fanfic: the devil in the flask [6/12]
Disclaimers: I do not own.
Ratings/Warnings: M. Flat-out M for mature (as well as explicit) scenes, gothic themes, disturbing and occasionally gory imagery, and all-around delicious Kuroshitsuji darkness. Makes references to characters all across the map of manga, anime, etc.
Pairings: Sebastian/Ciel, Ciel/Lizzy if you squint later, Sebastian/everyone, and too many others on the side that don’t really make a difference
Summary: we can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy in life is when men are afraid of the light - a family of witches, they say, where the crosses are turned upside down by invisible hands and ravens are sacrificed to the devil, where incest and tragedy and murder prance hand in hand with noble responsibilities and otherworldly elegance, where the man is sighted most often in the company of the current heir of the Phantomhive legacy, the young Earl left a vast estate of enviable value: and that is the boy Ciel Phantomhive
Posted on FF.net here or below:
⌈ the devil in the flask ⌋
chapter six
THE DEVIL IN THE FLASK
†††
10. a demon that is dreaming
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore…
There was the bitter kiss of winter in the air, just slightly assuaged in the halls of the manor by little fires under marble mantles and steaming hot drinks in old Saint-Cloud china. Ice laced the windows. The mist over the pure white snow was like the very manifestation of brumal stealth, and sometimes from the music room came the soft bittersweet melody of Chopin on the pianoforte. It was lachrymose and wistful, like the chords and notes themselves were crying, the voice of sorrow, and Ciel had no doubt that it was his father at the keyboard when the clocks were striking midnight and the winter wind howled along the eaves of the house.
It was January of 1887. Ciel was twelve and still dressed in mourning black, although his mother’s funeral had been almost three months before, and the flames on all the candles shivered by some invisible breath as Sebastian came to him and whispered in his ear: “It’s your father’s move at chess, but I want to play with you again…”
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token, and the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”
Chopin was drifting out of the music room again. Ciel wandered down the hall, running his fingers idly along the line between scarlet papering and coffered wood. The floorboards creaked under his tiny steps and the lamplight danced as if by some unknown draft.
“I won’t play with you again,” he denied firmly, refusing to grace Sebastian with eye contact as Sebastian moved from mirror to mirror he passed, following him in the glass. He could feel the spiritual energy crystallizing in the air.
“Why!” Sebastian demanded, like a lost child. “Why won’t you?”
“I can hear you when you’re not in my room,” Ciel whispered tersely, face straight. “I can hear you laughing and screaming at my father.”
But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only that one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
“You know if you play again, I’ll leave your daddy alone,” Sebastian coaxed, that lustrous sadness shimmering in his dark eyes. For a moment, Ciel was caught up by them. He stood staring at the reflection of the world in the mirror. In the reflection, Sebastian stood right next to him. But Ciel was alone in the hallway, heart fluttering sickly, and Sebastian only existed in the window of the looking-glass. And he looked so exquisitely sad, so lonely and helpless…
Just a few yards away in the music room, the Chopin stopped. The chords shivered in the air, violently chopped short with a dissonant slam on all the keys. It was a jarring, violent sound and Ciel jumped.
Vincent Phantomhive came wandering out of the music room, his eyes empty. When his gaze lit upon Ciel, he smiled, a weak excuse compared to his normal charm and radiance, because despite dimples and soft expression, his eyes were dead. Curious, how a man could be not alive, yet not dead, but something of a living ghost.
The floor creaked under his father’s feet and Ciel was a little puzzled when he hoisted him up to his hip as if he were still a small child. His father smelled like tobacco smoke, and strong brandy, and he stood there holding him for a moment before he pressed a kiss to Ciel’s temple and whispered, “‘And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming, and the lamplight o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor. And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted nevermore!’”
Ciel found his father two hours later in the claw-foot bath of the master washroom, his head cocked back and the water of his bath turned vibrant red from the deep open gashes in his wrists. The blade of the razor floated between his knees, and all the strength washed out of Ciel in one trembling breath.
