thinking about r!ciel's condescending acknowledgement of funtom's success — and how quickly he demands it all discarded.
r!ciel must be so deeply bitter — and hurt— that o!ciel has experienced so much without him. why did his shadow get to move forward while he was stuck in a fever dream of undeath this entire time? hadn't he told o!ciel that they would always be together? why wasn't o!ciel ruined without him? how dare he meet his foolish childhood dreams head on when his only dream was supposed to be of his brother?
in truth, r!ciel is trapped, frozen in time — just as petty and naively selfish as he ever was as a younger child, because in life he'd never had to conceive of a world where his twin wasn't there to shore up his own shortcomings. they were two halves of a perfect whole — and he never had to accept any cracks in that image because a phantomhive heir doesn't settle for second best.
r!ciel wasn't blind to his twin's loneliness and sadness, of course — he knew his twin like he knew himself, and he loved him even more. but r!ciel had the option to look away.
and that was the crux, where the whole was sundered: he might deeply rely on o!ciel when they were together, but r!ciel could leave. he didn't have to play by the same rules as his twin did. he never had to look back to know that his brother was behind him, and he alone could pretend that that was his brother's choice.
that didn't really make them sound like two equivalent halves of a perfect whole at all, did it?
a bizarre doll can't learn; it cannot record anything new on its soul. it cannot change the shape or refine the content of something it no longer has. so there is no option for r!ciel to consider that o!ciel is no longer half of anything. there is no making peace with the idea that his twin is whole, just as himself, and that he didn't need r!ciel at all.
...and there is absolutely no acknowledgement of the possibility that, even worse, o!ciel's other half is not him, but the devil that took his place when the twins were robbed of each other.
