To all the readers who have waited. Thank you. This one is for you.

-Caladriaharu

"It only remains now to speak of ecclesiastical principalities, touching which all difficulties are prior to getting possession, because they are acquired either by capacity or good fortune, and they can be held without either; for they are sustained by the ancient ordinances of religion, which are so all-powerful, and of such a character that the principalities may be held no matter how their princes behave and live. These princes alone have states and do not defend them; and they have subjects and do not rule them; and the states, although unguarded, are not taken from them, and the subjects, although not ruled, do not care, and they have neither the desire nor the ability to alienate themselves. Such principalities only are secure and happy. But being upheld by powers, to which the human mind cannot reach, I shall speak no more of them, because, being exalted and maintained by God, it would be the act of a presumptuous and rash man to discuss them."

-Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince

Chapter 14: Love and War

Ciel is in a strange state. On the one hand, he can barely keep his head up, and his legs feel as if they have been splinted with logs and then tied together. His eyes attempt to close, and every faculty bears the stamp of extreme exhaustion. His mind, on the other hand, is reeling fast, tumbling from one revelation through to another:

Alois is alive.

Alois is not dead.

I did not kill him.

He has come to take me away.

This is not a dream. I am not dead!

There is three-fourths of a moon in the sky, a scarf of luminous gray clouds partially obscuring its glow in a night as still as a painting. Alois limps quickly with his burden across the courtyard. Ciel barely notices their surroundings, concentrating his entire being on getting one foot in front of the other and not collapsing from the lingering effects of the drugs in his system. He does not like the hitched breathing from his companion through teeth that he can almost feel are gritted against pain. The last thing he saw with any certainty before stumbling with Alois to the cold outside was the lump of humanity sprawled on the ground outside his cell in a shape that could only have been Robert's. Likely, Alois had dealt with him before breaking into his prison. The bully's fate remains unknown, but Ciel has hardly a second thought to spare for his confused, love-lorn guard and jailor now. Wherever Alois is taking him, to salvation or to hell, Ciel is only too willing to comply. Any fate with Alois in it, saved or doomed, was better than the one he thought had been left to him just hours before.

Once during their shaking flight from the grounds, Ciel lifts his head and glimpses the statue of St. Sebastian rising in his vision...

Haunted memories of the dream curl around his consciousness.

He recalls the butler's words: "It is easy for you to give up your soul. But would you save it?"

Yes. Yes!

He recalls the end of that dream-He had pulled himself out of the ashes like a phoenix. He had truly believed Alois was dead, that he had come from the afterlife to break his heart...but the biting cold and the strong arm around him are more real. Until something contradicts his senses in the here and now, this is what he is going to believe in with all of his being.

Alois maintains a hurried pace. The courtyard disappears; they move beyond the grounds of the only home Ciel has known since his own burned and took everything with it. Once, he had refused leaving St. Sebastian's in Alois' plea to flee protesting that he would die out here, and yet it is surprisingly easy to let it all fall away, to accept the forest that quickly swallows them up. It turns out that Ciel had stood too close to the precipice he thought he had been prepared to embrace and found that the darkness there was too much. If he was going to die, then it would not be as a martyr strung up to be pummeled with arrows like the school's namesake.

At this point, with only spare, dappled light from the moon above managing through the pitch black forest canopy, Ciel can believe that the boy with the golden hair is actually part cat-their progress does slow, but his companion's footsteps are sure. Alois begins to give Ciel clipped instructions in a whisper: "watch this root," "duck this branch," "stay to the right-there's a hole there..."

The movement and the adrenaline have kept the boy with the charcoal hair warm to a point under the blanket Alois spread around him. Now, however, the chill is leaking in inexorably, and his smaller frame begins to shiver in spite of his ardent resolve to see this through to whatever end awaits them. He does not complain, but Alois must obviously feel recoils of it down the arm he is holding to steady his companion.

"Hang in there, Ciel. Not...not much more..."

Alois seems more thankful for the thought of it. Ciel doesn't waste breath, merely nods.

The broken iron-wrought fence is a surprise as the forest suddenly breaks. Here, the thin moonlight lands and skims over strange shapes in an otherwise flat ground, casting vague, individual mound-like shadows across the long, wilted grass.

Ciel's eye goes wide.

A cemetary...

Once, it feels like a century ago, Robert had told him that there was a graveyard beyond the grounds. Of course Alois would find it. Of course...

The fence, once sturdy, has decayed into more macabre decoration than function. Alois helps Ciel navigate through a gaping opening where the iron hangs like a set of jagged teeth. He tugs the blanket around Ciel's shoulders, and then wraps an arm around his waist. Ciel finally notices that Alois' hands are both swaddled in bandages with dark spots, but there is no time to assess the damage now. "Hope graveyards don't make you squeamish," Alois grins. In the pale illumination, with whisps of golden hair made transluscent, it would be entirely too easy to mistake his love for a ghost. Except for that haughty mouth.

When I thought he was dead, I begged him to haunt me. Ciel shudders, squeezes his hopes into that living space that Alois' voice had made for them in the silence, and begs inwardly for it all to be real.

At the far end of the cemetery, larger edifices surge from the flat plane. Unerringly, Alois leads them to one of these. He braces his shoulder against the door and pushes with a pained groan. The portal gives way, the grind of stone upon rusty iron heralding their entrance. Alois helps Ciel down three steps, but the mausoleum is not entirely dark-a wide crack in the roof has opened up a small section to the sky, and the light of the moon shines upon an obvious ash pile below it. Despite the aperture above, it is obviously much warmer inside the crypt than outside of it.

Orange light and a flood of heat surprise Ciel as Alois lifts up an old lantern he has just struck, illuminating everything else. Ciel's jaw drops slightly. In the small space, in addition to one large stone sarcophagus, there are crates of things-tins and burlap sacks, a second lantern, two large jugs, a mountain of blankets, an opened tin box of bandages and scissors. There is more that he cannot identify in a darkened corner, but it is enough to know that Alois has been preparing this place for longer than a couple of days.

A hard shudder grips him and he begins to cough. Alois grabs him with one hand before the boy with the one good eye can double over. "Okay, shit. Okay let's...let's get some heat in here. He leads Ciel to a nest of blankets and then sets the lantern on the floor so that he can follow Ciel down to the spread coverings and begin work to wrap him up into a wooly cocoon.

The boy with the charcoal hair does not protest the attention, but he is watchful of the way Alois pauses in his ministrations to bend an arm around his own chest, how he frowns in a twitch from time to time. His golden hair falls forward over his eyes, but Ciel still scrutinizes and memorizes every soft plane of his face in the hard light.

This is no ghost-It is truly the living face of someone he does not deserve after everything he put this boy through in his obstinance. But it is the most beautiful face in the world.

"Okay...you look snug enough."

Ciel blinks. The drugs still have him in some kind of hypnotic hold. Every detail of the moment has alarming presence-he can feel the outline of his lungs inside his chest as he takes a breath, can see each tendril of fog from his mouth linger longer than a split second when he exhales. He can smell Alois' familiar candy scent still clinging to him, even under the blankets. And yet it all swirls into dreamlike ethereality no matter how hard he tries to hold to a sense of reality.

And it hits Ciel all at once.

This is what it is like to feel...happy?

Yes...

Alois is all movement. In a moment of excruciatingly pleasant clarity, there is a wave of heat. And more. Layer upon layer upon layer. And at the center of it, when he finally stands up, is Alois and his smile.

"Better?"

Ciel gazes up at him, rapt. He nods.

"Okay. I'm gonna heat up some water for some tea. And I have food. Are you hungry?"

The boy with one good eye is still trying to process the prospect of getting tea. Actual, hot tea? Is he certain he is still alive? Perhaps he is the dead one, and he somehow managed to slip into Heaven unnoticed...

But Alois moves out of his periphery and is rummaging. "I tried to...get some stuff that you would like, but you...don't like a lot, frankly. Still, you have...to keep your strength up, and eating is pretty important for that."

Ciel's eyebrows draw together again. No, not Heaven. In Heaven, Alois would not be so obviously working through pain. But there is no point in halting him now, even falsely supposing that words alone could accomplish such a Herculean task-it is a matter of time until Alois stops, and then perhaps they can both rest.

