Hello! I'm back!

Besides school and stuff, I have no excuse as to why this is so late. .-. Sorry, I'll try not to let it happen again.

I've gotten quite a few views on this story (barely anything at all for other writers here, but a lot for a beginner like me), and I wanted to thank everybody for reading, reviewing, favouriting and following! I didn't expect people to see this story, and knowing that people are reading and reacting means more than you guys know. Thank you guys so much!

Okay, soooo this chapter might confuse people. It's told pretty much entirely from Ciel's perspective, and since he doesn't know Annie's actual name, he is still calling her by the name she introduced herself as. So she is addressed as Siobhan for this chapter. Just to clear up some stuff. I'm also going to start saying who's perceptive it is, because this story is going to involve a LOT of perspective changes.

Disclaimer: Unfortunately, Black Butler/Kuroshitsuji and it's characters belong to the very talented Yana Toboso, but my OCs belong to me.


Ciel

Ciel analyzed. That's what he did. It was his duty as the Queen's Watchdog to dissolve the worries of Queen Victoria, and being able to look at a situation then see what the Yard had missed had become made him very good at his job. He could analyze crime scenes, situations, locations and, most importantly, people, as naturally as he could breathe.

When he had first became the Watchdog, it had required some time to acquire then master the skill to see every facet of a crime that had adults puzzled and stumped. It had also made him very good at playing games of chance. Now, though, it had become second nature to the young Earl. It didn't take much effort for him to be able to see clearly through the ruse of most adults or people.

Siobhan was no exception.

Siobhan was harder to read than most noble adults that he usually affiliated with, and even though Lao was a part of the underworld, he wasn't quite the same as she was. Though Lao was very much engaged in criminal activity, Siobhan was forced to deal with more dangerous repercussions for her actions. But he ruled that she was harder to properly observe because of her living in the criminal infested East End, having to be secretive in order to keep her head attached to her shoulders. Still, he knew that there was a lot more than what she was letting on.

From what he had seen so far, she worked alone, a lone wolf type - the way she had approached the initial fire fight made that incredibly clear. She was unused to forming plans that involved the abilities of someone other than herself. Sending Sebastian to draw the guards away was pretty clever, he supposed, but she didn't properly take the demon's vast range of skills and use them to their full potential. Then again… She didn't know how much Sebastian was capable of, when Ciel did. She wasn't aware of his capabilities, and she was more than likely distrustful of both him and Ciel. Involve them as less as possible was probably her tactic right now.

She was also very skilled with her rifle and her pistol, but she was the dangerous type of skilled. She had her revolver tucked away in the holster he had seen underneath the cover of her jacket, her rifle was slung over her back, with her hands nowhere near either weapon. To an untrained eye, it would seem like she was ignoring it. To Ciel, she was very aware it was there, but she was aware of it the same way someone was aware of their nose. Always there, always ready to be used, but she didn't need to constantly touch and fondle it to know that it was there and prepared to be fired. The weapon was an extension of her. Ciel had learned to be cautious with people who handled any weapon as if were a part of them. They were people who respected an armament and could use it to their fullest potential, no matter it's condition. Sebastian was treated those silverware knives like they were a part of him, and he could make those small, blunted knives into weapons of mass destruction.

Then, there was way she talked. It had puzzled him until she spoke more than one word sentences. Her accent, though very clearly of a lower class, was a tad bit different from other East Enders. Not by much (it was slight), but it was there, undeniably clear once he noticed it and listened for it. After shifting it through his mind a few times when she spoke, he ruled that her first language was not English. She seemed like she hid it- she hid it fairly well- but she would make small slips in parts of the conversation. Sometimes she'd have a small accent, but he couldn't put his finger on what it was because it only came up rarely into her words. It may be a hybrid of accents from two countries. Lao had an accent like that, due to how much business he did in English versus his native Chinese language. Perhaps it was a similar case.

Regardless, all these factors matched up with everything but one detail; her occupation. Bartenders, while usually being good information brokers if enough money was at stake, did not have the particular personality, nor the skill set Siobhan seemed to possess. When they did have connections to the criminal underworld, bartending was usually a cover. If his hunch was right, it was the same for Siobhan. Avoid suspicion by hiding in plain sight, or something along those lines.

