My Dirty Little Secret

|Secret Nine: Fear the Dark|

They were in the library going about their usual business. Ciel would do his homework and from the other side of the table Sebastian would correct him. It was like it had been every other time, except this time, it started to rain. Ciel hates the rain, because the rain brings lightning, lightning brings thunder, and both of them together bring darkness. Ciel, among the many things he hates in the world, hates the dark most of all. 

Why? Because it reminds him of the closet that his mother would lock him in. She would get frustrated with him, sometimes for no reason at all, and lock him up. The only light that remained in the closet was what crept underneath the door. However, his mother would often leave the room, turn the light off, and forget he was in the closet. He would stay in there, confused, conflicted, trying to reach for the doorknob that didn't exist. Trying to escape from the darkness. But he couldn't. It was impossible.

The eye-patch wearing boy sat here now, at the library table, jumping, flinching, each time the thunder made noise. Sebastian noticed this but didn't say anything. Maybe he just didn't like  thunderstorms? It didn't seem that odd to him, many people hated them, it made them anxious. Why would Ciel be any different? He thought it to be trivial. But time would prove otherwise. 

Lightning continued to flash, thunder continued to rumble, and the rain continued to fall. It wasn't long before the power went out. It wasn't long before Ciel couldn't see anything in the school. The library was the one place without emergency lights, the one place where no light would shine. He hated this place. He hated the fact that he needed to tutor here now of all days. He hated the feeling of being vulnerable in front of a stranger. Why him? Why now? What did he do to deserve this? What did he do to deserve being trapped in the one place where darkness could surround him, choke him, again.

Ciel stopped, for a moment, like a deer in headlights. He was thrust back into the past, back into that closet. He subconsciously moved underneath the table, sat, curled up into a little ball, hugging his legs, and rocked back and forth. He repeated the words 'I'm sorry' over and over sometimes interchanging them with 'I'll do better next time' or 'I promise it won't happen again.' Sebastian immediately noticed this, and crawled underneath the table with him. He didn't know what was going on inside that head of his but he knew he needed to do something about it, and fast. 

"Ciel?" he questioned. The boy was unresponsive. He was locked in the closet, no longer in the library, no longer a high school student. He was just a child, locked away, never to be heard from until his mother remembered that he existed.

"I'msorryI'msorryI'msorryI'msorryI'msorryI'msorryI'msorryI'lldobetternexttimeIpromise," he repeated over and over again. Sebastian, who was at a loss about what to do, continued to try and get Ciel's attention.

"Ciel?!" he took both of his hands and placed them on Ciel's cheeks. The boy flinched at first but slowly raised his head. He was still mumbling the words until he made eye-contact with Sebastian. Those glowing red eyes glowed even brighter in this darkness than at Svante. Sebastian seemed fake, not there at all, like this was just a nightmare Ciel was going through. Ciel stopped speaking and stared, focusing just on Sebastian's eyes. They calmed him in a strange way. They made everything seem better. Even though everything was only getting worse. The lies of peace crept into his mind. He was calming down, ever so slightly.

"Ciel, I don't know what is wrong with you but you aren't wherever you think you are. You're with me, here, in the library at Black Hearts Academy," the voice said. It hadn't registered to Ciel that this wasn't a dream, that this wasn't The Butler but actually Sebastian Michaelis, the boy he was supposed to be tutoring.

So, if this was a dream, Ciel felt it okay to do as he wished. He crawled up to Sebastian and hugged him, bawling his eyes out in the darkness as the rain continued. Sebastian wrapped his arms around the boy. He wasn't very good with this kind of thing, so he just sort of patted his head and let him cry.

"Please don't lock me up again Mother, please, I promise I'll be good. I won't do anything bad ever again...just please don't lock me up!" Ciel pleaded with his imaginary problem. Figments of him would flip back and forth between the child crying in the closet, to the high school student clinging to Sebastian. He wasn't all there yet, and he wouldn't be, until the darkness was finally gone. Until his memory was totally suppressed.

"I won't ever lock you away again," Sebastian said, not completely sure what he should've said.

Ciel smiled and nuzzled closer to Sebastian, "Thank you. Thank you. I promise I'll be better from now on. I'll get good grades and never mess up my scholarship. You'll love me then, won't you? You'll go back to Papa, won't you?"

Sebastian just awkwardly patted Ciel's head again but remained silent. He was a bit worried about what kind of childhood this boy had. What kind of mother would lock up their son? What kind of father would let that happen? Sebastian was frustrated and angry. He wanted to help, but didn't understand where these feelings were coming from. Why did he feel the need to protect him?

No, he did understand, he just didn't want to. He knew the night Ciel went to Svante, that he wanted to make the blue-haired boy his. Sebastian was just still coming to terms with that. Ciel was fragile, tonight made that more clear than anything. If something, anything, happened to him, to break his heart completely, Sebastian would never be able to enter it. He had to be careful about this. He had to think it over and be smart. This wasn't one of his fleeting relationships that he had in the past. Ciel could very well be his soulmate. 

Was this what Izaya meant when he told him those words so very long ago?

'Two things happened when I met Shizu for the first time. The first thing was, I felt I simply had to annoy the crap out of him. It wasn't because I hated him or anything, I simply found him fascinating, I wanted him to get angry and remember me as he stewed the rest of the day, trying to get revenge. It is a strange form of affection, but he eventually got the point. The second thing was, I would get angry. Whenever he smiled around being someone else. Whenever he wasn't looking at me. In short, I'd get so jealous I'd do something even more annoying to him. So, in other words, when you find someone that you want to remember you, and want to look only at you, that's when you know you're in love.'

This was certainly the case for Sebastian. He enjoyed annoying Ciel, the expressionless face he usually wore would change ever so slightly, to show him a new side of the boy. And he got very jealous over the people who could be so close to him all the time. He wanted to join them, to rise in the ranks of this stupid school, to wear that stupid uniform just so he could take the same classes as Ciel.

In fact, he might just do that.

The rain stopped and sunlight shined through the windows. The power was still out but it was no longer dark. Ciel was brought back to reality, to the library. He quickly removed himself from Sebastian, crawled out from underneath the table and sat in his chair to continue doing work, like nothing had happened. Sebastian didn't want to bring back any bad memories, so he did the same, and they went on with their usual business. 

Like nothing had ever happened.