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Lizzie’s carriage had scarcely stopped before she was out upon the gravel, the hem of her pale blue travelling dress gathered in both trembling hands as she ran. The Phantomhive manor loomed imposing against the washed-grey spring sky. Even now that it had been restored, it had something of a ruin about it. Ash drifted when the wind stirred, soft as snowflakes, settling in the golden curls escaping beneath her bonnet. It felt wrong that the world had continued at all after such a thing as the fire. Wrong that birds still nested in the hedges, that clouds still moved lazily overhead, that somewhere beyond the estate gates London carried on in ignorant peace.
Her mother had tried to stop her from coming. Told her, “You are too sensitive for such sights, Elizabeth.”
But Lizzie had endured the funeral clothes and whispered condolences and dreadful silences for long enough. She had listened to adults speak of tragedy in low voices as though the Phantomhives had already become ghosts. She had sat awake night after night imagining charred little hands, wondering whether Ciel had suffered, whether he had called for her, whether he had died frightened and alone.
And then suddenly the news had broken. Ciel alive.
Recovered. Returned. Miraculously unharmed.
She had scarcely believed it until now.
“Ciel—!”
She flew toward him before propriety could stop her. Her hair billowed in the ashy spring sky like golden shards against a broken tapestry, heels lifting from the ground just barely as she slung her arms around the taller of the two young boys who had been but corpses until mere days ago. At this the child lifted the corners of his mouth, his pink cherub lips closing around the syllables of her name as though a physical thing he sought to tear into.
“Elizabeth,” Ciel Phantomhive said, and when he smiled his teeth glinted like polished knives in the sun.
As if on an unspoken agreement Lizzie burst into tears. “I am so glad you are alive. Oh Ciel, it was terrible, I could hardly stand it. Everyone said you weren’t going to come back. Mother nearly forbade me from coming here altogether. I am so happy to see you. The both of you.”
Only then had she remembered the second figure standing nearby.
He had lingered half a step behind Ciel, so quiet he might truly have been a shadow. Looking upon him directly sent a strange chill through her. He looked nearly identical, from the rosy softness of his cheeks to the ribboned shoes at his feet, so that one might have struggled to tell them apart if not for some frailty, some childlike helplessness, a darkness inherent in this unfortunate boy Ciel had never possessed.
Lizzie had not missed him. She had not shed her tears for him. Her grief had belonged wholly, selfishly, to Ciel.
She suddenly felt very foolish. How could she have wept daily for one cousin and felt indifference for the other? Ciel was her betrothed, it was true, but it was not as though she did not love the rest of her family. This too was a child she had once played with, laughed beside at dinner tables and holiday parties. She had not an empty heart.
How monstrous it now seemed. She felt the shape of her cruelty as distinctly as if it had been placed in her hands.
This ungrieved little boy clung to the sleeve of Ciel’s frock, fingers curled tightly into pristine black fabric which was miraculously without injury although it had surely been burned in the fire along with everything else. This, too, was strange.
Surely, Ciel could not be as he had been, and yet here he was, golden and unmistakable. Lizzie wondered how it was that he knew to present himself so–to be so composed, clothed so elegantly when he had never been forced to attend to himself until now. And more, how despite returning from the dead he was unchanged, in temper as well as adoration for his brother. Nothing at all appeared to be missing, even out of place. Her eyes continued to water.
She smiled bravely and pressed a kiss against his hair. She knew to count her blessings. Couldn’t it be that they had been given a second chance? Why could she not be simply grateful?
“I am glad too,” Ciel said. “Now that we have returned things will soon be better. I will be Earl and we will be able to go back to the way it was before.”
The case went as follows:
The House of Phantomhive was dead.
Not merely ruined, nor fallen into temporary misfortune, but dead in the truest sense of the word. The great manor that had once stood over the countryside like a dark and watchful monarch had been reduced to a carcass of blackened stone and splintered beams.
The fire had devoured everything with indiscriminate hunger. The east wing collapsed, caving inward beneath a roar of sparks. The library, the gallery halls, the servants’ quarters: vanished. Velvet curtains, portraits older than empires, generations of records and secrets; all swallowed whole beneath that terrible sea of flame. Even the gardens had not escaped untouched. Winter roses crisped upon their stems. Ancient hedges burned down to skeletal branches. In the stables, the horses screamed until the roof gave way.
By morning there had remained only ruin.
