Author's Note- I originally posted this story on AO3 with the tags "Violence" and "Infanticide." Please use your best judgement.

Ciel awoke to pain— a rare occurrence, since his transformation into a demon. The strange need gnawed at his stomach.

"It is to be expected," Sebastian murmured, still sitting by Ciel's feet. He had sat there the whole night through— a whole year through?— his legs crossed, palms facing up and placed on his knees, his whole self suspended in meditation. He had doffed the tailcoat of old, wearing only black trousers and a white shirt, two buttons undone and revealing a sliver of gleaming marble skin. They were alone in that dimension, in a field of white and midnight blue roses that glowed as if wired with electricity.

"I could spend an eternity in this paradise," Ciel mused, words still soft from sleep. "I rather suspect I've gone to heaven and become an angel."

"You've finally healed from the strain of your transformation. Will you spend another eternity indulging your sloth?" The butler cast his eyes over the boy, who was still lounging in the spot where he had lolled for months— years— without an interesting thought in his head. "Not at all appropriate for a Phantomhive."

"I am no Phantomhive. I need not be anything at all."

Sebastian's eyes narrowed. He plucked one of the blue roses beside him, raised it to eye level and watched it. Over the next moments— hours?— the smooth petals shriveled, and their otherworldly brilliance dulled and then vanished.

"Get up, young master," the elder demon let go of the withered blossom and stood, brushing his hands on his trousers. "Let's see if I can't find you a proper, three-course feast."

—

"This is revolting," Ciel muttered.

"This is humanity," Sebastian replied.

They stood on the roof of a whore's shack in London's East End. A nighttime storm thundered, lightning illuminating the otherwise dark alleyway, raindrops plunking into the puddles of refuse that lined the street.

"Pay attention," Sebastian whispered.

Ciel focused his demon senses and crinkled his nose, hearing the tell-tale grunting and creaking of bedsprings below. "Why should I care about this useless woman?"

"Pay attention, and you may find out."

Ciel raised an eyebrow at his butler's rather inelegant tone, but he then returned to studying their surroundings. He shifted his focus from sound to scent, nostrils flaring as he detected an impossible delicacy. He would call it divine nectar, but real creatures of heaven would surely mock his ignorance. No, he could call it licorice, spicy and sweet on his tongue, thin and black and elastic as he rolled it between his teeth . . .

"What does it smell like to you, Sebastian?"

"Her persistence."

They waited on the roof for the man to stagger out. Then Ciel waited on the roof as Sebastian dropped down to the door. He heard the slashing of talons, the crack as leather boot met bone, the following tell-tale silence.

"Down," Sebastian ordered.

Ciel started, caught off guard by his servant's curt command, but he quickly obeyed, leaping from the roof with his newfound grace. As he entered the shack, he found a scene out of memory— the fallen woman painted in red, an entirely too satisfied butler grinning in the shadows— but he paid no heed to the echo. He was too interested in the woman's soul, the shining chaos of reels issuing from the gash in her chest.

"One bite, young master."

Ciel reached among the reels, and a single thread curled, tentacle-like, around his finger. He raised it to his mouth, snapped it with his teeth, and swallowed—

a mother dead in the hovel they called home. a father gone from before she was born. labyrinthine alleys. carriages nearly rolling over her invisible self. surviving. living. starving. disappearing into crowds as an invisible ghost. picking pockets and dashing away. eating, surviving, growing tall, growing pretty. painting cheeks with rouge. forgetting the insults. living loud in the night. catching every man's eye. living as visibly as possible. surviving against all the odds—

"Useless, hm?" Sebastian mocked in the background.

Ciel barely heard him. Hunger clawed within him, irate at being thus teased, and he reached back into that brilliant light for more.

"No!" The butler suddenly exploded into motion, ripping the reel from Ciel's hands and scooping the young demon up into his arms.

"Sebastian, I order you to let me eat . . ."

A sudden rush of air ripped the words from his throat. Before he knew it, he and Sebastian were far away, perched on a fence around with some country hut. Ciel squinted into his butler's deep red eyes, shimmering ominously in the night, and he began to wonder why his order had failed to give Sebastian pause . . .

"I was afraid the appetizer would weigh more heavily on your stomach than I intended," Sebastian breezily answered Ciel's thoughts. "Fortunately, our main course will be prepared in mere minutes."

Ciel focused on his senses once again and recoiled in disgust, smelling snot and bloody phlegm. "What the hell, Sebastian . . ."

"Would you mind not jumping to same wrong conclusion twice in one night?" the butler suddenly snapped, eyes flickering with that peculiar fuschia. "You risk becoming tedious."

Ciel's eyes flashed pink in response, but he fell silent. Underneath the scent of sickness, he recognized something surprisingly clean— mint. Once again, he turned to his butler and asked, "What do you smell?"

