Archive of Our Own ^beta

When you’d first been pulled from your day-to-day life, forced into a world quite literally separate from your own, you honestly hated your captors. No matter where you looked, you were met with seemingly the most self-obsessed beings in all of existence. No one seemed to give a damn about your situation or the fact that they’d straight up kidnapped you, and any attempts to express your distress was dismissed as selfishness as if you weren’t the victim in the situation.

At first, you’d thought Mammon was the absolute worst. You couldn’t get him to shut up about how much of a burden you were and you would have beat the living daylights out of him if he weren’t one of the most powerful demons ever.

You weren’t sure when exactly this changed, but it was probably after you made your pact. Seeing him as a flustered mess the next morning had shown you a different side to the demon, and he almost looked small as he did his best to save face as his brothers teased him. That’s when you began to realize that his obnoxious, self-congratulatory nature was a shield - a desperate attempt to protect himself from the deeply rooted notion that he wasn’t enough. He treated you like a burden because he felt like one.

When you’d used your pact his eyes widened, locked with yours as he finally called you by your name. That was what you’d wanted, but you couldn’t even focus on his words as you stared. He still had the eyes of an angel, beautiful blue orbs with specks of gold that reflected the contents of his heart, a constant reminder of the past that he did his best to bury.

“...Listen. The next time your life’s in danger, I’m gonna be the one to save you, all right? Don’t you forget that. ...And if I can’t manage to save ya, then make sure you die, got it?! I don’t want no one else steppin’ in and savin’ you, all right?! It’s me or no one, understand?!”

You looked into his eyes, and your heart nearly stopped as you saw the desperation in them. The grip of his hand on yours was painful and Beel’s eyes on you were almost scary, but you couldn’t bring yourself to care. A silence befell the room and Mammon averted his eyes from your own. You watched the heat rise in his cheeks, a darker shade overtaking the majority of his face.

It was the smallest of gestures, but you recognized that he was opening up - or at least trying to. You still had a long way to go, and knowing Mammon, it was going to be a long, long journey, but the longer you stared at the mixture of fear and hope in his eyes, the more you were convinced that it was worth it.

“All right, got it.”

And it was worth it - or so you keep telling yourself. The closer you get, the farther you fall. You know very well that you aren’t alone in your pining, but no matter how much progress you seem to make, you know that Mammon will always panic, say something stupid, and you’ll get thrown right back to square one.

As much as you love the demon, you know he’s not ready to open up fully, and he might not ever be. You get it: he’s been alone for so long, indulging in his sin in a desperate attempt to drown out his fears, spent so much time acting as the punching bag of everyone around him that now he refuses to believe he can be anything more.

The only time you’d ever seen him even get close to admitting his feelings was as you watched him cradle your fucking corpse, sobbing and begging for you to wake up. He hadn’t even touched you for months after that, and it took a mental breakdown from you to get him to explain that he was scared that you would be cold and lifeless to the touch (or even worse, not even there). It broke your heart as you realized that you’d hurt him, and he couldn’t even touch you without being overwhelmed with the idea that he would lose anyone he loved - after all, the last time he let himself care for someone, he had to watch that person’s mangled body die in his arms.

You can’t do that to him ever again, and you know that. You want nothing more than to hold him in your arms and make him allow himself to feel loved, but you can’t, so instead you lay in your bed and try not to cry as you realize that you’ve fallen from grace and straight into the mercy of a demon.