All Good Things

This may or may not even be an AU.

for the prompt: demon!Edgar; Jimmy gets more than he bargained for. A Christmas present for Jynx.

Black candles had been the hardest things to find, out of all of it.

Sulfur and brimstone he'd been able to pick up at the Wall-to-Wall Mart, the silver chalice had been half off in the out of season Halloween junk for sale at the party store, and daggers he had plenty of already lying around. He had settled on one of the wicked looking ones with the toothed edge and the vanity holes in the blade, since it wasn't like he was going to hit anything hard enough to shatter it. But the candles, the candles had been hard. There were dark green ones and red ones and a metric fuck ton of white ones, but nothing in black because apparently the target audience of soccer moms or whatever didn't want any fucking black candles.

Mmy had ended up in a shitty little tourist shop by the airport, buying a huge ass candle shaped like a unicorn. It was black. It was also a unicorn. He was doubtful about exactly how metal this actually was.

The altar was about ninety percent finished. He had the dubiously metal unicorn candle at the center and the paraphernalia organized around it, he'd put down the meat and guts and things in the proper shape, parted with about a cup of his own blood, sketched out the chalk lines, and was now searching for an appropriate aspect of "defilement".

Mmy was vaguely aware that people who attempted to summon demons often ended up like, possessed or violently slaughtered or eating through a straw for the rest of their lives. He'd seen all the documentaries; he'd watched the one about the little girl that sprayed projectile vomit nine or ten times. At the end of the day, though, he'd figured that the whole point of Evil was that it was in opposition to Good, and Evil directed at Evil would have to be a neutral or even positive equation. He'd done some math. He had been pretty good at math, when he'd still been in school.

Let's see. Hmm. Defilement. He wished vaguely that he'd taken the time to sit through a bible study at some point. The terminology was kind of stumping him.

Mmy climbed down from the attic, swinging from the trap door the last couple of steps, and went rifling through his bookshelf. He flipped through the disorganized stacks until he settled on the tape carefully hidden under his tenth grade report card, and considered it with a mixture of admiration and disgust.

Big Dog Buries His Bone, the cover read. Mmy had only been able to get through that one once.

He stomped back up the steps and closed the trap behind him.

"Alright," he said, clapping his hands together. "Let's do this thing."

He lit the candles, placed the tape at the center of the altar, and tried to settle into a lotus position on the floor. He was not nearly flexible enough. He settled for crossing his legs and figured, fuck it, like the demon is gonna take the time to correct his posture.

"Marquis Forneus," he intoned, "I conjure and compel thee, I—fuck."

He looked down at his notes. He tried again. He got about two words more this time before he had to cut off and check the notes, again, god damn it, third time is apparently not the charm, this is why they cast him as the tree in the middle school play. He sucked in a frustrated breath, shifted his notes to his lap, and got ready to just read the damn things off his sheet.

And then the wind picked up.

Jimmy twisted his head to check the high tiny window just below the peak of the roof, which was as mired shut as it ever had been. Maybe the trap door? No, still shut.

His notes flapped against his chest and he caught them just a second before they left the circle entirely. There was a whistling, a dull creaking protest from the walls and the ceiling and the floor itself as an impossible influx of wind pounded against the wood. The makeshift altar wobbled on its tottering legs. The air pressure exploded, blasting paraphernalia and chalk and dust across the room, and Jimmy wrapped his hands over his head as he ducked, wide eyed and swearing, into his own lap. A sound like the ocean, like a wave crashing. And then, silence.

After a moment, when nothing further happened, Jimmy carefully uncurled himself.

"Well," said the indistinct figure examining the altar, "I have to say I'm surprised."

As Jimmy watched, speechless, the figure resolved into a man—tall, mild looking, with flashing round glasses on his prominent nose. The man picked up the unicorn candle and flipped it over idly, examining the bottom as the flame continued to burn in a perfect, straight flare. Wax dripped cheerfully upwards.

Well he'd said it three times. Maybe that was all he had really needed?

Jimmy tried to find his tongue with limited success. "Aren't—" his voice broke, "-aren't you supposed to be a sea monster or something?"

"That's pretty old fashioned," the creature replied. "It takes up quite a lot of space too, and I assume you like having a roof on this… building." He gave the attic a skeptical look, as if there could be a more accurate description that he was, at present, too polite to utilize.

