Chapter Text
Not all demons were angels.
Some of them were, certainly, but as Hell’s population began to grow, they quickly realized they needed more of their kind to keep things in order. They reached out upon the Earth to find the most fitting creatures to join their ranks, and that was how the majority of Hell’s inhabitants were created.
The demon did not remember his changing. He knew he’d been mortal once, though he could not recall any details of that life. All of his memories were the ones he had formed within the domain of The First.
The only tie he had to his mortal life was his home.
He wasn’t sure how he knew of the place. He had no memory of what the home had looked like when he’d occupied it, and he could not investigate it as structures had been demolished and built and demolished again upon the property over the years. The demon had thrived in Hell for longer than most civilizations had existed, and he did not step foot on the Earth for several centuries after his transformation. He would never see his home again.
And yet, for some inconceivable reason, he was drawn to that place, and he visited it now and then to see what humanity decided to do with what had once been his.
The demon was known to cause problems there on occasion. It may not have been his home for a very long time, but he still resented the thought of reprehensible people occupying the space. On the rare chance the demon discovered something he found to be distasteful, he made sure the people knew how he felt.
Many a fanciful homeowner had been chased off the property, and significant damage had been caused to different structures and belongings throughout the years. If they caught him in a particularly bad or cruelly pleasant mood, the occupants suffered even worse torment.
It seemed only fitting that the birthplace of a demon had its fair share of blood spilled upon the land.
Rumors pervaded the area, claims of ghosts and hauntings circulating the community. Blessings were often performed, and many wardings against evil were erected around the perimeter. There were even a few stories warning about a demon who owned the property, and a few exorcisms had been performed to remove the trespasser.
That last one always made the demon laugh. The mortals spoke as though he had stolen the space rather than had it stolen from him. Besides, he didn’t see it as “haunting.” He liked to think of it more as… housekeeping.
Regardless of how one might interpret his presence, the result was the same. The demon visited his home now and then, sometimes spending decades away before returning to satiate his curiosity. If he didn’t approve of the tenants or their creations, he removed them in whatever way he saw fit.
No power on Earth could stop him from doing so.
People became weary of the land. They never knew what might invoke the spirit’s ire. Many advised against so much as mentioning the place, and they worked hard to keep people from building or living there, though there were always nonbelievers who brushed the stories away as nonsense.
Despite the spread of technology making people even more skeptical of supernatural intervention, those who had lived in the surrounding area for generations remained afraid, and they had plenty of reason to feel that way. Horrible things had taken place upon that ground.
However, contrary to popular belief, not every tragedy that befell the land was caused by the demon.
One morning, when the sun was just beginning to peek over the horizon, the demon made his way to the place he would always consider to be his. A modest home stood upon the land. It must have been constructed fairly recently, as the demon did not recognize it.
It seemed he would not need to pass judgement on its tenants, though, because, to his mild surprise, he found it ablaze.
With the first hints of daylight peeking over the horizon, the house looked as though it was summoning the sunrise itself. Fiersome shades of orange and red chewed through the foundations, blending beautifully with the autumn leaves that drifted lazily past, uncaring of the destruction around them.
The demon basked in the warmth, preferring it to the brisk wind that rustled his long hair and black chiton around his body. The sight was mesmerizing and familiar, and he had no inclination to intervene, content to watch silently as the fire ran its course.
Then he heard the cries.
A child’s cries.
The demon’s body surged forward immediately, and he effortlessly tore the door from its frame, tossing it aside. Flames licked his skin harmlessly as he hurried up the stairs that had not yet crumbled and made his way down the hall, focusing on the child’s voice to guide his way.
He only spared a glance at the burning remains of the dead. There was nothing he could do for them.
The demon found his way into a small bedroom and went straight for the closet door, flinging it open.
There, curled up in a ball, head covered by singed hands, was a boy.
Kneeling before the child, the demon put a hand on his knee. Startled, the boy moved his hands and looked up at him with one wide eye.
Raw, bloody skin with charred edges ruined the upper left side of his face as though some burning piece of debris had slammed into it, blackening his flesh and pulling away the melted skin as it fell. He could not open his eye, though the demon suspected it was still intact.
The child looked at him helplessly. His cries had ceased, and he seemed to be waiting to see what the creature before him would do. He didn’t appear fazed by the demon’s inhuman appearance, though that was no surprise considering his current predicament.
The demon got the impression that the boy was waiting to see if he would be saved or if the creature before him was there to mercifully end his life before the flames reached him.
