“What do you mean, they said no?” Levi speedwalks in the direction of his house, but Shepherd follows him. Levi has decided that Shepherd isn’t hot any more. He’s just frustrating and annoying and he keeps using those puppy dog eyes and Levi feels bad about trying so hard to get rid of him.
“Well, the Registry wants you to have a guardian angel, even if you don’t want one.”
Levi groans. Time to find that cliff.
“You must have something bad after you. I’m not sure what it is, but you must be a special case, because it was a quick and immediate ‘no’.”
Levi keeps walking, avoiding eye contact or even looking at the guy. He doesn’t want to be part of this garbage.
Shepherd obviously notices this because he pulls on the bottom of his shirt and looks at the ground again. “…Sorry.”
God Damn it, this isn’t Shepherd’s fault. He’s just doing his job. Levi can’t be this much of an asshole to him.
Don’t hate a single person for the actions of their group, or whatever the poetic way to say that is. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
“No, don’t apologise.” Levi stops walking. Hopefully this won’t make Shepherd sad again. “I just- I’m a little frustrated and overwhelmed right now, and this new guardian angel thing isn’t helping.”
“Oh. Of course. That’s…” Shepherd looks like he wants to apologise again, but he can’t, because Levi told him not to.
Levi rubs the bridge of his nose. He really doesn’t want a guardian angel, but he doesn’t seem to have much of a choice here.
The best thing he can do is work out some kind of compromise. “Are they listening?”
“What?”
“The Registry. Are they listening right now?”
“No.” Shepherd frowns. “Why?”
“Here’s what I think should happen. I think we should be friends. You can stick around, we can hang out, but no hovering around and telling me what to do and ‘protecting’ me or whatever, because I can do that myself.”
“But won’t the-“
“We’ll tell the Registry you’re my guardian angel. And we’ll just be friends.”
“You’re not supposed to know about the guardian angel thing, though.”
“Then we can stick with the friends thing, you can pretend to do your job, and everyone will be happy.”
“But I want to do my job.”
Jesus Christ, this is impossible. This is why he doesn’t want to work with angels.
“Meanwhile while we’re being friends we can go around doing guardian angel-ing for people who actually need it.”
Shepherd sighs, and then nods. “Okay. But you’d better be good at pretending to be friends.”
“By the time your boss comes around, we won’t need to pretend.” He says it with enough poison in his voice that he doesn’t realise that actually maybe that was a kind of nice thing to say and-
This isn’t what he wants. He doesn’t want to be friends.
But, at this point, it seems like it’s the best option he’s gonna get.
It takes a while, but Levi finally gets rid of Shepherd, using some excuse about needing to go home and take a nap. Obviously it’s not going to be the last Levi sees of him, but he’s free for now. At home. In silence. Binge watching garbage on Netflix. Regretting his life choices.
This is nowhere near as fun as he thought it’d be. He’s spent all day wishing to be home but now he’s here, he’s bored, and he honestly wants to have someone around again. His apartment is a mess. Clothes are all over the floor, empty cups and dirty dishes sit on every flat surface, and it makes his already-small studio apartment feel smaller.
He spins around on his office chair. He goes in circles, listening to the TV make people noises, another circle, again and again and again and again until his stomach feels bad. Levi crawls onto the floor and lies there.
Why is he so bored?
Before spinning on the chair and watching garbage, he’d been looking at pictures of Hell from the internet, but that just made him homesick so he gave up pretty quickly. Maybe he should go back to doing that.
Hell is a nice place, after all. Trees and grass and shit. Houses. Not entirely unlike where Levi is now. They call it the Middleground sometimes, but Levi usually just calls it The Human World even though angels and demons and everything that isn’t human lives there too.
But even if the human world is similar to Hell, it’s not similar enough. He’s not important here. He’s important in Hell, and that’s what he should be. That’s where he should be. They’ll let him straight back in as soon as he works out how to get to the Gate.
When he isn’t in Hell, like now and many other times, he is nothing. He does nothing. He has no friends or notable hobbies. He spends all day watching Netflix and bitching about the things he just bitched about.
