Chapter Ten
His Fiancée, Babysitting

She'd only been asleep for an hour when the crash of shattering porcelain snapped her up out of bed, her heart pounding as though she'd run a marathon. And, for a single blessed moment, she didn't recognize the Irish brogue that echoed through the halls, at true banshee level:

"What the fecking hell do y'think yer doin' to me!"

And then she remembered Ciel's late night visit, and the Irish whore, and all Lizzy wanted to do was cram the pillow over her head and forget the world. The fact that the whore was still in the building was a miracle in and of itself; half the reason she hadn't been able to sleep was because of the constant (if muffled) argument between Colleen and Paula, with Paula trying to convince her to stay and Colleen steadfastly trying the locks of every door and window she could get her hands on, convinced that this was a trap. The only thing that made her stop was a reminder that Ciel had told her to stay.

Lizzy wasn't sure if the fact that Colleen suddenly went silent and meek at the mention of the Queen's Watchdog was good or bad for her sanity. Either way, it meant she had a weapon to use, until she drilled the fear of God, Queen, Country, and Rapier into the whore.

Preferably in the last-to-first order.

Considering the fact that Edward would be back from his assignment sometime this afternoon though, she wouldn't be able to do much about that. Lizzy threw the covers back, wrapped her dressing gown around herself, and followed the sound of the Irish curses.

Colleen was either a new import from Ireland to England, or had spent enough time around Irish sailors to pick up some truly fabulous swearwords. Of course, none of them except Michael, Paula's husband, would be able to understand any of them.

"You stupid little slut!" Whittacker said, crouching in front of the laundry cabinet. "You come out of there right now, or so help me I'll put you back out on the street myself, milady's orders or no!"

There was an explosive noise that could only be described as a snort at that, and in the darkness of the laundry cabinet (all the laundry had been kicked out onto the floor) Lizzy spotted a flash of furious blue eyes and a pale shoulder.

"You ain't gettin' anywhere near me!"

And there was another eruption of Irish that meant Colleen was cursing them to Constantinople and back. Lizzy tightened her hands into fists, and drew a deep, cleansing breath. Then she took another one. There was no time for this. Edward was coming back at noon, or thereabouts, and after having lunch with him Rebecca would be coming to visit and tagging along to Nina's so that they could both have new dresses made. There was no time for the whore to be doing this, and no time for Whittacker to be making things worse. I can't believe Mother hired this woman.

Whittacker backed away from the cupboard, looking like she wanted nothing more than to lock the little whore inside and leave her there until the end of time. When she spotted Lizzy, all the blood fled her face. Lizzy gestured to the side, so Whittacker followed her to the end of the hall. "What happened?"

"I put her near the water and she started to scream. She was in a panic, miss, I would've kept her quiet but she broke away from me, and by the time I managed to find her—"

"Go downstairs and get Michael, please." Lizzy said. "I'll watch her until you get back." And when Colleen is taken care of, I'm going to throttle you until you can no longer stand.

Whittacker looked at her for a long moment, wondering, before she bobbed her head and vanished down the hall. Lizzy took another deep breath before sidling up to the edge of the cupboard, out of sight of Colleen. As Whittacker turned the corner, muttering about bratty children, there was a tentative snuffling from inside the cabinet. A moon-white hand appeared on the rim of the door. Lizzy held her breath as, slowly but surely, a scruffy black head poked out and looked around. Before she could retreat, Lizzy seized the girl by the shoulder, dragged her out, and slammed the cabinet door behind her.

"D'anam don diabhal!" Colleen shrieked, and raked her nails down Lizzy's arm. Lizzy gritted her teeth rather than scream back, and wrenched the girl around. Colleen's eyes weren't blue any longer, they were black with a thin blue rim; her pupils had swallowed her eyes in her panic. Clearly, Whittacker had been trying to get her into a tub before they'd woken Lizzy; she was only half clothed, her wretched skirt torn around the hem, her torso bared for all to see. There were bruises on her arms and back. Lizzy softened, but only slightly, as Colleen opened her mouth and shrieked like a banshee. There was another flurry of Irish before Lizzy whipped her around and slapped her hard across the face.