A crash thundered through the house, shaking the floor beneath them and startling them both. The demon moved forward urgently, holding his hands out. The boy quickly lifted his arms, and the demon scooped him up and hurried from the room.
He cupped the back of the boy’s head and held it close, careful not to touch the wound on his face. He assumed the dead were the child’s family, and he didn’t want the already traumatized boy to have to see the gruesome sight of what remained of their bodies.
They were out of the house in seconds, and the demon carried the child a safe distance away to a large, fallen log, where he carefully deposited him. He could hear a fire truck in the distance, which meant the child would not be alone for long.
Satisfied that the little thing was safe, he straightened up, preparing to return to Hell.
Before he could, tiny hands shot out and clung to his leg.
The demon looked down to see the boy looking up at him, breath hitching from withheld sobs and hacking coughs.
“I’m scared,” he whispered.
The words would not have been audible to another. The boy undoubtedly had damage done to his lungs and could put little sound to his words.
But the demon heard him anyway.
He’d always had a weakness for children. They were innocent little creatures so susceptible to the cruelty and horrors of the world. The demon enjoyed hurting people, but only the ones who deserved it.
No child deserved it.
He knelt before the boy again, taking his hands in his own. They looked impossibly small, wrapped in his long, charcoal-black fingers as the demon stroked them. The boy’s breathing began to even out when it was not interrupted by violent coughing fits. He seemed comforted by the demon’s presence in a way mortals rarely were, and they sat in relative silence as the boy’s life burned to the ground a short distance away.
Eventually, flashing lights came into view as mortals hurried to get to the fire.
It was time to go.
The boy seemed to realize the demon was going to leave before he even moved, and he shook his head, whimpering as he tightened his grip on his hands.
Terzo smiled softly and pulled a hand away to stroke the hair on the good side of the boy’s face.
“Be safe, little one,” he said in the child’s mother tongue.
Then he was gone.
That should have been it. The demon had saved the boy’s life, and now he could go on with a clear conscience. He’d never cared about mortals before, and he wasn’t going to start now.
Still, he felt guilty for leaving the child with nothing and no one. He tried to remind himself that none of this was his responsibility. He could have left the child to die, and no one could have blamed him for it. Death came for all mortals. He had done the boy a favor, and that was where his intervention stopped.
And yet, he felt compelled to check on him anyway.
It was sometime later, perhaps a few weeks. Time was difficult to keep track of, and the demon rarely bothered trying. He hovered around the new home the boy had found himself in for a few days, listening in to learn what he had missed.
The first thing he discovered was that the boy’s name was Copia.
Copia’s parents had been the ones killed in the fire, and he had no other family to look after him. He had been taken in by acquaintances of his parents in a nearby town who promised to provide for him until he could do so himself. Having met the gentle, soft-spoken boy a few times before, they’d hoped he would adapt to his new life without too much trouble and would be able to live fairly normally as part of the community.
That had not been the case.
Copia was struggling. He barely spoke despite his lungs taking surprisingly little damage from the smoke, and he kept to himself, rarely able to be coaxed out of his room. He ate very little and never with the rest of the family.
However, the biggest issue was his eye.
It was still intact, as the demon suspected, but the boy had lost all vision in it. As a result, he struggled with his balance and didn’t seem to realize when people were talking to him unless they touched his arm to get his attention. Unfortunately, unexpected touches usually made him flinch violently and retreat into himself.
These challenges seemed to frustrate Copia, and he had lashed out on multiple occasions. It annoyed his new family, but the demon could not blame him. The boy had just lost everything, including half of his vision. Expecting him to be a happy, friendly child without a care in the world was not only absurd, it was cruel. He deserved patience and empathy and time to adjust, not to be pressured into getting over such an extreme trauma and becoming some strangers’ dream child.
Annoyed at the family for their lack of sensitivity and care, the demon decided to go to the child himself to see how he was really doing.
He appeared in the boy’s room in the early evening when the rest of the family was eating dinner and having bonding time. Copia sat cross-legged on his bed, food untouched on the nightstand. He had a book propped open on his lap, and his head was tilted as he read, a crease in his brows as he focused on the words.
The upper left side of the boy’s face looked significantly better than the last time the demon had seen it, but it was not a pretty sight. The skin was a lurid red, and parts of it were blackened with scabs. His eye was open now but only partially, the area around it puffy and tight, and the eye itself was a milky white, contrasting starkly with the bright green of the other.
His observations were cut short when the boy suddenly looked up and gasped.
