Chapter I

For an ending, it had always seemed anti-climactic. A kidnapping, a bullet and one mistake was all it had taken. Ciel Phantomhive was dead.

It was such a boring way to go, and to add even more reason for spite, it had happened while the boy was protecting that fiancée of his. She'd been fully capable of protecting herself. Ciel had been tactless, reckless, but it was no excuse for himself. Where had Sebastian been that he hadn't stopped it?

He couldn't remember anymore.

He didn't want to believe it was his mistake, yet the more he resisted, the more certain he became that it must have been, hence he'd chosen to forget. Regrets had no place among demons. It was disgrace enough to breach a contract. The least he could do for his dignity was imagine a scenario where the end was beyond his control.

Time passed, as it always did. And, as cliché as it was to claim, nothing was the same.

For one thing, he was no longer "Sebastian". His identity shifted to suit the needs of his current contract, whatever that might entail. Often times, he had no name at all.

Creating a new contract never took long. So many peoples, saturated with loathing and selfishness, saw naught but a world of want. The abstract concept of a soul was nothing to them until it was everything. The centuries had jaded society as it had him.

He tried to counter this by becoming more selective. A dignified, prideful soul desperate with ambition, with just enough of a conscience to anticipate the consequences but too driven to care, that was what he sought. Every time he thought about what he wanted to taste, his mind wandered back to the one he never got to try.

The currently contract free demon had manifested in to an indoor marketplace humans referred to as a 'mall'. His superiors would infer he was searching for a contract. He doubted he'd bother. The air was littered with noise, voices squawking the least refined slang to touch his ears yet. He strolled by packs of teenagers with lamentable posture, through the buzz of inane, repetitive melodies, to the storefront a dear friend called home.

Wide hetero-chromic eyes stared at him as he approached, one a pallid green and the other smoky blue. She rose towards the window, her mouth opened to reveal the dainty tips of her tiny fangs. Her tail swayed rhythmically, thumping the wall.

The being once known as Sebastian gazed into the depths of her eyes in admiration. "Good afternoon, my lady. I see you are as radiant as ever."

It may have been his imagination that the lady's mew was a pleased 'hello', but he'd believe it all the same. He ran a gloved finger across the glass, tracing a squiggle. the cat braced herself, wiggled her butt, and pounced at him. Her soft, squishy paws pressed against the window pane.

If he could find a master to take the cat, maybe he'd stick around. Not all humans were as allergic to the fluffy balls of cuteness as Ciel had been. Some even went so far as to like them. One of his previous mistresses had. He could remember how much he with ended up despising that woman, but she was probably his favorite master of the past century thanks to the cat.

"Were I able to keep you, I would. It is a shame that my living arrangements would be beneath your standards," he admired.

The lady mewed in what he imagined to be a final plea. Her giant, mismatched eyes glistened straight towards the cockles of a heart he didn't have.

Perhaps dealing with a master wouldn't be so terrible, provided they were open to pet adoption. He could always imply the cat was part of the deal. Familiars weren't unheard of. Granted, familiars were witches' territory, but modern humans hardly knew the difference between a chupacabra and a churro. They weren't exactly equipped to identify the customs of hell.

The cat turned her head, rubbing her cheek against the glass affectionately. He cooed to her the most soothing truth he could manage—the only truth he'd spoken in quite some time. "Perhaps, by tomorrow, the circumstances will have changed."

From the inoffensively taupe couch currently engulfing him to the giant bowl of candy and half-filled coloring books, the pediatric psychiatric inpatient office belittled Cian. A woman with copper ringlets sat on a proportionally appropriate chair on the opposite side of the room, legs crossed, clipboard atop her knee.

Sunlight glared off the metal nameplate across the psychiatrist's desk. It took a surprising amount of willpower not to return the gesture. Already, Dr. Newmann was an enemy.

"Now, now, I know this isn't comfortable for you, so we'll start slow. It's important you're comfortable here," the doctor explained, each word ringing shallow. He knew her words were false for the same reason he was stuck in this glorified playroom.

"So," Dr. Newmann continued, interpreting his silence as understanding rather than contempt, "let's start small. Simple. Get to know each other."

For a fraction of a second, he let his stare lift off her name plate, straight to Dr. Newmann. His lone eye froze over. "I don't need to be here."