The iron gates stood twisted from the heat, and the once-proud crest of the Phantomhives cracked clean through the middle. Villagers of the land gathered at the outskirts in hushed knots, crossing themselves as they stared toward the scorched hilltop. Some whispered of tragedy. Others, more superstitious, muttered that the manor had finally been claimed by the devils it had harboured for generations.
And perhaps worst of all—no bodies had ever truly been recovered.
The Earl and his wife were declared dead swiftly enough. It was a much simpler manner to bury empty coffins than admit there was nothing left to bury at all. Smoke had lingered for days after the blaze, drifting over the moors in thin grey ribbons as though the estate itself still struggled to exhale its last breath.
As for the young twins, England had mourned them publicly for scarcely a week before the gossip began. Kidnapped, perhaps. Burned alive. Taken by enemies of the Crown.
The Queen’s watchdog conspicuously absent from his post, lawyers and distant relatives had begun to circle the title like starving carrion birds.
Then, three months after the fact, the late Earl’s young heirs emerged from the darkness side by side.
One storm-soaked evening Scotland yard had found the twins standing before Saint Mary’s hospital, pale figures cloaked in black against the rain.
News spread quickly after that. Faster than wildfire ever had. The Phantomhive heirs had survived. The line endured. England’s guard dog yet breathed.
It was no misfortune, of course; Francis was nothing but glad to see her nephews had both found their way back to their rightful place at the estate. Whatever ghosts they had dragged back with them from the grave, it ought not to matter—the fact remained that the line could not simply end. And although Ciel was but a child, a successor could only succeed. There was a duty that came with survival, and it was for the better that Ciel had lived.
It was plain to see which of the two had returned more damaged. The spare seemed fractured somehow, his spirit left trembling beneath the surface. Loud noises made him flinch. Sudden movements sent panic flashing across his face before he hastily concealed it. He spoke little.
Ciel was a different matter. Where his brother seemed broken, he seemed only to have sharpened. Francis had always known her nephew possessed intelligence beyond his years, inherited perhaps from his father’s calculating nature, but this was different. It was as though all traces of childhood had been drained from him like blood from a slaughtered pig, leaving only ruthless clarity behind.
She did not want to imagine what might have come to pass if there had been one survivor only.
It was unkind all the same. There was something of selecting a lamb for the Easter feast in what was being asked of him. Yet there was no alternative. The title could not remain vacant. Rivals would descend upon the family holdings within months if action was not taken immediately, and the Queen herself would not tolerate uncertainty for long where her watchdog was concerned.
It would have been better to wait, but England would not have it, would demand more bloodshed. It was imperative to act now, reclaim the title before it was lost as so many things had been in the flames.
So they sat together in the drawing room of the resurrected manor, the air thick with the scent of rain and burned wood drifting in through cracked windows.
“I will be watchdog.” Ciel said, calmly. “Brother is not suited to it. I will protect him.”
“You speak as though the matter were already decided,” Francis said coolly, a stern glance of reprimand. “Titles are not reclaimed by sentiment alone, Ciel. You are aware of what they will ask of you? Of what it means to stand before the Queen as the Earl of Phantomhive? This is not a child’s game of inheritance. It is a lifetime of service and sacrifice.”
Ciel did not answer immediately. He remained seated, his small legs barely long enough for his polished shoes to touch the floor. Gloved hands folded neatly within his lap, utterly motionless save for the faint upward curve of his mouth.
“I understand well enough,” he replied, lifting his chin. “Abandoning one’s name is far more disgraceful than dying with it.”
“In that case, you must arrange for an audience with her Majesty at once. Do not speak of this to your brother unless you wish to upset him. His mind will not be able to bear the burden, you understand that, don’t you?”
The smile that followed was small and exquisitely polite, yet profoundly wrong upon the face of a ten-year-old child. Candlelight flickered across his features, catching strangely against the vivid blue of his visible eye. For the briefest moment, Francis could have sworn the colour shifted; something of fire glimmering beneath the surface like an animal’s stare in darkness.
“Don’t worry, Auntie,” he said pleasantly. “I happen to be devilishly good at keeping secrets.”
He could not rest. The mansion was as it once had been, a perfect idyll pulled from the cradle of childhood, pure and untouched by tragedy, and yet it frightened him.
