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Hastur growled loudly, thumped a fist down onto Ligur and lay limp and panting. Ligur was whimpering softly, and grinning widely. He raised a hand and half tugged, half shoved at Hastur to make him move a bit, leaving the arm crooked over his back. Neither of them made any reference to that. It wasn't like they were hugging, after all. Hastur reached over to the pile of discarded clothes and fished out a pack of cigarettes from what was left of Ligur's nasty trousers. He peered at the packet and sniggered at Ligur.
"Menthol? What are yer, a girl?"
Ligur snorted and wriggled in a way that made it clear what his feelings were on that matter. Hastur grinned and tossed the packet aside.
Finally, too exhausted to do much more than try to stay awake, they smoked the menthol cigarettes.
"They're good fer yer," Ligur said. "Clear the airways."
"Taken up breathin', have yer?" Hastur said. "Anyways, these fings give yer cancer, says so on the pack."
"S'nice easy-breathin' cancer, though," Ligur said in as close to a cheerful voice as he had.
Hastur looked at him. The expression on his face made him vaguely uneasy. Ligur looked -- relaxed, happy. The little twist of a sneer Hastur was used to seeing wasn't there. It made Ligur look -- younger, somehow. Which was stupid, Hastur thought. Neither of them were young. They were ageless and mighty. Even if they didn't look it at the moment. Ligur, now, somehow managed to give the impression of being as skinny as a drowned rat and unhealthily overweight at the same time. Binge eating on earth, that what it was, Hastur thought. Went straight to the gut.
"Ligur," Hastur said, feeling it was unnatural for Ligur to look so relaxed and relatively cheerful. "Do sumfink for me, will yer?"
"Wot?" Ligur said sleepily, rolling over and peering at Hastur.
"Show us yer wings."
"Wot?"
"Yer wings. I want ter see 'em."
Ligur sat up and looked at him warily.
"Why?" he said suspiciously.
"Don't yer want to see what it's like to do it wiv yer wings out? C'mon."
"Dunno --," Ligur started.
Hastur whacked him in the face. Not too hard, just enough to focus the mind. Even Ligur had a line where getting whacked in the face stopped being fun. Ligur chewed his lip, then shook himself like a dog, and opened his wings. Hastur clambered to his feet and looked at them avidly. They looked very much out of place on Ligur, who was currently kneeling in the mud, shivering and looking round him for any of his clothes that hadn't been shredded in Hastur's enthusiasm. Hastur grinned; most people would have expected Ligur's wings to be like the rest of him - short, stubby and in dire need of a bath. They were huge and white, each of the feathers neat and gleaming with a soft silvery sheen. Hastur knew for a fact that Ligur sneaked off when he thought no one was looking and spent a lot of time brushing and rearranging them. He reached out and put a hand on the left one. Ligur flinched away, eyes wide.
"Wot yer doin'?" he demanded suspiciously.
"I ain't goin' ter hurt yer. I just want to touch them, all right?"
"No," Ligur said, shifting away. "Wot's so special about my wings anyway? Yer see them all the time Down Below."
"S'different," Hastur said. It was. Below they were both elaborately arrayed and spent a great deal of time terrorising their subordinates. Even Ligur had a kind of awful dignity, Below. Up here they were both less burdened with the load of being lords of Hell. They were just a couple of demons, if no one was around to see them. And Ligur up here looked pretty funny, with his incongruously huge and beautiful wings that he was currently twitching protectively behind him.
Hastur shrugged. He didn't blame Ligur. He wouldn't want anyone touching his wings neither. You could do a fellow serious damage if you got a good hold of his wings. He looked aside and scratched himself. Out of the side of his vision he could see Ligur settle down and go off his guard. Hastur whirled and grabbed him.
"Gerroff me!" Ligur squawked as Hastur got a good fistful of feathers, and then squashed the wings against his back..
"Relax," Hastur said, getting the little shit in a headlock. "I told yer, I ain't goin' ter do nuffink."
"No offence," Ligur said sarcastically, "but havin' me in a half-nelson ain't makin' me trust yer on that score."
"Shut up," Hastur said genially.
He kept one wing securely pinned, and let the other go, making sure he wasn't at a good angle for Ligur to try whacking him with it. He ran his hand along the bone, feeling the powerful muscles under the soft white feathers.
"Stop that," Ligur said in annoyance. "Yer messin' 'em up."