Jimmy cleared his throat. "Uh, cool, so I—I injur thee with all force and flame, Forneus—"

The demon winced. "Edgar," he said, "if you wouldn't mind."

"What?"

The demon delicately replaced the candle to the table, picked up the plastic chalice of lukewarm blood and took a sip. "Edgar," he repeated. "Edgar Vargas. You can't just throw around a true name like that, you'll get me in trouble."

Jimmy had to admit, he did look like a bit of an Edgar. It was the mock turtleneck that really did it.

Edgar had gone back to inspecting the altar, picking at the crusts of drying meats. "Anyway," he said, "all the thees and thous and injurments are mostly filler. Big Dog Buries His Bone? Really? I wouldn't have pegged you for the type."

There was a wildly disconcerting moment where Jimmy tried to decide if there was actually an innuendo laden in that pegged or if he was just projecting it there like the world's most fucked up psych patient. Edgar's delivery was almost too sincere.

"Gag gift," he lied.

Edgar raised both eyebrows. "I doubt that," he said. He looked over Jimmy's body with a critical eye, lingering on the acne and the shredded hems just long enough to leave blazing pinpoints of self-consciousness at each locus. "I very much doubt that."

Edgar had turned his attention to the chalked floorboards with their concentric circles and squares, labeled points at intersecting lines. They had something to do with stars or planets, Jimmy didn't really understand it. Edgar kicked at one of the chalk lines, his toe bounding off a boundary as if he'd come into contact with a physical wall.

"Impressive," he murmured. "How did a little green thing like you manage this?"

Jimmy wasn't sure what that meant, so he settled for answering, "It's just numbers," with a shrug. He watched Edgar pacing the circumference of the wider circle containing them both, steps moving with an unpredictable grace like waves across the shore.

"Well, Mmy," the demon said at last, straightening up. "What can I do for you?"

Jimmy decided to be flattered rather than unnerved that Edgar knew his self-selected appellation. He puffed up a bit. "You're in charge of making people likable, right?"

"I also teach rhetoric," Edgar agreed, "and languages."

Jimmy held up one of his pages of notes. "Loved by friends and foes, right?"

Edgar nodded amiably.

"I want to be loved by—" Jimmy broke off. "I mean. He's not really a friend yet. But I've got a plan! I just have to… introduce myself."

It had been months since he first spotted Johnny, months of endless nights of too much furious energy to sleep, directed at no particular goal, the brightness of an evening where there was only darkness before. He had no idea what to do with himself. He'd half expected all this to fade back into tedium sooner or later, but the pressing urge to draw closer only grew in power. He had been reduced to pacing streets, mooning under streetlamps, with an ear out for panicked shrieking.

"We're so much alike," Jimmy said, "I've just got to show him that."

"You want me to make him love you," Edgar said.

Jimmy blanched. "I wouldn't—"

"Oh yes," Edgar carried on, "I knew you weren't the rhetoric type. You'd like a magic charm that bends people to your every whim, that's what you'd like."

Edgar meandered closer, with his uneven graceful steps, hands behind his back. He paused at the edge of Jimmy's personal circle, the double ringed chalk thing with delicate tiny lines exactly every one point two inches between them.

"You like easy solutions," Edgar said. "No, there's not a philosophical bone in your body. You are a blunt instrument." He turned, lifted the dagger from the table. "It isn't that you have no artistic sensibility," he added, twirling the knife under curious fingers, "it's just that you're terribly dull."

Jimmy did not like where this was going.

"But I," Edgar said, "I can make you a charmer. Oh, not a charm, no, not to alter reality around you. I can alter you, I can make you a master of persuasion, I can make you an intellectual sun, an inescapable gravity. I can make you a king," he said, and then added modestly, "in a manner of speaking."

"Um," said Jimmy.

Edgar jammed the knife point first into the table, with a jerk too vicious for his placid face. The table rocked drunkenly. The easy push and pull of his movements could hypnotize, and from a seat on the floor there was entirely too much of Edgar to ignore. Outside, it had begun to rain.

"You're an unlovable thing," the demon continued, peering down at Jimmy in a dim shadow of his own making. "A cruel, blunt thing. There are crueler blunter things than you, certainly—you're not even lucky enough to be the worst."

