Chapter Text
For all the bloodier associations of the color red, Ciel has never particularly linked it with the worse of its connotations. Moonlit-dark has wretched reminiscence of some cult kidnappings that were, in retrospect, a bit more concerning then he’d written them off as, at the time, and it is cooler colors — purple, mostly — that the glow of will have him reaching towards his covered eye in a throb of phantom pain. There are, notably, worse colors than red.
Which is why that is not the forefront anxiety in Ciel’s mind as he makes his way down the street in the middle of a red light district.
It should be less anxiety-inducing, it really should, given how many times he has made this exact walk in the past few weeks. But he never feels any less out of place as he walks, despite the habitual nature of this trek. Maybe he’d feel more in place if he ever… did anything. Anything more than pause briefly, admire one of the young men leaned long and thin against a lightbox, silhouette shadowed.
He doesn’t think he’ll ever do anything more.
It’s a hobby. A strange one, and unproductive, but he hasn’t particularly needed to be productive of late, so it’s fine. So he can take an hour out of every few days to walk along a street he pretends he got lost on, looking at things he pretends he doesn’t want.It’s a routine. He is good with those.
It’s a Tuesday night, and a bit early, and most of the men aren’t out yet. A few of them call out to him, playful and light like they know they aren’t really expecting him to come along, but early enough in the night to be content spending the extra minute fucking around. He doesn’t respond more than a nod to acknowledge them, and move on. One of them — one that called to him, honey-sweet, called him baby — is shorter, stockier, with muscles tight over his arms. Baby . Behind him, not really paying attention, is a young man with blond hair, biting his nail. Not the most attractive of hobbies, but barring that, he is pretty. There is a slope to his shoulder Ciel thinks briefly about biting down into, before writing that off. The man is familiar, too, in a strange, unplaceable way. Ciel, that said, is moving on. No need to place it.
“Aw, babydoll,” the same, shorter man coos. Which tightens something in Ciel’s gut he doesn’t entirely want to think about. Babydoll. “Stick around a minute. You look like you could unwind.”
“ Be unwound, more like,” the blonde man mutters, before laughing harshly like he’d told a much funnier joke. He looks over at the man next to him for approval, and finding little, turns to Ciel. There is a moment of narrowed eyes, a head tilt, before those blue eyes — big, pretty, familiar — widen.
Ciel needs to keep walking. Where he’d hesitated — babydoll freezing his step — he continues going, not responding to either of the men. He turns over the blonde man’s face in his mind, lazily trying to figure out the familiarity, when he hears, from behind, “Get your ass back here, Ciel Phantomhive.”
And that, well, that stops him.
It isn’t like he is wholly unknown — he’d garnered enemies in his youth, and as much as he’d pulled back from the whole Watchdog bit, after Sebastian, and as much as focusing on business keeps him more away from the public eye, he is in no way invisible. So, it isn’t the name that gets him to stop. It’s more the playful, cocksure tone.
The familiar as hell tone.
Ciel turns just far enough to see the blond running over to him, abandoning his compatriot. He catches up to Ciel, skidding to a stop. He is near half a foot taller than him — though, to be fair, his heels looked to be far taller than Ciel’s — and grinning. He exhales, hard, and says, “Well, fuck me, it is you. I thought there was some other eye-patched prick in the most dandy-ass clothes you can get wandering my streets.” He laughs again. Ciel doesn’t say anything. “Oh, don’t do that. You remember me.”
Ciel swallows, testing the feel of the words in his mouth, making sure they make sense, before trying out, “Alois Trancy?”
He said it half-unsure, but the moment it falls from his mouth, it’s certainty. In all honesty, he’d forgotten the kid. Well, not quite kid anyone — Ciel had guessed, in his youth, that Trancy was his elder by a year or so, putting him at maybe twenty-one, now — and he’d grown into adult quite well. His blonde hair had grown out, past shoulder length would be the estimate, as it is currently tied behind his shoulders. He’s tall, and has filled out his frame from what Ciel remembered as something boyish and lanky. There’s a hardness around his eyes that may have always been there — Ciel is lucky to remember Trancy’s hair color and name, forgive him forgetting something silly as that — that conflicts with the carefree posture of his lithe body.
Trancy’s grin somehow magnifies, and he claps a hand on Ciel’s shoulder. “Oh, thank God. I thought you had brain damage or something, because I know for a fact I am not forgettable.” He slings an arm around Ciel’s shoulder, whose posture immediately stiffens at the contact, even through the layers of his coat. “Now, what is Ciel Bloody Phantomhive doing picking out street men on a Tuesday afternoon? Could have sworn you had a whole not-queer thing going on.”
