A/N: I do not own or profit from any of what Kazue Kato has created.


He had known for some time that Mephisto wore a mask before the human world. He had seen that mask slip. He knew what lay beneath it. And yet, as Samael rose where Mephisto had fallen, Shiro couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. Like a deer frozen before the headlights of a speeding car, he watched the demon get to his feet, the teeth in his grin stark white against the black miasma, his eyes furnaces between madness and rapture.

"Some exorcist you are, Shiro-kun", the familiar voice said, in the familiar cadence that didn't belong to that person. "Killing humans to save a demon."

"Well…" Shiro felt something tug his lips that could have been a smile, but was more likely to be an unnerved grimace. "Not just any demon…"

A weak chortle escaped Samael's blackened lips. That's right... He was still sealed…

"Indeed, I wonder how they found out… but no matter…" he rasped. "My name and title were never meant for human ears. In chess there is always sacrifices", he said with a smile Shiro had seen only once before: when he had captured the demon that possessed Yasuda.

He was going to…?

"I should never have spiked his tea…" Shiro's brain worked in ultra rapid on the entirely wrong track as the demon approached, katana gleaming in the shifting light. Well, of course: he was a liability, he knew things humans were never intended to know, but-

"Not gonna happen", he said coldly, drawing his own sword and placing the tip over the outer line of the binding seal: the only thing between the demon's fully awakened heart and his battered body. "Unless you wanna go poof in a more literal way, I suggest you back down."

"Go ahead: send me back to Gehenna", he sneered, not even slowing his pace. "I'll find a new host."

"I don't think you want to." If he survived this, he would consider a career in acting. "I happen to know that's not just any host you're wearing. You were quite fond of your old friend, weren't you? Fond enough to bind yourself to him for twenty-four years, and hold on to his body and his mother tongue four centuries after your contract expired. You'd hate to lose a memento like that." Blame it on nervousness, adrenaline, or crazy conviction that he was going to pull it off: Shiro smiled. "Wouldn't you, Johann Faust?"

Whatever Samael had expected to hear, that wasn't it. Grimoires and history books had been carefully wiped clean of a demon presumably named Mephistopheles, save for a mention of a certain old folk tale. And when Shiro had hunted down a copy of Historia von Dr. Johann Faustus, things had fallen in place.

He didn't know what he was doing, really. He only knew what he was going to do: sometimes, that's all you need. That, and a bloody good poker face to cover for your frantic heartbeat.

"How about striking a deal with me, your highness?" he continued, taking advantage of Samael's surprise. "I give you my silence: I will keep your secrets. For eternity. In return… In return, I ask you to give me your trust. For the same period of time."

Samael stared at him, at loss for words. Then his lips quirked, and he burst out laughing.

"He's… still the same…"

Samael laughed with his whole body, committing the heinous crime of resting the tip of the katana on the floor for support. He laughed like a madman, clutching his bony chest; laughed until bright tears marred the black smudges on his face.

"Ehehehahahaaa you have guts, Fujimoto Shiro! Truly…!" He was close enough to cut Shiro down where he stood, but made no move to do so. The green eyes scrutinised his face, reflecting the dancing light. "A deal thin as air, and solid as bedrock… kukukuku… only a reckless idiot like you would think to propose such a thing as friendship with someone like me."

Just like that first day in his office, Shiro's consciousness was hanging by a thread; suspended above his body like a balloon filled with fear and crazy hopes, floating on the absurdity of the situation.

"Yeah, well, you gotta admit: a reckless idiot is a lot more fun alive than dead."

"So true, so true~" Samael slid a clawed finger over the cut in Shiro's neck: Shiro couldn't have moved even if he wanted to. Passing the finger to his lips, the demon licked the blood off. "Deal."

"Yuck – wait, just what did you…?" He remembered Faust signing his body and soul over in blood. "Was that…?"

The cocksure grin was back in place, even if he looked like he'd been dragged through seven hells.

"Just wondering what idiot tastes like~"

"…you're a jerk." And Shiro really should learn not to speak his mind…

"Coming from the same mouth as 'King of Foppishness'?" he remarked dryly, ears pulling down. "I take it your eternal silence comes part and parcel with your eternal impudence?"

"Sort of, yeah", Shiro smiled, barely able to stand as the weight of death left him. Holy crap, he couldn't believe it… "Now what? Shouldn't your heart, er, understand that it can calm down?"

"It would…" His eyes went from the shattered, glass-like substance on the floor to the flames that hissed at their shackles. "If it had been connected to me. So much for keeping it safe, it seems", he snorted. "It all boils down to that seal they crafted: can't access my powers through it, can't create a new container, can't deactivate…" His gaze landed on the exorcists' seal: Shiro self-consciously removed his katana from it. "And if we break it, my heart will disintegrate my host body instantaneously. I could return… but not fast enough to stave off the onslaught on the Academy."