He sank down to his haunches, and then fell to sit on the yellowing tile floor. He could not scream. His voice had withered away. Instead he felt an involuntary tightening of his face, as if all expression had begun to rot and rendered him stiff and dumb. He stared at his father, dead in the bath, and he realized he’d just been waiting for this moment. From the instant his father had hugged him in the hallway to the closing of the washroom door, unlocked, Ciel had known intuitively-truly, out of sheer instinct, a state of being unintentionally in tune with these foreshadowing shreds of time-that he’d have to go into the washroom before dinner, and he’d most likely find his father lifeless. And what had he been talking about, quoting Poe? Had he been referring to Sebastian?
Sebastian had driven his father to this point.
“I’ll be your mamma and daddy now, I promise you…” Sebastian whispered, so sweetly, so compassionately, but Ciel closed his eyes to keep from seeing him. “I’ll take care of you-”
“I can take care of myself!” Ciel shrieked, voice cracking.
“You can’t even button your own shirt-”
“Go away!”
Ciel slapped him-boxed him hard in the ear-and he was disoriented, startled by the way it felt like he’d hit someone solid, and then he bristled for the spirit to react badly. But nothing happened. Sebastian looked surprised and injured. Then, begrudgingly, he left.
Ciel was alone in the washroom with his father’s body.
He waited. The silence was overbearing, the drip of the water from the faucet steadily driving him mad. His father’s dead eyes stared unseeingly at the coffered ceiling, paintings of angels and goddesses dancing from wall to wall-Juno, Jupiter, Minerva, Venus, Diana, a cluster of putti in their own little mural, each oval fresco nested in a frame of elaborate enamel carvings like fashion plates-and Ciel waited, wondering if his father’s spirit might show up yet or not. He’d already seen his mother once, standing at the window holding Miss Beast’s hand, but the moment his mother had met his stare she’d disappeared in the blink of an eye.
No spirit came. Not even Sebastian again. Crying, Ciel went downstairs to fetch Madame Red.
The death certificate said that Vincent Phantomhive took his own life by a fatal slash to both wrists on the night of January 14th, 1887, a month after his son’s birthday and two and a half months after his wife’s grisly death. Rachel’s funeral had been grand and without incident, unless sightings of Ciel Phantomhive skipping along with a dark-haired man outside St. James’s counted as incident, but Vincent Phantomhive’s funeral was elaborate and luxurious. The church overflowed with flowers. The sky was mother-of-pearl, a terrible storm descending on London with the most rain falling near Piccadilly. The coffin was lined in cream silk and filled with roses, and some already started gossip about “the future Earl and Lady” when Ciel and Lizzy stood arm-in-arm peering down into the casket solemnly. Both held a rowan branch in their pocket. Whispers circulated at the funeral that a guilty conscience had made Vincent do it, after getting away with poisoning his own wife. Others yet claimed it had “only been a matter of time”, that the Phantomhives were “manic like that”. And then the thoughts turned to the poor orphan boy Ciel, and what was in store for him. What of that man, then, the one like a butler who was ready to tend to Ciel’s tears should they ever fall before the public?
There was a decoration ceremony in the ballroom of Buckingham Palace. It seemed perfect scandal to ordain a child as Earl, but that was how it had been outlined in Vincent Phantomhive’s last will and testament, and hadn’t Louis XV become king of France at the age of five?
The day before the Phantomhives returned to the country manor after the ceremony and subsequent banquet, a footman found a disturbing message carved into the wallpaper of the Berkeley Square drawing room:
one by one they fall
and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men
will never, ever be enough to pick them up and put them back together again
How ironic that it was not a verse of Poe.
---
11. hate and love are two sides of the same emotion
The first time he made love with Sebastian, he wasn’t even totally aware of it.
There was a marked difference between making love with someone and having someone make love to you, which was all Ciel knew up until that year-Sebastian, making love to him, an unintentionally one-sided sort of act that involved a lot of clenching one’s teeth and fingers curling in the sheets and covering one’s face with the pillow to muffle the slightly frightened gasps and whimpers as like an incubus the man pierced him with his throbbing member, so torn between the pain and the puzzled prepubescent pleasure. It wasn’t forced, though. Confused as he was, Ciel allowed it. He secretly liked it when Sebastian cradled him against his chest and moaned into his ear, “My beloved…”
It was Christmas of 1885, which meant he was still assigned to his bed after Sebastian had maimed his right eye and Uncle Diedrich shined a light to check for healing every morning and every night, and Ciel was ten years old but the pleasures of the flesh were far from mysteries to him. During the season, he went on adventures with his father through crepuscular London, watching and analyzing and learning the important lessons of life. He’d woken up in the middle of the night three conscious times now with his own little arousal, stimulated by some dream or perhaps a ghostly hand, and he could never reach a wet finish like grown men could but the ticklish feel of his fingers was bewitching. Oh, his soul was corrupt, he’d go to hell soon for sure.
