
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/7303621.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Kuroshitsuji_|_Black_Butler
  Relationship:
      Sebastian_Michaelis/Ciel_Phantomhive
  Character:
      Sebastian_Michaelis, Ciel_Phantomhive, Rachel_Phantomhive, Agni_
      (Kuroshitsuji), Soma_Asman_Kadar, Sieglinde_Sullivan
  Additional Tags:
      AU, canon_divergence_from_Lolita, alternative_universe
  Stats:
      Published: 2016-06-26 Updated: 2018-03-22 Chapters: 20/24 Words: 60178
****** Ciel - A Reimagination of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita ******
by nighttime_tea_party
Summary
     Sebastian Michaelis does not need to be a demon in order to be a
     monster; Ciel Phantomhive will still remain his bait.
     Based on an idea I posted on tumblr. Taking the plot of Lolita as a
     base, we follow Sebastian, a man who finds himself enthralled with
     the son of his hostess for the summer of 1947.
  This work was inspired by
      Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
***** Chapter 1 *****
Chapter Notes
     To the first time readers, welcome. To the old readers, welcome back
     and sorry.
     This is a story about a human Sebastian Michaelis that really doesn't
     lack any of his demonic characteristics - ever since I read Lolita, I
     saw similarities in Humbert's and Lolita's relationship with that of
     Sebastian and Ciel. Especially Humbert's and Sebastian's narcissistic
     characters resemble each other strongly, although Sebastian lacks the
     last bit of humaneness that Humbert showcases by letting his self-
     hatred seep through the lines occasionally. There are striking
     similarities but also significant differences and that's why I want
     to write this story and explore my very own turn of events.
     As many people have noticed, this fanfic suddenly disappeared - and I
     have to say it is my fault entirely. I got reported for plagiarism. I
     misinterpreted the AO3 TOS and thought I could cite whole passages
     from the book. I didn't want to just copy-paste the book and I think
     my readers understood that. I thought I could only build a bridge
     between my fic, Kuroshitsuji and Nabokov's book if I his book and my
     writing together but I realise now that that was stupid and I
     should've tried to entirely make this story up of my own writing from
     the start. That's why I majorly edited the first five chapters with
     my own words. I do think this is for the better and now I'm actually
     glad I was forced to take this opportunity.
     That being said, there are words that I want to keep - most
     prominently, the very first lines of Humbert Humbert's ramblings,
     although I adjusted them to my story. But also terms and phrases that
     leave their imprint on the story. In the below introduction chapter,
     you will immediately notice the underlined parts with numbers at the
     end - in the end notes, these numbers reference the source, you will
     find the exact page of the issue I cited from in these end notes.
     There are five cited parts in this chapter. This is an
     unrepresentative amount of the rest of the story, where only
     sporadically direct citations will occur.
     I believe that by not using Nabokov's words anymore, this is a Lolita
     AU fic as much as it is a Kuroshitsuji AU fic. And by chapter five at
     the latest you will realise that this story is taking its very own
     path: I do NOT intend to just follow the plot of Lolita brainlessly.
     I am always open to concrit! I am not a very experienced writer and
     my English isn't perfect, so I would be thankful for any piece of
     advice, be it something about my style, my possibly wacky metaphors
     or just mistakes.
     Lastly, I hope you will enjoy reading this story! I hope to see you
     again in later chapters.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
Ciel,_light_of_my_life,_fire_of_my_loins._My_sin,_my_soul._Ciel,_a_single
syllable:_The_tip_of_the_tongue_making_a_twist,_then_resting_on_the_palate.
He_was_the_colours_of_the_sky._Foggy_grey_like_November_air_in_the_early
morning,_standing_roughly_five_feet_in_one_sock._He_resembled_a_stark_spring
noon_sky_at_school:_strong,_bold_and_confident._In_the_lazy_evening,_he_was_the
mellow_reflection_that_made_the_deep_sea_appear_blue._He_could_be_a_storm_cloud
hiding_the_sun._He_was_the_biblical_allegory_of_heaven's_messengers_when_he
wanted_his_way,_the_fallen_one_when_nobody_watched._In_my_arms,_he_was_always
just_Ciel._(1)
 
===============================================================================
 
I was born in 1910, Paris, where I grew into a tall, dark and handsome man – my
charm resembling the movie heroes stealing away the hearts of the women of our
time. Although my father was a gentle, easy-going person, I have to blame his
love of the occult for my pandemonic name. Sebastian, not an extraordinary
given name per se; coupled with the last name Michaelis, I became a living
homage to the great inquisitor and creator of a classification of demons. Now,
the highly honoured reader might be inclined to come to the conclusion that
this name foreshadowed the deeds of a monster. But first, I ask of you to
listen to my confessions to the end, for they are not the confessions of a
ruthless beast, but merely of a lovesick fool.
My childhood was a happy one. Although I never learned to know my mother, my
widowed father provided me with parental love worth two mothers, as well as a
good education. In my adolescent years, I was sent to a boarding school in
England, where at the same time my manhood and love for the English language
awoke. Dear reader, let me tell you: a boarding school is a cesspool of
juvenile sexual frustration, much more so an all-boys one. Luckily, through
mutual experimentation and exploration with my peers, I soon found my sexual
interests not to be bound by gender. And as the years went by, I embraced my
role as a mentor to the younger, less experienced students; by day in French
and Mathematics, by night in Physical Education. And upon my graduation, more
than one tear was shed.
I continued my education in Oxford, focussing on the beloved English language.
Not much of relevance happened in these years, that is, not much else than what
I had known from boarding school. Haunted by fond memories of the years this
boy became a man, there would, however, develop and ripen a particular taste in
arts, crafts and sexuality.
For the reader to understand my further elaborations, I must familiarise him
with a certain concept. There is a time in a young human's development, a thin
line, the beautiful golden streak on the early morning horizon, the glowing,
beautiful point of time when the day has not yet fully begun and only a handful
early risers wish their slumber goodbye. Only the nightly wanderer will notice
the lights in their rooms turn on, see their figures rise through the windows.
And as quickly as the sun forces the moon away and the wanderer loses sight of
what is behind the windowpane, these early risers, enchanters of the Neverland
between night and day, transform and leave the house and live their day like
any other would; their nymphic morning beauty put to rest alongside the moon.
These beautiful spectres, unbeknownst to themselves, captivating the poor
wanderer and misleading him with their light, I would like to introduce these
girls and boys as “nymphets”(2) and “faunlets”(3), respectively.
The golden string spans between the ages of nine and fourteen. Only a moment in
a life, yet everything after lacks the golden shine. The heart melts at the
relieving view of the rising sun but cannot be bothered to look at the harsh
orb at noon. Likewise, these early-risers radiate their most beautiful light
only for a matter of moments. And just like not every daybreak blesses us with
that spectacle, not every child is a nymphet or faunlet. They hide among age
peers from the view of anyone that is not a “nympholept”, unrecognisable to the
common man: those that do not share the same romantic sympathies. The nymphet
among children will enchant the connoisseur but might not necessarily be the
prettiest girl in the group. The adorable pig-tailed girl with the rosy cheeks
might be a poster girl for an all-American milk product but her dark-haired
friend to the right whose eyes are just a bit too far apart could be the
perfect nymphet when an ever so elusive bat of a lash, the tilt of her head,
the movement of her limbs will have the expert recognise her, possibly even
before she does so herself. The faunlet might not be the best behaved, good one
in a group of restless children. His face might be smeared with mud and his
knees be bruised but his eyes will be alight with a fire not seen in those
around him. I would argue my own roots lie in my faunlethood when I reflect my
early years of boarding school.
Of course, I knew better than to act on my raw instincts, for I have always
been a civilised individual. I had sworn myself to limit my personal joys to
watching the hellenic tempters roam like a lover of the visual arts that cannot
paint would: devoting, in great agony, in dread and admiration of the pieces of
art he can never touch. My graduation from school meant the beginning of a long
way of starving my innermost appetite.
 
The years following tertiary education led me back to Paris. A few small
translation jobs, parental financial support and relations formed in recent
years granted me the opportunity to concentrate on my personal creative self-
fulfilment. It was a fruitful time, I wrote as many as four novels in five
years in English and French, one of which has since been translated into four
other languages. Raw emotion and straightforwardness sold my work – though, the
rawest of emotions, the craving for a spritelet's (to find a term to group my
nymphets and faunlets together) sweet taste, I had to hide under layers of
language and character distortion.
After this peak phase of creative expression, I so happened to acquire an
employment as a university lector. The head of the institute was just as
pleased to welcome the fresh breath of a young and successful author among
their midst as I was to have an excuse for my creative fatigue and resulting
lack of productivity. At this point in my life, talking about writing had
become much easier to me than doing the task myself.
This went on for another few years until in the year 1947, life's path led me
to New England. I had inherited a small fortune from an uncle of whom my only
memory was a faint smell of cigars. I had quit my academic profession at an
English Studies institute at a Parisian university, taking the only matter of
meaning, my progressing work on a comparative history of French literature for
the English-speaking students, with me to the United States. A much needed
divergence from life as I knew it; had I just shortly before fought out an ugly
divorce with an even uglier woman whom I had only married a year and a half
before. The reader needs to understand, I had struggled for a long time: The
healthy young man I was, an outlet for my carnal desires was needed. But alas,
I am not a reckless idiot and so I forced myself to only take a sip of the
golden nectar of spritelet youth in my dreams and fantasies. I bedded adult
women for years, my eyes never open when I sunk into the rosy cheeks and tender
spritelet flesh in my dreams and in my dreams only. I understood that a
connoisseur of the charm of little devils like myself had no choice but to hide
his longings. But my marriage with that woman, childless as it remained (thank
god!), could not suffice for what roamed in my loins.
The prospect of engaging myself in academic efforts, thousands of miles away
from dull Paris, promised to tend to my damaged emotional state. A former
colleague at the English institute had arranged a stay for poor, stressed
Professor Michaelis in a relative's estate. I was promised the room of the
relative's husband's late aunt who had recently passed away. A home with a
beautiful garden, surrounded by beautiful greenery, much space to breathe for
the last of the couple's children had just left for college, it sounded
wonderful.
After a bit of letter correspondence with the married couple, I was formally
invited to spend the summer in their mansion located in Ramsdale, a little town
in New England. However, after a long and tedious travel, I arrived all dressed
up and nowhere to go – there I stood, at the train station, waiting for Mr.
Lovely House to pick me up, yet no Mr. Lovely House arrived. In fact, the
lovely house had burned down and Mr. and Mrs. had gathered what had survived
the flames to seek shelter in a relative's home and only on their way were so
kind to at least let me know about the incident through a phone call. They told
me, however, that a friend of hers, Mrs. Phantomhive, a lady living a few roads
away from the destroyed estate, offered to accommodate me. Describing my
momentary mood as annoyed would be a euphemism. In my head, I immediately began
to plan my travel back home to Good Old Europe, where houses do not just get in
my way by burning down like the fragile little wooden matchboxes in the new
world. Yet good manners asked for me to at least pay that Mrs. Phantomhive a
visit to politely refuse the offer.
A seven minute car ride away, a wooden horror in a faded grey that most
probably used to pride itself on its whiteness years ago forced itself into my
view. Hoping he would drive me back in only a matter of moments, I generously
tipped the chauffeur and told him to wait for me outside but an old lady across
the street called him over in a jovial way and he replied that I could find him
there if I need anything else. I was left to myself again, facing the monster
in front of me like David faced Goliath, and rang the door bell. A tall woman
opened the door. “Monsieur Michaelis, I assume?”
I prefer describing her immediately, to get the task done. A tall but frail
woman in her mid thirties with strawberry blonde hair tied high at the back of
her head, Rachel Phantomhive could be considered a conventionally attractive
woman. Her deep azure eyes told stories of long lost nymphet allure, still
reminiscing in her confident demeanour.
The woman invited me to come in. After a little trivial chit-chat, her careful
way with words had hinted me at her participation in the local book club: She
was very particular about the rules of conversation, though not so particular
about the topics.
As she set out to lead me through the house, my resolution of not settling for
the summer there became stronger and stronger. No reasoning in the world could
convince me of the benefits of spending a whole summer in that pit of suburban
modernism and functional eclecticism. Much rather would I take the tedious way
back home than scrape a living here by waiting for summer to pass.
 
My thoughts drifted off to considerations about how I would spend my next days
dwelling in the hotel room, looking out for a charming guesthouse in the area.
But first, I_was_led_upstairs,_into_“my”_bedroom(4). A storage room in size, a
workhouse in style. I did my best to hide the shock, nodded and smiled, and
went on with the ordeal.
On our way back downstairs we quickly passed the only bathroom in the house,
Phantomhive quickly apologising for the mess of wet towels spread across the
room, then led me further into the kitchen downstairs, in_the_corner_of_the
house_where_dining_room_and_parlour_were (5). At the end of the room, from
behind a French window, bright greenery surged into the kitchen. “the piazza”,
my hostess for the moment explained. And there, with the sudden energy of a
geyser shooting up into the air, I lost my heart to the boy lounging on the
grass on the other side of the garden – half-naked, fanning himself with a
homemade paper fan, lifting his eyes from the book in his other hand to stare
at me with the slightest trace of disfavour in his eyes. That dangerous child,
source of my personal rise and demise, a devil in disguise. Looking as picture
perfect as he always will in my heart: Frail, slightly sunburned shoulders,
back bent in a crescent as he rested on his belly, a silvery grey head of hair.
Dressed in a polka-dotted black sleeveless shirt, ends tied together in a knot,
he hid his milky white chest from my gaze. The little faunlet sat up to better
examine me in return, offering me the opportunity to admire the blade of grass-
imprinted skin stretching between the shirt and shorts, and in a similar way,
his thighs that I would later stain with kisses, only bore the pattern the soft
grass inflicted on him. It was then that I realized everything between my first
prepubescent self-discoveries and this meeting was just a series of false
rudiments of joy. The thirty-seven years I had lived so far all led up to this
very encounter. The fascination with and longing for slim spritelet limbs, they
were mere foreshadowing and preparation for the impact of passion that flooded
all of me on that early summer day. In that moment, when my glance slithered
over the kneeling child, his radiant blue eyes blinking at me sceptically, the
vacuum of my soul managed to suck in every detail of his bright beauty and lock
them within my heart forever. I have not yet lost the ability to judge my
situation – I am well aware the judges will discard these elaborations of my
mortal soul as the start of a disgusting and sick dislocation from reality,
seeking comfort between the legs of a defenceless child. For all I care, about
this I do not. Instead I am being so presumptuous as to demand these judges to
read to the very end of my confession.
All I remember from there is that I had the most difficult time of my life to
keep standing on my feet since I was an infant; even more difficult proved the
task to follow the Phantomhive woman down the stairs into my Garden Eden.
“I have to apologise for my moody little Ciel. I will have him introduce
himself properly later. But would you take a look at my lilies!”
“Wonderful lilies. A wonderful, wonderful sight!”
 
 
Chapter End Notes
     (1) altered from Nabokov, Vladimir - Lolita - Page 7, chapter 1 -
     Penguin Classics edition
     (2), (3) terms coined by Nabokov, adopted in my rendition
     (4) Nabokov, Vladimir - Lolita - Page 40, chapter 10 - Penguin
     Classics edition
     (5) Nabokov, Vladimir - Lolita - Page 41, chapter 10 - Penguin
     Classics edition
***** Chapter 2 *****
At this point I would introduce Exhibit A – a pocket diary bound in black
imitation leather, with a golden year, 1947, engraved, in its upper-left
corner. However, it was destroyed and all I can provide are my recreations,
though rest assured I remember its content by heart, for it was the only
companion I could share my woes and longings with. Keeper of my secrets from
that day I moved into the Phantomhive house, covering most of June.
Thursday. Very warm. Sat outside in the piazza, reading the newspaper. Ciel
came outside to read too. He spends much of his time reading. Outside because
Rachel wants her son to “tan a little, load up on Vitamin D”. Ciel groans in
protest, does as he is told anyway. Like everyday. But I agree with his mother
– she offers me the opportunity to watch the little slim porcelain doll
crouching in the shadow, behind sunglasses and his mother's ridiculously huge
sunhat, twisting backwards and forth until he finds a comfortable position and
leans back. Resting against a tree, just his freshly sunscreened legs are
kissed by the sun – oh, I am convinced the sun, too, would love to creep beyond
your shins! Those scandalously short shorts would be the perfect piece of
clothing to slip its hands beneath. But wait, there's more! For a few seconds,
the marvelous little faunlet boy laid away the book to knot his t-shirt up,
exposing to my view that beautiful skinny stomach whose tracing ribs I so
desperately want to retrace with my lips.
And yet, the boy does not speak a single word to me! I sit so closely but all
the while he seems so far away. Perfectly normal, according to Mrs.
Phantomhive. What a difficult child.
Tuesday. I have been spending much of my time not working on my comparative
history, but instead reading in the piazza, hoping for the boy to make his
appearance too. And as usual, he would. I am proud to say that over the past
days he started addressing me, asking for salt at dinner or wishing me a good
morning. Still in overwhelming contrast to old Phantomhive, though, who will
grab the thinnest, driest straw of a reason to talk to me. Do I need a refill
for my drink that I just now took the very first sip of? Is the chair
comfortable or should she bring a cushion? The burden that comes with good
looks. She fell for my sleek appearance, enigmatic smile and sonorous voice. I
just can't help being a woman's dream incarnated, the mysterious bad boy
character whose life's purpose is to break the heroine's heart, or so Hollywood
would make you believe. How easy life could be if only I could find joy in the
common heroine!
Wednesday. Finally, I think, I – we – that is, Ciel and I – had a breakthrough!
I had noticed the boy's sideway glances into my direction. When his mother went
inside to prepare lunch today, he finally gathered himself up and, hesitantly,
walked towards me, eyes fixated on the book in my hands.
“What are you reading?”
My heart raced at that angelic voice directed towards me.
“The Prisoner of Chillon. Lord Byron.”
He stepped closer.
“I've never read anything from him. Is it any good? Can you recommend it? I'll
be done with my book soon.”
I felt pierced by the starkness of his eyes' azure blue.
“I can but wouldn't you prefer something befitting your age?”
He snorted.
“Don't you underestimate me.”
Yes, I am positive we bonded today.
Thursday. Mrs. Phantomhive went out to run errands. I enjoyed an afternoon home
alone with my sunburned pearl. The woman does not need to force him outside
anymore - he goes there on his own, much to my liking.
He came outside with his almost finished book jammed under his arm, carrying a
tablet with a large glass of ice-cooled water and a bowl of cut fruit and
tripped on a root. The glass did not break; the bowl, however, did and cut its
way into the boy's calve. After exclaiming a word his mother would have scolded
him for, he waited for me to return from the bathroom with bandages. How happy
he was to have grown-up Mr. Michaelis tend to his wound! I told him to just
call me Sebastian. Oh, the sound of my name from the boy's mouth!
The beguiling child watched me as I examined the wound, gently wiping away the
blood in order not to press possible glass shards any deeper. Thank you, dear
glass shard, for granting me the opportunity to touch this graceful leg today.
When I disinfected the wound, I stroked his soft thigh as a means of comfort;
for whose comfort I will not say. The closeness enabled me to perceive his
odour. A mix of sweet sunscreen and pubescent pheromones. And then I bandaged
his wound almost as tightly as my trousers had grown.
Friday. Keeping this diary is madness but too thrilling not to do. I don't
believe my handwriting is decipherable on a quick glance, but nonetheless I
need to take care.
Saturday. Mrs. Phantomhive joined me in the piazza just as Ciel was sent to
bed. The woman approached me to talk about her son. After his father's death,
the poor boy changed, she explained. They had been very close and when his
father died, it seemed like a part of the child's heart died too. Death was not
kind to him: Before his father's decay, he had to wish his little brother
goodbye, who died at two from severe illness. Today, he is a reclusive child,
not shy but simply disinterested in others. At least he is a good boy, studies
eagerly and ambitiously, she sighed. But he keeps too much to himself for her
not to worry. And it seems he wants to grow up as fast as possible, leaving
hardly any room for the usual joys of childhood. But how wonderful it is that
he seems to open up to me! A very rare thing, according to her. She is
convinced I remind him of his father, for she, too, sees resemblance in me.
Monday. I have been keeping my door wide open while working throughout the last
few days. It took until today for this to lure the boy in. As he planned to
pass my room, he reluctantly stopped below my door frame. I inquired whether I
could do anything for him. He replied that he was just curious what exactly I
have been working on. I invited him to take a look at my desk where, closed
shut, this diary, too, was lying among my stationery. The boy's curiosity asked
for an explanation that surpassed a mere single-sentenced reply. He made me
feel invited to go into further detail than anything I had ever told his
mother! As he leaned over my scripts, looking through the notes, I laid my hand
in his waist to draw him even closer, so he could take an even better look, and
imitate a fatherly gesture, or so I could sense the warmth radiating from his
body while I was describing the challenges of introducing the English-speaking
reader to French literature. He listened eagerly, asked for clarifications on
some parts and when we were finished talking about the book, he turned his head
around to face me, just the length of a nod away, and looked at me as if in
anticipation. My hand still in his waist, I weighed between the pros and cons
of locking my lips with his, the way he looked at me, I am convinced he was in
anticipation of just that, I really am. But just as I inhaled the bit of air
that one inhales before kissing, or talking, or doing anything really with
one's mouth, the mother called for Ciel to set the table for lunch and he
followed her demand instantly. To hell with that woman!
Let me state this: Again and again I am surprised by this lovely little
faunlet. When he is not tempting me by showing off his scarcely clothed budding
body or alluring me with his non-verbal mannerisms, he provides me with the
pleasantness of being able to talk about myself and my interests. Everyone
likes to talk about oneself and one's interests! And even more so when offered
an interested listener.
Tuesday. Elizabeth Midford from down the road, one of Ciel's classmates, came
over for a visit. One of his very few friends, I was told. A perfect example of
a pretty and charming girl lacking every nymphet allure.
The two of them sat down to play a game of rummy. Elizabeth, seemingly the
incarnation of the concept “the more, the merrier”, asked me to join them.
Embarrassed by the childish nature of his friend's request, Ciel assured me
that there was no need for me to lower myself just out of courtesy. But I
accepted thankfully, not least because of a spark of jealousy that I had felt
before when the children sat together. Completely unjustified jealousy, I
acknowledged when I closely watched them being friends, good friends but
nowhere room for anything more than that.
Wednesday. Very hot. Wearing nothing more than a pair of swimming trunks, my
celestial Ciel cooled himself by pouring water from a garden hose all over his
body. A hearty sigh of relief only locked my eyes tighter on that view I could
not look away from in the first place. What's more, as if this was a bad motion
picture, his mother came out to hand the boy a popsicle! Raspberry, his
favourite. Almost comically perfect timing in retrospect. As usual, he sat down
to read, I had recently lent him the Byron. Lounging on his tummy, he enjoyed
his read and caressed his popsicle. Pink lips softly enclosed the tip, taking
on some of its colour. When that wasn't enough, he nibbled on it, sucked the
colour out, occasionally pushed the ice cream further into his eager mouth
whenever he felt like it. Oh, how it agonized me! Did you know what you were
doing to me, little boy? Thank god the mother was busy inside because
otherwise, she would have been witness to my heavy breathing while I imagined
to thrust myself between the boy-child's lips, in and out and in; first gently,
then relentlessly; making him gag on my length. And when I would come, the boy
would greedily swallow all of me, and tell me he preferred my taste over the
raspberry popsicle.
Ah, if only!
Thursday. I was working when Ciel crept into my room. Embarrassment shining
through his demeanour. He admitted he had just eaten my piece of cake, and that
he was really sorry, and he owed me a little favour but if I would please not
tell his mother because she doesn't want the boy to eat that many sweets all
the time.
Oh dear boy, you could eat all of me and I would not mind.
Friday. Ciel approached me to converse about the Byron book that he had read
the other day. He told me he preferred prose. But that it was fine. Well
written but a bit melodramatic. I told him that's just the way Lord Byron is
supposed to be. Maybe he'll understand when he's older. He gave me the cold
shoulder for using his age against him and let me know that that's not it and
that I am a jerk.
Later that day, he returned to tell me I could recommend him books anytime. Oh,
my beautiful bird. I might borrow you my copy of Teleny and leave bookmarks at
my favourite parts.
Saturday. Ciel had a fight over the telephone with one of his school friends.
His voice roared through the house when he proclaimed that he sees no need in
meeting when they meet each other daily all semester long. The moment he hung,
up, I could hear his mother starting to argue with him. I assume it must have
been something along the lines of, “You are a really mean boy,” “You should
care about your friends more,” to which he would reply, “why should I pretend
to care”
Monday. Old Phantomhive asked me to accompany her to the city to help her pick
a birthday present for a friend of hers, lauding my taste in fine things. I am
relatively convinced now that this woman, to my horror, is taking her first
steps at trying to make herself my new Mrs. Michaelis.
I could not think of a single reason not to accompany her and being the old-
world gentleman I am, I just could not be rude and decline. I thought that
maybe I could at least take the chance and run some errands on my own.
My dove, I could swear, showed the slightest little trace of jealousy when it
was just the two of us going out. The thought kept me busy all the way
downtown.
Tuesday. Schoolmates came over. Ciel was unhappy with that but Rachel left him
no choice. The children were terribly loud and I stayed inside for most of the
day. On my way downstairs to grab myself a glass of iced water, I passed a
window looking down into the piazza. Elizabeth had come over and had just
joined forces with a plain, freckled, bespectacled boy to splash the other two,
my beloved Ciel and another charming faunlet boy whom I had first assumed to be
a girl. I heard my opinionated darling shout, “Hold it, McMillan! Elizabeth!
You're flushing away Harcourt's ice cream!” and then, not all that loud, “why
can you kids not act a little less immature for a second!”
I wondered what kind of “mature” activities he would have preferred. And then
my mind drifted off into spheres far beyond. What kind of mature entertainment,
I wondered, would be more to his liking?
Wednesday. Ciel spent the breakfast quarrelling with his mother. He would never
invite the kids over again. Mrs. Phantomhive reminded him of how she heard him
laugh with the others multiple times. An expression of his resignation for the
day, he insisted.
Later that morning he came to talk to me, believing I would understand him
better than his mother. I explained that whether he likes it or not, he will
always need to get along with people he has not a trace of sympathy for; that
this hardly changes with age. The boy asked me for personal experience with
people I do not get along with, of which I had plenty to share. I must say I
thoroughly enjoy this little devil's spiteful traits.
In the afternoon, Rachel asked me for a one-on-one to tell me in private how
happy she is to see how well I get along with her son – to a point where she
fears the end of summer and my departure, and that Ciel would miss me. And then
she told me what a shame it is for a man like me to not be happily married,
that she cannot imagine what woman would let a man go that gets along with
children so well. She had found it to be a rarity for a man not to be put off
at the thought of living with a child that is not his. Oh, if she knew how much
joy I take in living with this child that is not mine!
***** Chapter 3 *****
                                        
Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, you are now familiar with the essence of my
notes. The ordeal would stay the same day after day. A temptation so close to
my claws that it dared to overwhelm me, yet thank god, or the devil, or Zeus,
or whatever higher entity was keeping me company, that I had had plenty of
experience satiating my hunger with the help of my vibrant imagination. The
mere passing of a touch could grant me bliss if I just let it do. That was
enough, I wanted to believe. Yes, I wanted to believe but I could not, not
anymore. But the devil, it must have been him, took joy in watching me. And in
an attempt to break the repetitive daily scheme, it seems, the lord granted
starving, dying Sebastian a nib – just a nib – of that forbidden fruit's
nutritious flesh.
One sunny Sunday, I overheard an argument downstairs that I had almost had
myself before, if Rachel had not known her place with me. Good Christian widow
Phantomhive, who was about to leave for church, had raised a son with no
particularly Christian values to speak of. Instead of sitting on the wooden
benches and having to listen to the delusive talk of a lonely old man and
singing along to brainless chants, he exclaimed, he would rather scrub the
floor all morning. And that was fine by her, let her son scrub the floor if he
so pleases, and the floor better be clean enough to eat from at her return, and
then she left her son behind, and she would probably pray a rosary or two for
his lost soul at her destination.
I walked down the stairs as soon as the mother dragon had left her nest. Ciel
eyed me in slight disbelief of his victory – or was it a victory? The house was
rather large for a lone boy to clean in just a matter of hours.
“What can I offer you in order to help me do this and not tell my mother,” the
boy requested, expressionless and in the most monotonously serious and
professional voice that I had ever heard a twelve-year-old talk in.
Wrong question.
“I'll do pretty much anything. That means, I won't do anything that would
particularly please mother. Not now.”
Wrong addendum.
It was time to avert the worst possible outcome. “Ciel, you are lucky today
because I'm a little stuck with my work at the moment and would rather do
anything other than be a prisoner to my desk.” But why not make the best out of
the situation. “I'm fine with you owing me something for a later day.” You
shall owe me – let's not make this about what I truly want, though.
The business-man-mask fell from his face. He mumbled a few words of gratitude
and then advised me to follow him to the storage room.
The concept of Ciel standing beneath the doorframe, one foot in the storage
room, picking up the cleaning supplies, was absurdly interesting. The boy,
still dressed in his immaturely short sunday trousers and pristine white dress
shirt, the frail child whose tender hands had rarely known physical labour, was
about to scrub floors on his own will – well, not entirely. Nonetheless, it was
clear that he preferred the task over joining his mother for the holy mass.
He handed me a bucket and a couple of cleaning cloths, then ordered me to fill
the bucket and follow him to the hallway. Gladly I obeyed. I placed the bucket
in the middle of the hallway and Ciel sat down next to it. Shirt sleeves rolled
up and a cloth in his right hand, he lowered himself onto all fours, legs
slightly parted and back arched inward a little rounder than looked healthy,
yet very inviting to my curious eye. The boy's muscle tension lacked terribly
in strength, it usually showed in his posture when he read his books, or the
backaches he complained about so often. But right now, it showed in his rear
pointing towards me in a most obscene manner.
“What are you waiting for back there,” my sweet little faunlet exclaimed and
thereby disrupted my musings.
“Are you convinced it is a good idea to do the cleaning in your Sunday clothes?
You will get yourself dirty.” Not exactly what I had been thinking about but a
fair point all the same.
“But that's the intention. Watch me get myself dirty, honestly, watch me.” and
with an unexpected dedication, he began to polish arbitrary spots on the
parquet with a violent force that had me worry for the floor's poor life. I
submerged my own cloth in the bucket and started my cleaning procedure.
Silently, we rubbed. One definitely more aggressively than the other.
Until I broke the silence, “God is dead, isn't he.”
The boy sat up. “Huh?”
Proceeding with my part of the cleaning, I explained, “The earlier argument
reminded me of that. God is dead. And you, Ciel, killed him. You have slain the
Lord and taken his place.”
The boy gave me a quizzical look.
“Your mother is a woman of strong faith. You, however, her own flesh and blood,
completely disregard the force of believe that she draws her strength from. God
is killed by the non-believers just like a fairytale that isn't told will be
forgotten forever. And thereby, the killers free themselves of god's boundaries
and become gods themselves, don't you think?”
Ciel thought about my question for a moment, then agreed, “Yeah, I've always
thought that only by 'freeing ourselves from the lie that is god', as you say,
our minds can be free.”
“But isn't this freedom a double-edged sword? Does the non-believer believe in
sin if there is no god to punish it? What keeps the non-believer from sinning?”
The boy crossed his arms and thought for a brief moment. “But in this world of
many gods, one god punishes the other's sin, doesn't he.” What a surprisingly
optimistic attitude of his. I had come to appreciate the boy's cynicism, yet
the sudden burst of innocence sent an even pleasanter shudder down my spine.
“...either that, or we will destroy each other in a modern Ragnarök.” Well,
there we were again.
For a while, we did nothing but clean. I more successfully than Ciel, whose
strategy seemed to be wiping in uncoordinated circles, one moment in front of,
the next right behind him. I could not help but tease him for his helplessness,
the Young Master who had never had to do any physical labour before. What a
spoiled child he was! If I can talk like that, I might as well show him how to
do it properly, he barked back at me.
Of course, I would never let an opportunity to get closer to my beautiful,
helpless little faunlet go to waste. Thirsting, self-aware Sebastian stood up,
walked toward the irked little imp and encircled him, pressing him closer to
the ground with the weight of the approacher's chest on the boy's weak back. I
placed my left hand next to him on the ground and took his right hand in my
other to guide it on the floor. The bold act of drawing close to him like that
alone was enough for my manhood to swell. It grew in volume when I could take
his smell in, a little larger even when Ciel exhaled a little call of surprise.
I had to take care so that despite my physical closeness, the boy would not
feel the mountain peaking in his direction. I would speak wise words of advice
and wipe his hand over the floor and with every moment that passed, I felt the
clearness of my sharp mind fade, and although it had only been a matter of
seconds, the moments felt like a sweet eternity to me, and little harm did he
do to my state of serenity when Ciel barked at me that he understands, he can
do this alone, so if I would let go of him because this is starting to get
weird. And I felt his elbow in my ribs and it felt like I was struck by cupid's
arrow, who had missed the target, but my heart was His already, anyway.
I went back to the area that I had cleaned at before and for a while neither of
us said a word. While I wiped silently, I watched the child from behind, on his
fours, making little sounds of effort and exhaustion. My trousers grew tighter
and in my mind, I painted the most beautiful pictures of the child, of me
turning him onto his back and spreading his lean limbs apart, and kissing and
touching and tainting him. And all the while, I polished and polished the
floor, like a madman I polished the filth away as if it would help condone the
sins in my dreams.
Eventually, the hallway was clean. In fact, I am convinced it had not been that
clean in years. Only when I turned around, I realised that my little boss had
walked up to me from behind, bucket full of cleaning water in both hands, to
tell me to stand up. But in my surprise, while turning around, I accidentally
punched the bucket, to his surprise. The impulse followed a clumsy step
backwards, to whose consequence the boy tripped over his own feet. I could not
watch as fast as half of the bucket spilled across Ciel.
The boy's mouth could spill many filthy words but seldom had I heard more than
at that very moment. And I, for one, could not help but chuckle. “At least now
you got yourself as dirty as you wanted to.” Since the boy was less amused by
the situation, I apologised quickly, knelt down and offered my hand. Ciel was
quick to take the hand but instead of taking it as a form of help, he pulled me
down and spilt the remainder of the bucket onto me. There we lay, soaking wet
of dirtied water, on the ground we had just cleaned so thoroughly. And mind me,
I had still to worry not to let the boy beneath me get in contact with my
hidden manhood, so consequently, the most abstract coordination of bodies had
resulted. My forehead came to rest on the cold and solid ground next to his
chest (I had preferred my head to collide with what awaited below instead of my
lower body, so I fell accordingly), his armpit fitting perfectly around the top
of my head. Beneath my fingertips I sensed, tracing through thin, wet fabric,
one of the pinkish nipples that I wanted to kiss so dearly; my other arm
entangled itself with another of his limbs and my lower body half collapsed on
the wet ground next to my darling.
Where we touched, it felt like we were melting into one. The cooling feel the
wet clothes created on my back stood in juxtaposition to the warmth that was
created by our touching bodies. I had already been so aroused before that the
mere friction of his torso against mine as he fidgeted a little was enough for
me to reach the serene point of la petite mort, the sweet release. A small gasp
I made was interpreted by my joy-bringer as the reaction to my head hitting
agains the floor. Lucky me, for that granted me the opportunity to remain on
top of my darling's beautifully moist body for a little while longer,
pretending to need a few seconds to come to my senses again for reasons
diverting from the truth. Ciel apologised and asked me whether I was alright.
He was afraid I had hit my head too hard but a few words of reassurance that I
was alright later, I gathered myself up and offered my hand again to assist
Ciel, and this time, it was taken as an aid, instead of an opening.
I advised the boy to take a bath and told him I would take the full
responsibility for the cleaning session's poor results, to both of which he
gladly agreed. I would also have to take a bath later, but first, I was content
with sitting down for a while and reminiscing the escapade. Ladies and
Gentlemen of the jury, will you not notice my best intentions! I had finally
found relief without compromising the chastity of my land lady's son!
That son's voice pulled me out of the thick mist in my thoughts once more.
“Concerning what we talked about earlier,” he began, “In a way, I find the
thought of god being dead comforting. It suggests that if there once was a god,
he might have meant well with mankind. A god like that sounds better to me than
one that created man to see him suffer. Man's sin became greater than god and
killed him. Cruelty is man's greatest creation, like we were god's. I wonder
where this might lead us.” And with that, he disappeared, leaving me unable to
reply.
If god had not died yet, he certainly did when I came that day.
 
