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✵ Claude

“I think we’ll call you Claude.”
She gave him a name.
He never corrected her.Their first meeting was unremarkable, really. Just a girl on her knees in a meadow of forget-me-nots, whispering prayers to no one in particular. A demon, watching the girl with folded arms and narrowed eyes, trying to decide if she was stupid or brave or both. He asked what she was doing. She asked who he was. She smiled when he said he had no name – and gave him one herself.He hated it. Why did this strange girl care to give him a name? They didn't even know each other.Claude is all jagged edges. He snaps before he softens. His sarcasm is a reflex, not a performance – armor that he never learned how to take off. He picks fights. He makes jokes no one but him laughs at. He doesn’t like questions, doesn’t like being known. And yet, Lumière never asked for anything from him but his presence – and she gave more than she ever took. Her kindness wasn’t something he earned. It was simply offered. She confused him to no end.But the truth is, he never minded. Not really.
Because something about her – the way she listens, the way she never judges, the way she says his name like it means something – has rooted itself into him. He won’t say it aloud, not in words, but it shows. In how he walks beside her instead of ahead. In how he watches over her when she sleeps. In the sweet little letters he writes and never gives her, filled with things he doesn’t know how to say while she’s awake.He calls her a fool for trusting him, for caring about a demon. That she needs to toughen up.
And yet, letter after letter, Claude proves that it’s him who was changed.
That even demons can be remade in the presence of someone soft.Now a reformed, baptized demon, Claude travels the spirit realm with Lumière and their peers - helping others like she'd once helped him.

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✂ frédéric

“You are breaking at the seams.”
That was the first thing he said to her. A diagnosis at first meeting.Frédéric was never meant to care – that just wasn't how he was wired. He was meant to observe, correct, and stabilize. A renowned figure in the spirit realm – not for his empathy, but for his methods. His methods of Guiding were clinical, unorthodox, and often cruel. Mortals entrusted to his care were reduced to data points, case files, symptoms. When Lumière became one of them, she was no exception.At first, she was fascinating to him. Fragile, fractured, and still impossibly kind. The way her spirit body bore cracks like glass disturbed him – not because of their appearance, but because he couldn’t understand why she hadn’t shattered completely. How could someone so broken still smile? Still pray to a God that hadn't helped her? Still speak of her tormentors like they were companions?
He treated her like a subject. He poked and prodded – both physically, and psychologically. He pushed her until she began to wither under his attention, the way everything eventually did. He thought he was helping. It never occurred to him that he might be the cause of her worsening state.And then one day, she cracked. Flinched at his touch.It was something small, barely visible. But Frédéric saw it. A recoil, like a wounded animal withdrawing from a hand that claimed to heal. The sharp line which drew further across her forearm when their skin met.
He saw her fear. Of him.That was when everything shifted.Frédéric is not a man who apologizes. But after that, he stopped trying to fix her. He stopped treating her as a problem to be solved, and for the first time, to simply.. be near her. Just for the sake of being near.
He brought books, not charts. He learned how to sit in silence without dissecting it. He learned how to touch without causing harm.
And it was within that silence that he began to change.He had always been protective, possessive. He hated that others could reach her in ways he couldn’t. He hated how soft she made him feel. And he hated that, despite it all, she still looked at him with the same quiet grace she gave everyone – as if he hadn’t hurt her, as if he could still be something good.Frédéric doesn’t know if he deserves her forgiveness, but he stays. Perhaps he believes he needs to repent for his treatment of her – just like Claude. Regardless, his mellowed behavior has made him a companionable man – though some dark traits still remain.

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