title: ageless
genre: romance / hurt / comfort / horror
pairings: shiemi/amaimon, rin/bon
warnings: death, destruction, half-baked ideas
"This is a story about the
monsters and the lovers,
This is a story about how
they became the same thing."
—Emily Palermo, Love in the Time of Monsters
chapter o1. in which the demon king makes a bargain
Amaimon draws open the window and despite the hard, grinding, resistance, it slides up, quick as a shaft. He leans his shoulders out, surveying the cool autumn night and looking out onto the drop ten floors below. This side of the hospital faces the forest where beyond is the river, then the city floating like a dream-lit star on a cloud of mist.
His eyes scan the trees until he spots what he is looking for among the underbrush—a bird. Or, something bird-shaped made of shadow and blood. Amaimon lifts his chin in a nod. The took takes flight, scooping air beneath its wings and diving back into the forest. Becoming a creature of shadows once again.
He hesitates there a moment. Welcomes the cool relief of air, the perfect slice of moon above the city lights, the perfect black velvet of the night in the forest buzzing with life.
Tonight is a night.
Slowly, he turns back to the cool gray room, watching the shadows flicker and chase each other from beyond the blessed candles. The scent of them, and the blessed oils and symbols of magic, leave a burnt under-taste in his mouth. Besides the acidic tastes of hospital.
In a sweep, he reclaims his spot on the plastic hospital bed, careful not to disturb his bed-fellow in the deepest of sleeps.
He stares on, eyes red with irritation, at the lily-white form in the bed beneath the heap of blankets that were quickly becoming useless, he cannot make out the rise and falls of her chest.
He had brought blankets in the beginning. He had brought them and put the pink cat slippers on her feet. He had brought her sweaters and pajama pants and scarves and gloves. He had all but conjured a fire-spite to sit at her bedside.
But everything he has done, all his efforts, were laid to waste as the slow, deep coldness blossomed like a flower inside his wife.
My wife, he thinks, dismally and then he begins to peal back the layers of blankets, one by one—the old quilt, the shabby red flannel, the deep purple throw, the jersey comforter—until she is, from the waist-up in nothing but her sweater, her pale white hands knotted together like tree roots in the winter.
He stares at her, the pale, pale whiteness of her and something swells in his chest.
She had been so beautiful when they met. All smiles and sun-kissed cheeks and a spool of long, golden hair he could curl around and around his fingers like rings. He had adored her completely. Her soft voice, her quiet, brimming confidence, her style of dress, the way she spoke—
But she had, as human often do, faded.
Pretty hurts and pretty fades, as the saying goes, but it did not strike the chord it hit. Shiemi's prettiness, the vivacious liveliness of her, had not faded due to malice or age, quite the opposite.
Her prettiness was diminished only because of the disease that racked her body, demeaning her fragile, lily-ghost-white, sickly. The kind of illness that waned her rosy cheeks to parlor, her thick hair to clumps, her cheery smile to one of strained lips.
Shiemi has been diagnosed and dying for months now with no relief, no medicine, no cure in sight.
He feels the tightness in his chest with the realization and that does not relent either. It continues clamping, like a fist, as he stares down at his cold wife, the one he had been coiled up against in sleep not twenty minutes before.
He reaches for her, brushing the back of his hand across her cheek, but she does not stir.
Her dry, white lips remain parted, but no sound comes out.
He takes her hands in his, touching the callous hills of her palms, the sea-shell press of her fingernails, the thin wrists that he can circle with finger and thumb. She is delicate and bird-like and beautiful. And the strange coldness that has intruded and robbed her, has taken hold, stiffening her bones and skin.
From his own throat, he issues a noise, not a cry, but something almost animal in relation.
In all his years of existence, he has never cried, never eked a sob, never felt a hot rush or tears nor the constriction of them in his throat.
He cannot do these things. He is, as he always had been, a demon and the very symbols the exorcists carved into his wife's bed repel him, but he is stronger, older, and always would be.
He will always be ageless in the turn of time.
Unlike his human bride.
Amaimon does not cry, but he mourns.
