Part 3: xanthosis

"We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not." —Heraclitus

9/ the deep

Sebastian has created a careful shell, as pretty as can be. Outside the dreamsilk, it has night-dark hair and eyes the color of fire; but its limbs are perfect, human, immutable. Sense and solidity, a creature as crafted and exquisite as the mechanical delights of the silver swan; clockwork automata. When they had first met, in the place between life and death, he had seen only the soul, the terror; and the void made images like shadows upon a screen; the weird phantasmagoria of the magic-lantern; and there had been beasts prowling the night, and creatures of the deep, and eyes like bubbles on sea-foam.

Even there, how strong-willed, how impetuous his master had been!

But: since then, Sebastian (the demon that calls themself Sebastian) has figured out exactly how to step upon the ground: not too lightly; so that the impressions of his footsteps herald his coming. He has figured out how to smile with human-blunt teeth in a face that, every passing day, looks more and more the perfection of stone, as though carved by the Greeks; and yet there is a blush in it; and blood. (It is not the blood that scares them—the humans. It is not the choking of it or the way it pools dark under a wound and overflows. It is not the way he staggers down as though spent when it is ripped into—it is when he stands back up that they fear; when the blood and bones knit together and they realize the careful illusion is naught but that. What is underneath? they wonder. And the answer is: nothing, nothing, nothing. [Did you think that I cared? What is "I"? You little fool. To think the unknowable had an essence; to think it was anything like your own.]) And Ciel Phantomhive looks without fear, even at that.

(The soul does not remember the monsters it had seen, in the place between life and death.)

(At first the thought amuses the thing calling itself Sebastian. How arrogant, Phantomhive's assurance, when he remembers not the teeth and the hunger of the thing he keeps on a leash.)

(And then—)

Perhaps it is after the picture that has been taken. Perhaps it is after seeing Ciel reject Angela's gift, their offer to wipe the slate clean on his sins. Perhaps, perhaps, but it is only when they are on the Tower Bridge, fighting the heavenly being, that Sebastian realizes he doesn't want his soul (his Ciel) to see this.

That he doesn't want to damage his master's impression of him. (Even till the end?)

He will hear Ciel's haughty, cold order; that last one; when they are finally on the island and all illusions will be stripped away. He will offer gentleness and hear Ciel say, "be as brutal as you like." Because suffering and pain are life, and everything other than that is a pretty, breakable illusion, a glass bauble, a figurine. ("Be as brutal as you like"—and what if, young master, I would like to cradle your soul in my lips as I drag you down into the endless night, as if merely pulling a curtain close? What then? If I may choose, If I may like—)

(It has never been this way before.)

(No other master has been given this offer.)

(No other master has given him a choice.)

And so, when he crouches above the small body on a bridge that sways in a sharp wind, its unfinished spars like the ribcage of a whale, the shriek of souls that give its foundations stability, and the bright glow from the angel past the broken point—

When he leans down close, he has no doubt in his mind that he will be the victor. And yet that is not what stays him in that last moment.

It is the thought that Ciel might see what he becomes when the lights are off, and everything else has disappeared. As though his master might glimpse the howling void where nothing, not one bright soul and not a thousand, could fill. As though he might realize that the answer to his constant question (what are you, Sebastian?) that he has answered so many times before, in humor and in reverence (your butler, of course. Everything you wish. Everything you desire. Everything you see inside yourself, and you, of course. Yours.) has been—all this time—a falsity.

This art I am, I made for you; and behind it is nothing, nothing.

That it is terrifying is only natural; for true lack is against nature. That it has once been something other—less hideous—he recalls; most clearly against the shining of that heavenly glow. That it doesn't want him to see—

He will not think of it then. He will not question or compartmentalize, explain or define; he will not dare draw bounds against the infinite, or wonder why this little master exists so in the very core of his regard. He will only say,

"Please. Close your eyes."

And Ciel will.

/

"Open your eyes."

And Sebastian did.

Even there, in the deep, in the in-between, feeling Ciel around him. He opened his eyes on the creature beyond the tableau by the bed, the them frozen in place as though in a setpiece. In the underneath where the light of the candle above might be the light of the moon, he opened his eyes and saw what remained of Ciel, now that the soul was gone.

He saw: ice-cold plains and the sounds of mourning. Early afternoons in springtime, filled with flowers; petals soft enough to bruise, and thorns, and the scurrying of prey in the distant trees; lines of ants against the ground and the rotting dead that turn to rich loam, a deep black soil from which new trees sprout, and the root vegetables dig their little ways in kitchen gardens; he saw:

Fire; the choking of smoke, and the ash that rains down under the lowering sky, and the softness it makes of the ground; the seeds that, burnt, unfurl then, being seared; that would not bloom from dormancy otherwise.

Muddy silt on the edge of shallow rivers and the drag of cattails, pulling toxins from the earth and holding them there, safeguarders of the box that must never be opened. And children playing in the shallows, twisting violets into rings, making crowns and fairy-land braids.

He saw: bones at night, shining under the stars; the restful quiet and the flickering eyes of prowling beasts. And the flickering of will-o'-the-wisps teasing travelers to their doom. And all, moving with a certain internal spiral, as though the void of that existence could hold all that and more, and more.

Sebastian stood, or floated, in the underneath, and blinked; and saw galaxies reflected in a silver teapot, and the thin cut of a knife's blade. He saw the banked fires in the hearth, and the poised perfection of a young aristocrat at the turn of a century. He saw all that and more, and more.

And when, at last, he had seen all there was to see—not a soul, not his soul, among them, and yet—

Well. Then, at last, he moved. Reaching forward, with the careful tendrils of the nothing behind his hands, the nothing behind his mouth, as though to see when the emptiness that trailed behind him would swallow it up. And yet—

The night only welcomed the dark. And the spaces between only cradled the beauty of existence—as though it

were

the setting for a jewel.

.

.

.