Chapter Text
The small red bottle of disinfectant seems like the perfect blood substitute to you, which says more about you and your lack of good judgement than is comfortable. Also, it’s run out before you even get halfway through drawing patterns on the floor. You start grabbing alternatives. What’s left of your camping kerosene fuel. A couple of energy drinks. It’s only when you’re smearing the last of the pattern onto the floor with lipstick that you realize how far you’ve fallen.
Well. No going back now. Maybe you shouldn’t have agreed to do this just because of solidarity, but you’re a good friend. You see things through. Also, your living room floor is a mess, so it’s either finish this and have at least a chance of summoning someone to help you with housekeeping, or face cleaning up alone.
Chant the spell, the book says. You chant the spell. Light the candles, the book says. You light the candles. Put out the stream of blue-ish fire suddenly shooting out of the candles towards your ceiling, the book says- no, actually it doesn’t say that. Maybe you can just wait it out.
The fires grow ever larger. Your ceiling is starting to char. This might not have been such a great idea. You’re still weighing the pros and cons of just skipping out on your lease when something just drops from the char mark on the ceiling onto your floor, landing with a heavy thump.
It’s probably not a good idea to look, but then the entire evening has been a long chain of bad ideas, and do you really want to break your combo?
You look. Yes. You should definitely skip out on your lease.
---
Maybe something went wrong. You’re pretty sure the book is supposed to bring you live demons, and that lump on the floor is most definitely not a live demon. This is what you get for buying marked-down products.
You crouch down to get a closer look, and it looks like an extra from a B-rate horror film. It’s got stitches and purple skin and everything. You half expect it to just get up and start lumbering around, trying to eat someone’s brains, and maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to just get that old hardcover bible from your bookshelf. Just in case.
You’ve just gone and grabbed it when something makes you freeze in your tracks. A low, long moan, coming from behind you. Which is funny, because the only thing behind you that could make a sound like that is-
The candles flicker, and their fire fades away, and suddenly you notice that all the other lights in your apartment have gone out. For some reason, the lights outside your window seem so dim and so very far away.
Something behind you drags itself across the floor.
You don’t really want to turn back around. But never let it be said that you didn’t go down without a fight.
---
“And can I say once again how very sorry I am to, uh, people do some rash things when they think their life is at stake-”
“You punched me in the face,” says the zombie.
“You set my living room on fire,” you say. And he did. Right after you jumped on him, whacking him with the bible and screaming the power of christ compels you! The power of christ compels you!
Maybe he won’t remember that part. And anyway, you wouldn’t have needed to do that if he hadn’t reanimated his own rotting corpse.
“So?” he says. You stare blankly.
He eyes you. “You summoned me. So you want something. What?”
Uhh, shit. You didn’t think this through, not one bit, which is why you physically assaulted a zombie and now your living room is a charred shell of its former self. Maybe it’s best to come clean
“I can’t go back until I do whatever it is that you want,” he says, “and I got things to do. You wasting my time?”
“I,” you say, not making eye contact and trying very hard not to imagine what it’d be like to get eaten by a zombie. “I, uh.”
The zombie looks unimpressed, which is still better than hungry, but you can’t take any risks. Think.
“I want you to clean the apartment?” you say.
“What.”
---
What sounded like a minor task to your panicky brain is actually a monumental undertaking, now that the lights are working and you can see the full extent of the carnage. The majority of your furniture has been burnt to a crisp. Practically nothing is salvageable.
The bible sits, untouched and clean, where you left it on the floor. The two of you pretend not to see it.
---
You give him the extra futon, because your sofa bed is nothing more than a distant memory, and your apartment only has one bedroom. It's hard to fall asleep for a variety of different reasons (property damage, flesh-eating zombie), so you study him instead, looking for weak points.
"Can't sleep with you staring," he says.
"Are you going to eat my brains?"
"What."
---
Apparently someone knocked him unconscious, and he answered your summoning by accident. So he’s not actually a zombie. Which means all that purple skin is not actually decayed flesh.
