黒執事の地獄

your average human comes pre-installed with instincts to:

Befriend

Tell story

Make Thing

Investigate

Share knowledge

Laugh

Sing

Dance

Empathize with

Create

we are chalk full of survival instincts that revolve around connecting to others (dog-shaped others, robot-shaped, sometimes even plant-shaped) and making things with our hands

You’re Ryland Grace’s students.

Your teacher is the first one to explain the Petrova line to you. Next thing you know, he’s gone.

He never comes back to teach your class. His things are moved out. The new teacher isn’t as cool.

You hear the name of the astronauts on the Hail Mary. Humanity’s last chance. That’s your teacher. You know him. And suddenly you realize that last day in the classroom was the last time you’ll ever see him.

The world gets worse. Colder. People die. Everything goes crazy. Somehow you’ve still got your hope set on your middle school science teacher. The one that threw hackysacks at you and was your favorite teacher and who explained things until they made sense.

Everything but this.

You’re an adult now, in a terrifying world, and you don’t know what’s going to happen next.

And then the beetles come.

And your teacher came through. He saved the world. They release the videos, you see his face again.

And you’ve gotten used to the idea, that you’re never going to see certain people again. Teachers, friends, family.

But you thought you were never going to see Mr. Grace, who taught middle school science, ever again. And you had a chance to. But he chose to go save his friend.

And you wonder when he taught you that. You don’t think he did. But it makes sense, all the same.

Eridian vampires, do you see my vision?? Eridian zombies? Someone who was buried in the eridian quarry-graveyard starts humming after decades, and gets up and shambles forward? Little pebbles you better eat your less-tasty nutrition blocks or the walking sleepers will come get you

while his asthma made a reappearance during BoC, we promptly learn that sebastian didn't know it was a preexisting health issue. there's also zero discussion/voiced concern about the possibility of ciel having another asthma attack during BoA, which always struck me — cold+wet+exertion are kind of a crazy triple threat. is his asthma a non-issue at that point?

we also don't know the full spectrum of chronic illnesses ciel dealt with as a child. it's possible that it was only the asthma, and his symptoms were just significantly worse, so it made him bedridden more frequently. sebastian has certainly made fun of ciel for his lack of athleticism & low stamina, but he doesn't seem to be aware of any more serious health concerns — at least not now, three years into their contract. but i wonder if there were originally other chronic conditions at play as well.

all of this is to propose: sebastian can't cure a physical malady within the bounds of his contract with ciel, but he can influence the likeliness of his contractor getting ill if he knows the illness to guard against.

maybe sebastian can't cure him outright because ciel actually forbade him from interfering, during the early days of their contract — out of lack of trust in sebastian and out of his own pride, in equal parts.

maybe ciel was ill much more frequently during their first couple of years together, and sebastian just slowly learned the signs, and read family physician books, and bit-by-bit figured out how to protect his little lord from these invisible threats without violating his contractor's order not to interfere.

(if his reaction in BoC is anything to go by, he must have absolutely panicked the first time ciel fell ill and he realized his tiny contractor was even more fragile than most humans.)

and maybe, thanks to sebastian's machinations, ciel's immune system has been able to slowly, slowly get stronger over the last three years because he isn't already compromised + sick all the time.

Like- where did it go after it was used as the sacrifice, or “trade” I think was how it was worded, that allowed Sebastian to cross into the human realm?

I assume/head-cannon that souls cannot be destroyed, or at least don’t “go away” on their own after a persons death. Why would the grim reapers be harvesting and keeping extensive records on something that just disappears? Obviously souls hold some form of power or essence to them, I mean, they are literally food aka provide sustenance for demons.

So, assuming that the souls harvested by the reapers don’t just disappear after a persons life is marked complete, then they must be stored somewhere in the reaper headquarters, right?

(It’s been ages since I watched S1, so I have no idea if it was the same sort of thing, but I remember scenes taking place in a library of sorts in the reaper headquarters? That’s the sort of thing I’m picturing.)

