Work Text:
Warm breath fans over his greening face. Cruel, inhumane words said to him like a siren luring a sailor from sea. It's cruel, but it's riveting. There is a fine line between desire and uncertainty, Ciel knows. He's walked it for many years; has wondered if he could push the creature into doing something about his hatred for him. Ciel tried, for many years. Doing things like refusing to eat dinners he specifically asked for, spitting hot tea in his butlers face, breaking their expensive China. He's gone as far as forcing Sebastian to work an entire month with his hands tied behind his back, just to piss him off.
But nothing worked. Nothing made the mans porcelain face crack.
Until it did -- regretfully, Ciel doesn't know what he did to push the demon over the edge. Frankly, he's extremely offended right now. Up until three minutes ago, small hands were stained with writing ink as he wrote a letter to Elisabeth. As he'd done every few months since returning to his cousin.
As far as Ciel knows, he'd done nothing particularly deserving of death that day. Sebastian was presumably downstairs making dinner.
Even as his butler is poised threateningly over his body, bruising fractured wrists into the wooden floor with knees caging his body in, Ciel doesn't know what he did. Even when a gloveless hand grips his jaw with a bone shattering force and forces his lips into an unsightly pucker, staring down with icy judgement in neon pink eyes. Sebastian, apparently, just cannot stand Ciel any longer.
Despite all of it, there is still desire. A curious ache that swells like a wildfire, always so sudden that it gives Ciel whiplash. What was it that pushed Sebastian over the edge? Will his butler finally kill him? That's what Ciel desires most. He's wanted a way out of the contract since... since he realized he was just a kid. Has Sebastian decided he's had enough of playing chess with a child that's always ten steps behind and twenty ahead?
But it's also a heavy lump of hurt, resting hard and painful in his throat.
He tries to push away those thoughts. Warm red eyes watching over him at night, a steady presence that kept the nightmares at bay. A soothing hand running through his hair to lull him to sleep.
His heart aches, he begs it to stop.
Sebastian throwing fits over his health after the Campania. His butlers voice shouting at him to keep his eyes open - his eyes stinging with salt water and nose burning with the pungent smell of rot and blood. Sebastian fighting off the Living Dead until the sun rose and not a splash of blood landing on Ciel. Sebastian carrying him back to the carriage, and then back into the Manor, up to his room, to his bed. Where he stayed sick bound for weeks. Sebastian attending to his every need with soft smiles and deceptively kind eyes.
STOP.
Green vines stained red that tell tales of a snake, of a creature who told lies and beseeching any who'd hear him. Damning all who gave him a moments time, fangs, elongated mouth gaping on a spit-slicken hiss. The vines, the ropes of nature scream at him, tell him — we told you so — with a withering blackness to their roots. Ciel does not cry. Nor does he weep and grovel for the reason why.
That's not to say he isn't dying for the answer -- he just knows he won't receive one. If he had to guess, though...
"Your Knight only serves you if you bare an iron fist; whereas you wear a silk glove and call on me as your iron fist. No King dare bare their life, no Lord would ever fathom twiddling their thumbs and batting pretty eyes at a creature of Hell to get their worth. A King or a Lord would not trust a demon. You died the moment you began to trust me."
Or... Perhaps worse...
"Your soul is different. You've learned to love again. You see in me something you lost that day. A fath-"
No. Ciel would much rather die than ask his butler why he was being betrayed. Because, truth be told, he already knows. Ciel knows that somewhere along the line, he did change. His heart once drained of its desire and plucked of its veins began to pump again. It had begun to beat for one sole reason, and he cared not to admit for who it beat for. Why it beat for who it did.
Distantly, the child in Ciel wonders if his father could ever forgive him. Forgive him for moving on, for finding family in that which he also found fear.
Bastard. Sebastian. He couldn't even bare his usual irritating, eye-sore of a smile as he ended their contract.
Sebastian gave Ciel minimal emotion, and the only actual emotion Ciel could place was rage. Felt it in the iron grip of his wrists, saw it in the swell of the man's pinched brow, heard it in his simmering tone.
