Chapter Text
Though he makes a big show about how he intends to stay up all night to ensure the Hero doesn’t attempt anything while his king rests, Ashiya falls asleep almost instantly—leaving Maou alone in the dark with Emilia.
Emi, he corrects himself. She’s Emi here.
Less than an hour prior, he knocked her to the ground and covered her body with his own to protect her from the gunfire. It was an instinct he hadn’t known he had, and it was clear she was equally surprised.
He listens to her breathing—too rapid to be asleep. Short, clipped exhalations. He wishes he didn't know how to interpret them.
Her presence here seems simple—she lost her wallet, and he lived nearby—but it doesn’t feel simple. The implied trust it would take a young woman to ask a centuries-old demon king to spend the night in his one room apartment feels alarmingly complex. He turns it over in his head, worrying the rough edges until they slide smooth against his skull.
Emi felt safe with them; or at least, between street vagrants and her self-proclaimed arch nemesis, she chose the latter.
He steals a glance at her. She is huddled against the wall, the edges of the blanket he gave her pulled over her head. A few crimson locks peek out.
Cute.
A treacherous fondness rattles through him, and he quickly looks away.
Of all the things Maou didn’t expect about living on Earth, it’s the emotions that leave him floundering the most. The problems he’s presented with are nothing like those of Ente Isla, and—now that he’s in his human form the majority of the time—neither are the people.
Emi most of all.
She is abrasive and aggressive and always in his business, and in another life, she tried to kill him a dozen times over, but…sometimes she’s disarmingly soft. He doesn’t know how to deal with her like this, how to deal with himself. She shows an ounce of vulnerability, and his brain malfunctions. He does ludicrous things like loaning her train fare or counting her breaths in the dark.
Still too fast. Anxious.
A pang shoots through his chest.
It would be so much easier if he hadn’t learned these signs of human distress from his coworkers and customers in the many months since he’d last seen her. If he didn’t know how uncomfortable Emi was, he wouldn’t feel this stomach dropping empathy that eats through him, leaving guilt in its wake. He’d never felt it in the past. She’d advance on him, breathing hard, blood running down her face, and he would grin—he wouldn’t be hollowed out by the knowledge that he decimated her homeland just as his was destroyed. The knowledge that he was her monster.
Is he still?
He thinks about that for a long time, staring at the dim stains on the ceiling, barely visible in the light filtering in from the streetlamps outside. Finally, Emi’s breathing slows, deepens, and she falls asleep at his side.
He wonders if he has his answer.