The room is warm and sticky.

Claude is sitting at the table, his back straight, his eyes focused on nothing. His fingers play with themselves, grinding and moving and undulating like the sea. He's twitching, in anticipation, hunger, he doesn't know.

Regardless, in this hollow, in this room - he is here and there is Claude at the dining table. The world has gone still. The walls are red and gold and stretch on eternal. The floor does not feel good beneath his skin, and he wonders if this day will ever end.

Claude finally begins to move.

The clock on the wall stops. The time is thirteen minutes past eight, but he doesn't know what that means or why or if any of this has ever meant anything at all.

Claude begins to move.

His fingers stop their writhing, and they slide forth. Winding. Crawling. It doesn't take Alois long to imagine them as spiders. They crawl over to a bowl of fruit, peaches. His fingers seem to soften, twist round in a circle, caress the skin. He picks it up. And begins to feed.

Gorge.

Consume.

His teeth rip into the sweet flesh, and Alois sees flashes of his tongue as it rolls against the sugar-juice inside. He devours it, with sticky sweetness rolling down his face, blotches on his suit. He picks up another peach and does the same again, teeth sinking and burying and mashing and destroying.

A sound starts to rise, and Alois doesn't know if it's his or Claude's but a sound is in the air and it is tight and gasping and like moaning. His eyes are aflame and his skin is aflame and his heart is aflame and suddenly the gold and red all melts and blurs into fire, warping, smoking, burning.

He wants his teeth in his flesh, Alois imagines, imagines the way his skin would melt and burst like those peaches. He imagines his quick tongue rubbing and rolling all over his insides, red and raw and beautiful and melting all together. How sweet the taste, how sweet his skin, how sweet his blood.

Claude's moved on from the peaches. He has quail bones in his mouth, now. White little things coated in brown, cooked flesh. Dribbling. He's bent over the table, now. A disgrace. An utter disgrace. But Alois thinks of those bones breaking beneath his teeth, imagines what it would be like to have those fangs rake against his nerves, sink into his bones. Suck out the marrow. Suck him all dry. Suck and suck until there's nothing left but his stupid, shitty clothes to stay as a stain forever on the earth.

Claude eats the duck eggs, shells and all. He eats the fancy-french named stuff that Alois never bothered learning. Spaghetti that took too long to eat has slapped his face red. Dead things. Dead plants. Dead animals - all dead things, that's all he eats, devours, destroys.

He's frenzied, now. Sugar, sugar. Chocolate pudding. Ice cream. Sorbets. His face is a mess of bubblegum colours, of chocolates and sweeties and nice things but none of this is enough, none of this is enough because nothing is ever ever ever ever enough for him.

But then, beneath all the mountains and mountains of food, Alois can finally see the figure that emerges. Naked and with flesh white like poor, unsoiled snow - naked and with eyes that sparkled like blueberries wet with dew, staring up, unmoving - Ciel Phantomhive. Claude's eaten out a shape around him. He's above him. On him. All chewing and dribbling and mad, mad, mad with something. Love, maybe. Love, probably.

The world spirals gold and red, and he thinks of fire and crunched bones and eyes the colour of blueberries burst open.

Ciel's skin is white and soft and Alois can taste it in his mouth, taste it and imagine it like cow-skin, chicken-skin, sky-skin. It probably tastes like all the stars, burning out. It probably tastes like all the things in the sky, of pollen and birds and flightful things.

Alois can't watch this.

Claude stuffs a butterfly in his mouth, and Alois wakes up crying.