JE/NEWS+SPN- "All's Chaos on the Eastern Front" (6/7)
Massu wakes up because of the silence. Tokyo, by nature, is not a quiet place. It’s crowded and lively and full of activity and light and sound.
When Massu opens his eyes he is in the train car still and it is dark. He jumps to his feet in surprise and yanks his earbuds out of his ears. “Hello?” he asks, voice echoing in the empty car. When he squints to look out of the window he realizes that the platform is empty too, that the entire station is empty.
He grabs his cell phone out of his pocket and fumbles it open, tries to dial Tegoshi, or P, or whoever it was on his call list he’d last talked to.
The screen flashes No Service at him.
Swallowing, Massu slowly steps forward and reaches for the emergency door release.
~~*~~
After fumbling around in the dark with only the screen of his cell phone he manages to make it up the stairs to the street level again, where there’s some light.
When he steps out into it he blinks, momentarily blinded, before his eyes adjust.
He immediately wishes they hadn’t.
Dirt and debris blows through the silent wreckage of Tokyo. Windows are shattered, buildings in ruins, wrecked and abandoned cars litter the streets.
Not a single person in sight.
Massu starts walking. “Hello? Is anyone here?” he calls, and all he gets in reply is the echoes of his own voice bouncing off of the buildings.
He peers into destroyed shop fronts, restaurants he’s eaten in and stores he’s spent time in. There is the bakery he likes, with their chocolate almond croissants, and the Lawson’s that used to have NEWS’s picture in the windows and banners on the walls. Now those pictures are gone; the glass is so dirty he can barely see. Someone has scrawled English letters across the door, forming a word he does not know.
“C-R-O-A-T,” he manages to spell out, and furrows his brow when he tries to put them together. Even when he does manage to sound it out and hear it, it makes no sense to him.
The city is covered in it; he notices it written in katakana too, spray painted onto the billboard that used to have KAT-TUN on it, advertising cell phones that would break down the language barriers between nations.
None of it makes any sense.
Behind him, he suddenly hears the pad of footsteps as they stumble over broken glass and garbage.
He whirls around.
The little boy who is standing in the middle of the street staring at him is filthy, no more than six or seven, with ragged, dirty hair that obscures most of his face.
Massu feels a wave of relief at the sight of another human being. “Hello?” he asks, carefully. He picks his way through the trash, taking careful steps towards the boy with his hands raised to show he means him no harm. “What’s going on here? Where has everyone gone?” he asks, and notices that his voice shakes a little. “Was it demons?”
The boy doesn’t answer; Massu gets closer and closer, close enough that he can crouch down a little and offer a small smile as he peers through the matted locks of hair to look at the boy’s face.
And Massu sees that boy is smiling, and his eyes are bright red.
The boy pulls a knife from his pocket.
Massu runs.
~~*~~
The demon killing knife is a safe weight in his back pocket but the thought of killing a small child when he doesn’t know what’s going on is unthinkable to him somehow.
He has to run and find Yamapi, and the angel will tell him what has happened since he fell asleep.
Behind him, the boy shrieks and gives chase, and as he does, Massu sees it in his periphery when others start to emerge from the shadows, red-eyed, sneering humans that give off the feeling of monsters.
They join in the chase, and Massu feels nothing but cold terror as he sprints as fast as he can towards where he knows Yamapi’s apartment is, using every shortcut he knows as a local.
He does not expect the chain link fence that traps him in the middle of a grimy alleyway.
The red-eyed people close in.
Massu, in disbelief, ducks hopelessly behind a dumpster and closes his eyes, cringing against the smell as he wonders if the others are okay, if NEWS and his family and the rest of Johnny’s and the cast of Kinpachi-sensei and everyone else he knows or has ever met is alive and well. He wonders if they will miss him when he is gone, because a strange part of him thinks that these red-eyed people are going to try to eat him.
Then the bullets start flying.
Massu forces an eye open at the rapid sound of automatic gunfire, at the blare of noisy rock-and-roll and the crunch of tires over glass and bodies and asphalt.
The tank that cruises into the middle of the street fires a hail of bullets into the crowd of red-eyed people, as the faces of impassive Japanese soldiers in American Military dress mow down Massu’s attackers with weapons he never knew a Japanese soldier knew how to use.
The red-eyed people fall to the ground under the assault, dead in masses, and the rock-and-roll plays on before the soldiers climb back into the tank and it moves on, like massacres in the streets of Tokyo happen every day.
Massu’s knees are shaking too hard for him to move for what seems like a very long time.
~~*~~
When the sun starts to set Massu manages to climb over the chain-link fence and very carefully pick his way to the fashionable part of town, where Yamapi’s high rise apartment and safety is.
It is exhausting, and he is hungry, and he smells like garbage when he arrives at the building.
Its door is hanging off of one hinge and none of the lights are on.
Massu wants to cry, but instead, he unsheathes the demon killing tanto from where it is tucked into his jeans and goes inside.
~~*~~
The door to Yamapi’s apartment is a lot like the door to his building. It is no longer keeping anything in or anything out.
Massu peers inside the apartment and sees cobwebs and shotgun spray. He ducks inside, goes to the sink, and very quietly vomits into it. It doesn’t take long because he hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast, and once he’s reduced to dry heaves, rests his forehead against the metal and closes his eyes for a moment.
When he feels like he isn’t going to die again, he stands, wipes the sides of his mouth, and goes to the study.
There are still some books and scattered spell ingredients collecting dust in the room when he gets there; Massu pulls open the desk drawers, rifling through papers and talismans and scrolls looking for some sort of clue as to what had happened.
Ironically, he finds the first clue to all of this chaos wrapped around a vial of dead man’s blood, to keep it cushioned.
The newspaper he unwraps from around the tube reads: “Croatoan Virus spreads from America.” It lists death tolls thus far, emergency rescue teams, the systematic shut down of infected areas of Japan and the aid of the US Military in response to the threat.
More importantly, the date on the article reads September, 2013.
Massu realizes, with a sick feeling of dread in his gut, that the newspaper also looks kind of old.
The second clue is under that; a single, sepia-toned photograph of NEWS and some people he doesn’t know, standing in front of a sign welcoming visitors to Miyota Town in Nagano.
