Reduction (Digital Devil Saga, Heat/Jenna/Sera)
Okay. You know how sometimes I say I'm going to the special hell?
Well, I'M GOING TO THE SPECIAL HELL FOR REAL THIS TIME, GUYS. Dear Meganada in Power Plant, the term "wrongsexual" has never been so appropriate for me.
Title: Reduction
Author: puella_nerdii
Fandom: Digital Devil Saga (2)
Characters/Pairing: Heat/Jenna/Sera
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Um. Incest, dubcon, cannibal demons, hermaphrodism, questionably-aged participant. So basically the canon. And significant spoilers for DDS2.
Prompt: Heat/Jenna, in a threesome with any other character from your list.
Wordcount: 3425
Summary: You don't like the truth, but there it is.
Heat isn’t this. Or he wasn’t this.
He slams his fist through the monitor. His, not Agni’s. The shards and jagged edges dig into his knuckles and glint with his blood and he doesn’t give a shit, the pain’s nothing, it’s the breaking that’s important. And it’s not breaking enough and it never will, even when he smashes his elbow into the remains of the screen again and again and howls and the sound’s just as pulverized as the glass is. Mangled, that’s the word for the strips of skin hanging off him in tatters and that’s the word for everything now. It burns, and he can’t cast the fire out of him, it’s not something Agi can drain off or Bufu can freeze, and he fucking hates it.
“Look at what she made you.”
Angel. He snarls. She doesn’t.
“Madame Margot would have asked what she reduced you to.” She stands in the doorway, fingering the neckline of her shirt. The light billows out from behind her and he squints and it’s wrong. “But that’s not entirely accurate. You’re not a reduction, you’re a reimagining.”
“Fuck off,” Heat says.
“Even the nature of your reactions,” she says. “There’s complexity there, I think, but the anger overwhelms everything. It’s fascinating, both as itself and as comparison.”
Heat thinks of other words that mean fuck off and lists them in his head, clenches his fist and ignores the way his shredded skin screams when the air washes over his cuts. His arm starts pulsing, pounding, the red lines radiating from his Atma and spreading outward.
“Transform if you want,” Angel says.
He braces his fist against the wall, shakes.
“The strong devour the weak.” She strokes the doorframe with the backs of her nails. “And I’m stronger than you are.”
His hands tremble. The red lines halt, stop spreading. Suspended.
“You’re not denying it.”
“You want something,” he snaps.
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Come with me.”
“That’s not an answer,” he says. Growls. His atma still pulses, but slower now, like his heart, sends ripples of heat through his blood, enough to make his stomach clench and his teeth tighten. He wants to rip her lips off her face and shove them down her throat until she gags on them, wants to tear her nails off her fingers and scratch her face up with them, wants to yank her hair out and strangle her with it, wants to ruin how she looks now, all white and bloodless.
“I want to undo the damage Madame Margot’s wrought,” she says.
“What Cuvier’s done,” he asks, “or what God’s done?”
She smiles. “Very good. Very good.”
“Shut up.”
“O’Brien would be pleased. The man was something of an apostate. Of course, Catholic guilt is difficult to fully absolve.”
“Shut up,” he says again, forces the words out through clenched teeth. “I’m not-” There’s a word for what she’s doing, but it slips out of his head, things do that a lot and he doesn’t know how to catch them, how to keep them, how to hold on to them. “Whatever you’re trying to make me.”
“No. You’re what she made you.”
He doesn’t say anything, just walks forward and smashes his fist into the door, inches away from her head. She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t even blink, just looks at him like-there’s a like there, she’s looking at him like he’s something and he doesn’t know what but he might have known once and it pisses him off, everything pisses him off and he doesn’t know why and that pisses him off more.
“Do you want to see her?” Angel asks.
“You already know what I’m going to say,” Heat says. “Don’t you?”
“Yes.” She beckons, one finger extended and crooked. “Come with me.”
He does, and he hates it, but it’s all he can do. He follows her and he knows people are looking at him, talking to each other about him and it’s pointless and their words don’t really mean anything but the people talking think they do and the sounds scrape against his ears and he can’t get them to stop, not even when he glares at him, because then they’ll just talk about how he’s glaring. It never fucking ends, it just keeps going on and on and on.
Nothing ends.