Shortly after the boy had settled in the bathroom, the telephone rang. It was
Mrs. Phantomhive, who called from the Midford house. After a brief explanation
as to why I could not get her son to the phone and an apology on my side, the
woman asked me to pass the message on to him that he shall come to lunch with
the befriended family.
Had my self from a day later had the chance, he would have told me not to let
the boy go that noon.
 
 
 
***** Chapter 4 *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
In blissful solitariness, I had lunch downtown. I took my time but the
Phantomhive house was still empty at my return, leaving me alone in my elation.
A very welcome opportunity to let my reflections of the morning roam freely.
With nobody else to do it, I lauded my performance myself. Had I not found
heavenly solace in my celestial love's touch, in his image right to my hands –
I had made him my lover without his knowing, without impinging on his purity.
What more did I need than receiving this much without having to take anything
from him! Nothing more than this I needed. No will of his against me, no reason
to worry for his security or well-being. I had done no harm that day. Just the
clouded likeness of the child offering himself to me in my hazy head was
enough.
Or so I told myself. The mirage of perfect, attainable, soulless Ciel in my
fantasies revealed itself but an allusion to the hunger that now haunted me
more than ever before. The serpent had granted me nothing more than the smell,
not even a bite, of the forbidden fruit, and now I wanted to devour all of it.
Peel the apple, reveal its sweet flesh, dig my teeth and my whole existence
into it. And nurture off its sweet and sour carbohydrates. I had frequently
played through an imaginary scenario where I would narcotise the child while
the mother was away, undress him and explore his defenceless body, move his
limbs like a doll's, hold him against me, molest him, have my way with him, and
lay my lips onto an area only he could find, to leave a memento of something he
had no memories of whatsoever. But learning from my most recent experience, the
fantasy had lost its appeal. What worth is the lifeless, obedient doll when
what one really wants is the obstreperous oddball? Much sweeter to me would be
the taste of Ciel's final indulgence after a bit of provocative struggling, not
unlike the unapologetic bucket attack agains me earlier that morning.
All of me ached for my little darling and finally, no – not finally – no Ciel
came home, just his senior. The boy had been taken to the movies by the
Midfords.
Dinner that evening was plain. It had been a perfect day, Phantomhive
apologised, so she couldn't leave in time for preparations for a proper Sunday
dinner. Mrs. Midford was an engaging person, Rachel explained. She had inspired
her to make a decision. Elizabeth was leaving for summer camp tomorrow. Didn't
that sound like a wonderful option for her own boy as well. Leave him no chance
but to get along with his peers. The children would stay for the rest of the
summer.
My darling would be taken from me the instant I felt closest to him so far. It
is astounding how quickly a mood can shift a hundred and eighty degrees. I
blamed a headache acquired by the earlier fall that suddenly came back to haunt
me for my visible change of spirit. Phantomhive asked me whether she ought to
call an ambulance, she had heard about the accident from her Ciel, I might have
suffered a concussion. I dismissed the offer.
She continued to elaborate in depth, “It could support the growth of Ciel's
character. His attitudes are getting out of hand as of lately. You can probably
easily imagine the heated fight between us that unfolded when the decision was
made. To be honest, I don't know what else to do anymore. I asked the Midfords
to take Lizzy and him to watch a movie so he would calm his temper in the
meantime, I can't lead a level-headed conversation with him today. I imagine
we'll have a few tough days ahead of us until Thursday, that's when I will
drive him to the camp. Are you convinced I shouldn't call an ambulance? You
look terrible, if I may say so. At least promise me to see a doctor tomorrow if
the headache is still there by then. Anyway, I think the great outsides will
turn out to be a lot more fun to a young boy like him than looming over old
books and the radio and throwing tantrums at the slightest suggestion of doing
anything else all summer long. I believe that now that he finally seems to open
himself up to someone new, that is you, monsieur, is the perfect time to push
him in the cold water. May the community of peers, and lack of familiar faces,
help him to overcome his antisocial behaviour, help him form his character in
ways I can't. Thank you for reaching out to my son, you might have done more
good than you could ever think you have.”
“Madam, are you convinced this really is for the better?” The most
embarrassingly bad attempt at persuasion ever made.
“I confess,” said Phantomhive, “I hate to make him go. But his moods and
fiendishness put me in front of a challenge I can't seem to handle. My little
boy is starting to grow up but as his mind grows independent, his lifestyle
seems to turn into unstoppable recluse and dependence on being pampered. I
think we need to take this chance.”
How wonderful! Now the fruit of my own effort, personality and looks; the
wonder of the boy's frozen heart finally opening up to the Hero, would be
stolen away from my hands, and the boy would be punished all the same. What
makes the woman believe that just because charming, handsome Sebastian
Michaelis could approach her son, now everybody else could?
“I see your appetite is suffering from the headache as well. Would you like to
retreat for the day? Or can I offer you something else?”
Retreat.
 
On the next day, mother and son went shopping for necessities and bribes for
the camp stay. Among these bribes for the boy novels and comic books (he
preferred to mostly hide his childish love for those from me and instead enjoy
them privately, in the safe zone that was his room – I could not not be
reminded of my very own shameful private joys) for rainy days at camp U. They
couldn't fight his bad mood, though. As was to be expected. Instead, Ciel
mostly withdrew to his room, to avoid any further strainingly pointless
arguments. I, too, preferred to search the stillness of my own bedroom, as
numbing as it might have been. Solitarily, I started planning my very own
summer escape to the seaside, as well as a timely return for the start of the
new semester. With the lonely prospect of the upcoming months without Ciel, I
couldn't stand the thought of staying in the sorry Phantomhive house.
On Tuesday, when Ciel and mother returned after another shopping trip, the boy
had dinner in his room. He felt offended because the woman had claimed that his
respected Sebastian, too, agreed on the camp plans. As a natural consequence,
the boy no doubt felt this was all a ploy against him. How dare her pull me
into this conflict I wanted no participation in whatsoever!
The next day, I approached Ciel jokingly, meaning to be friendly. Everything I
got in return was a frozen shoulder – cold would be too euphemistic a word. No
trace of our usual exchanges. I had expected his familiar sassy but playful
stings, just enough to hurt a little, but instead he stabbed right through me
by saying nothing at all. That evening, the boy skipped dinner entirely, washed
his hair and went straight to bed.
I felt almost affronted by the thought of Ciel considering that I wanted him
away from the house to approach his mother. The thought of it made me sick. The
truth was, I feared the outcome of this separation.
My love for Ciel was eternal but Ciel, my Ciel, was not. The 14th of December
would mark his thirteenth birthday. That meant only some two more years until
the demise of his faunage. Ciel would turn into a “young lad”, then grow of age
and nothing would be left of my Ciel, the only true Ciel to me. The_Ciel_whose
cingulum_pectorale_had_not_yet_broadened,_the_boy of_soft_skin_and_full,_ash-
coloured_hair_and_naughty_way_with_words when_irritated_(1).Gone he would be.
I was supposed to lose two precious months of faunage to the fiendish Camp U.
Two months lost forever! Fate proved not to be in my favour after all.
A single scene of solace granted itself to me on Thursday, moments before I
would be left behind.
That day, I had little desire to slip out of bed. If the only form of goodbye
were as cold as my treatment had been the previous two days, I preferred
sleeping through the whole departure. But suddenly, there came a tapping, as of
someone gently rapping at my chamber door! Not waiting for me to gather enough
strength to get to my feet, Ciel stormed into my room. He had sought me out to
say a proper goodbye while his mother was packing the car. At first, criticism
of my not appearing on my own seemed appropriate, though. And then, shifting
from one foot to the other and avoiding my stare, he tried to find words of
goodbye befitting his unsentimental ideal version of himself. I helped him a
little,
“Let me tell you a secret, Ciel, but don't tell your mother I told you, will
you?”
Ciel glanced at me.
“I would rather have you here for the summer. The house will be terribly boring
without your terror.”
“Tch.”
“I really mean it.”
“I know...”
A pause. Then the boy proceeded, “I can't wait for this ordeal to end and
return to places and faces I've grown used to.”
“Does that mean you will miss me?”
“Hmph.” just that, no agreement but no denial either.
“Will you give me a hug before you leave?”
Ciel hesitated, made half a step back, and then stepped forward to wrap his
arms around sleepy Sebastian. “If you insist. You helpless freak.” And he
hugged me just a little tighter than necessary, and I reciprocated, and like
that we stood there just a little longer than necessary, and I enjoyed it.
At that moment, I realised that the boy did not usually accept, let alone
search for body contact, and that Ciel had in the beginning often been awkward
about my ever so light touches. But it seemed that by constantly advancing, I
forcibly pushed my physical presence into my darling's difficult to conquer
inner fortress (like the kind of friend that forces himself into a group and by
time becomes an accepted, if not even treasured part of the round) and now that
I had made it there, I was allowed to draw his little waist against mine. Even
though I wished for so much more, I applauded myself for even getting this far
with this unapproachable handful.
Still in my hardly presentable sleeping slacks and dressing gown, I escorted
Ciel to the car where his mother already waited for him. There I stood, just
like old Miss Opposite across the street, and waved my darling goodbye.
 
 
Chapter End Notes
     (1) altered from Nabokov, Vladimir - Lolita - Page 72, chapter 15 -
     Penguin Classics edition
***** Chapter 5 *****
When I returned indoors, I could still feel Ciel's thin waist melting into my
hands, his silky hair brush against my cheek, I could still smell his warm
skin. My target now was his room; his closet, to be precise. In a fit between
frenzy and hysteria, I dug through his clothes, in search of a memento, a piece
of Ciel-smelling cloth that I could comfort myself with. And there it was, the
holed, ancient abomination of a pyjama shirt: a bit torn on one of the seams:
His favourite, it seemed, while home, but nothing to be seen by the outside
eye. The boy and his mother had agreed on investing in new pyjamas, in benefit
of unpresuming Sebastian, the man that could not have been happier about
finding any other piece of clothing waiting for him at home. I sat down on
Ciel's bed, buried my face in the dusty blue textile, mused about the good
weeks we had had, then stood up again to retrace the last steps that I imagined
Ciel must have made through the house in order to check for any almost left
behind items. When I eventually passed the kitchen counter, I found a stark
white envelope, ornamented only with the letters “Mr. M”, right beneath the
kitchen shelf where old Phantomhive stored the tea and her horridly horrid
barley coffee. I laid the beloved piece of cloth aside for a moment to focus my
attention on the newly obtained artifact. Ladies and Gentlemen, for a distorted
moment I mistook the letter's scarily perfect handwriting for a certain
schoolboy's attempt at emphasising his maturity but I was soon taught better:
 
This is a proposal: I do not love you but I want to marry you. I kindly ask of
you to read this letter to the very end before you dismiss it.
We have gathered in this house as three lonely individuals. A wife that lost
her husband, a son that lost his father and a husband left behind by his wife
[I am to be blamed for this misconception of hers]. In this odd assembly, for
the first time in years, I feel this loneliness of ours lifting its weight.
Fate and an unfortunate fire granted me a fatherly reminder of what a happy
home meant for a mother as well as for a child.
I am writing this letter as a mother primarily and a woman secondly. I will be
completely honest of my intentions: As I said, I do not love you, although a
certain likeness of yours to my beloved Vincent up in the heavens draws me into
you. I have always trusted my instincts and have seldom regretted doing so and
as such, I believe you a good and honest person, although a bit reserved. I do
not love you now but I think I can grow to love you over time. Why would I want
to do that, you might ask yourself? The answer is Ciel. The answer is always
Ciel. I am worried about Ciel. I am putting the following burden on you: My son
will soon not be a child anymore. But as a growing young man, he will need a
father figure more than ever before, even more so considering his struggles
with forming friendships. When you first arrived at our humble home to enjoy
this summer, my primary worry was whether my son will non-resistantly accept
you here. The worry has evolved into whether he would non-resistantly let you
go at the end of the summer. I came up with a plan. I would send him away to a
summer camp and face you with an ultimatum in the meantime. Either leave the
Phantomhive house for good if you feel you cannot take the (admittedly
enormous) burden of becoming my child's step father or stay, marry me, provide
emotional security to my growing son and enjoy the assets of a marriage to a
good American wife. Yes, I am writing this as a desperate woman. Yes I know, no
man in his right mind would dream of a marriage under these conditions. Yes, I
am well aware you think of me as out of my right mind. But this is me clutching
at the last straw.
Please hear out the benefits of this potential marriage: First of all, I could
grant you US American citizenship. Maybe that might be desirable to you.
Secondly, my husband left us with a small fortune, which I do not like to spend
but could make good use of in a marriage. Thirdly, I would grant you stability
and comfort in a good housewifely manner, day and night.
Maybe your stoic old-world mannerisms have been hiding a liking for my person
all along. Or maybe you could find solace in what I can offer and think you can
even fall in love with me someday. Sometimes, I like to think, that can be the
case. Perhaps my imagination is just too vivid.
I do not want to pressure you into deciding to stay, please be aware of that!
Please do not stay if you disagree with these conditions. I am writing this
letter just for the very low chance that it might not be of no avail after all.
If you do decide to turn my proposal down, and I expect this to be the case,
then please see yourself out by the end of the day because I do not want to
return to the face of a man in front of whom I have made the most helpless fool
of myself. If by the end of the day I meet you in my house, I consider my
proposal to be accepted.
When you leave, kindly leave behind an address so that I could refund the
twelve dollars I owe you till the end of the month. And do not forget to leave
the key on the desk on your room.
Goodbye, Monsieur Michaelis.
Kindly yours,
Rachel Phantomhive
 
Granted, after all this time, I could only summarise the essence of the letter
but do trust me, what I remember, I remember correctly. Similar to my habit of
keeping a diary, I kept written tokens of personal bearing and liked re-reading
them at various occasions. The letter was a favourite of mine because, although
painfully preposterous, it marked another sudden change in luck, perhaps among
the most important ones. Right then and there, I read it again for the first
time, to reassure myself its content hadn't been a maniac's feverish delusion.
And then I read it again, to reassure myself that this was not a trick of some
kind, either a bad joke of Ciel or of the Phantomhive woman herself. And then I
read it again just for the thrill of it. And then I knew I had to keep it as a
memento of god's good will with me, a lucky charm, if you will.
Mrs. Rachel Phantomhive asked to become Mrs. Rachel Michaelis so her son would
have a father again. Out of almost surreal love and desperation, the holy
mother happened to ask the devil in disguise of a saint for consolation. But
really, who else than a madman would be able to make a decision that grave and
radical after just a month of sharing a roof? What was the woman thinking?
The thought of this marriage alone filled me with the greatest joy since –
well, at least since the previous Sunday's events.
The letter addressed a thought I had only ever dared thinking in its vaguest of
forms. Even before Ciel, I had flirted with the prospect of wedding a lonely
widow, ideally without any relatives left to look after her, just so I could
take my joy in her child. With the vague idea suddenly taking on a radiant
form, I suddenly understood the full extent of casual caresses that his
mother's husband could easily give Ciel. And then, gradually, caress him not so
casually anymore. And so on, and so forth.
Mark my word, I never intended to marry poor Rachel to rid myself of her. I
cannot deny the idea wandering my mind once or twice – but imagine the
consequences! Had the police not seen through my schemes, smart little Ciel
would have. And what worth was lone legal guardianship if the guarded child all
but trusted me? No, it was best to let the sorry woman be and approach the
object of my yearning slowly, gradually, so maybe, eventually, he would give
himself to me. If not, Plan B (the attentive reader might remember my plans of
narcotising my darling) would suffice.
I set out to call Camp U in hopes of catching Rachel there. I would rather have
her know my positive reply immediately, so she would not be too nervous, and I
could reduce the likelihood of a fatal car accident caused by nervous
inattention. I looked through the little telephone book that was carefully
stored in a desk drawer below the telephone. I found that Rachel preferred to
collect her telephone numbers in a chronological, rather than alphabetical
order, and after the underlined NEW number of Mr. Derek Traun, I found the
combination of numbers needed to contact Camp U. However, when I got connected,
I heard she had left twenty minutes before.
 
The marriage happened suddenly, quickly and quietly. My widowed wife's
remaining far-away relatives weren't notified about the marriage until after
the ceremony. I, on the other hand, had no relatives or any other kind of
valuable person on this side of the ocean, anyway. We agreed on a small and
humble ceremony.
Had not Rachel insisted on integrating him into the ceremony, I would not even
have taken Ciel away from his summer camp either, not daring to be too tender
with the cornered boy yet. To his personal enjoyment, however, he was granted a
full weekend away to attend the procedural, only two weeks after his admittance
to Camp U.
On Friday, the day before the marriage, my soon-to-be stepson confronted me in
my bedroom. “Still sleeping in your own room, huh,” he wondered. I looked up
from my desk and turned to the door, at the approaching boy. “Yes, my old-world
morality is taking the better of me, I suppose.” Ciel's expression shifted from
skepticism to blunt disbelief.
“Is that so.” He crossed his arms. “Speaking of morality, I'm not sure whether
you've noticed yet but I took the freedom to borrow a few books from your
shelf. Very interesting ones, if I may say so.”
I turned around to closely examine my book shelf and as a matter of fact, books
that I had never seen there before replaced the missing ones, as if not to let
me notice until I were to look for a missing one.
“Rather interesting specimens among them. Far from this old-world morality you
value so much. I can't look at Julie and Justin, the pair of twins at Camp U,
anymore without having to either laugh or cringe. And only two days ago, when
it rained cats and dogs in the afternoon and I had plenty of time and little to
do, I had to wonder whether you haven't had your own fair share of encounters
with handsome Hungarian pianists. I wonder how many other hidden gems there are
waiting to be found among the titles I don't recognise on your shelf.”
Oh well. Hiding in plain sight had always been a popular strategy of mine. Den
Wald vor lauter Bäumen nicht sehen, as Germans would put it. A curious spy
might attempt to search my drawers and cupboard for things I want to hide away.
But who would hide the most interesting secrets in plain sight? I would, and I
would do it successfully for most of my life. Though, that day I found out the
strategy had its downsides when forces of fate and circumstance lead a small
hand to the points of interest. I mirrored Ciel's crossed arms. “I should scold
you for taking my things without my permission but I find this outcome to be
too interesting to be angry.” That reaction noticeably startled the boy a bit.
He had probably tried to embarrass me. “My dear Ciel, I am a connoisseur of
arts. I can appreciate a brave and provoking opus for how it challenges
boundaries of societies as well as minds.” This, the attentive reader will
notice, is the full truth. My personal sexual preferences have little relevance
to the literature that boy had discovered among my belongings. “Or do you think
life necessarily imitates art?”
Ciel hesitated to give an answer. Obviously, the conversation had not taken the
direction he had planned for it to go. I could watch him search for a sensible
reply. Twitching his upper lip, fiddling with the thin air between his fingers,
and then, finally, exhaling, “I find it hard to separate the two entirely...
when it comes to this kind of art.”
“Is that because your own emotional response to the books overwhelmed you too
much for you to separate fact from fiction?”
Cherries kissed my darling's cheeks. “Well, I, for one, couldn't have known
what I would get myself into when I started reading these novels, could I.”
“And yet I assume you went out of your way to read both books to the end.”
Checkmate. The most beautiful embarrassed silence on the faunlet's lips.
“Ciel,” I carefully pronounced with my most sonorous voice, “from tomorrow, we
will be family. And as family and friends, you can rest assured I will always
have an open ear and mind for you. I was a boy of your age one day too and you
would be surprised what experiences a young man makes in the secludedness of a
British boarding school.” Yes, I was starting to become a little reckless, I
admit.
Ciel tilted his head. “That leads me to the topic that I actually came to
discuss here for. I have to wonder about this whole marriage-thing. I didn't
really get the impression mother and you would go into that direction with each
other.”
“Love comes in many forms, wouldn't you agree?”
“...no, that doesn't convince me at all.” He gulped. “I'll be keeping an eye on
you, Michaelis. Don't you hurt my mother. I don't know what either of you are
up to, my mother told me the whole thing was her idea, but the one I don't
trust in this is you. I'm keeping an eye on you, you suspicious specimen.”
“I wouldn't want to hurt the woman that grants me the most wonderful thing in
the world.”
He wasn't entirely convinced by that answer, nor did he understand. But who
could blame him? In his shoes, there would have been no chance I believed this
absurd thing either.
The mother protector took his leave and left me behind wondering whether our
conversation just now had gone really well or really badly.
 
***** Chapter 6 *****
Chapter Notes
     It's been a while! Thank you for being patient with me. I'm not happy
     with this chapter, I think it feels rushed but that's probably
     because it was, indeed, rushed. I generally struggle a little with
     the pacing of the story, I think. To be honest, I just wanted to get
     this one done so I can get to the next chapter.
     Despite that, I hope you can enjoy this chapter a little at least.
     Please tell me what you think.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
On our wedding day, the weather seemed like heaven was crying tears of laughter
at our fraudulently holy matrimony. Better than the ceremony, I remember the
dinner we had at a rather decent restaurant that Rachel had requested, it was
delicious, this dress suit that Ciel was wearing, truly delicious, his slim
form clad in, for his standard, unusually well-tailored garments. It was the
suit that he would wear to church but because he always left home with the
jacket dangling off his arm, I had not yet had the joy to see him fully dressed
like this. The boy acted in his typical manner, maybe a bit better behaved than
usual. No trace of our heated discussion from the previous night. He laughed
with us, complained about his company at Camp U and about having to return yet
again, until Rachel left us alone for a moment to “powder her nose”.
“You keep staring at me, more than you're looking at your brand new wife.” Dear
god, he was right. Between marvelling his unfamiliar shape, observing his
attitude and just woefully pining like the lovesick fool I was, there was
hardly any time left to try to pretend I cared about the woman next to me. Not
untruthfully, I spoke, “Your mother takes utmost care of her demeanour and
appearance, all day, everyday. But you, look at you, suit and tie, back
straight, I think I've never seen you like this before. I think I am in shock.”
Ciel snorted and leaned forward, rested his chin on his palm and ever so gently
kicked my shin, more of a tap than a thrust, and replied, “Shock, huh. I can't
wrap my head around you. I'm starting to think I should be afraid of you.” I
stepped on his foot and trapped it this way, smiling nonchalantly. “Are you?”
The boy's expression hardened for a brief moment as he caught the foot I had
pinned his down with by trapping it with the help of his other foot. At his
success and dominance over me, he smirked at me, “Not at all. I'm far too
curious about you.” I had another leg left and attacked his trap when Rachel
returned to the table. “Stop or you'll get your shoes dirty, yes, I saw exactly
what you two did, if I didn't know better, I'd say like father, like son.”
Ciel returned to Camp U with an assorted set of books from my collection: ones
that I had given him and others whose absence I only noticed after a closer
observation of my shelf. With just us two newlyweds left in the cold house,
Rachel joyously introduced me to my husband role. This included a formal
introduction to our neighbourhood by hosting a little dinner party (tedious),
activities with other couples (even more tedious) and making me familiar with
her past. There was her late first husband, Vincent, a man of confident posture
but slim built from what I could tell from the few selected pictures she showed
me. “Ciel takes after him, doesn't he?” Indeed, he did. “But he has my eyes.”
And she was right again. It took me until that very moment to see it but when
my wife showed me pictures of her child-self, I could not stop seeing my Ciel
in them. Rachel noticed the excitement that struck me when I looked at the
pictures. I marvelled at the beautiful little girl, a picture book nymphet. The
pretty prototype of the beautiful faunlet I would meet someday, many years
later. In some of these pictures she posed with a freckled girl with a striking
resemblance to Anne of Green Gables. Her sister Angelina. Died in childbirth
some five years ago. Death did have a cruel grip around this family's throat.
After giving me a glimpse of her own childhood, I had the pleasure to discover
Ciel's transformation into the perfect boy he had become. At his birth, he was
small and weak. The doctors doubted he would make it to his first birthday. But
the little boy fought. And he won. He struggled with asthma for very long but
even that he could eventually mostly overcome: I had never witnessed an attack
since the first time I met him. Rachel and Vincent had sheltered the boy and
kept him from playing outside with other children too much; the reason he now
preferred to keep to himself, she supposed. Nobody expected his strong little
brother to be the one to pass away from meningitis. Tragic.
In a certain picture, I discovered the reason for the Phantomhive family's
wellbeing even after the husband's demise. A photograph of Vincent,
symbolically shaking another man's hand. “That was when Mr. Traun promoted him
to junior partner,” Rachel explained, “Vincent deserved this promotion, without
a doubt, but I have to thank Mr. Traun for helping us through the financial
difficulties that we faced after his death.” According to Rachel, her husband's
senior partner granted her a fair widow's pension, out of kindness towards the
family but, as she emphasised, rightfully so because the company would have
never made it as far without her late husband's work. Personal contact to the
man had mostly ceased, except for a friendly letter every Christmas.
As much as I enjoyed learning details about the boy I so missed, I suffered
from the suburban society life that I had to partake in with my wife. The
Midfords, especially, became my most exhausting domestic hurdle. The couple
were the only people Rachel could earnestly call her friends, and Mrs. Francis
Midford hated me like the pest; feelings that were based on reciprocity. Rachel
hoped for us to grow together but let me anticipate the course of things by
saying that it wouldn't come to that. I must thank that woman for saving me
from myself, however. There is a certain kind of service that only an enemy can
offer. They can put a mirror in front of you, for example; a reality check, if
you will. A friend is either too oblivious or too considerate to provide this
kind of service. In my case, I was provided with a second chance.
I had played the possibility over in my head time and time again. I would gain
absolutely nothing. Ciel would see through me and it did not matter if I had
gotten away with it or not, if Ciel, and only Ciel, had seen through it, what
would be the point? I knew this perfectly well, and yet I needed the help of
fate and Mrs. Midford to save me from myself.
Let me start from the beginning. At the wedding, I resolved to win over Rachel
Michaelis's heart. I wedded the woman because she wished me to, and I was well
aware that her exuberantly cold proposal letter tried to distract from the
state of matter that she was, indeed, drawn to me. The similarities to her late
husband (that I could not see) that she stated were what perhaps helped me
handle Ciel, were, in fact, charming her. The logical conclusion was to mime
mutual feelings of affection. It is an awfully mundane proverb but love does
make blind, and I would take the profit. I would make her blind for my passion
for her son.
Soon we would have regular sexual intercourse. I would look into her eyes,
desperately looking for Ciel in them, and she would love for me to look at her
so lovingly. The woman soon melted between my fingers but I felt increasingly
sick. After every climax that I reached with the help of fantasy Ciel, I awoke
with the cruel realisation that it was the mother that was lying in my arms,
not him. She disgusted me. Even worse, I disgusted myself. And so, I began to
consider it again.
One particularly sunny afternoon, Rachel suggested refreshing our sweating
selves at nearby Hourglass Lake. A nice place, clear water, surrounded by tree
crowns and, most importantly, rather secluded. On weekday mornings, one could
be relatively sure to enjoy the beach privately. On any other day, I would have
avoided accompanying her. I had grown tired of our “bonding activities” by
then. There is only so much good company that I can tolerate, let alone company
by a woman that I could only tolerate. However, it had been especially hot
throughout this particular week and the prospect of cool water sounded too
tempting not to say yes. The heat had started to numb every part of me,
especially the brain. I had turned into a most stupid version of myself. The
thought that crossed my mind occasionally but then hid itself deep in the
darkest corners of my mind looked for the light of day in the early August
heat. I wanted to rid myself from this woman. The setup was perfect. I didn't
need to think of a plan; the plan offered itself to me. There were two calm
human figures visible on the opposite shore; fishermen, I suppose. They were in
the perfect distance: too far away to witness a murder but close enough to see
the desperate attempts of a man to save his drowning wife, hear his screams for
help. It would be easy. In a careless moment, I would dive down, drag one of
Rachel's legs into the deep water and watch her drown from down below. I would
be able to hold my breath, whereas Rachel, in her shock, would swallow heaps of
cold water, breathe it in, feel it suffocate her, burn in her lungs. And by the
time her body stopped struggling and I were sure of her end, only then I would
desperately scream for help. And until the two fishermen were there, with their
rowing boat across the lake, my poor old wife would have died because careless
Mr. Michaelis did not notice her cramps, or stroke, or whatever tragic twist of
fate it might have been, in time. And poor old me would get away with murder.
The prospect looked wonderful in my overheated head. And let me remind you one
more time, if nobody else had, Ciel would have looked through my schemes at
once and all would be for naught, but senseless Sebastian simply could not
fathom this outcome. All he could think of was having Ciel for himself, himself
only. Hell, I would have intended to make him mine against his will, turning
against everything I had worked towards so far.
As Rachel swum in front of me, serenely, facing away from me, the thought
roared in my mind. I swam into her direction, trying not to catch her
attention. It seemed to be the perfect plan. I had almost caught up, I was
ready to dive down – at once, Rachel and I both turned around.
A familiar voice rung from the shore, it was Mrs. Midford's. Accompanied by her
husband, she had had the same idea as my wife had that day, and by appearing in
the best possible moment, her presence saved me from committing the greatest
mistake of my life. And by the end of the day, Rachel Michaelis did not have to
fear me anymore. Maybe it was the cool water, maybe it was Midford's ice cold
presence, maybe it were both together, but in the afternoon, I had cooled down
enough to imprint in my mind how utterly insane the whole attempt would have
been.
And it was not long until it would not be just the two of us anymore. The
intensive honeymoon period seemed to be defeated and I spent most of the
remaining summer days working on my book, woefully writing in my journal and
occasionally adding a sentence or two to the end of a letter that my wife sent
to my camp kid, while Rachel would water the flowers, visit neighbours or read
her magazines. And in the evening, I would fulfil my duties as her husband,
thinking of him, only him, and she would fall in love with me. And all of a
sudden, Labour Day came around and Ciel, my Ciel, my perfect Ciel, returned.
 