The fireplace sighed low with the wind slipping through the chimney, embers breathing orange beneath white ash. Curtains whispered at the tall windows where they had been left parted just enough for the night air to creep through in silver threads. Somewhere distant a grandfather clock marked the passing hour with patient dignity. The sound rolled through the corridors like a heartbeat.
Everything was wrong precisely because it was right.
Every polished surface gleamed with a perfection that felt rehearsed, every corridor stretched in patient expectation, familiar and immaculate beneath the glow of gaslight. The carpets muffled footsteps too neatly. The walls stood too straight. Even the scent of the house lingered unchanged: cedarwood, wax polish, roses drifting faintly from the conservatory below. It was a lie crafted all too lovingly.
This home had not yet seen blood, had not been made into slaughterhouse or battlefield, was but a dream, and all the worse for it. He wanted to pretend that the threshold of that December day had not yet been crossed, that tomorrow he would wake to breakfast trays and lessons and his mother’s gentle reprimands, that he was safe within the tangle of satin cushions, in the soft embrace of his brother; the clean skin of a child who had been bathed and warped in cotton, comfortable in the unblemished shell.
He missed Ciel. He wished that he didn’t. He knew it was his own fault that had brought about this change, that what had crossed over could not be returned, and yet when he climbed under the covers he felt the body beside him cold and lifeless.
At first he had believed the stillness beside him to be temporary, the rigid composure of someone merely pretending toward rest. Ciel had done that before as a child, stubbornly refusing exhaustion until sleep stole him mid-sentence. There had once been warmth in those nights: tangled blankets, sleepy complaints, sharp little elbows driven into ribs whenever one of them crossed the invisible border dividing the mattress.
There was no mirth in his company now. No murmurs beneath blankets. There was no uneven hitch of sleep, no soft shift of limbs seeking comfort. The body lay as it has been placed, composed, deliberate even in stillness. Ciel’s eyes were red in the night, predatory lanterns lighting the path to hell. They did not blink often enough.
He did not want to be touched. He said so.
“Then I will abstain.” Said Ciel.
They lay facing each other. He did not dare turn. The only thing more terrifying than the danger he knew of was that which he did not.
He was rigid beneath the covers, fingers curled into the sheets as though testing their substance, as though they would dissolve beneath his touch and reveal something truer beneath–ash and blood and fire.
The thing beside him observed him with unbearable patience.
He wanted to cry. He wanted to be back in the cage, for all it had been barred and cold and terrible, it had housed his brother, and the thing across from him did not. Ciel was dead. Ciel was by his side, a perfect imitation, unchanged in character, in speech and image. He knew both: that the demon might have appeared as anyone; that there had simply not been another choice.
Without Ciel he would have been nothing. Starved to death within a month. Even among their captors he had possessed little value of his own. Frail things gave too easily–it was no fun to break in a thing already dented.
But as two, they had been precious. As long as Ciel was with him he would been everything they could have asked for, bare skin like diamond, fragile enough to bruise beneath a glance.
“I won’t love you.” He said, stupidly. “You’ll play your part in front of others, the same as me, but it is only in service of my revenge. You are nothing to me. A tool.”
“I do not require your love,” the demon told him, “Only your soul.”
“But you are greedy.” He argued. “You don’t only take things you require.”
The matress creaked softly beneath the redistribution of weight. The room was suddenly very dark. The candles guttered, shadows stretching impossibly along the wall.
“You are very clever, young master.” The words were a whisper. A secret between monsters. “But you must not fear me. Blood is not the only thing that binds. Ropes will suffice as well.”
He could no longer see the ceiling. Could no longer see where the room ended. Darkness pooled around the bedposts and crawled along the windows in slow ribbons, blotting out the moonlight. It was as though the air itself had bent inward.
Then–carefully, brutally, hands–if they could still be called hands–began to wrap themselves around his throat.
The sensation was unbearable: claws capable of rending bone lifting him with impossible gentleness. His eyes dropped shut. He did not demand for it to stop.
“You cling very tightly,” spoke the disembodied voice. The bed existed alone in an ocean of darkness. “Even when all that remains is pain.”
He breathed in sharply. “Say clearly what you mean–instead of playing at it.”
“You wished to follow your brother into death,” it said softly. “Even now you resent survival because he cannot share it.”
“I said—” His voice fractured. “I said not to touch me. You said you would abstain.”
“I am abstaining.”
