"Lawless of Greed." His creator plants a hand in his hair, and Lawless looks up out of instinct, bleary-eyed, toward the source of that dark, amused voice. "Of all the sins, your nature is unique. Do you know why?"
Lawless licks dry lips. In these early days after the conversion, his bones are still piecing themselves together out of the dust they were ground to, and he is prone to sudden, terrifying bouts of thirst. The creator's words reach him as from a distance resounding with low bells.
"You embody unslakable desire, but not in the same way as your other siblings. You are not Lust or Gluttony, whose appetites confine themselves to a particular realm of mortal experience, and yet you will often crave for the same transgressions they do. Nor are you Envy, for the boundlessness of your hungers will not bar others from sharing in their fulfillment."
The names of his brothers are familiar. Doubt Doubt spends most of his time in snake form to avoid the rest of them, coiling quietly through rooms of the laboratory. World End smears blood all over his mouth whenever he feeds, the sight of which makes Lawless's fangs itch. All of Love has yet to awaken from his humanity.
"You will find yourself consumed by the need for novelty, for beauty, for more of the beings you meet. Your thirst will run deeper and broader than the impulses that drive some of your siblings. It shall be a curse, at times. But I hope you do not turn away from your greed. In wanting and having more, my child, you will discover your nature. And I pray you remember that this desire, which others may call a sin, is instead the light that will beckon you to salvation."
The words skip stones down his spine. Lawless leans more deeply into the hand atop his head so that it slips sideways past his temple. His creator laughs, softly, a sound sweeter to the ear than blood to the tongue, and rests his palm against Lawless's cheek.
"Yes, that's it. This is my benediction to you, Lawless of Greed. Whatever names you shall carry, do not forget this desire for more than what circumstances bestow, more than what fate claims to have the power to weave. You are the One and Only capable of such insatiable want."
How it sickens him to watch Ophelia caged in this married life.
Sycophantic servantry, cozening courtiers—to see the way she lowers a smile at them drives a knife into his stomach. Even the minuscule freedom he has in being allowed to roam wherever he likes in the royal quarters, albeit in hedgehog form, has been hard-won.
Between each day's appearances and banquets, Ophelia rarely has a free moment. Worse are the nights, which he cannot and does not want to fathom. He is careful to give the bedroom chambers a wide berth.
One month, the prince leaves for a three-night diplomatic trip. As soon as his horses are clopping down the cobblestones, Lawless switches back into human form and wrenches open the door of Ophelia's boudoir.
She is composing a letter, from which she looks up at leisure when he enters. It's been over a week since they exchanged more than a whispered conversation. Walls lean in to surround her, and flowers, brooches scintillate their pinpricks of false amber, viridian, and amaranth into the room.
"You've been so good, Lawless," she says, standing and pressing his hands in greeting. It's so little, compared with what he's used to (her full weight in his arms, the heavy golden scent of her hair strung with firefly-like jewels). "I know it's been difficult living here."
He swallows. "Ophelia, can you really be happy living here, with this play-acting?"
"Is that what you see me doing?"
"No, but… come on, you never wanted this!" This country has rivers and forests, but they have never even wandered through them, never known heady flights through the sunset-baked air like they would have back in the old country.
Her smile melts into benevolence and censures him without disapproval, without intent to wound, only with a damnable patience. "Perhaps so. Maybe I didn't know the shape my dreams would take, and maybe it's not a shape I like. I do miss our country. But I could endure anything for this, all for how still the cannons have been since we came here."
She releases his hand and walks to the windows, throwing the shutters open so that blue night air streams into the room. Its very scent is melody. To Lawless, the air sings of birds and fruit and bodies of water even he doesn't know yet. He's never let anything he wanted linger long in sight without attempting to make it his own, and Ophelia looks into that distance without any semblance of longing.
He tries hard to be filled with her desire, since his own is unattainable. It's always been like this. Even as a little girl, she wanted things with a bright, commanding ferocity that made him enjoy the game of being a princess's guardian. Often, to be suffused with her will was enough; it was only his own fault if, because of a certain tilt to her eyes or swing of her ankles, he ever felt cursed with insatiability.
He catches his breath as he realizes she has been studying him, no doubt at the grimace that must have snuck onto his face during the rush and fall of his thoughts. "This kind of life isn't what you imagined, I know. You don't... wish to break the contract?"