So he has to get back to Hell. Otherwise he’ll be stuck here to suffer for eternity with the humans.
Levi crawls back onto his chair and spins around again. Oh God, that was a mistake. His whole body feels horrible now. His head, his stomach, his eyes…
He would kill for a distraction right now. When he went too long without a distraction he just started thinking about sad things and how much he hated his body and how much he wanted to fix but he couldn’t.
It took an embarrassingly long time for him to realise he was a bloke. Between all the dying and being reborn two thousand years ago, he didn’t have time to do much thinking. And being transgender wasn’t much of a thing back then either, and by the time he’d realised it, he’d die again. And then he’d be reborn, and he’d spend the next twenty years trying to remember everything about who he was.
God, his life sucks. Dying sucks. Remembering you’ve died sucks more. Remembering all four hundred and twenty times you’ve died is the shittiest thing, though, because as well as dying, you can also recall the pain from each and every one.
And that’s just how Levi’s life works. Dying, being the King of Hell, and dying again. In the more unfortunate lifetimes, he’d died before he could even get back to Hell, and those were the shittiest ones. He’s hoping that this one doesn’t repeat that trend.
...Has a distraction come for him yet?
Levi crawls onto the floor again, rolls around, and then starts to take off his pants. Not for any reason in particular. He’s bored, and a pair of jeans has endless uses. He could turn it into a hat, or a jacket or-
And, of course, that is when the knock on the door comes.
It’s probably Shepherd. There’s only one person who knows where Levi lives, and it’s Shepherd.
Levi quickly pulls his pants back on and crawls over to the door. He cracks it open. “Shepherd, I’m so glad you’ve-“ and then he remembers he has neighbors and it could be one of his neighbors telling him the house is on fire and here he is with his pants about to fall down and-
Nope, it’s Shepherd.
“You can call me Shep, you know. If we’re going to be friends. I think it’s a lot easier than saying Shepherd all the time.”
“Great,” says Levi. “Why are you here, Shep?” It feels almost too casual saying it like that. But they are meant to be friends, so…maybe it isn’t?
“I don’t really know, I’m supposed to be working right now but… you know.” He shrugs. “Can I come in?”
“Sure,” Levi says, and immediately after he remembers his home is a constant dumpster fire and probably a health and safety hazard.
But it’s too late. Shepherd- wait, no, Shep is on his way in already. He stops after about seven steps to take in the view.
“Are you alright? Genuinely? Are you-“
“Don’t ask questions you’re not prepared to know the answer to,” says Levi. He kicks a pile of clothes off the sofa. “Uh. Have a seat. Make yourself comfortable. If that’s even possible.” Levi closes the door to his room and shoves some more trash out of the way. “Would you like some tea? Coffee?”
“Oh. Um. No thanks.”
“That’s good because I have legitimately no idea where my kettle is.” Levi laughs nervously and sits on the floor. It’s probably hidden somewhere in the mess. He also doesn’t know where he keeps the tea or coffee, he just relies on them to materialise out of the garbage piles when he wants one.
It never happens, but he can always hope.
“Listen, I know you rejected the whole guardian angel thing but I will tell you as a new friend you really need to clean your room. Please. Dear Lord.” Shep looks around the apartment. The pile of Coke bottles on the floor. The dirty clothes on the bed that Levi has created a nest out of. Used knives and forks booby-trapping the ground. He didn’t notice this stuff until Shep came along for his surprise visit.
Levi is pretty sure there’s a family of diseased rats living somewhere among all this garbage, but Shep hasn’t seen them yet, so as far as they’re both concerned, the rats don’t exist. Besides, Levi is probably immune to the plague by this stage.
Probably.
“I can help you, if you want, honestly, really, this is-“
“Wouldn’t that be a guardian angel thing to do?”
“At this stage, it’s not a guardian angel thing. It’s an intervention.” Shep sighs. “Guardian angel job? Killing demons. Not-“ He gestured to Levi’s room. Just.
All of it.
“-Not this.”
“This isn’t a friend job either.”
“We’re not going to solve any problems by sitting here and whining about it. I'm going to 7/11, and since that sounds like a good friendship bonding exercise I decided to come here and ask: do you want to come?”
