Possessed
June

With summer in full swing, it was both hot and rainy when the Phantomhive family arrived in the Emergency Room. Rachael had been too disturbed to cry, and Vincent just paced around the waiting room, buying sodas and crisps out of the vending machines just to keep his hands occupied with something, but never actually consuming anything. He simply uncapped and recapped the bottle, or rolled the bag of crisps over in his hands, crushing them as he fought to not simply scream. To scream might make him feel better, but he couldn't, not in front of Rachel. It would scare her. (Ciel was scaring her.) It would scare her more. (Unlikely.)

Logically, it wasn't wholly surprising when the surgeon came out and said "Mr and Mrs. Phantomhive, I have good news and bad news." Rachael expected more than he did, because she practically leapt to her feet, eyes seeming to brim with some sort of strange hope that not only did they save his eye, but they found out there was a fruit fly burrowing across the front of his brain, and that was the cause for his behavior, how mad! Anyway, he'd be perfectly fine, good as new, better than before, even. Vincent saw that hope in her eyes and it worried him, so he placed an arm around her, protecting her from the venom he could taste in the air before it came from the surgeon's mouth.

"The good news is that he's going to be okay." Vincent glared. A poor choice of words. "The bad news is that the damage to his eye was extensive. There was nothing we could do but… clean it up."

He practically snarled at the man, and he would have hit him if Rachael hadn't finally burst into tears. The surgeon looked uncomfortable, but he said no more until her shrieks dulled into silent tears. They couldn't see him tonight, he'd explained, but tomorrow he'd be ready for visitors. Tomorrow, he'd promised. Vincent was angrier that night than he could ever remember being – it was a dull rage, directed at anything, at everything, at God. For cursing his son. His perfect, beautiful son was now mutilated and probably insane, and there was nothing he could do. And he was seething with a hatred he couldn't direct at anything, and he hated that.

It took some convincing, but the Phantomhives went home. Neither actually slept, but they did manage to lay in bed together, each silently comforting the other from the misery that both were feeling. It was something, and something was better than nothing. Clean it up. That was all they could do. Clean it up. Ciel had made such a mess of his eye that the only way the surgeon could describe it was that he cleaned. It. Up. The fleshy pieces of his eye, ragged bits of destroyed cornea; every happy expression that eye had ever been a part of was now a memory. Now, the best they could hope for was a glass eye. It would never move with the other. It would simply be… still.

Unfeeling.

Unseeing.

Was that what Ciel was now? Just a glass person? Vincent feared for the worst. If he wasn't transparent now, he would be if the doctors recommended to send him to an institution. He knew what they did in institutions. Strapped people into chairs and gave them electroshock treatments until they got nice and quiet, or worse, he'd learned that they did something called lobotomies a while ago. Did they still do that? He didn't know. From what he'd heard, it involved stabbing an ice pick through someone's eyeball and scratching at the front of their brain. It made them quiet. Did they still…

They couldn't possibly. It was barbaric. Surely only the Americans did that? Only the Americans would be barbaric enough to be doing such things in 1967. No, it'd be okay. Everything would be okay.

Everything would be okay.

Because if it wasn't, Vincent had nothing.

The next morning, they returned to the hospital. Neither had slept at all, but they were both wide awake, almost raggedly wired from their despair. Ciel, however, was sleeping peacefully, head wrapped up in bandages and attached to an IV. The drugs were keeping him asleep, the doctors had explained to them, and that was better. He would be in shock if he woke up – the longer he had this comfort, the better. Rachel cried, reaching out and holding her son's hand, ignoring everything else but his face. His lovely face. Under those wrappings, it was mutilated by his own madness. What would they do? What could they do?

They stayed with him for the day, discussing treatment options with the doctor. To Rachel's, but not Vincent's, surprise, he was calling in a psychiatrist. "A really good one, Mr. and Mrs. Phantomhive. Really straight guy. He doesn't do any of that quack stuff from back in the day, he uses real methods that are proven to work. Medication and therapy and stuff, ma'am. He's good."