Well, the hallway does, eventually. Ends in a flight of stairs, as bloodless-white-the word antiseptic springs into his head-as the rest of the complex, spiraling down to Sera’s EGG. The paint’s chipping at the edges of the stairs, revealing rough metal underneath. He curls his toes around one step, feels the steel dig in through the soles of his shoes.
“She doesn’t trust you,” Heat says to Angel. It isn’t a question. “And you need her to trust you.”
“We need her consent and cooperation,” Angel says.
“So that means you need her to trust you.”
“Need, no. There are ways to compel her consent.”
Heat snarls.
“But there are advantages to having God on your side,” Angel says, not really smiling. “So we’d prefer that.”
“Are you going to let her leave that thing?” He grips the railing, grinds his palm into it hard enough to leave a stripe across his skin.
“She needs to be allowed out at intervals.”
Intervals. He thinks of solar cycles and scowls-is that why Agni’s burning in his chest, his stomach, his arm? Burning closer to the surface, anyway, close enough to sear his skin right off, he thinks there’s steam rising from the gashes in his arm. “And you’re going to let her out now.”
“For a while, yes. Her health would deteriorate if we didn’t give her enough periods of exercise or fresh air.”
“Stop talking like that,” he says.
“Stop talking like what?”
“Stop talking like you care about her.”
“She’s important to us,” Angel says. “She’s important to you in a different way, but that doesn’t diminish her importance to us.”
“You keep on saying us,” Heat says. “Why don’t you say me? Do you care about her?”
“I thought you’d understand the principles of group cohesion,” Angel says. They’re almost at the bottom of the stairs now. Her hand hovers over the doorknob. “How a group speaks with one voice if it wants to function effectively, because dissenting opinions create conflicts within the group structure. I don’t believe in it, myself. You don’t, either.”
Heat slams his arm down on the door, on one side of her head. “You don’t know what it was like.” Bitch, he almost adds, but he thinks she’d like that.
“I watched everything,” she says, in the Gale kind of way that means you’re an idiot but you’re so much of an idiot that you probably don’t realize what I’m saying. Except he does, and he growls at her.
“I’m not stupid.”
“No,” she agrees, “you aren’t.”
She pushes the door open and he doesn’t fall through the doorway or anything, he has enough balance not to do that, he doesn’t even stagger all that much. His boots squeak against the clean floor. There’s blood outside everywhere, the strong ripping the weak from limb to limb under the black sun, and there’s nothing inside here except white so bright it hurts to look at and order and it’s wrong and it’s fucking fake and nothing matches up the way it should.
He watches them hatch Sera from the EGG, hears the hiss and the whirr and the sound of fluid dripping. They towel her off, white fabric smeared with yellow-and-clear slime, her hair’s slick with it and drops of the liquid cling to her eyelashes, glue them closed. They have to wipe it off before she can see, she can’t do it on her own. She’s so small like this, even smaller than she was when they found her in the crater. His legs flex, swell, and he’s about to run forward and snatch her away, take her away from everyone and everything except him, he can save her, but Angel steps in front of him.
“Acclimation’s a delicate process,” she says. “The man you’re derived from understood that. You’ll hurt her if you take her away now. The shock might kill her, and you don’t want that.”
He wants to spit in her face. He doesn’t, but he wants to.
They finish unhooking her, disconnecting her and drying her off; they sling a robe around her shoulders and they have to strap her down and wheel her forward and it should be him doing it but it isn’t and Angel’s smiling again and he has a damn good idea about why. They reach the end of the walkway and push her off to the side into a white room with white floors and a white ceiling; her hair’s the opposite so he looks at it, can’t help but look at it, can’t help but look at her.
“Stay there,” Angel says to Heat. “And get her out of the restraints,” she adds to the workers, who do it. Do it just like he does it. She isn’t his leader but he does it anyway. This is wrong. Everything about this is wrong wrong wrong wrong and he knows it but he can’t change it and that’s the most wrong part about it.
Angel walks inside the room. Heat stays on the walkway, hovers outside the door where he can see Sera but she can’t see him.
“Go away,” Sera says. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
“We’ve brought someone here to see you,” Angel says. “Come in.”
He does.
“Heat…” Her eyes get rounder and his breath catches in his chest, tightens. “Heat, where’s Serph?”
Fuck.
Agni’s roar rips through him, tears his arm apart from the inside out and he lunges forward and grabs her shoulders-they’re even thinner than they were in the Junkyard, he doesn’t even need to let Agni out to crush her bones in his hands, grind them up-and now she’s looking at him, really looking, and Angel’s looking, too. Looking but not doing anything.
