Chapter Text
Prologue
Sebastian is 46, Celeste is 9, Cielle is 9
The girl emerging from the trees at the edge of the meadow is not Cielle, but someone Sebastian has only ever known as a ghost.
The condition of being flung through time on a whim had left Sebastian with a well-honed ability to roll with the punches. The stubbornness that led others to cling to their beliefs of what ought to be as opposed to what was, as if they might make it so by sheer force of will, by holding on just a few more minutes to the promise of the past, was a luxury he had never been able to afford.
Life dealt you a hand, as they said. He learned to read his cards quickly, and make decisions without sparing a second to wish for an ace. His life often depends on it.
Some four decades in, not much is capable of unnerving him any longer - but watching Celeste step into the clearing that had only ever belonged to him and her younger sister sends a chill up his spine. They study one another. He, for his part, tries to appear as non-threatening as a complete stranger dressed in her father's clothes, in what is essentially her backyard, possibly could.
She eyes him back with a hostile curiosity, and mild disbelief.
But not surprise. He drops any pretense of being a stranger, then and there. "Hello, Celeste."
She narrows her eyes at him, already caught out. "How did you know I'm not Cielle?"
"Because Cielle is my friend," he answers. And because she doesn't start glaring at me like that until she's pushing 15. "As I'm sure she's told you. My name is Sebastian - but I'm sure you knew that already too."
He can't say why he's surprised at the revelation that Cielle told Celeste about him. She's never mentioned it to him; is it possible she had forgotten? It's hard to tell exactly how old Celeste, and by extension, Cielle is right now, but the girl in front of him can't be that much younger than ten.
How long did Celeste have left to live? A year, at the most?
Months?
Weeks?
"I thought she was making it up," Celeste says. She sounds a tad disappointed to have discovered her sister was not, in fact, lying about the man who visited her in the meadow.
"Now why would Cielle make something like that up?" Sebastian asks innocently.
"I don't know…" Celeste dug the toe of her shoe into the grass. "Because she wanted to be special."
He can't help but be a bit annoyed at that barb. Still, he has no interest in touching an argument between two women with a ten foot pole. Experience had long since taught him to not get involved, no matter how young the women in question were, nor how childish their quarrel. "Where is Cielle, by the way?" he asks instead, leaning back on the boulder that sat at the edge of the meadow. It's rained recently, and he can feel the damp chill of the stone through Vincent's trousers. "I'm sure she would love to introduce us properly."
"She's in trouble," Celeste says and her delight in telling him this is not as well as disguised as she might have thought.
His ire deepens, even as a sadness spreads through him at the impending loss of the person before him. The grief it will irrevocably imbue into the soul of the someone he loved so dearly. A phantom limb that would follow her around for the rest of her life. "Oh? Whatever for?"
Celeste is a good liar, but too similar to Cielle, whose childish tells Sebastian knows better than the back of his own hands. "She stole."
Sebastian raises his eyebrows. "Really?"
Celeste's nod is steady. Her eyes, however, flicker back and forth a tad too quickly, betraying the truth. "Sweets from the corner store. She's not allowed out to play until tomorrow."
"She must have told you to come explain to me why she couldn't be here, then," Sebastian says, knowing very well she had done no such thing. If he couldn’t be certain of Cielle's possessiveness of this meadow and his visits, he's assured by the creeping flush of guilt rising up Celeste's neck. "Good of you to go to all that trouble."
"… She doesn't actually know I'm here," she admits, and now she smiles. Out of nervousness, or an attempt to charm him, Sebastian can't entirely be sure. Not from Celeste. "I read her diary. The list of dates."
"And what date was today?"
Celeste steps forward, her head tilted in fasciation. "You really don't know?" she asks, high-pitched with excitement.
He resists a sigh. "What did Cielle tell you about me?"
"That you traveled through time." It comes with a laugh of disbelief, of confusion, of amazement. "But I was sure she was lying!"
"Well, you're 'o' for two," Sebastian responds, clapping his hands together. "Now, Celeste. Would you be so kind as to tell me today's date?"
She pauses for a moment, as if searching for a reason not to tell him, and comes up empty. "It's October 3rd."
"What year?"
Her eyes shine with delight. "You don't even know the year!?
Sebastian bites back a sardonic response of what part of time travel do you not understand?. "I don't even know the year, Celeste, and I would be so grateful to you for telling me."
