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Ciel remembered a time when he used to go to the church with his parents. He’d wear one of his best jackets and a blue ribbon that matched Vincent’s, and he would cling to his mother’s hand. His parents were all adoring smiles and gentle touches.

The church was beautiful; a masterpiece in oblique gothic beaux-art, swooping glory and arched platforms and stained windows, so perfectly pious that Ciel would feel impossibly closer to God and the cherubs painted on the high ceilings as if they were really watching over him, as if he could hear His Voice whenever he heard the hymns.

He’d stare ahead, with wonder, expecting the Door of Heaven will open from the sky and a ladder will be dropped from a high, high place and they could all go there.

“When you pray, what did you ask of God, Mother?” he asked.

Rachel would smile and gently tuck his hair behind his little ear. “I pray that God will always answer your prayers, Ciel.”

He looked at her in amazement. “Will He really?”

“Of course He will. We are all His children, His white lambs. He will watch over us from the darkness and the wolves.”

Ciel, like any good son, had blindly believed his mother’s words. He really did.

That was why, in pain and in slavery and in helplessness, he had prayed and prayed and prayed, begged for a God’s miracle.

In almost laughable irony, a demon, proverbial wolf to His white lambs, answered him instead.

Ciel never went to the church again after that.

Then one day, the fierce and unstoppable Lady Frances comes knocking, effectively taking the ivory door apart, much to Sebastian’s consternation (because they just replaced that door), a death threat short of maiming to imperiously have him attend the mass (“This is preposterous! Unacceptable!”) as Ciel puts up a brave, but ultimately futile, struggle against the lady and then attempts to cull the storm.

“Are you not a believer, bocchan?” Sebastian asks, endlessly amused. Of course he’s amused by Ciel’s plight, the bastard. He drapes the formal, high-collared blue jacket, a Sunday’s best affair, across Ciel’s shoulders to dress him for the mass.

(Ciel wonders how is it that his life has come to this point: a demon dressing him for a mass.)

Ciel snorts, because his valiant efforts against Lady Frances were dashed to the ground when Lizzie was finally involved in the argument, the cunning employing of trembling lips and wide, shimmering-with-tears-that-will-never-shed-green eyes on him.

Lizzie looks like a helpless puppy.

Ciel has no sympathy for small helpless animals, even puppies, but Lizzie is… well, Lizzie, even though he knows she is the furthest word away from helpless.

“Do you not wish to ask to be let into Heaven?”

Ciel stares at him, incredulous. “Are you honestly expecting an answer to that?”

Sebastian chuckles, the sound low and velvety. “I thought all humans aspire to go to Heaven. Why, I do not understand because I simply do not hold any affinity for the place.”

Ciel scoffs.

“I have a strong personal belief that it’s better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven,” Sebastian hums. “However, I do wonder the reason of your apparent heresy, bocchan.”

Ciel tilts his head to a side, fearlessly barring his throat and allowing Sebastian to fasten the string. “Not heresy. But unless demons were sent to do God’s favours, I supposed I am a fundamentalist.”

Sebastian peers though his dark lashes at him, obscure veils over gleaming garnets. “Fundamentalist, is it?”

“Regardless of our faith, or the lack thereof, we are all devout,” Ciel shrugged his arms into the silk sleeves, his own second shed of human skin. “And I do not deny His existence; I simply believe in His abandonment of me and that I’ve sold my soul to the ultimate evil because I’ve lost faith in the ultimate good. Thus, I am at the altar of disbelief.”

“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong, bocchan,” Sebastian tuts, long finger intruding on Ciel in mock chastise. “That is a very narrow-minded way of thinking. I’d have expected better of you.”

Ciel shoots him a withering glare. “What are you blabbering about now?”

“The ultimate good and evil are not churches and devils, bocchan. The ultimate good exists within the good deed itself, thus pathway to heaven is paved with good intentions. While the ultimate evil, it dwells within humans. It is what feed us, rear us, beings of the other realm.”

