A/N: Sorry for the long wait, ladies and gents! I had Deaf Camp this past week so there was no time for writing anything I'm afraid. :) But here it is and longer than usual too! This chapter is mostly CielXHarry interactions, building their relationship further.
IMPORTANT PLEASE READ!
Okay, there has been some confusion over Harry and Sebastian being mates so I felt the need to clarify. Harry and Sebastian are not currently mates! After all, you don't go and marry every person you sleep with do you? In the last chapter it talks briefly about how, even instinctually, Harry rejected him as his mate. The process of becoming mates does not just involve sex, which we will see later on and which Harry has been against up until this point. Also, there is a time jump of a few weeks between this chapter and the last as well as several during the course of this chapter. I don't particularly care for filler chapters so I'll be skipping some time here. Thank you.
Disclaimer: Nope.
Warnings: Slash, Mpreg, Dub-Con.
Chapter Ten... "Absence from whom we love is worse than death, and frustrates hope severer than despair." ~William Cowper
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'I was curled in strong arms, a grinning pair of lips nuzzling the skin of my neck. It felt nice...this freedom. In a dreamscape, there was no pressure to worry about was should and shouldn't be. There was no need for right and wrong. No place for guilt. I reached back, a groan spilling off of my tongue, to wind my fingers in pitch colored hair.
"Impatient are we?"
"We are." I quipped back lightly, tugging on the dark locks with a smirk.
Teeth scraped over the exposed flesh of my throat and I winced though there was no pain. In the real world, my throat was littered with healing bites. Here in the dream world, pain was nonexistent. The outside world was the dream in this place. A hand trailed over my exposed stomach, not with the intention to inflame but simply to admire. To appreciate and adore rather than lust after. If only there could be this out there. This soft, sweetness tinged with mischief. If only things were different from this eternal waiting hell I'd found myself trapped in. A kiss tickled my collarbone. Then again...there were certainly upsides to this life.
"Tell me." He whispered to me, voice barely above a breath, "Tell me why you care for the Earl so much."
Ciel. My little one. My little princeling. So strong but so hurt too.
"He's...like a sparrow who's wings have been cut. His body is hurt and broken but his spirit, that indomitable spirit refuses to give up. Ciel is Harry Potter. They are the same. Children raised to die who stood against evil men."
"But you are Harry Potter. Aren't you?"
Was I? Is that righteous boy-soldier really who I was now? Was I still that person? The enemy, the lover, the betrayer, the friend? Or was I more Samael now than Potter? More of the demon instead of the wizard?
"I hardly know anymore."
My partner hummed, seemingly as if in acceptance of my answer but he never gave any verbal indication of what he thought of my explanation. He kept his opinions on the matter entirely to himself. After all, what good would they do? It wouldn't stop me from loving Ciel. Crimson eyes took me in stoically and in his eyes there was an endlessness that threatened to rob me of reality entirely if I looked to close. I would be drawn in to the fantasy, forever trapped in it.
"I'm waiting for you, Harry."
My voice caught in my throat and I fought against the burn in my eyes. Harry. That's who I was. But was it possible to be both Harry Potter and Samael? Could I be both in one? It sounded like a daunting task, a frightening possibility for my future that I had never even attempted to consider. Could I remain who I was but accept this new part of me too? Accept the demon I had grown to be as well as the wizard? No answer was forthcoming.
"I know."
That would be the last time I saw Tom in my dreams and somehow, when I awoke, I knew this fact as if it were indisputable. And with that lonely knowledge, I hid in the depths of shadows where curious carmine eyes could not spy and I wept.
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~ "Hating the one you love is harder than loving the one you hate." -Cristina Orante
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I grimaced as the levitating charm I shot went suddenly wide, sending several teacups bouncing up in the air before crashing back down to their tray, shattering. So much for floating the tea tray. The cups themselves hadn't made it more than a handful of inches from their places before the spell gave out. Ugh! Merlin be damned, what now?! The heat was over! Yet Fate seemed content to make a fool of me once more! It was always one thing after another, wasn't it? Typical.
"You need to feed." Sebastian's voice came from behind as he entered the kitchen bearing away the Earl's finished tea service. The demon's eyes frowned, taking in my badly muddled spell. Dear Merlin, if I was mucking up first year spells, we were in serious trouble, "You are weakening yourself and your magic by refusing to take sustenance."
Sustenance that required the death of a human being. A living breathing person with thoughts and feelings, with family and friends. Could I make myself a murderer that way? Certainly I would in defense of Ciel, but could I justify it only to sustain my own hellish existence? Was murder really the best course? And if demons were immortal then could I die from the starvation of souls? If the answer was no, then there was no need to kill in order to live. I would continue on anyways, perhaps a little weaker but hadn't I been just that as a human? I just had to keep telling myself that I had been this weak before, this frail. I had been human and no matter how long it had been since then, humans could live just well and fine with their weakness. Some even reveled in it. So I shrugged off his observation and slid my wand, the focus rapidly becoming temperamental from not being used to it's liking, back into its holster within my body.
"Again with this? You know I won't do that."
Sebastian sighed.
"Still with these foolish human sentiments. It is truly disappointing, my raven. Sickening, really." His viridian gaze showed that he truly did find my lack of desire for souls a disappointment. I snorted. Good. Maybe then he would leave me well enough alone. Maybe then he would finally regret turning me into this...this thing. But...did I really want him to? After this peculiar sort of truce we had found in the last few weeks since my heat had ended, did I want to go back to the bitter warring state we had been in before? The lack of a good answer to that question put me on edge.
"Terribly sorry to be so repulsive to you." I drawled unapologetically, sneering at the butler who cleaned up the broken china with preternatural efficiency.
