Work Text:
It's an odd feeling for him, something akin to the human feeling of deja vu, brought on by a flower of all things. A violet dark enough to hinge on a shade of royal blue. It tugs at something in his chest, something that feels like a memory, the content of which has faded with time. There is a ghost of a laugh in his ear, far too bitter to be the sound of joy that it mimics, but it feels correct somehow. He chases the thought back into the depths of his mind certain that there will be something at the end of the thread. Something familiar, but instead there is an absence, a perfectly shaped gap where there had once been an answer. An itch pricks at the back of his left hand, and he looks at it expecting to see a mark, but it is blank. No contract mark, no explanation for the tightening and pulling beneath his skin that seems intent to drag him in circles around the hole in his mind.
It is strange. Not the having forgotten, that is relatively normal. One cannot be expected to remember every contract, every event in a life that stretches as far back as his. It's the grief that is strange. The slow choking feeling like the air is being pulled from his lungs. The pain of it is new and jarring. Who was he forgetting? And why did chasing it feel like turning himself inside out?
When he focuses on the violet again it is withered and dead; and that feels right in a way. He picks it anyway pressing it into the worn sketchbook he carries with him. Behind the page with the silhouette of a boy turned away from him in a way that dares him to follow. The ghost of a laugh turns bitter before it fades.
-
He has a rule now. He will not hold a contract for any longer than three years. It's not something he states to those he is contracted to, he doubts it would go over well, but it guarantees that he'll get their soul regardless. It works well enough, but occasionally it causes him to cross paths with a reaper when he takes a soul or more from the Not to Die List.
The first is William. He looks at Sebastian with something akin to pity in his annoyed expression. It makes Sebastian want to turn the Death Scythe on him just to get it over with and not have to deal with whatever William thinks is going on.
"What happened to not gorging yourself on second rate souls?" It's as much a jeer as a genuine question, "I can't help but notice your leash hasn't been as tight as of late."
That was at the turn of the century. It pricked at his skin almost painfully. Not the jeering, but the joke of it. Like they were both in on something, except Sebastian didn't have a clue.
-
Then there was a circus. The steam organ music pulled up a fragmented memory. A tiger. A boy with an eyepatch and a terrible temper, though his face is a blur. Snakes. A fragment of a nursery rhyme. And then a fire. He was standing beside a boy who was laughing as the world burned. Sebastian destroyed the circus that triggered that memory; and Grelle was waiting for him at the edge of the death and destruction he had wrought.
When she looked at him there was a gentle sadness in her eyes. Part of him cringed waiting for some vulgar comment or another, but it doesn't come. She smiles gently before she speaks.
"Darling, I had really hoped Will would have been wrong for a change." There is no condescending tone to her voice, "Not that I'm not glad to see you up to your old tricks again! For a moment there I was worried you'd never get out from under his ghost."
Who's ghost? They boy's? He'd hardly done this for his sake.
"I'm not under anyone's ghost." It comes out less harsh than he wants it too, more like a plea than a statement.
"Oh, Darling." There's the pity, and it makes him bristle again, but she lets him leave. Something he is sure Will won't be happy about.
-
It's weeks, maybe years later when he redraws the mix of memories. A burned-out shell of a circus with modern machinery and Victorian stylings with a boy standing at the epicenter of the damage with is back to Sebastian and his head thrown back in laughter. Sebastian cannot recall his face, but he can still hear that laugh. Unbridled joy and so full of life despite the death he was surrounded by. That day was the closest to a real laugh he'd heard from him in all their time together. He doesn't know how long he stares at the memory before drops of water hit the page blurring the ink. It takes him a moment to realize he is crying.
-
Undertaker still runs a funeral parlor. Sebastian doesn't have it in him to be surprised, but he still hesitates to knock. In the end he doesn't need to. Undertaker opens the door and lets Sebastian in. He locks the door and the click of the thumb lock rings like a gunshot in the quiet of the room.
He sits on a coffin out of habit and they sit in silence. True silence without the sound of breathing to disrupt the air for a length of time anyone living would find uncomfortable. Adrian is giving him time to collect his thoughts and put words to them. Those words never come. His thoughts loop and tangle together, hazing and blurring until only emotion is left.
