Chapter Text
“Do devils have soulmarks?” Aki had once asked him, gaze fixed ahead as he drove them back from a mission. Both hands on the steering wheel, his suit immaculate barring the tiny splotches of crimson on the collar, quickly drying in the heat.
Angel had looked over at him, feigning boredom at the topic. “A better question to ask is do Devils have souls. You need a soul to have a soulmark.”
“Well? Do they?” Aki’s gaze never deviated from the winding strip of road ahead, and Angel allowed himself to take his partner in, black hair ruffled by the open window breeze, shadows ripening under dark eyes.
He looked away, returning his gaze to the passing scenery outside. They were in the countryside somewhere, fields of corn stretching all around them. It was somehow both claustrophobic and freeing, to be surrounded by a nature so heavily controlled by mankind that the very term nature was hardly apt. Perhaps cultivation, or agronomy were better suited. Aki would’ve know – he was good at word puzzles like that.
Angel sighed. Soon, they will be back in the city. A sea of concrete and trash and traffic and noise and people. So many people. He closed his eyes, forehead tipped against the cool glass of the window.
“You tell me,” he eventually replied, not meaning to sound as mournful as he did. He decided to let it stand though; he was unsure of what may spill from his lips if he continued speaking.
Aki didn’t say anything, allowing the topic to drop, and Angel couldn’t tell if he was relieved or disappointed.
Hayakawa Aki.
He doesn’t remember the first time he saw those words, letters of golden filament sown into his skin. He will pull up his sleeve and trace the curl of y, or the fluidity of the k, and wonder how he has always known what it meant. He closes his eyes and feels the raised marks; scars embroidered onto skin by so-called gods. A soulmark, a blessing anointed on cursed skin.
He doesn’t remember discovering it for the first time, seeing these markings embroidered onto his skin and realising that their shapes weren’t random. That they were letters, representing far beyond melanin or scars.
He doesn’t remember, of course. She made him forget.
Most of the time, he keeps his sleeves down, suit a fraction too large for his frame, cuffs brushing against his fingertips. He hides the writing under the nondescript uniform, pretending that every inch of him is pale and unblemished and deadly. Nothing hidden, nothing promised.
It went like this.
A child, leaning over him, gaze sharp as it lands on his arm. Skin not yet weaponized, and so the child touches it, chubby fingers sweeping over his forearm.
“Wow!” She had said, only in a language that Angel, too, has forgotten. “You have a soulmark?!”
The sea rolls on sand, a susurration on which life was based. Angel was unaware that it was additional; that the sound was not simply the uninterrupted music of the world. Overhead, birds call to one another, wings spread wide over salty winds. Angel sits on sand and believes that this is the entire world, measured to a single, perfect beach and inhabited only by friends.
“A what?” He frowns, tilting his head to view it from her angle. Other children have gathered around them now, each gasping and murmuring at the spidery lines on his skin. To him, they were nothing more extraordinary than the pale rind that lined his fingernails; the individual feathers which made his wings. The golden marks on his forearm were unremarkable, as noteworthy as the children’s sunkissed freckles.
“A soulmark!” One of them enunciates, and Angel repeats the word, trying it out like a sweet.
(it rolled around his mouth hard-boiled, too hard to be enjoyed)
“Haya-kawa Ah-ki.” One of the older girls pronounces, finger tracing his skin. Angel’s eyebrows knit together, trying to decipher this new sound.
“Haya what?”
“That’s what it says! Hayakawa Aki! She’s your soulmate!”
“A soulmate?” His frown grows, looking from child to child. “What’s that?”
The children laugh. His ignorance often brings them amusement, the one adult who knows less than them. “A soulmate!” The girl says again, tapping at the golden markings - no, golden letters.
“Only very lucky people are born with soulmarks! My great-aunt has one - it’s a shell, on the underside of her foot, once as gold as yours. Only when grandpa died, it went black and cold. Even though she says it reminds her of him and makes her sad, she still tells us it is a blessing. Very few people have soulmarks.”
“- And, and, and!” A little boy picks up the story now, too excited to wait. “My papa told me it was because when our souls were waiting to be born, we all had two heads and four limbs, but then the gods grew jealous and split us all in half, and now we spend our earthly life wandering, searching for our other half and -”
“-You skipped a part!” The older girl huffs, but quickly continues enthusiastically. “But the gods pitied us, so sometimes they will bless a soul and give them a hint to find their soulmates and will stitch a golden soulmark into their skin. That they may find their true other half and be happy! The gods must've very much favour you!”
“Favour me?” Angel repeats doubtfully, staring at the golden letters apparently stitched into his skin by these gods.
“Or maybe you did something very good in your past lives and this is your reward from the gods!” A little girl pipes up, and the others murmur in agreement.
Angel does not remember much of his past lives. But he knows enough to smile sadly at her.
“I don’t think that’s how things work. Or at least, not for me.” He goes to stand, but they all clamoured about him and the sea whispers acceptance and the sand sucks at his toes, and so he had stayed.
But deep within he knows what they said could not be true. That it wasn’t possible for him to be blessed by anything, let alone by a celestial being.
But really, there was a far simpler way to disprove it.
They said it was a soulmark. A way to find the other half of your soul.
Angel is a devil. He does not have a soul to be halved; a soul to long for something more.
He is a devil. And when he kills all those children a few years later, the sand stained red and the sea turned away, he remembers this.
He is a devil. He has no soul.
He cannot bear the idea of being someone’s half; of his name pressed onto foreign skin, sown there by some unknown divinity onto some unknown being.
Of someone tied to him. Inescapable.
He is a devil. A soulless thing.
And so, he forgets.