Here’s a fun fact about demons.
They’re not evil. They’re not mindless abominations that murder everything in sight. They don’t lack feelings. Demons are people.
Here’s another fun fact about demons.
Despite the above, some of them are cannibals.
Levi Sterling has discovered this at a rather unfortunate time. He’s barely ten minutes away from his place, he almost got through the day without incident. He’s just been to the shops getting groceries, and now he’s walking - well, running - through the park. There’s trees and grass and some kind of demon chasing after him and there’s no one around to save him.
Levi is also a demon why is it doing this why is this happening-
He should have expected this, really, because sometimes humans are cannibals, so there isn’t anything stopping demons from being cannibals.
...but. He’d had faith in demons as a whole.
Keyword: ‘had’.
He’s trying to get away without looking panicked. He doesn’t want anyone else to be scared because this thing is after him and him alone, and, you know, he’s meant to be a King Of Hell. He should be beating the shit out of this little bastard. This situation should have been resolved ages ago.
But, well, unfortunately, he’s kind of stuck and not very King Of Hell-y at the moment. Currently, he only has a small percentage of the strength he’s meant to have and his stupid teenage girl body has betrayed him. Why is he still alive? This is the shittiest possible situation to be in.
Also, his shoelace is undone.
Something is following him, and he doesn’t quite know what. It’s definitely a demon, but he doesn’t know what kind of demon. It doesn’t look like a person, that’s for sure.
He’s got a policy of “Don’t Look Back”, because the moment he looks back he will freeze in fear and the demon will come and eat him because cannibalism. He doesn’t want to die yet. He’s only like 22 and still hasn’t reclaimed his rightful place in Hell. There is so much he has to get done and he can’t be disrupted again by a stupid cannibal demon who-
Levi stumbles over an uneven patch, knocking a carton of strawberry milk out of his shopping bag and spilling pink all over the red brick of the path. He’d be more devastated if-
If he hadn’t just seen the demon.
If you can imagine a child, do that. If you can imagine a child made of lava, do that. If you can imagine a short man made of lava wearing jorts and a bucket hat, that would probably be the best description. That is what is following Levi right now, and he doesn’t like it.
Levi freezes. Not because of the bucket hat. Because of the lava.
Why did it have to be lava? Couldn’t it be something less ouchie? Something less painful? Something less fatal? A water demon, maybe? A plant demon?
Of course it’s lava. What else would it be?
Levi turns forward and bolts. He just goes for it. Faster than he’s ever run. Faster than the wind. Faster than a jet plane. Faster than anything he can think of, because if he doesn’t run fast he will either be evaporated, or murdered, or eaten by this jorts lava demon, and he isn’t very good at running, and he needs something to distract his thoughts from the burning in his lungs.
Levi stops running after twenty seconds to take a break. He can’t breathe. He's wearing a binder, and you’re not supposed to run in those things. And he isn’t fit, and he hasn’t run anywhere since high school P.E., and even if he hadn’t made the stupid fucking choice to wear his binder today he would have been in the exact same situation. If the demon doesn’t kill him, he’ll probably break his ribcage from trying to breathe too hard anyway.
This was a mistake. Everything was a mistake. It would be a whole lot easier if he just let himself die right now.
Jorts is catching up. Scratch that, he doesn’t want to die, he has a lot to do, he has a throne to get back to, and his death can’t be as shameful as this. He has to keep running.
Levi takes one final breath and keeps going. Walking quickly at first, but then running again until his foot catches on something and he trips.
His undone shoelace finally came to bite him in the ass.
God damn it.
Levi rummages through his shopping to find something to protect him. His hands run over a carton of eggs and even though he was planning to eat those for breakfast, they’ll have to do. He grabs an egg and throws it at the demon.
The shell cracks and the insides drip down and quickly go from fried egg to extremely burnt egg.
The demon is unfazed.
Levi scrambles backwards as the melting man slides towards him. It crawls closer, searing black into the ground behind it and hissing out puffs of smoke as it approaches. Levi pushes himself to his feet but it’s caught up to him now, there’s nowhere he can go that it can’t, heat swelters on his skin, it’s dripping lava onto his nice, clean, white shirt and the smoke is burning his eyes-
It goes flying backward.
Someone - a young man - is standing in front of him, holding a large stick with a charred tip.
Levi breathes a sigh of relief and lets himself fall forward. The ground is still hot and the soot is getting on his hands but he’s a King of Hell. He doesn’t care about hot things. Except when it’s lava.
“Are you alright?” asks the someone.
And really? A stick? Why didn’t he think of that? He spent this whole time running instead of thinking of how to get rid of it? He should have at least tried something.
“Hey, are- do you need help?”
Like he could have just kicked it oh god someone is talking to him.
“What-“ Levi looks up at The Young Man With The Stick. He’s probably around Levi’s age, with short brown hair and a green knitted scarf. His face is round and clear and he has these really beautiful green eyes, and god damn it, Levi told himself he was going to stop getting distracted by strangers. Wait, shit, now he looks even stupider, he has to say something- “Oh- uh- no. I’m fine.”
“Okay. Good. I was worried that it had hurt you or-” He starts pulling at the ends of his scarf, he’s looking at the ground, he’s just as nervous as Levi is about this. “I mean, it’s not good that it was following you but it’s good that you’re not hurt and- oh, sh- oh no it’s come back.”
