A/N This series is addicting. I just happened across it a couple of days ago and found myself hooked from the first episode. I ended up watching almost the entire first series in one night, only going to bed at 5:30 am. Not good! Anyway, I hope you enjoy this.
Oh yes, certain words are capitalised at times and not at others. This is intentional and has specific meaning: it's not accidental inconsistency.
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Do I hate him? Do I hate the one who eternally holds my leash, my Young Master? Do I hate the one whose delicious soul, so tortured and yet so pure, drove me in such a desperation to claim it that I lost all sense of reason, of logic?
It is a complex matter. He has been my Young Master for such a short time in the lifetime of my kind, yet he has been one of the few that ever truly touched me. That ignorant, arrogant, ungrateful brat who seems to live only to spite me was one of the few who could ever call up any form of anger. Indeed, in the many long years I have served masters, I have never once deserted my post because of anger.
I remember well that day in Paris: the day my contract should have ended. Faced with two who had been behind his parents' murders, he gave the assassination order – and then retracted it. He stopped me, ordering the retreat, using the power the contract gave him over my actions. For the first time ever, he retracted an order.
Looking back on it, I should not have reacted as emotionally as I did. I even broke one of my rules as a butler: to never question the master's order. He gave me an answer, yet to this day I cannot truly understand why he stopped me. Was it out of loyalty to his Queen? Was it fear of our contract ending and his soul being eaten? Was it as he said: that the context was wrong? I believe he regrets stopping me, as much as he will ever allow himself to feel regret, that is. Had he allowed me to kill the angel and Queen, many lives would have been saved in London. Not that such a genocide matters to me, a demon; I wish that I could have killed the two there, all the same. It would have been so much more simple: I would have killed the two conspirators, fulfilled my part of the contract, and then been able to enjoy the banquet which I had worked on for years. End of contract, end of story; we would all have been able to move on.
As it was, the issue became so much more convoluted. I deserted my post, which, incidentally, taught my Master a valuable lesson in humility and vulnerability, and took up watching from afar. This was not the Master I had served, the prey I had painstakingly raised into a feast fit for a demon king. No, this was some pitiful, puling, hesitant child, unwilling to bear the consequences of his own actions, unknowing of his place in the world. I had thought better of him. Perhaps that is why I reacted with the cold anger and disgust that sent me storming from his side, if such a description can ever be used for the poised leave-taking I delivered.
He was certainly not the most arrogant master I had ever contracted with, nor the most ungrateful. I have grown accustomed to my best efforts being met with cold disdain or even punishment. To one such as I, the aforementioned experiences only add a sauce of satisfaction to the meal. Indeed, his pessimistic views on life and lofty evaluation of others were quite amusing at times: certainly, he and I matched each other in personality quite well.
No, I think, after much self-perusal, that the reason I allowed myself to react with emotion instead of cool logic was because this was entirely out of character. He had never recalled an order before. Never. He had hesitated to give an order at times and he had modified a pre-existing order, but never directly contradicted it. He told me to kill the angel and the Queen. He then told me to stop, to retreat. It all hinges on that. His previous resilient personality, the one that allowed no regret and understood that there could be not back-steps, had collapsed. He even dared to deny the existence of his soul when my very being proved it. I almost had to check the contract in order to verify that it was indeed Ciel Phantomhive sitting beside me, not some look-alike changeling.
It was not until he reached London, hungry, tired, cold and alone, the city burning around his ears, that he regained himself, found once more that sense of righteous purpose which drove him on and kept his soul unsullied through all his evil deeds. The angel tempted me, the demon. It would have been amusing in any other context, but truly I only had eyes for one: my master who was not my Master. The anger that had sent me from his side was gone. All that was left was disappointment: a bitter sourness that curled the tongue. An emotion I am not used to feeling. Nothing else.
Yet…. Can I admit this, if only to myself? Yet there was another emotion, one I am even less familiar with than disappointment: sadness. To see the tenacious, motivated and unwavering adult, if only in mind, turn into this wretched, currish, contemptible child was saddening. Thus, it is almost unsurprising that when his character reasserted itself, I was hit with a wave of surprise, delight and, for some reason, a sense of relief that was not only because the taste to my favourite dish had been restored.
That one sentence, his questioning why his servants had not used live ammunition on the too friendly Devil's dog that had gained their hearts, told me he had remembered that actions have consequences, that sacrifices must be made, and that no hesitation is tolerated. He was once again my Master and I am not entirely sure why this filled me with any more than satisfaction than that his soul would be all I had hoped for. Some things remain ever mysterious, and emotions are members of that set.
He did not fear death once again, only that his purpose might rest uncompleted. I tested that by allowing the bullet to pierce his side: a non-fatal wound if dealt with carefully, yet one that he did not flinch from. His resolve held and so I intervened before he could be killed. I was filled with a satisfaction that wiped away all anger, disappointment and…sadness.
Once more I faced the angel, the Queen already dead by its hand, and this time, my Master did not recall the order. My Master ended up falling from the bridge to his death and I dived in after him in order to take his body to that island which is sacred, if infernal beings could call it that, to demons. After all, both body and soul are needed for the feast to be served.