“See, the main part of my job-“ Shep sips at the 7/11 slushie. “Is to kill demons. They’re heartless creatures-“
Ouch.
“-who care about nothing but killing humans-“
Ouch.
“-and their own self-gain.”
Levi should probably be more insulted right now.
What Shep believes is both hurtful and wildly incorrect, but Levi doesn’t really expect him to believe anything different.
Most demons are normal people. Most of them look normal, they blend in, they’re not good or bad. They’re just people.
Some are bad. The angels can kill as many of those bastards as they want. It makes Levi’s life easier. The angels can kill as many murderers as they want. But if they’re going to just go and kill demons simply for being demons…
Well.
He can’t let that happen.
“They’re attracted to negativity. Cynicism, sarcasm, anger, hopelessness, general sadness.”
Maybe that’s why Levi is so depressed all the time. That’s just what demons do, apparently.
“And then they latch onto humans and make everything worse. Sometimes they physically eat people, sometimes they just eat their emotions or energy. There are a lot of different demons.”
“That’s pretty cool.” Levi doesn’t want to hear any more of this. This sucks. This isn’t cool at all. It’s kind of annoying now and even though he’s only doing this out of obligation, he’d started to like Shep just a tiny bit.
He’s killed that part of himself now. Never again.
“Anyway. I’ll stop talking about my job. Sorry.” Shep pulls on the ends of his scarf. “What do you do?”
“I, uh. Not much. I finished school a while ago. Now I’m just sort of lost.”
“Oh,” says Shep, then shrugs. “Me too. Except I just went straight from school to being a guardian angel. Which was pretty cool, because that’s what I wanted to do, but I haven’t really had much time to think about anything else.”
“Is angel school any different to here?”
“I don’t know,” says Shep. “There’s a real emphasis on productivity. And following the rules. Which I guess is normal, but they make it obvious so often it just gets kind of over the top sometimes.”
“So not that different to people schools.” Levi drinks his slushie. He wants this walk to end so he can go home and be bored. Being bored is better than being uncomfortable because the guy next to him wants to murder all demons. “Where’d you get your scarf?” Levi asks, because he’s out of better questions and he needs something to fill the time before he gets home.
“I made it myself,” Shep says. “I was procrastinating an assignment, and I started knitting, and then three hours later I had a finished scarf and an incomplete assignment due in the next twenty minutes.”
“Wow,” says Levi. He’s trying to stay neutral. He’s trying not to find Shep a funny, relatable guy but god damn it, it’s hard when he’s saying shit like that.
Levi doesn’t ask any more questions. Shep doesn’t either. They walk together in an awkward silence for a long time.
They walk past a park, and another, and a 7/11, and another, and then they’re close to Levi’s apartment building and the suffering is almost over.
Except somewhere in the silence it stopped feeling like suffering. Everything feels less pointless now. He can find his way back home. He isn’t going to die. He’s going to get all his memories back, he’s going to get rid of this angel following him around, and he’s going to go back to ruling Hell.
And he’s going to do it all tonight.
Okay, maybe that’s a little optimistic. But it certainly feels like he can do it all tonight.
“How are you feeling now?”
“Good,” says Levi, then he pauses and thinks for a second. “God damn it, was this your plan? You dragged me out here to make me start feeling be-“
“It worked, didn’t it?” Shep smiles and puts his hands in his pockets. “I can’t say I know much about friends. But I think this is something that friends do.”
Levi glares at Shep. That bastard tricked him into feeling better about himself. How could he do that? Using sneaky tricks and bribery to make Levi stop feeling like shit.
Levi sighs. He guess he better... “Thanks.”
...he’s trying not to be friendly. But he’s stuck with Shep, and he may as well not make another enemy because god knows he has enough of those.
“You’re welcome,” Shep says. He smiles again.
It’s kind of cute, but god damn it, Levi can’t be feeling like this. Remember, Shep wants to kill him and his entire kind.
Shep’s smile fades. Levi wants to say he’s not cute any more, but he’s still beautiful when he’s not smiling.
