided.
You still feel the tether. Still feel him.
But you wonder—quietly, urgently—what happens to a soul that was never meant to stay. What happens if the reaper dies before the cursed man does?
You haven’t asked him.
You don’t want to hear the answer.
Because somewhere deep down, you know it’s not just you losing ground anymore. It’s the tether itself. Fraying. Unmoored. And if it snaps before either of you is ready, you don’t know what part of you will survive it.
The sickness isn’t fading.
It’s building.
It’s slow, but not still. Not anymore.
And with each passing year, the silence between you shifts. It changes shape. It grows thicker, heavier, the way air does before a storm.
Not just the quiet of understanding.
But the quiet of an ending.
A countdown neither of you can stop.
The wind has changed.
You feel it deep—threaded through the brittle hush of the trees beyond the ridge, in the ache behind your ribs where the sickness sometimes stirs. It’s early October, and the hills of southeastern France are washed in a weary sort of gold. The vineyards below are bare now, their fruit harvested and their branches left skeletal against the twilight. A few lonely trails of smoke rise from the chimneys of distant houses, the kind built for people who never walk as far or as long as you have. The sky, too, seems tired—draped in lavender and gray, the sun sinking in slow bruises across the horizon.
You’ve stopped for the evening.
The two of you are perched on the broken terrace of an abandoned monastery, its stones slouched under ivy and age. The ground beneath your cloaks is still warm from the day’s sun, though the chill has already begun to settle into the air. The fire you’d built hours ago is little more than glowing cinders now, and neither of you has spoken in some time. But the silence isn’t sharp—it isn’t like it used to be. It rests, low and familiar, like moss growing in the spaces between things. You sit with your legs tucked beneath you, your back pressed against a worn stone wall. Remmick’s a step below, knees pulled up, arms slack, head tilted toward the shifting sky.
He looks older tonight.
Not in the way a human would—there are no wrinkles, no fading of color—but in the shape of his stillness. In the quiet, slow drag of his breath. In the long, searching glances he casts at nothing in particular. You’ve watched that change settle in over time, like dust gathering across a forgotten altar. It doesn’t unsettle you anymore. But tonight… something pulls at the edges of your attention. A thread in the air. A question not yet asked.
You shift. A flicker of pain climbs through your ribs, sharp enough to steal the air from your lungs for a moment. You try to muffle the sound, but it escapes anyway—a thin, involuntary breath through your teeth. Remmick turns, gaze sharp and immediate. He doesn’t speak. Just watches. But the weight in his stare lands heavy.
You press your palm against the stone and lift your chin with effort. “I’m fine.”
He doesn’t argue. Doesn’t nod. Just keeps looking. Still and quiet and unbearably present.
Then, after a stretch of wind and dusk: “You never used to feel the cold.”
You blink. And it’s only then—only when he says it—that you realize your hands are shaking again. Your breath is visible in the air between you, pale and shivering like it’s been waiting to be noticed. You hadn’t felt it. Not until he gave it shape.
You draw your cloak tighter, the motion slow, embarrassed, and avert your gaze. The silence returns—thicker now. Not heavy with distance, but full with the weight of what isn’t being said.
Then, softly: “I used to think you’d outlast the world.”
You turn toward him. He’s not looking at you. His eyes are still trained on the edge of the sky where the light fades slowest. But his voice—there’s no armor in it tonight. Just the raw, threadbare truth of someone who has stopped pretending to be unbreakable.
“That even if I was dust and memory, you’d still be walking somewhere. Quiet. Unchanging.”
The words settle. Deep. Deeper than they should.
He draws a slow breath. His hands curl slightly over his knees. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” he says. “If you go before me.”
There’s no fury in it. No blame. Just quiet devastation, delivered like a confession he’s held in his mouth for years.
You feel it echo through your chest—soft, sharp, and unrelenting.
You exhale slowly, the breath dragging from your lungs like a thread pulled loose from something fraying. “I’m not going anywhere,” you say—not with conviction, not with hope, but with the kind of quiet that used to sound like truth. Now, it’s only an echo. Familiar. Hollow.
Remmick shifts at the sound of it, his gaze lifting to meet yours. His eyes are darker in this light, but not because of the fire. It’s something deeper. Rawer. Like the centuries have finally worn through the shell he’s always held around himself, and what’s left is something naked and thin—a grief that never stopped forming words.
“I don’t want to be alone again.”
There’s no drama in the way he says it. No desperation. Just an ache that folds in on itself like tired wings. You don’t respond right away. You can’t.
Because part of you still sees the man who crawled toward you all those lifetimes ago, flesh torn, voice thick with blood, speaking a dialect long since lost to memory. You remember the way he looked at you then—like you were salvation. Or damnation. Or both.
And part of you sees the man now, curled in the fading light, the same bones, the same face, but gentled by wear and wounded by time. There is no begging in him now. Just the fear of what silence might be if you are no longer in it.
You move before you think—slowly, carefully, like your body isn’t sure what to do with the impulse. You slide down the broken terrace tier until your knees brush his. He stills. Not in alarm. But in surprise. You rarely touch first. Even rarer is the moment you allow yourself to need him in return.
Your fingers brush against his—barely there, more breath than contact—and for a moment, he doesn’t move. Then he closes his eyes, lashes low over firelit skin, and leans ever so slightly into the touch. Like it’s something precious. Like it might vanish.
“I remember everything about you,” you murmur, voice low, careful. “Not because I chose to. But because I can’t help it.”
Your eyes stay on him, studying the slope of his brow, the twitch in his jaw, the way his mouth parts as if to speak and then stills.
“And I think that’s the only thing I’ve never resented.”
He lets out a sound—quiet, broken at the edges. Almost a laugh, but not quite. It’s tired. Disbelieving. Wounded in a way that doesn’t bleed but bruises from within.
You sit there, the two of you, knee to knee beneath a sky beginning to bloom with stars. There’s no name for what you are to each other. Not lovers. Not strangers. Something older. Something heavier. Bound not by blood or vow but by time itself—by the way you’ve endured, together, through every end.
You don’t speak again. You don’t have to.
The cold begins to retreat—not entirely, but enough. The ache inside your chest loosens, just enough to let you breathe without it hurting. Just enough to feel something like yourself again.
Even if only for a moment.
It starts with blood. As it always does.
The winter wind moves low through the valleys of Lombardy, dragging fog in its wake like a veil pulled across the eyes of the land. The air is sharp—wet with the bite of snowmelt and the smoke of burned pine. You move west, quiet as the clouds above, following roads slick with frost and passing through villages that close their shutters before you even arrive. Lamps dim. Doors lock. Children are pulled inside by the wrist.
Remmick grows hungry.
He tries to hide it, the way he always has. But centuries have taught you to recognize the signs long before they surface fully: the way his gait tightens, deliberate and strained. The crease forming between his brows even when he’s at rest. The brief, involuntary pinch of his nose, like he’s fighting a scent that turns his stomach. His shoulders stay high, coiled, like an animal waiting for permission to lunge.
So when he drifts down a narrow alley behind a roadside tavern one night, you don’t follow.
You wait at the edge of the square, arms folded beneath your cloak, the mark on your palm pulsing faintly in warning. The scent of the street is sour—old beer soaking into warped wood, meat fat gone cold, leather left too long in the damp. Somewhere beyond the fog, a fiddle stumbles through a waltz, the notes warped by drunken hands.
Then the sound comes—muffled. A gasp. The sharp crack of bone or skull. A body thudding into stone. Then quiet.
You stay where you are. You do not reach for him. Not yet.
When he returns a minute later, you know something is wrong before he speaks. He moves strangely—off-balance, like his limbs aren’t syncing right with his breath. One hand is cupped protectively behind his head, fingers pressed as if trying to hold something in. His skin is waxen, too pale even for him. But it’s his eyes that stop you: they glow too red, too fast. Like a fire flaring beneath thin glass. Controlled, but barely.
You take one step forward, frowning. “What happened?”
He doesn’t meet your gaze at first. His jaw tightens. “I didn’t finish.”
You blink. His words are quiet. Measured. Almost confused.
“His blood tasted wrong,” he adds after a beat. “Too much alcohol. Or something.”
You search his face. He never leaves them alive.
“Was it deliberate?” you ask.
He shakes his head, visibly rattled. “No. I meant to finish it. I always do.”
There’s a pause between you. The fog curls around your boots. The music inside the tavern falters, then swells again.
“Something felt… strange.”
His voice drops lower, like the words themselves unnerve him. He closes his eyes, presses his palm hard into the side of his skull. “I saw something,” he says, hoarse now.
You step toward him, slow and careful, the way you might approach a dream that’s threatening to collapse if you look too closely. “What do you mean?”
He drags in a breath, jaw working. “A room I’ve never seen. A woman singing in a language I didn’t understand. A stone fence, covered in moss. And a name—Gerthas.” His eyes flick open again, glassy. Unfocused. “And then nothing. Just… silence.”
You go still. Still enough to feel the wind thread through the folds of your coat, still enough to sense the shift in the air. Behind you, the tavern door creaks open. You turn—just slightly—enough to catch movement in your periphery.
The man Remmick fed on stands in the threshold.
Or—what’s left of him.
His skin is a ghostly pallor, nearly translucent under the faint yellow light that spills from inside. His hands tremble at his sides, fingers twitching like spider legs, tendons pulled too tight. His lips are dark, cracked and smeared with blood—his own, still fresh. But it’s his eyes that stop you.
They burn. Not the way Remmick’s do, but close. Too close.
You start forward instinctively, a whisper of command building behind your teeth—but a hand clamps around your arm.
“No,” Remmick says. His voice is low, rasping.
You glance at him.
His pupils are blown wide, nearly eclipsing the red. His grip tightens on your sleeve as though anchoring himself. He’s breathing, short and shallow, even though you both know he doesn’t need to.
“I can feel him,” he murmurs, not looking at you.
Your gaze shifts back to the man in the doorway. He’s moving strangely now—jerky, like he doesn’t fully understand how his body fits together anymore. His spine twitches, head tilting, limbs drawn too long for how he once held himself. Something inside him is unraveling, and another thing—older, sharper—is beginning to take its place.
You understand before the words reach your mouth. “What did you do?”
Remmick doesn’t respond.
He’s staring through the man like the world behind him has split open. His lips part. The red in his eyes dims briefly, like a flame guttering low.
And then the man stumbles forward and collapses to his knees. A sharp, wet groan claws its way from his chest—too deep, too layered, too guttural to belong solely to human pain. He convulses. His back arches violently. His mouth drops open. And what comes out isn’t a scream.
It’s sound, yes. But not a mortal one.
It’s the shriek of something ancient dragging itself through the threshold of a living body.
You freeze.
Because you’ve heard that sound before.
Centuries ago. When something else was born into the world..
Remmick gasps beside you.
And without turning his head, without loosening his grip on your arm, he breathes, “I think I see his memories.”
Your breath stutters.
He clutches the back of his skull like something’s splitting through from the inside. “His mother—her hands. The porch. A man shouting. The dark. He’s terrified—he was terrified before I ever touched him—”
“Stop,” you say, sharper now.
But he can’t. He’s not with you fully anymore. He’s somewhere else—trapped in the flood of a consciousness not his own.
The man—no, the turned—is now on all fours, trembling, gasping, mouth slack and moaning low, like an animal trying to remember how to be human. His fingers are curled against the stone, legs spasming. Something inside his chest shifts audibly—bone or voice or will—you can’t be sure.
And then… silence.
Not peace. Not pause.
The kind of silence that waits for movement.
And it comes.
You don’t wait for Remmick to recover. You move—past the turned man’s writhing body, past the sounds of bone still warping beneath skin, past Remmick’s bowed frame and trembling hands. The fire in your chest pulses. You press your fingers to your palm, to the old scar, the mark that has never failed you.
And there it is.
A tether. Fresh. Newly stitched into the soul of something that should not be.
Your eyes close, jaw tightens. A reaper should’ve been summoned already. The moment the soul was claimed. The moment undeath took hold.
But no one came. Only you.
Which means this isn’t just a turning. This is a transgression. A wound in the world. And you’re the only one who’s seen it.
If you don’t act, someone will.
Someone who doesn’t know Remmick. Someone who won’t care if this was a mistake.
You look down at your hands. No sickle. No blade. No ceremonial iron. You didn’t come for this. But the land doesn’t wait for intention. It waits for instinct. And the world—always listening—offers what it must.
Your eyes scan the ground. Beneath the low-hanging limbs of a yew, a thick branch lies half-buried in frost. It’s old—its bark split, one end jagged, the other tapering enough to drive through flesh with the right force.
You grab it without hesitation. The excess wood snaps beneath your grip with a loud crack. You brace the narrower end against stone and grind it down, your fingers aching with cold, your breath slow and fogged. You shape it into a crude point—not elegant, not smooth, but lethal.
It’s not a weapon meant to last. It’s meant to end.
You rise, stepping toward the man.
He’s half-upright now, swaying on his knees, his breath ragged. His body still twitches with echoes of the change. His eyes are wide, blood-tinged, unseeing. His lips move, mouthing something that doesn’t form sound. Whatever soul he had is caught, suspended between what he was and what he’ll never get the chance to be.
He is terrified.
You don’t flinch.
You raise your arm.
But then—
“Wait.”
The word stops you.
Spoken low. Not a shout. Not a demand.
Remmick.
He’s close now. You feel him behind you—his presence heavy, like a shadow waiting to make its shape known.
You don’t turn.
Your voice is quiet, steady. “Step aside.”
He doesn’t.
The wind presses through the trees.
“What if he didn’t have to go?” he asks.
You turn, slowly.
The fire in your chest ready to burn through him—until you see his face.
And it isn’t desire you find there.
Not hunger.
Not even guilt.
It’s hope.
Frightening, naive hope.
“Don’t be a fool,” you breathe.
“I’m not.” His eyes hold yours, steady. “Not anymore. I’ve had years—centuries—to think about what I was. What I became. And you—” his voice trembles just slightly—“you’ve stayed. For centuries. Even when you hated me. Even when you wished I would die.”
