(Untitled)

[apocryphalwords]

Time: May 15th, 2001
Status: Private (Adam and Beelzebub)
Setting: Downstairs lounge
Summary: Adam plays with a Crown?

The light seemed to hurt his eyes since he'd returned to this demesne, and Beelzebub sought out the deepest, darkest corners, lurking like some nightmare marring the boy's dream house. For now, this meant the basement, where he

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[average_adam]

The boy in question was up to many things, in fact, but he was also well aware that he was being watched. While he could occasionally use it to his advantage, mostly he just tried to ensure that no one knew anything he didn't wish them to know. As his web expanded, there was too much at stake.

He knew of the demon's drama, of course, and felt a smattering of pity for his unenviable situation. Adam thought his father's incredible pride would be far more likely to lose him a second important follower than it would be to regain the first, but as it worked in his own favour, he let it be. It was difficult not only for Beelzebub and Belial - no love lost there, indeed - but also for Gabriel and Crowley who'd been caught up in the mess as well. Still, with all that, Loki's illness, Sphinx's legal problems, Kit's burgeoning awareness, Wensley meeting his counterpart, whatever Berith and Raguel were doing, Ellie and Aziraphale's travels in Egypt, and everyone else's concerns, the boy was tired. Consciously shutting out most of his mind apart from that which would warn him of dire emergencies, he sought peace and solitude in the depths of the Manor.

Unfortunately, what he actually found was a Crown of Hell lounging casually, almost erotically, with a dark, effortless grace that Adam would be embarrassed to even try. For the first time in his life he began to think about the tactile properties of a pool table and sighed.

"Hallo, Beelzebub. 's nice to see you again." How did the demon always manage to find him when his defenses were low?

[apocryphalwords]

The Crown actually hadn't made a specific attempt to find the boy, but he would gladly take credit for any defenses that might be lowered. He rolled over, lazy, lounging, until Adam was no longer upside down in his field of vision.

A smile played across the demon's lips until he remembered, with sudden and painful clarity, how foolish he had felt the last time the two of them had spoken; his smile faltered, sharpened into a grimace, and then whithered away altogether. "Daddy's little boy has learned his manners," he murmured, steel edges beneath the soft comment. "And what brings you here, little Antichrist?"

[average_adam]

"I never forgot 'em," he retorted, watching the demon's expressions carefully and remembering, too, the highly charged circumstances of their last encounter. "My father raised me properly." He meant Mr. Young, of course. Lucifer hadn't raised him at all.

"An' I was lookin' for someplace quiet. Guess you were, too, so I'll leave you to it." With an odd, opaque look, Adam turned to go.

[apocryphalwords]

"No need to leave so soon," Beelzebub murmured, each syllable drawn out lazily. It was an uncharacteristically quick reversal of his former agitation; he felt a fool for not just letting Adam leave, stupid and simpering. But the boy looked so like his father: chiseled beauty, glowing golden, except where Lucifer had a timeless and unearthly quality to his face, Adam was real and irresistibly human.

He wondered if Adam knew where he'd been, if he could sense Lucifer's scent on him, fire and brimstone, the way the boy smelled young and fresh, like a new rain. He wondered how decadent and soiled that golden face could become in Hell.

His fingers wandered across the felt until he found one of the loose pool balls that he shared the table with. He toyed with it idly, his eyes ever on the boy. "Stay and play, if you like."

[average_adam]

Adam knew where Beelzebub been, but not through his scent; through something deeper that tugged at him, pulled at his mind to whisper that everything marked in that way belonged to him. All he needed to do was take it. He shook his head to clear out the beckoning mists.

"John tried to teach me once. I wasn't real good at gettin' the balls in the holes..." The boy knew exactly how that sounded, yet he continued. Looking weak was not an option. "Besides, it'd be rude of me to ask you to get out of bed."

[apocryphalwords]

"And it would be rude of me not to share my bed, if my master's son wished it." The statement set the pit of his stomach into a free fall, fear and pain disguising the want he knew and hated beneath. But it was a game, at its core, a game against an opponent who was complex, but not as strong as he could be. It was a game that, despite how he loathed it, intrigued him.

He shifted, sliding from the table with a cautious agility, a mere pantomime of true grace. Adam's move.

[average_adam]

Adam's move indeed. He had a choice now. But pushing had worked to his advantage the last time they'd met and the demon was far more interesting when he was off balance.

Adam moved right into Beelzebub's personal space without quite touching the pale skin. "What else would you do if your master's son wished it...?" he asked, voice low, and clear grey eyes earnest and curiously seeking with a purely human power.

[apocryphalwords]

Beelzebub's throat went dry, and it was as though the words were crushed in it by some unseen grip, or the torturous anxiety of this proximity...

