He can...remember a time...a time before now - before there were these horns on his head and these claws replacing his hands. It was a better time. He had vague, foggy memories of a woman (his mother) who had gentle hands and a warm smile and smelt like freshly clean linens and sweet candle smoke, as well as even foggier images of a stern man with soft, glittering eyes that wrinkled at the corners when he smiled. Sometimes he caught the trail end of a memory of him playing with his mother - tag, hide and seek, ring around the rosie, but they always faded and slipped before he could really get a good look at it.
He was sure whoever had been his parents were long gone, as dead and cold as the heart in his chest, but he so ached to know what their touch had felt like, what they sounded like and what their names were; had they picked him up and swung him around when they hugged him? Had they called him by sweet pet names and kissed his forehead and cradled him when he was sick?
He couldn't remember - he only had hazy images of their faces in his head, brief scenes of a tiny house and a crowded kitchen, the memory of a long dirt road with holes as big as he was and carriage tracks in the mud.
The rest of his childhood is something he recalls with a fair bit more clarity. He knows he was an energetic and social child, although his eyes made him a misfit, and he never seemed to fear the leering eyes of distrustful adults who ushered their kids away from the red eyed street rat. He knew that the constant threat of becoming one of many murder victims didn't bother him in the ways it probably should have, and there was a sort of recklessness to his childhood that hadn't ever led to hefty consequences. The obvious poverty and pain around him hadn't effected his playful, wild nature, and neither had the sharp scolding from strangers and those he thought of as "caretakers" although they were perhaps more those who could afford to let him sleep on their floors.
He went by a name back then, one he could still hear on his mother's lips, but now the exact syllables and vowels didn't quite stick in his mind. He could also still hear the taunts as well, the calling of cruel names and whispers they thought he would never know about. Those sounds littered his childhood, as many other dark and ruined things often did.
And then the whole thing just shattered right before his previously innocent eyes. One man, on a cold fall afternoon, a stranger to the enthusiastic young boy, had stopped him in the shadows between two crumbling buildings. He remembered the old man asking for directions, but things had escalated so fast, and he could still feel those clammy hands on him, trying to pin him down and ruin him in the ways wicked men would continue to.
He'd been holding a wooden plank when it happened. He had planned on playing swords with the silver haired boy down the road.
Instead he killed a man; bashed his head in and crushed his ribs, had splattered red onto his hands and clothes until his trembling hands couldn't lift the plank anymore. Someone had started screaming, bold hands ripped the wood from his grip and he was shoved to the ground.
"Devil's child" and "Spawn of hell" were phrases used against him, and it was soon after, scrubbed clean and clothed in traveler's garb, that he left his simple little hometown. He would never return to the familiar dirt roads or see the old buildings that had once housed his good friends and the people that had enough good in them to put bread in his hands.
Things just spiraled downwards from there, everything heading to shit so fast he couldn't grab it and stop it. His first kill woke something inside of him, something hard and dark and twisted - something that gave him the ability to put one foot in front of the other...and a knife in his hands. Years would pass and he would kill again, over and over and over again, each dead body added to his kill count, quickly turning into double digits with not a single sign that he would stop. He could recall holding his bloodied knife, standing over yet another mutilated corpse, and feeling nothing. Just a cold numbness that spread from his fingers to the dark eyelashes shrouding crimson eyes.
He also found that for an odd, unknown reason, he simply did not age. At about twenty his appearance rarely changed unless he wanted it to, and eventually it became tiring and almost dangerous to continue going to get his hair cut.
He enjoyed it long and wavy and luxurious. Sometimes someone would praise his sudden and inexplicit beauty, the rich color of his eyes, the length of his hair and the softness of his lips, the sweet curve of his mouth when he smiled.
A façade.
A lie.
A mask to deceive.
Despite the constant killing and the contrasting numbness of his emotions and the sharpness of his mind, he lived has fully as he dared, finding festivals and carnivals and parties he could go to in hopes he'd forget the darkness that stained him. Sometimes he found others just as bad as he was, and sometimes he found those that shone so bright with their purity that it hurt him to lay his filthy hands on them.
Of course, everything ends.
His wild killing spree ends in the icy eyes of a fair haired man who wielded a scythe that burnt his skin when it touched him. He'd been confused when they took him to a place filled with books and whispers from those no longer living - he knows, some of them were slaughtered by his own hands. But why didn't they turn him in? He had been standing over a body so torn apart there was nothing left!
He finally got his much sought after answers in the form a scolding, much like the ones he'd gotten so long ago as a young boy who's innocence had still been in his grasp. It brought him joy to know the things he had been kept from, the stories and the whole other world that some cruel, sadistic god had snatched away from his vainly grasping fingers. It was the world he belonged to, the place he fit into like the missing puzzle piece someone had kicked underneath the coffee table.
