Chapter 3: The.Loyalty.Of.A.Dog.
And in your heart
You know it to be true
You know what you gotta do
They all depend on you...
~-~-~
The next morning found me at my desk, idly flipping through the information The Queen had given me on the case. Of the five kidnapped children, I knew four of them personally and had met one for a brief moment the last time I'd been in London. None of their families were anything particularly interesting—nothing illicit or dangerous in their backgrounds, to speak of—and, for all I could see, the kidnappings seemed quite random save for their obvious isolation to the upper class.
I took a sip of my tea—Golden Needle Black today, one of my favorites—and swirled the last teaspoon or so of liquid casually around the bottom of my teacup, pointedly ignoring the way my hand gently shook, as though a lack of attention would make it go away. Turning my thoughts back to the case, I tuned out my personal discomfort. I didn't much care for the children's parents, but none of the children themselves had done anything wrong. In fact, if memory served, I had rather liked most of them. Not to mention the reasoning that there hadn't been any sign of ransom notes yet, and if the kidnappers weren't after money it was quite possible that they were after something much more sinister.
I shivered, resisting the urge to worry at the suddenly tender patch of skin on my back. Sometimes my missions for the Queen brought back memories of things I would much rather forget.
"Young Master, you seem distracted today. Might I suggest that we begin our search tomorrow?" Sebastian walked through the room, tidying it from my restless night. "I doubt anything of excitement is going to happen between now and then."
There was no way for him to know, of course. Sebastian, despite his myriad other talents, couldn't see the future. Both of us were well aware that any delay in our investigations could very easily leave another child open to whatever predator were stalking them.
Drinking the last sip of tea from the bottom of my cup, I gently set it back on its saucer and swallowed heavily.
The picture sitting in front of me on my desk was of a family of four, obviously very well off nor reluctant in the least to show it. On a heavily padded armchair sat a man with frighteningly red hair on his head and a long black cane draped across his knee. Standing next to him, I recognized his wife, Cecilia Gundermoore, looking just as lovely as the day I had first met her something like eight years ago. In the years since then, she hadn't seemed to age one bit, despite having borne the two children who sat on the floor in front of her husband, looking unwaveringly at the camera and sitting with the rigid straightness that English society demanded of them.
On the left was the girl I was interested in for the purposes of the case. Her name, according both to the file and to my memories, was Clair Gundermoore, and she was eight years old. Her red hair was slightly more understated than her father's was, and she was really quite pretty. She was a rather funny girl, as well, and if anyone could have taught me how to laugh again, it would have been Clair. Unfortunately, she was currently in no position to remind me, and I had long since forgotten how.
As I closed the folder, my resolve was reaffirmed. However, if I were to trick Sebastian into letting me go, there was something I had to do, first.
"Leave me for a while, Sebastian," I said, scratching lightly at the sleeve of the white nightshirt I had yet to change out of.
"Is there anything you need before I go?" He asked. Now that I had decided to get it out of my system, my chest felt like it was going to completely implode if I didn't manage to cough in the next fifteen seconds. I had to ask myself why it happened that the one time I wanted Sebastian to obey me without question was also the one time he decided to hesitate.
"No. Please, just go. Make sure we are ready to begin our investigation once I am done here."
"Understood, My Lord. I shall ready the carriage," he replied, bowing lightly, and he left, shutting the door behind him. I waited for the tell-tale click of his shoes on the parquet floor of the hallway, as they moved farther and farther away. When he was finally out of earshot, I stood, and made my way back to my bed.
Inside the top drawer of my bedside table, there were three things. The first was a golden locket, attached to a fine golden chain, which contained a picture of my mother on the left half and one of my father on the right. I couldn't wear it—in my line of work, things like that got lost too easily—and I couldn't keep it at the Phantomhive mansion, either, for many different reasons. The second item was a knife, and the third was something Sebastian had given to me after my last asthma attack: my inhaler.
It was one of two, really. I kept one at the mansion and one at the townhouse, just so I would have it if I ever needed it. It was a wretched thing, really. I hated it. The medicine inside it made me ridiculously hungry, and whenever I was forced to take it, my thoughts became so muddled that I couldn't think straight for hours afterwards. But, I knew I had to use it. If I wanted Sebastian to ignore the subtle signs of my illness which he'd almost definitely noticed by now, I had to do something to keep it under control.
