Cielizzy Week - Day 3, Loss and Happiness
Hi loves, to celebrate Cielizzy Week here’s a little fic I wrote a while back that’s one of my personal favorites. Thank you to everyone who’s participating - we’re so grateful for your enthusiasm and love for Cielizzy! :)
Saudade
In the name of higher consciousness/ I let the best man I knew go/ Cause it’s nice to love and be loved/ But it’s better to know all you can know. — Lana Del Rey ‘Pawn Shop Blues’
Desert flowers scented the air. Dried dark pink petals blowing across the dusty yellow plains. The sky was too clear and too blue, and the sun radiated far too much heat. Arizona's atmosphere was muggy, heavy with possibility and goodbyes. It was such an odd place to be, Lizzy decided, shifting her weight from one leg to the other, distinctly uncomfortable under her bonnet and parasol. Her cheeks were flushed red from the stifling heat and her light muslin shift—a dress Francis Midford would have condemned with absolute indignation—clung to her sweat soaked back though she refused to go back to the carriage.
Not yet, anyway. Not now.
Taking a deep breath, Lizzy almost choked on the oppressive heat, mouth dry and eyes wet, before she caught the faint perfume of cactus blossoms and clear desert air. Clutching her parasol closer, Lizzy bit down on her lower lip and gazed desperately at the vast expanse of sand and sky.
Gold and pale blue.
Ciel was dead. He was dead and gone—and so was Sebastian. Funtom had been transferred to Edward, so he could hold onto it until Lizzy was old enough. It was a stupid thing to do she’d cried; why would he leave it to her? She didn’t want his company or his mansion or his money—she wanted him. Ciel, the boy she loves—loved, her treacherous mind corrects—best of all. All she'd ever wanted was her and Ciel, the two of them smiling and standing in a garden of Eden with lush green canopies overhead and pale pink and yellow blossoms surrounding them.
She wanted children—a boy and perhaps a little girl too—laughing and joyous; the four of them playing by a circular lily pond filled with baby turtles and fuzzy yellow ducklings. She wanted to watch as dark purple and blue soaked the sky, to see evening stars come out and witness Ciel carrying their children inside for bedtime. She wanted happiness but, if domesticity was too much, Lizzy would gladly align her own dreams to match his. If he needed to be the queen’s watchdog always then she would help him in any way she could. She would stay away and be good, sweet, and ignorant if he wished; she would fight and aid and protect if that’s what he wanted.
Her entire heart had dissolved into his hands and she trusted him to hold onto it.
And for ten years he did. For ten years Ciel belonged to Lizzy and no one else. He loved her just as much as she loved him.
But then the fire, with its lashing red-orange flames and volatile pyromaniacs, burned Ciel’s home and his parents and his love to black ash. And for a month Ciel collected that ash and put it where his heart should have been. He took to Sebastian and London’s underworld and left Lizzy because she belonged to another spring. In the winter of his discontent, he froze out the world and everyone in it though Lizzy fought as best she could to breech the fortress walls and give light and warmth and love.
Maybe—even for a little while—Ciel appreciated it. She remembers his fingers brushing against her cheek, his sapphire eye looking into her soul and his desperate, broken whisper of Lizzy, please. She didn’t know what he was asking for—not then, not when the sun was setting and the world bathed in archaic fire—but she said something that made him smile and he kissed her for the first and last time.
The next day, the sun’s fire killed Ciel and all that was left was a pale corpse, an empty home...a black velvet coffin, embossed with gold fleur-de-lis.
And just like that, Ciel was gone.
Standing there, firm on her own two feet, Lizzy breathes in the hot desert air and closes the jade green eyes that’d always been the window to her soul. A scrapbook of memories, faded but still colorful, come to the forefront of her mind. She can almost smell Countess Phantomhive’s blush roses and earthy sweet May grass before she and Ciel tumbled to the ground, laughing and playing in this beautiful, forgotten arcadia.
She can see so many memories, most of them blurred together, but one moment stands out, brighter than all the rest.
I will never let this person go.
The night is dark and the air full of desperate screams; the Campania is sinking and Ciel is holding her hand, fighting the cold, rushing ocean water and—
Salty tears roll down Lizzy’s cheeks. At last, she cries softly into the palm of her lace gloved hand because finally—finally—she understands what Ciel is asking for. He could not let go of Lizzy because she must be strong enough to let go of him.
Lizzy, please.
Perhaps he did love her, perhaps he saw her as something beyond the conventional bounds of affection, entrusting her the amity and attachment of his bruised and battered heart. Executor of his last will.
Black humor, Lizzy thinks and then shakes her head. Ciel would have smiled at that.
Squeezing her eyes shut one last time, Lizzy conjures up the image of Ciel, seventeen and blue and beautiful, and slowly—so slowly—opens her eyes as the image dissolves into the crystalline air. Tilting her head up, Lizzy is met by a sky of pure, untouched sapphire—the exact same shade as Ciel’s eyes.
Everyone, she decides, deserves a proper goodbye and while her heart constricts with something like physical pain, Lizzy keeps her gaze locked on the blue, blue sky—and smiles.
Saudade: a nostalgic longing to be near again to something or someone that is distant, or that has been loved and then lost; “the love that remains”