The Parting


The perfect family came, a couple married a few years, childless, and good Christians in every way. They gave to their church and to charity, they helped with the little children on Sunday afternoon, and they had talked, with increasing seriousness, of finally getting a family of their own. They had loved Paul and Marsha on sight, and they had even loved Julie, although the solemn-faced girl hovering awkwardly behind her siblings had a cold, abstracted look across her eyes, and something about her, these days, made those most in tune to these things (the very faithful, and the very innocent) feel a creeping, shuddering wrongness down the back of their spines.

"Yes, they're perfect," Julie told him, the night after that first meeting, when he appeared in the window and the moon was high; two other girls, sleeping in their beds beside hers, shivering in their sleep from the cold draft. "But I don't want them to adopt me."

"Why not?" Ciel asked, as he leaned against the sill, interested in what her answer might be.

"Because I'm going to die," Julie said, "and I don't want…" he words failed her, and she hugged herself, sitting there upon the bed in her flannel pyjamas.

"Ah, I understand. The tragedy must be confined to these walls," Ciel replied. "Nothing to disturb the happy home?" There was something too sharp in his words, almost mocking, and he didn't know why, except perhaps that the meticulousness with which Julie meant to craft a fairytale life for her siblings disgusted him.

She had made this deal with him not for herself, but for someone else, and that was something he couldn't understand. He tripped up against it, shining there like a beacon of innocence. Someone like her, with her pure high-minded morals, was too good for something like this. Only she wasn't. She was just as hypocritical as the rest of them.

"Oh Ciel," she said tiredly. "Please don't." And she lay down, curling herself up against the cold.

He could have counted those pleases on his fingers: she said that word so often. It's an order, but please. Just please. Why are you asking me? Ciel thought. Why do you persist in asking me for everything, when it would be so much easier on us both if you just ordered it?

It made him remember those nights so long ago, when he had been (confined to) as small as she was, and the long, lonely windows had looked down on his long, lonely bed all the night through, while the nightmares in his head—the ones he couldn't kill—prowled, waiting for him to sleep.

Stay with me, he'd said, to his demon, the only thing that knew him—the only thing that could—and pretended it was just another order.

It was easy enough to bring that creeping feeling into their minds, when they looked at her—to make them think that there was something about this child that should be kept far away from all things innocent and good, and it made their resolve to adopt the other two all the stronger.

Paul and Marsha wailed and swore and made oaths that they would never let the three be parted, not ever, they wouldn't even go with the family if Julie couldn't come along. Even when Julie tried to explain, first kindly, and then coldly, and then in screaming tears as she shouted to Paul—don't you think our parents would have wanted something better for us than this? Take it, damn you!

They left on a grey day, Marsha still crying and confused, not knowing why they were leaving her older sister behind, Paul and Julie glaring at one another in frosty defiance that crumbled as soon as Julie saw the two out the door and fled into the hidden nook at the back of the orphanage's tiny library room.

They would never forgive themselves for that, Ciel thought. It would always be Paul and Julie's greatest regrets that the last time they had seen each other had been in anger.

When his almost-noiseless footsteps entered the room, and Julie looked up at him, he could see her flinch—but then she steeled herself, and faced him squarely. "All right," she said. "You've done your part."

"Not yet," Ciel said, as he sat across from her on the worn old carpet, between shelves and shelves of books on cool metal racks.

"What do you mean?" Julie said, almost aghast. She didn't want to live—not now, not without her siblings.

"You said you wanted the Davis family to be happy," Ciel explained.

"They will be," she said, leaning back, looking at him with hollow, tired eyes, still not understanding. "You promised."

"Oh Julie," Ciel said. "You're part of the Davis family too. And you're so unhappy, I couldn't possibly kill you now."

Julie flinched. He could see the understanding worming its way into her brain, the spark of betrayal flickering behind her eyes. She had chosen her words carefully, but not carefully enough. "Then, you're not going to do it..." she said at last, heavily.

"Not yet," Ciel said, and reached for her trembling face until she finally gave into all her tears, and wept.

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