The tea arrives too fast. Ciel thinks he may have dozed off, lulled into sleep by his drugged state and the swaying movement of Alois' forelocks as he worked to get him this warm drink. He has to struggle to get his arms free of the blankets, but then the honest to god teacup is in his hands... hot, curling wreathes of steam. Bliss.

"It may taste like shit."

It tastes like all of the warmth of Alois' poor heart spilled out into a convenient vessel for him to savor. It is the most delicious flavour in all the world. With the first sip, heat and life begin to fill him up from the inside. Ciel has not felt this human in so long. The irony of it all happening in a cemetery, surrounded by the dead, with the bleakest of futures for them both does not escape him. However, enveloped by blankets that Alois brought for him, drinking tea that Alois has made for him, Ciel is protected against any fear. In fact, with every drop, Ciel is certain that his soul is somehow being fitted for armor.

After Ciel's hand is also holding a biscuit to nibble on, Alois finally collapses next to him. He grabs an edge of a blanket and pulls it over him. When he turns to favor his wounded side, he is conveniently staring right at Ciel's lips as they put delicate pressure to his meal. The memory of every stolen kiss hovers at the surface, mixed with concern. His lips are still too blue, Alois thinks, but Ciel's colour overall is improving. When they had managed into the mausoleum and he had lit the lantern, it was all he could do to keep from panicking at the drawn, pale body sagging against him. Alois was a fucking god at ignoring pain when he had things that had to get done, and everything had held out long enough to get the place warm enough that it felt like it might not kill them both overnight. But now the adrenaline had well and truly worn off. Still, there were worse things than staring at life returning to his love. Much, much worse things. All the worries of what might have happened in the days he was separated from Ciel are still in the back of his head, but he can't extrapolate from Ciel's actions and nonverbal communication if his condition is due to bad things that had happened to him before Alois could rescue him. Of course, there were more pressing concerns. Ciel had insisted that he couldn't survive out of doors with his constitution, but in Alois' estimation, it wasn't as if staying in that prison cell surrounded by witless and dangerous adults was going to yield a somehow better fate.

I couldn't protect you then, but it won't happen again.

Alois shudders on a shaky sigh and his arms find their way around Ciel's waist. He applies enough pressure to the hug to remind himself that this moment is real, and that they are both still alive. The throbbing pain in his chest is one part a result of his injuries, and two parts love, pressing outward, warming the space between them. This kind of agony is so comforting. He exhales again and floats against his anchor.

"Alois."

Alois' eyes fly open. Had he just nodded off? It was possible. He focuses on the voice, blinks, sits up slightly in alarm. The fire is still crackling, projecting dancing radiance along the apple curve of the other boy's cheek. Ciel is staring at him with intensity that could plumb the depths of his soul. The moment is pregnant with intensity and Alois picks up on it as keenly as if his body was hard wired to Ciel's.

"Yeah? Are you okay?"

"Thank you."

Alois blinks and becomes still.

"Thank you." He says those impossible words again. "Thank you for coming for me. Thank you...for..." And then Ciel's eye does something that Alois has never seen it do before. It begins to glisten in the dim firelight.

Oh. Oh no. Panic begins to surge like a tsunami into lost tranquility.

"Ciel..." Alois sits up fast. He does not like this. There is too much of what he feared in the emotion here. No. This heavy atmosphere, this sense resignation is too familiar. "You don't have to thank me. Like I'm gonna just leave y-"

"Thank you, for living. For not dying."

Alois sucks in a breath. The teacup clutched in Ciel's hands is empty and the biscuit is gone, eaten presumably. How long was I out? Was I out? But he reaches up carefully and takes the cup from the vise, sets it down, away, so he can grab those precious small hands into his bandaged own.

Ho shit.

Now maybe that was the context of all this. Of course Ciel would have thought he was dead. In that battle with the fucking headmaster, Ciel had collapsed. He had been on the floor already, and Claude Faustus was inhuman. Alois had been punched, kicked, and thrown against a wall-only his legs would work reliably. It had only been a matter of time, seconds, maybe, until he was actually really dead. And then his body did what it did-muscle memory-it looked for an exit and it carried him through a window. And then, cut and bleeding, it carried him to his feet, to his path...

His path back. And a hand pulled him, gave him strength to live...this hand. These frail hands.

"Yeah. I didn't die. I had a bloody adventure, but I didn't die. And neither did you. So, thank you. Thank you..." He tilts his head forward and touches it to Ciel's. Their breath mingles, and the moment feels like an eternity of a heaven Alois knows he shouldn't ever even ask for. "I left you there. I'm an asshole."

He feels the forehead turn back and forth.

"No. You did the correct thing. If you had stayed, you would have died and he would have won then and there."

Alois breathes the sigh of relief he didn't realize he had been holding for days. And with every word, Ciel sounds more and more like himself. His old self-the self that actually made sense once in awhile.

"But while I am suitably impressed by your vaunted resourcefulness, there are no guarantees of anything after this moment. Not for you nor I."

Alois hears it, a sigh so soft that it starts the snapping of tripwires in his brain. This is where things went so fucking wrong in the past. He lifts his head away from Ciel's because he needs to see him, needs a hint of what this is going to be.

"Ciel...please don-"

That small palm covers his mouth, closes up his protestations as effectively as he did once to the other boy in a tunnel deep below St. Sebastian's Home for Boys. Had it truly only been a few days ago? But this hand on his face is a tight, firm fit. It has more strength than Alois would have given him credit for in this situation. The surprise of it forestalls any real counter attack for the silencing.

"Alois..." That one blue eye holds shades of woe in tumbles of azure. They skim along the glistening surface of improbable tears...until the words spill out of those pale lips:

"I love you."

Alois' chest seizes. His own eyes fill, but he doesn't know if he is overjoyed or in the pit of despair. He waited so long for those words, but in a graveyard...in a place of the dead, with everything hanging over them...

Why are you saying this now...

And then the sobs start. And once they start, Alois just can't get them to slow down. His chest, no his heart hurts. It tears itself to pieces and finishes what that damn demon started. He tries to take a breath, because breathing is fucking necessary for life, but it's been punched right out of him. He doubles over, his head somehow finding Ciel's lap, and he cries. Even if they were both going to die, he cannot deny anymore that they were the unspoken words that had sustained him through hell. And yet, he hadn't been ready to ever hear them spoken. Had expected them to remain as an airy thing, too pure for words, and he had no defense at all for the surge of writhing emotions he had been managing for so long and can now finally be freed.

He cries harder than the day he cried for Luca. He cries louder than the day he cried for his dead parents. It is deep and weighted with uncertainties and the unbearable emptiness of so many years. But as it leaves him in what feels like torrents, he also feels the burden begin to lighten. It is several minutes before he can even process that Ciel's hand is on his head, in his hair, threading through it, brushing it softly, gently, rhythmically...

A steady beat...a ship in a maelstrom slowly finding its way through a storm that had been reigning for so many years...

Slowly, so slowly, Alois finds the rudder. The feel of it under his palm is so foreign, but there is someone here with him with a much steadier hand...and it is bringing him to port with just his nearness and his touch. Ciel does not ask him why he is crying, and Alois is grateful. He already knows. Even that revelation is a balm for his tormented heart.

And then, the silence...

The firelight flickers along the walls, casting shadows in ways that would have terrified children their age who had not already known death and torture and all of the real horrors of the world. Now the shadows are solace and the fire just life-giving warmth.

Alois finally takes a deep breath. He sighs. Ciel's hand has not stopped its comforting brushes. Sometimes his fingers pass over his temple and Alois trembles at the fragile perfection of this moment in time. He wants to live it until the world crumbles away and everything becomes dust...

"I had a dream." Ciel's voice is barely a whisper, but because of the absolute stillness of their universe, it travels in and through Alois' heart. "I had a dream that you were dead. And I believed it."

Alois stirs. In Ciel's lap, he feels the other boy's body tighten with remembered mental pain. Sluggishly, and with difficulty, he begins to sit up again. The hand in his hair lets go somewhat reluctantly.

