October 21, 2011
7:46 a.m.
"No – wait! Please come back!" she cried to a McDonald's advertisement slapped across the backside of her fuel efficient Friday morning bus. For the very first time this semester, it submerged itself into the morning rush without Patrice taking up the first front seat.
Left in the middle of a quickly clearing crosswalk, one arm stretched out in desperate longing while the other tightly cradled her hefty weathered school bag, the rumbling baritone of a bobtail truck sent her scrambling to the sidewalk where a poorly placed open guitar case, caught her converse and sent her rolling. In one fell-swoop she managed to rip her last pair of good jeans and spill every subject from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. across a sidewalk in the middle of a loafer stampede. Rather than groan about her luck, since complaining only ever seemed to make it worse, Patrice cautiously picked her belongings from the fray of remorseless feet, stuffed her bag till it messily gaped once more, and made her dash for the college.
Right around the first mile she was reminded how much track hurt in High School and how a doctor's note was not going to get her out of this one. Sports along with any strenuous activity were the enemy for those built on gangly limbs, stacked top-heavy and closely acquainted with an inhaler. Plus her glasses had a nasty habit of sliding down her occasionally greasy nose. If not that, they would fog worse than the windshield of a car with a broken dashboard vent.
"All…most…there!" she wheezed, seeing the pigeon covered University rooftops ahead.
By the time Patrice made it through the black-barred entrance gate, up a tall staircase to the music department, into the proper room, and lastly into her wobbly seat, there was no time to finish her essay. Defeat was painful and would only now worsen in the form of her professor, who walked in on the dot and slung his leather bound briefcase atop his desk in a very annoyed fashion. Why in the world did a man who clearly despises mornings, become a professor at all?
"Good morning class," grumbled Professor Allison, eyeing every disinterested face and idiot who agreed with that false statement. "Hopefully every one of you remembered to finish the paper I assigned last week, because I know I will remember to grade them over the weekend."
Every ounce of color in Patrice's cold nose and flushed cheeks instantly drained, leaving her to miserably slip deeper behind her one-man desk. As Professor Allison reminded everyone that each essay cost more than a single test, so skipping out on one was like driving a spike through your GPA, Patrice switched her laptop on and floated her cursor over the word document icon entitled "Music Theory". It seemed to mock her misfortune in the same fashion as that McDonald's advertisement, smiling back at her as the bus drove off.
Maybe if she typed really quick, really quiet, by the end of class she would at least have a third of it done? A crappy seventy-percent was better than willingly accepting a zero after all…right?
"Please hand your papers forward. I will collect them now so none of you slackers can pull a fast one," Professor Allison's glare seemed to specifically weed out Patrice, despite the fact that before this morning, she gave him no reason to include her in the "slacker" category. After all, she was here on an academic scholarship and couldn't afford lazy grades anymore than she could afford D and G.
"Screw my life," whimpered Patrice, putting her forehead harder to the desk than she had originally intended on. "Ow."
On the verge of throwing up, in a desperate act of hope, she clicked the essay's icon and silently prayed beneath her breath that she had typed up more than she remembered.
The laptop took its sweet time, allowing its owners nails to dig ever deeper into the edges of her desk. When Word finally popped up on the screen, Patrice saw her header, title, intro, thesis, and everything else down to the conclusion.
She blinked in wild confusion – the paper was complete! "B-but when did I...? How did I…?"
Quickly skimming the first couple of lines in every paragraph, she found the paper to be written beautifully – maybe a little too elegantly worded than her usual work, but she was in no position to play it safe. Without any hesitance, Patrice's left hand shot up in the air as her right set the essay in correct format; double-space, Times New Roman font, and size twelve.
"Yes, Patrice?" drawled Allison, well on his way to collecting every complete paper.
"Professor, my flashdrive broke this morning so I wasn't able to transfer the word document to print in the library. Could I-" her courage wavered for only a moment. "Could I just e-mail it to you?"
Holding the papers between his thumb and index, clearly upset by the thin stack, he gestured with them towards Patrice in his famed face of disgusted disapproval. "If you were to refer to the class syllabus, you would know that I do not accept papers via e-mail."