His lips slowly stretches into a smile that, while it may be unsettling as it come to some, only has Ciel itching to hit him where it hurt with the cane. Where did it hurt the most for demons anyway?

“Churches and demons are more like, say, accessories: pornographic complementary elements.”

Sebastian fixes the last button and brushes the back of his finger, ever so lightly, against Ciel’s scrunched up nose before holding up the top hat. “We are the picky, chill, sepulchral balance of common sense and humanity, so to speak. Demons encourage humans; tempt them, coddle them, just like how moral rears their desires of flesh.”

Ciel makes a face and snatches the hat from Sebastian’s hand.

(He rarely wore gloves anymore when washing and dressing him since a while ago and Ciel wondered when exactly did he stop.)

“For a demon, you sure like to preach about philosophic hypocrisy, Sebastian,” Ciel growls and jams the hat onto his head. “And I hate preaching.”

“But of course, my Lord —”

“However I will admit that you are my, as you said, pornographic complement,” The Earl spits out with another glare, gesturing to the space separating them, holding at infinity and ending at one.

Oh, he’s flushing. Oh, he feels harassed, Sebastian thinks with glee, red eyes darkening.

“After all, between us is like sexual violation waiting to happen, isn’t it, you sick bastard?”

Ciel storms out of the room, face a flaming red much to Lizzie's sweet-voiced concern.

Sebastian bursts into peals of laughter behind him, sounding more human than Ciel thinks he has any rights to be.

Ciel sits on his armchair, fingers drumming lazily; willowy legs strapped in gartered silk stocking and heeled oxfords crossed at the ankle, thoughtfully studying the glass and chrome chessboard splayed in front of him, locked in an eternal check. He plays against himself a lot these days.

His own best enemy, he thinks.

There is a knock on the door, a precise three taps.

“You called, bocchan?”

Ciel does not look up when Sebastian closes the door behind him. Instead, he leans back on his armchair and unfolds his legs. “It’s undone. Lace it up.”

He extends his leg, a beacon of flesh.

Sebastian raises his eyebrow, the gesture so bizarrely humane, even as he sinks to his knee in endless amusement of the gall of this small, fragile creature that is fearless. He tightens the knot, which he learned through the human way.

“I should think that bocchan is old enough to know how to tie his own shoes.”

Ciel spares him a cool glance, raising the tip of his oxford until it touches against Sebastian’s chin. He tips the demonic face upward, Sebastian complying easily enough, and finds himself staring into amused eyes that reflects back no light or life.

“Why would I do that when I have you?” Ciel says. “Besides, I rather like the view of you like this. It’s becoming of a dog; in fact, I keep thinking that I should strap you. Or put a collar on you. Sebastian (1) used to wear collars.”

He prods harder and finds satisfaction in the faintly annoyed look in Sebastian’s face when he has to crane his neck to accommodate it. “I like the diamond buckled kind, but for you… hmm. Well, even dogs have their own class, I guess.”

Sebastian’s eyes gleam for all the lack of ability to absorb the light, the breadth of his irises turning even wider, brighter. “My, Master, I certainly wasn’t expecting you to have such… inclinations. Should I be concerned by the exposures you have while growing up? Is this Baldroy’s influence? Because I will incinerate him with his own cookery if it does.”

When did “bocchan” sometimes become “master?”

“Apparently I do,” says Ciel. “Or so Lau said.”

For a minute, he says nay a thing. Then, The Earl dares to toe the line.

“You know, Sebastian, for a while now, I’ve been wondering: if like this, would you lick my shoe if I tell you to? Kiss my feet?”

Sebastian frowns in disapproval. “I’ve just tied your strings, bocchan.”

“Undo them. You can always tie it again,” Ciel tilts his head to the side. “That’s your job, after all.”

For a moment, it feels as if Sebastian is trying to strip him mind and soul, with his eyes. Ciel is going to poke him if he continues.

“If that is your order, then yes, my Lord.”

“Lick it then.”

