Ghost of a Rose. Fic. Kuroshitsuji. Hannah/Sebastian.
Okay, dear Kuroshitsuji-knowing part of my flist. (And I think that's almost all of you.) I need some crits on this unfinished work of er, art. SPOILERS FOR SEASON II in case if there's someone who still hasn't seen the end of it.
I need to know how OOC I made Sebastian. This part is Hannah/Sebastian, but the tables are going to turn in the second part.
Word count: 2112
Rating: PG+
Ghost of a Rose
They meet again.
Centuries have passed, millions of human lives have dwindled away, and the world has greatly changed when they meet again. He has retained little of his former grace and magnificence: a haunted look in his eyes, an eternal longing for something unspoken which he cannot attain. She has changed only a little bit, though not in his eyes. To him, she is completely different now than when they had initially met; while in reality she has remained much the same, if only wiser now.
They meet, eye to eye. For a moment they only stand there, sizing each other up. She knows the look in his eyes, though he tries to hide it, knows and smiles lightly.
"You lived."
She tilts her head in a confirmatory nod, but doesn't elaborate; doesn't gloat, seeing his poor state. She just stands there before him in her demonic attire. With great displeasure he finds that he can no longer compare.
"You still serve him."
Not a question, he notes and hates her. Because it's her - the one who made it happen; the one who fulfilled the most demonic of contracts. The ultimate. The forbidden. The one punishable by Lucifer himself. And yet here she stands - liberated and free to roam as she desires.
"Sebastian Michaelis."
His name burns through him like a spear, like the mark of an eternally chained demon. She bears no name in contrast, nothing to call her. Well-fed, but without a current contract. He can feel the power emanating from her - the one he used to know as Hannah Anafeloz.
"Still serving a cruel little master who now feeds on human souls and leaves you starving."
A cold chill runs down Sebastian's back and he hasn't had that too often in his life. Maybe all of once when he witnessed the power of a real angel, not the joke Angela had been. A genderless being of light and goodwill whose presence had made him double over and whose name had made his tongue shrivel up and wilt, unable to even bear the sound of it. He had been young and foolish back then and it had been centuries since another truly holy being had come down to earth. This feeling was very similar to that one. If she knew, so did the others. He had been a great demon once, feared and respected, even among the ranks of his own kind. Who, it seemed, were all mocking him now if the way she looked at him was anything to go by.
"Will you cling desperately to your aesthetics until they erode you from existence?" she asks impassively and stares him straight in the eye, but he cannot bear her gaze for long; not anymore.
Aesthetics are all that is left for him in this world. Aesthetics, and an eternal contract which saps him.
"How much does he give you? A soul per century?"
He can feel her eyes burning down on him and hates himself for being unable to look up, to straighten himself and shrug her off the same way he had done once, when her name was still Hannah Anafeloz.
He doesn't know what compels him to answer her.
"A quarter." His tongue barely moves, creating words in a language he can barely speak, as it is not one he uses to obey his master's orders. "Soul," he adds, and his voice drops even lower until it is a mere sound with no discernible syllables.
Hannah says and does nothing for a while. When she finally moves, Sebastian is startled to feel her nails score his cheek and nudge his chin up. She tries to examine the faded hellfire in his eyes, but Sebastian slaps her hand away and snarls at her to stay away. She smiles, her face splitting in a knowing grin.
"Would you like to be liberated?"
Sebastian stares at her, completely speechless.
"Do you want to be liberated?"
Does he? Sebastian no longer knows. The contract binding him to his little master is not eternal. Or wouldn't be if his aesthetics were not the deciding ones in the way he chose to exist.
"How did you survive?" he asks instead. He will not, cannot ask anything else right now. He cannot think about anything else, about himself and who he was, once upon a time when her name was still Hannah Anafeloz. He clings to that notion because it is the last clear point of reference in his life, one before everything blurred into perpetual starvation.
