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They’re always right on the brink of despair. Angela looks back at him from a mirror some nights, and he finds himself weeping about the absolute hopelessness of the world, of their position, of human nature, and she offers, again and again, to dry his tears with fire. Once, she had cried too. She didn’t anymore. She hadn’t for years. Other nights, it’s Angela clutching the mirror, angrily recounting the world’s impurities and injustices while Ash’s tears fall and fall until he’d swear they could spill out through the mirror and flood the room and the city and the world.
It’s their duty, after all. Cleanse the unclean. Eliminate the filthy. That’s the only way they can come home. Some days, most days, Ash thinks they would have to cleanse the entire world, rain fire on the corrupted until there was only dust left. In the heat of summer, the thought is stifling. He thinks he can see flames on the street and faces in the shadows. Angela thinks she can’t see faces at all, and they are surrounded by a soulless imitation of God’s work.
The man facing him is unclean and tainted but Ash can find neither his sword nor his senses, and he’s shivering in the heat and fading under a too-intense yellow stare. The man makes a gesture, and Ash chokes and stumbles. The hands on his shoulders are clammy through four layers of clothes and poor-quality leather gloves.
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He wakes next to water, with spiderwebs in his hair. It takes him too long to recognize a fountain in a square, and longer still to realize that one of the young men working for him is standing in front of him, blinking curiously. He says something, but Ash doesn’t understand, because his mind is a mess of disconnected words and ideas. Charles Grey pulls a cobweb from Ash’s hair and hauls him inside, talking until the incoherent syllables separate into words.
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Paris. He deposits the Queen in the care of Charles Grey and his ilk and lets the wind on the tower blow through his hair. It’s almost familiar, and he’s almost sick when he smells distant smoke. It’s Angela who descends the tower and carries on the rest of the day and the next. Ash prays for a respite from demons, and just this once his prayers are answered. Ciel Phantomhive and the demon Sebastian stay in England. A girl on the street tells anyone who will listen about her kind-hearted benefactor, who stepped in and gave her and her friend a new lease on life after their theater was closed. Angela tells him that story in the evening, smiling into the mirror. He has half a mind to find the girl and thank her for making his precious sister smile.
His sister. He had almost forgotten she was his sister. Surely she had once smiled at him without the aid of a mirror...?
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She’s the one who brings it up. They hadn’t always been this way. She remembers towers and swords and cradling a crying little brother in her arms. It’s one of the many things he can’t remember, and he begs her for stories – had he done that before? – as she rants into the mirror. She obliges, and the stories almost make the constant stabbing, burning pain fade.
In the real world, Charles Grey asks for extra duties, and Ash can’t refuse him, least of all when the young man is steady and calm while Ash’s hands shake when he gestures. The whole palace smells unclean, like rotting flesh. Ash vehemently fills every space he can find with dried lavender, and tries not to scratch at scars he doesn’t remember getting. Angela complains about a tremor in her heart, and it breaks his that he can’t fix it.
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That house has started to reek less than the palace. Ash tries not to cling to the strange man with warm grey eyes and tries not to cry on Mr. Tanaka and tries, he tries, to remember to hate the demon. The ability to do so slips away, little by little. Outside the door, he chokes and stumbles and can’t carry on any further, and wakes by a brook with spiderwebs in his hair. The yellow-eyed man is sitting beside him, and he looks much less monstrous than Ash thinks he should. He can’t pin down the reason why, so he introduces himself instead.
“Oh,” says the man with yellow eyes, tilting his head. “I am called Faust.” And he sits in silence winding spider-silk around the latest open wound on Ash’s arm. Ash can’t remember how it got there, and looking at it for too long makes him feel sick. Faust leaves him with a spool of the stuff. It’s soft to the touch, and Ash sits on the ground petting it for the better part of an hour before he can muster up the strength to move his legs. The realization that Faust is a demon, has to be a demon, passes straight through his mind like water through a sieve. A lot of things have been doing that lately. He wonders if he too has termites in his ears.