This idea that souls cannot be destroyed has one very explicitly stated exception, though. A soul eaten by a demon will cease to exist, Sebastian said so himself.

Now back to r!ciel. His soul was Sebastian’s ticket to the human realm, actually, maybe even his doorway given that he manifested looking as though he were emerging from r!ciels body. So Sebastian didn’t eat it, therefore if we apply that logic, it still exists somewhere.

I doubt it was collected by a reaper after the matter. It clearly wasn’t collected by Undertaker when he retrieved the body (if he could still do the soul harvesting in his retirement). I think he would’ve if he could.

So then comes the million dollar question of then where is r!ciel’s soul? Did it switch places with Sebastian and is now in Hell? Does Sebastian have his soul somewhere?

I think……I’m not sure………wait actually

Notice how he states that it’s “the fare”, not “my fare”, when later on he uses that personal pronoun when saying “my reward”.

Let’s see if I can explain this, but r!Ciel’s soul was sacrificed, or offered to Sebastian. A soul is the price that HE, the demon, pays to enter the human realm if they are able to quire one. R!Ciel’s soul was HIS fare. He traded it or deposited it somewhere else.

I guess my reason for thinking of this was wondering if undertaker would ever have the motivation of retrieving r!Ciel’s soul from wherever it’s at in order to fully revive him. If he’d use Sebastian, or even request him help, in that effort.

honestly i think when it comes to r!ciel's soul the truth lies somewhere in the middle. i'll base this on sebastian's quotes from chapters 137-138:

"until the day your foolish wish is fulfilled and i devour that soul" (this speech bubble was placed next to r!ciel's body. in the fan translation they used "your" but it's probably incorrect since ciel is later surprised that the demon will eat his soul)

"it's up to you whether you decide to make a contract with me or not. i already received my payment" (basing this on the polish official translation as well, in the fan english it says "the payment," not "my payment")

"that was the fare for manifesting in this world, not for my services"

my theory is that r!ciel's soul was taken as a form of down payment. when sebastian fulfills the conditions of the contract binding him to ciel and goes back to hell, he'll get o!ciel's soul as payment and the "deferred payment" in the form of r!ciel's. if he hadn't made a contract he would've left eating r!ciel's soul right away, but he didn't do that because it wasn't the one he cared about.

i can't believe we go from witnessing sebaciel's first interactions through sebastian's cinematic record (god knows every scene of that flashback is burned into my brain) to ciel lying on top of sebastian's bloody form, shouting his name and trying to shake him awake... devastating.

and then the lifeboat scene. everything about it just makes me insane. how sebastian struggles to keep the corpses at bay, and how ciel watches him—still sure he'll win, but terrified anyway, because he can see how badly sebastian is hurt.

and all i can imagine after that is sebastian holding ciel close, trying to keep the cold from seeping into him and triggering his asthma. ciel can't do anything but melt against sebastian's chest, boneless and shaking, not just from the cold but from the growing fear of hearing sebastian's ragged breathing and coughing blood.

and then it all crashes back into him—the fight with undertaker, the fear, the blood. sebastian's blood. on his clothes, on his gloves, on his face.

ciel forces the memory away, clinging to sebastian as hard as his frozen limbs allow. sebastian, if he's still conscious, doesn't say anything. he just holds ciel tight, thinking he's only snuggling closer for warmth, that the shaking is just from the dive into freezing water. they stay like that until dawn breaks and the rescue ship finds them.

headcanons aside, it means so much to me that ciel feels the need to say something to sebastian.

"i've never seen you like this before."

and

"i can't have the phantomhive butler staying like this. take a good rest once we get back to the manor. you did well today."

you can't tell me that isn't ciel admitting, in his own composed way, that seeing sebastian hurt unsettled him. that it scared him.

(and that the thought of his demon not being invincible terrifies him in ways that have nothing to do with the contract)

anyway.

please feel free to remain ladylike… young mistress.