Hello everyone! This one going to be longer than my usual stories, and I'm going to split it into chapters. I don't know the title for the whole thing yet, but when I come up with one I will change the title. For now it will be 'Untitled'. This is a twist of Kuroshitsuji that takes place in the 21st century. I have used characters both from the first season and the second season and I have made some minor changes to them, as you will see, but tried not to change them too much. Please don't be offended or upset if you don't like the changes I made. This is just a fanfiction and the creation of my overactive imagination at 5:00 in the morning. So, yeah. xD

Warnings for this chapter: It has a bit of profanity, and the characters might be a little OOC at first. That's about it. I hope that doesn't bother you too much. Please enjoy! I will be posting chapter two as soon as I come up with it.

Disclaimer: If Kuroshitsuji belonged to me, would this be called a fanfiction?

1. Black

I stare down at the paper on my desk. I've painted several images on it without realizing it, and the creepy thing is that they're all the same.

They're painting of a man, the same man appearing over and over again. He's beautiful. His hair is jet-black, such a deep shade of black that it almost has a purple hue to it, and it sweeps down to his neck and curls over his forehead. He's wearing thick glasses and his jaw is very square and defined. Under the lenses, his eyes are deep and mysterious and a light brown colour that's almost gold. His lashes are thick and dark.

Dark droplets of liquid… blood on a rose, turning it black. The rose in his coat, symbolizing something… its sickly sweet scent enveloping me as he carries me in the warm circle of his arms that means safety…

Claude. He's back.

I stand and look around the rest of my room, at the smudged sketches and paintings tacked up on the walls. They depict dark, haunted eyes and white-gloved hands reaching out through the paper; lips pressed against blood-red roses and bodies ensnared together. There's a painting of myself, except that it's not quite right—my pale blue eyes are the same, but I'm dressed ridiculously in a purple velvet jacket, a green vest, short shorts and tall boots, and my tangled hair is short and white-blond instead of long and brown.

And everywhere I look, there's the man looking back at me in the paintings, his golden eyes serious and not even a hint of a smile playing at his lips. He's clad in black, his hair windswept and tumbling down his head.

"Who the fuck are you?" I say to the paintings. I begin to laugh—my laugh is high-pitched and bubbly, girly—but then suddenly I stop and glare at the drawings on my walls. "Seriously. Why the hell am I painting pictures of a man who I even don't know?"

But I do know him from somewhere. I have to. I don't have enough imagination to have invented him; he's too real. I used to see him when I was little and had no friends; he was like an imaginary friend who I talked to even though he never responded. Around the time I was ten, he disappeared. Now it's been three years and he's back. I see him at school, at the park, in my room, at night, and this time he isn't just in a painting. He's real, a real man stalking me; if I reached out, I could touch him and feel the rough fabric of his coat or the cold smoothness of the buttons on it.

Cold, the touch of death… Hands in white gloves touching me, holding me. "Don't ever leave me!" And then another voice, his voice, blending into the fog and darkness: "Yes, your Highness…"

Claude is haunting me.

I drop my paintbrushes into a cup of water, not even caring as the cup tips over and water rushes over my desk, dripping down onto the carpet.

"Jamie?"

I whirl around and relax, seeing my little brother. Lucas is watching me timidly, his brown hair tangled on one side and flat on the other so that I can tell that he's just woken up. Lucas is the only one I will never get angry at for coming in my room without knocking.

"Why are you awake?" I glance at the glowing digits of my clock. It's five o'clock in the morning.

"I couldn't sleep." Lucas pads over to me and looks at me with his grave brown eyes. "The voices were whispering again."

My little brother has always been able to hear the voices. He tried telling our foster parents about them once, but that only got him sent to a shrink, so he never mentioned it to them again. They think he's stopped hearing them, but he still does. It's just me he runs to when their whispers get too loud for comfort. Lucas is the one who heard Claude's name and told it to me. He doesn't see Claude everywhere like I do, but he hears him and all the others that I see standing silently by my bed at night or out my window during the day. While their images haunt me, their voices haunt Lucas.

