6Still, the glassy horror in Sebastian's eyes surprises him.
"What's wrong?" Ciel says. "I know you enjoyed yourself… you see, you cannot lie to me…" he runs one hand upon the former butler's porcelain skin, and the demon turns aside, picking up his clothes and dressing himself. He leaves the room, and then Ciel is alone, and though he knows he has succeeded, it has not worked—he still hates Sebastian more than ever, but his revenge has backfired, he feels worse than before.
He keeps remembering the horror in Sebastian's eyes.
"It is just what he deserves," Ciel says to himself, as he closes his eyes on the scene of the crime. "He's done as bad to me—done worse…" but his voice falters.
Sebastian isn't seen by anyone in the house for nigh on a week, and when at last Ciel queries where he might be, the servants tell him he is in his room. They do not know what happened, they think it is only because of his grief, and Ciel feels a nauseous mixture of triumph and horror that they don't know, and never will.
He goes to the butler's room, and uses the master key to unlock the door. Deference to Sebastian's wish for privacy does not even occur to him.
There he is, sitting in the open wardrobe, under the spare uniforms, in a pile of purring cats, not moving, except his hands, which caress them fretfully.
"I see," Ciel says meanly. "Here everyone's been worried about you, and you're enjoying yourself with your pets. Do you think that little of your last promise to your master? You said you would complete his revenge and yet you're merely idling away." He reaches forward, trying to take the cat from Sebastian's hands, but Sebastian grabs his wrist with a sudden inhuman strength and the eyes that had seemed focused only on the cats are now burning into his, angry but—not burning with demonic fervor, merely angry, and terrified, like a man.
It surprises Ciel, and he stumbles back, his mouth suddenly dry; his limbs tremble.
He flees.
/
The Queen has sent a message, and so here they are, at the doorway; Ciel is pulling at the strings of the damned eyepatch, his disguise as Watchdog for those who knew the earl, which keep slipping over his eye when he tries to tie it; and he notices the catch in Sebastian's breath, the pained way he watches the movement.
"You must know how to tie it," Ciel says at last, abruptly, and shoves the whole thing into Sebastian's hands.
Sebastian holds the fabric with exquisite care, turns Ciel's head and ties it on deftly in one smooth motion, and when he steps back, for a moment the tenderness in his expression aches—though it is mixed deep with the terror and the bitterness.
Ciel has to bite his lip to keep from saying something awful and cruel, but the hatred is there within him, ready to boil over—and he is so tired of it.
Sebastian has not said a word, since.
Ciel is growing weary of his uppity presumptuousness in the matter, but nothing can be done. They are to join a band of travelling folk who seem to be the precipitation of a change in character of the minor lords and ladies whose manors they visit—cruel people becoming suddenly generous, giving away swathes of their money and land in a way that speaks of the possibility of something dire.
Ciel introduces himself as the Undertaker's apprentice, forced to leave the city when word of the man's misdeeds were known. Sebastian is his feebleminded uncle, a mute.
That was not Ciel's idea—but Sebastian still has not said a word.
In keeping with the travelers' idea of charity, they have taken the two in, and as the pair know how to pay their way, they are not given trouble. But the bottles that fill Ciel's bag grow emptier each day, and he wonders when, on the lonely moors, he will fall asleep to not wake again.
During the day, when they walk beside the carriages, Sebastian holds a ragged kitten he had found, about to die, and which he treats as though it is his own child, feeding it from the corner of a cloth dipped in milk. The folk think well of him for it, and any unease they might have at his strangeness is forgiven.
Ciel they treat more warily, for an undertaker—even if merely an apprentice—is always too close to death.
Still, he fixes the wooden things along the way and at the houses they pass, and no one looks askanse at his cover, for which he is grateful—even his accent slips smoothly into what it ought to be, being not a nobleman, and if he thinks he hears Undertaker on every turn of his tongue, no one else will say.
And the bottles in his bag grow emptier each day; his time grows shorter as the moon in the sky is eaten and the crisp end of winter turns to the earliest days of spring.
/
It is something about her, Sebastian says, catching his hand and tapping on it.
It never ceases to rouse Ciel's anger. That his brother had taught the demon what had been their own secret language, and now it is doled back to him in increments he is forced to swallow; he hates Sebastian ever more, wishes he could end this farce, but Sebastian is silent.
"What," Ciel says, in a low voice. "You mean Angela?"
The former maid turns, as though she had heard him—but she is deep in conversation with another, and yards away. He's seen the ropey scars on her back when the group went down to the river one morning to bathe, and she pulled off her clothes uncaring of modesty and dove into the frigid waters. Her master used to beat her; and worse, he suspects.
Yes, Sebastian replies. She's not what she seems. He pauses. It's strange, for I've felt something like her before; but I cannot remember where.
Is she the culprit, then? Ciel replies in the same language, in deference to the subject. We'll have to prove it, somehow; how does she act? Blackmail?
Sebastian hesitates. No.
What, then? Ciel presses. Sebastian does not reply.
