A/N: Guys. GUYS. Guess what, I'm back and I'm therefore stating the obvious! Unfortunately, I didn't get as much done as I intended to because a nasty writer's block got hold of me. I'm momentarily only three chapters ahead, but I'd like to be a few more chapters ahead, so except for this week, updates will come every Wednesday until further notice. But since this is me coming back and trying to offer you something good, you're so getting two chapters this week. And maybe because I like the chapter that follows this one.

Anyway, it's good to be back and I hope you guys are around, too!

By the way, did you know that Alex Beoulve has drawn great art for Crescendo? It took me minutes to calm down and an hour until the grinning stopped. Links can be found on my profile page. Thanks again, Alex!

Beta credits go to Carrie2sky as always. My chapters look pretty with her help :D

Thank you for all the favs/alerts/reviews! You are all awesome!

/lengthy A/N

Warnings: I should warn you about Ciel's first kiss because it's not even from Sebastian. I am a horrible person. Please don't forget that this is still a Sebastian/Ciel fic, and that I would never ever make any excursions into another pairing if not explicitly stated from the beginning.

Disclaimer: If only a temporary hiatus could make me the owner of Kuro... But no, nothing has changed.

ACT IV

Temptation

(Dance)

The end of innocence

Chapter 18

Joker – vibrant, good-natured Joker – is standing by the window as Sebastian is studying for his A levels, looking out silently, solemnly. The young artist pauses in his work, sets down his pen and gets up from his chair. Joker has become difficult lately and Sebastian must say he's losing interest. There isn't much more to gain from having Joker around and before his creativity suffers from it Sebastian will jump off the wagon and take what's left with him. He smiles at the younger male with the eyeliner and the gelled hair. Joker is very interesting to look at with the way he dresses and paints his face; Sebastian has always been fascinated by how different he would look after every change, but back then, the ever-changing face paint had been more of a game to them. Nowadays, it seems as if the make-up has become his symbol for self-confidence, for he would never take it off in Sebastian's presence. He was able to a few months ago, but he's closing up and Sebastian is falling out of love with the inspiration Joker has to offer. There isn't much to it anymore. And while Sebastian loves to plan his moves and words in advance at least roughly, such moments of utter clarity and the realisation and actions that follow are mere impulses from deep inside of him that lead to words of finality. Only words, though, never anything else. He doesn't need anything else.

Taking Joker's hand into his, he switches on all of his charm and tells him very clearly that he feels he has exhausted Joker as a source for inspiration. It's easy, really, to make them his, to find out their secrets and their fears and their hopes, to transform all of it into paintings and to tell them that they don't need anybody else but him. They don't want anybody else than him either. And if they stay with him, they will find solutions to their problems together, they will be two halves of the same thing, the artist and his muse and they will never know that they are giving Sebastian much more than they are aware of.

Taking them is easy.

Making them go is a very, very different thing.

Joker stares at him. Then he screams, a desperate howl that makes Sebastian wince. At first the staff barges into Sebastian's room and the adolescent tells them to take Joker away. When the acrobat uses his teeth and nails and doesn't stop causing a ruckus, lunging for Sebastian, the head of the Michaelis family himself enters the room, shocking everybody into motionlessness – including his son – as he grabs the flailing teen by the collar. "Whatever you are doing, stop it," he tells his son. "There are things of actual importance you will have to attend to."

Sebastian bows his head and sits down by his desk to continue studying as Joker is thrown from the grounds.

Sebastian changes his phone the next day, and Undertaker, who is on his semester holidays, accompanies him only to laugh hysterically enough for the whole shop to worry about whether he's getting enough oxygen. The artist leaves the old phone at Joker's doorstep as it reports missed calls and unopened text messages and jumps into Undertaker's car. He watches over Gregory and Edgar at school and hordes a quantity of people around him, a wall that Joker cannot penetrate. Students ask Sebastian about what has happened, but he only shrugs, saying that they've grown apart. It is partly true, but on the other hand he has made Joker too dependent to understand that Sebastian wants him gone.

When Joker stops coming to school, Sebastian doesn't think much of it.

Undertaker (still on holidays) tosses the newspaper in front of his feet one day as Sebastian visits him at the morgue with Gregory in tow. While the boy rushes to Undertaker's side to inspect the corpse with eyes full of interest, Sebastian picks up the paper, finding what Undertaker wanted to alert him to as if they both share a strange bond that wires their thoughts together.

"He's dead, huh?" Sebastian mutters.

"Very dead, indeed." Undertaker cackles loudly. "See?"

