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Such a beautiful child.
Hardly believable to have been born of a woman; no, such a child was conceived in the bud of a water lily, guarded by the effervescent nymphs of nature, bloomed in the reflection of the starry sky and nurtured by the silent frost. Tears of the river washed his moonlit skin, claiming a kiss on his conch-like body.
Child of the sirens, and gifted with such a dreamy voice, too! What fairytales written, what legends passed mouth to mouth, none could translate that wonderful charm of his into language. Snow White of the infernal lineage – raven feathers for hair and skin like fresh snow… only the motherly blood was swirling in his eyes, not in his cheeks.
Blessed with intellect encompassing the whole of the mortal world and beyond, he was the true heir of the night. They watched him with reverence, in a religious daze, honouring the cosmic ether that had granted them a god of their own to walk the earth.
Those were the memories of his conception. Childhood, they would say. But childhood, to earthlings, is the days spent under the sun, and he rarely felt the warmth of day on his skin.
He was shackled to the night, for he was never a human. He was a god in flesh, drawing his iridescent light from the Moon, and speaking the language of the wise North Star that guided those who were lost. Such power was his blessing.
And for such blessings he was cursed with sickness.
And what use was a broken god to his people?
All gods must fall, shall the faith in them ever waver. And he was no exception, with that fragile gift of a body. No longer illuminated, he was casted out into the starless abyss, where only the darkness reigned true. He reached out a trembling hand for that satellite that once claimed his name as its patron, but his fingertips grew cold before anyone could reach back. Once the patron of the Moon, now the ruler of the Dark.
Born from the nymph’s crystalline tears, now wallowing in murky waters of his own. If he were kissed, why are there no freckles scattered on his skin? If he were worshipped, where are the shrines that were raised in his name? If he were the salvation, where are those who could salvage him in return?
No longer is his stream appealing to thirsty wanderers. His hands that fed, now bitten bloody. And those wings, that like veils spread the comfort of the night, are clipped and torn, ugly, for it is a superstition that a raven’s feather is a harbinger of ill omen.
But it’s quite alright. All monsters are destined to reign in solitude.
(███, if I kissed you, would you let me in?
He chuckles. Depending on how far into the maze you want to go. Be warned, however – the further you wander, the scarier the traps.
Then it is, indeed, very convenient that I’m rather good at avoiding those.)
No one should stand on equal ground with a devil like that, lest they are trampled upon. They shouldn’t see the truth, they shouldn’t dig under the fortress to fracture a beautifully crafted façade.
Walking among the mortals, he can only do so much to keep them safe. From him, from his deceiving allure.
He develops a distaste for hair combs, loathing the sound they make when they brush over the horns on top of his head. No, the messier the tuft, the safer his crown – as invisible as it is.
Granted, only he can see through his translucence, and it’s a price he pays for this worldly body. Mirrors have become his enemies. He scrunches his spine and twists his head around, fingers of one hand drawing notes over the ridges of his ribs on the other side. How crystal-like, how deceptively fragile, and in hatred his fingers dig into the membranous skin below the shoulder blades, where ugly scars open up around the cracked bones of his wings. Mangled flesh, bloodied hills around the base, naked humerus.
A monster.
(I have brought you! A gift. From the catacombs of Hades himself!
He accepts it into his hands. It’s a rose covered in black paint.
Wrong! It is a black rose that sprouted from a broken heart of the king of the underworld.
Why was his heart broken?
Why, it’s simple. He wanted to be with the others to listen to the morning birds sing.)
This demon has no right to mingle with the angels. In the night he shall remain, veiled in darkness, away from God’s eyes. The God that dared displace such heavenly beings to the pits of this rotting earth. Some divine comedy it is, penned out of spite by a terrible playwright.
It’s Hibiki Wataru and Ran Nagisa in the lead roles, Tsumugi tells him. Here, where humanity gathers in blissful ignorance, there are still those who crowd by his side in the reminiscence of his past glory. They are in the middle of the parterre, crouched in the shadows with the rest of the audience, a breathless backdrop for the angels, who, in the centre of the stage, shine against all of humanity’s flaws.