Silence hit the hall so fast it felt like a runaway train. Lizzy kept her hold on Colleen's shoulder, just in case the whore tried to bolt, but there was nothing. Colleen was absolutely still, her arm twisted at an awkward angle as she tried to keep her body as far away from Lizzy as possible, her head yanked to the side as though someone had pulled her hair. After a moment, Lizzy let her go, and the Irish girl turned to look at her with the sort of expression she'd seen on beggars in Venice. Like the world had gone too cold for them to understand. After a moment, she pulled off her dressing gown and tucked it around the girl's shoulders, wondering how long Colleen had been shivering.

"You can't be screaming here." Lizzy said, in a soft voice. "We're not going to hurt you, I promise you that. Ciel left you here for a reason. He is the Queen's Watchdog, and he wants you alive, and no one in this house – no one – is going to go against his word." Unless he turns into an idle prat again and I have to slap him as well as her. "I may not want you here, but that doesn't mean I'm going to throw you out."

Colleen snapped around. "She said—"

"You don't listen to them. You're not their problem. You were given into my keeping. As long as you're in this house, you come to me. You understand me?"

She was calming down a little now, breathing a little slower. Her eyes were turning normal. Lizzy glanced at the girl's arm. There were no needle marks, nothing to indicate that the girl was anything other than lucid most of the time except for the strong smell of gin that was still coming off her in waves.

Resigned to her role of babysitter, Lizzy let out a long sigh. "Come on. I want to get you cleaned up a little bit before I have to go out."

Colleen nodded with huge eyes, and let Lizzy lead her back down the hallway.

Lizzy still wasn't entirely sure what Ciel's game was in leaving Colleen with her instead of taking her back to Phantomhive Manor. Of course, she understood the logic of it – Ciel received clients there, and the sight of a young female clearly from the wrong side of town would only detract from his stellar, if frightening, reputation, as well as jeopardize their forthcoming marriage in the eyes of society – but at the same time, she didn't know why he was keeping an eye on this girl in the first place. And the whore was aggravatingly tight-lipped about the whole thing. Not even the most direct question earned her anything other than a wide-eyed, close-mouthed look of apology. It took another hour to get her cleaned up enough to at least be semi-presentable (Lizzy ended up having to chop half of her hair off, so that it was in a somewhat less ragged bob around her head; nothing else really to do about it) and dressed in one of Paula's old dresses that had been taken up for a housemaid who had left years ago. By the time they were done, Colleen hadn't said another word, except for a soft exclamation or two when Lizzy accidentally smacked a bruise. Eventually, Whittaker brought Michael up, and Lizzy deposited the whore in his keeping. His soft Irish made Colleen's face light up in a way that almost didn't belong, some sort of ethereal happiness that would have been impossible to see under all the dirt and muck and fierce shields that had been up around her the night before. Lizzy nodded a thank you in Michael's direction, and went to change herself.

She was reading letters in the drawing room when Edward swanned in, stinking of horse and beaming at her. Ignoring her squawk of surprise, he swept her up into a hug that took her feet off the floor and spun her in a sickening circle. "Ma petite soeur!"

"Put me down, Ed, you barbarian!" She cried, but she was laughing. Edward grinned at her, set her on her feet again, and let her hug him back. "How was France?"

"Delightful weather. Delightful people. Delightful work."

"Ergo, it was dreadful." Lizzy said with a grin. It stretched her face in a way that made her nervous. She hadn't grinned in a long time, it seemed. "Don't tell me you met some delicious French girl that Papa would adore and Mama would heartily disapprove of."

"Don't tempt me, Lizzy, if I made up stories Mama would smack my hand with a ruler."

"I won't ask what Papa and the Queen had you working on, I know you can't talk about it." She hugged him once more, and then wrinkled her nose. "Go and wash up before having lunch with me, please. I don't particularly want to smell sweat and horse the whole time I'm eating."

