yes, this is the last story in "How Not to Spend Eternity." It's been a long journey! I started posting this whole thing in July 2018, 5 years ago, as a sidenote to "Unweaving," when I needed an easier, more fun story to write along with my attempt at a longfic. That was before I'd ever finished a longfic at all (Unweaving was the first) and gosh... I was at a totally different place, writing-wise, and life-wise. In the end, HNTSE would become the series I was most proud of, and one that was very close to my heart. It's taken a number of twists and turns from being only one story (HNTSE) to having a little sequel (The Contract) to turning into a full-blown series. I wrote an arc 1, that ended with "Dogwood and Chestnut," (the one where Sebastian & Ciel get together) and seriously considered ending the story there, but I still felt there were things that needed to be told and stuff the characters had to work through. After all, getting together doesn't fix characters nor does it lead to character development... it felt easy, but too much like a cop-out. So arc 2 began—new OCs and shady government projects, and a darker spin that wrestled with the nature of evil and the possibility of redemption. This last story has been half-finished for more than a year, and for various real-life reasons I was terribly stuck on it. But I knew that, no matter what, I wanted to finish the story this year. For all the readers who have stuck with the series this long, and for myself.

“The way up and the way down is one and the same.”

—Heraclitus

“Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, the one living the others’ death and dying the others’ life.” — Heraclitus

Ten drops.

That’s how much the vial contained, in its crystalline glass.

Looking into its clear depths, Sebastian saw the burning over plundered cities, soot-stained fog, a flower whirling along an everlasting current, cold.

His hand, around the glass, trembled.

Will I? He thought.

One drop shivered on the brink, on that clear lip, and for a moment he found himself unable to move. Why?

Still: he reminded himself of the perfection, the power of having that self in his full grasp. Who knew how far he would be forced if he did not fight back? Wasn’t it, after all, right to do so, instead of subsiding futilely into despair?

To gravity, at last, it succumbed.

Ten years old and standing by the open window, Ciel looks out. And remembers: playing with Lizzie on the fine, shorn grass, the softness of dirt underfoot; the faces of his parents. And his dog, which had always somehow unsettled him, though he knew—still—it would not harm him. And there it is, in his reflection; or what he has replaced it with. He wonders, for a moment, what it means to have taken a Thing made of possibility and darkness, so many feathers, and a voice… what it means to have taken a Something made of teeth in the corner of his eye, and too many smiles; magnesium, raven’s wings, and turned it into a dog. He wonders, for a moment, watching that unfathomable face, porcelain and hard, what It is thinking, and realizes with a thrill of despair that he will never know.

Seventy-five years later, sitting by a table that is not a table in a house that was not a house, where the sound of wind was ever-present, scouring the walls and gripping the corners of the windowsill, Ciel wondered, again, what Sebastian was thinking. Sebastian, who watched him with careful patience as the not-teacup hovered closer to his lips…

Why the play? And would he ever ask? Whether the tea which was not tea could ever hope to compare, there was something to be said for the continuance of an illusion, the careful presence kept toward a principal. And that Sebastian had started it again only now, when the two were in hell, seemed only natural, for everything in its warped, strange manner was just as it should be. It was a teacup filled with nothing but thoughts, and here in this space of unbeing it had just as much formless truth as anything else. Perhaps it was succumbing to ease, to try to understand Sebastian only through the things he handled. But Sebastian had given it to him, and watched even now as it hovered at Ciel’s lips.

Nothing trustworthy there, but why should he expect any different?

He drank, and felt a slide of suffocating care masking a bitter core; there was a faint perfume of soft sweetness like morning mist in autumn, and the deep dark mystery of soil. A sharp spike of hatred, new and flowering, that made him pause and turn the flavour on his tongue; it felt acidic and sharp and clean, merely one note in the entire array of sensation.

He looked toward Sebastian with a question in his gaze and the butler took his hand, sliding his gloved fingers over Ciel’s own, and finally taking the now-empty cup, and setting it aside.

“Now, what was that all about?” Ciel said at last.

“It will become clear to you…” Sebastian said, “soon enough.”

“Mm,” Ciel replied, pulling Sebastian closer, and the butler capitulated gracefully to sit on his lap, facing him, back against the edge of the table and its pressed cloth. “I have a terrible feeling you’re trying to make things difficult for me.”

“Me?” Sebastian said, with mock innocence. He put his hand to his breast, affronted. “Master, you wouldn’t doubt your loyal servant, would you?”

“You know, every time you say that, you act as though I’ll fall for it,” Ciel said.

“And,” Sebastian said, his eyes glinting. The liquid of his hair brushed against Ciel’s forehead. “Did it work?”

Ciel smiled. “Not yet.”

He has seen many masters struggle with the knowledge of their identity as nothing more than food, with their interpretation of that final end-state toward which all else now inexorably gathers, but he has never yet come across something so small, so unformed. And because Ciel wants so desperately to show he is affected by nothing, here he can come, Sebastian: creeping ever closer. am i disturbing you? (with such a condescending smile)

of course not

Of course not! How foolish his young master is. Yet there is something like acceptance in it that he turns over and over as though looking for the flaw in a shining sapphire, polishing it ever further, only to find new facets and dazzling depths.

He will not be appeased, he knows, until every winding corridor is made in his own image; the final and most blasphemous act of creation. What is care, if it wishes only to destroy? There is, and has never been, any other conception to a demon. The beauty of debasement is theirs, always.

And he creeps so carefully into the unprotected spaces of the child’s self that he hardly takes note of how the child follows him back into the untouched recesses of his own mind. (Or if he does, then even his own overthrow is a triumph.)