Rachel had frowned. "But… but you can't be positive he has to go already, are you?"

He'd been a bit taken aback by that question, but hastily answered, "No ma'am, of course not. That's for the doctor to decide."

They were feeling a little better by lunch time, and both of them ate lightly in the hospital's cafeteria. Ciel would be coming off the drugs in a couple of hours, and the psychiatrist would be coming to see him. If everything was alright with his head, they could take him home! That was Rachel's thought process as she ate her way through an apple, eyes distant but hopeful as she brushed dust off of her dress. Vincent, on the other hand, was more realistic, and so he ate with less enthusiasm, although the groaning in his stomach couldn't allow him to stop entirely.

After lunch, they took a brief walk around the garden as the doctors woke Ciel, gently. First, they cut the bandages away from his sleeping face, which was properly cleaned and without evidence of his insanity except for the place where his eyelid caved inward. It would be a long time before Ciel Phantomhive could ever have a glass eye. They switched his IV to a lighter painkiller, and slowly, conscious returned to him. It was a strange feeling. A familiar feeling. The way one wakes up when they know something is horribly wrong but they can't quite remember what it is, so there was a horrible feeling but he couldn't quite figure out why.

And then, he opened his eye. Only the one. The other one remained closed, a little bit of blood in the corners of them, which was a natural part of the surgical process. "Ciel," the nurse cooed at him. "Ciel Phantomhive, my name is Christine. I'm a nurse here at Saint Juniper's Children's Hospital. Can you hear me?"

He nodded. Damn, his head felt… heavy. His whole body felt heavy, but somehow it was light too. How did that work? He just wanted to get up. Hospital? That was somehow only just occurring to him. "Why am I in the hospital?" Why did his face feel so sore? What had he done? What had he done? In response to his growing panic, the heart monitor began to beep more rapidly, and the nurses quickly took notice. All at once, they were yelling at him to calm down, which did exactly the opposite, and one of them was stabbing a needle into his IV. It was too much. They were all too loud, and he groaned, lifting his heavy arms to cover his ears and the back of one of his hands brushing over his eye.

He froze.

And screamed.

It wasn't a high pitched shriek of horror, like the nurses had probably expected. It was more of a desperate yell. A terrified, anguished groan, rubbing his palm over the lid because there was nothing underneath it. His eye was gone. His eye was gone gone gone. Had he been in a car accident? Had he gotten in a fight? A million thoughts rushed to his aching head and in the seconds of horror he felt, screaming low and desperate, the contents of the second needle reached his bloodstream. And quickly as the anguish had come, it faded into calm. Everything was calm. Everything was bliss, in fact. The bustled around him, propping him up with pillows and making a show of getting him comfortable, one of them coming in with something for him to eat and the other pushing a TV remote in his hand.

He was calm now. He was happy. Everything was okay. He could do anything. Why was he laying around in bed? He wanted to see his parents, and tell them he loved them. Where were his parents? He must have communicated that out loud, because one of the nurses smiled warmly (she was pretty. Red lips, big blue eyes, hair pinned up in victory rolls, despite that they'd mostly gone out of style. She reminded him of how his mom had looked when he grew up) – and told him that "They'll be here soon, Ciel. Just relax until they get here."

And relax he did. He ate through the sweet portion of his standard issue hospital lunch and childishly refused to eat the turkey and salad, which seemed to amuse the nurses, although they eventually got him to eat some of both. He flipped through the TV channels, not stopping on the coverage of the war but instead flipping on Bewitched. Nose wiggle, magic, laughtrack. He even laughed a little with it, and his attention was so focused on the television that he didn't really notice his parents come in. (How could he not?) He just didn't.

Rachel couldn't help but cry at the sight of him. He looked so… normal. Just sitting in bed, watching TV, a tray of food next to him, crumbs from a decimated brownie and only a couple bites of his healthy food properly eaten. Tears ran slowly down her face, and Vincent's arm secured around her waist as he cleared his throat. "Ciel? Turn off the TV, we came to see you."

