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Devilish Impulses	By : Arianawray Category: > Black Butler (Kuroshitsuji ???) Views: 13948 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Kuroshitsuji or any of its characters, and I do not make any money from these writings.

Chapter List
- 1-Unwanted
- 2-Whim
- 3-Trust
- 4-Taste
- 5-Scheme
- 6-Command
- 7-Competition
- 8-Advice
- 9-Enlightenment
- 10-Sustenance
- 11-Caught
- 12-Breath
- 13-Arms
- 14-Inflammation
- 15-Imagination
- 16-Intent
- 17-Compromise
- 18-Sacrifice
- 19-Despair
- 20-Compassion
- 21-Interest
- 22-Equality
- 23-Mentor
- 24-History
- 25-Disorder
- 26-Reputation
- 27-Gifts
- 28-Admission
- 29-Watching
- 30-Bonds
- 31-Revelations
- 32-Confrontation
- 33-Struggle
- 34-Separation
- 35-Duty
- 36-Change
- 37-Together
- 38-Love
- 39-Epilogue: Heaven
- 30
- 31
- 32
Revelations

Ciel rises from a dream, pursued into the waking world by a rush of images. He stretches in his bed. Warmth and contentment from his night with Sebastian flood his body and heart, but the dream troubles him like a disturbing undercurrent. He cannot pin down specific images from that night-vision, for they wash past his conscious mind in a blur.

He normally stirs only when Sebastian comes in with his morning tea and newspaper, and parts the heavy velvet drapes to admit the sunlight. It is rare for him to wake on his own. Sebastian will be surprised when he comes in...

That thought is interrupted when he glances at the drapes and sees that the thin line of light where the curtains almost meet in the middle is bright – too bright. The sun is high in the sky.

He throws the covers off and walks over to the window. He pulls one curtain aside and looks at the clock on the side table. Half-past nine. Sebastian never wakes him this late.

"Sebastian?" he calls. That shred of the contract which survives allows him to summon the devil from wherever he is. "Sebastian!"

He will come. He must come. Mustn't he?

In an instant, Ciel realises that something is wrong. He knows it. The vague dream visions trouble him again as he slips on his rings before taking a quick swig of water from the carafe on the nightstand to wash down his morning breath.

"Sebastian!" he calls once more.

No answer; no butler.

He runs into his dressing room, which he rarely enters because his demon chooses his clothes for him. He pulls on the essentials: a shirt, clean drawers, and shorts. As he hastily tugs a pair of stockings over his calves, he snags the silk on his blue ring, but he doesn't care about that now. He struggles into his shoes, ties on his eye patch roughly, and hurries downstairs.

"Have you seen Sebastian?" he asks Mey-Rin, the first person he encounters at the bottom of the stairs.

"No, Young Master!" she replies. "I was wondering where he was myself. He always gives us instructions for the day, but I haven't seen him this morning."

Ciel runs into the kitchen to find Baldroy cutting up vegetables on the counter.

"Do you know where Sebastian is?" he asks, though he already knows what answer the man will give.

"No, Your Lordship," the chef replies. "Did you dress yourself? Didn't he take you any breakfast?"

By now, Mey-Rin has followed him into the kitchen, and Finny is putting his head round the side door.

"He must have stepped out to see to something urgent," Mey-Rin suggests.

"No," Ciel insists. "Something's happened. I know it."

"Why do you say that?" Baldroy asks, puzzled. "It's hardly the first time he's left the manor for a while without informing anyone. He's been doing that for months."

"He's always there to dress me in the morning – always," Ciel says. "He wouldn't go out without returning in time, or at least without first informing you that you'd have to be my valet for the day."

"Maybe Mister Tanaka will know?" Finny asks.

"Tanaka won't know," Ciel says barely audibly. "Sebastian wouldn't leave like this if he wanted anyone to know. Something's very wrong."

"What is happening?" comes a voice from the kitchen's main doorway.

It is Agni, who has just stepped into the manor after setting out from London early in the morning with Soma in a hired coach, only to find the air here bristling with an incredible, malignant spiritual energy.

"Agni, Sebastian's gone!" Ciel cries, rushing up to the Brahmin. "Can you sense anything wrong? Anything?"

The tall Indian bends down and gently holds the earl's thin upper arms in his large hands. "Lord Ciel, there is something in the air. I can't see it, but I can feel it. Something happened here last night, but it isn't here any more."

"What do you mean?"