Only air creaks out when he opens his mouth. Foolishly, his body wants to fall to one knee and pledge his loyalty, as if he's a chivalrous knight of the court and not an artificial fiend. Somehow he stammers out his objection, and Ophelia extends a fond hand to his arm.
I'll want it too, he promises himself, shivering with what it takes to forget the urge to press his lips to her ear and exhale reverence down the line of her neck. Peace, then.
The moonlight going to waste makes him sigh with regret, and the wrinkling at the corners of Ophelia's eyes tells him she knows. There is nothing faked about her smile, and that awes him. She is a performer of the highest caliber, a virtuoso who outshines him on the stage, aware of but paying no mind to the curtains above them that ever shudder toward each other.
Licht doesn't speak to him before his concerts. It's a rule. He has his rituals, and Lawless respects his art.
That doesn't mean he enjoys the hours before the recitals, when Kranz insists he not wander from the hotel or cause a commotion while Licht warms up, grooms, invokes his heavenly muses or who knows what else. By the time Lawless takes his seat in the front row, it's actually tempting to hallucinate meaning and conversation into the notes Licht draws from the piano.
Everyone else is doing it, after all. They cry and clutch their hands because they think Licht's music is speaking to them. The first time he went to one of Licht's concerts, he laughed at the weeping masses. Did they think he was doing it for their sakes?
But as he spends more time with his Eve, he starts indulging in the same fallacy. Like tonight, when Licht starts playing the Allegro scherzando from Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto and it utterly halts Lawless where he had been shuffling his sneakers on the lacquered floor. When the rambling notes give way to a waterfall of arpeggios that groan and rut against him. When even the playful descending flourishes feel like too intense a touch, like feathers brushing over cuts, unspooling him into exhalations of dark mist. When the recapitulation gathers time and weight in its chords and builds, builds, builds.
Heavy-lidded, he devours Licht with his gaze the same way the others do. And Licht, too, like Ophelia, like Lawless, lives to be looked at and listened to like this.
They are performers, all three. They know what it is for everything else to fade into the background: the orchestra, the court, the war. Laughter rises in his throat, drowned by the whirlpool of sound so magnificent it's almost cacophonous, almost random and dissonant in its chaos. Lawless has his art, too, the centuries he's spent contracting with different Eves, whose lives he has ensured are beautiful by their fleetingness. To take his pain and cannibalize it into art makes for lovely art (and a destitute, desolate soul).
He never knows whether he wants his Eves to get what they want or not. From a tragedian's standpoint, desires snuffed on the brink of their consummation are the most sublime. As long as he doesn't fall prey to identifying too much with their grandiose ambitions, he is safe.
…although Licht tempts him to do so more than his other Eves. This boy's will is a searing ambrosia. His delusions of heavenliness are so lightweight that Lawless simultaneously wants to tear it all down and to keep batting the fantasy around in any ridiculous way he can, like those cherubs at the corner of tableaus who pluck harp strings.
He wonders how much longer it will be until he goes insane from this farce, and if it will be a relief. If it will be like the death he doles out so generously without being able to partake in its consolations.
He startles in his seat as a chord thunders sforzando. Someone gasps beside him.
Right, away with those thoughts. They don't suit him. As the piece hurtles onward to its conclusion, Lawless bites his tongue and bides this moment. He is a vase for Licht's sound; there is nothing else but this unwilled alchemy. The slam of keys—tell me this is in the score, tell me this isn't dissonance, the sound of Licht's own liberties—razes him with holy light.
The last chords shatter the air open like a wound exposed in a war zone. Shell-shocked, the entire audience gets to its feet for a standing ovation.
In defiance, Lawless remains sitting. Licht's narrowed eyes fall to him as he bows and is forced to lean down toward the vampire's gaze. Lawless gives him a fang-bared grin for applause.
Enough of this heavenly fare. After the pomp and circumstance is done with, he'll drag his angel back into the orbit of this ill-fated star, and they'll fight until they tear each other back to earth.
The night before Ophelia's execution, she allows Lawless to stay in her room. When his hand at her waist has ceased to tremble, she moves away to close the open window he came through. Then she sits on the bed and tugs down the corner of her gown, exposing one brilliant shoulder.