Sebastian peers up at him, never breaking the gaze as he pulls apart at leather and lace, leans down, and licks at the smooth texture of expensive waxed cowhide, distinct on his palate, before smoothly removing the footwear, cupping Ciel’s pale and cradle the delicate foot with both hands and kissing the tip of his toe, the side of his ankle, the pulse under the skin reverently.

He pulls away and Ciel makes a face. “That was disgusting. Eww. I can’t believe you'd actually do that.”

“Such a hurtful thing to say, my Lord,” Sebastian says as he tucks Ciel’s foot back into his boots.

Sebastian dusts himself as he stands and needlessly fixes his coat.

“Shall I go and prepare the dinner now?”

“Yes, now get out. I don’t want to see your face until dinner.”

The Hanged Man, the Devil, the Tower.  The arrangement suited them aptly.

When the contract began, Ciel was a child barely at the cusp of adolescence. He was a beautiful human child; insolence made it even more so.

It was one of the reasons why Sebastian answered his summon. Ciel’s soul was lustrous and tainted and broken, and he was everything Sebastian could appreciate in a meal but Sebastian was the Devil, whose bored mind is not just his own playground but a fatally dangerous one to its trespassers.

Childhood gave Ciel this alluring scent of open innocence. When the boy lowered his chin, there was delicate buoyancy; when he lifted his gaze, he had a curious flicker in his eyes that lingered, though dimmed, but refused to be snuffed, when in the face of Lady Elizabeth or Prince Soma.

Sebastian did not know the younger, smiling Ciel, who was sweet and temperate, who would probably fascinate him, but not arouse him, but whatever was left of that Ciel had merged with the Earl of Phantomhive, and it made Sebastian someone he called “bocchan.”

The Hanged Man.

Adolescence, however, was like the five o’clock of a time piece: when all the hours reached a quivering axis, the day exhausted and the wheels of the evening made London’s dark, shoddy alleyways seemed even narrower, more menacing, as every preternatural dwellers burst to life.

Ciel had never phased that awkward stage, having raced through maturity the way he did everything else; his body simply gave way to spry, elongated limbs and a slender outline. His face, set-off by eyes like Atlantis, a civilisation that Sebastian had only ever seen once in his long existence, and a coy smile on red lips, gave an illusion of pixie-faced debutantes in the drawing room after dinner.

Now, when he turned away, he exposed pale elegant neck; when he titled his head to the side, there was a subtle loftiness; every gesture eager to seduce its audience. Ciel Phantomhive moved through a garden soiree like a hooker on a strip show: leaving a trail of sophisticated socialites, who mistook their precariousness for the Earl’s, panting for his attention.

Sebastian would shake his head and smiled in a compassionate manner as he served those very same people perfect cups of tea and sweetened pastries.

Amusing little mortals thinking that they could touch something that belonged to a demon.

Well, Sebastian liked to think of himself as magnanimous for a demon. He was not necessarily cruel. They could look, but if they dared to touch, Sebastian is going to have to slap them on the wrist.

Because, as Ciel Phantomhive owned Sebastian Michaelis, the demon owned the boy.

They were the Hanged Man (sacrifice), the Devil (temptation), the Tower (ordeal). An aptly arranged arrangement.

Sebastian was the Devil.

Ciel remembers things in two ways: he remembers his mother in one of them, a beautiful photogenic face like a beautiful portrait with gentle strokes of bleeding colours and vibrant memories.

And there is his father, whose face was there on the other side of his eyelids; the ghost of him predominant and absolute.

Recently though, the ghost comes with red eyes. The smile is similar, more dead, but Ciel thinks that he had never wanted to slap it off his honourable father’s face before.

Presumptuous, insufferable prick.

Ciel grows older. Sebastian does not.

Sebastian continues to wear Vincent Phantomhive’s face as he bathes Ciel, tends to him, tucks him in, dresses him, undresses him, and Ciel grows increasingly aware of the weight of those hands on his body.

Ciel is certain that Sebastian is doing it on purpose; Ciel has not much use for virtue, but the depravity of finding temptation in a demon wearing his father’s face is certainly new, even for him.

