Part 2: leucosis
"And it is the same thing in us that is both quick and dead, awake and asleep, young and old, the former are shifted and become the latter, and the latter in turn are shifted and become the former." —Heraclitus
5/ the monster
In the very deepest inkling of night, Ciel climbed out of himself. The bed, blue as it was with the drapes shivered with wind; like a boat's tattered sail under the salt-spray. Inside was the corroded, spongy mass of what had once been bedclothes, all pooled together into a sticky gelatin formed of his own cooked-down bones. It was rank; it filled the air with a gaseous mixture, sour-sweet with rot.
He left that puddled creature behind, that corpse sitting in a sheen of darkened blood and ooze; that boy-shell of his, serene and with eyes closed; he left behind the caving chest, the spars of his ribs curving from the hook-tangled center where the dead-live bird still grew and drowned.
Light, he vantaged the room, only a touch-breath here and there with a hollow buoyancy, like empty things. Nothing pulled at him but the suction darkness of the tendril that crawled over his back and into his open mouth, reaching somehow into the not-chest and the open space inside, the longing horror of it.
Sebastian was not inside. He had opened the window, and there was a balcony that had never once existed—rail-less, it sloped like a downturned leaf trembling at the hint of rain. Sebastian stood in a chilled wind that shrieked ceaselessly around the manor, he stood barefoot and gloveless in his shirtsleeves which were rolled up to the elbow, the corded muscles of his arms outstretched, the angled definition of his wrists over sculptured hands, the wet plastered wildness of his smooth dark hair, and when he turned around to meet Ciel his eyes were slitted points of pink fire that cast uncanny light onto the top of his cheekbones.
The wind and its death-rattles keened like a child.
/
Ten years old, and he has been dreaming of soft beds for what seems like eternity, but now that he has it all: warmth and comfort and only the fading purple of old bruises instead of a constant sharp ache and hollow hunger, now that he is full and can rest, now that he has doors between the world and his nakedness, hot water, and pillows filled with down, he can't sleep.
He had not had such nightmares when the entire world had been a nightmare. He had slipped from the shivering horror of wakefulness into a restless sleep that dragged him into oblivion, and he had welcomed it; curled up against the bony shoulder of another child just as lost as himself; they had exchanged names, once, when such things still mattered. And then progressed to the mere presence of touch, of a touch-that-was-not-to-hurt. The tilted illusion of safety.
Like it was a balm, sleep had washed away the fear and the anger into a cool, rarefied numbness, but now that he has everything it has turned against him. The bed is lonely and huge, and its softness swallows him like an open mouth. It is everything he wants, and he hates the thing for it.
He is talking about Sebastian. That is what everything seems to come down to, these days. But Sebastian, though he has wings—though he must have, having so many feathers, is not like a bed, even one that eats him, wants to lick him into its interior. There is something more terrifying in the knowledge that Sebastian does have want, and Ciel is not sure—he is never sure—if he is nothing but cream and sugar and spice, dissolving under those sharp teeth. He is sure he has been a boy, once.
He had been sure—once—of the limits of want, but that was before the things that happened in the cult, the hurt that is about touch and the hurt that is not about touch. He is smart enough to—he knows the name for it, he has seen—he is not an idiot, and he has seen the underworld and the street-corners and he knows—
Listen. If Ciel had to tell anyone—he would know exactly how. But in his mind, where believing-things go, where his burning heart takes its rapid-fire pulse and his breaths open from inside, pulling against the catch in his center—in the animal, base part of himself that overturns his rationality when the light leeches away and tiredness descends, he does not know. It is all a single point of fear like a purpled bruise, even though it is all over. And because he can't help himself, he presses against it—
Because he can't help himself, he sleeps in the ravenous bed.
.
.
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