7/ ablution
Darkness could not last forever, because the world turns like clockwork. But in the still of deep night it sometimes felt as though the forever of it would be forever; long and lingering. Still like humanity that stole the fire because it could not wait, they take their greedy light, be it nothing but a pale imitation of the sun; still, the candlelight reflecting on the inkdrowned bath was there and real and warm against the evernothing shadows.
Forgetting the scene on the bed, that carcassflesh of the boy and the butler's shadowself waiting, the butler's human form, by the bath of the dripping dark that was Ciel, watched his master submerge and reform, return like sea tides and stare at him with bright sparking eyes and a grin, while even the image of those eyes were kaleidoscopic more, and more, winking in like stars.
"Join me, Sebastian," Ciel said, tugging at him with hands that unravelled. So he did, pulling off his shoes and socks and placing them on the flagstones; pulling off his coat and his vest and his shirt and his trousers and his pants, and then looking down was surprised, though he had felt the brush of fabric against him, to find that he was nude and human-skinned and not a beastly dark. He did not look toward the tableau beside the bed, that death-photograph commemorating a half-truth once sleeping.
He waded into the pool of the all-nothing and the soft caress of Ciel's deep and slow breath, and the thought came to him that in destroying Ciel he would destroy himself. It surprised him: first of all, that the thought would occur, and second of all, that it was as half-true as the other. That nothing he spun into continually and which through Ciel's gaze he was made into a living creature, made real by that encounter of pure-knowing with another. He had not been real for a very long time, before Ciel. Not since his other name, the one he did not know any more, and could no longer pronounce. There in the tub where they held each other and he rested his face against the living void of Ciel's being, feeling the equilibrium of it, watching the dance of the candleflame across them, and across his own humanesque skin, playing across the knobbled whirl of his knuckles and the droplets of pitch running down his chest and plinking back into the deep.
It had hurt to be unmade. And it had hurt slowly, until he had forgotten that the hurt was there, except that it never had been forgotten, only renamed hunger. It had hurt, equally, to be made again, and it hurt still to know, from the vantage of something more-or-less real, that he was not what he had once been, before the fall. He did not wish to return, and yet the knowing still hurt. Nothing might wish, or long, or mourn, but it did not know what it felt; it was incapable. The beast could only act, and feel, and hunger, and even rejoice in the freedom of its unknowing. But when Ciel asked for the pretense of a real thing with choice he had given it choice. And the thing that could only obey had chosen, and through choosing, become real again.
And now he, Sebastian, was choosing.
To end it all. To slip back into the nothing. Unchanged.
"You hate me," Sebastian said.
"Of course I hate you," Ciel said. "I always have. I may always. We practiced it, we built ourselves that way. But this isn't about hate."
"What is it about, then?"
"It is about me letting you down," Ciel said. "About my selfishness. My failings. Take your pick… it's about me—and everyone else. At least as far as I can gather, for you've refused to speak of it. I won't pry but I must guess, since you've asked me. It's about Jack, and Helen, and it's about hell and the way they look at you; and all that I've done, knowing and unknowing. I've ruined you and they won't let you forget and that's the true problem. We do all right when we're alone. We always have. But the world doesn't see us the way we see each other. Neither world, above or below. Is that about right?"
"Yes, my dear," Sebastian said. "That's about right."
/
Into the deep Sebastian bent his head and sank—while the deep stopped up his nostrils and ears and eyes and pushed in, in, in like the beating of a trapped heart or a lullabye. Soft, slow, deadly, safe. Just that. Two together not watching but only feeling the cradled lap of the endless sea. Somewhere miles above he could see the candle, in shape and aspect like a lighthouse, flickering wanly on the shore, and remembered a promise he had once made to a candleflame-soul. Light in the darkness, his to safeguard on their journey. In the afterimage, the bright illusion of it was still there, longer-lived than the light though its substance was only in him.
.
.
.