The man behind you groans again, limbs shuddering as something dark finishes knitting itself through him.
Remmick lowers his voice.
“What if it didn’t have to end with me?” he whispers. “What if it could be more? Another. With us. Someone who knows what it means to be this way. I saw inside him. I felt—”
You strike him in the chest with your open palm.
Hard.
It forces him back a step. He doesn’t fight it.
You drop to your knees beside the turned man.
His eyes flicker to you—wet, red-rimmed, pleading. There’s barely anything left in him, but his spirit still lingers. Caught in the transformation.
Caught in limbo.
You press the stake to his chest, fingers wrapped tight around the splintered wood.
Behind you, Remmick’s voice cracks.
“No.”
Your reply is cold.
“Yes.”
His body seizes—every limb drawn tight like a bowstring. His mouth falls open, but no scream escapes.
And just as fast—he falls still.
The light in his eyes dies. And a breath you cannot see—cannot name—lifts from his lips like smoke on winter air. And you feel it. The spirit detach. Loosen from the mark. The tether inside him breaks.
You let it pass. There is no reaper here to take him—not yet.
When it’s over, you sit back on your heels, stake still in hand.
Your fingers tremble. You don’t stop them.
Remmick stands several feet away now, stunned. The fire in his eyes is dimmed—confusion writ deep across his face. Not confusion at what happened.
But at himself.
You don’t look at him as you speak.
“You were willing to bind him to this?”
Silence. Heavy. Immediate.
He doesn’t answer. So you do.
“You would’ve done to him what you did to me?”
Remmick’s mouth opens. No sound comes.
Because there’s nothing to defend.
The truth stands now, clear and cold between you.
He was ready to pass the curse on.
The weeks that follow drag like uneven breath—neither calm nor strained. Just… off. Like a song played out of key. The rhythm of your shared steps begins to falter, though you pretend not to notice at first. Pretend it’s the wind, or the road, or your own body slowly coming apart.
But it’s him.
You sense it in the quiet. In the places where he used to walk beside you, and now lingers half a step behind—or ahead. In the long shadows he casts when he disappears into the trees at dusk and doesn’t return until the stars have scattered.
He doesn’t speak of these absences. Not directly. And when you ask, his answers come thin and careful—words stretched too tight around something unsaid.
You tell yourself it’s nothing. Or if not nothing, then temporary. Residual.
The aftermath of that night still lives between you—coiled and silent. The echo of a breath you didn’t take, of a choice you didn’t let him make.
He’ll move past it, you think.
He always has.
But he doesn’t.
As the thaw of early spring sets in, he grows more elusive. His returns become unpredictable. His scent changes—earth, fire, the metallic tang of blood not fresh but days old. His coat hangs heavier when he walks through the door, soaked from rain you didn’t see fall, flecked with salt and soot. Sometimes his boots leave a trail of crushed herbs or barn straw or river moss. Once, you spot a thorn embedded in his cuff, sharp and gleaming like it came from somewhere wild.
He never tells you where he’s been.
You watch him from your corner—silent as he unfastens his collar, shakes out his hair, scrapes dried blood from beneath his nails. His face blank, empty. Not tired. Just… emptied.
One night, you ask without turning your head, “Was it animals?”
No answer.
You don’t ask again.
Summer presses in heavy and breathless. The roads dry out, the grass yellows. The rivers shrink. You begin to slow—not just from your own changing body, but from the weight of everything unspoken between you.
He doesn’t seem to notice. Or maybe he does. But he says nothing.
He rests longer now, but never near you. You find him curled in old cellars, in long-forgotten crypts, lying still beneath the broken ribs of roofs that haven’t sheltered anyone in years. He doesn’t pretend to sleep. But he closes his eyes and doesn’t move, like someone practicing the art of being dead.
You stop waking him. You stop following.
Instead, you walk through morning markets alone—passing woven baskets, drying meats, stalls of linen and dye. The villagers eye you cautiously, but politely. You trade coin for food, soap, cloth. You fold it all into your satchel, then wait beneath trees for longer than you used to.
He always finds you again.
But later.
Later and later, each time.
And when he does, his words are brief. His gaze softer—but distant, like he’s remembering a version of you that no longer fits the shape you’ve become.
You still sleep near one another, most nights.
But the firelight rarely touches both your faces at once.
But one night, deep into August, you find him again.
He stumbles through the door long after midnight, slumped at one shoulder, his shirt soaked dark with blood, his lip split and weeping red. The light you left burning has gone cold, but you’re already moving, crossing the room before he fully registers. Your hands rise instinctively, reaching for his ribs, his jaw, his face—anywhere to check, to ground, to understand.
But he flinches at your touch.
“Don’t,” he breathes, cracked and low.
Your fingers still in the air. He doesn’t meet your eyes—just passes, brushing by with the cold weight of someone half-drowned in something he won’t explain. He retreats into the far corner of the room, shadows swallowing the shine of blood on his hands. You remain where you are, one arm still lifted like the gesture might mean something if it lingers long enough.
You sit by the window for hours afterward, unmoving. The moon hangs pale above the ridgeline. The wind doesn't stir the trees. You don’t sleep. Not out of fear. But because a colder truth begins to settle inside your ribs—that he is retreating. And not in the way he used to. Not in mourning or shame. This is something deeper. Sharper. He’s disappearing into a place you cannot follow. And for the first time, you aren’t sure he wants to be found.
The next night brings no solace.
Dusk falls in soft, amber folds, bleeding into navy as the sky surrenders to night. You're holed up in the crumbling remains of another long-forgotten house, one of those nameless stone husks that litter the countryside like bones. The hearth is collapsed, the roof patched in moss and rot. Firewood sits untouched where you left it hours ago. He’s late. Again.
When he does return, his coat is misbuttoned, collar damp with blood. His gait is off. He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t look at you. He crosses the room with the quiet of someone used to being haunted and kneels in the far corner. He begins wiping his hands with a rag too worn to be clean, too stained to be useful. The air around him carries a bitter blend of iron and turned earth. Blood and grave dirt.
You stay on the other side of the room for a time, arms folded, jaw set. Watching. Waiting.
“How long do you think you can keep doing this?”
No reply.
His shoulders twitch—slight, reluctant.
You take a step closer. Then another.
“Remmick.”
Still nothing.
Only the rhythmic drag of cloth over skin, over blood that’s already dried, already part of him.
You move in until the air between you tightens. Your hand closes around his wrist, firm, no softness in it. “I asked you a question—”
He yanks away with force, enough to make you stumble back a half-step. Then he rises, not with anger, but something hollower. Something frayed. He doesn’t look like someone ready to fight. He looks like someone who’s already lost.
“I didn’t want to be alone,” he says. His voice doesn’t rise. Doesn’t plead. It just lands—dull, worn, the edge of something long buried slipping free.
You go still.
There’s a beat of silence. Then another.
Your voice lowers. “...What did you do?”
He tilts his head, finally facing you. His eyes are wrong in the low light. Ringed faintly red, not with hunger—but something thinner. Exhaustion. Regret. Or maybe it’s just shadow.
“I’ve been turning people.”
It doesn’t explode between you. It sinks. A quiet, ruinous drop into a deep, still lake.
You don’t move. Not even to blink. Your body holds still the way it has in the face of death, in the breathless lull before spirits pass. He watches your face as if bracing for violence, for the sharp crack of fury or the cold edge of words that would shatter him. But you don’t lash out. You can’t. Not yet.
Because the truth is still taking shape behind your ribs.
It isn’t just the act that stuns you. It’s the intention. The repetition. The method behind it. The shape of a pattern carved slowly, year by year, soul by soul. He knew what he was doing. And he kept doing it.
You take a step back. Not far. Just enough.
He doesn’t follow. Doesn’t shift. He stands there with his arms slack at his sides, like he’s waiting to be struck. Or abandoned. Or both.
You say nothing. And the silence that follows feels like falling underwater. It fills the space between you, heavy and slow, muffling even the crackle of the breeze through the broken window slats. The stacked firewood in the corner—the one you meant to light before he returned—sits untouched. Forgotten.
And still, you don’t respond.
Not in the way he expects.
Because your retreat is quieter than that. It happens not in your limbs but in the part of you that once reached for him first. The place that stayed, even after everything. You fold inward. Your breath slows. Your eyes drift past him to the far stone wall, blurred and dim. The sickle-mark in your palm pulses faintly, heat crawling beneath your skin in waves. You don’t know if it’s warning or memory. But it burns all the same.
He’s still watching you. Waiting for the snap. The scream. The sharp cut of rejection that would make this easier for him to bear.
But you’ve never been easy. And this—what he’s done—this is not a wound you can scream out of your body.
Instead, you sit with the truth.
You see the man from the alley, a year gone now. How he writhed on his knees, unsure of his own name, until your hands gave him peace. How his spirit, confused but intact, passed through you like a sigh. How the tether that had begun to form between him and your kind dissolved before it could root.
But what if you hadn’t been there?
How many of them didn’t have you?
The question splinters in your mind like glass beneath water.
How many died clawing through dirt, uncertain why the light no longer came? How many lingered, half-formed, their spirits bruised but not broken—anchoring themselves to the air, to others, to anyone near enough to absorb the binding?
And how many reapers—like you—were drawn by the pulse of those souls? Marked without consent? Tethered to remnants of humanity caught in a curse disguised as salvation?
Your eyes close. The weight of it crushes your ribs inward.
Dozens.
Gods forgive you, maybe more.
Dozens of the bound. The half-dead. Reapers pulled into a sentence they didn’t deserve. Reapers who, like you, now sleep beside someone who will never change—and wake knowing they themselves no longer can.
Your voice stays buried in your chest for too long. But the silence begins to shape itself into something heavier than grief.
It’s not rage. It’s betrayal. Quiet. Deep. A betrayal of belief. Of whatever fragile thread of trust you’d still wound around his presence.
You open your eyes. And you finally meet his gaze.
He hasn’t moved. But the desperation that once haunted the corners of his expression is gone. No more hope. No more pleading. Just a slow, dawning recognition of what he’s truly done. A guilt that’s only now beginning to form in his eyes.
But not yet worn. Not yet claimed.
Your voice is low. Sharp only because the truth within it cuts so clean.
“How many?”
His throat works, but he doesn't answer—not with words.
And that, you realize, is the answer.
Too many. More than he could count. Or worse—more than he wanted to.
Your voice doesn’t rise. It doesn’t need to. The weight of it—flat, steady, final—strips the warmth from the air between you. The stillness in your words is sharper than any shout, and it cuts deeper.
You take a single step forward. Just one. It’s enough.
Remmick doesn’t look away. He doesn’t flinch. But he braces. His jaw tightens ever so slightly, a ghost of defense rising across the structure of his face. It’s habit, not conviction.
You don’t blink.
“How could you do that to them?”
The question isn’t loud, but it lands like thunder anyway—silent thunder, the kind that builds pressure behind the ribs and makes the world feel a little too close.
He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t shift.
So you don’t stop.
Your voice stays level, but your breath has to work harder now—tight in your chest, your ribs caging the anger as it slowly morphs into something worse. “How could you take what happened to you,” you continue, your throat closing briefly around the memory, “what broke you—and give it to someone else?”
His eyes flicker. Not away. Just a tremor of guilt behind them. His mouth opens slightly, like he’s gathering words, like he’s searching for the right shape to wrap around an excuse. But nothing comes. Nothing you haven’t heard before.
“You begged me,” you say. And this time, your voice does waver—just for a breath. “The night it happened. I still remember your voice. I remember the blood in your teeth and the way you reached for me like you were already falling into something endless.”
You shake your head. Slowly. As if it will help you make sense of what’s standing in front of you now.
“I watched you suffer. I stayed. I carried that night with me longer than I’ve carried anything. And now...” You swallow hard. “Now you’ve forced that same question into the mouths of strangers.”
A flicker of movement in his throat—he swallows, or tries to. His shoulders tense, just enough to show he heard you. Maybe even felt it.
His lips part.
You see it—something close to remorse ready to crest.
But again, nothing comes.
So the words keep rising. And this time, you don’t try to stop them. You let them come like rot turned to breath, like wounds exhaling for the first time in centuries.
“You know what this is. You know.” Your fingers twitch at your sides. You don’t try to still them. “You’ve lived with this curse longer than any of them ever will. You know how it hollows you out. You know how it lingers in every breath, how it scrapes your name from the inside out.”
His face shifts—but only just. His eyes are damp now. But you don’t trust them.
“You’ve walked in this half-life, all this time, and still, you chose to make more of it. To bind them to this. To pull them under.”
You stop speaking.
Not because you’re finished. But because something else steals your voice.
The look in his eyes.
It's not defiance. Not shame, either.
It’s vacancy—a hollowing. A flicker of someone once human, now dulled to what that even means. And for one terrible, shattering instant—you no longer see the man who once wept at your feet. The one who followed you through a century of winters. The one who sat beside your sickness and stayed.
You see what he feared he’d become.
Not a monster. Not a beast. But something far worse.
A soul that’s simply lost.
Too far gone to name. Too far gone to want to return.
The silence stretches until it creaks.
Then—
“I didn’t mean to.”
The words come quiet. So quiet they almost slip past you. But they don’t.
You flinch like you’ve been struck.
Because you’ve heard those words before—from dying mouths, from spirits who begged forgiveness before their end. From cowards who only learned the shape of regret when it was too late to offer anything else.
You step back.
And somehow, the space between you becomes something more than physical. It becomes a chasm. A wound.
His brow tightens, the line between his eyes deepening as if he’s fighting the very shape of the thoughts forming behind them. His mouth presses into a hard, thin line before he speaks—and when the words come, they’re hoarse, clipped at the edges like they cost him something.
“I didn’t set out to do it.”
You don’t answer. You don’t flinch, or move, or breathe a word in reply. And that—your silence, your stillness—is somehow worse than shouting. It strips him down. Exposes him.
