Hate Is For Remembering
Laughter. Childish laughter that sounded so far away. Years away. Lifetimes away.
Ciel blinked his eyes open. His cheek was pressed against the cold floor and the soft breaths escaping his lips clouded the tile with condensation. There was an aching pain in his temple that coursed through the rest of his head. With a groan, he started to push himself up.
"You're awake!" a voice chirped at him.
He turned his head to the side and his eyes widened before he remembered himself and schooled his expression into a scowl. He couldn't quite remember what he was doing, or where he was, but he was certain he hadn't intended to end up lying on a cold floor on his face. "Elizabeth?" he questioned with confusion in his voice. "What are you doing here?"
"Waiting for you to wake up, silly. You don't have a lot of time, you know."
"What?" It was all he could muster at the moment.
A hand the boy could not see grabbed him by the elbow and eased him into a kneeling position. Ciel's body tensed and he tried to jerk his arm away. Elizabeth just shook her head and pointed at the floor beneath his knees. Ciel turned his eyes down and saw the reflections of himself and Elizabeth kneeling together on the floor, and to the boy's right - and slightly behind him - stood a butler dressed from head to toe in white. The visage turned Ciel's stomach and he swallowed a few times to keep his bile under control. Ash's presence was an affront to his senses and for the moment, the young Earl couldn't place why that was.
Ciel raised a hand to his right cheek, the movement of his reflection catching his attention. His blue eyes cleared suddenly and realization forced his mouth open. Before his protests could leave his lips, Lizzie grabbed his hand. "Do you remember this garden?" Her fingers tightened around his hand and her green eyes shone brightly in the strange light that hovered above them. She gestured with her head towards the floor and her smile was so earnest. Ciel sighed and glanced down. As before, he had to look past his own reflection. It was like looking at yourself in the glassy surface of a pond, and then your eyes shifted ever so slightly, and you could see beyond its delicate surface to the wonder that hid beneath.
The images presented to him had a cold, monochromatic glare. Ciel did remember, though. This garden was not on his grounds, not a part of the Phantomhive estate. No, this particular bower was tucked away on a corner of the Midford estate. It had been the pride of Alexis at the time. He showered his daughter with affection, and one summer decided that by the following spring, his princess should have a hedge maze all her own. Ciel blinked as the sheer force of a time long gone pushed at the back of his eyes. He refused to think about the time before his revenge became so important. His revenge...
"Do you remember this day, Ciel?" she asked once more, jostling him from his thoughts. "Aunt Ann was there. We had a picnic..."
Ciel tried to remember. His eyes traced along a low hedge wall and a soft gasp left his lips. There he sat in the grass. He was no more than five years old. His eyes were so bright in the spring sunlight, so wide with wonder. A voice called his name and the tiny boy's head turned. Ciel's reflection stood himself up and rushed off towards the voices. Ciel watched and a tight feeling began to form in his chest. He suddenly remembered what he was about to see. Tiny Ciel rounded a corner and lept straight into his mother's arms. She was so warm, and her embrace so tender. Ciel remembered. He remembered and he hated it.
"We had such fun that day..."
Six-year-old Elizabeth ran from behind Rachael Phantomhive's skirts and threw her arms around Ciel the moment his mother put him down in the grass. When she released him, her hand found his and squeezed it tightly. The young Elizabeth pulled him along to her maze. The young boy reached out his hand and trailed it along the living wall. Multitudes of tiny leaves brushed against his fingers. He looked up towards the blue sky - the sky everyone likened to his eyes. Ciel felt a jolt in the pit of his stomach as he locked eye contact with his five-year-old self. The boy smiled at him so serenely, with so much hope in those unjaded eyes, and then turned his laughing face towards young Elizabeth and ran with her through the twists and turns of the maze.
In a fit of childish giggles, the young nobles rolled themselves on the new spring grass in a clearing towards the center of the verdant maze. The small boy had no cares and no fears, no brands or mental scars. He had all the love in the world, and as bright a future as they come. After having caught his breath, he was up in the grass and with a laugh jumped to his feet and ran for a path of the maze he had not yet walked. The young lady Elizabeth jumped up, her skirts and petticoats swaying about her ankles and bounded off after the small boy.
"You ran from me," Elizabeth cooed gently.