"I do not understand it myself, but whatever it was, it seems to have moved. If Mister Sebastian went out to deal with it, he may have gone with it."

"No," Ciel shakes his head. "He wouldn't leave me... not now... not after all we've been through!"

"He may only have gone out for a while..." Mey-Rin clings to that hope, but tears start into her eyes as the young master's distress affects her keenly.

"Lord Ciel," Agni says. "I too believe that Mister Sebastian would never leave you just like that. If he did, it must have been for the most important and urgent of reasons."

"We have to find him," Ciel says, fighting to keep his voice steady as he thinks of everything Sebastian has been hiding from him, and which he has not succeeded in uncovering. "I must find him."

He pulls away from Agni and tears out of the kitchen with the rest after him, pushing past Soma who has come to find out what is going on. The prince can only splutter: "Huh? Wh-what's wrong? Ciel? Agni!"

"Mister Sebastian is missing," Agni tells his prince in an undertone as the earl and his staff disappear down the passageway. "Something bad may have happened to him."

Soma stares at his manservant before running after Ciel. The earl is tearing towards Sebastian's bedroom, hoping against hope to find something there that will tell him where his demon butler, protector, friend and lover has gone. He is first through the door. In seconds, the space fills up with the rest of the household, save for Tanaka.

"What should we be looking for?" Soma asks.

"Don't touch anything yet," Ciel says, glancing around. "I've searched this room several times. I'll know if anything is out of place from the last time I looked."

"Why have you been searching Mister Sebastian's bedroom?" Baldroy asks curiously.

"I suspected that something was wrong, but he insisted it was nothing I ought to know about. I shouldn't have wanted to believe him; I shouldn't have wished to believe that all was well," the earl mutters bitterly. "I should have demanded the truth, even if it would have meant quarrelling with him."

He feels sick at heart to think he had so badly wanted to believe everything was fine, throwing himself into what he and Sebastian seemed to be building for the future. It had softened his usual suspicion and ruthlessness, which could have unearthed an answer by now.

Ciel pulls out the bottom tier of the chest of drawers and observes that the bullet he had found previously is still there, with the buttons. He opens another drawer, and another, and another, rummaging through each one.

At first, the others in the room can only stare. Apart from Agni, who saw that private moment between the earl and his butler in the passageway, they are bewildered. They do not understand why Ciel is suddenly, irrationally, frantic about a butler whose welfare he had always seemed somewhat callous about. They do not understand why he talks as if he had a particularly intimate friendship with Sebastian. They still do not see why Sebastian's absence should mean that anything untoward has happened, for he has always appeared more than human, capable of amazing feats, an untouchable being.

But they push aside their confusion once Ciel flings open the wardrobe door and starts rifling through the clothes.

"Young Master, please..." Mey-Rin begs. "We don't know what we can do to help. Please tell us how we can help."

Ciel stops ploughing through the jackets, coats and shirts on their hangers, and turns to look at his staff and friends. For a second, he does not know what to say. If he is wrong about this whole matter, he will have panicked for nothing, and will be needlessly exposing the depth of his relationship with Sebastian. But if these instincts that are forming a great pit in his stomach are correct, then he is going to need all the help he can get.

He speaks at last: "I've looked through everything in this room before, and there is nothing apart from Elizabeth's gift of the black scarf, and a spent bullet in the bottom drawer of that chest, that is a personal possession of Sebastian's. Everything else here, down to his underthings, was supplied by the manor. I need to find something that is out of place. Something that may tell me what he is doing, what he has done, where he has gone."

Agni apart, they still do not understand. But they have done many things before that they do not comprehend, so they snap into action at once.

"Have you looked behind, under and on top of all the furniture before?" Baldroy asks briskly, starting to move items away from the wall.

"Yes," Ciel answers, turning back to the wardrobe to inspect every article of clothing – all the pockets, all the folds, and the lining. "But I last checked a few weeks ago. Something might have been concealed there since then."

"Right," the chef says, lying flat on the floor to look beneath a cabinet.

Finny, Mey-Rin, Soma and Agni join him, grabbing chairs, or helping one another up and down, scanning the top of the wardrobe and the upper shelves, and shifting the desk, chest of drawers and bed. Soma then goes through all the sheets of paper and envelopes at the desk, while Finny lifts the mattress, and Mey-Rin shakes out the bedcovers and checks the pillows. Ciel continues going through every pocket of every one of Sebastian's garments.

