Chapter Text
Working for Satan isn’t as bad as it sounds. As an Agent of Hell, you get your corporeal form back, affixed with a post-lifetime warranty that keeps you from worrying about your health. Every day you spend “cursed to your fate” is another day you get to watch the sun rise, get to have your morning coffee, get to stretch and close your eyes and feel your heart beat like a moth in clasped hands. It’s still here, and you are still here, and although you live now as a snake among men, you’re happy. Or you would be. If not for the fact that, a week into your afterlife, your higher-ups drop this bombshell on you: what’s happened so far has been a trial term. From now on, you’re to work the way the real agents do—with a partner.
You would not call yourself a ‘people person’. In fact, the only upside to your murder is that, now that you’re dead, you no longer have to deal with other humans. Now, though, you’ll be spending the rest of your damnation with a stranger at your side. Maybe you shouldn’t have been so ready to accept a plea deal from devils.
Your boss—using that term loosely, as ‘boss’ implies you could ever quit—set you up with all of the amenities needed for physical survival, including an apartment that’s pretty nice for being in the bad area of town. Apparently, your partner lives in the same complex, and you’re to meet them in the parking lot Monday morning. You’d try to argue your way out of it, but your lines of communication to the underworld are shut down, presumably until you stop whining. Well, damn. Looks like your haggling skills need work.
You get up with the sun on Monday and get ready for work, brushing your blond hair back and squinting into the mirror. First impressions, first impressions—what’s the most concise way to make this partner learn you don’t give a fuck about them? As your mother always said, the most important thing is to be yourself. You rub the stubble on your jaw and decide you’ll explain it to them plainly. Having reached this decision, you head out onto the parking lot.
You light a cigarette and let smoke out through your teeth, waiting by your work-supplied hummer for someone to show. It’s been long enough for you to start spacing out when someone taps you on the shoulder from behind.
“jesus!” you shout, and your cigarette falls to the ground. You grind it out with your toe when you turn to see—a kid. A fucking kid, not even twenty, he has to be. There’s no way this is your partner. Except, he’s wearing the typical agent uniform, a suit and shirt and tie all the muted black of a shadow on asphalt, accented with a crimson tie clip. Not only that, but he’s dripping the aesthetic of ‘wicked’: god busted out the protractors the day this kid was made, as he’s needle-thin and just as sharp. His hair is a shock of crow feathers and his left eye is permanently shut, the eyelid dipping into his socket and run over with a comet-tailing scar. A wound that nasty must have been what did him in, when he was living.
He smiles at you toothily, pink tongue flashing where his canines don’t match up. “Hiya!” is the first thing he says to you, bouncing on his heels. You sigh.
“I suppose you’re my partner?”
“Looks like it! The name’s Smithers, by the way. And you are?”
“Cyrus.” You give him your best vitriolic glare, eyes half-lidded and piercing like two partially-eclipsed suns, and you loom in close enough for him to feel your breath. “Listen, kid. I don’t care who you are or how you got here, and I’m not in the mood to lie about that. I’m here to do a job. Not to be your buddy, not to deal with all of,” you gesture up and down at him, “this. I’m not going to be your friend, and it’s best that you accept that quickly. Got it?”
His smile flinches, then pops up again full-force, showing molars that glisten like wet marble. “Oh, don’t worry about me, Cyrus! You see,” he lets out a sharp two laughs, a crow-cackle, “I don’t give a fuck about you, either!”
Then he spins around and lets himself into the passenger seat of your car. “Well?” he says when you just stand there. “Get in! Eternity waits for no one!”
You still don’t move, and he starts honking the horn. People open their windows, squinting out to the scene below them, wondering what kind of asshole is waking them up at this hour. You rub the bridge of your nose and groan.
What the Hell have you gotten yourself into?
You wish you could go back in time to grab your past self by the shoulders, to shake him so hard that the last of the blood runs out of his dying body. “You are about to go to Hell,” you’d say, “and they are going to give you a choice: torture for eternity, or a plea deal. For the love of god, man—don’t take the plea deal.”
However, time travel isn’t real, not even for the dead, and you’re left to deal with your decision’s consequences. You’re an Agent of Hell, now, which means you shouldn’t be tortured. However, it seems that Smithers was assigned to you specifically to make your life—well, to make it Hell.
After the exchange in the parking lot, you two need to get to work. However, as soulless drones are apt to do, you stop for coffee first. Smithers drums his heels against the front of his seat and tells you to buy from a cafe near the apartment, and you’d say no just to spite him, but the place has a great reputation and you’ve been dying to try it out. The only problem is that it has no drive-through, you have to go in and order it all yourself.
“Make mine triple cream, triple sugar, with three shots of vanilla, please!” Smithers calls out the window as you enter the store. You nod and head inside.
It’s been a week, but you’re still having trouble adjusting to the fact that you aren’t human anymore. The first time you looked at another person after your death, your breath caught in your throat, your heart caught in your stomach, and your feet caught on the pavement, making you crash to the ground like a fool. But it’s just that shocking, because you can see the people around you, and know that not a single one of them is clean.
Take the cafe customers, for instance. Sin is crawling up their throats, slicked onto their bodies, caked on in layer after layer of scarlet. It burns as vibrant as a rash, staining them without their knowledge, and it still turns you into a bit of a hypochondriac. You take your place in line, so distracted by the ethical filth around you that you don’t think too much when you order the coffees. You bring them back to the car, and only realize something’s off when Smithers takes a sip and makes a little cough sound. He swallows with a grimace and turns to you.
“What is this?” His naturally-high voice has bent up another octave. Your brow furrows.
“It’s called coffee.”
“Yes, coffee—just. Plain. Coffee.”
“Fuck. You wanted cream and all that stuff, right? Sorry.” You’re mean, sure, but you own up to your mistakes. “It won’t happen again,” you say as you pull out of the parking lot.
“Wait, where are we going?”
“To work. We’ve wasted enough time getting drinks from this place, we should really get going now.”
“But—the coffee.”
“Like I said, it won’t happen again.”
He’s quiet for the rest of the drive. It’s relaxing. As long as you keep him unhappy, maybe this partnership will work out, after all.