Let's be Friends || Black Butler x Male! Reader

Double Charles

"The Noah's Ark Circus; it's a traveling circus that's passing through England. They're becoming increasingly popular, but all for the wrong reason."

"What is a circus?"

"A grand show of tricks and wonder!" The Undertaker exclaimed with a smile, raising his arm high in the air as to present something that wasn't there. "It's a marvelous world of colors and things you wouldn't ever believe possible. What you see in a circus is something you can never see in the outside world!"

Your eyes twinkled in awe at his statement, "My! Can we go?"

He chuckled at your awe as he walked past you. In the process, he lowered his arm to give you a quick pat on the head.

"No."

You slumped your chin on the top of the shop's front desk, groaning quietly and watching in disappointment as the Undertaker went around to collect a series of skulls in his arms.

The shop was opened today, but it was also awfully slow.

You supposed that late January was a time when humans preferred not to die.

It was nearly the end of January, marking four months spent living with the Undertaker. In the time you had spent with the Undertaker, you learned how to properly take care of the deceased, how to size the deceased for their coffin, and also that the Undertaker was somewhat obsessed with the Phantomhive family. On top of that, he was also bringing the deceased Ciel Phantomhive back to life through his reaper abilities despite his retirement.

You were pleased with your experience as an undertaker in training. You were not pleased about the latter.

You knew much about reapers. Your mother was inquisitive about them, and her persistence in learning about them was amplified when she realized that reapers hated devils. You were unsure of how she was ever capable of learning about them, but that wasn't the point.

The point was that you knew about reapers, their duties, and the things they shouldn't do- the things they are forbidden from doing.

This "forbidden" thing in question is tampering with a human's cinematic record.

A cinematic record was a collection of every event a human experienced, from the beginning of their lives to the end of it. If a human was alive, their cinematic record consisted of the very beginning of their life to the current moment. As the name suggests, their cinematic record acts like the film of a recording camera, notably for cinema. When the life of a human ends, the film in their cinematic record ends as well. Watching a human's life was like watching a film, and just like a film, every human life comes to an end.

The Undertaker, however, was taking this film from the deceased Ciel's cinematic record and tampering with it to keep it going- to keep Ciel's life going.

You were not a reaper, thankfully. You didn't need to be another type of supernatural being. You were a devil and an angel, but even as someone who wasn't a reaper, you knew that tampering with a cinematic record, or even tampering with human affairs if it wasn't necessary, was absolutely, unquestionably wrong. Doing something such as that would get you severely punished by the "higher-ups" in the Grim Reaper hierarchy. On top of being upset at the Undertaker's recklessness, it was plain to see what a violation it was to Ciel's very being. The Undertaker was keeping him away from the afterlife. Ciel's soul was who-knows-where. It certainly wasn't in the afterlife, if the Undertaker was able to bring Ciel back.

That, or the Undertaker was dragging Ciel away from Purgatory- or worse, Heaven- to bring him back. You highly doubted this possibility, but that was as someone knowledgeable of how these types of things worked. The Undertaker, a reaper, otherwise known as someone who has not a clue of how human souls work in Purgatory or Heaven, was experimenting with a human's soul to bring them back. He was fortunate not to have damaged something as precious as the human soul. It was stupid.