Levi stands at the Gate between his world and the human world. It’s one of seven Gates that exist, and the closest one to where he lives. So close, in fact, that it is within walking distance, which is convenient because Levi is too stupid to drive a car.
He’s here for a reason. There’s a very compelling reason for him to return home that isn’t just ‘I Want To Go Home’. There’s a Problem. He just... doesn’t know what the problem is yet.
This particular Gate is called the Lydian Gate because it led to the kingdom of Lydia in the underworld. Lydia itself is ruled by this cool person called Lucifer who sounds scary but is pretty cool once you get to know them. It’s fortunate for Levi, because he has to cross through Lydia to get back to where he’s meant to be which is called the Kingdom of Locria and it’s obviously the best one because it was his and it’s really cool.
Anyway, the Lydian Gate is disguised as an old house and had at one stage actually been a house where people lived, until they got sick of demons walking through their kitchen during dinner.
Levi has done a lot of reading on this subject. He knows far too much useless information about it. He doesn’t need to know what the gate is called, or what its past was. All he needs to know was how to open it.
Conveniently, all he needs is two things he carries with him at all times.
Fire.
And blood.
He lets his blood drip onto the shitty old carpet and lights a fire on his finger. He presses it to the carpet in an attempt to light it up but the carpet is wet because the windows are broken and boarded up and this place is a desolate wasteland. It smells like garbage and mold. It’s probably a health hazard for him to be here.
Cobwebs hang in every corner and snakes live in the fridge, which is definitely not where snakes normally live.
He tries again but the carpet is still wet. He’ll probably have to dry it out. Levi sits on the floor and misuses his sick fire powers.
They’re supposed to be for beating the shit out of his enemies. not a glorified hair dryer.
As he sits and waits, he looks around the room. All there is to do is to sit and think, which he tends to do a lot of in this room because all he does is fail to open the Gate.
He’s been here several times before, and nothing has ever worked. He spray painted a pentacle on the floor, he graffitied the walls, he wrote Levi wuz here next to the window where everyone else’s graffiti was and he peed on the floor, not because he thought it was going to help, but because he was annoyed and he wanted revenge.
But this time it was going to work. This time he’s done his research instead of assuming all his knowledge would help him. He doesn’t remember jack shit about how the Gates work, so this time he sucked it up and went to the library.
A string on the carpet finally catches alight. Thank God, he was starting to get bored. Now it’s time for the real fun to start.
White light shines out from the fire until it engulfs the room. There is no room now. There is only white and. There’s not much of anything else. It’s a nothing room. He can’t see which way is up or down or left or right or where the roof or floor is. All he can see is white flames nothingness.
And a . A figure. A person.
Oh. Of course. The Guardian. He’s forgotten about those, too. He’s forgotten most things, and this is a relatively important thing, because it’s probably going to set him back years depending on who it is guarding the gate.
She’s sitting on the floor, watching something on her phone, straight-faced. Emotionless, almost. Maybe he can sneak past her. She doesn’t seem to be paying attention or anyth-
“Back so soon, Levi?”
Well. That just proves him wrong.
But it also proves him right about so many things. He isn’t just some delusional teenager with detailed visions and memories of a place that doesn’t exist. H, he’s Levi, he’s real, he exists, and this girl knows him.
He knows her, too. He thinks.
He just can’t quite remember her name.
“Wasn’t expecting you for another few years at least.”
“Well,” says Levi, and then he doesn’t say anything else because he has nothing else to say. “Yeah.”
She turns to face him. He definitely knows her face. Green eyes, brown hair, plaid shirt with a rainbow flag pin on it. That’s just her. He knows who she is.
But not her name.
He knows when they met, and what they’ve done together, but for the love of God he can’t remember her name.
“I see you’ve forgotten who I am.”
“No I haven’t,” he says. “I know exactly who you are. I remember meeting you, I remember all that garbage, I remember everyone’s faces, I remember you but...”
“I can’t let you through, then.” The Guardian leans forward, her hair falling over her shoulders.