Thus, the first time he made love with Sebastian, he wasn’t totally alert to it.
He was tangled in his warm comforters, and the bandages from his eye had been strewn across the bedroom floor. He awoke to it, from a feverish sleep, his back arching up off the bed and into a sudden assault of vexing pleasure. A scriptural verse circled round and round in his head as if whispered there by some secret voice-
The father whose sons you are is the Devil; and you desire to do what gives him pleasure…
-and his heart fluttered below his throat as his breath came in short little gasps. Dizzied, his arousal was unbearably delicate and sensitive under the butterfly-kiss of the sheets. Dirty, dirty boy he was. It seemed he was dreaming for all this sweet disorientation, and was it a man’s body hovering over him or was it truly his own body this time, deceiving him into thinking he was not alone and writhing with a child’s confused, infantile delight? No, this was an innocent dream. A dream of someone loving him tenderly-a new love, a pure love, a love very different from the love his mother and father and family gave him, a love that made his soul shiver-and this lover was kissing him as their hands stroked his boyish chest and made his nipples cherry pink, pinching and suckling them without relent. He was helpless to the keen sensations, curled up and shuddering in a ball on the bed. He came with his tiny little sex throbbing in thin air, lost in that torturous place of nascent maturity between child and adult, only he was awake! He knew that he was! Like fog at daybreak pierced by silvery morning light, the dreamlike daze swiftly dissolved, and it was Sebastian crushing him to the bed in an amorous embrace, slipping into him flushed and stiff, slick with his own fluids, but Ciel knew Sebastian’s presence by heart and the man hadn’t been there moments before! He would have bet his life on it!
Ciel cried out in shock, eyes widening. His back arched and his body still quivered with the last of his first real orgasm, and Sebastian clapped a hand over his mouth to stifle the scream. Panic burst in Ciel’s veins as the struggle and aggression sent him reeling back to that cold terrifying moment when Sebastian’s tongue had plunged savagely into his eye. No, no, no, he thought. But this wasn’t like that-no, this was their special exchange, not rape but love bites and grown-up kisses, dangerously addictive sensations, and he had the sticky stuff all over his thighs and fingers after he rolled closer to Sebastian’s chest, shivering and gasping for more. Was there a verse in the scripture about bedding the devil? Didn’t matter. He was going to hell either way.
“We’ll walk through the fire and brimstone together,” Sebastian whispered against his clammy forehead, and Ciel gasped again. He moaned. He choked on his breath, actually, trembling in Sebastian’s arms and so terrified of liking the way it felt to make love with the man, but the chords of pleasure reverberating through him were much too distracting to let him worry about Sebastian reading his mind just yet. He was consumed by the heat of the moment, undiluted and untainted, and his child’s instinct distilled it as love in its purest form.
It was six weeks later that Ciel saw Sebastian in similar positions with that wild-eyed specter Miss Beast.
He felt very betrayed.
Rather, he felt as though his heart had been ripped out and stomped on and given back to him bruised, bloody, and broken.
Sebastian didn’t seem to understand why Ciel didn’t want to see him afterwards. He stared at him longingly from his ghostly side of every mirror Ciel walked by until finally Ciel asked Maylene to cover them all. If intelligent entities could seemingly copulate with humans, what kept them from being intimate with their own kind? Surely Ciel had not supposed loyalty would be the gravitating force. But he was only ten, and he could not articulate these brooding thoughts, so he just yelled and cried and ignored the man, and fell asleep in his father’s office on his father’s leather armchair before a cozy fire with Gulliver’s Travels on his knee and his father at the thick walnut desk, and it really wasn’t any wonder that the sense of betrayal went away, irrespective of such obstinacy, with a sigh of acquiescence and feigned tedium when Sebastian took him by the chin a few days after and gave him a kiss filled with such love, it foolishly slipped Ciel’s mind why he hated him in the first place. He couldn’t stop his own heart from yearning, could he? Who would do that purposefully? The way it felt when Sebastian loved him far outweighed the pain when Sebastian did things like ruin his eye or say sneaky, contrived things with a charming smile.