“Can you feel, you know?” you ask, gesturing to what looks like an underworld version of third-degree burns.
He nods. You walk out the door and head straight for the drugstore.
“I don’t need-” he starts to say, but you’ve already slapped the burn cream on his face, and his options are either stop complaining or eat the burn cream.
After sputtering through the first tub of ointment, he wisely gives up and lets you finish the other nine tubs in silence.
---
And so your impromptu home renovation begins.
The first couple of days he just silently does whatever you ask him to. Move the rubble. Stack the recyclable pieces. It’s like you summoned a demon and got a sentient roomba instead.
On the third day, you give up and queue a bunch of movies to listen to while you tidy, and the moment a superhero movie starts up, he’s off.
“That empty hero doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” he spits, and holy shit, what did batman ever do to you? It just goes downhill from there, with him providing the most uncomfortable running commentary you’ve ever had the misfortune of hearing. It gets to the point where he’s rambling about his mission to drag false idols off their pedestals, and you have to ask, just in case.
“You know superheroes aren’t real, right?”
He squints at you. You put the broom down.
---
“So you don’t…”
“None of us humans have superpowers,” you say, slapping on another handful of burn cream. You’re not sure it actually helps, but you can’t just sit there and watch him casually swan around with what has to be the worst burn injury you’ve ever seen.
This demon that spent the last two days completely silent suddenly can’t shut up, asking all sorts of nonsensical questions about how society functions without heroes. Who saves the people, then? What do you mean, children don’t inherit their parents’ powers? You’re lying, how can there be no heroes-
You smack him in the face with the burn cream. Rude.
---
On one hand, at least he’s talking to you. On the other hand, he’s spent the entire weekend going on and on about just causes and hero killing and how society needs to move past their reliance on heroes because-
“Why are you like this,” you say, trying to resist the urge to cram the entire jar of ointment into his mouth.
Sudden silence. Oh, now he doesn’t want to talk. Fine. You’re used to the quiet. The two of you look at each other, and if this is a staring contest, you don’t think you can win. Do zombies blink?
He abruptly turns and moves to lean against the wall (No chair. No sofa. Much fire).
“When I was a kid,” he begins.
---
“Who are you calling?”
“The police. An ambulance. Child protection services,” you say, holding your phone up to your ear.
“You're an idiot,” he says, taking the phone away.
You kind of understand how he turned out this way if that was his childhood. PTSD probably triggered that sociopathic gene you read about, and it was all downhill from- wait. He didn't have to tell you anything. A heart to heart talk is not what sociopaths do in their spare time. That’s pretty suspicious.
"You asked," he says.
You wait.
"And I can set you on fire if you do anything stupid," he says, snickering. You chuck the tub of burn cream at him. Goddamn demons.
---
So this is your life now, or at least it is for the next couple of months. You go to work, you come back, and you and your demon spend the evening trying to put your living room back the way it was. You spend literally all your spare time together, and after a while you start to forget it was ever any other way. Hang out. Clean up. Pick out furniture online. He's even stopped going on about vengeance and murder (as long as you remember to avoid playing any of those superhero movies).
"Almost done," you say, looking around your apartment with satisfaction. It's looking almost livable again.
He pokes a corner of the wall with his foot.
"You missed a spot," he says, and god damn it, there's a huge char spot. How the hell did you not see it?
It keeps going on like this. You think you're almost done, and suddenly there's a stain you didn't see, or an entire side of a shelf is still burnt, or a chunk of paint has completely peeled off.
"Maybe I'm cursed," you say, after two weeks of your living room being just shy of livable again. "Maybe it's a poltergeist. Maybe there's a hobo living in my closet."
"There's two of us and only one of them," he says, looking not at all bothered.
---
A week, two weeks, a month passes, and before you know it the two of you have somehow fallen into - there's no nice way to say this - lazy complacence. No longer do you spend time trying to paint that spot on the wall, or sandpaper away that burn mark. Instead, you grab dinner, lounge around on the couch, and watch movies until late in the night.