Chapter End Notes
     I hope I could convey that Sebastian is a gross motherfucker (pun
     only half intended)! haha
***** Chapter 7 *****
Chapter Notes
     It hasn't been two months yet! I managed to update before my set
     goal.
     I forgot to add this to the beginning of the last chapter but if you
     started reading this fanfiction before the last update, I suggest
     going over everything prior to chapter 6 again because I edited the
     whole fanfiction. If you don't feel like doing that (which I wouldn't
     if I were in your place, let's be honest haha), at least take a look
     at chapter 3. I rewrote it completely and it is now something
     completely different. I think it's worth taking a look.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
Ciel arrived late at night. Eyelids heavy, yawning heartily, pale, though
sunburnt skin gleaming in the moonlight (he must have inherited the inability
to tan from the red-haired family line of his mother), I exactly remember the
first time I saw him again in so long. I wanted to throw my arms around him,
cradle the exhausted boy to sleep, then kiss the sleeping beauty. I walked up
to him, naively hoping for an embrace, one equally as sweet as the one I
received at our goodbye. All I got was a pat against my upper arm and a mumbled
“Hello, going to sleep, night.” But his return alone was enough to please me
for the moment.
Magically, my mood lifted into new heights. I tried my best not to be obvious
but waking up everyday, knowing that Ciel was home again, brightened my whole
world. Even though we only had a handful of days left until his return to
school and the boy needed them for personal recreation. Finally at home,
finally at peace, I understood and yet it was difficult to let him be.
I gave my boy time. No bigger mistake than to rush things now, I thought. Ciel
hid in his room for two days, only gracing us with his presence during meals
and scarce chance encounters when he snuck to the kitchen in search of a glass
of water or something sweet. Rachel voiced her disappointment in the results of
her son's camp stay, had he not returned in the exact same way he had left –
moody and solitary.
My wife's assumption was not exactly correct. The boy did change – though
mainly in his behaviour around me. The change had started when he learned of
his mother's and my engagement and it progressed throughout the wedding
weekend. Ciel had become more attentive of me. I was well aware of his
observation over me: The way I interacted with his mother and the way I reacted
to him. The game seemed interesting, so I played along. I could be very loving
towards my wife if I just put a little bit of effort into it. My smile had
always been my best poker face.
On the third day, circumstances (if not to say fate!) ended the boy's
seclusion. Rachel busied herself with preparing dinner. I had spent the
afternoon in the piazza, eagerly searching the newspaper for something
interesting, in an attempt to flee from my work. My efforts were to no avail
and eventually, I returned to my office. Upon my return, however, I surprised
another member of the household. Ciel was sitting at my desk, reading something
– my initial fear was that he had found my journal but the fear proved itself
wrong – it was an old magazine, a rare one that I was very proud to call my
own, when he turned towards me in shock as he heard me enter the room. How
strange, had we not already more or less established it a common thing for the
boy to read my books without permission. He jumped up, magazine in his hands,
then turned to the shelf where he had found it, but he did not move: had he, he
would have come closer to me and he was evidently scared of that.
His distress fascinated me, lured me in and I could not help but approach him.
The closer I came, the further he stepped away, pressing the magazine to his
chest, as if to use it for protection, until he bumped against a wall. He
fidgeted and searched for an escape route but I would not let him run so
easily. Whatever might be wrong, I inquired. Nothing, according to him. His
upset breathing pattern spoke against his words. Clearly he lied, I explained
to him. I could see that he was nervous, like a cornered little rabbit in the
fox's burrow, and that it was unusual for him to shy away like this just
because he had borrowed something, and, oh my, what have we here. I leaned
against the wall, entrapping Ciel between my hands, slid a knee up between his
slender legs and gently pushed against his bulging crotch. With a sigh, the boy
dropped my treasured magazine to the floor.
He looked at me with an almost comical mixture of shock, fear, embarrassment
and desire. Ladies and gentlemen, desire! An invitation I just could not turn
down. My little faunlet, awfully aroused, in my territory! I think the reader
can imagine the bare thoughts, dreams, plans that suddenly bloomed in my
inspired mind. The boy froze beneath me like a fawn in danger, giving me time
to overthink my plans. Without a doubt, I would take this opportunity but the
question remained in what way I would proceed. While I considered my options, I
proceeded to stroke Ciel with my knee and this, my valued readers, presented
itself to me as the answer. Below me, Ciel whimpered and whined and half-
heartedly asked me to stop. I pressed his torso to the wall, stepped a little
closer, proceeded to rub his covered erection with my thigh. The sensation
through both of our clothes and his sweet little moans were enough to drive me
wild with lust and yet I held back. That day, it was Ciel's, and just Ciel's
time to be pleasured. It seemed beneficial to bring to his attention that I was
doing him a service. That I knew that at his confusing age, haunted by
uncontrollable lust and curiosity, a helping hand (or knee, or thigh) was an
invaluable thing. That there was nothing worse than to be left to oneself, left
to finding ways to handle the problem alone. I told him that his moans sounded
lovely, but that he had to take care not to moan too loudly; having his mother
check on him surely was not something he wished to happen. Ciel held his hands
against his mouth, looked down at the movement of my leg against his crotch and
then up to me: Eyes slitted, eyebrows drawn together and his hands sliding down
his chin, exposing a gaping mouth, wet tongue, an invitation for intrusion.
Lecherous. Lust had overwhelmed him completely; had I not held him up against
the wall, he would have dropped to the ground.
It did not take me much longer to stimulate Ciel until he came with a cry
almost too loud for both of our good. He collapsed against me. I stroked his
hair and told him how beautiful he was: He was beautiful when he let go of his
shame at reaching his climax, he was beautiful because he reached it so
quickly. He really was just an innocent little boy, previously untouched by
anyone other than himself, losing his mind to the simplest of friction that I
could offer. The little boy told me to shut up.
Ciel hid his face in the fabric of my shirt and I held him tight. He clearly
needed the comfort to gather the pieces of his mind back together. To me, it
had only been a brief (yet valuable) moment but to him, the world had changed.
He leaned against my own bulging erection, his confirmation that he had not
been the only one to take pleasure from what had just happened. It did not seem
to bother him, however, seeing as my support helped him catch his breath again.
After resting against me for a little while longer, Ciel gathered himself
together again. “I need to change,” he mumbled, avoiding eye contact with me.
He was clearly embarrassed after the exaltation caused by his orgasm ebbed
away. How sweet. I sent him off. He needed to ready himself for dinner and I
needed a little time for myself as well. Now, let me take the the time until
dinner to explain my deeds. I am convinced the readers must be surprised that I
left it at just stimulating Ciel in this simple way, not helping myself to
relief until he had left my office. The truth is, I did not want, by any
chance, to overwhelm the boy. I had had my share of joy before and at that
moment, I was content with just Ciel being back again. To him, however, this
was new. And it had to be all about him. It all had to be about pleasuring him,
making him feel what I had wanted him to feel for so long. Under no
circumstances did I want to scare him away. Ciel had to have the feeling that I
was allowing him his freedom, that I was not forcing myself onto him, that all
of it happened because he wanted it so.
Dinner presented itself as a little awkward. Ciel had evidently little idea how
to behave in a situation like this, sitting opposite of the man that had just
provided him his first orgasm caused by a foreign hand (well, leg). Even Rachel
picked up on the strange silence between us, wondering whether we had had a
fight. Ciel was quick to dismiss that assumption, assuring his mother with
great enthusiasm that all had been well between us and that he was just a
little tired and did not feel like talking. I could not help but chuckle.
That night, my wife enjoyed the pleasures of a very spirited Sebastian. My head
was still filled to the brim with memories and fantasies of Ciel climaxing
beneath me and they inspired me to reenact them on Rachel's body. One has to
acknowledge that that day's developments resulted in benefits for everyone in
the family.
The following day marked Labour Day: Ciel's last day of summer, his final day
before school commenced again. Rachel had planned to take him to the Midfords
but Ciel begged to be allowed to stay home, for he was still so tired and just
wanted to rest before he had to go back to school. Rachel was soft that day and
she allowed him to stay.
That day, I withdrew to my office and distracted myself with work to take on a
passive role. It was Ciel's turn to take a step towards me, he had to approach
me on his own will. And he did. Not long after I heard his mother's car leave,
my faunlet appeared at my workplace. Without knocking, how rude, I scolded him.
The boy ignored that and inched toward me, not without hesitation. When he had
reached my desk, he opened his mouth to say something but the sound died off
before he could form it. He opened it again, just to repeat the same failure.
Before he could try again, I took the burden of opening the conversation from
him: “You want to talk about yesterday.”
“Yes.” Ciel took a deep breath and resumed, “You know that... that I know that
technically, what you did wasn't ok. I could tell my mother and she would call
the police.”
The police, how funny. With no evidence, what business would the police have
with me? Rachel, however, posed the greater threat. I countered, “I know that,
of course. And yet I trust that you won't. And do you know why?”
Ciel just looked at me with a wary expression, waiting for an answer.
“It would mean that you'd have to describe to your mother in embarrassing
detail what happened and you simply cannot do that.”
Ciel looked down at his feet, unable to deny my words.
“And be honest with me, didn't I just act according to your desires? You needed
the relief and you were more than happy that I could offer it.”
Ciel was taken aback by that proclamation, even though he must have assumed all
along that he would be faced with it. He went back into combat mode. “You're
gross. To say something like this... and don't you think I didn't realise that
you took your fair share of fun out of this.”
I pulled the boy nearer and he was leaning over me now, supporting himself on
my shoulder with one hand. He would have collapsed onto me otherwise, for I
dragged him toward me so firmly. I breathed, “Of course I did. You have no idea
how enchanting you are when you are as wanton as yesterday. I will gladly
service you again if you want me to.”
I could tell Ciel's racing heartbeat from the subtle up and down of the skin
covering his carotid. He gazed over me and pondered his options. I let him
ponder. Then he murmured, a bright blush lighting up his face, “In that case,
let me set the conditions. You will serve me... like... like you did
yesterday.. whenever I want you to. And I won't spill a single word in return.”
I laid my hands on my young debaucher's hips and pulled him toward my lap, a
command that he obeyed to by placing himself on top of it. “I will do whatever
you wish me to do, Ciel.”
That was clearly the answer he had wanted because upon hearing it, he pushed
his crotch against me. Unintentionally so, judging from his embarrassed
withdrawal that followed the gesture. I hindered him from leaving my lap,
pulled his hips closer to mine again and slid my hands beneath the trouser legs
of his way too childish shorts. I could hardly hide the excitement that came
over me when I could finally knead the boy's thighs, after longing to touch
them for so long. Ciel threw his arms around my neck to support himself. His
face merely a hand's width away from mine, I could feel his breath on my lips
and see where his lashes were rooted. He held his eyes tightly shut; visual
sensation would only have impaired his haptic experience. I laid my upper lip
on his but dared not proceed without asking for permission, “May I kiss you?”
And permission was granted with an aspirated, “'es”
I closed the distance between our lower lips and merely breathed the air he
breathed for a little longer. I withdrew one hand from his trousers and used it
to stroke Ciel's soft cheek. Then, carefully, slowly, but with determination, I
slid my tongue into his hot little mouth, in search of his. When I found it, it
tensed for a split second. The muscle relaxed again but Ciel did not really
know what to do. Hence, he did the only sensible thing, which was to do nothing
and let me play. The touch was so unfamiliar to my little lover, the foreign
body in his mouth was answered with a bit too much saliva and it oozed from the
corner of his mouth. The kiss was clumsy, unbalanced and wet and it was the
best kiss I had ever had.
Ciel opened his eyes again when I broke the kiss. His gaze wandered across my
face in a disordered manner, as if he was searching for something, his own
expression shifting from dazed to serious to amused. Finally he chuckled, “I
can't believe you really are this perverse. I seriously considered the
possibility that you jerked me off yesterday just to embarrass me. But we're
way past the point where that is arguable.”
“But is it really perverse if I can't help whom I fall in love with?” I did not
like the notion.
“Pah, love?! Are you kidding me?”
“Do you think I would risk my honour, my freedom, my life, just to get close to
you, if it weren't for love?”
“Did you really marry her to get closer to me?”
I brushed his neck with my lips and whispered, “Indeed.”
Ciel gasped at the sensation. “That's not love, that's obsession. And if you
can't tell that much, you're a sicker man than I thought. You-” I attempted to
shut his mouth with another kiss but he avoided me and proceeded, “Don't cut me
off like that. Listen, the truth is, I'd been hoping for a while for something
like that to happen someday.”
I singlehandedly unbuttoned the boy's shorts. “Yesterday's encounter, you
mean?”
Ciel watched my hand move underneath the waistband. Another gasp. “Yes...”
“But you seemed severely distressed. Did you get cold feet?”
The boy hid his face in his hands. “My god, why am I even telling you this.”
“My best guess would be that you wanted me to know all along and the state of
arousal frees you from the mental restraints to tell me.” I dug deeper into his
trousers, below his briefs. And there it was, the very first time I was allowed
to touch the boy's most intimate parts. Ciel let out an embarrassed whine. I
pulled the clothes a little further down his legs to expose his erection. It
was small and pink and juvenile and it wanted to be caressed by me so badly. I
carefully inspected its form with my fingertips. My step son proved himself the
perfect little faunlet, in every detail of his body, of his being.
“Sebastian... You're so sick... So sick...” I grabbed it firmly. Ciel cursed.
Then he started to rock his hips. “But I guess I'm just as sick.” I lightened
my grip a little and let him move in my hand. “Sebastian... I... I was waiting
for you to do this to me... the things your sick books described...” Of course
you were. How could you resist the thought of having strong and handsome
Sebastian send you to other spheres.
The boy clawed his fingers into my shoulders. The movement of his hips on my
lap teased me more than it pleased me and eventually, I could not help but use
my other hand to tend to my own carnal needs. With closed eyes and forehead
leaning on mine, Ciel continued to insult me under his breath. And then he
came, way too early. I was nowhere near being done and this time, I did not
want to, could not leave it at that. I let Ciel lean on me while I continued to
treat myself: roughly, almost violently, in contrast to how carefully I touched
the boy on my lap. Behind his back, I inspected the boy's ejaculate in my hand.
It was rather little and clear. I estimated he must have had his first
ejaculation about a year ago. The thought of innocent eleven-year-old Ciel
exploring his body finally drove me to my climax and I came with a small moan,
my face buried in the curve of his neck.
Ciel fell asleep on top of me. I did not dare move and wake him up, so I just
stroked his hair, enjoyed his smell and reflected on my luck. This boy, my boy,
had given himself to me on his own. Neither was there need for force, nor for
sleeping pills.
We remained on that chair for minutes, hours, days, maybe weeks, I could not
tell. I lost my sense of time and only found it again when Ciel woke up.
 
At night, I shared the bed with my pubescent lover's mother as if nothing had
happened, and held her too. And so I found myself bedding a mother and her son.
 
Chapter End Notes
     Mhm I hope this chapter turned out well. I was a little nervous to
     post it, afraid that I ruined the first real sexual encounters. But
     then I thought screw it, this is just a fanfiction, what am I even
     working myself up with haha.
     There's no real hint to that but I like to think that the magazine
     mentioned is Chameleon: a Bazaar of Dangerous and Smiling Chances, a
     sole 19th century issue that featured homoerotic poems and short
     stories, among which pederastic motives were featured too.
     In the second sex scene, I tried to convey the absurdity of
     Sebastian's supposed role as Ciel's obedient “servant”. He says he
     waits for Ciel's next step but as soon as Ciel enters the scene,
     Sebastian practically bullies Ciel into admitting that he liked what
     happened the former day. Ciel did enjoy it but he is completely
     inexperienced, has no idea how to handle the situation. He wants to
     step out of the game victoriously but he has little concept of what
     this victory was supposed to look like. Sebastian agrees to “serve”
     Ciel whenever he wants him to but the truth is, he just proceeds to
     do it again out of his own will, not because Ciel asks him to do it.
     However, he asks for Ciel's permission before kissing him: something
     that is hardly as risqué as fumbling his thighs (though one could
     argue that the kiss weighs more because it hadn't happened yet)
***** Chapter 8 *****
Chapter Notes
     I originally intended this chapter to have double the content but I
     was neither satisfied with the pace, nor its tone. For a week I'd
     been struggling to put it together and today I rewrote some of it,
     copied together stuff that I'd already written, left other parts for
     the next chapter and here we are.
     I admit I didn't read through the whole thing again as I'm writing
     this. I will probably go over it tomorrow again and edit a few
     horrible mistakes and inconsistencies out but right now, I just
     really want to post this update. EDIT: I have edited it by now and it
     wasn't nearly as terrible as I feared it to be haha
     Sorry for updating so irregularly. I originally wanted to write this
     chapter and wait until April to post it but I just can't wait. But
     I'm afraid to say that there will be a gap after either this or the
     next chapter. I apologise. I hope it's the next one.
     I hope you will enjoy this chapter!
Thus began a period of bliss.
Ciel went back to school. To my luck and to his; had I not otherwise faced
great struggles to hold myself back. My mind – my heart, too, was set ablaze by
Ciel's formal acceptance of my affections. I hid in my office, pretending to
busy myself with work, when actually, all I did was think of him, Ciel, Ciel,
Ciel, Ciel, Ciel, Ciel, Ciel. Hazy consciousness, vague and yet intense visions
of Ciel in my arms, a choking feeling I could not place. I consulted my dear
journal to help me put my thoughts into words but all that I could produce from
my pen were scribbles: Little spirals and strokes, Ciel's name in every line
that I tried to start to write a sentence in. The page looked like an aphasic
madman's attempt to regain his ability to express himself while desperately
clinging to the only word he could phrase: Ciel.
I had found a way to fake composure when we had dinner. I sported a perfect
persona of calmness and normalcy and so did Ciel. After dinner, Ciel did not
immediately disappear in his room anymore either, unlike the days before. I was
surprised to find him appear extraordinarily relaxed between his mother and me.
All day I had thought about how I wanted to have him to myself again but in the
evening, the odd little Michaelis-Phantomhive-family spent the remainder of the
evening listening to trivial comedy programmes on the radio and I was once
again happy with just occasional little knowing glances and the casual touches
that I was gifted with by my step son sitting between his mother and me.
A strange domestic routine developed between us. Sometimes, things were just
like they used to be: Ciel came to me to vent about his classmates, never to
his mother. He still borrowed books from me, sought for my support when he did
not want to be taken to church on Sundays and stole my desserts. Things that
Rachel did not approve of but accepted as given. Other times, however, he
approached me with intent on matters his mother would certainly never have
forgiven. Our sexual relationship became part of our routine and Rachel did not
suspect a little thing.
We knew how to take advantage of the woman's daily routines. She spent her days
mostly downstairs, whereas my office and Ciel's bedroom, our own personal
territories, were conveniently located upstairs. When I worked, she dared not
ever interrupt my diligent academic efforts. Moreover, starting with the new
school year, Sebastian Michaelis the Frenchman was more than happy to give Ciel
private lessons in the language that was to thank for providing his name; not
that he had had any dire need for those lessons in the first place, as French
was one of the boy's strongest subjects, but Rachel agreed that practice with a
native speaker was a wonderful opportunity to perfect his skills in a way that
school could not offer. Indeed, there was plenty that this tall, dark and
handsome French gentleman could teach the good American boy. Most diligently,
we cultivated his tongue work, in order to get rid of that terrible accent, as
well as use it as a stimulant during our study breaks. 
Speaking of tongues, I want to take the opportunity to tell my readers, valued
ladies and gentlemen of the jury, an anecdote to capture the essence of our
blooming romance. I vividly remember that particular rainy Friday afternoon in
late September. Ciel's mother did not like the rain as it got in the way of her
beloved gardening hobby. Out of boredom, she drove downtown to do the following
day's grocery shopping, a measure that presented itself as a wonderful occasion
to us.
I found Ciel lounging on the sofa in the living room, lying on his stomach with
a comic book and a bag of candy neatly placed before him. The boy did not
notice me creeping up on him; my accomplice, the pouring rain, covered any
noise I made.
“So much candy and look at what you're reading!” I tackled the boy from behind,
pressed his stomach harder into the cushioned seat and came to sit on the
narrow edge next to his hips. He flinched and punched my nose. A second or two
to realise what he had just done. Then no 'Sorry'. But a 'Serves you right'.
Ciel took another piece of caramel out of his bag, rolled over onto his back,
fixated me and slowly slid the candy between his pouty doll-lips. The boy
chewed on it with great enjoyment and let me watch him.
“Did you come downstairs to play father figure and scold me?” He was still
chewing. “No, you're just a loyal dog looking to rub himself against his owner
whenever he allows it, aren't you.”
I replied with just a “Brat.”.
We both smirked at the opposite until the other's view let us forget how to
hold our facial muscles in place. For a while, we merely watched each other
like this, no word daring to break the roaring silence that came with the heavy
rainfall. Ever so slightly, Ciel's lips parted and I, ever so slightly, lowered
myself to him. He lifted his chin towards me in anticipation, yet I could not
help but let him wait for just a little longer. Let my watch linger over my
beautiful porcelain boy-doll. Then, carefully, I bowed down and brushed my lips
over his. He replied with a barely audible sigh. I cupped his head in my hands
and lost myself in his image for another while. Ciel was even more charming
when he was waiting for my touch. The hardly noticeable but all the more
enticing movement of his lips along to his adapted breathing pattern, lips that
looked plumper than usual when he was waiting for mine. His lashes, shifting
the shadows and reflections in his eyes when his eyelids became heavier. Every
little imperfection on his skin, every faint discolouration or a bursted
capillary, they reminded me that he was real, and I was with him, and he was
mine. And my Ciel reached for my face and made me kiss him.
The boy was still no perfect kisser but he had learned since the first time our
lips locked. He let himself be led but knew how to let me have my joy in
leading him. When our tongues met, I could tell the faint taste of caramel that
had danced around his tongue before it was my turn to do so. His saccharine
little mouth made me hungry for more. The boy moaned into me as my tongue
searched for more of him. He always moaned quite self-indulgently, yet (to the
benefit of our discretion) never too loudly. How much of it was coming from his
own impulse and how often he just played me, knowing perfectly well that he
could enslave me with his sweet voice, I never learned.
I backed away from him only long enough to be awarded with the view of his
desperate need for more of me written across his face. I then granted him the
relief of my lips playing with his again. A soft nibble on his lower lip, an
accidental collision of our teeth when Ciel tilted his head. I took the tilted
head as an invitation and moved my tongue to his earlobe. The needy faunlet
firmly wrapped his arms around my torso. Only briefly did I touch this area,
however, before I remembered to take utmost care not to give in to visibly
marking my lover so obscenely high. I receded from him and just looked at the
panting young boy beneath me. He was waiting for more but I only brushed a lock
of hair out of his face and whispered, “Not today.” Yes, I had come downstairs
that afternoon in search of the touch of Ciel's skin. But my desires changed
into musings of a more sensitive nature. Marvelling the beauty of the moment,
pure and innocent, felt suddenly much more riveting. Ciel below me was a piece
of art. A sensual, rosy-cheeked Caravaggio youth, lit in Caspar David
Friedrich's most melancholically damp eventide. Had I been a painter, there
would be a portrait of him on that day in my legacy. Alas, I have but words and
memory to keep the image alive.
Yet I could not help but sympathise with the boy's need for more touch. I
picked the lightweight up, leaned back into the opposite corner of the sofa and
placed his head on my chest. He pressed himself away from me to look at me
directly, big question marks written on his face. I told him to settle down on
my chest, close his eyes and listen.
“Pay attention to your own perception.” I ran my fingertips down his spine.
“It's easy to lose yourself in lust. But there can be more to lust than frenzy.
Feel how the condition of your body heightens your senses. Doesn't everything
sound realer now than it usually does?”
And my obedient little boy listened. To the rain, my heartbeat, my breath too.
Just as I listened to his. Our bodies ached for one another but the aesthetic
of the moment knew how to enrapture us both enough to just wish to take delight
in the poetic beauty of two lovers' bodies embracing in the numbing white noise
of rain. Ciel became very calm. I took his hand and toyed with it. I entangled
his fingers between mine, kissed its knuckles, brought it back to its original
place and stroked its soft skin with my thumb. For all the things an honourable
man could condemn me for, that scene was so serene, not even my wife's valued
vicar would have seen anything but beauty.
When Rachel returned, she found us both asleep, bag of candy and comic book
tangled between our legs. Ciel was nervous and embarrassed to be caught like
this but Rachel just smiled and complimented us on how close we had become. She
later told me in a bittersweet voice that the scene reminded her of the happy
lazy afternoons when Ciel was much younger and her first husband still around.
Ciel started to find it thrilling to explore how far he could go with me in
front of his mother. Initially, it used to be me who liked to play with the
boy. Casual touches: A pat on his lower back before he left for school in the
morning or a thumb on his lips to wipe a rice grain away. But the boy liked the
game. And he played it well.
He had always been a tease, from the very second I stepped foot in the piazza
and saw him for the first time, but nowhere near comparable to the adventurous
measures he took after he became used to his role as my lover. He tangled his
slim arms around my shoulders from behind me when he approached leisurely
reading Sebastian in the living room, pretending naivety when he asked what I
was studying so attentively. During our belated back-to-school family shopping
trip, he wiggled his bottom at me while he presented his potential new pair of
trousers and asked for my opinion on how they fit around his thighs, if they
weren't too tight. When the whole little family spent the evening listening to
the radio together in the living room, he spread himself across the sofa and
laid his head (or his feet, whichever option he currently preferred) onto my
lap. Rachel would scold him for his bad manners but he just replied that
Sebastian surely wouldn't mind. I told Rachel not to worry. On his most
adventurous days, during dinner, Ciel searched for my legs below the table, out
of Rachel's sight, and stroked them up to the thighs with his sock-clad little
boy feet. Oh, he played me well. It took me a good load of composure not to
throw him onto the table and have my way with him when he was teasing me like
this.
Ciel indulged in his new position. The boy had seduced an adult and he took
pride in doing so. The revelation that I desired him and not his mother, that I
preferred him over her. Ciel felt powerful over me, and he was powerful. Our
mutual desire really gave us power over each other, a kind of control and
dependency unique to forbidden lovers like us. We shared a secret whose
revelation had the potential to destroy both of us and we bathed in the thrill.
 
***** Chapter 9 *****
Chapter Notes
     I'm back! With a rather short update, I'm afraid. But better short
     than nothing, I suppose! Now that it's summer, I will hopefully be
     able to produce more in shorter time.
Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, I am writing this confession because I do not
deny any of my deeds. You are aware that I do not need to elaborate on my love
affair with Ciel as it is not the crime I am charged with, yet I freely choose
to explain myself because I value this chance to elaborate on the reasons why
it is rightfully not our affair that has me face Iustitia's hard judgement.
Ciel was a selfish little lover. He made use of my service without bothering to
give a thought to my wishes. He made me kiss and caress his body and I did so
with great passion. Sometimes he would sit on my desk; other times, we made
ourselves comfortable on the boy's bed. I would lick and suck and nibble on him
until he poured his love onto my tongue or I would stroke him manually and let
him spend all over his darling little tummy. He would insult me for that sort
of nasty behaviour of making such a mess but truthfully, he never really
minded. However, he strictly would not let me penetrate him. At first, I dared
not go so far on my own account, I had rather let him have time to get
accustomed to the feeling of my aching body against his, outside of him, while
my uppermost priority was to please the boy in my care. But even after weeks,
not a single curious finger was allowed to sneak inside of him. And it goes
without saying that there was no attempt on his side to give anything back. He
just used me to be stimulated, but for my own relief, I had to trust entirely
in my own hands.
Come to think of it, there was, indeed, something I received in return. Ciel
loved to listen to my elaborations on what drew me to him. In return, he
explained to me how he had developed his want for me. My nonchalant handling of
Ciel indulging in the risqué parts of my private library set a train of
thoughts in motion, which ultimately ended at wondering whether I would want to
do the things described in the books to him. At first, the thought unsettled
him but after a hot and humid summer of thinking and fantasising, he found that
the thought had turned into desire and he decided to try to act upon it.
Despite, or maybe even because it was wrong and scandalous. Ah, rebellious
youth!
To Ciel, everything that mattered was maturity. He could not wait to grow up.
I, on the other hand, cherished him the way he was: Fresh, soft, weak in my
hands. Interestingly enough, my hands turned out to be the one place where he
allowed himself to be weak. When I cherished his body, I made him feel adult in
his weakest states. He searched for my stimulation most desperately whenever
his mood was worst. When he was angry, annoyed, or maybe even scared, he
allowed himself to collapse in my arms. From what I observed, I was fairly
convinced he had tried to hide his weaknesses ever since he had lost his
father, especially from his mother, and letting go and giving himself to me
offered him solace.
One afternoon, I found him standing in front of the mirror in his bedroom,
nude, marvelling at the colourful little bruises that he had received from me
as a souvenir of the previous afternoon. He did not notice me opening the door,
so I took the chance to watch him behave in his natural, unaffected
surroundings. Ciel brushed over the love bites carefully, pressed a little
against the most prominent one, dangerously far up on the inside of his right
thigh. The beautiful young boy looked calm and content.
Just a short while later, I added to the marks on his body. He was
exceptionally sweet and peaceful that afternoon.
Over time, I learned to know Ciel in his everyday life. He liked to proclaim at
home that he could not care less about his classmates and how much of an
inconvenience it was having to be among middle schoolers everyday (because he
clearly saw himself above that) but the occasional phone call to ask him
whether he would like to accompany some other children to play a game or go to
the movies spoke of how his demeanour at school could not possibly be as
fiendish as he liked to present himself at home. Very rarely, he would even
agree on joining them, although it had to be a movie he wanted to see anyway,
and it hat to be Elizabeth Midford from down the road asking because she, and
only she, could beg him long enough to convince him to give in. It was also
Elizabeth, and only Elizabeth, whom he never spoke an ill word of, save for a
few little complaints about how she liked to nag him so much. It would stand to
reason that a healthy young boy would take interest in a sweet girl of his age,
and that the possibility offered itself as a threat to my relationship with
him. I can, however, tell the difference between a blooming young romance and
the familiar, sibling-like ties these children shared. If anything, I feared
that Ciel might accidentally spill our secret to her, though the fear was
unjustified as I overestimated their honesty with each other in great measures.
Other observations about daily Ciel only emphasised what I had already taken as
evident. The boy's appetite was poor and had it not been for his candy
consumption to compensate, he had certainly died from malnutrition long ago.
Without a doubt, this questionable diet was to blame for his small frame, how
he evidently fell back behind his peers in his growth. It seemed that Rachel
had long given up on trying to make him eat his whole meals, even though the
portions she served him were always the same size as ours. Better to leave the
possibility open, however slim, for him to eat a little more, than to take the
option from him entirely, I suppose.
A matter Ciel showed no such reluctance for was his attire under the public
eye. Whereas in the summer heat and privacy of home, the faunlet never cared
about any stares he might attract (mostly from me) with his lazy and
inappropriate outfits, he valued a well-groomed appearance in the world
outside. For how could he expect to be taken seriously if he could not even
take care of his own appearance, he explained.
Time passed and Ciel turned thirteen years old in December. Rachel's gardening
hobby had little to offer in the cold season, with the result that her
attention completely shifted to her family. That made sexual advances
significantly more difficult to carry out. The force of circumstance to keep my
hands off my step son in his mother's presence bothered me not as much as I
expected it to, however. Ciel and I went back to our origins. One must not
forget that all there was between us could only bloom because the little imp
and I had liked to spend our time together from the very start. Good
conversation to please the mind remained just as valuable as body contact to
please the flesh. Sometimes we played chess; the boy was skilled at the game
and happy to finally have a partner to truly oppose him. Other times, we talked
about topics that were beyond Rachel's field of knowledge and shared a little
intellectual intimacy. For his birthday, his mother and I had presented him
with a set of Sebastian-assorted (and Rachel-approved) literature and it
provided conversation topics a-plenty.
Rachel loved to see her husband and son in such talkative one-on-ones. She
loved it even more when I laid a fatherly hand on Ciel's hot forehead when he
had a fever (a fever that soon struck me too because I could not help but kiss
the glowing red little darling tenderly when the opportunity presented itself)
and when I massaged his tense back muscles in the same skilled way that I also
massaged hers when she had hunkered over the hearth for too long. She deemed me
a wonderful stepfather.
In January, I voiced my acute need of certain specialist literature that would
have facilitated my efforts to bring my own book to a close. My wife sent my
son and me to the local public library to have him show me around there.
Provincial and small, the library had little to offer on that behalf but I
could not deny its charm. Most of the books that lined the rows of its rust-
coloured shelves had surely seen better times but beneath thick layers of dust
telling that no hand was lain on some of these books for a long time, there
were little treasures to be found. On the occasion, Ciel and I had lunch
downtown and outings to the library became a preferred weekend activity, with
and without Rachel.
Sometimes, of course, I had to tend to my wife's demands as well. I compromised
to occasional church visits. I would never form any ties in the community if I
did not go, she liked to scold me. I preferred to attend the dance gatherings
and similar get-togethers that Rachel loved. Sebastian Michaelis is a vain man
and vanity shines brightest under the eyes of an awed audience. At parties that
imitated European tradition and culture, real and life-sized European Monsieur
Michaelis impressed with gracious stature, sense of tact in song and word and
stories to tell. My wife proved herself a fairly skilled dancer and Mr. and
Mrs. Michaelis soon danced themselves into the local hearts and gossip. Little
fairytales and large fantasies about the way we met bloomed among the good
citizens of Ramsdale and one curious madam or another did we leave in the
belief that we had, in fact, known each other for a long time, but fate was not
kind enough to cross and realign our ways until last summer. Upon our return
home late at night, each of us tipsy, we would laugh about the untruths that we
did not attempt to put an end to and the feeling of fame and glory these
untruths bestowed upon us. I recognised Ciel in her impish joy in fooling her
friends and acquaintances with me.
I do have to admit that I grew to value her as a person. I find it fitting at
this point to formally apologise to Rachel for not doing her justice in my
prior descriptions. I treat her as an obstacle in my tale but I do realise that
if it had not been for this woman, Ciel would never have been mine. She was a
respectable, principled person, more so than any other individual I would ever
encounter after her.
At the end of one of these nights out, when we had found the way to our
bedroom, Rachel finally managed to phrase an issue that she had struggled to
express to me as it possibly posed a threat to our serene, financially carefree
situation. On the occasion of her obligatory Christmas letters, she had spread
the message of her marriage among her acquaintances. This meant, however, that
her benefactor, Mr. Derek Traun, too, learned of me. Rachel feared that these
news would cause Traun to cease financial support for the family and put us, a
starving poet and his wife (as she did not put but obviously meant it) into
monetary troubles. The assumption hurt my pride but I tried to swallow it down
and explained to her that she underestimated my financial stability as a well-
published author with his new project on the finish line. Rachel apologised to
me and explained that she trusted my capability to feed the family but needed
to settle the matter with Derek, as she called him familiarly, as he had always
been kind to her family and she felt obliged to be honest with him. The man had
since replied to her letter, in which he apparently asked to meet this fellow
that had caught her fancy in person and that she told him that she was sure
that I would also strike a chord with him, for she liked to explain that I
shared some good qualities with her Vincent.
It would not come to this meeting.
 