Ciel blinked for a moment, taking several minutes longer than usual to process what he was saying before picking up the remote and flicking it off. "Dad. Mum. I missed you." He caught sight of their faces, both quite somber and Rachel's streaked with tears. "Why are you crying?"

The innocence of that question was odd. It wasn't as if he didn't know his eye was missing – he did know, but in his drug-induced and undeniably lucid state, he didn't mind that fact. But the idea of the loss of his eye and the sadness on his parent's faces being connected simply didn't occur to him. And the question elicited an even stranger response from his parents than he'd expected; Vincent looked angry, and Rachel looked taken aback. And he flinched at his father's anger, just as any normal child would, the gesture in of itself so fucking pathetic that Vincent deflated immediately, moving closer to him and squeezing his shoulder.

"Your mother's crying because she – we – were worried about you, Ciel. You…" He looked over at the doctor, who gave him an encouraging nod. "You hurt yourself. We're going to have a doctor come look at you and see if they can help you, okay?"

And what else could Ciel Phantomhive say but okay.

He spent a little time with his parents before Doctor Faustus arrived. The psychiatrist was a no nonsense sort, he could tell just by looking at him, and there was something about him that Ciel trusted, despite that he trusted almost no one. Those who had a strict foundation of their morals were predictable, and from what he was beginning to understand, predictable was good. It was safe. Maybe that was what he needed. He pawed every now and then at his eyelid, which caved inward, and the drugs in his system prevented that from being a painful experience. The nurses only stopped him when he tried to take off the bandages; he wasn't ready, they said. He wasn't ready. In the brief time they spent together, his mother had assured him repeatedly he wasn't in trouble, although Ciel doubted the integrity of her words. But it seemed as soon as they'd arrived, they were being ushered away, replaced by the no-nonsense doctor who introduced himself as Doctor Faustus.

Perhaps if Ciel hadn't been so medicated, he would have felt uneasy.

The questions were invasive, and to the point. Do you have any physical problems you are concerned about? Do you feel depressed or anxious? Have you ever had feelings about wanting to harm yourself before this incident? Do you use alcohol or drugs? Do you have problems with your temper? Do you worry a lot? Do you resent being given advice? Do you trust people? Do you care what people think of you? Are you comfortable in social situations? Do you ever hear voices? What is your greatest fear? They were straight forward and yet so loaded. He answered most of them in simple yes or nos, although some required greater thought than that; lately, everything seemed… different. Everything. The person he thought he was seemed less like someone he knew and more like a façade that he experienced every now and then.

"Every day is like waking up from a nice dream, but then I realize that I'm alive in the nightmare. It's hard to explain."

Doctor Faustus showed virtually no emotion as he wrote down his answers, though, if Ciel had been paying greater attention, he might have seen the faintest hints of a smirk. He might have. But he didn't.

Once the evaluation was done, it took all of fifteen minutes for Vincent and Rachel Phantomhive to sign their child's life away. Dr. Faustus put on a particularly hard sell, and it wasn't as if they'd known what they were doing. They thought it was for the best. To send their mentally ill child away where he could no longer harm himself, and maybe get the treatment he really needed; no sound parent could deny him that, when the doctor was throwing around words like paranoid schizophrenia and suicidal tendencies. No, of course they couldn't. In his dreamy haze, his parents drifted back inside, kissing his forehead and hugging him loosely around the neck, telling him he was going to take a long rest. They'd send his things to the hospital, they promised. And Ciel was so confused. He held on to them, mumbled about how he didn't want to go, squeezed the material of their clothing but not tight enough, because it seemed like all-too quickly, they were gone.

They were gone.

Life-altering decisions always deserve a second opinion, you have to understand that. But the problem with Ciel Phantomhive is that any other doctor who came in and asked the same questions would have reported the same findings.