Warning signs that once defeaned him into ignorance blare again. Loud. The sound pierces through his eardrums and forces him to hear them, to see the red flag that wraps around Sebastian Michaelis. That's always been stuffed into his chest pocket like a handkerchief.
Ah.
This is betrayal at its sickest, most loveliest form. This is hot, wet betrayal sliding down his cheek in the form of blood. Red and nickel-scented.
It's the sickening POP! of his contracted eye squelching from his skull. Hung on an elongated black claw. Immediately Ciel is rid of all protection from Sebastian's hand, drained of the sickness that festered in his bloodstream in the form of trust.
The gore-soaked organ slides past snot slicken lips, forced down his own throat when Sebastian clamps his mouth shut to force him to swallow. The seal of their contract gleams one last time on the demons hand before simmering out, inky blackness fading away like a sandcastle on a wet shore.
Ciel Phantomhive does not whimper nor does he beg for Sebastian to just get it over with, but he allows himself to cry now. It's natural. He's not crying for his life. He's crying because anyone would given their eyeball was torn from its nerves and yanked from their skull.
Sebastian speaks through it all, the entire process. It's oddly enchanting if you can get past it all being curses of his name. Sebastian is actually quite talkative this particular evening. But it falls on deaf ears. He speaks of things Ciel would rather not hear. Harsh, unforgiving things. Of how his soul will not pass to Heaven nor Hell given he sold it to a demon, but now that his soul isn't being eaten, he will simply writhe in blank existence for eternity. Black. Endless black nothingness, where you couldn't see your own hand in front of you.
Ciel wonders why the creature isn't speaking in a language he understands. He isn't forced to tell Ciel his every thought now, nor is he binded into telling only the truth, but he also will face no repercussions for beseeching Ciel's name now, either.
Ah.
Why you? Ciel aches to ask. Of all the people in my life who sought to kill me, why you?
He still doesn't ask.
Curiosity may kill him before Sebastian can.
Sebastian speaks mostly in tongue as he studies Ciel carefully now, sometimes shifting his head to the side which forces his cheek into the cooling puddle of his own blood. As if searching to make sure the contract broke fully and correctly. This goes on for a few minutes. Ciel loses track of time. There's noisy adrenaline searing his brain, thrumming in his veins, and he's cold. Cold?
Oh.
Oh.
This is death. Isn't it?
Ciel knows all there is to know of death. He's curved around it like the gleaming ring on his finger too many times to count. He knows the ins and outs — or lack of outs — just as well as he knows how to sort documents and stamp seals. He is finely aware that once death has its grip on you, your name is printed in a Reaper's to-do list.
Ciel's name is about to be augmented in its legacy.
All that he'll be in a few short minutes is a reminder of what being a Phantomhive means. Untimely ends, unsolved murder cases, gold slipped secretively into a detectives pocket to keep his mouth shut.
And, well — this?
This is the cold fear he's heard described right before you know you're going to die. So why is he afraid, now? He's prepared himself for this exact feeling from the moment he gave a Demon a name. From the moment his blood-soaked, eleven year old hand was encased in an ice cold, talon-tipped grasp.
This feeling grips his heart like an iron fist. It's a choked whine jerking from his chest as his heart is pulled from it. This is the numbing coldness when you see your own beating heart outside of your body. Held in the hands of The Devil himself. The Devil is beautiful, though. Soaked in red, pinning him with a look he can't quite place, lean with a handsome face. Ciel hates that. He truly hates how beautiful Sebastian is, even with a clawed hand secure around his heart.
Sebastian's face often reminds him of his father.
Ciel wants nothing more than to never see such ironic beauty again. How pitiful. His wish comes easily enough. Blackness dotting his vision, the deafening sirens smoothing into soft white noise, limbs growing tired and heavy.
Inexistence is easy, he decides as soon as it comes. It's not cold or hot, it feels like nothing at all. But it does wrap around him like an oddly textured hug, prickles his skin as he walks through it. He really has to pull his legs up to trugde through it. At least, he thinks he's walking. It's hard to tell when you can't feel anything beneath your feet. Even harder to tell when you can't.... see your own hand in front of you. Huh.
So, the bastard was telling the truth.
How curious.