Levi needs to stop being gay for one second and get his shit together. He can’t let himself be like this when the enemy is right in front of him, even if the enemy is a very attractive young man who is the same age and exactly Levi’s type.
Shit. Oh, fuck. God damn it.
Shep is still frowning.
“Something up?”
“Demon nearby,” he says, and looks into the distance. “Somewhere over there, I think, I can feel it. I have to go and make sure it doesn’t hurt anyone.” Shep takes his hands out of his pockets. “Do you know any magic? You could come with me, but I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“You’re sounding an awful lot like a guardian angel.”
Shep gives an exasperated groan. “Friends don’t let friends get brutally murdered because they’re underprepared.”
Levi misses the days when he could kill lower level demons with the snap of a finger. He’s looking at this stupid ass rat demon and he hates it, but he can’t get rid of it because he’s dumb and weak. All he can do is make this tiny ass flame in his hand. Even humans can do it better than him half the time and they don’t even have magically-charged souls or whatever the fuck Levi has.
He used to be able to close his eyes and explode anything he wanted. Instead he has to look into the eyes of this creature and know it would nibble off all his fingers if he gave it a chance. It’s the size of a big dog.
Luckily for Levi, Shep’s a guardian angel and is probably good at beating the shit out of rat-looking bitches like this. He probably does this every day to work out or something.
Shep picks up a stick and gives it a good whack on the noggin.
Okay. Never mind. Maybe that’s all he knows how to do.
The demon spurts out a trail of purple oil as Shep hits it. The thing drips with it, with puddles forming under its feet with each footstep.
Oh dear god, he hopes Shep knows how to do more than just hit it. It keeps coming for them, the oil slick behind it growing longer and thicker with each step. It’s disgusting, it’s gross, and Shep hits it away again. This time it goes sailing through the sky and hits the roof of a building, then slides off onto the ground. It doesn’t disappear, though, it heads towards them again, dripping more oil and turning more and more purple.
“Can’t you do anything else?” Levi asks.
“Only if I have time to concentrate.” Shep stares at the ground and holds his hand out. He takes a deep breath in, and out, and then a light begins to form in his hand. He keeps staring at the ground and it gets longer, more defined, forming into a pole. He breathes out again and looks up, holding the pole in front of him.
“Is that the best you can do?”
“Yes, it is, I’m really bad at magic, but this works for me so you just have to trust me.” Shep waits for the thing to get closer to him, then he holds the stick in one hand and gives the rat another good ol’ whack. This time is better because it’s a magic whack. It’s not much of an improvement, but it certainly is an improvement, and it’s working well enough.
The rat is slowly starting to fade, the oil it’s dripped everywhere disappearing and its limbs going translucent. Every time Shep hits it with the stick, the light fades from the stick and goes into the demon.
It’d probably hurt to be hit by that. But that’s not Levi’s problem. Yet, anyway.
Shep lands one final blow and the stick shatters as soon as the demon turns into a pile of dust.
Yeah. That’d definitely hurt. But at least Shep is… competent. At killing demons. If someone comes to assassinate Levi, then at least he won’t die alone.
Haha. Yes he will. But if something comes to kill him that isn’t an assassin and is just plain stupid, at least he’s safe from that. Thanks, Shep.
“That was fun,” says Shep. “You should join me next time.”
“How about no,” says Levi. “I suck at magic. I’m good, man.”
“I’m bad at magic too. We can learn it together, and then we won’t be so alone at being terrible at it.” That’s a nice thought, actually. Someone who he can just be terrible around. He can suck at something with someone. Someone to suck with so he won’t be sucking alone- that’s...starting to sound bad, Levi knows he thinks like a 12 year old but that was just getting too close to innuendo. He likes the idea of being bad at something, while there is someone who is also bad at it.
There. That’s a better way to phrase it.
Shep walks back to the apartment with Levi.
He’s never really had any friends, or close relationships. Once he started remembering who he was, he’d just cut himself off from everyone. He’s been alone for a very long time.
Even though he’s fraternizing with the enemy and befriending a man who probably wants to kill him, he’s deciding he doesn’t mind as much. It’s just nice having Shep around.
This might not be so bad after all.
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