"I-I know, I've read the syllabus top to bottom numerous times," she softly confessed, face heating up as her fellow classmates began to turn one by one in their chairs to stare. "But you see its complete right here on my laptop, and I can't exactly afford a new flashdrive right this instant. Please?"
Professor Allison sighed heavily, referring back and forth to Patrice and the thin stack of papers in his hand. "Fine, just send it right now and replace that flashdrive. Got it?"
"Yes, got it!" she chirped.
"Good. Also," his thick brows lowered in warning, "take your seat. I'm about to start class."
Only after another moment of awkwardly standing up in the middle of class, Patrice threw herself back down into her seat red-faced and e-mailed the promised essay to Professor Allison's class inbox.
Music Theory let out at 10:00 a.m. so she had an hour and thirty minutes of a lesson to endure.
About twenty-minutes into class, Patrice could no longer keep her eyes focused on the blackboard. Professor Allison had an obnoxious way of abbreviating every other word to supposedly make the task of note taking quicker. If anything it made note taking all the more difficult. But it wasn't just Allison's method that coerced her focus elsewhere; the mystery of her completed paper and the occurrences of last night had Patrice's brain reeling.
The majority of her sanity reasoned that last night had to be a dream and this morning some sort of hallucination due to the lead-based paint of her apartment. But how could she explain the exquisitely completed essay?
"Sleep…typing?" she muttered to herself. If that were so, her subconscious self was leagues more articulate than her conscious self.
Once again lost in thought, Patrice's eyes hidden behind their thick lenses and fluffy uncombed bangs, wandered their idle gaze far from the blackboard to settle out the window. Mornings in San Francisco were always dreary. The ocean never failed to bring in its thick blanket of fog overnight. From the salty docks it crept across streets, into alley ways, and through any gate it could. At this hour the University still lay in the fog's belly, its consistency varying throughout the campus. From her window seat Patrice could only make out the ends of the music department's rooftop. But as a lone breeze swept passed, thinning the fog just enough where she could see the green grasses of the quad below, she spotted a tall, thin silhouette standing just outside the gazebo.
Prescription a bit dated and fog still relevant, she strained her eyes to focus on the mysterious man. Through murk she managed to make out that he stood alone with his hands at his sides and head tilted back as if he were looking up towards the music department - to and through her very window - directly at Patrice.
"So Mister Wong, where does this Metalcore belong in my classroom…horrible noise…a great example of music this era…"
Allison's conversation with another student faded far into the background, until it was totally drowned out by the sudden sound of large flapping bird wings. Pigeons could never manage such a frightening racket and it only grew louder, but no one else in the classroom seemed to hear it or smell the faint scent of burning in the air. With no desire whatsoever to draw any attention her way, Patrice stayed silent and threw her worried gaze back out the window. There was neither bird nor fire, just the shadowy man, faceless and yet staring straight-up at her.
The unseen bird drew ever closer until its erratic flutter was as if it circled her head, bent on making an eerie music with the pounding of her own heartbeat. Somehow she knew that the shadow below was the cause of this, beckoning her so that now no matter how hard she willed it, Patrice could not turn away.
Silently biting down on her bottom lip, she protectively put her hands over hear ears and cowered in her seat. "Leave me alone…leave me alone," her teeth chattered.
But the shadow would not yield. It forced Patrice to look at it, as if it reveled in her fear of not only its evil, but of the world around happening to notice that she was going mad in her seat.
Just when Patrice thought she could not take a moment more, two horizontal, bright red slits formed on the shadow's face, flaring open to reveal narrow, serpent-like eyes of the deepest hell. Their powerful gaze sent her tumbling out of her seat, where she clattered onto the classroom floor and grasped for her exhaustedly quivering heart.
"Miss Wells!" fiercely snarled Professor Allison from behind his desk. "What on earth are you on this morning?"
"N-nothing!" The classroom came rushing back all at once; the smell of chalk, the soft chatter, and heckling faces.
"Get off my floor and out of my class if you're so keen on disrupting my lecture!"