The inhaler consisted of a glass base, inside of which was a dry sponge and a sealed container of the loathed medicine. Attached to the base was a long, thin tube, which ended in an uncomfortable piece of material that fit tightly over my mouth. From the first moment I'd laid eyes on it, I had viewed it more as some barbaric torture device than something that might potentially save my life. Curling my fingers tightly around it, always mindful of the fact that if I broke it then I would truly be in trouble, I headed to the one place where I thought Sebastian might not hear me—the bathroom.
I tried to focus on how cold my feet were as they padded across the floor, or the way my nightshirt brushed against my skin, but nothing could distract me from the tightness in my chest—the quickening of my breath and the sudden constricting feeling of my lungs being too big to fit inside my ribs. I pushed open the French doors that separated my bedroom from my bathroom, shivering heavily when the cold air from the unheated room hit me like a slap in the face.
The first time I ever used my inhaler, I had thought pretty seriously about jumping out of my bedroom window so I would never have to do it again. I had been completely unprepared for the way it would affect me. For the same reason that I rarely drank alcohol, despite being in a situation when no one expected me to abstain, I hated my asthma medication.
With shaking hands, I twisted the top off the medicine bottle and poured half of it onto the dry sponge. Once the mouthpiece was situated over my lips, I stepped into the bathtub and curled myself into a ball on the porcelain floor. I wasn't worried about Sebastian finding me—he wouldn't come back until I called him to do so—but I needed to get as much out of the day as possible. I didn't want to waste more time holed away in my bathroom than I absolutely needed to.
I breathed in, tasting the sterility of the medicine as it drifted past my tongue. Pulling it away from my face, I placed the hated contraption on the lip of the bathtub, and waited.
When the first cough bubbled up through my chest, I met it with both relief and dread. I closed my eyes and imagined Sebastian's voice in my head, telling me to breathe, to calm down, but it didn't help very much. I knew, and this was why I had sent him away, why I had refused to let him see my discomfort. He would blame both of us for this. He would blame me for going outside without proper clothing, and he would blame himself for letting me. Sebastian's disappointment—something I had only seen two or three times in my life—was something which I never wanted to see again, if I could avoid it.
The coughs came hard and fast now that I was letting them out. Within a few minutes, my throat was exhausted, and the coolness of the bathtub was pressing tightly against the skin of my cheek. I couldn't decide whether I liked the sensation or not. After a while, once my breathing began to slow down and the spasms began to subside, I curled my legs up to my chest, closing my eyes for what I promised would be just a moment.
I must have fallen into unconsciousness somehow, or at least dropped into a heavy enough doze that I became unaware of the time as it passed. The medicine traveling through my system was supposed to stimulate me, but I was just...so tired. Even though I thought I might have somewhere important to be, I couldn't force my eyes to open again. I'd been awake for less than an hour, and already I wanted to crawl back into bed and situate myself so far into the covers that I could barely breathe.
Perhaps I shouldn't have been all that surprised when I felt a hand on the small of my back, just below the marred skin that I had ever only allowed Sebastian to see. For all I knew, I'd been curled up at the bottom of my bathtub for the entire day, and my butler had been standing outside with the carriage for hours.
"Do you feel the bite of the collar around your throat, Young Master?" He asked, using his fingers to repeatedly smooth a pattern down my back. Somehow, I believed I could feel the newly discovered warmth of his hand through the two layers of fabric that separated his skin from mine, and I let my eyes fall shut again. "Is it painful?"
Despite the distaste behind his words, he tucked his hands around me and lifted me from the bathtub. Under his feet, I could hear the crunch of glass.
"Did I..." I trailed off, hoping that my voice sounded more confident and sure to my butler than it did inside my head.
"Yes. You broke it. Hopefully I can find a pharmacy with an extra available."
I thought I could hear disappointment in the way he spoke—in the way his fingers were tense as they dug into my side.