Agni peers into the chest of drawers again, before it occurs to him to ask: "Lord Ciel, did Mister Sebastian ever say why he kept this bullet?"

"I shot him with it. He said it seemed significant."

"You shot–" Soma gasps before falling silent, realising that he has no idea how to even begin forming questions to probe deeper into the earl's matter-of-fact remark.

"I wonder if his keeping it in these drawers might point to something else significant here?" Agni asks. "Did you look under and behind each drawer?"

"I tried, but those drawers are heavy, and I didn't have the strength to pull the upper ones all the way out," Ciel admits. "Rather, I could have pulled them all the way out, but they would have fallen on me, and I wouldn't have been able to lift them to slot them back onto their grooves. But I did draw them out as far as possible, and I felt along the backs."

Agni and Finny start pulling the drawers out with ease, depositing them individually on the floor. Finny puts his head into the cavity of the hollowed-out chest, and runs his hands over its inside-back, sides, base and top.

"Nothing," says the gardener.

But at the same moment, Agni goes: "What is this?"

Ciel scrambles over and sees that Agni has found a small envelope glued to the back surface of one drawer. He kneels beside it as Soma hands him a letter opener from the desk, and carefully cuts the glued-down flap. He slips his fingers into the envelope and extracts a folded sheet, written on both sides. The type of paper and the handwriting instantly mark it as being from Percival Ambrose's collection, which he has gone over many times. Yet, all it takes is one swift glance at the contents for Ciel to immediately know that he has never seen this before.

Sebastian has been hiding it from him.

Remaining where he is on the floor, he starts reading, not noticing or caring that the others are crowding behind him, reading over his head and shoulders. The very opening lines tell him at once that this is a letter Ambrose wrote to him, Ciel, during his stay at the manor. So why has Sebastian hidden this from him?

I warned you before that devils were devious beings, and I remind you of that here. Your devil claims to be willing to work for you without a contract for your soul. He would be a rare specimen indeed if that were so. But it is my duty to warn you that what appears to be affection and loyalty on a demon's part could as well be something very different.

All the knowledge I have mined from Carsten has brought to my awareness the practices of demons. It is their nature to conceal their ends and motivations, because it is a point of pride with them – and was pride not the downfall of the very first devil in existence? – not to be easily read. They do not like to be pinned down. Many of them may not lie completely, but may trade in parti-truths, shades of grey.

Perhaps your devil is truly fond of you. But possible it is also that he is attached to you for a purpose. Through Carsten I have learnt that a devil's pleasure is never greater than when its prey is filled with terror and betrayal, particularly when the prey still possesses a certain naïveté. That is why they care to form contracts at all. Purely attacking and devouring souls unclaimed by God is mere feeding; a contract establishes trust, dependence, even affection, and they feed on the pleasure of these emotions which finally prove useless to the humans who feel them. It is why they are often protective of their prey beyond what is necessary – because they want to preserve some innocence in them for their enhanced pleasure later.

I do not know if you can trust your demon. He has declared to me and you that he is willing to right the balance of power to prevent harm to you. He seems to mean what he says, but I do not know – I cannot know – if he does. If you choose to trust him, you should be aware that as he proceeds to right the balance of power, he could take one of two directions after a point.

When he has accumulated sufficient power to divert the attention of the balancing forces from you to him, he may either fulfil his purpose by holding fast to the very end, or he may turn against you and every other by becoming a power unto himself. The strength he will have attained by that time will make him a force capable of destabilising the powers of hell and earth, though he is unlikely to affect heaven. If he turns against you and everything else, he will become an immense devil among devils. Then you, and more creatures on earth and even in hell than you can imagine will be his mere playthings. Do not fancy that he will remember any affection for you when he becomes such a monster, or that he will show you any further compassion.

If he begins to hide things from you where once he was open; if he shows signs of having slain your enemies without your knowledge (so that the power exercised will be his alone and not yours); and if he refrains from possessing you fully in the flesh even when he has the opportunity and desire to, he may be sincerely protecting you. But it could also be his laying the groundwork to betray you, and in the same stroke become a greater demon than Satan himself, one who can shift the balance of the universe in his favour. When that happens, you will be utterly at his mercy, for him to do with as he pleases. Once he tires of you, you will be no more than a fly to him, worth nothing but to be crushed between his terrible fingers.

