The Undertaker has a wooden chest. It’s unassuming, unremarkable. Not the sort of thing anyone would suspect of holding priceless artifacts.
Well, they’re only priceless to him. See, they are a lifetime confined to a space with less room than even the lifeless husk of a person is allowed.
Photographs and jewelry and folds of cloth — attire all the way from infancy to adulthood. There’s silk and satin and lace and wool. All packed neat and tidy in the darkness.
They’d once belonged to the love of his life. They’d once hugged her delicate frame. The necklaces and skirts had watched her laugh, watched her dance.
And then they had lost her — he had lost her. Forever.
Except.
Her nose, her eyes, her cheekbones. They’d appeared again on the face of their son.
But in no time at all, the Undertaker had lost sight of that face once more.
If not for the survival of one grandson and his own intervention with the other, he might never have gotten to see those pretty features again.
So it is fortunate, he thinks as he slides a nightgown — lacy and light, once locked away inside wooden walls — onto his grandson’s collapsed form. It is fortunate that these boys look so like their father, who looked so like his mother.
The Undertaker lays his darling into bed, slides a needle into the crook of his arm. A nasal cannula into his nose. He presses a kiss to the boy’s lips, is rewarded with a soft, breathy noise and the fluttering of lashes.
The clothes that sit at the bottom of the Undertaker’s wooden chest will see laughter and dancing once more.