"Death did not want me."
Sebastian glowers. It is a vague answer, but she is a demon and won't give a straight reply unless she deems it necessary.
"Is he alive too?" he almost snarls, remembering the one who had started it all. Claude Faustus. He should be nameless now.
"No." And there is something like a small wonder - or is that amusement? - in her voice. "When I woke, I found that I still lived, but he was no longer."
At least in this Sebastian can take some solace. No one else would come around to taunt him. No one else to mock and ridicule him but his little master who was growing more and more prolific by the day, raking in soul after soul.
"You did not answer," she reminds him, but he has no answer, only questions to shield himself from the undeniable.
"Why are you here?"
"You killed my servants," she states flatly.
"You got them involved," he snaps back before adding a thoughtful, "So they were yours, after all. I though he didn't have the might..."
She hums thoughtfully.
"Neither had you."
He takes offence and makes it known.
"Many offered to pledge allegiance. I had no interest, or the need for pawns. I was quite capable of handling everything alone. Of course," he smiles quite viciously, and bitterly besides, "a more fragile being..."
"You were," she laughs, interrupting him. "You were once before. Now there is not a single worm in the underworld who would approach you."
"And yet here you stand," he bites back and the fire burns within him anew. If he is lower than a worm in the hierarchy of Hell, then what is she now? She who died and came back again, she who committed the sin of allowing a human soul to transform into something it wasn't supposed to become, ever. Souls were food: nothing more, nothing less.
She sizes him up briefly and decides to go with the truth.
"I need servants, and there is no one who would match my requirements."
"Aren't you aiming too high?"
"Aren't you looking too low?"
During all this they have remained still: two unmovable mountains in the rapids of eternity, and behind her there is storm, but behind him - empty seas of salt, sand, and desolation. His pride and aesthetics speak louder than his hunger and he would rather kill her than become her servant, exchanging one immortal master for another. She reads the answer in his eyes and smirks.
Sebastian's little master is stirring - a sign that he has not yet fully crossed over - and Hannah needs to depart. She leans in to Sebastian's ear to give him parting words to consider.
"I still have it with me."
If she came like a whisper on the wind, then she tears away like a typhoon, making her presence known and Sebastian struggles to suppress the flinch from both her words - which he hopes to have misunderstood - and his master's reaction. Through Alois Trancy and his contract Ciel also knows Hannah's signature and though it was only a brief moment centuries ago, he has the ability to recognise it. Whether he has or not, Ciel doesn't comment on it. He merely stares at Sebastian with unreadable eyes and his butler can only guess at what is on his mind.
Just having woken after a three-days sleep after the fulfilling of his latest contract, Ciel already desires a new one. He has noticed that with each passing century, with each fulfilled contract the time he spends sleeping away the exhaustion shortens. Three more and he will not need to sleep at all just like Sebastian, Ciel calculates. Sebastian has taken notice of it as well and knows that his conversion to a full-blooded demon is drawing close. He thinks of this as he serves his master food on empty platters and pours hot water from a teapot which hasn't seen fire in entirely too long. He dresses his master, taking special care of laces and tricky buttons, making him highly presentable before listening to his orders for the day - all mundane tasks while his little master chooses his next contract. He refuses to be summoned like a dog - he'd had enough of that with the Queen of England - and now he prefers to be the one to handpick his next entertainment, taking after Sebastian and failing only a little bit. After all, Sebastian is still the one to go about all the mundane tasks the new contractor wishes to be done and which Ciel has never known how to do and would never lower himself to even attempt at. He is still lord Phantomhive, even in this new life.
Sebastian thinks of all this for the next month. Hannah does not show herself before him again, but her words linger behind and he is almost certain that he has understood her parting message. He cannot suppress a shudder when thinking about it, but whether it is disgust, hatred, or anticipation he cannot tell. Either which is fine. Either which gives him something to mull over; and a thought which has already settled itself in his mind is starting to grow and form.