Sebastian finally takes a look at the corpse, blue and purple and broken, but he recognises the red hair, the sharp face and he drops the newspapers in surprise. A moment passes in which Undertaker and Gregory stare at him, waiting for a reaction.

"That," Sebastian says flatly, "was a very, very low blow."

Undertaker doubles over, screaming from laughter, crying, obviously finding his joke spectacularly funny while Gregory puts on a pair of gloves and then starts experimenting with Joker's hair. Several bones must be broken alone in his face, and as Gregory prods at it, his fingers sink into skin as the broken bone gives away.

Sebastian leaves, haunted by Undertaker's laughter and wonders how it feels to press into dead flesh and feel the broken bone shift underneath.

There is a monster inside him, and it is going to sleep.

OOO

By the time February ended, Sebastian realised that must be a very sick man.

There wasn't a specific situation that triggered the thought, in fact, he'd been lying in his bed, tossing and turning while the clock struck 5am, and when he had decided to roam the halls like he did almost every night, the thought had come to him, unwelcome, and he had been forced to accept this.

There was a certain… thing that came from Ciel, undefined and unable to be paired with any of his traits. It was the boy in his whole complexity, the inside and the outside, the acting skills, the fake smiles, the real smiles, the dead eye in his right socket, the way he sneered and frowned, talked and breathed. Sebastian had been utterly fascinated from an artist's point of view back then, but something had shifted in mere four months … things had already been different at the very beginning. Sebastian was a man of strategy and he had been very appalled by himself that everything he had said and done had been based on natural responses. Yes, he had had a motive back then, and it still was his goal to see and have everything that Ciel had to offer but he could feel that he had never been impersonal about it. With Ash, things had been rather similar, though on a different level. Pursuing, hunting that man had been out of personal interest, too, but not and never as personal as with Ciel.

This was a whole new thing, unseen and never experienced when it came to his muses. Never had he wanted to give them something in return. He had loved the art they had been (and were), he had never thought of them as anything else but a passionate hobby, a love for the idea that, while connected to the corporeal existence capturing it, never had crossed the fine line between loving what the subject represented to loving the subject itself, to want it more than necessary.

As the brush glided over the canvas, leaving trails of black in its wake, Sebastian's gaze found Ciel's several times. He had been aware of a certain shift between them, had been aware of his hands that wandered along the line of Ciel's waist and down to his hips and how Ciel would never say a word, remaining relaxed as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. Yet Ciel would never initiate touch, he would rather wait for it, for example, sit down very close to Sebastian and have the artist pull him closer. There was something yielding in the way Ciel's body carefully leaned against his in those moments, something accepting along with the very clear message that said, 'I'm okay with this.'

Sebastian wondered about going further than that. He knew this way a boy, a minor, but it wasn't the body he was attracted to so much, it was the mind. And he knew that Ciel would grow up one day into a handsome young man, attractive, beautiful like his parents. Sebastian wanted to see that day, but he also didn't feel like waiting that long. He could be patient, yes, but this had a limit when it came to his muses: It was a relationship on time, it was fiery and vibrant and burned down quickly. The future always contained implications of Sebastian having found another one, for not even the strongest had lasted more than four years and Sebastian hadn't even been attracted to Ash (Sebastian refused to think about his romantic relationships in comparison to the ones with his muses: While nobody had died at the end of the former, the relationships had been as short as the latter and without any other kind of attraction than the physical. And somehow – oh, wonder – romantic pursuits had been choked in the beginning stages whenever a muse had passed by). How could a broken boy last longer than that? The artist almost sighed inwardly.

It would be a very sad day when Ciel ceased to inspire him.

"Something wrong?"

Sebastian looked up from the canvas to stare at Ciel who was looking up from the piano, his gaze dubious.

"I was just thinking."

"Be careful. We wouldn't want to damage that brain of yours."

Sebastian laughed dryly. "You're really funny. Why don't you become a stand-up comedian along with Gregory?"

"I sense sarcasm."

"If you only sense it, I must be doing something wrong."

Ciel pursed his lips, not knowing that the simple action demanded all of Sebastian's attention. "Anything new about the Viscount?"

"No," Sebastian answered. "Lau and his people are still doing the background research, but it seems as if Aleister has only visited the dens."

"The dens?" Ciel asked.

"They're dealing and consuming drugs there," Sebastian elaborated. "Lau says business is always good."

Ciel snorted. "I can't believe we're working with that criminal."

"I can't believe he's suspecting the Viscount," Sebastian said. "Then again, I didn't know he had enough courage to go into one of Lau's dens at night, looking the way he does. He attracts people; I wonder how he got out of there again."