Adrian watches him. He always watches him. He has been for longer than either one of them would care to admit. There was a time before the boy; before the contract; before everything, when watching Sebastian had been something else entirely. Something warmer. Something that made the centuries feel less heavy.
Sebastian doesn't remember that either.
"I don't understand." Sebastian manages eventually, his voice is raw at the edges, and it makes him flinch.
"I don't suppose you would, grief isn't common among demons. Your kind don't usually form attachments to the souls you pursue." Adrian's tone is conversational, kind even, like he is explaining something simple to an apprentice. Not condescending, "I imagine that's not the only reason you've come to see me a century or so after the fact."
Prodding but gentle. Adrian is giving him a direction to chase his thoughts down. It helps.
"Why?" There is so much weight to the question. "Why do you, Grelle, and William all look at me that way. Like you know something I don't."
Adrian hesitates, this is a delicate place to be in. He knew Sebastian had forgotten; but how much Sebastian had forgotten had still been up for debate. He wasn't expecting it to be so much. The boy wasn't there, but if he looked hard enough, he could almost see the specter of the boy over Sebastian's shoulder. Smiling that cruel delighted smile of a child winning a game where he was the only one who knew the rules.
And beneath that specter, Adrian sees something else. Himself, a century ago, standing in this very parlor as Sebastian laughed at something he said. The way Sebastian's eyes had lingered. The way Adrian's heart did something it hadn't done in centuries.
Sebastian doesn't remember that either.
Adrian doesn't have an answer and he hates it.
-
Adrian knows Sebastian; he hasn't asked if that is the name this form is using, it has just stuck; is waiting for an answer. For Adrian to give him the puzzle piece his mind is missing so he can understand what he is feeling. The thing is Adrian has that answer. He was there. He processed their deaths. He's watched their cinematic records - both of them - more times than he really should have. First out of duty, and then out of something he doesn't care to name. And he was there, in the spaces between, watching Sebastian with the boy. Watching Sebastian feel something for the first time and telling himself it didn't hurt that it wasn't for him.
He could describe it. He could tell Sebastian everything.
In the same vein he knows why he can't do that. It won't help. Not really, because there is no softening the end of that story. No way to keep Sebastian from hearing himself destroy the boy one piece at a time. No hiding the frantic mania Sebastian showed as the child bled out and died. And, selfishly, Adrian doesn't want to relive it ever again. He unlike Sebastian, has it memorized.
"We remember him." Adrian starts, "As grim reapers it is our job to tend to the dead and dying. And while you and Ast- while you and Ciel were working together, there were plenty of dead to tend to." He barely catches the slip and corrects it, it's been a hundred years since he had to use the wrong name, "You made a quick enemy of William, and Grelle, she's rather... fond of your particular brand of chaos."
"Ciel." Sebastian tests the name on his tongue, and Adrian wants to correct him, "I don't... why?"
"You don't remember him." It's not an accusation, but with the way the demon flinches it may as well have been, "I don't blame you. At the end the two of you were close in your own way. It was the first time I had seen you so invested in a human, in anyone." He thinks of earlier times, of glances held too long, of conversations that meant more than they should, but he doesn't share them. Those memories are his alone now. "The two of you stood on almost equal footing. Playing mind games with one another and with everyone else. Waiting to see who would break first."
"He set a circus on fire and laughed." Sebastian sounds on the verge of hysteria, "I set a circus on fire and he laughed."
-
Sebastian breaks in front of him. The human shape collapses into a shadow, a void where a man once was, the tendrils of it lashing out and the coffin beneath "him" shattering into splinters. Adrian debates calling his scythe to him but waits. A sound shakes the building, he isn't sure if it is a scream or a sob, but whatever it is breaks all the glass on the premises, and rattles Adrian's brain in his skull, and sends coffins sliding from their displays to crash against the floor. Some even falling open.