When Zachariah appears out of thin air beside him, it’s the least surprising thing about Massu’s day.
“Welcome to the future,” the angel preens, and as he explains what’s happening and why, Massu really, really wishes he had Tegoshi’s power to shut this guy up.
~~*~~
The camp at Nagano has another high chain link fence running all around it, which of course, Zachariah strands him outside of rather than help him teleport into; the camp seems overgrown with vegetation, with the carcasses of broken vehicles and piles of trash alternating between grass and weeds.
Massu manages to sneak in after he picks the lock on the fence, avoiding a pair of patrolling guards who he can’t recognize the faces of, but recognizes the weapons of very much. Shotgun blasts look incredibly painful, and Massu would like to avoid knowing first hand exactly how much they hurt.
He gets as far as the shell of a familiar, eight-seater white van before he is attacked from behind.
A knife hilt smacks him across the head before he can react and just like that, his eyes slide shut as he passes out.
~~*~~
When he wakes up he is handcuffed to a pillar and staring himself right in the face.
Himself does not look friendly.
“Um,” Massu begins, and Himself looks unimpressed.
“What year?” Himself asks.
Massu stares. “Um?” he repeats, and Himself looks vaguely amused.
“What year are you from?” Himself asks. “I mean, I did all the tests; holy water, silver, etc., etc., etc. Nothing worked. So the only other explanation is you got beamed up by an angel.”
Massu nods. “2010,” he explains.
Himself looks a little bit nostalgic. “Good year.”
Massu blanches. “Not really.”
The smile Himself gives him isn’t very heartening at all. “Trust me,” Himself tells him, eyes tired, “2010 was a good year compared to 2014.”
Massu doesn’t want to know the details; he thinks he’s seen enough. “Where are the others?”
And then Himself really looks tired. “Dead,” is all he says. “Or dying.”
Massu watches Himself march out of the cabin without another word.
Massu wants to vomit again.
~~*~~
Hours later, Massu watches Shige die. He watches Yamapi finish dying, at the end of a long, downward spiral that ends as the Croats feast on his blood.
And then he watches Himself die, snapped in half under the crunch of Agaliarept’s feet, the demon smiling bemusedly at him through the blackened eyes of Ryo’s familiar face.
And as it happens, Massu thinks that it’s a relief. The look of liberation on Himself’s face as the life drains from his eyes seems like something he has been wanting for a very long time.
Ryo looks at him and says, “And now the way is ready. Lucifer comes.”
He disappears with a laugh and Massu is left, staring at Himself’s lifeless body as it lies under sakura trees in full bloom.
“Not pretty,” he hears Zachariah murmur a moment, later, from behind him.
When Massu turns, the angel smirks and presses two fingers to his forehead.
~~*~~
“You can stop it,” Zachariah tells him, and Massu finds himself back on the train platform, time slowed around him and the angel as the passersby continue about their business.
Massu’s head spins. “I don’t believe you. That’s not what happens.”
“I don’t care if you believe me or not. But it will happen if you don’t say yes,” Zachariah snaps, looking disgusted. “Honestly, I don’t understand why none of you little monkeys will cooperate with us. You’re making this apocalypse a disaster.”
Massu’s stomach churns. “Everyone died.”
Zachariah brightens a bit at that. “Yes, yes they did. Because of your stubbornness. Well, yours and some others. You see what I’m getting at here? We need teamwork. We need team players, ready to jump on board and aim for paradise.”
“Is Nishikido-kun…”
A snort. “What, you really didn’t notice? He is kind of evil.”
Massu realizes he really didn’t. No one has. But it makes sense, a stupid amount of sense. Immediately, he wonders if Ryo is being messed with on his side as much as Massu is being messed with right now.
“Well?” Zachariah asks, impatient. “Your choice. Do you want to doom your friends and your country to death, or do you want to cooperate and say the word?”
Massu takes a deep breath. “No,” he says.
The angel blinks. “No?” He throws up his hands. “Of course not. Because no one feels like taking one for the team besides me. You saw what happened. Didn’t you learn anything?”
“Lots,” Massu acquiesces. “But probably not what you wanted me to.”
Zachariah snarls, stepping forward. “Then I might as well kill you, because you’re as good as de…”
Massu isn’t there anymore.
~~*~~
Massu slumps in relief when he suddenly finds himself in the jimusho meeting room, surrounded by snacks and sitting next to Tegoshi. The train platform is nowhere to be seen.
“Good timing, Tegoshi,” he breathes, when he meets his groupmate eyes, Tegoshi alive and well and not strung up by the red-eyed people on a cross section of wood with blood coming out of his hands and feet.
Tegoshi smiles. “You were late for our meeting.”
Massu eats some snacks.
~~*~~
As Massu fills his belly, Ryo hunts.
He is the one who finds the meeting, demons sitting across the table from witches striking deals.
They gather around a table and it’s a lot like those movies he’s seen before, where the Yakuza has to make a deal with the mafia or the Triads and each side doesn’t completely trust each other but have to put aside their differences to work towards a mutually beneficial common goal.
On the table, trussed up and sobbing, is a twelve-year-old girl; her name is Masaki-chan and she’s been missing since this morning.
He knows this because he’d just gotten off the phone with Koyama and Shige, who had talked to her parents back in town after she’d gone missing, just like a trail of other girls her age over the past few days.
He’s found her and he’s waiting for them now before they can go in to save her.
Or he’s supposed to be waiting; that issue becomes kind of moot the moment one of the demons flips Masaki-chan over onto her back and smiles at her, black eyes twinkling mirth as he takes a knife in one of his hands.
“So, shall we consummate this agreement?” he asks the witches in a pleasant middle-aged baritone, looking over his shoulder at the two of them, who practically drool in their eagerness for some high grade virgin’s blood.
“Yes,” the witches say.
“Great. Then it’s a deal.” The demon raises his knife.
Ryo thinks that this probably isn’t a very smart thing to do, but hey, it’s Shige and Koyama’s fault for being slow.
Honestly, after being on a running show for all those months, one would think they’d be a able to get to a virgin sacrifice just a little bit quicker.
Ryo stands, aims his shotgun, and blows off the demon’s arm.
The knife clatters uselessly to the floor, Masaki-chan sobs as blood covers her face, and everyone in the room jumps to their feet.
