AN: Ok, sorry, originally... there was an issue and it only uploaded about half of this... and I didn't realize it... *feels seriously embarrassed because fanfic made no sense* I don't own anything...

It was boring to be immortal. Immensely, intensely, unbelievably...

Boring.

Over the years you found ways to make the pain go away, briefly. To lose sight of their deaths Ciel would pay any cost. He was much too proud to kill himself, and the survivor's instinct was ground to deeply within his bones. But sometimes he wondered if he hadn't been, if he could die who would care? Certainly not Sebastian. To Sebastian he was just a reminder of the debilitating hunger. Worse than thirst, worse than cold, worse than death itself.

Ciel would know, after all.

"Sebastian?" he called, his voice echoing slightly around the mostly empty penthouse. It took the man a minute to appear – he had probably been far away elsewhere, torturing someone to make them agree to give up their soul, no conditions attached. No one really believed, not anymore. It was the 21st century. Angels and demons – how could they exist when there wasn't a God?

Sebastian bowed his head, knowing full well that Ciel didn't like the sight of him full on and that now he was a demon he could make that displeasure... known far more clearly than before. He believed that he reminded Ciel of his time as a human, of all he had lost. It pissed Ciel off that he hadn't been able to die after getting his revenge. It did, even if he wouldn't admit it. He could have found a way to search for the murders of his parents on his own – not that he would have been successful mind you – but he chose to find the one way that assured he would both get his revenge, die and literally be damned in the process. It was his way to claim the 'part' he subconsciously assumed that he had played in this horror. Even if Ciel didn't realize it, he was deeply masochistic at heart in the textbook psychological ways.

"Yes, Mr. Phantomhive." It was stupid to have a twenty something year old man calling a young teen boy 'young master' or 'my lord' in this age of equals. It would simply make them stand out even more than they already did.

"Fetch me some tea." Ciel paused for a moment, as if considering some deep moral problem. Which, in a way, he was. "Make it edible."

"Of course. Just a moment." Sebastian turned to slink his way out to the kitchen, silently cursing Ciel in his head for interrupting him. He had been almost finished, so close...

Not that the taste would have been bearable. No soul would ever be enough. Not after Ciel.

To make the tea 'edible' – that is, to keep Ciel from immediately spewing it out of his mouth, or if he managed to swallow it, barfing it up – Sebastian had to mix fairly fresh human blood in. The more blood, the better it tasted to Ciel, or Sebastian if he chose to indulge in a cup. Sebastian's running theory for this was that human's souls were crammed into every orifice of their body – such a large concept for such a small flesh. Since their bodies consisted mostly of blood and it was what circulated throughout their entire body, it contained the highest 'soul' content of a human's flesh – except the heart, of course.

Ciel's ethics, if he wasn't immortal, would've killed him. He refused to eat. To take a soul, even those willingly offered. And there were those, for one so beautiful.

Sebastian finished making the tea, and pulled the vial of fresh blood from the inside of his suit coat. He was just about to pour it into the perfect cup of incredibly hot liquid when he sensed the danger.

How do you describe something that Sebastian himself still didn't understand? There were no words for it, in the many languages he'd learned over his innumerable years. Ciel began to fall in the other room, and he could feel it before he even began to slip off the recliner, giving Sebastian ample time to not only finish the tea but place it gracefully on the floor before catching his master ever so carefully.

It was hard for a demon to pass out, especially one as young as Ciel. But it had been a long time since he had something that would give him even a little bit of nourishment, such as the blood in his tea. He 'abhorred' the taste of blood. At least that's what Ciel said.

To be honest, he just loved it too much to trust himself not to want more than something that simple.

"My lord, you are an idiot." Sebastian said, smoothing the dry strands of hair back from Ciel's face. It was beginning to fall out, littering the apartment with long black hairs. It had been too long since he'd submitted to a hair cut. A decade, at the least. That wasn't the reason why it was falling out, of course. The reason it was falling out was because Ciel was a prude.

"I heard that, you bastard." Ciel muttered, and his eyelids fluttered but he couldn't seem to force them open. "The... the tea..."

"Of course, my lord." Sebastian carefully let a few drops slide between Ciel's lips.

The change was instantaneous.

Ciel's eyes snapped open, turning from their color of dried blood to a red so bright it might have been on a plastic wrapper. He grabbed the stone mug that Sebastian had thoughtfully provided instead of a teacup and drank with the thirst a starving man might gulp thin chicken soup to fill the holes in his stomach. He didn't notice the cracks in the gray rock from where his fingers clenched too tightly until the cup was empty and he'd gained a bit of self control back, enough not to lick his clothes where some of the drink had spilled on him.

"I've told you not to call me 'my lord' anymore, Sebastian." Ciel said thoughtfully.

Shit. Sebastian thought. Actually, he thought a far more colorful word in a language far darker and far less easy too translate than American English. He'd thought that Ciel would have been so far gone with his hunger and sickness that he wouldn't have noticed he'd slipped.

"And you broke an order. Twice."