He breathes again. Shallow. A dry inhale like someone forcing themselves through smoke. “I wasn’t thinking about the tethers. Or the Veil. Or you.”
His voice hitches. Not enough to show guilt. Just enough to reveal the shape of something rotten underneath.
“I just…” He stops. Something curls at the corner of his lip—a bitter twist, not quite a smile. Not quite anything. “I got tired of watching everything die.”
He runs a hand through his hair, too rough, like he’s trying to scrub the truth from his own scalp. His shoulders rise and fall, agitated.
“You don’t understand,” he says, and the defensiveness creeps in—not against you, but against the weight of time, against the echoing void he’s been walking through. “Everywhere we go… everything ends. Every village. Every name. Every soul. I memorize faces only to watch them rot. I learn the patterns of a place—the rhythm of it—and then it burns. Or it floods. Or it’s swallowed by something I can’t name.”
He turns, finally, and meets your eyes. His gaze doesn’t plead. It accuses. And beneath that—grief.
“You don’t think I know what I am?”
His voice softens, grows flatter, as if he’s told this to himself before—too many times. “I know. I know. I know it when I pass a mirror and see the same face I wore when I died. I know it when I feed, and the blood tastes like dust. Like silence.”
You still haven’t moved. The fire between you has died down to its last flickers, the shadows dancing high on the cracked walls. His voice drops lower, the last of it more confession than excuse.
“But when I turned them…” His breath catches, a fracture in the calm. “It felt like… I was holding something back from the end. Like maybe—just maybe—if I left something behind, if I made something that wasn’t just destruction… I wouldn’t be the only one still standing in the ruins.”
His gaze drops as his posture slumps.
All the edge, all the frantic justification, it drains out of him slowly. Like blood from an open wound.
“I didn’t want to hurt them,” he says. “Any of them. I just didn’t want to be alone anymore.”
Silence falls again.
But not the same silence as before.
This one is heavier. Thick with the weight of years, of choices that were never meant to stretch so long. Of grief that has begun to ferment into something stranger.
And when he finally looks up at you again—
His eyes are red with something closer to the look of the man who cried out for help in a forest long ago, bleeding from the throat, clutching at the sky like it might split open and take him back.
Your breath punches out of you in a single, sharp exhale.
And then something inside you cracks. Not gently. Not like a bone giving way to strain.
It splits you open like a fault line, clean through the center.
It isn’t grief that does it.
It isn’t even guilt.
It’s the audacity.
The staggering, blind selfishness of it all—laid bare at your feet like a dog-eared confession, ugly and bleeding and begging for absolution.
Your hands curl into fists at your sides, knuckles blanching, nails biting deep into the lines of your palms. The firelight catches in your eyes but doesn’t soften them. When you speak, your voice comes from somewhere deeper than your body. From the marrow. From the wound.
“You didn’t want to be alone?”
It comes out like a curse. Like a prayer choked halfway through.
Your laugh follows—bitter, sharp, without any beauty left in it. An ugly thing, twisted at the corners.
You take a step forward. Your voice gains weight with every inch.
“You think I haven’t been alone? You think walking behind you, century after century, bound to something I never chose, wasn’t isolation? You think I’ve just been watching you suffer?”
He flinches.
You don’t stop.
“I have followed you through plague and war and famine, through nations that don’t exist anymore, through nights so cold they cracked the air. I’ve watched you beg for death with blood on your teeth, and I stayed.”
Your voice cracks then—loud and ringing, echoing off the cold stone walls with the force of something too holy and too ruined to bear.
He steps forward. Fast. Anger sharp on his tongue.
“I never asked you to stay.”
You freeze.
The words hit like a slap across the soul. Hard. Unexpected. Cruel.
Your mouth parts, but for a second—just one—you can’t speak.
Then, quieter than before, but no less furious:
“No,” you whisper. “You didn’t have to.”
The silence between you stretches. Strains.
And then—he snaps.
“You think I wanted this?” he shouts, his voice cracking under the weight of the truth. “To live like this? To feel this much and still be empty? To carry time like a sickness in my blood while the world decays around me?”
Another step.
You don’t flinch.
You meet it.
You rise to meet it with fire.
“Then why did you make more?” Your voice is thunder now, built from the thousand storms you’ve weathered in his shadow. “Why did you do to them what was done to you—when you know what it does to a soul? What it steals?”
His face contorts—not with rage, but with something worse. Something collapsing from the inside. Shame. Horror. Recognition.
“Because I was drowning!” he cries out.
And the whole cottage seems to flinch around the sound, the walls groaning with the violence of it.
“Because every day, you stood there—waiting for me to die. Silent. Unmoving. And I couldn’t breathe under the weight of it. I couldn’t stand the way you looked at me, like I was already gone.”
You stumble back a half step. Not from the force of it—but from the clarity.
From the truth laid raw between you.
His chest heaves now. His voice has torn itself to pieces. His hands shake at his sides, like he wants to reach for you and doesn’t know how.
And you—you just stand there.
Burning. Not from the outside, but rom somewhere far more dangerous. Because reapers aren’t meant to feel like this.
You were made for silence. For stillness. For balance.
But this—this is fury.
Not righteous. Not cold. But personal.
Your jaw clenches until your teeth ache. Your vision swims not with tears—but heat. The storm that lives in your chest builds fast, and it is not divine.
It is human.
It is broken.
And it wears your face.
You stare at him.
Your breath rakes in through your chest in short, uneven bursts. Your fingertips feel numb, too far from the rest of you. And your vision—your vision is edged with a strange white heat, blurred at the margins, like staring at a candle flame too long. Like grief and rage are pressing in from either side, distorting everything that might have once felt real.
He stares back.
The room between you feels like a wound. A swollen, festering thing that can’t be drained. Neither of you speak—not because there’s nothing left, but because anything spoken aloud might tear the last threads between you to shreds.
And then—quietly.
Almost too soft to hear, like a breath drawn wrong:
“…Where are they?”
Your focus narrows. Not on the words.
On his flinch.
A twitch behind the eyes, small but sharp—something flickering, recoiling. Defensive. Familiar.
He knows what you’re about to do.
And he knows he can’t stop it.
“Don’t,” he breathes. Shakes his head. “Please. Don’t.”
But it’s already too late.
You move past him without a word, grabbing your cloak. Your feet carry you forward as if your body knows the way without needing permission. The door groans on its hinges as you shove it open, and the night air hits you like a slap—wet, earthy, thick with early autumn rot. Leaves hang brittle in the trees, curling at the edges like burned paper. Somewhere in the dark, a dog barks once and falls silent. You brace yourself against the threshold and reach.
Not physically. You reach with what remains of you—the old power, the forgotten rhythm that hums through your bones like a distant drumbeat. It's faint. Stretched thin after years spent too close to something that steals more than it gives. But it’s still there.
And the world—reluctantly—answers.
It blurs at the edges. Pulls apart in seams only you can see. Veils ripple. Threads quiver. And beneath it all, just beyond the dying trees, you feel it.
Them—at least some.
Souls.
Not old ones. Not ancestors. Not ghosts.
New.
Just outside the edges of the village—where the earth dips and the bones of a granary sleep half-swallowed by ivy and stone—you feel the flicker.
Faint. Half-formed. Drifting.
Souls that haven’t yet passed—but haven’t been claimed either.
They tremble like sparks in fog, confused. Young. Unanchored.
And there are several.
Your throat tightens. You don’t speak. You don’t scream or cry or rage. You move.
Fast.
The underbrush snaps beneath your boots. Your cloak whips around your calves. You hear the door crash open behind you, then the sound of him following—his steps heavier, more frantic.
“Wait—wait,” he gasps. “Please—”
You don’t stop. You don’t even slow. Because you already know.
“It’s not what you think—!”
But it is. And it always has been.
Your pace quickens. The wind rises, carrying the scent of damp hay, crumbling stone, and something else—wrongness. Like rusted iron. Like rot.
“They’re children!” he calls. Desperate now, breath ragged. “I didn’t know what else to do!”
Your jaw clenches.
Your fists are tight at your sides, and your feet crush the cold grass beneath them like it’s the only thing holding you to the ground. The woods stretch up around you, branches black against the bruised sky.
“It was an accident!”
You don’t answer.
Because the village is behind you now. Because ahead—just beyond the crest of the hill—is something far worse than betrayal.
What waits ahead is the truth you’ve always feared. That the tether wasn’t just a curse between two—
But a plague. And it’s spreading.
The path ahead winds like a scar, deep and deliberate, cut through the earth by time or fate—you're no longer sure which. You follow it without pause. The hem of your cloak trails low across moss slick with moisture, catching pine needles and damp leaves as you move through the darkening trees. The cold has a voice tonight. It whistles through the branches, threads its chill fingers through your hair, skimming the back of your neck like a breath you didn’t ask for. Above, the stars begin to gather in the sky—pale pinpricks in an ocean of bruised black—but they do not feel like they’re watching. Not tonight. Not here.
Behind you, Remmick follows. His footfalls stutter at first—quick, then slow, then uneven. But eventually they fall into rhythm, trailing just a few steps behind. Close, but never beside you. Never quite touching. You say nothing.
He does.
“You don’t understand,” he says, voice ragged and low like smoke that doesn’t rise. “I wasn’t trying to make more. I was trying to… to save them.”
You don’t look back. You step over a knotted root and keep going, your jaw clenched so tight it hurts. “Save them,” you repeat, bitter, low. Your words drop like stones. “From what?”
Silence.
Not hesitation—shame.
Because there is no answer that makes it right. No redemption buried deep enough to cover what’s already been unearthed. And you feel them now.
Their presence gathering like frost beneath your ribs. Each step forward pulls the invisible thread tighter, the sickle-mark beneath your skin flaring hot with recognition and grief. The pull is unmistakable. Your body remembers this sensation. From that first time—his time. When a soul bound itself to you without permission, without warning, and began rewriting the very purpose of your existence.
But this—this is worse.
Because it isn’t just one.
You can feel it like tremors through your bones—small, steady, wrong. Echoes of the freshly tethered. Souls not dead, not living, stuck in the gap between, like birds trapped behind glass.
“There were only two at first,” Remmick says behind you. Softer now. Like the truth has worn his throat raw. “I didn’t mean for it to happen. But they were starving. One had a fever, the other—”
You stop short, spinning on him fast.
Your boots scrape against the frost-glazed soil, and for a second, the world tilts under your fury.
“You gave them the same ending you begged me to save you from.”
His whole body stills. Like a breath held too long. And when he meets your eyes, they shine—not with bloodlight, not with power—but with something collapsed. Ruin. Regret. “I know,” he breathes. “I know what I did.” His voice is the sound of something broken being turned over in the dark. “But I couldn’t just watch them die. I couldn’t keep doing it. Watching everything disappear and knowing I’d be the only one left to remember it.”
You want to scream. Want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until something gives. Until he says he should have come to you. Until he admits that the centuries you’ve walked behind him meant something. That the bond you carry—burden or not—should’ve mattered more than whatever aching loneliness drove him to this.
But you can’t find the words. Because the air is too full. And your body aches with a pull you cannot ignore.
You turn away. Again.
The trees thin. Their branches retreat like arms being withdrawn. The scent hits you first—ash, old grain, and something older. Something wrong. A rot that has nothing to do with time.
And there it is.
The granary.
Weathered stone. Ivy-choked beams. Roof half-caved and braced with long-forgotten timbers. It looks like a memory someone tried to bury. But it isn’t empty. You feel it—like a hand pressed to your spine. Not the dead. Not ghosts.
The nearly tethered.
Still hanging in the balance. Flickering like guttered candles. Souls bound to the wrong edge of the veil, clinging to the ones who marked them. Who changed them.
You slow. So does he. But now, he doesn’t speak. Because now he feels it, too.
The stillness. The weight. The ache of souls held in place by something that should not be.
You reach the edge of the clearing and stop.
The wind shifts through the tall grass, rustling low like a warning.
You don’t breathe. The air in the granary is thick with rot and time, and if you let it in, it might anchor somewhere it shouldn’t. Behind you, Remmick stands still—his presence pulsing close, his silence somehow louder than words. You square your shoulders, your bones humming with something low and final. And then, without ceremony, you step over the threshold.
The door groans open with the slow resistance of wood swollen by rain and age. It scrapes against stone and earth, and for a moment the sound feels too loud, too alive, in a place that’s forgotten what breath is. The scent hits you first—wet straw, mildew, and something colder beneath it all. Not death exactly. But its reflection. A wrongness you can feel in your teeth.
Inside, the granary is dim—darker than it should be, even with the sagging roof torn open to the sky. Moonlight spills in through the gaps, thin as thread, laying pale streaks across the straw-covered floor. The beams above are bloated with damp, some bent in the middle like backs hunched too long beneath unseen burdens. Shattered baskets lie collapsed in the corners. The remnants of a harvest gone to dust.
And there, toward the back wall—they huddle.
Three of them. Half-shadowed by the broken slant of a rafter overhead. One kneels with hands limp in their lap. Another crouches with elbows on knees, head bowed like they’re waiting to be named. The third sits with arms locked around their legs, face pressed into their knees, rocking so slowly it could be imagined.
You don’t need to see their faces to know what they are.
You feel it.
The tether hums—alive and wrong beneath your ribs, pulsing like a second heartbeat out of rhythm with your own. It’s raw. Fragile. Flickering in that thin space between body and soul, where life hasn’t let go but death refuses to catch them. They’re barely holding on. And if they slip too far, the damage will be permanent. Not just to them—but to whoever finds them next.
If anyone ever does.
You step further into the dark.The wood beneath your boots creaks with your weight, each sound an echo against the hollow bones of the structure. The air shivers around you, cool and close, and you feel Remmick behind you, moving too. His presence doesn’t retreat. It follows.
You scan the walls, your breath slow, your fingers twitching. You know what you need. You always do. There—against the far beam, half-buried in straw. A length of wood, thick and uneven, the end broken clean through. You see the edge—sharpened by splinters, jagged enough to pierce. You move toward it, slow, deliberate.
