The Midfords forbade their nephew from attending the funeral.

The news of Elizabeth's untimely end shot through gossiping circles as soon as her name was in the obituary. It was said her death was a grisly accident, but of course the public did not believe it, especially since Scotland Yard ran the Earl through an extended inquiry. But such wild accusations spread, ruining a young man's reputation. Even the Board of Directors at the Lewisham hospital had misgivings about accepting the money from the charity ball, feeling as if it was tinged with the tragedy of Lady Midford's unexpected death.

Of course many of the donors would have thought it in poor taste to revoke their donations, but since Ciel sat on a sum the hospital saw fit to not receive, he sent it across the Channel as supplemental payment for city damages. The claim for the damage of his property in LeHavre was dropped due to authorities having found reason to believe it was no accident at all. The fire had caused such damage to the whole length of the block and this was an exorbitant expense. This move, which I had neither advised nor discouraged, had an additional spark of resentment against the Earl.

Even the Queen saw fit to send correspondence to the troubled Watchdog, with all the negative attention he was bringing to himself. "When certain sources suggest a lapse in your morality," she wrote, "I have to consider if it unwise to place my trust in you."

Alexis and Francis had more personal reason to never speak to Ciel after Paula had rushed to the Midfords with news of the lewd occurrences in the house of Phantomhive. One could argue for the maid's good intention, for she only wished Elizabeth be removed by a parental authority that could help her Lady see reason. The Midfords would have been too late, for by the time they had the ability to act on the situation, she was well-past saving.

The once proud earl carried his grief in bitter solitude, for no one even cared to give condolences to the boy who lied to them all. No longer would the public view him as society's child who possessed such values of grace, nobility and purest love. The glamour that was the life of Ciel Phantomhive had dissolved alongside his most vital chess piece, his protector, the one to elevate his influence and had given him such power to meet his goals.

By no means had I left him, but rather the guise I had called "Sebastian Michaelis" had left me. For a time I endured the agonizing chore of pressing myself into that persona. This pointless visage could not aid Ciel in any useful manner, and I strained to not surge out of it for my own personal desire. Eventually I had to resign myself to resting in my own dark corner of the town house. I would not leave him, but I refused to be in his presence as my true, despicable self.

Ciel stood in the doorway to my quarters, rather the quarters I occupied while butler. The light of his candelabra could not penetrate the murk of the room, so thick my presence had become. He stepped into the darkness with the full knowledge that it was only I who lurked as shadow and infestation. Finding me, he knelt down to place his palm to my face and I shivered. I felt his radiance with more keenness that I did those candle flames.

"I want to go home. Please, will you take me back to the manor?" Simple words sounded bizarre, coming from such an imposing figure.

My voice sounded raspy and distant to my own ears. "And why should I take you?"

"Because I want to go and you said you would not leave my side."

"What if I was lying?"

He pulled his hand away, and the light of the candelabra quivered across placid, yet doleful features. "Then I suppose I would have to leave on my own and you can suffer knowing that I am forever lost to you." He had made some determination, and I reasoned this was why I felt him so imposing.

Rising in response, I growled, "You are not in a position to threaten me with an ultimatum." Even as I towered over him, he did not so much as flinch as he stood in the nefarious pit of my once-bedroom.

He sighed. "Sebastian, an ultimatum is all I have to give, all or nothing. So take me back to the manor, or don't."

For the first time, he had offered me a choice. He acknowledged my free will, when every second he was still alive was because I had chosen not to eat him.

The truth was I had to be with him.

So in a sense I had no choice at all.

"How can you even call me 'Sebastian' when I am like this?" Before I had only slipped from my guise to some partial degree. I could not say I was horrible to look upon, for there was little to see amidst the leaden aura, plumage all around me. I no longer felt as skin and flesh and bone but as some substance that could hold an edge as lethal as obsidian.

"Because that is as I know you. I have no intention of calling you anything else." His smile pressed against my starving mouth, fangs pricking against his soft lips. I lapped away the blood that trickled down his chin, twisted my claws into soft hair and still he clung to me in that infernal mist. He was dressed in his travelling cloak, already determined to leave. "Carry me. Never mind a carriage."

"Very well."

Would there ever be need to lock the doors and secure the windows? Anyone could enter to see a dinner never cleared from the table, records in the study never filed away. His violin sat by the grand piano.

