It had been two weeks since Vincent went to London to look at the bodies. The developments in the case had been slow, but they
did turn out, at least to some effect. All of the murdered girls were identified by their parents and the girls were given funerals and buried by their grieving, sobbing families who not only had to deal with the tragedy of their child's death, but also the disgusting knowledge that the person responsible for this had gone unidentified. Not a single connection between the victims had been found. All of them were average girls of average lives. They came from families that went without rivalries. They were boring people. Scotland Yard just ignored everyone, because they were damn bloody useless. The fact that the queen actually had to hire a private watchdog to clean up all of their fuck ups with the more... underground cases was proof enough of their sheer incompetence. Yet, when some thing good happened it was always: thank the police, or thank the hardworking men over at the yard for keeping the streets safe at night. Never was it, let's thank this hardworking man who has to do the vast majority of this work by-his-fucking-self. Sure, the yard did handle more cases than Vincent did, but they had teams of people working on a case. They had a group of investigators, they had a group of spies, they had chemists and researchers to look to for help. Vincent had a cookie-baking mortician and the human incarnation of grumpy cat.

Vincent was in the library again, sitting on the comfortable chairs by the fireplace. He had a glass full of gin and Rachel to keep him company, who was also drinking this afternoon. It was warm and comfortable in the library with the fire crackling faintly as background noise and the smell of old books. Rachel sat across from him on a stuff chair, writing in a fancy looking notebook, the cover was pale pink with gilded floral embellishments on it. Vincent would have asked what it was that she was writing but he actually didn't want to know. Rachel was minding her own business and he was sulking about with a newspaper, looking for anything in recent events around London that might have been suspicious. It was mostly filled stupid, stupid, stupid gossip and things that he couldn't even pretend to care about, not even out of politeness towards the hardworking and bored writers employed at the paper. He sighed and turned the page of the paper. Rachel was looking up at him, her large blue eyes were just staring down at him. Vincent didn't want to ask what, or be the first one to speak so they spent an uncomfortable thirty seconds of stillness. The were staring each other down, waiting for the other to break down and be the first person to say something.

"You're being so weird about this, if you're having trouble then go ask Diederich for help," Rachel told him.

"No."

"Damn it Vincent, just go over there and do something."

"I'm looking over advertisements for more missing girls," Vincent said. See? He totally was doing something about this case. Sometimes it's easy to identify a body, some times it isn't. Right now he wasn't finding much in the way of looking for missing girls. For once the young ladies of the greater London area weren't running off. There were no new possibilities of kidnappings, so presumably that meant that there wouldn't be another soggy corpse covered with white flowers showing up in the Thames.

"Why is it so hard for you to talk to him? Did you do something stupid?" Rachel asked him. No he didn't, at least not all too recently. It was less of a 'what did Vincent do to offend him today?' question, and more of a 'I'm really trying my best to avoid offending him for once, alright?' question.

"I do a lot of stupid things, and it doesn't make him have to listen to me any less," Vincent explained.

"Then what is different this time?" Rachel asked, it appeared as though she was quickly getting annoyed with Vincent avoiding the act of telling her the truth.

"I don't know."

"You do know, you just don't want to tell me about it," Rachel said. She sounded just a little bit offended, but there was really nothing Vincent could do. He wasn't about to out Diederich's secret to Rachel. It was bad enough that Undertaker had him in a choke hold and forced it out of him. Rachel would never threaten to kill him over such a thing. She'd just sigh, and shun him and be mildly irritated about it for a few hours and then forget about it. There was no risk in not telling her, so Vincent said nothing in regards to that secret, as far as Diederich knew, his mouth was sealed, and Vincent wasn't about to admit to him that Undertaker got it out of him with a quick hand gesture.

"Hello," Alexis said. Vincent looked up at him. Vincent was in the parlor with a small snack of tea and cookies. Frances had invited Alexis to visit there today. Vincent wanted to say hello, and maybe spend some quality time cajoling some terror into the poor young man who had the absolute misfortune of seducing his normally prim, proper and repressed younger sister.

"Good afternoon, Alexis," Vincent said, a friendly smile on his face, "Care to join me for some tea?"

Alexis nodded nervously as Vincent pointed to the chair sitting across from his own. He was still studying at Weston college, and Vincent knew from many years of experience that the boys at that school got almost no time off at all unless they were to sneak off the premises. This means that Alexis not only must have worked himself to the bone to get all of his work done ahead of time in order to plan for some time off campus, but that whatever time he did get was precious little. How sweet it was that he was expending such efforts to court Frances. However, Vincent knew the real reason why. While most boys (Vincent definitely was included in this category) made do with having sexual relations with the more effeminate students (there was one reason only why Chambers was well liked at Weston), Alexis well, it wouldn't work for him. He was painfully heterosexual. Oh no, instead of buggering the other students he had to go off campus and find his way far beyond the outskirts of London to seduce innocent young ladies of the highest esteem. Alright, so Frances wasn't that innocent, begin a Phantomhive and all, but really. Vincent was no stranger to the ideas of raging hormones and desperation, but he had to say that he wasn't at all pleased with what transpired while he was away.

"If I find out that there's been some, untoured, funny business, between you and my sister, I will gut you using this," Vincent said, brandishing an ornate letter opener. It was kind of sharp and shaped like ornate cavalier sword. It was fashioned out of gold with an inlay of sapphires, it was not at all a device suited to gutting a man. It probably wouldn't even do much except put out an eye, but if worse came to worse, Vincent would find a way to make it work. The way Alexis shook was proof of that.

"Sir, that is, a uh, letter opener," Alexis said.

"It will be slow," Vincent said, looking at Alexis straight in the eye. The tone of his voice was unusually severe and grim, devoid of the usual good humor and politeness he put on for those he didn't know well enough. Alexis burst into tears and ran out of the room. Vincent had no idea how he managed to have sex with Frances.

"Vincent, what the hell!" Frances barged into the room just minutes later from Vincent's lovely little 'chat' with Alexis. He tea hadn't even gotten cold before Frances came forth to defend her beau's honor.

"What hell? Hell is a fictional place, Frances."

"You know exactly what you did! Why is Alexis is crying?!"

"I don't see what the big deal is. I told him if he touched you I would gut him with a letter opener."

"He's terrified!"

"Good!"

"Damn you," Frances said. She was being melodramatic.

"He only has reason to fear a threat like that if he's been touching you in a way that I find to be untoured funny business, which he has," Vincent told her. If Alexis didn't want his life threatened by Vincent Phantomhive, then he shouldn't have gone and done something that pissed him off. It was only common sense.

"You don't get to decide what is and isn't appropriate for me."

"You are so blinded by your infatuation with him that I would honestly being doing you a favor by killing him."

"If you kill him, see what happens."

"Is that a threat?"

"His parents are part of an esteemed family. They work with Queen Victoria, how will you answer her call if she finds that a young man of the Queen's Knights has suddenly gone missing? Do think she'll take 'he ran away' as an answer?"

"I've been cornered," Vincent said. Damn it. Frances was good at strategy. Sometimes he felt like he and Frances were just a little too much alike. They were too cunning for their own, and any arguments between them were a stalemate.

Another chapter in which Vincent continually has no idea how to respect the personal boundaries of others.