Wrong Turning:
Chapter 14:
He opened his eye with some difficulty and found it so tiring that he gave up and closed it again. Faintly he could hear someone telling to wake up and something being pushed down his throat.
He ignored the voice and fell into unconsciousness.
He woke up for real and found himself in a yellow painted room with something attached to his hand. He blinked a few times and saw someone with red hair and a white coat standing by his bed.
Was he in hospital?
He looked at the person by his bed again and recognised her.
It was his aunt.
He tried to speak and a wave of dryness in his throat prevented him. He remembered everything then. Sebastian had revealed his face and just about killed him.
"Don't try to speak at the moment," she ordered and then shed the doctor persona. "Don't worry me like that again!"
He underwent an examination and found out exactly what had happened. He had needed resuscitation and intubation and had been unconscious for almost two days.
"How am I still alive? No one else knew I was there?" he asked once he had been given water and a supply of stronger painkillers.
Angelina sat down in the chair next to his bed.
"A combined effort of people that were sharper than you," she said with no genuine rebuke.
"I should not have trusted him," Ciel sighed.
"No, you should not have," she agreed. "You have people wanting to see you. When are you ready to have visitors?"
Visitors probably entailed Lizzie or Alois. Lizzie had made him promise to not get tricked by him and Alois had never liked him. Seeing them would remind him how stupid he had been to go along with Sebastian. He wasn't ready for that yet.
"Tomorrow perhaps."
Her response was to nod and stand up.
"They are at reception, I'll go and tell them to come back tomorrow."
Ciel caught the back of her coat. "What happened to them?"
She understood exactly what he meant.
"The three of them fled. You need to give a statement to the Police when you are ready so warrants can be issued for their arrests."
She left him then and he lay there alone. He had messed up badly. He had known Sebastian was highly suspicious from that start and had begun to trust him once Sebastian had changed. It had all been an act.
He had even admitted to that sadistic bastard that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with him.
The sight of Lizzie and Alois walking together into his room was one of the most surreal things he had even seen. His cousin was decked out in pink and her giant bow in her hair had been reinstated. Alois had toned down his outfit by omitting the booty shorts, but the clash of varying shades of purple was painful to see.
Lizzie held out a green tin to him.
"I brought you a present. I didn't think you would be able to cope with nasty hospital tea so I have some teabags."
Ciel accepted it awkwardly having no immediate plans to drink tea ever again due to the reminder of Sebastian. He looked over at Alois who had his hands behind his back.
"I brought some books with me."
His friend passed over a stack of novels and Ciel struggled to hold the weight with a IV on his hand so Lizzie placed them on the bedside table.
"How did you all manage to find me?" he asked to break the silence that had been present once the gift giving was completed.
"It was me, Will, Elizabeth and your aunt," Alois informed him. "I stopped by to see how you were recovering and Will told me that he had heard you leave with Sebastian an hour before. I found that extremely strange so I called your aunt- she gave me her number when we first met in case anything happened."
Ciel thought back to his aunt's mysterious visit. The reason for it was clear now. She had been suspicious of why someone had wanted to send him there.
"It turned out she was pretty suspicious of Sebastian and called me to ask if I knew anything. I remembered your question about your old house and we added things up together. I called the Police out there. You were found almost dead in the ruins with no sign of any of them," Lizzie explained.
Ciel resolved to have a word with his aunt about her suspicions of Sebastian and why she hadn't said a word to him.
"Were you under some sort of agreement for revenge with him?" Alois questioned. "I remembered that question you asked me once."
"Yes, we were in some sort of agreement. It was all simply a trap."
"You should have told me about it instead of keeping it quiet. Sebastian was clearly a sadistic dickhead from the start."
He saw Lizzie kick Alois under his bed for asking a question like that. He smiled slightly over that. She had always been a little overprotective of him.
"He was."
The already awkward conversation lapsed into silence and was only interrupted when his aunt poked her head in. She apologised for interrupting and checked his neck.
"You have some nasty bruises forming. They won't be permanent," she informed him and rearranged his duvet. "Were you all busy talking?"
The look on Ciel's face was enough of an answer. She pulled a pack of playing cards out her pocket.
"I confiscated these from the children's ward. A group of them were playing poker with them for the use of the hospital toys. You can play with them. Be warned, Ciel is very good."
She left them to it. Ciel shuffled the cards and arranged them neatly. An hour later he had won £50 from Alois and £20 from Lizzie.
"How is he still winning?" he heard Alois whisper to Lizzie. "If he wins anymore, I can't do my laundry this week. I have five pairs of shorts to wash, you know."
That made Ciel smile and he realised he had been spotted when Lizzie beamed at him.
"You finally smiled! You looked so down when we came here and Aunt Ann said she heard from the nurse on night duty that you had nightmares," Lizzie said.
"I will be fine in a few days."
He obtained a further background information from his aunt later on. She came in and visibly relaxed when she saw him sitting up reading a book instead of lying down and looking miserable.
"You look better," she commented and dragged a chair over. "I need to confess something."
Ciel looked up and remembered he was missing her side of the story.