Too scared to be embarrassed, Patrice packed her things and followed Professor Allison's pointing finger right out of the classroom, but not before glimpsing back out the window down to the quad, where absolutely no one stood in the dense fog.
Patrice left the music department in a hurry to scurry into a bathroom downstairs. Inside the bathroom she gathered her senses in a stall, and only when her heart stopped trying to beat its way out of her chest, did she come out and douse her face in cold water from one of the sinks. A few other girls from her class inevitably wandered in after being excused. But upon sight of Patrice, looked down at their phones and walked right back out the door.
"She's such a freak," muttered one to the other, before the door swung shut behind them.
The word freak was not exactly a term that broke her heart anymore. Besides for being quiet and not all too concerned about her physical appearance, Patrice hardly earned the sole right to the word, but its avid use refused to die. But for the first time since middle school when she denied an 8th graders clumsy advances and he angrily lashed that title onto her, did she really wonder if it might be true or not. Considering what just happened in the music department, freak was hardly the word for it. Something like crazy or lunatic fit a lot closer. Then again she always heard that crazy people had no idea that they were crazy.
Patrice's reflection stared back, searching her face for a telltale sign that she was in fact losing her mind. In the end, the sound of the bathroom door opening had her quickly fasten her glasses back over her face and push away from the sink that had supported her wobbly knees up until now.
"Patty?" softly cooed an unsure voice. "Hey, what happened back in class? Are you okay?"
Miyuki did not have 8:30 music theory; it was her older brother that did. He must have texted her after Patrice was told to leave class.
"Yeah…I'm alright," she lied, once again in the refuge of a locked stall, listening to Miyuki's approaching footsteps.
Just outside the bathroom stall now, Miyuki peeked in through where the door did not meet with the walls. "Satoshi said you leapt out of your chair screaming, like you fell asleep in class and had some sort of nightmare. Is that what happened?"
Atop the down seat, knees to her chest and bag trapped between both, she wondered just how much her friend liked her. "I…I saw something outside the window," she hesitantly began. "A man was standing in the quad, looking up at me."
"Like a stalker?" awed Miyuki, excited by a possible live drama about to unfold before her very eyes. "Was he cute?"
"If he was cute, do you think I would have jumped out of my seat screaming, Miyuki?" snapped Patrice.
"Well, no. I guess not," she sadly replied, reaching into her Keroppi tote bag. "You know if some guy is creeping you out. You could always report him to security. They'll keep an eye out and if they spot him, they'll escort him off campus."
There was a large portion of the story that Patrice purposely left out. Miyuki may have been into the supernatural when it came to television and books, but not even she would believe that some shadow with malicious, glowing red eyes was just standing around in the quad outside the music department, staring up at her. Plus hearing and smelling things that weren't there just opened up one too many doors of possibility. None of which Patrice was willing to venture through and get an anxiety attack over each one.
Hearing Miyuki still rummaging around in her bag, Patrice peered up just in time to see a flashdrive slip between the stall door and its wall. "Here, Satoshi told me to give you this. He said to tell you not to worry, that he has about three of them lying around in his room. So you can have this one," she wagged the little device. "Come on. Take it. You know you want to."
Even though she had lied about her flashdrive breaking, it was in fact barely working. "No, I couldn't. I'll buy my own," she turned away from the temptation. "Tell him thanks anyway."
With a shrug as she slipped the flashdrive back into her bag, Miyuki suddenly began to giggle. "How about you tell him yourself? He's always offering you things. I think Satoshi likes you," she stuck her tongue out playfully.
"No, he doesn't," Patrice firmly corrected, finally opening the stall door to walk out. "He just feels sorry for me. That's all."
Unable to argue with that, Miyuki reached for her friend's hair and attempted to groom her as she often tried. "Do you even own a brush?" she laughed.
"I do, it just doesn't seem to help one bit."
Miyuki was a very pretty girl and her brother was equally good looking. However it wasn't their looks that drew her to them, it was just their overall kindness and their own goofy qualities. Even at the ripe old age of twenty, Miyuki still loved to wear her keroppi bedtime cap in public, and her brother would whip out his 3DDS whenever a professor assumed too highly of him. Mr. and Mrs. Ishikawa were equally nice; immigrants from a little village in northern Japan that Patrice could not pronounce without hurling Miyuki into laughter.
