A/N: This idea about possession is a thought that has grown into headcanon for me, and one of those ideas I'll be returning to play more with in the future. I think maybe some of you have thought the same thing? =)

Thank you so much, Dare mo! Wow, that will be enough to cover his whole Italian education until Rome! I promise to be more specific next time. x') Keep your soul and eye colour; I'm cheap. ;)

I do not own or profit from any of what Kazue Kato has created.

It's not the lies.

It's not the secrets.

It's the silence.

The silence that tears the screams out of your chest, with claws of betrayal and broken glass.

"Language shapes thought; thought shapes humans; humans shape society - and society, in turn, plays a part in the shaping of language. The very fundament of human existence, therefore, is mastery of language."

It took a few Italian classes for him to realise that Samael wasn't acting. That he wasn't faking that smile in some messed-up attempt to keep the puppet show running. That he wasn't faking… at all.

"...me li as... as-ci-u-go aru sole e magari divent... diventano turoppo chiari." Fuck. His tongue was cramping.

"Again. Feel the placement of your tongue, the setting of your jaw: keep the apex against the alveolar ridge, as in the picture."

Jumbled words. Puppets without strings. Shiro stared through the crayon illustration, wondering why it didn't just catch fire. Garish doodles that didn't make one shit of sense. Like Samael.

Not a word about his betrayal. Not a single hint of gloat. No Schadenfreude, as the Germans had so accurately named it: glee over another's injury.

He would have preferred that. If the damn fuckhead was gonna be a demon, he could at least act like one. Make a show of it, relish in it; show how fucking pleased he was with himself.

But Samael neither hid nor flaunted his victory. As if it didn't matter. As if it was just another chore ticked off the list, just another document signed and stacked on his desk.

He wasn't even pretending.

He simply didn't care.

"Buongiorno , signora Raccagni", the demon spoke with flawless accent, barely even looked at the course book over his magazine. "Venga, venga...ecco si seda qui. Come va?"

"Niente male, gurazie. Andura... andrà ancora me... me-gli-o con i caperi in orudine. Shtavo... sta-vo-lu-ta me il taglia-"

"Me li taglia."

"Me li taglia... anche un pó?"

After all he'd done.

"Glieli spunto soltanto?"

Played him like one of his goddamn toys.

"No, no, me li shcali un po... chino, peruché cosí non mi pi... pi-achiono-"

"Piacciono."

"Mi piacciono più. Po-i dobu... dovrei, fare anche il corore, vede?"

And it hadn't even been amusing enough to gloat over?

"I was so fucking stupid."

Stupidity doesn't count among the cardinal sins, but it should. It fucking should. Because it's just as harmful, just as irresponsible, and just as easy to indulge in. Walk the simple path. Make the simple choice. Choosing without thinking.

The silence never left; no matter if he rehearsed Italian until his tongue went numb, it was there between the lines. The unspoken things that polluted the air in the tower. Taut. Quivering, vibrating, begging to snap; cut bleeding gashes in the air, steel strings leaping of the shrieking neck of a burning violin.

at least have the decency to show my destruction was more than an idle pastime

But it kept playing. Tuneless disharmony. Screeching silence. Unsaid words grating nails – purple claws – over his eardrums.

Samael knew it, oh yes, he knew. Knew aaall the strings to pull, all the buttons to push. He knew Shiro hated the silence more than anything. He knew Shiro refused to let him have the pleasure of knowing how much it hurt.

He knew perfectly well that the daggers of betrayal strike deeper the closer you are; slow daggers, slipping in between the ribs through charming smiles, not noticed until they strike the heart.

And there he sat, in his fucking Renaissance chair, reading his fucking shoujo manga, and waited in silence for an outburst that would never come.

"Hmm~ getting better, albeit slowly. It will come easier once your mouth is accustomed to the sounds", hummed the demon in chipper tones from behind the magazine pages. "What the mind forgets, the body remembers forever~"

"Coming from a guy who doesn't even have a body." No. Don't rise to taunts. Shut his mouth, shut his ears: focus on the never-ending page 29.

"Letting emotion get in the way of your thinking again?" came an amused remark, followed by a light tap on his head from the pointer.

"Ignore it." And wish him to hell.

"A very bad habit for an exorcist, Shiro - and an insult to your intellect, at that. I've had many bodies, and each one remembered." Samael splayed his fingers over the scrawny chest of Faust's body, and brought his voice into that pompous cadence of his: "The rich phonemes of German, engraved forever in muscle memory, roll off its tongue as easily as they did when this body belonged to Johann: and like Johann, it has no fondness of pomegranates."

"Ignore it." He had a favourite daydream for occasions like these: that he had let Tanzi's spies finish their work in Deep Keep. That Samael was staggering, falling, writhing on the ground in a puddle of blood and miasma.

"I used to like pomegranates, when I had a Greek body", Samael reminisced conversationally into his magazine. Why care if his student listened, when he never cared about him at all? "Possessing someone is a curious thing – like moving into a house with the former owner's possessions still in place, I suppose. Each one still furnished with all manner of quirks and routines acquired throughout life; the body remembers, long after the mind forgets."

The body of just another puppet. ...just another puppet? Then why did he-

"Ignore him, dammit. Don't listen to a demon." Demons deceive. Demons lie.

What the fuck do you make of it when two demons' lies contradict each other, then?

One had to be lying, either Samael or the demon that had tried to possess him in his dorm room. That demon had had every reason to twist the truth to make him surrender; Samael didn't have to. He already had him collared and bound. Like Faust.

Like Faust? Tch, he should stop kidding himself.

That wasn't just a puppet. That body was a living, breathing memento of Johann Faust, hardwired with his habits and tastes before and beyond the departure of his soul.

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.

Shiro stared down at the Latin letters in his course book. Samael might be droning on for all he knew: his own world was a quiet thunderstorm, glowing with embers that refused to die but lacked the strength to build into flame.

"He was your friend." A bitter thought. A thought of someone who had no delusions left to kid himself with. "I'm just another puppet."

Don't let emotion get in the way of thinking?

Yeah.

Demons didn't have that problem.

A/N:

Phoneme – let's try a dangerous allegory here. Dangerous, because there's a high risk of misunderstandings occurring. But you're not linguistics students, so having a general idea works fine for you; and if you are linguistics students, you don't need any explanation. :)

You know how letters form words, yes? C + l + a +s + s = class. And you all know what a class is. Now switch c for a g, and you get glass: just one letter changed, and a different word with a different meaning.

Spoken language works the same, you could say: it's built up of small units of sound that can be strung together into meaningful words. Instead of letters, they're called phonemes. Switch one phoneme for another and you can (but not necessarily) get a different word with different meaning. You could think of a language as having two alphabets: one made of letters, and one made of phonemes. Some letters in language A may not exist in language B, and some phonemes used in A may not exist in B either.

It's important to remember that letters and phonemes don't correspond to one another, though. Ash contains three letters (a-s-h) but only two phonemes (a-sh). S and h just happen to be the two letters we combine when we want to represent the phoneme "sh" in English.

Italian dialogue
...you really don't have to think too much about what they're saying. Shiro's pronunciation is terrible, for one thing, and they're roleplaying two ladies talking about haircuts.