4/ quietus
Ten years old, and Ciel walks the halls of a cavernous house that is his. When he enters the front hall, soft steps, the click of heels across a chequerboard floor, he is playing a game against his enemies. One step: the shadowed figures from the Underworld that ring the mansion at night with their guns, trying to wrest him from his place. Another step: and the grave figures of his parents loom from above in their tall, tall frame, painted faces recriminatory, solemn. A third step and he hears the echo, just an eighth-note off from his own, and Sebastian has followed him onto the tiled floor; a knight, a beast, a creature that always jumps uncannily this way and then turns the other. He does not trust the creature. He must never trust the creature.
(And yet when he remembers that flash from the corner of his eyes, fangs reaching for his unprotected back, carefully twisting his words—oh, how he doubts the painted sincerity of his butler's tone, and the soft kiss he placed upon the back of his hand, when the coiled thing bent its knee!)
Ten years old: but he is almost eleven. He is truly the Watchdog to the Queen, he is truly Earl, a part created by every move he has made thus far, and he is terrified.
But he would not trade this terror for safety; not now.
He wonders what that makes of him.
He wonders why it is that he sleeps, now that he has seen the blood of his enemies feed the ground.
(iron-rich loamsoil, his roses:
white like—innocence… death)
/
Truly, only a very foolish creature could accept a tonic that makes one ill again and again. Bedevilled thing, sharp in the sting of pure water. But then, surely only a very foolish creature would offer a tonic that makes one ill, again and again, and expect one to accept it.
(Fool creatures they are, the both of them.)
But, lying weakly upon the bed with trembling limbs too heavy for him to hold, Ciel realized that it was more than mere illness Sebastian was offering. Perhaps it was something in the taste of the poison he had only now pinpointed. Or the way Sebastian supported Ciel's head, gently, to accept the next drop, and looked down at his hands, after, just… silent.
I am, Ciel thought, being killed by my own butler. And I am letting him do it.
The thought was oddly hilarious.
Ciel had wondered, at the realization, if that numb, pressing cold he felt was betrayal. But that would have required a trust to break. And that would have required an unknowledge of Sebastian's position, which Ciel could not claim. It was, and had always been, Sebastian's due: his life. If Sebastian chose to take it now, it remained so.
Bile turned to blood, and blood to bile. The darkness of nothing became shaped into a form, and that form decayed from within. The conscious Self that in this place turned each scattered impulse into a solid metaphor which could hold the bed with its heavy drapes, the deep midnight quiet of their remote fastness, the butler sitting beside him, young thing with ancient eyes, was unravelling until Ciel found himself sliding out of himself. But without the freeing, boomerang force with which he usually unspindled into air—he was still: concretely aware of his false-body and the laborious rattles of its chest; just as he was aware of the shadow of Sebastian's eyelashes on the butler's pale cheek, as Sebastian sat as though he meant to imitate a statue. Each non-thing and its non-being was so achingly fixed in place. It was delirious, deliriously so.
He had been chasing after his own end for aeons, knowing its face.
.
.
.