AN. I think I'm missing the point of Kuroshitsuji. I love the background characters too much to swoon over the main characters.

"We'll make a real-life Atlas," the doctors would say, brandishing syringes and their morbid curiosity (the latter of which was infinitely more dangerous). "A man strong enough to shoulder the whole world on his back. A veritable Heracles, even, able to vanquish demons with his bare hands."

"Man must know," they told him as they strapped Finnian bracing into chairs and tables and gurneys. "If he can become a God."

The first injection set his blood on fire, and the heat raged uncontrollably in his body until even the marrow in his bones felt too hot.

The second injection was ice, and sent him into uncontrollable shudders and tremors and they had to still his head to prevent him from biting off his tongue and drowning in his own blood and potentially (heavenforbid) spoiling the experiment.

The third injection he could never remember past the fact that it happened.

The anesthetic never set in, if they ever gave it to him at all.

"For the sake of science," they assured him as they dragged him back mostly-delirious to the waiting room.

It continued on in this way for more time than Finny could remember (because in-between the injections, they had scrambled his brains for fun). They poked and sampled and prodded and tested until his head was filled with nothing but straw and his arms felt like pincushions for a seamstress.

When he was not in the doctor's hands, he dreamt he was. His world was composed of drug-induced sweats and chills and emptiness, and he ceased to notice the difference between dreams and reality.

"For the sake of science," said the faces in his waking dreams. And just because they could, just because he was there and they were there and they had run out of dogs to stick pins into, they stuck them into him.

S-011 died within a week. He was too fragile; his bones splintered into pieces. S-013 lasted three months. The blood vessels in her brain all burst at once.

S-012 wondered briefly (when he had the presence of mind to wonder) what happened to A through R.

And in the end, the doctors got their Atlas, their Heracles, over the bodies of countless failed experiments. This was not before, of course, the lab was shut down and all trace of such inhumanity was erased.

He was the god that didn't exist.

But when Sebastian and Ciel took him in and promised him daylight, and the withdrawals had faded into the occasional mild shudder, Finnian felt no kinship with the heroes that he was supposed to resemble. He imagined King Midas might've had more in common.

The doctors had altered the part in him that was inherently human—the limitations of the body. Hands that intended to be gentle now broke bones. Fingers for touching became weapons.

They had given him the curse without the gold.

No matter, really, as it still destroyed things just as effectively.

His hands could be trained and his strength reined in until he could handle everything as delicately as empty egg shells, but the scars and the changes remained permanent. Midas might have had it better (at least the golden touch didn't come at the cost of freedom), but Finny prefers not to think long on it.

For now, he knows the breaking point of every vase in the Phantomhive mansion, knows how easy it is to snap bones just like tree limbs, but felt no closer to immortality than the doctors who tried to create it.