You think about asking him about it. Shouldn’t we finish the contract? Don’t you want to go back? What if you’re stuck here?
“Pass the yakitori plate,” he says, scrolling through the list of movies, and you decide it can wait.
---
Your days of sloth comes to a halt, as all good things do, when you’re least expecting it.
Sometimes you wonder about your neighborhood, because both your own and the other nearby apartment complexes seem to run into mysterious disasters on a rotational basis. Roof cave-ins. Apartment flooding. And fires. You can’t forget fires, especially since there’s one blazing in your complex right now, red and orange flames licking up the sides of the concrete wall, luckily nowhere near your own unit.
You take the stairs, just to be safe, but you’re not that worried. These disasters never really seem to lead to loss of life (that, or building management is doing an incredible job of withholding information). The fire’s not in your apartment, so whatever. No big deal.
It is with this attitude of indifference that you open your front door to find your living room, once again, awash in blue fire.
“Come on.”
“I saw him,” your demon says (kind of? It’s hard to hear over the sound of your apartment becoming unlivable again). He’s standing right in the middle, surrounded by what you can only assume are his own flames. “He went through a portal, I have to go back.”
This is exactly why your parents told you not to procrastinate. You point wildly to your ruined apartment; how’s he going to go back if the contract isn’t complete?
By the look on his face, the answer seems to be brute force. Well, why not? You stand back and let him do his thing.
“Bon voyage,” you say, waving. You can hardly blame him for his revenge fetish, and you’ve probably held him back for far too long. It’s kind of sad to be parting so suddenly, but the whole thing really wasn’t as bad as you thought it’d be, it’s just a little sad to be losing your room-mate-
Uh, he doesn’t look so good. Can demons get burned by their own hellfire?
“Hey,” you say, but he either doesn’t hear you or doesn’t care. He keeps going with admirable determination, really, very inspiring, but at this rate he is going to end up as demon rice crispy before getting anything close to revenge. You look around desperately for something, water, a fire blanket, why didn’t you buy that fucking extinguisher?
There is no time to think any more. Your demon is already medium rare and barreling towards being well done. You grab the bible from where it lies, uncomfortably uncharred on the floor. The flames get hotter as you approach him, hot enough to make breathing a thing of the past, and hot enough that you’re pretty sure you’re also on your way to rice crispy-ness. At least you don’t have to be sneaky about it, because he’s so distracted with whatever demon business he’s got going on that he doesn’t notice until you’ve moved up right up beside him. His eyes go cartoonishly wide, and he reaches out to push you back, immediately singing your clothes because his hands are still on fire.
He says something, but you can’t hear it over the roar of the flames. What are you doing, or It’s dangerous, or Get back, but you’ve already raised the heavy book high above your head, and before he can say anything else you bring it down as hard as you can.
---
It’s almost nostalgic, dragging the lump of unconscious zombie (sorry, demon) over to the least charred part of your living room. You reach for the burn cream.
---
It’s hard to actually perform first aid with burnt hands. And arms. But you get it done. He regains consciousness just as you’re finishing up, looking blearily around.
“Murgh,” he says, flailing around a bit and spreading ointment all over.
“Yes,” you say, soothingly, like a nurse talking to a patient who’s not all there in the head. “Shut up and hold still.”
“S’rry,” he says, trying to grab your hands so he can...what? Assess the damage? No, thanks. You pull them away, but he just hauls himself over and ends up face-first in your lap. You try not to think about how much burn cream you’d slapped on his face, and how much of that is now on your clothes.
“You toasted my apartment again,” you say.
“Mrhy.”
“I think you toasted me, too.”
“Mgh,” he says, raising one hand and waving it at his head. Okay, fine. Maybe you can call that one even.
“You know what would make you feel better?”
Silence, but his hand has snuck its way around your waist and is now fiddling with your sweater, so you know he’s listening.
“Fixing my living room,” you say cheerfully, and grab his hands before he can try to singe your clothes.
---
