"The devil doesn't come dressed in a red cape and pointy horns. He comes as everything you've ever wished for."
Yamaguchi's devil came early, with glasses and blond hair decorating the sneer on his lips and a single cruel word. No one would ever convince him Tsukki wasn't a miracle hiding under a devil's guise.
The Tsukishima family are all devils, if you bother to look close enough. But well, doesn't every downtrodden child deserve their own personal devil? It's not like they're the only family of devils around.
Tsukki would always find him when he wanted to hide from the world. Those were the only times Tsukki would go out of his way to reassure Yamaguchi, pressing their foreheads together as he slipped headphones full of noise over Yamaguchi's ears and stayed with him until sleep came. He'd always wake up in Tsukki's bed, warm in his arms and pleasantly groggy from who knows what.
When Tsukki needs him, those moments were more than enough to make him scream at Tsukki about not needing anything more than Pride.
Hinata took devil befriending to a whole new level- Kageyama, Kenma, Nishinoya, Aone, Oikawa, and on some level even Tsukki also grudgingly respected Hinata. There was something about the human ball of sunshine that attracted devils like no one else he'd ever seen.
And then he met Natsu.
Natsu looked astoundingly like Hinata, but she spoke with the same venom a devil was born spitting. Their mother laughed, saying Shouyou had been the same before he'd found volleyball. It seemed you didn't have to come from a purely demonic lineage to be one after all. He still had no idea who their father was, but their mother seemed to be waiting for him to come back.
Hinata though... He was nothing like a devil. Hell, he had a verbal contract with Kageyama (To the Top!) and while he could be scary as hell during a match, he never appeared as anything but human outside those moments.
Still, in those few seconds, he looked just like Wrath.
The idea of Kenma as a demon was odd, especially when you looked at the contrast between him and Kuroo. It wasn't until Hinata told him that he'd had any idea Kuroo was a hundred percent human and Kenma was the one from a very old devil family that had lived in Tokyo even before the Edo period.
Befriending Hinata turned out to be some sort of exclusive way into knowing all about Kenma Kozume. He loved the PSP system over all others, he had been friends with Kuroo since before he could remember, he had very bland feelings towards volleyball, he'd been bullied and possibly still was despite his status, he'd bleached his hair because he thought it would make him stand out less, be sneezed when people talked about him, and there were several colleges who had already asked him to study there so he would join their devil-clubs or whatever they called it.
It didn't surprise him when one day training camp Kenma approached him and muttered something about "Shouyou said you liked Monster Hunter" and proceeded to drag him off to play it.
Kenma had a surprising dedication to being Sloth like.
It only took one look at Nishinoya for Yamaguchi to tell he was a devil. One might have viewed him as an imp, mischievious but phenomenally good at his job.
It wasn't hard to figure out that he had mountains full of Greed though. It's what kept him sharp- he never thought himself the best. He always found some Libero better at even the tiniest thing and obsessed over practicing it over and over, not satisfied until whatever skill they had was his.
Sometimes he looked at Oikawa and thought "lust" but in the end, he knew he didn't know Oikawa well enough to tell.
Iwaizumi had called him Envy in undertones sometimes, when Oikawa looked at Kageyama too long.
He supposed he could see that too.
Kiyoko had no intentions of being so, but Yamaguchi looked at her out of the corners of his eyes and thought 'Lust' every time.
To him, Lust wasn't a state one demon could perpetually be it- no, it was those that surrounded Kiyoko that made him think such thoughts. A demon of Lust would make more sense if they had others around them commit the sin first.
She didn't want it though, and he would never shame her for that.
Gluttony as a sin wasn't too different from greed to him.
But there was looking at wealth and earning it, and then there was looking at a desire and taking it no matter the consequences...
Ushijima was a Glutton for so many things, but in the end they all led to winning for himself and only himself. He wanted the best (and could never acknowledge a school 'beneath his standard' might hold many of them) and so the best he would take. Nutrition, equipment, players, it was all to be consumed until there was nothing he wanted left and never look back.
But there were somethings this demon couldn't take.
Yamaguchi wouldn't let him take Karasuno's chance at facing Nekoma in the finals away.
The weight of the ball in his hands steadied his breaths.
One last breath in (too short, too short) and he stepped forward, ball gliding up off the pads of his fingers and then-
Your demons fight in your mind for your actions every day. Who will win today will be the one you feed as you wake up, preparing to face the world.