Each step is a decision.
Each step is the beginning of mercy.
But just before your fingers brush the wood, a hand grabs your wrist.
Hard.
You’re yanked back in a single, sudden motion—enough to make your balance falter, your breath catch, your boots skid over the damp straw. You twist in his grip, already reaching for your knife, when you see him. Remmick. Inches from you. His hand clamped around your arm, the veins in his wrist taut, the muscles trembling like a man trying not to break apart.
His eyes aren’t glowing. They aren’t wild. But they blaze with fury. Not at you. But at the truth you’ve come here to finish. His voice is low, shaped sharp from his throat. “Don’t.”
You stare at him—more startled by the tone than the grip. He looks like he’s been running his whole life and just realized he has nowhere left to go. His chest rises unevenly. His jaw trembles even as it locks. You twist your arm again.
“Let me go, Remmick.”
But his grip tightens.
“I said let go.”
He doesn’t. His breath stutters out. His voice drops to something threadbare and trembling.
“Not like this.”
Your anger flares, your heart stuttering with a surge of everything—grief, betrayal, exhaustion. “Then how?” you ask. “How do I undo what you did? Tell me that.”
His face shifts—crumples for a split second before he composes it again. His hand remains firm. “They don’t understand yet,” he says. “They don’t know what they are.”
“They’re dying,” you spat.
“They’re still here,” he breathes.
You stare at him.
And for a moment, you think he might cry.
You wrench your wrist free. Not cleanly. Not gently. His grip drags like nails across your skin as you tear yourself loose, the scrape burning raw where it peels against bone. The jolt that shoots up your arm is nothing compared to the one ripping through your chest. You don’t stop. You don’t speak. You cross the length of the barn in three long strides—each one carved from rage, each one louder than the last. Your boots crush straw and ash and broken wood beneath them. You’re breathless, but not weak. You’re burning. You’re moving like someone who’s already decided.
The stake is in your hand. Its splintered edge bites into your palm like it belongs there. You don’t look at it. You don’t need to. It’s not a weapon. It’s a truth.
They sit ahead—three of them—newborn, but not crying. They’re curled close to one another like deer cornered in a winter field, breath fogging faint in the cold air, eyes hollow with something they can’t yet name. Their limbs are stiff. Their skin pale in that new, half-set way—death not fully taken, life not fully shed. One blinks, too slow. Another flinches as your shadow stretches over them. The third doesn’t move at all.
They don’t speak. They can’t. The throat forgets how when it’s been severed in silence.
They don’t understand what’s about to happen. But you do.
You raise your arm. The stake lifts with you—rough-hewn, ugly, a thing that’s done its duty too many times. It’s chipped from older wood, half-rotten, but still solid at the point. It only has to be enough. You step closer. The one sitting against the wall, the smallest—maybe youngest—is your focus. Their head tilts up slightly. Their eyes are ringed in gray, already sunken from the change. They look up at you like a question.
Your grip tightens.
Your arm curls back.
And then something hits you.
Not a touch. Not a pull. A full-body slam—force and weight and fury all wrapped in muscle and bone. You don’t even register the sound you make as your side crashes into the barn wall, ribs colliding with old timber, dust and splinters filling your nose. The stake flies from your hand, clatters to the floor in a sound that feels too loud. Too final.
Your vision sparks at the edges. The impact robs you of breath. You fall forward slightly, one knee hitting the floor, hand bracing in old straw.
And then—you lift your head.
The pain coils through your side, your shoulder shrieking. But none of that registers. None of it matters. Not compared to what you see.
Remmick. In front of them. Between you. Chest heaving. Eyes bright. Not hungry. Not afraid. But wide with something too tangled to name. He’s shaking slightly. His hand still half-raised—caught between apology and instinct. Caught between the part of him that knows you and the part of him that just betrayed you.
Your mouth doesn’t move. Your breath saws out of you in silence. Your hands curl into the straw.
And those three—
They’re still behind him.
They don’t know what they are. Don’t know what’s been stolen from them. Or what’s been forced in.
But you do. You feel it. That tether. That pull. Three of them now—three threads caught in your ribs, tangled like knots that can’t be undone. You feel the wrongness in your marrow. The wrongness he made. And now the fury inside you is no longer just burning—it’s molten. Old. Alive.
This is the rage no reaper is meant to feel. The thing your kind was designed to exist above. But it’s in you now. Flooding your veins. Singing your name in a voice that sounds like every soul he’s ever stolen. You don’t speak. You rise from the floor with the quiet of something ancient. Your hand finds the barn wall—rough, damp, cold—and you use it to steady yourself, the ache in your side swelling with each breath. But the pain doesn’t slow you. It roots you. Grounds you in the one thing that still makes sense: this moment.
And this moment is war.
He watches you rise. The way your shoulders square. The way your eyes shine—not with sorrow, not anymore—but with clarity. With purpose.
He knows.
And still, he steps forward.
So do you.
You reach the stake first—fingers curling around it like it’s the only thing in the world that hasn’t lied to you. You don’t hesitate. You swing, low and fast, toward his center—but he’s quicker than he should be. His hand snaps out and catches your wrist. He twists.
Pain slices through your shoulder like lightning. You grit your teeth. Snarl. Your other elbow comes up and crashes against the side of his face. The crack echoes like a shot. Blood bursts from his lip, glints against his teeth, but he holds steady.
Then he lunges.
Not for your throat. Not to maim. To restrain.
Because he still thinks he can stop this without hurting you.
You, however, are long past that mercy.
Your knee slams into his gut, your boot hooks behind his ankle, and his balance shatters. He stumbles. You follow him like a storm. The two of you collapse into a tangle of limbs and breath and bruises—years of grief and guilt erupting into flesh. His hands find your waist. Yours find his throat. The stake stays in your grip even as he grabs for it, trying to wrench it away, but you twist your body hard and knock his head back against the floorboards with a dull thud.
He gasps.
You don’t stop. You drive your forehead into his nose. The crunch is deep. His curse is hoarse, desperate. You knee him again. Once. Twice. He doubles over.
And you rise.
Your boot lands square on his back—sharp, brutal, deliberate. The force of it drives him flat against the floorboards, and there’s a sickening crack beneath your heel. His spine.
He chokes on a sound—not a scream, but something guttural, fractured. His body seizes once beneath you, limbs jerking, then goes eerily still.
Paralyzed.
Just for a moment.
But long enough.
He bucks once, twice—but his legs don’t move. His arms flail weakly at his sides. His strength is there, but his body won’t obey it.
You press down harder, chest heaving, fury blooming hot in your throat. His eyes—wide, red, panicked—find yours. His lips move, forming broken shapes, but no sound comes.
And in the far corner of the barn, three figures do not move.
You turn toward them slowly, still panting. The stake is tight in your hands now, steadied. Sharp.
They stare. Three new vampires. Three flickering souls. Not turned long enough to learn what they are. Not strong enough to stop what’s coming.
And yet—they do not run.
Because deep down, even they know.
You step forward. Your boots press straw into the dirt. Your voice comes low, even.
“It’ll be okay.”
You mean it. And for the first time in what feels like years, it’s not a lie.
You kneel before the first—she’s barely a woman. Maybe seventeen. Her eyes are wide, rimmed with red. She smells like salt and cold earth and fear. You hold the stake over her heart, angled precise, gentle.
She flinches, not from pain, but memory.
Her lips part. Nothing comes out.
So you give her the only thing left.
The stake sinks in clean.
Her breath leaves her like a prayer.
And something inside the room lifts.
You feel it. The shift. The passing.
A soul, freed.
You don’t linger.
You move to the next—his shoulders broader, but his hands tremble. He meets your gaze like he wants to be brave, but can’t remember how. There are tears on his cheeks.
“You’re not alone,” you murmur, voice steady.
Then you end it.
The body falls soft.
The last one doesn’t look at you.
He looks past you.
At Remmick.
Still on the floor. Still bleeding. Still trying to move, his arms dragging against the straw, his voice raw and rasping.
“Please—” he chokes.
But you’re already lowering the stake.
The man watches you. His lips tremble. But he doesn’t resist.
You close your eyes.
Drive it in.
There is no cry. No sound at all. Only silence, as the final breath leaves the barn.
The final soul rises.
And then you are alone.
Three bodies at your feet.
One man broken behind you.
And your heart—your heart cracks like old wood in frost.
Silence settles like dust—fine, weightless, everywhere. It gathers in the rafters and drapes itself over the sagging beams, worms into the straw beneath your knees, clings to your clothes, your breath, the backs of your teeth. It pools around the still bodies at your feet, soaking into the wood beneath them. And above them—what was once within them—slips away.
You don’t need to watch them go. You feel it. Each one loosening, lifting, carried gently into that space beyond the veil. A flicker of something bright, brief, and final. Not mournful. Not afraid. Just gone.
And with their passing, the barn exhales.
The pressure in the air lifts. The unnatural weight, the pull of wrongness that had coiled around your ribs, begins to unravel. The stillness left behind is cleaner. Empty in a way that feels merciful.
Behind you, the only sound is breath.
Unsteady. Wet at the edges.
You turn.
Remmick hasn’t moved far. He’s half-slumped against a beam, body crooked, one hand braced to his ribs where the break is still mending. Blood paints a patch across his shirt, sticky and dark, and his hair clings in damp, tangled strands to his face and neck. He isn’t looking at you. His head is bowed low, jaw slack, chest rising in ragged, uneven pulls like a man who’s forgotten how to breathe through anything but pain.
You take one step toward him.
He tenses. Not visibly. Just a hitch in the rhythm of his breathing. A slight shift in his shoulders. But it’s enough.
“Go,” he whispers. It scrapes from his throat like something dug up from deep. “Please. I can’t…” His body turns slightly away, spine curled in on itself, trying to make his presence smaller—trying to hide. You see the trembling in his hands. The way he won’t look at you. The quiet plea to be left alone to drown.
You don’t leave. Instead, you move slowly to your knees—silent, deliberate—and settle beside him in the straw. No weapon now. No anger. Just the aching quiet left in the wake of everything you’ve done. You reach out, gently. One hand hovering, then settling lightly on his shoulder.
At first, he flinches under the touch, a quiet recoil. “Don’t,” he murmurs. “Just—don’t.”
But you don’t move away. You don’t speak. You just keep your hand there, grounding him.
And then—he lets go.
The collapse is slow, broken, devastating. His breath catches once in his chest, then unravels with a sound that isn’t quite a sob but close enough to splinter something in you. His hands reach for you blindly, latching onto your shirt, your wrist, your side—gripping like a man falling from a height he didn’t mean to climb.
You hold him.
He presses his face into your shoulder and begins to weep—not the sharp kind, not the frantic gasping of fear or pain. This is older. This is sorrow worn down into marrow. His tears soak through the collar of your shirt, his mouth moving against your skin—saying things you don’t try to make sense of. Apologies. Names. Fragments of prayers half-remembered from a life long buried.
You don’t hush him. You don’t tell him it’s all right. Because it isn’t. But he’s still here. And so are you. So you hold him tighter. Anchor him with the weight of your body, your arms, the steadiness of your breath against the ruin of his. You stay with him as the silence returns, this time less empty, less sharp.
And you don’t let go.
The days that follow feel carved out of bone. Hollowed, brittle, echoing with things neither of you speak aloud. The barn fades behind you. So does the village. Both left untouched and unnamed, as though silence might erase what happened there.
But it doesn’t.
It lingers.
In the way you walk beside him now—never behind, never quite ahead. In the way his shoulders tense at quiet, like he’s bracing for it to become a verdict. In the way you look at him: not with hatred, not anymore, but with something quieter. Heavier. The kind of pain that comes only after love has burned itself out and left ash behind.
Time doesn’t heal. It just shifts the shape of the wound. And still, the years begin to pass.
Not in waves, not in seasons, but in pieces. One fractured fragment at a time. A winter spent tucked in a shepherd’s croft in the hills above Galicia. A spring where neither of you speak for weeks, but you share a fire and food without hesitation. A summer where he returns after vanishing for four nights, and you don’t ask where he’s been. You just nod and slide a bowl across the table.
He nods back. And eats.
It isn’t forgiveness. Not yet. But it’s something.
The rift between you doesn’t seal. Not cleanly. It puckers instead—scar tissue woven in the quiet rituals of survival. In the way you hand him your cloak when he’s drenched. In how he no longer avoids your gaze when he wakes from dreams with blood dried on his jaw. In the brittle softness of early mornings, when you find yourselves sitting in the same room without needing to fill the air with anything at all.
He doesn’t run anymore. He leaves, sometimes. A few days here. A night there. But he always returns now. Not broken. Not bloodied. Just tired. A kind of tired that lives in his bones and his voice and the way he sits beside you at the edge of a field and watches the moon without speaking.
By the second turn of the year, he begins to talk again.
Just little things at first. A story. A name. A regret. One fog-thick night, he tells you he hadn’t been trying to make a family. That he knew they wouldn’t stay long.
He says he wanted to be understood.
You say nothing at first. Just watch the fog unravel across the field beyond, thin and slow. But you nod. Because you understand now in a way you didn’t before.
He hadn’t set out to make monsters. He’d just been trying to make meaning.
And loneliness—loneliness makes fools of everyone, eventually. Even the eternal.
By the time 1910 rolls in, the world is different again. The sky feels lower. The towns more crowded. The languages blur faster. But something between you settles.
He doesn’t flinch anymore when your hands brush.
You don’t pull away when he stands too close.
There’s still pain—threaded into the seams of your days like old weather—but it no longer festers. You pass him bread at dusk. He brings you firewood without being asked. The quiet between you is no longer a chasm. It’s a bridge.
And sometimes—on clear nights, when the wind is soft and the stars sit low over the hills—you catch him watching you like he used to.
Back before the turnings. Before you had to kill the children he made.
You never ask what he sees now when he looks at you.
He never tells you. But he stays. And the ache in your chest no longer feels like a wound. Just a memory.
Ireland, again.
