"Ah, come in."

Another day in the Phantomhive manor, I had been lost in thought when my butler came knocking on my office door. It had been a rather uneventful week; the Queen hadn't requested my services for a while, leaving me a lot more time to myself.

"More of this stuff?" I complained looking down at the silver platter with small cakes that had dog paw prints in the center of each.

"I apologize, Young Master." Sebastian said pleasantly. "As I have said before the other house help bought copious amounts of this a few months ago. However, if it pleases the master, I could make something more suited to his taste."

I sighed. "No, its fine. I have a lot of work to do so you may take your leave."

With his right hand over his chest he bowed slightly. "Understood." He said shutting the door behind him.

That last look he gave me . . .I couldn't help but wonder if he noticed. The truth was, I hardly had any work to focus on at the moment for the Queen, obviously, or even for my own company. I just haven't wanted him around lately if it was not necessary. With the current un-eventfulness in the Underworld, I have been left with a lot of time to think, and the things I have only recently come to realize have been troubling me.

During what will probably have been the darkest period of my life, that month, the month my parents died and I was tortured and treated with such cruelty, I lost faith in all things. Everything I used to believe in, all things that were significant and meaningful in my life, meant absolutely nothing.

Hatred. That was all I was left with. Everything else had been stripped away, forcibly taken. But I had found a way out. A long shot in the dark it may have been, but it was still a chance and reason for hope. A hope that I would not be left a powerless child. It was a hope that I would have the power to humiliate those who have put my family's name to shame and engrave the pain I suffered that month into their lives . . . permanently. As small a chance as it was, I reached for that spider's thread of what was left. To this day, my reason for hope has not left my side.

There are still things, people, that though I would never admit it to anyone, I love even now. People like Lizzie, my late parents and aunt. But the thing that I have never allowed myself to do again was put my faith in anyone or anything, even these people. I thought that this would be easy because of past experience, that there was no way it would be possible even if I tried . . . Until now.

Sebastian has been my butler for the past two years and not once has he let me down. He has been able to execute any task I command that he perform even when the odds are against him or I do things out of spite to make things more difficult. And recently I realized just how much I had come to depend on him as well as believe in him. I know that coming to trust and put your faith in the most deceitful and faithless being to exist was the most foolhardy thing a person could do and yet still, for some reason I have become very dependent on him and have even, in a way, started to look up to him. He may be just my butler but the thing that truly bothers me is not just what I'm feeling, but who he has started to remind me of in a lot of ways.