The voice emerged close enough that breath stirred the loose strands of hair near his temple. It was wrong, hearing that familiar cadence emptied of all humanity. Ciel had once spoken like sharpened glass; this thing spoke like velvet dragged over a knife.
“You requested I refrain from unnecessary contact.” A pause. “Evidently this is necessary.”
His throat constricted painfully.
Ciel had never soothed him. Not truly. They had loved each other fiercely, possessively, violently at times, but comfort had always existed in sideways gestures: stolen desserts from the kitchens, silent companionship during storms, fingers brushing briefly beneath dining tables where no one could see.
This was not what this being had meant. This was imitation filtered through something ancient and carnivorous.
The claws eased fractionally higher along his neck. Their tips rested beneath his jaw now, capable of puncturing skin with less effort than biting into ripe fruit.
“You are looking at me as though I am about to eat you,” the demon murmured.
“Aren’t you?”
“Humans are strange creatures. You fear being consumed, and yet all your kind do is consume each other. Attention. Affection. Flesh. Time. One soul passes and its tissue is absorbed by the other.” A smile touched the corners of that borrowed mouth. Its thumb brushed lightly behind his ear. “I am greedy,” it admitted softly. “You were correct about that. But true greed is not satisfied so easily as that.”
Then, with all the tenderness of a child imitating affection it did not truly understand, a kiss was pressed to the corner of his mouth. The darkness engulfed him; exhaustion at last dragging him under; and, in its entirety, he slept.
“I am Earl Ciel Phantomhive,” the thing that wasn’t said, and the Undertaker laughed until his eyes watered.
“My,” he cackled, shaking beneath his cloak. “What a dreadful joke to make in a place like this.”
The sound of his laughter bounced from coffin lids and dusty rafters alike, unsettling the stagnant air until even the shadows seemed amused. Mourning wreaths hung browned with age against the walls. Somewhere deeper within the shop, water dripped with soft, irregular rhythm, and dust danced lazily in pale shafts of winter light filtering through the grimy windows overhead. He thought briefly of how, when the fevers had stopped with the demon’s arrival, so had his coughing fits.
“Surely you remember me and my little brother.” Ciel smiled placidly. The winter light slanting through the high windows caught against the polished silver head of his cane and the dark velvet of his coat. “We require a service of you.”
“I would very much regret having forgotten you, young Phantomhive.” The Undertaker’s gaze slid between them with open fascination. “What fascinating specimens you both are. One soul split between two bodies. What an extraordinary little arrangement.”
The spare stiffened. “Careful,” Ciel said. “You are speaking about matters beyond your station.”
“Ah but you know little Earls,” Undertaker told them. “A service of me is provided to the Watchdog of the Queen, and only one of you bears that title, doesn’t he?”
They had considered this of course. If Ciel lived on, even if it was merely in appearance, the title belonged to him. He had received it proudly, under her Majesty’s approving gaze and among aristocratics both relieved and vengeful.
Nina had fussed for hours over patterns and stitches perfectly adjusted, presenting them a pair, polished and royal once more. Lau had accepted their contracts with bemused enthusiasm. The Madam had been stern and disapproving, but now that he considered it, she had never loved Ciel as she had her sister anyway.
For all the demon cared very little for human matters, he played at them with an immense passion; he had learned Ciel’s cadence quickly after resurrection. Learned where to pause, where to sharpen syllables into aristocratic indifference, where to permit amusement to glint and vanish. This was well. The spare did not mind having a brother who would do anything for him.
Title and rank may have been the beasts in name, but what was that in comparison to the bargain of his soul? He had its obedience, its devotion, love, obsession above all. That was the real inheritance. Someone who wanted him, kindled him not for a fool but for a king, a child of equal wickedness.
“What do you care,” the spare said. “We have paid you. Do not pretend your interest lies with her Majesty.”
“No,” Undertaker agreed cheerfully. “Certainly not with her. Does yours, milord? Returned from the grave and already carrying out her business. How industrious.”
“You’ve been difficult to get a hold of.”
“I have avocations.”
“Graverobbing is hardly an avocation.”
“Isn’t it? Then I’ve misunderstood myself terribly.”
The funeral parlour smelled of chemicals and wilted flowers and old velvet left too long in locked rooms. A grave trying desperately to imitate a drawing room.
It was not the clean silence of churchyards or mourning clothes. This was intimate. The kind of death that sat beside one’s bed at night and stroked hair from feverish eyes.