Ciel bristles. “I got lost.” This is why he doesn’t ever stop on these streets. He continues walking but, to his dismay, Trancy keeps the arm slung around his shoulders. In hopes of maybe getting the man to fuck off, instead, he continues: “Besides, I could ask the same of you.”
Trancy hums and taps a long, lithe finger on his ( dark, pretty as hell ) mouth. “Well, let’s see. Somebody — completely blanking on who — murdered my demon, my staff, and burned my fucking house down .” There’s a bite in his words that makes Ciel briefly worried, how close those teeth are to his face. “And the bank gave me jack shit — something about not proving a blood relation to the Earl, but that hadn’t been a problem before — you might understand how I started perusing other career options.”
“Well—” Trancy’s ears are pierced up and down with gold and diamonds, rings on nearly all of his gorgeous fingers. He’s close enough that Ciel could feel the occasional pass of silk shirt against his hand. He has more money on him than Ciel. “You seem to have done well for yourself.”
“Rich men adore me.”
Ciel doesn’t miss the implication on Trancy’s tongue, breathed against the shell of Ciel’s ear. He considers it. Briefly. Then, he shrugs off the arm on his shoulder. “I am sure they do. Now, I must be going. Good to see you, Trancy.”
“Ta, Ciel dearest~” Trancy does a little finger wave. The rings glint red in the light, burning into Ciel’s retinas in a way that makes his eyes seem desperate to hold onto what is likely the last time he will ever see the man. Maybe this will be enough to shake him out of this sour-stomach habit, bring him home to normal and he’ll never risk running into a once-enemy on such muddy terms again.
It was a nice thought.
“Hold on a moment, though—” Hardly ten seconds later, and Trancy’s hand is on his shoulder, grip firmer than it was a moment ago. Before Ciel can flinch away, Trancy grabs his eye patch and pulls it clean from the spot. He exhales, a laugh-breath of surprise. “Well, shit. You lost yours too.”
Ciel, instinctually, raises his hand to cover the naked eye, but he knows Trancy already got a glance of the pupil, blue and bare with only the faintest trace of the once-mark of a demon. There’s no point in denying it. “Yes. I did. And?”
Trancy cocks his head to the side, lithe arms folded over his chest, finger at the corner of his mouth. His every motion is a pose, and Ciel wonders how much work it is to keep that up. In any case, it’s enough space that he’s no longer holding tight to the eyepatch. Ciel moves to refix it. “That seems like a hell of a story.” He sways forward. It puts him firmly in Ciel’s personal space, such that any breath would be one shared. “That’s why I was so damn surprised to see you — besides the queer implications, of course — cause I figured you out to be… consumed by now.”
The shared breath smells like cigarettes and peppermint, mixed with some aftershave from the clean-cut skin of Trancy’s cheek. It’s a dizzying combination. Ciel steps back. “You’re right.”
“About many things, but which in particular? You ought to learn your specifics.”
Ciel writes off the sing-song condescension, and answers, “It is a very long, and quite hellish, story.”
Trancy barks out a laugh, and yes, Ciel supposes, it could have been funny. “I believe you, it is.” He leans back for a moment, looking Ciel up and down like he’s an auction item to appraise. Complete in his findings, Trancy hums. “Come up and tell it to me.”
“Trancy—”
“You’ll leave with your virtue intact, I promise,” Trancy assures. He stepped out of Ciel’s personal space, and has begun walking back towards one of the red-lit buildings. “Unless you want it gone.” He turns half-back, so that the edge of his profile lights up, bright and unflinching red. “It’s been a while, Ciel. Let’s trade stories.”
Ciel casts one long look over the long road home, lit in alternating shades of pink and white, a path to his manor and his bed and another day of routine, another day of doing the same things, with no one to share stories with.
He turns back to Alois.
“Alright,” he says. In the bare edges of Trancy’s profile, he sees the faintest trace of a smile. “Let’s go.”
Trancy’s apartment is a small, but crowded, affair.
It centrally has a sizeable bed — not close to Ciel’s, in diameter, but nothing too shabby — flanked by bedside tables on either end, one piled with booze and cigarettes and the kind of boxes inlaid with enough colored glass and jewels that you know hide a collection of drugs, and the other with nothing but a tall stack of novels. There is an armoire to the side, open door showing off an array of clothes in all sorts of colors. The air is heavily tinged with a rose perfume, but Ciel has been to enough brothels for work to know the underlying smell is one of sex. Bedroom and office, it seems.
“You can sit,” Trancy offers. He walks, long strides, over to the bed table, and pulls from the drawer two fine glass tumblers. “I don’t leave the quilt on when I fuck, so you don’t have to worry about putting your pretty arse on anything unsavory.”