Lucas touches a soggy drawing on my desk, the lines of the man's face running together from the spilled water. It's not recognizable anymore, for which I'm strangely relieved. "This is wet. Do you want me to help you clean it up?"

"Yeah." I nod, waiting for him to ask who the man is or why he appears all over the walls of my room.

But Lucas doesn't ask more after that, which is another reason why he's the only person in the whole fucking world that I might love. He doesn't pry or ask pointless questions. Instead he goes to the tiny bathroom by my room and returns with a roll of paper towel to help me wipe up the water.

"I'll put it away," I say, grabbing the roll when we've finished. It's my way of thanking him.

When I come back, Lucas is sitting in my bed, looking around. His eyes linger at the paintings of me, the familiar-stranger Jamie Macken, and then at the broken glass beside my bed. The shards are silver and reflect the ceiling—pieces of my mirror.

Looking at my reflection… but I'm not alone. Claude is in the corner of it, by my doorway, dressed in black, his golden brown eyes never leaving me, and there's something in his hands—a knife? He's coming closer, creeping up behind me—but there can't be anyone behind me! There's only me. Need. To. Escape. Pull back. Fist connects with the mirror, shattering it, breaking the man to pieces that fall uselessly to the floor. And pain in my knuckles, blood dotting my white skin—blood. Bloodbloodbloodblood.

"Oh, Jamie," he says sadly, and opens his arms.

I crawl into bed beside him and let him hug me tightly. His arms are skinny and small, not long enough to wrap around my shoulders, but his hold is strangely comforting. My body shakes and tears burn like acid in my eyes, but Lucas holds me until I stop trembling and my breathing is deeper.

"You had another one," Lucas says when I'm calmer.

I nod. Another… I don't even know what to call it. A fit? An attack? There's no way to explain the sudden bursts of white-hot rage that can engulf me any time without warning, without my having control of it. This time Claude's reflection triggered the attack and I punched my mirror and shattered it.

Our foster parents know about my sudden violent outbreaks, and they've been trying to get me to see a therapist. I attended the first few sessions and then stopped, running away into places like ice cream stores or souvenir shops whenever they dropped me off in front of the building where I'm supposed to have my therapy. They still don't know I'm skipping my sessions and I've managed to hide my aggression from them, keeping it to my room or places where they won't hear about it, so they think that I'm better now.

But I'm not. I'm a wreck, and Lucas knows it. He's seen me lose control, hurting people and myself as that boiling fury roars through me and leaves me shaking and sobbing and snotting, empty of everything.

The only thing I'm more afraid of than the dark is that someday, I'll lose control like that and hurt Lucas. That would kill me because Lucas is all I have left in this fucking miserable life. He's the only thing I have to hang on to.

"You'll get better, Jamie," Lucas promises. "Don't worry. I'll stay here with you."

Stay. Here. Don't leave me alone again! It's too dark. Not the darkness. Darkness, closing in on all sides, swallowing everything up. Spiders crawling over through it, shedding light, and then peace.

We sleep through the night together, Lucas with his arms around me and his heart beating familiarly against my side. I don't have one nightmare.

~o~

When I wake up, I see him standing in front of me. The same man that's in my drawings and dreams. The same fucking man. Claude.

A pathetic whimper comes to my lips. "Go away!" I plead.

Claude doesn't go away. He stands and looks at me, so serious that I think his face will crack and shatter like the mirror if it stays so tense.

Lucas wakes up beside me and looks confused. "Jamie?"

"Go away," I say again.

"He's back, isn't he?" Lucas asks, realization dawning on him. "That's what was wrong yesterday. You saw him in the mirror. That's why you broke it. Where is he?"

Claude doesn't move. I can't stop looking at him. His eyes are like honey: liquid gold.

"He's right here, by the bed. By the fucking bed," I spit, not taking my eyes off him. "Claude, why the fuck are you here?"

"He's saying something," Lucas says. "He's the voice I can hear."

"What is he saying?" I crane my ears, but Claude is as silent to me as he always is, just serious and watchful and alert.