"Wasn't it kinda stupid to break the container?" The words were past his lips before he knew he'd thought them. "I mean… You told me explicitly not to, and then you go and break it yourself?"

"In chess there is always gambles and sacrifices." The white flames reflected in his distant eyes. No, not flames. Shiro didn't know what it was, but… he got the sudden, crazy idea that it was liquid light and darkness, devouring each other ceaselessly. "It is troublesome indeed, however. I need an intermediate container, somewhere to store my heart where I can access it while I create a new one…" Samael pinched the bridge of his nose, frowning in dismay. "To find a vessel strong enough took centuries the last time."

Shiro remembered Kohu-sensei's words. The Baal rarely made an appearance in Assiah; rarely found bodies that were strong enough to hold their immense powers without breaking.

"I'll be your vessel." As usual, stupid things leapt out of Shiro's mouth without asking his brain. A sign as good as any that he was fine, really. Apart from the fact that his arm and leg were beginning to hurt infernally. "I've handled possession before."

Samael glanced down at him. Isn't it odd how every centimeter such a glance travels downwards multiplies derision by ten…?

"Do you realise who I am?"

"I just found out: you're Samael, Satan's eldest son."

It was that simple, really… Same person, different name.

"You really have no sense of drama, Shiro. I am the King of Time, eldest in Gehenna's royal family, outranked only by Satan himself; a demigod by definition." Good to hear his ego hadn't suffered any damage… "You're human; a puny little bag of meat and bones with a thousand ways to die. Your body is as useless as this one for containing my heart."

"Not the best outlook, but it's not like you have a choice, is it?" Shiro gestured at the seal and the flames with his good arm. "Either you stay in Assiah, powerless, or return to Gehenna and watch the Academy and your favors with the Vatican go up in smoke. Or you borrow my body and let me help you. It's only gonna be for a short time, right? Like you said, an intermediate container while you fix up your old one. I can last that long. So what's it gonna be?"

The demon eyed him with a curious look. Not that Shiro was surprised: he sounded three-ways-crazy at the very least, but… he had a plan. Somewhere. He just didn't quite know it himself yet.

"If you wanted to die, it would have been much quicker and cleaner to let me do the honors."

It was grotesque, how easily he said it. And meant it. Meant every word of what he said.

"Don't doubt that, but I don't hear any other alternative from you", he observed, carefully forgetting how bloody much his leg and arm hurt. "Meanwhile, there's no barrier shielding the students, no keys to evacuate them to safety, no other way for you to get your powers back." Ugh, this would sound so damn cheesy… "Look, I'm not one to play hero, okay? It's shitty work, but it's work that has to be done, and I don't see anyone else around who can. There's only one way to go and you know it. So what's it gonna be, Samael? Are you gonna trust me?"

The demon glared at him. Calculated. Calculated again. He didn't look as though he liked the outcome.

"…a gamble it is, then", he concluded. "Worst one I ever made. Only one formality to take care of first…" He bit his thumb and muttered something over the blood that welled up.

"Cursing me?" Shiro wondered, eyebrows rising.

"Blessing you", he sneered wryly. "Of sorts. My name and fatal verses are not things some high school students can figure out on their own. However, I shall have to track down the mastermind behind this without your assistance, as you seem hell-bent on dying without fulfilling your end of the deal." He whipped out the lacey handkerchief and pressed against a wound that wouldn't heal over without demonic powers. "Fool's luck, the purest form of it", he snorted. "I never disband a contract; it's unbecoming someone of my position. But you – you reckless, foul-mouthed, air-headed idiot –, your soul I will not claim." He rewarded Shiro a dry, condescending glance. "Though I doubt it will find a place in heaven anyway."

Shiro could but stare at Samael. Oh, let him rattle off his derogatory tirades: no words could conceal what he was really saying. And even so, no words could fully express what it took for Gehenna's Crown Prince to release a soul.

For the first time in his life, there was no cheeky response ready to leap out before he could think. Only a crooked grin.

"I suppose smiling in the face of death confirms it: you are mad. Any last words before you commit suicide?"

Shiro circled the raging pillar of flame slowly. As funeral pyres go, that was a pretty spectacular one. The limping lachrymose of his echoing steps drowned in the rapid fluttering of a heart that didn't want to die just yet. He could die, he knew that very well. It wouldn't be a pretty death, either. Quick, if he were lucky. Why was he doing this again…? For the school? For the students? For his own stupid ego?

Or was it something as simple as helping a friend out?