Ciel eyes the quilt suspiciously, but decides his exhaustion from the day outweighs his proclivity for distrust, and so takes a seat. After long enough in the throngs of high society pomp and flower, there is something oddly comfortable about Trancy’s coarse, blatant language. Nothing hidden, nothing euphemized.
Trancy, in the corner of his eye, pours into the glass some dark liquid from a stout bottle. He stands before Ciel, holding the glass out for him. Ciel doesn’t take it. It isn’t that he thinks Trancy is trying to kill him, with it, but in his life he’s learned a certain degree of caution one must have with unknown drinks.
“Ah, for fuck’s sake,” Trancy scoffs, all roll-of-the-eyes. He lifts the glass he’d offered to Ciel and downs it in one go. “I’m not gonna poison you. I do have a reputation to uphold.”
Ciel raises an eyebrow. “What reputation?”
“As a very good girl, darling.” Trancy lifts the bottle in a silent question. After a moment’s consideration, Ciel nods. “But I meant more, I can’t have someone see me bring a man up here, only for him to never return.” Ciel takes the glass from Trancy’s outstretched hand, and sips lightly at it. It’s lightly spiced, barely caramelized in flavor, still harsh on a tongue unused to alcohol. But not bad. “And if Lord Phantomhive was found dead in my apartment? God, the scandal.”
“Worse for me than you.”
Trancy scoffs. “You think I want people to assume you’re my taste? I have some discretion in choosing my clients.” He collapses down on the bed next to Ciel. There is still a space between them, but it’s closer than Ciel has been to anyone in a good while, regardless. “So, tell me, the eye. All blue again, no sign of demon, why do you keep the patch on?”
Ciel clicks his tongue. He figures this one should be obvious. “Because it doesn’t work .”
Trancy’s “ha” is incredulous. “What?”
Ciel lifts the patch, so Alois can see it, again. “I’m blind in that eye. Have been, since.”
Trancy well and fully laughs then, and Ciel remembers, vaguely, what a prick he was when they were kids, and as such it doesn’t really bother him. “Oh, God, Phantomhive, you got a shit deal.” He leans in and waves his hand in front of Ciel’s face, looking for reaction in the blind eye. “Imagine if Claude died and I couldn’t taste anymore. Shit.” He leans back, chews at his inner lip, and looks studiously for a second. “Well, it would make some aspects of my job easier, I guess.”
Ciel grimaces, a bit.
Trancy notices this, it seems, as he lightly slaps the side of Ciel’s face. It doesn’t hurt, at all, and Ciel feels no need to complain. “Hey, don’t get snobby. You’re in my house, drinking my alcohol, and taking advantage of my lovely company. I make most men pay for this.”
“For talking ?”
Trancy shrugs. “A lot of new queers like to take it slow. Other people just come by because they’re lonely. Some like to pretend I’m a wife, or a girl they fancy.” He nabs the glass from Ciel’s hand, and takes a sip. “I mean, it’s mostly fucking, but not all of it.”
“Well, I suppose it’s good.” Trancy raises an eyebrow. “That you get a break.”
“That’s assuming the talking is better. Some of these men are fucking boring .” He pushes the glass back into Ciel’s hands. He pushes back his hair with his now free hand. “Believe it or not, Ciel, some of us enjoy the fucking. I wouldn’t be in this line of business if I didn’t.”
Maybe it’s the heat-in-his-face from the alcohol, or the head-dizzy proximity, or the near-certainty he has that he is never going to speak to Alois Trancy again after tonight, that make Ciel shrug a bit and reply, “I wouldn’t know.”
Alois tsk s and pats Ciel’s hand. “Yes, darling, I’d guessed that.” He tilts his head to the side. “Really, there isn’t any shame in it, either way. I do this because I like it — and it is a good job for me, honestly. Most of my johns are nice enough, or will back the fuck down when I show I won’t deal with their brash, pseudo-masculine self concept.” Something dark and stony and unfamiliar passes over Alois’s face, one Ciel had never seen to be anything but smiles, shit-eating or laughing. “It was worse when I was a kid. Because, then, anymore fucking me is someone who wants to be fucking a kid, and you can imagine those aren’t the best people.”
Ciel swallows, tightly, and looks down at the glass in his hand.
“You can feel guilty about that, you know,” Alois says. Ciel isn’t looking at him, but he can feel the gaze heavy on the back of his neck. “It isn’t all your fault, obviously, and thanks for killing my demon, I guess. But if you want to feel guilty, you should let yourself.”
