"As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that."

― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Ciel remembers his parents, he remembers them well. After all, it has been less than three years since the day he last saw them. The day they... but that doesn't matter anymore. People say that remembering the dead keeps them from having peace in the afterlife, but Ciel's never been one for superstition, despite his butler being a demon. Perhaps because of it.

In any case, some of the memories of his parents are crystal clear and others can only just be considered recollections - blurred images and faded smells and muffled sounds and almost-there sensations. The hazy ones outnumber the nearly-perfect ones, and that does something to Ciel - makes him slightly unsure and a little queasy and more than a little frustrated, because if he forgets them, forgets what has started his quest for power (in all the wrong places, his mind readily supplies) if he forgets what has caused his thirst for revenge, where does that leave him? What does that make him?

And there are moments when he has to will himself to forget them, his parents. To let them go. Because he has to, in order to survive, just like he sometimes has to abandon fights he cannot win so he can live to fight another day. (But he cannot abandon his plans to revenge them, because he's stronger than that, because he has Sebastian.)

But those moments come and go with the pale and fickle English sun, and he goes back to his grand schemes and pathetic pawns and petty struggles for power - by which he means that the ones which struggle to take the power away from him find their own petty ends at the hands of his butler, not that he is petty. No, not at all.

And if there are days when Sebastian's bland smiles and unreadable looks and insolent replies feel more like home ("What is home, Sebastian?" "Why, young master, I thought you already knew - home is the place where little monsters go to lick their wounds,") than the memory of his parent's laughter, it doesn't have to mean anything. And if his nightmares of the manor burning to the ground are slowly but surely getting replaced by those of pain and need and blood and a cruel mouth gaping open like the abyss itself (sucking Ciel's soul right out of him), no one has to know. And if he sometimes lies awake at night staring at the ceiling and feeling as if the thing that drives him to become faster, stronger, smarter, is not so much his hatred for those which took the world away from him and left him in (sharp, shiny, bloody) pieces, as it is his fear (of pain, of death, of the unknown), his self-loathing (his very own demon), no one has to know that, either.

But the fact remains that somewhere along the way, the young boy has stopped being driven forward by the thing he had sold his soul to the devil for, the same thing he would manipulate, kill and even die for (revenge, petty and rightful and insipid revenge), and that the thing now moving him forward, the thing currently guiding (pushing prodding shoving) him from behind is the very devil he'd made said contract with.

Sometimes, Ciel can't help but wonder when exactly his desire for retribution morphed into this want, this need to win, to prove himself, to his butler of all people. Only, Ciel is not stupid and knows better than anybody just what that butler of his truly is.

And on moonless nights when the stars seem to shine as brightly as the mid-afternoon sun, he thinks that things are not so bad, thinks that it could be worse.

And he is loath to admit it, but a dark and jaded part of him whispers cruelly in the quiet recesses of his mind that - in time - he will come to see just how bad they can get. It is not a part that he likes very much.

I think I researched quotes and titles and Victorian pessimism for, like, two hours before I got bored and copy-pasted the first thing that sounded okay, because I figured, why not? Yes, I know that "The Picture of Dorian Gray" was published in 1890 and Black Butler is set in 1888, or sometime around it, which means the quote kind of appeared/became well-known after the anime would have ended, but I don't care.

Uh, yeah, sooooo... hope you enjoyed it, I guess? And if you could tell me what you thought of it, yeah, that'd be awesome.