10. I am the soft stars that shine at night.
The starlight shone equally on the house where Lizzie slept, and, far across the lands of ruined mud and trenches, the fitful sleep of a grandson with the same bright green eyes. He had that kind of luck, they said. The kind that is hard to believe in theory but easy enough, when it's the enemy's fire; the kind of luck his grandmother had as well, although she had not been in the war. When the starlight shone down cold and soft, it caught the planes of exhausted faces, it drew itself, a blanket, over uncovered shoulders. And perhaps, for a few short hours, it could give them rest.
And the violence would go on; the atrocities and the horrors and the desperate measures, the heroics and the senseless deaths, while the sun began to set over the Empire that had dared the dark to come.
/
I recognize this, Ciel thought, when they descended into hell. It was rawness and screaming, despair and ever-reaching. It was the worst that could never be imagined, and it was the ubiquitous mundanity of life. It was not, to his surprise, so very different from the Earth at all.
It was only after some time, when a weary tired feeling had begun to fall, that he realized that it lacked the breath of the wind, the glinting of the sun over shallow waters, the small imperceptible kindnesses that were so easy to overlook up there.
But all in all, it was as surviveable as any kind of life.
"Sebastian," Ciel asked, once, there. "What is it that you find so interesting about humanity?"
"I think I have listed the many ways," Sebastian said.
"...That it is similar to hell, or different?" Ciel continued. "Which one constitutes the focus for any kind of curiosity? The commonsense idea would be to assume the differences, and yet I doubt that purity is what draws you toward them."
"I would think," Sebastian said, "that it is in the intersection between the two. The large similarities that are hardly acknowledged, and the minute differences that are beyond understanding, that beg for consideration. There is nothing to consider in a vacuum."
"Is that all it is, then?" Ciel continued. "Scientific curiosity? Doesn't that preclude animalism and hunger?"
"I don't find that it does," Sebastian replied, after thought. "Although I resent the connection of those two terms."
"Don't tell me," said Ciel with a mocking smile, "that you are about to argue you are not a beast."
"I may be," Sebastian admitted. "But I have never yet seen anything that wasn't—including humans, though you wish to deny it. It is merely that some beasts are able to comprehend the possibility of something beyond a menial existence."
"And that includes you?" Ciel asked.
"As you said…" Sebastian added. "Why else would one be curious, at all?"
(At some point; in the darkness
In the fear of memories and the future
And: Tantalus reached for food, but it slipped away.)
"I thought I wished to be rid of the world," Ciel continued, once, there. "But there is something about it, still, that nags at me, that I can't yet let go of." He did not say this, and Sebastian did not answer. He did not say this, but it fell down a thousand oubliettes and seeped out through the walls, like water.
And Ciel asked, "what is death?"
How strange, to have been fearing and longing for something he couldn't even articulate, something he couldn't even comprehend.
"That is, perhaps, a question more suited to a death-god than I."
"And eternity?"
"Life, I suppose."
That leaves, of course, the question, what is life? Ciel thought. Greater minds than his own (he was loath to admit those did exist, but hell had many geniuses after all) had stumbled on that question, reduced to listing its attributes as though somehow it would cohere—in defiance of the fact that what they were trying to define was, in the end, that ineffable quality that made it cohere at all.
.
.
.