Ryo approaches, all false bravado and sexy Osaka man bluff. “Starting the party without us? I’m insulted,” he quips, and keeps his eyes on Masaki-chan, trying to look reassuring. He’ll find a way to get them out of this. Or her, at the very least.
He keeps his gun trained on the demon closest to her and hope that the witches don’t try anything sneaky.
Except they’re witches (he hates witches) and they do.
They start chanting, and then lights and magic is flying through the air, and Ryo figures that at the very least, he’ll have bought Masaki-chan some time, maybe even enough for his two idiot groupmates to get here and save the day.
He closes his eyes as a blue bolt of lightning crashes right toward him.
It ends up turning one of the demons into a pile of slimy, black goop.
Ryo blinks.
The witches blink too.
The demon whose arm Ryo had blown off glares at the witches. “Don’t,” it growls at them, and the witches look confused enough to actually listen.
Ryo stares at the puddle of goop starting to ooze towards his shoes.
The one-armed demon smiles big and inviting at Ryo. “Welcome, Nishikido-san,” he greets, like the whole missing limb thing is of no consequence.
“Isn’t he a hunter?” one of the witches-the fat one-asks her taller friend.
The skinny witch shrugs. “Maybe he’s a traitor.”
“Not,” Ryo snaps, gun still trained on the demon. “I’m here for the girl.”
The demon snorts. “Of course. You want her, you got her,” it coos, soothingly. “Anything for a vessel of...”
Ryo shoots it in the knee.
It reels backwards, leg collapsing underneath it. That stupid smile isn’t gone though, in fact, it gets even bigger somehow. “That’s it,” the demon purrs. “Be as angry as you want, Nishikido-san.” It looks down at the blood pooling around it, pointedly. “Destroy me with all the hate you have. And then feast. My blood will give you power over all demons; the power you so desperately want.”
Ryo reloads. “You shut up,” it tells him, and this time, he does aim for the face.
But then he catches Masaki-chan’s wide, frightened eyes from the table.
They’re directed at him.
He hesitates, lowers the nozzle slightly. “Let her go.”
And then the demon isn’t nearly as pleased anymore, and it turns and looks down at Masaki-chan. “You,” it growls, “are a distraction. Nishikido-san and I are talking about grown-up things now.”
Before Ryo can do anything, the demon reaches forward with its hand and very neatly, very quickly, snaps Masaki-chan’s neck.
“There,” it breathes, looking satisfied. “Now where were we?”
Ryo sees red.
~~*~~
When Shige and Koyama get there, it is in time to see Ryo pulling a wicked-looking sacrificial blade out of the last of the witches’ torsos.
“Monster!” she spits at him, as she crumples to the floor.
Ryo flicks blood off of the knife dispassionately, breathing hard, covered in streaks of black and red.
Masaki-chan’s body lies limply on the table, not moving.
“Ryo-chan…” Koyama begins, and can see the heaving shoulders of his groupmate even from across the room. “Ryo-chan, what happened here?”
The walls are painted crimson.
Ryo turns, as if noticing them for the first time. “I…” he begins, but before he can finish, his eyes roll back in his head and he collapses.
“Hospital,” Shige barks, when he gets to Ryo’s side, takes his pulse. He cringes. “Some of this blood actually is his.”
Koyama nods and hefts Ryo onto his back.
~~*~~
“So, looks like you and Massu are a matched set,” Shige reports a while later, when Ryo finally blinks awake again, in a hospital bed with the others gathered around him.
P and Massu both look at Shige in confusion.
Shige wordlessly presents Ryo’s x-rays, as swiped from the lab while Koyama was distracting the nurse with pictures of his cat.
P frowns at the familiar carvings on Ryo’s ribs, an almost indecipherable maze of symbols and complicated sigils basically spelling, Stay Away.
Koyama looks at P, confused. “When did you do that?”
P studies them for a moment longer. “I didn’t,” he answers, after a beat. “It’s in a very different format from the ones I carved onto Massu’s bones.” He tilts his head as he examines the details thoughtfully. “It’s very…creative,” he says, face expressing grudging admiration for the foreign handiwork. “Nothing any angel I know would use, however.”
Ryo already knows the answer to why that is, has probably suspected this for a while now anyway. “Then it was Tegoshi,” he admits.
Tegoshi blinks. “What? No… I don’t even know how to.”
“Yeah, that’s stopped you before,” Shige scoffs.
Tegoshi pouts. “Then how? When?”
P’s eyes light with realization. “When he stopped the dreams.”
Koyama and Massu both look very lost. Tegoshi does too, but manages to hide it slightly better.
Shige slaps a hand to his forehead as he puts it together (he tends to do that a lot and then because he’s one of the first, has to explain everything to the stragglers). “You wished that he didn’t have to go through the dreams, remember?”
“No.” Pause. “Did I?”
Shige deftly pulls out his cell phone, pulls up the internet document he stores on his google account, and after about a minute of searching under the keywords Cold Oak, shoves the screen under Tegoshi’s face once he’s found the right date and instance.
Tegoshi reads.
Then he looks up at Shige questioningly. “You really do write down everything, don’t you, Shige?”
Shige flushes. “Shut up. That’s what happened. It explains everything.”
Tegoshi hands the phone back. “I guess that was me then.”
Ryo chokes back a snort of laughter. “Of course. Thanks, Tego-nyan. The sleep was nice while it lasted.”
Tegoshi manages a sheepish smile. “You’re welcome?”
Shige balks. “What do you mean while it lasted?” he and P end up asking, at the exact same time.
Ryo groans. “Nothing. I said nothing. Pain meds.”
P looks down at his friend sternly. “You’ve been acting strange.”
Koyama nods in vigorous agreement, and Ryo suddenly finds all eyes on him, again.
He sighs and focuses on Shige, because at the very least, the look on the smart ass’s face when he reveals this will be worth it.
“So,” he begins, eyeing Shige with the hint of a smirk, “remember how you keep trying to figure out what I am?”
~~*~~
In a dreamscape brought on by pain medication and bone weariness, Ryo finds himself surrounded by a familiar gray-red colored world again, though this time the setting is the hospital. The steady beep of the heart monitor speeds up in his ears as he realizes where he is, and as he turns his head he sees Kusano, sitting in the armchair besides his bed and looking smug. “So now you know,” the demon reveals, picking under his fingernails with the very same knife that Ryo had killed the witches with earlier. “But can you stop it?”