He took Ciel’s hand in his.
“My, my,” Undertaker crooned. “How affectionate.”
“We are twins,” he replied smoothly.
He made a point of saying it to himself, as though repetition might cauterize the wound. The thing at his heel wore Ciel’s face with unnerving precision. Every movement remained exact.
“Oh, I do enjoy this,” Undertaker sighed. “You’ve brought me such lovely little mysteries.”
“We did not come to entertain you.”
“No?” Undertaker mused. “Then perhaps you arrived accidentally carrying entertainment with you.”
Ciel said, “Brother dislikes your sense of humour.”
Undertaker descended suddenly from his perch atop the coffin with startling silence for someone so gangling. His long fingers drummed lightly atop its lid. “Well i suppose I cannot abstain for you have provided me with such excellent laughter, dear corpse.”
There had always been something unnerving about the Undertaker’s attention. Most adults looked upon children with indulgence or irritation or dismissive fondness; Undertaker looked at them the way scholars looked upon rare anatomical deformities floating in jars.
“How rude,” Ciel said lightly. “You make me sound embalmed.”
“Oh, but embalmed bodies are honest things.” Undertaker protested. “They admit what they are.”
“You twaddle too much.”
“And you reveal too little.” Undertaker tilted his head. “That is how people begin opening coffins prematurely, my little lord.”
The spare withdrew a folded packet from inside his coat and laid it atop the coffin between them. Several photographs, scripts. A signet impression pressed into wax.
It bore the crest of the House Fairlie: an old and exceedingly respectable family whose fortunes had rotted quietly beneath silk gloves and church donations. Their estates bordered the northern reaches of Phantomhive territory, all frostbitten forests and villages strangled by winter fog. Before the fire they had maintained cordial relations with the Phantomhives. Afterwards, they had been among the first to petition Parliament regarding “uncertain custodianship” of neighboring lands.
The Undertaker slid the top photograph free.
The image showed a young gentleman seated in profile beside a carriage, dressed immaculately in mourning black. Handsome in a pale and forgettable sort of way. Aristocratic enough to pass casual inspection.
“Lord Fairlie’s second son,” he explained calmly. “Officially deceased three months ago from consumption while abroad in Vienna.”
“Yet inconveniently alive?” Undertaker guessed.
“Not precisely.”
“The original body was cremated before returning to England. His family accepted the ashes without inspection. Two weeks later, a man claiming to be him appeared in Surrey and resumed his place within the household.”
The Undertaker hummed appreciatively. “How enterprising.”
“The impostor knew intimate details,” Ciel continued. “Servants’ names. Childhood incidents. Financial accounts. Even handwriting habits. Convincing enough that his own mother accepted him immediately.”
“Then how was he discovered?”
“He wasn’t,” said the spare. “The family requested intervention privately; not because they believed him false, but because they believed him…changed.”
“He no longer ate with them,” Ciel continued. “He walked the halls at night. Forgot habits only visible in moments of instinct. The family hounds refused to approach him. And finally, his younger sister awoke to find him standing beside her bed at three in the morning.”
Undertaker chuckled.
“Children are so observant.”
“She claimed his eyes reflected candlelight like an animal’s.”
“And this charming little tale relates to your visit how, precisely?”
“You are knowledgeable regarding records of death,” he said evenly. “Burials. Certifications. Cremations. Cases where identification becomes… uncertain. We wish to know how often people accept the imitation because they prefer it.”
The Undertaker looked upon horrors the way starving men looked upon feasts. His eyes lit.
“Every husband mourning a changed wife. Every parent insisting their child remains innocent. Every monarch pretending the crown belongs to divine right rather than blood and slaughter.” He smiled. “Identity itself is merely a performance repeated often enough that others begin to fear contradiction.”
“When one loves humanity,” he said softly, “it becomes rather inconvenient when they insist upon dying.”
Let us relay a scene:
“We must retrieve it.” The spare insists. He lifts his head from where he is kneeling in the midst of the wreckage, bare feet cold against the stone of the altar steps.
His hands are covered in blood. It clots his lashes, soaks through his rags, makes it hard to breathe. Wind bites through the torn fabric at his shins.
“I could simply forge it.” The demon supplies, equal parts annoyed and indulgent.
“You will not.”
“It would be faster.”
He tightens his grip on the edge of the broken step until stone grinds under his nails.