Just as soon as the sound starts its over and gone. Sebastian is in his true form again. Devastatingly beautiful. All eyes, broad ebony wings, and pale skin stretched too thin over too-sharp bones. He is emaciated Adrian notices now, as if the demon has been starving for a century and only just realized it. The eyes that meet his are countless and unblinking, but beneath the multitude there is something raw and lost.
Adrian's chest tightens. He has seen Sebastian in many forms; arrogant, amused, dangerous, bored; but never like this. Never broken. He wants to reach out. He doesn't.
Adrian waits for the inevitable question.
"What was he like?" The discordant voice rumbles as much from the man before him as it does from the darkest reaches of the parlor where the sound still echoes.
And isn't that the question. He is asking after the boy he consumed, but if Adrian answers him honestly, he will be speaking about Astre, and there will be a disconnect Sebastian cannot yet perceive.
"He was brilliant." Adrian's voice wavers, and he's glad, that just this once Sebastian cannot see his eyes through the chaos of his true form. "Resilient. He had to be, didn't he? He called you from the depths of hell after all." Via his brother's blood and soul, via grief and despair so deep its clinging to the both of us even now. "He... Astre was.... there's no one like him. I don't think I have an answer that would do him justice. He was single-minded and foolish. Stubborn and filled with so much pride I couldn't tell the two of you apart if I wasn't in the room with you."
The name hangs in the air between them. Adrian sees Sebastian's form flicker, the eyes narrowing in something between confusion and threat.
'Who is Astre?" It's asked again with far less patience this time, the name both spat and growled, "Who is he?!"
"Astre is the name of the soul you consumed." The room falls into eerie unbreathing silence, only punctured by the sound of traffic passing on the street outside. "Ciel is the name of the boy sacrificed on the altar to call you into this world. They were twins."
Sebastian stills completely. Not the stillness of a creature holding its breath; there is no breath to hold; but the stillness of something caught between what it thought it knew and what it is learning. Adrian watches the storm form on the horizon of those too many eyes.
Then, so softly that Adrian almost misses it: "Twins."
And something in Sebastian's expression cracks. Not breaks - not yet - but cracks. A hairline fracture in something that calcified over a century of not-remembering. His left-hand rises, the one that has been empty of a contract mark, and he stares at it as if expecting to see blood.
"He laughed," Sebastian whispers, and his voice is smaller now, less demonic, more something Adrian hasn't heard in centuries. "At the circus. He laughed, and it was... it was the first time it was real. His laugh. All those years and it was the first time it was real." The eyes focus on Adrian now, desperate and terrible, "Why can't I see his face?"
Adrian has no answer for that. He suspects it's a mercy somewhere deep in the architecture of demonic memory, but he doesn't say so. Instead, he thinks of another face Sebastian no longer sees. His own. The way Sebastian used to look at him, before the boy, before the contract, when they would meet in the spaces between duty and primal instinct and simply be. The way Sebastian had said his name; Adrian, not Undertaker; not reaper, just Adrian; like it had meant something.
Sebastian doesn't remember that either.
Sebastian vanishes.
There is no warning, no shift in the air, no building tension; simply absence where a creature had been. The absence is followed a heartbeat later by a sound that shakes London itself: a screaming cry that rattles windows for miles, sends birds erupting from their trees, and citizens clutching their ears in sudden inexplicable pain. Its unholy grief given voice and it crashes over the city like a wave.
Adrian stands alone in his ruined parlor, glass crunching beneath his boots as he moves. He does not flinch at the sound. He's heard it before in a way; an echo of it anyway, in the final frames of a Doomsday Book he has watched more times than he should admit. And he had heard it in his own chest; on the nights he allows himself to remember what it is like to be truly seen by Sebastian, and to know that memory is now his alone.
He climbs the stairs slowly, each step deliberate, and opens a locked drawer in his personal desk. Inside are many things, keepsakes from a life long left behind, records he has no business keeping, memories he cannot seem to release. Among them, two books: one labeled Ciel Phantomhive, one labeled Astre Phantomhive. He takes both, weighing them in his hands. The weight of twins. The weight of a century. the weight of loving someone who no longer knows your name.
