Ghost in the Machine (Undertaker x Female Reader)

Chapter Ten.

Trigger warnings:
Trauma
Illness and death
Depression
Dysfunctional/abusive familial relationships

Chapter Ten.

Knowing that the details missing from my own perspective of the night's events were the main source of my uneasiness with my situation, what the Undertaker told me of my own history in that moment was brief, and a story I already knew. As he occupied himself with cleaning my bloodied hands and legs in front of the stove, he recounted what he'd learned of me in a way similar to the way anyone might store the necessary facts on a given topic: My day and place of birth, my family's hierarchy, the general history of our peerage, all things available as public knowledge.

By the time he was past those initial, benign bits of information and seemingly ready to delve beyond them, I was warm, tucked in bed in my new sleeping gown, the white cotton soft against my bandaged skin. Without my insistence, he had joined me in the bedding, having reclaimed the sleep shirt I had borrowed and drawing my body into its arms. I blinked sleepily at the scarring on his neck and the sensation of his toes curling tenderly against mine, concerns of impropriety firmly overruled by the blessings of peace and security. He kissed my brow, having already pulled my spectacles off my nose and placed them on the table.

"Sleep," he murmured, pushing my hair back from my cheek. "The rest can wait until you've rested."

"But...I want..." I squeezed the locket at my throat, my other hand clutching at the nearest lock of his hair, a long braid of silver from behind his ear. My nerves had crashed back down to earth from the great height to which they'd been dragged by the day's events, and my body was not cooperating with my brain's desire for answers. My eyes fell shut and opened again, determined, until a gentle stroking of my hair claimed my wakefulness entirely.

· • —– ٠ ✤ ٠ —– • ·

I was born, just as he'd said, the first and only child of His Grace, James, the Duke of Chelmsford. He'd married my mother, Anna, the daughter of a village doctor and thus decidedly not following societal expectations for a noble of his stature. She had often come to the great house of Chelmsford with her father when the doctor was required in order to provide assistance and learn at his elbow, although I had no concept of how revolutionary this was until late in my childhood.

James, my father, first encountered her when they were both adolescents, and although he—as the older brother of two—was expected to inherit the title and to marry accordingly, my grandfather could not dissuade him from falling in love with Anna, and passed away before he could convince him to accept a more appropriate wife from the ranks of English nobility. James was still in his late teens when his father died, and although he was of an age and experiences suitable to inherit full responsibility as the new duke, he had not yet reached the point when it was impossible for him to not marry. And so, since neither my grandmother nor his younger brother George had legal say in how my father conducted the business of the title, James went against all the rumblings discouraging the notion and made Anna his wife a few years later.

I remember being cherished as a child, and encouraged to follow in my mother's footsteps; she had gained considerable prowess as a healer in her own right after training at her father's side. She, however, did not press her passion for it upon me and instead encouraged me to learn and discover a path I could follow as my own. My father, ever entranced by my mother's goodness and conviction, had set up a library of medical references for her, among many other tomes, and permitted my use of it as well, both during her lifetime and after her untimely passing.

Many happy afternoons were spent in that library, or in the gardens, or in my room. The setting changed, as did the book in my hand, but volume by volume the words were devoured by me and along with them, the tower of knowledge they represented. Within the grief I struggled against in the years I lived past my mother's loss, I found myself leaning upon that tower for support and consolation, knowing her memory would sanction it as a way to make something good from something very, very bad.