"Welcome to my parlour said the spider to the fly..."

He is almost unrecognisable, only flashes of the one he was showing through as this stranger with short brown hair and sparkling, laughing blue eyes watches them all an lets his mind be warped and controlled by a dark, sinister, evil man.

And he can't even see the evil. He can't see the man for what he is, a manipulative creature, pulling the strings, the ultimate puppeteer and he can't even see it.

"Oh, the tangled webs we weave"

Franz notices, of course. He makes a mental note of every time that man plays his best friend's emotions like a complicated fiddle. He watches as his friend can go from loving the girl (And that burns like a stab to the gut) to clutching at the evil being that has made house in his mind, desperately holding, desperately writhing. Franz wishes there was a place in that boy's life for a young aristocrat, but finds himself being pushed further and further away from that boy's side as his position of best friend and mentor is slowly usurped by a creature whose very essence is poison.

The destruction is coming slowly. But it is coming.

"You may be the worst pirate I've ever heard of.
But you have heard of me."

The others are slowly falling away from the intoxicating mixture of charm and prestige that is that man. They are slowly coming to the light, coming to the light that Franz reached and grasped to with all his might the day that it all started, the day that two innocent men were killed, while they were unaware of their fates hanging in the balance of a rigged card game played by bored nobles. Franz saw it in the beads of sweat on that person's brow, and the way that in that moment, that person became both closer than ever and farther away than the most distant star to Franz in a secret that they shared.

That Franz tried with all his heart to prevent them from sharing.

It's only one of many. There's a name being uttered in the shadows of the family that Franz feels he should know, feels should be familiar. It's like a wisp of dust caught in a sunbeam. You can only see it when there's illumination and then, only then when someone points it out. There's a secret that he's not a part of and he knows it's only one of many. Franz is an outsider to these three families. Sometimes he's happy for it, other times it brings him close to crying because he can't even be a brother to that person that he loves the most.

"Thereare other ways to make someone happy than by marrying them."

Franz loved that person most in the world. But he watched as slowly but surely the inner workings of Villefort and Morcef and beautiful, painful Eugene all suffered at the hands of a tyrant from which he could do nothing about. They were all blinded by the darkness while Franz saw every last detail illuminated in light. Bathed in it and was dazed by it as well. These people couldn't see.

These people wouldn't see.

The person he loves most in the world is drawn closest to a dark whirlpool of deception from which there is no survival.

Albert...

"Alas for poor Yorrick, I knew him well."

.
A/n: SOMETHING THAT ISN'T FMA! YAY!

I'm a big fan of the Gankutsuou series, even though I've only seen 12 episodes of it so far. I'm a huge fan of Alexandre Dumas' "Count of Monte Cristo" And when I heard there was an anime about it, I went nuts!

Of course, the anime has a very different plotline from the book, so I'm trying to keep the book's plot out of my mind as much as possible while I'm watching it.

I love Franz in the anime though, he's so much more active than he is in the book. And Albert, while very different is still my favourite character. (Besides Edouard of course. You've got to love bratty children.)

Review please? -rattles tin-