Ah, the fantasies of childhood.
The haunting truth was that it was a diabolical dance in which he and Sebastian were engaged, and the inevitable end was disaster. Like the most passionate and jealous of lovers, they tested each other. They pleased each other. They infuriated each other and impassioned each other. It was a fragile, primal part of the Phantomhive family, interwoven throughout the generations until one could not exist without the other. The man and Phantomhive blood were steadfastly connected, and the stars seemed they wouldn’t have allowed any other design in the Phantomhive family but for the whisper of My beloved… and a scarred eye that meant prophecy. Oh, the black magic of fate.
“I hate you,” Ciel breathed against Sebastian’s ear, clutching onto his head above the neck.
Sebastian smiled, so human-looking with that sentience and seduction. Even his temporarily solid form felt warm and material, curled up with Ciel in the nest of blankets before the fire on the master bedroom floor. If Ciel pressed his hand to his chest, would he feel a heartbeat, or something more like the wind, air buzzing through tightly-gathered energy…? “But hate is such a strenuous, confusing emotion, isn’t it?” Sebastian purred, running a thumb lovingly along Ciel’s eyelashes. “Isn’t love better?”
Ciel shook his head, away from Sebastian’s hand. “Hate doesn’t confuse me,” he whispered, mouth dry. “Love does.”
The desire when Sebastian’s fingers curled between his legs was so great, it was irreverent. Oh, to have this feeling forever-one might believe you could live off such pleasure. The cupid’s tension buckled and as the fire shifted under the wide mantle, Sebastian rolled to his back and brought Ciel on top of him, and the evident outline of his arousal was hard and hot against Ciel’s buttocks.
Sebastian pressed both hands to Ciel’s face. He met his eyes, eloquent of heartbreak and luscious desire, and Ciel shivered to peer directly into that ruddy stare. There the man went again, preternatural projection, somehow gathering strength to share his own sensations with Ciel. For a brief moment of unbidden shivering acuity, Ciel felt what Sebastian felt: his own small body, supple and hot, and so very erotic with his thighs and ass unendurably warm on a ready erection, back arched and fingers curled with all the grace of a seductive little prince, dark hair and pale heart-shaped face and such a tender look of wickedness like an imp wholly aware of and wholly content with his own damnation. God, was it stimulating. God, did his heart race. He was throbbing with impatience and he wanted to rip into this embittered saint with a pretty boy’s face, he wanted to taste that dark and twisted, tortured soul, all the trauma and bruises in its strata, feel it between them as their wavelengths blended-
Oh, enough of that teasing. Ciel wanted it. He wanted that throbbing heat inside him. He wanted that fire in Sebastian’s stare to fill him up, and when Sebastian’s tongue explored his mouth, Ciel moaned and dug his hips down, begging for more.
Surely Sebastian understood that hate and love were only two sides of the same emotion, corroding the psyche with ravenous intent. It was deplorable. It was beautiful. The consummate lust was like the string of a violin being consistently tightened, tauter and tauter until finally it snapped and Ciel’s entire body quaked as he came, tacky viscous release and fluttering muscles. He locked his arms around Sebastian’s neck, hissing into his ear: “I am damned. I was born damned. I realize that. So love me while I can still feel love, if you insist that it’s so un-confusing…”
Sebastian crushed him to his chest and kissed him deeply. Momentarily, Ciel smelled his sweet skin and his warm hair as if the man were flesh and blood. He was feverish and shaking still from the climax, tailbone already sore and Sebastian’s release burning him from the inside out.
Oh, he was damned.
He was incurably, inexorably damned.
He was in love with the devil, and the love was so delicious. It was a veritable ache, the ache of ineffable hope and tragedy commingling as one.
---
To be beloved is all I need, and whom I love, I love indeed.
