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i.
When he is young, Ryo reads big books with a lot of Grown Up, Scientific language he can understand better than most of the teachers. He also reads books about poetry, and romance, and mythology when he runs out of anything else. He reads those ones, the easier ones, aloud to Akira sometimes, because Akira’s always been a little slower in learning how to do things like read and write and memorize his multiplication tables, and he says he likes it when Ryo reads to him.
He reads about how Zeus split human beings in two, man and woman, as punishment for their pride, and cursed them to always be searching for their other half. He reads about the red string of fate tied around your pinky. He reads about soulmates. Akira thinks the idea is very sweet, the concept that there is someone out there made just for you, created specifically for you to love and cherish.
“What do you think your soulmate is like?” Akira asks him one day.
“I don’t believe in soulmates,” he tells him. “And love doesn’t exist, anyways.”
Akira frowns a little. “You always say that.”
“Because it’s true.” he says it with such conviction that it surprises himself a little bit; he doesn’t know why he feels it so strongly, some phantom ache, and adds quickly, to cover it up, “It’s just chemicals in your brain.”
“They’re nice chemicals, though,” Akira says, because he always has a positive take.
“I suppose so.”
A moment later, “I hope my soulmate is nice. And pretty.”
Ryo listens to Akira go on about the qualities he’d like his One True Love to have. Quietly, he compares and contrasts, and doesn’t think he possesses a single one. Even more quietly, he thinks that if soulmates did exist, he’d hope his red string would tie him to Akira.
ii.
Ryo feels too big for his body, sometimes. Like his skin is stretching too thin and his bones are too brittle to hold him up. Like he’s full and bursting at the seams, but he doesn’t know what will come pouring out if he rips open.
There is a disconnect between what he knows he should feel and what he does feel, what he knows he should be and what he is. He knows this because he spends a lot of time watching the children in his class and the way they talk to each other and hum to themselves as they play with their toys. More than that, he watches Akira and the way he feels for everything and everyone. Sometimes, Ryo likes to think that all of the things he should feel were accidentally given to Akira instead. That he can’t feel these things because Akira does it for him, because Akira is kind like that. He would take whatever Ryo asked him to without a second thought.
(Tied together. One souls existing in two bodies. He brushes these thoughts off. His body is hollow and his chest is empty like a casket; maybe Akira has enough soul for both of them.)
Sometimes, Ryo feels too old for his body. ‘Sometimes’ here means most of the time. When he tears toys apart and tries to put them back together better; a girl in his class cries as she watches him try to shove a dinosaur head onto a baby doll’s body and she doesn’t understand that he’s trying to make it stronger. If it stays a baby forever it won’t survive. It is the oldest rule of the world and he’s known it since before he knew how to breathe or talk or think . He feels it in his bones of his being.
The other children don’t like him. His mind is older than his body, too, and he knows so much and he doesn’t know how, but the teachers seem to know this, too. No one likes a prodigy unless it’s their own kid. Ryo isn’t anybody’s kid, so no one likes him at all.
Except Akira, because Akira is always the exception. People make fun of him, because he cries ten times a day and doesn’t know how to stand up for himself.
“It’s the pinhole theory,” Ryo explains, and then they watch the eclipse together and he explains that, too.
The moon pushes and pulls the tides, it’s not the oceans breathing, he explains. Every emotion you feel is just a mixture of chemicals in your brain that make you feel a certain way. The universe is infinitely expanding. Someday it will stop.
He talks about things he reads in books and Akira listens with a patient curiosity, even though he doesn’t always fully grasp what he’s talking about.
“That’s super cool, Ryo,” he’ll say, “You’re really smart!”
Ryo will shrug, but he’ll say “Thank you,” instead of I know.
“The stars you see in the sky right now are dead,” he explains, the two of them spread out on the cliff where they met, the night sky peering down at them, “The light takes a long time to travel close enough that we can see it. The stars they came from have died out by now.”
Akira is quiet beside him, “Did it hurt when they died?” he asks, in that choked up voice that means he’s about to cry.
“No,” Ryo says, because of course it didn’t, “They’re just stars. They can’t feel anything.”
“What about when they fall?”
“Like shooting stars?”
“Yeah. When they fall from the sky. Does it hurt when they land?”
Something inside of Ryo twists, sharp and deep, and he doesn’t know why. He opens his mouth to tell him that it’s not stars that fall to earth, it’s meteors, and if a big enough meteor fell from space it would wipe out the whole planet.
Instead, he says, “I don’t think so. They burn up in the atmosphere before they can hit the ground.”
It tastes like a lie. Falling hurts, he thinks, somewhere deep inside of him, and they hit the ground so fucking hard it aches for years.
Still, Akira says, “That’s good,” like he’s relieved. He probably is.
“They’re just stars,” Ryo says again, “You don’t have to cry about it.”
“You’re crying, too,” Akira says, in that way that Ryo never understands. He feels his little hands brush against his own, lace their fingers together.
