So, I wrote this at about three in the morning in one go. I've suddenly become productive on here again because I have acute mononucleosis, which is a terrible thing. All I do is sleep and take pills and occassionally write oneshots. This just follows Sebastian's thoughts, which is why it seems disjointed, before anyone points that out to me. Please let me know if it's any good-- I think it gave me a better grasp of his character, personally.
Disclaiming here, I own nothing but a virus. If you want that, please, God, take it.
Enjoy!
Sebastian drummed his fingers on the desk in irritation. He was always far too composed to allow any outward signs of irritation around the household, but in the privacy of his room, a bratty impatience (no doubt picked up from the young master, of course) was making itself known.
Demons don't need sleep.
He lounged in his chair, allowing his head to rock back, and examined a hairline crack in the plaster ceiling that exactly replicated the fault in continental structure beneath a large portion of Asia. Here, alone, at approximately three o'clock in the morning, he admitted it to himself with horribly profound sense of loss.
He was bored.
In his last incarnation on this pitiful plane, he had singlehandedly destroyed half of an entire civilization, razed a continent to the ground, remolded their delicate human history in the palms of his hands amidst a glorious tableau of suffering, loss, pain, and sin. And now? He was balancing accounts.
Accounts.
For a 12-year-old human boy.
Not that he resented Ciel Phantomhive, oh, no indeed. He was never bored around the boy who had become his master. Their verbal sparring was delicious, and their underhanded power plays would have made the Borgias weep with envy. In fact, the more time he spent around the young master, the more a strange obsession settled in, a sort of twisted, loathing affection that could be explained away as some kind of Stockholm syndrome-style coping method or lauded as the deepest and only bond of fascination and grudging respect he had ever formed with another creature. Either way, it mattered little to him. The point was that he was never for a moment bored in his master's company.
It was when his master wasn't there that the ennui set in.
Humans spend, on average, one third of their lives asleep. This is a necessary sacrifice for the running of an inefficient organic system, but it is highly inconvenient for a particular demon, who therefore finds that one third of his time is full of restless boredom.
If his master assigned him tasks over night, they rarely required all of his time and were often hardly complex enough to relieve this insufferable sensation. The most interesting nighttime task to which he had been assigned in recent memory was the service of the young master's midnight demand for chocolate gâteau, which, to be entirely honest (which he was startlingly frequently, with himself, at least) had less to do with any particularly fascinating property of gâteau and more to do with the way he had unexpectedly found himself clutching at the front of his well-cut trousers midway through, quite vividly imagining splattering the gooey chocolate across his master's naked body and licking it off.
On which topic it must be noted that he had never been contractually bound to a human going through puberty before. It was... distracting.
Not for the first time, he considered the possibility that the master's fetishes were catching, before discarding it as unlikely. It was far more probable that he'd simply never before had the chance to discover that he found it arousing to watch pretty, blue-eyed boys mercilessly suck the filling from an éclair without even disturbing the whipped cream. Sebastian bit his lip. Oh, not again... Damnable human bodies.
At approximately four o'clock in the morning, the demon was considering the relative merits of different metals as used in cooking utensils. He had no love for cooking (no one said he HAD to be honest with himself in matters of pride), but it was a hobby and he was certainly getting enough practice. It was, however, impossible to deny that he enjoyed creating impossible desserts for the young master, if only for the boy's reactions. Surely he would learn, eventually, that the more outlandish the request, the more sly pleasure Sebastian took in fulfilling it, much to Ciel's frustration. But impossible orders were part of the fun of serving Master Ciel.
There was no way to ignore the child's intelligence, or his ruthlessness, but something in his arrogance, in his self-centered pride and stubbornness, and infuriating habit of doing the opposite of what he was instructed simply because you had the gall to attempt to instruct him... There was something about his aloof attitude, his treatment of the world as his "pawns", and the way he'd make any affectionate gesture into a threat and die rather than admit to caring for anyone but himself...
He reminded Sebastian quite strongly of a kitten.
The thought made the demon smile. He was very fond of cats. He had developed quite a bad habit in lieu of playing with the furry felines, too. The young master would have slapped him for it-- harder than he did for actually playing with cats and aggravating Ciel's allergy-- and no doubt devised some humiliating prank as revenge if he ever knew, but that had never stopped him before.
On some nights, when the boy's nightmares were strong and loud and he could feel the tension and fear and hatred running through their bond like vibrations down a taut cord and his hand ached beneath the mark, Sebastian would indulge in sleep.
But demons do not dream.
Instead, he would slip quietly into the dreams of the young master and slither through the bars of his remembered cage and stroke his hair to soothe him, whispering, "Hush now," and "Don't cry, kitten," with sinister sweetness in his ear. "They'll never hurt you again, kitten. You're my pet now..."
A demon? Affectionate? Whaaaat? Never. Now everyone go home and dream about Sebastian tonight! :D
Reviews are appreciated, as always!