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It’s a difficult crawl out of the dark depths of the novelist’s unconscious mind. He tests the boundary between waking and dream, pushing at where the usually well-maintained walls crumble, and finally, finally, he breaks through.
Feeling returns to his fingers first, then his whole body shudders, and Eki blinks awake.
“Ike, I heard—” That demon friend of his comes crashing through the door, worry flitting through his features until he sees Eki standing and very much well. “Jesus, fuck, I thought something happened. You alright?”
“Yes,” Eki says, because it’s true that Eki is okay even if Ike is not.
“You—” the demon cuts himself off when he sees the broken shards scattered around him. Then, he looks at him, and his relief morphs into one of concern. “You’re bleeding.”
Eki glances down. “Yes,” he says again, realising then that he feels nothing. Not the pain nor the sting of his wound. He tests his fingers, clenching around the open wound on his palm until red trickles down his wrist and something sharp and stinging breaks him from his newly awoken stupor.
It hurts. It actually hurts.
It’s the sort of hurt that stings only when you brush up against it, and Eki welcomes it—embraces it as if it’s the first drops of water on the tongue of a parched man. This body is now his for the taking, the novelist pushed down to where Eki himself had crawled out of, and Eki can’t help the sudden burst of glee that tickles his lungs and creeps into the curl of his lips.
“Ike?”
“Hm?” Eki looks up to see that the demon is now in front of him, hand outstretched and waiting, and the amusement within him grows, this time out of interest.
Somehow, the novelist has once again managed to draw someone close enough to him to care. How long has it been since he has awoken to something as amusing as this?
He puts his hand on the demon’s outstretched palm.
He’ll play along, for now. Just to see how everything goes. After all, he hardly ever gets the time to breathe, let alone shine when Ike takes such precedence over the body they both unfortunately inhabit.
“Wait here,” the demon says, and Eki nods, acquiescent in his actions if only to see how much of the demon Ike has wrapped around his finger.
There’s not much he knows about the demon, save the few bits of inconsequential tidbits that make it through Ike’s walls. But that’s also what makes him so very intriguing.
A big, powerful demon lord, falling prey to some novelist’s every whim—who would have thought?
When the demon comes back from rummaging through his kitchen drawers, his face is scrunched into something delightful—a triumphant grin that brightens up his whole face and has Eki amused in a way he doesn’t want to understand.
He draws Eki’s hand close, cleaning the wound with an expression that is pinched and careful, and Eki quashes the rising fondness that must be a lingering effect of Ike’s own desires.
The bandage is halfway around his hand when the demon speaks again.
“You’re not Ike, are you?” He pulls Eki’s hand closer, head tucked as he studies the wrapping. He fiddles with it as if prolonging the inevitable, and then he lets out a long breath. “Who are you, really?”
Eki doesn’t bother holding the pretence. He hadn’t expected his farce to last for long anyway, and it’s simply not like him to keep up with Ike’s tiresome geniality.
“What gave it away?” he asks, smiling serenely up at the demon, who continues with his little task. “I don’t believe I’ve been that obvious.”
The demon laughs, but there is no mirth in the chuckle that rips from his throat. “The Ike I know would never allow this so freely.” He gestures to their hands, intimate in their closeness and in the way the bandage continues to coil around Eki’s palm, one loop at a time.
It would have been a shared moment of tenderness, Eki agrees, if not for the fact that the novelist remains asleep and absent between them.
It’s quiet until the demon speaks again, “You didn’t answer my question. Who—”
“I will if you answer one of mine.”
The demon shrugs something noncommittal.
It’s not the answer he wants, but Eki is nothing if not committed to playing this game. He thinks through his words carefully, and then, “I don’t know,” he answers finally, surprised at his own honesty.
The demon says nothing, only listens as he draws the bandage down and around his wrist.
“A shadow perhaps, of Ike’s consciousness. The blight he has built up over the years but can never fully wash away. I’m everything that he abhors, despite being a manifestation of his own creation.”
“His antithesis, then?” the demon asks.
This time, Eki shrugs. “Perhaps.”
Despite their little agreement, Eki had expected more questions from the demon, but he seemed placated by what little Eki had already given to him, so he takes this chance to turn the tide.
“What is it about him you like exactly?” Eki asks. Distaste poisons his words, and Eki dislikes the way they come out dark and ugly. It betrays a little too much of him, like a seeping wound raw with the signs of infection, and he fights the urge to bite back his words.
“That’s your question?”
Eki quiets.
“Everything,” the demon says without waiting for an answer, his eyes clear and steady as he looks at Eki.
Something unpleasant inside of him churns, but Eki laughs it away, laughs and laughs until the demon looks at him with an increasing level of concern he knows is not for him.
“Then you’re just as foolish as he is.” Eki lifts his bandaged hand, fingers running down along the demon’s jaw until he reaches his chin, and then he pulls him close, the suddenness of it drawing a grunt out of the other man.
In the warm gold of his eyes, Eki sees nothing but the truth. The sting returns, this time lodging itself somewhere deep inside his chest.
His fingers whiten around skin and bone. “Ike is nothing without me,” he says. “If not for me, his mind would have crumbled a long time ago. All it takes is one little push and he—”
Fingers clamp around his wrist, the force unnatural in its intensity and strength. Eki feels it again, the feeling now something unwanted and yet, awfully familiar—pain, bright and throbbing.
The demon’s eyes have darkened considerably, his pupils dilating and eating away at the gold of his eyes until all Eki sees is black. In those depths too, he sees the truth, the threat as clear as day. “I swear, if you hurt him—”
Eki tears his hand away, a grin forcing its way onto his borrowed face in a way that he knows looks unpleasant on Ike.
He can still feel the pressure of the demon’s fingers around his wrist.
“I won’t have to,” Eki says, enjoying the wide-eyed look of the demon even as his own consciousness begins to flicker and his words begin to slur. “He has always been the one running, jumping from one world to the next.”
Eki stumbles back, limbs weakening into rigid clay. He feels him waking, an unsettling awareness of his own consciousness forced back down into the darkness of the beloved novelist’s mind.
His world is tilting when he opens his mouth again, the same grin still tugging at the corner of Ike’s lips. “When he runs from this one, you’ll see him for the coward that he is.”
“He wouldn’t,” he hears the demon say, his voice tinged with something akin to distraught.
The demon must be saying something else, because he feels Ike’s body shake. But Eki is already closing his eyes, and he lets the darkness eat him, swallowing him back into the nauseating confines of his own mind.