Ciel scowled at the back of her head as they moved down the hall. They met with little to no disturbance from any other guards, and he wondered if Sebastian and Siobhan had killed them all. He wouldn't be surprised if they had. There had been a lot of corpses in the front courtyard. Siobhan had only needed to dispatch a single straggler in the halls, passed out - intoxicated by drugs or alcohol or both - and had stirred when the trio had passed. The man had started to say something, and Ciel hadn't even been able to blink before Siobhan pulled her pistol out of the holster at the side of her ribs and put a bullet between his eyes. The apathetic nature of the action had startled Ciel, the almost mechanically ease and precision of her lifting the gun and pulling the trigger. Her eyes remained forward, and he wondered how she had made such a precise shot without looking. Maybe she had very good hearing.

There were definitely quite a few questions that needed to be asked when this was all over.

Siobhan suddenly halted, and Ciel almost ran into her back, beginning to form a protest on his tongue, but he held it back when she raised a finger to her lips, then pointed to the door. The main lab. She pointed wordlessly to the wall, gesturing for him to take cover, on the left side of the door. He did so, and watched as she took place closer to the door, taking her gun in her left hand, and Ciel suddenly noticed the blood staining her shoulder.

A round hole about the diameter of the edge of his finger was ripped through the front of her shirt. Blood had stained the off-white fabric, and the wound was

Before he could say anything, Siobhan spoke, eyes looking so intensely at the door that Ciel wondered if she was looking through it. Her voice was filled with barely controlled anger as she reloaded bullets into her pistol. "There'll be at least seven guys in in there. One of 'em has black hair, probably tied into a ponytail or some shit like that. Sunken, brown eyes. White. Scrawny as hell, looks like he's smoked too many pipes. Keep him alive, and keep another alive." She looked up to Sebastian, and at his somewhat inquiring expression, her expression indifferent and cold. Ciel felt the hairs on the back of his neck raise, "For spares."

Ciel narrowed his eyes at the woman. "I'll do the questioning, if it's all the same to you. I have some questions I need have answers to. If they don't talk, I assume you know what will get them to speak?"

She paused, the calculations and thinking she was making in her head evident in her expression, then shook her head. "No, I'm not havin' you come with me," She said, almost to herself, and when Ciel began to protest, she put up her finger to silence him, refusing to look at him, "Because, it's goin' to take a lot for them to loosen their jaws. I don't want ya to see that."

Ciel faltered, his mind spinning with the reasonings of those words. Why would she care what he did or didn't see? Uncharacteristic, from what he's seen of her so far. However… She did mention earlier that she had a younger brother, so she might be attaching her emotions towards her brother to Ciel. Not unheard of, but it was still foolish. Whatever she could do, Ciel had probably seen the same before, maybe worse, and he knew that she was achingly aware of that.

The room was bare of any personal items for obvious reason, and four tables were pressed against the walls, covered in various chemicals and equipment that would be necessary for creating drugs. Rubbish covered the parts of the ground, and a ratty old couch sat against the wall near the door, and other cheap, old chairs were scattered around the room. A phone sat in the corner, off the hook, by the window. Amongst the bodies of the fallen, two men, one standing and one sitting in a chair, stared at Siobhan as if she were a ghost. A man not matching Siobhan's description walked towards Siobhan, and the man she had described was frozen, with his eyes as wide as dinner plates as he sat on the far end of the couch, trembling as he looked to the dead man laying beside him.

The former man's arms spread and palms facing her in a way that was meant to be pacifying. His expression was a forced smile that scarcely covered pure terror at her coming toward him, looking like something out of a nightmare, with her cheek sliced open and the blood of his comrades splattered against her face and clothes."Lucy, what are you doin' here-?" Siobhan cut him off by taking the hilt of her revolver and smashing it against his jaw. He groaned pathetically, doubling over and clutching his face in pain as she grabbed his shoulder, dragged him, and slammed him against the wall. He coughed, the air rushing from his lungs as Siobhan pinned him by pressing her forearm against his throat.

Lucy? He had called definitely her Lucy. Ciel paused, looking in, and she seemed unfazed at the incorrect name. She reacted to it, responded to it, and she didn't even try to correct them. Ciel scowled. She worked under an alias in the Ferro family. She could be working under an alias now, which further complicated the background of Siobhan, and made it even harder for Ciel to get a read on exactly who she was.