He takes her cold hands and presses them to his face, trying to remember how they felt when they were warm, flushed with life, tugging him into an embrace and loving him. He remembers her hands smelling of roses and thyme from the garden, the rinds of dirt under her nails almost floral, how she would squeal with disgust and laughter when he chewed on her nails.
He presses her hands harder to his face, chasing the memory, but the coldness, the deadness of her sinks into him like a stone.
What is he to do?
He looks around as if for answers, but the cold, button-eyed stares of her slippers gaze blearily back at him.
He does not want to call her mother or a nurse or the doctor. He has been privy enough to his fair share of stares and ridicule form nameless humans. The nurses and doctors who were informed of his wife's profession—and who he was—and distrusted him immediately. Then, Shiemi's mother whom had wailed and accused him of cursing her.
These are selfish thoughts.
And selfish more as he knows that if he were to call someone, then he would be separated from her. He body would be stripped and washed and placed in a box, burned to ashes and scattered far, far away from him.
Human could mourn for most of their lives and never loose an iota of their loss. For demons, it is much the same and quite different.
Amaimon can mourn for an hour or a year, but it would all be the same. A drop in the ocean of his grief. He could recall the cheer of her smile centuries down the life and feel the rush of warmth and longing just as fiercely as the day he lost her.
"Shiemi," he whispers and stiffens when he hears the sounds of footsteps in the hall. His muscles tense with fight, but the nurse never checks her stride as she sails past their quiet, dark room. More pressed matters to attend to.
When she passes, Amaimon untenses, smoothing his thumb over the back of Shiemi's hand.
"My raven said you signaled him." His brother has arrived. Amaimon can see him out of the corner of his eye as he manifests on the window, the jaunty tilt of his hat, an insult. He leans over her as if to hide her from his brother's sight, but it's a futile gesture. "Aw, I see," His brother's ice blue eyes—the same eyes all the brothers shared—affix to him. "What are you thinking, little brother?"
His fanged mouth tugs at the corners, not a smile, but not a frown either.
He has Mephisto's attention, then.
Amaimon presses his lips thin and looks back to Shiemi. It pinches something inside of him. Something deep and harrowing and possessive. Something scary he reigns back for her. Something demonic he keeps barred in his chest and out of her sight. She loved him best without it, therefore, it was not necessary.
His head is still swimming with the ceremony that would proceed once he made the announcement—the collecting and washing and ashing. The inevitability of questions and accusations that he would hide from, guilty of nothing and unable to speak her name as it was blessed by holy lips.
He can already hear Shiemi's mother wailing.
He cannot bare it. In a thousand millennia of torture, he cannot imagine surviving the ceremonies humans play out after death.
He strokes down her side, a nervous habit of his. One that relaxed her in life and made her smile. She called him cat-like, cat-like and bat-like, just like the poem. He would curl around her for comfort when his nerves got the best of him, especially when she got sick. And she accepted this tick, this trait, because she loved him so well.
His finger graze over the white-apple of her cheek and then he leans down to kiss her mouth, like a faerietale, but her lashless eyelids do not flutter. Breath does not fill her. Sleep remains.
Amaimon's frown deepens.
"Amaimon," his brother's voice is edging on something, something soft and dark and dangerous. "Why did you call me here?"
It is this moment, Amaimon knows, he has nothing left to lose.
He rose from the bed and turns away from his wife, feeling cold even as he does so. He eyes his brother, sitting on the window ledge, curls of shadow and mist and power coiling around him like snakes. His head tips and the square of his jaw cracks.
"You know why I called you here." He says coolly.
In the dark corner of the white room, the Earth King makes a deal with the King of Time, whose nails hook like claws and bleed into his wrist in pact.
For years, no one will know of this conversation between the demon kings. The consequences of which will not be know until much later still. But that is not yet important. What matters to Amaimon in that moment is that the white building with its white walls and white magics will soon be a thing of the past; a bitter memory that will leave an acidic taste in his mouth.
For now, the flat line on the other side of the room begins to churn out a steady beat.
EDITS: changed the tense and the scene, so fixed it.
basis for my shipping: did one ever kidnap the other? ship that like FedEx.
i've missed writing for these two. my first fic of them, of course, was sweet and fluffy and now they are dark and scary. new series.
i know this fandom may be in a bit of a rut, but let me know what you think.
- cafeanna