"His wisdom," the demon said simply.

They crept to the hut, and Ciel pressed an ear to the wall, easily discerning the groaning and hacking cough of an invalid on the verge of death. The thrumming heartbeat slowed, stuttered, stopped.

"Five bites."

Ciel slipped in through the door, his newly agile fingers making quick work of the lock, and found an old man, curled on his side. His gleaming soul pulsated, its reels long, crowded, more thickly tangled than the whore's, and the young demon darted towards the corpse. His eagerness surprising even himself, he grabbed a full handful, sliced the reels with the black claws of his other hand, and fit the snippet of soul into his mouth—

fields of crops far as the eye can see. rise with the sun. work as it moves through the sky. sleep. wake for water, drink, linger to look at stars. gaze at an endless sky. on sundays, walk to church. feel some greater purpose— god, perhaps, or the mere fervor of community. "religion," the reverend tells you, is a latin word for "rebinding." tie yourself back together. go through it all again, until you die and you are loosed and let yourself go—

Sebastian tapped Ciel on the shoulder, and he tore himself away, even as the hunger pangs twisted his stomach even more than before. He turned to that butler, who promptly gathered him in his arms and bounded into the dark. As the rush of air choked him once more, the young demon wondered whether his servant's actions had some greater design.

Sebastian flew further this time— over a large body of water, Ciel suspected. They halted on a stone turret of an age-old castle.

"What is the reason for this taste test, Sebastian? I don't think it's simply your desire as a butler to provide as many courses as possible."

"My young master finally tries using his head," that butler smirked.

"Finally?" Ciel retorted, "Are you implying that I haven't been using my head?"

"I imply exactly that. You got quite slow in that realm, really."

The young demon's eyes flared. "Prove it," he spat.

"Tell me what the purpose of this 'taste test' is."

"Easy," Ciel scoffed after a moment. "You clearly intend to torture me with hunger. It's your sadistic revenge for the pain my transformation has caused you."

"You think . . ." Sebastian's eyes flashed. "You think the slight twinge of want in your stomach compares, in any way, with the depth of my starvation?"

"Well, what else could this be about?"

"Consider Hannah Annafellows."

"What about her?"

"Luka Macken."

"If you're going to speak in riddles . . ." Ciel stopped, considering. "Annafellows consumed Luka's soul before the whole Alois incident, didn't she?"

"Indeed."

"And she became soft. Childlike. Stupider than I imagined a demon could be."

"It is perilous, eating a full soul on an empty stomach."

"So you are feeding me scraps of souls that will reinforce my personality, without overtaking it."

"Close, young master," the butler gave his first true smile since Ciel's transformation. "Quite close. I chose an appetizer to remind you of something you had so much of as a human— motivation. The main course gave you something you need now, as a demon— self-possession, even in the face of infinity. The dessert will take something that no longer serves you."

What the hell did that mean? Before Ciel could ask, though, Sebastian had whisked him inside the castle, down narrow staircases, into a drafty dungeon, through iron bars. A woman lay, no longer breathing, on the chilled stone floor. The glowing warmth of her soul was absent.

"The reapers have already begun their work here. We shall have to be quick."

Ciel took a deep breath, smelling dust and dead flesh and nothing else. Then he realized that Sebastian had picked up a lump of blankets and held it out to him. A moving lump.

"No."

"Take the whole soul, this time, not that there's much to speak of."

Ciel stared at the newborn, who was stirring, gurgling, opening sleepy blue eyes to stare into Sebastian's red, and he clenched his fists, fighting an urge to obey his servant, and quickly. "Have you gone mad?" he hissed. "Is this some sick ritual? Do all demons regularly devour children in stone dungeons?"

"If you do not take her soul, I will. And I will be somewhat messier about the matter."

Ciel snatched the babe from his butler's hands and gazed down at it. It— she— it looked puffy and wrinkled, like all newborns, and trusting. The newborn demon raised one hand, black nails growing sharp and long at his command, and pierced. Try as he might to deny it, his heart thrilled to the crunch of bone, to the cry that echoed once thereafter, to the gurgling of blood that ended them both.

A few shimmering reels floated above the child's cracked chest. Ciel's hunger, now sharpened by two incomplete meals, revelled at the sight of that pitiful, meagre soul with no purpose but to be devoured, wholly and completely, by him. Some dark fiendishness within him reared its head and grinned, racing to destroy the fluttering thing and exult in its every secret—

darkness, Sebastian, Ciel, pain, evil, darkness.

"What did you smell here, Sebastian?"

"Innocence."

"What do you smell now?"

"Lost innocence."

Ciel dropped the small bundle to the floor, quaking with revulsion at what he had just enjoyed.

"Young master, the Shinigami are approaching. Please come to me, that we may exit the area in timely fashion . . ."

"No."

"Young master . . ."