She looked back at the other man with a cool look. "Don't worry, Freddie, you're next. Just gonna make good and sure prepared to talk," Freddie, as she had called him, stared at her as he went ashy pale. The man in her grasp gaped at her in unadulterated fear at the very calm and composed look of the woman holding him. "Hiya, Ben. Did ya miss me? Probably not. You know damn well what I'm here for, so lets just get this over with, hm?" She pressed harder against his throat, and he made a choking noise as Siobhan looked back to Ciel, inclining her head to the man. "Go wait outside. This shouldn't take long, but..." She looked at him with a raised eyebrow, her expression knowing. "No peeking."

Ciel sighed, standing outside the door and crossing his arms. Countless screams, expletives, thumps, shatters, and a gunshot later, the door opened, and Siobhan and Sebastian came out. Sebastian, as per usual, was clean and proper, but Siobhan was… not. Blood was splattered across the front of her shirt, some of it obviously her's from the look of the bullet sized hole in the fabric. Another graze had ripped through her side and blood had stained a part of the shirt there. Her face was splattered with blood, but her hands looked as if she had soaked them crimson. Underneath the red, she seemed much paler than she had been when she went in.

"Did you get the location?" Ciel asked.

"'Course I did. I may not have clean ways of doin' it, but I always get it done, Watchdog. Jus' like you." Then she looked at Ciel, and he leaned back to look into her dead, flat and eyes.

She turned without another word, looking away from him just as suddenly as she had met his gaze, and he felt a shiver run down his spine. Though the gaze had been brief, he had been able to see, clear as day, that her eyes were completely void of emotion and life, besides a dark fire that burned too dull to keep light. But other wise, it was so empty and cold that Ciel had felt familiarity. An almost exact replica to what Ciel had seen in the children in the cult, except she had been the culprit, rather than a familiar gaze, so similar -too similar- to those of the children who had been there the day he and Sebastian had made their contract.

Something clicked with him at that thought and in that one stare. The children shared something with her; she was a husk. She was completely and utterly empty. Someone who was nothing, had nothing to live for and had nothing to lose. She might have seemed lively, at first glance, but now, looking at her, her blood splattered face staring vacantly, with an almost familiar feel, at her blood soaked hands, he knew that it was a facade. Just a colourful mask to cover the grey. But something else matched together in her eyes to the hopeless children rotting in cages. That emptiness was there, held in eyes that had seen too much. The complete resignation to her fate; a surrender to what she could do nothing about. But the fire burning behind her eyes, the silent, sadistic, almost invisible pleasure and fulfillment at seeing the blood she had covering her hands. Though it had similarities to two completely different things, they blended together into a look that Ciel could recognize from one month and the years of investigation.

Siobhan had the eyes of an experienced killer. If it had not been clear yet - which it had been, of course - it was crystal clear now. Siobhan was more certainly not some simple street urchin who got caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time and brought into a gang against her will.

"You're not really a bartender, are you?" Ciel asked, not even knowing he had said it out loud until the words had slipped from his mouth. At this point, it seemed like a completely pointless question, since her occupation was very obviously not bartending, but he needed a direct answer.

She stopped walking, not freezing like someone who's been caught, but pausing, as if she were judging a way to correctly answer. She turned just enough to look at Ciel, her eyes now somewhat dazed, distant, and glassy, her expression of someone deep in thought. Her voice was low, with a certain softness that had not been there in her sharp voice and her harsh words. She seemed a bit dazed. "What makes you ask that?" She asked. He looked a bit closer, and noticed a thin sheen of sweat over her paler skin.

Not stopping now, Ciel shot back a response. "A bartender doesn't purposefully make such a mess. You know that you're sending a message."

There was a small quirk in the corner of her mouth and her voice was rough. "You're a clever one, aren't cha? Yeah, I'm sendin' a message to Ferro and Azzurro. A blown up lab can leave things up for guesses. Maybe some dumbass lit a match and it all went up in flame. But blood splatterin' the origin of the explosion? That makes him know for sure that someone is huntin' him down. Makes 'em paranoid. As much as they arm and defend themselves, a paranoid rat is a rat you don't have to hunt."

Ciel smirked, looking at her with a new appreciation. The next part of their plan had been to lure him in, but what Siobhan had left behind would make Azzurro desperate and scared, so he imagined that it wouldn't take long for him to make a wrong move and end the game.