So the idea is a bit out of the blue, on a whim, maybe because he is still half-asleep and lacking tea in his system, or because Sebastian is leaning down just enough, just the right height and tilt like this, when he is fixing Ciel’s ribbon, and Ciel just need to turn a little and their lips are pressing.

People says that kisses are magical. They defeat evil, awaken sleeping princesses from eternal sleeps. That they seal marriages, families, and souls.

Ciel has had kisses before; shy pecks on the cheeks with sweet Lizzie, and passionate ones behind the shroud of veils with beautiful people whose names he would not remember.

The kiss is startlingly chaste, considering its participants, all things considered; soft and close-lipped, but when they separate, Sebastian makes a tsk-ing sound when the tie comes undone again. Ciel, just to be spiteful, undoes it again.

Sebastian gives him a smile that speaks a thousand death.

Like a proper, collared British butler, Sebastian makes no mention of the kiss after that.

Neither does Ciel.

To Vincent Phantomhive, his little boy, his pride, his Ciel, light of his life. His sin, his soul. Ci-el, and all the glory of Heavens and Angels fell two steps down at the tip of the tongue, down to the palate, then to the heart and lungs and belly.

Ciel, his. Half of Rachel’s, but wholly, his.

His when Ciel was placed in his arms, wrinkly pink skin and all-seeing blue eyes. His when Ciel was barely three, standing and wide-eyed at his barely-knee-height in one sock and clinging to his slacks. His on the dotted lines over ivory parchment. His in Vincent’s arms, in the imaginary princedom by the sea with flying unicorns and castle on the clouds that he’d read to his little boy every night.

He would give the world by Ciel’s tiny feet, in a tangle of thorn. Because even the world was not good enough for the little prince.

He sympathised with all the beautiful children of the world, with Virgil, and Dante who fell madly in love with the nine-year-old Beatrice, with Petrarch who fell in love with the bejewelled Laureen of Vaucluse, lonely sailors who fell in love with powdered Japanese maiko, of Greek gods who fell in love with the delicate, mortal princes of Trojan.

It was wrong and perverted and every time he went to the Church — on one arm, his beautiful and innocent Rachel with a heart of gold, on the other, his perfect Ciel that the noble, winged seraphs envied — he would kneel before the altar and prayed.

He prayed for his sins, for forgiveness.

He prayed for the world for his Ciel.

Perhaps it was then that the God and seraphs had turned away from him, disgusted by his wickedness; damning him like how all sinners were damned to purgatory.

Maybe it was then that the Devil heard him, the echoes of his heart’s desire.

The night when the fire happened, he wondered if this was his punishment. His heart went to his wife, who died in pain and fire that she did not deserve.

Then, he saw it: a visage in cracked mirror, a swirl of black and evil, glimpses of leather and black claws, a slice of smile, a gaze of red through the lick of flames, and Vincent, somehow, in some way, immediately recognised him.

There was no fear, maybe Death was too near and Vincent was too numb, but there was curiosity and Vincent turned to him like he could offer him salvation, because God or Devil, right now, it didn’t matter.

“My little boy, my Ciel, is he safe?” He was nearly begging, desperate.

The darkness gazes upon him, and smiled, “He could be. If you want it to be.”

Vincent knew how the Devil worked. It couldn’t be different than a noble businessman, because there could only be the Devil at work whenever greed exchanged hands.

“My son must live. Take my soul, if you will. If this is my punishment, Ciel will not be the one to suffer it.”

The Devil titled his head — was it the head, really — and said, “I’ve heard of your desires, your sins. Your soul is black.” He paused, slow and patient as if they were having afternoon tea. “But your son is lovely. I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to sample him for a while now.”

“You can’t have us both,” Vincent said. “I will not allow it.”

“I will have what I desire when I desire it, mortal,”  The creature laughs; velvet and pinpricks of ice. “But yes, for now, your soul will do.”

“You will save my son?” Vincent asked, eyes wide and chest bursting in pain. He knew better than to trust a demon, but anything for his Ciel.