Only then did the demon realize he had forgotten to hide his true form. He rarely interacted with mortals. When he did, it was almost always because he had been summoned and thus had no need to hide what he was.
He considered leaving, not wanting to frighten the traumatized child any further, but then Copia tossed his book aside and clumsily got to his feet. Once he steadied himself, he ran forward and attached himself to the demon’s leg, hugging tightly. Bemused, the demon tentatively wrapped his tail around the boy who looked down at it with surprise before looking back up at him.
“You came back!” he said, face lit up in delight.
The demon didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.
“I’m Copia,” the boy told him brightly, undeterred by his silence as he pulled him toward the bed. He nudged the demon to sit and climbed unsteadily onto it himself before turning to face him. “What’s your name?”
The demon did not have a name. Not a real one, anyway. He had worked hard over the centuries to become the third highest-ranked demon in Hell, preceded only by The Second and, naturally, The First: Lucifer himself. When a mortal asked for some way to refer to him, he typically introduced himself as “Third” in the mortal’s native language.
“Terzo,” he told the boy quietly.
Copia looked even more excited than before.
“We both have silly names!”
Terzo couldn’t help but smile at the child’s happiness. If he didn’t know better, he would have believed he’d been mistaken and that this was a different child altogether than the one his new family spoke about.
“Are you a monster?” Copia asked curiously, not an ounce of fear in him.
“I suppose you could call me that,” Terzo answered slowly. He’d been called that more times than he could count.
“But what would you call you?” Copia prodded.
He was a perceptive little thing.
“I am a demon.”
Copia’s right eye widened, the left still struggling to stay open.
“Like the devil?” he asked in a hushed voice.
“I am not the devil,” Terzo said patiently, “but I am closer to him than most.”
“Wow,” Copia breathed.
What an odd child.
The boy interrogated him for some time, asking all sorts of questions about Hell and the other demons, as well as trying to get to know more about Terzo himself. Rather than being afraid, he enthusiastically absorbed all the demon told him. He wanted to know everything, even asking what Terzo’s favorite food was.
“I’m partial to rigatoni,” he answered, mainly as a joke.
“Me too!” Copia gasped, a happy smile spreading across his face as though sharing a favorite food with a demon was the best thing to ever happen to him.
Terzo couldn’t help but humor the boy. Copia was an adorable child, and it just… it felt nice to talk about himself. It wasn’t something he ever got the opportunity to do.
They spoke for a bit longer until the demon heard movement a few rooms away and realized they would likely be interrupted soon.
“I must leave now,” he told the boy, feeling oddly disappointed.
Copia’s expression fell, and that unreasonable guilt filled Terzo again.
“Will you come back?” he asked quietly, a pleading expression on his face as he clasped his hands in front of himself. “Pretty please?”
He shouldn’t. He should let the boy down gently, maybe even going so far as to remove the memories of his presence entirely. A demon had no place in a child’s life.
“Alright.”
The next time Terzo visited Copia, the boy lit up like the sun.
“Terzo!” he exclaimed. “I missed you!”
No one had ever missed Terzo before. He didn’t know how to feel about it.
It had been another few weeks, and Copia looked significantly better. His cheeks were a bit fuller, and his face had gained some color and a sea of freckles. He must have started spending time outside. His eye had also improved. He no longer had any issue keeping it open, and the angry red skin had faded to a bright pink.
Terzo sat quietly beside Copia on the bed again and was promptly wrapped in the young boy’s arms. He returned the hug this time, an unfamiliar warmth in his chest.
When the boy pulled away, Terzo gestured to the notebook on his nightstand.
“What do you like to write about?”
Copia hesitated for the first time, and Terzo tilted his head curiously. The boy lowered his head and picked at the blankets.
“I write about Mamma and Papa,” he said in a small voice. “People keep telling me I’ll stop thinking about them, but I don’t want to. I don’t wanna forget how much I loved them, so I’ve been writing everything I can remember. If I ever forget, I can read it and remember.”
Terzo thought about the bodies he’d seen and their positions in the hallway. He hadn’t considered it at the time, but they were closer to Copia’s door than the other on that floor. They were probably trying to get to their son before they fell.
“They must have loved you very much.”
Copia nodded in agreement, still picking at his blanket.
“I also write about Mina and Nina,” he said after a moment.
“Who are they?” Terzo asked curiously. He hadn’t seen anyone else.
Copia’s lower lip trembled, and he brought his knees to his chest.
“My rats,” he whispered. “They weren’t even a year old yet. They were just babies.”
