A/N: Hey, lovely readers! You are welcome to hate me all you want, because I KNOW that I suck, and I'm a shit author. Why do I keep tormenting you with new story upon new story, yet leave current works on unexpected hiatuses? Because I am a terrible person. Anyway, I read a one shot with a similar premise to this, though I cannot remember by whom or what it was called, and I found myself to be unsatisfied with the ending. It got me to thinking about how I would portray this idea, and well, here we fucking are. It's not going to be a very long story, but I can promise that it will have several chapters.

Thanks to my darling Kit for being my goldfish and editing my shit. Another big thanks to SebasuchansKitten for composing the following poem for this story. I love you so very much. You should all thank Kit for motivating me to write, and to stop procrastinating. I'm trying very hard to finish several chapters of other works all at once. Anyway, I'll stop rambling now. Enjoy~

Inside my corpse I'm a trembling wreck

Yet I can't help the composure I feel

I sense your soft breathing on my neck

To remind me that this moment is real

I heard you choke, I heard the snap

But I still tasted a terrible tart

I felt you deaden in my lap

Was that your neck or was that my heart?

To this day I carry your body,

Whether in a coffin or in a sack

I savage you until I'm no longer broken,

Yet you keep coming back

By your presence I'm still haunted,

Though in my mind, I won't believe it true,

I try to convince myself you're forgotten,

But I could never forget you…

-"Haunted" by SebasuchansKitten

Chapter One

I had taken my Master's life; yet I did not consume his soul…

He lay in a bed of sterling white roses, his hands placed gently, overlapping on the small of his stomach. Placed directly in the center of the softly rocking gondola, he could almost be mistaken for a porcelain doll, he was so still. The moonlight fell upon his pallid face, making his flawless skin appear more alabaster than it was. The coal black, silken eyepatch was a stark contrast to his translucent flesh. His eye was shut in rest, nary a wrinkle or worry line marring his face. Obscenely long, dark lashes dusted his high cheek bones, and his pouting lips were parted slightly, though he breathed silently through his nose. The rise and fall of his chest was barely noticeable, and I was only able to pick up the tiny movements because of my enhanced eyesight. I let my vermillion eyes rest upon his noble visage for far too long, studying the familiar features for possibly the billionth time. His image was burned into my mind, never to be forgotten in the coming millennia. In all of my eternal life, there had never been a soul I desired as much as I had his; there had never been a human that I had formed a contract with that possessed an ounce of personality or intelligence that Ciel Phantomhive had. He was a depthless pool of everything a person would wish to be, but would never obtain. There would never be another as tempting as my Master. The epitome of all that I would ever desire, held in such a dainty shell of a human.

Turning my attention back to the task at hand, I continued to row with the long paddle, gliding it through the still water. The night was silent, not a single breeze ghosting against the flesh of my cheeks. It was hauntingly beautiful, eerie and breathtaking all at once. It was not long before I spotted the massive rock formation on an abandoned island. There, I knew I would find what I sought out. By now my Master was roused from sleep, his single deep sapphire orb gazing out over the water blankly. When the gondola gently brushed against the sand of the beach, I turned to him and lifted him from his flowery bed. I carried him in my arms, up the face of the steep cliff, and into the dark and silent wood.

His body was so frail, so light that if I had not been able to feel his warm flesh through my gloves, or his gentle breath against my cheek, I would think him a mere phantom. His thin arms were loosely curled over my shoulders and around my neck, and his slim fingers dug into my tailcoat. It was his time to leave this earth, and we both were highly aware of that fact. I had fulfilled my end of our contract, ruthlessly smiting each and every enemy of my Master. His revenge had been exacted, and now it was time for me to partake of my meal. He was not afraid of what was to come; he was merely a satisfied and sated cat, relishing his victory over the last remaining mouse. I could sense in him through the bond of our contract that he was exhausted, accepting of his fate, and willing to finally embrace it.

I was walking slowly through the wood, in no hurry to reach our destination. An odd sense of dread was settling in my stomach like a poisonous miasma, yet I had no idea why. Should I not be elated that I would finally taste upon my parched tongue his delectable soul? Should I not be burning with the relief of finally being free from the shackles that he had placed upon me with the sealing of our covenant? I knew those things to be true, and yet…

Ciel Phantomhive did not know fear. He stared ahead, down the path that was leading him ever so slowly to his demise, yet he only felt peace. The cold grip of death was falling upon him, and the relief he possessed in his dainty body was staggering. He seemed to relax into me as we approached the ruins, awash in the pale moonlight that gave it an ethereal glow. I approached the stone dais, setting him upon a lone, stonework bench, and quickly set about to removing his eyepatch. I wished to gaze into his heterochromatic eyes, one tainted a deep amethyst with the dull contract mark imbedded within, the other as blue and bottomless as a sapphire. He stared back at me for only a moment, before letting his lids fall shut, exhaustion creeping into him once more.