"I-I don't know…" Lucas frowns. "Something 'your Highness'… I can't tell."

"Yes, your Highness." A face. His brother, Luca. Limp brown hair, vacant grey eyes, face empty. Dead. No, not his brother. His brother was… Lucas, in bed beside him. Or… Luca? Which one? Luca…

I grit my teeth and glare at Claude. "Fuck you, Claude," I whisper to him. "Fuck you."

~o~

I don't give a flying fuck about school, so I sleep through most of it. Normally I get away with it, but today is becoming an exceptionally bad day. My history teacher notices and starts yelling at me, causing everyone to stare at me accusingly. I doodle all of English class, not listening at all to the teacher's speech on conjunctions and prepositions and ignoring the whispers of the girls who sit behind me and who can clearly see the drawings on my page.

To top it all off, Claude is closer than usual, right beside me instead of at the back of the room whenever I raise my head. I want to tell him to fuck off, but that would draw attention to myself if people noticed me shouting at someone they couldn't see. I don't want another visit to the therapist.

Art is probably my favourite class, and the one class that I actually care to make an effort in. Today the teacher announces that we will be using acrylic paint to paint a dream we've recently had. I've had so many dreams lately that I'll have lots of choice. It'll be an easy assignment.

I start by using black and adding a bit of white, mixing the mushy paint into a dark, dark grey that I smear all over the paper. Then I add darker black for fleeting shadows here and there. I don't have much artistic talent, but it still gives it a spooky quality.

Darkness. Shadows. Faces… Claude's face, watching me. Narrow gold eyes that seem to see right through me into my soul, not fooled by lies or deceptions…

I draw in Claude's eyes floating in the top right corner and add a streak of purple for his hair. Then a blotch of white: his gloves. In the painting, Claude has no particular form; he is just eyes and lips and limbs in disarray, cloaked in shadows. At the bottom I paint a red rose and smudge it so that it looks like it's bleeding all over the paper under Claude's feet.

Bloodbloodbloodbloodblood.

The teacher passes by and stops at my table, looking at my painting with raised eyebrows. "Well done, Jamie." Her voice sounds impressed. "It gives the impression of chaos and confusion, all veiled with mystery. You're using your negative and positive space very nicely. Do you have a title for it?"

I shake my head.

"Well, you should think of one. Every piece of art needs a title. Keep working on it." She leaves.

I stare down at the painting, trying to think up a reasonable title. 'Bloody Vows' is the first one I think of for some reason, but I don't like it for the painting. It's too fancy. Just like the teacher says, this is chaos and confusion and terror. This needs a simple title that can sum it all up.

Then it comes to me. 'Black'. Simple and chilling. Perfect.

Suddenly the hair on my arms and legs stands on end and chills race up and down my spine. I feel very cold, as if a shadow has fallen over me. I turn slowly and see Claude standing there, looking at my painting with something like mild amusement on his face. The first expression I've seen from him.

"What do you want now?" I ask him, but he doesn't reply. I didn't expect him to. "Why the fuck are you following me around?"

A few kids nearby give me odd looks, but I glare at them and they quickly go back to their own paintings.

Claude steps forwards as if to see my painting more clearly and his arm brushes my shoulder, sending a shock of pure ice through me and freezing my veins. For a moment I can't breathe; my lungs are full of broken glass and my mouth is frozen shut.

Expressionlessly, Claude moves to the side so that we're not touching anymore, and the ice inside me thaws. I look around the room, desperate to know that I'm not the only one who can see Claude. That I'm not as crazy as people think.

But there's nothing. Everyone is focused on their own tasks, not paying attention to me and not even seeing Claude. It's like he's invisible—a ghost. I always thought that it was the dead that I could see and their voices that Lucas can hear, but that makes no sense. If Claude were a ghost, I wouldn't be able to touch him. My shoulder would've passed right through him just now instead of rubbing against the black material of his jacket and feeling that coldness radiating out of him.

Whatever Claude is, he's not a ghost. He is very much alive.

~o~