Lizzy waited until he was out of the room before looking at the letter again, and worrying the inside of her cheek. Theodore Parker's healthy scrawl stared back at her.

I may have to face Ciel today after all.

At first when Bard woke up, he thought he'd been drinking again. There was no other explanation for why his head would be pounding that way, or why his mouth tasted like he'd been kissing a corpse. There wasn't much else he could think, when he'd been left face down in the gutter. Had he forgotten to do something? He wasn't sure.

Then he lifted his head and realized he wasn't face down in the gutter after all, but face down in a mud puddle. And the mud puddle wasn't outside, but in a small airless room with a high ceiling, dirty walls, and a mud-smeared concrete floor. No door. No windows. He rolled over, wincing at the way his knee protested (when the hell did that happen?) and stared at the ceiling. If he focused hard enough he could see a thin seam about ten feet above his head of a trapdoor around three feet square.

They must have dropped me.

Bard shook his head furiously. The question was who dropped him and why, not how the hell he'd ended up in this room in the first place. His hands weren't bound, but his feet might as well have been; when he glanced down at his knee it was swollen to twice its normal size. Even looking at it made it throb angrily. Well, that can't be good.

They'd stripped him of his uniform, as well; his cooking goggles were gone, and the white chef's coat had been replaced with a rough button-down shirt, the kind he'd hated in America. He unbuttoned the cuffs and rolled the sleeves up to his elbows so his arms could breathe, and then heaved himself up into a sitting position, propping his back up against the wall. Even that made his head swim and his stomach roll.

Bard knew from experience that memory would be coming back slowly, especially after being conked in the head with a large metal object (because there was no other way they – whoever they were – would have been able to subdue him long enough to get him unconscious otherwise). So he sat there and closed his eyes and when he opened them again, images were filtering through his mind. Waiting with the carriage for Sebastian and Master Ciel, freezing his ass off in the cold by the Thames. Waiting, waiting, waiting, and he'd lit one of the cigarettes that Maylene had given him for Christmas just to have something to do. The horses had panicked at something. He'd stepped down off of the driver's seat…

A rush of black, freakish fast, and cold hands around his throat –

His memory cut off there. Bard drew a breath, a slow one, and let it out even slower before closing his eyes again. His head hurt too much for him to try and remember anything else today.

He didn't know how long he slept for. There was no way he could measure time, not in a room without windows or anything other than the soft light of the lantern that hung from the ceiling. He slept and he woke and he slept again, and sometimes he wondered why Sebastian and Ciel hadn't come to find him yet, and other times he wondered if this was all just a dream and he was still sitting unconscious in the middle of the road, and oh, would Sebastian lecture him for that one. His knee still hurt too much to really be real, but the fourth time he woke up he forced himself to probe it and figured out that it wasn't broken, just damned sore and twisted up. I'm not escaping by myself anytime soon.

It was the creak of the trapdoor that woke him again, and the weighty thump of something falling into the pit. When Bard squinted through his half-shut eyes, he saw a bundle, no bigger than an infant.

"I'm guessing that's my bread and water." He shouted up at the ceiling, or tried to shout; his voice was too hoarse and it just came out as a croak. "Come down here so I can see my concierge. I don't like staying at a place without knowing who's putting me up, you know?"

There was silence for a moment. The trapdoor remained open. Bard leaned forward, trying to see through the dark hole. He thought he caught a glimpse of silver before the door slammed shut again, and he frowned.

Silver. Silver didn't make sense. There was no need for someone to be wearing silver, not in the part of town he'd been in. And a silver mask…

A mask.

Obviously.

Bard let out an impatient breath (why was he so idiotic sometimes?) and dragged himself to the bundle. It was bread, sure, but there was a flask too, and when he cracked it open and sniffed the alcohol in it burned his nose. And there were bandages, and –

Pain. A sudden snap of pain and the scent of blood filled his nose. Bard drew his hand out of the package and stared at the sudden gleam of metal. His mind wasn't comprehending. Pain, and a round carapace, and the click of metal jaws.

Bard screamed.