Something in the tea had disagreed with him, Ciel thought; lying on cold porcelain tile and retching into a toilet. In the doorway, he could feel the glitter of Sebastian’s eyes: and he turned with a glare to his demon who had, of course, the perfect mask of concern, only. As if the damn thing hadn’t poisoned him.

“Is something amis, my lord?” Sebastian asked.

Ciel snarled, baring his teeth. “Do you think I’m puking up my guts just for the entertainment factor?”

“Well, you see, I didn’t wish to presume,” Sebastian said. He stepped inside, gently brushing sweat-sticky hair from Ciel’s face, gloves pressed against skin soft and burning with fever.

“You’re very warm. Perhaps I should put you to bed.”

“If you do, I’ll puke again,” Ciel said tightly, clutching one arm across his roiling stomach. “Degenerate creature, you’d bore yourself to madness if you didn’t torment me.” He cast one glance over at Sebastian, who watched him with a careful, blank expression, as though he hadn’t a clue what Ciel was speaking of. “Or are we pretending this was an accident?”

“My lord.” Sebastian spoke with such affront; and neglected to answer: of course it was too soon for the demon-butler to tip his hand. Ciel could order him to, but then, if he did, this game was over, and he’d never have discovered Sebastian’s true purpose. And it would be back to wandering around this not-a-house in hell, waiting for their time to run down. How he missed earth! The dependable sun, reappearing every morning to spite the night’s gentle embrace… here everything was grey, neither purely dark nor light, a muddied conglomeration of only the meanest aspects of existence.

Ciel looked away, letting the touch of Sebastian’s glove against his neck, the slow, swirling points of his fingertips, chase through the sudden dizziness that raked its way like throwing stars across his eyes.

When Sebastian put one arm under him and lifted him he groaned, hand twisting in the fabric of Sebastian’s suit, and swallowed down another tilting wave, bile pressed back only with difficulty, the sting of acid in his mouth. It was hot: much too hot when Sebastian brought him into the bedroom and laid him down, and he tossed off the blankets the butler tucked around him and then pulled at the collar at his throat. “Seb—Seba—s—”

“Shh,” Sebastian said gently, sitting beside him on the edge of the bed. “Don’t try to speak.”

“Don’t you… dare try to order me… about, demon,” Ciel muttered, closing his eyes. Darkness crept in, kindly, from all sides, and his fingers caught at the buttons of his shirt. After a moment he could feel Sebastian’s hands taking up the task, soon divesting him of his outer clothes, which he pulled off with much tugging this way and that as Ciel struggled, limply, to help. Then, naked from the waist up and still shivering, Ciel pressed his fingernails like claws into Sebastian’s shoulders as the butler painted dry, swirling patterns of his hands over Ciel’s chest, all of him aching, burning. Ciel felt a wave of nausea envelop him again and made it half to sitting up before he had puked again, all over Sebastian’s front and his own.

“My, what a messy little thing you are,” Sebastian said, as Ciel heaved bloody streaks of spit from his fanged mouth, viscous streaks that Sebastian cleaned with his gloved thumb.

“You’re disgusting, Sebastian,” Ciel said, as Sebastian pushed him gently onto his back again and bent down to lick the vomit from his skin with tiny, pointed kitten-licks. Ciel reached down, and yanked at Sebastian’s hair with taloned hands, pulling the butler to face him. “You like to see me sick and defenseless,” he accused.

“How could I not?” Sebastian said, with the edge of a smile in his voice. “You paint such a pretty picture that way.” Ciel saw Sebastian’s curled fondness, his excitement, and felt an uncanny warmth of his own care that almost crept onto his own scathing look. If he hadn’t felt so awful he would have laughed.

“You make a terrible pet, Sebastian,” he said smartly. “If I look away for one minute you’re tearing things to pieces for my regard.”

“Perhaps I merely make a terrible dog,” Sebastian retorted. “Not everything can be tamed so.”

Ciel sighed, tracing one hand down his butler’s face. “I know,” he said quietly. “And I wouldn’t want you to be.” He caught—before it was covered up by teasing—a quick flicker of surprise, of something hollow and uncertain, bitter and terrible, a trapped and wounded animal behind Sebastian’s gaze. He cursed Jack, and the unraveling he’d made of Sebastian, setting up the trial that stripped the demon of all he was—they hadn’t spoken of it, but Ciel had seen what being in hell, like this, stationless and alone, made of the proud creature; he didn’t begrudge Sebastian his acting out.

Ciel would be glad to put this all behind them. When they could resume their life on earth again, when Sebastian would be able to be… not free, of course. Ciel had not freed him before, and he certainly couldn’t now, now that Sebastian had nothing left but Ciel’s own protection. If it was unforgivable to destroy a creature so far that it could do nothing but depend on you, it was unutterably worse to do so and then abandon it.

"This should make you feel better," Sebastian said.

"Will it?" Ciel said wryly, but he opened his mouth for Sebastian to hold the dropper above his open mouth. His master, so knowingly putting himself beneath Sebastian's deadly touch; he did nothing more than twist his face slightly as the drop fell onto his tongue, and where the drop fell, a blackening started, burning through the muscle like acid. He swallowed, sighing, and relaxed onto the bed, closing his eyes.

Tinted glass in hand, Sebastian wondered why part of him wanted to shake his master, to insist the brat order him to stop, or to tell him what this tonic was truly meant to do; and then punish him for it. It wasn't like Ciel to give in, nor to let Sebastian have his way without argument… but then, it wasn't like Sebastian to poison him, either.