His scythe materializes in his other hand, and he pauses at the window overlooking the street. London is in chaos - distant screams, the clang of bells, the flickering of gaslights going out in waves as something wrong passes through them. He unleashed this. He chose to give Sebastian the truth knowing what it would do.
He could stay. He could help contain the damage. He could wait for Sebastian to return, could be here when the worst of it passed, could try and remind him of what else existed before the boy, before the grief.
But Sebastian wouldn't remember. And Adrian is tired of being the only one who does.
Instead, Adrian; once a reaper, now something else entirely, a man who has spent the better part of eternity watching the living, the dead, and the damned tear each other a part, a man who once loved a demon and will never admit it aloud; tucks the books under his harm and vanishes into the shadows.
He has done enough. Some grief must be witnessed from a distance. Some loves must remain unspoken.
-
The next morning the funeral parlor is empty. All that remains is a single pressed violet, left on the counter where anyone might find it, and behind it a sketchbook open to a page with a boy's silhouette - the face still unfinished; but beneath it in a hand that shakes:
Astre
And on the counter, separate from the sketchbook, a single photograph. Old. Careworn and faded. Two figures in a parlor identical to this one, caught in a moment of unexpected ease. One is Adrian laughing at something off camera. The other is Sebastian, in a form Adrian hasn't seen in centuries; softer, younger and looking at Adrian like he is something worth remembering.
Adrian left it there. He doesn't know if Sebastian will understand. He doesn't know if Sebastian will even remember. But it is something. A thread. A chance.
It is, after all, what you do when you love someone and they forget you. You leave evidence. You hope.
-
The city recovers. It always does. Windows are replaced, gaslights relit, the unexplained phenomena filed away as a gas main rupture, a freak weather accident, an act of god, or mass hysteria. The living have short memories for the things that do not directly threaten them.
Sebastian does not recover. Not quickly, not cleanly. He spends days - weeks - in his true form, curled in the darkest corner of whatever abandoned place he can find, form flickering from shadow to something almost human then back again. Memories surface in fragments, none of them complete, all of them painful. A pale hand reaching for his. The taste of tea, perfectly brewed. The weight of an eye patch in his palm. A voice saying his name not as a command or barked order but as recognition.
And other memories. Older ones. A parlor full of coffins. Silver hair and laughter. A name; Adrian: spoken with warmth he doesn't understand. He doesn't know where these memories come from. They don't fit with the boy, with the contract, with anything. But they are there buried beneath the grief, waiting.
He does not eat. He cannot. The thought of consuming another soul when the only one he wants is already gone, it turns his stomach in a way he didn't know he could still feel.
Eventually he returns to the funeral parlor. It is empty as Adrian intended. But the sketchbook is there, and the violet, and the name written in his own hand.
Astre.
And the photograph.
He picks it up. Stares at it. At himself, young and unguarded, looking at Adrian like... like...
He doesn't have the words for it. He doesn't remember it. But something in his chest aches.
He tucks the photograph into the sketchbook beside the violet. Turns the pages slowly. There are dozens of sketches he does not remember drawing; the silhouette repeated in different angles, always facing away; a single eye, brilliant and blue watching him from the page; an eye with a contract mark that matches the blank space seared into his skin.
And others. A profile of silver hair. A laughing mouth he knows the shape of but cannot place. A figure in dark robes turned away but beckoning him to follow.
He reaches the final page. The silhouette, still unfinished. The name.
And for the first time in a century, Sebastian weeps. Not the quiet tears that surprised him before, not water gently blurring ink, but true weeping - ugly and raw; and human in a way he has never once been. He holds the sketchbook to his chest and rocks, and the sound he makes is not the one that shattered London, but something smaller and more broken.
He does not know how long he stays there. Time moves strangely when you are immortal and grieving.
When he finally rises, he is changed. Not healed, never healed, but changed. He closes the sketchbook carefully, presses the violet and the photograph between the final pages, and tucks it inside his coat.
He has a name now. A face he cannot see, but a name he will never forget.
Astre.
And he as another name. Adrian. A face he can see, in the photograph, in his fragmented memories. A warmth he does not understand, but cannot ignore.