Those were the monster’s first memories of the angels, like the night that stayed up until the first rays of sun.
A paradox, unforeseen by the laws of the transcendent world he descended from. What a cruel twist of fate that let him cast his bloodied eyes upon the beauty he was never allowed to dream of. There, where they fly, celestial choir sings, and they sing with it, and they are adorned with halos and wings, and they have light in their eyes.
And it must be the same crude joke of fate that leads their eyes to meet with his, and when they do, vines envelop his bleeding heart, and those vines intertwine their lives against all odds.
How could it be so? So cruel. To them, for them to embrace the naked conch of his body and find music within it. Where they walk, the flowers bloom, and where he follows, the life itself withers under his feet, but they merely retrace their steps and spring the world anew, as if decay never soiled their evergreen garden.
In the hearts so pure, he is merely what he is; raven feathers for hair, and skin like fresh snow, and drops of blood swirling in his eyes, and his sin can’t be perceived.
As beautiful as he is monstrous, and shall he desire salvation, he may only find it at the hands of those untouched by corruption.
In return, by that very touch he is purified.
“Rei,” Nagisa calls him. That’s right. Rei, he is called. There is a caress on his cheek, tender fingertips, warmed up by the friction of their skin. “You seem spaced out.”
Shapes on the ceiling – it is still twilights, and the jazzy blues of the evening sky play shadows on the soft interior of his room. Rei was looking for his wings, for the ugly claws to burst through the black membrane and shred the pillows to feathers – but they aren’t here, his wings.
Rei’s gaze finds Nagisa’s face hovering over him, a delicate frown of concern between his perfect brows, and a sweet wrinkle of a smile as soon as their eyes meet. His palm cups the side of Rei’s face, a thumb swiping the apple of his cheek, idle fingers grazing his earlobe. Lips connect with his exposed forehead – he must have brushed the hair out of his face to ease the heat.
It’s not a fever, Rei is not sick, not in this way. His body is hot, sweat has gathered on his forehead like dew, blood has clotted in all the sensitive parts. He doesn’t handle the heat well, and this sensation – this slight, yet desirable, ache igniting like matches in his belly and spreading down his limbs – it burns, even if only a little.
“Would you still like me to continue, my infernal prince?” comes Wataru’s voice from somewhere within the blues.
Nagisa lets go of Rei with a chaste kiss. Rei drags his chin to his chest, looking down past himself at Wataru who kneels between his legs. Broad hands hold Rei under his knees, almost protectively, as if he is composed of glass bones and paper skin. But he is not that brittle of a doll. A rag doll, if anything. They know, they know, he holds strength beneath his pale constitution, and he’s got endurance that he almost begged – oh, he begged! – for them to make use of.
“Apologies,” he mumbles, and his eyes squeeze shut for just a second, to sweep the reverie under the curtain, to pull himself back into the haven of his bedroom, where Nagisa and Wataru are tangible, physical beings, who have him in the palms of their hands. When Rei opens his eyes, he catches a glimmer of lube on Wataru’s slicked cock, and Nagisa’s long nimble fingers drawing circles on his lower stomach, beside Rei’s own resting dick. Resting, but yearning for the touch, again – for the touch, to resume. “I spaced out for a moment.”
Rei forces a corner of his mouth to quirk in a semblance of a grin; now he is Rei again, now he is a body in their bacchanalia of three. He shifts slightly, pressing his knees to Wataru’s sides, caging them, dragging them closer.
“You may continue, my dove.”
But nothing escapes the two of them and their watchful gaze. United, ever-seeing, like circles of the seraphs, they see him inside out, even when he toughens his mien with scales. Wataru smiles with a curt bow of their head and elevates Rei’s hips above their knees, to slide their cock between his cheeks, intentionally teasing, deliberately hesitant. A thin braid flips over their shoulder, sticks to the left pec. Amusingly, Wataru gathers their hair into a ponytail when they have sex, and Nagisa lets his hair loose. They have beautiful hair.
As beautiful as they are ephemeral. Yet residing in this material world, next to Rei.