Siobhan looked out the window in the room, brows pulled together. In the quiet, her ragged breathing was very loud. "Phantomhive, we should probably haul ass. This place'll be swarmin' with Ferro's once it goes up in flames, and I don't wanna be here when they show up."

Ciel inclined his head, and Siobhan turned around and started to walk back down the hall. Her feet were dragging in audible scuffs as she shuffled away, and Ciel looked to Sebastian, speaking low. "Azzurro will spring the trap once he discovers this. Then"

A thump made him look up, and his eyes widened at the sight of the woman leaned against the wall, her hand on her shoulder. She was leaning too heavily, and she looked as if she was barely holding herself up. "Ms. Cunningham?" Ciel asked carefully.

"Shit…" He heard her swear, and she almost stumbled when she pushed off the wall, but she caught herself. Ciel nodded to Sebastian, looking from the butler to the woman, and the black haired man nodded, closing the distance between him and Siobhan. He offered her a hand, but she knocked it away and shoved him back, her words slurred. "Getch'yer hands off a me. "

She pushed too hard, and stumbled backwards, legs giving out. Sebastian caught her and swept her into his arms, ignoring her weak and feeble struggles. He looked to his master. "She has lost too much blood. She will need to go to the hospital."

"N-no," She hissed, clenching her hands into tight fists, her expression defiant. "No doctors."

"You need medical attention, Ms. Blackwood," Sebastian said calmly.

Ciel frowned at the butler. Ms. Blackwood? Another alias she had told Sebastian? He must've had realized she had lied, and maybe she had managed to lie once more. Unlikely, but completely possible.

"There's... " She trailed off a bit, and she almost looked like she was about lose consciousness, but she shook her head and lolled her head to the side to look at Ciel. "There's a doctor… In my apartment complex. Dr. Allen Connors."

"Where do you live?" Ciel asked.

"2-210 Whitechapel road. Apartment… 12B."

"Do you know that the doctor will help you?"

She seemed to get a bit lost in thought at the question. "H-He 'as before. He'll do it 'gain."


Actually reaching the dingy, shabby apartment building wasn't difficult. Siobhan had sat in the car with Ciel for the ride there, staying silent the entire time. Well, almost silent. Her heavy pants of exertion, and her eyes were half lidded in a last ditch effort to keep herself awake, and one of her hands were placed at the wound at her shoulder, trying to stop the blood flow, and her other rested on the bloodied coin purse at her hip. An odd action, considering she was always bleeding from her side, but by the way she kept casting lazy, suspicious glances at Ciel, he concluded that she thought he was going to steal back the money once she collapsed.

Once the carriage had come to a halt, Sebastian helped Ciel out, then lifted Siobhan out of the now bloody seat, carrying her out of the carriage and into the building. The building inside was dull and dim, with peeling wallpaper and old, wood flooring and stairs that creaked in immense strain when they were stepped on. Ciel looked around. The building wasn't dirty, per se, but it didn't exactly look like it was in very good condition.

They climbed the stairs, the only sound around them distant murmurs of other occupants, the stairs shrieking, and Siobhan's heavy, strained breathing and her occasional moan of pain. In front of him, Sebastian did not rush, holding Siobhan's body in his hands gingerly to keep from moving her and agitating her wound. She looked remarkably small, curled in on herself to protect wounds in the tall man's arms. Ciel imagined that Sebastian's usually pristine uniform would be smeared with her blood after this.

Coming up to the door, Sebastian shifted Siobhan so that he could free one arm and knock. The butler quickly rapped his knuckles on the door, and Ciel heard an awkward, pubescent, countertenor voice call a quick, "Coming!", then the thumping of someone running to the door. The door flew open, revealing a breathless boy a bit older than Ciel with dirty blonde hair, and forest green eyes that still had the roundness of childhood. His face, though becoming more angular and strong jawed, was still fairly round with baby fat. He was gangly and a bit skinny, but more from rapid growing than lack of food, and was he taller than Ciel by about four inches, which made his jaw tick. This must be her brother, Ciel thought to himself.

The boy smiled politely, welcoming. "Hi-?" He froze upon seeing Annie's bloodied body, and he opened the door wide in a clear gesture for the trio to come in. "Grandpa! Clear off the table, Annie's hurt bad!"