"That dream sounds pretty awful."

"Yes. I...must have convinced myself thoroughly. In my dream you came to me with..."

He stops, and Alois notices the bitten bottom lip. It's red. He's been worrying at it. Maybe he's been fighting telling this thing that he obviously needs to say. If so...

"Who did I come with?"

Ciel looks him in the eye.

"Luca."

It's another lance through Alois' swollen heart.

Ciel balks, but then his shoulders square slightly as he grasps for the strength to soldier on through the rest of it. "In my dream, you came with Luca. You politely informed me that I... was a substitute for your brother."

Alois blinks. The words help gather the screaming voices in Alois head into attentive silence. "What?" But Ciel does not repeat nor elaborate. Instead, he fixes that insurmountable gaze on his companion and does not let go. He knows that he has been heard correctly. It is only a matter of knowing how much of his dreaming suspicion was real and how much was dream. This is not a wall between them, but there is a held distance. And for obvious reasons. If Ciel thinks...

Alois turns his whole body to face the other boy, and he can now plainly see that Ciel is fighting on his own emotional battlefield. Alois is not book smart, no, but he is wise enough to understand that Ciel is breaking rule after rule of his own to present all of these weapons to the only person left in the world who can wield them and do actual damage.

It's hard to find words, but he has to. And he has to surmount his own shortcomings with language to make it something that Ciel will understand and never question. He braces himself. The words come from a scar at the pit of his soul, but if Ciel could do all of this, suffer all of this, then Alois could not turn away from that kind of courage now.

"Ciel," he breathes, "I loved my brother. I loved him more than anything up to the point in my life when he died. I won't say I don't think of him, and of how I fucking failed him." Alois' head falls forward, and right there he thinks he is just going to stop. But it's not the answer to the unspoken question, and he would have to consider himself unworthy of that enormous confession if he could not make it to the end. "I know why your brain made you dream that shit. It's because...I said all that stuff about my brother to you when you were talking about admitting to crimes you didn't do. But Luca went to Heaven. He's not suffering here, a place he must have been miserable in, even with me around to tell him dirty jokes. You aren't a fill-in for Luca, I swear."

Ciel is still saying nothing, but he is listening.

Alois takes a deep breath.

"Ciel, I didn't think this kind of love was something people like me could have. Loving my brother was comfortable, familiar." He shakes his head as he tries with his faulty vocabulary to put his emotions into words. "When I'm with you...my head hurts, my chest hurts, I get dizzy and hot. I wanna kiss you and hold you and protect you. But I want to live inside you. I want to be a part of you. I've thought of how to be closer, to be under your skin, to be near your heart to hear it. Just to hear it..." He feels his body beginning to vibrate, as if Ciel is already a physical part of him, a special kind of nerve, that when touched, triggers the mania that he is so loathe to repress-the verbal recall of all the madness makes it hard to stay in this moment. Alois wants to laugh. He wants to jump up from his seat, run out the door, and do cartwheels and pirouettes around gravestones of dead boys who can't know the sheer fucking intensity of this fucking goddamn love!

"Alois."

Ciel's voice snaps him back. He realizes that his hands are clutching his arms and he's rocking. His fingernails are digging into his flesh and his lacerated hands are pulsing with agony at the pressure. It's okay, this pain. It's okay...

"Alois."

But he has to come back. A voice tells him that it's important, so he swallows and takes a breath. Ciel's hands are taking his, pulling them away from his body, disarming him of the power to hurt himself in the boiling emotions that have always been a precursor to chaos.

"I'm okay. Fuck. What was I saying? God." He takes another deep breath. Centers himself in this warm place where the only person he loves is still holding onto him. When his eyes meet Ciel's, the truth coalesces. He reaches for the words with headlong confidence. "Ciel, you are the center of my fucking universe. You aren't a substitute for Luca. Everything in my life until I met you was a substitute for you."

Ciel makes a small noise. The boy with the one blue eye looks like he has been stabbed and he is trying to act like everything is fine. Alois doesn't know if this is good or bad. Everything is in strange territory. Up is down and left is right and the globe is spinning, finally, to his satisfaction but he can no longer figure out where Ciel will go at any given moment. His certainty waivers. "I'm sorry, I suck at this. I don't know how to explain it better. Please don't dream of me being dead anymore. That's too sad, Ciel, it's just too damn sad. You just said you loved me and I can start to maybe live again."

"Stop!" Ciel shakes his head. He pulls his hands away abruptly and hides his face. Alois holds his breath. When the hands slowly fall away, there is a boy with no mask, no hidden features, stricken because he has been surprised to the point of pain. And then Ciel's lips turn up into the faintest of smiles in direct contrast to the tear that escapes his one good eye without an attempt to cover up the obvious show of weakness. Alois is transfixed, watching it carve a glistening path around the globe of his cheek to disappear into the darkness under his chin. "Your...explanation," Ciel takes a shuddering breath, "was eloquent enough. It is enough. I understand, and I believe you. I do believe you."

Alois thinks he is going to faint. He reaches out because the need to gather Ciel into his arms is so strong that it is physically hurting him. But Ciel holds up a hand.

"Then there is just one thing left. And then, no matter what happens, whether we succeed in our gambit for freedom or not, I can be satisfied."

Alois sees the thread. The thinnest, tiniest shred of hope dangling between them. This Ciel...this one...this is a Ciel he has never known-honest, but still so beautifully fucking composed. These opposites in harmony-the beauty of it is going to wreck him over and over and over again...

"What is it?"

Ciel takes a breath. He is steeling himself for something.

"You should see it."

Alois immediately flushes. It's an automatic response. "See it? Oh. Oh whoa...oh whoa wait. Wait just a second, maybe we're going a little faster than-"

"You idiot, not that."

When Ciel suddenly blushes from his fingertips to the crown of his head, Alois realizes he maybe jumped to a conclusion. Ah, damn his dirty mind! It was going to ruin his life!

"Oh. Right. I didn't actually think...okay, see what?"

Ciel shakes his head. He retreats into the blanket. Whatever strength he was gathering a second ago is quickly draining.

"No, no. No don't go away like that." Alois follows him forward, but carefully, gently. Ciel is laying back in the nest and Alois reduces the distance between them to less than zero. And he inches even closer, waiting for the cue that he should stop. But it is not coming.

When they are eye to eye, Alois takes up the role as comforter. Fingers alight on Ciel's cheek, on the face of the boy who is simply watching him, considering, weighing, fighting with himself even now.

"Show me, Ciel. I want to know every part of you, whatever it is."

"You will...find it grotesque." Ciel says it simply, with conviction. "Everyone who has seen it does."

Alois smirks. "I am not everyone, Ciel. If I were, you'd hate me right along with the rest of them."

Ciel narrows his eyes, and then lets forth another sigh. "You are strangely adroit with language tonight."

The blond boy shrugs. "Fucking miracles have happened one after the other these past few days."

"Fine." Ciel's hand reaches up, back behind his head. He tugs at the strap behind his ear, and the surgical mask over his face falls away, though Ciel's long forelocks still keep the truth of that space hidden.

The last barrier. Alois suddenly understands what he means.

Holy shit...

Slowly, deliberately, Ciel's hand pushes the hair out of the way.

Alois looks. He has to look. He wants to look, but not out of morbid curiosity, but because this is the source of Ciel's greatest shame. This is the mark of the moment in his life that stripped him of absolutely everything that had any meaning to him. It was why he was at St. Sebastian's home for boys. It is connected to the fate they both now share...

He sees the ruined flesh around the eye socket. The socket is a dark, empty pit that once knew light. There is simply nothing there, and while the eyepatch shields others from the horror and wrongness of it, there is nothing to spare Ciel himself from bearing witness to this same sight in a mirror or a window or a reflection in someone else's eyes or even his memories over and over and over and over every day of his life for the rest of his life...

The eternal hollow of a harrowed life...

Alois takes it all in. He feels Ciel watching him, waiting keenly for a response.

"Holy shit."

It seems to be the reaction he was expecting. The tension suddenly leaves the smaller body in a sign of resignation. But Alois is not done.

