The main hall was vacuous almost. The walls were a pasty medical white, whilst the floors were checkered tiles. The ceiling felt too low, even for a short kid like Ciel. He looked up at it, almost thinking that he saw it slowly lowering to crush him, those pale tiles, splotched randomly by water stains. He looked to one side, saw a hall seemingly stretching to infinity, then to the other only to see the same thing. Ciel's eye lingered on the hall to his right, why he wasn't sure. But then a sound, a sharp clicking noise, caught his attention. He jerked his head so he faced directly ahead.
A tall old desk was there, cluttered with papers and files. Two large filing cabinets balanced either side, with a large set of mail slots in the center. Sitting at the desk was a woman with hair as red as Grell's but twice as unkempt. She wore large glasses that magnified her eyes immensely as she typed at the machine before her. Ciel stared uncomfortably, feeling stress and anxiety permeating from her.
Grell, who was standing beside the boy the whole time, walking up to the desk. "Ms. Mey Rin!" he chippered in a pleasant voice, "may you please give our new arrival a key to his room?"
No response; she still clicked and clacked on the typewriter.
Grell turned his head back to the waiting boy and smiled, giving a one-more-moment sort of look. He turned back. "Ms. Mey Rin, may you please give our new arrival a key to his room?" His voice had lost its previous cheerfulness and was marked with annoyance.
No response. Grell sighed deeply. He bent over the desktop towards the working woman, sticking his ass high in the air.
"MEY RIN!"
Simultaneously, the woman in question screamed at the top of her lungs, shot up straight in the air, and pushed her typewriter forward, causing it to fall of the desk. It crashed to the floor with a loud smash, nearly crushing Grell's toes as he quickly jumped backwards, his ass almost colliding with Ciel's face.
"I'M SO SORRY, I AM!" she screamed as she dived over the desk in a vain attempt to catch the falling metallic object, causing papers to come flying in multiple locations like psychotic confetti. Unfortunately, her adequately sized breasts caught her on the edge of the desk, causing her to hang precariously on it as her glasses slipped onto the bridge of her nose and arms began to flail wildly in an attempt to grab the papers just out of reach.
Ciel simply stood there and watched with mild amusement.
Grell, having recovered, stood up and began to move about erratically. "Sweet Jesus Almighty!" he yelled dramatically, as if surviving a near-death-experience. "You incompetent ginger! How dare you nearly kill me like that!?"
"I'm so sorry sir!" Mey Rin was still desperately grabbing at air upon the table. "I'll get all the papers once my arms can reach them, I will!"
Grell turned to Ciel, who was just beginning to laugh. "I am ashamed that your….eye had to be assaulted with a display of such gross incompetence! Mey Rin! Please get this child his key at once so he can be assaulted no longer!"
"Righto!"
Still lacking the rather obvious sense to get up, Mey Rin began to slowly swivel around on the desk, attempting to turn around to face the cubby wall. Somewhere in her pivoting, one leg got caught over the other, and she, like her mechanical predecessor, fell over the edge of the desk and onto the cluttered floor with a loud THUNNKK!
Mey Rin then commenced to flail about like a cockroach turned over, yelling and muttering senselessly, her glasses now resting somewhere amid all of the papers.
Grell turned to Ciel once again, his face now marred in a mix of contempt and embarrassment. "Funnily enough, this is the second time this has occurred this week."
"Really now?"
Grell sighed and made his way behind the desk, picking one of the keys from a cubby hole near the top. It was brass and had a tag displaying the number 13 in bold red letters. Grell then began to walk to the right hall way, briefly stopping to gesture for Ciel to follow.
"This way to your room!"
Ciel quickly followed, not wanting to be left alone with the still flailing secretary. "Uh, sir?" Ciel called as he caught up to the walking man. "I thought you were going to take me on a tour?"
Grell stopped. "Oh. Yeah. Well, you see, I think I am running late to a meeting with my beautician, so I am just going to take you to your room and let your roommate show you around!"
Ciel wasn't sure whether the man was lying or being honest.
"Oh! So I have a roommate?"
"Yes! I think you will find him most….hospitable. Here, it is only a few steps this way."
They continued down the long white hallway for some time. It seemed to stretch endlessly. The generally blank walls were intermittently decorated with bulletin boards or the occasional clock. There were no windows, the only source of light being the frosted bulbs above. Some flickered, some buzzed, but all were dim and yellow, causing a certain eeriness to fill the hallway.
Along the way they passed several doors, possibly rooms for patients. They all were of a dark wood with a small grating on the top for a sort of window.
Grell made no attempt to talk to Ciel the entire way down, opting to merely hum to himself and drum his fingers along the sides of the front on his coat. Ciel simply held his bear close to himself and tried to be as small as possible, wondering what kept the older man beside him from being in one of those rooms as well.
Eventually Grell stopped at a door at the end of the hallway.
"Well, here it is! Dinner's at eight!" Grell turned on his heels and was gone down the other way before the child could say more.
Ciel watched the red coat of the man get smaller and smaller as he walked away. He turned his back toward the door. It seemed so big all of a sudden. He felt the cold metal in his hand as he stretched his arm out to the keyhole.
"It's open!" yelled a tired voice from within.
Ciel turned the knob and entered.
He found himself in a small room, the lights dim, the walls blank. A smell, strong and heavy, filled the air like a haze, stinging his nose and clouding his head and eyes. It smelled like fruit and spice. He wrinkled his nose at it.
He heard a giggle. "Do you like it? It's incense, bought from bazaar at Constantinople. I got it for my birthday last year. They say it gets you excited, if you know what I mean." There was another giggle, sharp and girlish.
Ciel did his best to look around the room, but had a hard time due to his squinting eyes from the haze. One bed was empty, but the other wasn't. In it, posed like some nymph from a French postcard, was a boy.
His gaze could only be described as lazy yet absolutely starving. Icey blue eyes were half lidded, resting on a face perfectly pale and handsome. Though they were tired, there was a sense of hunger in them, as if his eyes wished to devour the boy before them. Like Grell's in a way, but markedly different.
Red lips were pulled into a half smirk. Blonde hair fell about his head. He rested on his side, one hand acting as a sort of pedestal upon which his cranium rested, the other lying listlessly upon his side. He wore a simple dark shirt along with shorts that ended halfway on slim and smooth thighs. He was shoeless and sockless like a child.
Like Narcissus, thought the boy in the doorway, like Narcissus resting near a pond.
"Hello, Ciel." The boy spoke in a voice dripping with lust and ego. "Welcome to Blackwood, the kingdom of dreams and madness. I am Alois Trancy. Remember that name. You'll either dread it or beg to hear it again and again."
One thought that entered Ciel's head at this moment: Where the fuck did my parents dump me?!
A/N: I am SO sorry for being late on the updates! I have been SO damn busy these past few weeks! I know this is rather short but I think I got my point across. Thank you all so much and don't forget to review (if you want, that is)! Thanks for everything!
