The manor is burning. Everything is burning down around him, and he is screaming for mother and father, but they are not coming. They are… they are lying on the ground. Their heads are down, close together… like they had been holding each other when they… the blood is all over, and the house rings with emptiness… Sebastian is dead on the floor, the—the blood is everywhere, and there is no way out. He is alone, and he runs and runs but the corridors are endless, and then they come.
"I'm going to see the ruins," Ciel says. "Sebastian will take me there. It shouldn't take long. I'll have to decide what to do with it eventually, it might as well be now."
"All right," his aunt answers, softly. "Write to me, if you end up staying longer, would you? Even if it's just a telegraph." He can see the worry and sadness that cloud her eyes; the smooth polished jet of her intricate necklace and earrings, the black of her dress, remind him of her own unspoken mourning.
"Of course," he says, and kisses her on the cheek when she leans down to hug him. There is a catch in her breathing, but she remains dry-eyed, and he is thankful.
It seems like shaking off a cloud, riding out of London early in the morning. In a literal way, that is true, for the air becomes clearer the further the train travels, past the brick and stone that makes the city and over the sleeping fields, until even the memory of it has vanished into the crisp country air. Ciel sits alone in the first class carriage, Sebastian taking third class with the luggage, and he leans forward toward the glass as he watches everything stream past below him.
His earrings are jet, now. It had taken some tricky work, and his aunt had bit off more than one muffled curse halfway when she realized that she was speaking in front of her beloved nephew. It had been him that asked her to change them, for as beautiful as the blue looked, it wasn't proper for mourning. The sapphire jewels went back into their case, waiting for when he would put off the black. These new ones were hers.
"I wasn't even sure I had small ones like these," she had confided to him. Most of her own jewelry was large and dangling.
She'd gotten into a right row about it with Sebastian when she'd first seen what they'd done, but Sebastian had been as unfailingly polite as he could be when he really wanted, and countered all of her shrieking with the medical information the woman who'd performed the procedure had informed him of. That calmed Aunt Anne down as nothing else could, and very soon they had progressed to discussions about germs and cleanliness, and then, of course, she had asked him what in the world had inspired them to this, and Sebastian had only answered that it was the young master's decision, and if he wanted to tell her, he would.
Ciel had only told her that he thought it looked nice.
"Well, I suppose it does, at that," she had answered at last, and then really taken a good look at him for the first time before promptly squeezing him in a bone-crushing hug, while Ciel asked her weakly to please let go of him now.
"You look stunning, darling," she'd said, when she finally did, and her smile had been unfeigned.
They get off on the platform in town, and Sebastian asks around for some time before he finds someone with a cart willing to take them to the manor.
In the daylight, the ruins already look old and crumbling. Ciel picks his way inside, over stones lying like broken teeth, and charred wood crumbling to ash under his foot; Sebastian takes his arm after the first time he stumbles and doesn't let it go until they have gotten into the center of what is now a wide open place, blackened and mangled, like a wound. An accumulation of frost is crusted over the ground, and the crevasses of broken things make it all look eerie and unfamiliar. Ciel is surprised by how hard it is to match up his memories of the rooms with the ruins; he wanders in aimless circles, staring down at broken pieces, scraps of bright fabric, silver and gold that have survived the burning.
At last, Sebastian says that it is getting late, and he should not stay so long out in the cold. Even in his thick coat and hat and gloves, Ciel is shivering; he had not noticed until Sebastian mentioned it.
"We have one more place to go before we leave," Ciel says. They make their way out of the ruins and across the grounds that are so bare now, grass crunching under his heels, and there is the graveyard, bounded by its iron gate, and there, as he had known there would be, is a new row of graves, a line of four; a monument to the dead. His mother and his father's graves are in the center. On the one side, by his mother's grave, is that last one that doesn't fit: it regards him with his own name, a silent tongue of condemnation. You should be here, it seems to say. Everyone else is. Why have you, of them all, survived? Weak and pathetic as you are; it would have been better if you had died.
He is trying. He is trying to make it right, somehow; not by his vengeance, which is for him alone, but by the fact that he is becoming the person his brother wanted to be. He can hear Sebastian's soft footstep behind him as he steps into the graveyard, and he knows that that he will never meet his family in heaven, not now.
At last, Sebastian says that the driver will certainly not stay any longer, even with the amount they've paid him, and so they walk back to the cart and jostle back into town. The sun is setting, and by the time they've gotten close to those lit places, he can see the stars.
.
.
.