"Holy shit, Ciel. This didn't fucking kill you? Are you kidding me?" Ciel narrows his one eye. Over his ruined eye, the eyebrow half moves. There is still some sensation there. "You fucking lived through this, and you don't think we are going to make it out of here? Are you kidding?" Alois shakes his head. "You're the strongest person I've ever met, Ciel. It went all the way through and you still lived through that. Don't you see? This isn't a sign of everything you lost, it's a sign of what you still have." The boy with the one good eye is dumbfounded, but listening. Alois has that need to run around the gravestones again, but he has to keep it together for the sake of this moment. "Ciel, you've clearly got a fortress around your brain for a reason. You're too much for death-yours and mine. You're so amazing that you didn't need that goddamn eye to find me! To see me. To actually see me. I love you. I love you."

The revelation, the warring desires of madness and Ciel's love confession are kind of ungluing Alois. Completely. There is too much energy to not do something entirely unbelievable right now! He can't imagine what it will be, but it's going to happen soon...and then maybe he'll just die of the joy entirely.

Ciel's arms suddenly have him around the neck, and then their lips are pressed together, mouths together, open, and Alois can feel his madness find purchase in this kiss. It lights the path, and he is so eager to topple down this route, to tumble head over fucking heels. He is pulled forward, half sprawled over a yielding body, and he has to extend a hand just to keep from squishing the smaller boy. Pulling Alois off balance has been Ciel's fucking gift since the boy with the blond hair had first laid eyes on him, and, clearly, that was not about to stop. The small hand at the back of his neck moves into his hair, gripping him by the roots so that he can't escape, and then they are so clearly joined that Alois is not sure where he begins and Ciel ends.

Oh, God, this kiss...

After the initial shock of the contact, there is a moment where Alois' jubilation turns to panic and then into a mania that feels like a cyclone of water being sucked down the drain of his lover's soul. But then, impossibly, Ciel takes complete control and steers them both around the whirlpool with a rhythm that matches the beating of his heart.

Their hearts.

Ciel and all of his broken parts and Alois and all of his broken parts finally make up one perfect person.

Alois feels himself sigh into the kiss, and then they sink together against the wall of the mausoleum. Hands in hair, noses glide together, drink in the air that their mouths cannot because they are drenched together. Ciel's enthusiasm for kissing becomes Alois' new reason for living. Without effort or a battle, Alois assumes the lead. He teaches his lover the rhythm of a kiss. His tongue rolls against Ciel's, and there is an answer. Like the waves of the ocean, they find a pace, and then they pause to breathe with their mouths, but only so that Alois can tilt Ciel's face and kiss him from a new direction.

This is Ciel's taste, Alois shudders. It is bright, highlighted by the scent of soap from his cheeks. It is rich and real and all his. Forever. His. When he pulls Ciel's face towards him to kiss over his forehead, the eyebrows of his good eye, Ciel doesn't protest at all. He is basking in it, and the reaction gives the boy with the blond hair the confidence to trail his lips over...

The boy with the one good eye shudders but does not pull away when Alois gives his other eyebrow attention. He cannot kiss something that is forever gone, but he can remind Ciel what he still has. And Alois is not afraid of that pit that might horrify anyone else. That emptiness is a part of Ciel, after all, and he will love it as much as he loves every other part of him.

Ciel sighs so heavily, that Alois is almost afraid he has kissed all of the breath from his body. He pulls away slightly, and the vision of Ciel's plump lips and absolutely content expression is beyond surreal. The other boy glides the fingers of his right hand into Alois', netting them together, and his attention turns to the bandages.

"How badly did he hurt you?"

Alois's exhalation is a half laugh.

"I'm not feeling any pain right now, Ciel."

"Alois."

Ahh, there it is. Commanded so easily with just a word and the tilt of an eyebrow.

"Um. I think I have a cracked rib. Breathing hurts, but it's far more manageable now. My left shoulder was dislocated, but that's happened before. It just aches. I hit my head. You've probably felt the lump there by now. And, uh...my hands were cut up from the glass. I was wearing my blazer, or that could have been worse. I got all the glass out, skin will heal. Hell, all of it will heal." He grins a little self-deprecatingly. "I've been beaten up before. I know how to take these lumps. Luckily, I have a hard head and I-"

Ciel leans forward and touches his forehead to Alois', taking care not to squeeze the bandaged hand too hard. "You escaped. You're alive." The statements are commands in and of themselves, to leave the matter there-as if this was all part of Ciel's master plan from the beginning.

But Alois has doubts he can forgive his flight from his love's side so easily.

"They buried Freckleface tuite sweet. Bet they barely waited an hour before they said some prayers and then chucked him into the dirt. It was a whole day that I had to hide out in the cold licking wounds before I could even get to sneak back to find out what had happened to you."

Ciel imagines Alois, bleeding and in pain, hunkering down in this place without even a fire to help him. Every movement, any smoke, would have given him away, but he managed to escape right under the groundskeeper's considerably long nose. The boy with the one good eye did not think Alois was capable of that level of patience, but apparently there were many nuances to this boy's character that he never fully appreciated.

But he chooses his next words carefully.

"What did you find out about me?"

"I snuck into the dorms and hid. I overhead things-that you were alive, in solitary confinement. I spent some time 'thinking about the error of my ways' there before you and I actually met, so I knew where it was. But there were too many people around you, it pissed me off. And then someone came and took you away." Alois takes a breath. "Ciel, where did they take you? What happened?" His face darkens. "And why the fuck was that beady-eyed pig squatting outside the room like the fucking warden?"

"Robert said he was there because he was the only boy tall enough to see through the slide door. Apparently, my physical condition required oversight." Ciel shudders at the remembrance of those heavy hands attempting to wrestle love from him like it was something that could be physically stolen. "Did you kill him?" He asks, remembering the silent mass of dark limbs as Alois pulled him from the bowels of hell.

"I don't know. At that point, all I was trying to do was to get you out as quickly as possible. He was actually asleep when I punched him in the face."

In spite of Robert's many faults of character, Ciel is somewhat relieved, if for no other reason than that Alois' name with another murder against it would have made it impossible to clear.

"Ciel," The tone of the other boy's voice drops and his eyes reflect the change from petty disgust to outright malice. "What happened to you."

It is not a time Ciel wishes to re-live. In truth, the memory of it is ameliorated by Alois' survival, but it was definitely the lowest, most shame-filled, desperate moment of his life. Alois took a beating, suffered injuries that would cow an adult, and dragged himself off to frigid uncertainty. By comparison, Ciel could not even withstand five blows of a paddle. He feels disgraceful.

"The teachers interrogated me."

"Was the Headmaster there?"

"Of course he was."

Alois seethes while Ciel attempts to proceed as if he is re-telling the experiences of a stranger whose life has no bearing on his own. "They asked questions. They attempted to lead me to provide evidence that you were responsible for Freckleface's death." There is a pregnant scant seconds where Ciel can feel every atom of Alois' body leaning in to hear the verdict.

"Please, god, tell me you didn't say you did it..."

"I did not."

Alois slumps over, a relieved breath sweetening the air.

"I won nothing by it, but they will have to go to hell to find their answers." Ciel wishes his tone would have had the note of disdain that the phrase warranted, but, truthfully, he had felt nothing but utter defeat upon being carried from that room.

"Did he touch you?"

Ciel sighs. There is little to gain by refusing to answer questions. "Three blows of the paddle." He manages it with airy detachment, but the reddening of his cheeks and the shudder of his spine is enough to betray him.

"Fuck. That bastard. I'm going to kill him..."

Alois understands everything. But this murderous intent is an ominous grip on both their futures, and Ciel is not willing to fit Alois for that battle. Thankfully, he knows a perfect distraction for their mutual woes, and is not above employing it to salvage the tentative pleasure of their reunion.

"Alois," he whispers the name, which draws the blond boy's attention from the homicide of his mind's eye to the pale face of his lover. Ciel has let his hair fall back over his ruined eye, but there is enough of a shadow to remind Alois of his previous declaration: We have already survived so much, and there is an uncharacteristic warmth in his voice that stirs Alois' over-swollen heart with breathless anticipation. And just like that, Ciel is actually reaching towards him, drawing him down for another kiss. Alois feels his heart leap, and he spills into his companion's efforts with more than double the enthusiasm.