We took to the brisk night after the street lamps had been put out. Anyone who happened to spot us would see no more than a shadow over the rooftops, the moonlight blotted by thick smog. Ciel clung to my shoulders, buried in my neck and I relished his breath on my sooty skin. When we cleared the city I decided there was no rush to return to the manor directly.

We headed south from London, most certainly not the way to his estate, but I think I wanted some coastline. As we passed along rolling hills in Surrey he murmured into my ear, "This is not the way."

"Is it necessary to return there immediately?"

"It's just... where else do I have to go?"

I held him tighter to me. "You are with me. Is that satisfactory?"

"Yes, I suppose."

He would not stop stroking my chest or my hair, as if this was a perfectly normal way to pass the time. Was this fresh fascination, or was this a preferred form?

"Ciel... I want you to know... that I think I failed you entirely."

"I think you're right."

"Do you not despise me for this?"

"I don't have the energy to despise you. The way I see it... you gave me a second chance, a second life on bought time, and I could have used that to seek revenge.

But who was I really fighting against, Sebastian? I can see now that it was me, that I was an enemy to myself, that I was standing in the way of my revenge because... because I found something better to live for."

"Please explain to me what that thing is, because from what I can see, there is nothing in your life left to salvage."

"I'm talking about you, you idiot."

I slowed among the conifers as we neared New Forest, lifting his face to peer down at him. His nose was red from the brisk air. "How can you say that you live for me? I brought you to ruin."

"I was destined for ruin from the beginning. What if we never took the actions we did? Never succumbed to any of these desires? You would have brought me my revenge and taken what is your due. And you speak as though you regret to see all that comprised my life has been wretched from me. Does this mean you care of my livelihood?"

"I have cared for your livelihood for some time."

"So I suppose we both lost sight of the main objective."

The more I thought on this, I was forced to confront a strange reality. I wanted to be in contract with him, a new objective. I had no desire to forfeit my identity as Sebastian Michaelis, my position in his life, or the lengths I would go to elevate him. Even if it meant enduring the itching, groaning hunger for the span of a human lifetime, because Ciel Phantomhive provided some speck of intrigue in an otherwise monotonous and lonely existence.

I stopped on the edge of a windy precipice of Dorset Coast. The moon waxed far out to sea, casting some of its milky light onto the churning ink of the waves crashing against the rocks.

"Ciel." I set his feet on the craggy ground and knelt before him. An ocean of stars glittered around him as I looked into his puzzled expression. Perhaps I needed some isolated space away from the smog, a midnight expanse where I could stretch myself. "I have never done this before, but never have I met a soul who would compel me to such lengths and I do not believe in my long existence I will have an opportunity to meet another as brilliant as you. This will be the only time I will offer it."

For the first time that evening he seemed to want to pull away, but I held his hands with an iron grip. Did some hoarse timbre of my voice frighten him? Could he only see me as a pair of eyes in the night? "Am I the one thing in this whole world that you would be willing to give your soul for? Would you live a full life for me to give me the satisfaction of seeing you live just for my existence? I can give you that life, a third chance even. Give me the opportunity to elevate you once more, to serve you under some new condition. This offer is yours for the taking."

His sweating palms unnerved me, but they could not lie. He whispered, "A new contract?"

"Yes!"

A sliver of moonlight reflected from a vacant eye and spilled to his cheek. Another stream of silver preceded painful sobbing to blend with the howl through this rocky cove. He hunched over malicious claws clasping at his delicate fingers. "How? How can you offer me this? Why would you even bother when you could just have me now and be done with it?"

"Because I do not wish to be through with it!"

"And what if I am, Sebastian?" he wailed.

Did he not realise a new contract would give me the ability to function in a physical reality as he would need me? That I could grant him even greater power to match his will, to ascend to even higher fortunes?

He dropped to his knees, staring into my eyes so I could not ignore their pain. "Can't you see, Sebastian? You would ask me to be your pet. How can you want to shower me with a life that is easy, with no goal to be had and no purpose to be served? To what end? What do I have to continue for?"

"Me!" Ciel saw the selfishness of such an offer, but how could any cunning pretence serve me at this point?

"But I made a contract with you for myself!" He yelled. "To fight, to triumph, then to die knowing I had accomplished something. And that was to be my offering... to you… proper payment for services rendered." His voice trickled to a whimper. "I failed, and I was fool enough to believe it was supposed to mean something. All that I had built up is gone, and none of it was ever really mine to begin with, was it? You had granted it all to me, I see that now. Without you I am nothing and can I really live a life that is my own, knowing that all of what I am is because you have granted it to me?"