"I'm sorry, Sebastian," I said, as he pulled back the covers and lowered me back onto my bed. He didn't answer, instead he doused the lights and left the room, and I was alright without having his reply. After all, I'm not sure that I understood what I was apologizing for anyway.
~-~-~
"Sebastian..."
I opened my eyes to the feeling of a soft hand stroking my cheek, brushing the hair back from my forehead. I was resting on my side, and under my body was another, cloaked in the finest black wool.
"Today was a very long day, Ciel. You should rest."
"No." Somehow, I knew that wasn't what I wanted. "I don't want to rest anymore."
His fingers moved down my throat, over my thin shoulders and onto my back. I could feel his touch getting closer and closer to where I knew the brand rested, though it had been on my skin for so long that I couldn't physically feel it anymore.
"Please, don't..."
He ignored me, and his fingers began to trace around the circle, trailing over the hypersensitive skin around the scar tissue. I couldn't stop the shiver that raced down my spine, and his other hand came up to my face, gently untying the patch that rested over my eye.
I looked up at him, watching his violent red eyes as they rested their gaze on my burnt, wretched skin. It itched under his gaze, the phantom pain of a wound that had closed a very long time ago.
"It's ugly."
"You are the Earl of Phantomhive. Would you stand for it, if it were truly ugly?"
My eye patch dropped to the ground, the softest noise, yet it broke the silence as I stared into the red of his irises. The contract in my right eye kept everything in perfect clarity, from the way his bangs swept softly across his forehead to the tilt of his chin.
"The Phantomhives live for ugliness, Sebastian. The only difference between our own and that of the world is that ours is usually kept locked up tight inside of us, together in our chests with all the other unsavory things that we'd rather leave forgotten."
"Like this?" He asked, trailing his fingers across my eyelid, skimming slowly over the violet, ringed pentagram. "Does it surprise you, when you look in the mirror? Do you try to forget?"
I lifted my hand to cover his where it rested on my brow, smoothing my thumb over the bloodied skin of his contract.
"Forgetting about the contract would be the same as losing you, wouldn't it?"
"Of course. But, so would remembering it."
I sighed, closing my eyes against the sudden tightness in my chest.
"I don't want to lose you at all..."
Suddenly, I felt the familiar warmth of his black overcoat cover my chest, and the feeling of my butler surrounded me, invading every one of my senses.
"If God offered to save you, Ciel, would you let him?"
With a small smile, I tightened my fingers around his hand.
"I would never abandon you...not even for God."
I wondered if I'd ever been as sure of anything in my entire life as I was of that conviction, in that moment, in that place that was everywhere and nowhere all at once.
~-~-~
The morning after the 'incident', as I had come to call it in my mind, I had woken to the feeling of black wool against my cheek and the sight of a new inhaler and a steaming cup of tea in front of my face. The tea was Lapsang Souchong, a variety that I'd had Sebastian buy from Lau on a few occasions, but one that I had never quite developed a taste for. I drank it in silence and bit back my pride, knowing that my butler had selected this particular tea on purpose—if this was the only way he could find to chastise me, I would bear it with my tail tucked between my legs.
Once I could manage to overlook the tension between Sebastian and me, I found myself being quite bored over the next few days. No matter where we looked, no matter who we talked to, all we ever found were brick walls and dead ends. Somehow, in the middle of a city that never let anyone get away, the kidnapped children seemed to have completely vanished. Even Sebastian was coming up empty handed, and the frustration was beginning to color his usually blank face.
However, on the morning of January twenty-eighth, we left the house armed with fresh determination. After six days of fruitless searching, the Queen's attendants had sent her Watchdog a new letter.
During the night, Clair had been returned to her bed.
Luckily, of the families that had been victimized, I was most familiar with the Gundermoores. I had been to their home many times, and, consequently, Clair's comfort level with me was high enough that I could question her without being too much of an imposition. It didn't hurt that her mother liked me quite a bit as well.
Their estates were located in the far northwest section of London Proper, a good thirty minutes by carriage from where my townhouse was on the eastern border of the city. In the week since we'd left the Phantomhive Estate, the weather had warmed considerably. The streets were still covered in a thick layer of dirty snow, but it had become relatively warm, provided I was standing in the sun. At the very least, I could finally see out of the carriage windows.