“I haven’t even said that’s what I want yet.” For all she knows, he could just be coming to say hi. Or maybe he got here by accident. There are so many reasons he could be here.
“It’s what you always want.” She shrugs. “Sorry, pal. King or no king, if you can’t even remember my name, I can’t let you through yet.”
“But you have to,” Levi protests. “I have a guardian angel and he’s really cute but he’s probably going to kill me so I have to go back. The human world sucks.”
“It’s, like, 90% the same,” she says. “Stop being a baby. You’re a King of Hell, you should be able to stop a single angel.”
“But I’m weak. And he’s so nice.”
“Exactly. You’re weak. You’re emotional. I’m not letting you back in. How can we expect you to be a decent leader if you’re scared of one angel?”
“I’m not scared of him, I’m gay for him.”
“...you’re also scared.”
He hates how well she can read him. “Yes.”
“Exactly.” She sighs. “We done here? Netflix is calling me.”
“No,” says Levi. “We’re nowhe-“
The white world disappears and Levi is left standing in the middle of the room again.
“-re near done,” Levi finishes slowly.
God, this place really smells like piss compared to the Gate. Why did they put the Gate to such a nice place in such a shitty old building?
He sits on the floor, and then lies back to stare at the ceiling. He’s never going to get back. It’s all too fucking hard. He doesn’t want to keep living here in the human world where he has to pay rent and think about things like people and jobs and money and his absolute hatred for his own body.
But Hell is stressful too. He wants to go back because it’s easier there than it is here, but really, ideally, he’d just stop existing. He’s sick of it. Thousands of years he’s existed and it’s getting kind of old.
But that’s hard to do, too. So he’ll have to do one of them, and currently the only thing he can do is stay in the human world.
After about half an hour of contemplating existence and the meaning of life and how worthless everything is, Levi finally manages to summon the will to stand up. He doesn’t want to, but he has to get home eventually, and he doesn’t want to walk home in the cold and dark where he’ll probably get murdered.
The moon shines through the cracks in the boarded up windows and illuminates the spray paint on the carpet. Oh boy, it is definitely time to go. He hadn’t realised how late it was getting.
He pushes himself up and rubs his face. He has to stop doing this shit. Going to random places, crying, thinking about his life, regretting everything, losing track of time, regretting everything more, and then being in pain because he’s done something stupid like lie with his nose on the floor for half an hour. He’ll probably end up falling asleep there next time he does it, and no one wants to sleep at the gate because it smells like shit and the spiders would probably eat his flesh as he dreamt of better times.
Levi walks out of the house, under the hole in the fence where the wire’s been ripped away, and past the sign that says ‘no trespassing’.
Well, what’s he gonna do about it? Is everyone supposed to ignore the Lydian Gate because of some stupid human sign? He doesn’t think so. As far as he’s concerned, that sign means nothing. He can’t read.
Anyway, if he gets arrested he can probably just convince Shep to fix it for him. Or the Guardian. They can probably do something.
He feels less alone now. There are people around him who know of his existence and who call him Levi instead of whatever garbage name his parents gave him. Maybe that’s kind of a low bar for friends but Shep and the Guardian are Levi’s friends and he wouldn’t change them for the world. Like, sure, maybe there are people out there who won’t murder him for being a demon. But 1. Levi doesn’t have to come out to Shep and 2. Shep is probably way hotter.
He should probably be more worried about the Shep Likes To Murder Demons thing but honestly that’s a problem he’ll deal with later.
Levi puts his hands in the pockets of his jacket, walking down the street feeling like a cool kid. If only he had a pair of sunglasses. The gravel path crunches under his feet, as gravel does, and he kicks some out of the way. This is what life should be like. Pleasant, smooth, nice sounds, not crying despite experiencing a major setback and-
The gravel he kicked into the air doesn’t come down again. It levitates, surrounded by a purple smoke that looks very demon-y and very bad for Levi.
He steps away. The gravel slides through the air towards him.
