AN: A reminder to not take any of this too seriously. I'm just vibing.

She can't help but bat her lashes. Twist her hair around her finger. Subtly pull down the front of her shirt to expose her cleavage when their both not looking. She wishes she hadn't lost her purse in the whole 'being sacrificed to a prince of hell' thing. It would've been nice to put on some lip gloss at least.

The man is dressed weirdly, but so is everyone here. Perhaps they're LARPers or cosplayers. Maybe they re-enact old battles like they do in the southern states. It's weird, but she could get over it. Especially when he looks like that. And his accent.

Lord have mercy.

"My Lord I must ask, who is your…acquaintance?" His maroon gaze slides to her, cat-like eyes deep and smoldering. He looks at her with mild curiosity, perhaps faint disgust. She straightens and glances down at herself and her inappropriate attire for the occasion. Still, not a good enough excuse to call her a whore or look down on her. She should've shot the mobsters while she had the chance.

"Sydney. Syd," She answers, giving a wide, flirty smile. "You can call me Syd. You are?"

"I am the humble servant of Lord Ciel Phantomhive. My name is Sebastian Michaelis," He crosses an arm over his chest and gives a small bow. She holds back a snort. What the fuck kind of name is that? It must be his LARP name or something. That would explain so much, except for the loaded gun and murder. Maybe they get a bit too into it?

It probably wouldn't be the first time.

"She saved me," The little boy, Ciel, eyed her. He looked even less friendly than his butler did. "And then she offered me up to them," Syd couldn't help but scoff in disbelief.

"Okay, not true. I gave you the fucking gun, you little twerp. It's not my fault you didn't use it," God she doesn't miss having younger siblings.

"She says she's a Devoe. From the Italian Devoe's, but I have contacts in that family and know for certain there is no Sydney," Ciel looks her over suspiciously. She crosses her arms, suddenly feeling a lot less flirty. She hadn't expected an interrogation from a prepubescent lordling.

"I'm from the American branch. You know, the one who married into the Stewart family. Oil Tycoon's. Old wealth, very powerful, blah blah," She waves her hand and rolls her eyes. Throwing around her family name is often an annoying but necessary evil. Ciel turns to Sebastian, and the two share a split second look she can't interpret.

My Ancestor, Arran Stewart, was a Scottish immigrant who arrived in New York in the 1850s when he was just a boy. He was an ambitious man, dedicated to advancing himself and his family in the world. By the time he was twenty-two, he had capitalized on the growing oil market in the Northeast and made himself very wealthy. So wealthy that generations down the line his descendants would flourish and be known as some of the U.S.'s most prominent upper class.

He was also, to my knowledge, a total dick. The only good thing I'd ever heard of the man was that he was good at making money and that he supported the Union during the Civil War.

The Devoe's are also old money, in a very different way. Some of the original Italian mobsters who got involved in all sorts of illicit affairs, but mostly stuck to the trade of illegal goods. It wasn't until the late 1890's they got involved in even seedier business. The kind where people who knew too much went missing, the kind where even the cops looked in the opposite direction.

Weirdly enough, I prefer the mobsters in my family. They may be heartless criminals but at least they're honest about it.

1889. That's what the kid had told her the year was. Only, time travel was supposed to be theoretical. Don't get her wrong, she'd read Einstein's original works on relativity. Had fallen down a rabbit hole and read all about the speed of light and gravitational force and all that jazz. But the key word in all of that is 'theoretical'. Despite the advancement of smartphones and Ai and all sorts of other unethical shit that was almost certainly rotting their brains, no one had discovered a sure way to travel through time.

"Did I take shrooms and forget about it?" Ciel and Sebastian were watching her closely, but she ignored them. They likely weren't even real. None of this was. Maybe she'd never been kidnapped by cultists at all. That would be a relief. Maybe she was actually in her apartment right now, tripping balls. It wouldn't be the first time.

This felt different than drug-induced hallucinations, but who knows? Anything was possible. Except for time travel. That was off the table.

"It's the only logical explanation," Ciel insists. Sebastian has politely taken her elbow to help her into the old-fashioned carriage. She imagines in the real world one of her friends has finally found her and put her in the backseat of their car. Maybe to take her to the hospital, maybe to grab a pizza.

"Pretty sure that's the psilocybin talking. It's fine, I'm having a bad trip," Sebastian spares her one final glance, then closes the carriage door and takes to the front. A moment later, the horses are clicking away on the dirt path, the carriage rocking violently. She feels nauseous. Shrooms did that to her. Why did she take the shrooms? It's always a mistake.

"Arran Stewart, the current head of the Stewart oil family, is married to a woman from the States. To my knowledge he has no connection to the Devoes," Ciel explains, for the third time. He is growing increasingly incensed. That's how she knows it's the drugs. Her hallucinations always get pissed when she calls them on their bullshit.

She's throwing out the goddamn mushrooms when this is all over. She'll find something else to hallucinate to. Maybe stick to just weed and alcohol for a while. She should cut back on using drugs to cope with reality anyway. It's obviously starting to become a problem if this is what her subconscious is creating.

