Meet our lovely friend Sebastian in this first chapter :) The M rating is for language and sexual situations in later chapters. Please enjoy.

Uninteresting

Briiiiiiiing Briiiiiiing. BRIIIIIIIING.

Sebastian groaned and rolled over, hitting the snooze button on his alarm clock on the third try. Better than yesterday, anyway. Yesterday it had taken him a whole five times to beat that infernal machine into submission. And hey, improvement's improvement.

The early morning haze carried him from his bed to the shower, and from the shower to the mirror, and from the mirror to the wardrobe, and from the wardrobe to the kitchen counter. He didn't remember all of it, but he doubted anything of great importance or excitement had taken place during this morning journey. He thought vaguely of what kind of exciting things could conceivably take place between his bed and his breakfast, and by the time he'd capped off his third outrageous mental scenario (only two of which contained raging elephants, and only one an unexpected pregnancy), he had finished both his eggs and his tea, and was almost ready to consciously acknowledge the outside world.

Sebastian peaked behind the curtain on his kitchen window, and once he had resigned himself to the inevitable fact that the sun had indeed risen again today, he made his way to his study. There he gathered up a myriad of papers and notebooks and packed them neatly into his bag. Among the other things that he took, he nearly forgot to grab a file folder that carried all of his classes' most recent essays. While he was certain that plenty of his students would just as soon rather not see the marks that his merciless red pen had carved onto their pages, he figured it would be best if he actually brought them to class.

Once he was certain that everything was together, he grabbed his keys with all the vigor and flourish of an unconscious horse, and left his apartment. His car wasn't old but it wasn't new, and the make and model were nondescript enough not to describe. The first time he turned the key in the ignition in the intent to start the car, the engine thought better of it and sputtered out.

"Really, now," Sebastian sighed, "if I have do things today then you most certainly have to, too." As if on reluctant command, the engine turned over on the next try. "Of course," he muttered to himself, "even a broken down vehicle would be much too exciting an endeavor for any morning of mine." Without much more thought, he put the car in gear and headed off.

The high school where Sebastian worked was in the middle of town. The demographic was mixed and uninteresting. The students of varying levels of intelligence, and uninteresting. His fellow staff of varying levels of competence, and uninteresting. And as he unlocked the door to his classroom and went in, he noted that it, too, was mostly uninteresting.

Sebastian crossed the room and sat down at his desk, unpacking his things from his bag. He took his first class's essays from their file folder and stacked them on his desk. He wouldn't give them out until the end of the period, of course, because he knew that if he started class by handing them out, that would be all the students would be interested in.

He checked the clock on the wall. It would be another ten minutes or so until the sea of students milling about outside would begin to trickle into their respective classrooms, and he would be expected to teach some of them.

How uninteresting.

Sebastian leaned back in his chair and let out a sigh.

He had been working at the school for only a few years. Previously, he had been employed at a university, where the students were interested and the subjects interesting. He could teach his material in the way that he wanted, and no nuance was caught in the sieve that he was forced to strain academics through to thin them out enough to spoon feed them to sensitive high schoolers. Leaving the university was the worst decision in his life (next to one other, of course), and this was the price he was forced to pay for it.

Sebastian picked up the stack of essays and shuffled through some of them. As his eyes scanned his correction marks beneath the dismal scores at the tops of the sheets, he marveled at some of the mistakes his students had made. This was an English class, and yet he wondered if any of these adolescents had ever spoken the language before.

As he flipped through the pages his hands stilled as he held in front of him the only perfect paper in the stack. While most of the students who had sneaked by with a passing grade had only unremarkable scores, this one stood out. Only this one.

He skimmed over the essay again, marveling at the student's use of analysis. He had used techniques that Sebastian hadn't even remembered teaching. He glanced at the name and chuckled. He wasn't surprised.

This student was the only one in his class to have gotten perfect scores on his essays. Some of them, anyway. Because those he didn't write with the pen of the gods, were utter failures. When he wasn't handing in perfect papers, he'd turn in multiple blank pages stapled beneath one of only a paragraph or two, with notes at the end that amounted to things like "I wasn't interested in the prompt" or "I had better things to do."

Sebastian was brought out of his musings by the jarring screech of the school bell. Students began to file in and take their seats, the offensive ringing of the bell was replaced by the chatter of conversation and the scraping of desk chairs.

Sebastian sighed and went over to the blackboard, writing across the top of it the title of the next piece of literature they would be reading. As he drew a thick line beneath Shakespeare's Hamlet, he wondered to himself what he'd be reading in young Ciel Phantomhive's essays on the bard's tale of revenge, and he placed bets with himself on if they'd be works of analytical masterpiece, or simply blank pages, upon which Sebastian would never read his thoughts.

I know much hasn't happened yet in this chapter, but we will be meeting Ciel soon, so that is exciting. I'd ask that you please review, but I doubt that if you had the thought steadfastly in your mind that should refuse such a act, my words would do little to sway you. :)