"It's 1992."
His stomach sinks with the confirmation of what, deep down, he'd already known; the girl in front of him would be dead before the year was over.
He pities her, the twin he would only ever come to know in stories, a child who would never experience anything meaningful of what life had to offer. Even in a life as chaotic and fleeting as his own, as cursed as his own, there was possibility. Possibility he'd never dreamed of, and yet it had come to him all the same. He had come to it, in this very clearing on a summer afternoon in 1989.
There was no possibility to be found in this girl's future, fixed in history as it was.
He pities her, and yet, he resents her too, for she had stolen one of these precious few visits he had with Cielle during the so very brief innocence of her youth. There were only a scant few scattered in the years between that first meeting of the six year old and the time traveler, and her tenth birthday.
The worst day of her life.
"Celeste," Sebastian begins, and his throat rasps the word. His mind is racing, but it had been so long since he had received that list, dictated it to her here. The numbers blur together. "Do you remember how many visits were left this year? What- What the dates were?"
She furrows her brow. "Er - November 10th, I think-"
Sebastian breathes a sigh of relief.
"-and then Christmas." She eyes him a little haughtily. A child who embraces whole-heartedly the opportunity to tell an adult they were wrong. "But we won't be here at Christmas, we'll be in Scotland. We always go to Scotland."
This December will be the Phantomhives' last trip to Scotland. The family property there, handed down for generations, will be leveled and sold off in parcels by Cielle's aunt and uncle on her behalf, and the only surviving member will spend Christmases here from then on, at her family home. Starting this year, with Sebastian's visit.
None of which he can begin to explain to the girl in front of him. Nor the relief he feels that Celeste has not stolen the last visit from her sister before that awful day. That Sebastian has another opportunity to be with her beforehand.
To… Prepare her, somehow, someway, though he knows better than most that it was an effort wasted before it had begun.
There was no way to prepare anyone for such a tragedy. Let alone a child.
"Did Cielle explain that I can't control when I travel?" He asks as his heart slowed its beating, as he reorganizes his thoughts. "I can't pick what date I come. That's why that list is so important to her."
It's plain that Celeste hadn't believed a word of what Cielle had told her. Sebastian is somewhat disappointed in her lack of loyalty; not to mention her framing job.
"But that's just stupid," Celeste says with all the tact of a nine-year old. "Why can't you pick when you come?
He bites back a smile. "I'll tell you what, Celeste, I'll make you a deal." He pushes himself off the rock and around to where the box that had held Vincent's clothes was, along with a collection of things that had built up over the last few years. A weathered novel Cielle had brought one day to read while waiting for him to arrive, and Sebastian had read the final chapter aloud to her with her tucked under his arm. A notebook filled with doodles, half of them penned by Sebastian, the other by Cielle. The pencil that drew them. A yo-yo. A deck of cards that had been used for go fish many a time, waiting for the day Sebastian decided Cielle was old enough to learn how to play poker - which, for the record, was eleven. And a beaten-up travel set of board games.
He unearths that set and holds it up to show her. "Why don't you and I play a game of chess together. You win, and I will answer all your questions."
She perks up with interest. "All of them?"
"Well, all the questions you can ask until I disappear, that is - Cielle told you about how I disappear, right?" Celeste nods and Sebastian continues. "Alright. But if I win… If I win, then you need to tell you parents the truth about those sweets."
Her eyes widen. "I didn't-"
"We both know you did, Celeste," Sebastian interrupts, shooting her a slightly reproachful look. "You were the one who stole it, and you made it look like it was your sister. Do you really think just anyone can lie to a time traveler and get away with it?"
She swallows hard, and looks truly nervous for the first time since stepping into the meadow. Sebastian has to admire her confidence, and hide his amusement at her naivety.
"I don't know how to play chess," she says in a quiet voice.
Of course; chess had always been Cielle's game, never Celeste's. "Checkers, then," he pivots easily, digging out the board that Cielle would stop reaching for sometime in 1990 in favour of the game she would proceed to play competitively through university. The game that would finally bring them together within the confines of time, their paths through the universe converging. "So. Do we have a deal?"
****
Chapter One: Your Day Will Come (Part 1)
“When I was alive, I believed - as you do - that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said 'one o'clock' as though I could see it, and 'Monday' as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year's Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls. You can strike your own time, and start the count anywhere. When you understand that - then any time at all will be the right time for you.”