“If I’m your vessel, I can,” Ryo shoots back. “As long as I don’t say yes, right?”
The demon snorts. “I’m a demon. I can take any vessel I want, genius. I could ride you in a heartbeat and you’d be screaming behind me the entire time.”
Ryo falters. “You’re lying.”
A grin. “I don’t have to. You’re not my vessel, sweetheart. You’re one of the boss’s.”
Ryo sucks in a breath. “Lucifer.”
Kusano chuckles. “There we go. Not as dumb as your agency wants us to believe you all are, huh?” He stands then, casually brandishing the knife in one hand, turning it and turning against his palm like a pinwheel in the breeze. “Of course, you’re not the vessel, but the simple fact that you’re designed to carry him at all means you’ve got some appeal to the rest of us.”
“If I’m not the one, then why do you keep bugging me?” Ryo growls, mind racing as he tries to figure out the demon’s angle.
It shrugs. “I like messing with you. Oh, and the fact that the boss might need you, the way things are going. Good to have a contingency plan. Humans are unpredictable.”
Ryo sorts that out. Grins. “The vessel won’t say yes.”
A nod. “And Lucifer really only has so many meat suits scattered about the place. In retrospect, Azazel probably shouldn’t have had all the most powerful candidates fight it out death match style back at Cold Oak. The guy did have vision though. Liked the drama.” A sigh. “Of course, it only leaves us with a handful of possibilities now, and weaker ones than we’d like. They fall apart fast, you know. Still, a vessel’s a vessel, right? Buy a day, buy a week, it’s all the same.”
Ryo feels something like hope swell in his chest when he realizes Lucifer is running out of skins to wear. “So if no one says yes, then what? Lucifer is left wandering around without any shape? Apocalypse cancelled?”
Kusano snorts. “The vessel will say yes, eventually. Your only real importance is that you’re fresher than the first guy.” Pause. “And you’d stay that way too, if you would just give in and start on the demon’s blood regimen I’ve been trying to pitch you over these last few years. Good for the heart, you know. Keeps you at the top of your game, gives you super powers. I mean, don’t you want a piece of that? Super strength, telekinesis, killing demons with your mind? Plus, it would keep you from falling apart all over the place like the first guy is.”
“Flattery’s obviously not the strong point of this sales pitch,” Ryo drawls.
“Honesty is,” Kusano responds. “I’m all about revealing the truth.”
“Twisting it,” Ryo corrects. “We know.”
“Do you? It’s not twisting the truth if part of you already believes it to be true.” He walks a circle around Ryo’s bed then, and Ryo’s eyes flicker down to the fingers trailing along the edge of the thin hospital mattress.
When he looks up again, Masaki-chan’s grinning, heart-shaped face looks back at him. “Truth is relative.”
Ryo glares. “Bastard.”
“Oh, that’s not nice,” the demon twitters, looking appropriately scandalized at the big bad man’s inappropriate use of language around children. “But a lot of the things you think aren’t very nice in the first place, are they, Ryo-chan?” Masaki-chan smoothes down the hem of her skirt primly. “Such a gloomy mind. You couldn’t save one little girl who was depending on you. If a hunter can’t even do that, then how can he think about saving everyone?”
“Stop using her like this,” Ryo growls.
A smile. “As you wish.”
He morphs into Uchi. “This is a little weird now, isn’t it? You see me but I don’t know you anymore. Not like I used to. Another person who couldn’t be saved, at least, not completely. Did you know that sometimes, he has nightmares about the things you all have seen? Can’t, for the life of him, recall them in the morning though.”
Ryo clenches his jaw. “If pissing me off is the plan, good work.”
Uchi tucks a strand of hair behind his ears and winks. “This is all just a reminder,” he promises. “I know sometimes you forget how helpless you all really are. How much things you’re going to lose when this all hits the fan. You’ve felt parts of it already, and that was just the beginning.” The knife is still spinning in his hand, and with one swift motion, he brings it up to his own neck and slices across it, drawing a thick swelling of blood up from around Uchi’s throat.
Ryo looks away as it bleeds out all over the foot of his bed.
“Here’s the offer, Ryo-chan,” he says, unaffected by the blood loss as he licks the knife clean. “You say yes, and we let your little ragtag group of wannabes live. They can have a place, their own little pocket of hell to do whatever they want with. They get to survive. All you have to do is cooperate. And hey, you might not even get burned out of your body at all, if the vessel says yes before we need you. Then all you’ll have to deal with is me riding you. Consolation prize.”
Ryo’s answer doesn’t even give him pause for a second. “Fuck yourself,” he snarls.
Agaliarept uses Uchi’s face to crow in laughter. “Spunky. I like it.” He spins the knife one last time and blows Ryo a kiss before slamming the blade down, right into Ryo’s chest.
~~*~~
Ryo’s eyes snap open.
In the armchair beside him, P looks back, unblinking in the darkness as the heart monitor beeps beside his ear.
It reflects how Ryo’s heart is hammering in his chest, and he sits up, squeezing the bridge of his nose between his fingertips tiredly. “Did you hear any of that?” he asks.
The angel nods.
Ryo lets out a long, humorless laugh. “Two demons want inside me. I might be flattered if I didn’t want to puke.”
“If Lucifer doesn’t need to take you, Agaliarept intends to. As a vessel of Lucifer, your constitution is much more desirable for a demon than any normal human’s.”
Ryo smirks. “Like taking a piece of Lucifer into battle with them for luck?”
P doesn’t smirk back. “Yes.”
Ryo leans back against his pillow and wishes he’d never been born.
After a moment, P gently reaches out to him with two fingers. “Sleep,” the angel whispers. “I’ll watch over you.”
Ryo wants to protest, but before he knows it, his eyes are fluttering closed.
~~*~~
P can feel the tatters of his wounded Grace fading away into nothing as the days until the End of Days pass, one after another after another. On some days, he can hardly tell the bits of himself and the bits of Tomohisa still inside apart.