Well, technically you never ordered me to do it, you little bitch, or we wouldn't be having this conversation. Sebastian thought at Ciel with hate he'd thought he'd reserved for men long dead. But he just continued to stare stoically at his master.

"So, I get two free questions."

"Excuse me?" Sebastian said. What the hell was going through his demented little mind now? Ciel had cracked long ago, but this was a new level of oddness.

Ciel sighed as if it was obvious, and flashed to the fridge and back so quickly it was like he was hardly gone, brownies with 'chocolate' frosting in his hands when he returned. The sweet tooth hadn't changed, over the couple hundred years. "Because you disobeyed me, I get to ask you two questions and you have to answer them to the best of your ability. Honestly."

Sebastian resisted the urge to roll his eyes. "Mr. Phantomhive, you do know that you could just order me to do this and I'd do it anyways."

Ciel laughed. Giggled, really.

Sebastian's eyes widened slightly in understanding. High. He was high from the blood.

He hadn't had any form of human life in so long that probably just standing near a human would make him dizzy. Actually drinking some blood made him almost giddy. Well, giddy for how Ciel had been lately.

"But would that be as much fun? Come on, pull out something to sit on and we can have a conversation. Like we used to." Ciel's eyes went slightly purple for a moment, as if light blue contacts slid over them with no warning, but it was there and gone so quickly Sebastian couldn't say for sure. And then Ciel bit into another one of the brownies and the moment was gone. "Go on. Or do I have to start ordering you to do even this?"

Sebastian bowed automatically. "Of course, my – Mr. Phantomhive. I was just... taken aback by your change in demeanor."

Ciel laughed lightly again. "That is one way to put it."

This was terrifying.

Sebastian was back with his bed in the living room in under ten seconds (the only other item in the house he could sit on comfortably). He positioned it a careful distance from Ciel. At the very worst, Ciel would attack him again. At the very best – well, there hadn't been very many 'very best's lately. And all of those kind of sucked too.

"How long am I going to stay thirteen?" Ciel pouted drastically. Yet sincerely.

Sebastian blinked, distracted for a minute by the combination of the severe position of Ciel's lips and the color the blood had added to them. "You aren't thirteen."

"Physically, dipshit." His expression went from mocking to serious in an instant.

"You aren't thirteen." Sebastian insisted.

"Well then, what the hell am I?" Ciel insisted back.

"You're probably fourteen, almost fifteen physically. Around there. You don't stop aging until you hit your peak. You probably haven't noticed the changes because they've been so gradual."

Sebastian studied Ciel for a moment. Peak. He couldn't imagine how much more... peaked this kid could get.

"Peak? How so?" Ciel looked slightly pissed off that this question didn't have the answer he'd expected.

"When you reach your most... attractive point." Sebastian paused, trying to find the right way to phrase it without sending Ciel back into his former catatonic state. Try giving him a bath when he'd barely breathe. "It's a sort of self defense system. When people see how pretty you are, they don't want to destroy you – they want to protect you. Beauty gets you many things. Seeing as you were very-"

Sebastian stopped cold.

Whoops.

"Seeing as I was very what?" Ciel said, innocently licking the chocolate and blood frosting off his fingertips.

Sebastian took a deep breath. Idiot. The souls inside scolded him. Motherfucker, such a beautiful guy and you won't even – a particularly loud one started before he began to speak, overwhelming their voices with his own. "Seeing as you were very weak earlier, I should probably make you some more food."

"But I feel fine now." Ciel whined. "And you still haven't answered my next question."

Sebastian huffed. Oh, very subtle. the same soul commented. "And that would be?"

Ciel smirked. "If I were to ask you about..." his smirk dimmed a little, but returned with doubled the forced strength. "If I were to ask you about that night when Elizabeth died, what would you say about it?"

Sebastian stopped breathing. It wasn't a big deal, until his lungs screamed for air and he was forced to inhale again. "I would beg you not to ask me of it."

Ciel's face went black. "And what does that mean?"

Sebastian's eyes were glued to the same strip of hardwood flooring, tracing the impurities in the grain over and over again. "Please."

"What?" Ciel said. 'Please'? He must have misheard. Hundreds of years, and he had never heard a sincere please from Sebastian. One that wasn't a taunt or a social necessity.

"Please do not make me speak of that night with you, Ciel." Sebastian looked up, very suddenly, into Ciel's eyes, on the verge of begging.

"Why not?"

Why did people always ask you that? Did they not realize that to tell you why not they would have to tell you why first?

Sebastian stayed silent.

"Why not?"

Sebastian stood abruptly, heading for the kitchen stiffly at an almost human pace. "I will prepare your dinner, my – Mr. Phantomhive."

"Fuck you!" Ciel screamed.

In the right context...

"I order you to tell me what the hell you think about that evening Elizabeth died, exactly what you think, down to the last detail, and for you to tell me now, in such a way as I can hear it."

In the right context, that 'fuck you' could have meant something entirely different.

In fact, it had.

The night Elizabeth died.