The fever hadn't gone down. If anything, it had risen; when Sebastian checked the temperature of Ciel's skin, pressing his own lips to the demonling's hollow throat he felt the burn of it against him like a coal-fire. Even that gentle touch left a dusky bruise, purpled and strange, and Sebastian rubbed his hand—in their new, clean gloves—across it as though he could coerce it away.

There was something like corpse-flesh to the sheen of him, he realized, though Ciel was still breathing deeply and regularly; though he'd only yet taken two drops. A creature frail and powerful, sleeping on a bed of dreams.

Sebastian slipped off his shoes, slipped off his socks, and climbed onto the bed, the rumpled sheets pushed aside, the expanse of his master's skin. He sat at the juncture between the young man's parted legs, the soft wool trousers under his palm, the naked, narrow waist; he leaned forward to rest his own head upon Ciel's collarbone. He closed his eyes.

Beneath his sleep, empires unravelled. In the corridors of his dreams, he saw strange figures trapped in iron maidens, none with eyes. He walked down a constantly sloping hall, trying to reach the center, smelling the perfume of grave-flowers, spider-lilies, burning red.

His shadow stretched across the floor in front of him, hiding the narrow walls. His shadow, chased with wings, and a raven's harsh call.

He woke holding his master's hand, slim violinist's fingers and perfect dark nails. They were rotting at the tips, sweet and spongy; one finger broken off in his hand with a hollow snap. Sebastian stared: at that curve, that careful piece, like a curled tail. The stump where it had pulled away was bloodless, streaked with pus, and crumbled when he touched it.

He looked up to find Ciel watching him.

The rotting had bloomed across his master's lips, a dark stain across his mouth and cheek; it made a blackened swirl across his neck, a crumbled mess at his shoulder, taut muscle almost eaten away. Everywhere Sebastian had touched him.

"Young master…" he whispered.

"Interesting, isn't it?" Ciel said. "You ought to lodge a complaint against whomever made that tonic." His master stood up, or tried to; he lost his balance by the bedside and had to hold fast to the bedframe, a look of furious concentration in his eyes.

When Ciel finally managed it, his eyes lit in satisfaction, and he walked carefully to the window, opening the shade. "Oh," he said. "It's still night." He turned around, the bright sparks of his pupils casting eerie light across the room; then the contract flared up purple between them, buzzing and bright, like a current.

But Ciel said nothing.

"Don't you have an order for me?" Sebastian asked quietly.

"At the moment?" Ciel shrugged. "No. Why—ought I to?" He looked challengingly at Sebastian, who opened his mouth, and closed it again.

"Surely you don't trust me," Sebastian said, uncertain.

"I told you I never had," Ciel said.

Ten years old, and Ciel walks the halls of a cavernous house that is his. When he enters the front hall, soft steps, the click of heels across a chequerboard floor, he is playing a game against his enemies. One step: the shadowed figures from the Underworld that ring the mansion at night with their guns, trying to wrest him from his place. Another step: and the grave figures of his parents loom from above in their tall, tall frame, painted faces recriminatory, solemn. A third step and he hears the echo, just an eighth-note off from his own, and Sebastian has followed him onto the tiled floor; a knight, a beast, a creature that always jumps uncannily this way and then turns the other. He does not trust the creature. He must never trust the creature.

(And yet when he remembers that flash from the corner of his eyes, fangs reaching for his unprotected back, carefully twisting his words—oh, how he doubts the painted sincerity of his butler's tone, and the soft kiss he placed upon the back of his hand, when the coiled thing bent its knee!)

Ten years old: but he is almost eleven. He is truly the Watchdog to the Queen, he is truly Earl, a part created by every move he has made thus far, and he is terrified.

But he would not trade this terror for safety; not now.

He wonders what that makes of him.

He wonders why it is that he sleeps, now that he has seen the blood of his enemies feed the ground.

(iron-rich loamsoil, his roses:

white like—innocence… death)

Truly, only a very foolish creature could accept a tonic that makes one ill again and again. Bedevilled thing, sharp in the sting of pure water. But then, surely only a very foolish creature would offer a tonic that makes one ill, again and again, and expect one to accept it.

(Fool creatures they are, the both of them.)

But, lying weakly upon the bed with trembling limbs too heavy for him to hold, Ciel realized that it was more than mere illness Sebastian was offering. Perhaps it was something in the taste of the poison he had only now pinpointed. Or the way Sebastian supported Ciel's head, gently, to accept the next drop, and looked down at his hands, after, just… silent.

I am, Ciel thought, being killed by my own butler. And I am letting him do it.

The thought was oddly hilarious.

Ciel had wondered, at the realization, if that numb, pressing cold he felt was betrayal. But that would have required a trust to break. And that would have required an unknowledge of Sebastian's position, which Ciel could not claim. It was, and had always been, Sebastian's due: his life. If Sebastian chose to take it now, it remained so.

Bile turned to blood, and blood to bile. The darkness of nothing became shaped into a form, and that form decayed from within. The conscious Self that in this place turned each scattered impulse into a solid metaphor which could hold the bed with its heavy drapes, the deep midnight quiet of their remote fastness, the butler sitting beside him, young thing with ancient eyes, was unravelling until Ciel found himself sliding out of himself. But without the freeing, boomerang force with which he usually unspindled into air—he was still: concretely aware of his false-body and the laborious rattles of its chest; just as he was aware of the shadow of Sebastian's eyelashes on the butler's pale cheek, as Sebastian sat as though he meant to imitate a statue. Each non-thing and its non-being was so achingly fixed in place. It was delirious, deliriously so.

He had been chasing after his own end for aeons, knowing its face.