Hunger starts to become an issue. Sleep as well. The speeds at which he travels slow until they feel no faster than a crawl. Koyama worries about him, tries to teach him about these things as best he can. Brushing his teeth, showering, deodorant, hair. Laundry, cooking, dishes, wounds. Of all of them, P finds that the things he looks forward to the least are the ones that normal humans must do in the bathroom after meals and upon waking; he listens to Koyama’s stuttered descriptions of what to do and when and decides that it is all disturbing and undignified.
The one plus about sinking in a bog of humanity is that it is much easier to get drunk now, a small comfort during the low points of living in a world slowly dragging its feet to the end.
“What about God?” Koyama demands one day, shit-faced and weary after watching the news report and coming face to face with the image of earthquake victims and poisoned water supplies. “He’s a parent, right? Why would he let this happen to his kids?”
P doesn’t speak on it; God has been gone a long time and as far as he knows, Castiel’s desperate search has been fruitless thus far. It is part of the reason why Chamuel fell in the first place. Koyama’s current suffering is from an old wound revisited. P pushes more liquor towards his former brother instead of using words.
From across the table, Massu sighs. “Maybe I should just say yes. I mean, do you think that would give us a chance?”
Ryo smacks him upside the head.
“Ow,” Massu says.
“Don’t make me do it again,” Ryo growls. “No one is saying yes. No fucking way.”
Shige finishes the last of the sake, before tilting the bottle expectantly at Tegoshi.
Tegoshi sighs, blinks once, and the bottle is filled again. Magic. The most useless magic ever. He multiplies their fried fish cakes as well, at Massu’s prompting, and Shige makes a joke about fish and wine as he pours Yamapi another cup of sake from the fresh bottle.
“Remember concert tours?” Koyama asks, after a beat, sounding wistful and nostalgic. “I liked doing those. Being an idol.”
The others “Hmmm,” thoughtfully, suddenly full of their own fond memories.
P sways against Massu in his seat and murmurs, “I think I was just starting to understand human singing. I could have become good at it, with practice,” he says.
The others laugh, but they don’t tell P why.
“Maybe when this is all over you’ll get to do it again,” Tegoshi offers, consolingly.
P turns bleary eyes on him. “The chances of…”
He’s cut off when he and Koyama both suddenly go rigid in the seats, heads pitching forward like someone had simultaneously slapped them upside the head.
“What is it?” Shige asks, slurring slightly and suddenly wishing he hadn’t drunk so much tonight.
“I don’t know,” P answers, and Koyama looks just as clueless as he is, only doubly headachy at the mind-invasion because he lacks the same angel protective padding that P has.
P turns to Tegoshi, looking expectant. “If you could clarify.”
Tegoshi obliges him and gently taps two fingers to the angel’s forehead.
P is instantly sober again, which is, as far as most of the others are concerned, a damned waste of fine alcohol. But then the angel tilts his head, listening, and no one dares to say anything.
A blink and a gust of wind later, and Yamapi’s seat is empty. Massu tips over into the empty space in surprise, and lands with his head in Koyama’s lap.
“Something’s…rising,” Koyama manages to suss out after a beat. He pushes Massu out of his lap and gropes around the table for more alcohol to numb the pain. “I don’t know what.”
“Great.”
Ryo manages to down two more shots before Tegoshi reluctantly sobers everyone up.
They head back to the safety of the jimusho to wait.
~~*~~
P finds himself in the middle of an open field, surrounded in a circle by the trunks of freshly fallen trees.
In the center of it all he can see the earth starting to pulse like it’s trying to breathe, bits of dirt and rock and grass falling through a hole in the middle that slowly grows wider and wider with each throbbing motion.
Curious, he goes toward it slowly, watching. It smells like death, and P crouches at its edge, finding that he can’t look away.
But then the angels attack.
~~*~~
When P arrives at the jimusho in a gust of wind he wastes no time in depositing the body on top of the conference table, getting mud and dirt and blood everywhere.
The angel seems out of breath, eyes haunted and humanly weary.
The others peer down at the unconscious body on their table, and through all the dirt and mud, it’s Ryo who recognizes him first.
“Kusano?!” he barks, and instantly reaches for his holy water.
P stops him with an arm, giving him a strange look. “He’s human.”
“He’s dead,” Ryo snaps, and everyone winces except the angel.
“We need to hide him,” P breathes, and almost reaches out himself. But then he stops, bone-tired, and looks at Tegoshi. “Can you?”
Tegoshi nods and tentatively puts his hand on top of Kusano’s chest. He closes his eyes, concentrates. Light explodes outward from his palm a moment later, Kusano’s torso surging off of the table like he’d been defibrillated, eyes snapping open as he sucks air into his lungs.
Everyone stares at him.
He blinks back, owlishly.
“Is it really you?” Shige breathes, and resists the urge to reach out and poke the young man on the table.
Kusano looks around, before grinning. “So I’m starving. Who wants to buy the zombie lunch?”
It seems like a wildly inappropriate question considering.
Ryo feels the inexplicable need to punch him in the arm.
Which he does.
Kusano yelps. “Ow! Dude, that’s the first thing you do to someone who’s been dead for like, four years?!” Kusano punches Ryo back, in the same exact spot.
And just like that, NEWS knows it really is him.
~~*~~
“They said they needed me to help save the world,” Kusano explains breezily, as he munches on a bowl of chicken curry. “So you know, they put me back together and I’m a real boy again. Apparently they can do that.”
P looks suspicious, despite feeling an inkling of gratitude for Kusano’s resurrection. “What did they say they needed you for, specifically?”
Kusano shrugs. “Just that, really. I take it you flyboys are big on the cryptic stuff or something. I think Zachariah may have actually popped a boner over not having to tell me all the details.”
P gives him a strange look, like he’s trying to decode that sentence.
“But you still agreed to come back anyway?” Ryo asks, and worries about all this consent stuff. Angels are probably at least as tricky as demons are when it comes to wrangling a yes out of someone.
“I said I’d do what I could to help,” Kusano says. “Then Zachariah said he’d bring me back, and we’d talk.”
Groans all around. “You basically agreed just like that?” Shige demands, incredulous.
Kusano holds up both hands in surrender. “Woah, hey. Heaven’s the good guys, right? Why would I need to be suspicious? I mean, P’s an angel.”