The rest of the night is a blur to Alois. At some point, the kiss breaks and Ciel murmurs something about getting under the blankets. Obediently, the boy with the blonde hair complies, but not because he is at all cold or even hurt. Strangely, the pain in his side is completely gone when he settles in, gathering the boy with the charcoal hair and one good eye to him with careful tenderness. The madness that alternately veiled reality and forced it into startling focus all at once is tamed.

Alois feels completely drunk. Exhausted. Exhilarated. And then Ciel is honest-to-god kissing his cheek and he turns his head back to those lips, an open mouth. A baby birdy, he thinks, kind of giddily. The sweetest...the most precious. His life...his soul...

At that moment, Claude Faustus lowers himself to a crouch to visually inspect the moaning pile of clothing and torpid flesh on the floor that partially blocks the open doorway to the cell of solitary confinement. There is no blood on the victim's clothing or the wooden floor, but by candlelight, the bruise on his cheek is still flowering. It is a ripe plum that creeps to eclipse the corner of Robert's left eye. It appears quite painful. But not painful enough.

The headmaster is not often surprised. He does not enjoy the sensation that his hour of complete triumph appears to have been undermined, and the witless child at the end of his gloved fist is not the one who should have opened his eye in terror just now.

Robert gasps as Claude Faustus easily hoists him up to his feet and beyond, a good two inches, the collar of his cotton white shirt both a support and a unbreakable vise. Impotently, one bully grabs at the arm of the other in a muted exclamation of fear and distress. The wordless gurgle that dribbles from his purpling lips does nothing to liberate him.

Faustus tilts his head, almost clinically interested in shades of red to blue that chase each other across Robert's expression.

"It was an excruciatingly simple task," he begins in a voice that perfectly suits his office as a headmaster. "Your only job was to keep this door closed."

Robert's eyes roll up. They bulge as if his brain were an expanding balloon searching for space to fill.

"Tch." Faustus puts Robert on his feet, holds him steady until the distressed boy can gain his bearings. When Faustus removes his hand reluctantly, his victim bows over immediately, coughing and gasping with the greatest drama. While the notion of putting the failure out of his misery was appealing to the headmaster, there would be use for his testimony. Of course, the Headmaster knows who it was that crept into the sealed wing with a master key, who dispatched the useless guard with one perfectly aimed fist, and stole his precious Ciel away. Faustus had timed his visit to coincide with the waning of the drugs in his system-he wanted Ciel to know exactly was at his bedside, had cornered him into a locked room with no friends and no help forthcoming. He wanted to see, again, that face of complete destruction, to savor it this time now that none of the others could witness how he salivated at the very thought of his lips against that yielding flesh...

The heavy, tall child has backed himself against a wall, fear and the thread of ripening hate emerging from the expression that is now too pale. The fear was anticipated. The hate, however...

Faustus narrows his eyes at the shred of defiance. Perhaps he should kill this boy, after all. Unless he can be useful in sealing Alois Trancy's fate as a witness, there is no reason he should continue to draw breath for prolonging the headmaster's final victory. When he takes a step forward, however, a familiar and unpleasant sensation pulls his attention to the courtyard beyond the wing. The lure of it is more enticing than the punishment he was about to render, and he turns away from murder.

The double doors fly open, and Claude Faustus pulls his cloak around him in a stormy billow as he gathers the measured steps between himself and the statue of St. Sebastian.

Narrowed eyes glare behind panes that pick up and reflect the moon's radiance. "I do not think you are abiding by the rules of the game, Michaelis..."

"Perhaps that is because you are the only one who considers this a game." The resonance of the voice is magnified by the walls of the building. It would have tricked any mortal into believing the statue itself had spoken.

A smirk defies the eerie reply. "Oh, but it is a game. One that I have been winning for quite some time." Claude Faustus stops several feet from the base of the statue, a malicious grin highlighting his features.

"And yet, such an unhappy expression you were making just now." A figure steps out from behind the statue of the martyr, one whose crimson eyes gaze down at his audience, holding his place above as a king to petitioners. His presence a palpable thing-it hushes even the minute sounds of night, stills the air, and feels mightier than the stone he perches upon.

Claude's unpleasant smile disappears. A clenched jaw heralds the ripple of malice in the atmosphere, making even the air repugnant.

"This is only a delay of the inevitable, an extra move or two. When I find him, and I will find them both, I will be sure to taste that final fruit slowly, to savor every drop of despair at the bottom of that soul, and then you will be back to square one."

Sebastian tilts his head as if listening to the protestations of a petulant child, and his reception of it as almost as condescending. "If you are so certain, then why the long face?" He smiles subtly, and it carries too much confidence. "But, I assure you, I have broken no rules. After all this time, you simply cannot accept defeat."

Claude Faustus snorts. "I thought you said this was not a game?"

The figure shrugs. "You use that metaphor. Do not fault me for attempting to speak to you on your own level." He leaps lightly to the ground and takes sure steps forward towards his adversary. "For example, what if I told you that he is already in Heaven?"

The Headmaster clenches his fists, but a snarky half laugh punctuates the stillness. "I would say that you are lying. Your love of irony is eclipsed by your helpless compassion for broken things."

"Tsk tsk," Sebastian wags his finger. "If we are speaking still in metaphor, then I assure you, I am not lying. It is too bad that you cannot see it for yourself." He takes a breath as the two creatures finally come face to face with each other, charging the air between them with an angry hum of opposing energy. "I will have you return them all," the 'butler' murmurs. "Every last one."

"Interesting," Faustus smiles, "I wonder how you will do that, since you cannot move against me yourself unless our Masters' pact is broken. Until then, the only way you reach forward is with human pawns, and I have already proven they are no match for me."

"Ah," Sebastian breathes, idly brushing a non-existent piece of dust from the other creature's lapel, "Oh, Claude, if only they were simply pawns. If only they were..."

The dismissive, mysterious tone has finally cut the Headmaster's patience to nothing. His hand darts forward and seizes the offending wrist instinctively, craving reprisal for the delay and the gratification he had been expecting. Immediately the crackle of energy between them becomes a spear of unpleasant sensation that rampages down the Headmaster's spine. He is forced to release his nemesis almost as soon as he has him. Frustration is beginning to leak to the surface. "Where is CIel Phantomhive?"

Sebastian smiles, and, oh, it is insufferable.

"I told you. He is in Heaven. As Hamlet would say, 'Send thither to see. If your messenger find him not there, seek him in the other place yourself.'"

Claude Faustus grinds his teeth. Despite the fragile balance of power, he is loathe to simply let this one go...

A rattle from the door behind him is a reminder that there is still another wakeful set of eyes and ears somewhere. Faustus turns his head to find the interloper. In the span of a second, the saint spirit is gone. At the Headmaster's feet is a solitary black feather.

With only the setting moon to light its way, a crow finds the opening in the mausoleum. In a shutter of beating wings, it lands upon the stone sarcophagus, clawed feet finding purchase as it surveys the grave-turned storehouse. Two boys, one blond haired and one with charcoal hair are entwined in a tight ball under several blankets propped up against a wall. Alois's head is leaning on his left shoulder, and Ciel's rests just at his collarbone. It is easy to believe they had fallen asleep in the middle of a kiss, like the reverse of some ancient fairy tale. Both faces are softly glowing in the reflection of cooling embers.

The crow blinks red eyes. It turns its head to arrange a few feathers along its back, and then it hops down onto the scanty pile of dry twigs near what is left of the fire. Dark wings shudder, bracing it in place as the nocturnal visitor lifts one stick, then two, tossing them into the dark coals streaked with orange. A tiny shower of sparks curl up from the agitated embers, the black feathers shimmering with iridescence as the crow flaps its wings, coaxing the fire, by degrees, back into a little more warmth. When a steady crackle trickles, the crow hops back onto the sarcophagus, blinks once more, stretches its wings to heaven, and disappears into the waning night...

When Alois finally opens his eyes to a subtle scraping sound, he is aware of light and a lonely chill. The radiance is due to the watery morning leaking through the opening of their shelter above. The chill is due to the fact that Ciel is no longer in his arms.