Jimmy sank his teeth into his lip.

"It's not entirely your fault," Edgar soothed, dropping in one fluid motion to his knees. Up close, his skin was veined with tiny pearlescent scars. "If you had been born rich, no one would have minded. And if you had been born to a different father, perhaps…" He glanced meaningfully at Jimmy, who pulled his jacket tighter.

"Let me change you, Mmy. Let me give you what all your genes and your circumstances took from you. You can be loved by everyone, not just one man, not just one friend. Those girls who snubbed you? Done. Teachers who failed you? Done. Strangers, acquaintances, relatives, lovers—"

Edgar was pushing closer now, hands and knees, and Jimmy dropped back onto his elbows trying put more space between them. Behind the flash of those glasses, Edgar's eyes were as black and terrible as the lightless depths of the ocean, dangerous with an unbearable pressure. It was the darkness of chemical vents, volcanic, teeming with life that had never seen the sun.

"Show them all," Edgar said, "what a magnificent tyrant you could be. Step on them as they crawl at your feet. Clean your boots on their cheeks. Drown them in their own love, push them from the dock until they go under, love them and discard them and want for nothing."

He was close now, so close, as close as the delicate chalk barrier would let him come. Jimmy swallowed dry air, looking over his bent knees at the face of a terrible inhuman thing and wanting nothing more than to reach across the barrier and touch him, lift his glasses, to worship—to be served—

"I will teach you," Edgar murmured, "I will change you. Oh, the things I could make you. You only have to say yes, Jimmy, you only have to say… yes."

Jimmy paused, with his hand just at the edge of the barrier. That was his real name. Warning bells were starting up in the back of his mind, a wordless plea from his hindbrain to fucking pay attention.

He drew his hand back, slowly.

"Just Nny," he said. "I only want Nny."

Edgar paused, cocked his head to the side. He was still as terrible and hypnotic as he had been, but now Jimmy could see it as it came.

"Nny," the demon repeated, tasting the word as if it were a familiar but forgotten dish. "Ah."

In the silence then, the faint sound of rain outside grew heavier.

"You don't want to be a great and awful king?"

Jimmy shook his head. "I want Johnny. Sure, I'd like to see the world choke on my dick, but that's not gonna do it, man. Johnny's a—" he searched vainly for the right words, "—he's a fuckin' visionary. An artist. He don't care about any of that stuff. I gotta make him like me for… uh, for me."

"You'd rather have one man than the entirety of creation gift wrapped for you," Edgar said, sitting back. He sounded doubtful.

Jimmy sucked air through his teeth. "Well…" he hedged, "do you do multiple wishes?"

"No."

"Then yeah, I guess," Jimmy shrugged. "That's what I want."

Edgar considered him for a long moment, his eyes alien and unblinking, and then broke out into a warm smile. It was indulgent, soft, even fond. "Well if that's what you want," he said, "then that is what I will give you."

Jimmy glanced around the room. "Really?"

"On my word," Edgar said, pleasantly. "I will not change either of you. You will show Johnny exactly how much alike the two of you are, no magic, no lies."

Jimmy brightened. "Awesome. You want me to sign something?"

Edgar waved him off. "For you?" he said, with an intimacy that made Jimmy's heart race. "No, I wouldn't dream of it. We'll do things the old fashioned way, as friends do. Open up the circle."

It wouldn't be hard to do. Jimmy looked down at the floor. All you've got to do is smudge the chalk. But demons go in circles for a reason, and summoners go in a different circle for an even better reason. Jimmy may not have understood most of the philosophical stuff he'd read for this exercise, but he'd gotten that much.

"How do I know you won't just eat me or something if I pop this thing open?"

For a flicker of a second, Edgar looked as though Jimmy were a delicacy of rare and delicious nature, and he would like nothing better than to swallow him whole. What he said, though, was, "I've given my word."

Jimmy hesitated, tapping the floor uneasily, but finally gave in. What was he here for if not to take some risks? He slid two fingers over the concentric rings of chalk, feeling a faint sizzle like electricity run up his arm. Edgar's eyes flashed. He came forward over the edge of the fallen boundary with such suddenness that Jimmy toppled onto his back.

He looked up at the man looming over him, as mild and pleasant as he ever was-too mild, too pleasant for the circumstances. Jimmy felt his breath catch.