****
Cielle is 20, Sebastian is 31
Cielle arrives at the Beaumont library in Northway twenty-five minutes before competition registration opens, so she buys a coffee from the kiosk in the lobby and smuggles it up to the third floor. This early on a Saturday there are only a handful of other people to be found among the stacks, and she figures she can explore in relative peace while she waits to sign-in.
It's not the worst way to have to spend the morning. The Beaumont is beautiful, but too far from campus to justify a visit independent of the chess tournament being hosted there today. She wouldn't have all been disappointed to scan the shelves, perhaps find a title or two worth cracking, and take a seat by the front of the building to read in the early morning fall light that trickled through the artfully sculpted windows.
She wouldn't have been disappointed, had she not known the alternative that awaited her.
"Can I help you find a title, miss?"
The voice, that voice, is so unexpected that she doesn't place it. She knows it so well, but only in the context of home. That voice belongs in Aylesbury, in the meadow that lies in the woods of her family home, that makes up so much of her childhood. It doesn't belong here, in a library in Oxford, so she doesn't think twice. The words, "No, just browsing, thank you," are halfway out her mouth by the time she turns her head and sees him and stops short, her heart skipping in her chest.
Sebastian.
Familiar, and unfamiliar all at once. He's dressed in clothes that fit him too well, tailored to his form as opposed to her father's castoffs. His hair is black, shaggy and pitch black like ink, no salt-and-pepper hints at his temples. There's only a few wrinkles to be found in his forehead as his eyes, the rich brown of her dreams, drop down to the coffee cup in her hand.
"There's no food or drink allowed in the library," he says, polite but disapproving. "I can dispose of that for you."
His voice, she hears it now, curls around her like a blanket. Distant as it is, cool as it is, it still settles on her like the warmth of a hearth, a mug of hot chocolate. A safety she'd gone so long without, she had begun to grow use to its absence. Its lack, stretching out before her like an ocean, the inevitable shore so distant she'd grown to doubt she might ever reach it.
But she had. Finally, she had.
"Sebastian" she breathes in amazement, her fingers shaking around the cheap paper cup. Her eyes drink in the sight of him, head to toe, tall as ever but young. Younger than she's ever known him. "It's you."
"Pardon?"
He's never looked at her like this before. There is no affection in his gaze, but she is too overwhelmed with excitement to be disheartened. She is a stranger to him - but in many ways, he is a stranger to her as well. "You're a librarian," she murmurs, incredulous. "Really? A librarian?"
He frowns at her. "… I'm sorry, have we met before?"
She laughs, a little too loud in the silence of a library, and far too hysteric. There's a middle-aged man sitting at a table at the end of the aisle they're standing in, and he looks up and frowns pointedly at her. "Yes," she says. Her smile must look deranged "Or- I've met you. But you've- you're looking at me like you've never seen me before. Ever."
His eye twitches, and he glances behind him to where the man is still staring at them. Maybe out of earshot, but maybe not. His fingers wrap lightly around her elbow to guide her to walk further down the rows of books, and every inch of her lights up in the memory of his touch. "Look, miss-"
"Cielle," she interrupts quickly, eyes flickering up from his fingers back to his face. "My name is Cielle. Phantomhive."
"Alright then, Cielle. I'm very sorry, but I honestly don't remember you."
"I know."
His eyes search hers, alarmed. "Do you understand why I don't remember you?"
"Yes," she breathes, beaming, but this answer only seems to disquiet Sebastian further.
"So you know about…"
"Your problem," she supplies, readjusting her grip on the cup. Her fingers have crushed it slightly. She nods enthusiastically. "Yes."
His jaw ticks. "And who told you?"
"Well, you did."
Sebastian stops in his tracks, frowning back at her. His eyes flitting over her, as if really seeing her for the first time. Judging her as being worthy of his deepest secret, and coming up in disbelief. "I did?"
She bites back the well of information that threatens to spill out of her. The when, why, and where Sebastian had told her about the genetic defect that dictated his, and by extension, her, life. An unforgettable detail of her past, and one of the many critical unknowns of his future.
She laughs again, unable to help it. The irony of her being the one to withhold information of the future from him is too delicious not to savor! She feels lighter than air, higher than the clouds. "I'm sorry," she says, turning to face him fully. "I'm supposed to be acting normal- This must be so strange for you."
