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Akira is crying, and his hands are wrapped around Ryo’s throat. His arms are tense with his efforts, firm and knotted with muscles in a way they hadn’t been prior to Amon.
I miss the way they were, Ryo thinks rather absently while his eyesight begins to blacken at the edges. He closes his eyes, allows his body to relax so it can fall into the heaviness.
Just a little more, he thinks, wills Akira to squeeze just a bit—
Akira makes a strangled noise and abruptly loosens his hold, as if Ryo is the one choking him.
Ryo is wrenched from the hazy precipice, is acutely aware of the burning within his throat. He falls to the floor coughing, hands splayed out on the cold marble floor of his apartment.
Since his awakening three days prior, Ryo had been planning everything very carefully.
It had been set into motion with a phone call, words that feel like the most honest thing Ryo can say, has ever said in his countless lifetimes: “Akira, I need you right now!”
Ryo had heard the frantic unlocking of the front door from the comfort of his stark living room, and softly smiled at Akira’s characteristic and very endearing fumbling.
Then.
“Ryo, what happened?”
Akira’s panicked voice, newly deep yet still familiar.
Ryo watched as Akira took the scene in; Ryo leaning over Jenny’s still body, bloodied knife still in hand, several fresh punctures in her abdomen.
For three days Ryo had been careful, had composed himself and masked his distress so well that not even Jenny could sense what he knows to be his premature awakening.
Ryo now understands that Jenny had never been human, her relation to him always an illusion that she had expertly weaved at his—his?—own behest.
Something within him sings that he is something much stronger than she, and much less human. It scares him, but he is more scared for Akira.
“Akira, listen to me,” he had said softly. And Akira had listened, rapt, as Ryo told him of the truth, his intentions for this world.
He told him of his rebellion, his near-perfection and infinite arrogance (although none of it feels like his own.) He told him of his millennia-long desire to protect all demons from God’s flippant cruelty, and of his own divine apathy toward humans, although it all felt so distant and unreal.
He told him about how every step had been for the greater cause, the turning of humans against each other so his monsters could reclaim the earth.
Akira had listened so patiently, had let Ryo finish everything before he looked at him—
perhaps searching for some sort of further confirmation in the sharp lines of Ryo’s face—before asking a single question.
“And me?”
Ryo almost wanted to laugh, almost wanted to cry.
You? I love you.
He had paused for less than a second before answering. “You’re not human anymore, Akira. I changed you so that you could survive it all.”
Akira opened his mouth then, preparing to say something—
“Only you.”
And Akira was smart enough to know what came next. He closed his eyes, perhaps in grief or defeat.
Ryo had long since stopped expecting to understand Akira, this single human tangle of contradictions and illogical desires that he wanted to protect more than every demon in existence.
Before he was even conscious of it, Ryo began to move nearer to him, held Akira’s face with his right hand and absently swiped at a stray tear with his thumb.
“I will kill everyone but you, Akira.” Ryo intoned gently but steadily as he resisted the urge to kiss Akira’s eyelids. “You know what you need to do now. I made it so no one can interfere.”
Akira’s eyes snapped open, and he looked at Ryo as if he were helpless, as if he were not a being capable of snapping Ryo’s current form in half with ease.
“Kill me right here or I’ll kill everyone, Akira.” Ryo murmured. “I’ll make it so that nothing you love will exist anymore. I’ll take it all away, get it?”
And so.
Now, Ryo coughs on his hands and knees and Akira begins to hyperventilate. Jenny’s crumpled body is off to the side, her blood marring a fluffy white throw rug.
“Akira,” Ryo’s voice is wrecked, but he pushes on.
“I have done this thousands, millions of times, and it all ends up the same way.” He inhales sharply, tamps down on the pain in his throat. “It’s a punishment for me. But we can break it! And it’ll all be over, all be okay!”
Ryo realizes that his words are now urgent, panicked. He feels they do not have much time.
His speech is already beginning to sound foreign to his own ears, and the ache of his bruised neck is beginning to fade.
Akira just keeps looking at him with widened eyes, breaths slowing as Amon’s instincts are surely warning him of the growing energy emanating from Ryo.
Ryo steels himself, decides he must be cruel after all.
“I have seen that girl you love, her head on a pike.”
Akira tenses, eyes slitted, and Ryo notes that his hackles are raised, already becoming more Amon than Akira.
This will do, then.
“I just watched, I watched every time!” Ryo smiles, breathless and manic and intent in coming across as positively gleeful.
“Stop,” Akira says, but it isn’t his voice anymore. “Stop.”
“The things they’ve done, Akira, the things they’ve done to her body—”
He notes with relief that Amon has now taken over Akira’s body completely, and he anticipates the demon’s razor teeth sinking through his soft human skin, its sinew and meat.
“Goodbye, Akira. Please live.”
And then there is a golden light flooding everything, a brilliance that Ryo knows does not exist in the natural world.
Oh, darling boy.
You know we are not the selfless type.
And Ryo knows that for all his love, he has failed again.