***** Chapter 10 *****
Chapter Notes
     I did my very best to finish this chapter before I go on vacation!
     Which is tomorrow, so wow, it was close.
     I hope you'll enjoy it!
See the end of the chapter for more notes
 
Spring arrived before I knew it. The months flew by and I was beyond pleased
with the path my life had taken. The role of the picture book family father had
been written for me. Even wary Mrs. Midford grew to accept me, or at least
refrained from showing her dislike of me as openly. Everything went perfectly
well. So well that it surprised me.
One sunny Sunday morning in May, Ciel sneaked to my bedside to wake me up. When
I showcased confusion about what he might need this early on a Sunday, the boy
only snorted at me and ordered me to get up.
As he had successfully dragged me out of the bedroom, eyelids still heavy, he
finally explained, “You're a sub-par exemplar of a father but you could at
least help your... 'step-son'...”, a term at which he shuddered, “...help with
his duties on Mother's Day. It's your duty too, you know? Or do you not care
about your mothers over there in Europe?”
“I apologise but it is, in fact, a holiday I have little ties to, not only
because it isn't celebrated the American way in France, but also because my
mother died in childbirth.”
“...Oh. Yeah.” Ciel felt a little sorry about his unthoughtful accusation.
“Well, but you're living in the United States now, you're married to my mom and
now you're in it with me. I'll use you without hesitation.” Oh, how I loved it
when he talked like this.
Ciel told me that he had made Mother's Day breakfasts all by himself in
previous years – a sweet gesture of him, yet not without a tragic aftertaste. I
imagined he must have practiced this tradition with his late father and kept it
up even after his demise. Now he had somebody to lend him a hand again.
We went to the kitchen. After standing there for a few seconds, both of us very
unpresentable in our pyjamas, he asked me whether I could make pancakes. Not in
the American sense, I explained, but I could serve his mother crêpes, if that
was acceptable. Fair enough, he told me, as that was more than he could ever
have produced by himself, had his previous Mother's Day breakfasts consisted
merely of cereals and orange juice.
I sensed that he had planned to make me his footman while doing nothing at all
and just watch me work, so to prevent this course of events, I told him that I
would teach him how to make my crêpes and thereby involve him in the process.
Flour, eggs, milk, a little butter and a pinch of salt were all I needed and
what I ordered Ciel to provide me with. He was quick to place the ingredients
on the kitchen counter and waited for me to take further action, but instead I
just instructed him on how to prepare the batter.
Even though the boy gave his best, it was apparent that he had never touched
any cooking supplies before beyond washing them when his mother asked him to.
Filling the bowl with flour, milk and salt went fairly well, although he could
have been less reluctant with the salt. The eggs, however, were a mess.
Luckily, I had my little apprentice open the eggs into a separate bowl, as if I
had seen the disaster coming already. Ciel took his first egg and tapped it,
very hesitantly, against the edge of the bowl. As it had hardly even cracked
open, he gave me a puzzled look. I told him to smash the egg harder. He did. He
overdid. He smashed the egg in two and it fell apart in his hand. Half of it
landed next to the bowl, while the other half mixed with the fractured pieces
of eggshell within the piece of tableware. For a moment, the both of us just
stood there in disbelief and stared at the mess. I told Ciel to clean himself
up while I cleaned up the mess he left behind. Before I let him try another
time, I made him watch the way I opened an egg. And on his second try, the mess
he made was hardly even worth mentioning anymore.
When all the ingredients had made it into the bowl successfully, I let Ciel mix
the batter. He did it with so much dedication that I found it to be perfectly
smooth under my final inspection. He certainly did not want to show any further
failure in front of me after the egg incident anymore. The boy deserved
acknowledgement and so I told him that he did well, and although his exact
words were, “Tch, that's the least I can do!”, his posture and expression spoke
of the pride he really felt.
“And now we need to let the batter rest for thirty minutes.”
Ciel frowned. “Ugh. I'm gonna fall asleep again in the meantime.”
I picked the thin boy up and sat him onto the kitchen counter. “Not if I keep
you busy.”
Ciel gave me an accusing look. “There's really only one thing you can think of,
isn't there?”
I faked offence. “Now, I don't know why you would interpret my innocent
statement this way, but on the other hand, I think I do deserve a kiss for my
efforts, don't you agree?”
Ciel let out a little growl, then pulled me toward himself to give me my well-
deserved payment. I took it with great joy and embraced him tightly. When our
lips parted, we rested our foreheads against each other.
My thoughts drifted off and I could not help but inquire about something I had
been thinking about for a while. “Don't you find it odd to live a life like
this? The happy, All-American family on the outside: Proud mommy and daddy
Michaelis, who love each other so dearly, and you, their bright middle schooler
son; while truthfully, I'm really here for the boy and not her, and not exactly
in order to live the joy that is fatherhood either, and mommy's love being one-
sided... if you can even call the projection of her crippled feelings onto me
'love'–”
Ciel slapped me. “Don't you talk about my mother like this. Look, I'm in this
as long as you don't mistreat her. But I dare you spill another rude word about
her and we'll see where that takes you.”
I drew back. Swallowed. “I am truly sorry. I wasn't in my right mind.” I really
was not. Did I forget whom I was talking to?
Ciel snorted.
“However,” I continued, “Aren't you feeling any sort of guilt for betraying
your mother in this way?”
Ciel laughed. “You're asking me if I feel guilty? You? You know, I'm just a
poor child that was seduced into doing unspeakable things by his monstrous
stepfather. Where do you see my guilt in this story?”
I closed the gap between us a little and cupped his thighs with my hands. “You
sure love to play the child-card whenever it's convenient, don't you?”
He smirked. “I know my strong points and I'm not afraid to play on them. I
can't say I don't need them in this game against you, if I'm being honest
here.” Then he reached for a stray hair strand to wipe it out of my face.
“A game against each other, this is what you think of us?”
“You're a powerful player and I need to stay careful around you. Can't drop my
guard.” He took my hands and placed them on his waist.
“You are cruel to say something like this...”
I started to make little circular movements with my thumbs. We looked at each
other and did not say a single word. As if by telepathy, with mere glances, we
told each other stories about what we would have liked to do with each other at
a better time and suddenly, it was time to pour the rested batter into the
frying pan.
We had nothing but maple syrup to serve our crêpes with, so we were left no
choice but to compromise to this rather unorthodox blend of France and America.
Rachel, however, could not have been happier with her breakfast when Ciel woke
her up with the first treat in his hands.
At noon, our family of three went on a spontaneous picnic trip to Hourglass
Lake. Unfortunately, we were not the only ones with that particular idea and so
we ended up in what you could call a town party. Rachel enjoyed the day none
the less and the bless that she felt was still written on her face in the
evening. At the sight of his happy mother, Ciel was happy too. Mother's day
1948 stays in our memories as the sunny, laid-back and serene prelude to the
Monday that followed.
 
I can still see her appalled face before my eyes as if it had been yesterday. I
had returned from a quick outing whose purpose I do not remember anymore, when
I found Rachel standing in the kitchen, eyes focussed on the object of her
interest in her hands. I had never seen anybody as pale of shock as that woman
right in that moment. When she heard me approach, she looked up at me. Not
capable of speaking a single word, all she could do was wave my journal at me
to signalise that she knew. Half of its content was written in French and it
had run out of pages to write on by late December but that did not matter. She
knew.
I raised my hand to my forehead and massaged my temple with the thumb. I had to
come up with something. Anything. Why would I write this dangerous book but not
think of an escape plan in case push came to shove. What a fool I was.
“Rachel,” I began, “Let's not jump to conclusions now, will we?” I made one
step closer to her, she stepped back. “As you know, I will finish my current
book in a matter of weeks now and over the past few months, I have started to
collect my thoughts about a new novel. I know what it looks like. It looks
horrible. And I used your and Ciel's names as placeholders because I am
terrible at coming up with names. I knew you would be shocked if you read it
and that's why I have told you nothing about it yet but it's fiction and I've
always wanted to produce a most shocking story–“
“Fiction!” Rachel burst out, “Fiction, you say!” She opened the journal to
frantically look for something to recite, “My thoughts circulate around nothing
but Ciel's thighs. I want to stain their whiteness with my lips, I want to...”
her voice broke, she shook her head and closed the journal again. “Even if this
were fiction, it would still remain the sickest, most disgusting thing I have
ever laid eyes on!”
I was helpless. There was no chance I could redeem myself now. Yet, I did not
want to just give in. “Rachel, dear, please try to understand–“
“Shut your mouth! You're the Devil himself! I can't believe I welcomed a
monster into my house with open arms, gave myself to him, but worst of all,
gave him my son! My beloved child... Ciel...” My wife fought against the tears
that welled up in the corners of her eyes.
While I made futile attempts at soothing her, Rachel stepped backwards to the
kitchen counter, holding onto the journal tightly, never losing eye contact
with me, and searched the counter for a knife. Not to attack me, but to protect
herself as she then slowly went for the other exit of the kitchen, still
fixating me. When she had stepped out of the kitchen, she glanced over to the
telephone in the hallway right outside, still pointing the tip of the knife at
me. I assume she contemplated on her chances of successfully making a phone
call to the police. She decided against it. All the while, I tried to stay as
calm as humanly possible, tried to reassure her of my good will, and that, as
shocking as my notes sounded, art sometimes had to be shocking, but she would
not listen. I could do nothing. In a fight, I would have undoubtedly
overwhelmed Rachel. But Ciel, what about Ciel? If I were to kill his mother, no
matter how skilfully, no matter what brilliant explanation for her sudden death
I could provide, Ciel would see through me. The purpose of my being would run
through my fingers like the egg that Ciel had destroyed the previous day. I did
not follow Rachel when she dropped the knife and turned away to escape the
house through the backdoor. I was done for. It was over. I had had my fair
share of perfect life in harmony for almost a year and now the time had come to
redeem my debts. I picked the knife up that Rachel had left behind and looked
at my distorted reflection in its blade. Now it was me that looked as pale as
Death himself. I sat down on the kitchen floor, knife still in my hands, and
contemplated on what to do. Should I take the chance and run away? Leave
everything behind and escape? Or should I end my life right there? Perhaps
Rachel would have liked the latter option. Of course, I would not do that
because of course, I would not be here and write this confession today, had I
taken my own life that day.
The telephone rang out of the blue. I stood up and thought about whether I
cared about it or not. At the second ring, it had already driven me mad enough
to just want to end the sound and I put the knife away and answered the
telephone. The voice on the other end belonged to Meyrin, Old Miss Opposite's
household help. Her voice was shaking and she stuttered, though she always
stuttered and I did not think anything of it. I better come out of the house,
she told me. Had Rachel told her already? Did she, out of all people, want to
confront me? No, she told me to hurry because a car had hit my wife. I beg your
pardon? Yes, a car, it hit Mrs. Rachel, right in front of our house, and my son
was there too, but he was not harmed.
I hung up without a further word and raced outside. The next moment happened in
slow motion. A handful of curious people had been quick to notice the spectacle
before me and now they surrounded Rachel, who was lying on the ground, eyes
wide open, dead, her head encircled by a splash of blood in the form of a
shining halo. Her strawberry blonde hair was stained with deep reds. She looked
like she was a satanist cult's offering to the devil.
The driver that had hit her down rushed to me to apologise but, more
importantly, to inform me that Rachel blindly ran onto the street just when he
drove down the street and that it was not his fault. Of course it was not his
fault. My wife had fled from our house and likely wanted to contact the police
from the safe home of Old Miss Opposite. This would not have happened had that
woman known her place and not stuck her nose into the private belongings of
others. Emotions welled up within me. Ciel, where was Ciel? I fended the driver
off and looked for the one that truly deserved his apology.
Ciel had just returned from school and stood about ten steps away from his
unsightly mother. He was screaming and cursing, desperately trying to get
closer to her but a neighbour held him back. I rushed to him, took him up into
my arms and said nothing. After a while, he stopped struggling, laid limp arms
around my torso and his face into the curve of my neck. I felt tears drop onto
my skin and also tears well up in my own eyes. Silently, I stood there, holding
this boy, my boy, up in the air, tears in both of our eyes, albeit for
different reasons. The endless grief that his tears tried to wash away weighed
about the same as my endless relief. Rachel had not been able to do anything to
me and Ciel watched her die, by another's hand and certainly not mine. I was
not to blame for her death, not even by Ciel. The neighbours' curious stares
had shifted from the dead woman to widower and orphan in each other's arms,
tears in their eyes. Without us noticing, local press had already found and
snapped a photograph of us and tastelessly printed it with a horrible caption
in the following day's newspaper.
I carried Ciel in and asked him to stay there and let me settle the matters
outside. After a short argument, he finally agreed that it was better for him
not to see his mother in this grotesque state, or it would imprint in his mind.
I went back outside again and was immediately greeted by a young policeman that
looked like he had just seen his very first corpse. I hardly remember the
content of our conversation, I just remember that I was shaking all the way
through, though I do not know this from my own memory, but from the
descriptions of curious neighbours that had listened in on our conversation. I
do remember that my mind was elsewhere, maybe somewhere at heaven's gates to
catch Rachel to thank her for her sacrifice before she passed through them
forever.
After the policeman thought he had learned enough from me, Meyrin hesitantly
inched toward me, holding something in her hands. “I-I found this book a few
feet away from your... from Mrs. Rachel, I did. It was lying there, open – ” my
heart skipped a beat, “ – but I didn't read anything, no! I mean, I don't
understand a single word of French except for 'mahn-sierr', mahn-sierr. And I
didn't mean to look, mahn-sierr Sebastian, I'm sorry, mahn-sierr Sebastian! But
I wanted to return it to you, you see. It looks important and I don't think the
police would care about it, would they?
She returned the journal to me, a little torn at the edges but content still
safe and secret from everyone but me. I had had luck another time, for I
assumed the police would, indeed, have had interest in the journal's contents
and Rachel's sacrifice would have been for naught. The same absurd luck that
prevented me from drowning my wife the previous year under the eyes of
spectators now did the job for me. Good luck was the only force capable of a
perfect crime and good luck was my accomplice.
Rachel was taken away and I went back inside, in search of Ciel. He needed me
now and I wanted to be there for him. As heartless as the reader might have
deemed me from my elaborations by now, the relief over my safety did not
outweigh the concern for my beloved little boy. I was well aware of the
emotional impact that the loss of his last remaining family member was bound to
have had on him.
The faint sound of flowing water led me to the bathroom. I had a bad feeling.
Its door was locked but it was possible to open it from the outside with a
nearby key, so that was what I did. Inside, I found Ciel naked, cowering in the
bathtub, beneath the shower head. His face was directed at the streaming water,
eyes closed, and it was impossible to tell whether he still cried or not. He
did not seem to notice me breaking in until I rolled my sleeves up and laid a
hand on his shoulder. The water that came down on Ciel was ice cold; he had
used up all of the warm water but it did not seem to matter to him, even though
his lips had taken on a blueish tint and his skin was covered in goosebumps.
“Please come out of the shower and dry yourself. You'll catch a bad cold
otherwise.”
Ciel just looked vaguely into my direction for a moment but said nothing.
“I beg of you.”
“What was she doing. Why did she try to cross the street so carelessly.”
“I don't know, Ciel. I don't know.” I was technically not telling a lie. I
assumed she tried to call the police from across the street but I did not know.
“Now, please do me the favour and come step out of the bathtub.”
The boy granted me this one favour but did nothing beyond that. I turned the
water off and grabbed a towel to dry his worn figure. First his hair, then
carefully his face. Now I was able to see that, despite puffy eyes, there were
no tears streaming down his cheeks anymore. I proceeded downwards, across his
neck, his chest, reached beneath his arms to reach his back, then dried the
arms, his lower body, his legs, his feet. Ciel still made no attempt at moving
anywhere else and I took another dry towel and wrapped it around him, then
picked him up and carried him to his room and onto his bed. This boy was in a
state of emotional distress beyond my grasp. I had never experienced anything
like it before. I wanted to support him but it was difficult for me to
determine what exactly I could do for him. Ciel seemed like he was made of thin
glass, about to break at the slightest impact of sudden pressure. Even his skin
seemed more translucent than usual. His eyes were dull. None of the usual glow
was there to be found. Their skies were hidden behind thick grey fog. I was
afraid at his sight. Afraid I could break him with anything I did. The relief
at my own safety slowly faded away into a sort of helplessness in front of the
orphan. Caring for the weak was not my métier.
“May I get your pyjamas and dress you?”, I inquired.
Ciel nodded, eyes to the ground.
I stood up to get him briefs and his pyjamas, then helped him put the clothes
on with the utmost care. A brush of a finger too hard and his skin would have
torn. Fully clothed, I scanned over him one more time. At least I did not have
to fear for him to fade away from the cold anymore, although his hair was still
damp, as were his lashes.
I raised my hand to wipe the fringe out of the boy's face and then cupped his
cheek. “I'm here, Ciel. I'm still here.”
Ciel said nothing.
“I'm here today and I will be here tomorrow.”
A moment of silence. Then the boy of glass raised his voice. “Don't leave me.
Don't ever leave me. I swear to you, if you, too, ever leave me behind, I will
never forgive you. I will... I will...” he swallowed down the urge to cry
again.
Ciel looked like he would collapse anytime soon and I caught him in my arms
before it happened. All I knew to do now was to embrace him and thereby force
into his consciousness that I was there. To let him feel the body warmth of
another living person by his side. I crawled into his bed, pulled the blanket
up, Ciel to me and wrapped the both of us with the soft cover. It was a sunny
day in May but cool enough to be comfortable beneath the sheets like this. Ciel
nuzzled against my chest. I held him to me tightly with one hand, cupped his
head with the other and played with damp strands of hair. As we lay there
silently, I, the only one that was left to him, and him, my only reason of
being, I had a realisation: Ciel would heal. And when that time would come, all
of Ciel's love would belong to me. There would be nobody to share it with.
Rachel had given me the greatest gift all over again: Ciel, my Ciel. Once
again, genuine feelings of compassion had mingled with selfish joy. Only now
that I bring these memories to paper do I realise how little of a good person I
was, still am.
The exhaustion from the distress and my presence were enough to successfully
help the boy fall asleep after a while. When his breath weakened, mine followed
suit and I, too, fell asleep on this late afternoon.
It was about half past eight in the evening when Ciel rose from my hands and
woke me up by sitting down on top of me. My mind still caught in a dream about
little nothings and eyes not opening further than halfway, I looked up at the
shape mounting me. The blue hour had almost ended and light in the room was
scarce but despite of all of these unfavourable circumstances, I could see
Ciel's face. Clearer and clearer with every moment of me further realising his
presence. He had something that could be called an expression again, which was
a relief of some sort.
“Did you have a nightmare?”
“Fuck me.”
“Pardon?”
“Fuck me. Fuck me like you've always wanted to. I give you my permission. Fill
me up, make me forget, make me feel something else, tear me apart if that's
what you want. Do it.”
Silence. I was still half asleep and needed a few seconds to process the
meaning of Ciel's request. After some consideration, I gave my reply.
“I do not think that's a good idea tonight. You know there is little I would
rather do, generally speaking, but right now, you don't know what you want. I
don't want to take you against your will, especially not in this state.”
“Shut up! I know exactly what I want, which is have my mind fucked out of me,
have it numbed, if only for a moment.”
“No, listen–“
“We made a deal and this is an order. Don't you remember anymore? I tell you to
fuck me and you fuck me, understand?”
I sighed. Ciel understood that as resignation, or at least an opening, and
began to unbutton his pyjama shirt. The weak light making its way inside
sculpted the pale chest that revealed itself below the fabric. I was weak. We
both knew I was weak. I laid my hands on the faunlet's thighs, respectively.
Ciel shed his shirt with a swift movement and exposed his narrow shoulders. He
was as beautiful as always and as beguiling as never before. Still in a fight
with my own bad conscience, I did nothing further, and Ciel, instead, began to
handle the street clothes that I was still wearing. Slim fingers reached for
the knot of my necktie and undid it, then quickly unbuttoned my shirt. I took
his hands to pause his motion.
“Alright, I give in. But please let me get something before I can't stop myself
anymore, will you?”
Ciel thought for a moment. “If what you want to get is what I think it is,
there's no need to. I don't need you to go easy on me.”
“Trust me, you do need it, we both need it. This has nothing to do with going
easy or not.”
He sighed. “Fine...”
Ciel let me go and I rushed to fetch the small vial from my personal
belongings. At my return, I placed it on the bedside table. Before I returned
onto the bed, I took off my shirt and threw it to the ground. Ciel had pushed
away the blanket and was waiting impatiently for me. While I crawled back onto
the bed, he looked at the vial and asked, “When, where and how? Can you just go
and buy something like that?”
“Last September, when I assumed I would soon be given permission to enter you,
at the pharmacy and yes, I can. This is a lubricant for surgical purposes and
if I purchase it far enough away, nobody questions it.”
“Well, now its time has come.”
“Indeed.”
I bent over Ciel. In his eyes was aggression he did not know where to direct,
there was sadness and despair and maybe something I would dare to call
resignation. His body spoke a different language. His muscles were tense and he
overstretched his back, so that his soft little tummy rose up into my direction
ever so slightly. Just looking at the boy like this, offering himself
completely to my mercy, was enough to wash away every form of doubt I still
harboured. I slid my hands down from his shoulders, across his chest and
aforementioned tummy, to the waistband of his pyjama trousers, then slid my
hands beneath it to peel both trousers and briefs off the porcelain boy's body
in one movement. His exposed erection lay on his lower belly, screaming for me
to kiss it, and so I did. Ciel let out a hearty moan and pushed his hips up. He
did not need to hold back anymore, for there was nobody else in the house to
eavesdrop on us. I lifted my lips, pressed his hips back down onto the mattress
and viewed this living piece of nude art one more time. Ciel's breathing was
laboured. He covered his mouth with spread fingers. I pushed the hands away to
find access to his lips, then laid mine onto his and linked our tongues. After
a short while, Ciel pushed me away. “Just do it already. I have no patience
tonight.”
“I cannot 'just do it', or else I will really tear you open. And neither I, nor
you want that, even though you claim otherwise.”
“Well then, at least take the rest of your clothes off. I want to see what you
will push inside of me.”
I followed this order and bared myself to him completely. My frail little lover
swallowed at the sight of my length. He had never paid as much attention to it
as now that he would soon feel it fill him up.
I lowered myself to give him a kiss on the cheek and a few words of comfort,
“Don't worry, little darling, I will prepare you adequately.” Meanwhile, I
grabbed the lubricant from the bedside table. I sat up, opened the vial and
dipped my middle- and index finger in to take some out. I pushed Ciel's legs
further apart and lifted his hips to have better access to him. Before touching
him, I looked at the boy's exposed intimate parts one more time, as if to raise
my awareness of what I was about to do with him.
“Sebastian...” Ciel looked at me through slitted eyes. “Do it.”
And then I laid my fingers on his entrance and spread the thick fluid in
circulating movements. Ciel made ever so tiny little moans; sounds as cute as
nothing I had ever heard before. He wiggled his bottom a little, though not
into my fingers. As I found the lubricant to be adequately spread, I dipped my
middle finger into the vial one more time and spread generous amounts of
lubricant on it. Then I looked at Ciel again and announced, “If you allow me, I
will now begin.”
Ciel pressed his eyes shut and gave me a weak, “Yes.”
I pushed my middle finger into the centre of his tight muscle rosette.
Fingertip barely in, the inexperienced boy winced at the sudden unfamiliar
sensation. With rolling movements, I crept further up, little by little. He was
burning hot inside and oh so tight. Nobody had ever touched him like this
before, not even he. I was the very first person to feel his insides and the
very first person to massage the tense muscle walls to relaxation. My finger
halfway in, I accidentally brushed his prostate, and Ciel flinched and sighed,
even though I had wanted to avoid that for the moment. I could not excite him
too intensely yet.
I apologised for having to pull out again in order to get more lubricant. The
small frame at my hands needed every help it could get and I did not want to
risk hurting it more than absolutely necessary. My warning did not prevent Ciel
from whining a little 'no' when I retreated, however. With the help of some
more of my wonderful medical aid, I slipped back in and spread the substance
within even deeper depths of him. Ciel reached for his erection but I would not
let him touch it.
“No treats now, or you'll spoil your appetite for later and you don't want
that, do you?”, I whispered into his ear.
“I can't take it... I need to...”
“I will not let you, though. You asked me to have my way with you and my way
you will get.”
Ciel just whined at that.
I continued to prepare him. My first finger had made it all the way in. Deep
inside of him, where he was even hotter, I moved it slowly but confidently.
Ciel never said a single word, he just whimpered and moaned and sighed every
now and then and increasingly moved into my movements. When I judged that he
was ready for a second digit, I withdrew again and took some more of the clear
fluid. Already not as tight as before, I stretched his entrance open even
further by carefully inserting the freshly coated middle- and ring finger.
“Ah!”, came from Ciel at the stretch.
I moved my fingers synchronously down into the depths between the small boy's
buttocks. His whole body was tense, his toes curled up and I noticed that it
was getting more and more difficult to proceed further in. The situation called
for a change of positions. I withdrew from Ciel again, flipped him onto his
belly and raised his hips to have better access. Ciel took the opportunity to
grab a cushion to hug and support himself on. I pushed my fingers back in and
indeed, the position change helped. This way I had him prepared for another
finger in no time. I repeated the same procedure of pulling out and pushing the
next one in but this time, Ciel let out a pained cry. In my increasing
impatience, I had been careless for a moment.
“My apologies.”
“No... keep doing it like that...”
“But it will hurt again.”
“Well, that's exactly what I want, you dunce.”
If the rude little boy wanted it so much, he might as well have got it. I
pushed the three fingers deep inside of him, a pained cry, then twisted and
coiled them up and spread them apart, another pained cry. His agitated voice
did my own state no good service, either. The wider I spread him apart, the
more desperate I was to finally, after so many months, violate him with my
aching member.
“Seba-ah-aah!” He became louder.
One last time I added another finger.
“When are you going to” – a gasp – “put it in...”
“Patience, my boy. We're almost there.” I ached to do it more than he could
ever know but I was worried I might seriously injure him if I overdid it.
“Please! Please! Just do it! Hurt me!”
I broke down. The last of my composure melted away and I withdrew my hand from
the boy's behind to prepare my dripping erection to enter him. Ciel looked back
and watched me do it in desperate anticipation. I took his hips, adjusted them
to the ideal position and finally, I penetrated my beloved faunlet. At first, I
just pushed my tip in; despite his pleads to treat him roughly, I refrained
from any form of violence. Rightfully so, because even though I gave my best to
go easy on him, the volume of a grown man's erect penis was almost too much to
take for a virginal body as small and frail as his, no matter how desperately
he needed the stimulation.
Ciel was hot and tight around me, almost too tight, he felt like everything I
had ever wished for and more. Ciel, love of my life, lover of my dreams, he
squeezed me and I almost tore him; I pushed inside and he pushed back; I
whispered into his ear how much I loved his body, loved him, and he cried out
in pain and pleasure. I could see tears well up in the corners of his eyes
again and I was unsure if they welled up because of the corporal or emotional
pain. I whispered into the gape of his neck, “You're beautiful. You're perfect.
You're strong.” You're mine. Then I moved inside of him to push against that
certain spot that had briefly excited him before already. Ciel let out a
roaring moan and his twitching insides wound around my length tighter once
more. I continued by moving in and out, all the while taking care to stimulate
his prostate as thoroughly as I could. Once again, Ciel reached for his
erection that was hanging down helplessly, but once again, I did not allow him
to touch himself. That night, the tight little boy would come just from me
fucking him, I decided.
Ciel was heaving from his panting as my pushes increased in force and speed.
With every thrust, I produced a different kind of nasal sound from him. I
became a little tired of ramming him into the mattress and since I did not
think he still needed this position for easier entrance anymore, I paused my
movements within him for a moment to pick his body up from the bed and pulled
it toward mine. I turned us around so I could lean against the headboard and
let Ciel lean against my chest. The new sensation of so much of our skin
melting into each other while we gradually neared both of our climaxes stirred
up a new wave of longing within me. While I kept the high tempo of my thrusts
up, I laid my lips onto the boy's temples and growled his name into his hair
once every few kisses. In response, Ciel moaned louder and louder, and
eventually, he moaned my name in reply to his and in a matter of a few more
pushes inside of him, crying my name out loud, the beloved boy in my arms came.
Then, as he rode out his orgasm, he actually started to cry silently. I
followed after him quickly and spent deep inside of him, where I had wanted to
spend for so long. If there really is something like heaven and hell, I am
content with being sent to the latter place after my death, for I was allowed a
feeling sweeter than anything heaven could ever provide within these realms of
the living.
When I came to my senses again, I immediately withdrew from Ciel to turn him
around to me and kissed the tears away that crept down his warm cheeks.
Ciel laid his hands onto my chest, looked me in the eyes, and whispered, “Did
you kill my mother?”
Confused and slightly unsettled, I returned his stare. “You saw it happen,
didn't you?”
“That doesn't matter. Don't lie to me. Did you kill her?”
“I would have never killed your mother. I was happy with our family of three. I
thought you knew that.”
“Mhm...”
“On top of that, even if the police had never found out, how would I ever have
been able to get away with it from you?”
“That sounds like you thought it through at some point.”
“I admit I did, though that was long ago, I was a fool and even then I came to
the conclusion that it was a most moronic idea.”
“You are, indeed, very dangerous after all.”
“Trust me, I didn't kill her. I had no reason to do it.”
“I will never trust you... but I do believe you.”
This conversation left me behind with the shadow of a bad conscience lurking
over me. I had not told a single lie. I had not killed his mother and I had not
wanted her to die on this day, either. However, it were ultimately my actions
that led to her escaping the house. Moreover, her sudden death proved itself a
fluke to me and the conflict of finding joy in the misery of my sole reason of
being did not leave me entirely cold.
The 10th of May, 1948, was the day after Mother's Day. Ciel was thirteen years
and a little less than five months old and falling asleep in filthy sheets
covered in drying stains of lubricant, my ejaculate and his. On the day after
Mother's Day, our relationship as it had been before died and, like a phoenix,
reincarnated.
 
Chapter End Notes
     This chapter was an emotional ride for me to write, hands down. It
     was really difficult for me to determine how human and humane I could
     write Sebastian without him being too OOC. Sometimes I tried to let
     him sound more cruel but I just couldn't do it. I'm weak. I need to
     work on that.
     Let me voice a final goodbye directed towards Rachel: Sorry for
     everything I've done to you haha! We know so little about her from
     the manga and I just forced characteristics into her.
     I hope I could stir some emotions up within one reader or another. I
     beg of you, leave me a comment if you liked this chapter, please. I
     hate to beg but I think this was one of the peaks of this story and a
     turning point and I just can't put it any other way than that I need
     affirmation that it was interesting and that there's interest in me
     continuing. Previous chapters have been getting less and less
     feedback and I'm starting to feel like I'm shooting these chapters
     into the void. Thanks for your consideration!
***** Chapter 11 *****
Chapter Notes
     Chances are that when I say something on tumblr like, "I'm working on
     [thing] but it will probably take a long time because I'm busy", I
     will just ignore all of my duties and dive straight into finishing
     [thing]. I have no control over myself.
     Special thanks to Toboso Yana because the most recent chapter sort of
     supports the last third or so of this chapter.
     More special thanks to ChromeHoplite for beta reading this chapter!
See the end of the chapter for more notes
I pressured the driver that had run Rachel over into paying for her funeral.
The whole town attended the ceremony and it was too long and very dull, like
funerals usually are. Ciel did not cry when he wished her goodbye. He just
watched, unable, or unwilling, to speak a single word.
My improved relationship with the Midfords proved itself an asset. Both of them
legal professionals, Mr. Midford offered a helping hand at settling matters
after my wife's death – most importantly, to secure that I would quickly gain
full legal guardianship over Ciel. The breakdown of Rachel's bequest was
another significant service he provided. It was then that I had insight into
the external fundings of the Phantomhive family for the first time. As I have
explained already, my wife had long lived solely from the remains of her
husband's dedicated work, yet I had not had the slightest idea about the
gigantic sums of money she had received on a monthly basis in a time when most
of the population only barely started to recover from the hardships of war. She
had not led a modest life with her son, yet did her lifestyle never hint at the
wealth that her husband had really left behind. Most of the money went straight
into a fund for Ciel's sake. After my enquiry, Ciel admitted to knowing about
this fund, although he never planned to take advantage of it. He hinted at a
distrust of the means at which the money had been made. What means, I did
wonder? Rachel had always avoided the topic – she loved to talk about her
husband; not so much about the character of his business.
Neither did Midford tell me, although for the reason that he simply did not
know. What he did know was that the flow of money would automatically move
directly into Ciel's pockets at his mother's death. What to do with all of it?
The boy did not want it and neither did I. With great amounts of money come
great amounts of problems. I would rather sustain the both of us with my own
efforts. Keeping a low profile seemed to be the most sensible thing to do.
After a short break, Ciel went back to school. I busied myself with bureaucracy
and finalisations of my textbook and welcomed him back in the evening: Him, and
only him. Everything had turned out rather nicely. It was only Ciel and I; I
and Ciel. No mother, no wife, no distractions or threats or obstacles; just us.
I had him, it was easy, I was happy. Ciel was not.
Everyday, Ciel came home from school, lazily dropped his books at the door,
threw himself into my arms, pressed his lips against mine and demanded my love.
Everyday, I made love to him and everyday, he wanted more. He wanted me
quicker, harder, absolutely ruthless. By the time I had overcome the blindness
that came with my lust and realised his primary intention of being hurt by me,
like he had asked for at the very first time too, the boy had started to take
desperate measures in the form of ugly insults and provocations, hoping of
bringing me to a point where I would lose myself and injure him on purpose. To
my shame, I have to admit, he was partially successful. He did anger me,
although not with his insults, but rather with the very attempt at emotionally
manipulating me. There was one time that my hand indeed slipped and in a raised
voice I demanded of him to shut up. When Ciel cupped his glowing red cheek with
an expression of satisfaction, I found myself again and did not fall victim to
his words anymore.
Shortly after, I learned that he had begun to show a similar pattern of
behaviour at school. Roughly two weeks had passed since Rachel's sudden death.
It was not later than eleven in the morning and out of boredom, I was starting
to make preparations for that day's dinner already (since the task had become
mine to fulfil), when the school counsellor called on the telephone. He asked
me to come to the school as soon as possible, not only to pick up Ciel, but
mainly because he had to have a one-on-one conversation with me. Worried and
with little idea of what had happened, I found the counsellor and Ciel sitting
next to each other, in uncomfortable silence and light tension. Slightly
dishevelled hair and a black right eye, the sight of my ward, for the first
time, did anything but delight me. At my appearance, both struck a flash of
relief. Before I could take Ciel back home, the man that I had talked to on the
telephone earlier asked me for a word in a vacant room nearby.
“Mr. Michaelis, your son has recently been getting himself into fights with his
classmates and today, the situation escalated.”
I sighed but did not reply; just waited for further elaborations.
“You don't seem particularly surprised. Were you aware of this?”
“No, I wasn't aware. But Ciel has been volatile around me recently as well.
Allow me the question, in what way did he provoke his classmates?”
“I have no reliable accounts about the details but as far as I can tell, he has
been increasingly disrespectful towards other boys. Today, three of them ganged
up against him and beat him up.” The man hesitated to go on. “I hate to say it
this way, and rest assured, the other three boys are facing their fair share of
trouble, but he had it coming, in a way.”
Of course he had. I knew he had.
“I understand that you and your son have only recently been faced with a blow
of fate. Ciel has never caused any trouble so far. Hence, please consider this
conversation as nothing more than a friendly pointer. But you need to talk to
him. He has been disrupting the peace in his class and it can't go on like
this.”
I apologised for my stepson's unacceptable behaviour and promised to have a
talk with him. The counsellor dismissed me with a stack of shiny pamphlets
dealing with trauma coping and communication issues in families that I dumped
in the next litter bin outside of the school.
Ciel seemed pleased to be sent home for the day. In the car, I finally
addressed his recent misbehaviour.
“Ciel, you need to stop. You can't go on like this. I thought I could just wait
for you to snap out of it while I believed it was only me that you were
provoking but you cannot act like this at school. I mean, look at yourself. You
meant for those kids to beat you up, didn't you?”
Ciel did not reply; he just frowned.
The truth is, I was annoyed with him. Maybe that was the reason why my foot
stepped a little too hard onto the gas pedal. My voice deepened, became louder.
“Answer me. You're looking for any chance to get somebody to physically hurt
you, aren't you?”
“What does it matter to you?! All of a sudden, you act like you're my parent
but actually, it's none of your business to tell me how I'm supposed to behave.
You're fucking a little boy, remember? You're not in a position to judge the
way I cope with myself.”
I applied the brakes maybe a little too suddenly and quickly parked the car at
the closest possible spot. Then I turned toward Ciel, one hand still on the
steering wheel and the other on Ciel’s head rest to support myself while I
leaned over him. “Believe it or not: You, my little boy , are stuck with me as
your legal guardian and as such, it is not only very much my business how you
behave at school, but also how you treat yourself. I have little experience
with mourning as my father died in my absence at a reasonable age and I admit I
have little understanding of what's going on in your head right now; but this
is not normal and it needs to stop. And stop coming at me with your abuse
complaints because those are getting boring and you know as well as I do that I
have never forced you to do anything. Hell, I would have never touched you, had
you not been asking for it so badly!”
Ciel's frown became more prominent, his eyes narrowed, the corners of his mouth
dropped and he looked like he was about to cry out of anger. Instead of crying,
he tried to find words to properly express himself, even though he struggled.
“I... This... I can't... I don't know. I just don't know.” He sighed. “I don't
know why I'm doing this. It feels right to do it. Have you ever felt the need
to hurt yourself, Sebastian?”
I leaned back into my seat. “No. I'm familiar with the concept but I have never
even thought about it.”
“I guess this is the same thing, I'm just... I'm too much of a coward to do it
myself. I feel like I...” He shook his head.
“No, go on. I'm listening.”
“I feel like I need to be punished. I don't even know what for but something
tells me that I deserve it.”
“Do you blame yourself for your mother's death?”
“That's not it...”
“Do you blame me for her death?”
“...I wish I could. It would make everything easier.”
I just watched the boy collect his thoughts.
“I'm so angry. I'm infinitely angry and I have nowhere but myself to direct the
anger at. I hate myself, Sebastian. I hate myself with all I've got. Why is it
me that's still here? All the others are gone. My brother, my father, and now
my mother. The one without purpose is left. Have I ever told you about my goals
in life?”
I shook my head.
“That's because I have none. I just exist. I used to exist for others. For my
family. For my mother. Being with her was my purpose. To keep her entertained,
to keep her company. Now that's obsolete. I'm just here. I don't know what to
do with myself. I'm a useless human being that doesn't know what to do with
himself, or what to work for, and I hate myself. I look at my reflection in the
mirror and I want to puke all over it. It feels only right to be hit and
bruised. I feel like I need punishment for my pointless existence.”
I needed my own fair share of time to think about what to say next. I thought
long and hard, yet I could not find the right words.
“You think I started the fights at school. All the adults at school think I
did. The truth is, I would've just kept to myself but they couldn't shut up.
You know what everyone has been saying recently? Ciel must be an angel of
death. Or maybe the grim reaper is following him around. Why else would
everyone around him just drop dead? I'm worried about his stepfather dying soon
as well. I stayed silent for the first few days but they kept deliberately
saying it loud enough for me to hear. I got sick of it and reminded them of
their own sorry burden on society by pointing out the many ways they kept
proving to be helplessly stupid and helplessly worthless.”
That sounded a little more like the Ciel I knew. It was refreshing. Not that he
had not started, but to hear that he still had enough pride left to look down
on specimens not worthy of breathing the same air he breathed.
The boy continued with a different train of thought. “I told you before that
you mustn't abandon me but please, just throw me away soon so I can end it all.
Don't keep me for your entertainment for as long as I'm interesting and then
leave me to myself. I can't take any of this anymore, Sebastian. Please.
Release me.”
I felt remorse. All this time, I had been counting the years, months, days
until the estimated point in time at which I would do just that. Ciel had seen
it coming all along. It was then that I, for the very first time, realised that
I had been thinking of him as hardly more than a cheap handkerchief that I
would dump in the waste as soon as I had used him up to a point of no mending.
I felt my stomach twist at the realisation. I felt it twist even worse when I
realised what I was about to say. You're wrong. I wanted to tell him that I
would never do that. But that was clearly a lie. Or was it? At this very
moment, I came to realise that Sebastian Michaelis was dead. An impostor had
taken his place. I felt like I had become a different man.
If I think back to that time now, I should have seen it coming much earlier. I
was not happy after Rachel's death. I should have been but I was not. Rachel's
death was all I had ever wished for not even a year earlier.  Ciel, plagued by
loneliness and despair, drowning himself in my feral touch, as if it was the
only thing that could bring him any form of solace. A broken child, desperate
for somebody's love. That was undoubtedly the true character of what I dreamed
of when I first met Ciel. What did the means to acquire him matter to Sebastian
Michaelis? That is what I should have thought, what Sebastian Michaelis would
have thought. I could have just told this boy at my mercy that I would always
love and never abandon him and have my fun with him. I would not have hesitated
to do that a year earlier. But was I still the same man in the spring of 1948,
after eleven months of life with Ciel Michaelis, né Phantomhive, that I was in
the summer of 1947? I had changed Ciel, had made him mine, but had he perhaps
changed me too?
Sebastian Michaelis was dead. “I won't throw you away.” I meant it. I was
almost sure. “I never will.” Long live Sebastian Michaelis.
Ciel's jawline shook and he fought hard with himself to produce proper
language. “If you're lying to me now, I will kill you before I kill myself. I
swear to god, I'm serious.”
I knew that he was serious and in that moment, I was truly content to hear
these words from his lips. “Ciel...” I pulled him into my arms and whispered,
“If I prove to be a liar, please do not hesitate to kill me.” Should I end it
all one day, he shall see to my end!
Ciel reciprocated the embrace. His fingers pierced the skin of my back through
my shirt, as if to bundle all his force to support himself, as well as to
prevent me from slipping away. He trembled all over.
Eleven months earlier, I had lost my way back from Ciel. Now, I was forced to
find it again and I decided to destroy this very path. “You are the purpose of
my being. Let me be yours. And when I die someday, and only then, whether it be
by your hand or the strings of fate, only then will I allow you to die too.”
It was the first time that Ciel believed my words when I opened my heart to
him. Perhaps it was the first time my words had truly been honest.
 
