Drowning
Drowning
Ciel’s POV
The air blew sharp against Ciel’s face just as he burst out of the building with his lungs burning and heart hammering in his chest.
His eyes instantly caught the glint of metal parked to the side.
He recognized the motorbike instantly to be Icarus’s. After all, he'd seen him ride it around for a while now.
Without skipping a heartbeat, Ciel skidded towards the bike and hopped on it. He didn't doubt for a second that it could be someone else's and could have only been coincidentally similar.
Ciel knew Alyssa, Elara and Zias must have used it in their desperate escape to get there. That must be how the bike got there in the first place.
Nonetheless, Ciel didn’t have the luxury of untangling every detail. What mattered was that he got to Icarus, fast!
He doesn't even care about the hunters now.
Ciel swung a leg over the bike, fingers tightening on the cold handles, and kicked it alive.
The engine roared, breaking the uneasy stillness, and he sped into the streets that soon blurred by.
' Icarus...'
The unruly pack member's name thudded in his chest with every turn he made.
Although they hadn’t been as close as a family in the way a pack was supposed to be one, Icarus had still been more like a steadier kind of man everyone else gravitated to.
He wasn't too good, but he wasn't that bad either.
He'd always been laid back, the kind of guy who's friends with everybody.
Even though Ciel had always kept himself apart from everyone else, he'd never really had a grudge with Icarus. They weren't close, but they weren't enemies either.
He's always remained a distant relative.
However, that doesn't mean he had no obligation to save Icarus right now. The poor guy had been wrongfully dragged into all of this.
None of this was his fault!
The wind stung Ciel's eyes as he pushed the bike harder, struggling to push Elara and Zias' pained expressions off of his mind.
Soon the house came into view, a squat structure standing crooked and worn in a street with a little over three more buildings. Each in the distance.
The front door hung open, swaying in the breeze.
Ciel drifted the bike into a halt, he hopped off and tore straight in the house, every sense already screaming at the iron tang in the air.
Blood!
The smell hit first, heavy and metallic. Thick enough to coat his tongue in a disdainful taste that was all too familiar.
Inside, the light of day painted a grotesque picture of overturned furnitures, gouged walls, claw marks slicing through everywhere. Strands of fur clung to the floorboards, glued by sticky blood and torn flesh all around.
Blood splattered everything; walls, curtains, the shattered frame of a picture on the floor.
A clear indication of a wolf fight. Yet, he saw no one around. Neither did he hear sounds of scuffles.
' The fight is over?' Ciel’s stomach clenched, but his feet carried him forward anyway, hoping he wasn't too late.
"Ngh!" A faint sound cut through just as he neared into the carnage.
It was a ragged grunt, barely audible, but enough to spear him with hope.
“Icarus,” Ciel rasped, voice already breaking as he called out.
He followed the sound up the stairs, heart hammering as he turned the corner.
But just as he did, he froze.
Before him, Icarus lay sprawled across the wreckage of his own living room, his body a ruin. Wounds riddled him, deep gashes torn through muscle and skin, blood pooling beneath him like a spreading shadow.
But his throat...
It bore the worst ghastly slash, raw and wet, that painted his chest a dangerous scarlet that had Ciel's head ringing in alarm.
Ciel rushed forward and dropped to his knees so fast his bones jarred. His hands hovered, shaking, before pressing desperately against the wound. Warm blood surged between his fingers, slick and unrelenting.
“Icarus! Icarus! stay with me,” Ciel begged in a cry, voice cracking. His vision blurred, hot tears burning at the corners of his eyes. “Don’t talk. Just-- just hold on!"
But Icarus’s lips trembled, shaping words that dissolved into wet gurgles. Blood bubbled up, staining his teeth. His hand twitched, finding Ciel’s wrist with surprising strength.
“Don’t--" Ciel choked, pushing harder against the wound, trying to hold back the tide that wouldn’t stop. His heart felt like it was splitting open.
But Icarus’s eyes, clouded with pain, still clear with meaning pleaded.
“Fa--mi--ly,” he rasped, each syllable ripped raw. His fingers pressed Ciel’s arm, as he relayed his final trust. “Take… care… of them.”
“No,” Ciel whispered, shaking his head violently as if denial alone could bend fate. “We’ll get you through this. You’ll see them yourself.” Ciel couldn't bear the weight of seeing a family crumble like this!
He couldn't!
But Icarus only gave a faint, broken smile. His chest heaved once, twice, and then, he stilled. His grip slackened, sliding from Ciel’s arm to the floor.
The silence that followed was deafening.
Ciel’s breath hitched, tearing in and out of him as though the air itself resisted. He stared down at Icarus' body. His vision a swimming pool of grief.
“No…” It wasn’t a word anymore. It was a wound. A wound so deep it could never heal.
Something inside him cracked wide open, spilling grief and rage until he thought he might drown in it. He pressed his palms to his eyes, but the image of Icarus’s last smile was burned there, cruel and eternal.
He didn’t even hear the door open at first.
It wasn't until the sound of feet slapped against blood-soaked wood that he noticed Selena had arrived, he barely registered her gasp in his mind.
Her remorseful wail pierced through, sharp and raw, as she crumpled beside Icarus, pulling his body into her arms. Her sobs echoed off the broken walls, filling every corner with grief.
But to Ciel, it all seemed muted, like sound underwater. He stood slowly, staggering back. The world dulled to shadows and echoes. Selena’s screams were distant. The blood on his hands felt unreal. His grief was a bottomless abyss, swallowing him whole.
...
The waiting was worse than the fight.
I sat in the dim room, every tick of the clock drilling into me like a countdown I couldn’t stop. It had been too long since Ciel left.
At first, I convinced myself he was delayed, maybe helping Icarus walk, maybe fending off some straggler. Or maybe even evading the hunters in town. But as the minutes stretched, unease gnawed through the fragile hope I clung to.
Elara sat beside me on the bed, unmoving. Her gaze fixed on nothing, distant and hollow. She hadn’t spoken since Ciel left.
Zias, on the other hand, had cried until exhaustion stole him away. Now he slept curled in the corner of the bed, his small chest rising and falling as his innocence gave him the escape none of us could grasp.
How I envied him...
But Elara... her silence frightened me. It wasn’t just grief. It was… absence. As though she had slipped behind a veil I couldn’t reach. I wanted to say something, to pull her back, but the words withered in my throat. What comfort could I possibly offer when my own hands were shaking?
The room pressed in around me, heavy with the weight of things unspoken. Every creak of the floorboards, every sigh of wind outside made me flinch.
I hated this-- this waiting, and this helplessness. My mind kept circling back to Ciel. To whether he had found Icarus. To whether they were even still alive.
And deep down, a question I didn’t dare voice clawed at me: ' Are they alright?'
The question tightened around my chest like a fist of doubt, striking at every chance it gets to punch me.
I clenched my hands in my lap, nails biting into skin. All I could do was hope.
Hope that the next sound I heard would be the door opening...
Hope that Ciel would return...
Hope that Icarus would walk in behind him with that crooked smile.
But the silence stretched on, merciless. And hope, for the first time, began to feel like a lie.