The Soldier
Then: 1945
Ciel's second contract was his weakest; a man named James who had called him with the help of the old woman in whose house—converted to a makeshift hospital for the countless injured—he had been laying, day after day, his ear and the skin of his face blown off, his arms and legs just stumps. Because he could still speak, he could communicate, and the old woman, who would walk through the house at night, doing what she could to help to ease the nurses burdens and the soldiers' loneliness by listening to their stories, sat by his bedside as he rambled, listened to the way he cursed the enemy and his country and God and asked him if he wanted to be healed so much that he would make even the biggest mistake.
"There's only so much I can do with my own little magic, beside send you to rest, but I can tell that's not what you want," she had told him.
"What do I have to lose?" James had said, and laughed, as much as he could through the torn skin of his throat, when she said his soul.
The incantation she had performed had shone out, calling infernal attention like a soft, whispering brush, an ad in the paper. A bitter man, who wants only to be healed in body. A soul of substance, but middling quality. It was a weak call, all things considered. As she told Ciel tartly when they met, "I had no wish to bring all the hordes of you down on me. But, if one was in the neighbourhood, well," she shrugged. "You could do worse than him."
Perhaps Ciel had always been too easily moved by pity. That was what Sebastian had said, when Ciel came back to England with James in tow. The mark on James' back and his own hand had only shown when the two were near, and James had never stopped hissing at the sudden pain when it would spark to life.
Ciel was used to pain. His own mark always burned, no matter how far he or Sebastian might travel from one another, and he couldn't sympathize with the grimace that would travel across his master's face.
James was not a man of imagination. After the purpose of his contract was served, and he had walked around again, alternatively laughing giddily and crying, looking at himself in the dirty mirror and touching his face with shaking hands, he had not done any one of the things that might have made life much harder for Ciel, or even put off the collection of his soul. When Ciel said that they were going back to see his business partner, James had come without complaint, expressing only the wish, (with a fervent curse) that he could get back to civilization and away from this blasted battlefield.
The war was already over, officially, and though the reality would take some time to catch up, already people were starting to wonder if the future might not be an attainable thing. The only thing James wanted was to see his home one more time.
Two soldiers making their way back to London was so mundane as to not call any attention at all. James had brown hair and blue eyes and when he was healed, even the old woman had remarked that the one thing he didn't lack was in good looks (good sense, she added, was another thing altogether). Ciel had always drawn eyes, but James needed someone he didn't feel threatened by in any respect, and so Ciel—now Dale—was a shorter man, stocky, not ugly but not particularly eye-catching. Still, there was something about him that made everyone look twice, some indefinable aura that made women (and some men) catch his eye at him before they looked at James, and then back after. The slow edge of a smile that Ciel could send their way made anyone breathless, and James, who watched him playing this little game all through the rattling trucks and then the trains that passed through these dead lands back into society, or what was left of it, made the first of his orders to Ciel. "Stop that… seduction you're doing. I don't like it. No, it's an order."
"Yes, master," Ciel said. He watched the way James's brow furrowed, thrown, uncomfortable with the way that servile word flowed off his tongue so naturally, almost—but not quite—making a mockery of itself.
It was the first time Ciel called him master instead of James, and he never called him James again after that.
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