This is not what life should be like. Life should be nice. Life should not be getting attacked by a demon because you kicked some gravel.
This fucking sucks.
Of course it had to be this far from the Gate for something to attack him. If he’d been any closer to it, the Guardian probably would have noticed and come to kill the offending demon.
Out here, she wouldn’t be able to tell. Levi is alone out here and he has to kill the demon with the power of one small candle.
Or maybe he’s not alone. Shep is meant to be the one killing the demons. Shep will be able to help, as long as Levi comes up with a sufficient enough excuse about what he was doing out here so late.
Levi pulls out his phone and sends a text.
help me
That’s kind of vague though, and probably a kind of unnerving text to receive at night. So he’ll send another to fix it.
im near the old abandoned house ☹
That’s not much better, but the gravel is climbing up his shoe now and he needs to run soon.
help theres a demon and i dont know how to beat up demons
And then Levi starts to run. The gravel sticks to him, though, like dipping something in maple syrup and it goes everywhere and it sticks everywhere and there’s no escape. Except instead of maple syrup, it’s gravel and it’s worse.
Levi’s phone beeps.
God damn it, not now. Can’t Shep see he was running? Well, he can’t, but Levi doesn’t want to run and read texts at the same time so he runs onto the grass and hopes it holds off the gravel monster for a bit.
It doesn’t really.
Shep’s text reads I’m on my way and that’s a good thing. Levi puts his phone in his pocket and starts to run again but he can’t run forever because he never does any exercise and his legs hurt already.
Levi stops running and gives up on that plan. It’s just not going to work. He picks up a stick instead and hopes it works. You know, Shep has a stick. He’s not special. Levi has a stick too so he can beat up demons just like Shep. It’s a decent sized stick. Maybe he can cover it with light too like Shep does.
Maybe the stick isn’t as straight as Shep’s but this can be similar enough. Levi closes his eyes. It’s time to use some magic.
He thinks about the stick, and what the stick would look like if it had fire all around it, and how the fire would feel in his hand, and how the flames should wrap around his hand.
He opens one eye just a tiny bit to see if it’s worked.
It hasn’t.
Levi opens both of his eyes again and groans. Instead of the cool fiery stick he should have, there’s a small flame on the tip of the stick. Even now, it’s flickering away.
He’s going to have to try pretty hard to keep it going. Levi holds it out and whacks some gravel away with the stick.
This is stupid. He feels like Harry Potter. Abracadabra or whatever. It’d be handy if magic worked like that. Just one spell that can kill anything.
Levi points the stick at the gravel. This is even stupider. “Avada Kedavra,” he says, in the least deadpan tone he can manage, which isn’t far from completely emotionless.
Nothing happens. Because that’s not how magic works. Stupid. Waste of time.
Levi sits on the ground and waits to die. When the gravel starts crawling up his legs again, he hits it away. The good thing is that gravel doesn’t have legs so it can’t move very fast. The bad thing is that every time he hits it away, more gravel comes back the next time and eventually this will bite him in the ass but for now this is everything he can do.
Can’t the flame get bigger? Can’t he do something? Anything?
Apparently not, because he’s Levi fucking Sterling and he can’t catch a break.
What can you do when gravel is crawling up your leg? Not much except wait for your friend who has a stick- god damn it, Shep is going to be useless too. So he’s going to die.
Unless he can like... talk to it?
He hits more gravel away and looks around to make sure Shep isn’t right around the corner before he reveals all his secrets.
“You know I’m like...a king, right?” he says. “Maybe you should think before killing me this hard.”
The gravel rattles together. Levi isn’t an expert in the language of gravel demons but he’s assuming that since it hasn’t stopped crawling up his leg that it didn’t work.
“Maybe I could...work out a deal for you?”
The gravel rattles faster.
“Is there anything you really want?”
“YOUR DEATH,” says the gravel, rattling together in a chorus of deep vocal-ish sounds.
“But why?” says Levi.