---
The chronicles of the Phantomhive family will be continued shortly…
back to chapter five ††† on to chapter seven
Ratings/Warnings: M. Flat-out M for mature (as well as explicit) scenes, gothic themes, disturbing and occasionally gory imagery, and all-around delicious Kuroshitsuji darkness. Makes references to characters all across the map of manga, anime, etc.
Pairings: Sebastian/Ciel, Ciel/Lizzy if you squint later, Sebastian/everyone, and too many others on the side that don’t really make a difference
Summary: we can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy in life is when men are afraid of the light - a family of witches, they say, where the crosses are turned upside down by invisible hands and ravens are sacrificed to the devil, where incest and tragedy and murder prance hand in hand with noble responsibilities and otherworldly elegance, where the man is sighted most often in the company of the current heir of the Phantomhive legacy, the young Earl left a vast estate of enviable value: and that is the boy Ciel Phantomhive
Posted on FF.net here or below:
⌈ the devil in the flask ⌋
chapter six
THE DEVIL IN THE FLASK
†††
10. a demon that is dreaming
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore…
There was the bitter kiss of winter in the air, just slightly assuaged in the halls of the manor by little fires under marble mantles and steaming hot drinks in old Saint-Cloud china. Ice laced the windows. The mist over the pure white snow was like the very manifestation of brumal stealth, and sometimes from the music room came the soft bittersweet melody of Chopin on the pianoforte. It was lachrymose and wistful, like the chords and notes themselves were crying, the voice of sorrow, and Ciel had no doubt that it was his father at the keyboard when the clocks were striking midnight and the winter wind howled along the eaves of the house.
It was January of 1887. Ciel was twelve and still dressed in mourning black, although his mother’s funeral had been almost three months before, and the flames on all the candles shivered by some invisible breath as Sebastian came to him and whispered in his ear: “It’s your father’s move at chess, but I want to play with you again…”
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token, and the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”
Chopin was drifting out of the music room again. Ciel wandered down the hall, running his fingers idly along the line between scarlet papering and coffered wood. The floorboards creaked under his tiny steps and the lamplight danced as if by some unknown draft.
“I won’t play with you again,” he denied firmly, refusing to grace Sebastian with eye contact as Sebastian moved from mirror to mirror he passed, following him in the glass. He could feel the spiritual energy crystallizing in the air.
“Why!” Sebastian demanded, like a lost child. “Why won’t you?”
“I can hear you when you’re not in my room,” Ciel whispered tersely, face straight. “I can hear you laughing and screaming at my father.”
But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only that one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
“You know if you play again, I’ll leave your daddy alone,” Sebastian coaxed, that lustrous sadness shimmering in his dark eyes. For a moment, Ciel was caught up by them. He stood staring at the reflection of the world in the mirror. In the reflection, Sebastian stood right next to him. But Ciel was alone in the hallway, heart fluttering sickly, and Sebastian only existed in the window of the looking-glass. And he looked so exquisitely sad, so lonely and helpless…
Just a few yards away in the music room, the Chopin stopped. The chords shivered in the air, violently chopped short with a dissonant slam on all the keys. It was a jarring, violent sound and Ciel jumped.
Vincent Phantomhive came wandering out of the music room, his eyes empty. When his gaze lit upon Ciel, he smiled, a weak excuse compared to his normal charm and radiance, because despite dimples and soft expression, his eyes were dead. Curious, how a man could be not alive, yet not dead, but something of a living ghost.
The floor creaked under his father’s feet and Ciel was a little puzzled when he hoisted him up to his hip as if he were still a small child. His father smelled like tobacco smoke, and strong brandy, and he stood there holding him for a moment before he pressed a kiss to Ciel’s temple and whispered, “‘And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming, and the lamplight o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor. And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted nevermore!’”
Ciel found his father two hours later in the claw-foot bath of the master washroom, his head cocked back and the water of his bath turned vibrant red from the deep open gashes in his wrists. The blade of the razor floated between his knees, and all the strength washed out of Ciel in one trembling breath.