"So, uh, how do you want to…"

"With a kiss," Edgar said. His hands were at either of Jimmy's shoulders.

"Oh." Jimmy swallowed. "What do you get out of this? Like, bargain-wise?"

"A chance to repay an insult," Edgar replied, cryptically. "Your soul. A kiss."

He leaned down. The angle was more like an animal going for the jugular than a man for a kiss, and Jimmy could feel prey instincts trying to shake him, but he wasn't prey. He wasn't gonna be prey. He was a predator. He was going to be something killer.

Edgar's lips were soft, barely there, a rip tide dragging Jimmy up from the floor and into a kiss as consuming as anything he had ever experienced. He gasped into the void of Edgar's mouth.

Edgar pulled back, looking down in a shadow of his own making. "I think you have potential," he said. "And I love a project."

-x-

Edgar showed him how to kill.

The two of them were walking down a midtown road late in the evening, observing the bustle of cafes and bars through their yellow windows. Jimmy had snagged a bag of kettle corn from a street vendor as they wandered past, expertly tucking it into his oversized jacket while the vendor was preoccupied with his till.

"Why does Johnny kill people?" Edgar asked him, with the air of a teacher laying down a pop quiz.

"Uh," Jimmy said, "cause he's a fuckin' badass?"

Edgar gave him an exasperated look. "Okaaaaay," he said, "but how does he pick them?"

Jimmy gave this some thought, as he shoved handfuls of stolen popcorn into his face. "I 'unno," he said, "I've only been close enough to hear him talk once, and he didn't kill that chick."

A restaurant down the road was switching off its lights, room by room. There was still plenty of foot traffic in this part of town, but soon it would slack off as the buses stopped running and the bars filled up. Various pedestrians gave him nasty looks as they passed, which might have been because of the poorly painted anarchy symbol on the front of his jacket, or it might have been because he was stuffing his mouth full of food and not particularly worried about closing it between bites. Maybe both.

In all honesty, some of the appeal of Johnny C was in his absolute impenetrability, and after an agonizingly long moment of constructing that sentence, Jimmy presented it to Edgar.

"Impenetrability," Edgar repeated. He lifted one scorchingly pointed eyebrow.

"Fuck off," Jimmy mumbled. "I mean the, like, aura of mystery. The not-knowing itself."

"Oh I know what you meant," Edgar replied. "So then, why don't we penetrate Johnny C, together?"

Jimmy stopped walking, squinting at his companion, but Edgar just kept meandering on as if he hadn't said a thing. After a moment of uncertainty, Jimmy jogged to catch up.

"What do you hate most in the world?" Edgar asked.

He'd said what, not who. Jimmy was getting wary about throwing words around in Edgar's company—they seemed to have a lot more nuance and impact than they did around other people. Jimmy wasn't thinking about it in those terms, exactly, to be fair. Mostly he was thinking that he didn't want to look like an illiterate jackass in front of even a kind of unimpressive demon, especially one who could probably eat him whole if he said the wrong thing and who might have also been his first kiss. If that sort of soul consuming monstrous appetizer could be called a kiss.

"Jail," Jimmy said, at last, thinking of the night he'd spent in holding last week.

"That's a temporary hatred. A hatred of inconvenience. I mean, at the bottom of your crispy little soul, what do you loathe?"

Jimmy watched the street up ahead, where a girl was jogging along with her yappy little dog leashed in front of her. He felt his lip curl as she passed, reached out with one boot and kicked the dog's nearest foot out from under it. "Girls," he said.

"And why girls?"

Jimmy shrugged, tucking his chin into his collar under the weight of a tangled negativity with no clear beginning or end. Their stupid little shoes, their stupid little faces, their impossible dead eyes and their hollow eerie laughs. Girls of every shape and color, the very idea of a girl, the alien hive mind of them all—soft bodies as desirable as they were fragile. The very idea of that softness, of that fragility, made him grit his teeth.

Destroy the softness of the world, his whole body seemed to be whispering. What is crushable deserves to be crushed.

"Dunno," he said. "They just piss me off."

"What about men?"

Jimmy shook his head. "Men aren't, like, a single group."

"No?"

Jimmy looked at him, nonplussed. He hated loads of individual people who were, in fact, men—he could flip open the Kill Book and find them on any given page—but you couldn't just say "all men" like they were a unit. That would be weird.