“CONVENIENCE,” says the demon. “WE WANT DEATH. YOU ARE NEAR US.”
“Does it have to be mine?” It would be a bit of a dick move to send this demon to kill someone else, but it would buy him some time at least and then he and Shep could use their sticks to fight it off the innocent victim.
Or he could find some asshole and just dump it on them. That could work too.
“WE ALSO WANT BRAGGING RIGHTS,” it says in a significantly less deep voice. It’s still crackly and rattly. Just less threatening. “WE THINK IT WOULD BE COOL IF WE COULD SAY WE KILLED A KING.”
“Wouldn’t it be cool if you said you befriended the King,” Levi says hopefully. This is pointless. This is worthless. This isn’t working.
The demon slows its ascent up Levi’s leg for a moment. He takes the chance to brush some of it away from his jeans. Can’t have these things getting torn. They’re expensive as hell.
“NO,” says the demon after some contemplation. “IT WOULD BE COOLER TO SAY WE KILLED HIM.”
Well, fuck.
It’s crawled further up his leg now, it’s just past his knee and there’s just small rocks everywhere. This sucks. This is stupid. He could die just because he ran into some small rocks.
“Hey- hey! Careful with the jeans.” The rocks are crunching together as they ascend. This is getting weird. Also, they’re making his jeans dirty and he doesn’t like it. These are name brand Levi’s jeans and Levi paid a lot for the right to make stupid jokes about them and he’s not going to let these stupid tiny rocks destroy them.
He brushes off another wave of gravel and something on his knee catches his eye.
Those bastards.
A loose thread on his knee. They’re going to pay for this. They aren’t getting away with it now.
Levi pushes himself up and kicks the nearest tree. The remaining gravel falls off. It’s time to play seriously now. No more games.
He holds the stick in his hand, and without meaning to, the candle flame turns into a blaze that engulfs the entire stick. If he were paying more attention to the stick, he’d probably notice that he’s just used proper magic successfully, but he’s too pissed off about the jeans to notice what he’s doing.
A purple steam shoots from the gravel. Levi hits it again.
Now all the gravel is on the ground, and none of it is on his beautiful, beautiful expensive jeans. His poor, damaged, expensive jeans that he paid a lot of money for and this stupid fucking demon destroyed them.
Levi throws the stick onto the gravel and stares. Heat rises throughout his body. Fire burns in his fingertips, licks around his hand, his arm, and then surrounds the gravel.
Those fuckers took a thread out of his jeans and ruined everything. The flames rise higher. Levi’s teeth are clenched as he makes everything around him burn. His breathing is heavy as he stays dead focused on the rocks in front of him.
The flames burn hotter and fast. This piece of shit demon deserves it. The haze rises from the demon faster and thicker and-
It explodes. Gravel goes everywhere, grazing his face and his arms and having one last strike on his injured denim. When it all lands and doesn’t start moving again, Levi breathes out a sigh of relief.
His jeans are safe.
And...so is he, he guesses. With all the strand-coming-out-of-the-jeans thing, he’d forgotten he’d been in actual danger of death by gravel at one stage. So. Hooray. He’s not going to die.
Levi sits down to assess the damage. Strand come loose, x1. Streak of mud, x2. Patch of dirt, x4. Oh, his sweet child. Levi hugs his jeans. They’re alright now. Nothing to worry about. A quick wash and they’ll be almost as good as the day he bought them. Levi laughs, trying to convince himself that the damage is repairable.
A twig snaps nearby. Oh God, not again.
“Levi?”
Shit, he’d forgotten about Shep.
“Levi, are you alright?” Shep runs up to him and bends down. He’s holding his stupid fancy magic light stick. He drops it and it disappears.
“There was a demon. It-It just exploded.”
“You’re not hurt?”
“Only emotionally,” Levi says. His pants will never be the same again. “It was weird, though. It just blew up. Just like that.”
“I’ve never heard of that,” says Shep, holding out a hand. Levi takes it and Shep helps him to his feet. “But demons are strange and unpredictable. Could just be a weird type of demon.”
