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Sebastian had never been asked to describe pain. It was the one thing humans understood implicitly, born to it as they were; new lungs gulping down their first breaths to wail. Mother and child singing out their dizzying anguish in chorus. Humans tilted their heads to figures done in colored glass above pews, to his face from symbol-scratched floors, and asked: Why is there pain? Never, what does it feel like?
In this form, Sebastian conceptualized pain like a human would a tear in a newly tailored frock. Stitching popped, and Sebastian bled. There was dismay at the imperfection but no sting beyond his own annoyance that something so fine had been tarnished. Real discomfort only came when the layers were pierced. The tug of a demanding young master on his contract seal, for instance.
The dull throb currently shooting down the fingers of his contracted hand was a feeling Sebastian had become familiar with over the past three years. As familiar as the nightly balancing of the household accounts that he was trying to finish, illuminated by the single tallow candle he kept on his writing desk. Sebastian did not require any light to complete his work, but it was a precaution that had long become a habit. It wouldn’t do if a sleepless servant happened upon the Phantomhive butler doing paperwork in pitch darkness.
Fingers twitched and Sebastian paused, tilting his head as he flexed the hand. Distress , without the sharp edge of wakefulness. The young master was having a nightmare. A bad one.
Nothing to be done. Sebastian returned to his ledgers with a sigh.
One too many unexpected visits from Lady Elizabeth had taken a toll on their food stores this month, and they’d need to make another trip to town sooner than he would have liked. Sebastian produced another piece of paper to begin a list, grimacing in distaste as his pen jolted off course with a spasm. Nib returned to page with hesitancy. Another spasm. This one harsher than the last.
Sebastian leaned back in his chair with an exhale his body did not need, but nevertheless felt fitting. Against the long shadows of candle flame dusting his knuckles, the convulsing tangle of fingers looked more like a twitching spider than an appendage—as loath as he was to make the comparison, even if certain theologians would consider it an apt one.
Then, came a crescendo that sent the cool relief of a burst blood vessel, along with a scream only he could hear.
Between one instant and the next, Sebastian was in his lord’s front room, lit candelabra in hand as he eased open the door to the bedroom with a perfunctory knock. This was one task that did not require the cloak of humanness to complete.
Ciel was sitting upright in bed, mismatched eyes snapping to Sebastian’s face as he entered. The boy’s contracted eye had always emitted a faint glow, but now it shone with such intensity, such heat that it was almost white. If Sebastian didn’t know that such a thing was impossible, he’d fear it would pool right out of his lord’s skull.
“Where were you?”
Sebastian’s eyebrows raised at the accusatory tone. Surely even his ornery little lord would not be so unreasonable. “Young master?”
“I called for you, and you didn’t come. You left me.” He sounded dazed. Sebastian did not wait for a further invitation before he crossed the room, setting the candelabra down on the nightstand as he examined his charge. Unshed tears were balanced on the boy’s lash line, lending his gaze a feverish over-brightness as he stared uncomprehendingly at Sebastian. Small hands worried at the rumpled bed covers.
“You left me,” Ciel repeated, but he sounded less sure of himself than before. His contract mark dimmed.
“I will always come when you call, young master. It is etched into the very fabric of the covenant by which I am bound. By your own design, of course,” Sebastian smiled, sly. “Why else would I be standing in front of you now if I was not summoned?”
Ciel nodded slowly, turning over his butler’s words with a silent contemplation he usually dedicated to Funtom’s quarterly reports. A hand raised as if to grab Sebastian’s sleeve—to confirm what his eyes saw, and his mind couldn’t yet believe— but it paused, redirecting to grab a fistful of hair and tug. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Ciel groaned.
“You just experienced something frightful, sir. It is normal to feel disoriented.”
“It felt so real,” Ciel continued as if Sebastian had not spoken. The hand dropped from his head, instead wrapping around his right leg as Ciel tucked the limb up to his chest. A flimsy shield against his own words. “Usually, when I dream of that terrible month it is more like flashes of memory. Even when my body appears as it does now, the events do not change. But I remember waking, taking tea, our lessons, returning to my office…That’s when they came.”
