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Oh, Hell	By : Arianawray Category: > Black Butler (Kuroshitsuji ???) Views: 4696 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Kuroshitsuji (Black Butler) and make no money from this or any of my other fanfics

Chapter List
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Change Of Scene

Bastard molester.

Ciel scowled as he flipped through the rack of fluffy bedroom slippers at BhS along Oxford Street. He found a pair in his size, priced at only three quid and ninety-nine pence, in a cute dog design complete with pink tongue hanging out and ears that flapped. This was the design Sebastian was sure to hate the most, so he bought it.

Killjoy creep.

Down the busy shopping street he walked to the Benetton store, where he unearthed the most cheerful, multi-coloured lambswool jumper he could find, and bought that too for twenty-four pounds, confident that Sebastian would least approve of this eye-catching pattern.

Pervert.

Next, he popped into a Sock Shop and gazed at the wild designs all around him. They had socks with rainbow fruit on them, gaudy chinoiserie cartoons, sheep, cats, flowers and everything loud. Just the sort of thing he had been trying to wear as a rebellious statement for the past two decades against Sebastian's eternal aesthetic of black and muted hues. Yes, Sebastian would hate the socks on sight. He picked out three of the brightest designs – the psychedelic flowers, the rainbow fruits, and one of the chinoiserie patterns which was a quirky mix of Oriental fans and piglets dressed in brocade-patterned robes.

He paid for them and stepped back out into the street. The socks were small enough to be stuffed into his satchel, so he put them away, but all the other carrier bags had to be slung over his shoulders or arms or held in his hands. One would never have guessed it from the numerous purchases he was toting, but Ciel Phantomhive was not truly in the mood for shopping. He had never liked London in the summer. Yet, he had left one hell only to decide to surface in this other hell of an over-crowded retail mecca packed with tourists, pickpockets and summer-sale bargain hunters, with a wallet full of cash and no genuine interest in anything he had bought.

Just so he could be away for a while from the bastard he was stuck with.

"Arsehole," he muttered angrily to himself, ire rising again at the memory of yesterday's encounter in the library. While he was angry with the older devil, he was more furious with himself – the thought of how he had whined and moaned and clutched Sebastian's hair to keep his mouth right there was burning two fiery red spots into his cheeks.

The humiliation had prompted him to slip out of the mansion this morning and escape hell for a breather. Novice devils could not leave without permission from their guardians, but he still had the permit Claude had obtained from Sebastian for the Disneyland outing. At the end of the excursion, Claude thought Sebastian had nullified the magically worked authorisation; Sebastian assumed that the gatekeepers had taken it back from Claude. It helped that they were not really on speaking terms – and Ciel simply said nothing about the permit being in his pocket.

It meant that he had been able to transport himself out of hell this morning without attracting Sebastian's notice. While their contract technically meant that Sebastian always knew where he was, their reluctant association with each other these ninety-seven years past had resulted in the senior devil largely blocking out awareness of his location, except when Ciel was in real danger and called for him.

With any luck, he wouldn't notice he was missing yet. That would give him more time alone, in a busy place distracting enough to keep his thoughts off Sebastian's mouth, Sebastian's hands, Sebastian's body...

Bastard.

After buying so many things he did not really want, he unexpectedly spied something he did. Near where Regent Street joined Oxford Street was a fruit seller operating out of a cart stall. Ciel crossed the road to the stall and ran his eyes over the sweet, ripe summer fruit. The blackberries looked particularly tempting. He wanted the very best among them, and he would sniff them out with his sharp little nose.

"Only a quid for a punnet, lad," the seller said, laughing when this customer, who looked every bit like a beautiful teenaged boy, started picking up the perforated plastic containers one after the other to sniff them. "They're all the same, top quality stuff – y'can't smell a whole lot through that plastic, anyway!"

"Yes, I can," Ciel stated. "They're not all the same. I want this punnet."

"One quid's a great price for a pack like that," the seller grinned. "Y'wont find a better price 'tween here and Charing Cross Road."

The blackberries could have cost five hundred times that for all Ciel cared; he had the money. He only cared about the quality of the fruit. It was purely a bonus that the price was ridiculously low – as it often was in summer, when local berries ripened in such numbers that growers pushed stock as hard as they could before it rotted. He dug about the pockets of his jeans for a pound coin, and handed it to the man before walking away with his purchase.

