#thank you to everyone who participated to dadbastian week in any way. much love :)

[cangrellesteponme]

NOVEMBER 4TH - SETTING SUN

(read this on AO3 here)

final day of dadbastian week! i come bearing gifts (soul crushing angst)

this one is… well the prompt is setting sun, what else was i supposed to write? a heartwarming conclusion? i'm an evil creature, what can i say.

in which the contract's last day comes. sebastian gets one thing he wanted from his young master, at the cost of everything else.

enjoy!

The initial plan for the day is to let the young master sleep as much as he would like to.

Unfortunately, he is up before dawn and screams himself hoarse at the mere sight of anyone in his room, so Sebastian stands by the door in the darkest hour, waiting for him to discern the present from the memories. It takes a long time, always, but he eventually opens the door.

“I don’t think I’ll go back to sleep. Should we get ready for the day?”

His voice is both brave and fragile, but his still glistening cheeks make the scales tip in favour of the latter. Sebastian carefully wipes the tears away, as he always does.

The day is… odd, as expected.

Sebastian offers to play any game, go anywhere, eat anything at all, and the child agrees without much enthusiasm, even if he seems to enjoy some of it, at the very least.

The oddest part is that he talks, and talks, and Sebastian cannot help but feel like he is the one being comforted. He most ardently wants to say that it is futile and unneeded, as he is not the one who dies today, and that loss surely overshadows any mixed feelings he may feel about it all. But every time he considers telling the boy he is fine, his voice refuses to cooperate and he feels the familiar constriction of his oath, like his own hand around his throat warning him not to lie.

He persists through the day with those feelings unspoken.

As Sebastian hesitates to tuck him in, his young master grows quiet, pensive. With his — quite understandable — propensity for sombre moods, it usually is no cause for concern. Nothing is usual about this day, and the silence weighs heavily on Sebastian’s mind. It is with the urge to lift that that he thoughtlessly speaks.

“Any concerns?”

It sounds like a pathetic attempt at addressing the thousand regrets of the day, laughably concealing them under the veil of doubt. As if any question, any answer, could rid the end itself of its finality. Oddly lenient, the boy does not point it out.

“Many. I am… afraid? Isn’t it odd to be afraid of something I wanted?” he asks, and he somehow looks exactly like the child Sebastian first met that day. The sight is disconcerting, to say the least. Even more so considering that there isn’t much fear in him, comparatively.

Sebastian has seen him afraid before, has terrified him himself many times, but he has never quite looked like this — it is hard to see any fear in him in the complete absence of fight-or-flight, hard to put an adequate name on this aimless and dulled terror, and the calm facade reigning over it all. Sebastian would once have found it fascinating. He is now appalled at the lack of fight left in his young master.

“I would love to say something nice and heartwarming. In another world, I think I would have told you I hope to be born again as your son this time.”

He sighs and leans back into the pillows, and the pallor of his skin makes him seen gone already.

“But we both know my soul is not going anywhere.”

Sebastian wants to tell him many things, but not a single word comes to mind. He only knows human emotions by name, and recognises them only from an observer’s standpoint, for a manipulator’s purpose. None of this knowledge helps him put words on the sinking weight in his limbs currently at war with his hunger — one tells him to stay, stay and watch over his boy, and the other whispers promises of devouring a soul worth his patience, his work, his attention. For reasons he doesn’t understand, Sebastian does not want to think about what he would do if he had an actual choice.

(He fears, deep down, that even if there were loopholes in the contract, he would have given in to his hunger.)

He has been waiting for this day — it was written into the contract, after all, even if he hadn’t expected to suffer from more than hunger pains in the final hour.

Is this loss, he wonders, or perhaps grief? Would those words ever fit the emotions of a being who is more of a force of nature than its own individual? They might, he thinks, as the thought of eternity without this master makes flesh collapse into an aching void where his heart might have been, if he had bothered to give his body more than the appearance of something arguably human.

Unaware of Sebastian’s turmoil, or perhaps unwilling to do much to acknowledge it, the boy looks up at him, tense and expectant.

“It is time, isn’t it?” he asks as airily as if he wanted tea and not death in his cup.

It is, in fact, time — as much as it will ever be. Sebastian is… unsure of how to proceed. Back in the earlier days of the contract, he planned to make it hurt — that was, after all, the best way of consuming a soul — but now… would he hesitate, if the boy cried? Screamed? Pleaded? It is yet another question he wants no answer to.

“Sleep,” he hears himself say, and he is surprised to hear the faintest tremble in his own voice, and to see it mirrored in his unstable hand brushing hair out of the boy’s face. “I will watch over you until the end.”

He looks… stunned — as if the tenderness behind the offer of a painless end and the gentleness in touch and treatment were inconceivable, grounds for stupefaction. Sebastian realises that the kindness he himself perceives as the dominating force in his spirit is still an odd, uncharacteristic behaviour in the child’s eyes. That even though his soul has known easy, freely given affection in his youngest years, it has also faced storms and tidal waves of pain too great not to submerge and taint the memory of every single past act of love, no matter how immense his daily joys once were. That Sebastian himself once was a devastating flood, regardless of his current efforts to be the sun his young master needs.

All at once, he is overwhelmed by the desire to bargain for another day, another month, another year, anything to right past wrongs and give his boy enough warmth for happiness to freely emerge once again. But the sun sets already.

In the quiet that follows, Sebastian tells himself it is the soul’s sorrow he feels, and not his own — as he is, of course, incapable of such emotional depth — even as sobs too loud to be the fruit of imagination echo through the Phantomhive manor. Not that anyone will ever know, either way.