Chapter End Notes
     By the way, if you're not following me on tumblr and you're curious,
     I post art for circa half of my chapter updates there and you can
     find it here: http://nighttimeteaparty.tumblr.com/tagged/lolita-au
***** Chapter 12 *****
Chapter Notes
     Summer is almost over in the northern hemisphere of the real world
     and in this fanfic, it hasn't even started yet. I would've loved to
     write about summer when it's actually summer but then again, it
     doesn't really matter, does it?
     Many thanks to ChromeHoplite for beta reading this chapter!
See the end of the chapter for more notes
As soon as we arrived back home, Ciel went to the bathroom. Rachel's personal
sanitary articles were still scattered all over the room, as if in anticipation
of her next use. Ciel grabbed them one after another. First her tooth brush,
then a rosemary shampoo that she loved for its mediterranean scent that neither
Ciel, nor I used; a range of skin care products that he could not carry with
just his two hands anymore – he now wrapped everything in a towel for easier
transport – and an array of perfumes. At the last bottle, Ciel hesitated. It
was Rachel's favourite scent – flowery, with a note of citrus. He put it back
where it had originally stood. With everything else, the boy marched straight
to the dustbin and dumped it all, towel included.
I walked up to him and before I could ask, Ciel explained that he was tired of
seeing these objects all over the room when nobody would ever make use of them
anymore. Those things were unnecessary – considering our previous conversation
in the car, the word choice was striking.
I was told to leave him to himself for a while. Ciel withdrew to his room. That
served my own good too, seeing as the results of said car conversation left me
with some food for thought of my own.
I had said and thought things that I did not fully understand; that I could not
take back. Throughout my life, there had always been but a single constant:
Sebastian Michaelis was the top priority. In all I did, my wellbeing was of
utmost importance, no matter the circumstances, no matter the people involved.
I had never thought it odd: Is not every man for himself?
What had Ciel done to break this constant? To make me want to give up my own
freedom and independence, for the sake of another? Of course, in theory, I was
still very able to do whatever I wanted to do, whenever I wanted to do it.
Practically, I felt obliged to Ciel. No, not just obliged – dependent too. My
own happiness depended on his, whether I wanted that to be the case or not. All
this time, I had been thinking to myself that Ciel was my reason for
everything, yet somehow I oversaw the moment my ulterior motives regarding him
started to mingle with altruistic ones – the moment I truly let all other
reason behind. That being said, is it truly altruistic to tend to the needs of
the being that is one’s sole purpose?  Is it altruism to have the desire to be,
in return, the single source of purpose to the other? Did it not all boil down
again to wanting nothing but my own good? Whatever the answers to these
questions, Ciel still only had me – but with the change of the perception of my
own motives, I felt less remorse and more pure joy that I had become the anchor
of his life.
Ciel was all I ever wanted and more than I ever imagined he would be. When I
saw him for the first time, languid and shameless in his mother's sleeveless
and revealing, oh-so-loose blouse, I fell in love with a doll: A masterpiece;
the centrepiece of a sophisticated collection. Little did I care about the
person behind those azure crystal glass eyes. Had it stayed like that, I would
not write this confession today. However, during my pursuit of him, I made the
inevitable mistake of discovering, then falling to the mercy of the vivid world
that hid behind the blue. I realised that Ciel was rude, had a foul mouth, yet
he could be well-behaved if he wanted. He was intelligent, curious and hard to
fool; he cherished dangerous thoughts as opportunities to broaden the horizon,
instead of running away from them in fear. He loved to play games and he was
brilliant at winning them, though he avoided battles he could not win; he was
stubborn, sneaky, arrogant, a lone wolf and he accepted me as his partner in
crime; made me his secret as much as I made him mine.
Yet there was a central concern that bothered me. All my life, I had been
chasing the ideal, the perfect beauty, the solace of this sorry world – these
sweet little spritelets. At thirteen-and-a-half years, Ciel was still a perfect
faunlet. My attraction to him was natural; a given. It would also be a given
for the attraction to fade at the time his limbs became bonier, his face harder
and his skin rougher. I did not want this consequence to follow. I wanted
everything to remain the way it was then. No, I wanted to overcome my nature.
It had just so happened that I had been created this way. My attraction to
youth was an absolute. At least, I had always considered it an absolute. Now I
was realising that when Ciel's youth was lost, I would lose myself too. I knew
that after Ciel, there would be nothing left at all. If I were to leave him
after all, I hoped that he would execute me in a most painful way, that the
pain would imprint on my fading soul and haunt me in hell for all eternity.
I was deeply, madly, irrevocably in love. Or was I? What was “love”, anyway? If
I was in love with beauty and the arts, what I felt for Ciel was more than any
word could convey. Describing it as “love” was an insult, yet “love” was the
only word I had. Though, is it not pretentious to assume that the word for love
– the cherished, idolised, supposedly highest of all sentiments – is not enough
to term it? L-O-V-E, four letters in English. L'amour in the language of my
father. It could, according to wise minds long before me, build and nurture,
though it could be destructive too. It could be selfish, it could be a danger
to all but the lovers themselves, or it could be a danger to the lovers. At the
very least, I knew that Ciel had acquired the power to destroy me, if he so
wished.
Still, was “love” the word I was looking for? To this day, I cannot make my
mind up around how to term this brand new concept. I, the poet, out of words!
How outrageous!
I did not see Ciel again until I called him to dinner. Both of us with calmer
minds, we were able to discuss the way Ciel would proceed at school. He did not
want me to interfere with the bullies. He had little more than a month left
until summer break would start yet again and he said that he was old enough to
deal with these kinds of matters by himself. He promised me not to seek
opportunities to be injured anymore in exchange for my promise to be available
to him at anytime, without limitations.
Our new standards returned to him a sense of power and security that he had
believed to be lost forever. I liked him better this way. There were many vices
of which I am guilty; necrophilia is not one of them. Yet when Ciel had been at
his very worst, sometimes I believed I had a dead boy in my arms. Finally, he
was making demands again, and those demands were not meant to annoy me, nor
produce a violent reaction from me, but merely out of his own selfishness. When
he made his demands and called me by my name – “Sebastian” – as if under a
spell, I could not help but fulfil his every wish. A terrible way to raise an
adolescent and a perfect way to spoil a king. Ciel was still desperate for my
touch, and my touch was the only form of solace that I knew how to give, yet he
never complained about any gentleness toward him anymore. With his fading fear
of being neglected came a growing acceptance of my appreciation of him.
It rained every day in the second half of May. The sun hid behind thick clouds
and in the house, it was always too dark to do any work, yet too bright to turn
the lights on. I would have rather slept all day, though I had little to do
anyway, and the overall mood served as a wonderful excuse to, in fact, spend
most of the day in bed – together. I had Ciel stay home from school for the
rest of the week. I took him to the library, though against his will, for he
was embarrassed of his black eye, worrying about the talk that would ensue. I
insisted that there was nothing he needed to worry about; that a boy with a
black eye is nothing out of the ordinary; looking back, it was a mistake of
mine. There was one particular stare that we could have otherwise avoided but
this is not the time to dwell on bad luck and bad timing.
We brought only a single book back home: A Poe, he was one of Ciel's
favourites. The extended weekend was spent with many pots of tea, scarcely
clothed beneath thick blankets and well-known poems and lesser-known tales by
my good old friend Edgar with the child-wife resonating from my lips. Ciel had
known all of these quite well, though never had he heard them in another's
voice. And behold, for the very first time since Rachel's demise, I felt Ciel
chuckle against my chest when I read to him the Literary Life of Thingum Bob,
Esq. He had me know that the humorous stories had never been his favourites but
that they were much nicer when read to him.
Lunch was not really something we considered a necessity, unlike little naps
and kisses and caresses between stories, and when neither of our attention
spans could bear entire short stories anymore, I proceeded with poetry.
From childhood's hour I have not been
 As others were; I have not seen
 As others saw; I could not bring
 My passions from a common spring.
 From the same source I have not taken
 My sorrow; I could not awaken
 My heart to joy at the same tone;
 And all I loved, I loved alone.
 Then – in my childhood, in the dawn
 Of a most stormy life – was drawn
 From every depth of good and ill
 The mystery which binds me still:
 From the torrent, or the fountain,
 From the red cliff or the mountain,
 From the sun that round me rolled
 In its autumn tint of gold,
 From the lightning in the sky
 As it passed me flying by,
 From the thunder and the storm,
 And the cloud that took the form
 (When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.
Ciel rose from my arms and looked at me, a question written across his face.
Just whom are you talking about?
I wondered, too.
I drew him into a kiss and the kiss drew us into more. The rain grew stronger
and the droplets knocked against the windowpane like spirits begging for
shelter, drowning the voices of the demons melting into one below this roof.
It was on this extended weekend that Ciel completely abandoned his own bed,
moved to the master bedroom and from then on only used his own room the way I
used my office anymore. Every night, this boy lay next to me, and he was
beautiful on my duvet. The crisp white blanket wrapped around his milky waist,
a neck exposed like a defeated dog's, at the mercy of the superior hound. I
woke him more than once because I could not keep my lips away.
Our days spent in the privacy of home were carnal, peaceful and pure.
Chapter End Notes
     The poem in this chapter is "Alone" by - you guessed it - Edgar Allan
     Poe.
***** Chapter 13 *****
Chapter Notes
     Once again, many thanks to ChromeHoplite for beta reading this
     chapter!
     Please read my end note for a question that I have for my readers.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
Our days spent in the privacy of home were carnal, peaceful and pure; outside
the fortress, they were not. I had not noticed it before but people were
talking behind my back, too. Without Rachel around, I had quickly made it a
habit to frequent the grocery store every morning soon after Ciel left for
school. I had little interest in the idle chit-chat of housewives but after
Ciel's complaints about his schoolmates' ugly accusations, I could not help but
overhear similar words behind my own back too. “The Phantomhive Curse”, or “the
poor fellow over there, having his beautiful wife taken from him so quickly and
now being stuck with her arrogant brat”. Unlike the talk at school, those words
were not meant for me to hear. The first time my ears caught them, I had the
loud ladies know unmistakably that I did, in fact, hear them very well by
passing them way too closely with a cold glare. How troublesome. In a small
town like Ramsdale, what else would bored housewives do than elevate themselves
by pointing out the misery of others? It was then that I started to consider
that leaving town would do both me and my charge more than well.
The rainfall still did not stop. It must have been Rachel up above, shedding
the tears her son did not dare to shed. Everyday, Ciel came home from school,
exhausted. I thought that I might be able to distract him by forcing him to
accompany me to the market in the afternoons, engaging him in the development
of our dinner plans, as well as treat him to a chocolate bar or caramels, but
not even in the presence of the child did the ugly whispers around me stop and
I regretted the attempt. Children or adults, it did not matter: They were just
the same, and it was my Ciel's fate that served as entertainment for the whole
town. Whether it was disregard or words of pity, the contents of their chatter
did not matter – Ciel had become the cursed boy with the dead family and he was
sick of it. Sick of the fake smiles and feigned concern when neighbours
inquired about far too many details of Ciel's state. He started to hate the
town of Ramsdale.
He started to hate Ramsdale and yet he turned me down the first time I offered
to take him away. The familiarity of our home was too important to him. When
everything else he ever knew had been taken from him, the house was the only
constant he had left. “It will pass,” he said, “The school year will be over
soon.” However, the thought had implanted into his brain and its growth was
unstoppable.
One late afternoon, Elizabeth Midford stood at the door, a box of freshly baked
cupcakes in her hands. She came in hopes of cheering Ciel up but the fiendish
boy sent her away with the advice not to associate with the sicko that drove
both of his biological parents into suicide and is probably working on the next
one already (apparently, that was what the talk at school had developed into).
The girl was clearly hurt by Ciel’s rejection. When he disappeared in his room,
I apologised for my son's rudeness and explained that his intention surely was
not to upset her. She told me that I was wrong, that he intentionally pushed
her away, and that it hurt her because he did so thinking that he did not
deserve any help. She knew him well; better than I had thought.
Before Elizabeth left, she pleaded with me to hug Ciel tightly in her stead,
because she hoped that at least I could do that, for Ciel had grown to love me
like a real father , and she was sure that I loved him like a real son , and
that a father was what he now needed the most. I promised to hug him as tightly
as I could; a promise easily made, for she had no idea how tight the embraces
were that we exchanged, and I had to cover my amusement about how correct she
was about him needing a body to cling to. For a moment, I felt a cruel joy once
again about being the only one allowed to hold him.
Little Midford left behind the box of cupcakes. It contained a note from Mr.
and Mrs. Big Midford directed at me: A reminder of their offered support,
wherever they could be of any help.
The reminder came in handy and I accepted the offer quickly. I had a talk with
my friendly pro bono lawyer about the financial and juridical possibilities of
leaving town with my son for an unknown period of time.
Mr. Midford apologised to me because the first time he went through my wife's
bequest, he had failed to notice documents that had been created only recently.
He explained to me that the financial allowances that Vincent Phantomhive had
left behind for his son were not available to Ciel until his eighteenth
birthday – not entirely, at least. The fund for Ciel's sake had been owned by
Rachel until her demise. It would have automatically gone to Ciel, and he would
have had no access to it as long as he had been a minor. However, sometime in
the past year, Rachel, in secrecy, made her husband – me – a benefactor of
hers, too. Though, there were conditions, as simple as they were limiting: My
access to Ciel's money was meant to sustain a living for the boy. Only if I
were to find myself unable to provide to him with my own money would I be able
to withdraw from the account. Even then, the amounts I could withdraw would be
limited to the most necessary. Mr. Midford expected a positive reaction from
me, though when it did not come, I had to explain to him that all I could feel
was offence. This woman really had not believed in my academic work at all .
Midford laughed and patted my shoulder, then lost himself in stories about the
times his wife believed him in the wrong, and that she usually turned out to be
correct with those doubts.
I had to admit that the news about our financial security were a positive
revelation nonetheless. I did not think I would ever need any of it but the
mere knowledge that it was there supported me in my plans to distance Ciel from
Ramsdale for a while. Mr. Midford found it to be a wonderful idea; his wife did
not share the sentiment entirely when I explained that I had no plans to return
for the new school year. Despite that, the couple offered to watch over the
house in our absence, and help administrate the publishing of and income from
my comparative history of French literature that I had recently sent back to
England for print. Running away with Ciel turned out to be a plan very easily
executed, and that encouraged me to make the offer to Ciel again.
This time, I knew how to choose my words and the time to speak them. It was
easiest to make Ciel listen to penetrating thoughts when I was, in fact,
penetrating him. He was a slave to his own joy and that joy included giving in
to my display of power when his will was weakened by the blood circulating in
his lower body. That and the tumorous effect of the first time I made the
proposition helped him listen when I announced, “I might as well just abduct
you and take you all across the country, in search of a place where nobody will
find us.”
Ciel moaned at that, my confirmation that I was reaching the depths of him that
he was too proud to admit to have with a cool head.
“This is a large country and there must surely be much to see and many places
to steal somebody away to.” I cannot deny that the prospect made my own blood
boil as well.
“Of course you wouldn't stop at sodomy with your stepson, you would kidnap him
too...” He pushed himself against me.
“I'll make you mine more than ever before.”
“You're terrible and I should run away from you...”
“But look at at yourself, you can't help but stay with me.”
Ciel knew that I was right and he knew that he now wanted me to leave him no
other choice than to be taken away. Freedom in captivity was what awaited him.
If it was not up to him, he could push the blame for abandoning the place onto
me.
We continued our haggling about the conditions of our departure when there was
physically nothing left of me inside of him but the liquified expression of my
love for his form. Nuzzled against my chest, the middle schooler pressed that
he wanted to bring the school year to a close, and after that, I would be free
to steal him away to anywhere I wanted to go.
The remaining weeks were filled with preparations for our travels – mainly
instructions for Mr. and Mrs. Midford on what to do with the Phantomhive house
and possible administrative scenarios that might occur. I shared with them the
first hotel we would stay at so they could call me if there turned out to be an
immediate issue that I could help resolve.
I told the Midfords differently but I did not look for a place to stay, no. I
had told Ciel that I would steal him away like a criminal would, and even
though he knew that I was settling things for a clean and (mostly) legal
departure, I wanted to stay true to my words at least to some extent. There
would be no police following us but we would sure as hell run from one place to
the next to avoid capture. And who knows, if we did end up with too little
money for our escapade, why not pull a Bonnie and Clyde, instead of relying on
boring funds? Only the two of us mattered; our lives, our fun, our happiness.
Everyone else was just an extra in this feature film of ours.
Ciel was excited for our departure. He spent a good amount of time thinking
about which things to take with him in the limited space that the car provided,
and at first, the heap of “bare necessities” (clothes, a chessboard, two other
board games, loads and loads of books) would have demanded he run after the car
because his seat would have been needed to transport everything. After some
consideration, he realised that he did not really need any of these things at
all (except for the clothes, maybe) and he left it up to me to decide what to
pack.
As for me, I struggled with leaving my personal library behind; I did not know
how long we would be away. After all, I had made the effort to bring those
books across the Atlantic ocean under the assumption that I would only stay for
a season. Eventually, I packed a few select volumes that I thought would
provide both Ciel and me good entertainment.
The weather improved. Whether it was a consequence of Ciel's lifting mood or
just the expected arrival of summer, I do not know. On the first day of summer
break, we were gone from Ramsdale. To where, nobody knew, not even we. In
search of what the Land of Freedom promised to give, we set out to roam through
the endless roads of the United States of America. Had we left only one day
later, god only knows how differently events would have unfolded.
 
Chapter End Notes
     They're on the road now. I could write little adventures without much
     meaning and fill a few chapters with those. They wouldn't benefit the
     overall story, though. I do want to write a bit of that someday but
     my question is: Should I rather proceed with the story and not get
     distracted with that kind of stuff, or would you prefer a "filler
     chapter" or two? I will write something like that no matter what,
     you're not gonna miss out on anything: If I don't write them as part
     of the flow of this fanfic, I plan to write them as sort of
     fragmented chapters that I would add after I'm done with the fanfic.
     I'd also like to do something similar with the long time that I
     hardly covered when Rachel was still alive. The question is just if
     the on-the-road-nonsense should be part of the "main fanfic" or if I
     should write and post them separately.
     I'd be really thankful for opinions on that!
***** Chapter 14 *****
Chapter Notes
     I didn't realise I stole the hotel name from Final Fantasy XV until I
     read the chapter again for the first time ahaha
     Thanks again to ChromeHoplite for beta reading this chapter!
See the end of the chapter for more notes
We set out to follow a route of scenic stops and tourist traps, recommended to
us by a war-defying 1939 edition of some  The American Traveller's Road Guide
that Ciel had found between Rachel's old photo albums.  Our first stop, an inn
with the somewhat foreboding name The Crow's Nest shared, according to this
book, an eccentric style befitting its owner, an emigrated Bohemian and avid
Kafka enthusiast who saw it as commemorative to have the hotel shaped in the
image of the dead novelist, or so it said.  We had no idea how one would shape
a hotel after an author and curious as we were, we decided to find out for
ourselves. At our arrival, however, the old Czechoslovak had already been dead
for six years, the crow had turned into a blackbird under the next generation
and the hotel had evolved into a popular, rather expensive honeymoon inn – a
coincidence, or joke made by a higher entity, that left me quite amused.
Ciel was less amused. More than I, he was mindful of the impression we might
make. Even though he did not assume that anyone would find us out, simply by
the majority of clientele to whom the hotel catered, for there was a young
family there too, waiting for the keys to their room at our arrival, he was
still embarrassed. I left him on a sofa in the lobby while I went to check in
and fetch our keys. On my way to the reception, I caught the abashed teen-ager
burying his face in his hands from the corner of my eye.
The hotel was busy with new arrivals – something that would not have surprised
me at the beginning of summer break, had it not been for the fact that this was
not a hotel preferred by families. It did not matter, I waited in line until it
was my turn to be taken care of by the concierge. I had placed a reservation
after all, so there was nothing I had to worry about.
“Welcome to The Blackbird's Nest! Mr. Sebastian Michaelis... we reserved a
bedroom with a queen sized bed for two nights for you and your wife.”
“No... no, there must be a mistake. I'm here with my son, not my wife. I asked
for twin beds.”
An uneasy expression appeared on his face. “I beg your pardon, I have received
a reservation for Mr. Sebastian Michaelis and his wife, Ciel.”
“Ciel is my son; not my wife. I explicitly asked for twin beds for this
reason.”
The concierge shuffled through his papers. “Oh, oh, I'm terribly sorry, Sir,
terribly sorry! It is my mistake, my very own! I had your names and the
reservation forwarded and assumed that the mention of twin beds was an error. I
regret to inform you that we are all out of twin bed rooms. As you can see, we
are incredibly busy at the moment. I am truly sorry to ask this of you but
would you put up with sharing a double bed with your son over the weekend? Of
course, we will see to a special discount as our means of apology, Sir...”
Obviously, I did not mind at all. My original intention had been to rent a room
with twin beds so as not to raise any harmful suspicions surrounding us but if
it was the hotel that had us share a bed, it was not my wrongdoing at all, not
at all. I sighed almost too theatrically. “Well, I suppose it can't be helped.
My son is in a slightly difficult phase of his development into a young man and
might protest a little but with good reasoning, I will be able to talk some
sense into him.”
“Thank you so much for your understanding! I am truly embarrassed about my
mistake. I am really not good with French names.” The man turned around and
reached for two keys.“Room number 304. Here you are, Sir. Your luggage will be
brought upstairs.”
“It is an unusual name, even in France. My wife thought of it.” I took the
keys. “Thank you.”
While the bellboy saw to our luggage, I explained the situation to Ciel. He
turned a little pale at first, his lurking fear of being found out growing in
the back of his mind, but when I brought up that it just was not up to either
of us to do anything about it, and that it was entirely the hotel's fault, he
relaxed again.
There was nothing Kafka-esque left to the original design of the hotel.
Instead, the new generation of owners had invested much money into expensive
furniture but had not been particular about the style of the objects they
purchased, with the result of a rather eclectic look to the entire house. It
did not matter, I hardly had to pay anything for our room and the bed we were
bound to share was a very comfortable one. In that respect, the honeymoon nest
proved itself worthy of its recent reputation.
Ciel and I wanted to have dinner in the hotel restaurant but first, we needed
to do something about our dishevelled appearances. The long drive under the
summer sun had taken its toll on us and we were both exhilarated to finally be
able to shower. Ciel took the first turn.
While the boy was occupied under the shower, I further inspected the room. It
was unlike anything I had ever seen in Europe and over the course of our
travels, I would learn that it was just like anything I would find in the New
World: On first glance, but only the very first, all looked rather neat. All
the new carpeting and curtains and a free alcoholic welcome drink for two that
had been placed there before our check-in (it tempted me to try to intoxicate
Ciel, just for the fun of seeing what would happen, but as with many impulses
one spontaneously has, I deemed it wiser not to act on it) could not distract
from all the little faults. Once the subtly but annoyingly misaligned wallpaper
had caught my attention, it never entirely let it go again, and I followed its
traces to the ground and into the corners and soon understood that whoever had
refurbished this room had had particular ideas about the overall look but no
attention to detail. The wallpaper went down the exposed areas of the wall but
as soon as it hit the corner of a dresser, or the bed's headpiece, or the
ground, it just stopped. The ends were just chopped off, walls behind furniture
remained naked, and there were neither cornice, nor skirting boards, to finish
the walls against ceiling and ground. Technical equipment was installed in a
similarly sloppy way: A torchère of distinctly French design stood in one
corner of the room, cables extending to the power outlet all the way over to
the next corner, completely ignorant of their untidy appeal. Most peculiar to
me, however, was the the odd feel of stepping on the ground: I walked three
circles through the room until I realised that both floor and walls were
aslope. Not dramatically, not in a fashion that impaired the way you would walk
through the chamber, but enough to notice and more than I had ever experienced
in any modern building in France, or England, or during my travels through
other countries of the old world. I found it hilarious.
My absorption in the flaws and faults of this superficial room and their
possible symbolism of society as a whole was interrupted when Ciel returned.
Now it was my turn to clean myself, and while I was showering, I wondered if
Ciel would take notice of the botches too. Probably not – for the Phantomhive
house had had its own fair share of similarly curious imperfections, though I
had always credited those to Rachel's housewife-style make-shift solutions.
At my return, I found Ciel lying on the bed, only half-dressed, dozing off.
Fragile, pale and calm, the usual mirage of one of heaven's messengers; the
effective disguise of this truly faunish little imp. I was rather tired myself
and so before I even dressed, I joined him in bed; Just for a moment, dinner
could wait that long. I pushed his limbs aside to wrap him with mine. Ciel
winced at the sudden touch, then relaxed again as he recognised me next to him.
He rested his head against my chest and listened to my steady heartbeat while I
caressed his cheek. I had almost dozed off myself when I heard the boy call for
me weakly.
“Sebastian...?”
“Mhm?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Go ahead.”
“What made you pick up writing?”
I needed a moment to compose a cohesive answer to his inquiry in my head. I had
never really thought about it. My drive to write came naturally to me; like
hunger, or thirst, or lust. Even in times when my means of earning money did
not demand for any creative writing, I needed the outlet. Fragments of stories
or poems that I wanted to pursue someday (alas, they shall rest in premature
piece now) had always been strewn across my notebooks and other personal
belongings, even back in Ramsdale, in my journal, between my daily records. My
temporary habit of recording my days was just another form of literary
expression.
Some consideration eventually helped me to articulate myself. “I suppose...
paper is my oldest friend; always loyal to me.”
With his forehead still against my chest, Ciel absentmindedly tapped his
fingers against my ribcage. “A loyal friend?”
“It listens to my darkest thoughts, my most selfish wishes, my most deplorable
intentions and yet it doesn't abandon me. There are things that just cannot be
said to anyone but paper, wouldn't you agree?”
“I bet most of what you think is along those lines.”
I chuckled. “Perhaps you're right.”
“You are a lonely man, aren't you?”
I moved my hand into the nape of the boy's neck to play with the ends of his
hair. “I've always considered myself a natural loner, not lonely. But I suppose
I  was  a bit lonely. Until recently.”
Ciel needed a moment to deduce what had changed  recently , then complained,
“You're terribly cheesy sometimes, do you know that?” He was wonderfully easy
to fluster.
“I'm just being honest with you. And apart from that, I suppose it comes with
the profession.”
Now Ciel chuckled. “I wonder if it's the fate of everyone that has an affair
with a writer to listen to these kinds of cheesy comments.”
“If that bothers you so much, you better brace yourself because I can still go
much cheesier, you know?  Honey .”
The boy lifted himself from my chest. “Nooo, don't! I can't take it! Not pet
names now! Argh!”
“There's no way you can stop me now.”
“Oh yes, there is. I'll shut you up.”
“Ah, yes? How are you-”
Ciel forced his tongue into my mouth. He left me no choice but to give in and
over the course of his violent intrusion, I forgot the sickeningly sweet words
I had planned to torture him with. If it had not been for the slightly too thin
boy's grumbling stomach, I would have gladly forgotten about my own hunger too,
but life-sustaining measurements, like the intake of nourishment, had to be
given priority.
The restaurant was decorated in a similar fashion as our room: Somebody had
paid much money for expensive furniture; though not as much attention to
detail. More than one thing was off but I shall not bore the respected reader
any further with my ramblings about interior design.
The lucky circumstances of our inexpensive lodging inspired me to motivate Ciel
not to hold back with any extravagant dinner wishes and that translated to him
as encouragement to order not one, but two pieces of cake for dessert. I had
never seen the boy eat this much and it came as no surprise that after a three-
course-meal with double the desserts, his stomach was bloated and he writhed in
pain when we returned to our room. “Oh my god, I'm dying,” he cried, “but I
have no regrets... stop laughing at me, Sebastian, or I'll kick you somewhere
that will make you roll on the bed just like me!”
I had hoped to make use of the opportunities our shared bed invited us to
explore but Ciel had betrayed me with cake and there was no love left for me
that night. I barely managed to force him off the bed to brush his teeth and
change into his pyjamas (“I know, I know, I'm not a child anymore, you don't
need to tell me.” – “Then get off the bed and do it!” – “Uuugh.”) and after
that, we went straight to sleep. It had been a successful day: Ciel did not
seem to have spent a single moment thinking of pains of the past.
I awoke to the little tease massaging me through my pyjama trousers. Ladies and
gentlemen of the jury, my ward was everything but an innocent little boy. When
he noticed me come to my senses, he stopped. “You dirty old man! You were rock
hard in your sleep. To your misfortune, my service ends here, I was just
curious to see if you'd wake up from that.”
“Where do  you  even touch me when I'm sound asleep, you  dirty young man ?”
“I just accidentally brushed your crotch with my knee when I woke up, it
certainly wasn't my original intention to fondle you in your sleep. That's more
along the lines of something  you  would do, not I. Well, without good reason,
that is.”
I tried to pull Ciel to me and have him assist me at relieving myself but all I
got was a playful lick on my lower lip before he pushed me away and jumped off
the bed.
“Old man, I'll get ready for breakfast now and wait for you down in the lobby.
I'll check the newspapers they have there and in the meantime, you can see to
your problem alone. But don't take too long.”
And so, the miniature devil left me to myself, I cursed into the silence of the
room but did not take too long. At least  one  of us was in a splendid mood, I
thought.
The splendid mood had faded when I caught up with Ciel in the lobby. Instead of
the playfully evil grin from earlier, a concerned frown met me downstairs.
“I just had the oddest of conversations with a hotel guest, Sebastian.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Well, the topic itself wasn't all that odd... he came up to me, saying that if
he wasn't mistaken, he knew me from many years ago.”
“That sounds like something a predator would say, to lull you into following
him.”
“But he really did know me. He asked me if I was Ciel and I confirmed that. He
seemed familiar to me too but I really couldn't tell from where I knew him...
half of his face was covered beneath his messy bangs. He looked scruffy
overall; I can't remember my parents having relations to anyone looking that
untidy. He seemed really out of place, like he wouldn't be able to afford
staying in a hotel like this.”
“What was his name?”
“He wouldn't tell me. He said he'd tell me his name if I told him a good joke
but I just left it at that.”
“That certainly does sound unsettling.”
“Doesn't it? I felt uncomfortable at that point but I didn't know how to fend
him off or escape the conversation. I didn't wanna go back up to our room
either... He kept asking me questions I didn't want to reply to; whom I was
staying with, to which I replied ‘with my family’. Then he asked what we were
doing here, if he could talk to my parents, why I avoided answering his
questions, whether I am  happy ... well, who wouldn't avoid those questions!”
“Is he still here?” I looked around the hall for a man that fit the
description.
“No, he disappeared just before you came here.”
Now I frowned too. “Let's have breakfast for now but I would rather not spend
the second night here. We might not be crossing any lines just by staying in a
hotel together but I would rather avoid the attention of suspicious,
unidentifiable ghosts from the past.”
“I couldn't agree more but can we please not drive as long as yesterday?”
“You can trust I don't want that either, Ciel.”
After a simple continental breakfasts, I sent Ciel back up while I arranged
our  early departure. Maybe it was an overreaction on our side but better to be
safe than sorry. I regretted missing the chance to indulge in a little more
intimacy with the absurd knowledge of that hotel's primary purpose in the back
of my mind but ultimately, it was a loss I could live with. Off to our next
destination we were.
 