Strange and unpredictable indeed. In the past- what- twenty years? He’s barely been able to use magic at all. But whatever the fuck happened there was activated by his anger over his jeans. Not the fear for his life, which he has had many times while facing demons, but for some reason the angry just makes his magic work.
“Are you sure you’re alright?”
“My jeans,” says Levi.
“What about them?”
Oh, fuck. He said that out loud. “The demon broke them.”
“Maybe you’ll start a new fashion trend,” says Shep.
Levi sighs. This is weird. And stupid. And his jeans are damaged. Today sucked.
“It’s alright, I can fix them.”
“...You can?” In all his whining and thinking about his poor damaged jeans, he’d never stopped to think if they could actually be repaired. It makes sense that this is fixable. It’s just a small thread.
“Absolutely.” Shep smiles. “But for now, you need to go home. It’s late.”
Levi sits on the couch with a bowl of cereal for dinner. Shep sits next to him with some kind of sharp implement for thing-fixing that Levi doesn’t quite understand, but it looks like Shep has already put the loose thread back in. Or maybe he’s taken it out but he’s done it so well that you don’t notice it. Either way, his jeans look normal again. It’s actually kind of cool. Shep knows how to do things so that it makes things look new. Levi would never be able to do it.
“Why were you out there in the first place?”
“Trying to do magic.” It’s not a very good lie, but it’s one he can back up better than any other lie. And he wasn’t about to tell Shep what he was actually doing there. Oh yeah, I was just trying to get back into Hell. Normal people stuff. “It was quiet. Isolated. No people.”
“Did it work?”
“Not really.” Levi tries to make a big fire like he did before. He pictures it in his mind, tries to remember how it felt when the flames were all up his arm. As always, the small candle flame on the tip of his finger is all that happens. Even smaller than usual.
“Yeah, me too.” Shep puts the jeans down and looks at his hands. “I’m supposed to be really good at magic. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong. All I can ever do with magic is a stick made of light, and that barely even makes sense. It’s stupid. I don’t know why I can’t do any better.” He sighs. “All I can think is that there must be something-“ Shep stops and shakes his head. “No, never mind. I don’t want to be annoying.”
“It’s alright, you know,” says Levi. “We’re friends.” What’s the point of this whole thing if Shep can’t rely on him as well? If they’re gonna be friends they need to do it properly.
“Are you sure? It’s not a waste of your time?”
“Man, I’m just here staring at the ground anyway. If you need to talk, go for it.”
Shep thinks for a second and nods. “Okay.” He doesn’t say anything after that. He sits there and stares at his hands a bit before continuing. “We- guardian angels- we’re meant to be really good at magic. All of us. So we can protect humans and kill demons that try to attack you. But I’m different and I don’t know why. Everyone else always had it right away. It took me years to work out how to do that stick thing. It was difficult. I wanted to be a guardian, though, so I studied and I studied and I bargained with them and I finally got into a school. And then I studied and studied and studied more but they still don’t take me seriously. Even though I can do anything they can do. I can still protect people. I just use different methods. But even when I’m doing it they all still treat me differently. Like I’m not good enough.”
“Damn,” says Levi. “That sucks.” He wishes he had something better to say. That sucks isn’t enough for what Shep is feeling. “Do they really matter? You’re a guardian angel now – I mean kind of a different one because of our agreement – but you’re just as good as any of them. We can prove it. You can prove it.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Shep says with a shrug.
“Let’s go out and do it tomorrow. We’ll track down a demon, we’ll kill it, you can show that you’re just as good as anyone else. You don’t need to be the same as them. Let’s go do some vigilante justice.” Levi looks out his window. There’s a whole big city out there, endless houses and the blinking stars inside their windows. There are a lot of people and surely some of them need protecting. Surely someone out there needs a guardian angel and doesn’t have one.
Tomorrow Levi is going to help Shep for once.
“Okay,” says Shep, smiling nervously. “Tomorrow.”
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