Money was no object. He had always had wealth – as a human and as a devil. Sebastian had shown him how their magical powers could create impeccable documents of birth, education, finance and even medical histories, so they could have mortal identities which could be replaced with new ones every eighty years or so. Doing this allowed demons to operate in the modern world as if they were ordinary humans, giving them convenient base identities to work from whenever they needed to reside amongst mortals for moderate periods of time.

It also allowed them to retain the mortal-world assets they wished to keep. A piece of freehold property, for instance, could be purchased by a devil using one identity, then willed through normal legal means to his next identity once the first had reached the end of what would be an unsuspicious age at which a human being might pass away. Devils had no real interest in material things. However, in this age where everything was recorded and shared amongst government, law-enforcement and legal entities worldwide, a devil who wished to traffic with mortals needed to establish some material foundation in order to operate more easily in the guise of a human being.

Ciel had identities galore, numerous pieces of prime property, and very impressive bank balances. But out of that vast store of wealth, all it had needed was one pound to purchase this little carton of genuine pleasure. He pried the punnet open and ate a berry, savouring the perfect ripeness of the flesh and sweet juices that burst over his tongue.

He slipped into one of the side roads off Oxford Street and sat down to eat the berries, resting on the steps leading up to an office that was closed as it was the weekend. He wondered if he should visit the Phantomhive manor after this. The property had reverted to the crown upon the disappearance and eventual presumed death of the last Earl of Phantomhive – himself – and had become the sort of place that people paid to enter on conducted tours.

Ciel had done that in recent years – paid a fee to a guide to be shown around his own home. Even now, he lacked the words to fully convey in any language how incredibly sad and stupid an experience that was. Still, he did it occasionally, when Sebastian agreed to accompany him. He could have just materialised somewhere inside the manor to skulk around like an intruder, but he paid to visit, because he just wanted to walk in through the front door like a human being, the way he had for the first thirteen years of his life.

But no, he wouldn't visit the manor today. He would keep shopping for things that he knew Sebastian would loathe, because being obliged to set his eyes on items he regarded as eyesores was nothing less than the killjoy bastard deserved.

He ate the berries, then shoved the plastic container into the Benetton bag – rubbish bins were hard to find in this part of London, and he didn't want to use any magic that might draw attention from other immortals. He was just turning back into Oxford Street to pop into Selfridges for a look at the latest hat collections when he sensed something that made the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

At once, he knew he had made a mistake coming out here on his own.

This was why novice devils were not let out of hell without their guardians' authorisation. Hell was a natural environment for demons; everyone knew their place and bounds of conduct. Devils in the mortal world, however, were by and large beyond the supervision and judgement of other devils. Some lived here because they liked dwelling among humans, and were extremely civilised towards mortals (until they selected one to devour). But if they scented another devil they had no existing pact with, they might attack him or her for reasons ranging from territorial infringement to sheer bloodlust if they thought they could get away with it. Even if they were in a contract with a mortal, with rules to govern them, such rules usually didn't cover their conduct towards other devils.

This was also why Sebastian usually accompanied Ciel everywhere in the mortal world, save when they were in Sebastian's own territory, or within the network of city areas claimed by devils they were on cooperative terms with. An unprotected novice demon like Ciel, out of his guardian's area of control, was an easy victim for devils who were not on friendly terms with them – and it felt like one of them had sniffed him out.

If he called for Sebastian, he would arrive at once. The hostile devil would back off when he saw that the novice he was targeting had a powerful protector. But Ciel was still angry with his guardian and with himself, so he ignored that sensible option. Instead, he decided to handle this on his own. He nipped out of the area at top speed, causing a couple of people near him to wonder where the beautiful, dark-haired boy they had just seen had vanished to.

Sprinting in the direction of Hyde Park, he moved too fast to be visible to human eyes. His ultimate aim was Belgravia, where he still owned the damned town house he had owned as a human. This was private property – not something bestowed on the Phantomhives by the royal family – so he had retained possession of it through some cunning creation of a new identity after his "death", and an "old will" that Sebastian had arranged for lawyers to dig up.