Edgar snagged a handful of popcorn and tossed them all into his mouth. Jimmy caught a flash of a second set of teeth, wicked and inhuman, behind the first. "Never mind," Edgar said, "we'll work with what we have."

Hatred, Edgar told him, is a seductive force. It has a gravity of its own, increasing with each new acquisition. He described hatred as a force as powerful as any chemistry, human beings as solar masses of it orbiting their own cosmic systems of black holes, as dense and inexorable and consuming as the center of any galaxy. It was a force that, properly harnessed, had devastating power potential.

"Johnny," Edgar said, "hates nearly everything. People, animals, objects, they're all the same to him."

"He won't hate me," Jimmy said, sensing the direction of this conversation. "He can't. We're too much alike."

Edgar's hand snapped out and caught him by the throat, jerking him round so that they were almost nose to nose, loosening Jimmy's grip on the popcorn so badly that the whole bag flew out of his hands and scattered on the concrete. Edgar's glasses flashed, reflecting Jimmy's stunned expression.

"Do you hate yourself, Mmy?" Edgar murmured, his nose almost touching Jimmy's.

"N…ooo?" Jimmy answered. He was not certain. He did not particularly want to be certain.

Edgar stood there for a moment, unmoving, and then he smiled. It was a pleasant smile. He let go of his hold and cupped Jimmy's jaw, just briefly, before stepping back and resuming his pace. He snapped his fingers, and the bag of popcorn reversed its trajectory back into Jimmy's hands, as if it had never fallen.

"You and Johnny are pretty alike," Edgar agreed. "But if you really want to show him how much the same you are, you'll need to step up your game."

There were a couple different things that could mean. A hunger swept through Jimmy, almost as strong as the rattle of fear going through him. Edgar either didn't notice or didn't particularly care.

"So, uh," Jimmy started, trying to catch up again, "you know a lot about this stuff for a… attraction type of guy… thing."

"Equal and opposites," Edgar replied. "Demons, as a general rule, are interested in power. Hatred is an attractive power…" he glanced over at Jimmy, whose blank face must have given away his complete lack of comprehension. "Look," he went on, "you know how when someone you hate walks into the same room as you, you just have to keep checking on them? And you want to talk about them all the time, like you can't get enough of how awful they are? It's an attractive force, it draws things together."

Jimmy tried to think of his own emotions as a kind of power. Like electricity? He couldn't help but think he'd probably run a whole city block by himself.

"Hatred is violence," Edgar said, "hating is an act of violence. So, we're going to tap into your potential energy here and make something out of you."

Edgar was behind him, suddenly, with one finger pressed under his chin, directing his attention to a pedestrian at the end of the road. His other hand settled over Jimmy's, guiding it to the outline of the knife Jimmy had started carrying everywhere, after he had been mugged one too many times. Jimmy sucked in a breath, almost too distracted by what was going on behind him to register what he was being directed at.

"Now," Edgar said, "it's not easy to kill a human being the old fashioned way, so here's how you're going to do this."

-x-

It was not easy.

Edgar sat down next to him, back against the tree Jimmy had thrown up beside, as unperturbed by the retching as he had been by the violence. Jimmy himself was soaked with blood, but Edgar was as clean as a patch of lamplight on the grass.

"The first one is always the hardest," he said, politely sympathetic. "Next time you'll know to go for the major arteries first."

Jimmy wiped his numb mouth with one hand, staring vaguely into the middle distance. He hadn't expected there to be so much… so much everything. It looked so elegant and simple when Nny did it. There wasn't any of this wailing and thrashing and fighting. Jimmy had almost gotten pinned for real—the killing blow had been a panicked one, more self defense than anything else.

"I'm shit," he heard himself saying, dimly, "I can't do… anything right."

Edgar put one hand on the back of his head. "C'mere," he said.

Jimmy obliged, shuffling on his knees until he was sitting between Edgar's legs. He felt disgusting. He'd botched the whole thing, he'd gone soft under pressure, and to top it all off he'd just thrown up in public. God, what had made him think he could do this? What had made him think he could do anything?

"Kid," the demon said, pressing his palms to Jimmy's face with a gentleness that made him want to cry, "there is something horrible inside you, something foul and pestilent."