He sank down to his haunches, and then fell to sit on the yellowing tile floor. He could not scream. His voice had withered away. Instead he felt an involuntary tightening of his face, as if all expression had begun to rot and rendered him stiff and dumb. He stared at his father, dead in the bath, and he realized he’d just been waiting for this moment. From the instant his father had hugged him in the hallway to the closing of the washroom door, unlocked, Ciel had known intuitively-truly, out of sheer instinct, a state of being unintentionally in tune with these foreshadowing shreds of time-that he’d have to go into the washroom before dinner, and he’d most likely find his father lifeless. And what had he been talking about, quoting Poe? Had he been referring to Sebastian?
Sebastian had driven his father to this point.
“I’ll be your mamma and daddy now, I promise you…” Sebastian whispered, so sweetly, so compassionately, but Ciel closed his eyes to keep from seeing him. “I’ll take care of you-”
“I can take care of myself!” Ciel shrieked, voice cracking.
“You can’t even button your own shirt-”
“Go away!”
Ciel slapped him-boxed him hard in the ear-and he was disoriented, startled by the way it felt like he’d hit someone solid, and then he bristled for the spirit to react badly. But nothing happened. Sebastian looked surprised and injured. Then, begrudgingly, he left.
Ciel was alone in the washroom with his father’s body.
He waited. The silence was overbearing, the drip of the water from the faucet steadily driving him mad. His father’s dead eyes stared unseeingly at the coffered ceiling, paintings of angels and goddesses dancing from wall to wall-Juno, Jupiter, Minerva, Venus, Diana, a cluster of putti in their own little mural, each oval fresco nested in a frame of elaborate enamel carvings like fashion plates-and Ciel waited, wondering if his father’s spirit might show up yet or not. He’d already seen his mother once, standing at the window holding Miss Beast’s hand, but the moment his mother had met his stare she’d disappeared in the blink of an eye.
No spirit came. Not even Sebastian again. Crying, Ciel went downstairs to fetch Madame Red.
The death certificate said that Vincent Phantomhive took his own life by a fatal slash to both wrists on the night of January 14th, 1887, a month after his son’s birthday and two and a half months after his wife’s grisly death. Rachel’s funeral had been grand and without incident, unless sightings of Ciel Phantomhive skipping along with a dark-haired man outside St. James’s counted as incident, but Vincent Phantomhive’s funeral was elaborate and luxurious. The church overflowed with flowers. The sky was mother-of-pearl, a terrible storm descending on London with the most rain falling near Piccadilly. The coffin was lined in cream silk and filled with roses, and some already started gossip about “the future Earl and Lady” when Ciel and Lizzy stood arm-in-arm peering down into the casket solemnly. Both held a rowan branch in their pocket. Whispers circulated at the funeral that a guilty conscience had made Vincent do it, after getting away with poisoning his own wife. Others yet claimed it had “only been a matter of time”, that the Phantomhives were “manic like that”. And then the thoughts turned to the poor orphan boy Ciel, and what was in store for him. What of that man, then, the one like a butler who was ready to tend to Ciel’s tears should they ever fall before the public?
There was a decoration ceremony in the ballroom of Buckingham Palace. It seemed perfect scandal to ordain a child as Earl, but that was how it had been outlined in Vincent Phantomhive’s last will and testament, and hadn’t Louis XV become king of France at the age of five?
The day before the Phantomhives returned to the country manor after the ceremony and subsequent banquet, a footman found a disturbing message carved into the wallpaper of the Berkeley Square drawing room:
one by one they fall
and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men
will never, ever be enough to pick them up and put them back together again
How ironic that it was not a verse of Poe.
---
11. hate and love are two sides of the same emotion
The first time he made love with Sebastian, he wasn’t even totally aware of it.
There was a marked difference between making love with someone and having someone make love to you, which was all Ciel knew up until that year-Sebastian, making love to him, an unintentionally one-sided sort of act that involved a lot of clenching one’s teeth and fingers curling in the sheets and covering one’s face with the pillow to muffle the slightly frightened gasps and whimpers as like an incubus the man pierced him with his throbbing member, so torn between the pain and the puzzled prepubescent pleasure. It wasn’t forced, though. Confused as he was, Ciel allowed it. He secretly liked it when Sebastian cradled him against his chest and moaned into his ear, “My beloved…”
It was Christmas of 1885, which meant he was still assigned to his bed after Sebastian had maimed his right eye and Uncle Diedrich shined a light to check for healing every morning and every night, and Ciel was ten years old but the pleasures of the flesh were far from mysteries to him. During the season, he went on adventures with his father through crepuscular London, watching and analyzing and learning the important lessons of life. He’d woken up in the middle of the night three conscious times now with his own little arousal, stimulated by some dream or perhaps a ghostly hand, and he could never reach a wet finish like grown men could but the ticklish feel of his fingers was bewitching. Oh, his soul was corrupt, he’d go to hell soon for sure.