The month passes and the quarter of a soul which he was promised is never delivered. He hides his disappointment and does not question his master; has learned not to.
And one day, Hannah is back. Or rather - he knows that she is nearby and goes to seek her out. She has two demons at her side and when Sebastian arrives at her place, her new servants are finishing up the pieces of a soul which she'd split between the three of them. So she has not waited on him - that thought stings a little, but it is a pleasant kind of pain, one which he had almost forgotten existed. The look passing over Sebastian's features is not lost on her, but she does not comment, does not jeer. She turns her back on the two young demons and directs all of her attention to him, waiting for him to speak first, but Sebastian cannot find the right words. He'd thought of many on his way here, but nothing had seemed appropriate.
"Do you," he starts and stumbles several times, his own voice betraying him. He is broken; breaking, and she is the only one who tells him that he can seal all the cracks again. "Do you really have it?"
Hannah does not smile, does not say a word. She only nods.
"Then…" There is desperate hope in the way he says that word.
She doesn't promise anything. She opens her arms for him and he takes a step forward and collapses against her, shaking in her embrace like a child, and there are no words strong enough to describe his disgust with himself at that moment. He hates himself for letting her hold him like this, he hates her for creating the contract which dragged him down, and he hates the two young demons who stare at him as though he is some sort of an amusing creature. But he is desperate and hopeful, and breaking, and... it's such a human thing - to feel - those words come to him from somewhere in the past. He has heard them before, but he cannot quite remember where, so he only glares at the two demon children. Earlier he would have considered them being naught but mere vermin. After a while they turn away and return to devouring the last crumbs of their meal.
Meanwhile, Hannah has begun speaking. Her voice is low, meant only for his ears, and with her every word Sebastian finds himself sinking deeper and deeper. Her voice is what he remembers it to be - slow poison and hissing of a snake, but right now he cannot live without that. He needs to poison himself thoroughly to complete what he is setting out to do. For he is no longer a magnificent demon on par with the firstborns, the ones chased out of heaven. He is Sebastian Michaelis - a wretched butler, seeking liberation.
I need to know how OOC I made Sebastian. This part is Hannah/Sebastian, but the tables are going to turn in the second part.
Word count: 2112
Rating: PG+
Ghost of a Rose
They meet again.
Centuries have passed, millions of human lives have dwindled away, and the world has greatly changed when they meet again. He has retained little of his former grace and magnificence: a haunted look in his eyes, an eternal longing for something unspoken which he cannot attain. She has changed only a little bit, though not in his eyes. To him, she is completely different now than when they had initially met; while in reality she has remained much the same, if only wiser now.
They meet, eye to eye. For a moment they only stand there, sizing each other up. She knows the look in his eyes, though he tries to hide it, knows and smiles lightly.
"You lived."
She tilts her head in a confirmatory nod, but doesn't elaborate; doesn't gloat, seeing his poor state. She just stands there before him in her demonic attire. With great displeasure he finds that he can no longer compare.
"You still serve him."
Not a question, he notes and hates her. Because it's her - the one who made it happen; the one who fulfilled the most demonic of contracts. The ultimate. The forbidden. The one punishable by Lucifer himself. And yet here she stands - liberated and free to roam as she desires.
"Sebastian Michaelis."
His name burns through him like a spear, like the mark of an eternally chained demon. She bears no name in contrast, nothing to call her. Well-fed, but without a current contract. He can feel the power emanating from her - the one he used to know as Hannah Anafeloz.
"Still serving a cruel little master who now feeds on human souls and leaves you starving."
A cold chill runs down Sebastian's back and he hasn't had that too often in his life. Maybe all of once when he witnessed the power of a real angel, not the joke Angela had been. A genderless being of light and goodwill whose presence had made him double over and whose name had made his tongue shrivel up and wilt, unable to even bear the sound of it. He had been young and foolish back then and it had been centuries since another truly holy being had come down to earth. This feeling was very similar to that one. If she knew, so did the others. He had been a great demon once, feared and respected, even among the ranks of his own kind. Who, it seemed, were all mocking him now if the way she looked at him was anything to go by.