Dr. Newmann shifted forward, her shoulders scrunching. "This isn't about need, Cian. It's for us to be sure there isn't a need, or give you help, if you did happen to. Think of it like a yearly check-up, but for your mind."

"But circumstantially motivated, so, it's intrinsically nothing alike?"

The woman's false smile toned down, her pleasantness giving way to sympathy. "Everyone needs a person to keep their secrets. A confidant. That's what I'm here for. There's not a thing you can say to me that won't leave this room." Unless, of course, it involved child abuse or intent to harm himself or others.

"I'm familiar with confidentiality laws, doctor. Don't patronize me."

Again, he could spot the shrink shrinking into herself. The tip of her pencil pressed to the paper, no doubt marking him guarded, uncooperative. She cleared her throat twice. "Then you know, it's OK to answer. I'm a friend," who is paid an exorbitant amount of money by the government to stand talking to him.

"You have access to my medical file and pertinent police reports. I'd expect you're familiar already."

The clipboard lowered. "Cian," she repeated, as if knowing his name meant knowing him, "I'm not interrogating you. You don't have to talk unless you'd like to," spend an hour every other day for months on end being asked the same questions repeatedly.

Cian plucked a lollipop from the bowl and twisted the wrapper. His lone eye affixed to the candy, watching it unfurl. It wasn't the act itself that entranced him, but the way he perceived it, flattened through his sole functional eye. If he'd not already known the proportions, he could've hardly seen the size difference between the sucker and Dr. Newmann's head.

To admit what happened as if it wasn't traumatic, like it hadn't ripped his strength and dignity straight from his soul—that was the quickest way to leave.

It was a good time to lie.

If he let his concentration slip, the memories overtook him. The white haze of floodlights. The skid and crunch of metal twisting his arms. His mother's nails pressing to his neck, trembling, clawing through flesh to his very blood. Even now, surrounded by artificial lemon and melting crayons, he could hear acid singing the shower curtain, her screaming in duress.

Even a week later, under a moderate dose of painkillers, her words kept corroding him. 'You're not my son. Never were. You stole him. Give it back! You demon, give him back. Die and give him back!' He grit his teeth around the stick.

The doctor cleared her throat, again. "We can just sit, if you'd like."

Cian pushed the candy against his cheek. His shoulders straightened, adopting regality he'd had no right to possess. "A month ago, my family was in a car accident. I broke my leg. My step-father, his arm. My mother," was an empty shell. The sheen drained in her eyes. In its place, a husk of cold rage.

"She hadn't appeared injured, then. An undiagnosed intracranial hemorrhage triggered a psychotic break, Capgras' syndrome," She'd smacked his head against the bathroom wall, knocked him down by his knees and tried to drown him in hydrochloric acid, all the while screaming that he wasn't her child. "She attacked me while I was asleep, dragged me to our bathroom and tried to drown me. My step-father intervened."

Cian concentrated on the taste of cherry. Still, he felt his mother's emptiness drift across him while he recited whatever he expected would satisfy the doctor. "I know it wasn't her. The physical pain's there, of course, but, she's being treated. She'll come back. Frankly, I'm just happy we're all still alive."

From far before the day he was born, Cian always had a gift for lying. It was a shame he could so rarely use it on himself.

The sunset slapped him on the way outside. Hospital walls and fading leaves shone ablaze in the orange light. It would've given Cian pause if he wasn't so desperate to leave. He trudged ahead, his cane scratching the pavement, so focused on his departure, he'd hardly noticed the rumble from his step-father's car.

A navy blue Civic crept along the curve, matching his pace down the sidewalk. A mop of mussy curls craned around the driver's side window, looking to Cian's back. "Key—"

Vaughn Crowley was by far the creepiest coroner in the province, which was a bit like being the worst dressed vagrant at a homeless shelter. From his perpetually rumpled clothes to his thick-rimmed repressed-librarian glasses and wisps of a barely-present beard, he was a perfect projection of an imminent mental breakdown. He was also Cian's stepfather.

Vaughn's words could've been a dagger at the nape of Cian's neck, and he wouldn't have jolted any more upright. His gaze flat-lined at the sight. "You should've called."

"Thought you'd notice."