Ciel frowned. She was being called Annie now. Another name. Ciel rubbed his temples, trying to push away the migraine he felt coming on. Siobhan was becoming more complicated and more trouble than she was worth in every passing minute. Too many names, too many identities, too many mismatching stories and skills and jobs and histories.

Sebastian looked at Ciel when he sighed as he moved into the apartment, faster than he had before. Clattering crashes erupted from off to the right. Ciel, curious, looked, seeing an old man with a nose that looked like it had been broken and not healed correctly, grey hair and an equally grey beard, sweeping the contents off the kitchen table, and hastily cleaning off the surface. He looked up, calling to the boy. "Joseph, go fetch the Doc!"

"On it!" With that, the boy sprinted out, shouting, "Dr. Connors, Dr. Connors!", followed by frantic banging.

"Put 'er on the table, butler," The old man said, gesturing to the now clean table. Sebastian did as told, laying Siobhan on the table. The old man quickly assessed the injuries, his eyes were sad. His voice was thick. "Oh, Annie, what did they do to ye…?" He brushed a long lock of her hair out of the wound, and it was congealed with blood.

Joseph burst back into room, arm full of what looked like blood bags, followed by a man carrying a medical bag, brown haired and grey eyed, in his late forties and a woman, blond haired and hazel eyed, the same age. He immediately cursed at the wounds. "God dammit, Annie, stop getting shot!"

She wheezed a laugh so weak it was pathetic. She was still conscious, but apparently just barely. "S-so-"

The doctor scowled at her. "Don't speak, idiot!" He chastised, opening the bag and placing it on the table beside Annie. "Marie, get the needle ready, I'm gonna clean out the wound."

The woman, Marie, nodded, but Ciel narrowed his eye. "Aren't you going to give her any medication?" Everyone was scurrying around Siobhan's prone body, moving frantically, with jerky movements.

The doctor looked up as he grabbed a pair of clean, very sharp scissors, moving to the side with the wound and sniping them experimentally. "For Annie? No. There's no time, and she refuses them anyway. A waste of effort on both her part and mine." He looked to the old man, "Can you get her the bite, Will?"

The old man, Will, nodded hesitantly, then opened a drawer and grabbed what looked like a cloth wrapped around something cylinder shaped. He pressed it to her lips, and she opened her mouth and began to bite down on it. Ciel noticed her fists clenching tight and her expression was tense in anticipation.

Dr. Connors readied the scissors to her shirt, looking down at her. "Some of the blood has dried to your shirt, so I'll have to rip it off. Are you ready?" She said something muffled by the bite, but she sounded sarcastic. The doctor rolled his eyes, sounding equally sardonic when he spoke. "I'll take that as a yes."

He began to cut at the bottom button of her shirt, and in one clean, very quick motion, he sliced open her shirt. He cut away the parts congealed by blood with little incident, and though Siobhan seemed to be in no pain, her fists, clenched so tightly that her knuckles were white, and her jaw, clamped too tight onto the bite, gave her away. She let out a strangled, weak shriek as the doctor tore away the cloth over the gunshot wound.

Usually, Ciel would have been mortified and looked away from her bare skin, but he was entranced in silent horror at the marred skin.

Scars criss crossed and slashed across the skin of her chest, some long, some aged and shiny with scar tissue, others red with stitches still laced in between the flesh. There was a prominent scar that jumped out at Ciel - a long, surgical cut going down from her sternum to the underneath the remains of her shredded shirt. Once he saw the first surgical scar, he began to notice others. All clean, precise cuts, contrasting against some of the jagged scars and old gunshot wounds.

Ciel tried not to shudder. How could any human survive being cut, slashed and shot so many times?


Joseph

Joseph watched Dr. Connors make the first cut. In the beginning, it had used to make him sick to watch - he had actually thrown up the first time - but now he had long since been fine with it, because he knew that it was to help Annie. As Dr. Connors got tweezers to pull out the bullet and it's shrapnel, Joe looked over to the other boy standing on the other side of the table, looking disgusted.

The boy was short, and was dressed in pristine, blue coloured noble clothes. His hair was a shiny blue-black, and his skin was so pale that Joe swore he'd glow in moonlight. He was also skinny, with only a bit more weight that the street kids, which was weird. Weren't nobles supposed to be well-fed?