His voice was sweet, and Jimmy pressed palms to his knees in a desperate search for reassurance.

"Trust me," Edgar said, "I'll make something out of you."

-x-

Edgar showed him how not to get caught.

"You can pour the rest of the bleach in," Edgar said, flipping a page in his novel. It was a dime store, star crossed lovers type thing, with pages that were already going yellow at the edges. He had claimed that he enjoyed the human interest, whatever that meant.

Jimmy poured the rest of the bottle into the tub and adjusted his face mask.

"I think I liked the gasoline drum method better," he said, with an expression of distaste Edgar wouldn't have been able to see even if he looked up from that shitty book.

"You won't always be able to do that," Edgar replied. "The materials and the location may not allow for it. I'll teach you the piecemeal method next, that one is versatile."

He didn't look up from the book then either. That damn book, not even a good book, should not have been more engrossing than Jimmy. He silently willed the thing to spontaneously combust, squinting at it until he felt a headache coming on. Nothing. Fuck Sara and Esteban, Lovers and Doomed Rivals.

"Johnny never has to worry about the bodies," Jimmy groused, reaching for the brown bottle.

"Not everyone is so…" Edgar pursed his lips, disapprovingly, "privileged."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means you have your guardian, and he has his. Unfortunately, we're not in the same weight class."

Jimmy shook up the bottle and tossed it in, plastic and everything. "How do you know?"

Edgar didn't look up, but for a moment his eyes stilled over the page. He made a face. "You wanna know how I got these scars?"

Jimmy blinked at him, uncertain whether that was a real question or not.

"Never mind," Edgar sighed, returning to the paragraph, "too early for that one."

Jimmy stepped back from the tub. Their work here was pretty much done, and soon he'd be shuffling home again, back to square one for another night of mediocrity. Another night of pacing himself. Another night of regular old pacing.

"When do I get to meet Johnny?" he demanded. "I've killed like four people. It's been weeks."

Edgar did look up then, an inscrutable look on his long face. Behind the flash of his glasses, Jimmy caught a glimpse of the same terrible eyes he had seen before, the hungry incalculable depths. It was enough to make a man shiver.

"All good things," Edgar said, "in time."

-x-

Edgar showed him how not to get caught.

Edgar showed him how to kill.

Edgar doesn't show him the rest of it, but he doesn't need to.

When Edgar judges his work done- it is a Saturday, and Jimmy has absentmindedly kicked the corpse of a woman, trying to get a scrap of flesh off his shoe- Edgar leaves him, glasses flashing, a strange smile gone like so much rain. He leaves no forwarding address. Jimmy stares at the empty sidewalk for entirely too long, until the lights along the street start to come on.

He has to work the rest of it out for himself, the location and the script and the timing too, and through all of this he finds himself more and more desperate, as each silent evening passes into each solitary day. He dreams about the ocean, like nightmares but also kind of like wet dreams, in a way.

This is his ticket out, his ticket up—he only has to cross this one last hurdle. The world is so much more silent than he remembers it being. Anything has to be better than this.

-x-

It doesn't end well.

Jimmy dies like a body hitting the surface of a river from the top of a towering bridge, crashes through to the afterlife in the same way. He's falling, he was falling, and he's never left he ground.

Spit fills his mouth, and he realizes dimly that it's open, ratcheted as wide as it will go. His jaw makes a straining clicking noise. He doesn't understand. This is a street—it is a street, isn't it?—and he was in a basement, there's a sky or something like it, he thinks he can feel the sun on his lungs—

He's still heaving with his chest vivisected open, hands clawing at the sharp points of his own shattered ribs, when the shadow settles over him. There is a flash of spectacles.

"Potential," Edgar says, like an afterthought. He looks the same as he crouches over Jimmy with deliberate grace, as mild and pleasant as he ever was, and infinitely more terrible. His eyes are death, his mouth is the grave. He reaches through crushed the rib cage and wraps a hand around the pulped mess that used to be a heart. It still pounds.

Jimmy doesn't understand. He doesn't understand anything, where he is or what's been done to him, how could things go so wrong- why his heart is beating even now, in Edgar's hand-

Edgar presses a kiss into Jimmy's gasping mouth.

"All good things," he murmurs.

It's Jimmy's second kiss.