A/N: Special thanks go to
ChaosVincent for helping out with this! ^_^
TwistedDiscord, for giving Samael a nickname that irrevocably stuck the idea in my head.
YFanGirl1613, for recommending this fic on tv-tropes and making me feel like I've been granted a place on Mount Olympus.
I do not own or profit in any way from what Kazue Kato has created.
Shiro tried to get his thoughts in order as he walked up to the office, but it's hard to be prepared when you have no idea what to expect. Would it be Mephisto sitting in that high-backed chair, or would it be Prince Samael? As embarrassing as it was, Shiro felt his feet slow as he approached the white double doors. He had hesitated before those doors once before, when he hadn't known what he would find behind them. All over again, he didn't know. So much had changed, and yet he hoped… if only one thing could stay the same in this mess… if only just one thing, he hoped it would be Mephisto.
Shiro drew a breath, smacked himself mentally, and turned the han-
"G-huah…!"
It hit him in the gut with enough force to knock him flat on his back in the corridor: the panda wastebasket itself pivoted a landing on the floor, looking extremely pleased with itself. Shiro stared at it, unable to find words or air.
"Did you see the height of that jump?" An enthusiastic voice drifted out from the office. "It was the best so far!"
"No: did you see where my kidney landed?" he snarled back, crawling up on his feet with wheezing breath and intestines in disarray. "Stupid, childish, ridiculous…!"
"Tsk tsk, and you study for Doctor?" the lilting voice chided. "The kidneys are-"
"In the back: I know. And I swear your stupid wastebasket dented my spine." He staggered into the office doubled-over. The panda bounced ahead of him, chirping and squeaking at its master behind the heavy wooden desk. It was rewarded with a crumpled caramel wrapping from a near-empty bowl. "Oh, great: you're teaching it to attack people."
"I'm making use of its unknown potential. Good afternoon, Shiro~ Show him again, will you?"
The wastebasket bounded off to the edge of the carpet and charged like a triple jumper. It leapt into a swan dive, tilting its body horizontal in the air. It would land on its head… but just before it made contact with the floor, the lid flipped open and catapulted the familiar into a second arch, aimed straight for-
Shiro caught it before it could rupture his spleen. The little demon squeaked proudly in his hands.
"I'm thinking of teaching it twists next", Mephisto announced with a face of pure, childish joy. Yep, that was Mephisto. Beyond all doubt, Mephisto.
"You're the same as ever." A smile – a real smile – ghosted his lips. It felt… strange? Unaccustomed? …good? Regardless, he made sure to catch hold of it before it slipped. "So what should I call you these days? Your real name wouldn't go down well." He put the panda down on its side, disabling more attacks, and grabbed a chair. "But if I shorten it, it might." Shiro deposited the chair in front of the desk, and his sore body in it: the smile held. "I think you look like a Sammy."
Mephisto's eyelids sank like slow guillotine blades.
"Use that repulsive moniker ever again and I will have your exorcist ID read 'Shiro-pon' when you graduate."
"Right: Mephisto it is."
Normal. People might have different attitudes towards normal; contempt, idealisation, fear, longing… It all depends on what is normal to the individual, but most individuals react the same to their normal-of-choice: they relax. They feel at ease, feel comfortable, feel… good. As the word-fencing and the displeased squeals of the panda drowned out the past days' arguments, Shiro relaxed into the feeling of this very peculiar situation that was his normal.
"Trivial matters out of the way, what brings you to my office?"
"I was wondering if you've still got my pendant somewhere, after last time? I need it back."
The demon's smile curled like the tail of a cat that has spotted prey.
"Is that really the question you should be asking~?"
Oh yes, everything was normal: and Mephisto was playing games where Shiro could only fumble his way ahead blindly. He looked at the demon, trying to read… Was there something he had missed? Something he should have thought of? Something…
"…you could have sent your bat with it, as you did before", he said, testing the proverbial ice with careful steps. "But you didn't." His brow furrowed as Mephisto's smile grew more… satisfied? "You wanted me to come for it. Why?"
"That's the question: bravo~ And you are about to provide the answer to it. Eins, zwei, drei!"
"…the Ceremonial Hall?" Shiro glanced around the familiar training ground. There was nothing out of the ordinary with it: the high arcs of the stone ceiling were the same, the ghostly lantern lights hovering on the water surface were the same, and this all made Shiro more suspicious of what Mephisto was up to.
"It shall house a most unusual ceremony indeed." The principal removed his top hat and pulled a sheathed katana out of it. "I want you to fight to kill", he said, tossing the weapon to Shiro. "Summon every ounce of strength and dexterity in you and try to cut me down."
He was still Mephisto, alright. Doing weird crap without any explanation. Shiro had to admit, he couldn't even guess what this was about. What did sparring have to do with his pendant? Or was it just his next weird game…?