A mischievous smirk twisted his handsome face into something both wicked and arousing all at once. My heart began to thud in my chest.
"You are far from repulsive to me, Samael. I can assure you of that." My true name rolled off of his tongue like poisoned honey and turned the title into something deviously sensual, even erotic.
Blood flushed to my face at the sound. Sebastian earned a glare for the blatant seduction attempt and I turned to leave the room, and him, behind.
"Don't call me that." I shot back while trying and failing to curb my embarrassing reactions to his ridiculous flirtations where no one could witness my shame.
I would just take a pip down to Undertaker's for tea and bone biscuits. Someplace where I didn't have to worry about some demon sticking their big headed gob into my business all day!
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~"I wonder if I've been changed in the night. Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?'"―Lewis Carroll,Alice in Wonderland
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Ciel sat next to me in the garden on a late summer afternoon as we went over preparations to visit the London town home for the Season. It was a bittersweet time for our little Earl, though he would never admit such weakness in front of Sebastian. It was this time last year that he had said goodbye to his aunt for the last time. This would be the first year that he took to the social season without Madame Red at his side. He had been understandably distracted during our preparations so that now, at the last minute, we were finally going over the lists of accommodations and invitations he had responded favorably to. Sebastian stood at his side, as always, serving us both tea and interjecting his own thoughts and opinions here and there as wanted.
I popped a sweet blueberry scone into my mouth as tea was served, a moan of appreciation sounding nearly erotic if the sudden heat in the butler's eyes was anything to judge by. That all changed when I took an eager sip of the liquid ambrosia I had been provided. And promptly spat it back out in disgust.
"Ugh! Sebastian! This is terrible!" The butler didn't even have feign the affront on his face. It had been quite some time since the demon had difficulties making something as simple as tea. To muck it up so badly had to be a joke!
"I beg your pardon?"
I poured the hot liquid out into a nearby bush with a grimace, distaste written in my every feature, "What are you trying to do, poison us? It tastes like metal, like blood!"
His eyes darkened in irritation and I could feel it coming through from his side of our link in waves. Ciel was discreetly sniffing his own cup though did not appear to have come to the same repulsive conclusion as I had. His cerulean eye gazed between the two of us in suspicion. Sebastian was only looking more and more offended.
"I can assure you, Harry, that there is nothing wrong with either the food nor the drink I have prepared now or ever. May I be the first to say that my culinary skills are superb."
Ciel took a delicate sip, much to my horror. What if he got sick?! What if he was poisoned?! Despite Sebastian's good intentions, there were others who would jump at the chance to see the Earl of Phantomhive dead and buried. Perhaps it was a mild poison that my demonic tastes could pick up but his blander human ones couldn't? But Sebastian was practically ancient, even amongst our kind. He would have picked up something like that, right? And what reason would he have to poison his own master?
"He's right, Harry. The tea tastes just as it always does." The noble child said calmly and slowly as if he were reassuring a rabid animal.
I wasn't convinced. To the consternation of my sire, the horror of the servants and Ciel's vague amusement, I spent the next several hours combing through the food pantry and throwing out every scrap and leaf of tea that I could find. With Ciel's safety, I wasn't taking any chances.
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~ "Mother is God in the eyes of a child"- Silent Hill, 2008
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I knew the moment that Ciel had awoken. Even as far as the quaint country-side hills surrounding the manor for miles, , his fledgling bond to me snapped to attention. I could hear him mentally cry out for me across the distance, feel his pain and fear. His need called out to me on levels that I had yet to analyze too closely and I did something in that moment that I had avoided doing for some years.
I apparated.
What had started as sniffles and a cough here and there the day before had turned for the worst into a fever that raged and hammered against the frail defenses of my little one's immune system. Sebastian was there, I vaguely noted, but at the time he seemed so unimportant, so easy to overlook. In the face of my Ciel, my little sky, bent over his bed vomiting, the demon may as well have been a decoration on the wall for all the attention I payed him.
The room smelled of sickness. I could hear the struggling in his tiny, weak lungs as he struggled for breath, a rattling that sent alarm surging through my being. There was fluid there. Pneumonia? Pneumonia in this world could be lethal...His heaves halted as I crossed to his side, retrieving my wand and beginning to cast ever medical and healing spell that I could scrounge up from my war days as a human. There weren't many but enough to stabilize him and remove the foreign buildup in his pink, bird-like lungs. His body would fight off the rest of the fever in its own time, I tried to tell myself. I didn't believe it. There was an anxiety building within me. A wildness I didn't understand but that echoed my breeding cycle in the way that it hovered just beneath my conscious awareness. It was creeping up like the tide. When Ciel's eyes began to drift closed from exhaustion, I could not force my arms to let go of him. I rocked him gently, humming soothing tunes to his shivering form. Some were nonsensical, some I could vaguely recall from my days as a human but, either way, they did the trick. His normalized breathing evened out into soft puffs of air. Even when he was long asleep, something in me would not allow me to leave his side. I settled down beneath the covers with him, folding his miniscule figure up in a comforting embrace. I wasn't sure who it eased more, myself or the child.
It wasn't until the first light crept over the edge of the window sill and emotionless, blank crimson eyes finally caught my attention, that I realized that I had disregarded and ignored Sebastian's presence the entire time. I hadn't paid him the slightest acknowledgment at all. There was a meaning there in that fact and though I could not read it, it was clear that he could and Sebastian did not look pleased.
A/N: There we go! A bit longer for your wait! Now the ball is really getting rolling and we are officially past the first stage of the story. Things are about to get real, ladies and gents! Real dramatic, that is!