"Ciel, you know you are so much more than that..." I would not have pleaded this proposal if I did not believe him to be worth it.

"You're lying again. All I've ever been to you is a boy in a cage."

"No, Ciel..." my throat was starting to feel tight in that way I did not care for. "I never managed to contain you. I could never predict your actions or motives, as if you could be some common human. You have affected me in ways I never thought possible! I feel… I feel so much!" As I rambled I pulled him into my chest, even if there was no beating heart within it, but he could make it so once again. "I was offering before and now I am begging, please anything you could want in this whole world and I can grant it—"

"Sebastian, I want you to have my soul."

The wind slowed as if it wished to listen. He pulled himself upright in my arms to wipe at his face. "Do not ask me to live a life of pathetic melancholy. Do not ask me to put off what is inevitable. I will wither before you, grow cold and sour and jaded with an existence that means nothing." He pulled at my face, wishing his nails could dig into my temples. The tears sprang fresh under a voice thick with grief. "Do you not understand? Am I not the despair you sought to make of me? Am I not good enough still? Must I suffer more of this tedium?"

I could not believe what I was hearing. He was not requesting that he forfeit his life because he was too cowardly to continue it, quite the opposite. Begging to live knowing there was no point to it all would have been a coward's plea. Ciel Phantomhive was no coward. With his whole heart he wished to bestow to me himself at his deepest despair. I could go on for another thousand years and never happen to recreate another such instance.

What a feast to lay before one as lowly as myself.

Could I even shed tears for this? My moans could bring the tides higher to pelt at the cliffs where we embraced, but I could feel no scrap of fragility in my being to match the wonder I felt for him. Still, his trembling shoulders rocked with my own, his fingers pretending to brush away an imaginary weeping.

I kissed his eyelashes, noting how his tears were like the spray of the sea. My Icarus, who flew too low.

"No... Ciel, I think you are quite perfect as you are. I just wanted some more time to savour you as some autonomous, self-driven individual, and to give myself a moment longer to be someone I rather enjoy being."

"Because what would you be without me?"

I would be something I did not have much will to be for any longer. I had detested seeing myself deteriorate to my original condition, as if I had never known prior to him just how pointless it all was, these expansive aeons of death and depravity, the reckless consumption of thousands of souls that could never complete the broken thing that I was but his... one given with the last will of his life...

Ciel had become the very thing that he was always meant to be: a willing sacrifice.

I plucked him from the rocks. "I do not deserve you. I did not meet the requirements of the contract, and yet you will offer me this still. Why?"

"Because you are the only one to ever believe in me. Someone as magnificent as you regards me as exceptional. Because you thought me worth something from the start. Should I continue?"

"No, you flatter me enough."

Holding him to me, this aura swirled about him as thick as the wool of his cloak. He seemed not to mind. He laid his head upon my chest, his arms about my shoulders.

"Sebastian, just give me one more dawn." Ciel lowered his head and yawned against my neck. "I don't need a contract for that, do I?"

I chuckled. "Certainly not." Even as a demon, I could manage something as simple as that.

I tread the forests, and then the moors at no break-neck pace, wishing to give Ciel a few hours of rest before the sky began to lighten. Each stride felt as another count toward the beginning of the new day, and I considered that if I so wished I could flee to the west until the end of time so Ciel would never be greeted by the sun. If I did so he would come to resent my boundless selfishness.

Better to grieve the loss of Sebastian, I reasoned, for the dawn promised a glorious treasure. As I meditated on this to the sound of Ciel's even breathing, I thought back to the words spoken by William, that intolerably bureaucratic Reaper who could only classify my gorgeous human as "anomaly." He was not on their records to meet Death, and yet I would have to kill him in order to consume his soul.

What perplexed me even more was that as true to William's word, not a single entity from on high had made itself known to intercept my roving the country side. "An anomaly in the progression of events," as the Reaper called it, which sounded like his legal explanation for… I had little understanding of these matters. I knew the "subdivision" he mentioned, something my ilk would have referred to as "legion," or "dominion," with "unsalvageable" translating to "marked," meaning the soul in question had a fate worse than damnation, but one of oblivion.

There was such a notion that we would eventually lose the souls that were heavy enough to sink to Hell, for all souls had the ability to attain their Grace once more. Yet, Ciel was "undetermined," by their records and the guardians of Fate were all flustered. What could that even begin to mean?