Because the town house was his and Sebastian's, that part of Belgravia was marked among demons familiar with London as Sebastian Michaelis' territory. No devil would touch him within that territory unless he wanted to make an enemy of Sebastian for the rest of eternity.

Unfortunately, the demon coming after him was fast – too fast for him to outstrip before he could reach safe ground. By the time he made one end of Hyde Park, he knew he would not be able to outrun his pursuer. So he dropped his shopping bags to the ground and whipped around to face the strange demon, who emanated waves of unfriendly intent. A few people were in this part of the park, but no one paid them any attention.

"I happen to have a bad case of the munchies, little imp, and you look like you'll make a nice meal," said the demon, who was in the guise of a slender mortal man in his thirties or thereabouts, dressed in a highly fashionable but not very tasteful mustard-yellow suit. "I don't scent a protector in the vicinity either, which makes you legitimate prey."

Ciel was afraid, but covered it up with a sneer: "I thought you were some fearsome beast worth running from, but it appears you're only a muzzled fop who's too stupid to stipulate proper feeding terms in his contract with his human master."

"A brave taunt, but I smell your fear," the predatory demon grinned.

"I smell something unpleasant too, but I don't think it's coming from me," Ciel snapped.

"Keep talking, little one – I'll like the feel of you yelping away inside my belly – makes everything nice and ticklish for a bit."

"If you think I'm going to be an easy meal, think again," Ciel warned. "I'll cheerfully claw my way out from inside you."

"You might be able to do that if I were an ordinary devil," the yellow-clad one chuckled. "Alas for you, I'm not quite so ordinary. I'm a Devourer."

Ciel blanched. Among the lessons Sebastian had given him about demonkind had been a few concerning Devourers – devils who specialised in feeding on weaker demons to boost their own power. Devils were hard to kill, and one who crudely tried to swallow another – or even a portion of another – might as well get ready to have his innards ripped apart from the inside. Devourers, though, were different. They were generally weak compared with most devils, but they had the ability to draw the essence out of a young and unskilled demon the way any demon might draw the soul out of a human. The empty husk of the victim whose immortal vitality had been thus sucked out would crumble away into nothing.

He shouldn't have come out here on his own.

He would have to call for Sebastian after all, and face the humiliation of being rescued by the one under whom he had been writhing shamelessly just yesterday. Well, there was no help for it.

He opened his mouth to summon him, but the name wouldn't come off his tongue. He urgently tried to think the name – just thinking with the intent of summoning him was enough – he would come. But he realised something was very wrong when his mind felt numb, incapable of bringing a single thought into focus.

"Little imps like you who slip away from home eventually scream for their protectors when they can't run any further," the other devil laughed. "That's why I use a spell which not only paralyses your tongue, but also confounds your mind so you can't thought-summon anyone."

All that went through Ciel's head was confusion and vague thoughts going in useless circles. One of the flailing ideas that was trying desperately to form in his brain was that panic alone was all right, because Sebastian would sense that very panic and come to him immediately.

Except... other floundering thoughts trying to assume a shape in his swimming head were that it would take time for this kind of spell-scrambled panic to reach him, and it would be too late, because the predator in the mustard-yellow suit was already right in front of him, reaching a hand out to draw him close to take his very existence away –

Suddenly, the cloud of befuddlement snapped when the spell was abruptly broken by an intervening flash of black which snatched him to safety and sent the mustard devil staggering backwards into the park.

His first returning coherent thought was that Sebastian had made it in time. But when he glanced up at the one who had him in his arms, he saw that it was Claude Faustus.

"Claude!" he gasped.

"Fortunately, Alois heard five minutes ago from the gatekeepers that you left hell alone this morning," Claude murmured, his attention mainly on the opponent in yellow a few feet away from them. "He told me at once, and I came up here to track you down. Coming here by yourself was not a clever thing to do, Ciel."

Ever since Disneyland, Claude had called him "Ciel" in the most natural manner, and Ciel had not objected. After all, Faustus was no longer the devil who had usurped Sebastian's place and pretended to be his butler for a time, but a fellow demon. And Ciel could tell that Claude and Alois really enjoyed being with him. Being with them was so different from being merely tolerated by Sebastian that to his surprise, Ciel had found himself liking them right back, from that very first excursion.

