Undertaker liked to think that he had a sort of fraternal affection for the Earl Phantomhive. It was not entirely off the mark, by his reasoning. It was not uncommon for a child or three to appear on his morgue slabs, nothing to taint their angelic faces but a dark ring around their necks. The hug and halo of a parents love. In darker times and harder lives, he knew, a mother would send her kids off the Sandman and on down the Styx least they suffer at the hands of starvation, weak and laying in the streets. Streets he walked daily, if they could still be called streets in the way they twisted so tightly between vendor carts, slum markets, and up steep inclines that disappeared into the fog. He had to always step over the unloved ones as they lay in the filthy heaps of themselves, triple stacked for warmth like rats. The poor things sometimes grabbed at his ankles in a grey rainbow of fingers but then they would stop, see what color he carried and perhaps only one would reach even farther out to snatch at his coat. Snagged, he'd looked back and meet pleading eyes as bright as church light. Might the Earls eyes been like that before they learned of the spark that could make fire from ice?
They say a man is a runaway carriage dragged by the mad horses of his passion and all it took was the strong hands of a companion, partner, lover of some kind to steer those ponies in the right direction. He had no idea as to the name of his own horses but it didn't matter much. He enjoyed the sudden jerks and potholes that threatened to knock him off the edge, not to mention his arms had just enough strength to occasionally tug the beasts in a way he favored. He had never held the reins of another, expect maybe at their End-Time, but that didn't much count. It was a cheap way to control someone's fate and hardly satisfying. He merely rattled his carriage alongside another's; shouting outing over the stampede that the end was nigh, but of course, the previous Earl met his demise despite him. They had smiled the whole way, Lady Coach-Driver and Lord Cabin-Passenger; it still made him sweat and squirm in delight.
He called the Earl's four-legged beasts Revenge and Resignation. Literately and figuratively, the young Earl had his driver. Even after their smooth turns, inclines, and night-rides the fact never changed that the destination of the twosome was Gehenna. The Earl, like everything, was doomed to off somewhere, get lost in darkness, collide head-on, loose a wheel and tumble out of control but pulling into Pandemonium and parking wherever they stopped was something Undertaker simply could not allow.