He had asked me once, "Do you have a soul?" Not one that could bewail my existence. But I feared that after Ciel was to be consumed, I should begin to.

Gravel crunched underneath my feet and the birds chirped along with the sound of crickets. To the east violet gave to pink and orange shot through the clouds in anticipation of a sun that was sure to crest over the horizon at any moment.

I felt not one soul in that manor. Even his humblest servants had abandoned him. Then I laughed, for in the end perhaps I had been most humbled by the boy I had endearingly referred to as my master. That stirred him from his shallow sleep. "It is as good a time as any for you to wake up."

I leapt to the roof on the east wing. He blinked himself awake and watched the clouds shift from fire to gold, the edge of the horizon ablaze with a new day. After a time he requested to be put down to stand on his own, leaning over the balustrade that had been a rampart against invasion. When the sun breached the tops of the trees and became too brilliant to look upon, Ciel watched how the light crept into the yards to give colour to the world again. The shadows shortened, the mist rose, and the pink air gave to blue against the fresh green of May.

"Hang on... what is that?" He pointed southward to a spot well past the sunroom, closer to the west end of the lawn.

It was my rose garden.

I felt as such a blight on all this prismatic beauty so I resided to myself, that ten minutes, I would force myself to be Sebastian for ten minutes, only to show Ciel this one thing I had made with all the want for him I had never voiced.

He gasped as black receded to pale skin once more, eyes cooled to their approachable honey-umber. I brought him safely to the ground and deposited him on the lawn where he ran, flinging the travelling cloak away as some final act of freedom. He panted when he came to the entrance of the garden, but kept spinning at every turn to catch some other odd rose sprouting from fresh earth.

It was unlike any proper garden that showcased its exotic breeds in isolation. They mingled, fought for resources, trying to outgrow one another. The thrill of having to strive for space and sun and nourishment forced them into even more prolific blooming, as if to give greater announcement to their presence would grant them dominion in this little plot that was the full scope of their reality. Along the path twirled the most brilliant of them. The morning sun filtered through the vines of the pergola, playing shadow of petal and thorn over his face. Splotches of pink reflected on the white of his shirt.

"Every one of these roses speaks of you, Sebastian."

"No, I brought every one of them into being with you in mind." He glanced up from admiring the hearty Apothecary blooms. My voice no longer rasped, but contained that lilting refinement that was so familiar to his ears. "Because this is my need for you, an expression of how I see your essence, all sophistication gone wild and surging, the many aspects of your character mingling to overpower my senses. Do you smell the thickness of it? This is as I have lived these five years, and it has been worth all millennia to experience this one moment."

He tripped over the flagstones to collide with me. "Sebastian..." that was all he could manage to say between kisses, to feel him press into these human-like lips, my human-like fingers on his jaw. I moaned at how I would give it all to make such a state of being last until eternity.

A moment later, he chuckled in that sad way when he found something ironic, so of course I asked, "What is it?"

"I just thought of that Valentine Lizzie gave me. Do you remember?"

My arm wrapped about his waist as we walked side-by-side down the stone path. "Indeed."

"I had thought of it these past days, feeling like I should have not stowed it away where I could not see it. But... it was just a silly love poem and flowers embroidered all about it. An expression of her love, she said? It was a pretty thing to look at. I could not walk in her love, nor breathe it in, nor see the sun rise to watch it bloom to life."

We walked where brambles hid a secret alcove of the garden where my sculpture stood. Ciel walked around it, touching where vines climbed up its base. He recognized the expression on the figure hoisted to the sky. "This is how you see me..." For it was true, while I could carry him in my arms I felt some apprehension that I could not contain the whole of him. Even if I had failed him entirely, in this moment he appeared unencumbered by his downfall. "When did I ever have need for the words of a silly love poem?"

I remembered those embroidered rhymes those months back, from the glance over Ciel's shoulder when he sat on the sofa during that Valentine's Day. It felt a lifetime ago, and in one sense it was, because we were still bound yet lived with such a disconnect to one another. When I read the poem I too thought it a string of pretty words with little substance, but as I recalled them now I understood it as a full confession of the heart, for any expression of love was an act of willing exposure.

Ciel should know what he is forfeiting his soul to, I thought. Give him these words, and show him what they mean. Show him what love does to a demon.

"How do I love thee?" A final, tender caress over his cheek before the illusion faded. I settled him among the dark rosettes and apple-scented canopy. "Let me count the ways."