She really liked Miyuki and her family, and thus was incredibly jealous but never acted on it. They were just too good of people to mistreat in any way.
After about ten-minutes of enduring a few more friendly pokes and prods, Patrice smiled and then gently shooed Miyuki's helpful hands. "It's fine, really. I um…I need to go though."
"Oh. Okay then. Well I guess I'll tell Satoshi thanks but no thanks once again from Peppermint Patty! We'll see you after your next class, right?" she looked hopeful as always.
"Yeah, I'll meet you guys up at the café," kindly reassured Patrice.
Liar.
October 21, 2011
11:46 a.m.
Countless times she had reassured Miyuki that she would meet her and her brother at the school cafeteria, and not once has she ever done so. The reason behind that was simply money. The school cafeteria was really expensive and it would be embarrassing to sit in front of her friends without the means to afford a thing. Of course they would both offer to pay for her food, like they would offer to pay for a movie ticket or BART pass when they wanted to bring her along somewhere. However Patrice could not bring herself to accept their kindness. It would be rude to accept and even more so to get in a habit of expecting handouts. It wasn't that she was incredibly noble or had some sort of ego to protect. Patrice just did not want to be a burden on anyone. Ever.
After leaving her second class, still shaken up by the occurrences of the first, the path back to her favorite loitering area went through the quad she saw her phantom at, so she opted for the detour through the construction area of a new lab unit. Following the winding sidewalk into the swirling fog, shadows of other students sprinting across the well manicured lawns in the distance reassured Patrice that she was not alone. Not that it ever personally helped to have an audience when you were prone to doing things those on the more normal side, found questionable.
Inevitably the fog grew thicker, so much so that it choked out the sight of everyone and everything else but the oncoming sidewalk.
"Sheesh, it's really ridiculous today," she grumbled to no one particular. "Knowing my luck, I'll end up wandering clear off the Golden Gate."
Outside the buildings and long hallways, the autumn weather was bitterly cold. In her only sweater, the very same gray pullover from last night, Patrice wrapped her arms around her upper body and her bag in hopes of keeping warm. It did not help. The warmth of her body escaped out with her materializing breath that joined the slow moving fog as it eerily seemed to clear a path towards a gazebo. The exact gazebo that sat in the quad she had tried so hard to avoid.
"How did…" she came to a slow stop and peered around in confusion. "How the heck did I get turned around?"
Off in the distance she could hear the loud crack of hammers on wood from the construction unit she had meant to pass by.
Ahead of her stood the gazebo; vacant as it always was during the colder months. It had been erected her freshmen year, now as a junior, it had endured many taggings and sloppy re-paint jobs. Originally it had been a cream white, now it was an off-beat eggshell.
Approaching the gazebo, still protectively clutching her bag of books that she knew could be used to bludgeon any possible attacker, be they natural or supernatural; she peered inside to find unsurprisingly no one, just benches built into the gazebo walls, silently flaking paint.
Gulping as she slowly began to step out, something suddenly leapt from beneath one of the benches and took flight, soaring noisily passed her ear.
Letting out a loud shriek, Patrice dropped her bag, threw her hands over her head and made to sprint for her life out of the gazebo and out into the open cold. Before she could even make it out onto the dewy grass, she smacked into a familiar, immovable chest clothed in an equally familiar, finely tailored coat of black. Bouncing back from the collision, she frantically gathered her senses to gawk up at Sebastian Michaelis standing in the gazebo entryway, calmly peering down at her with his oddly colored eyes, as if he had been standing there and watching the entire time, unbothered by the cold bay weather or the eerie world of impenetrable fog that swirled behind him.
"Pigeons," he softly said, referring to what had flown out of the gazebo and frightened her so. "They're simply rats with wings, nothing to be afraid of."
Unlike most who have encountered Sebastian, she did not take immediate notice of his dark ambiance and wonderfully charming mask. Instead a natural sense of panic overcame Patrice, when she realized that the music department was empty at this time of day, most students were in class about now, and the fog that refused to lift, veiled them and this gazebo with only one exit and that was through Sebastian.