“Serph’s not here,” he says. She’s cold under his hands, colder than she should be. “I am.”
She leans away. She leans away and she’s trying to close her eyes and-
“Serph betrayed you!” he shouts, forces the words through his throat. “Serph betrayed all of us!” She-she has to see that, she has to, he has to make her see-but he never would, never would leave her, he’s here for her and he’s by her side and Serph isn’t, Serph’s dead for all Heat knows and when he thinks that knife-sharp pain twists in his gut and is that part Sera’s fault, too?
“Stop,” she says, tilting her head up towards the ceiling and squeezing her eyes shut (and why won’t she look at him), “stop, you’re hurting me.”
“You made him to hurt you, Seraphita,” Angel says.
Sera stills in Heat’s hands. “You’re lying.”
“He’s dangerous,” Angel says. “He’s threatening. You don’t understand his desire, so you direct it towards yourself and only yourself, because you think that gives you control over him. If he sees only you, wants only you, then he’s yours. Well,” she adds, “yours and Serph’s. You did build in that ambiguity.”
Sera presses her lips together until they turn white.
“He is what you made him,” Angel says. “You wanted him to be like this, and you got what you wanted. And you do want it, but you can’t admit as much to yourself, because good girls shouldn’t want that. Good girls should want Serph. But you aren’t a good girl, Seraphita. You want both. You want everything.”
“Don’t-” Heat’s hands are shaking on Sera’s shoulders, pressing into her skin hard enough to leave red marks behind. “Don’t say that about her, don’t you dare say that about her.”
“He’s leaping to your defense,” Angel says. Cool, even, measured, like Gale but nothing like Gale. “He wants to be your prince, and you deny him even that much. And in denying him, you deny yourself. Because he’s you. And you don’t like that, but it’s true. You don’t like the truth, but there it is.”
He hears her breathing. It’s shallow, fast. She’s hiccupping, choking-choking something back.
“Look at him, Seraphita,” Angel says. “Look at what you’ve done.”
Her eyes open. Black, dark as her hair and shining in a way her hair doesn’t. They suck him in hard enough that he could drown in them. Fuck, maybe he already has. And he sees himself in her eyes, too, but darker, shaded in.
“Sera,” he says, and kisses her, crushes his lips against hers. She gasps into his mouth, a tiny fluttering sound, and that sends fire roaring through him again, burning a line straight down to his cock. He drills his tongue into her mouth and she’s warm and wet and Sera and he pulls her closer until she’s pushed against him everywhere, soft and small and-shaking.
“I’m sorry,” she says when he breaks it off to breathe. “I’m sorry.”
He doesn’t know what to say, can’t think of anything, not when being this close to her’s burning the thoughts out of his head, and it’s better when he does things so he sinks his teeth into the side of her neck, right where her jaw connects. His teeth, not Agni’s. Not yet. But Agni wants her, too.
Fingertips slide flat up the back of his neck. Not Sera’s-bigger, harder, longer nails. “Do you want him, Seraphita?” Angel asks; her breath puffs against Heat’s ear.
“I,” Sera says. “Yes.”
Heat moans, shoves his knee between Sera’s legs and pins her in place and runs his teeth over every part of her the robe doesn’t cover, all of her white white skin and he’s the one making it red, leaving angry streaks on it. His arm throbs every time he darts his tongue out and tastes her: the sweat beading at the hollow of her throat, the EGG fluid clinging to the side of her neck, the veins throbbing just below her jaw.
“You’ll have to sing to him,” Angel says. “You built in that failsafe, at least. Can you do that?”
Her chest rises and falls under his lips-he’s almost on his knees with his face in her stomach, Sera’s stomach, Sera, Sera. He bites down, bites until his jaw aches, he can’t not, and he sucks hard enough to draw the taste right out of her skin. His arm bulges, ripples, expands-
“Light-” The first note’s faint, just a shiver in the air, one that runs down his spine. Her body ripples, he feels it. “Light-shines on heaven…”
It’ soft, the sound falters and wavers and cracks, and the rhythm’s not what he remembers, but it’s Sera’s song and Agni realizes that, retreats back into his atma. He slides his fingers up her ribcage, blunt nails and human palms, digs in until his knuckles whiten.