The thing is, Ciel really hasn’t given half a thought to Alois in the past six, seven years. When he feels like being particularly mournful about his actions, there are worse things he’d done, harsher ghosts to beg refuge from. (Freckled face and cropped hair, sword in hand. A single word. A dead friend.) (Of all the ghosts, she is the harshest.) He had left Trancy alive, more of a kindness than he’d offered others. In the long list of sins he stores and stuffs away and chases off, stripping an orphan kid of the demon-won grandeur he’d surrounded himself in, it hadn’t seemed like much of a sin, then.
But here is Alois, all adult, all grown, with a life of his own and not a bad one.
And a lot of shit in his past that Ciel could have prevented.
“Wasn’t my best work,” Ciel offers. It’s all he can. He’s learned well enough that there’s not much good in stewing in his past crimes. “I’m hoping you didn’t take me here to lecture me on my wrongdoings.”
“Ach, no.” Alois giggles, a little, and Ciel looks at him again. He is all adult, all grown, and a lot more in control of what his life is than Ciel can claim. He’s a man who knows who he is. Which isn’t easy. “I try to limit any traits that I’d have in common with priests, and I am not your confessional.”
Alois leans into him, and there is something subtle and catlike in the tilt of his chin, the narrowed eyes and quirk of mouth. “You’re one of the only people still alive who knew me, back then. Who I knew, back then. I wanted to see how we turned out.
“How did we?”
Alois sucks in air through his teeth. He blinks, long eyelashes catching the light. “I turned out perfect, of course.” He narrowed his eyes, looking over Ciel. His lips just slightly parted. “You… I am still figuring out.”
Ciel’s glass is empty, and with the tilt, there is hardly enough distance between them away for any air he breathes to have not come from Alois’s lungs, and to Ciel, want is a stranger living in his own home. Something ever hiding, just out of view, fully unacknowledged and unviewed but always, always there. And there it is again, footsteps heavy on the floorboards, making itself known, as if Ciel hasn’t heard it do so and ignored it so many times.
He could do well, to ignore it now.
He doesn’t.
Reaching to the side of his coat, he dips his hand into the bag at his waist and pulls out some indiscriminate amount of money — he doesn’t care to count and wouldn’t know the proper sum even if he did — and pushes it into Alois’s hands.
The action startles Alois back, a bit. He looks down at Ciel’s offering, confusion in the furrow of his brow. “Ciel, I didn’t bring you here to pay repara—” He lifts his eyes to meet Ciel’s gaze, and immediately open seeing him, cuts himself off. His mouth opens in a soft “ Oh .” With that, his expression curves into a grin. He leans forward.
(If Ciel had allowed himself to think, he may have noticed an emptiness come over the eyes looking in his.)
As it is, all Ciel does is nod. To form words would be to think, and the want is still stomping its way through his chest, and he is better off not thinking at all, he decides.
“You’re going to need to use your words, darling,” Alois purrs. He slips his hand under Ciel’s chin and tilts it up so Ciel has nowhere to look by him. “What do you want, Ciel?”
The want , the intruder, Ciel has never asked its name, let alone its purpose. But he finds, now, that its answer is so close to the surface he doesn’t even have to search for it.
Voice small, near-breaking, he says, “Kiss me.”
Alois’s grin widens into something a bit more real, showing his teeth, white and shiny and canines sharp. “Hm.” He leans in until there is barely room to breathe in the space between them. Against Ciel’s lips, he says, “Good boy.”
The words alone are enough to open Ciel’s mouth in a whine, such that when Alois’s lips meet his own, they slot together perfectly.
The mouth beneath his is wet and warm, and the want has made itself master of the house, and with hardly any of Ciel’s say in the matter, his own hands raise to cup Alois’s face, fingertips brushing the soft hairs on his neck, aiming to get ever closer. Alois places a hand on his waist. Puts his tongue in Ciel’s mouth. Then, Ciel’s tongue in his. Teeth and fingernails and the dizzying heat of the room.
It is Alois who pulls away first.
Ciel finds himself panting, staggered breaths in the space between them. He’d forgotten he removed his eyepatch, until he feels Alois, with surprising tenderness, setting it back in place, smoothing over the edges with his thumb.
It’s that, he thinks, that snaps him out of it.
He starts backwards. He pushes away, so fast he nearly tumbles off the edge of the bed before he rights himself. He backs up so his spine is pressed to wall, still making firm eye contact with Alois. “I—” Alois tilts his head to the side, waiting for Ciel to continue. “I have to go.”
With that, he opens the door, and runs.
From the open door behind him, he hears a loud, bright laugh.
“Goodnight, Ciel!”
He doesn’t look back until he is stood outside, breathing in the cold air.
All lit up red.