I do not own black butler.
Chapter 7: Matches and Gasoline
Helix- Phantomhive Manor, England 1888
Dawn was creeping in when I returned to the manor. As I slipped inside to begin my chores, I let out a sigh.
"Do you really have to follow me everywhere Sebastian?" I asked without turning around as I walked down the empty halls lite with only a couple of candles.
"I do as my master orders," He replied as I entered the kitchen.
"And I'm assuming that you can't disobey those orders?" I said as I lit the stove and began pulling the ingredients out for breakfast.
"Not when it concerns my master's safety."
"Me disappearing in the middle of the night is nothing for you to be worried about."
He stared at me and I laughed.
"I was checking in with my command before they sent someone to drop the information they'd gathered in my lap with a unwanted visit from an untrained idiot that I would end up babysitting," I said as I grabbed a couple of mixing bowels and a whisk "Any information I got I'll pass on to Ciel after lunch. Besides, I believe it's time that Ciel was woken up."
Sebastian glared at me. "I'll bring the fruit tarts up as soon as it's done since it looks like you prepared the tea and scones while you were waiting for me to return."
He gave me one more glare before he disappeared to wake the Earl. I sighed. By the time I was done in this time, I figured that the moron would give me a headache that would take years to get rid of.
Once I was done baking, I slowly made my room to the dining room were I would mostly likely get assigned to work with the person I did not like very much at all and by that point I was quite sure that the feeling was mutual.
"Good morning Ciel," I said as I walked into the room carrying a platter.
"You are supposed to refer to him as young master, as is custom," Sebastian said as I set the platter down in front of Ciel while giving the butler a threatening glare. I did not need a lecture from him at this time in the morning.
"You are forgetting that I don't actually work for him and that I can leave at any time unlike you I suspect." I said as straightened back up and placed my hands onto my hips. "So just shut up."
"Are you two done yet," Ciel asked in a bored tone.
"For the moment," I said a with a a mischievous smirk.
Ciel glared at me.
I shrugged. "You should have figured out that we would be butting heads, the minute we meet."
Ciel sighed as I heard an explosion in the kitchen. "I'll deal with it," I said as I quickly exited the room.
"Bard, what did you do this time?" I said with a sigh as I entered the charred room.
"I thought..." he started before I put my hand up to stop him.
"Just don't try to cook anything for the next week, especially if you plan to use anything explosive in the mix," I said as I rolled up the sleeves. "For now let's just get this cleaned up before we both hear about it."
Bard let out a sigh of relief and dove right into cleaning it up. Of course Mr. Perfect had to walk into the room just as we were finishing it up.
"Don't you have perfect timing?" I muttered as I got up off of the floor with a dirty rag in my hand. "The work is already finished, so you can go back to whatever you had been over-achieving at earlier."
Bard looked at me and backed away as Sebastian and I got into a glaring contest. I crossed my arms and leaned against a counter. This wasn't going to end with me backing down and he was going to learn just how much patience I had to wait for something to happen.
The bell rang for Ciel's study interrupting the silence of the room, but neither of us moved.
"Going to give up yet," I said as I noted the butler rubbing the back of his hand.
He shot me one last glare with a slight smile before turning and leaving the room. I let out a deep sigh. It was a good thing that I was a very light sleeper because I mostly likely was going to have to look over my shoulder for a while after standing the moron up like that.
After cleaning up the laundry and repairing the garden, I walked into the main hall to see Sebastian standing there with a bucket and a rag in his hands.
I stopped and put one hand on my hip as I put my head in the other. "You know trying to make me spend my every waking moment doing chores that the other are too incompetent to complete without causing mayhem, makes it a lot harder to actually get reliable information about the situation at hand. In fact I don't really think that you like the fact that I'm standing you up when it comes to finding information."
He turned his back to me and set the bucket and rag down on the tiled floor.
"And if you think that you are going to make me wash that floor, you are out of your mind. I may be hiding as a maid, but that doesn't make me a maid, even though I'm better at it than some." I waited for a few minutes, but he gave me no answer. "Fine I'll head to London then and enjoy the sights of a different era."
The idiot gave no word of protest as I turned and walked back out to the garden intending to use a transport spell due to the impending look of rain.
Of course as my luck would have it, it started to drizzle the second I arrived in the alley next to Undertaker's shop. A voice from within, had me ducking around a couple crates a few feet away from the door, just as it started to rain harder.