“I do not trust you.” He says, throat raw and tasting bile. This thing might be able to change forms, turn wine into water, but it cannot pull children from their graves nor return to him his innocence. “You will do as I see fit. You will do what Ciel might have done.”
The creature shakes its head, all the cadence of the spoiled child. “I can’t imagine you were a pleasure to have for a brother-such insolence.”
That stings. He knows Ciel loved him. He had said it often enough, and fiercely, stayed with him when he was sick, held him when he was scared, suffered with him in the depths of hell. He thinks his parents loved him also, useless and lesser as he might have been.
He folds his arms tightly. “What would you know of brothers?”
“Mm.” The demon tilts its head thoughtfully. “Very little. Humans divide affection into such peculiar hierarchies.”
“What do you know of humans at all? Aren’t you despised by all things?”
The demon kneels without urgency, as though it has all the time in whatever eternity it prefers.
“You called for me.” It purrs, features shifting fluidly as though sculpted from smoke and wax. The transformation is slow enough to witness every detail settle into place: sharper jawline, colder eyes, aristocratic stillness pulling taut across young features. It has a scar upon its shin where Ciel had once fallen upon the gravel, a mole in the curve of its arm that had been used to tell them apart before they had been able to talk. “You should know better than most that I am not. There are those who revere me. Who would debase themselves for a word from my lips.”
The resemblance is unbearable–it lacks imperfection. Every private marker once used in childhood games of identification, now presented like proof of authenticity in something that has never been human at all. It is Ciel distilled into something predatory.
“Stop that,” he hisses.
The demon blinks, nearly innocent. For a moment, there is nothing in its expression at all. Then its mouth curves into something faintly amused, as though the criticism has been delivered about a suit jacket rather than stolen skin. “Why? Humans trust what resembles them.”
“You wear him poorly.”
“Oh?”
“You took him,” he says, suddenly angry. This is not enough. This is not anything. It is not vengeance–it is comprise, aggravating, unsatisfactory. He wants power, to bring his enemies to their knees, to force this being which has stolen the last of his childhood into submission. He wants to weep forever. He wants to force a slender hand down the gullet of his brother’s corpse and retrieve his heart.
A soft laugh.
“It would be considered ill mannered to decline a dinner invitation.”
“You are disgusting.”
The demon’s smile deepens with slow satisfaction. He forces himself to breathe.
“And yet,” it says, “you continue speaking to me.”
“We will finish our transaction,” he says at last, voice steadier now through sheer will. “And you will retrieve the ring. I do not care how convincing an actor you are.”
A small sigh.
“As you insist. Shall I continue wearing your brother while we proceed, or would that be too inconvenient for your sentimentality?”
Rain lashed against the windows in uneven bursts, coach wheels grinding through black water and horse filth alike. The city beyond the glass appeared malformed beneath the storm: gaslamps stretched into halos, cathedral spires vanishing into fog thick as burial cloth.
It was as though London adored the occult. Mothers clutching daughters tighter crossing alleyways. Men gathering in pubs to exchange theories with drunken enthusiasm. Priests warning of Satan. Doctors arguing anatomy. Scotland Yard, naturally, failing entirely.
They seemed to cross reapers everywhere lately; not just the kind to have sublimated and become allies or whatever it was they had evidently done. Grelle’s distaste for Ciel’s choice in form was remedied only by her admiration for his fighting skills. But there were the pure bureaucrats too, who did not care for either him or his contractee.
Many of them seemed more like skeletons in impossible suits; some were women, were children, crowding rooftops. They clustered around calamity, and where they passed calamity struck, trundling past as though a freight train when it bellowed and clanged.
“How come they cross our path so often. Is it inevitable that we shall give them due to reap?”
The demon rested one gloved finger lightly against its temple.
“There are bells in the trees, you see.” Ciel told him. “They're supposed to ring when the devil's afoot.”
“I don't get it,” he admitted.
“It is to say, I believe that is a theological question, young master, not a practical one.”
The carriage lurched violently as it turned.
A moment later it stopped altogether.
Through the rain-streaked window rose the silhouette of the townhouse, all soot black in the storm, narrow windows glowing dimly amber.
Ciel emerged first from the carriage, unfolding elegantly into the rain as though the weather itself avoided touching him. Black umbrella blooming overhead, he extended one gloved hand toward the coach. He thanked the coach man with a tip of his hat.