This causes him to sit up abruptly, in full panic mode.

But Ciel is not gone. He is wrapped up in one of the blankets near the meager fire and his fingers grip a fountain pen against a piece of parchment set on a nearby crate as a makeshift desk. Eyepatch replaced, he is clearly intent on his work-the scratch of pen is methodical, precise, measured and determined.

Alois blinks.

Despite his pale cheeks, there is a kind of life in Ciel that Alois hasn't seen since...

Well, since never. He finds that he's transfixed by it, as if this boy is a precious artifact that was more suited to a museum that Alois would have been barred from on principle alone. He doesn't want anything to move to disturb this tranquil purity.

Unfortunately, Ciel is not as patient. He tilts his head, eye narrowing at his companion's strange stillness even though he was clearly awake.

"I took the liberty." He holds up the pen, questioningly. "Pilfered from Professor Cooper, my English teacher? He was on a rampage about it last week." Incredibly, there is a hint of a smile on those lips. "You did leave it out for me, I presume."

Ahh, God! Ciel's voice, this timbre...

"Yes. You presume correctly. A little present, yes. I'm so glad you like it..." Alois turns and crawls out of the blankets, slowly, with purpose, stalking his prey like a cat.

Ciel raises an eyebrow. "What are you doing?"

Alois' grin quirks at one end, and the liquid pools of his eyes deepen and darken.

The boy with the one good eye blinks, but he is unsurprised when Alois pounces on him. His attack is not heavy-in fact it is perfectly executed to ensure that the pen in Ciel's hand does not spill even a drop upon the paper.

"Alois, I cannot write correspondance like this," Ciel says blandly from amidst his companion's steady embrace. Alois ducks his head, kisses Ciel's neck, and the shiver of reaction is enough to satisfy him for the moment.

"My apologies, my lord. What are you writing?" Alois nestles his chin on Ciel's shoulder and absolutely shudders with the love that has filled up his body instead of blood or organs or regret. He can see Ciel's precise, beautiful handwriting, but it takes extreme effort to make out the words, and so he doesn't try.

"A letter," his lover answers him, the hint of annoyance rising in the tang of his response, but Alois just smiles wider. "And it is difficult to do so when I cannot move."

"I love you, Ciel." The boy with the blond hair likes how Ciel squirms slightly. "Tell me you love me again."

The exhalation is a sigh, and then Ciel is pushing at Alois' ribs, but carefully.

"I have said it. It is not necessary to repeat it on the hour."

Ciel sounds like the obnoxious, arrogant child he first met. The boy with the blond hair wants to cry from this level of joy. The emperor of his heart of this moment had kissed him so much in the darkness. They kissed for hours, forever...Alois' lips and his tongue can still feel those tiny little teeth, the shape of Ciel's mouth..."I love you, Ciel Phantomhive..."

"Tch." The arms pressing at his enclosure gain a bit more force. "I know, you idiot. Now, release me and make us some tea. A few of those crackers from last night would not be refused either."

Alois giggles. This is the Ciel he remembers, and yet, everything feels new. It is scalding. The demand passes from his ear directly to his nethers and he feels oddly like he might come from that command so airly given to him. It is ironic that they kissed for hours night before and only now did the rest of his body feel wonderfully, positively filthy. But he couldn't do something so vile all by himself when Ciel is clearly working so hard...

Ciel is working!

"Is this thing you are writing part of 'the plan?'" Alois gasps with sudden inspiration.

Ciel purses his lips. "A part, perhaps."

"Who is it to?"

"Whom."

"What?"

"To whom is it."

Alois blinks. "That's what I just asked."

Ciel sighs at the lesson that would likely never be learned. "At the very least, there is someone at my parents' old summer estate. I am not sure who it is but..." He recalls the address on the card he had once received from the mysterious butler who persists in his dreams from that first day of meeting under the shadow of St. Sebastian's statue.

"Ah, the master of the house...that should be you?"

"Since I have not been notified by anyone I assumed that the estate was liquidated for the purpose of settling my parents' debts. Presumably, there is someone now living there with connections to this school. Let us just say, the coincidence is extreme."

The warmth of Alois' body suddenly departs as he disengages himself to meet Ciel's demand for sustenance.

"I can't believe you like my tea," Alois murmurs as he works. It is enough to drag a corner up on Ciel's mouth, but when he feels the other set of blue eyes perusing him, he has already gone back to his work.

When the silence deepens and a cup is eventually placed before him, Ciel signs his name to the paper in hard lines, blots the letter carefully, and then seals it in an envelope he found with the purloined stationary. That task accomplished, he lifts the cup to his lips and is reminded, again, just how terrible the tea actually is, and yet, how perfect.

Oh, last night.

Oh, this day.

Out of his periphery, he finds Alois' figure and tracks it, watches as he bends down, scouring a neat pile of supplies, searching for biscuits. Just 24 hours ago, Ciel had thought he would never see this person again, and it had filled him with such regret that nothing felt comparable-not the loss of his family, his birthright, his eye, or his innocence.

Honestly, had Alois admitted that he had been a substitute for Luca or that his deformed face was grotesque, Ciel would never stop being grateful that he was not dead. No matter what, Alois was probably destined for the closeness he craved just for the mere act of breathing, but Ciel is not about to tell him that-at least while there were more tasks that needed to be done to secure their future.

Presently Alois pulls forth a tin with an exhalation of triumph. When he moves to join Ciel to eat, sitting closer, even than their days sitting in the refectory, Ciel suddenly finds that he actually breathes easier. Alois Trancy is a furnace. His breath smells like candy, and his closeness physically supports the struggle to live. Alois is completely unaware of how beautiful he is, pushing a lock of unkempt hair out of his face as he bends over the tin, trying to pry the unyielding metal apart. Ciel observes the crook of his fingers as they crawl over the puzzle, seeking weak points, the pursing of his lips and the arch above his eyes that dip in frustration and a flash of malice until the lid pops off. Instantly the feral features smooth and explode into a bright grin replete with flashing teeth.

"Ha! Here you go." Alois tilts the tin toward Ciel and then blinks.

Ciel flushes to the roots of his hair and attempts to glance away to the forgotten warm cup in his cradled fingers, but he was not fast enough by far. Alois is so close, all he has to do is tilt slightly and he is kissing Ciel's cheek. Ah, so gently.

"Here is your biscuit, my lord," Alois murmurs into Ciel's ear, and the sound has a smooth, hot texture like the globe of a lit lamp.

Ciel's heart thumps and his body tingles. But he is no longer a prisoner of propriety-when he admitted his love, he gave propriety back to the adult dogs who had imprisoned him. And that is how he is able to answer Alois' seduction with barely a backward glance at the formalities pressed upon him since birth. Much to Alois' surprise, Ciel turns to face his lover and kisses him full on the lips.

Alois freezes with shock. It is Ciel's turn to feel triumphant as the body next to him stirs. The boy with the blond hair sits up onto his knees, breathing a name so plaintively, that Ciel almost feels guilty for pulling away and relieving Alois' forgotten tin of a biscuit. Which he promptly begins to chew.

"Aaaaaaaaaah! I am gonna dieeeee!" Halted, Alois dramatically flops onto his back, arms splayed out, his expression bedazzled and cherry red. "What...what the hell. This isn't fair. You cannot. You just...Ciel. Ciel. Cielllllllllllllllll!"

Ciel smirks and swallows a bite of the meagre breakfast, cozy suddenly, in the nascent application of this new power he has. They are literally surrounded by death here, but the boy with the one good eye cannot remember the last time he felt so...free. In the back of his mind, he knows that they cannot stay like this, however.

"Okay, just...just do whatever. I'm ready..." Alois breathes, eyes closed, the picture of absolute submission to a new level of bliss.

For half a second Ciel considers another test of his power...

And then something in the air shifts. The smaller boy does not actually hear anything, but Alois is into a crouch in a second. He tosses his blanket over the fire and smothers it mercilessly with both hands as Ciel freezes in place. His heart, which had been thudding at a pleasantly clipped pace, is now pounding hard enough to hear the force of it in his ears. When he blinks, Alois is across the mausoleum, pressed to the wall, a rusted haft from the wrought iron fence clasped in both hands, point down, in stabbing position.