Tch, wouldn't help him by dying. Yet somewhere within, vague as a whisper between waking and sleeping, Shiro knew he wouldn't die. It could be vain hope, blind faith, or common denial; he felt a deep, solid conviction that the flames of hell wouldn't devour him. Heh. Thinking really didn't go well in Shiro-kun.

"No goodbyes", he murmured, a shaky grin quirking his lips. Before he could formulate second thoughts, he gritted the sword's tip over the lines.

It wasn't black, but it wasn't white either. And it wasn't coaxing him to surrender control: it wrought it from him, crawled in under his skin, licked the insides of his lungs and tore his senses out of his body.

The pain in his arm disappeared, the fatigue disappeared: everything… disappeared… Like autumn leaves blowing off a tree, he disappeared, bit by bit… so relaxing, like going to sleep after a long, tiring day… making the world he knew seem like nothing but a dream...

"Ngah…!" Something floundered in the evaporating nothingness, something noisy and bothersome; a thought, a half-forgotten fragment of something that had been important. Once. To someone. To...? "I… I'm… Fujimoto… Shiro…" And that thing inside him was not Fujimoto Shiro.

He grasped through the thickening numbness, reached for his scattered pieces. And the more he reached out, the more he struggled to hold his self together, the more fierce became the force that was breaking him apart.

"Part of me, not… controlling me…!" He gritted his teeth, forced himself to remain awake and aware. There was no fighting this back: only holding on for dear life to what consciousness he retained and hope that he could buy enough time. "Gah, Mephisto…" His mind jerked and twisted to escape the intruder, slipping out of his grasp, striving toward that state of bliss oblivion where it could encapsulate itself in coma and drown, hide from a power it couldn't withstand. A power that would consume and kill him. "…arrogant twat…" Mephisto, Samael – whatever his name was, he was still the same stupid, annoying clown. "You're not… winning…" he snarled, tying his self together around that thought. "Not against me. We want the same thing... so would you fucking work with me you stupid old goat...?!"

The same thing, the same goal, the same... same cocky, swaggering prankster that he had so much in common with.

Floor. He felt the floor under his hands. Shiro anchored his consciousness to that point, focusing all of his being on the hard surface and the splitter that was his sole link to the world, and to a body that was fatigued and hurting and struggling. He found his lungs and breathed, breathed as controlled as he could. The darkness wasn't crushing him now: it was streaming through him, as if he had found a shunt to redirect the force, as if... it had become part of him.

Or he a part of it...?

He almost lost concentration at the change, and the darkness wasted no time exploiting his slip: it pushed, roaring through him and making his whole body tingle with an electrical buzz.

"Like hell I'd die losing to a guy who wears a pantyhose…!"

Lifting the world on his eyelids, Shiro squinted at the demon through the flickering light; and the last shreds of the illusion Mephisto Pheles were burnt away. That was Prince Samael: a demigod, a King of Gehenna crowned in flames.

"Oh my…" The creature's smile stretched languidly like a cat in the sun, basking beneath eyes that burned yellow, not green. He raised a clawed hand tipped with candle-flames of white. "I had almost forgotten… what my birthright feels like…"

"Oi, would you hurry up a little! Your birthright's tearing me to pieces!"

The yellow gaze fell on him, and Shiro felt his body and consciousness slip from him again. That was his real self…?

"Hurry…?" the creature that had been Mephisto put middle finger and thumb together. "I have all the time in the world~"

*snap*

The next thing Shiro was aware of was something being torn out of him. His mind fell back into his body in a hundred jumbled pieces; it drowned him out from his senses, and his head filled with thick, painfully throbbing cotton wad. Distantly, he felt a smooth, gloved hand cup his face, turning it gently back and forth.

"Knock it off…"

Never mind gently: Shiro didn't want to move, or be moved, ever again.

"Conscious, even? Looks like there's more to you than just a big mouth…" Samael snapped his fingers, and something that felt like paper tissue dabbed at his upper lip and chin. "How are you feeling?"

What an absolutely ridiculous question! Ngh, but it hurt too much to laugh…

"Like hell. No offence", he confessed faintly.

"Not even close to the real deal", he chuckled, lifting him from the floor.

He should've protested. He didn't want to be carried like a girl; deep down he didn't. But everything was muddling together so quickly, and he couldn't find his mouth…

With a muffled bang they were somewhere else, and Shiro felt his limp body touch down on the soft, sleek surface of Me- Samael's gaudy bedcovers.

"I have a lot of work to do, so if you'd be so kind and stay put this time?"

"Not goin' anywhere", he mumbled with the shadow of a crooked smile.

Shiro faded into slumber heavier than unconsciousness, and he was never really sure if he heard a "thank you" or not.