“He will escape the fire.”

He will not escape what came after; the Devil did not tell Vincent. Your son will come to me when it is his time, willingly, agonizingly ripe and willing.

“Thank God…” Vincent breathed out, even as he breathed in poison deep into his lungs. “Thank God.”

“Oh, but there is no God here.”

As the flame consumed Vincent Phantomhive, he stepped out of the mirror, dressed in the dark of night itself.

He leaned down, pressing his lips against the burnt, deformed flesh that was Vincent Phantomhive’s lips, and sighed in delight as if he had just sampled apple-and-honey treat when (memories, emotions, darkness, soul of) Vincent Phantomhive seeped into him, into his skin, somewhat filling an insatiable, eternal hunger like pitiless black hole within him.

“There is only me.”

And then, he was gone.

Sebastian isn’t entirely sure if it is curiosity driving him or that his young master just really, really likes sex.

Or perhaps just the power that comes with it, which sounds more plausible.

He thinks it started that one afternoon when Lau came to visit.

The Chinese man had let himself into the mansion, loud and uninvited as usual, but Ran Mao was strangely absent from his lap.

What begin with the young master’s irritation was gone when Lau, with his long pipe and knife-like smile, leaned close, hovering over the armchair, and there was an intent in his touches, and it bought a languid smile across his bocchan’s frowning lips and the lowering of his lashes.

Sebastian politely averted his eyes when Lau places his hand on a gartered thigh and when he came back to the slight dishevel Lau’s hair and the crook of the ribbon that Sebastian himself had flawlessly tied that morning, he just poured the tea and asked if they would like their tea cookies now.

It might have been earlier when Prince Soma had taken upon himself as a good “best friend” to spend the night to play at the mansion, despite the master’s endless rants and protests.

His bocchan, barely out of his eighteenth summer, had skilfully cornered a flustered Agni in the kitchen when everyone else had fallen asleep. Sebastian knew he knew that Sebastian was still awake and will always be.

The young master had that increasingly common smile resting on the curve of his mouth, standing on tip toes and absolutely defeating the much larger man. He bares skin through sloppily tied sleeping gowns, speaking in whispered secret and fluttering eyelashes.

Sebastian had closed the door behind him with a sigh, flipped his pocket watch to see that it was already very late. He lamented the come morning; when vindictive, sexually effervescent younger masters are always exhausting to deal with. Especially in the mornings when he is cranky and demanding proper English breakfast while nursing a bruised hips.

His young master would have made a fine demon.

On days when he is idle and the young master is put away by paperwork, Sebastian would think about how Lady Elizabeth would feel, how devastated she would be, if she is to find out about beloved Ciel who has grown into a different reality than hers.

In which Ciel would still marry her and die to make her happy, but unable to return her sentiments, and would still spread his legs for another for which ever purpose or pleasure, and kisses her chastely on the cheek.

The young master makes it a point that Lady Elizabeth is not to know of this; her innocence he cherishes above many things, though certainly not above all things.

Sebastian thinks that Lady Elizabeth knows to an extent; not the thing that matters, such as Sebastian and the rest of the Phantomhive household, but exactly how far, they and whole noble residents of the Queen’s country certainly wonders.

But she chooses to stay, chooses to love. This, Sebastian thinks, is the strength of mortals: a love that is able to look away.

Ciel Phantomhive may never understand that love; his is hail and fire and, raging vengeance upon the wrongs done to the things he loves, and it terrifies him at times. However, he is at the same time, so incredibly weak against it.

Sebastian is a demon. In principle, he does not understand it though he certainly does not despise it.

Love, like humans, has it charms and uses.

But Lau and Agni, Prince Soma and Lady Elizabeth, and their desire, and his loyalty, and her love, will water the soul inside the young master and in the end, Ciel Phantomhive will still belong to the demon.

So here they are.

Here he is: lying in a web of bloodied, disintegrated limbs, in the gutter of vengeful despair and destruction.