Elizabeth,

Here's to wishing that I could be spending time in the townhouse messing around with poetry along with your splendid self rather than suffer through business meetings all day. You won't believe what some of the men are like here – or maybe you do, considering your fiancé's line of work. It's like salvaging a shipwreck, one disaster right after another in developing these new dyes. The flowers we're importing for the new colors aren't working out quite like we thought. We're not getting quite enough of them, and it's incredibly troublesome to deal with.

I heard from Beddor that you've expressed an interest in the mythology of the Orient, and I have some good news for you. Next week, with the Orient in mind, I'm holding a little get-together near Kensington that you'd probably be interested in going to. It's a bit of a séance, I'm afraid – Beddor, who manages the building, can't get enough of the stuff, and a lot of it is his call anyway – but we all decided that you should come, seeing as you're helping us out with your fiancé.

Répondez s'il vous plait, mademoiselle! And at the risk of looking like a fool, I'm begging you: don't leave me to suffer the old fools alone. None of them can turn a phrase quite like you can.

Sincerely,

Theodore

Ciel kept his head angled towards the letter, but flicked his eyes up towards Elizabeth. She wasn't looking at him – her face was turned to the side, her bright green eyes fixed on something out the window in the fog-encrusted street. Her hands were clasped lightly together in her lap; she wasn't even blushing. Instead, she looked rather detached from it all, and for some reason that irritated him. He lowered the letter. "You're not encouraging his ardor, are you?"

"Of course I am." She responded, without looking at him. "How else am I supposed to get a single grain of information out of him, Ciel, if I don't pander to his game? And don't you dare say because it's improper, you've done much worse things than flirt a little to get your way."

This might have been true, but that didn't mean he particularly enjoyed seeing Elizabeth flirting with an American who could easily kill her if she so much as mentioned opium flowers. Fighting the urge to crunch the letter in his hand, Ciel set it carefully on the table. "Are you going to the party?"

"Obviously. It's taken me a while to convince them how much I hate you. If I don't go, they'll realize it's all a sham and probably send a fancy assassin after me."

"You can't joke about this sort of thing, Elizabeth, it's not funny in the least."

"To you it isn't." She said, and flicked her fan open to hide her face. Her eyes were anything but humorous, so he let the barb pass. "I'm only telling you about this, Ciel, because I promised you that if I was going to do something dangerous—"

"You mean stupid?"

"—I would tell you before I did so." Lizzy frowned. "Besides, I highly doubt you'll let an opportunity like this one pass without saying something about it."

He wouldn't. Generally. Ciel studied her. She still wasn't looking at him – the fog outside was demanding her full attention – but if he tried he could still read her expression, a mixture of stubborn determination and wariness, like she was waiting for him to slap her down again. Their conversation of the night before was still resounding in his head, the tentative way she'd reached out to him like she'd been afraid of even speaking her mind around him. And despite the fact that he still wasn't sure if he could accept her terms, he could see in her face how much she needed him to.

The fact that his instincts screamed at him to accept – no matter what his common sense was telling him – disturbed him.

He hadn't really had an opportunity to really study her face since she'd returned and thrown the entire investigation into a whirlwind of frustration, confusion, and – as much as he hated to say it – results. The angle of her jaw was different; she'd lost the roundness of face that she'd had before, or, rather, it had been displaced into a mixture of softness and sharp angles that suddenly startled him. Her fingers were longer, too, and her arms…muscled wasn't an appropriate term for a girl, but they were wiry. He had no doubt that she'd been training just the way she said she had, fencing, fighting, anything she could poke her nose into. The curiosity hadn't vanished, and neither had the stubbornness, but it seemed like just about everything else had shifted into something new, and foreign, and undeniably familiar.

Lizzy had grown up, he realized all of a sudden, and something in him snapped. His endlessly infuriating, endearing, frustratingly naïve little cousin had grown up, and if she wasn't a woman yet, she would be soon. Lizzy had gone and grown up without him noticing, and she'd turned beautiful in the mix.

Lizzy. Beautiful.

He shoved that thought away as though it had burned him.