Koyama sighs and puts his hand on Kusano’s arm. “We’ve got a lot to tell you,” the oldest informs him, solemnly. What he doesn’t say outright is, a lot has happened since you’ve been gone.
Kusano blinks. “I can still finish my curry first, right?” he asks, and gestures to his bowl with his spoon.
“You should probably listen first,” Shige suggests, and slowly takes the spoon out of his friend’s hands.
True to his prophetic nature, Shige is right.
Because if Kusano had eaten everything, he thinks he’d probably be feeling a little bit sick right now.
~~*~~
That night, after Kusano and P make up P’s couch for him to sleep on (and Kusano makes the angel uncomfortable with the whole “So now you need to sleep, huh?” issue), Kusano ends up being the one who dreams.
“And here I thought you were copping out on us,” Zachariah tells him the minute he drifts off, as Kusano suddenly finds himself sitting in Yokohama arena, at the edge of the stage. The spotlight shines bright and steady on him, and he is staring out at all the rows upon rows of seats, seats that used to be filled with fans that would sometimes chant his name.
“Miss it, do you?” the angel asks, but doesn’t sound the least bit sympathetic.
“Nah,” Kusano says, when he thinks about it. “Just a nice memory, is all.”
“Great. Very interesting.” Zachariah sits down next to him. “But there are more important things going on here.”
“So I gathered.”
Zachariah looks irritated. “You weren’t where you were supposed to be. And now I can’t find you.”
“P’s pretty fierce when he wants to be,” Kusano snorts. “You know, despite that whole dead fish eyes thing, there’s fire under there. Took out your two boys before I even saw daylight and whisked me away like Prince Charming.”
Zachariah scowls. “He’ll be dealt with.”
“From the sounds of things, you’ve made it so that we’ll all be dealt with.”
“Don’t let them fool you into believing their petty, selfish lies, Kusano,” Zachariah warns. “They’re the ones who are willing to risk billions of souls just for one or two more measly days on this godforsaken rock. And I mean godforsaken literally.”
“It’s a nice rock,” Kusano answers. “You should maybe spend a day or two down here sometime. Soak up the culture. There’s this club I know, great hot wings.”
Zachariah twitches, clearly starting to lose his patience. It’s a personal talent of Kusano’s to make people do that. Angels too, apparently.
“Kusano,” Zachariah sighs, “Masuda isn’t the only vessel out there for Jophiel, you know. He’s not as special as Michael, tied to one specific bloodline. We’ve got options here. You.”
Kusano chuckles. “So that’s what this is about. Massu won’t give you guys the time of day, so you want me to get some angel in me since we’re both apparently compatible with this not-as-special archangel of yours.”
“Look, those children you call friends don’t know what they’re doing. They haven’t seen or experienced half the things you have. They don’t understand what hell is like.”
Kusano cringes slightly at that, in his shoulders. “I kind of want to keep it that way.”
The angel smiles at that, genuinely. “Well good. We’re on the same page then. They don’t seem to understand what happens if they don’t let things play out the way they’re supposed to.”
Kusano sighs. “Mankind is getting wiped out either way, of course they’re fighting against both shitty options.”
“They don’t understand the stakes of after,” Zachariah clarifies. “They think hell is just a bad dream. A joke.”
Kusano shudders. “It’s not.”
The angel nods. “And we know that. You know that. That’s why we’re turning to you. All you have to do is say yes.”
Silence.
And then, after a moment, Kusano leans back and he shouts in frustration. The sound bounces off the walls, echoes across the arena in a harsh, sharp bark. He sounds like an angry, wounded animal.
His voice reeks of sadness, desperation, sacrifice.
Zachariah doesn’t care. “Well?”
“Alright,” Kusano murmurs eventually, jumping to his feet. “I get it. I’ll meet you outside Yamapi’s place in ten.”
Zachariah’s grin is so big it actually manages to make him look more like a douchebag than ever before. “Atta boy,” he says, and blinks out of the dream without another moment’s hesitation.
Kusano takes a deep breath and before he leaves, looks out at the rows and rows of empty seats, face in the spotlight, feet at center stage.
For a moment, he lets himself remember how they used to scream his name.
He grins and wakes up.
~~*~~
When P hears the door to his apartment open he bursts out of the bathroom in less time than it takes for a person to breathe in.
But the living room is empty and Kusano is already gone, a distant fluttering of wings the only clue P has as to how.
The angel with very little Grace remaining stands wet and naked in the middle of his vessel’s living room and hates how helpless he is becoming.
~~*~~
Meanwhile, Koki takes an innocuous late-night smoke break outside during a short break in his group’s latest series of tedious tour planning meetings; he spares a quick look over his shoulder for any sign of the jimusho’s security guards before surreptitiously disconnecting the alarm arming the emergency exit on the roof. He pauses to make a face when he looks down and finds a weird chalk drawing scrawled out on the ground in front of his designer sneaker, right in front of the threshold. Security must get bored a lot if they’re doodling on the ground when there’s nothing else to do, he thinks, before sneaking out.
Johnny tells them not to use the roof or the balconies anymore because apparently he is growing paranoid in his old age, but KAT-TUN is two floors removed from the company’s top freaking floor and Koki doesn’t want to waste half of his break riding the elevator all the way down to the lobby so he can get his nicotine fix in the designated smoking area.
Just thinking about it prompts him to mutter all the English curse words he knows at whatever asshole decided to make the latest round of jimusho rules more like American ones before he props a cement brick he finds nearby into the doorway to hold it open.
He doesn’t notice how the weight of the door pushes the brick a little bit backwards before settling at equilibrium, irreparably smudging the strange chalk circle drawn on the ground in the process.
He lights his cigarette and enjoys the view.
~~*~~
The following morning, when NEWS stumbles into work bleary-eyed and cursing after failing to locate Kusano despite P and Tegoshi’s best efforts, they immediately notice that things seem strange.
More strange than usual anyway; all five members of ARASHI are currently engaged in a full on screaming match in the lobby regarding each other’s bad driving habits while security seems to be taking sides rather than breaking it up. From there, NEWS climbs into the elevator; they end up picking Kamenashi up along the way, the KAT-TUN member is very obviously on the phone and only pauses to give NEWS a perfunctory nod of greeting before he continues talking, eyes narrowed in annoyance. He tells whoever he’s talking to, “No. Your choice. Him or me,” with the kind of spitting vitriol usually only reserved for use by high school movie head cheerleaders.
