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He is golden, radiant in energy translated into languages, dialects of a bright heat, a ringing light, a scorching hum. He spills out in erotic waves, tastes like sangria in the nose: the blossoming stench of overripe fruit crushed under heel and left to bleed out over tree roots dressed in mushrooms and moss, with so many congregated insects rubbing their wings together up towards the sky and ready to kneel before the slaughter.
He curves, all his lines curve, like it would be so simple to frame him now, but it isn’t. Akira’s eyes won’t stop shifting, a shoulder dragging his gaze to an ear, a mouth to a hip, like a Picasso brought to life in terrible splendor. Satan defies focus. For all his smooth lines and aesthetic, he is a mirage in the field of vision, flickering in the visible waves of heat which roll languidly up from the earth like tongues.
His smile is drawn in a bow, taut and ready and aimed straight between Akira’s loamy eyes.
“Surely this is more than you had hoped.” Even his voice transcends the air, and though Akira can see his lips and their dance, his tongue press against perfect and too-sharp teeth, the sound reverberates in his skull instead of his eardrum. Akira’s teeth grind. He wishes he would catch a bit of lip, a smidge of cheek, between their awful pressure, the crunching beneath Satan’s continual vibration in his ear.
“Ryo was never real, was he? It was always you,” Akira hissed. Baring his teeth had no effect on the image before him. Satan’s smile became the only thing which didn’t induce vertigo upon sight.
“No, for a long while he was Ryo. He had no idea, poor thing.” The air is drenched in amusement, a champagne light and twinkling over their exchange. “Why? I’m the one who loves you. The one who has given you the ability to endure beyond humanity’s twilight. Akira, where is your sense of gratitude?”
Akira cannot give a reply. No amount of words strung up could make reason. And maybe that is what Akira in all his fiery blindness should have realized. There could be no reason in the heart of an angel, that divinity left no room for the sway, the slip.
The silence outlives itself and collapses inwards with a synched flutter of a dozen driven-snow wings.
And yet there it is, the fracture in the fractals of his light, and Akira sees it, by Amon. Satan is, was, will be, God’s first creation, most beautiful, most terrible, the first draft. There is a strand, so small that he barely thinks it at first.
Their dance begins, one the Earth watches, ravaged as it is, for twenty pregnant turns. This is the only way their story could have ended. Satan denies this with every nuclear crater, rapid extension of limb to connect with flesh. Akira realizes that tenuous thread at last.
By Satan’s hand, Akira permits his own death.