My my, that was a long break. I could make excuses, but that's not what anyone reading this came here for.
Tonic
Komui was sick. Not even pretending this time, completely and utterly, miserably sick. As Reever had heard, at least twenty times in the past hour.
“I know you're sick Chief, but if you won't take your medicine you'll just have to work through it.”
“But sick people shouldn't work!” Komui snuffled past the tissues jammed in his nostrils. “Sick people should lie around getting better. I read it somewhere scientific.”
“Well if you're just going to be lying down you can read some of your paperwork.” Reever dropped a pile of paper on his lap with a thump. Komui wheezed pathetically underneath it, waving his arms weakly to appear pathetic. He even ventured a feeble cough in a last ditch call for sympathy as Reever left.
“Sounds like that cough is getting worse Chief.” Reever said, seeming remarkably cheerful for someone whose boss and friend was dying two feet away. “Better take your medicine.”
The door closed behind him and Komui was left alone with the two things he hated most in the world: his paperwork and his medicine. He glared at the bottle on the bedside table, glinting in the light. It did nothing, which is highly unremarkable generally, but a disappointment considering that Komui had spent all morning trying to burn it with his mind.
It was horrible. Komui knew this instinctively. It was like a bottle of milk that had just turned, it looked so innocent and pure, but underneath was an unspeakable foulness. The clue was in the name itself: medicine. Reever might reassure him otherwise, but Komui knew that medicine came from “medici”. And what were the Medici family famous for? Poisons. He folded his arms and glared at the tonic. There was no way that vile brew would pass his lips.
Magnanimous
You could never accuse the Earl of being miserly. Hundreds of years of shrewd investment and association had left him incredibly affluent. The Noah family wanted for nothing and neither did those who knew them. For a man bent on the destruction of humanity, the Earl had garnered a reputation as a philanthropist. His money flowed discreetly into hospitals and schools as well as into the pockets of prospective politicians, and scientists, men who performed interesting little experiments for the better of human kind. If an idea intrigued him, he funded it. However, the expense was not always as magnanimous as it first seemed. The hospitals were those inclined to send a stream of souls his way. The schools linked him to the poorest children, whose young lives were already inclined to the kind of sorrows that made them perfect victims. The politicians would cover up his family's more overt excesses and the scientists... well all scientists to some extent are as close to destroying humanity as him. And so he conducted his own experiments, his little human rats trapped in their mazes of greed, pulling any lever and pushing any button it would take to please him. His only real generosity was killing them quickly when they outgrew their use.
Ever noticed that if you've been away for a fandom for a while it gets a lot harder to write? That's why the end of High Seas is taking so long.