"Of course. Anyone would see you. Most of whom would suspect you're plotting to kidnap me."

Vaughn's mouth twisted at his words to come, cracking close to a weak smile. "This generic them overestimates me. Would you mind getting in? Idle cars, pollutions' work."

"Yes." Cian stood still, eyeing the clutter past the tinted windows. Paper bags, cups and newspaper pages all waited to be crushed by a stray foot. The stench of old French fries and former fish sandwiches was imminent. Barely a week without his mother around, and already Vaughn was drowning in rubbish.

Vaughn paused for a second, considering what to say. "Would you be open to bribery?"

Cian remained unenthused. "Theoretically. Caramel macarons and blueberry tea, for instance."

"Which I'd hypothetically accept."

Vaughn lifted his hand from the steering wheel. He flipped the latch on the passenger side door and nudged it open.

Cian leaned against the car. He reached his cane into the mound of fallen food wrappings and knocked them to the floor. He planted his heels at the edge of the seat, pulled his knees to his chest and condensed himself into the lone clean spot. He slammed the door.

A dissatisfied realization slipped from Vaughn's mouth, thoughtless and blunt as ever. His forehead pressed into his hands. "God. I could lure you to a van with candy."

The anticipated aroma of rotten food was completely overtaken by that of formaldehyde. Cian pressed his nose to his knees to block the smell. "Don't worry. I only extort from you."

"Actually, I'd prefer you not extort anyone."

"Admirable." Cian's eye barely rose above his sleeves. He peered suspiciously back. "Should I leave, then?"

"No, no. You're fine. I'm not. Not nearly Machiavellian enough to've expected that to work. And if you let anyone lure you with sweets, best they're the first person who'd be questioned. Yeah," A veil of gloom and tension fell between them, so striking, even the formaldehyde faded away.

The engine rumbled, hungry and unstable as the people inside. It took a terrible thirty seconds before Vaughn managed to ask. "How terrible was the doctor, exactly?"

"Imperfectly adequate."

"Oh. How, nondescript." Vaughn's head shifted slightly. His eyes set on the rearview mirror, connecting with Cian's reflection. "You know, we could try someone else. A guy, or," the phone could start ringing. "Shit. Work... Would you mind?"

Of course Cian did. Vaughn might be one missed anti-psychotic from a spree killer, but, he was family—and as such, it was only natural to lie to him. "If it involves your paycheck, no."

"There's a dinner in the fridge. Salmon. Three days captured. Should be minimally toxic."

Cian made a mental note to find something edible in the house that didn't have a quantifiable toxicity. He tolerated Vaughn, but sometimes he worried he'd open the fridge and find a severed hand.

As expected, Vaughn's work stretched far into the night. Cian's as had well, though for different reasons. While his step-father was busy with scalpels, microscopes and the dead, Cian had a laptop, beads and a sewing machine.

Hw awoke to the repeating thirty second chimes of a DVD menu. The orange and blue background of The Princess Bride stared down from his computer monitor. The family cat, Eulalie, was sound asleep across the keyboard, her paws blocking the power button. A clock at the bottom corner gleamed twelve after midnight.

The beaded lace and bowler in his grasp wasn't what he'd imagined. The beading laid haphazardly, limp, as if decayed by time. He set the piece upon his head and checked his reflection. A sewing pin pricked his finger.

Cian plucked the pin from the hat. He tuck it in a stuffed rabbit on his dresser, held his breath, and listened to the pulse of his home. The air conditioner whirred, constant, churning. He rose from his seat, opened the window, and overlooked the mid-October evening. No clouds lingered. If he hadn't known better, he'd mistake the horizon for a blank slate, desolate, waiting to be marked.

The reasonable part of himself knew he should've gone to bed. His project wasn't finished. He wasn't ready. There were so many excuses, and none of them meant a thing.

Cian flipped on his air purifier to mask the silence. He arranged a mannequin head, a wig and a body pillow on his bed as a stand in for himself, just in case Vaughn got home and started looking. He rushed into his closet for a jacket, grabbed a duffel bag from under the bed, and left the room, the door open just enough far enough that the cat could leave.