That’s right, their hair he can touch. His arms feel weak, out of his control, but he raises a hand to the back of Nagisa’s head and brushes his fingers through the soft stands. They trickle down the sides of his face like moonlit streams.
Rei gasps. Wataru eases themself inside him in a careful first push. Nagisa watches him; a delicate fold in the corners of his mouth, and his eyes, as if pillowed, narrow with a smile.
He doesn’t say much, but he cradles Rei’s head in return, brushing the unkempt fringe from forehead and combing through the curls so tenderly, so lovingly, as if he knows to avoid the horns growing on top of his crown. He soothes the tangles in his hair as Wataru reassuringly kneads his thighs.
“It’s alright, dove,” Rei breathes out, “be brave – you can move now.”
Wataru bottoms out in one swift motion and bends slightly forward with inertia, now hovering in Rei’s field of vision, a halo chasing away the shadows. “As you wish, my prince,” they say, and with the first proper thrust, Rei puffs out with a moan.
How immoral is the sound against the choral exhale of Nagisa’s quiet chuckle. “You are very good, Rei.”
Whatever words he could have tongued in reply, whatever retorts, he chokes on another sinful note when a hand touches his neglected dick. Nagisa hauls himself into a more comfortable position on his knees to jerk Rei off with one hand, while still keeping watch on his reactions. He is so prudent like that, shrewd even in the sealed vacuum of their pleasure. Rei’s eyes flutter close.
Pleasure. Rei feels so much of it. Lust, and gluttony, and greed, he wants it all from the hands as pure as theirs. How he wishes their touch could wash away the monstrosity of his soul! But it’s like they don’t fear the monster inside him. Whether Rei tells them to use him, they listen and interpret his words in their own way – use you, why, of course, my prince, I will use your time wisely and gift you everything you deserve.
“You really are the most beautiful like this,” says Nagisa. Crystalline words, yet Rei wants to taint them with tears. Every praise like shards of glass directly to his chest; how Nagisa laces his sentiments with such sweetness for Rei only, Rei will never comprehend.
And Wataru – ah, Wataru – he moans – such impartial knowledge of his body as suitable for the omniscient angel. Every thrust like divine blessing, the pleasure coiling in his pit like forsaken serpents. And Nagisa’s hand speeds up too, and his other strokes down the middle of his chest, traces his nipples, counts the rapid beats of his frail heart, and adores him, adores him.
A moan escapes Wataru’s mouth, a low, effervescent sound, and when Rei gathers enough strength to move his hips into their movement, there is a hitched, higher-pitched whine.
“You should praise him, Wataru,” Nagisa says to Wataru yet sounds like he is still speaking directly over Rei, keeping his watch on him, his face; his curved eyebrows and his parted mouth.
Wataru pauses the powerful sway of their hips for only a brief moment to say, “I am powerless before your allure, my king of the night,” and yet it all but makes Rei want to wail. Were the world made in his will, he’d make this last forever; he’d fill the eternity with this ceaseless pleasure, peg every second to his whimsies.
But he is a reject of this world, and the world of darkness that once crowned him as its ruler, has long since casted him out behind the gates.
Nagisa’s fingers squeeze around his length. A sob gets caught in his throat. “Tell me, what more can I do for you, Rei?” Nagisa asks not because he doesn't know, but because he wants to hear Rei say it – to express his desires, to stay present in this liminal zone between heaven and earth with them, as part of them.
“Angel, please,” Rei whispers, practically soundless, all voice lost in this ascension to the higher domains. “Let me please you.”
Nagisa smiles, tender as cotton. He lets go of Rei, which is a detrimental loss but a necessary sacrifice, for his weight is welcomed on Rei’s chest and shoulders, knees planted by either side of his head, and the sight before him – heavens, there are only so many downfalls Rei can survive before he is plummeted to the last circle.
He adjusts the position of his head, and there are those loving fingers in his hair again, carding through the tangled strands, careful not to grip too tightly as Nagisa leads his dick into his parted mouth. Rei feels so sloppy. Sweaty, and needy, and misshapen. Though his spit-slick lips and his tight throat are harbingers of delight on Nagisa’s face, and he promptly sways his hips, and Rei’s vision is blurry with tears.