I bent over him in the grass, and his legs tangled with me as so much black seemed to swell. As though the Earth were reaching to claim him but rather it was into me he sank.

"I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach..." Ciel stopped my words with a fierce kiss, his last effort to prolong this inevitability. He would not take to oblivion in mild acceptance, but feel every moment of it, respond to every sensation. He was encircled in the entirety of me and I felt every inch of him at once, his limbs pressing against such a massive weight that was borne of my ferocious passion for him. "When feeling out of sight for the ends of being and ideal grace."

How far could a demon's soul extend toward some other living being? Compared to him I felt brittle, a tiny husk in the expanse of all things, and that I would be an inadequate container to what he was offering me, regardless of his conviction that he was mine to claim. "I love thee to the level of every day's most quiet need, by sun and candle-light." For how could a broken vessel hope to contain light?

He gulped for the air but in my grasp little was available to him. His heart sped to push more blood to his limbs to fight, and he writhed under me. The very smallest components of him fought at the putrescence that burrowed into every pore, every orifice, but withered as does tissue disintegrate when exposed to poison.

"I love thee freely, as men strive for right." My voice had gone hoarse once more, just as I had unfurled as a suffocating mass of feather, and piercing obsidian Such pain wrinkled his brow, his breath wheezing but he pulled at me still, petal and thorn under him sticky with red, its scent infused with rose and sea and sky.

I pulsed over him, smelling the nearness of his death that his soul continued to push against. His heart sang of his conviction, even if his body still clung to the tendrils that animated him. "I love thee purely, as they turn from praise." Ciel had taught me such humility, in every moment when he faced me with the full knowledge of his limitations, but in some paradoxical way this tenacity is what made him limitless.

Claws pulled at his sides to rip the flesh asunder, and even still I whispered these gentle words. "I love thee with the passion put to use in my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith." To live a millennium of no kindness... I had not known the misery of my existence until he had shown me something greater. It was given not because he felt I deserved it, because such things are not bought and sold like a service. He gave me this because he knew I would glorify it.

I had expected him to scream from the violence of it all, the compression of his bones and the collapse of these systems that were turning to useless effluence. Even as he convulsed in shock he kept his eyes wide because he did not wish to miss his final moments. His breath rattled wet as every gulp strained against a lacerated chest, his lungs unable to contain full pressure.

"I love thee with a love I seemed to lose with my lost saints." It was not a bodily sacrifice, the sacrifice of flesh that houses one in life, but the sacrifice of eternity, as one dwells in the hidden space of omnipresence. This thought rushed upon me, a distant memory that snapped into focus like a dream I had after a turbulent sleep.

"I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life." In my long existence all moments that bore any meaning were contained in the short time I had extended Ciel's life. As his heart thumped slower, some scintillating threads collected to the centre, retreating from this battered limbs, rising and coalescing.

With preternatural eyes I saw this golden bead pulsing its way out of a useless body. Shivering before this miraculous concentration I hovered about, inches below me. Despite my starvation, how I gasped and tugged at this failing body under me… I was stalling.

He knew he had but seconds, for a unique lucidity is engaged when a soul is compressed against the surface of its host. His lips could just form the words "take it," with the little breath he had left, a final order.

My voice trembled as I recited to him the concluding line of this confession. "And, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death."

I consumed his final breath. That one inhalation felt as breathing for the first time, and I wept as the entirety of his memory rushed through me in an instant, but at the same time that moment could have been endless. His existence did not unfold before me as a linear record, but instead as a reverberation of sound, echoing against the emptiness of myself.

It came as a deafening wave to polish the jagged hollowness into gleaming softness. I felt myself dissolving to clarity, as rain pattering atop so many rose petals. A single breath scattered the parts that were once Ciel Phantomhive. They crept into the cracks of me, and I knew this was healing, this spiralling sensation causing the weight of me to fall away like crumbling stone. But there was no longer a place to fall to, no means for which to descend because some fundamental part had been stripped away, or perhaps patched. Despite weightlessness I felt more complete than what I thought possible.

It was eternal expanse, the most complete awe I thought I could never know again, a billion points in time each gleaming as a speck of light in the darkness and this was his consciousness that blanketed over me. It was a rearrangement of my condition on some most fundamental level, as basic and yet as tumultuous as which creates the light within all things. This was the fusion to set me into some formless state and from here I ascend, open to the Infinite that shimmers constant.

I'll have an author's note in a few days time.