“I’m not sad,” he says, and feels, once again, like he’s lying.
Akira laughs quietly into the night sky.
iii.
He wakes in the middle of the night breathless and scared of things he cannot remember, before and after Jenny comes and takes him away, in the little town by the ocean and in the states and everywhere else he travels. The taste of sulfur, adrenaline, a flash of white wings and horns curling like the cartoon devils he sees on TV. Akira, lost. The soul-deep ache of loneliness. An endless free-fall through the sky, arms outstretched towards the heavens.
He never remembers these dreams, and never knows why his heart hammers in his chest. All he knows is that he is afraid.
(“If it makes you feel any better,” Satan tells Akira, “Ryo didn’t know until recently. He really did think what he was doing would save humanity.”
“It doesn’t,” Akira says, and his voice is all choked up but his eyes are dry, “It doesn’t make me feel better at all.”)
iv.
Sabbath reminds him of things he doesn’t remember, the steady hum of music and the smell of alcohol and sex and weed and the heat of a hundred bodies moving at once. It has his heart racing just as much as it has his stomach rolling in disgust.
Akira looks beautiful under the lights, flashing and changing. His eyes are wide and he presses close to Ryo out of discomfort or maybe just because he wants to. Ryo presses back.
They kept in touch after Ryo left, and instead of a Skype call a week turning into one a month to one a year to none at all, they Skyped and texted and didn’t call as often, but were always aware of each other in a way that was better than anything Ryo could have hoped for. Akira is the first one Ryo tells about becoming a professor; Ryo is the first one to hear about Akira’s decision to join track and field, or how upset he is about his parents leaving to do important doctor stuff.
He confides in him late at night that the Makimuras are very nice, but he’s not sure he will ever feel like he belongs here. Ryo nearly tells him: that’s okay, I don’t feel like I belong anywhere on this earth. But that would be a lie, because if Ryo belongs anywhere, it’s here, typing away on his laptop and listening to the quiet sound of Akira’s voice distorting through the phone. He tells him it’ll get better in time, instead, and that adjustment periods are normal and if he creates a routine for himself he should have an easier time settling in.
The words come live with me crawl under his skin, and Ryo knows they are ridiculous and unrealistic. Ryo is a busy person, and Akira still has school.
He doesn’t—he doesn’t miss him, not when he knows where he is and still remembers the sound of his voice exactly, but he. Wants. To be around him, again. Feels something in him pull with an unfamiliar urgency after Professor Fikira sets himself on fire — demons are real, devils are real, they are everywhere and Akira is still like that kitten Ryo almost slashed open. He needs to be stronger.
Ryo watches from his place sprawled on the ground underneath the dead demons’ bodies as Akira roars and kills until they are the only two creatures left alive. Akira is strong, now, even if he cries when he wraps Ryo up in his big arms and says are you okay? how hurt are you? and carries him home like he’s something precious to be handled gently. He’s warm and solid and Ryo feels like if he could live in this moment for the rest of his life, safe and with Akira around him— fuck the demons, he could be content.
Akira is strong now. He’ll survive what’s to come. (Which is— what, exactly? The search and extermination of demons? The fight for mankind? Something bigger and more important looking ahead of him through a fog that he can’t see through.)
He is strong. Ryo ignores the voice in his head that tells him it won’t be enough.
v.
Once, in a certain loop where things either work out perfectly or horribly, Akira gets a clawed hand through Satan’s chest. It pierces right through, like it was made to do this one thing.
Satan looks down, looks up, feels his legs giving out. Akira looks properly horrified with himself, looks down and up and down and catches Satan as he falls, because only he would catch the creature that destroyed his world.
“Ryo,” he says, always clinging to the name of his best friend and not the name god had granted him with. Blasphemous, some part of him thinks. Good. “Ryo.”
He is crying, even after he said he couldn’t, wouldn’t, cry for him. Maybe he’s crying for himself, for once. It doesn’t matter.
God laughs down at them, at Akira’s hand still buried in Satan’s chest. Satan — Ryo will not be the last creature alive, this time. The thought of Akira existing the same way he did, aimless and completely alone, makes him want to cry. Makes him cry.
Still, he thinks he’s been waiting a long time to die by Akira’s hand.
“I love you,” he tells him, Satan and Ryo both. He does not stick around to see the look on Akira’s face, because he thinks it might ruin him if he did.
vi.
God asks have you learned your lesson, little angel?
Satan says: fuck you.
God laughs down at them.
The world starts anew.
vii.
“What’re you doing this for?” Akira asks him one day, much more direct and confident than he would have been a few months ago.
Ryo looks up from his laptop. Akira is eating from a bag of chips he must have found in the kitchen. He licks the salt from his fingers.
“There’s a journal being published next month that I’m writing a research paper for.”
“Not your paper,” Akira says, rolling his eyes but smiling a little, “I mean the demons. What’re you fighting them for?”
Ryo blinks, “If we don’t fight them, no one else will. The human race would be devoured.”
Akira hums, “It kinda makes you wonder though.”