Ciel's reaction to this was indeed curious: The boy stiffened once he understood the implications and avoided Sebastian's gaze. "Like I care. He needs to go behind bars."

"We don't have any proof apart from the recollections of a drug dealer and gang leader who is all for convenience."

"You said we could trust him."

"And we can, but have you ever thought about how this would sound in court? Besides," he continued, "the Viscount hardly is a man who kills others. He would never get his hands dirty."

Ciel regarded him with an unreadable look, making Sebastian wonder what was going on inside his head. "If he's indeed the man behind the attack on my parents, he didn't kill them himself, did he?"

Sebastian shook his head. Ciel had a point there.

"We could tell the police anonymously. Tell them there are drugs in his house."

"How would a house search help?" Sebastian asked. "This is about the murder, right? It's three years back, Aleister got away and has no evidence left. You don't sign papers with professional killers." He thought back to Madame Red's funeral. "And he wouldn't kidnap his own beloved brother, would he now?"

Ciel pursed his lips. "I… don't think he would."

"He was crying at the funeral. Not necessarily because of your aunt but because he feared that Edgar is dead."

The boy inhaled sharply. "Alright, forget the anonymous call."

"Forgotten," Sebastian said automatically. "It wouldn't have brought us far at all. We may assume that we are dealing with two different people right now." He might as well tell Lau as soon as he had spare time at hand.

"What are you drawing this time?" the boy asked all of a sudden.

"Not you," Sebastian replied with a small smile when Ciel huffed.

"I'm not expecting you to draw me all the time."

The artist chuckled and waved the boy closer. Ciel only did it reluctantly, which heightened Sebastian's amusement. When the boy stood in front of him, he turned him around so that Ciel's back was against his chest. He took Ciel's right hand and placed his paintbrush in it, closing his own around the smaller hand and relishing the warmth it emitted.

"I thought you are left-handed."

"I'm ambidextrous," Sebastian replied. "Although I do prefer using my left hand." He set the paintbrush on the canvas, guiding Ciel's hand as if the smaller one was the artist.

The boy stopped breathing for a second.

Sebastian wrapped his free arm around Ciel's middle, but the boy pinched it half-heartedly. "You're getting black paint all over me."

The artist didn't loosen his grip. "It's a good thing that you're wearing black then, right?"

Ciel sighed, leaning against Sebastian. The artist's breath was ghosting over the younger male's neck, but Ciel didn't show any sign of discomfort. However, he brushed his free hand over that spot, apparently trying to get rid of the ticklish feeling. Sebastian chuckled again. This young teen was a source of never ending amusement. Using the boy's hand, he finished the first layer of his new painting. Seeing the spectrum of colours he was using since having Ciel as his muse was interesting: Sebastian was using dark colours most of the time, there was only the occasional speck of a pastel blue or a cream colour or the shade of porcelain skin when the boy himself was in the painting. Little flickers of innocence. How intriguing.

Checking his wristwatch, Sebastian let go of Ciel's hands. "We should leave. I was supposed to bring you home after the ballet." They had followed Alois' invitation to see him dance as Tybalt in a new version of Romeo and Juliet, and while Sebastian wasn't happy about not having had his cousin around (Claude had been oddly protective of Alois, courtesy of their last meeting, Sebastian figured), he had to admit that Alois was quite good.

"Don't," Ciel said, "I don't feel like having to talk to Lizzie again."

Sebastian winced in mock sympathy. "That bad?"

"It's not as if you care." Ciel rolled his visible eye. "But yes, it's that bad."

"Stay with me, then."

"I can't."

"Why not? You get to stay up the whole night here."

Ciel huffed. "But that's because you don't sleep, you dimwit."

The artist chuckled softly. "True."

"My aunt will ground me if I don't come back home tonight. I did the spontaneous sleep over a bit too often this month."

Sebastian shrugged non-apologetically, thinking of the nights in which Ciel simply had vanished and returned with a sleeved shirt from Sebastian's wardrobe and declared that he'd stay. He already had a spare uniform here and the guest room had officially become Ciel's room. "We might have overdone it." Not that he found that bad. The teen was great company.

"A bit," Ciel said dryly. He took a step to the side and went past Sebastian. "Alright then. Let's go."

Sebastian sighed at the way the boy ordered him around, but he followed obediently. "I'm not your butler. Please try to remember that."

"I'll try," Ciel drawled as he walked to the stairs. It didn't sound as if he intended to go through with what he just declared.

