Belphegor was dancing.
His naked ankles spoke the endless volumes of lust in a Siren's howling, sexual song. Crash thee on my rocks, die thee in the Flame, petit mort, mort.
He had one breast and it was covered in blood, flesh white, blood red, eyes with no color and all color at once, rolled up into the back of his head as he communed with the base of desire.
You could see each strand of his hair curling as it joined in coitus with the wind.
In the window above him a woman, drunk on power and a man who was not her husband, drunk on old wine, joined together and made the beast with two backs, and Belphegor listened, and he laughed into the air.
He spun in circles by Lepaix's body.
Love was death, and death was love, and it was a tune to which Belphegor danced endless dances, always moving in circles, the never-ending completion of circles like two bodies slipping into one.
Later there would be birds eating Lepaix's flesh and that, too, would be love, which was as sinful as lust, which was as terrible as hate, as agonizing as grief, as final as death.
Belphegor had dark, dark skin, burned not by the flames of Hell but by the flames of passion, his own, others' -- it was all the same in the end.
It did not matter who, or where.
It simply mattered what.
Belphegor also had smooth skin, caressed by the last droplets of rain as if it, too, were his lover.
And the world, a pillaged city he had conquered, and the men and women, held as his captives, were his lovers, too.
A lover was a body that fit into your own, against your Scheme of Things, and knew as you did the music of your body, the flutter of your lashes, the flesh of your palm, the taste of your mouth, which led to the revelation of all your secrets.
Belphegor was all one curve, body made of a man and a woman, the first man and the first woman, twined together and smelling faintly of moss.
Some might say he was a demon not of lust but of dance, the sort of dance that poisoned angels and fed the river of demons' bitterness, or perhaps fed bitterness like poison into angels and poisoned demons' bitterness.
A demon and an angel watched him with mixed feelings: the demon in disgust, and the angel in awe.
Israfel thought he had only heard such wonderful music once before, in the halls of the palace, but perhaps that was from the motion of Belphegor's body, too, the sway of his hips and the arc of his wrist and the curve of his lips. but this was sight mixed with sound, making love to each other, a music he had never known which lured all the senses and clenched, tight but warm, in the very center of his belly.
Crowley felt a surge of resentment towards this beast that was so like himself, this beast that shared his knowledge and his supposed shame and his delicious sin and made it not something worth Falling for, the impersonality of Crowley's predicament made clear, made it unnecessary and galling; and that this foulness, so much like his own foulness, was what had caused Aziraphale's previous pain, so that it may as well have been his own clawed hand that had gutted the angel.
Belphegor tapped his feet against the ground, threw his head back, turned in endless circles of sex and sweat and ecstasy and the rain, running in slow rivulets down his cheekbones, high and fine and blackened with soot.
Israfel licked his lips, Crowley felt a knot in his stomach, and Belphegor laughed, the softest, sweetest sound you could ever hope to hear.
Come and lie thee in my arms, taste me of my flesh, die thee in the song.
It was the smell of apples that lingered, spicy and surreal, upon the humid air, a wet poignancy that Crowley looked back on as an old memory and Israfel as an old scar to which he had never felt the wound's sting.
This is the fate of all men, the brotherhood of all men, the lust which pounds through my eyes and in their veins, come and taste thee of my mouth, of my flesh, of thy drunken pity, come, and dance thy feet a while, and feel the burn on thy flesh a while, the flames for which you have longed so long when you have not yet tasted or felt of them, and you want thy arms, thy hungry arms, to have.
Belphegor was not singing but his body was, of the flesh beneath your skin, of the want beneath your bones.
Israfel grew hungry, blue eyes hazed over, wanting to have the memory of touch to his fingers and life to his existence, a dance to his music.
Crowley felt the coming of an old sadness, an old bitterness that was not anger but a lingering question of 'what if' echoing, echoing in the recesses of his name.
"Belphegor," Crowley murmured, merely for the sake of following his code of being, keeping his head down as he passed by his brother, the demon Lust, boots on the cobblestones going clack, clack, clack.
Belphegor laughed again, that tendril laugh, that climactic laugh, coital and cozy and snug up against your throat even as it escaped his own.
Somewhere in the city a man and a woman orgasmed together at the same time with two simultaneous cries becoming one, and that sound was Belphegor's laughter.
Israfel felt his breath catch in his throat, for he knew the beast's name, and to know a name was to know all you needed to, for a summoning, perhaps. When you could whisper a name you made such music, and if Israfel whispered that name, the demon would dance to it, of that he was sure.
On the air Crowley could smell it.
The stench of cold comfort, rot and wine.
It revolted him now as once, a rebellious child, he would have taken such pleasure in the way it was everything Heav'n was not.
Israfel could not smell it because he could not smell such foul things; he was unused to them; his nose was untrained to the scent; he was not yet ready for it.
"La libertie, la fraternitie, ou mort," Belphegor sang, and it echoed in the smells and it writhed in his dance and settled upon the tongues of the people, desperate for a song of justice or, in lacking such, a song of rage.
Rage, too, was passion, as was envy, as was greed, a hunger for anger or for another body or for what someone had that you did not or for all the sweetness in the world to dance in your full-yet-empty belly.
Israfel watched.
And Crowley felt the flames leap up inside of him, dancing in outrage, yet dancing in hunger, too. He could not resist his nature. He was what he had become. On the tremulous songs of the air he felt darkness mix with light and saw through the grayness to know that on these city streets there would be no victories, only brotherhood and blood, and that there would be no pure love, for love was impurity itself. You were only pure if you sought nothing. To love was to seek your lover. True love was selflessness, the most impure emotion of them all.
And Crowley ached.
It was a long time coming.
Back in Crowley's apartment Aziraphale stood naked before his full length mirror. In the half-unreal light of day just beginning to a promise of more rain, he wondered if he could fall through the glass, which would give way around his nudity, and let him pass into another world that had no Heav'n and had no Hell, only himself, complete, no need for that other half which he could not help but wonder about.
That ache was gone to him now, a foreign, distant memory.
He spread his arms out and away from his body and saw with a faint sense, buried deep, of delight in the way that his hipbone curved down into his thigh, and the soft, pale planes of his skin, and the high rise of his neck into his chin. His arms, too, were graceful and slender, and they were nothing like wings.
Like all such pregnant things, it was a long time coming. At least, a long time planned for. At least, a long time in the making.
Crowley pushed the door open to his bedroom and saw the angel of the Golden Gates all golden befor ehim, a body that belonged to the soul which he knew, which he had curled over the night before to protect, to keep from all pain, and in the blurred air, confused, or perhaps simply uncaring of one side or the other, he knew most things he scoffed at were unimportant, but this was not.
He dropped the bottle of wine to the floor and it did not break, rolled over onto its side, the blood red liquid inside the curve of its belly glinting like rubies in the weak light of his bedroom lamp.
Outside the cry was taken up -- fraternitie. It was easier on your back if you had a brother beside you, who knew you, and who knew the great delicacy of your pain, trembling like a dove trapped between your palms.