Originally posted to LJ April 30th, 2010.

Under different circumstances, having two strapping men tying him down would have been nothing short of thrilling. Now it was just terrifying.

When William had first told him that he would be going on trial for his crimes, Grell was not too worried. He imagined the worst they could do to him would be to bury him under a mountain of tedious paperwork. The London Branch was short-staffed as it was, so there was no way the Management Division would consider demoting him.

The day of his trial was when he began fearing not only for his job, but also his life. As William took his arm in a vice and led him down into the bowels of the Shinigami Library to stand trial, Grell was overcome with an unshakeable sense of foreboding. If there was one thing Grell hated it was silence, and the absence of any sound but their heels clicking across the floor only served to wind his nerves to the breaking point.

"William?" Grell said in the sweetest tone he could manage, and Will shot him a dangerous sideways glance. Even for William, who normally gave Grell the cold shoulder anyway, it was a harsh look. It alone was enough for Grell to realize it would be best not to say anything else.

At the end of that deserted hallway and through a set of massive marble doors, a jury of his peers waited for him. Hundreds of narrowed eyes peered down at him from rows upon rows of seats, all arranged in a semicircle to face a single high-backed chair in the immediate center of the room. Two well-built men met them at the door, and William handed Grell over to them. They led him the high-backed defendant's chair where they sat him down and proceeded to shackle his wrists to the armrests. He struggled at first, but a swift poke in the ribs from William was enough to make him go quietly. The two men made their way back to their seats once he was secured, and William followed.

"Will! Don't leave me! This isn't fair!" Grell yelled, and no sooner than he had finished his sentence, Will had turned back around and brought his death scythe crashing down atop of Grell's head. Grell whimpered in pain, but seeing William's eyes so narrowed and angry was even more unpleasant than being hit on the head.

"Sutcliff, you still don't understand the severity of what you've done, do you?" William asked, his tone so poisonous that Grell leaned away from him. "You brutally murdered five women. You broke the oldest and most important of Death God laws. The last time a trial of this magnitude was held England was still part of the Roman Empire," he said, leaning in and taking Grell by the vest, pulling him so that they were eye to eye. "You better behave yourself, Sutcliff. The man who'll judge you today has also judged the souls of Marie Antoinette and Robin Hood. This is not a situation to take lightly."

William let him go then, turning around and taking his seat in front row right alongside Ronald Knox. With William seated there was only one seat in the room that remained empty, the one to William's immediate right. Grell could hardly imagine what ugly brute would be sitting there to pass judgment on him.

"Let me out of this chair!" Grell yelled, and quickly noticed that no one else in the room was talking.

The idle chatter in the room seemed to die down all at once. It was replaced by the door behind him opening with an ominous creak and the sound of leather heels against the wooden floor. Grell tried to twist around in his seat and see what the new arrival looked like, but his restraints and the high back of his chair made it impossible.

It wasn't until he walked right up beside Grell's chair that Grell could see him. The red reaper's face immediately twisted in disbelief, his glasses falling uncomfortably low on his nose. Long black robes with sleeves wide enough to engulf his entire hand, a long top hat that was ridiculously out of fashion, and a silver sash thrown over his shoulder. Grell had met the Undertaker only once before, but once had been quite enough to be in presence of this dull weirdo.

"You're a Death God?!" Grell squeaked, and the Undertaker giggled at him.

"I'm retired," the Undertaker replied. "Mostly."

Grell grimaced. From the moment he had walked into the Undertaker's shop with the late Madam and the earl, the Undertaker had probably known that some of the murders had been the work of the Death God. He had been stringing both Grell and the earl along during that entire visit, playing dumb even though he most likely knew exactly what had been going on the entire time.

Grell flinched backwards as the Undertaker reached a hand out towards him. Grell didn't want those long nails anywhere near his skin, but being tied as he was made it futile to resist. He whimpered as a nail brushed across his cheek, but the touch was fleeting. To his surprise, the Undertaker took hold of his glasses and adjusted them to sit properly on his nose. Grell raised an eyebrow at him, and the Undertaker only cocked his head slightly before turning away, his face split by a smile. He took his seat, crossing his legs and resting his head in his hand, looking oddly amused at the whole situation. One he was settled, Ronald stood up and shuffled through the stack up papers on the podium in front of him. He cleared his throat before beginning.

"Grell Sutcliff, you are charged with illegally modifying your death scythe--"

"So?"