On his way out, he made two stops. The first was to the fridge in the basement, where he pulled out a bottle of his mother's wine. The second was to the front hall. Vaughn kept a spare key inside a gray duster coat at the back of the closet. By taking the spare, Cian was able to lock the door while leaving his normal key dangling innocuously from the rack.

The midnight air was brisk with misty rain and a violet chill, and the streets loomed with the liveliness of a funeral. Cian huddled into his coat, tapped his cane forward and continued. A few steps in, the patter became a metronome. A few hundred steps in, he paused to open the wine. He gulped straight from the bottle.

However long it had taken Cian to reach his destination, by the time he'd arrived, he had all the grace of a weeble.

A wooden sign, dark green with golden embellishments, marked the building as 'St. Augustine's Church and School'. The sidewalks were outlined with stones and overflowing shrubs. The paths veered in opposite directions across the plot—to the left, the long, brick rectangle of a school, and to the right, the chapel.

The chapel wasn't particularly grand, but in the dead of an empty night, even its pillared archway reached the vacant sky. Etchings of angels hovered overhead, engraved in fading marble. An inscription rest beneath them, long rendered illegible by time.

Cian plopped an exhausted shoulder against the door. As he expected, it didn't budge. He fumbled the key into the lock and twisted. The door released, and he hobbled inside.

Stained glass windows lined each wall, cast in shades of varying blues and browns in the darkness. Cian flipped the switch beside the entryway. Beams flooded the space, revealing the pews, aisle and altar. Colors brightened in the glass, navy to royal blue, brown to maroon or sienna.

Cian collapsed into a back pew. His bags crashed along with him. The hat tilted forward. He nudged the brim up with the back of his hand, finished a swig from the bottle, and unpacked his supplies from the duffel bag—a digital camera and collapsible tri-pod.

"Pheh," A wheezing chuckle slipped into the stale air, recognizing the unintended play on words in what so many expected of him. He was here to shoot himself.

A tremor passed through his hands, pointless, but insistent. It took a couple of tries for him to screw his camera on the tri-pod. By the third, it was secure. He set the legs atop the pew, stood up beside it, and searched for the right angle. When he'd stopped, one window's image was in view—a bare cross with the crown of thorns. The lightbulbs upon the ceiling were set in such a way that every floating speck of dust gleamed in the viewfinder.

Cian marked the camera's timer for two minutes. He grabbed the next pew over to lean against while he climbed to the floor. Once his feet were firmly settled, he slipped from his trench coat. The wool pooled at his feet.

He was dressed in a hairline-striped navy blue vest with black lace over the lapel, matching shorts, and a ruffled off-white shirt. The shirt dipped into an asymmetrical point at the back left side. Glass beads dripped from the edges, pulling the fabric towards the floor. A repainted compass dangled from his neck. The overall effect was as striking as it was androgynous and generally uncomfortable.

If anyone spotted him, he'd never hear the end of this. Were he able to talk to someone about this, he'd have rather asked a girl to model. Unfortunately, asking someone meant telling them he was considering studying costume design. That wasn't happening. He'd have better odds avoiding bullies if he submitted a formal request for them to glitter-bomb his locker.

He followed the angle of the camera by pointing his finger towards the lens. This forced him to walk—or rather, wobble—back towards the window. He gripped two unsteady hands along the image's ledge and wiggled his way up.

He leaned back against the window. At first, he meant to keep his balance. By the third second of resting, he was just tired. His left leg fell off the perch, dangling towards the floor. His arms wrapped around his one folded knee and pushed himself away, letting the exhaustion wave over him.

The clock kept on ticking. No signs flashed from the camera. There were no electronics humming, no birds chirping, not even a car speeding down an empty street. It was a full, perfect silence, and in it, the minute dragged on in a lie of forever.

This whole church felt the same way. On the surface, it was beautiful, but it was never honest. Every day, people told themselves they'd be better. They wished and pleaded, and told themselves it was fine simply because they'd tried. As if there was a God, and he'd want to bother with people.

Each passing second sent new bubbles to his boiling blood. His eyes sharpened on the shrine, fixating until his frustrations spurted out.

"Damn it! You…!" His temper snagged in his throat, remembering the camera.

Cian lowered his chin. He slid back against the window. In spite of his efforts to keep his pose, he collapsed against the glass. The intent of a glare lingered in his reddened eye.