"When you were looking into universities, I received an offer. The sender said they would pay part of your university fees and your maintenance loan if you did Business at a certain university. The sender claimed to be sympathetic about the downfall of Funtom and suggested you take Business so you could build it up again. Half the money was provided with the letter and I agreed to it and challenged you to that chess match."
The Earl gritted his teeth. Had she really sent him there based on that?
"I had a personal reason too," she seemed to guess his thoughts. "I knew you wanted to study Maths at Cambridge, but I didn't think the social side and the types of people there would help you."
Help him? Did that mean she had always known more than she had let on?
She took hold of the arm that wasn't connected to an IV and pushed up the sleeve on the pyjamas he was wearing. Ciel's eye widened.
"I've know what you've been doing for a long time."
Ciel tore his arm out her grip. "Why did you never help me!?"
His aunt averted her eyes. "It was mistake to never try to help you. I thought you would be fine as long as you didn't overdo it- I would have stepped in if you had shown signs of getting worse. I thought it would be something that you would grow out of when you go to university."
"I thought you were a doctor," Ciel said harshly.
She looked guilty. "I have made several mistakes with your safety now. When you came back for reading week with no new marks I was very relieved. Then I noticed how worried you were."
"So you visited me."
Something must have made her change her mind and give him that offer to give up and come home.
"I came to see who was around you. I knew it wasn't Alois - I began to think it was one of your flatmates causing you distress. I met Sebastian and he was so creepy and suspicious. He called me Madam Red."
"What's the significance of that? You do wear a lot of red."
Angelina now looked embarrassed. "It's what I used to be called at parties. I haven't been to a party since I adopted you so it was strange. I didn't think that it was a coincidence that he used that name so I told you that you could leave at any time."
Ciel stared at her silently. She had had his best interests at heart when she had sent him there. They had both made mistakes regarding trust and believing lies.
For the following day his only visitor was Lizzie as Alois had an important tutorial to attend. She had brought flowers and cards from people he knew. Finny had given him a bouquet of flowers that he had clearly picked himself as there was still soil on the stems. Bardroy's flowers smelled heavily of smoke. His university course had teamed together to sign a card and a box of chocolates.
He watched Lizzie struggle to arrange Finny's mismatched flowers in a vase and since she was taking so long his mind drifted off onto other matters.
Prior to making the contract Sebastian had said that there was no point in the price of their contract being his death as he had already decided to give up on life. So why had the real price been his death?
"Are you thinking about him again?" Lizzie's voice jerked him out his thoughts.
Ciel explained what he had been wondering about just so he could get someone else's view on it.
"He is a very cruel person is all I can say," she commented unexpectedly. "He gave you things to live for so when he came to take your life you would not want to die."
With that he understood. Sebastian had seduced him just to be cruel right at the end. He was never going to make a mistake like that again.
"Do you still want to live so you can get revenge on him?"
He was unable to answer that. It was a complex question. Trying to obtain revenge for what happened eight years ago had almost caused his downfall. Going after Sebastian would probably be the end of him and when he woke up in hospital he had been relived to find out that he had survived. He didn't have a genuine desire to die.
He looked at Lizzie and saw that she was fiddling with her hair. Having spent a lot of his childhood with her, he recognised what it meant.
"What do you have to tell me?"
She pointed at the flowers. "There was one more bouquet delivered this morning. It was some lilies. Aunt Ann took them…"
From that Ciel knew who the sender was.
"Were they from him?"
"There was a card with them- that's now she knew who they were from. There was a USB with it that she gave to the Police."
"What did the card say?"
His aunt had probably taken it too. He was surprised when she produced it from her bag.
"Aunt Ann said I could give it to you if I thought you were ready for it."
She handed it over and Ciel opened it.
Dear Ciel,
I hope you like my flowers. I chose lilies to represent how close you were to death.
Do you think your survival was due to my incompetence? Or that it was a miracle?"
The answer is neither. I let you survive. I regretted that I did not get to play with you enough so I let you go.
My parents believe that you are dead so I am now free of them. As a thank you for that I have enclosed a USB containing copies of everything we ever found and a recording of Ash admitting everything. You can do anything you want with it- I do not care what happens to them.
One day, I will come to you to take the price properly. So please keep living for that. Feel free to try to track me down first- I get to see you sooner that way.
Yours lovingly.
Sebastian
xxx
Ciel crumpled the card in his hand.
"Bloody sadist," he cursed.
"What are you going to do?" Lizzie asked worriedly.
Ciel flanked out the window at the clear blue sky outside,
"I'm going to live so I can outwit him when he comes for me."
The End
This fanfiction is a rewrite of my first Kuroshitsuji fanfiction written in 2012 on another account. The original has a completely different and the price of the contract was exactly what it sounded like. If anyone wants to read it, they can ask for the name. Hint: it's alliterative and someone in the reviews already recognised it.
Is this my last Kuroshitsuji fanfiction?
Possibly. I am not really an avid fan anymore. It doesn't hold my interest as much as it did. I might just need a break from Kuroshitsuji fanfiction, but who knows what the future holds.
-Charlotte