“Good,” Angel says somewhere above him.
He drops all the way to his knees now, tugs her robe open, and-she’s bare to him, exposed in a way she wasn’t back in the crater, because now she knows it and her thighs tremble. He braces his hands on them, leans forward-her scent, salty and sharp, drifts towards him and he can’t stop, doesn’t want to, can’t stop until he tastes her, her-her slickness on his tongue, in his mouth, everywhere. He drinks it down, drinks her down, everything he can. Sucks and licks and bites, faster and faster until the motion blends together and it doesn’t matter what he’s doing as much as it matters that it’s his mouth on her, his mouth making her do this.
“Earth and spirit-light brings-glory and grace…” Sera’s song trembles somewhere over his head, keeps him anchored here. “May it-” she stutters, voice ragged. “May it open our-eyes to the truth-”
The song stops and so does Heat. He pulls away from Sera and looks up; Angel’s fingertip is over Sera’s lips, blocking the sound.
And then Angel’s tugging her coat open and her pants down and Agni roars loud enough to white out the world around him. She’s-she’s both, he sees that when he looks up at her, he knew she was, she told him that however the hell long ago it was, but he hasn’t seen it until now. Her cock’s as hard as his is.
This shouldn’t-he never thought of it like this when he pictured it again and again in his head, it didn’t go like this-
Angel pushes Sera down into his lap and she doesn’t even say anything even though Angel’s not stopping her from singing anymore, there’s just a low rolling note that isn’t in Heat’s memories of the song but it could be. Deep in him, Agni purrs.
“Seraphita’s my creation,” Angel says to Heat. “Just like you’re hers.”
“You-” Bile wells up in his throat, but then Sera shifts in his lap, grinds against his cock, and whatever the hell he was about to say dies.
“She wants you to take her,” Angel says. “So do it.”
He tears his bodysuit free, rips through the clasps and buttons. It’s hard to do with Sera on his lap, rocking against him, but he’s not going to move her away. He’s not. Finally, though-the fabric’s ruined but that doesn’t matter, what matters is his cock rubbing against the cleft of her ass and even if he can’t see her face he can feel the tiny spasms shaking her chest and hear the whispered breathy notes sliding from her lips and he rocks forward, buries his face in her neck and moans or growls, he can’t tell the difference.
“Shaanti, shaan-Heat-”
Sera, he tries to say, but the words are too strangled, so he picks her up-she weighs almost nothing-and leans back, rests most of his weight on his elbows and-sinks her down onto his cock, or maybe she’s the one sinking down onto him without him pushing, but either way she makes the highest sweetest sound he’s ever heard and his hips snap up hard when he hears it, hard and fast. He still can’t see her face, just the curve of her back, just the way her shoulders roll when he grips her hips and thrusts into her ass. It burns, abrades, there’s a way to do it and this isn’t it. Sera’s song gets broken up by gasps, pants, but it’s all music to him and to Agni and she’s tight and she’s searing every part of him that she touches and she’s Sera Sera Sera.
Angel’s hands cover his; her fingers press down on the gaps between his knuckles. He looks up, past Sera (somehow he looks past Sera). She settles herself between Sera’s spread thighs and-she thrusts in, too, her cock almost rubs against his, there’s not much separating them, just Sera, and Sera’s so small…
He can’t move much, not with Angel blocking him every time he tries to thrust. He grits his teeth and grips Sera’s shoulders and-he wants more, he always wants more, he’s always going to want more. He’s just like them.
“Divine-divine light cries-ah-cries out to-to you-”
Heat pushes in relentlessly, deep as he can, Angel’s cock jostles his and chafes it and Sera gasps “divine” and the note breaks when Heat does, when he comes hard enough to make everything else go silent.
He stays buried in her, though, buried in her until Angel’s perfect even pace gets sharper, more powerful. He keeps his face nestled in Sera’s shoulder but he still smells blood in the air, coppery and thin, enough to make Agni happy. One, two, three, four; her nails rake down the backs of Heat’s hands and the breath she lets out sounds more like a rasp, a hiss.
Angel pulls out before he does, curls a fist around her cock and wipes herself clean that way. He has to do it more slowly, but even then he feels Sera shuddering, quivering, gulping down tiny mouthfuls of air when he moves. He helps her to her feet, or tries to, and she’s not resisting but she’s not really doing anything, either.
“This is who we are,” Angel says.