"What are you doing here?" she demanded, glimpsing down at her only weapon, unloaded all across the cement. "You followed me here—that's stalking!"
Also noticing secondhand textbook spillage all across his feet, Sebastian gracefully knelt down on one knee to orderly gather them. "Technically I did not follow you here. That would be impossible, as I had quite a lot of work on my hands back in your apartment once you left. Again, technically speaking…" he came to a pause mid-sentence to glimpse through his heavy lashes up to her face; no eyes, just annoyingly thick lenses. "I followed your scent here once I completed that impossible purge of filth."
Finished with her bag, he regained proper posture and held it out towards her along with what looked like to be a package bound in a royal blue, silky scarf knotted at the top. "Here you are," he kindly gestured for Patrice to take both. "Since it is now the afternoon and most people enjoy a lunch, I took the liberty of packing yours."
The bit about her scent did not strike as odd, just that he enjoyed an elaborate method of speaking.
Patrice never once packed a lunch in college, mainly because her food was needed at home, where the endless hours of studying took place. "Um, that's…nice. But really unnecessary," she swiftly retrieved her book bag, leaving Sebastian holding out the cloth-wrapped package.
Over his many years, he has known many Americans. Never before had he met one who acted with caution when presented with kindness, let alone food. Generally speaking, he had the impression that they were of a brasher nature. But every species and nationality had their exceptions. Or maybe this was all just because Patrice was not only a young potential master, but female.
"Hence why I previously said 'I took the liberty of'," he set the package down on one of the flaking benches.
An awkward quiet befell the scene, in which rather than force his food on Patrice, he instead untied the top-knot of the package. The cloth fell open like blue petals, making a modest blanket for the lacquered box to rest upon. A strong, delicious aroma of steam rose from the continence inside and wafted in her direction. Instantly her nose gave an excited twitch as she leaned in close, rather than away towards the exit she had been so thoroughly eyeing like a nervous mouse does to its hole in the wall.
"Grilled sauté hen on toasted rye, topped with tomato, red-leaf, cucumber, and a spot of gray mustard—every bit organic, since the people in this area seem to be quite keen on that," not that he cared if humans desired to drink down pesticides with their hormones, that was their business. In his case he just did not want the taste of his handcrafted meals to suffer.
Patrice hardly heard half of what Sebastian explained to be in front of her. All she knew was that it had been an incredibly long time since anyone ever packed her a lunch, and never had it possessed any aroma beyond the smell every kindergarten school lunch box got when one too many baloney sandwiches were packed and forgotten.
"Um, you really didn't have to do this," she said, trying to muster up the same strength she used to refuse Miyuki's brother's kindness. "I mean I'm not…I'm not all that hungr—" A vicious growl came between them, that from her stomach.
Sebastian knowingly smiled, "Please, I insist."
Surrendering to the divine smell of lunch and her insistent hunger, Patrice sat down a safe distance from Sebastian as he brought a steel-plated thermos from seemingly thin air.
"There is also this: since you clearly did not agree with the Earl Gray, today's brew is Darjeeling. The tea itself originates from a region of the name's sake, in West Bengal, India. It's prized over most black teas and I'm sure even your feeble pallet could appreciate its musky, spici—" his eloquent narrative was abruptly severed.
Not even two seconds after Patrice brought the thermos lid to her lips for a drink, the tea dribbled back out, down her chin, and onto the cement floor of the gazebo. Her face had taken on a pale green as she set the thermos lid down and slowly pushed it as far away from her as she possibly could.
"Musty should never, ever be used to describe anything you put into your mouth," she shuddered. "That's as awful as Earl's!"
Sebastian stood there, not quite sure what he had just witnessed. Never before had anyone rejected anything he's ever cooked, baked, or brewed—especially not some degenerate who thought Lipton to be a tea and Earl to be a person.
"This matted, uncultured mutt," he grudgingly thought with a kind smile on the exterior.
