6/ four drops
The thing that was his master had never looked more and less like himself. Pulled away from the papered shell of humanity like a husk cherry; there was no smell that was a soul, only thunder and rot and the deep sameness of the void. While the boy's body fell apart, the creature came to join him on the membrane; that vast small balcony overlooking a vast small world. In the metaphorical sense, a thin, pinpricked, freezing rain began to fall; and Sebastian shivered.
The creature looked at him. Without planning, the demons twined the edges of their limits together, as though holding hands.
"You know," Sebastian said, when the silence had grown unbearable.
"Yes," Ciel said. "I won't insult you by telling you how foolish you're being," he said, saying just that. "But it's your move."
"There's no need for it to be a game," Sebastian offered; in lieu of the olive branch he could not. "It might be a battle—you might seize the upper hand still."
Ciel chuckled. "When has anything between us been aught but a game, Sebastian?"
The name that Ciel had chosen for him fit perfectly into the woven spell that made up his binding, his shining collar. It almost had the ring of truth in it. His move, indeed. No, Ciel had made a move—however small. Ciel had reminded him that no matter what became of the new demon, Sebastian would always remain what Ciel had made of him. The despair in his breast felt like a warm ember shining in the cold.
"Come inside, master," Sebastian said, quietly. "We don't want you catching a chill."
The bath was already waiting. And when Sebastian lit the candelabra, one candle after another until all three and their pitchfork spectre filled the room with a wavering strong light, Ciel slid into the water.
On the bed, the empty shape of his master's skin still curdled. The butler kneeled on a flagstone floor that reached into the limits of space, encompassed by walls. Sebastian reached for the soap, watching the ink of Ciel leech into the bath like a shadow, lingering in wait.
His own shadow was behind him. It had moved, and it was standing by the bed, its vortexes almost still, and looking with a curious rapt sense at the solid remains.
Sebastian tipped another drop into the bath, into the darkness-sense of Ciel, and watched the pockmarked ripples that it made, and the unraveling magnetic screams that pulled tight at the thread between them. His hand—almost—shook.
He capped the tincture again.
/
Seventy-two years earlier, Sebastian sits by the bedside, while the frozen emptiness of his master's body, cold and almost untethered from the soul, lies on its bed. One white rose in his buttonhole. Tea on the table. He reads Alice in Wonderland, ostensibly to give Ciel's soul a way back, something to latch onto so that it does not entirely slip away from its body into death. And, also, because he cannot think of anything else to do.
To let Claude win—and eat his soul. No.
It is intolerable to think on.
Hunger is no new sensation, nor is satiation. But the bright sharpness of the world when he refuses that hollow ache as though battling his own need makes the world so much—ah, more! It was not that this refusal to baseness meant anything. Nothing did, to such as them. But it could look and thus fool the eyes. Of humankind, at any rate—for of all other species, none other put such pressure on this one prismatic organ. For the human, to see is to believe—for the demon, there is no belief, for the demon can never merely see. They perceive with other senses more fully than with sight, though they have eyes to spare: the smell of sickness or fear or want, the taste of skin and inside the skin and the air, proprioception that extends beyond bodies (demon or any mortal) and sees into the essence of things, and of themselves.
Nothing is more thrilling and terrible than knowing one's own emptiness, deeply and entirely, without ability to forget—for even a moment—nothing is more cursed. And seeing the shape of Ciel-that-is-not, Ciel a form not breathing but in stasis, with only that small tunnel of whipthorn light, that rabbit hole into the soul which is even now still running—
Well. It makes one think. It makes one—
When he reads, he cannot forget but he can pretend, casting himself into his own part. He does not look closely at the fact that the part he casts for himself is still Sebastian, even beyond the planes of the world. But the emptiness within the shell of his sky's soul resonates with his own as though in mockery. Like all false beings it only looks a perfect picture.
He had once derided Ciel for that reliance on falsity, of which the photographic medium is the pure pinnacle—to see may be to believe, but there is no other organ so easily fooled. To take the picture, one must distill the dimensional onto a flat surface, and even that is merely the beginning of the tricks the medium is so adept at. There are colors that can be painted on the negative to change a figure's shape here and there, pieces and even people that can be scratched out; blemishes of the skin removed; the photograph, far from being a truth, is always a work of art, and as such it saves only the image of what one wishes to be, not what one is.
But then humans act as though this fragile, flimsy illusion contains the essence of a thing.
But what if a thing has no essence? Then, it follows that whatever that thing pretends to be, it necessarily is. And the demon that is nothing is so very fond of playing Sebastian. I would have posed for a photograph, he had once said, and he had said it in jest, so that his young master would not look closer at its truth. I would be anything you ask me to, for however long you ask. I would prioritize your pretty, delicate illusion, though we both know they are fragile things with nothing but teeth underneath. He doesn't know why.
/
Before, like many things, can no longer be understood, except as a visitor to ruins, piecing together meaning after the fact. So it is that there was never any youth to the thing-that-was-not-yet-Sebastian, only a newness. The thing that was not yet a nothing, before the war and the loss and the lack, and darted across the open sky doing barrel rolls into the uncanny blue and watched the slow whirling span of the world and felt the sun on wings. Thinking: holy, holy, holy.
The earth is full of—
.
.
.