"And it is the same thing in us that is both quick and dead, awake and asleep, young and old, the former are shifted and become the latter, and the latter in turn are shifted and become the former." —Heraclitus

In the very deepest inkling of night, Ciel climbed out of himself. The bed, blue as it was with the drapes shivered with wind; like a boat's tattered sail under the salt-spray. Inside was the corroded, spongy mass of what had once been bedclothes, all pooled together into a sticky gelatin formed of his own cooked-down bones. It was rank; it filled the air with a gaseous mixture, sour-sweet with rot.

He left that puddled creature behind, that corpse sitting in a sheen of darkened blood and ooze; that boy-shell of his, serene and with eyes closed; he left behind the caving chest, the spars of his ribs curving from the hook-tangled center where the dead-live bird still grew and drowned.

Light, he vantaged the room, only a touch-breath here and there with a hollow buoyancy, like empty things. Nothing pulled at him but the suction darkness of the tendril that crawled over his back and into his open mouth, reaching somehow into the not-chest and the open space inside, the longing horror of it.

Sebastian was not inside. He had opened the window, and there was a balcony that had never once existed—rail-less, it sloped like a downturned leaf trembling at the hint of rain. Sebastian stood in a chilled wind that shrieked ceaselessly around the manor, he stood barefoot and gloveless in his shirtsleeves which were rolled up to the elbow, the corded muscles of his arms outstretched, the angled definition of his wrists over sculptured hands, the wet plastered wildness of his smooth dark hair, and when he turned around to meet Ciel his eyes were slitted points of pink fire that cast uncanny light onto the top of his cheekbones.

The wind and its death-rattles keened like a child.

Ten years old, and he has been dreaming of soft beds for what seems like eternity, but now that he has it all: warmth and comfort and only the fading purple of old bruises instead of a constant sharp ache and hollow hunger, now that he is full and can rest, now that he has doors between the world and his nakedness, hot water, and pillows filled with down, he can't sleep.

He had not had such nightmares when the entire world had been a nightmare. He had slipped from the shivering horror of wakefulness into a restless sleep that dragged him into oblivion, and he had welcomed it; curled up against the bony shoulder of another child just as lost as himself; they had exchanged names, once, when such things still mattered. And then progressed to the mere presence of touch, of a touch-that-was-not-to-hurt. The tilted illusion of safety.

Like it was a balm, sleep had washed away the fear and the anger into a cool, rarefied numbness, but now that he has everything it has turned against him. The bed is lonely and huge, and its softness swallows him like an open mouth. It is everything he wants, and he hates the thing for it.

He is talking about Sebastian. That is what everything seems to come down to, these days. But Sebastian, though he has wings—though he must have, having so many feathers, is not like a bed, even one that eats him, wants to lick him into its interior. There is something more terrifying in the knowledge that Sebastian does have want, and Ciel is not sure—he is never sure—if he is nothing but cream and sugar and spice, dissolving under those sharp teeth. He is sure he has been a boy, once.

He had been sure—once—of the limits of want, but that was before the things that happened in the cult, the hurt that is about touch and the hurt that is not about touch. He is smart enough to—he knows the name for it, he has seen—he is not an idiot, and he has seen the underworld and the street-corners and he knows—

Listen. If Ciel had to tell anyone—he would know exactly how. But in his mind, where believing-things go, where his burning heart takes its rapid-fire pulse and his breaths open from inside, pulling against the catch in his center—in the animal, base part of himself that overturns his rationality when the light leeches away and tiredness descends, he does not know. It is all a single point of fear like a purpled bruise, even though it is all over. And because he can't help himself, he presses against it—

Because he can't help himself, he sleeps in the ravenous bed.

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—

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.

Thirteen years old, and Ciel is drowning. It does not, really, feel like falling endlessly into waves. It is pressure, and it is a cold that is encompassing, a vice around his lungs, a knife down his throat. The Campania is falling, rending with a great, hollow groan and pulling everything around it down, like a collapsar. The remains of Drossel Keinz' puppets, lost souls tied to false flesh, are swirling by, weird unconnected pieces, straw heads and silver arms, gold eyes bobbing on the surface—and Ciel, like just another one of them, pulled. Into the whirling mass, and if he thinks enough, he might realize this is the end; but instead all he knows is the cold and the dark underneath of the waves. He has been engulfed. This, he realizes, watching the soft, wormlike image of his fingers in the brine, is the inside of it all, and the sea is a freezing expanse, like the table in the cult had been, cold stone down his spine and the dagger; he of all people knows death, he has felt it so much before. And then—a hand reaching for his. He is being pulled up, and as he breaks the surface he gasps, and the hand is as hot as a brand, reborn for the nth time. He is sitting inside a small boat, shivering even under Sebastian's warm wool coat, and everything is darkness and noise. But he didn't have to, Ciel thinks.

He doesn't know why even in the pink of approaching dawn, when he finally feels Sebastian's blood under his fingers and sees his own hands shaking, shaking, trying to hold him up—why he feels. He is not infallible. The thought chases its way in his head. He can be defeated. (And still, even then—) He came back for me.

When he was a child he had known the names for emotions: anger was for the helpless press of suction inside his lungs when he couldn't breathe; sadness was for the loss of his favorite stuffed rabbit, happiness was the endless expanse of days running under the sun, Lizzie towing him by the hand; why even now do those days exist under the tint of gold?

None of those had been able to encapsulate what happened in the cult. None had been able to encapsulate what happened after—what was "fear" and "triumph" when they were one and the same? How could he begin to disentangle the flame that burned in him when he saw the shining in Sebastian's dangerous, beastly eyes? He had wiped it all clean, made a new self in which all emotions were only an alluring intensity of want, or the clammy, false pretenses he wore otherwise. And so he does not wonder to name the thing now flaring in his breast, the thing which urges him to hold tight to Sebastian's shoulders as the butler heaves and shakes, the thing that sends the tingle like waking nerves down his shoulders, elbows, hands; he only knows that Sebastian is here.

