The other thing I am always pretending is that Ciel Phantomhive's death was some freak accident that I had absolutely nothing to do with. I know I killed him. I remember it in vivid detail every night before I fall asleep, and I have for two years straight. Two years. Twenty-four months. One hundred four weeks. Seven hundred thirty days. Seventeen thousand five hundred twenty hours. One million fifty-one thousand two hundred minutes. Sixty-three million seventy-two thousand seconds. That is how much I think about it. So much that I'd figured out exactly how long it had been since I had murdered another human being. Okay, so I had actually asked Claude, my Demon abacus to calculate it for me. I looked up at the clock on the wall of my office that evening, tapping my fingers on the mahogany wood, paying no attention to the work I should have been finishing. Sixty-three million seventy-two thousand one seconds. Sixty-three million seventy-two thousand two seconds. Sixty-three million seventy-two thousand three seconds.... I heaved a sigh and pushed my chair back as I remembered having done on one very boring afternoon two years ago. I put ornately decorated feet up on the edge of my desk and leaned until my chair balanced on its two back legs. I closed my eyes and spread my arms like wings, thinking to myself that I was falling and Claude would come catch me in his strong arms and hold me close to his body.... My heart thumped in my chest as I thought about it, and I had to force the breaths, because they kept getting stuck in my throat. I knew I wouldn't fall. My legs were longer and stronger, and I knew instinctively how far back I could lean before I would fall. Disappointed, I opened my eyes to stare at the moldings in the ceiling, tracing the elaborate patterns before I uprighted myself and crossed my legs underneath me. It was a tight fit, but all I had to do was put my knees up on the arms of the chair and it worked, though it was little more than uncomfortable. I had decided to fold myself a single paper crane out of a blank sheet of paper out of a drawer in my desk, and was purely frustrated to find that it was nearly perfect. Nearly. None could be as perfect as the one that sat hidden away in the locked drawer at the top left; the one that Claude had made for me at my demand. And even though I had crushed it with my foot, it was still perfect. Not because it wasn't deformed or crumpled, because in that respect it was far from perfect. No. It was perfect because Claude had made it for me.
Speak of the Devil, I hadn't seen Claude in a little over three hours, but I was certain that it was nearling dinner time. I was bored enough that I didn't want to wait for Claude to come fetch me, so I didn't. I unravelled my legs, planted my heeled boots firmly, and pushed my chair back, standing like I had something important to yell across my desk at some worthless shit on the other side of it, with so much authority that I'd probably make him puke out of fright. Was that possible? It sounded funny, so it didn't matter if it was possible or not. I chuckled lightly at the idea of it as I nearly skipped out of the room. I was hungry. I hadn't eaten since the snack that I told Hannah to bring up for me an hour ago, and even then, I had only nibbled on the little cake. I felt my stomach tighten as I shut my office door behind me, and heard it growl in protest at its own emptiness. Placing a hand over my abdomin, I stared down in wonder, trying to decifer the message it was trying to send. The signals were mixed, so all I got was something about not wanting to eat because a murderer didn't deserve food, and something else about being a poor starving orphan in the streets with nothing to eat.... It wasn't that long ago that I really had been a poor starving orphan in the streets with nothing to eat, if I thought about it. It wasn't that long ago that I died of sheer lonliness. And it wasn't that long ago that I was reborn the heir to the Trancy Earldom.
I had no idea how long I stood there for. All I knew was that the thing to shake me from my trance was the sound of the Grandfather clock in the foyer tolling five o'clock, and I nearly jumped when I heard it. I looked down at my hand, trying to recall what I had just been thinking about, but it wouldn't return. What had it been...? I remembered noting some time this morning that I had grown a few inches since the last time I really paid attention to where my eyes fell on this door, which meant that I could probably rest my head close to Claude's heart now, instead of resting my head on his abdomin. Had I really gotten that tall...? It had been so long since I had actually hugged onto Claude that I really didn't know; but that was probably as tall as I would grow, anyway. I was seventeen now, so I had probably stopped growing. It was slightly depressing that I wouldn't get to be as tall as my sexy butler, but then again... what Human could ever grow to such an unusual height?