These visits, often unprompted and once irksome, have become rarer in the past few years.
But Ciel doesn't think overmuch of it when Soma comes striding into his study one afternoon.
His eyebrows shoot upward, however, when the prince reaches his desk and slaps down an envelope with a very familiar seal. "Why do you have a letter from the queen?"
"Because I asked her for it." Soma gestures him to open the envelope, taking a seat. "It's for you."
Ciel shoots the interloper a suspicious glance, then picks up the envelope and pulls out the paper, eyes narrowing.
"My dear boy... recent successes, congratulations... recent appointment... he assures me y- what?!"
Soma grins, folding his hands behind his head. "Surprise, little brother...!"
"What are you doing?" Ciel hisses. "Join the Evil Nobles? Are you out of your mind?"
He stifles a pang when he realizes he'd half-expected this to happen. The Queen would certainly welcome someone of Soma's pedigree and talents to the organization, and Soma's past had almost groomed him for an appointment like this, but...
Soma's shrug is too light, his smile too distorted, and it all looks eerily natural on him. "I know what you're going to say."
Ciel raises an eyebrow. "And what am I going to say, to talk you out of the most idiotic idea you've ever had?"
"You're going to ask me whether I haven't lost enough," Soma replies easily.
The pen Ciel had been holding stills in his fingers.
"And do you know what I'm going to say back?"
"...that you've lost everything already?"
Soma reaches over to ruffle Ciel's hair. At eighteen, the earl's grown not insignificantly, but the prince is still taller.
"Close," he says, and his voice is too like the Soma of old to be speaking the words sliding so effortlessly from his lips. The familiar conviviality, the simple joie de vivre, it's all still there, but it's wrong, a cheerfully crackling fire dancing gaily through a poisoned thornbush.
"I was going to say that I won't lose what I have left."