A second crawls its way forward, dragging another behind it, and then another. Alois' hands are gripping the iron so tightly that the trembling tip is the only thing moving in their universe. Even Ciel's lungs have stopped, the crisp air sucking what is left of the warmth of his tea into the sky above them.

Finally, Alois leans his ear against the stone and waits.

Ciel cannot stem a flare of fear that overcomes him without warning. In his damned imagination, the cemetery is held together by thin white strands and at the center of it all is a spider with yellow eyes. In his mind's eye, he sees the doors thrown inward, a hand around Alois' throat, squeezing the life from him so slowly. He's making a show of it for Ciel, presenting that odious grin full of secret malice and foul desires. Fear fuels the wintry fingers that clutch at bruised lungs. The panic is real because the danger is absolutely real...

"Must have been an animal."

Ciel's gasp is a clipped thing that cannot offer true communication of his state, but it does not go unnoticed.

"Hey, hey..." Alois can finally remove his focus from the false emergency and fix upon the one at its start. "Hey, Ciel!" And with a breath, he is suddenly in Ciel's space, his hand on the other's cheek, foreheads pressed together. The warmth is returning, but the dread lingers. "Ciel, Ciel, I'm right here. It was nothing. Shit. Please. How do I help?" Alois hastily removes the teacup from Ciel's rigid fingers and wraps his arms around the other boy's shoulders. It is his instinct to press close, because he literally can do nothing more to help. Ciel closes his eye and soaks it in. When he gasps again, he is able to take in a little more air, and a little more. He moves away from the yawning pit of unconsciousness by slow degrees. "That's it, Ciel. Breathe. Please just breathe." Alois turns his head onto Ciel's shoulder and breathes with him, as much to quell his own panic as to calm his companion. It is a lifetime before Alois feels Ciel's body become pliant in his arms, signaling that the perhaps the worst is over. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you..."

Ciel shakes his head. "No. Do not apologize. I am fine."

Alois doesn't immediately respond, but when Ciel is able to hold his tea cup to his lips without too much faltering, he makes a little more space between them. "I keep expecting someone-dogs at the very least," Alois admits by way of explanation. "Nothing and no one has been here since Freckleface's really quick burial."

Ciel nods. Alois is not expecting a response, but the phenomenon has not gone unnoticed with his more bookish companion. "It could be that the cemetery itself is a natural defense against...whatever Faustus is," he begins academically. Somehow, it is easier to talk about the headmaster in this way, as if he is a puzzle on paper that ink could draw out and map.

"What do you mean?"

"A cemetery is hallowed ground. Hallowed means 'blessed.' Traditionally, this is supposed to keep evil at bay, though human agents would not be affected by it, hence the solitary groundskeeper."

Alois notices that the temperature has dropped precipitously since he had to put out the fire to douse the tell-tale smoke that curled up through the hole in the roof. He peels the heavy blanket off of the makeshift fire pit to assess the damage.

"Faustus' nature might also explain why they did not just bring in dogs to find us when we were hidden beneath the grounds."

"What do you mean?" Alois asks as he preps the coal bed and manages to find an ember that hadn't fully succumbed to his haste earlier.

"I have heard of hell hounds, but mundane animals are said to be especially sensitive to supernatural creatures. Perhaps Claude Faustus was afraid the dogs would attack him straight out and betray his nature."

Alois blows a few times, and the ember catches the dry twigs he feeds it. The boy with the blonde hair glances up into Ciel's blue eye. "How do you know so much about this stuff?"

"Ironically, I read it in the library. The occult has been gaining popularity in England for years. It is that bastard's fault if he never realized that I read more than just the books he chose for me."

Alois clenches a fist, his gaze becomes distant. "Good. I'm glad you have read books about this shit because I can't wait...I can't wait until you tell me how to kill Claude Faustus. For good. For good, dammit!"

"No."

The reaction is visceral and the command is resolute.

"What?" Alois' gaze slides from the murder of his mind's eye to the face of the one who has been so very horribly wronged by the demon in question.

"I said, no, Alois."

"Why?!"

"For two reasons. The first is that I have no idea what could actually kill a demon and I cannot place you in that kind of danger. The second reason is that in the eyes of the law, murder is murder. If you kill the Headmaster of St. Sebastian's Home for Boys, I will never see you again." His chest hurts, and Ciel does not know whether it is leftover ache from holding his breath so long or if the very thought of never having this warmth beside him is breaking his heart all over again.

The icy blue stare is fury possessed, fierce, but relents slightly. Perhaps it is because Ciel could not say those words out loud with such intensity without his voice cracking at the end. The boy who had read Machiavelli's The Prince so many times that it was practically memorized knows that his power is shaking. After all, it is better to be feared than loved, but it is catastrophic to love. It is so deadly to be in love, to give his heart away to anyone else. But there it is. It has not been so long since Robert told him that Alois was dead. The remembered desperation of it is still fresh, and after their shared confessions, the ardent kisses...

Alois stands up. Ciel blinks and follows the line, but his companion's head is not bowed in acquiescence.

"Can you come with me?" He reaches out a hand. There is steel in Alois' resolve that is at least as potent as his own, but now curiosity has Ciel in its grasp. It is a far preferable sensation than fear.

The forgotten teacup is laid alongside the newly bred fire. He takes the hand and Alois reaches over to assist him to his feet. When they are standing face to face, a blanket secured around Ciel, rounding him out, Alois' fingers slide down to take his hand. He leads him to the crypt entrance.

"I want to show you something."

Alois grabs the handle and pulls. He grimaces, and Ciel considers stopping him, but there is a aura of determination that declares war on Ciel's conviction. To not face it would be an insult, and so Ciel obediently follows his companion out of the heat and relative safety into the open cemetery.

The sky is overcast, but the air is dry, at least. Ciel's breath outside the confines of the mausoleum mushrooms into a cloud and disappears amidst unbroken silence. He gazes out at the scenery he could only glimpse by moonlight the night before.

"Was it truly only last night?"

Alois squeezes his hand and begins to lead Ciel.

Despite the preparations, heat is leaking from the soles of his feet into the ground sheeted over with a silvery crest of frozen dew. It is entirely too beautiful for a place of death, or, perhaps too fitting. The gravestones here are overgrown. The frost obscures names, but even had it been the heat of summer, Ciel imagines that the worn stone would be just as impotent to render a name due to time's cruel wear. No grave sits without an angle-like distressed old men staggering in lines, they sink into sprays of wilted and decaying summer foliage.

Presently, however, the choir of ancient gray voices gives way to stones that are dramatically more recent as they walk. One, two, three, four... Ciel feels a creeping dread, that same sensation that life was about to drape him in another layer of foreshadowing. And yet, Alois' pace doesn't falter, and he does not speak. Eight...nine...and finally a grave where no blade of grass curls. A place where the earth is so freshly turned that Ciel imagines he could sink into it up to his eyeballs, until his feet could touch that broken skull...

Alois stops in front of it.

"It didn't take him that long to get it done. The kid wasn't really that big, you know, and I don't even think they bothered with a casket or anything posh like that."

Freckleface.

Ciel swallows. He wishes immediately that the action had not so telling.

"I'm not smart, but I'm not an idiot. You already know what I'm going to say, Ciel. Just look at this neat little set up. Ten dead boys in less than 20 years. One more and he'd have his own little cricket team in hell..." Ciel can feel Alois' sarcasm like a hot brand against his chest. "Now, I'm not exactly weeping over some basic strangers. I don't even really feel sorry for Freckleface-he should have just kept his damn mouth shut. But the next grave here is going to be yours, Ciel, if he has his way. And that's a fucking injustice that I cannot have on my conscience. I'm not letting it go. Somehow, that fucker has to pay for it all, and while he is breathing on this earth, I cannot sit still."

Every grave is proof of tragedy unknown. Someone's sweet, sweet son. Grandson. All of them abandoned to the Headmaster's cruel whims. Ciel is as sure of this as he is glad that it was them and not him. Them, not Alois. But that could change in a heartbeat, and it already almost had done so. Alois' injuries are the evidence.