My Master surprised me, even at the end. I offered him an almost painless soul-retrieval, despite my own preference for my souls to be bathed in pain, a concession made only to those who have impressed me. And he had, impressed me, that is. Apart from those three days towards the end of our contract, he had behaved as my Master should; indeed, those three days had tempered him, strengthened his will further, once he regained it. He refused it, offering me in return the chance to satisfy myself entirely on the buffet he presented. He asked for pain: to sear the pain of his life into his soul, were his words. Music to my ears that quite made up for his less than satisfactory actions. I leant forwards, ready to devour.
It was then that I discovered the trespass. That incompetent and inferior reprobate who dared to call himself a demon butler had taken advantage of my missing contract seal to steal my Master's soul. Claude Faustus had sneaked in and stolen the soul of the one I was contracted to, possible because of the loss of my arm, yet reprehensible to the extreme, even in demon society, if only because everyone else is afraid a similar situation might happen to them. Until then, my missing arm had been a mere regret as it prevented me from being the perfect butler to the end, one of my Master's first orders and a point of pride.
I will not deny I was angry. No, not angry: furious. Once more Ciel Phantomhive had been the reason for my ire, though not the cause, this time. My rage burned hot and I created a sizable scar in the landscape, something which I have since been reprimanded for by various others of my kind.
It was then that I conceived of a plan, so counter to all demon instincts that at first I could barely believe I thought it a viable option. I would remove my Master's memories and pretend that the contract had never ended, as indeed it had not. I was still bound and so was he by the fact that his soul was still in existence, not yet devoured. It was certainly a plan possible to carry out, yet not one that many, if any, other demons would even consider.
I questioned myself relentlessly in the coming time. What was so special about this soul? Certainly it was frustrating to have all my hard work go to waste and it was assuredly infuriating to lose to one such as Faustus, but there were other ways possible. I could have cut my loses with Ciel Phantomhive to go and take my fury out on Faustus' hide, perhaps waiting a few millennia until he got careless and I could execute a similar soul-theft. I could even have denounced him to demonic society and have him persecuted by all others of our kind, though to do so would have revealed a terrible weakness on my part.
Instead, I gave him a free revenge, though I might have engineered that a little. A decision made not from cold and rational logic, but from passionate anger and passionate desire. An obsession, I believe it could be called. I even dealt with Faustus instead of taking what was mine by force, albeit that the deal included a fight over the soul in question.
Unfortunately, a trend seemed to have been created. Just when it seemed that victory was in my grasp, every time something would happen to thwart it. First it was the demon brainwashing my Young Master into believing I was the one he should be taking revenge on and provoking him into ordering me from his sight, then it was the soul merge and then finally, that little brat's contract request.
And that is the stage I am now at. That soul, the banquet which I have worked so hard on has been despoiled. It is akin to having taken days over a magnificent dinner and then having pigs come in and trample all over it. No, worse. Scraps could be salvaged from that. Instead it is as if those pigs had trampled and when I went to stop them, I found my limbs bound with spider thread of unimaginable strength.
Bound. Bound forever to an undying master. To a tyrant whose reign is endless. Bound by that final command to an eternity of servitude. Never has the collar around my neck felt so heavy as now.
Do I hate him? It is hard to decide, but I do not think I do. I have felt hate before and that is not the emotion I feel towards my Master. There are many reasons for this, I decide upon reflection.
It is not entirely his fault that we are in this predicament. It is Hannah's fault for transforming him, Alois' fault for ordering that transformation. It is Faustus' fault for starting the whole mess and my fault for being in a weak enough position to allow him the theft. It could be said that my Master is at fault for that unthinking command, happy as I was to hear it at that point for the future it implied. I could, though I do not, even argue that the loss of my arm might not have happened had I not been held by the souls of the dead, unable to avoid the angel's blade, if the confrontation had happened on the day it should have. I do not because to declare that I know the exact circumstances for such a fateful action to take place would be an act of hubris unthinkable even to a demon.
Another reason is that, now unbound by a human's flesh and inhibitions, my Master truly is a match to my personality, or perhaps I should say that I am a part of his. Therefore to hate him is to hate myself and I do not, demon that I am.
Ultimately, however, I am his butler, his contracted demon, now his slave of an endless agreement. My whole being exists to obey him and fulfil all his needs: such is always the way of a demon under contract. Such is the way of a Butler, beyond all butlers. I cannot act without his order and he has not yet ordered me to hate him. Besides, even demons need hope and goals, and what hope is in an existence of hate? I could only pull myself down with petty revenges against the object of my hate: not the way of a Butler.
And to the end, I am one hell of a butler.
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A/N Wow, I hadn't expected I'd write quite that much. Over two thousand words! Not my usual result when writing this sort of thing. I simply love Sebastian's character. I know that demons are supposed to be emotionless, but look at his expressions in the anime and tell me he doesn't feel anything! Particularly look at the various expressions in the last three episodes of season 1: they are quite revealing. When browsing the net, searching to see whether there would be a season 3, (incidentally, if you know for definite whether there will be a third season or not, please tell me!) I noticed that several people said Sebastian hated Ciel. I thought it would probably be a bit more complex than that, so this was the result. I hope this has been in character for him and I would love to hear about your thoughts in a review.