You arrive in the early breath of spring, 1911—when the earth is still thawing and the wind can’t make up its mind whether to kiss or bite. The ferry pulls into the harbor with a groan, its hull brushing the dock like a weary animal nudging home. The rope is thrown. The gangway creaks.
Neither of you moves at first. Then he steps onto stone, and everything in him stills—like the moment his boots touch the earth, something buried long ago stirs awake inside him.
The land remembers him. Not with grace. Not with forgiveness. But with the weight of something familiar, something once-loved. The sea wind winds through his coat like fingers through hair. The smell of salt and turf and smoke presses close to his skin. He inhales like the air might taste different, like maybe the passage of time has been kinder to this coast than to others.
But it hasn’t.
The port is modern now. Wires and signs. Shuttered shops in bold English print. There’s a factory chimney where a chapel used to be, and the streets speak faster than they once did. But the hills still rise with the same ancient curve. The bogs still breathe their soft, damp breath. The peat fires still leave their fingerprint on every corner of the wind.
So you stay.
A quiet village nestled between stone fences and shy streams, not far from where his first breath once fogged the air. The land he was born into is long gone—burned in some forgotten skirmish, buried under names no longer spoken. But this place feels close enough. Familiar in its bones. The walls sweat with the same damp. The mornings ring with the same blackbird call.
You take lodging above a butcher’s shop. It’s small—one bed, one hearth—but it’s enough. Days are spent among slow-turning clouds and the ache of remembering. You keep to yourselves. He watches the sea. You count the steps to the river each evening. The ache between you has dulled to something bearable now. Something worn-in.
The news comes one dusk with the clink of tea cups and the low gossip of women in wool. You sit by the fire as one of them says it—quiet, but sharp:
The Celtic Hare. Bound for America. Dozens of names already listed. Families. Dreamers. The desperate. The cursed. A ship for second chances or quiet exiles, depending on who you ask.
You don’t ask. You don’t speak. But he does.
“We should go,” he says later, while the steam from the kettle curls between you like a question neither of you wants to ask.
You glance at him. One brow raised. His eyes are on the wall, somewhere past it. His voice is low. Uncertain.
“Not forever. Just—” He breathes out. “I want to see what they’re chasing. What I didn’t get to.”
You don’t answer. Not right away. But that night, long after the fire’s burned down and the village has gone to sleep, he reaches for the satchel near the hearth and pulls out two small things cupped in his palm.
Rings.
Simple. Gold. One worn thin by time, a small nick near the edge. The other newer, but not untouched. Both carry a faint shimmer in the firelight.
He doesn’t explain. He doesn’t have to.
You stare at them a moment, then lift your gaze. His face is unreadable. Calm, almost. There’s no plea in it. No arrogance either. Just a quiet offering. An answer to a question neither of you has asked aloud.
“What are those for?” you murmur.
He turns his hand slightly, so the rings catch the light. There’s something darker on their surface. Old blood. Washed, but not forgotten.
“I heard they’re taking families first. On the ship.”
You understand now.
A trick. A mask. A name you won’t have to explain.
You don’t speak. You just reach forward and take the newer ring. It’s cold when you slide it onto your finger—cold and unfamiliar—but it settles like it’s always been waiting. Like it was meant for you. Like it belongs, even if it doesn’t.
He watches you with something unreadable in his eyes. Then he slides the other onto his own hand.
And that’s it.
No declarations. No pretending. No vows exchanged.
Just a shared silence. An agreement stitched in metal and necessity.
But later, when you rise to fetch your cloak and brush past him, you feel his eyes follow the glint of gold at your hand. His gaze lingers. Just long enough to say something he never will.
Maybe never.
The night before your departure, he takes you to the lake.
It lies about an hour’s walk east, past the last of the thatched rooftops and crumbling stone walls, where the land begins to forget it was ever tamed. You follow him through thickets of blackthorn and elder, over moss-slick rocks and narrow sheep trails barely visible under the moonlight. The wind is sharp but quiet, a hush rather than a howl, and it carries the damp sweetness of peat and rain.
He doesn’t speak on the way.
But his steps are steady. Steadier than you’ve ever seen them. Like his body remembers the rhythm of this path even if his mind has buried it deep. He only pauses once—at a tree so twisted with age it leans like a crone over the trail. He runs his fingers along its bark with the reverence of someone greeting an old friend.
The lake reveals itself slowly. No grand opening in the brush. No dramatic crest. Just a quiet clearing, sudden and small, where the trees thin enough for stars to scatter across a patch of still, black water. It’s smaller than you imagined. Not a place meant for spectacle. A secret thing. Tucked in the earth like a forgotten relic.
He stops at the edge. Moonlight slides over his shoulders as he kneels, fingers skimming the surface. The water barely ripples. It’s so still it looks like glass, like one wrong breath might shatter it. He stares into it for a long time. You stay back, half-wrapped in shadow, watching him in profile.
“It’s still here,” he murmurs. The words drift out like breath. Not quite to you. Not quite to himself. “I used to swim in it. Before I was even ten.”
He says nothing else. But you feel it—the shape of the thought that follows but never forms. Something has outlived me. A place untouched by hunger, fire, war, or the hunger that came after. Something that endured.
When he stands, he doesn’t look at you. He moves like someone crossing into memory. Like someone walking barefoot into the past. He begins to undress. No flourish. No pause. Just one layer at a time, removed with the quiet care of someone who was raised to respect their belongings. His cloak slips from his shoulders. His shirt follows, fingers unfastening buttons in rhythm. Boots next. Then trousers, slowly, left beside the rest. He folds everything in a neat pile atop a patch of dry stone.
You don’t look away.
Not out of desire.
Not out of shock.
But because you understand. In your world, to shed the body’s armor is to step closer to the veil. To strip down to nothing but skin is to return to the beginning—where soul meets flesh without pretense.
And that’s what this is.
Not an invitation. Not a performance.
A return.
To boyhood. To water. To a time when he didn’t have blood on his hands. When he didn’t know what it meant to beg for death or create life that should not be.
He steps into the lake. The water accepts him without question. It doesn’t pull or resist. It opens like a mother’s arms, curling around him in a slow embrace. The reflection breaks as he wades deeper, until moonlight dances in ripples across his back, his shoulders, his jaw. He sinks to the waist. Then the chest.
Then stills.
You watch as he tilts his head back.
Moonlight washes his face pale. His eyes close. His mouth parts. For a breath—just one—he looks unburdened.
Not healed. But lighter.
The cold doesn’t seem to bother him. Perhaps it’s the memory of warmth that keeps him still. Perhaps it’s the ache of knowing this might be the last place that knew him before he ever needed to run.
You stay on the bank, arms wrapped loosely around yourself, silent.
Not intruding. Just witnessing. And for the first time in decades, maybe longer, you feel something shift. Not between you—but inside him.
A soft loosening. like something he’s been holding finally gave way.
Then—he turns.
“Come in,” he says.
Not a command. Not a question. Just a gentle opening. A doorway left ajar in his voice.
You don’t answer immediately. The wind brushes across your cheek, carrying with it the scent of wet stone and moss. The water laps softly at the edge of the lake like it’s breathing, like it knows something is about to shift. And he waits—not expectant, not urgent—only present, watching you the way one watches an eclipse or a comet: without assumption, only reverence.
So, you rise. And without speaking, you begin to undress.
There’s no shame in it. No theatrics. Only the slow, instinctual act of shedding what you no longer need to hold. Garment by garment, you peel yourself down to nothing. Not nakedness. Not exposure. Just being. A return to bone and breath and self.
You fold your clothing carefully and lay it at the lake’s edge, the fabric catching the moonlight like memory. For a moment, you stand still—bare, chilled, timeless.
Then you step into the water. It greets you like a threshold. The cold isn’t gentle. It bites. It presses against your skin with the sharpness of truth, climbing up your calves, your thighs, your hips. Every inch deeper feels like an unraveling—like the past slipping from your shoulders, like centuries of war and silence washing from your spine.
You don’t flinch. You keep walking until you reach him.
The lake reaches your chests now. His presence beside you is quiet, solid. A shadow of warmth in the cold.
He doesn’t touch you. But he doesn’t move away either.
You stand together, shoulder to shoulder, beneath the full weight of the sky. The stars overhead shimmer like old secrets. The moon hangs low, silver and swollen, casting a path of light across the surface of the water that leads nowhere—and everywhere.
Neither of you speaks.
There is no need.
The silence is not empty.
It is heavy with everything unsaid—years stitched into the seams between your steps, old griefs folded like letters neither of you ever mailed. You have walked through lifetimes together without asking what it meant. You’ve seen each other torn down, rebuilt, undone again.
Now, you are still.
Now, you are simply here.
The reflection of the moon ripples faintly between you, and you both watch it as if afraid that looking away might break the moment. As if, somehow, it holds the answer to all the questions you never thought to ask. The trees hush around the lake, swaying like monks in prayer. The water rests against your ribs like an old friend. And in the silence—raw, ancient, healing—you feel something loosen in your chest.
You feel his gaze before you meet it.
There’s a hush in the air, not silence, but stillness—like the moment before a prayer is spoken, or a name remembered. He turns slowly, as though any sudden movement might startle the moment away. His eyes meet yours, and they don’t search. They don’t plead. They simply hold.
Like he’s seeing you after a long winter. Like he’s seeing you and not just your shape, but your weight, your ache, your time.
There’s no hunger in his gaze.
Only recognition.
You don’t look away. Your face remains unreadable—stoic, still—but something shifts in the corners. In the faint curve at the edge of your mouth. In the slackening of your shoulders, like a blade being lowered.
He steps forward.
The water parts for him, slow and respectful, as if it too understands the gravity of this. And when he stops—close now, nearer than breath—he doesn’t reach out immediately. He just stands there, eyes on you, waiting.
Not demanding. Not begging. Waiting.
Your body doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t retreat. But it doesn’t pull him in either. You simply let him be there. And that, somehow, is permission enough.
He closes the final inch between you. Carefully, deliberately, he gathers you in. One arm slides around your waist, the other cradles your back, as though you might disappear if he isn’t careful. His chest presses against yours, cool skin meeting skin beneath the lake’s mirrored hush. Not in desire. Not in apology.
But in return.
His forehead bows to yours, then rests at your temple, damp hair catching the edge of your cheek. His breath draws in—not out of need, not to feed—but as if he’s learning again what it means to inhale. To be here. To exist without hunger. To exist with you. And for a moment—brief, tender, immeasurable—you close your eyes.
Your arms rise to meet his, folding over his back, one hand at the base of his spine, the other curling at his nape. You hold him without urgency. Without force. Like shelter. Like stillness. Like time choosing not to move forward.
The lake hushes around you both. No words pass between you. There is nothing to say. Only this. Only the quiet weight of history folded into a single embrace. The ache of years unspoken, softened now into something almost bearable.
For the first time in too long, you are not reaper and tether. Not hunter and haunted.
You are just bodies.
In water.
In moonlight.
The next evening arrives draped in silver fog, the air damp with brine and distant gull cries that echo like fading hymns. The village doesn’t offer a proper farewell—no waves, no well-wishes. Just the quiet ritual of pretending nothing ends when someone leaves. No one knows what you are to each other. No one dares ask. A few villagers nod as you pass, not out of warmth but acknowledgment. A woman in a shawl with weather-worn eyes presses a wrapped loaf of soda bread into Remmick’s hands without speaking. Her gaze lingers on his mouth, not his eyes, as if afraid of what might look back.
You thank her with a tilt of your head. Nothing more.
The harbor is chaos dressed as order. Crates and sacks piled high. Children darting between barrels. Salt-stiffened coats brushing shoulders. Laughter cracks like brittle kindling over low murmurs. Coughs rasp into gloved hands. A small girl cries quietly as her father lifts her from the earth, one hand always on the family’s bundle. The scent of sweat and seaweed and burnt peat wafts beneath the sharper tang of salt and fish.
Hope and desperation linger in the air like incense. Tangled and indistinguishable.
The Celtic Hare sits moored just beyond the ramp, her hull darkened by time and brine, her masts rigid against the greying sky. She isn’t graceful. She wasn’t built for elegance. But there is a kind of defiant strength in her shape. A stubbornness. She groans against her moorings like a woman too old for this voyage but determined to carry it anyway.
Remmick’s hand brushes against yours. His fingers hesitate for just a moment before lacing between yours. You let him.
The line inches forward, boots clunking on slick planks. The officer at the top of the ramp is all sharpness—salt-crusted beard, wind-cut cheeks, eyes as flat as river stone. He studies each family with practiced disinterest, his fingers black with ink as he scrawls names down the manifest.
When it’s your turn, his eyes flick to your joined hands, then the rings. The curve of his mouth doesn’t change, but something eases in his posture—just slightly.
“Name?” he asks, bored already.
Remmick answers, steady. “Riordan. And this is my wife.”
The officer nods without comment, gestures you on.
You step onto the ship. The deck lists slightly beneath your weight, the wood damp and sighing from long nights of rain and restless tides. A gull shrieks overhead and lands on the railing just ahead of you, its feathers ruffled, its call hoarse and indifferent. It watches as the two of you walk to the edge and pause at the bow. The wind sharpens. The lamps on shore begin to blink to life, small orange teeth lining the dark.
You stay still. Beside you, Remmick is quiet, shoulders squared as he stares back at the village.
He doesn’t speak.
You can feel the shape of his thoughts—the way they gather in his chest and press outward, like breath held too long. You know he’s tracing the curve of the coastline in his mind, remembering every stone wall and crooked path that no longer stands. You know he’s watching the steeple—the one that always caught the last light before dusk—as it fades behind mist.
He is mourning.
Not a person. But a version of himself. The boy who climbed trees barefoot and bathed in holy lakes. The man who burned everything he touched after.
Your fingers tighten around his. Not to reassure. Not to possess. Just to be there.
The fog thickens. The gangplank lifts. The ship groans again, her hull swallowing the voices from the shore. And when the sails catch the wind, and the land begins to recede, neither of you turn away.