"I want you to taste it." Her smile dawns like a coy planet on the far horizon. "My resolve. So you know it the way I do. So I can share it with you, Lawless."
She does not comment (if she notices) on the way his pupils swell huge or his breath catches. Although blood had been the last thing on his mind, he has never spurned what was offered to him. So he sits next to her and, painstakingly, they both hold their breath as his fingertips graze the skin of her shoulder, sweeping aside a strand of hair.
As if paying obeisance at an altar, he lowers his mouth to the skin and pauses there a moment to feel the way she shifts on the bed. Her own lips part and her gaze stutters, becomes slow and liquid with anticipation. Ophelia, heavy and real there with him, scented like rain and deep perfume, darkly starlit and the centers of unknown galaxies. He closes a hand around hers as he bites down.
With the first drop, her love floods and floors him. Blood always yields its flavor to the soul that infuses it, and Ophelia's reveals a terrible clarity, a resolution upon which one could sharpen knives. Lawless's eyes go wide; his entire being feels stretched, distended, with her force of belief, with its almond notes and scent of myrrh.
Tasting it leaves no question. Of course she will do this. Lawless knows he has only ever really touched Ophelia around the edges, except for in these moments, when her raw heart flares to light and life under his tongue. And yes, it is peaceshe wants, and he can taste her will molding peace into being with an almost forceful devotion that is more blasphemous and greedy than any saint's fervent supplication.
He couldn't drink long even if he wanted to. Her resolve runs through him in a way he would later compare to music. He kisses the two minuscule wounds as he withdraws. These attempts at gentleness only amuse her, he knows.
That night she invites him to stay in her bed with her in human rather than hedgehog form. Despite the ample space, they sleep crumpled close against each other. Rather, Ophelia sleeps, her martyr's expression lost on relaxed lips, her face simply human and helpless like the rest of her lot, and Lawless gives himself over to the lash of his thoughts, each one of which brings them closer to day.
He thinks: I will never want again if it leads me to this.
I'll cut it off before it ever gets to this point—if I ever recover from this. I want too much, and it's not enough. Look at this. I can't interfere.
There are other things. Countless things in the world I can have. Demand, and ye shall receive. I'll take everything. The whole world.
I wonder if it even amounts to this.
He can't know how much of it he believes. For this moment, he can keep the thoughts at bay by his fingertips, which hum low and content where they rest on the curve of Ophelia's hip. But such respite won't last. The sun, after all, is rising.
"…look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east…"
Hundreds of years after that, on a similar night, the jin drained from his body and his broken ribs dragging every breath he takes through crinkles of glass, Lawless thinks: this is what greed's brought me to again, huh?
Licht pauses at the doorframe, a glass of water in his hand. When he had gone to Mahiru's kitchen for it, Lawless had still been in hedgehog form. He hadn't felt well enough since Tsubaki's assault until now to attempt turning back. Grumbling at the new spots of pain his human body reveals, he slides the back of his wrist off his eyes and squints at the light from the hallway silhouetting Licht in its cheap gold. "Tenshi-chan…"
He's not looking so angelic now, the day's bruises faded to purple on his jaw and the gashes on his neck and arms barely clotted over. Licht sits on the bed and, stiffly and yet as if by impulse, holds out the glass. "Hyde."
The name wavers in his mind, like a plucked string whose note he has difficulty identifying. But enough remains for him to know that that sound is his. Lawless pushes himself upright, groaning as the movement seems to unfasten his organs and then snap them back into place. He drains the entire glass, ignoring Licht's darkening scowl. When he's done, he wipes his mouth on his hand, his bracelets jangling and breaking the silence.
"Do you have it?" He's aware that he's mumbling.
"What are you talking about?"
"The name tag."
Licht reaches into the pocket of his hoodie and brings out the item, cleaved in half. A bit of silver chain is still attached to one end. Lawless palms it, perhaps too quickly, because Licht raises an eyebrow.
They are both on new ground here. Later, as they lie on opposite sides of the bed, Lawless rubs at a bloodstain he's left in Mahiru's mattress with one hand and clutches the two halves of the tag in the other, as if he can weld the metal together by force. Licht is watching him from a few feet away, he knows, over the barrier of his turned back.
