8/ drowning

Thirteen years old, and Ciel is drowning. It does not, really, feel like falling endlessly into waves. It is pressure, and it is a cold that is encompassing, a vice around his lungs, a knife down his throat. The Campania is falling, rending with a great, hollow groan and pulling everything around it down, like a collapsar. The remains of Drossel Keinz' puppets, lost souls tied to false flesh, are swirling by, weird unconnected pieces, straw heads and silver arms, gold eyes bobbing on the surface—and Ciel, like just another one of them, pulled. Into the whirling mass, and if he thinks enough, he might realize this is the end; but instead all he knows is the cold and the dark underneath of the waves. He has been engulfed. This, he realizes, watching the soft, wormlike image of his fingers in the brine, is the inside of it all, and the sea is a freezing expanse, like the table in the cult had been, cold stone down his spine and the dagger; he of all people knows death, he has felt it so much before. And then—a hand reaching for his. He is being pulled up, and as he breaks the surface he gasps, and the hand is as hot as a brand, reborn for the nth time. He is sitting inside a small boat, shivering even under Sebastian's warm wool coat, and everything is darkness and noise. But he didn't have to, Ciel thinks.

He doesn't know why even in the pink of approaching dawn, when he finally feels Sebastian's blood under his fingers and sees his own hands shaking, shaking, trying to hold him up—why he feels. He is not infallible. The thought chases its way in his head. He can be defeated. (And still, even then—) He came back for me.

When he was a child he had known the names for emotions: anger was for the helpless press of suction inside his lungs when he couldn't breathe; sadness was for the loss of his favorite stuffed rabbit, happiness was the endless expanse of days running under the sun, Lizzie towing him by the hand; why even now do those days exist under the tint of gold?

None of those had been able to encapsulate what happened in the cult. None had been able to encapsulate what happened after—what was "fear" and "triumph" when they were one and the same? How could he begin to disentangle the flame that burned in him when he saw the shining in Sebastian's dangerous, beastly eyes? He had wiped it all clean, made a new self in which all emotions were only an alluring intensity of want, or the clammy, false pretenses he wore otherwise. And so he does not wonder to name the thing now flaring in his breast, the thing which urges him to hold tight to Sebastian's shoulders as the butler heaves and shakes, the thing that sends the tingle like waking nerves down his shoulders, elbows, hands; he only knows that Sebastian is here.

Don't scare me like that.

Don't ever scare me like that.

Not again.

/

In the dark bath, as Sebastian drifted into the deep places, Ciel felt. In the unravelling between them, it was nothing, then, to open the space where Sebastian poured the fifth drop, even as Sebastian hid inside the great expanse of night-dark, and Ciel could taste the essence of him even there, like wine; and ever there, where he could pull the covers over them as though, perhaps, neither being would ever have to breach the surface, as though it were possible to exist in the shivering womb forever; he knew where all the spaces of Sebastian's thoughts, which spun like coal-shards into the depths, hit down like a spark; and he gathered them, each one, close. What else could he do? In here, now, there was nothing to do but be the closed-eye-dark; in every way it had and was to do: the unaccountability of it; the way it could hold all, and more than all, and Sebastian too; or the memory of him, when he drifted. As though, beyond the bounds of liminality and time, there was indeed something: the something that named itself Ciel and knew how to keep infinitely precious things. He had the memory of being held himself to draw on, the knowledge of what to do when, betrayed by the sting of the light, it is only the un-judging rest of things that comforts, without asking: and so he did.

Was he dying, even as he held him?

Then he would hold him all the closer.

Was it void he held, no star at all but only the image of one, blinking from an endless sky?

(Did it make a difference, when either way it lit his path like fire—?)

.

.

.