He sees Sera’s lips form the last words of the song: shaanti, shaanti.
Well, I'M GOING TO THE SPECIAL HELL FOR REAL THIS TIME, GUYS. Dear Meganada in Power Plant, the term "wrongsexual" has never been so appropriate for me.
Title: Reduction
Author: puella_nerdii
Fandom: Digital Devil Saga (2)
Characters/Pairing: Heat/Jenna/Sera
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Um. Incest, dubcon, cannibal demons, hermaphrodism, questionably-aged participant. So basically the canon. And significant spoilers for DDS2.
Prompt: Heat/Jenna, in a threesome with any other character from your list.
Wordcount: 3425
Summary: You don't like the truth, but there it is.
Heat isn’t this. Or he wasn’t this.
He slams his fist through the monitor. His, not Agni’s. The shards and jagged edges dig into his knuckles and glint with his blood and he doesn’t give a shit, the pain’s nothing, it’s the breaking that’s important. And it’s not breaking enough and it never will, even when he smashes his elbow into the remains of the screen again and again and howls and the sound’s just as pulverized as the glass is. Mangled, that’s the word for the strips of skin hanging off him in tatters and that’s the word for everything now. It burns, and he can’t cast the fire out of him, it’s not something Agi can drain off or Bufu can freeze, and he fucking hates it.
“Look at what she made you.”
Angel. He snarls. She doesn’t.
“Madame Margot would have asked what she reduced you to.” She stands in the doorway, fingering the neckline of her shirt. The light billows out from behind her and he squints and it’s wrong. “But that’s not entirely accurate. You’re not a reduction, you’re a reimagining.”
“Fuck off,” Heat says.
“Even the nature of your reactions,” she says. “There’s complexity there, I think, but the anger overwhelms everything. It’s fascinating, both as itself and as comparison.”
Heat thinks of other words that mean fuck off and lists them in his head, clenches his fist and ignores the way his shredded skin screams when the air washes over his cuts. His arm starts pulsing, pounding, the red lines radiating from his Atma and spreading outward.
“Transform if you want,” Angel says.
He braces his fist against the wall, shakes.
“The strong devour the weak.” She strokes the doorframe with the backs of her nails. “And I’m stronger than you are.”
His hands tremble. The red lines halt, stop spreading. Suspended.
“You’re not denying it.”
“You want something,” he snaps.
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Come with me.”
“That’s not an answer,” he says. Growls. His atma still pulses, but slower now, like his heart, sends ripples of heat through his blood, enough to make his stomach clench and his teeth tighten. He wants to rip her lips off her face and shove them down her throat until she gags on them, wants to tear her nails off her fingers and scratch her face up with them, wants to yank her hair out and strangle her with it, wants to ruin how she looks now, all white and bloodless.
“I want to undo the damage Madame Margot’s wrought,” she says.
“What Cuvier’s done,” he asks, “or what God’s done?”
She smiles. “Very good. Very good.”
“Shut up.”
“O’Brien would be pleased. The man was something of an apostate. Of course, Catholic guilt is difficult to fully absolve.”
“Shut up,” he says again, forces the words out through clenched teeth. “I’m not-” There’s a word for what she’s doing, but it slips out of his head, things do that a lot and he doesn’t know how to catch them, how to keep them, how to hold on to them. “Whatever you’re trying to make me.”
“No. You’re what she made you.”
He doesn’t say anything, just walks forward and smashes his fist into the door, inches away from her head. She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t even blink, just looks at him like-there’s a like there, she’s looking at him like he’s something and he doesn’t know what but he might have known once and it pisses him off, everything pisses him off and he doesn’t know why and that pisses him off more.
“Do you want to see her?” Angel asks.
“You already know what I’m going to say,” Heat says. “Don’t you?”
“Yes.” She beckons, one finger extended and crooked. “Come with me.”
He does, and he hates it, but it’s all he can do. He follows her and he knows people are looking at him, talking to each other about him and it’s pointless and their words don’t really mean anything but the people talking think they do and the sounds scrape against his ears and he can’t get them to stop, not even when he glares at him, because then they’ll just talk about how he’s glaring. It never fucking ends, it just keeps going on and on and on.
Nothing ends.
Well, the hallway does, eventually. Ends in a flight of stairs, as bloodless-white-the word antiseptic springs into his head-as the rest of the complex, spiraling down to Sera’s EGG. The paint’s chipping at the edges of the stairs, revealing rough metal underneath. He curls his toes around one step, feels the steel dig in through the soles of his shoes.
