there were two very similar prompts on the kink meme so I did both of them. This one gets a little bloodier than Devil Do.
Well I ain't been saved, what for?
If I went to Heaven I would only be bored
So first thing: the devil is really tall. And he doesn't look much like the album covers Mmy is familiar with, but he does have the horns and those are pretty cool. He's kinda got a weird…. muppet…. scifi thing going on. He's rocking it though.
"Sweet digs you got down here," Mmy says, flipping up the current page of the wall calendar to find yet more playful kittens looking soulfully at the camera. It's adorable. From the flaming heart of Pandemonuim, below the office window, something screams like it's trying to hack up a lung.
"Needs more spikes though," he adds, eyeing the round edge of the ceiling. Honestly it kind of looks like the whitehouse caught on fire and never went out in here. "Maybe teeth. You seem like a teeth kinda guy."
In a swirl of his long coat, like fabric moving under water, the devil takes a seat at his desk. A sheaf of papers levitate up and flip open in front of him, stopping on the final page. "Jimmy Eureeds," he says, as the last page hovers before him.
Mmy grins. "That's me," he says, "and let me just say, it's a real honor to meet you in the flesh. Bone? The not flesh. My mom always said I'd end up here. But I don't go by that so much anymore. Call me Mmy."
The devil looks over the top of the gently floating paper. "Really," he says. "After everything that happened in your final moments?"
Mmy keeps grinning, although in his ears he's hearing the sick crack and splatter of his own ribs under sledgehammer. "We just got off on the wrong foot," he says. "He'll come around."
The sheaf of papers settles down precisely on top of the stack below it, in the box that says ACQUISITIONS. The reason Mmy gets the feeling the devil's a teeth-kinda-guy is because the high collar of his suit is lined with the unmistakable curved shape of molars, as if his collar was a mouth opening up to reveal his sinuous neck like a tongue. It's real freaky.
"In what sense," the devil says, "do you expect Johnny C. to… 'come around'?"
Mmy rips off the current page of the Cat A Day day-calendar and shoves it in his pocket. He loves those little gremlin looking sphinx motherfuckers.
"He's gotta die someday, right?" Mmy says. "I'll work on my pitch and give it another shot when he croaks. I guess it could be a while, I mean, he's pretty badass. You'd need serious firepower. A shootout with the cops is a pretty good way to go."
"You're taking this all in very good humor," the devil remarks, "considering how historically vile your retributions for comparatively petty slights have been."
Mmy is still smiling, but now he can feel his eyes squinting up, not quite on the same page as his mouth. "Nny's not like those other people," he says.
"No?" the devil says.
"No," Mmy says. "Nny's—he doesn't hurt people the way—he's pure, it's purifying—"
Mmy finds his hand clutching at his sternum, at the fabric of his shirt, nails digging into skin that he has seen split open and peeled apart over him. He has seen the frantic wet pumping of his own organs below his skin.
"I did something wrong," he says, "I made him mad, but it's okay—it'll be okay, because he bled it out of me, I'll do better next time—"
"Young man," the devil says, "you would do well to disabuse yourself of the notion that there is any redemptive quality to the things Johnny C. does. All you will find below the surface of that self-important aggrandizement is nonsense. Chaos and whimsy."
"That's not true!" Mmy snaps, "He's a visionary! He's a macabre genius!"
The devil considers him for a moment. He shifts, his whole towering shape shifts as if it's folding down into itself, as he stands from his chair. The thorn twists of his shoulders become arms, the ivory skull becomes washed out brown flesh, and all at once Mmy is looking at the heart-stopping silhouette of Nny. Only it's not Nny, not quite like it was when he looked up into that face haloed against the dim light of the basement, trembling, blood-flecked and wrathful.
This is Nny as Mmy imagined him—tall, poised, pale and confident. The cloven boots click against the floor as he comes around the desk, gloved fingers trailing metal tips over the edge of outboxes and inboxes, sparking like a blade on a whetstone. Mmy swallows.
"A genius, you say?"
Mmy watches Nny come towards him, step by step, frozen like a deer in the headlights. Each step scrapes and swerves, catlike, the hips sway—Mmy thinks of black widows, for some reason, the way their beautiful legs move in an endless smooth rhythm. He's always been scared as hell of spiders, a fact he does not like to publicize, but the way they move? It makes a shiver run up his spine.
"Is there genius in indiscriminate slaughter?" the devil asks him.
"It's not-" Mmy says, "it's not indiscriminate. He hurts the people who deserve it. The kinds of people who made us… what we are…"
He doesn't realize he's been moving until his back thumps up against the wall. The devil is still coming towards him, hands folded behind his back, hollow unearthly eyes glowing in the cavern of Nny's sunken sockets.
"Foolish Persephone," the devil says, "you think you can marry Death and survive?"