“Something’s wrong,” P says, after they get off the elevator.
“Yeah. Place is creepy,” Ryo mutters, eying some of the janitorial staff, who seem rather more robotic than normal. Koyama greets a familiar cleaning lady like he does every time he sees her, inquiring about her health, asking how her children are doing.
She runs over his foot with her cleaning cart.
“Cristo,” all the NEWS members say on instinct (except for Koyama, who is too busy rubbing his foot). The cleaning lady doesn’t flinch.
“Alternate universe?” Tegoshi proposes, because that is completely logical.
Shige glares at him. “That’s not how they work.”
Tegoshi sniffs. “How do you know?”
Shige ignores him. “Let’s just go find Johnny, okay? Maybe he can use his psychic mojo to find Kusano before that idiot does something drastic.”
“How do you know?” Ryo repeats at the resident to-be prophet, and Shige throws his hands up.
“Do you have a better idea?”
“No,” P answers brusquely, and leads them down the hall towards Johnny’s office. “If Tegoshi and I can’t find him, then Johnny is the only person with the kind of power who can.”
Shige takes a moment to look smug before they enter Johnny’s door and everything in the universe goes wrong from there.
~~*~~
P stops in front of Johnny’s desk just as Johnny turns in his chair to face them, grinning like a cartoon super villain.
At that moment a circle of flame explodes around him, Johnny’s eyes flash inky black, and the rest of NEWS finds them inexplicably grabbed from behind by a veritable chorus of tiny juniors, all sporting the same inky-black eyed look as their boss but somehow, still far too cute to punch in the face.
Though Ryo does try.
Koyama gives him a scandalized look.
“Seriously?!” Ryo snarls back, and gets smacked in the side of the head with a fierce, prepubescent elbow.
“Just stay still,” Shige instructs through gritted teeth, giving Ryo a pointed sideways look that says we have a plan.
“Welcome, hunters,” Johnny greets in the meantime, throwing his arms out on either side of him with great pomp and circumstance. “Would it be tacky to say I knew you were coming?”
P’s eyes narrow. “Agaliarept.”
A smirk. “Perpetiel. We finally meet. I get along well with fallen angels, you know.” He pauses to look over P’s trapped shoulder to Ryo then, who’s still struggling gamely against the demon-strengthened juniors. “Hi, Ryo. Been well? Feels like it’s been so long since I’ve seen you.”
“If that’s the case, why don’t you come over here and greet me properly?” Ryo grunts, lips pulled back in a sneer.
The demon wearing Johnny’s face laughs. “I just might. What’s say we swap? Mine for yours? I could go for a newer model.”
“What’s in it for me?” Ryo prompts, and hopes he’s enough of a distraction on his own for whatever it is Shige and Tegoshi have planned in the meantime.
Except that he forgets how Agaliarept reads minds, and the moment he thinks that, Johnny’s black eyes turn to Tegoshi behind Koyama and Shige, who has his eyes closed, who is concentrating as hard as he knows how even as two possessed juniors pin his arms back behind him.
Several things happen at the same time.
The overhead sprinklers go off, torrentially.
The juniors shriek as Tegoshi orders, “Out,” and black smoke pours from their mouths in a rush, disappearing into the floor.
Koyama catches as many of the dazed juniors as he can.
Massu dashes forward, rips off his sweater, and lays it over the waning circle of burning holy oil on the ground.
P steps out of the ring and together they advance towards the desk, P’s hand outstretched, Massu’s demon killing tanto unsheathed and ready.
But before Pi can try anything, Agaliarept throws him through the wall with a thought. The angel crumples to the ground in the opposite hallway, blood dripping from a gash on his temple and eyes rolling back as the demon’s power keeps him there.
“Bad idols,” the demon tsks, grinning. “Aren’t you supposed to be on your best behavior when you’re talking with your boss?”
He locks eyes with Massu then, who freezes in his tracks before he can stab the demon in the forehead. Instead Massu starts to turn mechanically, until he does a complete about face and is staring at his groupmates again. The demon killing sword is slowly, forcibly being pointed at his own throat by his own hand.
“Oh, and guess what else I can do?” Johnny’s raspy voice chuckles, “Wouldn’t it be funny if the archangel vessel filleted himself in front of everything he’s trying to protect? Bet he’ll wish he said yes.”
NEWS members look on in horror as a thin trickle of blood drips out of a narrow cut on Massu’s throat.
“Stop it,” Ryo demands.
“That wouldn’t be any fun,” the demon snorts, dismissing Ryo with a wave.
“I’ll say yes,” Ryo offers, before he can think. He doesn’t know what else he can do right now.
Shige and Koyama throw him horrified looks, their arms full of groaning or unconscious juniors.
Agaliarept smirks. “Is this the bargaining chip I needed all along?” he marvels, casually surprised. “If I’d known that I would have slowly offed each of your cute little friends one after another until you begged me to take you to Lucifer.”
“Do it now, just let them go,” Ryo begs as the sprinklers rain down over everyone, the knife point starting to dig incrementally deeper and deeper into the soft flesh of Massu’s throat. “Like you promised. They all live.”
Agaliarept laughs. “Well, isn’t that something? I agree to your…”
“No.”
And then, before Lucifer’s general can finish, NEWS and the other humans in the room suddenly disappear, except for the one who sent them away.
The demon blinks in disappointment at Tegoshi. “Well. That’s not a good way to end the game. Things were just getting interesting.”
Tegoshi, exhausted, stumbles back into the wall behind him, blinking water out of his eyes. “Maybe I don’t feel like playing games,” he breathes, trying not to let the nausea of mass teleportation knock him out. He hopes he didn’t accidentally send them back in time; it had kind of been a rush job.
“What a cute little messiah,” Agaliarept chortles, as he studies Tegoshi. “I can’t quite unlock your head.”
“You wouldn’t be able to handle what I’m thinking,” Tegoshi promises.
“I could always just rip your pretty little head right off your pretty little shoulders instead,” the demon offers, conversationally. “I’ve always wanted to kill a messiah. Missed my chance last time around.”