They tell him he is beautiful when he cries. Sticky lashes and rosy cheeks, glimmer and sheen and colour on his perpetually pale skin. And where it may be true, there hides a weakness unsuitable for this lapsed king of the night. Monsters can’t cry.
And yet this monster shivers for lamenting relief of his body and soul.
Wataru changes the pace in favour of more shallow, steady thrusts, so they could let go of one of Rei’s legs and grip his weeping dick instead, jerking him in tandem with their movements, and Nagisa flows right into it, right into him, and Rei disintegrates into a million little streams.
“Just a little more, Rei,” Nagisa sighs, and his face paints with bliss, the perfect kind, the kind that blessed angels wear underneath their halos.
“My dark monarch,” Wataru hitches a moan, “if you let me come inside.” Rei responds with a terrible, drawled out moan of his own, squeezed and muffled by the girth of Nagisa’s cock in his throat.
He can’t see, but in this blasphemous delirium Rei thinks he hears the fluttering of Wataru’s white wings as they break open behind their back, fighting the shadows away, sprinkling silver over the dark topaz of the twilit wallpaper. How appropriate for an angel. How grievous is this salvation to waste it on a monster like Rei.
Nagisa’s fingers tighten in his hair as Wataru’s fingers do too, and Nagisa’s hips stutter as Wataru’s hips do too, and Rei momentarily loses sight and breath and heartbeat as a violent spasm runs from the top of his spine down, and,
tight, stuttering,
he finishes off.
Cursed eyes, tainted lungs, and this damned heart – now none exists, all gone up in flames and scorched to a husk of a being.
Head cut off at the neck and tossed somewhere far beyond the ornamented cornices of his ceiling, Rei’s body listens to the crescendo of his duet of angels, a vague rendition of a Requiem in D Minor. It tastes like Nagisa on his tongue, viscous in his throat – like molasses, and it heats him up from the inside of his belly.
They are so flawlessly attuned to each other, and to him, as if by some miracle, a godly grace. He can only inhale the air he’s been missing when Nagisa frees him of his weight – and it is such a pity that he does. Wataru lowers his hips back into the sheets, and his legs drop powerlessly by either side of them.
Perhaps it was a tactful retreat on Nagisa’s part, lest a bat burst out of Rei’s chest and eat at his exposed heart.
When his head returns to its place between his shoulders, he opens his eyes and sinks into the quiet, evening blues. Before he is attacked by the cold, he is swathed in warm kisses on his thighs, and his stomach, and his face, too, dotted with dew of tears and sweat.
“Rei,” Nagisa calls him. He always does, calls him by his name, bringing him back to the ever-spinning Earth where they lay in each other’s embrace. Like equals. Like the first clueless humans, wallowing in the mother-nature's love for them.
But were they all equal… would it mean his angels are composed of mere flesh and blood as others? Is his own star-crossed flesh nothing but the product of one’s instinct for creation? Relinquished into the dregs of being not by the will of God, but by some arbitrary order. Unkissed by the nymphs, but salvaged by angels. And still, not a freckle to show.
Wataru gracefully falls beside him with a savoury sigh. “Ah, and as always, you fill me with heavy delight, my prince of eternal inferno!”
An arm draped over his middle, a hand counting innate beats against his chest, cheeks pressed to either shoulder, some mutual understanding keeping his skin warm as the sweat cools. Discomfort prickles in his legs, between his legs.
“I admire how your speech never loses its lyrical quality, Wataru,” Nagisa says. “Sometimes, I grow so tired I struggle to express myself even in the simplest sentences.”
“Of course, my beloved, once your oral skills are honed to such perfection as mine, it is impossible to lose your tongue!”
Their conversation breezes over his chest like leaves collected by the early autumn wind. Just a little bit. Just a little bit more.
“Hm. There was definitely a comedic intent behind that line, wasn’t there?”
“Challenge yourself and unravel my secrets on your own, my silver fledgling.”
Just a little bit, he prays. Just a little bit more, until Rei greets the morning.