I had my baby! A little boy. Got him out in one push-to the utter astonishment of the nurses and doctor. He was born early august and I've been taking any spare time from cuddling him to write for you. ^.^

I named him Link.

6

He didn't go to work that night.

He freaking owned the place and was thousands of years old. If he wanted to take the time to recondition himself for life in his damn apartment (or brood, fine, he'd admit to that), then he damn would. It's not every day you're reason for even trying gave you a visit from the grave.

Even so, Ban called him up sometime around dinner rush. He ignored the call and was rewarded with a text.

Ban: You dead?

Meliodas let his head drop back on the couch armrest with a solid thump. Besides him, on the floor, stood three hefty, and empty, bottles of Spirytus Stawaski, the strongest alcohol he could find on the market at 96% alcohol. The forth bottle hung in his hand, half-way gone.

Still, he'd only reached a sleepy kind of buzz. He could barely remember what it was like to be drunk, but he had seen it enough times to know this wasn't it.

He blew some hair out of his face.

He should respond. If he didn't, Ban wasn't beneath dropping his job and hunting him down. Idiot couldn't get it through his brain that even in the worse of trouble, Meliodas couldn't die. Even if he wanted to.

So, he propped his cell up on his chest and slowly typed a reply.

'Still kicking.'

He let the phone flop back down and took another swig. The booze had a remarkably mild, sweet smell for how much alcohol it contained, which made the after burps all but tasteless. It was like drinking warm ice.

The vibration from the return text actually felt kind of good against his chest. Like a quick mini massage. Huh, maybe he was further along than he gave credit.

Ban: I meant ur soul. *emocon of hands together in prayer*

Meliodas wondered if Ban would still come after him with only his emotional and mental well-being at hand. Probably shouldn't put it past him.

'Totally soul-dead. Will resurrect tomorrow. You called in Escanor?'

Ban: No. I'm letting the whole place burn.

Meliodas took that to mean all was well and happily dropped his phone back onto the carpet. It only had two percent life, so he didn't bother turning it off. That would take the brain energy needed to drink.

Soon, his emergency store of drink was gone, and his metabolism had already started on munching away what buzz he had managed.

Cursing in several languages, he dumped the bottles, swaggered to his bedroom, and fell face down on the mattress.

Next thing he knew, he had started sobbing again. Great, ugly, gasping sobs that hurt even to hear, especially coming from his own throat.

So pathetic…

But this was part of the price of light—of anything worth it, really. Everything had its opposition. To have happiness, one had to experience sorrow, and so on. It was one of the main reasons he had been a demon in the first place: because he wouldn't accept that. What was all power and all freedom if one couldn't avoid suffering?

So, in truth, this horrid pain was a gift.

He swore in several other languages, including demonic.

Why the hell did it have to be this way?!

He coughed on a particularly ragged sob and pushed himself up to breathe. He was immortal, not undead. Air was still very much useful.

Some time passed, agonizingly slow, and yet pass it did. He dropped in and out of daydreams where he walked and talked with her about nothing and everything. These dreams would stop as he remembered a certain way her eyes would shine when she smiled at him, or the brush of her hair against his arm as it swished back and forth with her hips. She had had wings back then. Glorious, beautiful things that had started out looking like a strangled swan had been tied to her back.

Those white beauties had held the very sky beneath her on that day, great ladle-fulls of air, each wing the size of a full grown man.

The snap of a door closing jarred him back to reality.

"Hello, Captain."

He twisted his face into his damp pillow and moaned.

Couldn't catch a break.

With a grunt to clear his throat, he twisted his head back to ground out, "Stop breaking into my house!"

"Noooo!"

"Dick," he turned his face back to his pillow to hiss out a breath. Nothing he could do now. If he was lucky, he could convince the stupidly talented ex-burglar to leave before he got a look at Meliodas's face.

He heard a shuffle of plastic.

"Get out of my trash," it was more of a groan than a yell.

"Four bottles." A low whistle. "Didn't know stuff this strong existed. That bad?"

"Since when did you become such a nosey asshole?"

"Since the day I was born." The flap of the plastic garbage lid falling back into place. "Where've you been?"

"Fooled into believing you respected boundaries."

"Best friend privilege," and this time Ban's words came from his bedroom doorway. "So, you can either give it up willingly or I continue snooping. You missed Miss Silverette tonight, you know. She sure missed you. Damn, your room is dark as hell, per usual."

His chest constricted fast and tight. He couldn't have said anything in response to that even if he had wanted to.

Ban gave it a minute before pressing, "Well?"

"There's nothing you can do," he managed to break out.

"Yeah, I didn't say I'd do anything about it. Nosey asshole, remember?"

"Who did you leave to cook?"

"Duh."

Meliodas sighed against his pillow. Ban could wait there all night if he had to, he knew that. The goal had been to avoid having him over at all. Guy really didn't know boundaries, jerk.

He sat up, keeping his back to his friend and his eyes to the heavy black out curtains.

"Succubus's mind magic forced me to remember some crap rather forcefully and it screwed with my head. That's all."

"Bad enough to hole up in here? I'm not an idiot, Captain, you don't do this. You either stuff it under that stupid smile of yours or rip it a new one."