The boy spoke carefully as if each word was a pound of flesh carved from his person. His head was slumped, cheek digging into his knee, and the blue of his only visible eye looked sickly in the orange shroud of candle flame. “They dragged me back to that place. You never came. And there was nothing I could do about it.”
Sebastian tsked. “My lord, you can hardly blame me for something I did in a dream.”
“I know that!” Ciel huffed. But there was something delicate to him; a tremor in his shoulders that would have been easily mistaken for crying if not for the visible dryness of his eye.
Silence fell between the two. Sebastian felt wrong-footed. His master rarely spoke so candidly about his nightmares, more prone to demands than conversation. Don’t move. Don’t touch me. Don't leave until I fall asleep. In his years of soothing his lord’s night terrors Sebastian only knew their contents from assumptions, and what he had personally witnessed on the day of his summoning. The gaps, although not difficult to fill, remained unvoiced. Evocation of such memories was not something his master would tolerate regardless of altruistic intent.
Indeed, altruism was not something the boy had ever been interested in. He had once offered this child his world back, and Ciel had stripped the kindness away to reveal the false idol it was. What had been merely intriguing at the time now filled him with a strange sort of pride.
So, what else could Sebastian do but rely on the contract that he’d made with that tenacious little soul? Hollow human platitudes did not slide from tongues bound to truth.
He placed his palm against his chest, bowing his head slightly. “My lord, there is nothing to fear while I am here.”
A scoff. “You can get hurt.”
Ah, there it was. That unspoken uncertainty that had hung between them since the disastrous voyage on the Campania. Sebastian straightened. Ciel had uncurled himself as if the accusation had taken his whole body to fling out. He wondered how long the thought had been simmering in his lord’s head.
The immediate aftermath had not left much room for contemplation. Ciel’s fragile form had finally succumbed to the stress of hours spent shivering in the bobbing Atlantic, resulting in a low-grade fever that kept him bed-bound. Blood leaking between his teeth, Sebastian had been almost thankful for his master’s incapacitated state as he dodged both the Midfords and patrolling doctors to spit the crimson bubbling up from the low-healing puncture in his stomach over the rescue vessel’s railing. How shameful.
Returning to Phantomhive Manor has been its own kind of chaos. Dismayed servants needed to be placated, routines needed to be reestablished, and Undertaker’s plans needed to be dissected. The latter point seemed to have taken precedence as Sebastian had arrived with afternoon tea more than once to find Aurora Society papers sprawled over Ciel’s desk when he was supposed to be attending to other business, small face twisted as he waved the butler away with a flick of his wrist. The details of their injuries had seemed washed of color in comparison.
That face was twisted again with another troubled expression, arms folded. He realized that his master was expecting some sort of response.
“Yes,” Sebastian hissed out. “But that has never prevented me from following your orders. Such a thing would go against my butler aesthetic.”
“Oh, of course, your aesthetics. Those aren’t exactly infallible, are they? I’m quite certain it was against your aesthetic to bleed all over the Campania, and yet.” Ciel spread his palms as if presenting a winning hand at one of the games he was so fond of.
This figure was so far away from the young master in the ship’s ballroom who, when faced with a smug junior reaper on the verge of attack and cradled in the arms of a freshly injured Sebastian , had laughed away the possibility that his servant could lose. Where was that faith now? Had Ciel's nightmare truly shaken him so badly?
Content in his prodding, Ciel continued. “Was it painful, or did it just rankle your pride?”
“Young master, I don’t see-”
“Answer the question. That’s an order.”
Sebastian felt his eyes flash–a brief, fiery red that was gone with a purposeful blink. The experience was not one he was fond of recalling. It had been as though a seam ripper had cleaved his pretend flesh in two, leaving malleable innards exposed for idle perusal. His body had locked with the shock of it, mouth slackening. All the while, his master was falling, wide-eyed and reaching, like a bird tossed from the nest with only his down feathers. “Yes, I felt pain.”
“Well, then,” Ciel said, but he did not look satisfied. He was more sickly than before, pale and drawn in his too-large bed. A child faced with the limitations of a protector he had believed invulnerable. “I think that will be all. You may go.”