OOO

"How's life at the Midford's?" Undertaker asked the boy when they were gathered in his kitchen, the four of them, while dramatic classical music floated over to them. Alois had recently made a habit of coming over after school and work on something that Claude wasn't supposed to see. They were waiting for the tea water to boil and for Undertaker to move away from the doorway, but the former took its time and the latter seemed quite happy blocking the way.

Undertaker was the first to ask that particular question, Sebastian noticed. He himself tried it once, but Ciel hadn't answered. The wound must have still been raw one week after Madame Red's death, he guessed. It wasn't as if he understood the notion and workings of grief, really.

The boy looked up from Gregory's sketch pad. "It's alright."

"And your cousins are nice, yes?" Undertaker prodded, sounding more like he was going to hear the punch line of a joke very soon.

Ciel kept his expression unreadable. "They try."

"That's a no," Gregory said blandly.

"I know what a 'no' is, dear." Undertaker put a biscuit between his lips but didn't bite down yet. Sebastian frowned when Undertaker seemed to forget about the food right in front of his own face. Among the music was Alois' voice. Gregory prepared the tea, leaving his sketches with Ciel. The boy looked at them. "Do you enjoy the demon motive?"

"Quite," Gregory said. "Happens when you're around one from time to time."

Sebastian rolled his eyes. "That's exactly what happens when you cannot keep your silly assumptions to yourself," he said to Undertaker.

The man just giggled, speaking against the biscuit that he was still holding to his lips. "He came up with the comparison, not me."

Suddenly, there was a loud squeal of joy. Undertaker crushed his biscuit between his fingers and Ciel almost dropped Gregory's works. Alois pushed past Undertaker in the next second, rushing into the kitchen. "I'm gonna be a Faustus model!" he exclaimed happily, throwing his hands into the air. Even Gregory gave him a strange look.

"That's lovely," Ciel said dryly, automatically, as if he had a reservoir for retorts specifically designed for Alois. The older teen seemed completely unfazed by Ciel's dismissive tone and decided to wrap the arms he'd lifted into the air around Ciel's neck.

"Claude just called and he told me that there would be a test shooting and I'm going to be a model."

"One does not follow the other," Ciel said.

"Shut up, Phantomhive, and let me be happy for once," Alois snapped, voice suddenly dark and as sharp as a knife.

Ciel opened his mouth to answer, but Alois started giggling again and leaned forward, kissing the other boy straight. on. the. mouth. before letting go again and deciding to hug Gregory and keep him from putting the tea cups on a tray. "Somebody is quite energetic," Undertaker remarked. "Haven't you been dancing for the last two hours?"

"I'm just sooooo happy" Alois said with a wide (shit-eating, Ronald would say) grin. He let Gregory go to demonstrate how far his happiness extended with his arms, and the raven-haired young man stepped away immediately.

Ciel had woken up from the initial shock: He slowly grimaced as if he'd just seen something and understood bit by bit how disgusting it actually was. Then he wiped at his mouth with his sleeve, blushing and scowling and leaning against the wall and huffing. "Alois, that was uncalled for."

The blond teen laughed obnoxiously. Sebastian felt the sudden need to kick him out of the house. He couldn't, though, for this wasn't the Michaelis estate and Undertaker liked Alois for some idiotic reason.

"Geez, don't be so stiff about it." Alois rolled his eyes, but his attitude remained playful this time. He giggled again, a sound that grated on Sebastian's nerves. Ciel chose not to talk to Alois until Gregory brought the younger teen home.

"Do come back," Undertaker said as they went to his apprentice's car, "I might inform you of Sebastian's trick."

Ciel's only reaction to the statement was a pause before he climbed in the passenger's seat and slammed the door shut.

"That wasn't very nice," Sebastian said. He was further irritated by Undertaker's remark, and his hands itched to wrap around Ciel's arm and get him out of the car. He wanted to make it clear that this was his muse after Alois had dared kiss him and keep the others away from the boy, especially those who thought of him as a demon in humanoid form. (Alois, an unending source of annoyance, was currently strutting around in the corridor with unzipped shorts and a too-large shirt, muttering something about hairpins.) "I have the feeling you're trying to make me hate you," Sebastian continued after a moment's thought.

"I'd do much more if that were true," Undertaker replied. "But I wouldn't be a very good friend if I didn't remind you of your strange… habits." He patted Sebastian's head affectionately before looking at his wristwatch. "Oh dear, it's late already! Let's watch some telly, shall we? The celebrity gossip is on and Gregory is not here to whine about me watching it."

And so the fourth act has begun! I hope you enjoyed this chapter. Please leave your thoughts and comments )

Next chapter coming this Saturday.