/
They are within the manor grounds of a lord, and the production of Hamlet does nothing to endear itself to Ciel. He watches from the sidelines, along with Sebastian, who sits in his rough-spun clothes on the grass at the edge of the makeshift stage, while on the other side the lords and ladies in their finery play at taking the air, and sit on thick cloth, shading themselves with lace umbrellas.
The very last bottle is nearing the dregs, and Ciel knows how to get no more blood.
Even if he were to take some from a living being, there is no way he could guarantee it would be Sirius type, and would not make him deathly ill again.
Sebastian's hair has grown longer, and wilder; it is tied by a cord, but the ragged edges of it cover his face when he leans down over the young cat that follows him wherever he goes; he is barefoot, as the mad always are—a fine foolish play.
Ciel watches Angela, who plays at Queen Gertrude and seems to notice his gaze; for as Hamlet berates her for her betrayal of his father, she stares straight at him, regardless of the audience.
He shivers, and turns aside.
"When is she going to act?" he says.
You seem in a hurry, Sebastian says, tapping against the exposed skin of Ciel's ankle, where his trousers are short; his ungloved hand hidden in the long grass. The Queen is happy with our progress, is she not?
He doesn't look up, and if Ciel didn't know that Sebastian keeps as careful track of the bottles as he does, he might believe the innocence.
As it is, he kicks down on Sebastian's fingers with his heel, grinding them into the dirt.
"You can't wait for me to die, can you?" he says, and at last lets up the boot, in case Sebastian has it in him to answer.
I can wait as long as I must, Sebastian says.
/
The lord, who has long been a party to the Viscount of Druitt's more unusual pastimes—those involving missing young girls—suddenly finds himself giving money to the Church orphanages. It is precisely the kind of proof Ciel is looking for, if it were not for the fact that they have seen Angela do nothing. If anything at all, she has merely looked the offending lord in the eyes, which is inappropriate, but hardly evidence of wrongdoing on a grand scale.
Ciel takes his last drop of blood in the evening, and finally leaves the stables where the whole group is quartered to walk through the grounds alone. Sebastian, who is awake, does not stop him.
Ciel feels an understanding of why the animals go away from others of their kind to die—there is something too constricting about knowing it will happen where it will be made much of.
He's already died once, among fanfare; he has no wish for his second death to be of the same ilk.
It's chance that he runs into Angela as well, looking up at the sky, which is a deep black near the manor walls, far away from the few lighted windows, and covered with the brilliant seething blanket of stars.
"I apologize," Ciel says. "I didn't mean to startle you—"
Though, on second thought, she doesn't seem startled. She looks away from him again, back to the sky.
"The new moon is known as the beginning of a new cycle," she says, in her soft, melodic voice. "Some, those who have only learned the dark ways, think of it as the time when hope is lost, when despair is at its deepest—but just as surely, it is a time of beginnings."
Ciel looks up with her, and shivers to realize that it is, indeed, the new moon. He has had nothing but dark experiences in the ways of the moon, which they had been so careful to track.
But he doesn't leave, struck by the thought that he might still get a confession from Angela; though he can't be sure why it seems to matter so suddenly.
"You suspect me," Angela says. "You and your lover both."
Ciel starts, and looks at her with a mix of fear and revulsion—Sebastian isn't, never was, and that she could imply something like that of the Phantomhive line—but of course he is not Phantomhive, not here and not now.
"Do you all think that of us?" he says at last.
Angela shrugs. "You have no time to waste, do you? Or you would not be here." She sits down, and gestures for Ciel to sit beside her; somehow, he does.
"I'll tell you all," she says. "I'm an angel, yes. Or was. But in my hubris I did a terrible thing, and rent myself asunder. One half of me male, the other female; two that should have been in union now separated forever. I had great plans to purify the land, and took two winding ways to accomplish it—Ash granted the wish of a high personage, while I was meant to gather the rest; save those I could, before we both razed the land.
"That was three years ago now, and I like to imagine that I've learned, if nothing else, the error of such hubris," she says. She smiles, somewhat sadly. "It is so much easier to judge when one is not among the humans; isn't it?"
"What do you think I am?" Ciel says.
Angela looks at him sadly. "A shade," she says. "A desperate wanderer. Lost. I should have pronounced you unclean, not so long ago, and tried to end you. Part of me feels it still. Ciel Phantomhive, you have always known who killed your parents—your mentor knew, and was not quiet about it; you know it too." She takes Ciel's hand in hers. "Can any of us ever rise above our sins?" she asks him. Her eyes search his, and at last she shakes her head. "Not alone."
She rises, at last, and takes one step back. "I'm sorry."
Then she is gone, and the air is growing quietly chill.
Ciel walks back to the stables and relays everything to Sebastian.
Sebastian curls his lip. And do you know? he says.
Ciel is trying to piece it together; remembers times the Undertaker had talked to him, remembers what he'd seen of his brother's life. There is, of course, one obvious culprit, but as in the case of Jack the Ripper, it is precisely who his brother had never dared suspect—he cared too much about his name, his powers, and the one who had given them all to him.
Finally, Sebastian stirs. I've remembered what I've seen like her, he says. The one who wears the glasses incessantly—John Brown. He was the same.
"Then is it him," Ciel says. "And the Queen, after all?"
.
.
.