It was worth noting he'd passed through having a slight buzz into a semi-intoxicated mess. Within the course of seconds, that unfocused gaze had settled firmly on the altar, and his ramblings to a slightly slurred yet remarkably coherent tirade. He was alone. He might as well speak his mind.

"I presume you're not here. If you are, then, in your image, maybe that's not off, considering, we're all bloody, bleeding egotistical hypocrites. Why should anyone worship you? What have you done? Make life? Hah," he scoffed with what was clearly meant to be sarcasm, but sounded more in the range of a hiccup.

"No one asks to exist. Then you beckon, listen. Your orders, morals, they're detrimental at best. Those who bother, they get dismantled, for what? To come back to where they were? To prove to you, who, omniscient, by definition, then, must already know what'll happen, they have the right to perpetuate what you forced on them? That you gave and revoked? To make someone already aware of the end, let them loose, watch them fail, suffer, starve, murder for you, lay waste on cities, people, and claim you love them—which are you, sadist or a failure?"

Somewhere along the line, the drunken gloss in his eyes had switched to a cold sweat. For someone who supposedly didn't care, his blasphemy was remarkably impassioned.

The flash bulb flickered. Splotches of multi-colored light stained his eyelids. His composure didn't matter, anymore.

He slammed his palm against the glass twice in succession. "What does it matter that you exist? If you exist, if you ever did. Free will, illnesses, they're excuses. You took them from me!"

Another strained laugh shifted mid-breath into a hiccup, then another, until he couldn't utter a word. Somewhere in the back of his heart, he was ashamed something so simple was making him crack. He kept feeling as if he'd endured so much worse, that this should be nothing.

It wasn't just that he'd come close to death. He had to persuade himself that the one person alive who he unequivocally loved didn't mean to kill him. The only other force he had to blame was a God he didn't want to believe in.

When Cian's hiccups slowed to staggered, shallow breaths, he slouched, collapsing to his knees. The hat fell straight from his head. He hadn't noticed.

His voice lowered, anger dissipating in favor of accusation. "You aren't merciful. Not even sane. Be, take responsibility. Our mistakes are yours. If we're wrong, destroy us. Smite me. And know that I'd hold more faith in this world if I've spoken to walls alone."

Those vindictive words couldn't travel far, but they lingered. It wasn't by God, but he had been heard.

The entity once known as Sebastian had been scavenging. For the past few hours, he'd been listening to any and all pleas strong enough to reach him. Regardless of where their utterers physically were or what language they spoke in, he could hear every bitter syllable. Yet, after hours of masses droning in unison, one voice drowned the rest.

Sebastian remembered that voice. The accent was different, but the tone was identical, and it pulled him like a magnet. Before, he was even fully aware he'd moved, he'd already appeared from whence it came.

While he could've theoretically stepped foot inside the chapel, he opted to keep his distance. He kept watch from outside, perched between branches of a barren tree, facing the window, watching a fragment of the past beyond a stained glass window.

There was no way for Sebastian to mistake that face. The similarities were so exact that it couldn't possibly be anyone but Ciel.

The instant that Sebastian laid eyes on the boy, his hand began to sear. He yanked off his glove and looked to the back of his hand just in time to see the mark of their pact engraved anew, the same seal in the same place it rest so long ago.

Sebastian had never heard of this. It was rare enough that the soul of a human under contract escaped. That a human who would sell their soul would find enough redemption to reincarnate was practically impossible. Self-sacrifice didn't negate all evil acts, but it did redeem, and apparently had done so to enough of a point that Ciel had been sent back down. He couldn't be admitted into heaven, clearly, but he must have been cleansed just enough that someone would feel bad for damning him.

And yet he'd called again. Not consciously, not with an obvious purpose, yet, he had.

It was the soul, not the body, which a demon would bind itself to, but the previous conditions weren't possible. Whoever killed Ciel's parents should've been long gone. That should've negated the contract. Why it hadn't, Sebastian didn't know, but somehow, he didn't feel all that pressed to question. The important part was that he was there, alive, within grasp.

The words wouldn't reach Ciel from the other side of the surface, but he formed them all the same. They were close enough to cause a chill to run through the boy's veins, one which he'd wrongly attribute to the cold.

"Good night, young master."