"Interesting~" Mephisto poofed both swords away after a while of intense sparring that didn't amount to anything.
"What is?" Shiro asked, wiping the back of his hand across his dripping forehead. Hadn't they sparred a hundred times before…?
"Patience, Shiro~" he smiled, a strange spark flickering in his eyes. "Eins, zwei, drei!"
This time, they were…
"Are we… in Tokyo?"
"Tokyo it is, but we aren't here." Mephisto took in the surroundings with the airs of a proud gardener. "Only our minds are. So, tell me: what do you see?"
Besides the milling people and the multi-story houses and the neon advertisem-?
"What the…?"
You would always see coal tars in cities, and the occasional goblin making passers-by trip or snatching newspapers out of peoples' hands. But this…
"There are… demons. Everywhere." He stared with big eyes at the multitude of shapeless shadows hovering among the humans. They buzzed like millions of wasps wrapped in cotton, in the streets and in shop windows and phasing through walls. "But they aren't doing anything. They just…"
"Wait", Mephisto provided softly. "Wait for a chance to slip into an unsuspecting host: these are spirits that have not yet fully transitioned from Gehenna to Assiah. What can you tell me about them?"
"What? I don't… or… I think that, that one", he pointed to a churning cloud of black in the middle of a road crossing, "is a fire type. And that one…" His brow furrowed, though he wasn't sure what he was looking for, or listening for, or what senses you had access to when you were just a disembodied presence. "A rot demon…?"
"Interesting indeed~ Tell me, Shiro: have you noticed anything different since the events in Deep Keep?"
"Besides screwing up with people more than usual? No, not really", he said dryly.
"Hasty hasty: think again", he sang: and dissolved when a hurried man in suit walked through him. "Think in terms of demons."
Mephisto was still there when the man had passed, still with that odd spark in his eyes: and Shiro remembered where he had seen it. That was the gleam from the first day they had met, when Shiro had boldly laid down his demands for their contract. And if he were to chance a guess at what that meant, he would say it was literally the spark of interest.
"They've been after me a lot", Shiro replied in level tones: he knew the demon well enough to know that when he found something about you interesting, you'd better be on guard. "That's why I came to get my charm back."
"How would you describe Futotsuki Sen, your classmate?" Mephisto managed to say it as if they had been talking about Shiro's impression of Sen all along and the subject was nothing strange at all. He began strolling leisurely down the sidewalk, through the busy people as if he were smoke.
"What…?" When you don't understand a thing, just play along. Shiro followed, reflexively stepping out of the way for people who could neither see nor touch him. "Um, distant…?" He recalled the serene look on her face that time during their Esquire exams, when Midori and Sen's goblin had feasted on raw deer-meat. "Creepy. As hell. And…" And during the same exam, she had wanted to abandon Agari and Kita to die. "Callous. Like she doesn't... I don't know how to put it…"
"Isn't like other girls?" Mephisto filled in over his shoulder. "Is emotionally distant?"
"Yeah. And where are you going with all these questions?"
"To a phenomenon known as 'imprint'."
Imprint? Wasn't that what animal newborns did…?
"Never heard of it."
"Not surprising." They strolled down the lively shopping street of Chuo Dori; ghosts, side by side with the living. "What the Vatican fears, it tends to bury deep. Imprint was first observed in the Futotsuki clan, since they are one of few demon-worshipping societies to survive to modern day. As you know, they bond with demons by letting them tap into the darkness in their hearts: however~" He reached out and flicked away a coal tar that was tickling a woman's nose and making her sneeze. "A bond of that kind works both ways: demon taps into human, human taps into demon, and lines blur. After years of bonding, neither is entirely human or entirely demonic. Futotsuki Sen isn't like other girls, because her heart has housed that goblin familiar for most of her short lifetime. That", he said, turning to face Shiro with a smile like a silken garrotte string, "is imprint. You", he poked a gloved finger in his chest, "show the first signs of it."
Somewhere, in a body hundreds of miles away, Shiro felt the words hit his gut with the force of ten wastebasket pandas.
"What…? I… when your heart was…?"
"With normal bonding, it takes years for a human to imprint to the point it would be noticeable: you seem to have done it in seconds. Granted, containing a demon's heart at full power is a tad more intense than mere bonding", Mephisto snickered, stroking his beard with the expression of a stock market shark eyeing promising figures. "I'm not sure it has ever been done before."
"And what, exactly… would an imprint entail?" he asked, covering rather successfully how utterly thrown off balance he was. "Not that there's anything wrong with Sen… Oh screw that: there's a lot wrong with Sen."
"Don't ask me~ That depends entirely on the human. What grows in the human heart is planted by humans, and the only thing demons do is make the seeds thrive: an imprint merely augments the darkness already in you, a proverbial push in the direction you are already headed."
No. No, no, no, no…!