He will carry both with him. It is, after all, the only part of either of them he has left.
-
It is forty-three years before Sebastian returns to the funeral parlor.
Forty-three years of empty contracts, of souls consumed with mechanical precision. Of nights spent staring at a photograph he does not fully remember taking. Forty-three years of standing outside the parlor at odd hours, telling himself he is not waiting for anything.
He tells himself many things.
The door opens before he can knock. Adrian stands in the threshold, older in the way reapers allow themselves to age when they want to be left alone, silver hair longer than Sebastian remembers, eyes shadowed with something that might be exhaustion or might be hope. He does not speak. He simply steps aside and lets Sebastian in.
The parlor is different. Rebuilt, rearranged, the glass replaced and the coffins returned to their proper places. But the same scent hangs in the air: dust and old flowers and something else, something that makes Sebastian's chest tighten in ways he doesn't have a name for.
They stand in the entryway. Neither moves.
"You came back." Adrian's voice is neutral, carefully so, like he is afraid of what might show if he lets it warm.
Sebastian doesn't know what to say. He isn't prepared. Forty-three years, and he has nothing prepared.
"I found a photograph." It comes out wrong, too blunt, too abrupt, like when he was learning to speak for the first time. But it is the only thing he can think to say. He reaches into his coat, pulls out the sketchbook, opens it to the page where the photograph lives now, pressed beside the dried violet and the unfinished silhouette.
Adrian looks at it. Something flickers across his face - pain that is quickly hidden - before he schools his features into something calmer.
"You kept that."
"I don't remember it." Sebastian's voice is raw at the edges. "I don't remember... us. Whatever we were. Before." The word hangs between them, heavy and unidentified. "But I kept it. I don't know why."
Adrian is quiet for a long moment. Then he moves, finally, gesturing towards the back of the parlor where Sebastian knows there is a small sitting area. "Sit down. You look like you haven't eaten in decades."
"I haven't"
"I know."
They sit. The silence stretches, familiar and terrible. Sebastian watches Adrian's hands; long fingers, pale skin a ring with a square blue gem on his right hand that he doesn't recognize. he wants to ask about it. He doesn't know if he has the right.
"You used to come here." Adrian says finally, not looking at him. "Before the contract. Before the boy. You would appear in the middle of the night ranting and raving about god only knows what, and I would make tea, and we would talk until dawn." A pause, "You never drank the tea. You just liked watching me make it."
Sebastian searches his memory, desperately, and finds nothing. But something in his chest aches, like a bruise he didn't know he had.
"I'm sorry." The words feel inadequate. They are all he has.
Adrian looks at him then, really looks, and Sebastian is struck by how tired he seems. Not old; reapers don't truly age; but worn. Like someone who has been carrying something heavy for a very long time.
"You don't have to apologize for forgetting." Adrian's voice is softer now, less guarded. "It's not your fault. Demons aren't meant to hold on to... this." He gestures vaguely, encompassing the parlor, the photograph, the years between them. "I knew that. I knew that when I-" He stops. Shakes his head. "It doesn't matter."
"It matters." Sebastian leans forward, and something in him is desperate now, grasping for a purchase in a memory he cannot reach. "Tell me. Please."
Adrian studies him for a long moment. Then, slowly, he begins to talk.
He tells Sebastian about nights spent in this very room, about arguments that lasted until dawn, about the way Sebastian used to look at him when he thought Adrian wasn't watching. He tells him about the contract, about watching Sebastian pour himself into a boy who would never love him back, about the slow realization that what they had was already fading before it actually ended.
He tells him about the hundred years after. About watching Sebastian forget, piece by piece. About the nights he spent in his parlor alone, holding onto memories that were no longer shared as two cups of tea cooled without being drunk.
Sebastian listens. He doesn't interrupt. He doesn't remember any of it, but he feels it; the weight of Adran's words settling into his chest finding purchase in the hollowed out spaces left by the boy he consumed.
When Adrian finishes, the silence returns. But it's different now. Less empty. More like something waiting to be filled.