On the way to visit Clair, I ended up sitting in the carriage by myself. At some point, Sebastian had decided that having Tanaka drive was unnecessary and had taken up the reins himself. I had a very strong suspicion that he was simply creating an opportunity to be away from me, but of course I had no way to prove it.
If I were honest with myself, I didn't really understand why Sebastian still seemed angry. I had kept something important from him, I knew that, but was it really important enough that the usually stoic demon would allow himself to be affected this deeply? I wanted to talk to him, to pull the answer out of him, but I knew Sebastian better than I knew anyone—if he didn't want to tell me, then he certainly wasn't going to, regardless of anything I might do in an attempt to persuade him.
Soon, the carriage jolted to a stop in front of the Gundermoore mansion, a huge brick structure that was certainly larger than the four occupants and their house servants needed it to be. Not that I could talk, really, with the countryside manor I kept just for myself.
I knew where Clair's bedroom was, and we headed there almost immediately despite Cecilia's offer to have me sit down for tea. When I pushed open the door, I steeled myself for whatever it was I might find inside. The Queen's letter had been very vague about the condition Clair was in upon her return, and there was no telling what might have happened to the eight year old during her absence, or what new scars she might have on her body—or her mind.
"Clair? Can I come in?" At her murmur of assent, I pushed to door open the rest of the way, and walked into the room, followed closely by Sebastian.
"Hello, Ciel. Sebastian. How are you?"
"I think we should be more worried about you. You had your parents very anxious," I said, sitting down on the edge of her bed. She was tucked under the covers, and her long, red hair was spread out over the pillows like a fiery halo around her skull. Her little hands were gripping the edge of the coverlet, as thought she couldn't decide whether she wanted to cast it off or pull it more closely to her chin.
"I know...they thought something bad was happening to me. But it wasn't," She smiled at me and took one of my hands in hers. "I was ok. I was even there with my friends, Marie and Francesca. Do you know them?"
I nodded, because Marie Brownstone and Francesca Belmont were two of the other children who were in the files sitting on my desk back at the townhouse.
"Where is 'there'? Do you know where you were, or who took you there?"
The noise of Sebastian shifting slightly in the room was the only thing that broke the silence as the girl looked pointedly down at her coverlet.
"No...I don't know. They put a blindfold on my eyes, and by the time I got it off they were gone. They didn't talk while they were near me, so I don't know what they sounded like, either. I'm sorry..."
I squeezed her hand gently to reassure her, and her eyes lifted to meet my one-eyed gaze.
"All that matters is that you are back home, unharmed. There were a lot of things that could have happened to you, Clair. We were worried."
"I'm ok, Ciel. Really. But I am sort of tired...I didn't sleep very well while I was gone."
I nodded, getting up from the bed. We would leave her to get the rest that she deserved—we had gotten all the information from her that we would be able to get. As I waved goodbye and shut the bedroom door, my brain was working at a speed that it reserved only for the Queen's cases. It didn't make any sense for someone to return a kidnapped child without getting something from it. To take something forcibly and then return it without benefiting somehow...wasn't normal.
And in my vast experience, abnormal criminals usually meant headaches for the Lord Phantomhive.
"What does this mean?" I asked, running a nervous hand through my hair.
"It means, Young Master, that the person who took young Miss Gundermoore has profited from this in some way we are unaware of."
Sebastian turned to me, an unasked question in his eyes: 'What do you command, My Lord?'
I reached behind me, untying the knot on my eye patch with the unaffected grace of someone who'd been doing it for too long.
"Sebastian, I order you to find out who did this. Find out what they wanted, what they got from Clair. You are not to return until you do."
"Yes, My Lord," he replied, and a moment later he was gone, and the only thing that lingered in the hallway was the smell of the finest black wool.
I had to know. The collar was tightening around my neck, and I prayed that this wasn't the time when I finally suffocated from it.
~-~-~
a/n: I don't think they had inhalers back then, but I couldn't find any information on the subject. So, this is what I based Ciel's off of:
www(dot)sciencemuseum(dot)org(dot)uk(slash)images(slash)I054(slash)10322298(dot)aspx
It's an early inhaler for anesthesia.