Ciel is a fast reader. He gets to the end of the letter before most of the others do. However, everyone has read enough by the time he lowers the sheet to his lap and hangs his head over it to learn that Percival Ambrose believed Ciel kept a demon; enough to suspect that this demon might be none other than their missing butler, although the letter does not name him.

Agni is the only one reading over Ciel's shoulders who had any inkling of Sebastian's true nature before this. He was the only one who saw him deal with Sophia Easton's men in the dark of night on the manor grounds; his heightened senses and abilities also give him sharper clues to the nature of others than most humans enjoy. Therefore, he is the least surprised by what he has read, and the first to speak.

"Lord Ciel," the Brahmin says gently. "The revelations in this letter from Mister Ambrose must be a great shock to you, but you must not let them affect your good judgement."

"I don't believe it," Ciel mumbles in a hollow voice, head still bowed.

"Is this really about Sebastian?" Soma gasps. "It also mentions Carsten... does this mean that Sebastian and Carsten are both devils?"

"He's a devil?" Baldroy mutters incredulously. "I've always known he was unusual, but a devil? Look, Your Lordship, I don't know the half of what's going on here, but if Mister Sebastian has been concealing this letter from you, it doesn't look good."

Ciel shakes his head, and repeats: "I don't believe it."

"Of course you don't!" Soma says angrily. "It's hard to believe that someone you've trusted fully would intend to betray you! But listen to me – I once believed Agni had betrayed me, when the truth was nowhere close! Listen to Agni too – don't let this affect your good sense..."

Ciel is visibly trembling, shaking with an emotion that could be fear, rage or misery – the others cannot tell, with his dark head bowed like that, his shoulders sagging.

"Young Master, please..." Mey-Rin sobs. "The hiding of the letter doesn't look good to me either, but Mister Sebastian wouldn't betray you, no matter who... no matter what he is!"

"I believe so too!" Finny wails, great teardrops wetting his face.

Baldroy, more cynical than the others, takes a while to think about it. But at last, he declares: "He may be a devil straight out of hell, but all I've known of him is that he cares about you, Your Lordship. I know he even cares about us in his own peculiar way – and I don't mean caring the way I care about the hens I'm going to cook for dinner one fine day–"

He breaks off when Ciel raises his head, and gets to his feet. He is still trembling, but when the others look into his single exposed eye, it is blazing with an odd kind of anger. The earl crushes the sheet of paper in his left hand, trembling with emotion as he growls: "That is exactly what I meant when I said I didn't believe it. I don't believe it!"

"You mean..." Soma starts to say.

"That BASTARD!" Ciel roars at the top of his voice, making everyone jump, as he flings the crumpled letter to the ground. No one here has ever heard him shout so loudly before. "Stupid bastard! Did he think I would be fooled by that? Did he really think I would believe it?"

"But it really is Mister Ambrose's handwriting, isn't it?" Finny hiccups through his sobs. "I know his writing – he wrote a lot while I sat with him."

"Yes it is," Ciel snarls, blue eye glittering with anger, heart thumping with the knowledge that while he once would have believed the worst of Sebastian without difficulty, he would now stake his life on the conviction that he would never betray him. "It is Ambrose's writing. It is a letter to me. But there is no possibility in all the levels of hell that I would believe it contains the whole story. There's something else we haven't found. Keep looking!"

As they search the room again, Mey-Rin sniffles: "Mister Sebastian spoke so kindly to me yesterday, and gave me some good advice without my seeking it. He's never done that before."

"He said nice things to me too, yesterday, about my care of the gardens," Finny starts crying again as he remembers Sebastian praising him.

"He charged me with taking care of His Lordship's meals and health," Baldroy mutters. "As if he was getting ready to leave, now that I think about it."

Ciel freezes midway through his scrutiny of one of the desk drawers. He turns around to face the others and says thoughtfully: "So he seemed to be saying goodbye... but he didn't hand anything to any of you?"

The three servants shake their heads.

"Soma and Agni were away from the manor yesterday, so... that leaves Tanaka!" Ciel cries.

He springs up from the chair at the writing desk and runs out of Sebastian's bedroom towards Tanaka's sitting room on the second level of the manor.

"Tanaka!" the earl calls, bursting through the door of the steward's room.

The old man is in an armchair, contemplating a green porcelain bowl of exquisite proportions.

"Your Lordship," he says in some surprise, as everyone else pours in through the door fast on the earl's heels.

"Tanaka," Ciel approaches him urgently. "Focus your thoughts, and your memory. Think hard. Did Sebastian give you anything yesterday? Or say anything to you?"