Thus, the first time he made love with Sebastian, he wasn’t totally alert to it.
He was tangled in his warm comforters, and the bandages from his eye had been strewn across the bedroom floor. He awoke to it, from a feverish sleep, his back arching up off the bed and into a sudden assault of vexing pleasure. A scriptural verse circled round and round in his head as if whispered there by some secret voice-
The father whose sons you are is the Devil; and you desire to do what gives him pleasure…
-and his heart fluttered below his throat as his breath came in short little gasps. Dizzied, his arousal was unbearably delicate and sensitive under the butterfly-kiss of the sheets. Dirty, dirty boy he was. It seemed he was dreaming for all this sweet disorientation, and was it a man’s body hovering over him or was it truly his own body this time, deceiving him into thinking he was not alone and writhing with a child’s confused, infantile delight? No, this was an innocent dream. A dream of someone loving him tenderly-a new love, a pure love, a love very different from the love his mother and father and family gave him, a love that made his soul shiver-and this lover was kissing him as their hands stroked his boyish chest and made his nipples cherry pink, pinching and suckling them without relent. He was helpless to the keen sensations, curled up and shuddering in a ball on the bed. He came with his tiny little sex throbbing in thin air, lost in that torturous place of nascent maturity between child and adult, only he was awake! He knew that he was! Like fog at daybreak pierced by silvery morning light, the dreamlike daze swiftly dissolved, and it was Sebastian crushing him to the bed in an amorous embrace, slipping into him flushed and stiff, slick with his own fluids, but Ciel knew Sebastian’s presence by heart and the man hadn’t been there moments before! He would have bet his life on it!
Ciel cried out in shock, eyes widening. His back arched and his body still quivered with the last of his first real orgasm, and Sebastian clapped a hand over his mouth to stifle the scream. Panic burst in Ciel’s veins as the struggle and aggression sent him reeling back to that cold terrifying moment when Sebastian’s tongue had plunged savagely into his eye. No, no, no, he thought. But this wasn’t like that-no, this was their special exchange, not rape but love bites and grown-up kisses, dangerously addictive sensations, and he had the sticky stuff all over his thighs and fingers after he rolled closer to Sebastian’s chest, shivering and gasping for more. Was there a verse in the scripture about bedding the devil? Didn’t matter. He was going to hell either way.
“We’ll walk through the fire and brimstone together,” Sebastian whispered against his clammy forehead, and Ciel gasped again. He moaned. He choked on his breath, actually, trembling in Sebastian’s arms and so terrified of liking the way it felt to make love with the man, but the chords of pleasure reverberating through him were much too distracting to let him worry about Sebastian reading his mind just yet. He was consumed by the heat of the moment, undiluted and untainted, and his child’s instinct distilled it as love in its purest form.
It was six weeks later that Ciel saw Sebastian in similar positions with that wild-eyed specter Miss Beast.
He felt very betrayed.
Rather, he felt as though his heart had been ripped out and stomped on and given back to him bruised, bloody, and broken.
Sebastian didn’t seem to understand why Ciel didn’t want to see him afterwards. He stared at him longingly from his ghostly side of every mirror Ciel walked by until finally Ciel asked Maylene to cover them all. If intelligent entities could seemingly copulate with humans, what kept them from being intimate with their own kind? Surely Ciel had not supposed loyalty would be the gravitating force. But he was only ten, and he could not articulate these brooding thoughts, so he just yelled and cried and ignored the man, and fell asleep in his father’s office on his father’s leather armchair before a cozy fire with Gulliver’s Travels on his knee and his father at the thick walnut desk, and it really wasn’t any wonder that the sense of betrayal went away, irrespective of such obstinacy, with a sigh of acquiescence and feigned tedium when Sebastian took him by the chin a few days after and gave him a kiss filled with such love, it foolishly slipped Ciel’s mind why he hated him in the first place. He couldn’t stop his own heart from yearning, could he? Who would do that purposefully? The way it felt when Sebastian loved him far outweighed the pain when Sebastian did things like ruin his eye or say sneaky, contrived things with a charming smile.
