Lost in the Desert (Black Butler oneshot)

The Garden of Eden

Iraq. Mesopotamia. Babylon and the Garden of Eden. That was several of the many names of the place he's currently standing on, as desert winds swept through the already dusty nightly air of the super-giant Rumaila oil fields, the fine dust contaminating his otherwise great nightly coffee. But personally, the wiry, blue haired man preferred to refer to this historically rich country as a "massive fucking shithole".

For a certain Lance Corporal Ciel of the C Company, 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment of the British Army. Guarding the oil wells of Southern Iraq was the worst thing to have happened to the young man so far in the invasion. He joined the British Army, specifically the Paras, for adventure, albeit reluctantly thanks to the persuasion of his cousin. He opted to enlist instead of going through the painfully lengthy process of going to an officer cadet school such as, for example, Sandhurst where most of his colleagues in the British nobility or royalty went.

Now, here he was, in the middle of nowhere in Southern Iraq with no civilizations in sight, as desert dust continued to contaminate his small hole dug up several hundred meters away from an oil well. The small pile of C-4 plastic explosives in front of him lit up brightly in a brilliant radiant amber, keeping him warm in the windy darkness that covered the air of the vast desert.

If there's one thing that the young aristocrat learnt during this operation, it's that C-4s won't explode in your face even if you burn it with gallons upon gallons of gasoline, and that the desert is painfully hot during the day, and freezing cold at night. Case in point, when he woke up for guard duty an hour ago, he was met by an air full of dust, not helped by the sudden drop of temperature that made his life more miserable, he patiently awaited for the sun to appear as he continued to shiver lightly inside the shallow hole that made up his position.

Deep inside, he missed everything from home, including his parents, who had died in a freak motor accident in Scotland when he was just 12. For some reason, the Phantomhive Manor has a weird curse that has the morbid habit of killing off his ancestors' parents in every way possible from; from his manor burning down a century ago to a helicopter crash and others that he had forgotten.

He learnt of the curse the hard way when his butler, Sebastian, had personally informed him of the demise of his mother and father several years back. There's something off about his butler though, but he doesn't know what it is, it's just his aura perhaps.

He shook his head as pushed out whatever thought that remained within his head, returning to the task at hand. Through the green visage of his night vision node, he could clearly see his fellow paratroopers strolling around the fields in front of him, their rifles dangling from their back as they preoccupy themselves with a variety of activity, from placing rows of barbed wires to simply talking nonsense to pass time while others manned GPMG machine guns neatly placed on a pile of sandbags, their position overlooking the dirt road up ahead.

Up in the dark night sky, hollered a pair of American Cobra attack helicopters, flying off from their airfields down south in the Kuwaiti border to strike targets up ahead, their ominous light of red and green lighting up the grey contraption shaded by the darkness. If there's one thing that he learnt about night operations, it's that it can be hauntingly beautiful. Orange balls of light lit up the black void, followed by a long string of crimson tracers reaching skywards as the Iraqi AA desperately tried to shoot down the hidden assailants hidden amid the starry heaven.

The vaguely blue-haired Ciel looked up from his hole just in time to see an American F-16 fighter jet dropping a long trail of red flares from its tail, seemingly materializing into balls of crimson in the darkness of the night as the now exposed assailant casually evaded the atrociously inaccurate anti-aircraft fire in a series of looping maneuver. Silence followed afterwards for a minute, before a massive amber lit up the green world of his night vision node as a Paveway laser guided bomb from the same F-16 pounded the AA position with impunity, permanently silencing it in a massive cloud of smoke.