Tegoshi, still breathing hard, manages to find his feet again. “Try it,” he dares, and is glad he sounds a lot more steady than he feels.
The demon’s eyes narrow as he attacks.
The force sends Tegoshi stumbling back against the wall again, but luckily he doesn’t fall. Or go through it.
Grudging approval from Agalirept. “Not bad,” he says, in Johnny’s familiar voice, and Tegoshi winces at the cadence of it, at the knowledge that Johnny is still in there right now, probably watching and in great pain.
Tegoshi focuses on his opponents black eyes. “Leave him.”
Agaliarept’s body seizes up for a moment, but it’s gone in a blink of an eye; he shakes the command off a bit too easily. “Not focused enough, baby bird,” he chuckles. “But not bad, either, considering you’re more suited to telling the heavenly host what to do than the armies of hell. I really do want to see what the inside of your brain looks like sometime soon.”
He picks up a letter opener from his desk and pitches it at Tegoshi’s face, hard.
Tegoshi manages to turn some of the droplets of water raining down from the overhead sprinklers into a sheet of metal. It catches the letter opener, stops it in its tracks before all of it explodes back into another spray of water.
Agaliarept laughs and wipes his face. “Creative. How fitting for a small god.”
Tegoshi huffs, cheeks flushed from exertion. “Get out,” he tries again, firmer this time.
The demon chokes a little, a trickle of black smoke escaping from out of the corner of his mouth. He sucks it back in. “Getting angrier, are we?” He grins. “Good.”
He actually deigns to outstretch his hand now, steps closer, and starts chanting.
Tegoshi’s knees buckle as he’s slammed against the floor, spun around, and then lifted up with his arms spread open, pinned to the wall.
Cuts open up on either of his palms, over his eyes, his feet.
He gasps and ends up choking on his own blood.
The demon pauses to examine his handiwork appreciatively. “I always did like the classics,” he explains, watching Tegoshi try to focus beyond the pain to counter.
“You really are tragically beautiful, kid,” Agaliarept sighs, as the blood starts to fall more freely now, in small wet rivers under the rain of the sprinklers. He turns and strides back to his desk, to call his (or rather, Johnny’s) secretary and ask for some popcorn. He’s got a good looking idol bleeding out all over his floor and he wants to properly enjoy it.
It is a moment of over-confidence, a rare lucky break for them that no one could have anticipated.
The demon wearing Johnny’s face presses the button on his intercom.
But when he looks up again, the show is over.
He frowns. “Forgot angels were fast,” he muses to himself, lightly, before sitting back down in his desk and ordering the popcorn anyway. He can probably get another one of the juniors under mind-control and make him to do the full reenactment anyway.
~~*~~
Tegoshi whammies them all back to P’s place; one minute Ryo is watching Massu start to slice into himself and seriously contemplating letting the devil wear him like a condom and the next he’s stumbling forward over the sofa bed that Kusano had made up but never slept in last night.
Behind him, some of the juniors start to cry, because yeah, demon possession is traumatic like that, and of course it’s Koyama who busies himself comforting them while P blinks owlishly and gets to his feet, blood dripping down his forehead and into his eyes from where he’d slammed his head through the wall earlier.
Massu quickly pulls the knife away from his own throat and clamps a hand over the cut there, breath shaky and eyes big.
“Where’s Tegoshi?” Shige asks, after the initial nausea messiah-airlines causes has worn off enough for him to stop seeing spots in parts of his vision.
P’s shoulders go rigid.
“He didn’t come with us…” Ryo realizes out loud just as everyone else does inside, and a heavy weight of dread settles in his stomach. “Can he beat that demon?”
P wipes blood from his eyes. “Stay here,” is all he says, and with a flutter of displaced air, is gone in a heartbeat.
Ryo throws a lamp into the wall.
The juniors shout, and Koyama looks up in surprise. “Ryo-chan,” he starts, part worry and part admonishment, “that won’t help anything.”
Ryo glares at him. “I feel better.”
The former angel ducks his head. “We need to… we need to get these kids home. That’s what we need to do first.”
“You handle that,” Ryo tells him, and heads for the door. “I’m going after those idiots.”
Shige stops him bodily, stepping into his way and grabbing him by the shoulders. “How, by trading yourself in for everyone again?”
Ryo falters. “Yes. No. I don’t know.”
Shige sighs. “Deals with the devil won’t get us anywhere.”
“I can’t just stay here and do nothing,” Ryo counters, helplessness lending a dangerous edge to his voice.
Shige doesn’t back down, for once. “You have to.”
Ryo fights the urge to punch him. “I don’t have to anything.”
“Think,” Shige insists, firmly, and for the first time, the giant dweeb looks kind of intimidating. “Yamashita-kun and Tegoshi are the strongest of us. If you go you’re only a liability. Like it or not, right now, the four of us can’t do anything for them they can’t already do for themselves. Yamashita-kun will bring him back.”
Ryo feels sick inside. “Then what are we supposed to do?”
Shige turns to look over his shoulder, at the sobbing juniors surrounding Koyama, watching the event with silent, sad eyes.
Shige sets his jaw. “We do what we can. That’s all.” His piece thus said, Shige loses some of those hard edges around his mouth, looking at Ryo warily out of the corner of his eye, like he expects to be punched any moment now.
A moment.
And then Ryo takes a deep breath and comes to a decision. “Fine. Then let’s get these brats home.”
Everyone huffs in silent relief, though the helplessness continues to settle inside them like rocks.
~~*~~
P and Tegoshi appear twenty minutes later, while Koyama and Ryo are out driving the juniors home and Shige is busy pacing the length of P’s living room, trying to think about what should be done first and where. Massu, having finished wrapping the cut on his neck, drops the bandage he’s holding when the two arrive in the living room, and manages to catch them before they fall onto one big crumpled heap on the floor.
Tegoshi smiles up weakly at Massu. “Hey. Nice catch.”
Shige’s eyes go wide at the wounds on his hands. “What happened?”
Tegoshi winces. “I need more practice.”
P, on the ground beside him, sits up and looks around the room. “Where did the others go?”
~~*~~
The minute Ryo finishes chauffeur duty with his half of the juniors he’s supposed to call Shige for an update.
He turns his phone off and goes hunting instead.
PREVIOUS// NEXT