There was a murmur of surprise around the room at the Undertaker's interruption, and Ronald became uncharacteristically flustered.

"Sir?" Ronald asked.

"If that was all he had done wrong we wouldn't be holding such an elaborate trial. Shall we move on to why we're really here, hmm?" the Undertaker hummed.

"Uh, okay…" Ronald said, and shuffled through his stack of papers as whispers started to circulate around the courtroom. "Mr. Sutcliff---" he said, and this time it was Grell who interrupted him.

"That's Miss Sutcliff to you, Ronald," Grell said, and Ronald shrugged before moving on.

"Miss Sutcliff, you are also charged with operation of your death scythe without proper clearance--"

"Now we're getting somewhere…." the Undertaker interrupted again. "What else?"

"You are also charged with killing those whose names did not appear on the Death List," Ronald said, giving pause in anticipation of being interrupted again. He glanced briefly at the Undertaker, who seemed to have nothing more to interject with. Ronald continued. "Such is a violation of Code A, Section One of the Death God's Handbook."

The Undertaker's smile widened, and Grell squirmed a little in his seat. The guy was creepy even by Death God standards.

"I wonder if you understand the human soul," the Undertaker mused.

"What is that supposed to mean!?" Grell yelled. Undertaker didn't seem fazed in the slightest.

"There is a beauty to death," the Undertaker said, and Grell growled in annoyance. It didn't answer his question, and any idiot knew that there was beauty in death. There was an elegance in the act of dying, in the finality of a person's last breaths. Violent deaths were a hundred times, perhaps even a thousand times more lovely than something as mundane as death from old age. The way the red ran over the cobblestones, seeping into all the cracks in the street…

There was always something gorgeous about the tragedy of it all. And then there were some people who could only be beautiful in death like they could never be in life. The whores he and the Madam had sent to Hell were those people.

"Well I already know that!" Grell yelled, "I made those women more beautiful in death than they ever were in life!"

More murmurs ran around through the court.

"In even a painful, agonizing death, there is an undeniable beauty in a person's final moments and in the empty husks of their corpses," the Undertaker agreed. "The wounds, the lifeless faces that look both peaceful and terrified at the same time….fascinating, really. And they look so adorable laying in their coffins," he laughed slightly, and many of the faces in the jury wrinkled at the strangeness of his last comment. "But bodies will decay when put in the ground. The soul never decays. For a person to be treated with such cruelty not by another human, but by a Death God, how can that soul ever be at peace? The souls of those women will be in eternal pain for being sent to the afterlife as they were. It is your job as a Reaper to escort their souls in peace to the afterlife, but you ignored that duty."

Grell's face fell. For some reason he didn't know quite what to feel.

"What's the state of the London Division?" the Undertaker asked. While Ronald shuffled through his papers, William answered.

"We're constantly short-staffed," he said. "With Mr. Sutcliff on probation, Mr. Knox and I have been pulling overtime everyday for two weeks."

"Well, we can't afford to do anything drastic to him if that is the case, now can we?" the Undertaker said. "We'll just have to hope this little trial has taught him his lesson."

"But his death scythe--" William began, but was cut off with a wave of the Undertaker's hand.

"Give it back," the Undertaker said and rose from his seat.

Grell's face brightened at the prospect of getting his beloved scythe back, and of course the idea of escaping this mess without some unpleasant punishment inflicted upon him. The room's volume increased tenfold as the Undertaker approached Grell, coming to stand at the red reaper's side.

"You're not so bad, for a dull undertaker," Grell said, and the Undertaker laughed under his breath.

"The Ripper's antics kept me quite busy," he said, touching a finger gently to his lip. "Some interesting corpses, I must say…"

The Undertaker turned his head just so, and Grell caught a glimpse of his eye behind the white curtain of his hair. It was a swirling mix of yellow and green, the likes of which Grell had never seen before. He barely noticed as his mouth fell open, and he sank just a little into his chair. He would have melted into a lusting puddle on the floor if not for the restraints binding him to his seat. The Undertaker then walked past his chair and out of sight.

"Wait!" Grell yelled, twisting uselessly against his restraints. He heard the door open, and the Undertaker's footsteps slowly died away.

The rest of the Death Gods filed past him and out of the room. Some of them shot him disgusted glares, but Grell didn't much care. Ronald patted Grell and the shoulder as he went and William looked at him with his usual stare before passing him on by. He ignored Grell as he called out to him.

"Hey!" Grell yelled, his voice echoing in the empty room. "Is anyone going to untie me?!"