Strangely enough, there is a startling lack of tears.

(Maybe he’d run dry of them for a long time now. He just never noticed it.)

The stars above winks at him; a beacon of constellation undisturbed by the passage of time.

It’s strangely romantic, erotic even, even when he is bleeding in the mouth, blood pushed from punctured lungs, skin open and burning, and he has lost his remaining eye.

He knows that he could (would) die anytime now, but he is content.

Ciel has never feared death before, has morbidly appropriate himself a long, elaborate funeral rite since he was twelve, and while some of the more questionable figures in his life would take personal offence to that, he is finally at peace after so, so long, so fuck them.

Sebastian’s arm wrapping around his broken body does not stir him. He is used to this; this cold hard inhuman limbs put around him and making him feel safe.

Sebastian looks disgustingly in place as he always does; nary a hair nor string out of place.

It irritates him. Irritates him so much.

Ciel is just too tired to make unhappy noises about it as he usually would though.

He is sleepy, unseeing eyes bleary and heavy, like he could sleep for a long, long time.

A pair of lips presses against his forehead, almost loving in its butterfly weight and picture perfect in a frame, but it feels strangely like a brand on him.

Sebastian brings them to somewhere unknown, in a land far away and filled with white roses and ghosts of the past, behind them a trail of black feathers like a crow’s.

The demon kisses him there.

Ciel pushes Sebastian away, startled back into life, gasping and unbroken as could be like the time before he met the demon.

Pain is something that has always demanded to be felt, but this is the first time that he tastes it. Ciel feels his entire being repulsed, trying to reject the venom spreading through him.

He’s known this demon for years since he stepped out the last remnants of his childhood.

The demon dons on a human suit, a similar skin, and pretends to act like them though never quite a right fit, like a thin sheet over an empty shell, but Ciel’s never minded it.

It’s the first touch he knows after so many painful ones that, like a newborn duckling, he recognises without fail.

Until now.

Because Sebastian’s—no, not Sebastian, but the demon’s lips felt like everything you’d expect of a demon: warm, aged (like wine), dark (like chocolate), unbearably sensual, yet altogether, putrid.

Rotting. Hurt.

Dying.

“Have you ever wondered, my dear little Master, how vile creatures such as us would feast? Did you imagine something savage and bloody, or perhaps something a little more carnal?” The demon whispers, nuzzling his nose against Ciel’s cheek, caressing the other with his clawed, deformed hand. “But us demons are simple beings in hunger, for all our appetite. We sate ourselves through the most innocent and chaste of sexual acts: a kiss.”

Ciel stares at him, wide eyed and fragile.

But he does not move away.

The demon’s wonders: is it his rebellious spirit or his unwilling affection for Sebastian?

“I did not kiss your lips, bocchan, I kissed your soul, and from it I derive pleasure. You can’t even imagine how much.”

Throughout his existence, the demon has enticed madness from humans who were driven to insanity had seen his true form. However, his little bocchan has never averted his eyes and the demon thinks he should reward him a little for that.

“Every time we perform this deed, a little part of me will be pushed into you, as parts of you merge with me. Making us one, blurring the lines of our bodies until we do not know when one starts and the other ends.”

He puts on Sebastian’s face, his smile. The eyes remain.

The little human twitches, as if torn between belligerence and relief.

Defiant to the end; he is so lovely.

“Besides, did you humans not think it’s romantic to die by a kiss?”

Ciel knows that this demon is going to swallow him whole, wearing a face that he has grown to love.

But he doesn't move away; Ciel is soul worn and he thinks he could want this: Sebastian or the kiss, whichever offered to him.

It consumes his soul, twisting it into a ripples, the eddies turning a pulsing red that bleeds black. The touch is kind, and for the first time, Ciel thinks he senses warmth as the demon, who is also Sebastian, who kisses him like he would never tire of kissing him, will never let go, to delve deeper and remain there, and Ciel could only think:

Selfish prick.

It is dark here. Quiet.

Time slips away in silence.

Ciel sleeps.

The demon watches on.