Work Text:
“Beel.”
The two of you are alone in the dining room. There's not much left to cut through the silence other than the metallic ting of silverware against plate, your own thoughts. Listening to the noise inside your head is what has lead you here, to saying things like –
“Will you show me your demon form?”
He grunts in response, around a mouth full of food. He's heard you, but he needs to stop chewing long enough to register what you've said.
It's not like you're expecting him to agree. Satan will do it, and cheerfully, because he's admitted to finding it amusing. You've convinced Leviathan to transform, once – although in the case of Leviathan, you suspect he just enjoys being told what to do. Most of the others offer you less than eager responses, ranging from non-committal “maybe later”s to Mammon flat out lecturing you on the dangers of a demon in their true form. The fact that he felt bad enough about it to buy you lunch later, despite the fact that you hadn't been persuaded at all, was just another piece of evidence to add to the growing pile that these demons were not always as dangerous as they thought they were.
Not even Asmodeus will indulge you in this regard, no matter how many pretty compliments you butter him up with.
But Beelzebub is at his most placid when his stomach is full, so. There's that.
“Why?” Beel asks.
“Your wings. I want to see them.”
That is apparently all the convincing Beel needs, because he stands up – and you didn't really need him to stand up, he's tall enough as it is – and transforms. His fork is still in his hand, but the uncertainty of whatever it is you want to do with his wings has slowed him down.
Your own chair scrapes against the floor, keening in protest as you follow suit. The stone tiling most frequently used in the Devildom makes everything sound louder, more dramatic than it actually was.
Beel flinches.
"I think your wings are amazing," you say, as if to reassure him.
You're not really sure if reassurance is what he needs. Maybe he's not nervous, maybe he just doesn't like loud noises. Beel doesn't often vocalize these things.
He raises his fork again, pressing the shadow hog speared on the tines to his lips, but forgetting to open his mouth. So intent on watching you out of the corner of his eye that he doesn't remember, for a moment, how to eat.
"You do?" he asks.
It's disheartening, but not surprising, to learn that nobody has ever told him this before.
"I do," you say, disappearing from his line of sight. He almost turns to follow you, and you spread your fingers across the space between his shoulder blades to dissuade him. "They're beautiful, like looking at stained glass."
At the same time, you're marveling at how your hand can simultaneously take up so much space and hardly any at all on this giant of a demon.
You knead the heel of your palm into Beel's back, feeling out the dip of his spine, admiring the way his muscles jump at the motion, before moving onto his wings. They twitch when you touch the base of his right wing with your fingertip.
A hole is cut into the back of Beel's jacket, allowing his wings to sit uncovered. The full length of his wings are exposed and vulnerable, even though they are decorative, because you know that Beel can't fly. None of the brothers can – their wings being useless appendages is part of their curse – but Beel is an especially sad example. His wings are thin, both in terms of width and depth, and although they're quite long, they're definitely not strong enough to support his weight. He lacks halteres, the secondary pair of wings, that all houseflies have to maintain their aerial balance, and the wrong number of longitudal veins. The veins branching off his longitudal veins are too narrow, too weak, to avoid cracking, even if Beel could fly.
It would make so much more sense, in your opinion, to want to cover and protect them instead. A normal fly has surprisingly resilient wings, at least for its size, but Beel's look so fragile. You promise yourself that you'll be gentle while handling them.
“Can you feel this?” you ask, wondering at the sensitivity of his wings, at how much is too much, even for Beel.
You move away from the base, still using only the pad of your finger to travel down the length of Beel's wing, landscaping every dark line. The membrane of his wing doesn't feel like skin, and it's not scaly – the closest approximation is something like plastic. Smooth, and neither hot nor cold. If you close your eyes, you can imagine imprinting every sensation, every bump, on the tip of your finger.
Beel doesn't respond verbally, but every so often his wings shudder beneath your touch. Another flaw of their design is how slowly they move, how small their range of motion appears to be.
Once you reach the bottom of Beel's wing, you start over, this time using the flat of your hand.