Hastur ignored him and buried his fingers in the feathers, stroking and rubbing. Ligur muttered and twitched, but didn't try to get away. After a few minutes, Hastur stopped pinning him, and put both his hands to work, ruffling the feathers up, getting rid of any loose ones, and smoothing the whole shining mass down again. The tense muscles relaxed and the wings drooped loosely. He grinned at Ligur's bowed back, watching the little demon shiver. It had been a long time since he'd groomed anyone, but it seemed it was like falling out of heaven. Do it properly once, and you never forget. Hastur considered himself an expert on guilty pleasures, and getting humans to indulge in them. This was a real guilty pleasure, though, the feel of someone else's wings in his hands, being touched carefully and gently. He paid a lot of attention to the spot where feathers shaded into skin, watching Ligur gasp and nearly fall over.
"Hastur."
"Yer like this?" Hastur said, smiling widely.
"Hastur, please."
"Yeah?" Hastur murmured, nibbling right at the root of one wing, where it joined the back. That was a bugger of a place to reach by yourself.
"Please. Stop," Ligur whispered.
Hastur laughed.
"Why? You like this."
"Please," Ligur said in a thin, unhappy thread of a voice. "I can't bear it. Stop."
He was snuffling, Hastur realised, and it wasn't his sniffly little laugh. He looked over Ligur's shoulder and saw he was trying to disguise tears. They'd run down his face, leaving cleaner skin behind them. Hastur frowned.
"Wot's wrong? Yer do like this, you always liked this."
For a moment he was vaguely surprised that Ligur was so short. He should have been taller, and not so -- squirmy, he thought. He looked at his own not-too-clean hand resting on soft unkempt whiteness and suddenly saw a taller, wholesome version of Ligur, happy and laughing. He shut his eyes so he couldn't see what Ligur looked like now.
"You used to do mine, too," he said, slowly, opening his eyes again.
Ligur shook and put his hands over his ears. He raised his face, less appealing than usual with the tears and snot running down it.
"Stop," he said, in desperation. "Look, bite them. Try and pull them out. Hit me round the place for a bit, I'll feel better. Just don't touch me like that, like you're my friend."
Of all the bloody cheek. Hastur stepped round him and raised a fist, ready to smash the little bugger right in the kisser. He stopped as he saw the look of fear, and hope, and pleasure come onto Ligur's face. Hastur felt his anger drain away, and he lowered his fist.
"You like me hitting you?" he said, suddenly appalled.
"Yes," Ligur said. "You know that. Come on, do it."
"I really want to hit you," Hastur said, feeling sick.
"Good," Ligur said, "Hard as you like."
"I'm a fucking monster," Hastur said in surprise.
Ligur was looking desperate again.
"Yes, but that's OK, so am I," he said. "Look, Hastur, don't get caught up in things, it only makes for trouble. Hit me. Please."
Hastur hit him without warning and he fell over in the mud, trapping one wing beneath him and flapping the other in an ungainly attempt to get his balance back. He grinned and spat blood to the side.
"Do that again," he said, a horrible look in his face. "Do whatever you like."
Hastur got ready to stamp down on his elbow and paused. Maybe he should rip out a handful of feathers instead. He reached down and pulled Ligur up by the left wing, the shorter demon hissing in pain as the joint was forced too high. Hastur glared at the shining mass; Ligur was right, no point in stirring up the past. He grabbed the flight feathers tightly, ready to give a good tug, and laughed.
"You've got mud on your wings," he said as the smelly thick grey ooze ran between the feathers, besmirching them.
"Oh," Ligur said in a lost little voice, as if he'd been told his department hadn't made quota for a millennium and it was coming out of his personal allowance.
He pulled the wing out of Hastur's grasp and tried to brush the mud away, only succeeding in spreading it further. He looked as if he was going to cry again, as he rubbed obsessively at the feathers, making it worse and worse.
"Ligur --," Hastur said. You moron, he meant to say, but looked closely in surprise. "You have grey eyes," he said.
"We all have grey eyes," Ligur said, giving up and letting his ruined wings droop down. "It's just not that easy to see anymore."
Hastur reached out again, touching the slimy, mud-stained feathers like they were the most beautiful things he'd ever seen.
"Aren't we friends?" he asked.
"I don't know," Ligur said, and swept his wings tight around the pair of them.
Neither of them spoke for a very long time.