"Will you cling desperately to your aesthetics until they erode you from existence?" she asks impassively and stares him straight in the eye, but he cannot bear her gaze for long; not anymore.
Aesthetics are all that is left for him in this world. Aesthetics, and an eternal contract which saps him.
"How much does he give you? A soul per century?"
He can feel her eyes burning down on him and hates himself for being unable to look up, to straighten himself and shrug her off the same way he had done once, when her name was still Hannah Anafeloz.
He doesn't know what compels him to answer her.
"A quarter." His tongue barely moves, creating words in a language he can barely speak, as it is not one he uses to obey his master's orders. "Soul," he adds, and his voice drops even lower until it is a mere sound with no discernible syllables.
Hannah says and does nothing for a while. When she finally moves, Sebastian is startled to feel her nails score his cheek and nudge his chin up. She tries to examine the faded hellfire in his eyes, but Sebastian slaps her hand away and snarls at her to stay away. She smiles, her face splitting in a knowing grin.
"Would you like to be liberated?"
Sebastian stares at her, completely speechless.
"Do you want to be liberated?"
Does he? Sebastian no longer knows. The contract binding him to his little master is not eternal. Or wouldn't be if his aesthetics were not the deciding ones in the way he chose to exist.
"How did you survive?" he asks instead. He will not, cannot ask anything else right now. He cannot think about anything else, about himself and who he was, once upon a time when her name was still Hannah Anafeloz. He clings to that notion because it is the last clear point of reference in his life, one before everything blurred into perpetual starvation.
"Death did not want me."
Sebastian glowers. It is a vague answer, but she is a demon and won't give a straight reply unless she deems it necessary.
"Is he alive too?" he almost snarls, remembering the one who had started it all. Claude Faustus. He should be nameless now.
"No." And there is something like a small wonder - or is that amusement? - in her voice. "When I woke, I found that I still lived, but he was no longer."
At least in this Sebastian can take some solace. No one else would come around to taunt him. No one else to mock and ridicule him but his little master who was growing more and more prolific by the day, raking in soul after soul.
"You did not answer," she reminds him, but he has no answer, only questions to shield himself from the undeniable.
"Why are you here?"
"You killed my servants," she states flatly.
"You got them involved," he snaps back before adding a thoughtful, "So they were yours, after all. I though he didn't have the might..."
She hums thoughtfully.
"Neither had you."
He takes offence and makes it known.
"Many offered to pledge allegiance. I had no interest, or the need for pawns. I was quite capable of handling everything alone. Of course," he smiles quite viciously, and bitterly besides, "a more fragile being..."
"You were," she laughs, interrupting him. "You were once before. Now there is not a single worm in the underworld who would approach you."
"And yet here you stand," he bites back and the fire burns within him anew. If he is lower than a worm in the hierarchy of Hell, then what is she now? She who died and came back again, she who committed the sin of allowing a human soul to transform into something it wasn't supposed to become, ever. Souls were food: nothing more, nothing less.
She sizes him up briefly and decides to go with the truth.
"I need servants, and there is no one who would match my requirements."
"Aren't you aiming too high?"
"Aren't you looking too low?"
During all this they have remained still: two unmovable mountains in the rapids of eternity, and behind her there is storm, but behind him - empty seas of salt, sand, and desolation. His pride and aesthetics speak louder than his hunger and he would rather kill her than become her servant, exchanging one immortal master for another. She reads the answer in his eyes and smirks.
Sebastian's little master is stirring - a sign that he has not yet fully crossed over - and Hannah needs to depart. She leans in to Sebastian's ear to give him parting words to consider.
"I still have it with me."
