Shin Megami Tensei: Lucifer's Call to Atlus. This is for Jurhael.
A/N - Just imagine; all those possible timelines, and they end up going nowhere.
The Demonic Chorus
When the demi-fiend woke, he found himself in a crimson dream haunted by sleek shadows and silence.
The last thing he remembered was the end of the world.
"Can you understand what it's like to wake up and see so many children struggling in the black, stinking mud, and then to realize that they are the mud? If we wept, our faces would be scored by pits and grooves, as if by the strokes of a knife. So, no matter what happens, we never weep." Something bright and swift as anger flared in Futomimi's eyes, but he made no accusations. He stood there, regarding the demi-fiend narrowly until the terrible glitter subsided and left his gaze somber and hollow, an empty temple built from that awed and awful stillness living inside him. "Do you understand? You can look into these faces and find pain, fear, perhaps hatred, at least a little joy; but never any tears. All the grief is gone from us - we only know how to covet and suffer." He sighed; even that slow, tiny sound made the demi-fiend's skin prickle. "Seeing that in people so gentle and delicate is enough to change any creature, so long as it has even the scrap of a soul."
"Change," the demi-fiend murmured sibilantly, and touched Makami's bone-mask, thinking of feral, slender Inugami.
"Yes, like that," Futomimi said, somehow sympathetic, "and in other ways as well. Ways that will never show on the skin. Change is a fluid form of power, and we need that right now. Prophecies crumble into dust when the future arrives, and it is always arriving. We need something to hold us here, in this time and place. Present tense. Constant change means confusion, a state of flux; only we know where the center is." As if remembering something unexpected, he stopped short and his lips tilted into the suggestion of a smile. "Even you couldn't find us until we found you."
"You would have died in Kabukicho, if I hadn't come."
"Perhaps we knew you would be there. Perhaps I saw it and decided that our capture would be worthwhile, if it meant that you might rescue us."
The demi-fiend was alive with brilliant lines of light. He stepped back, banking himself in shadow, clearly measuring his reply. "Demons compete; I set you free to spite Mizuchi, not because I cared."
"We knew that, too," Futomimi answered. "But everything changes eventually."
Somehow he always found himself staring up at the sky.
It was a softer sight than the jagged edges of toppled buildings, and one far less foreign than the demons infesting every shadow and cavern, but there was still something strange about it, something that was heard and not seen, like a whisper crawling from the mouth of an empty hallway.
"Wings," the demi-fiend said, slanting his gaze upward.
The sinuous white fox named Inugami curled up beside him and bared its teeth in anticipation. "And razorbeaks and talons. Dreadful birds, on high."
"I don't see anything."
"Of course you don't," it said, and squinted into Kagatsuchi's light. "But they see us." The smile it offered was vicious and hungry. "You're our ward against scavengers, did you know? They won't dare come down on the demi-fiend, not with all the poisoned claws in the world. You must be fearsome."
And it glanced at the demi-fiend, scarlet eyes slitted and curious, and he nodded once without thinking because, yes, he was rather fearsome after all, trapped in a body burning with demonic light and the desire to snap delicate things in half. This was the nightmare that had carried over to the waking world, and he was the monster sleeping inside it.
"Don't be afraid of yourself," Futomimi whispered fiercely, clasping his hands. "That power isn't you; it's yours. It can create rather than destroy; it can restore life and purpose to ruin. I've seen it, I know that it's true."
Warm weight was a strange comfort, distantly familiar in the way of a forgotten childhood friend. The demi-fiend accepted the touch without comment. "I'm not afraid. What were you in your old life? What did you do?"
"I don't remember," Futomimi said benignly.
"You can see the future, so - "
"The past is different. It's done. It's ... wary of creatures like me."
"You seem," the demi-fiend said, drawing carefully away from him, "as if you want to save us. All of us. Everyone. From fates that only you can see, and I wonder if you say these things because you tried your own hand at destruction once. Is this some kind of - " He needed to pause, to search for the word; it hadn't been long, but the meaning was beginning to slip from him slowly - "redemption?"
