Kuroshitsuji: Seventh Sin

A Deal with the Devil

I was nineteen. Like so many other bright-eyed, cheery, hopeful young people, I wanted to get ahead, to make something of my life, on my own. I was proud. I was brave. I was honest. I was too late. My dreams died that winter, before I could even see the storm clouds closing in. The only sign I had was the heat, and even that I noticed far later than I should have. I recall the air being unusually muggy for Ireland that January. All at once, it came on, sickeningly humid as I trekked home in the melting, dirty snow. It was a hellish sort of feeling. I remember opening the door to my family's home, and I could hear the ocean beating on the cliffs as I saw my infant sister wrapped in black cloth.

Then my brother died. He was sixteen. I was sure he'd be the one to survive. He was so brilliant and strong. To see him go, weak and frail at the end of a short, vibrant life was a demented foreshadowing of what was to follow. He was lucky to get though it so quickly, so easily. There was a cruel irony in it. 

Following a rushed burial, my mother took us to London. We tried to find a doctor, to get some medicine, and a decent place to stay, but no one would help us. We were doomed the minute we set foot in their hospital. "London won't be taking on an Irish plague." I'll never forget the hostile, fierce nurse, so laced with ire, with piercing blue eyes sneering at me as she shoved me into quarantine. It wasn't my fault. What had I done to deserve any of it? My mother lost weight fast. After my father passed, she never recovered. He vomited so much blood that I don't know if he died of malnutrition, influenza or whether he had tuberculosis. I'm also not sure whether my mother died of a broken heart or not. Mark died before John. John died under the light of the harvest moon. It was last year, on a similarly brilliant night, with the warm, glowing moon hanging low in the sky, that he proposed to the girl he'd loved since childhood. Now, back home, she was pregnant and alone - alive - but without anything she once held dear. The pale orb above the industrialized, smoking English hospital was anything but quaint and welcoming. It was bleak, raw and cold, like all that was around me. 

I was better off, for the most part, but I was still dying. I could feel the tightness in my chest, the shooting pain in my head whenever I laughed, or more often, cried. One day everything went black. I didn't think I'd wake up. 

I wish I hadn't. The surgeries were worse than anything I'd ever known. I didn't understand what was happening, what they were doing to me. It was like being in some sort of fantasy, some scary story, unreal, fictional. I didn't know such horrors existed: being brought back and then forced into the numbness again, like being drowned in ice water and then set on fire. I prayed for it to stop, to just die. The night they took my hand, I almost cursed God. I could smell the blood, the preservatives, the etherial, tortuous medical nightmare. I longed for death. But it never came. 

He did. A man in a white coat. At first I though he was an angel. He had soft black hair and a lightly sun-speckled nose. He was charming, kind looking, enrapturing even. I trusted him instantly. He was the one beautiful thing in all the hell I was going through. 

I remember getting to the point where the pain was too much. I asked him to kill me, to save me, to let it all end. For some reason I knew he was different, that he could help, and for one, gleeful, hopeful moment, I saw Heaven. I really did. With all my heart I know my family, my baby sister, my parents and my brothers are safe. They're with God, and they're happy at last. I was ready to join them and I felt a rise, a tugging at my soul. I hadn't stoped believing after all. I was free. I exhaled, and with my last breath, I fell, and fell, and fell. Fire crept up my arms, and black obsidian shackles surrounded my wrists and ankles. Laughter rang out, and I tasted iron, copper and salt. I felt violated, licked by fire, by some very demonic, very real evil. Then, I woke up, and it stopped. For a moment, I thought myself to be insane. So much of my mind was hazy. I was drugged so much. I kind of like to pretend it was a dream.

But I know it was real.

My saving grace, my angel in white was a man of exceptional poise. He radiated a sense of purity, and almost glimmered, vibrating with some sort of healing energy. I felt like a moth caught in the tempting light of a lantern's golden flame. When I came to, I thought I had done my purgatorial sentence and maybe, I had a chance at salvation. Then I looked down. My hand, the one they'd sliced off, was back, and the entire top was black. When I moved it back and forth in the light, a ruby gleam flashed with each rotation. A mark was burnt into my flesh. I'd made some sort of deal. I'd been robbed of my salvation in one moment of weakness. The man who rescued me was anything but holy. 

I remember screaming, begging anyone who would listen to make this stop, to let me die. I didn't forsake God, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't, I wouldn't call anyone like him. He told me his name. I don't know why, what good that would do. Was it supposed to humanize him in my eyes? Would it help me come to terms with my choice? I felt angry. I hated him. Even so, he confided in me that he did what he had to do. It was the only way. He said he had to help me. 

When I finally became clear headed enough to let Felix explain himself, he was unbelievable. He seemed so honest. He told me that I had pleaded for an end. He said he was powerless to help except in a way he knew I wouldn't want. Still, despite my clear aversion to whatever he was saying, he persisted that he saw something in me that was different. I hated him more when he told me what it was: love. I wasn't angry, I wasn't vengeful, I was happy. I was happy that I saw my family at peace, with God after all they'd been through. He said I was selfless. For a moment, one fleeting second of weakness, I believed him. It carried on, though I'm embarrassed to admit it. For a short time, he became my savior, my own twisted, perverted version of the Christ figure I once clasped around my neck as I breathed in the incenses in my town's cathedral. I loved and grew to revere Felix as I once had him.

With the union between us, I'd be able to live. I could live and chase only the ghost of the ambitions I once had. I'd never achieve true happiness. I'd have a phantom victory, and at the end, I'd be consumed, my soul gone, to satisfy the evil that was my temporary salvation. Still, I figured it'd be better than being in Hell. Felix acted flawlessly. Everything he did, each word he said, every action he took was in perfect execution of the ideal partner. He perfected the illusion of true love. He brought with him wealth, money, power and status. I traveled through Europe, summered in Paris, danced through the halls of the estates of polite society. I lived like a Princess, but it was all a beautiful, wonderful, poisonous lie. 

It proved difficult for me to remain obstinant. The more he continued, the further he pressed, the greater I had to try to remind myself of what he is. There is no exception to this rule. Faustian bargains are what they are. They are not pure, they are not kind, they are not loving, or truly freeing. Still, in spite of everything, I could never fully devote myself to disbelief. I felt that there might actually be something benevolent deep within Felix Wolfe. I always believed there could be good in everyone. I once was so happy and jovial I even believed it could be found in the Devil. I never forgot that, and eventually, I'd come to know the reason for all the misery I had to endure.