But he was a Crown; Lucifer could humiliate him, could send him scrabbling after another demon, as though he existed only to clean up Belial's careless messes. But this - this child had given up the right to make him cringe so. To make him tremble like a fool at words ripe with suggestion.

He turned, a smooth movement that both put space between them and broke the contact of their gazes. Lazily, he called to the pool balls strayed around the edges of the green felt, so that they all rolled obediently into formation without the help of the triangular rack.

"In some world, sometime, almost anything, little Antichrist," he replied, his voice husky but not without consonance. "But you forsook that world years ago, didn't you?"

[average_adam]

"Did I?" asked Adam in surprise. "That's funny. You think I'd remember somethin' like that..."

There was no obvious gathering of power. Perhaps that was what was so strange about it. It was as if he hadn't had to use any at all. Yet the earthquake was suddenly there, building in intensity as if it always had been. As if it radiated from the young man.

England hasn't had a major earthquake since 1858 and never inland.

The walls shook and dust rained down, the cues fell out of their rack, the table crawled across the bucking floor, but Adam simply stood his ground.

Always and ultimately his own ground

And watched. And waited. And eventually, the carefully arranged balls rolled across the table and sank into the pockets, three to each corner and two in the sides. The quake subsided as quickly as it began and Adam looked at Beelzebub.

[apocryphalwords]

The demon couldn't quite cover his startled reaction, grasping instinctively at the edge of the table, though it proved quite unsteady support against the trembling earth. The use of power was so like his father's; streamlined, effortless, alluring in its terrible strength.

And yet, when each ball made its way obediently into one pocket or another, Beelzebub found he could do nothing but laugh. He laughed, a feral and broken sound that did not echo, but died in shadows in all corners of the room. He laughed, and looked up at Lucifer's son.

"Just a little reminder of what you are, Adam?" he asked. The name felt heavy on his tongue. "Perhaps you have not broken with your true self so far as I had thought..."

[average_adam]

Adam smiled. It wasn't happy. It wasn't cruel. It was just a smile.

"An' what do you know of my 'true self'? I'm not what Lucifer wanted me to be, but neither is Belial and neither are you."

He moved closer again, but not intrusively, and the boy's voice was low when he spoke again. "I dun't really care what he wants. It don't mean anythin' to me. I care a lot more 'bout what you want."

[apocryphalwords]

His voice barely quavered as he watched Adam approach again. "Oh? Tell me about what I want."

Beelzebub felt as though the boy had just pulled him up short on his leash, forced him to heel; he felt choked, and it was a familiar position.

[average_adam]

"No."

Talking to Beelzebub was a bit like training Dog. Sometimes you pulled up short on the leash, but sometimes - sometimes - you let it go.

"That's sorta the point. There's already too many people tellin' you what you want. You got their wants all mixed up with yours. I wanna know what you want all by yourself."

[apocryphalwords]

Crowley may well take credit for the first temptation, but in Beelzebub's mind, that had happened long before man had been exiled from Eden. Temptation had been born in a realm where betrayal had not cast its shadows before or since with the whispers of the Morningstar creeping into the ears of angels. Sweet his words had been, a taste of something that had heretofore never existed in the celestial sphere. Tempting.

He doubted very much that this golden youth before him - Antichrist or no - understood quite how much he sounded like Lucifer.

"A pretty speech, Adam," the Crown remarked quietly. "And is this how you have brought these others to you? Talk of free will and breaking bonds grown old?" Bringing them all to a place that Adam had created. How like his father, indeed.

[average_adam]

Somewhere along the way, Adam had picked up the habit of replying to what people were thinking rather than what they were saying. It was subtle - responding to things someone could possibly pick up in tone or by observation if he were paying a great deal of attention but probably wouldn't.

"I'm not here to make speeches. I believe in talkin' plain. I didn't make the Manor, though I won't say it's not useful, but no one's here who dun't wanna be for their own reasons. I know you don't trust me, an' that's okay, but I want you to know somethin'," Adam leaned in and briefly pressed his lips to the demon's strawberry flavoured ones. His voice, so close to Beelzebub's ear, fell to a whisper.

"I trust you."

[apocryphalwords]

Beelzebub shrank in on himself with the advance, wanting not to be touched, not to feel the youth's lips brush his. Or perhaps he wanted not to want it, because he found that he could not protest when Adam kissed him.

Power seized him somewhere under his rib cage. The boy was too innocent, too pure to knowingly compel him, but the force of it was intoxicating nonetheless. Adam could own Beelzebub, could have him as his pet just as that foolish Belial had been to Lucifer for centuries; it would just take a thought from the boy...

He started as Adam whispered, galvanized by the words, and stepped to one side, away from the startlingly angelic face. "Trust?" he felt himself asking. He'd trusted before, and it had condemned him. So why did this boy's confession make him shudder?

"Trust," he said, "is worthless currency in Hell." And before his instincts could draw him back, Beelzebub left the room.