Terzo had never understood humanity’s connection with animals, nor the grief they felt at their deaths, but seeing Copia barely holding back tears over his pet rodents made his chest ache. This was only their second real conversation, and Terzo could tell the boy loved fiercely. Having his only family ripped away must have been unbearable.
He wished he’d gotten there sooner to save him some of the grief that now pervaded him.
Copia fell silent, and Terzo was unsure what to do. He’d never tried to comfort a mortal before, and he’d never experienced grief himself.
They sat quietly for a while, with the faint sound of a happy family elsewhere in the house as the background noise to this child’s sorrow.
“Do you have a mom and dad?”
Terzo blinked in surprise at the soft question.
“No,” he said reflexively before pausing to consider the question. “Not that I can remember.”
“I’m sorry,” Copia said, and Terzo could tell he meant it.
How could anyone feel sorry for someone like him when they were going through such suffering?
“I used to live in your old home,” he blurted out, wanting some way to relate to the boy.
Copia straightened a bit in interest.
“Really?”
Terzo nodded.
“I cannot recall anything about it, but I know that is where I came from long ago.”
“Is that why you were there that day? To visit your home?”
Terzo nodded.
“I like to check up on it now and then to make sure people are treating it well. I don’t want any bad people to be there.”
“So my parents weren’t bad people?”
Terzo furrowed his brow in confusion.
“Why would you think they were bad people?”
Copia dropped his head again and shrugged.
“My new Madre told me that God punishes people when they’re bad. She said He rewards good people and that evil people burn.”
Fury rose within Terzo, and he had to fight it down, not wanting to frighten the boy. His tail flicked angrily, catching Copia’s eye, but his look of interest reassured Terzo he didn’t know what it meant.
The demon knew intimately the harm those kinds of people could do. Compared to many of the monstrous deeds he’d personally seen God’s worshippers commit in His name, this was nothing.
Except it wasn’t nothing. How could anyone look a broken little boy in the face and tell him his parents deserved to burn to death, no matter how indirectly?
Reaching out, he took Copia’s hands in his own for the first time since the fire.
“Listen to me, Copia.”
It took a moment, but the boy eventually lifted his head to meet his gaze. Terzo fought to keep the anger from his voice as he spoke to him.
“Your parents were not bad people. They loved you, just like Mina and Nina did. They did not do anything wrong. There was an accident, and they lost their lives, but not because they deserved it.” Tears began to fall from Copia’s eyes, and Terzo squeezed his hands. “Sometimes, bad things happen. There doesn’t have to be a reason. It can happen to good people, bad people, and anyone in between. Everyone feels pain and grief at some point in their life. Some people have it worse than others. That does not mean those people deserve to suffer more. It just happens randomly.”
“That doesn’t sound very fair,” Copia whispered, shoulders shaking as the tears came faster.
“That’s because it’s not,” Terzo told him gently. “It’s not fair at all. But that is why you must live and love freely. One day, you can have everything, and the next, be left with nothing. You know that feeling.” Copia nodded, a sob breaking past his lips. “Be who you want to be, love who you want to love, and cherish what you have. Do not let anyone tell you you deserve what happened to you, nor that bad things only happen to bad people.”
Copia pulled a hand away to rub at his face, sobs wracking his body.
“O–okay,” he choked out.
“Will you promise me to always remember what I said?”
“I promise.”
“Good,” Terzo said quietly. He was still momentarily, and then he tugged on Copia’s hand. “C’mere.”
Copia crawled over, and Terzo pulled him into a tight hug, uncaring of the tears that soaked through his chiton.
He hated that this family was all the boy had. If there were anywhere else for Copia to go, Terzo would teach them what it truly meant to burn.
The visits quickly became a regular part of Terzo’s routine. When he was not busy in Hell or dealing with the occasional mortal summoning, he would check on the child he’d saved.
One evening, he noticed a tiny little light plugged into the wall.
“It’s so you’ll always be able to find your way here, even in the dark!”
Terzo told him it wasn’t necessary as he could easily sense the boy’s presence. Besides, he could see in the dark.
Copia insisted, however, and Terzo didn’t have the heart to push the issue. The gesture was so sweet and heartfelt, and he started looking forward to seeing that little light waiting for him.
Most of their visits consisted of Copia animatedly telling Terzo all about what had happened since he’d last visited while Terzo sat back and listened. Every now and then, though, sadness and grief would well up in the boy, and Terzo would hold him as he cried. Some nights, it was about his parents, some about the loss of his home or his eye. Once, he had cried particularly hard about Mina and Nina.