You both watch until there’s nothing left but mist and sea. And still, you do not speak. Because the ache of leaving is loud enough.
The voyage begins with the steady churn of waves and the scent of coal smoke—thick, acrid, woven through every breath like thread through wool. It clings to your clothes. Your hair. Your tongue. The whole ship tastes like fire and salt.
By day, you stay hidden. Below deck, past the sleeping quarters and weeping children, there’s a hollowed-out storage nook no one bothers with. Barrels of salted meat and crates of dried potatoes press inward like silent witnesses. The air is heavy with damp wool and mildew, but it’s quiet. It’s dark. And most importantly—it’s sunless.
Remmick takes the far corner most afternoons, knees drawn up, arms resting loosely across them, head tilted back against wood that smells of rot and forgotten winters. He speaks sometimes. Not to you, not really. Just aloud. His voice soft. Aimless.
He talks about the sky. About the burn of the tea they serve on deck. About how he thinks Boston will smell like cinnamon and copper, because that’s what the coins in his mother’s apron always smelled like.
You don’t always answer. But you listen.
You’ve become something of an expert in the quiet art of listening—of letting him fill space without taking it.
At night, when the lanterns burn low and the horizon devours the last glimmer of sun, you climb above deck. Most passengers are too weary to notice the figures that emerge only after dusk—the pair that lingers near the stern rail, heads bowed to the sea, faces silvered in moonlight. The strange couple that never eats, never sweats, never prays.
You stand beside him, shoulder to shoulder, and let the air pass between you like breath between ribs.
The ocean, at night, is a kind of abyss.
But it sings. And you listen to that, too. The moon sways in the sky’s cradle, casting silver over the water’s skin. A cold beauty. Unreachable. You both watch it like a thing you once knew, like an old god too distant to worship but too familiar to forget. Sometimes he speaks. Just a word or two. Nothing grand. Nothing rehearsed. Sometimes you do. Mostly, you don’t.
On the fourth night, something changes.
It starts as a pulse. A faint throb behind your eyes, nestled deep in the soft parts of your mind. Subtle. Familiar. Unwelcome. Your fingers curl tighter around the railing. You say nothing. But later—below deck—it returns. More insistent now. A warmth creeping up your spine like a hand pressed flat against your back. Not fire. Not hunger. Not pain.
But pressure. The kind that lives in marrow. The kind that builds.
You sit across from Remmick, back to the hull, listening without hearing as he talks about starlight in the trees, about how he once followed it home. His voice is a hum. A memory. But not yours. You close your eyes. And press a hand to your chest. The space beneath your sternum throbs—soft, radiant, pulsing with something you can’t name. It spreads slow. Like breath through water. Like roots through soil.
Like a warning.
It doesn’t frighten you anymore. But it lingers longer than it should. By dawn, it’s gone. Or at least, buried. But it leaves a taste behind. Iron and dust. Like the ghost of something ancient clawing its way upward. By the fifth day, the sea turns restless.
The Celtic Hare begins to buck against the waves, her planks groaning with each swell like bones grown tired of holding. Buckets of coal rattle in their hooks. Children wail through the thin walls of sleep. The wind bites harder now, its teeth shaped by storms not yet arrived.
The sickness no longer waits for evening. It comes in waves now—sudden, unmoored. It strikes mid-step, when you're walking below deck and the shadows bend wrong at the corners of your vision, color pulsing like bruises against the walls. The air goes thick. Sound turns sluggish. You reach out to steady yourself, but your hand passes through the moment like it’s not real.
Once, you forget Remmick’s name. Only for a second. Just one ragged breath’s worth of absence. But it’s enough. Enough to feel the panic crack through your ribs like frost along old glass.
His worry starts small. A glance too long at your face when you speak. A hesitation before he answers. The way his fingers hover near yours but never quite touch, like he’s trying to memorize the way your hands looked before they started shaking.
By the sixth night, he says it.
"You don’t look well.”
You scoff—dry, half-hearted—and press your palm to the beam above your head as the ship pitches. “No one on this ship looks well.”
But he doesn’t smile.
You’re sitting across from him in the cramped corner of the hold, knees pulled in tight, the oil lamp between you casting long shadows across his cheekbones. His eyes—usually unreadable—are wide now. Open. Too open.
“It’s back,” he says, leaning forward, elbows braced on his knees, voice pitched low. “You don’t feel right.”
You look away. The sway of the ship makes your ribs ache.
“You’re cold again,” he says. “But you’re sweating. You lose your breath just from standing. Your hands—” He reaches for them. You pull them back before he can.
“I’m fine.”
He doesn’t argue. Doesn’t push. But he doesn’t look away either. And the silence he leaves behind weighs more than his words. When it stretches too long, when it fills the small space like fog, you speak again.
“I’ve been bound to earth too long.”
It lands like a stone between you.
His brows draw together. “What does that mean?”
You don’t answer right away. You lean your head against the planks behind you, eyelids heavy, the weight in your chest worse than usual. “Reapers don’t linger,” you say finally. “Not like this. Our time in-between is short. Measured. Just long enough to pass souls through. We’re not supposed to anchor.”
“But you have.”
Your eyes meet his. Steady. Tired. “Because of you.”
He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t move at all. But something in his posture stills—something that had been uncoiling slowly over the past few years, some false relief—that something between you might finally last.
You shift, trying to draw in a deeper breath, but it scratches against your ribs. “Maybe it’s catching up to me. The weight of it. The rot of waiting too long in one skin.” The ship lurches again, wood groaning, lantern swaying on its hook. Above deck, you hear a sailor curse into the wind, followed by the dry rasp of a child coughing.
Below, in your pocket of dark, the silence curls between you like smoke. You close your eyes. You don’t tell him about the dreams—about the gates that used to open for you without effort now slamming shut without reason. About the veil that once felt like silk but now presses in like water, heavy and slow. About how some nights, you wake up gasping with your hands clawed into your chest, certain something inside you has come loose. You don’t tell him that you're afraid. Not of death. But of being forgotten by the very forces you once served. You don’t tell him because you don’t know what he would say. Or worse—what he wouldn’t.
The final days bleed together.
Each morning tastes like copper. Each breath scrapes down your throat like it's passing through rust. Nights feel longer now—not stretched by time, but by effort. Rising becomes an act of will. Staying conscious, an act of war. Below deck, the air thickens by the hour, soured by sweat and rot and breath. There’s no wind here. No light. Just bodies pressed too close and time collapsing inward.
You keep to the shadows. Not by instinct. Not even by caution. But because there’s nowhere else you can be.
The sickness holds you now. Fully. Mercilessly. You sweat until your skin shines, then shiver until your teeth rattle. You can’t find the balance. Your limbs drift from you—foreign, heavy, dulled. Your mouth won’t obey your thoughts. Speech slurs. Words dissolve. And when you try to rise, your legs no longer trust the command.
Remmick sees.
And this time, he doesn't just watch.
He drops beside your cot—the makeshift bed you haven’t left in nearly a full day—and takes your shoulder gently, urgently, fingers trembling. “Hey,” he whispers. “Look at me. Please. Just look at me.”
Your eyes flutter open. Or they try to. The world above you spins, a kaleidoscope of warped wood, swaying shadows, dust motes dancing in the stale air. You manage a sound—a breath of his name, half-caught in the wreck of your throat—but it barely makes it past your lips.
He leans closer. His hand curls around yours. “Tell me what to do.” His voice breaks as he says it. “Tell me how to fix this.”
You try. God, you try. You raise your hand. Just barely. It twitches once, then falls back to your chest like stone.
And then you see it. The shift in him. That stillness. That terrible, familiar glint in his eyes—bright and faraway, like the snap of lightning on the horizon before the storm. A quiet, violent kind of clarity.
You know that look. You’ve seen it before—right before he makes the kind of choice no one should ever have to make.
He swallows, sitting back like something has just clicked into place. “The others,” he mutters. “The reapers. They’ll come, won’t they? If... if they’re needed. If they sense a passing.”
Your vision narrows further. The cot becomes a raft, your limbs going numb one by one. You drift somewhere between sensation and silence, the pressure in your chest growing heavier, deeper, like the floor is trying to pull you through it.
Remmick’s grip tightens on your hand. “Hold on,” he breathes, forehead nearly touching yours now. “Just hold on. I’ll get help. I swear it.”
But you can’t speak. Not anymore. Your body is too far gone. Your pulse flickers. The veil—once so easy to call—is nowhere now, hidden behind a wall of static and ash. And as darkness pulls over your eyes like a curtain, the last thing you see is not fear in his face.
Not sorrow. But purpose. Raw. Consuming. Unholy. The kind of resolve that breaks open the earth. The next time sound finds you, it doesn’t wear his voice.
It wears screams. At first, they’re distant—warped and waterlogged, like cries pushed through deep water. But then they rise. Shrill. Splintered. Panic peeling through every plank of the ship. A woman shouting in Gaeilge, sharp and desperate, her voice cracking at the edge of some holy curse. A child wailing—not calling for anyone in particular, just howling. A man’s voice next, thick with salt and desperation, pleading in fractured English: “Help her—God, help her—”
You fall again. Not into sleep. Into something heavier. Deeper. A kind of stillness that feels sewn to the bones. You don’t float. You sink. Your limbs are gone. Your mouth too. All that’s left is the hum of the ship’s body as it shudders around you—groaning under the weight of something it wasn’t built to carry. You taste blood in your throat. Or maybe it’s memory.
Another voice breaks through.
Low. Trembling. Unsteady in a way you’ve never heard him before. “I’m sorry,” he breathes. “I didn’t want to—just let them come. Let them see. Please.”
A wet gasp follows. A gurgled cry. Then a sound that doesn’t belong in any human mouth—a snap. A crunch. Like bone through cartilage. Like will breaking open.
You fade again. Outside, the storm screams. Or maybe it’s not a storm. Maybe it’s what he’s unleashed. Footsteps thunder overhead. Someone cries out for the captain. Another yells about the hold. About something loose. Something wrong. Panic folds into itself in wave after wave of fractured breath and flailing limbs.
Too many voices. Too many lives, fraying. And beneath it all—his voice. Frantic. Raw. Whispering your name like it’s the only prayer he remembers.
Again.
Again.
Again.
You return, but not gently. You return wrong. You surface like wreckage, dragged up by something frantic and ancient and clawing. Your body isn’t yours. Not fully. It’s heavy in places and hollow in others, like your blood doesn’t know where to go. Your ears ring. Your mouth tastes of iron and salt and something burnt. Your eyes are sealed shut, lashes fused with sweat or blood or tears or all three. And behind them, something pulses—a hot, sharp rhythm, like a scream caught between your temples.
The world finds you in pieces. Heat. Dampness. The stench of old wood and smoke. The sharp tang of rust and sweat and something richer—something that makes your instincts stir in quiet alarm.
And then—contact.
Arms. Wrapped around you, shaking. A chest behind your back, heaving like it can’t find air. A mouth by your ear, breathless.
“Come back,” it pleads.
Once.
Then again.
“Come back. Please—”
You blink. It stings like ash in the eye. The world blurs, then burns into focus. The lantern sways overhead, throwing sickly gold across the walls. The motion makes you nauseous. You groan. Your cheek brushes something soaked.
Cloth.
Wet. Sticky. Saturated.
You shift. Or try to. Your limbs answer—barely. And when your gaze finds something clear, it finds him.
Cradling you against his chest like he’s afraid your body might fold in half if he lets go. He’s crouched around you like a shield, like a curse, like a man who has done something terrible and can’t yet admit it to himself.
His face is pale. But it’s not the paleness that stops you. It’s the red.
Everywhere.
Across his chin. His throat. His collar. Down his arms. Smeared across the front of his shirt like a baptism gone wrong. Blood. Not old. Not dry. Still slick. Still warm.
You flinch. Not from him. But inward.
Your body folds in with a shuddering sound—half gasp, half sob—and his arms wrap tighter around you like he’s afraid your bones might slip through his fingers.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, quieter this time, as though apology might reshape what’s already been done. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
You try to answer, but your throat is lined with sand and copper. The words die before they reach your tongue. Your gaze shifts past him instead. Behind his shoulder, the shadows stretch longer than they should. The low lantern light flickers against warped wood, casting everything in tones of rust and rot. The floor is uneven. Buckled. Blood-soaked. Then—stillness.
A shape.
Curled near the far wall, limbs slack, body half-covered by a coat someone must’ve tried to use as a blanket or a shield. Another figure rests farther back, crumpled at the base of the stairs. And beside that one—small. A child, maybe. Slumped on their side like they’d fallen asleep mid-sob.
Your stomach turns. You cough—a dry, ripping thing that brings the taste of iron to the back of your mouth. Remmick clutches you tighter, his breath fraying against your temple. “I didn’t want to lose you.”
Your pulse bangs against the cage of your skull, hot and frantic, as if your body is trying to warn you. As if it knows more than you do.
He’s trembling. You don’t know if it’s from grief. Or guilt. Or something uglier. Something feral.
You shift, barely able to lift your head. “What…?”
He shushes you like a mother would a fevered child, fingers brushing your cheek in a tremble that doesn’t stop. “I thought it would work,” he says again, like if he repeats it enough, it will mean something.
Your body feels wrong—like it isn’t yours, like you're stitched into it with thread made of smoke. But your mind is sharper now. And the silence surrounding you is wrong. Not just eerie. Empty.
There’s no coughing. No footsteps. No quiet murmurs of others trying to settle into sleep.
No ship, no matter how weary, is this silent.
You turn your head further. Push against the grain of your body, slowly, painfully. Your eyes land on the edge of a crate.
A hand.
Pale. Unmoving. Fingers curled against the slats like they’d reached for something before giving up.
There’s another body behind it. And another beside that one. Some lying flat. Some collapsed against the wall. Some seated upright, heads tilted just slightly—like they never noticed they were dying.
Remmick’s grip tightens suddenly, voice thin with panic. “Don’t—don’t look.”
But you already are.