Kneeling before him, I brought my face close to his, shedding my gloves so that I could feel the heat of his flesh warm my chilled fingers. As my long digits brushed along his cheek and through his kitten-soft locks, I felt a tremulous shiver dance through him. The beating of his heart was slow, and it sat heavy with fatigue in the cavity of his chest; I could feel his pulse within my own body, a side effect of the strength of our bond. I was a mimicry of a human, using his livelihood as my own to pass off in the mortal world. Without him, it would be as though I was a walking corpse, and I would not be able to remain in this world. Perhaps it was time to end this foolish game of pretend, and return to the hellish world from which I spawned.

Our faces were mere centimeters apart; all I had to do was lean that much closer, and my lips would be upon his. I would feast upon his soul with a ravenous hunger, taste the perfection in each exquisite shred of his mouthwatering essence. My thirst would finally be quenched, the burning all-consuming aches of starvation would finally cease. And yet…

My ivory lips trembled in hesitation as I gazed upon his accepting face. I found that I could not do it. I could not leech onto him and rip his soul from him; I could not inflict the pain of his essence being stripped and tattered into a thousand fragments. The thought of even attempting to consume him plunged me into the blackest depths of hell, filling me apprehension and self-loathing. Why could I not dine upon him as my body so craved to do?

I let my hands slide from his blae tresses, my vermillion eyes watching with interest as they stopped to rest upon his slender nape. His skin was soft and smooth beneath my tremoring fingers, elegance visible in every curve and divot of his flesh. My hands tightened around his delicate neck, jerking harshly to the left before I had time to even consider what I was doing. The sickening snapping of bone echoed in my ears; the rattling of his last breath in his lungs weighed upon me with an execrable finality.

His life had ended at my hand, yet I had not consumed his soul.

I could sense the Reaper's presence before he stepped out from the shadows of the wood. I did not move my eyes from the sight of my Master even as I rose to my feet and stepped away from him. I allowed the Reaper to approach in his fluid movements, my chest aching and making it hard for me to properly think. My intuition told me that he had already known that Ciel's soul would be his for the culling. There is no other reason for him to have been able to show up as swiftly as he had.

"You knew?" The words left my lips before I had decided to speak them. My voice sounded hollow and deadened, even to my own ears.

"Yes," William T. Spears confirmed without hesitation, his tone as bored and uncaring as it had always been, though he did not look upon me.

The next question ripped from my throat, unbidden. "For how long?" I was not one to torment myself, yet I could not stop myself from asking the tedious queries.

Spears finally let his piercingly cold eyes assess me, as if he were seeing me in an entirely new—and unwelcomed—light. "It has been transcribed in his book for approximately 3 months, 14 days, 23 hours, and 5 minutes."

I wanted to know why his fate had changed, how it had come about, yet I could not bring myself to ask. Lest he did not know; for fear that he did. I could scan my memory as much as I wanted, though I could not figure out what had caused this outcome. My chest felt heavy, quite odd considering I had never felt something of the sort.

My attentions were turned outward as Spears pushed his spectacles up with the tip of his death scythe. His chilling chartreuse eyes were gazing at the corpse of my Master, as if analyzing something that was invisible to my vermillion orbs. I stood completely still, wanting to go yet morbidly desiring to watch him cull the only soul that I have ever and would ever desire so powerfully.

"Are you quite positive that you will not consume his soul?" His monotonous inquiry took me off guard. "He is still bound to you."

Confusion settled upon me like a suffocating duvet; I did not comprehend the meaning of that statement, so I chose to disregard it. I shook my head once as an answer. I would not devour him; I could not.

Spears merely shrugged at me, and with a sharp flick of his wrist, his scythe shot out and unceremoniously severed my Master's soul from his unmoving body. Ciel Phantomhive was no more; his body was now an empty shell. The Reaper disappeared, leaving me alone in my self-loathing. I took the feather-light corpse into my arms, returning to the gondola on which we had arrived. Placing his body back in the bed of roses, I positioned him as he had been before, taking one last look at him before gently pushing the boat out to sea. As it drifted away from the island, I called up a fire, setting him and everything surrounding him alight with the consuming flames. I watched the gondola float away, a show of dancing flames and ash, until I could no longer see it in the distance, before finally turning away.

I had not known then what the Reaper had meant. If I had, would it have affected my actions? Would it have proceeded the way it should have gone?

E/N: Well, I hope you enjoyed this chapter. Comments would be greatly appreciated. Make sure you show Kit some love for her wondrously perfect poem. You have no idea how much I love you, my little devil~.

Kisses and Love, Always love, Ritsy