The townhouse swallowed them as soon as the door closed. Warmth met them belatedly, clinging to damp fabric rather than offering comfort. The scent of coal soot and polished wood replaced the rain, though it still seemed to follow them in, dripping faintly from hems and umbrella tips onto the tiled floor.
“Did you get caught in the rain again?” Soma said at once, voice too bright for the weather. “Agni will prepare tea immediately. Hot tea fixes everything. It always does.”
“As I am sure we have told you before,” said Ciel pleasantly. “We do not require your assistance, Kadar.”
“But you are only thirteen,” he insisted, as though this were an argument that should eventually win by persistence alone. “And you have no proper butler. What happens if you are unwell? It isn’t proper at all. Doesn’t your little brother get sick easily?”
His eyes lingered upon the twins with poorly-concealed discomfort.
“I assure you, I am more than capable of taking care of him myself.”
“You are always like this,” Soma said brightly. “So serious. But we are family, no? Families should speak warmly.”
The spare looked at him sternly. “I do not have family except for Ciel.”
This at least Soma would understand. It was not as though untrue. He and Ciel had shared everything from unbiblical cord to utensils to violations. They had worn the same clothes, eaten from the same plates, slept in the same bed, held each other’s hands all throughout the rites. It was no thing another could have understood, save perhaps, the demon.
There was nothing the beast ought not to know.
“You must not act so formally with me–after all you are my brother.” He noted with grim amusement, when they were alone in his room and Ciel was removing his boots.
“How generous,” Ciel said, almost approvingly. “To extend the title of ‘brother’ so freely. Humans do enjoy collecting family members the way others collect relics.”
“You are in a mood.”
“I am always in a mood,” the reply came smoothly. “It is part of my nature. And I do not want to overstep.”
“You speak as though propriety matters,” the spare said flatly, almost amused. “When we have never been separate enough for it to apply.”
So it was. In life his brother had been tenaciously obsessive for as long as the spare had known him. There was no part of him he was certain Ciel would not have liked to claim for his own. Clutching wooden toys and porcelain in small white hands, demanding to be fed, demanding to be loved, demanding rank and title and submission, to be his sole companion, his patient and lover.
In death it had not been so. The demon might have been made of greed, even gluttony, but he demanded only one thing, passing glory into crueller hands with a voyeuristic pleasure.
It was his brother–but it was not only so, not his mere flesh and blood, but dreams too, wild fantasies of power, domination and bloodthirst.
From his place before the bed, Ciel lifted his leg and pressed a kiss against the bone of his foot.
“I am whatever you wish for me to be. I may call you by whichever name you wish and you me in return.”
The spare shuddered. He slumped against the kneeling visage of his brother much like an infant or a corpse. He felt suddenly frightened. Undone. He remembered painfully the unreality of it. This was not really Ciel, for Ciel was dead, was hollow because he had so readily held his remains to the devil’s mouth and commanded it to feed. And feed it did, fang grazing the skin of his inner thigh, hunger dealt with a bluff.
“I am yours, brother of mine,” the beast whispered, “Not a mirror but a second you; you have made me from your rib, your devilry. You have bitten the apple. I but comply with my master’s wishes.”
It was what he had wanted most of all. His brother. In any conceivable way, any definition of the word, alive. And he had gotten it. He would not have ceded to admit that perhaps he loved this more, perhaps the thing which had replaced Ciel was dearer to him than the brother he had known in mothers womb. He had chosen it for a companion, tamed it and delivered it. It was his.
He did not believe in such foolish ideas as the unconditional love of a twin. To be a twin was to tie your fate with the fate of the other. A tangle of knots, the kind of vow you made on your knees, next to the cool body of the one your life belonged to. The demon had delivered him, their fates entangled like the umbilical cord.
Ciel took his face in his small white hands, thumb scraping along his lid, as though he could trace the mark that burned in his eye.
“You are very foolish,” said the beast, sliding its hand underneath the tie of his eyepatch. “And very wicked.”
“Yes.” He agreed, pulling it in with the curve of his leg, hooking his heel beneath its back. “I think it must be in my blood.”
He reached out and kissed it. Clumsy and bittersweet, half disgusted and shaking. The demon smiled into him, teeth grazing at his lip. Then there was blood, and it was no longer Ciel.
“You don’t have the divine protection of any star.” Said Blavat to Ciel. “I can tell that much from just looking at you.”