“She doesn’t trust you,” Heat says to Angel. It isn’t a question. “And you need her to trust you.”
“We need her consent and cooperation,” Angel says.
“So that means you need her to trust you.”
“Need, no. There are ways to compel her consent.”
Heat snarls.
“But there are advantages to having God on your side,” Angel says, not really smiling. “So we’d prefer that.”
“Are you going to let her leave that thing?” He grips the railing, grinds his palm into it hard enough to leave a stripe across his skin.
“She needs to be allowed out at intervals.”
Intervals. He thinks of solar cycles and scowls-is that why Agni’s burning in his chest, his stomach, his arm? Burning closer to the surface, anyway, close enough to sear his skin right off, he thinks there’s steam rising from the gashes in his arm. “And you’re going to let her out now.”
“For a while, yes. Her health would deteriorate if we didn’t give her enough periods of exercise or fresh air.”
“Stop talking like that,” he says.
“Stop talking like what?”
“Stop talking like you care about her.”
“She’s important to us,” Angel says. “She’s important to you in a different way, but that doesn’t diminish her importance to us.”
“You keep on saying us,” Heat says. “Why don’t you say me? Do you care about her?”
“I thought you’d understand the principles of group cohesion,” Angel says. They’re almost at the bottom of the stairs now. Her hand hovers over the doorknob. “How a group speaks with one voice if it wants to function effectively, because dissenting opinions create conflicts within the group structure. I don’t believe in it, myself. You don’t, either.”
Heat slams his arm down on the door, on one side of her head. “You don’t know what it was like.” Bitch, he almost adds, but he thinks she’d like that.
“I watched everything,” she says, in the Gale kind of way that means you’re an idiot but you’re so much of an idiot that you probably don’t realize what I’m saying. Except he does, and he growls at her.
“I’m not stupid.”
“No,” she agrees, “you aren’t.”
She pushes the door open and he doesn’t fall through the doorway or anything, he has enough balance not to do that, he doesn’t even stagger all that much. His boots squeak against the clean floor. There’s blood outside everywhere, the strong ripping the weak from limb to limb under the black sun, and there’s nothing inside here except white so bright it hurts to look at and order and it’s wrong and it’s fucking fake and nothing matches up the way it should.
He watches them hatch Sera from the EGG, hears the hiss and the whirr and the sound of fluid dripping. They towel her off, white fabric smeared with yellow-and-clear slime, her hair’s slick with it and drops of the liquid cling to her eyelashes, glue them closed. They have to wipe it off before she can see, she can’t do it on her own. She’s so small like this, even smaller than she was when they found her in the crater. His legs flex, swell, and he’s about to run forward and snatch her away, take her away from everyone and everything except him, he can save her, but Angel steps in front of him.
“Acclimation’s a delicate process,” she says. “The man you’re derived from understood that. You’ll hurt her if you take her away now. The shock might kill her, and you don’t want that.”
He wants to spit in her face. He doesn’t, but he wants to.
They finish unhooking her, disconnecting her and drying her off; they sling a robe around her shoulders and they have to strap her down and wheel her forward and it should be him doing it but it isn’t and Angel’s smiling again and he has a damn good idea about why. They reach the end of the walkway and push her off to the side into a white room with white floors and a white ceiling; her hair’s the opposite so he looks at it, can’t help but look at it, can’t help but look at her.
“Stay there,” Angel says to Heat. “And get her out of the restraints,” she adds to the workers, who do it. Do it just like he does it. She isn’t his leader but he does it anyway. This is wrong. Everything about this is wrong wrong wrong wrong and he knows it but he can’t change it and that’s the most wrong part about it.
Angel walks inside the room. Heat stays on the walkway, hovers outside the door where he can see Sera but she can’t see him.
“Go away,” Sera says. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
“We’ve brought someone here to see you,” Angel says. “Come in.”
He does.
“Heat…” Her eyes get rounder and his breath catches in his chest, tightens. “Heat, where’s Serph?”
Fuck.
Agni’s roar rips through him, tears his arm apart from the inside out and he lunges forward and grabs her shoulders-they’re even thinner than they were in the Junkyard, he doesn’t even need to let Agni out to crush her bones in his hands, grind them up-and now she’s looking at him, really looking, and Angel’s looking, too. Looking but not doing anything.