Don't scare me like that.

Don't ever scare me like that.

Not again.

In the dark bath, as Sebastian drifted into the deep places, Ciel felt. In the unravelling between them, it was nothing, then, to open the space where Sebastian poured the fifth drop, even as Sebastian hid inside the great expanse of night-dark, and Ciel could taste the essence of him even there, like wine; and ever there, where he could pull the covers over them as though, perhaps, neither being would ever have to breach the surface, as though it were possible to exist in the shivering womb forever; he knew where all the spaces of Sebastian's thoughts, which spun like coal-shards into the depths, hit down like a spark; and he gathered them, each one, close. What else could he do? In here, now, there was nothing to do but be the closed-eye-dark; in every way it had and was to do: the unaccountability of it; the way it could hold all, and more than all, and Sebastian too; or the memory of him, when he drifted. As though, beyond the bounds of liminality and time, there was indeed something: the something that named itself Ciel and knew how to keep infinitely precious things. He had the memory of being held himself to draw on, the knowledge of what to do when, betrayed by the sting of the light, it is only the un-judging rest of things that comforts, without asking: and so he did.

Was he dying, even as he held him?

Then he would hold him all the closer.

Was it void he held, no star at all but only the image of one, blinking from an endless sky?

(Did it make a difference, when either way it lit his path like fire—?)

“We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.” — Heraclitus

Sebastian has created a careful shell, as pretty as can be. Outside the dreamsilk, it has night-dark hair and eyes the color of fire; but its limbs are perfect, human, immutable. Sense and solidity, a creature as crafted and exquisite as the mechanical delights of the silver swan; clockwork automata. When they had first met, in the place between life and death, he had seen only the soul, the terror; and the void made images like shadows upon a screen; the weird phantasmagoria of the magic-lantern; and there had been beasts prowling the night, and creatures of the deep, and eyes like bubbles on sea-foam.

Even there, how strong-willed, how impetuous his master had been!

But: since then, Sebastian (the demon that calls themself Sebastian) has figured out exactly how to step upon the ground: not too lightly; so that the impressions of his footsteps herald his coming. He has figured out how to smile with human-blunt teeth in a face that, every passing day, looks more and more the perfection of stone, as though carved by the Greeks; and yet there is a blush in it; and blood. (It is not the blood that scares them—the humans. It is not the choking of it or the way it pools dark under a wound and overflows. It is not the way he staggers down as though spent when it is ripped into—it is when he stands back up that they fear; when the blood and bones knit together and they realize the careful illusion is naught but that. What is underneath? they wonder. And the answer is: nothing, nothing, nothing. [Did you think that I cared? What is “I”? You little fool. To think the unknowable had an essence; to think it was anything like your own.] ) And Ciel Phantomhive looks without fear, even at that. 

(The soul does not remember the monsters it had seen, in the place between life and death.)

(At first the thought amuses the thing calling itself Sebastian. How arrogant, Phantomhive’s assurance, when he remembers not the teeth and the hunger of the thing he keeps on a leash.)

(And then—)

Perhaps it is after the picture that has been taken. Perhaps it is after seeing Ciel reject Angela’s gift, their offer to wipe the slate clean on his sins. Perhaps, perhaps, but it is only when they are on the Tower Bridge, fighting the heavenly being, that Sebastian realizes he doesn’t want his soul (his Ciel) to see this.

That he doesn’t want to damage his master’s impression of him. (Even till the end?)

He will hear Ciel’s haughty, cold order; that last one; when they are finally on the island and all illusions will be stripped away. He will offer gentleness and hear Ciel say, “be as brutal as you like.” Because suffering and pain are life, and everything other than that is a pretty, breakable illusion, a glass bauble, a figurine. (“Be as brutal as you like”—and what if, young master, I would like to cradle your soul in my lips as I drag you down into the endless night, as if merely pulling a curtain close? What then? If I may choose, If I may like—)

(It has never been this way before.)

(No other master has been given this offer.)

(No other master has given him a choice.)

And so, when he crouches above the small body on a bridge that sways in a sharp wind, its unfinished spars like the ribcage of a whale, the shriek of souls that give its foundations stability, and the bright glow from the angel past the broken point—

When he leans down close, he has no doubt in his mind that he will be the victor. And yet that is not what stays him in that last moment.

It is the thought that Ciel might see what he becomes when the lights are off, and everything else has disappeared. As though his master might glimpse the howling void where nothing, not one bright soul and not a thousand, could fill. As though he might realize that the answer to his constant question (what are you, Sebastian?) that he has answered so many times before, in humor and in reverence (your butler, of course. Everything you wish. Everything you desire. Everything you see inside yourself, and you, of course. Yours.) has been—all this time—a falsity.

This art I am, I made for you; and behind it is nothing, nothing.

That it is terrifying is only natural; for true lack is against nature. That it has once been something other—less hideous—he recalls; most clearly against the shining of that heavenly glow. That it doesn’t want him to see—

He will not think of it then. He will not question or compartmentalize, explain or define; he will not dare draw bounds against the infinite, or wonder why this little master exists so in the very core of his regard. He will only say,

“Please. Close your eyes.”

And Ciel will.

“Open your eyes.”

And Sebastian did.

Even there, in the deep, in the in-between, feeling Ciel around him. He opened his eyes on the creature beyond the tableau by the bed, the them frozen in place as though in a setpiece. In the underneath where the light of the candle above might be the light of the moon, he opened his eyes and saw what remained of Ciel, now that the soul was gone.

