Work Text:
Hwoarang runs his hand down the center of Devil’s back, and the texture is still surprisingly human. The temperature is different, though. Colder than all the skin around it that isn’t swirling with inky black. Despite how jagged and inhuman they look, there’s a somehow even more unsettling symmetry in the patterns around the base of each wing, split perfectly by the groove of his back like it were a mirror. When Hwoarang’s hand strays too close to the wing itself, it twitches, irritably, and Hwoarang still isn’t sure if those movements are conscious or not. He doesn’t risk it this time, though, since Devil seemed to be in an amicable mood otherwise.
Hwoarang moves closer to the back of the couch he’d been leaning mostly off of, reaching over to Devil who had apparently found a good spot on the floor where the sun was coming in through the blinds and taking advantage of the warmth. He folds his arm back under his head and doesn’t speak for a moment, still a little shocked that it had gotten to this; being within a few feet of the monster without having to be all that worried it would tear him to ribbons. He keeps his good eye on it, deceptively calm lying prone.
“Does that hurt?”
Devil moves its head, its horns make a sound against the floor that Hwoarang is sure means there’ll be a hole somewhere.
“You’d have to strike me much harder than that to do any sort of damage.”
Hwoarang sucks his teeth.
“No, dumbass, I mean–” He reaches down again and risks touching the same area. Devil’s head moves a fraction, but he gets nothing otherwise. “Here. Where the wings come out. It’s all…dark, and cold.”
“Is there pain where your legs grow from your hips? Where your arms come from your shoulders?”
“That ain’t exactly the same…”
Devil grumbles then, in a way Hwoarang doesn’t particularly like, and moves from under Hwoarang’s hand. He’s snakelike, turning towards the chair Hwoarang is laid out on while hardly leaving the floor, crawling up and into his space and forcing Hwoarang into an almost-sitting position with his back against the chair. Their faces get too close, one of Devil’s clawed hands comes too close, the rough horns protruding from the sides of his head almost pin Hwoarang’s head to the back of the chair. Devil looks slightly annoyed, but the small spike of fear or maybe the proximity or maybe just nothing at all – it was prone to doing things unprompted – spark a chitter of laughter from it, a brief, toothy smile before it fixes its expression again.
Hwoarang is at least glad that Devil doesn’t have the gauntlets anymore. He’d been convinced they were a part of the beast, and maybe in some way they were with how bonelike they seemed, but they’d eventually found a way to remove them. That did nothing for the sharp black claws it still had underneath. One of those claws was trailing up along Hwoarang’s cheek and a little too close to his good eye, just below the lower lid. Hwoarang leans a little further back and the hand follows. He grabs Devil’s wrist and can manage to pull it a little further away. It hums.
"The black of your pupil often shrinks and grows. Does that "hurt"?"
Its last few words come out in a hiss. Hwoarang manages to snake a leg between them and kick Devil back, just with enough force that it stumbles off the couch and back to the ground. Devil lands back in the sunlight, rolling to its side and letting out little splinters of a cackle again. Hwoarang is ready to stand up and fight back if it looks like things will escalate, more used to Devil starting things out of nowhere than he is untouched peace and calm, but the spot seems to calm Devil down again. It rolls onto its front and spreads its wings as much as it can with the little space there is to get the sunlight back on its feathers.
There are a few more moments where Hwoarang stays tense even when it looks like Devil really won’t move again. He lets out a sigh, sits back heavily on the chair.
“Remind me not to ask you anything again.”
Devil grumbles, its wings shake out a bit more.
“I do not hurt.”
Hwoarang stares at Devil. He’s unsure if that was a promise in return for not asking anymore questions, some kind of protest at the prospect of not being asked anything, or maybe even an answer to the very first question he’d raised. He leaves it alone, leans back against the arm of the chair and goes back to the heavy but preferable silence of the room.