It wasn’t an order. Sebastian stepped close, a placid hand resting mere inches from where his master’s legs lay under the downy covers. If he were anyone else he may have sat on the bed’s edge. “You are drawing finite conclusions from extreme circumstances. Remember, my lord, the ones who hurt you were mortals. You saw with your own eyes what happened to them. You know my capabilities.”
The only human that can hurt me is you. This went unsaid. Just because Sebastian was compelled to honesty did not mean he had to offer all his truths on a serving tray.
“But what if the ones who orchestrated it were more than mortal?” Ciel struggled for a moment. His next words were quieter as if they were a shameful admittance. “What if they are as strong as Undertaker?”
The motives behind Ciel’s relentless research over the past few days sharpened in Sebastian’s mind with unsettling clarity. This child knew the cowing effects of pain more intimately than most could fathom, and for a long time, he had believed that the demon he had shackled his soul to was above such suffering. This remained true even when Sebastian battled against other supernatural beings. Reapers were an inconvenience, never a threat. Until now.
Ciel had seen Sebastian brought low and had forced him to confirm it was more than an aesthetic blow. Powers greater than Sebastian existed, and if Ciel was entertaining the possibility that such forces were behind his past abduction, then it was only natural that belief in their covenant had begun to waver.
“Then, I will fight them as I’ve always done,” Sebastian said. “I may experience…discomfort, but that does not mean that I am suddenly unable to fulfill the terms of our contract. You will find I'm not so easily subdued.”
On a typical night, Ciel might have swallowed this explanation with a rueful smile, likening Sebastian to a half-starved beast— one who would never let his prey slip between his claws after years of careful cultivation. He had always found a twisted comfort in his butler’s base instincts. They were straightforward, uncomplicated.
It was not enough to satisfy him tonight. The want for something of substance was plain, and Sebastian allowed his voice to soften. “I caught you, didn’t I?”
The boy startled. This was something he couldn’t question. He had seen the arc of the death scythe as his stomach swooped with freefall. He had felt the brush of fingers close the grasping distance to encircle his wrist, the pull, the cradle of a solid frame against his own cushioning the impact. Sebastian had caught him. Despite the brutality of the blow, despite the pain that Ciel now knew had raked through him, the demon's grip had been unwavering. “I suppose you did.”
Sebastian offered his hands, palms out, in a mirror of his master’s earlier gesture. Ciel recognized the move at once, frowning. “Don’t get cocky.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Sebastian's respectful head tilt was met with narrowed eyes, but Ciel did not push the matter further. Instead, he slumped against his mussed pillows and fussily turned his head to regard the still-burning candelabra. “Ugh, I don’t know how I’m meant to go back to sleep now.”
Sebastian took the subject change for the concession it was, smiling as if they were sharing a private joke. “I believe I know a tried and true method for that, young master. I’ll return momentarily with some warm milk and honey for you.”
But tonight was not a normal one, and Ciel was not completely mollified. Bedsheets rustled like bird wings as they were kicked away. He stood in front of Sebastian, pale legs coltish in the dim light, and hands resting on his hips with assurance. “No need. I’ll come with you.”
He looked liable to catch a chill just standing there. Sebastian automatically went to grab the blue quilted dressing gown still folded on the chaise lounge at the bed’s foot, even as he protested. “I fear a nighttime jaunt will only wake you further.”
Ciel allowed his arms to be guided into the coat but batted Sebastian’s hands away to sloppily tie the waist belt himself. “I have no morning appointments. I can afford to sleep in.”
A duel sojourner to the kitchens was unthinkable when this little conversation had already put Sebastian so horribly behind schedule. He’d been interrupted before he’d even compiled a list of the manor’s needed supplies, never mind begin the preparations for breakfast. Sebastian quelled the instinct to consult his pocket watch. For a creature so long untethered to time, he’d grown used to counting the slide of mortal minutes and found the task pleasurable in its mundanity.
Another objection formed—one that would hopefully return his master to bed and salvage Sebastian's nightly routine, but his tongue faltered. Ciel was looking at him. His eyes were bright, alight with the boyish thrill of staying up past his regular sleeping hours. Their earlier troubles were smothered in the quietness of this night; dawn’s harbingers still far off.
“Very well, my lord,” Sebastian lowered his chin. “Let's just not make a habit of it.”