"Figure out how I kill, him, Ciel, because if I see him again-and I do want to see him again-I want to feel his eyeballs explode in my fist. I mean that very very literally." Alois' tone becomes low as he hypnotizes himself with a visual he has clearly been nursing. "I want to sit on his chest and pull those glasses off his head. And then I want to dig my fingernails into those sockets and rip them out by the meat. First I'll dangle them to see if they leak yellow piss, and then I'll squish one like a grape," Alois makes a fist and squeezes so hard his knuckles pale. "I want to stomp on the other. Make it flat like a slice of egg bread on the bottom of my shoe." Alois pulls his gaze away from the vision of bloody triumph to fix it on that place covered by a surgical eye patch and a fall of hair. Ciel can somehow sense the attention from the organ he no longer possessed. "Because he saw things he shouldn't have seen."

Ciel blinks and drags the brown turned earth from his focus so that he can see Alois.

Blue to blue. Pain to pain. Fear to fury. Hunted to hunter...

Ciel's stomach drops, and the blanket around him is no longer enough to keep the icy regrets of the dead here from touching him. And, once again, Alois' power to save is balanced by his mad dash towards certain destruction. He takes a deep breath of it all and exhales in a sigh, his one good eye shutting out the images of everything that could go wrong from this moment on, and he manages to make his turn towards the mausoleum vaguely imperious.

"Ciel?" The strain in the timbre of Alois' voice is worrying, but he is obediently trotting to catch up to him.

Ciel does not stop. "Claude Faustus told me that his specialty is in using our own civility against us. There is another way to stop him that does not require gambling your life or your freedom."

"What? Ciel, that's bullshit and you know that. I fucking stabbed him and it did nothing."

The smaller boy is exasperated. "That is the problem. All I have at my disposal to comply with your wish is questionable information that comes from faulty human sources. If human beings were in possession of all of the answers to the supernatural, then it would not be called 'supernatural' in the first place."

Alois grinds his teeth. "What do you mean then? What is the plan? What is this other way?"

"We must be in possession of those very tools he has been using to undermine humanity."

"What?"

"What we want is in the headmaster's study. There are too many inconsistencies. Something important is missing, and it is in that room. Once we have proof that he has been manipulating everything, then he will be exposed and his authority will be broken."

Alois is incredulous. "What? How...how does that sound any more certain than trying to kill the bastard? You have no idea what you're going to find in his study. His study, Ciel. You want to walk into the spiderweb, and you think I'm the crazy one."

Despite the rare ring of sensibility in the other boy's warning, this direction is the only gamble that can actually free them all from the headmaster's hold and provide any kind of future together. And there is a kind of grim pleasure in the prospect of this particular victory that is fitting. "You are a villain, Claude Faustus, and I am going to make you regret the moment you revealed the source of your power."

The boys have left the new end of the cemetery, and Alois has to dodge a few gravestones to keep at his lover's determined stride. "Ciel, what makes you think that Claude Faustus is just going to give himself up to Scotland Yard, even if you are right? He could simply level the whole place if he wanted to."

The boy with the charcoal hair shakes his head. "No. He is constrained somehow. The statue of St. Sebastian in the courtyard is his bane. He has attempted to have it pulled down through the only means he can actually set his hand on it-by having someone else come and do it for him. Whatever Faustus is, he is moving through the bureaucracy, and every bureaucracy leaves some kind of paper trail."

Ciel is having little difficulty navigating the cemetery. It proceeds with methodical engineering from headstones towards the taller mausoleums at the back. He can see the familiar frame of their temporary home looming towards them.

There is a rudy haze in Alois' vision. He knows that it's a warning, but Ciel's soul is tethered to his now, and whether he likes it or not, the other boy is going to pull them both if he walks like this with his head held up and such surety in his voice. It doesn't seem like a good plan. In fact, it feels awful. Yes, he wants to make spaghetti out of Faustus' intestines with a fork after he disposes of those awful yellow eyes, but there is something about that study that shudders him. Maybe it's because he knows that it is a bad place where he is likely to lose control and want to break things, and he wants to break the Headmaster's things so much that he might be overwhelmed and mess something up. But if he really pulls his gaze back from blood and thinks about it, his distress is probably over words.

Words. So many fucking words. And Alois is learning, yes. Thanks to Ciel's and his own due diligence, he knows every letter and can sound words out with about 60% percent accuracy if given time and forced concentration. But, ultimately, books and other paper things have letters that are so compact that his head hurts just thinking about them.

"I don't know, Ciel. We need to talk more about this plan. What kind of stuff do you think you will find in that st-"

Alois comes up short as Ciel's hand makes contact with his sleeve and grips it. Hard.

Immediately, Alois is scanning for the danger, but there is no sound, no movement. Ciel's face is pale, though. Way too pale.

"Ciel?"

"Alois...this...this is one, is it not?"

The blue eyes cast up under golden locks and he surveys the structure before them. Despite its austerity and its place in a land of the dead, it has strangely become home. "Yeah. This is it. Why? Are you okay?"

The smaller boy closes his slack jaw and then opens it again. "I did not notice...but it was so dark..."

"What? What the hell are you talking about?" Alois bites his bottom lip. He doesn't understand his companion's shock, and it is setting his unease at a precarious bent.

"The name over the portal. It's 'Michaelis.'"

Alois blinks. He looks up at the letters. And, yes, it starts with an M.

"Okay? What? Does that mean something to y-" Alois' voice trails off. Hearing that name said out loud strikes some cord of memory...

"I...I know this name. But I..." Ciel's voice is uncharacteristically falling into confusion at the same time that recognition presses through the loud chatter of homicidal echoes in his head.

"That...that butler guy."

"What?" The smaller boy turns to him, and Alois can feel the blood draining from his own fingers, his hands. "Alois! What butler?"

"The...the one who..." Alois grabs Ciel's shoulders because It looks too much like he is going to topple over. "That one day you were sick. I left you for two fucking minutes, Ciel, and you passed out. Remember? And when you woke up, you yelled at me to go back and get your damn book?"

Ciel squeezes his eye shut and shakes his head. How, how, how?

"Be plain, Alois. Did you meet that butler?" Ciel reaches into himself and grabs the emotions rushing from behind the broken mask. He thinks of his breathing as mortar and his will as granite, and slowly he takes possession of the unbelievable reality unfolding.

Alois drags a foot on the ground with all the reluctance of a much more dutiful child who knows his hand has been caught pilfering cookies again.

"That time I ran into the Headmaster, when I mentioned the bloody chess game that tipped him off. That butler came out of nowhere. Faustus called him Michaelis."

Sebastian Michaelis...

"Wait, Ciel, what are you saying?" Alois is suturing patterns together, but he could not know the full picture. So many pieces have been scattered in Ciel's mind, his dreams, through the years, back to that first night when he had put his hands against the window and had seen the statue move.

"There is one coffin in the mausoleum," Ciel pivots on his foot and faces those doors. Now his heart is truly racing.

"...Ciel, there's no one in it."

"What?"

"Didn't you notice? It was open a little. I checked it out the first time I was here. It's completely empty."

Alois' skin is crawling with a bizarre mixture of horror and excitement. That first afternoon after Ciel had told him there was a cemetery here, he had skipped class to find it. What had drawn him here, exactly? He doesn't know, but he had pushed open the door without too much trouble. And then, in stolen moments, he would collect things here from time to time. And that terrible night, wounded and terrified and shaken to the core of his being, he had stumbled here...

A muffled grunt alerts Alois to the fact that Ciel is trying to push the doors open on his own. Almost stumbling over his feet, Alois drops himself next to the boy he loves and helps him to shove the door open.

And then he blinks.

A giant black crow is perched on the lone sarcophagus. It tilts its head, red eyes meeting Ciel's blue. It croaks throatily and the volume is magnified by the close stone quarters, startling both boys. Its wings flap once, twice, and then it achieves lift, disappearing through the hole in the ceiling clutching something white and rectangular in its claws.

"H...holy shit, Ciel. That goddamn big crow stole your letter!"

They can do nothing more than turn to each other and share the absolute absurdity of the revelation.

(to be continued...)