Wiping her chin and mouth with her sleeve, Patrice watched Sebastian seal the thermos back up. He stood out like a silver knife in a drawer of plastic sporks; tall, sharp, eloquent, as if the word gentlemen solely existed now within him.
"Thanks," she said, taking her last bite, figuring she'd buy a soda later from one of the many vending machines that littered the campus. Surely if this otherworldly butler appeared to her for a third time, her new fortune was just as real as he. "So why are you here? I doubt you followed me to school, just to bring me lunch. I figured if you were real, you'd be on a plane back to wherever the heck in England you're from."
Noticing she was about to wipe her mouth with her sleeve again, Sebastian withheld a noticeable cringe and offered her his handkerchief instead. "You and I have some business to discuss," he replied.
Once Patrice was done eating, not a crust of bread left, he packed everything back up and set it aside. For the first time in a long time, Sebastian not only sat, but broke his posture by leaning forward to rest his elbows on his lap. The tall, dark man now stared out to the fog, clasping his white-gloved hands as they rested between his parted knees. Without a leash, no longer anchored by human flesh, he felt light again, as if a single gust of wind might take him up into the clouds.
"Oh yeah, business," said Patrice, interrupting Sebastian somber train of thought. "You mentioned that in your letter…something about a contract?"
"Yes," nodding his head, he turned to put the young woman in his sights. "Have you finally accepted the reality of your situation, or do you still believe me and everything else to be a dream?" His smile became a serious line, waiting for her answer to dictate its next move.
Patrice, who had been twiddling her thumbs nervously beneath the table, suddenly closed her eyes to give herself one last pinch. When she opened them back up, there Sebastian still sat across from her in the lonely little gazebo outside the University's music department.
"It's too much," she softly confessed to her feet. "The letter, the money, accepting it from someone I didn't even know…it's too much for one person."
"Madame Gwendolyn is dead with her inheritance nowhere else to go, unless you desire to leave a noble family's long legacy to the state?" clearly by his tone, that was not acceptable.
Any young woman would be over the moon to find that she was the heiress to a British noble family's legacy. They would be in ecstatic tears and yet this one, this odd one was not. Patrice apparently could not bring herself to accept her good fortune, anymore than she could take her eyes away from the only exit.
"Too much for one person, you say?" his eyes like freshly cut ruby, zeroed in on this sublime opportunity. "If you believe it to be too much for one person, I would be happy to offer you my services."
All this time having successfully avoided eye contact with him, Patrice brought her gaze away from the gazebo entrance to see that the Phantomhive butler had silently came close to lay a long, open hand of offering across the table that separated them.
"No, I couldn't," she shook her head and scooted further around the table, farther from him.
Hand slowly withdrawing, Sebastian brought his broad shoulders back and nodded with a subtle smile. "I see. Well, I've served the Phantomhive household and their descendents for many generations. Thus I'm well acquainted with the responsibilities of the name. I could be very useful to you, Miss Wells."
About to reach for her bag to leave this odd man alone, she paused. "You meant to say that your family has served them over generations? I mean…you couldn't be older than twenty-five."
For a moment Sebastian did not speak, he allowed the silence to stew between them, sort of enjoying the confusion and fear surfacing on Patrice's young face. "No," he once again brought a sinuous hand over his breast. "I in fact meant what I said because I never lie. For nearly three centuries now, I've served the Phantomhives."
Patrice Wells stared to Sebastian Michaelis as his apparent insanity sank through her clothes, puckering her flesh with chills from head to toe. "That's impossible," she harshly whispered.
"For a human, yes, it is quite impossible. But you see…" Sebastian slowly moistened his lips. "I am simply one hell of a butler."
Mid October in the city of fog, the cold was ruthless. Never before had she felt this sort of cold come over though, so icy that it sank passed her clothes, through her naked skin, into her bones, making the very marrow ache. Something was not right about him. Aside from how gentlemanly he presented himself, along with the weird things he's said, Sebastian made the wind go still and the fog squirm. To her horror, the unseen bird and its wings started their ruckus around her head again. Heart leaping into her throat, Patrice jumped to her feet.
"It was you! You were the one looking up at me!"