A woman slammed the door as she came out of the shop a couple seconds later. Anger showed through in every time her foot hit the ground as she head back towards the main road, ignoring the rain that was coming down harder with each second. It took everything I had to hold my laughter in. The same person who tried to end my life to the point that everyone I worked with knew that I wanted to end her, was walking away with her back towards me completely oblivious to the eyes watching her. Now I had a weakness that I could exploit later, when I located where her and her cohorts were hiding out. That second I had something else to do that demanded my attention.
As the rain poured from the sky i walked into Undertaker's Shop, to see the mortician setting down a pot of tea on a closed coffin.
"So what was she here for?" I asked as I pushed my soaked bangs away from my eyes.
"Information that she was unable to pay for," he said with a smirk.
I chuckled. "Well good thing she couldn't or the surprise would be blown."
"Hee. A surprise you say. Is she a friend of yours?" he asked as I sat down on a closed coffin and he handed me a cup of tea.
"Ah, no. I'm going to preferably put her six feet under in one of your coffins within the next couple of months," I muttered before I took a sip of the tea. "I have a couple of questions that I think you could answer a lot better than anyone else I know about Reapers and Demons, though I'm more here to take a break from a butler that I want to make vanish as of late."
"It would be nearly impossible for you to try to kill one," he said with a frown. "In fact he may kill you in retaliation and you are far too interesting to have to be picking out a coffin for at this point."
"That was not what I was planning to ask, I've already got a solution in mind that involves locking up in a spell cage and sending it to the bottom of the Thames for a temporary solution," I said with a mischievous smirk that earned a chuckle from the reaper. "So are you willing to answer my questions?"
"You know the price Dearie," He said as he stared at me expectantly. "I'm sure you and the butler have gotten into more than a few interesting tests of will."
"Then you'd better set that beaker down because I've got a good one that wasn't directed at the butler, but he ended up getting in the middle of it anyway," I said as I launched into the tale of the ice water I'd used to wake up the three idiots one morning that had lead into a week long prank war that all three of them had miserably lost. I'd just gotten to the part how Finny tried to throw a cream pie at me, only for it to hit the butler, when Undertaker doubled over laughing enough to shake the whole shop. By the end of my story, the coffins that had been leaning upright against the walls were on the floor along with the mortician.
"Now that Dearie was a first rate laugh," Undertaker said with a smile once he had calmed down. "For someone who has seen the worst that this world has to offer, you sure know how to pull a string of pranks and make sure you don't have any played on yourself."
"It's called a way to refine my skills outside of battle as well as a way of surviving everything I've seen, just like you I assume," I said as I looked up from taking a sip of tea. "Now for the questions I want to ask."
"Hee, ask away," he said as he sat back on top of the closed coffin.
"Okay. What is the reaper society like? What kind of weapons do they use and what are the effects of those weapons on both humans and supernatural creatures?"
He chuckled before he launched into his explanations that led me to asking for more details about the aspects that he had described.
"That is just the beginning of your curiosity and questions isn't Dearie," Undertaker asked about two hours later.
"Sometimes I need it to make it through a run a live and others I'm just interested in the other communities out there that exist without most people realizing that they do," I replied as I stood up to stretch my legs that were trying to fall asleep. "I've also been wondering about the last Guard Dog of the Queen who I assume was Ciel's father?"
"You are correct in the assumption that it is an inherited position," Undertaker said as I sat back down on the coffin. "Vincent Phantomhive made quite a few enemies and one of those was the one that killed both him and his wife."
"There must be some interesting stories when he first took over the title," I said as the first name of Ciel's father began to sound more and more familiar.
"Hee, there was this one story that he told be about a time when he was in France on a case for the Queen, about seven years before the young earl was born, when he ended up getting some career lessons from an assassin."
I coughed and sputtered as the math began to line up with the name and a mission that I never thought I would run across again. "What did the former Earl look like?"
"There used to be a portrait of both him and his wife hanging in the manor. Vincent looked like an older version of the Earl."
I shook my head in wonder as Undertaker confirmed my suspicion. "And here I figured I would never run into anyone who knew the smart-aleck, let alone I would be allied with his son."
"You knew him Dearie?"
"Oh yeah. I was the assassin that handed him those lessons with a few death glares attached when he did things that nearly ended up getting killed."
"So, I'll get to here the parts of the tale that he left out from you?" the mortician said with a gleeful smirk.
"Another day and another time," I said as I headed towards the door. "As it is I'm surprised Sebastian hasn't been sent out here to fetch me. I have a report to give to both of them anyway and now I have an interesting story to tell them."
"Good luck," Undertaker said just before the door closed behind me.
Sorry for the long wait. I've had a lot of of stuff going on between college starting up again and a few other things I have to take care of. Because of that I'm going to try to post at least once a month or every other month if I get to busy. Thanks to all of you who have favored and reviewed my story so far.