Chapter End Notes
     Sebastian might make himself unpopular with the American jury members
     with some of his comments (even more so than he probably already is)
     Sorry @ TheVillainousNoble for saying there will be something like a
     wake-up handjob in this chapter and then not giving you the real
     deal. :'D
***** Chapter 15 *****
Chapter Notes
     This chapter is 70% smut - be warned, or look forward to it,
     whichever applies to you.
     Many thanks again to ChromeHoplite for beta reading this chapter!
See the end of the chapter for more notes
I left Ciel two options. One was a drive, praised by our little elderly travel
planner, following the traces of local names such as Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Herman Melville, Mark Twain or Emily Dickinson; the other option was a bit of
nature, a bit of sight-seeing, a bit of beach and maybe a tiny bit of culture
on the way. Ciel went for the latter option. He was not 'crazy' about camping
or hiking or the like, and he had had enough of that the previous summer, but
after the 'bummer' that the previous hotel had turned out to be to us, he
preferred avoiding literary names for a while. That, and the trip would have
otherwise started to feel like a school field trip. Thus we drove on, following
a road with a view of the sea.
There is no such thing as “ocean blue”. The ocean has as many different faces
as there are languages spoken along its coasts. There is the bright turquoise
encircling the caribbean islands, framed by bowing palm trees; there are the
rocky Yugoslavian Adriatic coasts, glowing gradients of water as pure and clean
as the innocent blank first page of a paperback coming fresh out of print;
there is the deep darkness of the North Sea, seemingly the shadow of the ever-
present light of midsummer, and there is the cornflower blue of the Atlantic
coast of New England in June.
Our next lodging was a bed and breakfast located just an hour away, on a small
cliff facing this Atlantic ocean. It was not a place where people stayed longer
than a night and the cottage that housed us was calm, as was the coastline.
When our hosts heard the (slightly altered) story of why my wife was not
accompanying us, they did not hesitate to mention their own widowed daughter,
who had lost her husband to the Germans, and was, so they insisted, still as
beautiful as on the first day of her sadly childless marriage. Then came Ciel
and played the child, demanding in a most infantile tone my attention and
company to explore the area. With his help, the conversation died off quickly
and we headed outside. The elderly lady had suggested we follow the shore
northwards, for there was a war veteran living in a hut who nowadays
occasionally took joy in teaching the occasional vacationers and their sons how
to fish, and a few miles further up, we would soon reach a village with a
darling little café at the beach.
There really was not much to do in the area but explore its nature. Half an
hour's worth of strolling brought us to the mentioned café and although the
walk proved rather scenic, and we discovered an abandoned lighthouse on the
way, none of that kept us busy for more than half an hour. In the end, we did
not bother to have much at the café and the lighthouse, despite it having
ignited a spark of boyish curiosity in my young companion, averted our further
inspection by proving to be tightly shut.
There was a forest southwards of the bed and breakfast. Ciel was not one drawn
into the great outdoors but he was open to giving my guidance a try. I had
never been a man of nature either, nor was I in the possession of abundant
knowledge about these matters; however, I did appreciate the aesthetic appeal
of certain flora and fauna and the impressions natural light made on them. Over
time, I had made the boy more receptive to little pleasures like the contrast
of a dark tree crown against the cloudless, pale green sky at sunset, or the
shimmering fragment of a butterfly wing stuck in a cobweb.
The forest followed the line of the cliff. It stretched over about half a
kilometre, or a quarter mile, though we only explored a small area. There
really was not much to find there other than the wonderful view of the ocean
and the secludedness – and that was all I really wanted for the moment.
Ciel spent most of the rest of the day in our room, listening to the radio,
while I entertained our friendly hosts with true lies and fictitious facts
about my wife, my son and my French heritage. At night, I pettily refused Ciel
as he had refused me the previous one. We slept each in our own beds until at
four in the morning, the alarm clock that I had secretly set rang us awake.
After suffering a few insults, I managed to convince Ciel to accompany me
outside. Yet again, I took him to the forest and we stopped at a clearing.
There it was, point one on my secret bucket list of experiences to be made on
our road trip. In a private show, the sky changed its colours right in front of
our eyes. A cool breeze sent a shiver down the spine of the heavy-eyed boy next
to me. I drew him to my chest to warm him; he thanked me for it by accepting
the gesture, leaning against me. Eventually, the sun revealed its face above
the horizon. Rays of light laced themselves through the tree crowns above;
others embraced us upfront with their warmth. “June is fine,” Ciel said. “The
heat can get suffocating in late July and August, even at night, but June is
fine.”
The air was rich with qualities that had prior been unfamiliar even to me, at
least in this specific constellation: The smell of sea salt mixed with conifer
essences that embraced us; the soundtrack, an improvised jazz melody of the
joint efforts of waking seagulls and crickets and the birds of the woods; the
impartible noise of crushing waves and the wind in the leaves. Ciel by my side,
paying attention to the peculiarities I pointed out. Ciel when he closed his
eyes and the low sun cast shadows below his lashes. Ciel when I reached for his
cheek to caress it and he leaned into the touch and I felt the sun's emerging
warmth radiate from his skin. The sea, and the sky, and Ciel.
We were alone, protected by the trees. I bent down to him. Ciel did not refuse
my kiss. He did not refuse me either when I started to feel him through his
clothes with my hands. He made a soft gasp when I unfastened the three upper
buttons of his shirt; he laid his hand into my neck when I kissed him between
the collar bones. When I sank to the earth beneath us, he sank onto my lap.
“Sebastian”, he exhaled, hardly audible and with a tenderness exclusively for
me to know; a tenderness that never failed to reach a part of me I had, before
Ciel, not known to be inside of me at all. I caught the remainder of softness
in his breath with my mouth; inhaled the air he had used already. Ciel held
onto my shirt tightly while I completely unbuttoned his. He was warm; not only
his chest under my lips but also the hands that I clasped with mine; the hands
whose fingers more often than not were cold. Now they were warm.
One of his hands still in mine and my lips right below the ear that belonged to
the opposite side, I unbuttoned my own shirt. I took it off and one-handedly
spread it on the ground while I held Ciel to me. He understood that it had been
placed there for him and he helped by lying down upon it. His goosebumps had me
know that he was missing the warmth of my body. I bent down and over him and
brushed his skin with my hot breath. First his rosy pink nipple, then the
protruding ribcage, and finally, I exhaled beneath the waistband that I lifted
from his skin. I unbuckled his belt, unfastened his trousers and, together with
his briefs, pulled them down his legs, to his ankles. Ciel's attempt to say
something was drowned out by a seagull's cry. I wanted to undress the boy
entirely but as I looked at him again, I could not help but be in awe with the
awkward impression he made with his ankles tied together by his own shorts,
kept in place by the saddle shoes he was still wearing: A design I appreciated
on his feet. I assumed he liked them because adults wore them too, and I liked
them because his pair was of a distinctly childish shape.
The cool air did nothing to extinguish what had ignited between the boy's legs.
I enclosed Ciel's hardness with my tongue and he whined. One of his hands found
its way to my head and he curled his fingers into my hair. I closed my eyes and
moved my lips in collaboration with his lifting hips. The smell of sea and
cedar mingled with Ciel's and I found my trousers growing tighter and tighter,
though I did not grant myself the relief of removing them yet. Instead, I
finally freed the boy from the restricting shoes and trousers he had still left
on. I went back to where I came from, then moved my tongue from the boy's shaft
along the line back to his rear; I lifted it for better access.
When I slipped my tongue inside him, Ciel instinctively spread his legs even
further apart than they already had been. A gesture so purely wanton, it
produced from me a reply by growling into the depths of his body. He shivered
again – still partly due to the chilly morning air, as I could tell from the
goosebumps spreading all over his body again. I realised my unfairness – still
half clothed, while he lay beneath me, completely exposed. I sought to warm the
boy with another kiss on his neglected lips and an embrace, to which he kindly
replied by unfastening the set of clothes that covered my lower body. I took
the hint and rid myself of them, then, as we were almost equal (I left the boy
the protection of the opened shirt clinging to his arms), Ciel wrapped his legs
around my hips and drew me toward himself. I let myself be drawn and closed the
distance between his torso and mine. My warmth was comfortable to him and for a
while I did nothing but cover the best of the thin adolescent's body and pecked
his cheek and jaw and ear while he watched the reflection of the rising
celestial body whose light gradually turned from bronze to gold. My pecks
turned into proper kisses and I felt a smaller length jerk against mine. Soft
hands wandered onto my back as I stroked one of the thighs that wrapped me so
tightly and I whispered into his ear in French that I was enraptured by the sky
this morning. It was on these occasions that his judgment of my silly old puns
gave way to the pleasure his acceptance of my appreciation could bring.
Admittedly, the language played its part in that – the language of love was our
language of lovers; a code for us to communicate in secret, for his own
proficiency had long since surpassed John and Jane Doe's high school French.
Ciel's legs kept me close to him. I did not want to break our touch, hence I
started to move horizontally; I ground against him, back and forth. Ciel bent
his head back, mouth agape with a silent moan. I continued my movements and
with my free hand I caressed what I could reach of the side of his body: a
heaving ribcage, a hipbone and lastly, a supple thigh. While I kneaded it,
appreciating its specifically faunish eroticism, Ciel tilted his lower body in
a way that had me understand that he now wanted friction elsewhere.
I had nothing with me to ease my entrance into him. I had not foreseen this
turn of events when I led the boy into the secludedness of nature. The only
option I had was to prepare him with my tongue. It would have been an
impossible scenario at a different point but I was confident it would work.
Time had passed since my very first intrusion; over the course of many long
nights, the small frame below me had become shaped to host me in its warm
refuge. Stretching him appropriately was not the problem and I devoted my full
attention to wetting him as well as I could.
Ciel wrapped the sides of the shirt he was lying on around his body. I did not
want to take too long; I could not let my fragile playmate catch a cold from
the lack of my warmth. As soon as I deemed him ready for me, I crawled up above
his upper half again and slipped my arms between the shirts and his bare back.
The boy was quick to hold onto me again and he lifted his heavy head to steal a
kiss from my lips. I cupped his head with one hand and arranged his legs for me
with the other. Then I asked him to assist me by spitting into my hand because,
I claimed, I had spent so much saliva already and I had yet to prepare myself;
I did not really need his assistance but I did want his bashful reaction –
“You're so obscene” – ah yes, there it was – and then he took it upon himself
to wet his hands and reached for my erection, and I cannot deny the superiority
of his touch over my own.
I slid into him – slowly, carefully, a little hesitantly. My desire for Ciel
could not outweigh my concern for his physical integrity and unlike the first
time I penetrated him, Ciel now appreciated the concern. With my unoccupied
hand, I stroked his thigh, then his lower belly, then his thigh again, and
thereby helped him relax. The boy formed an 'O' with his lips and as I crept
deeper, he relieved himself with voiceless moans.
Ciel tried hard not to be too loud. It was early in the morning; so early that
nobody except mad tourists would have taken the effort to watch the sunrise
from a forest glade. There were no other tourists around, so the risk we were
taking was barely enough to positively thrill us. Despite all that, Ciel kept
his voice down and his muffled whimpers when he pulled me lower and buried his
face in my shoulder almost sounded like an expression of pain, rather than
pleasure.
It got warmer. I could not tell if it was just the rising summer sun to thank
for, or if our bodies warmed each other that much. Neither could I tell if the
flush painting my lover's porcelain face red was entirely his own colour, or if
the ambient light helped with its apricot tint. Entirely his own was the sultry
breath, as well as the moist lips it came from. When I slid my entire length
inside his lower entrance, I laid my lips onto his to swallow a possible
involuntary cry; though Ciel, instead, just convulsed around me and it was I
who sighed into our kiss.
We had shared many moments of intimacy and countless were still to follow: some
burned of passion, sometimes ruthlessly so, yet the most vivid memories do I
have of moments as soft and careful as that morning in June. We did not need
any words for we were one; conjoined or not. My earlier teasing words had not
been necessary; neither was any other verbal communication as the plain lift of
a fingertip could convey all relevant information between us. It was not
necessary when Ciel started to chant my name, first under his breath, then, as
our synchronised movements gained pace, slipping some voice into the song.
However, it was my favourite song – I knew what he felt and he knew that I did,
yet when “Sebastian” rang from his throat, tangled between his vocal chords and
almost strangled him, it was not to address me, or to please me, but to seek
his personal comfort in the sound of my name, and that – his selfish use of my
identity – that, dear ladies and gentlemen, was the greatest pleasure of all.
Ciel was mine, oh, he belonged entirely to me; he had given up on, or maybe
forgotten about, viewing me as his opponent and instead given in to the
alternative option: accept himself as a part of me and me as a part of him.
I peppered kisses over his face and neck but never his lips, so as not to let a
single “Sebastian” go to waste. With increasing excitation, the frequency of
our movements with and against each other increased; so did their intensity, so
did the pressure of what was flowing between us – in fact, the healthy, yet
almost tachycardiac sinus rhythm spreading itself in every last one of our body
parts and our synchronised, yet different motions were all too akin to the
pumping organ whose purpose not only poets but all users of language like to
misattribute with matters of affection. Perhaps I had not been the first one to
make the comparison and the “heart” was chosen the centre of love because it
looked, acted and felt like two lovers tangled on the forest ground.
In any case, our rate soon reached its peak frequency and almost-but-not-quite
synchronously, we pumped our life-giving fluids forward; one into the other and
the other into the periphery.
I quickly withdrew from him – spent, though not yet flaccid. With a small 'pop'
we parted. I watched the futile attempt of a thin string of ejaculate to keep
the connection between the tip of my member and his inner walls intact, only to
tear as I moved further away. As Ciel lay below me, no concept yet regained of
time or space or his identity, I lowered my face to his well-used entrance,
traced the widened muscle rosette with my tongue; first outside, then inside.
Again, I raised my face from him to watch: This small boy, spread apart just
for me, scarlet swollen and slightly irritated entrance, with the help of just
a thumb gaping open so widely I could see the fluid I had filled him up with
slowly flow toward the light of day. How barbaric and unnatural, to force a
young and not quite ripened body into copulation is the common consensus of our
time and culture but let me counter that complaint with solid proof in my
favour: How could his body fit my own frame so perfectly well if our unison had
been against nature? In what way was it barbaric to take what was mine when he
was the one that begged me to take it? You see, his faunish body knew its
purpose, and by giving in to his allure, I only followed to tend to Ciel's most
basic needs and cravings. The gaping, oozing entrance was my proof.
I slid two fingers inside of him to wipe away some of my trace, sucked them
clean and then lifted Ciel up to switch places, so now it was me who lay on the
ground and he rested on top of me, his ear on my heart, like he always liked to
do. As we lay on the ground like this, there was no chirping of birds, or
crushing of waves; no flowers or trees encircling us. There were only Ciel and
I and our breaths and our heart beats. Perhaps we had just lived the laissez-
aller that the characters in Manet's Luncheon On The Grass insinuated on, I
imagined. We closed our eyes and gold turned into white.
When we returned to our inn, the owners, both of them early risers, had already
gotten up and greeted us; not without surprise at seeing come home at this time
and as dishevelled as we were. I explained that I had taken notice of the
forest on the cliff the previous day and that I took Ciel there to watch the
sunrise, and diverted from the truth when I lamented that a careless step
resulted in the both of us falling to the ground; my back to the soil first,
Ciel tried to catch me but got torn down too and that was the reason for our
untidy appearances and, most of all, my dirty shirt. Afterwards, I explained,
we got caught up in lively conversation and that is why we stayed in the forest
for so long. The old couple found it rather adorable how father and son set out
to adventures on early summer mornings and forgot about the time along the way.
Ciel and I went back to sleep again for another hour or two – tangled up in a
single, way too narrow bed, and although it worked for that short of a while,
it drove me to the conclusion that I would thereon start to book double
bedrooms and prefer large, impersonal chain hotels without curious old couple
hosts over small, privately owned bed and breakfasts. It might seem a little
odd, though who would dare make any bold assumptions? A fine gentleman and his
dapper son travelling together, these were not the kinds of people that gave
any real reason to worry.
“All of that is fair and well,” the reader might think, “but what does it
matter to the case?”
All of it matters. All of what we did, all of what we felt, it all led up to
the inevitable outcome of Sebastian Michaelis facing his sentence with his head
up high. All of this is to be learned to understand why I do not, and will
never regret the crime I am about to face punishment for.
Chapter End Notes
     Can you imagine Sebastian's lawyer reading all of this and thinking,
     "This dude is fucked and there's nothing I can do because he's
     digging his own grave :) :) :)"
***** Chapter 16 *****
Chapter Notes
     As always, many thanks to ChromeHoplite for betaing this chapter!
See the end of the chapter for more notes
“I hate these long drives,” Ciel complained.
“I couldn't agree more but it can't be helped, can it? Everything is far apart
in this country. All over the place.”
The boy crossed his arms and frowned. He had been continuously growing tired of
our long drives and admittedly, so had I. Finally, we had a definite goal ahead
of us, though the drives remained too long. It was in late April that the both
of us were starting to have enough and my money ran out. Eventually, I did have
to access Ciel's inherited savings, though it was only a little.
I could tell from the way Ciel shuffled in his seat and looked at me again and
again that he was up to no good. Mischief had been written all over his face
and all I could do was wait and see what would happen. Now, while my past
version waits for the answer, please wait with him and in the meantime, my
current version will take the opportunity to shed some light on our road trip.
It is hard today for me to recollect the exact route we followed. In the
beginning, we tangled the roads of New England but as time passed and my
boldness grew, we travelled further away. First a little southwards, then to
the west and back up north, avoided the Dakotas and crossed the Rockies further
south again, only to go back up and follow the west coast all the way down. It
was winter by the time we had reached the south and almost spring when we
approached the east coast again. The circle almost closed when we finally
settled in the college town of Weston, about one year after we had left
Ramsdale, though that destination had already been decided on by the end of
April.
My preferred form of accommodation were the dime-a-dozen motels with
indistinguishable, interchangeable names such as Sunset Court, Family Inn,
Sunrise Inn or Country Court. After generously spending good money on our first
two stays, the thrill of saving money at the prospect of the initial
indefiniteness of the length of our travel weighed stronger than the wish for
luxury. Especially after learning that I would not receive the value I expected
for the money I paid in this part of the world. I derived a special rush from
housings that advertised in large neon letters that children under 14 were
free, and that rush was not exclusively of a miserly nature.
Ciel did not complain about my cheapskate choices as long as the rooms were
clean (which was not always the case) and we had something to see (easier
provided than the cleanliness). Overall, the boy was easy to travel with; apart
from the occasional sightseeing, our activities did not particularly deviate
from our routines back home. Occasionally, we would dine a little more
expensively but overall, diners and family restaurants became our food
providers of choice. We frequented libraries, indulged in the joys of sleeping
in and took opportunities that only cities could offer. I vividly remember a
museum visit in the birthplace of Ciel's favourite author: Lovely nymphets,
immortalised by the skilled hands of Sargent and Degas, and how they did not
compare to the mortal faunlet next to me. In that same city the boy asked for
the first time whether a large store with an assorted supply would not carry
any of my books, and although it is undoubtedly a writer's greatest joy to have
their lover interested in their writing, I had no doubt that any translations
would have been banned in Boston, as was common courtesy in this country. On
top of that, I advised him to wait for an opportunity to obtain French editions
of my work, as I felt my original words held more power to communicate their
intentions to him, and any other reader at that. “One day, when I take you away
to see Europe,” I would say, “ and show you around Paris, then I will obtain a
volume of my strongest work for you.”
“They probably suck and you don't want me to know,” he would claim, or, “I
really don't feel like waiting this long. Children are impatient, you know.”
Ciel was not as impatient as he claimed to be. His most childish trait was
perhaps his sugar addiction. I cannot count the amount of milk bars, ice cream
parlours and candy shops that he made me take him to. It was astounding how
much sugar this boy could consume all at once. I soon could hardly even look at
ice cream floats anymore and did not want to put up with the brown water that
they claim to be coffee, no matter how many free refills I would be offered, so
I eventually started to drink a lot of water. In the end, I used to tell
myself, it would be worth it to receive due payment in the form of his sugar-
sweet kisses.
On long and dull drives, I found myself watching Ciel next to me. Sometimes, he
slept peacefully. During daylight hours, he occasionally cranked the window
down and let his fingers flutter through the slipstream or moved his hand in
aerodynamic waves in our driving direction. On the rare occasions that we
travelled at night, the neon lights lining the streets and marking our
destinations dyed his resting features in bright greens, blues and pinks.
Recurring sights of military cemeteries always kept death close to us and
Ciel's consciousness. More than once, the voice of Nat King Cole greeted us
from radios in the many lobbies I checked ourselves in, and Ciel eventually
started to point these occurrences out by repeating the line, “They say he
wandered very faaar!” Granted, the song remained on the charts for a very long
time that year and therefore accompanied our travels for just as long but after
some time, we started to feel a certain mix of annoyance and bonding with the
chart-topper.
To complete this little list of recurring particularities, I have to discuss my
French accent. God knows how strong the tint of French to the sound of my
English is – I, for one, cannot tell and no reliable witness has ever informed
me about it. I learned to celebrate my French-ness, however, as I gradually
became aware of its assets. I sometimes liked to forget that there were, in
fact, not just two people – Ciel and I – in this world. A hand too bold, a grip
too firm – it did not line up with American standards of how to touch your
child. The Frenchman, however, was notorious for his corporal displays of
affection. To kiss a stranger on the cheek was a common custom, so was it not
the most usual thing for a Frenchman to let his lips hover a moment too long
too close to whatever part of his son's face was, by chance, close enough? Is
not the French kiss called such because all Frenchmen shared them like other
men shook hands? No, I did not go that far in public; both a vague awareness of
public decency and the fear of being associated with the customs of the worst
kind of felons the American justice system of the twentieth century knows –
communists – prevented me from it. Hovering lips and sneaky hands were the most
risqué acts I dared to commit and they were more than enough to draw a little
too much attention, though a few meaningless sentences in French and an
authentic, albeit exaggerated accent to the English I spoke to curious
observers did wonders to distract from my poorly disguised slips of desire.
For all the merry times, there were some unhappy ones too. Sometimes, almost
out of the blue, Ciel's mood could break down for the rest of the day. On some
occasions, it was an event or a statement that served as reminders of his
internal problems; other times, it happened on long drives, when there was
nothing for him to do but ponder. I could immediately tell when it happened:
His facial features would suddenly turn limp, his eyes dulled and either the
healthy colour would entirely disappear from his cheeks, or change form and
location into red streaks drawn across his neck by nervous fingernails. On days
like those, he would ask for some time to himself, either by sending me away or
by sitting down in a hotel lobby with a book as his solitary company, only to
return to me with the bookmark still resting between the same pages as before.
Alternatively, he would demand my affection, and that I gave him quite
willingly, for I still did not know any other means of comforting.
I tried to avoid these days by driving fast from destination to destination,
always on the run from the thoughts and truths that tried to hunt him down,
though I could not always drive fast enough. Ciel's wounds were still too deep.
He was still mourning – his mother as well as himself.
I noticed a gradual shift in Ciel's manner. In the early days of our liaison,
my elaborations on the (pre)maturity of his mind were the best stimulant I
could offer him and my musings over his unripe body served merely my own joy;
by autumn, I was convinced his interest had shifted toward the latter as well.
His face turned as pale as clay when I pointed out that we might want to buy
new trousers because he had outgrown his old ones by a centimetre or two; even
worse was his reaction when in the midst of lovemaking, on a day I paid special
attention to his body, I pointed out a single prominent hair sprouting in his
armpit (that I, for one, held no ill feelings for): He tensed, suddenly could
not bear my touch anymore, disappeared beneath the shower for unusually long
and on the next day, the hair was gone.
Yet another clue was a notebook that I found by chance, that I did not know
Ciel was keeping. No, that is not quite true – I very clearly remember
presenting him with it: A booklet as tall as one-and-a-half of Ciel's hands,
bound in brown leather. It was shortly after he had asked me about my
motivations to write. I did not address my suspicion because I was certain he
would have denied it but his curiosity left me with the impression that he
harboured a wish to express his own voice in this manner.
I bought the notebook in a department store while Ciel was sampling the wide
variety of stock that the candy department had to offer. When I returned to
him, he still had not decided between a box of mint chocolates and a caramel
drops one; the boy was so miserable that I just handed him the money for both
and all I asked for in return was to have a taste of both candies from his
tongue, which he deemed a bit unappetizing at first but then generously fed me
more than one of each. I digress –
I gave him the brown notebook on the same day, explaining that it was always
good to have something to take notes with at hand. Ciel accepted the book with
little words and at first I was not sure whether I had read him the right way;
my accidental discovery, however, proved my little present right.
When I scanned through the pages, an avalanche of wild phrases and verses tore
me off my feet: words elaborately assembled into sentences, only to be
deconstructed again; phrases amass crossed out until illegibility. His words
were insecure but there was a sincerity to them that he did not show otherwise
– just like I had told him before.
I was conflicted over what I should make of what I could read. On the one hand,
I had successfully managed to fuel a new kind of motivation within him; the
mere fact that my influence alone could bring him to revisit pen and paper as
more than just school supplies. As for what lay on the other hand, I would like
to give an account of the following drafts of his that I remember best:
In horror,
I watch my reflection age.
I am not whiskey, nor wine;
I am milk.
I decay.
(This, too, was crossed out, though only with a single line)
Do you remember the bright yellow maple leaf that slapped against the
windowpane? Surprisingly loud and forceful for a thin and frail and dying
thing. You put it into a dictionary to preserve its golden corpse.
(I did remember it)
Tempest, temptress, temperature, temporary
(This does nothing to prove my point but showcases another manner in which he
took notes in his book)
I found it wiser not to address what I had read in secret. I knew all too well
that I was the source of the worries expressed therein, even though I had
assured him of the genuineness of my appreciation already. But who am I to
blame him – had my words not even convinced myself entirely. I henceforth tried
to hold back with my words of cherish that applied specifically to his age,
like the width of his shoulders or his soft features, yet he and I both knew
that those were the means to use me, and he was afraid I would have no use for
him anymore as soon as he were to lose them. The truth was, only time could
tell. That, my honoured ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is perhaps my biggest
guilt.
On long drives, I began to ponder too. What drew me into Ciel as a person – his
individualism and skepticism of societal expectations he had better adhered to
– ultimately scourged him. At thirteen years, Ciel dreaded a future he saw no
place in for himself. Any other boy that was afraid of dreaming wildly might
have resorted to the simplest and most popular of ambitions: To marry and raise
children in a house with a brilliantly green front garden. This boy knew too
well that that was just an excuse for not having any other ambitions and he was
honest enough to himself to know that that was not what he wanted. As for the
dreams he was afraid to dream, I think there were plenty. He took too much joy
from his activities not to have any. He was a brilliant strategist, as
displayed in the many challenging games of chess during which I kept watching
him outdo himself. He had opinions on almost everything and a vibrant, though a
little too vulgar, vocabulary to express them. He was incredibly smart but did
not find any worth in his qualities whatsoever and I think that was the reason
he denied himself real dreams of his own. He deemed big dreams unrealistic.
Ciel was too serious of a boy for his own good.
Over the course of the following months, I repeatedly told Ciel about my joyful
time at the university in England that I attended. An environment to harbour my
personal interests, gigantic libraries with endless supplies of books that had
accumulated over hundreds and hundreds of years and the freedom to do, in fact,
whatever I wanted to do. My intention from back then is perhaps quite obvious
now – I could very well see this lost boy find a way on the same path I had
gone, and it would have been a beneficial path to me too, for I had good
relations to the head of the department of French literature and was positive I
could have obtained a teaching position at the same institute I so subtly tried
to talk Ciel into attending.
I was not sure if I my subtle attempts at manipulation were fruitful at all but
as I did not meet any outright objection with my musings, I just kept at them.
If anything, an insecure adolescent needs support and belief in his abilities
from a mature role model – and as little as he liked the concept of me
incorporating that, no one can deny that with nobody else to turn to, I had
become just that. All the smarts and cunning in this world could not make up
for a lack of experience that would eventually shape him into the person he
would become over time and if it was I who could and would shape him that way,
it goes without saying that I would take the opportunity to make the best of it
for him as much as myself. I am selfish enough to prefer a happiness for Ciel
that includes me over one without me by his side.
The colder months were spent in the southern states and Ciel turned fourteen
years old on a rather warm day. We had been on the run from nothing for half a
year and apart from my finances gradually declining despite my best efforts at
an inexpensive lifestyle that saw me start to ogle to Ciel's emergency funds, I
became very aware once again of how long Ciel already had been just mine, and
how he would continue to belong to me only. He had turned to embracing our
mutual codependence just the way I had. I wanted him, always, and he needed me,
for everything.
The south was warm, even in December, but only a little up north the
temperatures fell and cheap hotel rooms could be rather chilly in the morning,
which meant that Ciel disliked to get up and leave the protection of the warm
sheets behind. Hardly better could he bear it when my even warmer body slipped
away and out of the room but he was always appeased when I returned to the
bedside with a warm beverage and a small snack. He knew quite well that if he
so wanted, the warmth of my body would then return again to his side beneath
the sheets.
Our stays became longer and we did not bother to see as much outside anymore as
we used to in the beginning. In the quiet of our rooms, Ciel would sit in my
lap and read to me from a book or the newspaper; I would listen closer to the
languid sound of his voice than the words he spoke, and how it roughened when I
fondled his naked thighs on mine, and how it broke when I kissed the nape of
his neck. We might have gradually grown tired from the road but we certainly
did not grow tired of each other. I still recall sights like an amusement park
that had seen better times before the war or the gigantic monument of a
president long since passed but when I close my eyes, they follow open roads
getting lost beneath the horizon, I see the orange-tinted light glow on Ciel's
skin in a hotel room in the evening hours, or his impish smile over his
shoulder while he ran back to our car after he had just said something cheeky
to me during a stop at a gas station. I feel a genuine happiness when I close
my eyes and think back to that time.
Despite all the fondness, there came a time when a need to settle emerged in
both of us, and it was not just for the money that was unavoidably running out
by late spring. Ciel needed a decent education if I wanted my newly developed
plans to have any chance of success. I was well aware I could not provide that.
However, I did not want to return to Ramsdale with my faunlet swain – and
neither did he. Luckily, the many good relations that I kept helped me acquire
an employment in a women's academy in the small college town of Weston. Dr.
Arshad Satyendra Iyer, a fellow student of Indian descent from my time back in
England, had implemented my history of French literature textbook into the list
of compulsory reading in the past year and was delighted at the prospect of
working with an old friend.
Before we get there, however, I want to draw the reader's attention back to the
moment of Ciel's mischief-breeding that I started to describe above. It was
because of his reckless and inconsiderate behaviour that our travels would have
almost ended prematurely in a tremendous disaster.
That day, we had been on the road for several hours already. I usually avoided
drives this long and preferred to spend the night in accommodations along the
way but in some situations that strategy would have been more tedious than just
driving in one go.
I sighed. “It's not that far anymore; I'm not gonna stop again before we
arrive.”
“Yeah yeah...”
Ciel looked at me and bit his lower lip. He rubbed his thighs together,
clutched his trouser leg and kept the stare up. Oh boy. What are you about to
do to me now.I tried to focus my attention on the empty road in front of us.
Tried to. Ciel began with the execution of his evil schemings. From the corners
of my eyes I could see his hand slide into his crotch. His adept fingers
started to move rhythmically to create a bulge in his shorts; all the while he
looked at me, watched me try not to care.
“Mnnh...” The pitch of his voice rose, as it always did when he was aroused.
“Now, what sort of behaviour is this?”
“What else am I supposed to do...” He opened his shorts and slid a hand beneath
them. I wanted to strangle him. “I can't take the boredom anymore,” he whined.
I swallowed.
“Do you want me to stop? I will stop if you tell me you want me to,” Ciel
teased.
He knew perfectly well that I could not phrase that wish because a part of me
that the rest of me despised that moment wanted nothing more than for him to
continue. Ciel chuckled. He pushed his trousers further down to facilitate
touching himself, but more so to expose himself to me.
The road, Sebastian, the road, look at the road ahead of you. You'll crash your
car. Crash? How so? There's nothing you can crash into. Boy, I didn't know your
fingers were this proficient.
“You're not looking at the road.”
I was not looking at the road. Darn it.
The little exhibitionist pushed the shorts further down his thighs and, one
hand still playing with his erect organ, slid the other down between his
buttocks to shamelessly finger himself right next to me. “This feels so good,
Sebastian,” he moaned, “Even though I wish it were your fingers inside of me,
not mine... ah!”
The boy moved his hips back and forth between his hands; he was hardly sitting
in his seat anymore. His moans and groans and yelps became louder and louder
and I did my best to ignore them but my own body and my very nature were on the
brink of overcoming any reason I had left. When Ciel started to chant my name,
one of my hands found its way to his mouth – not to silence him but to push two
fingers inside of the next best hot hole of his that I could reach. He sucked
them like a good boy. It was then that I understood that I had no other choice
but to park the car on the roadside and do as the incubus at my side wanted me
to do.
I had only just moved the same two fingers to his lower entrance when Ciel,
with a loud “Oh shit!”, pushed me away and frantically pulled his trousers back
up. Before I could ask what was the matter, I heard the sound of knuckles knock
against the car window on my side. A policeman. Had he seen us? For a moment, I
thought it was over. I considered driving him over and away as fast as I could,
though I decided against that and for hearing him out.
“Good afternoon, officer, how can I help you?” I smiled my friendliest smile.
“Have you seen a pretty run-down, dark-red Hudson Commodore pass you? There's
been a bank robbery in a town close by and the culprit was seen escaping in a
car like that.”
“I'm afraid we haven't,” I looked at Ciel, mainly to allow myself the facial
expression of relief into his direction, “Have we?”
Ciel was panting and he hardly managed to phrase a “No...”
The policeman seemed disappointed. “I see... if you do, please contact local
authorities immediately!” He examined Ciel and drew his eyebrows together. The
boy was crouching in his seat, laboured breath, visibly opened fly and he
looked like he had seen a ghost. “Are you alright, young man?”
“Yes! I mean, no, I have a terrible stomachache and I really need to go to the
toilet.”
“You're lucky! Turn left two miles down the road and you'll soon find the next
gas station.
“Thank you, officer!” Ciel beamed in a sickeningly sweet, yet somehow pained
manner.
The policeman drove on and Ciel and I synchronously sighed in relief.
I turned to him. “See what you did? This could've been the end of it. Me in
jail, you in a foster family... is that what you want?”
“How could I know? There wasn't anyone on the road for like an hour! Oh god...
He... he would've seen you with your fingers up inside of me had I not seen him
approach in time. Fuck.”
“Fuck indeed,” I imitated him.
For a while, we just looked at each other, both of us panting. After the first
shock had ebbed away, it slowly became clear what both of us needed. The thrill
drove us further when every normal man in his right mind would have lost any
drive he previously had. Clearly, neither of us was normal, and perhaps not in
our right minds either.
It was Ciel that dared to phrase it first. “I want you inside of me
immediately.”
I complied.
While the boy rocked in my lap, I may or may not have seen the dark-red Hudson
Commodore pass our car, though I could not be sure; I was very busy pounding
relentlessly into the wanton little demon. No policeman heard of me that day.
Curiously enough, for the rest of the drive, a car followed us close behind and
I was glad it did as it made sure that Ciel would not try anything
inappropriate again, although I doubted he was in a condition where he wanted
or could do that.
So much for our route up until May. There is much that I would like to
elaborate on but for the sake of keeping this confession as concise as
possible, I shall not go into further detail until that point in time. The
month of May, however, will require special attention as there were several
crucial moments that profoundly influenced the further turn of events.
Chapter End Notes
     Arshad Satyendra Iyer is Agni's real name - just a pointer. ;)
***** Chapter 17 *****
Chapter Notes
     Hello everybody, sorry for leaving you hanging for so long! I
     struggled with this chapter, then manga chapter 135 happened and I
     couldn't bring myself to write anything that's even vaguely bad for
     Ciel, and after that, I felt uninspired for quite a while.
     As always, thank you very much ChromeHoplite for your beta reading!
See the end of the chapter for more notes
In May 1949, we had to live off Ciel's inheritance. The accessible money was
little but it did not matter since we had not lived large until then anyway and
it meant no changes to our lifestyle. I did not let this dependence rush our
way back to New England, however; it would not have helped as the house that we
would rent, which Dr. Iyer had found for me, was not accessible until June.
The tenth of May would mark the anniversary of Rachel's death and it did not go
unnoticed. Up until a week before that date, I had had the impression that
Ciel's mourning period was coming to a close but on the days leading up to it,
I could see the boy regress into a picture of misery. I tried to directly
address his condition but any attempt to console him was turned down. I knew he
harboured something and I knew it had to do with me; too evasive was he of me
to leave any doubt about that, even though he was bound to spend most of his
time in my close proximity.
In the meantime, I started to feel like we were being followed. Maybe it was
Ciel's tension that had a discomposing effect on me too, but I was seriously
starting to consider that the many different cars that followed us for long
distances, and sometimes even to our destinations, all shared a single driver.
At the same time, I was aware that I had to take care not to think too much of
it, and I became aware that I really did need to settle down soon and set my
mind at rest, or else paranoia might really overcome me. I tried to ignore the
cars behind us that anyone else would have paid no attention to in the first
place and focussed more on Ciel's case, and that I did not know how to proceed
with him.
One of these nights, surrounded by the massive walls of an unidentifiable
European classicist building, I had only just assured a Ciel with silky long
hair, now that he was a girl at the age he had reached, we should catch the
next train to Germany and not return for a couple of years, because within the
limitations of heterosexuality, the German law allowed little nymphets and
faunlets of fourteen to follow their nature, and their fanciers to succumb to
their charm. I heard a whimper behind me and when I turned around and woke up,
I saw Ciel asleep next to me on the hotel bed, whimpering, short-haired and
doubtlessly a boy.
The pale neon light coming from outside allowed me to see the dampness of his
lashes. In a microscopical moment of frenzy, I pulled Ciel to my chest and in
so doing, awoke him too. I expected him to push me away, like he had been
pushing me away most of the time recently, but instead, he buried his face in
my chest and held onto me tightly. I petted the back of his head and continued
to do so for a while, and when I thought he had fallen asleep again, the boy
whispered hardly audible, “You do this too little.”
What did I do too little? Wake him up from nightmares? Or was he asleep again
after all and talking in his dreams? Thinking of a solution to this puzzle made
me incredibly tired and I soon fell asleep again as well. I think I know now
what he meant and I do not think he was asleep when he phrased those words, but
I will not spell it out as I trust that the reader is less dense than I am when
it comes to correct and appropriate ways of comforting a ward.
Despite that night, his avoidance of me reached its peak on the anniversary
day. When I woke up that morning, instead of Ciel, I merely found a folded
sheet of paper next to me in bed, of thick quality and torn at the edges –
definitely a fragment of his notebook. My heart skipped a beat – could it be?
Was it a farewell letter? A quick look around the room confirmed that his
things were still there; merely his shoes were missing. Silly Sebastian, how
could I ever think he would run away from me? But wait, what if he did run
away, though not to a physical destination but the afterlife? Could it be? Had
he been this miserable? I snatched the letter from the potential runaway's
pillow; there was no point in wild speculations when I had a source of
information right at my hands.
The letter went like this:
 
