AN. I secretly wish that there was a spin-off manga called "The Unfortunate Adventures of the Inept Servants of Phantomhive". Really, I do. D: This is something goofy and light, which I haven't done much of lately...
Ciel, who had been leisurely enjoying his Earl Gray and his novel, suddenly found himself not enjoying these things.
It could have been because the oncoming storm cloud had eclipsed the sun and ruined his reading light, or could have been because his tea was a bit on the bitter side, or perhaps it was because the garden was once again in a state of ruins, thanks to a certain bumbling gardener who was currently making quite the commotion.
(It could have also been the fact that Ciel was Ciel, and he was always grim-faced and never truly enjoyed anything. But he preferred the former reasons.)
Under his breath, the young earl muttered something scathing about his inept servants, slouched further into his seat and buried himself further into his novel.
Sebastian, for his part, rather enjoying seeing his master so irritable, and, briefly reveling in this fact, went back to entertaining thoughts about cats.
Finnian, the bumbling gardener, was currently lamenting his inability to distinguish between pesticides and fertilizer.
"I thought I'd give the flowers a head start this year," he bemoaned, poking at the wilting and dead and dying blooms. "Now they'll never grow!"
The landscaping hadn't gone well, either. Several trees had met their demise as he had tried to coax a particularly stubborn weed from the ground. This weed, as it turned out, was an especially rare breed of hydrangea which the boy decided was best not to tell the young master about killing. Somehow, a boulder had found its way into the herb garden, and even Finny didn't profess to know how it happened.
But the shrubs still needed trimming, and Finny would be damned if he let up on his duties just because he was bad at them.
Most unfortunately for the Phantomhive garden.
The ladder for trimming and cutting was made of spindly iron stilts, but it proved time and time again too be sturdy enough for the young boy, at least. With shears newly sharpened and shrubs newly grown, Finny went to work.
He had an unfortunate penchant for overkill, however, and while he was admiring the birdsong and the quality of light through the clouds, he soon found that the tree had been trimmed to a toothpick. He stood gargling dry air for a moment, trying to figure out how long he had been cutting at nothing.
The ladder creaked, and the wind picked up (as the predecessors of rain and storm), and Finny, standing on his toes to see if he had somehow missed a branch, was caught off-balance.
He felt the ladder shudder and dip and topple, and he flailed futilely to try and stop his descent along with it.
Gravity took little notice and went right on dropping things.
The ground would have smashed into his face had something not grabbed hold of his shirt collar and stopped his fall. His feet dangled and the fabric burned at his neck, but he was altogether very glad that he had not acquainted the ground with his face.
Puzzled and relieved, he looked upwards to see what celestial force had stopped his fall, only to realize it was just Sebastian.
Finny flashed him a grateful smile, and the older butler took the time to give him a thinly-veiled look of annoyance before releasing his collar and dropping him.
"Finnian, please do take care while doing your—" Sebastian eyed the stripped tree scandalously, "ah, duties. The garden hardly needs any more deceased things."
"Yessir," the boy responded miserably. His hand was unbearably hot, for some reason. "I'll be more careful. Thanks for catching me, by the way! You must have been closer than I—"
"Go get that fixed up, won't you?" He interrupted swiftly. It was not a request. Very rarely was it ever with Sebastian.
Finny blinked, and was suddenly aware of a stinging pain in his hand. His palm had been split open and was oozing blood in a sluggish manner, staining his white gloves red. The shears sported the same red color, laying some feet away where he dropped them—he had obviously cut himself on them somehow when he fell.
"Oh!" he squeaked, and held the wound tightly in an attempt to staunch the flow of blood. "Right! Will do! Thank you, Sebastian-san!"
By the time he reached the front doors of the mansion, Finny began to feel light-headed.
"Oh dear," he said, navigating unsteadily through the entrance hall. Blood dripped in small speckles onto the floor. "It's not stopping."
From the smell permeating the air—burnt something and charred something-else—Finny figured that Bard was in the kitchen attempting to cook, and he chose to stumble off in that direction.
He proved to be right; when he entered the kitchen, Bard was wrestling with a set of eggs. They were already a lost cause, but he was trying very hard not to whip out the flamethrower, anyway. The stench of his cigarette smoke only added to the plethora of singed smells.
Finny whimpered, and Bard, consenting defeat, dumped his eggs in the sink.