Therefore, he swallowed his pride – something he would never have done with Sebastian – and said humbly: "I'm sorry."

"You should be sorry, for your own sake," Claude said. "But I'm not angry with you now that you're all right. I know you will learn from this experience."

Claude shifted Ciel onto his left arm and strode towards the Devourer, who started to move away when he felt the power that Claude was unleashing to show his strength. The predator knew at once that this devil was not one to be trifled with, and turned to escape, only to find his way blocked by the appearance of another strong devil.

Sebastian.

"You tried to make a meal out of my ward," Sebastian sighed in exasperation, eyeing the Devourer. He had sensed Ciel's distress once the spell dissipated, and rushed into the mortal world at once.

"In my defence, I didn't know he was yours," the other devil replied with a nervous grin.

"Go anywhere near him again, and I will shred you so finely that you won't re-compose yourself before London is fifty feet deep in the sea."

"Understood. Goodbye."

The mustard-suited demon fled, leaving the other three together.

"Call yourself a guardian," Claude remarked to Sebastian, smoothly and bitingly.

"You didn't return the gatekeeper the permit I issued," came Sebastian's cold rejoinder.

"It was your responsibility to confirm with the gatekeeper that it had been returned," Claude retorted.

"If somebody had not kept quiet about the permit being with him, none of this would have happened," Sebastian commented, looking pointedly at Ciel.

"Ciel is a young devil who has been over-sheltered," Claude told Sebastian sternly. "It is only natural for him to try pulling such stunts. Your responsibility is to keep a close eye on him."

"I can assure you that he will not be out of my sight or take so much as one step out of the house for the next hundred years," Sebastian rumbled forbiddingly, glaring at the earl.

Ciel went paler than his usual shade of pale. Claude noticed at once and countered Sebastian's threat with a trump card of his own: "You will do no such thing. I am taking charge of Ciel until he chooses to return to you. I hereby exercise my right to claim a novice whose guardian has let him out of his sphere of protection, and who has been rescued by me."

Sebastian's glare shifted to Claude, garnet eyes hardening. Mature demons had the right to claim novice devils they had saved from danger, if those novices had been abandoned by their guardians, or if their guardians had failed to save them. He knew it, but had not thought Claude would act on that right, considering that Ciel had only slipped away and had not been discarded.

Sebastian shifted his eyes back to Ciel, and asked: "Is that what you want?"

The final decision rested with the novice, who could choose to return to his guardian if he did want to go with his rescuer

Faced with a choice between possibly being locked up by Sebastian for the next century, and taking his chances with Claude, Alois and Hannah, Ciel plumped for Claude.

"I'm going with Claude," he declared.

Sebastian could not believe it. This was like losing the earl to Faustus all over again, except that there was no deception this time, no brainwashing, no underhanded replacement of one child with another. Everything was honourable and above-board, and there wasn't a thing he could do about it unless Ciel changed his mind.

"You never wanted me around, anyway," Ciel muttered to Sebastian. "You only wanted to eat me, and I was willing to be eaten except things didn't turn out that way. Now you can be rid of me."

Having obtained confirmation that Ciel would go with him, Claude bowed formally to Sebastian before vanishing back into hell with the earl.

Sebastian fumed silently at the corner of Hyde Park for a good ten minutes and contemplated wrecking the park to vent his anger, but thought better of it when he scented cats around and realised they might get hurt if he destroyed the surroundings.

He glared at all the shopping bags the brat had strewn around, and felt like setting them on fire, or leaving them to be picked up by bag ladies. But his nose caught the lingering scent of blackberries, and he spotted the empty pack in the Benetton paper carrier. It brought home the awareness that Ciel had certain unusual desires and needs that he had always superficially fulfilled, without really understanding them.

Pondering this, he picked up all the bags and returned to his home in the netherworld – without his ward, but with a load of shopping he couldn't understand why any devil would want.

***

"Ciel!" Alois cried, throwing himself at his friend the second he and Claude stepped into the house.

"Are you all right?" Hannah asked worriedly, hugging the earl and looking him over. "There are all kinds of predatory demons up there..."