The steward blinks at the earl through his eyeglasses for a few seconds before he locates the piece of memory he seeks, which floats about with all the other fragments of information drifting loose in his head. "Oh, yes, Mister Sebastian handed me a sealed envelope yesterday. He said I would not need to look at it until tomorrow, for it held some correspondence that was not to be sent out yet."

"Where is it?" Ciel asks.

"Here, Your Lordship," Tanaka replies, reaching across to the square table before him and picking up a large brown envelope, which shows marks of having been folded before.

Ciel eagerly takes it from him, tears the flap open, and pulls out the contents, which prove to be several smaller, sealed envelopes. The names and addresses on most of them quickly mark them as no more than letters of business relating to services provided to the manor and Funtom. One, however, catches Ciel's attention, for it is addressed to John Jarvis.

The earl seizes a letter opener from the writing desk at the side of Tanaka's sitting room and slits open the envelope with Jarvis' name on it.

"What if it is a strictly private letter to Mister Jarvis?" Soma asks.

"If it is, I shall apologise to Jarvis later," Ciel mutters. "But this is a crisis."

He sets his back to the desk and faces outward, intending to read the letter by himself this time. In any case, the others do not peek as they did before, lest there be something in there that Jarvis would not like others to know about. As Ciel pulls a thin, folded sheet out of the envelope, something else comes out with it – yet another, smaller, envelope, also sealed. This one has Ciel's own name on it.

The earl first scans the single sheet which had been wrapped around the smaller envelope. It reads simply:

Mister Jarvis,

Please do me the favour of keeping the enclosed, sealed letter in your possession until the day you observe that Lord Phantomhive has grown up, found happiness in life with his own wife and children, and no longer thinks of me.

Even if you never see that day, or if you should lose the letter, or fear that you may die before being able to give it to him, do not trouble yourself over it. The boy's happiness would not increase by being reminded of me. Even if he never reads it, it would not really matter. I would be no one to him by then.

Sebastian

Ciel puts this covering letter down on the desk, and tears open the smaller, sealed letter. He feels his blood run cold as he unfolds several sheets of paper covered with Ambrose's handwriting. These are more papers he has never seen before, which Sebastian has kept hidden from him. They are plainly a continuation of the letter pasted to the back of the drawer in Sebastian's room.

What I have written about thus far in this letter to you are the possibilities, the worst of betrayals that could happen. But since penning that earlier portion, I have spoken at greater length to your devil, and I believe he is the only being in all the worlds we know of who has the capacity and the will to save you from your fate.

I have had a revelation, an epiphany. Perhaps it has come to me only now, after all these years, because I am dying at last – being so close to death must have given me the leap of insight that has hitherto evaded me. Why has it taken me so long to see this? I must quickly write this down, in this brief interlude of lucidity in the midst of my confusion.

Child, I thought at first that it was all a matter of balance. I thought that if I bound your devil to you as a slave, you would rule the underworld and never give it the opportunity to rise up against you, while retaining full control over the fate of your soul. You would thus never be weak enough to be destroyed by your enemies. Then all you would need to do to preserve your family would be to act judiciously and loyally with the throne of England, and govern your own deeds.

But I see now, with this new blaze of understanding, that while such balance might have preserved your forebears, it did not save your father, and will not save you. The process, you see, is becoming damaged and unstable. It is ceasing to work as it used to. Balancing the forces is no longer enough to save your life. I have done much research into the nature of the forces of balance as they relate to Phantomhive, but only now – only on this night, do I suddenly understand everything clearly, and must scribble all this down quickly by the fading light of the fireplace.

I see now that a spell was cast. There is no other explanation for the way things have turned out. It must have been done some time after the death of Queen Elizabeth. By my rough calculations, it was cast in the reign of James I – most likely without the king's knowledge, for his hatred of witchcraft and devilry was well known. It must have been done in secret by some of his meddlesome courtiers with strong superstitions and strong belief in otherworldly things. These people must have feared and envied the Phantomhives and their potential for immense power. They must have sought ways to continue using Phantomhive to protect the monarch of England, Scotland and Ireland, while keeping the agency in check now and again by pitting the things of the underworld and otherworld against them, so that your family could always be there to do its work, but never grow too strong.