"Oy, Finny," he said, disposing of the evidence. "What're you doing here?"
"Bleeding," he responded in another whimper.
"What?"
"Bard, I think I'm dying!" He wailed, waving around his wounded hand. "It won't stop!"
In the fuss in was causing, Finny somehow managed to knock down a number of pots and pans that were hanging above the counter. And, because Finny had a problem with not knowing his own strength, this meant that the pots and pans were effectively destroyed.
"Hey, hey!" Bard blustered, mourning the cooking ware. "Calm down and stop swinging that thing around! You're getting blood everywhere!" He snatched a rag from the sink and threw it on Finny's hand. "Here, hold that there."
"Is my hand going to fall off?" Finny sniffled.
"Hold it, I said!" The older man grunted. "No, it's not going to fall off. Don't move. I'll go fetch some bandages."
Finny did as he was told, sniffing miserably as the once-white rag soaked up red. Being still, Sebastian was always telling him, was the surest way not to break things.
Within another minute or so, he heard a great clattering crash—a sound which he always attributed to Mey-Rin. He jumped and looked around cautiously, half-expecting something to come through the ceiling.
He wasn't far off.
Mey-Rin burst through the door with bandages streaming and hair askew.
"Finny!" She yelled, and, upon spotting him, began to bombard the boy with questions. "Does it hurt? Is it bad? Do I need to get the doctor? Are you alright?"
Finnian forgot the order of the questions as soon as he was asked, and his answers to them as well, so he stood there shaking his head no in hopes that that was an adequate answer to everything.
Mey-Rin gasped, dropped the bandages, adjusted her glasses, and retrieved the cloth from the floor. "You're not alright?"
"Mey-Rin," Bard reprimanded, and as he entered he put a hand on her head to stop her from tackling the smaller boy. "He's fine. Patch him up already, unless you want him to stand there bleeding on the floor."
"Y-yes!" The maid said, fumbling with the bandages again.
"Gloves'll have to go, kiddo," Bard said, stripping the soaked cotton from his hands.
"But," Finnian protested weakly, making a face. "The young master gave those to me-!"
They were in the trash already when Bard said, "We'll get you another pair. There's no saving those."
"Let me know if it hurts," Mey-Rin was saying, and she dabbed iodine on his hand.
The gloves disappeared from his mind as he winced at the disinfectant. "It hurrrrts," he wailed.
"Shush," Bard told him, flicking him on the forehead, and he fell quiet.
Mey-Rin, while usually clumsy and ill-equipped for delicate things, proved to be quite adept and gentle when dealing with wounds. She wrapped the hand swiftly and swathed the gash in ample cloth for padding until even the throbbing pain from the disinfectant had vanished.
"There!" she said happily when she had tied it off. "How's it feel?"
"Good," Finny responded, and gave her a winning smile. "Thanks, Mey-Rin!"
"Oh, i-it's alright," she gushed, turning red. "Glad I could help."
"Just don't do it again," Bard smirked. "Or else your hand might really just fall off. Where would that leave the garden, then?"
But Finnian wasn't listening. The pain had mostly subsided, but the scissored flesh felt foreign underneath the bandages, and there was the dull numb-tenderness that often accompanied wounds.
"They…they don't look like such strong hands, do they?" He mused absently.
Bard and Mey-Rin blinked, surprised, and exchanged a puzzled look.
"I mean, they break things well enough," Finny frowned. "But they bleed just like any old hands. They don't seem so strong."
For this, he received a light rap on the head. The boy looked up, about to protest, until he found Bard giving him a skeptical smile.
"The fact that they bleed, that they break things," he told him, the cigarette smoldering clenched between his teeth, "just means that you're human, kid. It's what we all do."
"I think you're wrong, besides," Mey-Rin said, and pulled his hands into hers. "They look very strong to me."
Finny could not have stopped the smile that spread across his face if had had wanted to. "...I guess they do," he conceeded with a grin.
"Ah, c'mon, Sappy," Bard announced, more loudly than was necessary. "Let's go see what kind of damage there is to be done around here."
Ciel, back in the garden, looked up from his novel.
"Sebastian," he called. "The garden's looking a bit sparse. Fix it."
"Yes, my Lord," Sebastian bowed, secretly resenting the fact that his cat-orientated thoughts had been disturbed. "It will be done."