The man standing beside him was tall and dark haired, and, to be completely honest, a bit intimidating. His expression was impassive, maybe even a bit apathetic. He was clad entirely in black, and a small pin was clipped to the front pocket of his tail coat. Though he was dressed all professional as a butler, he knew from Annie's self-defence lessons that the butler was dressed for trouble. His jacket was a bit looser than it should be, and slight bulges signified that he was armed to the teeth. It was concealed enough that Joe didn't know what the butler had on him, but not enough that he couldn't see the butler was packing weapons.

The butler looked to the staring boy and smiled innocently, putting one finger to his lips. Joe shivered and looked away. And he had thought nobles were the freaky ones.

There was a clink of the doctor taking out the bullet, and Joe looked to the bloody metal. Dr. Connors started to pick out the shards still imbedded with practiced precision, slowly but surely taking the other shrapnel out of her shoulder. Once he finished, he moved away to grab Annie's right calf and wrist, pinning her down. Grandpa did the same as Marie stepped forward, holding a bottle of alcohol.

Joe tensed, and he couldn't help the curse that slipped from his mouth. The noble boy looked over at him confused. "What? What are-?"

He was interrupted by Marie pouring the alcohol into the wound, and he fell silent at Annie's muffled shout. Annie's back arched away from the table, the muscles in her neck tense to keep from screaming. Her arms jerked in a struggle, but the doctor and Gramps held her down.

She stopped struggling after a few minutes, and the doc took her arm and held it up, nodding at Marie. "Get me the needle and the blood."

Marie nodded, handing him the needle, then she started to prepare the blood as the doctor sewed the wound shut. Marie jabbed the needle into Annie's elbow after prodding for veins a while, feeding the blood into her as the doctor finished. He sighed, taking off his bloody gloves.

"Alright," He looked over to Grandpa, looking all somber like, "As far as I can tell, she's out of the danger zone, but she might still go under for a while from blood loss. Marie is going to give her more blood as she regenerates her own, but make sure she eats the foods from the list I gave you a while back. Still have it?" Gramps nodded. "Good. So, now I'm going to be doing a full body examination for other wounds, so all you," He gestured to everyone, then over to the living room. "Out."

Grudgingly, Joe cast another look at his sister, before he shuffled into the living room, followed by the boy, the butler, and Gramps. He sat down stiffly on the couch with Gramps, trying and failing to not stare at the odd, pale pair. Silence stretched on for what seemed like an eternity.

The boy spoke first. "Will she live?"

"Takes a lot more than this to take Annie down," Joe said automatically.

"She lost a lot of blood."

"She heals quick," Joe said, then sneered at the boy, "I bet the money you bribed her with that she'll be up and moving around by tomorrow."

The boy glared at him, his gaze too heated for someone of his age. "She offered her… Expertise."

"And you accepted it, you-."

"Joseph, that's enough outta you," Gramps snapped, cutting off the boy.

Joe crossed his arms, scowling. He looked to the boy. "What were y'all doing?"

The boy frowned. "It's none of your business."

Fury rolled in his stomach, and his gaze went red around the edges. "The hell it isn't," Joe hissed, the only thing from keeping him standing up and staring down the boy being Grandpa's restraining arm. "I just wanna know why my sister is lyin' pale as sheet on the kitchen table, getting sewn up from a gunshot wound." The boy didn't seem like he was going to grace him with an answer, and Joe ground his teeth together to keep from swearing at the brat. "Annie'll just tell me later, anyway. I've got more beef with her than your spoiled, scrawny ass."

The boy's jaw locked tight, and he glared fiercely at Joe. Gramps slapped him on the back of the head for swearing, but the furious expression of the noble was exactly what Joe had wanted. He glared with as much malice as his baby face could muster.

The boy huffed, turning to his butler. "Prepare the carriage. We're done here."

The butler inclined his head in a small bow, hand to his heart, murmuring, "Yes, my Lord."


Awkward place to end it, I know, but this has just been a bitch of a chapter to write. I've rewritten it four times, and I'm still not very satisfied with it. The next chapter should come faster, but I've been supppperrrr busy with school work, so it's iffy. I'll try my best.

I'm just imagining Ciel being really confused because of Annie's many aliases. xD

Anyway, thanks for reading! Please review!