Chapter Text
The laboratory had always been a sanctuary of shadows, a cold mausoleum where gods and demons alike came to let their thoughts wither into dust. It smelled of sulfur, damp stone, and the stale, suffocating air of a man who had long forgotten the taste of daylight. Here, my world was painted in monochromatic shades of grey. I was a creature tethered to the infinite, burdened by a heart that refused to stop beating and a curse that refused to let me love.
Then, the heavy iron doors were thrown open, and the silence was shattered.
Nikola Tesla did not simply enter a room; he invaded it like a sudden summer storm. He was a creature woven from contrasting threads—his tall, imposing silhouette standing at a height that effortlessly commanded the space, yet his posture held none of the heavy, archaic arrogance of the gods. He possessed a mop of unruly, curly brown hair that seemed to defy gravity, bouncing with every enthusiastic nod of his head. But it was his eyes that caught me off guard. They were a brilliant, electric, bright blue—a shade of azure so vivid it looked as though he had stolen a shard of the living sky and trapped it behind his eyelids.
He looked entirely out of place standing before me, where my own reflection in the cracked glass vials showed only a mess of ink-black hair and a pair of deep, murky brown eyes—eyes like stagnant, bottomless swamp water that had long drowned whatever light they once held.
"The architecture of this room is magnificent, Beelzebub! But the ventilation—ah, the atmospheric flow is completely tragic for high-voltage conductor testing!" Nikola’s voice rang out, rich and resonant, completely ignoring the dark aura that usually made lesser beings tremble.
I did not answer. I merely watched from the dim corner, my hands tucked into my dark robes, waiting for the frail human to realize he was playing with a monster.
Yet, days bled into weeks, and the human refused to leave. The sanctuary of my isolation was systematically dismantled by the frantic scratching of graphite on parchment and the blinding, intermittent arcs of artificial electricity. Nikola brought with him an unbearable, radiant warmth. He was a mortal clock ticking loudly in a room full of statues, a beautiful anomaly that treated my grim workspace as a canvas for his impossible dreams.
Gradually, the silence between us shifted. It was no longer a wall, but a bridge.
We found a strange, unspoken rhythm in the dead of the night. Nikola would huddle over the grand oak table, his long fingers tracing intricate lines on blue parchment, designing machines that sought to grasp the lightning of the heavens. I would stand beside him, a shadow hovering over a flame, offering formulas born from centuries of forbidden knowledge. My dark, murky eyes would follow the swift, elegant movements of his hands, while his brilliant blue gaze would look up, burning through my defenses with an earnestness that terrified me.
To him, science was a prayer. To me, his genius was a revelation. For a god who had only ever known how to decompose, watching Nikola create was like watching the universe being born anew.
"Look here, Beel," Nikola whispered one evening, his voice dropping its usual theatrical flair, replaced by a soft, breathless wonder. He pointed to a complex intersection of gears and coils on the blueprint. "If we realign the magnetic flux, the energy doesn't dissipate. It cycles. It becomes infinite."
"Nothing is infinite for a mortal, Nikola," I murmured, my voice a low, gravelly contrast to his melody. "Everything you build will eventually succumb to friction. To decay."
Nikola paused. He turned his head, his tall frame leaning slightly closer into my space. The distance between us evaporated, leaving only the soft hum of a dying gas lamp between our faces. Up close, the blue of his eyes wasn't just bright; it was deep, housing an unshakeable faith in the tomorrow he would never see.
"The metal may rust, Beelzebub," he said softly, a gentle smile tugging at the corners of his lips. "But the idea? The spark that ignited it? That belongs to the cosmos. It never truly dies."
He looked so exhausted. Shadowed bruises of fatigue hung beneath his brilliant eyes, a reminder of the fragile, fleeting nature of his vessel. Before I could process the sudden ache in my chest, Nikola’s eyelids fluttered, and his head dropped forward, his forehead resting gently against my shoulder. He had fallen asleep mid-sentence, his breathing settling into a slow, steady cadence.
I froze. Every instinct told me to pull away, to cast him out before the dark entity resting beneath my skin woke up to tear his light apart. But as I looked down at the soft curls of his brown hair resting against my dark robes, my hand moved on its own.
With agonizing slowness, I lifted a hand and let my fingers brush against the edge of his jaw. His skin was warm—so terribly warm.
Nikola stirred at the touch, his bright blue eyes cracking open, hazy with sleep but brimming with a profound, terrifying tenderness. He didn't flinch away from my cold hand. Instead, he leaned into it, his large hand coming up to gently cup my wrist, anchoring me to him.
"You are always so cold, my dear god," Nikola murmured, his voice a slurred, affectionate caress. "Let me share a bit of my current with you."
In that quiet, suspended fraction of eternity, the boundaries of god and mortal blurred. Nikola leaned up, and I found myself leaning down, our breaths mingling before our lips met.
The kiss was not an explosion of lightning, but a slow, burning conduction. It tasted of ink, ozone, and a quiet, desperate devotion. His lips were soft, moving against mine with an optimism that felt like a healing salve on my ancient, scarred soul. I squeezed my eyes shut, letting the deep, murky brown of my existence be completely engulfed by his blinding blue light. For a single, fleeting second, the curse that haunted my blood was silenced by the rhythm of a human heart.
When he finally pulled back, a soft, breathless laugh escaped his lips, his thumb tracing my cheekbone before he succumbed back to sleep, completely trustful in my arms.
I stayed awake for the rest of the night, holding his tall, slumbering form against me, terrified to move, terrified to breathe. Later, when the first pale fingers of dawn began to creep into the laboratory, I pulled my journal toward me. With a trembling hand, I dipped my quill into the black ink and wrote:
I have allowed a sun to rise inside my darkness. He does not know that stars are born only to burn out, and I’m a fool who has forgotten how to survive the night without his light.