"I want to remember." Sebastian's voice is barely above a whisper. "I don't know if I can. But I want to try."
Adrian's breath catches. Just for a moment, but Sebastian sees it.
"Why?" Adrian asks, "Why now? Why after all this time?"
Sebastian thinks about it. About the forty-three years of standing outside the parlor. About the photograph he looks at every night. About the way his chest aches whenever he thinks of silver hair and a laugh he can almost hear.
"Because you left the photograph," he says. "Because you could have let me forget everything and you didn't. Because...." He trails off searching for words that don't exist. "Because something in me knows you matter. Even if I don't remember why."
Adrian closes his eyes. When he opens them again, they are bright in a way Sebastian has never seen.
"Stay." Adrian says. "Not forever. Just... tonight. Let me make you tea. You still won't drink it, but let me make it anyway."
Sebastian nods. Its the easiest thing he's done in a century.
-
Adrian makes tea. Sebastian watches. The kettle whistles, the leaves steep, the liquid turns amber in the cup. Adrian places it in front of him, and Sebastian wraps his hands around the warmth, breathing in the steam.
"I remember this." Sebastian says quietly. "Not the specifics. But the feeling. Being here. Watching you." He looks up, meets Adrian's eyes. "It feels like coming home. I don't know why I know that word. I've never had a home."
Adrian's smile is tremulous, fragile, beautiful.
"You did," he says. "For a while. You had one here."
They sit in silence as the tea cools. Sebastian doesn't drink it. Adrian doesn't expect him to.
But something shifts between them. Something tentative new and terrified. It's not what they had before; Sebastian doesn't remember enough for that, and Adrian has spent too long mourning to pick up where they left off.
But it is a beginning. A thread. A chance.
And for now, that is enough.
-
The years that follow are slow. Tentative. Sebastian returns to the parlor regularly now - not every night, but often. Sometimes they talk. Sometimes they sit in silence. Sometimes Adrian tells him stories about before, and Sebastian listens, and slowly, slowly, fragments begin to surface.
A laugh that isn't Astre's. Silver hair in candlelight. A hand reaching for his across the table.
He doesn't know if these memories are real or if his mind is creating them from Adrian's words. He doesn't care. They feel real. That is enough.
One night, years into this strange courtship of recovery, Sebastian reaches across the table and takes Adrian's hand. Adrian freezes. Looks at their joined fingers. Looks at Sebastian.
"Tell me id this is too much," Sebastian says. "Tell me if I am too late. Tell me if you've waited too long and there is nothing left to wait for. I'll understand. I'll go. I'll-"
Adrian squeezes his hand. Hard. Keeping him from finishing his thought, "I'll forget everything again.
"You're an idiot," Adrian says, but his voice breaks around the words and his eyes are bright. "You're a fool. You're a demon who doesn't remember loving me, and I am apparently still foolish enough to-" He stops. Breathes. "I've waited a hundred and forty-three years for you to take my hand. Don't you dare let go now."
Sebastian doesn't let go.
They sit like that, hands clasped across the table, as the tea cools and the night deepens and something new and fragile blooms between them.
It's not what they had before. It may never be.
But it is something. It is real. And for two immortals who have spent more time than either of them cares to count alone, it is everything.
-
The photograph now lives on the mantle in the parlor, beside a small, pressed violet in a frame, and a sketchbook that never leaves the premises. Sebastian added something to it recently - a sketch on the final page, opposite the unfinished silhouette.
It is a profile. Silver hair, laughing eyes, and a smile Sebastian spent a week getting right.
Beneath it in careful letters: Adrian.
Sometimes, late at night, Sebastian looks at the two pages together - Astre, the boy he consumed, Adrian the reaper who waited - and marvels at the strangeness of his own heart. He did not know demons could love. He did not know they could grieve. He did not know they could heal.
But here he is. Healing. Slowly. Tentatively. One night at a time.
And every night, when he returns to the parlor, Adrian is waiting. The tea is hot. The silence is comfortable.
And sometimes, just sometimes, Sebastian drinks the tea.
It tastes like coming home.