The next time he visited, Terzo brought him a little stuffed rat.
“It looks like you!” Copia exclaimed in delight, pointing out the pale purple coloring and the long tail.
He named it Terzo.
It was early winter when Terzo arrived to find Copia sitting on the floor pouting as he scribbled on some thick paper.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, surprised when the boy did not even look up at him.
“I tried to tell the kids at school about you,” Copia grumbled, “but they made fun of me, and then the teacher yelled at me. She said I was telling evil stories, and then she put me in timeout! I was just trying to talk about my best friend.” He muttered that last part with a particularly vicious swipe of the crayon.
He didn’t seem to notice the way Terzo had frozen on the other side of the room.
This was not good. Mortals claiming to see demons were never viewed kindly. He knew it was unlikely that they would kill the boy over such claims in this day and age, but things could quickly go very wrong.
Walking over, he knelt and put a hand over Copia’s, stopping his angry movements.
He didn’t know whether to feel affection or anxiety when he looked down to see the surprisingly detailed drawing of him. It was a much deeper purple than his skin actually was, but the anatomy was mostly correct. He’d even included the gold jewelry on his horns.
Copia looked up at him with a frown. Despite the seriousness of the situation, Terzo almost laughed at the grumpy look on the small boy’s face.
Leaning in, he lowered his voice conspiratorially, which made Copia lean in as well.
“I need you to keep me a secret, piccolo,” Terzo told him.
Copia also lowered his voice to a whisper.
“Why?” he asked, frown deepening.
“If they find out about me, they’ll try to get rid of me.”
“No!” Copia shouted, grabbing onto his wrist. Terzo shushed him, worried about the family hearing his exclamation. “No,” he repeated in a whisper.
“I don’t want to go either,” Terzo reassured him. “So I need you not to tell anyone about me, okay?”
Copia sighed heavily, making Terzo’s lips twitch in amusement.
“Okay,” he grumbled, going back to his drawing.
Before Terzo left that night, Copia gifted him his work. It depicted the two of them holding hands, and it made his heart swell.
“Thank you, piccolo. I will cherish this forever.”
He hadn’t known it then, but those words would ring truer than he’d ever expected.
As the visits went on, anxiety grew in Terzo’s chest. He constantly thought about that conversation, as well as the religious beliefs of Copia’s adopted family.
It wasn’t fair to force the child to hide part of his life. He deserved to have mortal friends and a life he could share with others. He shouldn’t have to be confined to the darkness just because some demon had become attached to him.
Not only was it unhealthy, it could quickly become a dangerous situation for the boy.
The demon knew what he needed to do, and he hated that it was the only course of action he could think of.
He considered wiping the boy’s memories of him entirely, but he couldn’t make himself do it. He had been instrumental in helping the boy through his grief. Removing all of those memories would be removing all the progress they had made together.
That was the excuse he gave, anyway. Deep down, he knew he just couldn’t stand to make the boy forget him.
He went to Copia late one night when he was fast asleep, the sounds of the world muffled by a blanket of snow. He was snuggled up with his stuffed rat beneath the blankets, face buried in its fur. Terzo stepped forward and gently stroked the boy’s hair, careful not to wake him up.
Terzo was a demon. A monster. He had no right to exist in the world at all and certainly not beside such a bright soul. He would only taint the boy’s life and future.
Copia was young. He would grow to forget Terzo ever existed without his intervention. At most, he might have memories of an imaginary demon that haunted him after an extremely traumatic event. He would get through it.
Still, Terzo wasn’t willing to just abandon him without a word. Copia had lost everything in one night. He didn’t want to take something else from him while he slept.
Rather than stealing his memories away, Terzo slid a false one into his mind. He couldn’t stand to actually say goodbye, but Copia deserved that closure.
With his hand still resting on his head, Terzo planted a sense of warmth, comfort, and parting. He made sure Copia knew he would not be coming back and put a heavy impression that he would be at peace with that. He couldn’t create feelings in a person, but he could influence them. Copia would know he had not been abandoned but that it was simply time for Terzo to go away. He should not wait for him, nor should he search for the demon.
Now, if the emotions were strong enough, they could push through Terzo’s influence. Copia was just a child, though, so Terzo doubted that would happen. Most mortals clung to the feeling of peace and comfort and would rather accept it, even if it was false, than reject it in favor of misery.
If only he could influence his own thoughts.
With one last long look at the boy, Terzo turned away. Before he could leave, however, something caught his eye.
With a deep ache in his chest, he walked over and turned off the night light.