I see now that those meddling courtiers must have stolen magic to cast the spell – there is no other way they could have done something so vast. I know of no other mortals with the kind of magical prowess my family had, so they had to have stolen the magic from beings they trafficked with. In those days, they must have had knowledge of devils, angels, grim reapers, fairies, elves and nymphs, amongst other folk. The true angels of heaven would not have dealt with them, but renegades like the one who killed your parents might have struck agreements with them for their own reasons, and either permitted the spell, or unknowingly had magical elements of their kind pilfered from them.

I realise only now that these other beings must have been knowingly or unknowingly linked to the spell, and also to the House of Phantomhive. Because of the spell, these otherworldly forces, most likely without fully knowing why, are drawn periodically to attack and weaken Phantomhive. Ostensibly, their acts balance the power that would otherwise keep building up in the Phantomhives, who seem to have been formed to accumulate strength. The spell appears to have worked well for more than two hundred years, but something must have gone very wrong with it by the time your father was murdered. If the spell was meant to weaken Phantomhive without utterly destroying it, then it ought perhaps to only have wounded your family, or at most taken your father alone, but spared you and your mother. Instead, your mother too was murdered, and you all but died – in fact, if my investigations are accurate, you would certainly have died had you not accidentally summoned your devil.

The spell therefore must already have been unstable when it nearly extinguished your family. It is in all likelihood growing more unstable by the day. I suspect that the instability of that spell is not only channelling into your person more power that attracts ever-greater danger from other forces, but is even transforming you into an outlet through which the imbalance of the world can be righted. But Ciel, you are merely human, and a mere human cannot survive being such an outlet. If this continues, your complete and utter destruction – sooner rather than later – is the only possible outcome.

Sebastian has recently revealed to me, in private, that you had once attempted to end your own life. It is a theory of mine, though I have no proof, that even such small things as your inclination to destroy yourself may be subtle effects of that old, damaged, corrupted spell. You are supposed to live, not to perish at such a tender age. But this corrupt magic spiralling out of control will not spare you, unless someone with the strength, power and determination to save you can relieve you of its oppression, and shift the outlet of balance away from your person.

I am pleased now that you disrupted my own spell to bind Sebastian to you, for that impulsive and compassionate act has by all appearances bound him to you anyway – but with the bonds of true devotion rather than the chains of unwilling enslavement.

I believe that your demon can and will shift the outlet of balance from you onto himself, and transfer from your spirit to his own the numerous chains that have bound every head of Phantomhive both to the cosmic scale of balance, as well as to the otherworldly creatures who come to weaken your family at intervals.

No mere mortal could do it. And no one, mortal or immortal, would be willing to do it. Except he who is devoted to you in every way, so much so that he would lay down his life for you.

With shaking hands, Ciel turns the last sheet over to see a short note penned on the blank surface in Sebastian's elegant handwriting:

Young Master, forgive me. I promised to be with you till the very end, and for a time, we both believed that end would come with your physical death. It appears as I write this, however, that it will be my end that parts us.

May you think so little of me by the time you read this as to be unaffected by these words, for in defiance of the darkness of my nature, I wish you nothing but good – joy and peace, light and hope, and a life filled with the love you could only know without me.

Ciel stares at these final words from Sebastian – words the devil had intended him to read only years from now, if ever. There is a strange, leaden feeling in his hands, his legs, in a tight band around his head, warring with the sickening pounding of his heart and an emptiness in his belly. In almost mechanical fashion, he positions the covering letter to Jarvis neatly over the sheets with Ambrose's writing and Sebastian's last note, folds them perfectly along the original creases his butler had made, and puts them back into the larger envelope. He tries to tuck the envelope into his jacket pocket, but realises he is not wearing a jacket. So he holds it in his right hand, steadies himself against Tanaka's desk with his left arm, and steps stiffly towards the door of the room, feeling as if his knees are bending awkwardly as he walks. It is as if his joints will either lock up and render him immobile, or fold under him as he moves, so he takes every step carefully, deliberately.

"Lord Ciel?" Agni speaks, not knowing what to say, for no one else knows the contents of the second part of the letter.

Ciel compels himself to keep walking, until the urgency of the situation gives rise to a silent scream deep inside him – from himself to himself – to start running, because he does not know what hour Sebastian left him, or how much danger he is facing this very moment, or even if he has already... no, no, no!

He forces his unsteady legs into a run, till he is sprinting along the passageway towards his study – for he realises now that the numerous stacks of papers Ambrose have left behind, and the knowledge he can glean from them, may be his only hope of ever seeing Sebastian again.
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Devilish Impulses