The wind lunged into Asakusa, ghosting through deserted streets. No one was moving or breathing; no one nearby. Futomimi was very still, very calm, watching tattered banners flutter feebly in dark windows.
"You might think that this must be easy, possibly even enthralling, and you'd be wrong. There's so much here, all at once, that can't remember what it is I remember and what I anticipate, and - I see you walking through yourself. Toward me. You aren't stopping." He went rigid, eyes wide and bright with fear and that all-seeing absence of awareness. "Where do you thinking you're going? It ends there. With you, and me, here like this but closer." He took a step forward as if facing down death itself. "Is this what I saw? I don't think so. You were - approaching. Advancing. As in war. Conflict. But you wouldn't, would you? We are allies. You wouldn't."
And his voice was so thin as he spoke that last word, so clipped and smoky, nearly weightless, floating above the dusty streets like a half-hearted curse, casting pale shadows where there had been only light. Agitated, the demi-fiend stared and shook himself, tasting the changes in the air, thinking Who-is-here-now? because this could not be Futomimi, not quite, not anymore.
"I," he said, placating but telling only the truth, "never supposed that it was easy."
"It isn't. But then nothing is anymore. I knew you'd understand."
All of the old places were gone; the buildings and monuments, the winding roadways like concrete snakes bisecting civilization, the cities themselves and even the trees. The demi-fiend wandered dead stone panels of what had once been the countryside with a procession of horrid, beautiful creatures that came to his hand one after another, loyal as dogs. Some looked nearly human; others were monstrous. They seemed to fear him, and to know where he had come from, so he let them stay, reprimanding them only when they crept close and tried to touch his palms.
The scent of their bodies unnerved him and he feared that he might begin to taste their cold skin through his fingertips.
Kabukicho was a black mass of pathways and pipes stitched with the signs of disease.
That was where the demi-fiend first met Futomimi and, though he was only one among many Manikins, he stood out even then like a universal cure.
"I think you may have been right, and I did something terrible. Or else I'm about to do it and no one can stop me. I don't know; there might not be a difference."
The demi-fiend waited quietly, his eyes reflecting internal fire. He recognized that cool, level tone, knew that it was never used in supplication.
"But," Futomimi added softly, "that is not why I say the things that I say. This is not a bid for redemption." He turned and even Kagatsuchi's harsh light seemed soft and liquid on his elegant features. He smiled; the suggestion of shadow fled from all the world around him. "You still have a beautiful human heart. I hope you believe in it someday."
The demi-fiend bathed in the cavernous darkness of Mifunashiro, listening to the murmur of clear water tunneling through ancient stone. In time, a cool glow began to haunt the highest reaches of the great, vaulted chamber where the Manikins had held their peaceful councils and tried to rally themselves to form a single, cohesive unit. A family.
The demi-fiend didn't need light to see, but he saw again anyway.
Futomimi was lying across his legs. He was much lighter than he looked. Wiping blood from the corner of the Manikin's mouth, the demi-fiend imagined what he might say if he could see what had happened to his holy land.
"It's all right. To tell you the truth, I always knew this was inescapable."
He might have. He must have.
"Perhaps this is it, my great crime. I've killed them all, the poor things; or I'm about to, in this moment: they're yours to protect now."
Handed over to a demon, because there was no one else left. It was a shame.
"No; demons don't mourn."
The demi-fiend was not mourning - he could not remember how it was done - but he did sit in the gloom with all of his cruel, resplendent creatures gathered around him, looking on and wondering why some things had to die before they'd even had the chance to live.
Days later, he rose, and his watchful procession rose with him, and as they all left the sacred shadows behind, he felt the future whispering along at his side, chuckling to itself because it knew that everything would find a proper place in the end.
There were only a few Manikins waiting on the path back to the surface, but they were comforted by the demonic music of his steps, and they seemed to know where he had come from. So he let them follow.
"I suppose someone should be able to call you home again," the demi-fiend said to the acres of hot, golden stone yawning wide over the bones of old Tokyo; and the wind sighed as if in relief, and he looked out across the bright shell of a sleeping world, wondering what to make of it.