"Baaaad demons," Luka intoned soberly. As if there were really any other kinds amongst the bunch of soul-stealing, mortal-devouring, despair-stoking creatures they were.

"I'm all right, thank you," Ciel replied politely. "Claude came for me in time."

"Ciel will be living with us for as long as he wants to," Claude announced.

Alois yipped in delight, smothered Ciel in a huge embrace, and covered him with wet kisses. Ciel had been in a foul mood up till now, and had thought he would remain wary and grumpy for a bit while assessing Claude's household dynamics. But Alois' licks and kisses were just so damn ticklish that he couldn't help it: he started chuckling, and immediately felt a lot better.

"Hey, cool Sock Shop socks!" Alois exclaimed when he noticed the brightly coloured items sticking out of Ciel's satchel.

"You, Luka and I can have one pair each," Ciel said at once, pleased to have something to share with the other two junior ones.

Luka chose the psychedelic flowers, Alois pounced on the Oriental pigs, and Ciel was happy with the bright fruit. They put them on at once and tumbled about in a tangle of slender limbs and colourful clothes on Hannah's bed. Ciel already felt right at home.

***

Sebastian hoped the brat was miserable. He rather pettily hoped that Faustus was so creepily kissing all the way up Ciel's leg from his foot to his thigh that he would flee the house within the next minute.

But no distress signals came.

By evening, Sebastian had stalked about his empty mansion more times than he wanted to count, a large, restless, sleek black cat looking for something to do.

He had tidied the living room although there was nothing untidy about it to begin with. He had straightened Ciel's room and decided that the space would not make a suitable nursery for cats, after all. He had discarded the perishable food that only the brat would eat. He had arranged every book in the library by subject, then in the alphabetical order of each of the languages they were written in, then by height, then by the colour of their spines – and none of the arrangements had pleased him. Now, he was back in Ciel's bedroom, looking through the shopping bags, inspecting the music collection, and opening the wardrobe to scoff at the little devil's choice of T-shirts with bright graphic designs, denim jeans and colourful jumpers. He had not approved the purchase of half the items here, yet they filled the wardrobe.

With a huff, he took some of the bright-hued garments out to put into a box that he would send off to Faustus' place so that they would be out of his house and with the young master to whom they belonged.

But as he looked through Ciel's possessions, it struck him how diametrically opposed the earl's tastes were now from when he had been human. Doggy bedroom slippers with waggling ears? Ciel had started out with classic good taste and a mature outlook as the Earl of Phantomhive. Then he had turned demon and regressed into a childish rebel who made questionable fashion choices. When and why had this happened? Had he handled the little noble incorrectly?

Why did the brat go home with the disgusting spider?

For the first time in ninety-seven years, Sebastian began to ask himself if he should have studied who Ciel was becoming rather than marching his ward along the path he had determined he should walk, and ignoring the colourful little ways Ciel had been hitting back at him.

Perhaps there was a loud, multi-hued message somewhere in there that he had missed.

***

Alois smelt nice, thought Ciel. Maybe it was a demon thing. When he'd been human, he had thought the Trancy boy over-perfumed and reeking of an unhealthy interest in sex. But now that they were devils – or devils of a kind, at least – he perceived his old foe and new ally as possessed of an intriguing sort of scent. It was particularly evident as they snuggled up together under the covers of Claude's bed – Alois' skin and hair smelt warm like amber laced with fresh lemons.

Nice.

Ciel gave a little growl of pleasure when Alois teased his collarbone with small, nipping motions.

"That tickles," Ciel murmured into the mop of blond hair.

"Everything seems to tickle you," Alois laughed, lifting his face off the earl's neck and chest with a purely cheeky grin that looked nothing like the sly leer he had sported when he was a mortal.

Ciel wondered at the glow on the other's face. Before he could censor what was on his mind, he blurted out: "You're so ridiculously normal now that it's unnerving.

"Normal?" Alois blinked his light-blue eyes.

"Meaning you're not that seriously screwed up boy you used to be. You still act like a dreadful slut, but you're not… sociopathic any more."

"Who's a slut?" Alois demanded with a mock-frown and a mischievous smile at exactly the same time as he groped Ciel between his legs.

"You were saying?" Ciel snapped in response.