You’re counting. Not aloud. But your eyes are moving. Measuring. And the number climbs fast. Too fast.
Dozens.
Slumped. Folded. Gone.
Bloodless.
Your breath catches on the horror before your thoughts catch up. It doesn’t make sense, not at first. Why no screams. Why no transformations. Why no—
And then you understand.
You know.
He didn’t try to turn them. He emptied them. He took everything. He left no spark. No soul clinging to marrow. No heartbeat to echo. No tether to draw the veil.
You gasp.
It tears out of your throat, sharp and thin, like your lungs aren’t sure they want to hold air anymore.
He bows his head over you, shame crumpling his posture like damp paper. “I thought it might summon them,” he whispers. “The reapers. If there were enough dead... if it was loud enough... I thought they’d come. I thought they could help you.”
Your eyes lock on his, hollow and blazing. “You killed them.”
His face breaks. “I didn’t mean to—”
“But you did.” Your voice is rough but steady. “You drained them. You knew what it would do.”
“I panicked,” he says, louder now. Desperate. “You were slipping away, and I— I couldn’t lose you. I thought I could trade something. Anything. I thought—”
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” you say, cutting through the spiral.
He goes still. His mouth parts, but you don’t let him speak.
“You can’t summon reapers like dogs,” you say, quieter now, but no less sharp. “You can’t force their hand. You wouldn’t have seen them. Not unless they were yours. Not unless you were already bound.”
The words hang there.
He exhales a sound—torn and guttural—but no tears come. He’s past tears. Past coherence.
You lie there, still wrapped in his arms, feeling the weight of it all press into your skin like frost.
The ship groans overhead.
The lantern sputters.
And the air is thick with the wrong kind of stillness—the kind that knows what’s been done can’t be undone. That no gods are coming. That the only judgment left is the one between you.
You close your eyes.
And you lie there in the arms of a man who slaughtered dozens in his love for you—dozens whose souls now rest, unaware that their deaths meant nothing to the one who caused them.
The ship groans as it pulls into the harbor—an old, wheezing sound that echoes like a body exhaling its last breath. The hull creaks. The ropes strain. The boards beneath the deck tremble with every shift of weight, as though the vessel itself is trying to rid itself of what it carries.
Night has swallowed the shoreline whole.
Fog rolls in from the east, dense and low, curling around the dock like it’s hiding something. The harbor lamps swing in the wind, their glass panes rattling. The glow they cast is weak—no more than a shimmer across wet stone and coiled rope. It doesn’t reach the hull. It doesn’t reach the blood dried between the floorboards. It doesn’t reach the stillness left behind.
Remmick doesn’t wait.
There is no reason to.
He lifts you into his arms, careful but swift, as if each second he remains aboard might turn to ash. Your head slumps against his collarbone, skin clammy, lips parted in a breath that barely registers. You’re awake, but only just—caught in the hush between this world and the next, your body a hollow drum pulsing with a sickness no one can name.
He says nothing. Doesn’t glance at the rows of bodies behind him. Doesn’t allow himself the time to wonder if any of them had names. If any of them would have made it. There’s no room for doubt now. Only motion. Only escape.
The gangplank is slick beneath his boots. Salt clings to the boards like sweat, and the fog curls thick across the dock, rising almost to his knees. The city sleeps beyond the pier. No officers stand waiting. No barking dogs. No lanterns held high with orders barked and lists checked twice. It’s too late. Too cold. Too easy to vanish.
But someone is there.
A woman stands at the edge of the dock, maybe twenty yards off. She’s thin, wrapped in a coat too thin for the damp air, her hair pinned back in loose curls that cling to her cheeks. One hand clutches a small leather case. The other—limp at her side—holds a handkerchief spotted with soot or ink or something darker. Her feet are soaked through.
But it’s her eyes that catch him.
She sees everything.
Sees the smear of blood down the side of his jaw. Sees the glisten of it on his sleeve. Sees your body cradled in his arms, your limbs too slack, your face too still, your lips tinged a color that’s too close to death. She doesn’t move. Doesn’t step forward. But her breathing shifts—sharp and shallow.
He doesn’t stop.
Doesn’t acknowledge her.
Doesn’t look to see if she’ll raise a hand, or a voice, or a cry.
He just moves.
Slips between crates and coiled lines, vanishing into the fog-draped edge of the pier. Somewhere down the narrow alleys of the harbor town, there’s a carriage waiting. Or a corner to hide in. Or a cellar that won’t ask questions. He’ll find one. He always does.
But behind him, the woman stands rooted in place.
Mouth parted.
Eyes fixed on the spot where you vanished.
She doesn’t scream.
But the memory will stay.
Burned into her bones.
Because whatever boarded that boat was not what stepped off it.
And something about the way he held you—the desperation in it—looked less like love…
…and more like loss still clinging to life.
tags (comment to be added !) : @bleedingsunlight @meechibee
Grim Reaper Reader [in tears]: Your people are suffering. For as long as they reside behind those gates, I cannot give them the peace so many require. Your bodies are not built for immortality... Please.... Help me.
Yan (Soon to be) Murderer: So what you're saying is..... I should kill everybody in town and bring their bodies to you-
Grim Reaper Reader: That isn't what I- Where are you going?! Please, have mercy!
Yan Murderer: Haha, don't worry! I'll give them all the mercy they need- When I cut their throats! See you soon- Byeeee!
So we have God reader, demon reader, maybe to make it fair we should add Grim Reaper reader now? With Ronin ofc
But of course. ~ DP
TW / CW :
- Death
- Gore
Enjoy. Have fun…
The Comfort of Death.
You watched, another soul on your abacus with a ticked off expression. Hands gripping your scythe with a small squint. It irritated you how much you’ve been called down to claim souls and how often people are dying. Sure, it was strange. But not too weird.
You sighed, tying up loose ends as you slowly slipped on your cloak. You fed into the grim reaper aesthetic too much but who cared? They didn’t see you. At least you hoped they didn’t when you stalked in the shadows. Always watching with eyes following every targets motions…
Yet recently, you noticed an influx of deaths in one grouped area. A small alleyway in a city that no one dared go in. You shrugged it off, getting ready and immediately heading towards earth with a large set of black wings that didn’t fly but helped you float.
You landed in the alley, eyes darting from the brick walls and the scent of rain. Eyes darting around as you stalked in the shadows. The smell of blood now piercing your nose. It felt acrid, horribly unpleasant for a normal human… but you weren’t a human. So it didn’t matter much-
You stepped on something. Grey and white brain matter squelching under you as you looked up. A smooth dull orb floating aimlessly in the air as it darted a bit. Obviously confused.
“Great. Lost one.” You spat, sighing as you took out your abacus and started counting. “Soul number 809341. You’re with me.”
The orb looked towards you with black holes for eyes, slowly drifting towards you as you held out a glass bottle. Slowly sucking the soul in and closing it with a cork. Your eyes making sure it was sealed and immediately nodding once you noticed.
You turned, about to leave as you hear steps from behind and a small clink of metal.
“Hah? And I thought reapers were only fantastical stories…” the voice is raspy, deep and harsh as he scrapes the metal against the concrete floors. “Yet you look charming… don’t you?”
You cringed, looking over at the man with faux devil horns and a devilish grin. Crowbar in hand as he laughed.
“I left for ten minutes and a reaper is already claiming this soul?”
Your tongue clicked, licking the edge of your teeth as you turned to face him properly. Not saying a word as The Devil scraped closer to you with an eerie grin.
“C’mon, don’t you know who I am?” He asked, croaking his question out. “Ronin. Call me Th’ Butcher.” He said, laughing like some hyena as he leaned against a wall and looked you up and down.
“Man, you’re awfully quiet there… devils got your tongue?” He smiled, leaning on his crowbar with a raised brow.
“Oh man… you’re cute huh? Silent in the presence of me?” You stare at him, hands tightening on your scythe once more as you looked away and said :
You Make a Fool of Death with your Beauty (One Shot)
A/N: Well, hello little beans, I know we’re now past the Halloween/Day of the Dead celebrations but of course I’m still posting this little piece of writing. Took me long enough but it is here. Inspired of course by my favorite band ever F&TM and one of my favorite books ever, Death with Intermitions by Jose Saramago, I decided to pull something nice, or at least I tried. Enjoy your reading! Lots of love to you my darlings.
Always since the beginning of time, always since the beginning of life.
How you came to be was a mystery you had never cared to discover. The fact that you were, that you existed, that you had purpose, was enough.
You were alone, yes, but you needed no one. Or so you thought.
The first time you saw her, you hadn't pay much attention. She was still an infant, young and innocent enough that her eyes could catch a glimpse of the world beyond, and too inexperienced to understand the hardness of the life she was barely starting to live. Too young still to understand what and who you were, to truly understand why you had walked straight into the sea. The same way her mother had done moments before.
When you emerged from the water and, in an strange fashion that would be repeated someday, you had turned to look at green emerald eyes looking right back at you. Confusion, fear, and sadness had pooled in her eyes as she understood only you would come back to the shore.
There had been no pity, no remorse, no anguish in your heart for you had none.
However, and it was also a strange occurrence, part of you hoped you would see those green emerald eyes again in their final day, filled with something else entirely. You would see eyes that had seen the world and its wonders, and marveled at its beauty, carrying beautiful images instead of what they had witnessed in your presence.
You carried the soul of the mother away, disappearing from her sight until it was meant for you to return and see what had become of those green emerald eyes in, what you dare to hope again, would be a long long time.
Little did you know you would see them sooner than later.
Same jeweled eyes brimming with tears as she tried in vain to call for a young man whose life and destiny, you discovered later in the endless annals of the universe, could had been as brilliant as the stars above, were it not for the malice of his peers.
You had reached him in his final agony. When his body, invaded by his own creation, could not take the pressure and the pain.
If you had been able to pass judgement on his case, you would have mused how it did little good for mortals to play with such inventions. But you were no judge and thus could not pass such judgement on him or his life. So you waited patiently for him to take his last breath, taking his soul with ease when he was done, as he did not protest like many others.
You felt a string being pulled at the core of your being, after watching her silently cry as her heart was breaking for a second time. And again you hoped, as you crossed him to the light were all souls go, for those eyes to be filled with warmth.
It didn't take long for you to see them again. This time it was a boy that had brought you back to her.
Named after what many people believed to have been the first man ever created, he had tried to find a solution to his impeding problem.
You.
He had tried to help her. For his sake. For the sake of his dead brother. For the sake of humanity. Playing with an element brought to her from beyond the edge of their world, manipulating and experimenting with it's unknown nature. He had put himself under her scrutiny with the promise of a future, attempting to amend a mistake that wasn't his, trying to pay for a debt he thought was his.
You loomed over him, witnessing what could have been of him as a new ichor ran inside his veins, before his mortal body gave in. For the first time in all your existence, a sigh of disappointment escaped you and it was truly a strange thing to happen.
The boy's protest, that came after he understood the nature of his circumstances, pulled you back to the task at hand.
In a unique voice, only for him to hear and understand, you had spoken, explaining his time on this realm was over. There was no use in fighting the obvious. He stopped his complaints when he asked about his brother. If he could find him beyond the light, only he could discover it, you had said, and feeling braver than he had ever been before, he followed you.
You passed by her side as you walked with him. The light in her teary eyes had not changed and, if anything, they seemed darker. Like a wild forest before the dawn. So, you went, hoping the sun would reach and illuminate them before coming back for her.
Then, you saw her for a third time.
You had no heart, but if you had had one you would have felt nothing still for the man that was about to die.
Egocentric, ambitious, arrogant, ruthless. He was all this and more in his final moments. Not even your shadow, hanging like a promise over him, made him reconsider his last words. Words filled with bile and poison, ready to sting, revealing secrets which were not his own.
He protested, of course, when you pulled his soul out of his body, and you added the word annoying to the list of his faults. He asked many questions, none of them you answered. He had been a proud man in life and so he was even after finding himself in your presence, showing nothing but indignation when you remained silent. Whatever awaited for him on the other side you did not care, and his passing had been tedious unlike any other before.
Only after he crossed the light, you dared to look at her.
You had no heart but if you had had one it would have ached for her.
For her broken trust, for her broken heart. For all the things that would shatter, all what she would break before becoming whole again.
The forest was burning and you could do nothing to put it at ease.
What would you find in her eyes the next time, you wondered, feeling heavy as you marched.
However, the strangest thing came to pass some time after that. Destiny was rewritten, erasing his brother's name from your accounts. He came back from the light, as if nothing had happened, and the world was anew. But your job was the same and, for the first time, you seemed to enjoy the idea of detaching his soul from his body one more time.
She crossed you mind, making you wonder if this new world would bring her a new destiny. One that was more generous and kind for her, who had lost so much already.
You received your answer shortly after.
She was agonizing when you arrived at her side.
You observed, lingering closer to her as you waited, the way she finally came to terms with her end. She knew you were coming and this fact did not frighten her. Her last words were that of comfort and honesty as she opened her heart like she had never done before. She was satisfied and with a smile on her lips before she closed her eyes forever.
When she found herself face to face with you, she didn't tremble like many others before and, unlike her son, she did not argue. She welcomed the light, fearless and poised, ready to find what would come next.
And so, you realized, you had taken another mother from her. Not because you wanted it but because it was your duty. Something that, for another first time, didn't bring you contentment.
You stood behind for a moment longer after her mother had passed, turning to look at her.
Once again, green eyes were brimming with tears.
Unconsciously, you took a step towards her. The shadow of a hand passed along her cheek, trying to wipe out a single tear streaming down her face. But the tear followed its path and your touch, cold on her skin, only made her shiver.
You were of little comfort and it bothered you, prompting from you a sound you didn't even know you could make.
Your little grunt startled her as she believed herself alone. It startled you too when green eyes turned sharply to look at you.
None of you said a word in the long moment that passed between you two. Both too surprised and confused to understand the nature of what was happening.