He absently thumbs over the carved letters while his mind works over the corresponding chasm Tsubaki has rent in his being. His mind wanders to his brothers and sister… When All of Love had his contract shattered, did he rue the lust that had ushered his house to ruin? Does Nii-san still wonder, many a night, if the responsibility yoked to him now is the inevitable consequence of his earlier inaction?
Their creator left it to them to answer these questions. But they all went their separate ways, so he can't know if they've also felt what it is to fear one's own nature. If they've had to deal with the retribution of the sins they symbolize. To be slain by a bit character and a bastard child demanding to be called brother… oh, fucking Fortune.
Once more, old patterns unfurl. The heroism of the day can easily mean nothing. It's just one more act upon the stage, before the stereotypical dark night of the soul. Just when he thought something could change, too, that he could change.
Because Licht is here now, but when he leaves? How many Eves can he depend on like this, if a princess and an angel are not enough? Is it because the want that's in him is eternal as sin, stayed by the influence of an Eve but never to be conquered or sated? They can say what they will about peace, about high-flown ideals like change, but Lawless knows that long after they are gone, it's the fervor of their voices, the solid warmth of their bodies he will carry instead.
But hold to this moment:
Ophelia and him atop the dome above her room, her reading Shakespeare to him in the warm, still, midsummer night air, from a time before her marriage.
He can almost get the hang of this human thing, he thinks, standing over the cliffs of the country while she sits leaning against the spire. The cloudy glow of the sky gives off enough light for the book laid open in her lap. "Ophelia, you read too many of these tragedies," he complains.
"I suppose I do have a fondness for them. Strange, isn't it?" The wind laps over them, teasing his scarf and her hair. Ophelia marks her place with a finger and tilts her head up at him. "But I can't help but enjoy the sense of fate behind them. Whatever befalls the protagonists, destiny proves an ulterior meaning in the end. It can be quite beautiful."
"Not something I'd probably ever appreciate."
She laughs and tugs at his hand, almost making him lose his balance as she pulls him down next to her. "I'm sure that in time you'll grow a taste for them. You have so much to live and see, being immortal. Now, come, read this passage with me."
Shoulders glancing against each other, they recite words of a language that has not yet grown archaic. All through the night they stay there, even when the sky eventually darkens to make reading impossible. Ophelia drifts off while admiring the view below, and pennons of her hair flicker in the wind from where her head rests against his side.
He doesn't have a name for the feeling in the air then, but it's larger than lust, kinder than envy. In tune with the greed that sings at the core of his soul, and yet overflowing with the sense that this is so much he's never had, never imagined having before.
It is a beautiful country.
After all of the grandiose concert halls and their acclaimed acoustics, it is in an unadorned hotel practice room that Licht's music shapes that moment from memory. Lawless had been thumbing away on his phone and Kranz paging through the newspaper. The afternoon had been unremarkable until Licht's fingers hit the opening chords.
At first the sound is nothing special, flatter than it would be on a stage. But it's full of strange glissandos and keening passages. Even without Licht's magic, the spinning notes gather circling vapors (blue and yellow sky, wind curving around her throat) of memory and become currents that spill down his ears and throat. Lawless clenches his teeth against this new sensitivity he doesn't altogether like. It's been like this ever since Tsubaki destroyed his item: abrupt outbursts triggered by the slightest things, putting into mind the fear of the limits of his immortality, mocking him with the consciousness of how he's wasted his newly precious time...
He stumbles out of the room in the middle of the piece, pulling his scarf over the lower half of his face to smother his breathing, which is fast spiraling away from him. Just outside, he leans against the wall and pauses, the music a little more tolerable for the distance. It's so clear. It paints life and will and reminds him of his stolen strength. If that was supposed to be strength, the mindless itch at the edge of his skin that led him to massacre everything that intruded upon his amusement.
He braces himself against the wall and feels himself slip down it. Cruel that the piano had not been invented yet in the time he shared with her. He can almost hear Licht's music trickling back through those days, underpinning the scent of summer mountains as he sat with Ophelia on the roof, or thundering in the rooms just beyond when she refused to leave. To be pulled through the violent sublimity of Licht's sound is a deliverance he cannot face alone. He had lived assuming he would never be able to step off this stage, ruing it. Now that its new players are about to push him off, all he wants is more time in the center. Irony. There are words for this, he's sure, in Shakespeare.