Next, you poke around the edges of his wings, feeling the sides, feeling how thin they are by pressing your index finger against them. They are worryingly flexible, something that is unique to Beel, as insects are normally known for their durability. The tip of your finger alone is enough to create a fold on one of the roundest parts of his wing, and although it evens itself back out once you move, you understand that this isn't healthy for something made of the same material as your fingernail.
You give his wing a sympathetic pat, followed by a few soothing pets.
“Stop,” Beel whines, at the third stroke of your hand.
“Beel.”
You don't just stop, you freeze. Ice attacks your blood, chills your thoughts to a panic. What else can you say besides his name?”
“Beel,” you say again, despite your brain's current resistance to forming words. “I'm sorry – did I hurt you?”
“No.”
At times like this, you really wish Beel would verbalize more freely. Luckily, a gentle prompting is usually enough to do the trick.
“No?”
“It's weird,” Beel says, and is voice is more clipped than usual, “but not unpleasant?”
“But you want me to stop?”
His fork is on the floor. You happen to catch sight of it out of the corner of your eye, and at some point he obviously dropped it, and – you should have noticed. What's left of the fork, anyway. He bit his fork in half and dropped it on the floor, and somehow all of that had escaped your attention.
“Are you sure it didn't hurt?” you ask again.
At this point, you're not entirely convinced.
You're willing to give Beel all the time necessary to formulate his response, but it comes surprisingly quickly, like he's embarrassed. Beel ducks his head, and speaks quickly, "I thought you only wanted to see them. You weren't supposed to – No one has ever complimented my wings before."
You're in shock. Again. Beel's reactions for the last several minutes have done nothing but surprise you, replaced the contents of your stomach with a rock made of guilt.
In the human world, that would be understandable, but in the Devildom? Poisonous scorpions and spiders and all other manner of creepy crawlies are frequently sold as pets.
But no, in Beel's case – you will your hands to lay still as he tells you stories. Jokes. Some of them dating when he first fell, some from the not so distant past. Demons asking if he ate shit, like any other fly. Being told to “buzz off”, the quips that anyone could defeat him if they had a fly swatter, like either of those things had been funny the first time he'd heard them. The times Levi had accidentally, unwittingly hurt his feelings by calling the Lord of Flies creepy..His own brothers complaining that it was unfair how fit Beel was, how he spent all day eating and still managed to be fit, that he had the easiest sin to handle –
He did not.
It is obvious, from the withering look on Beel's face, that this is harder for him to speak about than it is for you to listen. He attempts to backtrack as soon as he sees the look on your face, “It's in the past. Don't worry about it.”
It's in the present, too, you want to tell him. He wouldn't still be thinking about these things if it wasn't.
"I think your demon form is beautiful," you say, after mentally cycling through a list of comforts you used to receive in the human world.
"They're just jealous", "ignore them" – none of those words had ever helped you. They are falsities and inefficient advice. It's why you decide the best approach is to tell Beel something he's possibly never heard before, something you wish you would have heard more often, and that is touched by truth.
Beel, in his entirety, is beautiful. He has a smile that can warm an entire room, and the snuggliest arms in the Devildom. Beautiful purple eyes, soft hair, and a personality sweeter than candy.
There is not a single part of him that isn't beautiful, and that includes his wings.
Beel tugs on the cuffs of his sleeves, and you guess he might be chewing on his bottom lip as well. Both are nervous habits of his.
"You know, I…"
This time, it doesn't seem like he's willing to continue, no matter how long you wait. "Go on," you prompt. "...If you don't want to tell me, that's fine too."
It won't change the fact that you want to know.
Beel nods.
"Thank you," he says.
For what , you wonder. For telling the truth, or for loving him despite his perceived flaws –
He will tell you some day. Maybe.
About how much he hates his demon form, about why he always wears baggy shirts. How afraid he is that you will be able to pinch his sides one day and feel something other than hard muscle, and the jealousy he feels towards his brothers for being short enough to not stand out in a crowd. For now, however, it is enough to spend time together, for Beel to shift back to his human form, to revert into the quiet and even-tempered and seemingly confident demon everybody already likes.