"I killed..." Not to mention stealing, fighting, using people, lying – all of it, all the wrongs he'd ever done crawled up his throat and clogged it to the point he could barely breathe. "How do you reverse it?" he croaked with a feeling that his far-off body was going to be sick any moment. "Probably comes with one hell of a price tag, but that won't matter."
It's one thing to be targeted by demons: that he could live with. But to live with himself being-
"There is no such thing as reversing an imprint."
What…?
"Say that again…?" he whispered, barely able to hear his own voice for the buzzing vertigo in his ears. The ocean of life around them kept moving as if nothing had happened. Just kept moving. As if the world hadn't ended there and then.
"There is no such thing as reversing an imprint", the demon repeated with the ease of the truly heartless. "Even after a bond is severed, the imprint remains."
"Are you fucking shitting me? There has to be some way of reversing it, or halting it, or- or why the hell would you tell me if there wasn't anything to do about it?!" he shouted, partway between rage and panic.
"Now now, calm down~"
"Don't you tell me to fucking calm down! You put this imprint on me, and you will find some way of removing it! I don't care if you think it's interesting or fun: you're gonna turn me back to normal or I-"
"Hush, little lion~" Mephisto purred softly, so close the gloved finger on Shiro's lips was the only thing separating them from Mephisto's. Shiro did close his mouth, just in case that finger was suddenly removed. "Take a look around: you have quite the audience~"
The humans milled about them, unaware of the phantom visitors. But they did have an audience. Without Shiro noticing, the shadowy forms of the demons had closed in on them; watching them without eyes, circling them like vultures waiting for the prey to draw its final breath.
"You are here in mind only, with no body for them to possess", Mephisto murmured next to his face. "But they sense the darkness in you, as you sense the darkness in them. Kukukuku, indeed, you have imprinted fast."
Shiro's lungs emptied in a single breath, as of a giant fist getting him in the gut. He wasn't a good person, he was fully aware of that. But to have it thrown in his face like this, with these things watching him from another dimension, eating him with unseen eyes…
"I told you, because this is your future." Mephisto made a sweeping gesture, as if the shapeless, buzzing entities waiting to tear into him were a grand view from the top of the world. "They will be your companions; your silent watchers, your ever-present suitors, waiting to make your body theirs."
"Tell me you're joking…" he breathed.
"Sadly, no." That voice didn't know the concept of sadness. "Good to see you have cooled your head: now, to business~" Mephisto snapped his fingers, and minds and bodies reassembled on their chairs in his office.
The cheerful stripes and pinks and yellows seemed to stab the eyes worse than ever. Shiro's mind was still on the streets of Tokyo, face to face with… his future.
"Calm down, it probably sounds worse than it actually is. Sen might be weird, but she's had that familiar, what, ten years? And she's no maniac killer, is she?" But Sen was imprinted on a goblin: he was imprinted on a bloody Prince… "Even he doesn't know exactly what will happen…" Keep calm, keep it together. "Is there anything… anything that can be done?" he asked, fumbling to come to terms with it. To accept that the chaos over the past days was going to become his everyday life. His fingers clung awkwardly to the curved armrests of the chair: he had never needed a cigarette this badly in his whole life.
"Why, certainly~" Mephisto said in light tones, stirring health-hazardous amounts of sugar into a steaming teacup. "An imprint is an integrated part of your own nature: while it can't be reversed or removed, it is up to you whether to embrace or suppress that nature."
*tink* *tink* *tink*
The spoon's clinking against the teacup was rhythmic and thin and nerve grating.
"It's the choice all humans make, every minute of every day: just a bit more challenging for someone whose nature tips towards the demonic", he smiled.
"That's all you have to say, after doing this to me?" Shiro seethed, feeling a furnace open in his gut to line every word with an edge of molten steel. "'Take care of it yourself, good luck and good bye'? Not even 'sorry I infected you with an imprint that will turn you into a monster'?"
He wasn't surprised, not really, but he was furious; and if anything in the room deserved to bear the brunt of that, it was that callous, smiling bastard in the high-backed chair. Said bastard didn't so much as flinch, though. Didn't seem fazed one bit by Shiro's accusations.
"Would you describe yourself as pure of heart, Shiro? A servant of good, led by conscience to treat his fellow humans with kindness and respect~?" Sweet mockery curled like a scorpion tail in his voice; and in the green depths of the half-mast eyes, Shiro glimpsed Prince Samael. "You were no saint to begin with, little lion", he purred. "On the contrary, you had enough darkness in your heart to be compatible with mine." Compatible? Compatible, with Satan's son…?
*tink* ... *tink* ...
*tink*
"With or without imprint, you are a human in appearance and a demon at heart: and you are so by choice." Mephisto put the spoon down on the saucer and sipped. "Which has further supported my decision not to return the charm miss Honda gave you."