"Hey, twerp," She says, looking at Ciel. He scowls. "I'm assuming you're the manifestation of my subconscious or some shit. I mean, it could be your hot butler, but I doubt it since he's barely said more than a few sentences to me, and my subconscious is normally super chatty. Anyway, I just wanna know why you had me kidnapped by demon cultists?"

Ciel tensed, his one eye growing impossibly wide. "What?"

"Jacob, really? That's just embarrassing, you couldn't have picked someone better to kidnap me? I could snap that guy like a toothpick. Is this some lesson about my taste in men? No, couldn't be, I was only using him for his money,"

"I'm not your-"

"Maybe you want me to contact my Italian relatives? Nah, not even drugs would make that a good idea. Honestly, I'm stuck on the demon thing, and the magic ring pulling me through time. Sounds like a bad anime,"

"Magic ring?" He asks. She nods, pulling the ring from under her shirt and showing it to him. Ciel leans forward in his seat, staring at it with something that looks suspicioiusly like avarice. He may be her subconscious, but she knows greed when she sees it. She snaps back in her seat and shoves the necklace back under her shirt. This may all be a drug-induced psychotic episode, and she may not know exactly what the ring does, but she feels very possessive over it.

Especially if this isn't a drug-induced psychotic episode and it's all real somehow. But that's not possible. Right?

Right?

Maybe she should go back to a psychiatrist when this is all done.

"It's mine," She insists, giving a stubborn pout. "It may be old and ugly but I stole it from the cultists fair and square,"

"How is stealing fair?"

"I didn't make the rules of capitalism, I just profit off of them," He raises a brow, clearly unimpressed. Still, the child (her subconscious, she reminds herself sternly) seems unwilling to speak to her any further. He leans back in his seat, and she notices the tension in his shoulders for the first time. He's had a hard day. Kidnapped by mobsters, beaten up, life threatened. She knows that feeling.

"You need a cup of tea," she tells him, sympathetic. "Chamomile, I think. Add some ginger, and some mint, and stick to honey instead of sugar. A dash of cream. It will pair well with some lemon cookies or fresh strawberries," Ciel blinks, surprised.

"I thought Americans were obsessed with coffee," He states. She scoffs, disgusted.

"Wow, my country's founders make one revolutionary statement by throwing a few thousand pounds of tea in the Boston harbor and suddenly we're all coffee fanatics,"

I started drinking coffee when I was eight. By the time I was ten, I was drinking it black. I was so fidgety my teachers called my parents in to talk about a potential drug problem. Idiots. I didn't discover the life-altering power of amphetamines until I was thirteen.

Unfortunately, I was from then on banned from drinking coffee, which is a real downer when you're a pre-pubescent child already planning your college courses at Yale. It's not easy running on four hours of sleep without caffeine.

Then I discovered black tea. It has a much lower caffeine content than coffee, so I drank about two cups each morning and supplemented it by mixing in a five-hour energy and taking caffeine pills at lunch. Sometimes I swore I could see sounds. Of course, I never told anybody that. My mother might've destroyed my trust fund then and there if she got called into another parent-teacher conference.

The longer the carriage ride went on, the more antsy she got. Time could be hard to tell in a bad trip, but she was almost certain this was going on longer than any before. She should've started to come back to reality by now. Hear her friends laughing in the background. Smell the cherry-flavored vape smoke. Feel the rumbling of the car's engine.

Her ass was also starting to hurt really bad. Like, really bad. Like, the adrenaline of a fight had worn off and she was now realizing what she thought might have been broken, is absolutely one hundred percent broken. A headache was forming right behind her left eye, and her gut was twisting into knots. Nausea hit her like a freight train, and she doubled over.

"Stop!" She yelled, dry heaving onto the floor. Ciel's boots lifted off the ground. Ciel yelled something, but she didn't hear what. There was a ringing in her ears, and then something warm and wet dripping onto her neck. Through a haze of pain, she touches her neck gingerly and pulls back to look at it. Blood. Blood is dripping from her ears.

That's not good. Her mind supplies, and then the carriage is coming to an abrupt stop, the door is being lurched open and she is throwing herself out the door and into the arms of Sebastian. He has only a second to whip her around and turn her in the opposite direction and then she is hurling up bile and blood onto the old country road.

Her last thought before she fades into painless oblivion is, Country road please take me home.

AN: A few notes:

1) Oh God why did I write a character who loves tea, I know nothing about tea, fuck what was I thinking, please, god, help me, tell me more about tea so I don't fuck this up, fuck, shit, oh god, why-

2) Oh God why did I write a character who takes drugs, I know nothing about drugs, fuck what was I thinking, please, god, help me, tell me more about drugs so I don't fuck this up, fuck, shit, oh god, why-

3) It's been so long since I've seen the original Black Butler. I watched the Titanic arc like a year ago (which is what caused this fic to be born) but I still feel like I don't remember Ciel and Sebastian well. So if they're not in character, it's because 1) I'm vibing and 2) I DON'T REMEMBER