The noise of footsteps hinges reality back into place. The music stopped some time ago. Lawless gets haltingly to his feet and paces down the hallway, turning the corner as Licht's voice carries through it.
"Shit rat, where'd you go?"
A hot flush is coming over his face, and he's gritting his teeth so hard they hurt. Not now, not now. But he must not be as agile as he thinks (just another failure, that), because he's barely slipped into an empty ballroom to catch his breath before Licht wrenches the door open.
He freezes, dimly aware that his scarf is still tugged over his shaking mouth but there's not much he can pretend about the rest. The crease in Licht's forehead gouges deeper and harsher as he takes him in. "The hell are you crying about now?"
It's the worst, being looked at like this.
Lawless retreats into his hedgehog form, tiny feet scrambling as soon as they hit the floor. Animal instinct spurs him toward the nearest tablecloth as shelter.
He's forgotten how large the rest of the world remains, as Licht takes two steps forward and effortlessly traps him in his hands. "I thought I told you. Are you still running away from me, you rotten hedgehog? Time to move on from that stupid gag."
Just to startle Licht and get out of his hands, he transforms back. They both end up falling to the floor from the suddenness of the change, knobby limbs jostling in a now-familiar confusion.
Propping himself up on his elbows, Lawless snarls, "Move on? My whole life is nothing but 'moving on,' tenshi-chan, even if I don't want to. The play continues whether the actors will it or not." Fast and hot, the words wash into the space that separates them, which isn't much in this tangle. "Time will take everything, even you, like it took her. So what if I want to remain a while in a happy scene?"
Licht sneers at him. "So that's all you want, really? The past?"
"Don't make that face, Licht." If he laughs now, Lawless thinks he might never come back from it.
Licht's leg twitches and Lawless reads the movement wrong, anticipating a kick. With a sound like a twirling cape, he jolts back into animal form. Licht pauses, hand still outstretched inches from the quills. Lawless peeks out from under his paws.
"Come out of that form. I'm asking you to talk with me."
But I don't want to. He withdraws his spines and feels very small in the alien room.
"Tell me what you want, you shit rat. In this moment. Just try."
Ophelia strewing flowers into a brook, watching the water carry them down. Nii-san looking him in the eyes, a hollow red mirror of his own, betraying answers beyond the exhaustion there. Licht's fingers on the piano, only toying with sound, and unconscious of what they destroy and rebuild.
But that's not what Licht means.
In this moment. He pads carefully closer to where Licht sits cross-legged on the ground and tucks himself into one of his palms. Licht, also tentative, also guessing, folds his other hand over Lawless's back and carries him closer to his chest.
Not just the past, Lichtan. His Eve is listening, still, even after he's raised the curtains of his wayward soul for him. His Eve, who saw the vacant stage in his soul and summoned a piano, even though Lawless had only made his way into his life by a cheat and deception.
Lawless burrows as close as he can get to the warmth at the center of those palms, a warmth like that sought by starlings and their young. There is something still more he wants. A little thing, he thinks, though it's so hard to tell which desires will damn him.
But—his creator's hand on his head—it's who he is.
And—Ophelia smiling at a falling axe—if they do damn him, maybe he really will understand later.
Yes—the look in Licht's eyes when he stood, and reached—what use is greed if not for this? Hold to it, seek more in this moment, since forever is a flighty mistress.
Before he can go back on the impulse, he turns back into human form. Licht grunts as the change displaces their balance and sends them tumbling to the floor again, Lawless's head knocking against his Eve's chest and staying there. The arm curled around Lawless's back draws instinctively away. Then, warily, back into place.
Licht is waiting for him to speak, to vocalize a desire. Lawless buries his face in Licht's sweatshirt, which smells faintly of melon, and plays with one fabric wing of Licht's backpack trapped against the floor. If he's changed, if he's not changed; if he's sinning, if he's reaching for redemption—these things are out of his understanding. But even if Tsubaki has broken the Servamp of Greed, he won't be able to take away the nature their creator granted Lawless, the nature that compels him to want something and grasp it even if it's to be with shaking, desperate hands.
He relaxes and tugs his Eve a bit closer. For now, this is it. Licht is still waiting, and he wonders how long it will take for him to realize he's told him.