If she came like a whisper on the wind, then she tears away like a typhoon, making her presence known and Sebastian struggles to suppress the flinch from both her words - which he hopes to have misunderstood - and his master's reaction. Through Alois Trancy and his contract Ciel also knows Hannah's signature and though it was only a brief moment centuries ago, he has the ability to recognise it. Whether he has or not, Ciel doesn't comment on it. He merely stares at Sebastian with unreadable eyes and his butler can only guess at what is on his mind.
Just having woken after a three-days sleep after the fulfilling of his latest contract, Ciel already desires a new one. He has noticed that with each passing century, with each fulfilled contract the time he spends sleeping away the exhaustion shortens. Three more and he will not need to sleep at all just like Sebastian, Ciel calculates. Sebastian has taken notice of it as well and knows that his conversion to a full-blooded demon is drawing close. He thinks of this as he serves his master food on empty platters and pours hot water from a teapot which hasn't seen fire in entirely too long. He dresses his master, taking special care of laces and tricky buttons, making him highly presentable before listening to his orders for the day - all mundane tasks while his little master chooses his next contract. He refuses to be summoned like a dog - he'd had enough of that with the Queen of England - and now he prefers to be the one to handpick his next entertainment, taking after Sebastian and failing only a little bit. After all, Sebastian is still the one to go about all the mundane tasks the new contractor wishes to be done and which Ciel has never known how to do and would never lower himself to even attempt at. He is still lord Phantomhive, even in this new life.
Sebastian thinks of all this for the next month. Hannah does not show herself before him again, but her words linger behind and he is almost certain that he has understood her parting message. He cannot suppress a shudder when thinking about it, but whether it is disgust, hatred, or anticipation he cannot tell. Either which is fine. Either which gives him something to mull over; and a thought which has already settled itself in his mind is starting to grow and form.
The month passes and the quarter of a soul which he was promised is never delivered. He hides his disappointment and does not question his master; has learned not to.
And one day, Hannah is back. Or rather - he knows that she is nearby and goes to seek her out. She has two demons at her side and when Sebastian arrives at her place, her new servants are finishing up the pieces of a soul which she'd split between the three of them. So she has not waited on him - that thought stings a little, but it is a pleasant kind of pain, one which he had almost forgotten existed. The look passing over Sebastian's features is not lost on her, but she does not comment, does not jeer. She turns her back on the two young demons and directs all of her attention to him, waiting for him to speak first, but Sebastian cannot find the right words. He'd thought of many on his way here, but nothing had seemed appropriate.
"Do you," he starts and stumbles several times, his own voice betraying him. He is broken; breaking, and she is the only one who tells him that he can seal all the cracks again. "Do you really have it?"
Hannah does not smile, does not say a word. She only nods.
"Then…" There is desperate hope in the way he says that word.
She doesn't promise anything. She opens her arms for him and he takes a step forward and collapses against her, shaking in her embrace like a child, and there are no words strong enough to describe his disgust with himself at that moment. He hates himself for letting her hold him like this, he hates her for creating the contract which dragged him down, and he hates the two young demons who stare at him as though he is some sort of an amusing creature. But he is desperate and hopeful, and breaking, and... it's such a human thing - to feel - those words come to him from somewhere in the past. He has heard them before, but he cannot quite remember where, so he only glares at the two demon children. Earlier he would have considered them being naught but mere vermin. After a while they turn away and return to devouring the last crumbs of their meal.
Meanwhile, Hannah has begun speaking. Her voice is low, meant only for his ears, and with her every word Sebastian finds himself sinking deeper and deeper. Her voice is what he remembers it to be - slow poison and hissing of a snake, but right now he cannot live without that. He needs to poison himself thoroughly to complete what he is setting out to do. For he is no longer a magnificent demon on par with the firstborns, the ones chased out of heaven. He is Sebastian Michaelis - a wretched butler, seeking liberation.