He also found out just why he this oozing darkness in his chest where his heart should've been; he was a demon.
A demon!
He was told how to act and what he, as a creature of Hell, was capable of doing. He was expected to make contracts and deals, to trade something in return for the added numbers to his body count, and he collected things. Souls. They forced the numbness from his hands, gave him a thirst for life and gave a bounce to his step. With these new rules tacked on to his actions, he continued as he once had, his slaughter only slowed by the need to create a contract for each and every kill. It was something new, something that made the black, sticky mess of his mind make some semblance of sense! Perhaps he had no purpose but to be a dark blot in society, but it was one he wholly embraced.
His first name seemed so far away, so distant. He was known by others now, names that made no sense and didn't fit in his mouth when he was asked what he was called. Soon he started telling those that asked "call me whatever" for he never had an answer to that ancient question. Not anymore. What could he tell them? The name that he could still recall falling from his mother's smiling lips? The name that echoed in his head, the one that fit in his mouth with these terrible fangs he dared call teeth? No. He couldn't share that word, that secret treasure he hid behind whatever black tar he held within his ribcage. It was his. It belonged to him - the only thing he had left from a childhood tarnished by the cruelty of others.
All too soon, as landlines gave way to cellphones and automobiles to fast cars and minivans, he once again felt a numbness take over. He reached - he really did - but his reach was in vain and his hands too numb to feel, to see the beauty that thrived and wilted around him. The color seemed to fade, and he barely heard the whispers from his own soul - did he even have one anymore? Was there anything but the dark shadows of Hell inside of him? Where was his childhood innocence? His bravado? The playfulness he had once felt so abundantly? It was has if the many years had slowly drained him of whatever made him a living and thinking person, the thing that had once gave him a reason to strive for such high standards. His heart was cold and dead and his chest only had the ashes and rotting bones of the black and twisted thing that remained of his ruined humanity.
And then he met him; Ciel Phantomhive. Alone and trapped in a cage wrought from the cruelness of sadistic humans, his own blood staining a flimsy night gown and his tiny hands that clung to a bright jewel of obvious value. The boy was so young and already ruined, but there was a shine, a clean spot among the dirt and soot and blood. There was a pure, white hot innocence within the boy's weepy blue eyes, something that his kin would crave to destroy.
He wanted to protect it. He wanted to steal that boy away and cradle him in his arms, he wanted to shield the painfully delicate child from a world that did not care; It did not care about this boy, it still did not care about the dark path it had forced him down, and would never care.
However, he had rules attached to his actions. He could not simply disappear with the human in tow. A contract was made, a deal struck in the cramped corners of that dirty cage with a boy who's blue eyes - also ruined, a mark scarring one a violent purple. The boy kept that shining gleam of innocence, but he chased adulthood like it was something to actually desire, tossing aside his own childish whimsies like they were nothing! He himself had fought so hard to stay a child so long ago, and now here he was, with a boy who's nightmares left him screaming and shaking, a boy who no longer wanted to be a child, spending his time cleaning up after three idiots he only needed to tidy up after any fighting that took place.
Ciel gave him a new purpose, and instead of inciting crime and murder and darkness, he was discouraging it; dispatching criminals and taking down illegal businesses all over the violent town of London. His numbness was chased away by a bitter child who took over in jobs not meant for someone so young and inexperienced, who's voice commanded attention to it - even with that squeak that came with the inevitable onset of puberty.
Perhaps it wasn't the only thing he did. He'd long ago found that alcohol and drugs could help soothe an age old pain that settled in his chest and spread to his back; it ached and made his old bones creak and he could only grit his teeth and tolerate it. Human doctors could do nothing for him, that he could already tell, this was an illness of his own making. A chronic pain sourced from his own self destruction, from his self loathing and the numbness that had often lead to bad choices and one night stands that only served to lower his self esteem even more. Some illegal drugs here and there, found in underground clubs his youthful master would so angrily disapprove of, legal drinking he did in backwater bars filled with other people trying to hide from a life time of pain and suffering, and even the harmless smoking of nicotine and weed to erase the grey walls of his mind.
He could not be saved, he could not scrub at a reflection so wrecked that the icky sticky black had leaked into the cracks and leached him of human empathy. However...he could save this one lone boy, he could try and take this one example of something bent and battered and try his hardest to protect it.
Protect it like no had done for him and so many like him.
He could remember a time when he wasn't carrying a small body up the stairs and wasn't tucking a young boy into bed while humming achingly familiar lullabies from days spent in arms that smelt of fresh linens. A demon could care, even without the need for human compassion, a demon could need to shelter a lost soul even when their life's purpose was to destroy the souls of their victims - because why the hell not? Who could stop him from loving this boy, from feeding him and stepping between him and danger? He would be a shield - and when his lord needed it, a weapon.
His name?
Sebastian Michaelis.