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[righteousindignation]

["write a story based on this picture and this gif"]

It's effective, they tell themselves, something that works for them. Always watch her, and she will never act against them without warning. Instead of bars she has glass, and when she does nothing one could be forgiven for thinking she is a pretty little thing trapped inside.

She is not. She is bright as blood and vicious and violent just below the surface, the lover of brutality and chaotic passion, her mind here and there and everywhere. She is dangerous, in a word, and what they don't admit but she knows is that they are terrified.

Good. They should be.

Sometimes she is visited by others, ones they know could calm her or beat her back long enough to recapture her. They speak through the glass, never coming close enough to actually touch her because it is her punishment to have them close and never there, her punishment to have wings bound back and the contact she so desperately craves cut off. They intend to break her like this, and allow visits to rub it in. William is one of those that comes to see her. Dear William, ever the marble statue, perfect little reaper in his black suit and slicked back hair. Once he asked her what she did there, they expected her to be angry and fight back. What did she do in that glass cage? Why was she calm? It was unlike her.

She smiles and tells him she's getting lost in her own mind.

What no one acknowledges is that rage comes in many forms, and the type Grell cultivates is not the brash sort they would expect. Simply because she prefers to be dramatic does not excuse her from patience born of decades inside decades, and the anger she holds is dark, cold enough to burn, allows her to be the master while guiding her movements. Her rage keeps her cold at night, her red now blood on snow instead of roses with bloody thorns. Everything will pay, in time-being quiet now has the dual payoff of surprise and ever being contrary to what they would want to see. She does not live up to expectations, she expects and watches the world fail her.

Grell tilts her head back and falls into the memories of another who had to wait years for vengeance to be theirs.

There are three hundred and sixty five days in three fourths of the years one lives. Nearly always a reaper works, especially when they are shorthanded. And most of the time they take more than one soul in a day's work. She's had the time to do the math, there are tens upon tens of thousands of lives in her, and sometimes it feels incredible that no one has exploded from it, that divinity is capable of accepting them all and remaining whole. But then she has to think on how every single one of them has broken in some form-through violence, through laughter, through happiness, through repression-and it makes her laugh bitterly.

She tells this theory to William on one of his visits. Grell presses her hand to the glass, tells him that if he tries he can be aware of every life he holds in his own, how his Record must be made of so many others, that there is nothing to make him feel more like a god. He tells her that they are not gods, they are reapers, and there is quite the difference. That day, Grell watches him go, and when she tires of that she sinks her teeth into her hand and writes out poetry both remembered and of her own device on the glass, backwards in her own blood.

The look of horror on their faces is worth the effort and the ruined clothes.

One day, after all, despite how they try to pretend they are above her and that her crimes are too wretched to forgive, they will be in need of her. Whether as a warrior or a sacrifice. And she was never a deserter, there's at least that going for her. Patience, she reminds herself on the days when she wants to rip out her hair, control yourself Sutcliffe, patience for the day they think perhaps she will have earned back her life being her own.

She falls to pieces anyway, tears at her clothes and skin and what little she has so she doesn't forget what it's like to have real passion run through her veins. (Never her face, that's still sacred.) When the feeling dies down, she presses the limbs she has scratched against the glass, letting its ever present cool seep into them. Those are the nights she sleeps best and dreams of the entire place on fire, all the lives in her burning up as the flames embrace her, burning until there is nothing but the being that is her left.

Grell wonders if there is enough in her to fill her body if she gave it that much space.

Idle thoughts of a mad reaper who they will never, never break, and when William says that it would be better if she cooperated with them she laughs openly. You'd think that after how long they'd known each other he wouldn't ask those sort of stupid questions. Is there really some deep reason she should cooperate and not have them cooperate with her instead? Today he glances back at her as he leaves and she braids her hair into something intricate that wastes some hours of time, something that should she sleep on it her hair will be full of waves. She takes it all down when she's done, pulling her fingers through the strands that grow ever longer as time passes, and calls herself Mnemosyne for a laugh.

Hair as memories is so apt, however. Easily tangled up, taking care to keep in order, restrained to be manageable. Maybe she'll tell Will on his next visit, and maybe one day he'll touch the glass in return. Maybe it will shatter one day in a violent explosion, her divinity collapsing and coming out in a force that tells them she cannot be broken in their cage because she will break it first. Maybe she will rename herself and find freedom through a life she tries on for a little while.

Maybe, maybe, they will realize that the flaw in glass is that she can see everything they do in return, and with what she sees, what she hears, and what she knows, they have created something far more dangerous than they ever caged.