In her eyes you were still a shadow, faceless and phantasmal, but she still felt a speck of familiarity. An old memory resurfacing from the depths of her memory. An old ache reemerging from the bottom of her heart, which made the latest departure even harder. Her furrowed brows made you realize you had overstayed, long enough for her to actually perceive you.
As if suddenly remembering your responsibilities, you turned around and started to walk into the light. One step before reaching it, you stopped and lingered at its edge, not daring to take a step further.
There was something you wanted to say but you had no means of answering for you had no mouth. It was different when you talked with the dead. Your voice was meant for them and only for them, no need of lips or teeth or breath for them to understand you. At the other side of the veil it was that easy.
What did you wanted to say? You didn't know yet but you hoped you would know it in due time.
And so, the time came.
There's was magic in her blood. Magic so powerful it called for you.
You were pulled suddenly from the light and into a room illuminated by another kind of light, artificial and colder than the one you were used to, where an encrypted circle, with a language long forgotten, kept you confined.
"... and I summon you, Death, to do my biding." She exclaimed at the end of her chant with a strong voice.
"Who summons me?" You said with a hint of amusement that couldn't be noticed through the sound of a thousand voices coming from you. You had to admit it was quite the novelty.
"I'm Lena Luthor, and I shall be your master now." She declared.
"I have no master." You admitted. In all the millennia you had existed, there had been no one to answer to and you didn't think that was something that could be changed.
"I've bound you to this earth. If you wish to be freed, you must grant me my wish." She took a step towards you, a fierce look in her eyes.
Curiosity invaded you and you felt compelled to follow her little game.
"What is it that you desire?"
"I wish for my goddaughter to live." She declared and your surprise turned into concern and confusion.
"And what I'm supposed to do?"
"You won't take her life."
"I shall take her when it's time."
"You can't." She walked closer to the circle, desperation clear in her voice. "Not yet."
You didn't quite understand what was happening, so you reached beyond the veil, looking for answers.
A child was dying, fighting a strange sickness from a strange world. Her mothers couldn't do much and, even when a cure was in the process of being discovered, her diagnosis was not favorable. The little girl was suffering and the time to take her through the light was fast approaching.
"She's dying." You answered, feeling heavy once again.
Lena sighed. "You can't take her."
"I shall when it's time." You repeated.
"Haven't you taken enough already?" You saw her green eyes brimming again with tears as she raised her voice, and you felt a sting inside you.
"You think me responsible for their lives?" You asked.
"Who else then?" She brushed her tears before they could fall. "Tell me and I will summon them instead."
There was another sting, of something you couldn't quite pinpoint.
"You would do it just to save her?"
"I will." The fierceness in her voice never faltered.
"What do you offer me then?" You mused after a moment.
"Offer?" She furrowed her brows. "I have bound you."
"You have summoned my presence and bound it to this circle. Only that. I'm everywhere, all the time. You cannot prevent me from fulfilling my work just like you cannot stop the wind from blowing." You explained. These rituals were almost fun but they rarely worked for those who performed them. However, this time you wanted it to work. "I will take her in due time but if you so wish I can delay my visit. But beware, this gift comes with a price."
"My life." She swallowed, standing her ground like she was ready to fight. "You can have my life."
She looked at you with no hesitation. You could almost imagine the gears in her mind working. She was considered one of the most intelligent people in the world but she wasn't mad enough to think she could deceive you. Only you were foolish enough to change the course of someone else's destiny, all because she had called to you.
"Then I will have it." You looked at her, with something new moving inside you. "Three days."
Her goddaughter didn't die, although she did suffer for a while longer. Her sickness had taken a hold of her, making her agonize in the days to come in which only you could have ended it, but you had promised you wouldn't come. In that last day, the cure had finally been crafted and tested with positive result.
The child lived and it was time to collect what you too had been promised.
"Lena Luthor." You called with your voice echoing in the walls of her apartment.
She had been sitting on the floor, writing over the coffee table of her living room. Waiting as she knew you would come.
"The child lives." You said matter-of-factly.
"Yes." You saw her shiver as she raised her head, trying to find your figure around. "And I guess you have come to collect what is yours."
"I have."
"Then, I'm ready." She raised from the floor, looking around for you to look at.
She had prepared herself for that moment. During the three days that Esme had been ill, she had also tried to prepare everything before she had to depart. She had been signing her last will just before you had called. She didn't want to leave anything unsolved and, if she was going to leave with you that day, she was going to look at you in the eye with no fear.
"I'm ready." She repeated with a sigh, waiting for the inevitable.
"It's not your time." You answered, guessing where this was going.
She frowned. "You gave me three days for it."
"I gave the child three days, yes, in exchange for your life not your death. What use would I have for it if I had to take you with me?"
"You won't kill me."
"No."
"Then why are you here."
"Life." You said. "I wish to understand it."
"Understand life?"
"I've always been around." You said. "Never questioned my role and duty. Not once I've mourned those who parted, not once I've felt for them. Not once made deals with them."
"You made a deal with me." She kept looking for the source of your voice.
"I did." The echo of your voice reverberated in the room with strength. "I've seen you, Lena Luthor. Always been there at each of your goodbyes. I've seen what their loss has done to the light in your eyes, and I've wondered what it means."
"I don't think I can explain it." She mumbled.
"Try."
"It's not so easy." She said with a clearer voice. "Some things, to understand them, you need to experience them, live through them. You need to be...human."
When you didn't answer, she continued.
"We experience life mostly through our senses, our bodies. You would need one, at least, to barely scratch the surface of what it means to be alive."
"Then I shall get myself one." You finally answered.
Of all the things she had expected to happen, having to teach Death about its counterpart was not one of them. She didn't know if it was even possible. Would you change your mind if she failed?
Silence followed your conversation and Lena was left alone with her confusion, but not for long. The doorbell rang then, pulling her out of her thoughts. She walked to her door, a bit hesitant of what she might find behind it but she opened it nevertheless.
The face and the body she come to find standing in front of her was nothing like what she could have ever imagined.
Your eyes, real human eyes, finally looked into those emerald eyes looking right back, and the light in them seemed a bit brighter.
"It's you." She scanned you from head to toe, and it surprised her that the expression in your face was kind and expectant, as if you were already excited to be there.
"It's me." You said with a new voice, echoing with a single tone, and it surprised you how your new eyes perceived her.
It wasn't only the eyes but her brows, her forehead, her nose, her lips, her chin, her cheeks, her hair, and everything else, that made you want look at her and nothing else. You too had a mouth, lips, teeth, lungs to breath, but the words you had wanted to say were still far away from you.
So, you stood there for another moment until she asked the question that would start everything.
"How does it feel?"
"I..." It took a second for you to formulate your answer. "I feel."
For her, that was enough for a start.
"Then let's begin." She said stepping aside to let you in.
When you didn't, she figured out you weren't yet accustomed to such human interactions. So she took a steep closer to you, taking one of your hands and feeling it's warm finger around hers.
Suddenly, your heart, the one you now had, pounded fast and hard. A new voice at the back of your new head appeared, whispering a new truth.
You would see those eyes filled with wonder, you would say the words that you wanted to say. All in due time as you learned what it meant to be alive.
And from that moment on, you didn't have to be alone.
You were standing beside the wrecked truck when you felt it: someone was watching you.
You looked around to see a girl. You began to walk closer, but she suddenly disappeared. The “Dying but not actually” wasn’t out of the ordinary but the unanswered question of how a girl in a school uniform was there in the road intrigued you.
You walked back to the truck and collected the soul, mind still lingering on the gothic girl.
You thought of her often, wondering about her and hoping you wouldn’t see her again til she was much older. It always hurt you to take people that would be your peer group.
You thought that would be the last time you saw the girl until you felt the watching feeling again. You turned and saw her. You decided that this time it wasn’t a mistake, you opened your mouth to talk then you noticed her eyes.
They looked strained.
You now knew what was happening, she was having a vision. You sighed as you waved your hand in front of her face, breaking the concentration.
“Well, hello there.” You said, smiling under the shadow your hood cast, “A little far from home aren’t we?”
“Where am I? Who are you?”
“Well, now don’t panic, I am a servant of death. What people like you would call a grim reaper. I don’t think you’re dead though.”
“Shame.”
“What?” You said with a light laugh.
“That I’m not dead. If this is it,” she said motioning around the barren clearing in the dying, twisting woods. “It’s rather nice.”
“Well, this is just a mid-ground of death. I walk through here and find passing on souls. The actual afterlife is whatever the soul wants.”
“What if I wanted this?”
You pulled down your hood, “It isn’t your time, cutie. So you have a while to decide.”
“Don’t call me cutie.”
“Alright,” you said with a smile. “Don’t you have a life to go live?”
“Don’t remind me.”
You laughed at this, “what’s your name?”
“Wednesday. Wednesday Addams.”
“Well Miss Addams,” you reached for her hand, making her head fling back and her body slowly disappear. “I will see you next time.”
You sighed, it was nice to talk to someone. Curiosity caught you though: you unrolled a scroll.
“Addams, Wednesday.”
Her name and life line appeared, you sighed in mild contempt, “Only the best live that long.” You thought of what she said about her life, “I think eighty years is enough to change that attitude.”
| william, grelle, + ronald react to you making them lunch |
content: gn!insert + headcanons - can be read as romantic or platonic
ask box
update - othello + undertaker vers. here!
William tends to eat light things, he tries to refrain from eating anything too heavy. He only eats heavier meals when he’s off work or he knows he won’t be in the field collecting souls.
William doesn’t like to eat with his hands much, he will avoid it at all cost. Unless he needs to eat with them.
Knowing this, you want him to get a little bit more protein but you still respect his wishes for him to eat lighter foods.
You make him a salad with chopped grilled chicken. The salad is very much inspired by Italian cuisine, you want to make sure he eats all aspects of the food pyramid in his meal. The salad has a lemony taste to it with beautiful thin sliced almonds. The cheese is sprinkled around in a careless manner, but it’s spread everywhere in the salad.
For a small dessert, you give him sliced strawberries with a honey + chocolate drizzle. Nothing too overly sweet.
You give the meal to him at his desk! He looks up from his paperwork and his eyes widened at bit. He takes the container from you and opens it right away. William can’t bring himself to speak.
You stand there awkwardly and wait for a response. He looks up at you, “Thank you for this meal, it smells and looks delicious. Shall we eat together?”
You and William eat together. He’s quiet so you do most of the talking. After you two eat, he thanks you again for the meal.
The next day you have a letter on your desk, of course it’s from William.
It’s a detailed letter explaining how much he loved the food and he’s very thankful for the meal. His words are genuine through and through. He also apologizes for being so silent during yesterday’s lunch. He just couldn’t believe how good the meal was.
For a thank you, he volunteers to do your paperwork so you can go home early!
Grelle is a wild card when it comes to her meals. Sometimes she eats throughout the day, just snacking on whatnot. She expresses how much she hates packing and making food for herself. Grelle is too tired or sometimes too lazy to make her own things.
Her lunches are very random. Sometimes it’s leftovers from a restaurant she ate at. Sometimes it’s just a hastily made sandwich she made at last minute.
If Grelle feels like actually eating something good, she steals someone else’s lunch and frames one of the other workers for eating it.
You know Grelle very well, she loves extravagant foods and clothes. So, you want to make sure her lunch screams fancy and expensive.
You make her smoked salmon, cream cheese, and caper bagel. You bought the smoked salmon at your local market, and got your bagels from a bakery you often frequent. You place lemon wedges on the side to garnish the dish with. There are about 4 bagels in the lunch, so she can have them throughout the day (if she wanted to eat them like that).
For dessert, you give her a cinnamon roll from that said bakery. It’s nice and fluffy and it’s oozing with delicious frosting.
When you gave to her, she loudly gasped and took a good look at the food. Her mouth was agape, she was so surprised and stunned. Grelle loves the presentation of everything.
Grelle places the lunch on her desk and gives you one big hug. She pulls away and gives you a kiss on the cheek, a playful one. Her kiss leaves on big smooch mark from her divine red lipstick.
You smile as she brings you into another. She is so thankful, in fact, she wouldn’t mind paying you to keep on making her lunches! You decline that offer, you don’t mind making lunches for her for free.
Grelle however giggles as she says: “Oh Honey, don’t let the office or me take you for granted!”
You two eat together and gossip.
Her thank you gift is bringing in some sweets for you at work. Grelle then invites you to go shopping with her on your day off.
Ronald is a huge connoisseur of food. He will eat at anytime, if there is a chance to? He’ll be right there munching on the food. Ronald eats the most out of the other two. He loves food.
He’s not a picky eater, and he can handle mild spice. Ronald loves to challenge his palette and he also loves to eat comfort food. From a 5 course meal to the most crunchiest fish and chips. He loves it all.
Making food for Ronald was easy, you know he’ll eat it up right away. The difference is, you want to put your personality and your care for him into this meal. Nothing too fancy, you want him to eat some nice comforting food at the office. You want him to be cozy as he eats this meal.
So of course, you’re going to make him something hands on.
You decide to make him fried chicken thighs with a mild spicy honey mustard on the side. The chicken is also paired with small salad on the side. Though, you really want to hone in the comfort of this food. Something greasy and crunchy, he know he’ll melt into the meal.
For dessert - it’s also something comforting -, you make him extra fudge brownies. They’re so chocalately and they smell so sweet. It took you every ounce for you not to devour the whole tray (unless you don’t like brownies).
When you present the meal to him, he gets up from his desk and gives you one giant hug. You’re still holding the food, you’re super shocked. He moves you a little bit side to side as he blabbers on and on about the food. He can’t thank you enough.
Ronald takes the food, he’s so excited he picks you up and spins you around. You’re really not expecting this. Other reapers give you two a strange look, but they shrug it off. It’s not their business.
He eats lunch with you, and just loves it. He won’t shut up about the food you made, Ronald begs you to give him cooking lessons.
You’re a blushing mess, he didn’t expect him to complement you this much.
For a thank you, Ronald takes you to a very nice French restaurant for lunch. He even stays late with you to help you do work and paperwork. Ronald is still thanking you 3 weeks later.
