Welcoming in the New Year With Fic
This is an old pagan tradition that encourages good spirits to enter the home by offering them smut and character development for their favourite works of fiction.
It's also an excuse to have some fun like last year. I don't really do New Year's Eve, but I found that sitting around, writing fic with degr00ve provided the best one I've yet had.
Of course, I ( Read more... )
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"But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover --
But the cat himself knows, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name."
-- T. S. Eliot, The Naming of Cats
"And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor."
-- Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven
Demons dream but do not sleep.
The one that a human boy had, unaware of the power of binding and shaping imbued in the naming of things, named - no, made into 'Sebastian' considers it unnecessary to explain this to his master. He owes that boy, Ciel Phantomhive, by virtue of their contract, his unquestioning service but not every secret.
Like every night, Sebastian - the demon named after a dead dog and shaped to resemble a disgraced Earl left in pieces - lies on his back, red-pink eyes fixed on the enveloping darkness. Humans would consider a bed like this comfortable; not particularly luxurious but pleasant enough. To him, it matters little.
His proper name is a whirling, keening thing, unpronounceable by humans as it is not so much a word as it is -- a shadow across the moon, the taste of a knife, the noiselessness of a cat's footprint, an evening chill, a wolf's cry dissipating into misty air, a shapeless thing caught in the corner of an eye like a ghost and it is cold, very cold, and very dark, and very old.
The demon called Sebastian lies in the cold bedsheets and is looking up, not at the ceiling but the darkness before and after that. He and that darkness have long become familiar, having kept each other company for months now, every night. He smiles and entertains the thought that they are like lovers.
He blinks slowly, lazily.
Even that twisting, howling thing that he was called before the boy made him Sebastian is not his true name.
It's the one thing that even in the circles of hell, no demon will discuss: the subject of true names.
A very, very long time ago he'd had a name that wasn't Sebastian, nor that cold-dark knife-smile thing his fellows took to calling him later, either. It had been an iridescent, luminous name. Sometimes, he wonders if he can still pronounce it and yet somehow doesn't dare try. There is the possibility that speaking it will bring everything back -- the softness and the light and the splendour of being simply what he was first named to be. Everything would be bright and beautiful again and the darkness would be seared away. And still there is something that will not permit him to attempt to say it. Whether this refusal arises out of arrogance or fear he cannot say, but suspects so much the latter that he will forever maintain that it is the former. At least arrogance suggests dignity and strength.
In four hours, the sun will kiss the horizon and day will break.
Until then, that thing that has become Sebastian Michaelis considers its names.
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