Momentarily, he felt frightened. So he slept. Dreamlessly, though not for long, and he felt uncomfortably sweaty when he woke up, the way people always do when they go to sleep in the day and wake up after the sun has set. The nurses from earlier had already clocked out of their shifts, and the evening brought different ones, who were considerably less sweet to him, or perhaps it was his medication and the honey-glaze high that the day had carried wearing off. Or perhaps, after all these years, some part of him was still afraid of the darkness, and what the darkness brought. The cafeteria was closed, so he gave one of the kinder seeming nurses some money, so that on her lunch break when she ran to her favorite cornerstore, would she please bring him something?

He dozed off sometime after finishing his dinner, which wasn't the quality of food he was used to but it did the job, and the next morning came too quickly. At 6am, he was shaken awake, given breakfast and a needle full of light pain medication, and told that the streetcar would be there for him in an hour.

The hospital he was taken to was new. Not dilapidated the way one expected mental hospitals to be; in fact, the words mental or lunacy were not in its name at all. It had a perfectly innocent name; Saint Peter's Hospital. Not for the criminally insane, or for troubled youth; it was simply Saint Peter's. Some part of him appreciated this fact, just as some part of him appreciated that his parents hadn't sent him off to Bethlem. After all, Bethlem was much closer to home than St. Peter's; he wasn't entirely sure where they were when the car finally pulled into its destination, but he had sat in silence in the backseat for a very long time. Bethlem was closer to home, but he didn't want to go there. Not with its history; it seemed to him that a place like that would be painted in blood.

St. Peter's was new. The building's architecture was new, the floors were shiny, the walls gleamed with fresh paint; it didn't look like a mental hospital at all, but the sort of facility that specializes strictly in certain ailments, and monopolizes on the fact that if a person has that one ailment, they'll have to come there, or die. And Ciel supposed that… in a way, that's what this place was. But instead of treating rare cancers, it treated invisible sickness with very visible repercussions. The walls were lined with posters discussing recovery, how it's easy to quit drinking if only you believe in yourself, and he felt an odd glimmer of hope in that lobby.

Maybe it was because he'd actually hit rock bottom, and was beginning to realize it. Maybe it was because his parents had decided they didn't believe in him either, and sent him here. Maybe it was because he'd ripped out his eye with his fingers, and remembered watching himself do it, but no pain. Maybe it was because he really was insane.

But he felt just a twinge of hope.

His first day and night were virtually painless; once the streetcar dropped him off, he filled out a few forms (mostly just confirming what his parents had written about his allergies and medical history), and then a nurse gave him a little plastic cup with about eight different pills in it. Wrinkling his nose, he went through about four small cups of water (which seemed to annoy her) to get them all down, and within half an hour, he was asleep. And he slept for what felt like the first time in years. It was dreamless, and uninterrupted, yet when he woke up, there was no sense of time being robbed from him. No feeling of five minutes of rest, when in reality hours had passed. No, he felt rested, and knew a lot of time had come and gone, and he found himself looking around his room, trying to orient himself.

He was in a hospital now. That's right. Not the children's hospital, but a mental hospital. Because he'd torn out his eye. That was what had happened. The idea made his stomach drop out, his heart sink, and a sense of alarming, overwhelming dread overtake him. The offended side of his face throbbed painfully, and he glanced over to his bedside table. His suitcase remained unpacked, but a note had been left for him to call the nurses as soon as he was awake. A small remote with a single, red button set atop it.

They arrived, gave him more medication, and changed his bandages. The dull pain that had been growing quickly disappeared, and suddenly he found himself severely chauffeured. The room his parents had paid for had no roommate, and apparently that knowledge was spreading quickly. A couple of the younger patients gave him dirty looks, mumbling something about spoiled, wealthy children. It might have bothered him once, but the medication which hummed through his bloodstream sang him delicious, precious calm. He clung to it viciously. There were a number of on-site therapists, he soon learned. Group therapists, individual therapists, even therapists who used art and music as treatment. That all sounded very stupid to Ciel, but he didn't mention anything about it. The nurses and orderlies were kind enough.

There were a large number of medical doctors as well. Even in his sweetly drugged state, he had a vague understanding of what that meant. The doctors would be the ones strapping him to gurneys and attempting to electrocute the madness out of him. The therapists would be sanctuary. Talking never hurt anyone, but lobotomies were an entirely different story.

