question
(And he swallowed the eighth drop.)
/
Dawn filled the air with shades of rose and cherry blossoms. Like a soft and wavering image, two-dimensional and somehow vague, still caught in night, by the bedside, the tableau of a child and a butler still rested. On the wood floors, the light brought mahogany tones, and the fleck of gold. And Ciel watched the figure before him, Sebastian, on the other side of a game board that seemed just like it had in memory, and not. Sebastian, with a pull of all that emptiness behind him, like a shadow, pooling by his feet, soft-edged in morning; and a body like any other. The entire sculpture was moved from within, the regularity of breath expanding his chest, the pulse of a heart, and the blood that flowed through it; the hair that, still wet, hung above his shoulders like the gloss of feathers. He held a piece in his hand, a black knight carved of obsidian, and when he set it down it made only a soft, gentle thud against the paper-covered board.
The tips of his fingers were pink, and when Ciel caught his hand and traced over the dark nails there the skin was soft, as all human skin might be when it is new and young; uncalloused and yet traced with the deep lifelines of movement. The palm, open.
It was getting difficult to travel the boundaries and edges, now; to try to coil all his nightselves into their usual aspect, as though with increasing tiredness. And yet there was nothing terrible in it. Perhaps, this time, death would indeed only be like slipping into sleep, facing the one who knew him more than any other.
"If you had the ability to start your life again," Ciel said. "To go back, to any time in any of your numerous pasts, and make a path to suit yourself… where would you go, and when? And what would you change?"
"My dear," Sebastian said quietly, and stopped. Ciel looked up, caught by the quietude after his words, and looking at the angles of his face and the geometries hidden behind the gossamer veil of his earthly form. And there was bitterness, of course, but there was also something else: and Sebastian said, "for a very long time I knew the exact day, nay, I knew the exact hour, and it was when your own human heart had stopped."
"Not before then?" Ciel asked, softly. "Not before Claude and his meddling ways? Or even—before all of that? Before you met me at all? Surely there's something… some better heaven—"
And he lowered his eyes.
"You yourself, if I recall, gave up the possibilities of heaven," Sebastian said.
Ciel chuckled. "Oh, but I've always been a stubborn fool, and perfidious."
"And I no less," Sebastian said. He glanced down at the game board by their feet, and shook his head slightly, as though in wonder. "Claude; Hannah… they ruined me and worse than that in my mind, they ruined you. How long I spent imagining all the ways I could've made their deaths more grievous. How long I blamed you for being other than the soul I had worked so long for. But what have I really lost, in the end?"
"A meal—"
"A meal."
"Your satisfaction."
"Have I, though?"
Ciel looked up again, and the deep blue of his eyes pulsed magenta and filamented fire. "No," he said. "You will not lose your satisfaction; and you shall never lose it from me. My death is always yours, as has my life been." And taking the vial from the curled shadow hiding in Sebastian's wake, he poured a shimmering droplet—the ninth—onto his tongue.
It shimmered, and felt, to Ciel, like the Italian ices he'd had as a boy, each gleaming sliver a cold point that could not, still, be anything but welcomed. And Sebastian—
.
.
.