"Uh," Mmy says. His hands are sweating. He feels like he did in ninth grade when he tried to ask Clarissa Moore to Homecoming, right before she said she'd never be caught dead with white trash like him, right before he threw up on his shoes in the middle of the first floor hallway.
The devil stops just a foot in front of him, head cocked the slightest bit, watching. Mmy can't remember the last time someone looked down at him physically, and it gets him kind of hot, to be honest.
"That's pitiful," the devil says. "I've seen starving dogs with more dignity than you, young man."
Mmy licks his lips. He knows that's not really Nny, but it's hard to totally convince himself of that fact when the thing standing a foot away from him looks exactly like every self-indulgent fantasy of blood-soaked vindication he's ever had. If it would just reach out and touch him, stroke his cheek, tell him what wonderful work he's done—
"My my," the devil says. "I am ever astounded by the paltry price for which humans are willing to sell their souls. After all this time you'd think I would learn to expect it."
"Don't you, uh," Mmy says, "don't you already own my whole. Thing?"
"Of course," the devil says. "Entirely. I was just thinking of how many men walk about up there, unaware of the incredible power they have been willingly offered. If he asked you to, would you let him open you up again?"
"Yeah," Mmy says, immediately, because he would have done it the first time if Nny had just asked. If he'd been asked to bleed, he would have bled happily.
"Would you do it to yourself," the devil says, "if he asked you to?"
"Y, yeah," Mmy says.
The devil reaches for him, the silver tips of his wicked gloves flashing, and hooks a finger under the collar of Mmy's t-shirt. "Do it then," he says, and his voice is Nny's voice, the blistering dismissal, the thorny edges, a perfect imitation.
Fingers shaking, Mmy lifts a hand. He's on autopilot, he's not thinking about anything except the sound of Nny' voice, the last voice on earth that he ever heard, looping itself like a thorny vine around his windpipe.
He presses his palm against his stomach and pushes it up under his shirt, up his chest until the tip of his finger meets the tip of Nny's claw. One shirt and a glove, that's what stands between skin and skin.
His own nails are sharp. He likes the way they look when they're grown out, when he can paint them. He digs them into the delicate skin over his sternum, and with a pop that squeals pain all up his throat and down his ribs, he breaks it open. He breathes hard. Blood wells up around his fingers.
"Is that all you can do?" Nny says, with a dismissive flick of a glance down the length of Mmy.
"No," Mmy says, "no, I can—hold on, I can do it—"
He clenches his fingers under his skin and rips them down, scraping the arc of his sternum, tearing the flesh with a crackle and pop almost like elastic breaking. He clutches at the wall behind him. It's agony, but he's lived it once before, he can survive it again, he can do it. The skin over his stomach parts more easily, he doesn't have to fight so hard against himself. His fingers don't catch and drag as bad, but they push in to the knuckle as his hand shakes.
When he finally reaches the hard square of his belt buckle, he withdraws his dripping hand. Blood is smeared down the fingertips to the knuckle like cherry flavored latex, dripping in fat trails down to his wrist. Air drags through his open mouth and into his dry throat as he heaves for breath.
Nny hums, thoughtfully.
Mmy's vision all but goes spotted and starry as Nny reaches past Mmy's hand and under his shirt, following the same path, moving underneath the cloth like a parasite beneath skin. He can feel those whetstone sparks as wicked fingertips scrape up his stomach. This is—this is a lot for a guy to process—
Nny twists his wrist, and as if he were intertwining his hand with another, he pushes his fingers between the gaps in Mmy's ribcage. Mmy whimpers and flattens his hands against the walls, trying to hold still. The grip on him feels like—he feels like an object, a cup or a table knife, and this is—this is what he's always wanted, to be taken up and wielded like a weapon. To be held and kept, to be sharpened, to be useful.
"Please," he says, just barely able to make it come out.
"Please what?" Nny says, disinterested and callous. His fingers inside of Mmy slowly close, tearing the soft meat in their path.
Mmy makes a choking noise, a wet noise, as one of those metal tips lacerates his lung.
"Is this Hell for you," Nny muses, "or is this Heaven?"
It's both, it's everything, it's the holy visitation of wrath and love, it's too much for the stuff of human souls to hold without crumbling to dust. Mmy has never been religious but he is living it now, he is having it forced into him as everything he is struggles to accommodate the alien shape of it, sublime and ecstatic and terrible.
He moans.
"Your hell," Nny says, as Mmy's bones creak under his grip, "will be to reach for this moment over and over again, until the seas cover the mountains and the sun swallows the Earth, and to never again feel relief."
Mmy spits up blood, unable to look away from the hollow eyes that burn into him, unblinking, glowing with a light that existed before light, before the stars in the darkness, and he is afraid.
"Enjoy your stay," the devil says, in Nny's voice. "It's been a pleasure to make your acquaintance."