“Serph’s not here,” he says. She’s cold under his hands, colder than she should be. “I am.”
She leans away. She leans away and she’s trying to close her eyes and-
“Serph betrayed you!” he shouts, forces the words through his throat. “Serph betrayed all of us!” She-she has to see that, she has to, he has to make her see-but he never would, never would leave her, he’s here for her and he’s by her side and Serph isn’t, Serph’s dead for all Heat knows and when he thinks that knife-sharp pain twists in his gut and is that part Sera’s fault, too?
“Stop,” she says, tilting her head up towards the ceiling and squeezing her eyes shut (and why won’t she look at him), “stop, you’re hurting me.”
“You made him to hurt you, Seraphita,” Angel says.
Sera stills in Heat’s hands. “You’re lying.”
“He’s dangerous,” Angel says. “He’s threatening. You don’t understand his desire, so you direct it towards yourself and only yourself, because you think that gives you control over him. If he sees only you, wants only you, then he’s yours. Well,” she adds, “yours and Serph’s. You did build in that ambiguity.”
Sera presses her lips together until they turn white.
“He is what you made him,” Angel says. “You wanted him to be like this, and you got what you wanted. And you do want it, but you can’t admit as much to yourself, because good girls shouldn’t want that. Good girls should want Serph. But you aren’t a good girl, Seraphita. You want both. You want everything.”
“Don’t-” Heat’s hands are shaking on Sera’s shoulders, pressing into her skin hard enough to leave red marks behind. “Don’t say that about her, don’t you dare say that about her.”
“He’s leaping to your defense,” Angel says. Cool, even, measured, like Gale but nothing like Gale. “He wants to be your prince, and you deny him even that much. And in denying him, you deny yourself. Because he’s you. And you don’t like that, but it’s true. You don’t like the truth, but there it is.”
He hears her breathing. It’s shallow, fast. She’s hiccupping, choking-choking something back.
“Look at him, Seraphita,” Angel says. “Look at what you’ve done.”
Her eyes open. Black, dark as her hair and shining in a way her hair doesn’t. They suck him in hard enough that he could drown in them. Fuck, maybe he already has. And he sees himself in her eyes, too, but darker, shaded in.
“Sera,” he says, and kisses her, crushes his lips against hers. She gasps into his mouth, a tiny fluttering sound, and that sends fire roaring through him again, burning a line straight down to his cock. He drills his tongue into her mouth and she’s warm and wet and Sera and he pulls her closer until she’s pushed against him everywhere, soft and small and-shaking.
“I’m sorry,” she says when he breaks it off to breathe. “I’m sorry.”
He doesn’t know what to say, can’t think of anything, not when being this close to her’s burning the thoughts out of his head, and it’s better when he does things so he sinks his teeth into the side of her neck, right where her jaw connects. His teeth, not Agni’s. Not yet. But Agni wants her, too.
Fingertips slide flat up the back of his neck. Not Sera’s-bigger, harder, longer nails. “Do you want him, Seraphita?” Angel asks; her breath puffs against Heat’s ear.
“I,” Sera says. “Yes.”
Heat moans, shoves his knee between Sera’s legs and pins her in place and runs his teeth over every part of her the robe doesn’t cover, all of her white white skin and he’s the one making it red, leaving angry streaks on it. His arm throbs every time he darts his tongue out and tastes her: the sweat beading at the hollow of her throat, the EGG fluid clinging to the side of her neck, the veins throbbing just below her jaw.
“You’ll have to sing to him,” Angel says. “You built in that failsafe, at least. Can you do that?”
Her chest rises and falls under his lips-he’s almost on his knees with his face in her stomach, Sera’s stomach, Sera, Sera. He bites down, bites until his jaw aches, he can’t not, and he sucks hard enough to draw the taste right out of her skin. His arm bulges, ripples, expands-
“Light-” The first note’s faint, just a shiver in the air, one that runs down his spine. Her body ripples, he feels it. “Light-shines on heaven…”
It’ soft, the sound falters and wavers and cracks, and the rhythm’s not what he remembers, but it’s Sera’s song and Agni realizes that, retreats back into his atma. He slides his fingers up her ribcage, blunt nails and human palms, digs in until his knuckles whiten.
“Good,” Angel says somewhere above him.