He saw: ice-cold plains and the sounds of mourning. Early afternoons in springtime, filled with flowers; petals soft enough to bruise, and thorns, and the scurrying of prey in the distant trees; lines of ants against the ground and the rotting dead that turn to rich loam, a deep black soil from which new trees sprout, and the root vegetables dig their little ways in kitchen gardens; he saw:

Fire; the choking of smoke, and the ash that rains down under the lowering sky, and the softness it makes of the ground; the seeds that, burnt, unfurl then, being seared; that would not bloom from dormancy otherwise. 

Muddy silt on the edge of shallow rivers and the drag of cattails, pulling toxins from the earth and holding them there, safeguarders of the box that must never be opened. And children playing in the shallows, twisting violets into rings, making crowns and fairy-land braids.

He saw: bones at night, shining under the stars; the restful quiet and the flickering eyes of prowling beasts. And the flickering of will-o’-the-wisps teasing travelers to their doom. And all, moving with a certain internal spiral, as though the void of that existence could hold all that and more, and more.

Sebastian stood, or floated, in the underneath, and blinked; and saw galaxies reflected in a silver teapot, and the thin cut of a knife’s blade. He saw the banked fires in the hearth, and the poised perfection of a young aristocrat at the turn of a century. He saw all that and more, and more.

And when, at last, he had seen all there was to see—not a soul, not his soul, among them, and yet—

Well. Then, at last, he moved. Reaching forward, with the careful tendrils of the nothing behind his hands, the nothing behind his mouth, as though to see when the emptiness that trailed behind him would swallow it up. And yet—

The night only welcomed the dark. And the spaces between only cradled the beauty of existence—as though it 

were

the setting for a jewel.

When Sebastian climbed from the bath at last, he noticed that the definitions of the room had gained a new sharpness that heralded the coming dawn. Not yet anything but pale greys, it was as though they floated in shadow; along with the midnight drapes of the bed upon which the tableau still stood, looking as eerie as the stage-ghosts that magicians used to call to appear, courtesy of clever mirrors and recorded tapes, back when even the moving image itself held yet a certain, intangible magic. 

He turned, to see Ciel following him from the dark water; the young demon carelessly putting the vastness of the real to bed and looking like himself, but taller and older than he had ever been in life. Though they were each undressed still, Sebastian saw the vial, with its five remaining drops, hiding in a curl of his own shadow; the light from its reflection winking up like the point of a needle. And on the ground beside it was a game Sebastian remembered making with Ciel, all those long years ago; the careful drawings they had inked and colored with watercolor, pasted onto the board, labeled. And it did not seem surprising here, and now, to find it; nor was it even a surprise to find that certain elements had changed. Two black pieces from a discarded chess game were in the middle of the board, the king and the knight—yet, on this board and in this game, the special powers given to both king and knight were of very little use against the vagaries of chance. The wheel of fortune, a spinner to take turns, lay beside it. Fooled by a flower’s perfume, said the square they were on; in which the image of a demon wearing lavender, and a rose eaten away by spider mites, could faintly be seen. —go back to start.

He reached down and moved the pieces.

Seventy-two years ago, and Hannah has ruined everything.

(It’s something he never tires of repeating.) Hannah has ruined everything. (Even still, it is hard to wash all stain of culpability from himself. Surely, he must have erred—somewhere. How else could Claude, then Ciel himself; that dreadful Alois, and Hannah… how could they have gotten the better of him? How did it all come to this?)

(He doesn’t like to think these questions. To ask it of himself. It hurts his pride; whenever he has failed before—rare occasions, those—he has been able to quickly move on, to allow time to brush the edges of its sharpness; to distract himself with something else. But, now, there is nothing else to do… but wait on Ciel, and think—)

About how. much. he. has. failed. 

The thing that only looks like Ciel takes its rest, and acts with aloof coldness that deepens every passing day. And every passing day, he—(Sebastian?)—hates the sight more.

What a tiny little master. If only he had been quicker in killing it. If only he could wring its tiny neck.

(Do you wish to pull it tighter—?)(But he did not lie.)

(He held out the vial, poured another drop into Ciel’s open hand. And even as the spot burned as though with acid, the limits of the room shook as though it was only a reflection in a pond, in which a thrown pebble had created ripples.)

“I remember this game,” Ciel said, with some amusement, as he peered at the old thing. “We didn’t do half bad.”

“No,” Sebastian admitted. “We didn’t.”

“We used that to torment that embezzeler—Damiano, I think.”

“Indeed, the very same.” Sebastian smiled, and mirth danced in his eyes. “He couldn’t wait for dessert, so he decided to serve himself.”

“Sebastian—” Ciel said; and then he paused. Interlaced his fingers for a moment in thought as he sat beside the game. “You know I don’t regret it.”

“I find that hard to believe,” Sebastian said.

But Ciel only gazed back at him cooly. “Do you really?”

And there was something that stopped Sebastian’s quick retort where it lay on his tongue. He curled his hand tighter around the vial and wished that Ciel would give him an order—force his hand; overturn the entire blasted thing. He stared back, and let his eyes speak the confusion of rage. But Ciel only smiled, as though he knew just what he was doing.

Foolish young master. (And, still, so unbearably fascinating; so full of a purpose he could never hope to divine.)

If you win this one, he thought—for he knew that to win would be to say nothing until Sebastian had emptied the vial of every drop—you will die.

(And the seventh drop fell.)