Sebastian,(no “dear”)
I don't know what to say. I don't believe you. What happened on the day mother
died? I accepted your claim that you don't know anything way too easily. You
just have to know more than you admit to. You were at home. My mother must've
been distressed or she wouldn't have just run in front of a car out of
inattentiveness. What did you do to her?
Be honest with me. I know it's cowardly to confront you with a letter but I
can't help it; I can't look you in the eyes right now, ask these questions and
face your response. Please reply in written form. I'm outside when you read
this, catching some fresh air. Don't look for me, I'll be back at eleven
o'clock. Leave the room before eleven and put your reply into the drawer of my
bedside table. I don't want to see you when I return; I want to read your
statement by myself.
I won't let you get away with your feigned ignorance this time. It's wiser to
tell me what you know, and don't you dare try to make anything up.
Ciel
 
My first thought was, he's just like his mother. The matter treated in the
letter was a completely different one but it reminded me all too much of
Rachel's odd wedding proposal. I wondered if Rachel had taught her son to hide
behind a sheet of paper or if this tactic had been genetically inherited
together with her eyes and frail form. Then a sense of bewilderment set in.
What was I supposed to say? Did he really want to hear the truth? Could I lie
to him? No, I knew perfectly well that I could bend the truth but I could not
lie to Ciel. And when he explicitly asked me to tell him everything, I would
not get away with any less.
I certainly would not do Ciel the favour of replying in letter form. I found it
unnecessarily difficult to properly communicate when we could talk normally in
this hotel room of ours. I made up my mind to stay in the room and wait for his
return, and I would not leave the room until then, in case he were to return
earlier than expected. However, the arms of the run-down wall clock opposite of
the bed turned exceptionally slowly that morning. Luckily, the sweet tooth had
left behind a bag of cookies with which I could substitute my breakfast. They
did not keep me busy for too long, though, and I did not find any good
distractions within the limitations of the room. I realised I could make use of
the time by carefully planning what to say to Ciel but I soon realised I was
not the type of person to plan out conversations beforehand. Instead, I just
sank back onto the bed and stared holes into the ceiling for most of the rest
of the wait. I told myself it was the boredom that tortured me but this is a
confession and I have to be honest with you, so I will admit that I was ever so
scared.
Just before eleven o'clock, I heard the door open. False alarm – it was the
housemaid, who had failed to announce herself. I chased the woman away and told
her not to return before the next day, though just when I proceeded to stare at
the great whiteness of the ceiling, the door creaked again.
Ciel gasped. “I told you to stay away. I can't look at you right now.”
“If you want to look away, that's fine by me but I will not try to solve this
with a letter. This is a matter that needs proper discussion and you know
that.”
Ciel considered my words and soon he gave in. With an air of wariness, he moved
to the armchair in the corner of the room and sat down. The boy crossed his
arms and legs to imitate a look of strict dominance but his visible lack of
comfort gave him away. “I'm willing to listen to you but don't pull any-”
“I didn't kill your mother, if that's what you want to know. I really didn't.
You saw it, I couldn't have done it.”
He looked to the ground.
“I didn't wish for her to die, either. I've told you before and it wasn't a
lie.”
“You can't tell me that's it. There's more to it than that, I know there is!”
I swallowed. There was no way Ciel would take what I was about to explain well.
I had always known that it would end in disaster if he ever were to learn about
the circumstances. Yet there was no way around it; I had to tell him the entire
truth.
After a deep breath, I asked, “You remember what I told you about my habit of
keeping a journal when it's convenient, don't you?”
Ciel looked up from the floor. “Yes...”
“It lies in the nature of diaries to contain information that the author
wouldn't share with anyone else. So did my journal that I kept when I moved in
with you and your mother. It contained a lot of honesty...”
A skeptical swallow.
“...It contained a lot of honesty on you and me and the reasons for agreeing to
the marriage.”
“Wait... no...”
“Your mother found it and stuck her nose into it. I had only just returned home
when she confronted me about it in the kitchen. I tried to calm her down,
looked for excuses but in vain. She knew the content well enough – my colourful
descriptions of you, of us – to leave any chance of reconciliation for me.”
Ciel turned as pale as a ghost.
“I didn't do anything to her. At first, your mother moved to the telephone but
then decided against using it. Instead, she ran outside. I remained in the
kitchen, awaiting my certain arrest. I had given up, Ciel. In a matter of
seconds, I had accepted the invoice for the payments I had due. I was just
sitting there, waiting for the police to come and arrest me, when the telephone
rang. I had no idea. I hurried outside and there she was... and there you
were.”
Ciel's jaw trembled. He looked down at the tight fists that lay on his now
uncrossed legs. He needed both feet on the floor to ground himself. “You dumb
fuck. How stupid can a grown man be,” He shot up and pierced me with his eyes.
“How stupid can a grown man be!”
I did not say a thing. I cannot claim that he was wrong with his accusations.
“It's your fault after all! Why did you even have to write any of that down in
the first place? I can't believe it! It's all your fault. Yours entirely.
Everything that happened is your fault.” Ciel’s voice cracked. “The day you
came into my life, you destroyed it. You took away everything I had, in
exchange for your ever-dominating presence. But do you know what's the worst
about all of this?” Ciel sat down again. He laid his elbow onto the arm rest
and leaned his forehead against his hand for support.
I just stared at him, waiting for him to continue.
“The worst of all is that I... that I can't even hate you for that. I've had
this feeling in my guts that something like what you just told me happened.” A
hysterical laugh escaped Ciel's mouth. “The worst of all is that I can't even
hate you for stripping my life from everything that isn't 'you' because I don't
think I even had a life to begin with. I believe from the bottom of my heart
that I was never meant to live this long.”
Here I was, not justifying myself or my actions, and I realised I had not been
able to plan the course of this conversation beforehand because this was the
only course it could possibly take, and it was not one I liked it to take. I
wondered how broken Ciel had been before me, and how much of him I had broken.
“We both killed her,” All the colour disappeared from his face and he trembled
while he spoke, “you with your deviant character and I with my selfishness.”
I remained silent. If that was what he thought, I did not want to interfere
with his beliefs. If he partly blamed himself, my chances of getting away with
my misconduct were better. In my eyes, Rachel was more to blame than Ciel,
since it was her inappropriate snooping in my personal belongings that
ultimately resulted in her end.
“Get out. I need to think this through.”
I did not move.
“I said get out! I won't just disappear, if that's what you're thinking.”
I went outside without a single word. A flurry pushed me through the streets of
the town we were staying in. Once again, I did not know what to do with my
time. I decided that an hour would be enough time for him and meanwhile, I went
to distract myself by raising false hopes in the woman working at the milk bar
that had served me and Ciel with starry eyes the day before. When there is
nothing else to do, catering to my vanity is always a go-to option.
I returned to our room, armed with bribes in the form of lemon drops and a
chocolate bar that I had bought on my way back. Behind the door, I found Ciel
lying on the bed, his back to me.
“Are you awake?”
“No.”
I hesitated but then sat down behind him on the bed.
“Don't touch me.”
“I didn't plan to.”
“I think I do hate you after all.”
“That's fair.”
“...take me seriously.”
“I do.”
“I need you more than I care to admit.”
I reached out for his shoulder.
“I said don't touch me.”
I did not draw my hand back and Ciel did nothing to free himself of it. “Do you
want me to apologize?”
“If you have to ask that first, I'd rather you not to. If you don't understand
this much, I can't imagine you know what to apologize for in the first place.”
“...”
“You're absolutely horrible at this being-human-thing sometimes. To the point
where I sometimes doubt you're even human. Maybe this is why you ended up being
this depraved in the first place, because you're not human.”
“I’d like to believe I am a descendant of Bacchus.”
“Wine is not your problem, though.”
“No, I mean... never mind.” I found it wiser not to tell stories of the
ecstatic god with his wonderful nymphs and fauns.
Ciel turned around to look at me. He examined me with a strict look in his
eyes. “You might be depraved by yourself but the greatest depravity is you and
me together.”
“I disagree with you on one thing.”
“Which is?”
“I believe that depravity is an essentially human quality. All depravity in
this world, and stories thereof, are born in the minds of humans. Depravity is
very human, though perhaps not all that humane.”
“When you talk like this, I can hear how full of yourself you are.”
“You started this topic and I just added my perspective on it-”
“Shut up. Sebastian, I...” He sat up. We were close to each other, so close...
Ciel shook his head. “I have very conflicted feelings concerning you. You don't
deserve to have me but I don't deserve anyone other than you. We were never
meant to be together but I don't think we could've ever been without the other
either.”
“I disagree with you again, I am very sure we were meant to be together from
the moment my father and mother became one to create me.”
“It's absurd to imagine that somebody like you once had parents, or just a
single parent, that loved you dearly and wondered what would become of you one
day. Maybe some parents are better off dead.”
“Now you're being unnecessarily mean.”
“Cry me a river. I don't think that me being mean is the worst that will happen
to you because of me. I made up my mind, I will stay with you. If I leave all
irrational emotion aside, your revelation doesn't change much between us. I've
always suspected something vaguely like this, after all. It would be
hypocritical of me to start bearing a grudge on you now. But I have this
feeling that if we stay together, we are bound to damage and eventually destroy
each other. Like I said, we can't be without each other but I don't think we
can be with each other either.”
“So be it. I prefer a world where you and I are each other's gradual demise
over one where our demise is rooted in being apart. Though I would like to
believe that we don't necessarily have to tear each other apart.”
“Think what you want...”
“I will.”
He sighed. “Your hand is on my thigh.”
“Will you look at that, it is! I didn't notice.”
“I'm calling the police. Reason for arrest: being an unbearable idiot.”
“I won't let it come to that. I'll muzzle you before you have the chance.”
“I know exactly where this goes and I’m not up for that right now.”
I drew my hand back. Ciel nodded. We went to have lunch and after that, I gave
him the candy that I had not needed. It would have been a very poor bribe.
In hindsight, I think that this confrontation was a necessary evil as it
finally brought conclusion to Rachel's demise for Ciel. I consider myself lucky
that he reacted in a way that was beneficial to me, though I am unable at this
point to imagine a course of action against me. He saw no place anywhere but by
my side for himself, after all.
With Ciel's restlessness, my paranoia disappeared too. The remaining time until
our arrival in Weston flew by. I looked forward to settling down with the
beautiful boy that said he would destroy me one day.
Chapter End Notes
     DISCLAIMER: German laws DO NOT condone the sexual abuse of minors.
     Age of consent laws are more complicated than that. I'm neither
     German, nor a legal professional, so I don't want to explain any more
     but you can look it up on wikipedia if you want to know more.
     This story is nearing its end. I can't say exactly how many chapters
     are still to come but it will just be a few. Thank you to everyone
     who's been following it so far and I hope you'll follow it until the
     very end.
     I painted a picture in reference to the Bacchus statement that
     Sebastian made in this picture - more or less his imagination of him
     and Ciel. I think it turned out rather nicely, so please do take a
     look if you're interested: http://nighttimeteaparty.tumblr.com/post/
     169963896249/ciel-a-reimagination-of-vladimir-nabokovs
***** Chapter 18 *****
Chapter Notes
     Oh, look! I updated less than a month after the past chapter. Neat.
     As always, many thanks to ChromeHoplite for beta reading!
See the end of the chapter for more notes
If asked whether, given the chance, I would alter the course of events, then my
answer would be yes.
I am completely honest with you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, when I state
that I would have preferred a turn of fate where Ciel had not been robbed of
his mother too early, and where our mutual affection was not interspersed with
anguish. A turn of fate where, instead of being occupied with keeping him on
his feet, I could instead have invested all my energy into helping the boy
thrive, and in return I would receive his soul and body, our relationship
untinged by the guilt of my words slaughtering Rachel.
I would burn the journal if I could turn back time. Set its treacherous pages
on fire one by one until I could be sure that nothing was left of it. Of course
all was my fault, of course it was. The diligent reader of this confession by
now has grown very familiar to my vanity and it is this vanity that makes it
hard for me to face the truth behind my greatest mistakes - the truth that I,
and I alone, am to blame for them. I try to find faults in others, and on some
days I can convince myself of them, but this morning, just before I returned to
the stacks of paper on my little desk, when I looked at my reflection in the
dirty mirror of this prison cell, all of my faults stared back at me and I knew
today is one of these honest days when my regrets come to haunt me.
The ladies and gentlemen of the jury might be curious about my other regrets.
What else would Michaelis do differently if he had the chance? Would he have
told Ciel the truth about his mother unasked? No, I would not have done that. I
have invested much thought into other possibilities of revealing the truth but
in the end it always came down to this: Ciel had to be ready to discover it by
himself. Had I revealed the truth just after he had seen her grotesque corpse
on the concrete, not only do I think he would have disposed of me forever, but
he would have still blamed himself, maybe more so even than a year later, and
with not even me by his side to reassure him of his reason for existing, I dare
not think of what else might have happened.
As Ciel said, he had long harboured the suspicion that something I did,
something that had to do with him, had led to her death. For one reason or
another, a year needed to pass until he finally confronted the truth. I think
he had not been ready before, and I think he knew that too, and that is why he
ultimately decided not to punish me by going away.
There is but one great regret I have concerning the time of our road trip. In
hindsight, I wish I would have embraced Ciel more often. As I have previously
alluded to, I never really understood when a hurt human needed to be held by
another, not in a carnal or sensual sense but just to feel another's presence.
I, for one, cannot remember ever having felt this need.
The most tragicomical aspect of this lack of understanding is that whenever I
tried to offer consolation in the form of intercourse, an embrace would have
been a quicker and more effective method. I realise this now but did not
understand it in time. I could have conditioned myself to just wrap my arms
around the boy whenever he hurt, but instead I conditioned him as much as
myself into feeling an odd arousal whenever his mood turned for the worse.
If there was one thing I took away from the day Ciel confronted me, it was that
I was incapable of healing him. I undertook the travel across the country
because I thought it to be the best way to distract him from the problems back
at home but running away proved to be no long-term solution. I never had the
occasion to learn how to comfort or be comforted in times of great hurt, and
while I do think my single, admittedly not entirely selfless strategy was a
short-term fix, I do not think it helped to improve his condition in the long
term. Even though I still did not know what to do instead, I at least
recognised the need to change my approach.
Moving to Weston meant an occasion for change. This is where Dr. Iyer comes
into play.
Dr. Iyer had recently changed his first name to Agni for personal reasons and
asked me to drop the honorifics and talk to each other like in our student
days. Therefore I will henceforth address him as such in this text as well.
Agni was a tall, dark-skinned man, though surprisingly with hair as white as
snow. I met him early in my time at university and although he became a part of
my life by forcing himself into it, we soon formed a friendly relationship
built on mutual respect. Agni and I were very different but found that we could
draw from what set us apart. I would go so far as to say that he was the only
person I ever considered a close friend. As such, I found it self-evident that
if I wanted to consult anybody concerning my empathy deficiencies, it had to be
him.
The day we moved into our new home, Agni came to lend a hand and brought a
young companion with him. For almost three years, Soma Asman Kadar, a distant
relative of his from India, had been living with him to attend school in the
USA. He was a young man of about seventeen years, rather handsome, although
with an abundance of energy and terribly loud. It struck me as a surprise when
Ciel agreed to be taken around town by him, though my boy returned in the late
afternoon with eye bags painted by exhaustion. Ciel explained that he had made
the resolution to be friendlier towards schoolmates and age peers, and he took
the opportunity to start with Soma, but the good intentions took their toll on
him and he was starting to regret his efforts already.
Before Ciel's return, however, I took the chance to talk to Agni in private
over a cup of tea. My aim was to receive maximum advice while revealing as
little about us as possible. Luckily, he was a tactful man and knew not to ask
too much when I did not want to go into further detail. A rough picture of
Ciel's grief over his mother, and that he thought he was partly to blame for
her death because he had done something that upset her shortly before her death
set the little cog wheels in Agni's mind in motion.
“So, how have you been trying to take care of him so far?”
“First and foremost, I took him away from the toxic town that made everything
worse than it already was. On our trip, it was my priority to provide Ciel with
entertainment, so he would have as little time to think of his mother as
possible. Other than that... not much. I let him eat a lot of sweets.” Of
course, I could not tell him the entire truth.
“That sounds very much like you,” Agni chuckled, “but at least that's not
nothing. And yet he hasn't recovered from the trauma at all?”
“Well, no, yes; until May I thought he was on the right path but then we had an
argument, and I realised he could've been further in his grief work than he
was.” I rubbed the rim of the saucer to my hands with both thumbs.
“Did you ask him about his feelings?”
“No, he told me by himself.”
“Do you talk about his feelings often?”
“No, he's not the kind of boy that likes to talk about such things. He rather
keeps to himself. I respect that.”
“Oh, Sebastian...” Agni softly shook his head. “Every adolescent wants to talk
about his feelings but some need to be asked for them, or they will try to
fight their demons alone.”
I raised a single eyebrow. I did not know my face could do that. “Are you sure
about that? I have the feeling that he will see it as an intrusion of his
privacy if I ask.”
“Does the boy like you?”
“Well... yes...” like was a strange term to describe us. Too weak and sort of
missing the point.
“Are you unsure he does?”
“No, no, he does. But you see, I became his stepfather by chance and I don't
see myself fit for the role of a father figure. I think you know by now that I
don't have what it takes.”
“Do you like the boy?”
“You have no idea how much,” There it broke out of me for a second, but it was
alright, it was alright.
Agni smiled, “Then you do have what it takes. I think that's what's most
important. We can work on the rest. You may not be the most empathetic person
but as long as you're serious, you can learn to be better.”
I leaned back and reflected on his words for a moment. I did give Ciel the
little notebook to write his feelings down, but was Agni right by saying that I
should have instead just asked him to share his worries with me? Now that he
had told me, it did make sense. Of course, Ciel was too proud to actively come
ask for help. I should have known.
I proceeded, “There is one thing in particular that Ciel said that I didn't
understand, and that I need your opinion on.”
Eyes wide open and waiting for me to proceed, Agni prepared to impart more of
his wisdom to me.
“Some weeks ago, I woke up from Ciel weeping in his sleep. I went over to his
bed and woke him up by hugging him. After a while, he told me that I do this
too little. While putting it into words for you, I feel the answer to this
puzzle is rather self-evident and I'm a fool.”
“If it's true and you don't hug him much, then that's your answer,” he
suggested.
“It's just... I had the impression that I gave him other, better attention
instead of embraces,” With this statement, I was getting awfully close to the
limits of how honest I could be with him but I had to go that far, “I have
difficulties telling when someone is in need of a hug.”
“What did you feel when you hugged him that night?”
“Something along the lines of he's hurting, he needs to stop hurting.”
“There we have it, that's the magic spell that you need to use on yourself. Hug
him when he hurts.”
I thought about it long and hard. To me, an embrace was the little brother of a
kiss or sexual intercourse, and my arms around Ciel were means of holding him
close to me so I could feel the beloved boy's body fitting itself to my form.
Though, if that was true, then why did I not feel any such romantic desires
when I held him to me that night? All I could think of then was to hold him
together so he would not fall apart.
I do not know how long I sat there, just staring into my warped reflection on
the surface of my tea. Eventually, Agni interrupted my thoughts to satiate at
least some of his curiosity.
“To be honest, I was surprised to hear you had married.”
“Hmm? Yes...”
“What was she like?”
“Very pretty; big, blue eyes... that she passed down to Ciel. She was generally
gentle but enjoyed a bit of fun at the harmless expense of others sometimes.
Oh, and she managed to make me enjoy this seven-layered salad that I was very
skeptical of when I first came to America.”
“Did you love her?”
This took me aback. “I married her; why would you doubt I loved her?”
“Because throughout the entire story that you just told me, not a single time
did I get the impression that you had to struggle with your own feelings of
grief.”
His observation startled me a bit. It had been careless of me to forget about
my lonely widower role but I did not think it was relevant to the story of
Ciel's feelings. It was time to come up with a convincing impromptu story.
“You're right with that. I didn't marry Rachel out of love; I married her out
of a desire for a family, I think. I did like her, yes, but most of all, I saw
in her and Ciel two people that I could find purpose in, and I could be an
anchor for them. I thought that maybe I could grow to love her over the years
but I never had the chance to come that far.”
“To think that you, Sebastian 'I am an island' Michaelis, would one day wish
for a family, what a surprise!” Agni laughed, “And in your stead here I am, the
eternal bachelor. I don't think anyone back at university would've seen this
coming.”
I chuckled, “Certainly not.”
“I think Ciel is lucky to have you by his side. You did not have the chance to
learn how to be a father as other men have, and all of a sudden, you are alone
with a grieving teen-ager; a difficult situation for anybody, even organically-
grown fathers. But you mean well. It will be alright.”
I did mean well.
Didn’t I?
I took to heart everything Agni had said. Hug him more, ask for his feelings,
don't try to fix problems with sex (the last one was my own piece of advice for
myself, obviously). I wanted to start acting on these resolutions immediately
but I could not do all at once out of the blue. It would have struck Ciel as
odd and surely that would not have been helpful. One step after another.
As I said, I would not try to change everything at once, though maybe I could
start to take more than one step at a time. Ciel and I had a routine of
physical closeness that I thought I could try to morph into something else this
evening.
It was a cool and rainy day and Ciel had not dressed adequately for his
explorations with Soma. By nightfall, his fingers were ice-cold, so I made him
a cup of hot chocolate to warm him up from inside. Cup in hands, he waited for
me to sit down next to him on the sofa, and so I did, and I laid my arm around
the boy and pulled him close, careful not to spill any of the hot drink.
I was dead set on a goal, which was to talk and hug; no sex, not even allusions
to sex.
Ciel leaned his head against my cheek; I did have to fight against the
sensation of his soft hair on my skin and his scent to lure me into endeavours
that deviated from my plan. My foolproof strategy, however, was to visualise
Ciel in my arms that one night. The vision kept my mind and body strong against
all temptations.
The rich voice of the host of a radio show that I did not really listen to and
Ciel's occasional sips were the only sounds that filled the room. I was not
sure if the boy paid any attention to the broadcast but I reckoned that he
seemed to feel rather comfortable at that moment. A necessary prerequisite for
my plans. Now it would depend on my words, and my words alone, if its execution
went well.
“You'll turn fifteen in a few months,” I half-whispered.
Ciel tensed.
“You've grown quite a bit too, though you're still short for your age.”
He put his half-empty hot chocolate away and looked at me in horror. I needed
to slow down.
“I think there's something you don't understand.”
Now he looked even more scared.
I was not doing well, I needed to intervene with myself. I took his hands, only
his hands, to turn him completely towards me, then let go of him again. I
needed to address the fears expressed in his poem without revealing that I had
read it. A metaphor, a metaphor! My kingdom for a good metaphor! No milk.
“Ciel, I find... you're akin to an apple blossom.”
The boy thought about it for a bit, then suggested, “The prettiest just before
it blooms, only to wither away soon after...”
I shook my head in heavy disagreement. “Without a doubt, its rosy petals just
before the buds open bear a very unique beauty; different than blossoms of
other trees in that they become shy in their bloom and hide behind the green
leaves of the tree that mothers them as they lose their petals. However, you
must not forget that a blossom is but the precursor of the real thing. It might
lose its delicate infantile beauty but its core will transform into a
delicious, nurturing and tempting fruit. When the apple is ripe, nobody will
lament its evolution. One might fondly remember the bright pink blush along its
petals but the matured apple is what the whole tree was planted for in the
first place. Do you understand?”
Ciel stared at me and took a moment to process my metaphor. He gradually turned
red, like the apple I had just imagined, and cupped his glowing cheeks with his
palms. “Where the hell does this come from?”
“I owe you reassurance. I owe you the clear message that I want to listen to
you when you hurt and most of all, I owe you the help to leave the
misconception behind that you will lose your worth as you age.”
“You noticed, huh?” His hands dropped onto his lap.
“Of course I did. You don't hide this particular worry of yours very well.”
Ciel averted his look. He obviously struggled with his belief in me. “You
ramble about apples and blossoms and that's very much like you. But how can I
be sure that you mean what you say?”
“You can never be sure because we can never be sure that something another says
is true, whether they lie or just don't know any better. You can, however,
decide to trust in what I say.”
“I have told you many times that I don't want to trust you.”
“I know, and yet I sit here in front of you and ask you for it. All I can do is
ask of you to trust my words when I tell you that being with you has changed my
perspective. I have made many mistakes while being with you. I have hurt you,
harmed you, and I regret all of that but I don't regret letting you in on my
fondness of you because it hasn't changed since we met – no, that's nonsense,
it has changed a lot and that is why I don't regret it. I know there are words
you don't want to hear because you don't believe in them but please trust me
when I say that my fondness of you has only ever grown.”
Ciel looked at me again. He visibly contemplated on how he should respond to my
plea. He took a sip from his chocolate that must have lost its hot-prefix by
then, put it back onto the table and focussed on me again to form a reply.
“When I ask you to be honest with me, you usually are. At least, I can't think
of a time when I noticed you trying to fool me. I want to believe that what you
say is true.”
“I can't blatantly lie to you. I'm just not physically capable of it.”
“I think it's for the better if I believe you even if you don't say the truth.
I can't go anywhere else anyway.”
This was a premise I no longer wanted our cohabitation to be based upon. “If
you are desperate to get away from me, I think the Midfords would welcome you
to their home at any time. They have always worried greatly about you and if
you give them reason to believe that I kidnapped you, I'm sure they'd take you
in, no questions asked. No need to go into any further detail on the specifics
between you and me.”
“What would become of you?”
I shrugged, “Don't ask. It's not something you would be obligated to think
about.” Of course, that would be my end. I had told Ciel before and I think he
knew but I did not want to emphasise it, or else I would have fallen back into
my old manipulative patterns.
He softly shook his head. “You just robbed me of my only excuse for staying
with you.”
“Does that mean you’ll have to go?”
“No, you idiot, it means that I have to admit that I just don’t want to go.”
What a relief. “I'm glad you don't.”
Ciel smiled. He slumped down and leaned his upper body ever so slightly
forward, not with any intention in particular but likely as a reflection of his
brand new acceptance of me and, I hoped, himself too. Throughout our
conversation, I had been paying attention to his body language, looking for an
occasion that I deemed fitting for an embrace. I had grown nervous, thinking
that I must have missed the opportunity, but now it had come, I was almost sure
it was the right time to wrap my arms around him, and so I did. Ciel gasped in
surprise, though then leaned into my hold around him and there we sat, for a
minute or two, until the radio show host's enthusiastic insinuations on the
booming economy and the positive outlook on the fifties pulled us out of our
little calm world.
I started to develop an understanding of how to be better; at the same time, I
realised how truly monstrous of a man I had been. However, monsters, too, can
love, and this was the central problem. They cannot love without damage. I have
damaged Ciel, and I regret I did, though I simply could not do any better. This
monster with claws covered in venom could not help but reach out for a boy who
would suffer from the stings of its talons. But, knowing this, the boy did not
flinch away from those talons either. Instead he offered up his bare flesh and
invited the poison in.
Chapter End Notes
     After this fanfic is done, I'll light a candle and say sorry to
     Sebastian for making him say so much cheesy stuff all the time.
***** Chapter 19 *****
Chapter Notes
     Early update again! I'm SUPER motivated at the moment and I'm writing
     whenever I have time. However, even though I said that the story
     would be over soon, I've come to the realisation that I'll need a few
     more chapters than I initially thought to wrap everything up or else
     it will feel rushed. That's why I'm now a few chapters ahead already
     but I work on multiple chapters at the same time so everything fits
     together. I hope I can keep the slightly more frequent updates up,
     though.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
I had plenty to prepare before I would formally pick up my new employment in
September; make myself familiar with the campus, for example – a task that Agni
was so friendly to assist me with. Our little tour ended in the main library,
where a question formed in my head – Agni understood it before I could phrase
it – May I bring Ciel here? Yes, yes, I could. In fact, he reassured me, the
little girl of a colleague of ours also frequented the library quite often.
Agni left me behind so I could pursue some private research. The occasion
offered to read up on questions of mine, so I sat down, packed with
psychological literature, with the aim of putting together a better
understanding of Ciel's condition. I was relieved to learn that a normal period
of grief could well last up to two years, which meant that the boy's state was
not necessarily indicative of a greater problem. The same source talked about
the phases of grief, and how to overcome them. Some of them I could already
recognise in Ciel, for I was certain he had accepted reality for what it was,
and he had somewhat adjusted to a world and a daily routine without the
deceased. Other challenges had yet to be faced. To my understanding, the aim
was to establish Rachel as a happy memory – a defining factor of his past,
present and future, whose influence would remain a part of him, but that he
could reflect on in a positive way – to let the boy find a connection to his
mother in a life without her.
I eagerly noted my discoveries down, then spelled out the next great thinking
mistake that I had made – to draw a veil of silence around the topic of Rachel,
for I had believed that the evocation of her memory would do more harm than
good. The more I learned, the louder a socratic voice in my head assured me of
my complete ignorance. I promised to do better now. Not to Ciel, nor Agni, nor
Rachel; I promised it to myself. Immediately when I arrived home, I wrote a
letter to Mr. Midford to inform him of our new address and requested of him to
fetch a certain something from the Phantomhive house and send it to me.
The ladies and gentlemen of the jury might want to ask if, under this premise,
I finally stopped touching the boy inappropriately, and I would reply with an
offended no! I could become a better attachment figure while still maintaining
the sexual part of our relationship. Why, anybody please explain to me, why
should it be better for Ciel (who also enjoyed this part of our relationship –
who even sought it out as much as I did) to end it? What harm could sexual
intercourse ever do to him if he consented to it? What was the difference to
any other harmless stimulant, like an afternoon nap, or a chocolate bar? Come
to think of it, the sweets perhaps posed a greater threat, for they could have
ruined his teeth. What harm could the unification of our bodies do? It was not
the core of the disaster that would commence. Yes, it did relate to the turn of
events, but not because of any harm I did, but outward circumstances; a man, a
madman, a fiend.
Settling in the new town and at my new workplace, as well as the constant
pondering kept me busy for a good week or two. We did not have many personal
belongings with us, so they were quickly spread all over the house. It felt
grounding to have a study of my own again, and this one was larger than the one
in the Phantomhive house; similarly, Ciel, of course, had a room of his own,
and though it was primarily a façade since we slept together in the master
bedroom, to have a retreat of his own seemed fair.
Ciel surprisingly spent much time with Soma. The latter made it a habit to drop
by unannounced, and while we did not always open the door – it is common
etiquette to announce oneself beforehand for a good reason – the Indian boy's
success rate at trying to lure Ciel out of the house was astounding. Soma knew
how to do it: The drug store nearby or a milk bar a little further away were
attractive destinations to Ciel. Upon learning of our temporarily tight budget,
Soma even insisted on paying for Ciel's saccharine expenses most of the time,
which fostered my support of their regular outings. My boy would usually return
by late afternoon or early evening, assert that he was doing this for the mere
purpose of building connections that he could later benefit from, and I could
tell that he lied but if he needed this lie to feel at ease with having a
friend, I would not question it.
Ciel perhaps thought that I disapproved of the concept of friendship since I
had never once left the impression that I valued it in any way and always
listened to his complaints about his former classmates with much understanding.
But while I did not particularly treasure jovial connections personally, I in
no way would have looked down on him for engaging in them. Well, perhaps I
would have done so just a little bit earlier but I had learned since then. I
was a wiser fool now. My books suggested that the forging of friendships and
their upkeep were a good sign of recovery.
Not much time had passed since Soma had stormed into Ciel's life when another
adolescent was introduced. I vividly remember the bewilderment in Ciel's face
when he came home to me one evening and greeted me with the words, “I think
Soma tried to set me up with a girl.”
Sullivan was her name – Sieglinde Sullivan. An orphan, like Ciel, the German
girl had come to America as a war refugee with the help of Wolfram Gelzer, a
family confidant, who turned out to be a future colleague of mine, though at a
different institute. The attentive reader might have already guessed that
Sieglinde was the girl frequenting the library that Agni had told me about. On
the basis of knowing that both the Sullivan girl and Ciel were somewhat
bookish, Soma thought it was the most brilliant idea he ever had to suggest the
two to get together, completely ignoring the critical difference between Ciel's
preferred literature and hers: That girl devoured scientific tomes like others
devoured a hearty breakfast. However, although their interests did not line up
perfectly, Ciel was indeed impressed by her brains.
Sullivan beat me to taking Ciel to the library and I might have been a bit
huffy because of that. My suggestion to invite both friends over for tea
perhaps served the main purpose of observing the way Ciel interacted with both
of them, and how his interactions differed. It might not have been all that
telling of the whole picture that he treated a young lady more courteous than a
loud lad. All I know is that I saw that she was pretty with her pitch black
hair, sharp eyes and overflowing confidence. Back in Ramsdale, I could tell
that Ciel had never had any worrisome interest in the Midford girl, but
Sullivan – I could not tell if I had discovered Ciel's type, so to speak, or if
I was imagining things. The voice of reason in my head tried to reassure me of
how beneficial Ciel's newly forged bonds were for his healing process but my
heart protested. The heart is an utterly useless thinker.
I did my best to hold back but eventually, curiosity overcame me one sunny
morning.
“The Sullivan girl is a pretty thing, isn't she?”
Ciel interrupted the intake of his breakfast and slowly put his knife and fork
down as if in anticipation of a bothersome discussion. “I guess she is...”
“Don't you think so?”
“Of course I do, I'm not blind, but where does that come from all of a sudden?”
“You see, Ciel, you and I, we both happened to be born as men. So did Soma.
Sieglinde went the other way.”
“Are you trying to give me some weird Sebastian-style birds and the bees talk?
We have penises, she has a vagina, I know, thank you very much.”
I shook my head. “That's not what I mean. I've told you before that I've,
personally, never cared much about these things; you might as well have been a
girl; it wouldn't have mattered, we'd still sit here together at this table
today. I have no idea about you, though.”
“Are you referring to those former classmates of yours that had plenty of fun
with the other boys at school as long as there were no girls around and then
happily married and had kids later?” Ciel grinned, folded his hands and rested
his chin on their knuckles. “Aww, are we jealous?” I did not like that look on
his face. I drew my eyebrows together and wrinkled my nose maybe a little bit
too dramatically; Ciel snickered at that.
I denied it, “I simply want to learn about you.” At that time, I really thought
that was all there was behind my question, or at least I tried to convince
myself of that. “Is she attractive to you? Or any other female, for that
matter?”
The bluntness of my question threw Ciel off. “Wh-what about you, though? She
probably fits right in with your tastes, you sick, old bastard, doesn't she?”
Only then I noticed it – Sullivan was Ciel's age, thin limbed and with that
certain air around her – a lovely little nymphet, and I am positive I would
have immediately recognised her as such hardly more than a year or two ago; by
then, however, I had become so absorbed in Ciel that there was no spare
attention left for anybody else. Ciel could tell my surprise when I told him,
“No, in fact, I'm not interested in her at all.”
My bewilderment returned a sense of security to him and he came forward, “Well,
neither am I, at least not like that.”
“And what about women in general? Or are you perhaps too young to be able to
tell?”
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, for the first time in what felt like
centuries, Ciel took offence again in being called too young for something.
“Pah! This has nothing to do with my age. I... I can't tell but that’s
because... I mean, isn't it normal not to really think about that when...” And
there he stopped, bashful because of where his thoughts had lead him.
I decided to leave it at that and make up my own ending for that sentence of
his. With a bright smile, I changed the topic, “Anyway, I'm glad you surround
yourself with smart people, though I didn't expect any less of you.”
“Sullivan is smart, yeah – but Soma?” Ciel picked up his cutlery again.
“Didn't you know? Agni told me that Soma never does anything for school that
goes beyond his mandatory homework and always has way too much free time on his
hands, and do you know why? Because he doesn't need to study. Nothing at all.
He already knows it all.”
“Eh...?”
“Soma is so smart, at the age of fifteen, he declined an invitation to start
college in Cambridge – Cambridge, Massachusetts, not England – because he
simply didn't want to give up his normal teen-ager life, or so Agni told me.”
Ciel dropped knife and fork. “That Soma? Are you kidding me?”
“I was just as surprised as you are now.”
Ciel turned his face away and stared into the mid-distance. He drew his
eyebrows together, relaxed them again, then drew them back together, then
relaxed them once again. I could see the effort it took him to process this
revelation; the same effort it had taken me. For our mutual surprise to make
sense, I need to paint the picture that we both previously had of Soma: The
same boy that stuck bundles of raw spaghetti into his nostrils to mimic the
tusks of the elephants that his family in India owned was apparently a gifted
genius.
Ciel nodded. “Good for him, I guess. Good for him.”
And with that, both of us were happy: I was relieved to learn that I had
nothing to worry about, and Ciel was dumbfounded for the rest of the morning.
 
