Ghost in the Machine (Undertaker x Female Reader)

Chapter One.

By Shousei; also published on AO3.

Please note BEFORE READING:
!Manga spoilers
!Trigger warnings include but are not limited to angst, violence, abuse by family members, grief/loss, suicide, PTSD, depression and anxiety
!Potential for NSFW content

Story notes occasionally appear at the end of a chapter.

(〜￣△￣)〜 (〜￣△￣)〜 (〜￣△￣)〜

Chapter One.

I had come to know the smell of earth as an accompaniment to rainy days, or in the spring, as tenant farmers on our estate began to till the soil for new plantings. However, this incarnation of that scent was considerably less innocuous. It was under my nails, in my hair, in the folds of my wrinkled dress. Its menace had expanded itself to the auditory, as small heaps of it rained like thunder on the wood over my head. The sound and the smell of it was all that remained to me in that moment, as all light had disappeared and taken my voice with it.

With each clap of the thunder from overhead, I felt a fine powder of the soil settle down from between small cracks in the wooden planks, onto my skin and the ropes which bound me. I could taste it in my mouth, forced slightly open by the gag which muffled my screams for as long as they'd lasted. It turned my tears into streaks of muddy but silent protest against the end which had come to claim me.

I had always imagined how this might feel; it was not unusual in my case to wonder such macabre thoughts, since they came easily with the whispers that frequently followed me both within my mind and without. In my head, they spoke of who was to be "next," while in the halls of my family's house they muttered a thousand suppositions of what sort of creature I am, and how my doting father had no business keeping me there.

Now that it was seemingly my turn, my heart felt squeezed by a mix of confusion as to why I had not received notice of my own impeding fate, the sheer terror of its realization, and the excruciating sorrow of knowing my father had immediately preceded me in death, despite my inability to be there in time to stop the event.

I was raw with grief, weak from struggling and injury. However, I knew that this was not where I was meant to stay, not yet. I, who couldn't remember a time when I questioned the arrival of death, felt somehow betrayed by his silence leading up to this moment. Hadn't we always been honest with one another? I had even thanked him as my mother lay in her bed, finally peaceful after the pain of illness had made the last months of her life unimaginably wretched. I was five years old, and was convinced already that this was how things were.

That belief was now at an end.

I had already exhausted my voice and any other source of noise I was afforded, so that all that was left to me was the prayer I repeated over and over in my heart. Please, I thought. Please, God... Please, Death. Please... What I begged for in those delirious few moments, I couldn't convey in words even to them. It remained situated in pure feeling, in the shaking of my bound hands, and in the terrible void that remained in place of any manifestation of rescue. The idea that I had been forsaken creeped into my bones like winter's chill, dawning on me in a slow, deliberate way that left my stomach twisting into a new level of panic. Reduced to considering my situation from second to second, I lay there. I cried. I breathed. I was.

Then, suddenly, I was struck by silence. The pounding of earth from above had ceased. I blinked where I lay in the blackness, uncertain of what I hoped to see better from my position. Was it that I had stopped breathing? Had I smothered? Was this what death was...?

I don't know what I had expected. My feelings shifted from fear to something between shock and devastation. There was nothing, and nothing to explain why. I heard only a dry creaking in my throat, as I yearned to give my despair a form I could understand.