"Let them have me," Ciel whispered. "You can go free. This is an order, Sebastian— leave me here."

Sebastian gazed at the young scapegrace— who was now pushing the eyepatch back to reveal a glinting eye etched purple, his hand steadied by a newly rediscovered pride— and shook his head. "No."

The world rushed into a blur. Between the shock at his servant's disobedience and the horror at himself, Ciel saw nothing but a flash of metal— hedge clippers?— then the pearl-white buttons of Sebastian's shirt, then darkness.

—

Ciel awoke on the same field, sprawled once more among roses of blue and white.

"Demons are worthless," he stated flatly.

"Indeed," Sebastian's voice came from beside him, and Ciel rolled onto his side to see his butler, stretched on the flowers himself, facing his master. "I was waiting for you to make that conclusion."

"And it's hypocritical, no doubt," Ciel muttered. "After all the evils I committed as a human, a single murder drives me to suicide."

"Demons have an innate passion for violence. I have embraced it, perhaps you will not," Sebastian replied simply.

A minute— an hour— passed, as Sebastian watched Ciel's tears water the roses.

"Young master . . . You are not the first turn-blood to suffer upswells of emotion or shifts in perception after being transformed."

"What?" The demon-child took a steadying breath, slowing the tears. "There are other turn-bloods?"

"Yes, you imp— you're not as unique as you might think," Sebastian's eyes grew unfocused, lost in memories. "The turn-bloods I've known have, by and large, been as confused as you are now. Angela Blanc, for instance, split with Heaven but did not become a demon, and she went quite mad as a result. Hannah split with Hell and could not become an angel, and she went mad, too, albeit in a quieter manner. Dear Claude was fully at war with himself. The high spirits that drove him to demonhood clashed rather badly with his old Shinigami diligence . . ."

"Claude was a Shinigami?" Ciel interrupted, curiosity halting the tears entirely.

"Did you not notice the uncanny ability at manipulating souls, or, say, the green-gold eyes?" Sebastian snorted, "And really, no demon would manifest with glasses if he had any choice in the matter."

"Are you a turn-blood, Sebastian?"

The other demon flinched at that, and he turned to face that realm's strange, shifting, blue-black sky. "Do you know why I prized your soul, young master?"

"You've told me you admired my determination. And . . . my purity, if I remember correctly."

"I wished for your soul because, at that moment on the sacrificial altar, you reminded me of myself. You stayed strong and sane long after most others would have broken. You had become too clever, too knowing, for your own good. And you were being punished because of your supposed innocence."

"So?"

"You were like a fallen angel, were you not?"

Ciel heard a lament in his butler's low voice, and he glanced up at the fake sky that transfixed the demon, even now. "You have certainly disobeyed my orders, Sebastian, and I suspect you have told me some lies as well. What is the state of our contract?"

"What contract?" Sebastian chuckled grimly.

"The one drawn into my eye, of course."

"Ah, that." The butler waved his hand, and Ciel felt a warmth, then a lightness. He knew without looking that his right eye had been freed from the pentagram's bindings. "That was a relic of your human life. It meant little then, and nothing now."

"So you are not bound to me?"

"Bound by magic? I never truly was," the butler— non-butler replied. "The contract is far weaker than humans realize. Think of Paris."

Ciel squinted, sifting through the amnesiac haze that still lingered in parts of his mind. "You . . ."

"I abandoned you. Quite abruptly, too."

"That's not what I remembered first, you know." The demon-boy looked at Sebastian curiously. "I remember you wishing me well. You wished me pleasant dreams."

The elder demon turned his gaze to Ciel's sky-blue eyes. "That also happened in Paris."

"And . . ." Eyes flickering with the old Phantomhive genius, Ciel made his deductions. "You still wish me well. That's why you pushed me to confront demonhood's dark side sooner rather than later. That's why you saved me from myself, in that dungeon. It's why you're still here."

"Quite so, Ciel," Sebastian breathed his companion's name like a kiss. "You possessed a remarkable sense of self as a human, and I will help you preserve it now. It will make for quite a fine aesthetic."

"No proper demon would help me so much."

"Well, I haven't met a proper demon in ages. As far as exemplifying evil goes, we're a surprisingly inadequate lot," he snickered. "But we have our moments."

Ciel shuddered, reflexively thinking of the infant. Sebastian lifted his hands to cup the younger demon's face, gently brushing the sharp cheekbones. "We are hypocrites, all. And you should stay and contemplate that, for as long as it takes you to make your peace with these contradictions."

"I promise I won't linger here for an eternity," Ciel assured him. "I'll get up and go on soon enough."

"I am not surprised." The elder demon gave a soft smile. "Already, Ciel Phantomhive resurges."

So they lay once again in their endless garden, and Ciel fell asleep with Sebastian beside him. A new, strange need gnawed within them both.