Ah, the fantasies of childhood.
The haunting truth was that it was a diabolical dance in which he and Sebastian were engaged, and the inevitable end was disaster. Like the most passionate and jealous of lovers, they tested each other. They pleased each other. They infuriated each other and impassioned each other. It was a fragile, primal part of the Phantomhive family, interwoven throughout the generations until one could not exist without the other. The man and Phantomhive blood were steadfastly connected, and the stars seemed they wouldn’t have allowed any other design in the Phantomhive family but for the whisper of My beloved… and a scarred eye that meant prophecy. Oh, the black magic of fate.
“I hate you,” Ciel breathed against Sebastian’s ear, clutching onto his head above the neck.
Sebastian smiled, so human-looking with that sentience and seduction. Even his temporarily solid form felt warm and material, curled up with Ciel in the nest of blankets before the fire on the master bedroom floor. If Ciel pressed his hand to his chest, would he feel a heartbeat, or something more like the wind, air buzzing through tightly-gathered energy…? “But hate is such a strenuous, confusing emotion, isn’t it?” Sebastian purred, running a thumb lovingly along Ciel’s eyelashes. “Isn’t love better?”
Ciel shook his head, away from Sebastian’s hand. “Hate doesn’t confuse me,” he whispered, mouth dry. “Love does.”
The desire when Sebastian’s fingers curled between his legs was so great, it was irreverent. Oh, to have this feeling forever-one might believe you could live off such pleasure. The cupid’s tension buckled and as the fire shifted under the wide mantle, Sebastian rolled to his back and brought Ciel on top of him, and the evident outline of his arousal was hard and hot against Ciel’s buttocks.
Sebastian pressed both hands to Ciel’s face. He met his eyes, eloquent of heartbreak and luscious desire, and Ciel shivered to peer directly into that ruddy stare. There the man went again, preternatural projection, somehow gathering strength to share his own sensations with Ciel. For a brief moment of unbidden shivering acuity, Ciel felt what Sebastian felt: his own small body, supple and hot, and so very erotic with his thighs and ass unendurably warm on a ready erection, back arched and fingers curled with all the grace of a seductive little prince, dark hair and pale heart-shaped face and such a tender look of wickedness like an imp wholly aware of and wholly content with his own damnation. God, was it stimulating. God, did his heart race. He was throbbing with impatience and he wanted to rip into this embittered saint with a pretty boy’s face, he wanted to taste that dark and twisted, tortured soul, all the trauma and bruises in its strata, feel it between them as their wavelengths blended-
Oh, enough of that teasing. Ciel wanted it. He wanted that throbbing heat inside him. He wanted that fire in Sebastian’s stare to fill him up, and when Sebastian’s tongue explored his mouth, Ciel moaned and dug his hips down, begging for more.
Surely Sebastian understood that hate and love were only two sides of the same emotion, corroding the psyche with ravenous intent. It was deplorable. It was beautiful. The consummate lust was like the string of a violin being consistently tightened, tauter and tauter until finally it snapped and Ciel’s entire body quaked as he came, tacky viscous release and fluttering muscles. He locked his arms around Sebastian’s neck, hissing into his ear: “I am damned. I was born damned. I realize that. So love me while I can still feel love, if you insist that it’s so un-confusing…”
Sebastian crushed him to his chest and kissed him deeply. Momentarily, Ciel smelled his sweet skin and his warm hair as if the man were flesh and blood. He was feverish and shaking still from the climax, tailbone already sore and Sebastian’s release burning him from the inside out.
Oh, he was damned.
He was incurably, inexorably damned.
He was in love with the devil, and the love was so delicious. It was a veritable ache, the ache of ineffable hope and tragedy commingling as one.
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To be beloved is all I need, and whom I love, I love indeed.
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The chronicles of the Phantomhive family will be continued shortly…
back to chapter five ††† on to chapter seven