The demon crawls closer to the both of them, and the stranger swings the stick like a baseball bat, landing a solid hit on the demon, sending it flying backward again.
It hits the ground a few meters away and then turns to dust. The man turns around and rubs his shoe in the dirt to put out the embers.
“Uh,” says Levi. “Thanks?”
“You’re welcome?” The guy shrugs awkwardly. Levi shrugs too. He’s not very good at this, and obviously this stranger isn’t an expert on talking to people either. “Sorry, I just, um.” This is going horribly. “What’s your name?”
“Oh! Right. I’m Shepherd.” He looks up, with a little bounce, and holds out his hand. Levi takes it, and Shep pulls him up before shaking Levi’s hand vigorously.
“I’m Levi,” says Levi, brushing dirt off his pants.
Shepherd looks confused, and stares at Levi’s face a bit, and does some mental calculations and Levi knows exactly what he’s trying to do so he’s just going make this quicker and easier for both of them.
“I’m a guy,” says Levi.
It happens a lot. Levi does look a lot like a girl sometimes but he also looks like a guy and he’s pretty sure he’s in the ‘completely androgynous’ zone, which means that it’s about fifty-fifty for getting gendered correctly. And sometimes, part of that fifty percent chance involves someone spending a good five minutes inspecting his face and awkwardly avoiding the use of pronouns altogether.
He’s short, he has short brown hair and a round-ish face but he likes to think he dresses masculinely enough to not get mistaken for a lesbian when he leaves the house.
“Oh my gosh, of course, I’m so sorry,” says Shepherd. “Nice to meet you, Levi.”
“You too.”
“Levi who is not a girl. Sorry.”
“Please stop apologising,” says Levi with a shrug. He probably sounded more annoyed than he wanted to. It happens a lot and he’s only really bothered by it when people ignore him correcting them.
There’s a bit of an awkward silence with more looking at places that are not the other guy’s face, and kicking pebbles on the ground.
“So,” says Shepherd, breaking the silence after a few minutes of standing around. “Do you know what that thing was?”
Does he know what that was? Does he-
He’s only supposed to be leading it. He’s only supposed to be its superior. Of course he knows what it is.
That thing wasn’t supposed to be out here. As far as he knows any demon that looks like that has been locked in the Labyrinth for centuries, but, for whatever reason, it was out here and not in there.
Levi doesn’t trust this guy enough to say that, though. Yeah man, I know what that is, I’m just the King of Hell. So cool. So chill. Very normal.
But does he really want to say no and have to listen through the whole explanation? It’s like doing the tutorial of a game you’ve played a million times. Levi doesn’t want to hear it all again.
If this Shepherd dude has Ulterior Motives, it wouldn’t be a good idea for him to know anything about Levi. And Levi has the time. It’s not like he’s planning on doing anything else for the rest of the day... He’s probably better off going with the minor annoyance. Probably.
“…No?” Great, now he sounds like an idiot. He should have just said ‘yes’ and pretended he was a very special human or something. “Do you?”
“...Yes.” He twiddles his thumbs a bit. “I was supposed to be killing that. Before it had the chance to kill any humans. Or try to, anyway.” He looks up at Levi like a lost puppy. “Sorry about that.”
Levi wants him to stop making that face. It’s kind of pathetic, really. “It’s alright, nobody’s perfe-“
“Actually, that’s not all,” Shep continues, “I really messed it up because I’m meant to be your guardian angel and I’m not doing a great job and- oh shit you weren’t meant to know that.”
Wait what the fuck?
“Guardian angel?”
“Just- um- forget I said that, I didn’t say that, I didn’t say anything about-”
“Who said I needed a guardian angel?”
Does he get a say in this? Levi wants to make at least some input. Like: Go away. Or: I’m fine, leave me alone. Levi does not need a guardian angel. He’s doing fine on his own. He’s the King of Hell, for god’s sake, either they have an extremely evil plan, or there has just been some huge fuckup.
“There’s- there’s this place called the Registry of Guardian Angels, and I work there, and they-”
“And when was I supposed to find out?”
“Well- never, you weren’t supposed to find out, I messed up, I’m just really bad at my job-” He sighs. “I’m really sorry, this is my first time-“
Levi doesn’t want to insult Shepherd. It’s not like the poor guy’s done anything wrong, and he seems genuinely sorry about - well, everything. It’s just that Levi doesn’t want a guardian angel. At all. He doesn’t want to be around angels, because angels just generally don’t like demons.
It wasn’t like that before, but obviously something had changed.
“Listen, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, you’ve done a great job, but I really don’t need a guardian angel. Can you go back there and tell them that? You’re a nice person and it’s nothing against you personally but I feel like there are people who need protecting more than me.”
Shepherd looks at him, kind of dejected, and sighs. It’s that lost-puppy look again, and it’s making Levi feel bad. “I’ll- I’ll see what I can do.” He closes his eyes and disappears.
Thank God for that. Like, sure, the guy is cute, but if Levi ever has to deal with angels in the long term he’s going to go find a nice cliff to jump off.
Well. Maybe not something that drastic.
But that’s what he’ll want to do.
Levi turns around and heads for his house. Angels take a notoriously long time to deal with issues like these. Ideally, he won’t see Shepherd for another few weeks at least.
The evening wind is setting in, the sun is slipping below the buildings casting the city in a warm glow, and holy shit Shepherd just appeared in front of him again.
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