He met his therapist first. Doctor Faustus, again. Apparently, while there were many therapists on site, there were very few choices in terms of children's psychiatry. He was, after all, a child. Faustus was the only one who strictly took underaged patients, and so Ciel was shuffled off to him for most of the morning. The man asked him quite a few of the same questions he'd asked before, perhaps hoping for a response that was less influenced by pain medication, and Ciel did his best to answer them properly. But what frustrated him was that Faustus (who, after an hour together, took off his glasses and said to call him Claude with a smile that made him blood go cold) didn't seem to want to believe there was a start.

Ciel frequently alluded to the start. When this began. Whatever this was. But each time he began, Fau- Claude would interrupt him. Claude told him that the sort of behavior that lands one in a place like this does not have a definitive start. The start isn't what important, it's the trigger. Trigger, a word he would come to associate with denial. Claude told him that there had to have been a traumatic event in his life that had begun to trigger Ciel's violent behavior, and he found himself going from frustrated to angry. His parents, even his desperate father were better listeners than this! And yet every time he attempted to explain, he was cut off.

He felt… resorted. Like his thoughts were being picked apart and pieced where they didn't belong, and he left the extraordinarily long session (an orderly had told him that the first session usually lasted several hours) to his first doctor's appointment. By that time, he was too exhausted to even bother fighting off the sense of dread he felt in the pit of his stomach. Maybe the doctor wouldn't start the really terrible treatments immediately, maybe he'd just want to see his eye. Or maybe the complete lack of eye would make the lobotomy procedures all the easier.

Not unlike his therapist, his doctor was surprisingly young, but unlike his therapist, his demeanor was entirely different.

"Good afternoon, Ciel. Please sit down. I'm Sebastian Michaelis, I'll be overseeing the medical aspects of your treatment here."

Michaelis's office wasn't as cozy as any of the therapy rooms, opting for a more sterile, medical environment, but there was almost a sense of relief in being there. Therapy was all about tricking the patient into a false sense of comfort and security, offering comfortable couches, rich colors, and lots of toys to keep the hands busy. But this, this was… professional. More than that, it was stark. There was no lying or tricks, both of them were completely exposed, just as Ciel felt at every normal doctor he'd ever been to. This… seemed more normal. Maybe that, in and of itself, was the trick. Nonetheless, he nodded and sat down, letting Sebastian prod him for his vitals.

"How is your eye feeling today?"

"Alright. It was bleeding this morning, but the nurses cleaned it up."

Michaelis nodded. "That's to be expected, post surgery. Do you mind if I take off your bandages for a better look?"

Ciel shrugged noncommittally, but flinched under his doctor's hands. The flinch surprised himself more than the doctor, it seemed, because Sebastian carefully removed them and pulled out a flashlight, examining the offended area, opening his eyelids, and making a few notes. The process wasn't comfortable; the area was rather tender, and his stitches prickly, but overall not terribly painful. After a moment, Sebastian tossed his gloves in a wastebasket and sat back down across from him, clipboard in hand. "Everything looks fine. I expect you'll heal well, and once you've completely healed, we can see about getting you a glass eye, if that's something you'd be interested in."

Ciel blanched slightly at the word glass, but nodded. "Yeah."

The doctor smiled, and it was far less unsettling of a smile than anything Faustus had done. In fact, despite that Ciel didn't trust anyone in this abominable place whatsoever, the atmosphere here was far less unsettling than the rest of the building.

He didn't settle into a routine quickly because every day of his first week was different. The only thing that remained constant were his wake up time, his lights out time, and his mealtimes. The orderlies kept that schedule strict. On his second day there, he spent several hours in the visitor's lounge with his parents. On the third day, he was with Doctor Faustus from breakfast to dinner, eating all his meals in his office and so miserably stir crazy by the end of the evening that he nearly snapped and started screaming at him. The fourth day, he ended up spending a solid two hours with Doctor Michaelis, as he fiddled around with Ciel's eye and removed a few of the surgical stitches.