“About what?”
Akita rubs at the back of his neck, a nervous habit from back when he still had his baby fat and narrow shoulders, “Y’know, how could they exist? And how come we’re the only ones that can do anything about it?”
For a moment, Ryo does not know how to answer. Thinks about the years his mind feels but his body does not, and things ripping each other apart to survive. Turns back to his laptop.
“Life is cruel,” he tells Akira, “God is cruel.”
Akira seems to think, tilts his head like he wasn’t expecting that answer, “Miki’s family is pretty religious. Her dad says God is loving, that he loves us all.”
Ryo could laugh, but he doesn’t. “God rules arbitrarily, like nature’s storms, or cancer. No amount of praying can sway him. He doesn’t love me.”
He can feel Akira looking at him, dark brown eyes boring into him, “He loves everyone.”
“He doesn’t love me,” he repeats, stubborn, “I don’t know why. But he doesn’t love me.”
(Later, he will understand: love didn’t stop him from falling, and love didn’t stop the thousands of years he spent wandering around alone. He spent months crossing the largest ocean God created on the earth, staring up at the stars and thinking of nothing. It’s the largest thing he’s ever crossed on his own, and not even God could ever understand.
Love didn’t stop him from making the same mistakes again and again and again and love didn’t stop humanity’s destruction or Akira’s death. If love exists, then so does sorrow, and that fact alone makes Ryo the loneliest creature he’s ever known.
God does not love him. Maybe, briefly, Akira does. The only person on earth to ever love him, and he does not realize this until he’s already dead and cooling.
God is cruel.)
viii.
The kitten dies. Ryo crosses the ocean alone. The universe is infinitely expanding. The stars in the sky are already dead. These things are not connected, but they are the same every time.
ix.
There is a moment where everything makes sense. He felt too big for his body because he is. There is so much in his mind because he has lived for eons and eons and eons. He does not feel what the humans feel because he is not human, and he never will be.
He has to wonder, sometimes, if anything about himself, about Asuka Ryo, Akira’s best friend, was real. If he chose any of it. If he ever really had a say in how anything was going to go, or if it was all predetermined. The years he spent wondering why he wasn’t normal meant nothing. His human struggles were worthless. He does not know if this makes him feel good, or strangely bitter.
Akira still calls him Ryo, even after he reveals himself and destroys everything Akira does and does not hold dear.
You took the most important thing away from me, Akira says, angry and beautiful and nothing like the boy that found him on the cliff by the ocean. Quietly, as Akira promises to kill him, Satan wonders why Ryo was not the most important thing when that’s all Akira has ever been.
(I would rebuild the world for you, he tells him, staring up at the dead stars, I would give you anything you asked for, we could rule the universe together. I never wanted to save humanity. I wanted to save you. I’ve always wanted to save you.
God peers down at him and says you knew he was going to die.
I knew nothing, Satan thinks but does not say, because God is cruel and he is all-knowing. I knew nothing at all.)
x.
Once, Akira kisses him, and it’s soft and sweet and entirely perfect, the way Ryo used to love him back when he would throw things at the boys who took Akira’s shoes and read to him and watch the stars with him. Soft and sweet like a child loves.
Ryo kisses him back but he doesn’t know how to be soft or sweet or perfect. Akira guides him through it, a big hand on his chin and on his waist, and there is no demon in this, nothing frantic or bloodthirsty trying to claw its way out. It’s just Akira.
“Why’d you do that?” Ryo asks him when he pulls back. His voice is weak enough that he flushes in embarrassment.
Akira shrugs, smiles his bashful smile, “I dunno. I just wanted to.”
Ryo smiles back, something soft and sweet, the way he used to love him before he even knew what it was.
He leans back in, and it feels like the end of something.
A few months later and Akira is screaming at him with the head of the girl he likes so much cradled in his arms the way he cradled Ryo to his chest the night he first turned, the way he ran his fingers through his hair the first time he kissed him. The way they do this again and again.
They are not soulmates. They are not the soft, happy people he used to read about in those stupid books, what they share is not loving and pure and happy and beautiful. It is god-given, but God is cruel, and God has trapped them in this eternal dance and Ryo—Satan—Ryo will never ever be free from it. He’s caught Akira up in it as well, because he is a selfish creature who fears isolation and ruins perfect things and even now, even crying and weeping and regretting, he doesn’t want to give Akira up. He doesn’t regret meeting him, being swept up in his tears and his fragile little bleeding heart and then broken forever.
They are not soulmates. Satan—Ryo—Satan has carved his name into Akira’s back and let Akira do the same, ripping off his wings and breaking the heart he didn’t know he had, and they are tied together through eons of mistakes and heartbreak and fleeting moments of something he could call love, if he wanted to. There is no red string of fate. There is only he, and Akira, and the cliff near the ocean.
God laughs down at them. The world starts anew.
i.
When he is young, Ryo reads big books with a lot of Grown Up, Scientific language he can understand better than most of the teachers.