People spoke of overcoming fear; of defeating it. As though it were a foe that could be vanquished and then lie dead. As a child Ciel had been frightened of everything, and it would have surprised most people, who were not his parents, to know. After all—how sunny in aspect he had been! How gregarious! But he had been frightened of strangers and the dark; his dog Sebastian; running until he couldn't breathe, and dying; he had been afraid of Frances's strength and Diedritch's loud voice and his father's title. The list of everything Ciel had been afraid of encompassed so much of his world that he learned very soon there would be no overcoming it and no defeating it. Instead, he learned to go through it.

He would talk to strangers they passed on the road; he would stay up late in bed, without a single candle; he would play with Sebastian and run through the yard when the grown-ups were busy socializing; when he came close to death—three times? Four? He lost count how many times he'd fallen so sick—he kept lists of everything he didn't regret, and would stare unwavering into the possibility of nothingness.

He had practiced fencing with Frances, took note of what it felt like to lose, and mastered it. He had stood close to Dietrich when he spoke in his booming voice; and prepared, in every way he could think of, to become the Watchdog of the Queen.

That was before.

The truth was, he didn't become a different person after. He just had more to go through.

Being touched by strangers would sicken him; and more than once he had fallen into a fit. Spending time with Lizzie would make him ill with fear, thinking always if it had been her in my place, and—if she gets too close. It still could be.

Walking through the halls of his mansion, unchanged and untouched by fire, he would imagine his parents around every corner, and the room where he had found their bodies sewn together in the flames—though the exact image escaped him until much later—made him tremble until he sometimes feared he would once again lose his breath.

And he went through it.

In increments, and not without the occasional stumble.

He still ordered Sebastian to his bedside to assure himself he would be safe. He still avoided people as much as he possibly could.

And he found servants who would push those rigid boundaries—causing trouble and screaming in the halls until the sight and sound no longer caused his pulse to skyrocket; pressing him close in hugs when they worried he wasn't all right; chattering on and on inanely (and all, intensely loyal).

All but Sebastian.

Sebastian, you see, wanted something. And though Ciel had every intention of giving it to him eventually, he did not labour under the illusion that Sebastian cared for him in any way other than that.

In the hall leading to Angela, the walls warp strangely and the screaming souls, like faces, appear from the blackness, with staring eyes and piercing shrieks. He presses his hands close to his ears and runs, as fast as he can. Not over, but through.

Not over, but through.

When Baron Kelvin created a horrible imitation of the cult. When he found Angela, and the Queen, to be the culprits.

When he thought Sebastian had killed his parents. When it turned out to be Claude. When he fought the very essence of himself from Alois's grasp. When he died, again, and then faced a new and bleaker world, where his first breath was laced with blood from the hole Sebastian had punched in his middle; in the underwater dimness. Without a soul.

The only fear he had never been able to walk through, was the fear of making his way through the rest of time alone; without Sebastian. The fear that Sebastian would grow tired of him at last; the fear that the bond between them, that he clutched at so fiercely, would slip from his nerveless fingers at last.

And yet Ciel knew quite well that turning away from fear, ignoring it, curbing your life carefully to avoid it, was worse than useless. For it would never truly go away, but always be lurking, like a shadow, behind you.

How much better to turn squarely to face the dark!

(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—

“Eternity is a child moving counters in a game, the kingly power is a child’s.” — Heraclitus

“I said I would have my satisfaction,” Sebastian said. “And I will have it,” he continued. He dropped the vial to the floor, and with a soft clink it rolled to a stop against the king and the knight, still waiting at the start of the old game. And there it winked, like fire. “Master, my satisfaction is your continued existence.”

“Why?” Ciel asked, softly.

“Because,” Sebastian said, suddenly certain. “What do those past selves of mine have, that I might be jealous of? Gold and jewels and all the arts of man pass forth age after age, each alike. Masters rise to greatness, become tyrants, live bright and cruelly passionate, and then fall to become nothing but dust, half-remembered and unmourned. The heavens above have no need of me, nor do I want them. And the accolades and pride of a ravenous beast are nothing to it except pretty baubles to assuage its own emptiness. Those creatures are nothing, and I am Sebastian, my dear, as I have always been. I am yours—this form and function and this art; this care. Everything that I might ever become under your hand is more precious to me than all the vastness of possibilities that I might otherwise have taken, trampled on, and discarded. I have no regrets; not now. Not now that I’ve tried; not now that I can say I’ve held your own death and my freedom here, before me in my palm. It’s a pretty game to while away a morning, but I would not grieve over it.”

Now the image of the bed, the butler and the boy was soft, like the reflection of light in mist, and as still as anything that has not been touched by a sudden gust of wind. The mansion in the depths of hell, which had for so long been lost in a deep uncertain slumber, was bathed in a dawnlight sky, the illusion of sunlight drifting into the silent room. And the two demons, naked beside the dark water, sat on either side of a game, neither touching the pieces by their hands. The vial that had so recently held deadly poison empty; nothing but a glass, ringing against the floor, with light.

And Ciel looked at Sebastian with wonder, still uncertain; while in return Sebastian smiled, small and careful and warm. Ciel had known assuredly that his death belonged to Sebastian. From the moment he, as a child of ten, had given it to the demon, that death had been his poison and his promise, equally. But this—? To be given, instead, life—

The long years past stretched behind him; and Ciel knew the corrosion of betrayal, and the bitter sting of salt-tears, and the hatred that had boiled like a worm, the hatred that had festered between them in the way that only true things can. But, beyond that, when the years had worn the edges of their hatred smooth, it was not forgetting that remained. Ciel was surprised to find it; a kind of peace. Everything Sebastian had done to him—everything they had made of each other—had become a place where, in meeting now, it was as though for the first time. And when he opened his mouth and said, in halting words, "Sebastian—I'm sorry—" it was only a fragment of the unutturable, which he felt; and then, shaking his head, Ciel corrected himself. "No. I… I'm glad. To be here, now, though I don't understand how, and more than that, I… I forgive you; I long since have. When we met, when you saved me… I had no knowledge of what would happen. What would become of me. I wanted nothing but a punishment, I craved oblivion in order to justify the hurt; vengeance and then nonexistence has been the greatest gift existence denies me ever, and yet, continually, you do nothing but save me. Perhaps if I had died then it would have been the ultimate kindness, and yet, if this is your selfishness—I can do nothing but surrender myself to that, and gladly."

