At you side (I feel like a ghost)

[danzanelfuoco]

Fandom: Black Butler

Ship: None 
Warning: Spoiler chapter 126+
Challenge: Maritombola 10
Prompt: 42. Uno

“Everything’s going to be alright now, for I will never leave you on your own ever again. I’m home.”

It shouldn’t have happened like that, it shouldn’t have been like that. But then again, nothing in his life - their lives - ever went as it should. 

Ciel stands in front of him and he… he just feels empty. 

He thought that if Ciel would ever be back - not that he actually could, he was dead after all, his soul gone as a sacrifice so the Phantomhive Earl never allowed himself to hope, but deep down he had this knowledge, this certainty about what his reaction would be 'if ever…’ - so he thought he would have thrown himself at his brother, at his twin, and he would have cried on his shoulder, because he was never strong enough, always needing someone to save him. 

Instead, he doesn’t feel anything. Not anything that matters anyway. 

“This must be a lie!” 

 There’s surprise, yes, a horrific surprise and shame, because for as long as he didn’t mean to and didn’t want to, he had sacrificed his brother’s soul for his life - Sebastian standing behind him is proof enough. 

He had loved his brother more than himself, they had grown up together, sharing everything except a title, so close and so similar it must have been a mistake made by the universe them being two separates being, instead of one. When Ciel had died he had felt just as if his heart had been ripped out from his chest and crushed, just like losing a limb a part of himself, because they had always only been one. 

But now that love is gone. Severed away by swiping knives that scarred his soul, by marks that wounded his skin - the one on his back, the one on his eyes - and maybe it’s this more than the thing in front of him pretending to be his brother that brings him to the verge of panic.

Breathing gets more difficult - almost as an asthma attack, almost as if his weaknesses too had been fooled by his act of being the eldest and strongest brother and now that the secret’s out they have come back. 

He only half ears Finny screaming about an impostor, but he knows he is the impostor, even though the one in front of him could not possibly be his brother - because he’s brother is dead, dead, dead, with a knife in his chest, so that the demon beside him could cross to this world, gutted on a sacrificial altar by his own hand to retrieve that damned piece of jewelry Ciel kept ingesting. 

“The head of the house of Phantomhive is none other than me, Ciel Phantomhive.” 

He would deny it, but he can’t. It’s not actually as if he has some ground to spit his lie back to him. He isn’t Ciel Phantomhive after all. 

And the thing in front of him knows so much - how does he know so much? 

“He speaks the truth. He is the true Earl, Lord Ciel Phantomhive”

Sebastian words fall like a headsman’s ax. Definitive in his condemnation. 

 

I am but his extra. 

No. 

Not anymore. 

And his twin maybe senses it. Maybe senses that he has stepped forward, overcome their bond to be one on his own, because there’s a trap and Ciel is on the run with just Sebastian on his side. 

Always Sebastian on his side. 

How ironic that what validates him as himself, and not just as a reflection of his brother, is the demon that wants to eat his soul. 

It's just use and get used, is it not? 

Later his other servants would join him and he would seek shelter at Lau’s and he would start plotting again and keep plotting until he reaches his goals or he falls dead in ruin because he may not be Ciel Phantomhive, but one thing he is for sure: a survivor.