"Yeah. I guess so."

"It's freaking creepy. Stop."

"Working on it."

"Sure. When was the last time you ate?"

Meliodas shrugged, even as the mystery cereal meal with Elizabeth rose to his mind. Oh god, what a sick joke. Same name, same looks, even to some extent the same personality and quirks. Who up there was screwing with him?

"Ugh, nevermind. Just remembered all you have in your house is cereal and milk. It never ceases to amaze me how you're still alive. Cereal isn't an actual meal, you know." Ban sighed. "No choice, then. Come on. We're going out."

"No, I'm not."

"You don't got a choice."

Meliodas snorted. "Try to make that truth and I'll kick you through six floors to the stratosphere."

"And you probably could," admitted Ban, in all truthfulness. "But then you wouldn't get the little woman's numbeeeeerrrr."

Meliodas cringed, grateful for the darkness to hide such a reaction from his friend's attention. "I don't need that."

"Then I guess I'll just keep it then? I'm sure I could get her into all sorts of fun trouble. Remember that time in Boston with Dianne and King—"

Meliodas hurled one of his pillows, which puffed with enough force on the smirking grey-haired cook's face to rupture with synthetic fluff.

Ban didn't so much as finch.

"Six out of ten," said Ban. "If you were really mad it'd be something solid, but bursting a pillow is still pretty impressive. So I'll give you to five."

"Five to what?"

"Till I come over there and dress your grown-but-bitty man ass like a toddler. One—"

Meliodas called him something extra pretty.

Ban just smirked. "Two."

The bartender didn't think there had been anything within him to snap.

But snap it did, with all the force of a fat lady's garter.

"She's not my lover."

Ban snorted. "Not yet—"

"And she never will be."

"So it's 'cause you have no game—"

Meliodas's vocal chords snapped with the sudden force of his roar. "Damn it, Ban, she isn't Elizabeth! She isn't the woman I loved three thousand years ago!"

An understandable silence followed.

Ban blinked.

"Wha?"

The man's expression would have been funny in any other situation. Meliodas was far from laughing.

"You heard me," he growled, rubbing his throat.

"Three thousand…" Band blinked again. "Okay, I've always known you were older than you look—everyone knows that, else you'd be like, fourteen, but…" he suddenly scowled. "Real funny, Cap. Not even demons get that old."

"Shows what you know," Meliodas stood. "Now if you don't mind—"

But epiphany hit Ban just then so hard, it didn't take ten years of knowing him to understand that expression.

"You're a demon," he said.

"Yeah."

"A…a real one. Not the little stuff we deal with, like…like from the other worlds, like post-ressurection, like—"

"A demon lord," Meliodas faced him and looked his best friend in the face, despite the fact he probably couldn't see Meliodas through the darkness and the ugly, twisting coming over his gut. He might just hurl once this was all over. "Prince, to be exact."

A full minute of dead silence passed between them, where Ban stared into the dark room where he thought Meliodas was and Meliodas stared back, heart speeding up.

He had only just confessed to being the equivalent of Satan. A real life king of all adversity. It was equal to seeing God, and even His prophets had fallen apart with fear on meeting Him, and that was with the good guy.

"But…" Ban cleared his throat, and his next words came out at less of a croak. "But those can't be here, those, well, they don't have—"

"Bodies," finished Meliodas.

"Which would make you, like…"

"Post-judgement and suppose to stay in my own world, unable to abide any other level of glory than what I have been given, yes."

Ban cleared his throat again and put his hands in his pockets, missing on the first try. "Well. You meet new stuff every day. I take it there's a reason? I mean, you gotta deal with the big guy or something?"

Meliodas finally looked away, the twisting in his gut rising to join the heavy agony the alcohol had failed to dampen.

"It's her." He said. "I wanted to be with her. This was the deal."

"Reverse judgement." Ban nodded, though he didn't sound like he got it at all. "She's not what you are, I take it? And if she's dead, she was on this world, right? Three big ones ago."

Meliodas nodded before remembering Ban couldn't see him. "Yes."

"But, demons don't…you know…" Ban suddenly shook his head. "Yeah, you know what? I'm going to try and stop making sense of stuff now. You loved a chick that went somewhere other than demon hell and asked God to give you a deal where you could relive the one chance no one gets. And since there isn't really any such thing as rebirth—"

"But she looks just like her, Ban," Meliodas whispered, the stone in his throat returning with vengeance. "She has the same name, the same hair, the same…the same god damn voice."

"…Oh."

In the following quiet, Meliodas climbed back onto his bed and flopped face down in the softness once more, not caring if he didn't get air this time.

"And it's not like you can cheat on the girl you've been trying to get back with for three thousand years," said Ban.

Meliodas said nothing.

"And, course, it's not like you want to. But it's almost like she's right there—oh hell, wait, if you're immortal, you're memory—"

"It's perfect," Meliodas said into the mattress.

"Which would—aw hell, aw shit…shit. Dude, this is why these sorts of things don't happen. At least, they aren't suppose to. What the hell kind of girl was she? No chick can be worth that."

Meliodas sighed and tipped his face up out of the mattress.

"She…she was a goddess."