"I like you, that's all. I've always liked you and loved Claude. I naturally grope the ones I like. And I'm not sociopathic any more now that Claude loves me back."

"Claude loves you?" Ciel dropped his voice to a whisper.

Alois nodded happily.

"I always thought demons had no concept of love. I don't think I do," muttered the earl.

"Maybe we do, maybe we don't, I'm not bothered by the technicalities," the fair-haired devil said breezily. "I only know Claude adores me and cares for me and he's sorry he was harsh when he killed me and he's apologised for being callous when he talked about disposing of my soul. But beyond that, he's glad he murdered me because it ultimately meant I could be here with him."

Ciel thought that sounded somewhat screwed up, but devils would be devils, and that was probably a pretty decent synopsis of a demonic romance. He had to ask, though: "You don't mind it when he seduces mortals, or touches me the way he did during our play date?"

"You're special to both of us," Alois said with a kiss. "We've always been absurdly fond of you. I'm not jealous of you. As for mortals, they purely mean business and food. I like watching him with his human lovers. He's much more careful about who I bed, and that's another reason I know he loves me."

They heard Claude enter the bedroom, and they nestled deeper under the covers, stifling their chuckles as the one they were discussing approached the bed. Ciel felt the mattress dip when the older demon sat down, and he had a moment's apprehension that this was going to be the start of some brand of Faustian or Trancy-esque weirdness, perhaps with Claude groping both him and Alois all night, one with each hand. He braced himself to have to murmur vague excuses if Claude went too far, headbutt him if necessary, yell for Hannah if nothing else worked, and acquire another good excuse for fleeing hell.

But Claude only peeled the bedcovers back to kiss Alois passionately, before caressing Ciel's face.

"I want you to think of this as your home," Claude said to Ciel as Alois burrowed under his lover's left arm and snuffled his night shirt. "I hope those words do not bring back bad memories of when you were a child, when I tried to deceive you. I was behaving then as a predator aiming to steal a perfect meal. But you are no longer food, and I only want you to be safe and comfortable."

Ciel saw that he had removed his spectacles and put them on the nightstand. He found the devil's golden eyes soft and honest. He would not call it a gentle or kind gaze, for gentleness and kindness did not always sit well with the nature of demons, but this was close.

"So you're not going to molest me?" Ciel asked cautiously.

"Would you like me to?" Claude inquired very seriously, sounding perfectly ready to molest Ciel as much as he required.

"I think it can wait," Ciel answered quickly.

"Of course it can," said Claude. "You should first process what occurred between you and Michaelis. I am surprised that relations have deteriorated so between the two of you. When you were a human boy, he always looked at you with such tenderness."

"Well, I'm not human any more, that's the trouble."

"Don't say that. It should be a good thing that you're not human any more. If Sebastian doesn't appreciate that, he's a dickhead," Alois stated bluntly, before unbuttoning Claude's shirt and drawing a murmur of pleasure from the gold-eyed devil as he lapped seductively at the smooth skin over his chest.

Unexpectedly, Ciel felt envious of how easily and naturally Claude and Alois enjoyed each other. Acting on his feelings and bidden by a smile from Alois, he crept into the crook of Claude's right arm, reached up, and tentatively kissed the older devil on the mouth. Claude kissed him back, and in that kiss, Ciel tasted interest, protectiveness and... affection. The very same fondness in Alois' advances was what had caused Ciel to tell Sebastian that Alois was a better kisser than him.

That was what he had been missing from Sebastian.

As he melted into Claude's kiss, Ciel acknowledged that while Sebastian was technically more proficient than either of these two devils, he had been missing that vital affection when he had kissed and touched him.

Yes, Alois was still an incorrigible tart, and Claude would forever and always be a rather creepy spider demon. But they had died and come back together, and were happy with each other. On top of that, they actually liked him. When they touched him, they conveyed their absolute appreciation of who and what he was, every bit of him. In contrast, Sebastian had never wanted him as a demon. When at last he had taken a more intimate interest in him, his kisses had conveyed lust and desire, but no passion for him just the way he was.

In Ciel's book, that simply made Sebastian the worst kisser and most unwelcome lover possible.

Miserable bastard.
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Oh, Hell