He drops all the way to his knees now, tugs her robe open, and-she’s bare to him, exposed in a way she wasn’t back in the crater, because now she knows it and her thighs tremble. He braces his hands on them, leans forward-her scent, salty and sharp, drifts towards him and he can’t stop, doesn’t want to, can’t stop until he tastes her, her-her slickness on his tongue, in his mouth, everywhere. He drinks it down, drinks her down, everything he can. Sucks and licks and bites, faster and faster until the motion blends together and it doesn’t matter what he’s doing as much as it matters that it’s his mouth on her, his mouth making her do this.
“Earth and spirit-light brings-glory and grace…” Sera’s song trembles somewhere over his head, keeps him anchored here. “May it-” she stutters, voice ragged. “May it open our-eyes to the truth-”
The song stops and so does Heat. He pulls away from Sera and looks up; Angel’s fingertip is over Sera’s lips, blocking the sound.
And then Angel’s tugging her coat open and her pants down and Agni roars loud enough to white out the world around him. She’s-she’s both, he sees that when he looks up at her, he knew she was, she told him that however the hell long ago it was, but he hasn’t seen it until now. Her cock’s as hard as his is.
This shouldn’t-he never thought of it like this when he pictured it again and again in his head, it didn’t go like this-
Angel pushes Sera down into his lap and she doesn’t even say anything even though Angel’s not stopping her from singing anymore, there’s just a low rolling note that isn’t in Heat’s memories of the song but it could be. Deep in him, Agni purrs.
“Seraphita’s my creation,” Angel says to Heat. “Just like you’re hers.”
“You-” Bile wells up in his throat, but then Sera shifts in his lap, grinds against his cock, and whatever the hell he was about to say dies.
“She wants you to take her,” Angel says. “So do it.”
He tears his bodysuit free, rips through the clasps and buttons. It’s hard to do with Sera on his lap, rocking against him, but he’s not going to move her away. He’s not. Finally, though-the fabric’s ruined but that doesn’t matter, what matters is his cock rubbing against the cleft of her ass and even if he can’t see her face he can feel the tiny spasms shaking her chest and hear the whispered breathy notes sliding from her lips and he rocks forward, buries his face in her neck and moans or growls, he can’t tell the difference.
“Shaanti, shaan-Heat-”
Sera, he tries to say, but the words are too strangled, so he picks her up-she weighs almost nothing-and leans back, rests most of his weight on his elbows and-sinks her down onto his cock, or maybe she’s the one sinking down onto him without him pushing, but either way she makes the highest sweetest sound he’s ever heard and his hips snap up hard when he hears it, hard and fast. He still can’t see her face, just the curve of her back, just the way her shoulders roll when he grips her hips and thrusts into her ass. It burns, abrades, there’s a way to do it and this isn’t it. Sera’s song gets broken up by gasps, pants, but it’s all music to him and to Agni and she’s tight and she’s searing every part of him that she touches and she’s Sera Sera Sera.
Angel’s hands cover his; her fingers press down on the gaps between his knuckles. He looks up, past Sera (somehow he looks past Sera). She settles herself between Sera’s spread thighs and-she thrusts in, too, her cock almost rubs against his, there’s not much separating them, just Sera, and Sera’s so small…
He can’t move much, not with Angel blocking him every time he tries to thrust. He grits his teeth and grips Sera’s shoulders and-he wants more, he always wants more, he’s always going to want more. He’s just like them.
“Divine-divine light cries-ah-cries out to-to you-”
Heat pushes in relentlessly, deep as he can, Angel’s cock jostles his and chafes it and Sera gasps “divine” and the note breaks when Heat does, when he comes hard enough to make everything else go silent.
He stays buried in her, though, buried in her until Angel’s perfect even pace gets sharper, more powerful. He keeps his face nestled in Sera’s shoulder but he still smells blood in the air, coppery and thin, enough to make Agni happy. One, two, three, four; her nails rake down the backs of Heat’s hands and the breath she lets out sounds more like a rasp, a hiss.
Angel pulls out before he does, curls a fist around her cock and wipes herself clean that way. He has to do it more slowly, but even then he feels Sera shuddering, quivering, gulping down tiny mouthfuls of air when he moves. He helps her to her feet, or tries to, and she’s not resisting but she’s not really doing anything, either.
“This is who we are,” Angel says.
He sees Sera’s lips form the last words of the song: shaanti, shaanti.