"Ciel." The fan tapped his wrist, drawing his attention back to her. For some reason, Ciel could no longer look her quite in the eye. "I'm going to go. You know that. Don't you?"

He heaved a long-suffering sigh, and was relieved to hear that his voice didn't crack when he said, "I don't think I should be surprised."

Lizzy sat back in her chair and looked at him for a long moment, her head tilting slightly to one side. A curl of hair draped down over her cheek. "You won't fight me?"

I should. He thought to himself, and glanced at Sebastian who was standing by the door. But the butler did nothing, only smiled that depressing Mona Lisa smile that meant big things were going through that too-sharp mind hidden behind his dried-blood eyes. I really should fight about it. But for some reason all he said was, "I have a sinking feeling that you wouldn't listen to me even if I did forbid it."

She sniffed, hiding a smile behind her fan. "I don't have to obey your commands yet, Ciel Phantomhive, and you can pretty much take it for granted that that day will never come no matter what happens."

They looked at each other for a moment, and the silence wasn't awkward, for once. It was comfortable. Ciel clenched his hand into a fist around the head of his walking stick. Suddenly he was nervous. And he was never nervous around Elizabeth. He cleared his throat.

"I don't want you going alone." He added, before she could say another word. The moment broke into a thousand pieces, like a glass vase hitting marble. Lizzy made a grouchy noise.

"And who do you expect me to take, Ciel? Paula isn't exactly trained. And I can't bring an escort, not when I'm going to flirt with Parker."

"I don't think you should go alone, and if you try, I won't hesitate to lock you in the cellar."

The instant he said it he knew it was a mistake. Lizzy stood, and in her heels (when had she started wearing heels?) she towered over him. She forced her fan into his face. "Don't you dare pander to me, Ciel Phantomhive. I won't go alone, don't worry. But I dare you to try locking me in the cellar. You won't like what happens."

With that she turned and stalked out of the room, skirting the door that Sebastian guarded to disappear down the hallway. Ciel resisted the urge to watch her go, and fought back a sigh.

Damn women. He was never going to be able to understand them.

A/N:

EDIT (26/5/12): I went through and fixed the French here. :) Thank you to everyone who mentioned it.

Oh my god, guys. I am SO sorry it took me this long to update. I had half the chapter finished like two days after I last posted, but then I had my midterm exams and my brain absolutely WOULD NOT allow me to continue. It's been a real wrench writing anything until yesterday, when the clamp around my noggin finally eased up enough to allow me to write.

I love you all for being so, so patient, and I'll have the next chapter up soon, I swear.

That being said, who else is doing NaNoWriMo this month? I had an awesome idea (not fanfiction, sadly) that I'm really looking forward to writing.

And to answer some questions:

Little Miss Sophie: Colleen….how important will she be? This is a mystery. :3 One of those mysteries I can't really tell you the answer to quite yet.

Yuki Minamoto: I don't know if Vincent will show up in a flashback. It is, however, very much in the realm of possibility.

HypRRNeRd: Again, I'm sorry to say I don't know…I'm not sure if this story will cover the full three years (or four years) that are necessary for Ciel to be old enough to fulfill the terms of the marriage contract (upon coming of age at 18). So…it's possible, but it seems doubtful at this point.

Youdon'tmakemewannalala: The one-shot will be up soon, I swear! I just need to figure out an idea, which…I think I just did, thanks to LittleMissSophie's fantabulous review. And just so you all can see my muse, here's the inspiring line:

I want to see Lizzy kick ass and chew bubblegum. With Ciel.

And so that ruminates in your minds…what will Shu do?

KuroKuro: We will definitely see Rebecca again, don't worry.

A HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE tacklehug to Lackadasial Willow who reviewed every chapter, and a JUST AS BIG welcome to all the new reviewers! You all make my world.

You lot have EXpERieNCed, Cibeth, and i-is-animefreak, who kicked my ass in gear with their lovely and hilarious reviews. (The fangirl warcry made me bust up.) Love to you all, and I should hopefully have the next chapter up by the end of next week!

Kisses.