"What?" After all he'd said, after all he'd showed him, he was going to deny him…? "Are you completely out of your mind?!" he bellowed, a hairsbreadth from grabbing his chair and bringing it down on the demon's head. "You'll make me a sitting duck for all Gehenna's demons to gang up on – that's your idea of helping out?! I'll be dead within a week – I've had two demons trying to possess me already!"
"Trying", Mephisto emphasised with a polite smile that made Shiro ponder if a seventh murder would make any greater difference, now that he had been oh-so-helpfully pushed down that slope anyway. "You exorcised them yourself, did you not?"
"If you think I'll spend the rest of my life like that, you can go-"
Mephisto snapped his fingers and had Shiro effectively gagged and bound to the chair.
"Such hot blood in the young ones", he sighed, resting his cheek in his hand with the smile of one who is watching an unruly puppy attempt to drag away a shoe larger than itself. "As sweet as that mouth of yours is, it's good to also know how to use your ears. I have important things to tell you."
Oh, probably more great news, then. Shiro snorted through his gag and attempted to murder Mephisto with glares alone.
"My father cannot access Assiah, for the simple reason that nothing here is strong enough to contain him", he drawled. "At full power, there is nothing that can endure my presence either." Mephisto sipped tea with his little finger raised proudly as the bowsprit on a barque. "You should have died in Deep Keep, but your body seems – for lack of better word – built to house powers that humans normally can't. Isn't that interesting~?" he beamed. "Though, of course, I won't be the only one to think so. Father will be very interested in that body; not yet, but once he learns of your existence you will have to fight for your life every waking moment. 'All the more reason to have the pendant', your eyes say." Mephisto answered his glare with a pleasant smile. "That trinket will protect you no more than a sheet of rice paper would shield you from a downpour. Satan is a god: no charm or ward on earth can keep him away."
Shiro felt himself empty like a broken water tank. No, this couldn't…
"Fortunately for you, that resilient body came with a resilient mind~" That… was not a smile. That was an invitation to a game of Russian roulette, written out in two lines of sharp, white letters. "You will endure demons' assaulting you, until you learn to fend for yourself with no other ward than that mind: and you will temper it into a shield strong enough to keep demons out by force of will alone – strong enough to keep even Satan himself out. As long as he can't gain access to the darkness in your heart, he can't possess you. Furthermore~" The cup made the spoon company on the saucer with a soft clink. "As Director of True Cross Order Japan, I am bound by duty to eliminate demonic threats to Assiah. Should you fail to block access to your heart, you would be a potential gateway for Satan to enter Assiah: you see the pinch I'm in, yes~?"
It is an art, to menace without sounding menacing. To weave words into a silken slipknot noose and meander it around one's neck with serpentine politeness. It is an art, and Mephisto had had millennia to perfect it.
"The choice you have to make is a rather simple one: temper your mind, or I will have to eliminate you." He snapped his fingers and released Shiro from his bonds. "Well…?"
"'Well' what?" he snarled through clenched teeth. "It's not even a real choice. I'll do whatever it takes to stay alive and stay me."
"Splendid~!" Mephisto clapped his hands together in one of his nerve grating turnabouts. "Now, you already know the basics of blocking possession, but to help you fully grasp the theory behind I have prepared a few educational illustrations~" He snapped his fingers and summoned his bat to hover beside him with a stack of crayon drawings in its claws. "This is you", he said, using an oversized polkagris as pointer, and tapped at what looked like a yellow-haulmed karami daikon, "and when this demon", which looked more like a disgruntled potato with germ-horns, "tries to tap into your darkness, you must close your heart, as the next picture explains…"
Normal. Things would never be normal again.
A/N:
Okay, I will in no way claim that the idea of imprint is canon, it's just something that developed out of the fic itself. It seems, however, that demons strive to augment the darkness in a person, plausibly to make it easier to possess them: bring them out of balance, of sorts. And if you enter a "symbiosis", of the kind I've imagined up, I think you're likely to experience that augmentation little by little. The main idea, I think, could be canon. Only Mephisto could be "qualified" to determine that Shiro is indeed capable of living through possession by Satan. And I think he would need to "practise" on the lower-level demons he attracts, to learn to close his heart and fight off possession before Satan catches wind of this potential vessel.
Speaking of vessels: join me for a short trip back to the first chapter of the manga…?
Shiro: "Demons tend to possess those most similar to themselves." / "Demons possess wicked souls." (different translations)
So there's two parameters to being "the only person in the world Satan can possess": you need to have the physical/mental disposition to endure it… and you need to be like a demon yourself.
Anecdote: I was mulling over this chapter when I walked past the café next to the train station. They usually play music out in the street there, and I catch a line from a song I've never heard before: "he got a black heart, he got such a dirty black heart". And I cracked a huge grin. x3