"A little," he says, in a tone that means a lot.
"It's strange for me too - You told me this would happen, but I didn't think it would happen today, not here." She lived in Oxford for two bloody years, and they'd never crossed paths? Why couldn't Sebastian have just told her where to find him, why hadn't he just told her go to Oxford, to look for him half an hour to the west in a fucking library?
"You're here for the chess tournament," Sebastian says slowly, eyebrows raised.
Her breath catches around a laugh. "How did you…?"
He lets go of her elbow to gesture towards the charm dangling from her handbag. "Educated guess," he explains, and she sees the first hint of a smile on his lips at her resulting blush.
She fiddles with the edges of the black king, the details worn down over the years of carrying it. "You and I have played chess before," she confesses, unable to help herself. Evidently she isn't as skilled as Sebastian was at secrecy.
"Have we?"
"Many, many times." Their eyes are locked together. Does he feel what she feels? Is the pull that brought him to her already there, within him, just waiting for her to come along and tease it out? Is it love at first sight? "Too many to count, I think."
"That's a lot of times." He tilts his head as he looks at her, appraisingly. "So. Cielle. Are you any good?"
She grins. "I should hope so. After all, you're the one who taught me."
****
Sebastian is 31, Cielle is 20
He makes plans for coffee with the girl at the library. Those plans quickly turn into plans for drinks, and then before he knows it, the plans for drinks turn into dinner.
Cielle. Cielle Phantomhive. The last name sounds vaguely familiar, as unfamiliar as her unusual first name. He's not sure what to make of her. She seems slightly unhinged, but then again, from the sound of it, she's spent a fair amount of time with him. And she knows.
She knows about time travel.
That would leave anyone a touch unhinged, Sebastian gathers generously.
She barely looks legal, though when he signs her in for the tournament, her student ID has December 14th, 1982 as her birth date. She'll be twenty one in a few months; far as he's concerned, that's more than fair game, enough to ease any misgivings about her age in conjecture the way she's been looking at his arse when she thinks he won't notice.
So, he agrees to dinner. 8 o'clock, at The Pompette. Figures even if she does turn out to be crazy, she's still gorgeous.
Unfortunately for him, those two things combined in a woman tend to be his weakness.
And, in addition to all that, he has to admit - he's curious about her. This stranger who seems to know him. This stranger who claims to have been taught chess by him.
He also notes her rating when he signs her in. 1978. That's nothing to sneeze at, even in a town of formidable chess players.
Sebastian keeps tabs on her games, best as he can throughout the day. Passes by to see her name climb the ranks as she wins her matches. He even catches her eye on one turnabout, as she's shaking the hand of her next appointment, tucking her skirt beneath her as she sits down. Her time clock ticks, and even so, she can't seem to tear her eyes away from him long enough to make an opening move. Not until he's moved out of her sight, and then she's back to the board with the same unnerving attention she'd given Sebastian.
He checks the final score when he's leaving at the end of his shift. She ended the day undefeated.
Sebastian rushes home to shower, and make his apartment presentable for female company. He makes a stop on the way to the restaurant, and presents Cielle Phantomhive with a small bouquet of roses at 8:03.
It's plain she's pleased, although she's much calmer now than she was this morning. "You've never given me flowers before."
"I think within 24 hours of meeting someone is soon enough." He pulls out her chair for her before taking his own seat, smiling placidly back at her raised eyebrow. "I can't be held accountable for what future me has or has not done."
She sets the flowers down on the table. The waitress takes their drink orders; she orders a glass of rosé, and Sebastian a glass of chardonnay.
Cielle says the next thing to shock him as soon as the waitress has walked away with a promise of returning in just a few minutes with their respective wines. "I thought you didn't drink."
His fingers still on the glass of water in front of him. He blinks. "Are you sure you've not confused me with someone else?"
Her lips quirk upwards. "I'm sure."
"Hm." He sips the water and considers. "What makes you think I don't drink?"
"You told me you didn't."
"Maybe I lied," Sebastian suggests, because in that moment, it seems a much more appealing possibility than a future in which he is sober.
Cielle shakes her head slightly. "Mm, I don't think so. You usually just refuse to tell me things."
Or a future wherein he no longer lies to women. That would catch up to him very quickly. "Alright." He sets the glass down with a dull clink, and leans forward over the table. "I think you should explain now."