The butler without a master heckled into his fist. "Please forgive my rudeness from earlier. I had no intention of disrupting your studies. I hope the fall was not too painful. Did I hurt you, Miss Wells?"
Eyes wide, face pale as a ghost, the young student grabbed her bag and began to backtrack, feeling her way towards the exit. "You're insane," she trembled. "St-stay from me…"
Narrowing his ruby-red sights, he reached out and grabbed her saggy left sleeve; the ugly gray sweater was as coarse as it looked. "Pardon for handling you so freely, but I'm afraid I only grow hungrier and we have not even finished discussing our business," he softly hissed, that Cheshire grin infallible as long as potential prey's fear was afoot.
A loud slap echoed throughout the foggy world then, as loud as a leather belt across the broad side of a wet boulder. "Don't you dare touch me!" she growled, fingertips aflame.
Sebastian was struck by the fierceness behind the blow, not the pain it was meant to inflict and miserably failed at. "My, my…you're not the silly, ugly starling I thought you to be. Rather, you're a cowardly pigeon," he watched her step out onto the grass.
"And you're a beady-eyed crow!" she accused, lashing out a finger. "Stay away from me, or I swear I'll call the cops next time!"
For the second time today, Sebastian watched Patrice Wells run off in the opposite direction, this time she did not disappear down the hall of her sad apartment complex, but off into the fog that swallowed her whole. Perhaps another would have found this frustrating, a human who just wouldn't take the bait. However he found it all rather interesting despite his increasingly ravenous hunger. When prey became willing, all the fun went right out the window.
"So Patrice Wells, we have started our game and you flee without Knight or King. A queen's privilege is to move however, wherever she desires…and you choose to hide beneath your covers. Humph," standing up, Sebastian brushed his rebellious black fringe over an ear. "I wage she tastes like bitter cherries."
She ran. She ran as fast as she could, until her lungs cried mercy and her inhaler was as breathless as she. The fog only seemed to go on and on, until it came to abrupt stop just before a street of slick black that lagged out from afternoon chaos. A bus emerged around the corner, honking as she perched too close to the curb.
"Stop!" she shouted, waving her arms wildly.
The bus stopped, opening its doors for her to quickly leap aboard. After paying in little change, she scurried to the first seat behind the driver and hugged her bag. What had just happened finally anchored itself in her reality; Sebastian Michaelis was a monster as real as that A+ paper, as real as the orderliness of her bag, and the fullness in her belly. She could not wake from this nightmare anymore than she could wash out the taste from her mouth.
In the seat Patrice shivered from the cold his gaze harbored in her soul. The entire time she was on the bus to her apartment, she avoided the eyes of strangers who passed her on the aisle. They wondered what made the young, regular student passenger so pale, so nervous. When she got off at her usual spot, somehow Patrice managed to stop shaking long enough to put her key in the door and turn it. Once inside the apartment complex, she ascent the rickety stairs and rushed to her room, not only avoiding the eyes of her landlady, but her holler about late rent.
Door unlocked, she slipped into her room and slammed the door shut, locking each and every inch of it, from chain to the latch.
The silence of her lonely existence was calming. Patrice stood there in the dark, holding onto the door knob tightly. She was unsure if walls would keep Sebastian Michaelis away. But she would soon find that he was the least of her worries. As Patrice turned to look towards her single window across from the door, too see afternoon's light poorly filter through her dark , stained curtain, a knife glimmered in the posession of an intruder. She hardly had time to scream before something hard and heavy, bludgeoned her from behind and everything truly went black.
a/n: So there was chapter 2. I um…am starting to get a little nervous about this fic. It has been a really long time since I've written for another OC. Plus I'm finding my research to no longer be about weapons & Japanese culture. I'm now researching food & tea! Wth? Lol But I gotta admit that writing for Sebastian is very fun.
I've gotten some great feedback so far. It's really quite the relief. So hopefully this chapter will spark the fires for reviews. I really hope so ;( I'd hate to go at this in the dark. Anyway, thanks everyone! Hope to hear from you on Sebastian & if this OC sounds promising or not.
p.s. Ciel will be appearing in the next chapter. He'll clear some stuff up Lol