About a month after our arrival in Weston, our financial situation deteriorated
once again. Luckily, I had just picked up temporary employment at an office in
town to be able to afford the rent of our house because I was informed by not
only one but several letters that the bank would halt the flow of Ciel's
inherited money into my pockets unless I confirmed my identity with Mr. Derek
Traun, that ominous owner of the company that the money originally came from. I
had no idea this could happen, as Mr. Midford left me no reason to worry about
anything like that, but since I preferred not to get caught up too much in the
history of the Phantomhive family, I just let it slide and hoped that the
period until the employment we came to town for in the first place would pass
quickly.
In the meantime, my efforts to be better to Ciel proved to be fruitful. His
gloominess appreciably receded and despite his frequent outings with his new
friends, I did not fall short, either. In fact, if anything, I benefited from
his new spirits. One of those days, I was peacefully reading the newspaper in
the living room when the wild little faunlet appeared out of nowhere between my
knees.
“How badly do you wanna know what my mouth feels like around you?” were his
exact words.
He had never allowed me this particular pleasure before. Deemed it off-putting.
Though when he asked me that day, it was probably not entirely out of a whim; I
had showered shortly before, and I suppose he had waited to catch me nice and
clean, so there must have been a minimal amount of planning involved.
Ciel knew exactly how badly I wanted to discover that feeling, therefore I
granted him no verbal reply; my fingers combing through his hair had to be
enough. The little imp grinned, then groped me a bit before he unbuttoned my
trousers. I dropped the newspaper to the ground. With mutual effort, the legs
to Ciel's sides were soon unclothed, as was my shockingly solid length. The boy
looked at it like he looked at his hot fudge sundaes; where to dip the spoon
first? I had no idea where his sudden enthusiasm came from but now was not the
time to question it.
Ciel grasped my hardness with his delicate little hand. There is a certain
softness special to fingers that know no physical labour at all, and oh, did
this boy have soft fingers. He opened his hand around me again and shifted my
member between thumb and the remaining fingers, inspected its planes from
different angles – a little from the left, a little from the right, a little
from above –  the grasped it firmly again, put pressure against it with his
thumb, decreased the pressure, increased it again, looked me in the eyes. I had
no idea what he was doing, or rather why he was doing it - I felt observed,
analysed, and a little like in the middle of a very odd urological examination.
Did he think I would like that? Or was he just satiating his curiosity? It did
not matter, I had wanted this for so long, the mere proximity of his face to my
lower body was enough to keep me in high spirits. He could have probably just
sat between my legs and taken notes; I would not have cared as long as I had
had reason to believe that he would stay true to his words and let me discover
what his mouth would feel like around me.
He grinned when he saw me gnawing on my index finger, then bent down and
extended his tongue towards me – finally! The wet muscle slid up and down the
underside of my length, and I felt a lot of that muscle; the faunlet made sure
to get a good first taste of me. He closed his eyes when he put more attention
into how he touched me; closed the hand around me too and supported my length
with his thumb. I felt his plump lips and the pink tongue peeking out on my tip
before I could process the corresponding visual information. With his other
hand, he held onto my thigh. Ciel put a lot of enthusiasm into working his
mouth around my tip; eagerly he licked, sucked, kissed – like a lollipop, he
held me steady against his pretty pout, and he was surprisingly excited to have
his treat just for himself.
When I could not help but jerk against his mouth, he drew away to scold me.
Whoa, slow down there, mister. After a little penalty time, he took me back
into his hand and examined my shaft again. With the tip of his tongue, Ciel
lapped on a protruding vein, then looked at it, examined the blood vessel with
his fingertips, followed it up until it led him to the foreskin, where he
switched to his tongue again, but he did not stay there for long – the
attentive boy could tell from my sudden exhalation that if he were to proceed
there, the fun would be over too soon. Instead, he wrapped his hand all around
me once again, put my tip to his lips and swiftly slid me into his mouth. I
winced a little.
“Take care with your teeth, Ciel.”
Mouth stuffed, he just growled in reply. Ciel noticed the pleasure I took from
the vibrations his voice caused, and as he moved his mouth and hand up and down
my length, he moaned rhythmically into the movements. Just as I was getting
comfortable with the newly established rhythm, the boy let go of me, to catch
some unrestricted breath, and observed me yet again. I was starting to feel
like a scientific experiment, every little action of mine evaluated by the
boy's calculating senses. I cannot claim it did not excite me in an odd way. I
felt his heavy breath on my damp skin when he sampled my oozing pre-ejaculate
with index- and middle finger to examine its texture.
“Is this your first time seeing a penis?” I could not help but tease.
“Well, I don't usually see any this close, do I? And most of the time, yours
disappears inside of me pretty quickly as soon as you drop your pants.”
With that, however, Ciel's research on my manhood seemed to be complete. He
closed his hand and mouth around it again and proceeded like before. To my
delight, the boy used his other hand to unbutton his own trousers and touched
himself too. He also deserved some pleasure.
My little lover slowly took more and more of my length into his eager mouth,
until he gagged on it and had to cough the irritation away. He did his best but
was overall very clumsy; I was reminded of our first kiss, how the clueless boy
seemed to have no control over his mouth, and I enjoyed seeing and feeling him
in a similar way again. His dedication to keep going was the same as then: When
I suggested that he could stop anytime and I would do the rest, he decidedly
refused. He would bring this to an end himself, no matter what.
Did it feel good? Objectively, no. Too much scratching of teeth, too little
idea what really to do with me in his mouth. Not to forget the sheer
dimensions! At fourteen, Ciel still had a lot of growth ahead of him, and maybe
that included his mouth to a degree. He could only open it so far. I could have
told him to take my length out of his mouth and do it more like he did in the
beginning but it did not really matter as his very effort was enough to excite
me so much, he soon had me on the edge. I knew I had to intervene there.
“You might want to stop now... or you'll get to taste even more of me.”
Ciel pulled away but only so he could speak, “That's the plan,” bent down again
to proceed but I would not let him.
“No, believe me, you don't want this, I know you well enough to know that you
don't really want this.”
I should have known that Ciel did not like to be told what he wanted or not.
“You always swallow mine, now let me have the full experience too.”
I sighed. “Ok, go on, but don't blame me afterwards.”
Ciel did not take much of me into his mouth anymore. Instead, he played with my
foreskin and head with his lips and tongue and used his hand for more extensive
friction further down. The intensified sensation and the sheer beauty of Ciel
between my legs, eyes closed and mouth wide open, focussing more on my body
than his, and the little involuntary noises he made, all of those drove me so
wild that when I came, I dropped all reservations – I pulled him to me and
filled his precocious little mouth just the way he had asked for.
Ciel jerked back. He spit it onto the carpet and ran immediately to the kitchen
with a loud “YUCK!” to wash the taste away.
“I told you so,” I exclaimed from the living room.
When I pulled my trousers up again, the boy returned with a grimace. “This
stuff is nasty, how the hell can you do this without even pulling a face?”
I raised my index- and middle finger. “Two reasons. One: I can live with it for
the greater good. Two: I have power over your diet, I know what you eat and
when, and that has influence on the taste too.”
Ciel slitted his eyes. “Do you... feed me things that make me taste better? Any
weird drugs I know nothing of?”
The accusation had me laugh. “No, I just know when better not to go down on
you. I can teach you a bit more about that if you want, since you're in such a
studious mood today.”
Ciel waved his hand. “Thanks, I've learned plenty today. But sometimes I really
wonder where you take all that obscure knowledge from.”
There was but one issue left, and it still stood between Ciel's legs, despite
his disgust. “You couldn't get yourself very far,” I suggested, “Want me to
help you out with that?”
He replied with a sheepish yes.
I returned the little faunlet's favour and, as always, swallowed all of him,
because as long as it was Ciel that I was tasting, it could never be bad.
Only a day later, I got a vague idea where Ciel's sudden explorational mood
might have come from.
Chapter End Notes
     I love Sullivan, I'm so glad I'm including her in this story now.
***** Chapter 20 *****
Chapter Notes
     Bear with me.
     As always, many thanks to ChromeHoplite for beta reading this!
See the end of the chapter for more notes
On the next day, Sieglinde Sullivan came over; no Soma with her, just the heavy
books that she always carried around. Soma had not been all too wrong after
all: Sullivan did fascinate Ciel with her extensive knowledge and while he did
not care about reading scientific literature too much, the boy did enjoy to
learn.
When Ciel's friends came to visit, the trio usually gathered in the kitchen –
refrigerator right at hand. This time, however, the two adolescents disappeared
in Ciel's room, door closed. As I have previously established, I had no reason
to mistrust Ciel, so I just let them be. I did not plan to intrude on the
privacy of their conversation; however, I still halted my movement as I was
about to knock to offer the two some tea. I did so because of interesting
keywords that I could hear through the door.
Perineum...
...prostate
...and here, Cowper's gland...
It was Sullivan who was speaking in a very matter-of-fact voice.
I forgot what I was about to do and stayed hidden behind the wooden barrier.
Next, it was Ciel who talked. “So it doesn't come from just one place after
all.”
“No, not at all,” the girl explained, “It's complex, like what's in your blood;
that doesn't just come from one place, either.”
Very interesting. I had an idea what the literature she brought with her that
day was about.
She continued, “You're the first person that actually listens to me when I talk
about these things. Other people usually either call me boring when I talk
about physics or chemistry, or gross when it's about biology or medicine.”
“They're just stupid if they think so. It's interesting.”
I heard Sieglinde laugh confidently. “Isn’t it? That’s why I wanna be a doctor
one day. Maybe you should become one too!”
“I don’t know about that…”
“Hey, can I ask you something?”
“Hmm, depends on what you wanna know?” Ciel's tone carried a sense of
skepticism.
“You have some first-hand experience with this, don't you?”
My blood ran cold. Did she know? How did she know? Should I storm in
immediately? But what then? No, it was better to wait and see. I trusted that
the boy knew what to do. Don't say anything wrong now, Ciel.
In a high pitch, he denied, “No, not at all! What would make you think so!”
“Not even kissed a girl?”
“No!” Well, especially not that.
Sullivan sighed. “Too bad. I really thought you had done that at least, because
sometimes you sound so experienced. Also, you're not half as awkward as other
people about this topic. I just wanna ask someone a few questions that has some
practical experience but I don't really know anyone I can ask. I thought you
might be the one.” What a relief. She accepted his pathetic denial.
“Sorry, you've got the wrong one.”
“Do you think I can ask your stepdad some stuff? He seems like a cool guy, like
he wouldn't mind.” I was a very cool stepdad indeed, I even let the kids keep
to themselves behind closed doors.
“God, no, please don't. No.”
I snickered to myself. It was not all that easy to embarrass Ciel with topics
relating to sexuality, or at least I did not think it was, because he had not
been this bashful in front of me in a long time, but apparently it was
different with other people. I remembered the reason why I came to the door in
the first place. Entering the conversation now promised to be fun.
I knocked two times, then let myself in with my most hospitable smile. “Pardon
me, I wanted to ask you two if you'd like to have tea and biscuits, but I
couldn't help but overhear that you wanted to ask me something, Miss Sullivan?”
I found the two sitting on Ciel's virginal bed, anatomy books all over the
place. Ciel was clearly embarrassed, judging from the way he shifted on the
blanket, to be caught discussing their current subject; Sullivan, however, did
not bat an eyelash.
Ciel intervened, “Why don't you just go and bring us the tea? It's not
important...”
“Ciel, be politer to your guest, especially when the guest is a lady,” I
scolded him, then turned to the girl. “Yes, Miss Sullivan? Does your question
relate to your current studies?”
“See, Ciel? He's not mad at all about me teaching you.”
“That's not why I...” the boy whined, “Just don't-”
“Mister Michaelis,” A great gleam of scientific interest ignited in Sullivan's
eyes, “How long does it take for a young and healthy man for all the blood to
run down there so that the pen-hbfh”
Ciel tackled the girl down with a large pillow and a shriek. “Oh my god! Can
you maybe not go around and ask strangers stuff about their genitals?! What the
fuck is wrong with you?!”
“Language, Ciel,” I intervened.
“Shut up, you're not my father!”
“That was mean, Ciel,” Sullivan complained beneath the pillow, “What you said
to your stepdad and also, you can't just ravage a young maiden like that. You
have to be gentle with me...” Hand on her forehead, the girl made a coquettish
side glance.
Ciel did half a reverse somersault and landed on his back, somewhere between
the books, face as red as a traffic light. He opened his mouth as if to scream
but no sound came out. I struggled not to laugh out loud. My modest snickering
was still too much and the next thing I remember is the pillow that smacked
into my face.
I caught it before it hit the ground, laid it onto a chair that was out of
reach for Ciel on the bed, and turned to the girl again. “However, Miss
Sullivan, I'm afraid I have to agree with Ciel. I admire your academic
curiosity but it's not befitting of a lady to ask adult men they hardly know
these kinds of things. Take care whom you're talking to; you might as well end
up getting involved with someone dangerous. You're free, however, to ask Ciel
whatever you want. He's not dangerous.”
“Hmm, ok,” she replied, then turned to Ciel. “See? This is how to politely
decline a lady.”
Ciel was just lying on the bed at that point, petrified, desperately clinging
onto the last bit of life left in his chest.
“Pardon my intrusion, I'll just bring you two some tea, alright?”
Sullivan raised a thumb. “Yes, please, sir!”
Ciel kicked me in the shin as soon as Sullivan left for home. I deserved it, I
knew, but the amusement was worth the pain. Despite his current resentment of
me, the boy confirmed my suspicion that the curiosity about my reproductive
organs that he had showcased a day earlier was related to what his new friend
had been teaching him. I reassured him that there was no reason to be
embarrassed about curiosity regarding the theory behind the practical approach
he had already been very familiar with, but that he had to choose his words
carefully around a smart girl like Sieglinde Sullivan. “She might pick up on
something, no, it seems she's already picked up on something, considering her
allusions to your experience.”
“I know,” he murmured. “Wait, how long were you listening in on us?”
I smiled nonchalantly. “Not long and it wasn't my intention but I picked up a
few bits and pieces before I entered the room.”
“Well, I guess it doesn't matter. You know, I was kinda afraid you'd answer
her.”
“Her question was really inappropriate.”
“Of course it was but it's you I'm talking about. Imagine it would've been me
two years ago when I came back from summer camp. I bet you would've asked me if
I want you to show me.”
“To be honest, I think I would've told you to find out by yourself, on your own
body, but I would've been surprised and a bit worried if, at that age, you
hadn't had that experience yet, and I would've told you that too.”
Ciel blushed. “You're so presumptuous, to automatically assume something like
that of a twelve-year-old!”
I tilted my head to the side. “I went to boarding school from age ten; if I
know one thing for sure, it's that, yes, about everyone has had that experience
at twelve, the difference lies just in how the boys go about dealing with it.”
I paused. “But to give you the reply you actually want, you were different.
Your curiosity was in no way as technical as hers; you raided my personal
library out of a much more basic drive. Didn't you?”
“Oh, don't you think Sullivan is just technically interested. You have no idea
about the amount of ambiguous stuff she keeps saying when no adults are around.
She’s puberty on legs.”
I smiled. “Hmm, in that case, I suppose it's because I just don't care about
anyone but you. That's what you wanted to hear, isn't it?”
Ciel blushed even harder. “You're so terrible, I don't even know anymore why
I'm staying with you.” Clearly, that was a lie.
 
A few days later, I finally received a reply letter from Mr. Midford. Within
the envelope, I found just what I had asked for, and a little more.
Ciel was alright. The newly established daily routine and safety of a permanent
home were beneficial, as was his willingness to let people acquaint themselves
to him. I still wonder who had matured to enable him to do that now: the type
of people around him or the boy himself. I almost thought that I had imposed an
unnecessary task on Midford and given Ciel the object without an occasion when
that assumption was proven wrong.
One August night, Ciel came home from one of his ice cream outings, pale and
tired. It was not the regular exhaustion that usually came with spending too
much time with the Indian exchange student, no. I knew that fatigue: Dull and
empty eyes, the corners of his mouth hanging down. His grief was back.
I was prepared for this scenario. He would either disappear somewhere secluded,
perhaps bed, and hope to be left alone, or hop onto my lap and want me to make
him feel something better. I hoped for the first option since it would cost me
less composure. Of course, things did not go my way. Ciel climbed onto the sofa
I was lounging on, on top of me, and locked his lips with mine. His mouth was
sour. Had his kisses always been sour when he was miserable?
I accepted the kiss but just the kiss. His hands wandered over me but before
they could reach any destination below my waist, I grasped them.
“You don't feel well,” I aspirated.
“No shit, Sherlock.”
I kissed him again. I could not help it. His lips were too plump, too inviting
when he pouted. Kissing is alright , I thought, but just kissing.The boy,
however, took it as an invitation for more and moved his hands to dangerous
places. I stopped them once again. Ciel broke the kiss and gave me an accusing
look.
I did not give in. “What happened to make you feel so bad?”
“None of your concern. Now let me have this.” Since he could not do much with
his hands, he ground his crotch against mine.
I breathed heavier, this was not good. “Ciel... please stop.”
But Ciel did not listen to my words. Instead, he took to heart the answer he
preferred: The movement of my hips that had taken on his rhythm. Both of us
still fully clothed, we ground against each other. Ciel pulled my face to his
neck and I obeyed his command by kissing the tender skin, mind lost somewhere
along the way. Eventually, I flipped us around; laid Ciel onto the seating and
propped myself above him. He thought he had me. I, however, finally remembered
the one thing that could still help me: The image of the helpless and miserable
boy, crying in his sleep, and how I swore myself to do whatever I could do to
stop it. I needed to stop myself, now or never.
I pinned the boy down so he could not continue. “We can't go on like this
forever. Numbing the pain with intercourse won't solve any problems.” The
situation was far from ideal; I was excruciatingly hard and so was he. I had to
try anyway.
“Since when?”
“Since always, though I'll admit it took me a long time to understand this
much.”
Ciel relaxed beneath me and I took that as a sign that I could release him from
my hold. “Why should it help if I told you about what happened? You don't
really care anyway, do you?”
That assumption shocked me. I sat back. “Is that really what you think? Of
course I do! I want to know what bothers you.” Agni was right all along. If I
did not ask Ciel directly, he would never talk, no matter how much he needed
it. “Please tell me what happened. I can tell that you're thinking of your
mother again, you have that certain look.”
Ciel sat up and averted his eyes. “It's stupid. I should just get over it. Soma
got a letter from his parents and told us about it. I'm overreacting. Nobody's
at fault.”
“Do you think it always takes a perpetrator for sadness to be justified?”
“No...”
“Then why won't you just talk to me about your feelings?”
“Because...” The boy took a deep breath. “Because you didn't even really care
about mother, so why would you understand?”
“Because I care about you, that's how simple it is.”
Ciel gave me a tired look.
“Do you still not believe that I do?”
“...That's not it. I do believe you.”
“She was a wonderful woman and just because I didn't love her, doesn't mean I
couldn't stand her. Even though you seem to think so.” It would have been a lie
to say I did care about Rachel but it was true that I held no ill feelings
against her. If anything, I was thankful to her for giving birth to and raising
Ciel.
The boy folded his hands in his lap and looked down at them.
“Wait a moment, let me fetch something for you.” I went over to my desk, where
I stored the object that I had asked Mr. Midford for in a drawer, and returned
to Ciel to present it to him.
He took the two photographs from my hand. One of it was of Rachel like she
looked when I knew her, the other one depicted the whole Phantomhive family;
Ciel much younger, Rachel with a slightly different coiffure and father and
baby brother still alive. “Where did you...”
“I asked Mr. Midford to look for a photo of your mother. He added the family
portrait. I thought I should wait until a moment like this to return them to
you.”
Ciel's hands shook and so did his lips. He slowly placed the photographs onto
the coffee table and took a deep breath before he could continue in a
relatively calm voice. “Why now, after so long?”
“I was ignorant, so ignorant. I thought it was best not to mention her anymore;
I thought this way you could forget her and heal. Maybe I also simply
considered it easier for me. However, the aim shouldn't be to make you forget
her, but to enable you to think back to her in fond memory.”
Ciel examined the pictures on the coffee table, not daring to touch them, and
considered my words. He still trembled. I reached out for his hand. He looked
at me with great expectations and I knew that I needed to embrace him again.
This time, when I held him to my body, he did not try to slide his hands
beneath my waistband; he just collapsed against my chest. I combed through the
boy's hair. With his ear at my heart, his tremble eventually stopped.
“Will you tell me a bit about your mother? Let me see her with your eyes.”
The boy clutched my shirt. After a bit of consideration, he began, “She never
cried in front of me. When father died, she never cried in front of me. She
did, alone in her bedroom, when she thought I was asleep, but she always tried
to be cheerful around me.”
I continued to brush through Ciel's hair and listened, waited for more.
“When I didn't wanna go to school and acted like I was sick, she was never mad
at me. Instead, she asked me for the real reason why I didn't wanna go.
Sometimes it was because I had a fight with someone at school and didn't wanna
see them, or sometimes, I just wanted to stay home and play with my toys. If it
was something like the first case, she talked it through with me but then let
me stay at home anyway. When it was the latter, often she would still let me
stay, because I was such a good boy on most days and deserved some fun, or so
she said.”
“That was nice of her.”
“Yeah, it was.” Ciel took a moment to think of another story. “Mother loved
sweets too, as you know. When we had a bag of candies at home and it was about
to run empty, she always made sure that I got the last piece. When she made
pie, she did the same, even if she'd hardly had any yet.”
“Mhm...”
“When I felt bad, mother made warm milk with honey for me. She only made it
when she wanted to cheer me up because that way, it remained something
special... Oh, one time, I got into a fight with the child of our neighbours
and I ended up with a cut on my temple, and she threw a temper tantrum at the
parents to control their son, because she was one hundred percent convinced
that her Ciel didn't start the fight, but I think I actually did start it but I
only told her so after that...” the boy chuckled softly. “She had to go back
and apologise for being so rude.”
“She trusted you as much as you trusted her, didn't she?”
“Yes... she did... that's why...” The tremble started again. “That's why...
it's my fault... she trusted me... and then she realised...”
I held him tighter. “No, Ciel, no, nothing is your fault. You did nothing
wrong.”
“I regret letting you touch me.”
I tensed.
“That was a lie. I don't regret it. I hate myself for that. I could've done
something at any point, but I didn't, because I always wanted it. Even after
you told me about the disaster with your journal, I still couldn't bring myself
to regret what I did. Resent myself for it? Yes. But I don't regret anything,
and that's horrible. I wouldn't reveal your true intentions if I could turn
back time. I'd do it the same way again... God, I feel bad about not feeling
bad about sleeping with her husband.”
“That's nonsense, you have no fault at anything. It was bad luck that a car
came down the street just when she crossed it, even though there's so little
traffic there. It was unfortunate that she found my journal. I was incredibly
stupid to keep it in the first place. It was all my fault. I am to blame, not
you. I am... I'm sorry.”
“You don't apologise for making your advances, do you?”
“I can't be sorry for that. Never.”
“That's alright. It means that your apology is honest.”
I kissed the top of his head.
“Sebastian... You didn't do it on purpose. She didn't die because you wanted
her to. It was an accident. That makes your fault much smaller.” He clutched me
harder. “I don't hold any grudges against you anymore. But thank you for the
apology, it was about time. I needed it.”
“If you don't hold any grudges against me anymore, then forgive yourself too.”
“...It's not that easy... when I always lived to make her happy. She probably
died miserable. Disgusted about what had happened to me. Can you imagine what
she'd feel like if she knew that I hold onto the affair that killed her?”
“Do you feel guilty about being happy?”
“...Sort of.”
“But don’t you think your happiness is what your mother would’ve wanted the
most? I’m sure her prime concern was the harm I would cause. I mean, granted,
she’d resent me for everything I’ve done and still do, and that’s fair, but
you? Your mother always wanted you to be happy and healthy, no matter the
means, so don’t you think she’d want the same today?
“Hmm...”
“I believe if you want to make up for what you are sorry for, the best you can
do is to be happy.”
Ciel did not argue against that.
We laid there for another while and I asked Ciel to tell me more stories about
Rachel. I thought we would fall asleep like that, but no. When he was done
sharing his memories, the adolescent lifted himself a little out of my arms and
gently laid his lips onto mine. We did sleep with each other that night, but it
was alright, for the act did not serve as a remedy, but as a conclusion when
all had been said. In the morning, I made Ciel warm milk with honey.
Chapter End Notes
     Boy, that was cheesy. My inner tsundere is cringing.
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