Despite this, the first week really wasn't terrible. His medication kept him asleep at night, and his temper seemed to be calming down. In fact, all of his symptoms seemed to be waning, and at the end of that first week, he was looking better. A bit of color was returning to his face, a bit of control to his seemingly explosive mind. Once he entered group therapy, things changed.

The other patients treated him like a novelty. He was one of very few adolescent patients, and was probably the only one of them that – in their eyes – needed to be there. His teenaged company included a girl who suffered an eating disorder (why would someone just refuse to eat? He didn't get it) and a woman who was apparently a lesbian. Was that really enough to get locked up? Her parents had been the ones to commit her, not a doctor, so the institution was sucking her parent's money away by cutting her off from women her age. Instead, she was pursuing a relationship with a much older woman with a history of violence. Ciel might have found this amusing, once.

The young adults, 18 through 24, in his group therapy were mostly there for various addictions. He had nothing in common with these people. But that wasn't why things were bad. Things became bad when he stopped sleeping again. Every night, he'd leave Claude's office, head straight to Sebastian's for one last check up on his eye (the socket was being temperamental, and Michaelis seemed to think infection was imminent) and he would go to bed. But as if his temporary healing had been a bad joke, the dreams began to return. So did the violence. Ciel, who for the first week some of the orderlies and nurses were wondering why he was even there, was suddenly screaming all through the night, smashing his head into the concrete walls, biting his wrists open and scratching words into his thighs and arms. And the transformation was so fucking sudden, every night. At 8pm, he would retreat to his room to read until the medication kicked in.

By 10pm, he would be sound asleep.

And by midnight, he would be fucking crazy.

Numerous times, Doctors Michaelis and Faustus were called in. Sebastian would treat whatever wounds he would have sustained, and Faustus would watch him with an almost predatory stare, waiting desperately to witness an outburst. But it never happened. No sooner would they be in the building would Ciel collapse in the heap, lucid but trembling, clutching his wounds and mumbling about how it was gone. They had only the surveillance tapes and the stories from the orderlies and nurses to go on, and the tapes really didn't tell much.

Time went by, and he withdrew. His diet was closely monitored, and he was forced to eat a certain number of calories a day, but his meals were tasteless. Every interaction with his fellow patients left him blinking, wondering if it had actually happened or if he had simply been imagining it. His life, a half-remembered dream, that had once seemed so real but now was half there. His parents visited, and sometimes they brought Elizabeth, and those might have been the only times he felt really alive. He smiled with them, laughed at Lizzie's jokes, but more than that he clung to their presence, and the idea that if he was once like them, he could someday be like them.

Although his visits with Sebastian become fewer and far between after the last of his stitches are taken out, he looked forward to them. As much as he looked forward to anything. Sebastian wasn't a bad conversationalist, and because he wasn't an actual therapist, there wasn't ulterior motive behind his questions. When they casually talked, it was just that. Casual. Sebastian never asked things like 'and why do you think you feel that way?' or 'what sort of effect do you think that had on your life?'. They just talked. Sometimes their appointments ran very long, and Ciel wondered if Sebastian's politeness was starting to get him into trouble, since he seemed incapable of telling Ciel to shut up and leave. He sort of appreciated that, he supposed. It was something.

Claude both changed and increased with medications towards the end of the month. As his sleeping medications were essentially useless, he took Ciel off them completely, and opted for a new, powerful sedative. His episodes at night didn't stop, but it essentially meant he was silent during the day. Therapy was like pulling teeth, and his group therapist had all but given up attempting to engage him. Even his parents began skipping visitations.

As June drew to a listless close, Ciel Phantomhive's death drew ever closer. Waiting for him. He had six months to live, and no one was the wiser.

xx

Amnfdmnfvdc sorry this took forever. I got suck writing angst, mostly because I'm not very good at writing angst, but here's to hoping this comes out alright. It is about twice as long as usual, so perhaps it was worth the wait. Thanks for your patience, and I would love some words of encouragement.