Now it's her turn to play coy. "Explain?"
"Explain how you know my name, and about my…" He gestures.
"Problem," she supplies once more, and Sebastian nods.
"Yes. That. My problem." He hesitates. "How… Long, exactly…?"
She takes pity on him. "I met you when I was six years old."
Jesus. Six. "How do we meet?"
"You visit me in the meadow."
"Visit?"
"Travel," she amends amicably. "You travel there."
"And what is 'there'," he prompts. "Where is this meadow?"
"It's the meadow on my family estate. In Aylesbury." The waitress comes with their wine, and Cielle takes hers with a polite smile and a word of thanks, but Sebastian hardly acknowledges her. He can't take his eyes off of her, his fingers curling around his chardonnay for an anchor. "We'll need a few minutes with the menu, I think," Cielle says to the waitress, and then they're alone again.
Neither of them reach for the menus, which sit unopened and untouched between them.
"How often?" Sebastian asks. "You said I taught you- how often do I-"
She pulls a notebook out of her bag. "You travel to me 152 times," she tells him as she pushes it across the table to Sebastian. He opens it and stares at a list of dates written neatly in unfamiliar handwriting. Lists, plural, as he turns the page to find even more. "You dictated that list to me the second time you came to see me. And then the last time I saw you, you told me to give it to you when you meet me for the first time - which I know is kind of confusing-"
"Kind of confusing," Sebastian repeats bleakly, his mouth dry. He takes a large swallow of wine and Cielle's eyes follow his glass.
"Well, not more confusing than finding a naked man throwing up in your backyard when you were six, surely."
He tips his glass ever so slightly in her direction. "Touché. Although I'm guessing it was even more confusing when that naked man proceeded to disappear right before your very eyes?"
Cielle smiles softly. "Actually, by the time that part came 'round, you'd explained the whole thing to me. That you were a time traveler, and that you were going to disappear, but that you'd come back. And you'd keep coming back, lots of times. And of course, I thought you were lying - but then you did. Disappear. Just like that." She snaps her fingers, and then lets her hand fall slowly down again, like stardust. "And I just remember being… Fascinated, really."
She shrugs, and takes a sip of her rosé. There's a thin print of lipstick left behind on her glass, a dark pink shade in the shape of her bottom lip. "And then I came back," Sebastian murmurs.
"And then you came back," she confirms. "And you kept coming back. And I never really stopped being fascinated by you."
And there it is again. That look, her pupils wide, her lips parted slightly around nothing. Hungry. Wanton.
"…And then, I taught you how to play chess?" Sebastian asks, dubious and hopeful all at once.
Cielle grins and laughs a little, spinning the stem of the glass on the table. "Well- first we played checkers, then chess. Other games too. Sometimes you just helped me with my homework. We spend a lot of time on French verbs, so word to the wise, you might want to brush up."
"Good to know," Sebastian says numbly, his head spinning.
"I worked on my art, too. I drew a lot. But mostly we just talked." She shrugs again. "I asked you a lot of questions about my future, but you were always so damn cagey."
"Well, knowing the future tends to mess with people's heads." The words come to him easily, and he says them more by rote than with any real conviction. He's too caught on the idea of himself entertaining a child in a field instead of simply, well, leaving. Freezing in the woods almost sounds preferable. "It's not healthy to know."
"Yeah, I've heard that argument once or twice before, believe it or not." She rolls her eyes slightly, cupping her glass between her hands and leaning closer to him, her elbows on the table. Her dress, made out of some sort of crushed black velvet, is cut tantalizingly low, and Sebastian very resolutely keeps his eyes above her neck. "Thing is… You made an exception for me. Around the time I turned thirteen."
His palms are pricking with sweat. He lowers them to his lap, to wipe them off surreptitiously on his trousers, and manages to keep his voice steady. "Oh?"
Cielle hums, long and low. She's enjoying this, he realizes with stark certainty. She's enjoying watching him squirm. Her eyes are bright in the dim light of the restaurant, and she's fighting to keep soft smile from turning into something wider, more teasing. "It took a lot of wearing down on my part, but eventually… You told me."
He doesn't bother trying to hold out, to play this game with her. The unknowns are too daunting, and the possibilities are too horrifying. "Told you what?"
"That I'm your future wife."
****