The hurts still remained. The wounds, those old, aching things, did not dazzle and disappear; they did not even cease biting, when the air turned in a chill of cold. But they became less the end-all of existence than merely one facet; deep as they were. Strange; for so long Ciel had wondered himself a being made of hurt; for when at the age of ten his lifetime had shattered he had visioned himself created from the wreckage, nothing but a being made of hate. Without it, he had screamed, anguished at Angela's conjuring of his parents—he would be nothing; he had no self to go back to.

Oh, in the years since, how much has Ciel realized what it is to be nothing!

Without his title, without the bastion of humanity; when a creature exists only at the whim of others then, truly, can it be called nothing. And yet—! Despite it all, had he not persisted? Was he not, even now, something more than hatred? If Sebastian, who had been more deeply wronged by him than anyone, could continue to look at him and see something, was that not truly proof of Ciel's own existence?

Nothing!

Oh, what is it to be nothing! A curse? Or perhaps a boon! For just as surely, it was Sebastian's selfhood, his lack of nothingness, that he had been running from all this time, just as Ciel had been running from his life, toward the idea of a death like void: a complete absence; an inversion of soul, a violation.

To be faced, instead, with merely this: two imperfect creatures in the wreckage of an old game; two creatures facing each other in honesty. How much, more, can that be the terror beyond existence. The idea that, knowing all that he was made of, Ciel would still be here, still loved.

Folded on the floor beside them was a crimson suit. Now Sebastian unfolded it, holding out first the stockings, for Ciel to step into, silk and shimmering, and then sliding on low-heeled shoes, gleaming a polished black. The outfit was brocade, with birds in flight picked out in gold; waves of flounces like a continual fall of fabric, gathering at the narrow waist; buttons that gleamed in the new light of morning, a red that shone like the front row of fire. Every piece of it was made as though for a king, even the black lace at Ciel’s throat; his fingers, ringless, Sebastian pulled the black gloves onto; and, looking at the empty palms, Ciel held open his hand.

By the bed, the image of the boy was very faint, now. It looked like nothing so much as a reel of film that had been played until it wore down; like anything very old and very tired; and Ciel stood in his new clothes while the sunlight glanced off the bright crimson and he felt the warmth of it suffuse itself along his skin. Like waking up after a long, and very fevered, dream, the sunlight invigorated him; for the first time in a very long time Ciel himself felt new.

Seventy-three years ago, Ciel tells Sebastian a secret; something of no real purpose. “Sometimes,” he says, “I wonder what would have happened if my brother had not died.”

“I was not aware you had a brother,” Sebastian responds, not sure where his young master is going with this. Ciel has been in a pensive mood all day; now, he’s twirling the pen in his hand instead of signing the papers Sebastian has brought up to him, and the curiosity that Sebastian feels stays him.

“My older brother. My twin. He was born a few scant minutes before me, but he never took his first breath. So by the time I was born I’d already been upgraded from the spare to the heir, and I took the name that was meant for him.” Ciel smiles oddly. “Sometimes I wonder what would have been different if he had survived; if you would be bowing to a different master now.”

How ridiculous, Sebastian thinks.

But he only steps forward. Reaching out, his hand against Ciel’s cheek, he says chidingly, “and why do you think I wouldn’t have found you, even then?”

There is a gown folded on the floor. Ciel reaches to it, and when Sebastian makes to stop him, Ciel only says, quietly, “let me.” He shakes it out. The years have done his master good, at least as far as methods of dress go, Sebastian thinks; and at any rate they both have the power to make sure nothing catches or tears, and that buttons will always go easily. A small but important use of magic indeed. The gown is made of crow feathers, nothing but feathers at all, and edged in seed pearls the color of ice. Ciel steps around Sebastian when he pulls it on, and each pearl button up the back closes quickly. Sebastian gazes up into the ceiling, deep rose with the light of dawn, and feels a strange shiver of touch with each brush of Ciel’s hands against his skin. The rustle of feathers against his skin is familiar and strange, all at once; Sebastian reaches out his hand; there are silk gloves that cover his elbows, black and pure as void. Even the shoes he had once thought were lost are here again, as pointed as obsidian and as soft as smoke; tall heels with stilettos like daggers, black ice. Now, when Ciel steps back, Sebastian turns; and the feathers of the dress swing outward in a heavy arc, and the iridescence of their edges glow in every subtle color of gemstone. Sebastian brings his hands to his throat, and passes his hands across himself; the shining collar made of stars reveals itself at his touch, like the glimmering centerpiece of a universe.

“Now,” Ciel says, “I think I’ve had enough of this place. Shall we go?”

And Sebastian sinks to one knee. With his hand upon his breast, bowing his head, he murmurs, “yes, my lord.” And when he stands once again he turns for a moment to glance back at the strange still image of the bed: a dying boy and a butler, so many years ago. Without hesitation, he snaps his fingers, and the image disappears.

And Sebastian stretches his hand out; open; and Ciel takes it.

An empty room. A bed, abandoned; two pieces on a game board, the king and the knight, waiting at start.