The Wish


1950


Once, a very long time ago now, a boy who was later known as Alois Trancy, but was then only known as Jim Macken, to those who knew him—and those were not many, after his brother had died—had summoned a demon with a handful of nonsense words and a children's belief that they would call up a fairy. Ciel had sometimes wondered if his own summoning of Sebastian had only succeeded because of the cult's calculations, but it had not been the outward trappings of the summoning, or even the evil that pervaded that room like a roiling stench and burned its way down his throat. It had been something in his call, in that pure desperation that was open to any answer, unique to a child alone and which those that were older were never able to recapture, except occasionally through spells and ritual. It was that same type of call that tugged on him the day he met Julie Davis for the first time.

The girl, who could have been no older than twelve, though she might have been as young as ten, was sitting on the cracked porcelain floor of a stall in the girl's bathroom, and he could see that she had been crying. The salt tears had dried in streaks along her face, under her reddened eyes, and her nose was filled with snot that had started to leak out onto her upper lip. She was holding herself, her arms pulled toward her in a hug, and asking for someone to help, someone, please, it didn't matter who.

And he was there. His child's body didn't take up much more of the cramped space when he sat beside her, and when the girl finally wiped her eyes and looked at him with a quivering lip, the first thing she said was, "are you magic?"

"Yes," Ciel replied.

She nodded, satisfied.

"I can give you anything you wish," Ciel said, looking into her lost brown eyes and feeling a strange pang of recognition. "You would gain me and all my powers, and anything you ordered me to do I would be compelled to obey. But... there is a price."

"I understand," she had answered. "That's the way magic works. What do you want?"

"Your soul."

"My… soul?" She looked afraid, just a flicker, for the first time since he had appeared, and she put one small hand up to her breast as though searching for it somewhere next to her heart. "Does that mean that I will go to hell?"

"It will feel like a long, deep sleep, nothing more," Ciel answered. That was all that he could say, for that was all the comfort he could offer her. What dreams might come in that sleep, he could not know; what peace, or what torments, she might find, he could never say, and the agony of being forever cut from God's presence, he could not communicate, though he felt it still.

"And… you would take it? How?"

"Easily," Ciel replied, gently. "All it would take is a touch. But you must not promise it to me. If you make this deal with me, you have to promise it to someone else. A friend."

The girl tilted her head. "A friend? Why?"

"Because… he is very weak, and I want to help him," Ciel explained at last. "Your soul would help him very much. His name is Sebastian."

She ran that name over her tongue, consideringly. "Sebastian. That's a nice name. Is he nice?"

"He…" Ciel hesitated. It would be very easy to lie, to tell her yes and hurry this along. But there was something in her unwavering bravery and the strength of her soul that reminded him of himself, lost and alone; and he knew that the child in his memories would not have appreciated a lie, no matter how comforting. "He can be very nasty sometimes, unfortunately," he said. "But there are times when, yes, he is nice… and he matters to me more than anyone else in this world."

"Like family," she murmured, softly, to herself. Then she pushed herself straight-backed against the wall and nodded to him. "If you can give me what I wish for, I'll give my soul to Sebastian."

"What is your wish?"

"I want you to save my little sister. Her name is Marsha. She's very sick, and," her eyes filled with tears again, and she scrubbed the edge of her elbow across her eyes, "she needs to get better..." she trailed off. "And… I want you to get her and my brother adopted by good families. You have to make sure the Davis family is happy and cared for, and that they stay healthy, even when I'm gone. Promise?" She spit on one palm, and held it out to him challengingly.

"I promise," Ciel said. He solemnly copied the girl's actions and shook her hand, holding on through the pain and the scream that the girl was unable to push back. When it had ended, he pulled her close to him, feeling that now-familiar connection, that contract thread that bound the two.

"That hurt," she sniffled, weakly, into his shoulder.

"Sorry," Ciel said.

"You could have warned me," she said, reproachfully. Ciel chuckled. How many times had he accused Sebastian of exactly the same thing? A particularly haunting occasion with a tooth came to mind.

"As I said, I'm sorry," he repeated. "But did you think it wouldn't be painful? There's no way to describe it, and so I could not have warned you of how horrible it is to find that the deepest part of yourself suddenly belongs to someone else… like your very body has been hollowed out and lead by a string."

She leaned back. "Something like that would have worked," she said, with some dignity. "Or you could've just said it was going to hurt."

"In the future, I shall keep that in mind," Ciel said, with the hint of a smile, putting his hand to his heart as he inclined his head to the girl. Julie. She hadn't told him her name, but now he knew it, as he knew everything about her, in that strange and inexpressible way that still didn't mean he knew her at all. "My lady."

Julie laughed. "Who are you calling a lady?" she said. "I'm just a kid. Call me Julie."

"Of course, Julie."

"And what's your name?"

"Whatever you would like it to be."

Julie frowned, and her small brow furrowed. She looked at him with too-sharp eyes. "Don't you have a name at all?"

Ciel did not answer.

"Well, then…" Julie said, and he wondered what name his new mistress would choose; what would please her, what he would become. "Your name should be whatever you think is best." She looked at his frown, that tight surprise behind his eyes, and with the uncaring cruelty of a child, accepting without question their dominion, she continued, "That's an order. What do you want to be called?"

"Ciel." The word came out lowly, and he felt a kind of fierce pain, as though she had seen into the truth of him. He had always found lies so easy to bear, but oh: the truth hurt. It was only then that he realized he was still in his own form, the one he had come to her in, and nothing in her mind or her voice told him to change it.

She reached up, distractedly, to her forehead, perhaps wondering why the pain there hadn't stopped like it had everywhere else, and she started, her face going pale, when she saw the blood on her hand.

"What happened to me?" she said, shakily. "Ciel, what happened? Tell me!"

"It's just the mark of our contract," Ciel said. "Here… I'll show you, if you'll come out. There's a mirror in here somewhere, right?"

Julie nodded miserably.

He pushed open the stall door a creak and looked around, relieved to find that there was nobody else around.

"I sneaked off during breakfast," Julie explained, "and told the matron I was feeling ill and wanted to lie down. She's feeling sorry for me, 'cause of what happened to Marsha, so she didn't make a fuss, but the other children won't get out for half an hour yet."

"That's good, then," Ciel said, as he brought her over to a washbasin with a grimy, streaked mirror in front of it. He cleared a little space by brushing his hand over it, making the glass shine and easing back the cracks. Not quite enough to be noticed, unless you were looking closely, but the mirror suddenly looked somewhat younger and of less wear than the others in the room.

The star that was his mark was sitting low on her forehead, just between and above her eyes, and he showed her the answering mark on his own left hand.

He ran the water and took one of the papers from the edge of the sink as he dabbed the blood from the wound. "We've got a strong contract," he explained. "The more visible the mark, the greater the power of the bond. The fact that it bled means this is a particularly strong one; the mark probably won't hide itself, even if I'm not around."

"But I can't walk around with a star on my forehead," Julie said, leaning onto the edge of the sink by her elbows as she took another paper and blew her nose noisily. "What would everyone think," she continued.

"You'll have to wear a fringe," Ciel said.

"A what?"

"Uh—bangs. I can do that for you now, if you want."

After a short moment, Julie nodded. Ciel pulled himself up to sit on the edge of the sink while he turned her head to face him; a sharp pair of scissors materialized in his hand as he combed the hair over his eyes. He began to snip, the fallen strands disappearing as they touched the ground, and Julie watched, fascinated.

"I guess it doesn't look too terrible," Julie said, to her reflection, when he had finished.

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