"I wanted to see if you would chase me..." he replied honestly. Was it an inclination of all children to see if someone would chase after them? Or did that quirk belong to Ciel alone?
"I did chase you. You disappeared though..."
Ciel nodded. He furrowed his brow as the memories came to him. He had them locked so tightly away inside of himself that he was sure they would never see the light of day again. He could almost feel himself choking on the dust that wafted off them as they surfaced in his mind. He had hidden...
It was a perfect spot. The hedge row took a sharp turn to the left, and just after the turn was a lovely tree. Ciel ran behind the sharp turn, and tucked himself in the hollow between the roots of the tree and the living wall. Elizabeth had run past him in the shadow of the tree, tucked away in the dark. The small boy smiled to himself and he waited.
"I never found you that day."
Ciel shook his head. "No. Aunt Ann did."
Some time later, young Ciel had heard sobs and the sounds of skirts brushing over the lush carpeted ground. Elizabeth was mumbling something about having lost him. Aunt Ann - Madame Red as he would later come to call her - was lead by the hand to the last place Lizzie had seen Ciel. The boy in the reflection smiled to himself, and Ciel remembered being thrilled they had come to look for him a second time. His aunt's sparkling eyes peeked over the hump of the large root and looked down upon him. She reached out a gloved hand and poked him in the stomach, drawing forth a giggle in return. He could laugh back then, Ciel suddenly remembered. Why did the sound seem to hurt so much? Elizabeth had taken his hand, and the three of them returned to Rachael Phantomhive and the picnic laid at her feet.
Ciel's father had come along soon after, arm in arm with Frances. Vincent chatted amicably with Alexis and patted his sister's hand as he came to join his family in the grass. Ciel didn't want to look anymore, not really. His eyes remained glued to the images despite his conscious thoughts. He had once sworn not to look on the faces of his dead parents again. This was so much easier than last time, when they weren't spouting their nonsense at him. On the other hand. he reasoned, they still were. Elizabeth rested her small hand on her uncle's knee and with puffed-up cheeks complained how Ciel had hidden from her. He rested a hand on her mop of blonde curls and handed her a biscuit. He turned bright eyes on his small son. Ciel stared at the reflection and grimaced. One hand unconsciously pawing at the shirt over his chest as his memories resurfaced just ahead of the images.
"Now, Ciel, you mustn't hide from your responsibilities. A gentleman, a Phantomhive, does not do that. Elizabeth will be your responsibility one day. Do you understand?"
Wide blue eyes stared up at Vincent, and young Ciel nodded his head. Ciel nodded his head also. Behind him, Ash grinned smugly. Ciel had learned not to run, and not to hide. He may have been a boy, a young man of little temper, but he had patience. He dragged his eyes upward and let them rest on Elizabeth's face as she continued to kneel across from him. "I never hid from you after that."
"No. That is true. I think you take pains to avoid me sometimes, though." Her eyes dropped slowly and she stared at the hard floor which had become a swirling mass of grey again.
"I do not," he lied. Lies were so very easy for Ciel. "I am very busy."
The girl looked at him hard. "You are running out of time, you know. It goes by in the blink of an eye."
The young earl huffed in annoyance. "You keep saying that. Explain," he demanded.
That laughter came again. Ciel felt his shoulders rise to his ears with the grating sound. Ash leaned lowly over his shoulder again and rested a hand on Ciel's back. "Time is so fleeting. You have choices to make, as I told you. Do not fret, though. The hard decision has already been made as you were incapable of doing so yourself." The phantom of Ash patted his right cheek and Ciel jerked his head away and glared at the reflection of the white butler smiling indulgently behind him.
Still not entirely sure what was being hinted at, Ciel pursed his lips and then asked, "How much time?"
"That is the question isn't it? How do you judge something as relative as time?"
"Usually in minutes or hours..." Ciel quipped back, not hiding the sarcasm in his voice.
"Quite. Hours maybe? Days? ...Seconds?" Ash's lips curled into the facsimile of a smirk at Ciel's obvious frustration. Ciel couldn't help but note how absolutely sour it looked on the man's porcelain face. "Minutes? Ah, yes. That would probably be easiest for you. Thirty minutes from the time you arrived. Make up your mind soon, young Earl."
"In order for one to make a decision, there needs to be a choice," Ciel sneered, having grown tired of Ash's presence and the surprisingly stifling nature of such a vast expanse of nothing.
