Chapter Text
“Ow! My eye! Is my eye going to fall out? I know that just happens with human eyes!”
“Would you please sit down! I’m trying to get you an ice pack…” Michael rummaged hurriedly through the open freezer, “or something...similar.”
Shawn was not sitting on the couch. He was holding his dumb eye, which he was fairly certain at this point was only blood and caved in bits of skull, mostly cheek and brow bone. It hurt bad enough. It was also starting to heat, a telltale sign of swelling.
“Here,” Michael handed him a frosty bag.
Shawn glared at the offending offering.
“That is a bag of peas,” he snipped, voice edging on weary.
“Which is cold! My ice maker is on the fritz. The super hasn’t returned my calls. Would you prefer a steak?” Michael prattled, “popular in the fifties, cold and meaty. People would just slap that piece of meat right on their shiner. If I had tenderloin or ribeye...it’s practically ironic.”
Shawn wasn’t finding the humor. His eye hurt and he was starting to realize the pain was spreading to his whole face. It felt like a “Welcome to the Steaming Pile of Being a Human” sign was finally flickering on in his fresh and limited gray matter. Welcome to the Las Vegas, the endless night, of a hell that he had chosen, almost merrily as if he was innocent to the trials and tribulations of human stupidity. Already he was ready to start withering and dying but didn’t that start immediately the moment life began anyway? He was well on his way.
“I’ll take the peas,” he mumbled, but far from defeated. After all, he invented misery. A bad day was his cup of tea, a bad life was his masterpiece. This was nothing. This black eye? He couldn’t imagine being born into anything less.
But Michael did something a bit weird then, he gently removed Shawn’s hand via taking his wrist, and pressed the bag of peas to the scoop of his eye socket. Oddly, this was very soothing, which put Shawn even more on edge.
“There,” Michael announced like this was the solution to the whole sudden life problem. “Now hold it there for a bit. It’ll control the swelling, at least a little. I think a big bruise is inevitable, but at least you still have all your teeth.” He finished jovially.
Shawn, strangely, did press the bag to his face, keeping the other eye on Michael.
“My teeth…” Oh. Right. Teeth fell out. Shawn definitely knew that. A few hours on Earth and he already gambled with losing his teeth. By the time he was getting off this planet, this body was going straight to the dumpster, likely all the bones shattered, teeth missing, eyes gone. If there was a deposit on renting this moments-from-collapse heap of flesh, Shawn wouldn’t be collecting it. Shawn was thankful he made it through the day with teeth. He always liked having teeth as a leech, it would be uncomfortable to lose the one connection he had between bodies. “Yeah, at least I still have my teeth.”
Using the wrist that Michael had somehow captured, the lesser demon guided his old boss to the sofa and dropped him down in it. Shawn settled like an anchor, peas on ruined eye and very disoriented.
The evening had gone predictably badly much to Shawn’s delight, at first. Michael was out with some friends at a trendy bar. They were all pretty interested in Shawn’s appearance, especially when he stated that he was Michael’s boss from his old job. They might’ve leaned in a bit, curiosity peaked, as Michael floundered to come up with an adequate backstory for this statement. Apparently, Michael was living under the identity of an older man that recently relocated to Los Angeles from a small out-of-the-way town in middle America, where he had lived an unimpressive life. On a whim, he decided to see the coast and got mired here in the excitement. He obviously had to be pretty hush-hush about what exactly he did for his supposed last sixty to seventy years of life. His friends had some juicy ideas, it was written on their faces as they less-than-subtly interrogated Shawn.
“Well, we’ll be living together,” Shawn slithered abruptly, spying Michael tighten like a bowstring, “So you’ll see me often enough to have your questions answered.” That’s a laugh. They’ll be fed a steady serving of lies forever.
“Whoa whoa whoa, when was that decided?” Michael wheezed sharply.
“That was my understanding. I’ve come all this way and I have nowhere else to go. You did invite me. Said it would change my life. Now you’re going to put me on the street? I can’t go back,” Shawn practically smiled.
Shawn could give two shits about this little cohort of Michael’s friends. He forgot their names within seconds of the introduction. They seemed to find this whole show very interesting but were also becoming slightly uncomfortable that they were flies on the wall of this disagreement.
“You could get an Airbnb for a bit until you find work? What do you do? Urban planning?” One of them asked innocuously.
“Is that what you do now?” Shawn snipped at Michael, “that’s a laugh.”
“Yes, Shawn,” Michael rolled his eyes over reddened cheeks, “I’m actually very good at it.”
“Yeah, he’s won awards.” Another friend offered with a hint of sass, becoming a bit defensive for Michael, “What have you won?”
“I’m an…” Shawn hung, “accountant. Accountants rarely win anything, but without us,” he sighed dramatically, “the world would cease to rotate, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh god,” grimaced one of Michael’s friends. This made Shawn grin like a shark hungry for blood. This whole interaction was going swimmingly. “So clearly you have money to get your own place.”
Shawn faked a put-upon, melancholy frown, “unfortunately, no...lost it all in the divorce. I’m flat broke. Destitute.” He deserved an award for acting, was what. His eyes drilled wickedly into Michael’s until ruffled into action, Michael grabbed Shawn’s bicep.
“Can I speak to you for a second,” he asked without sounding peaceable, “alone?”
“By all means,” Shawn shrugged as if he could barely understand about what.
Michael hustled him back to the sidewalk outside before letting him go.
“Shawn, you can’t stay with me.” He surmised. “I can help you find a place and a job, but staying with me is out the question.”
“You’re the one that said a person just needs to be nurtured properly to become a better person or some piss drivel like that. I’m paraphrasing. But you’re just going to abandon that? That’s so selfish. I guess you’re doing a great job becoming human hmm?”
Michael opened his mouth and then shut it. He put his hands on his hips, glared at Shawn, tapped his chin, and frowned.
“This is emotional blackmail,” he stammered after a breath, “You don’t want to become a better person and I can’t convince you to be a better person, you have to decide to be one. You just want to stay in my house so you can harass me more.”
“Well, what if I want to be a better person?” Shawn lied.
“You’re lying.” Michael’s frown deepened.
“You’re not even going to give it a shot! Like! Where is your faith in humanity!” Shawn snapped.
“You may have a human body, but...I really doubt you consider yourself human right now. It takes a while to settle into...the whole existential dread that you’re a slowly decaying thing and that you’re helpless to stop anything.” and this sounded like a strange threat. As if Michael had summoned a very big wave that was eventually going to crash on Shawn and send him dashed into big jagged rocks. Shawn didn’t like to be threatened with future doom, so he pinched his already sour lips even tighter. He was about to really buckle down into getting Michael to offer him a place to stay when someone knocked his shoulder into Michael from behind, forcing the taller man to stumble a little and jostle his glasses.
“Stop blocking the sidewalk, faggots.”
At first, Shawn thought this was giggle-worthy, but then realizing it was aimed at him and Michael, the slur was actually demonically unforgivable. Michael scowled at the bruiser’s back but simply righted his glasses as if nothing happened. Shawn gaped at him a second.
“What the fuck was that?”
“Some asshole,” Michael said plainly while straitening his bow tie.
“Yeah, I can recognize some asshole, Michael! I invented them! What the fuck are you planning to do about it? You’re an immortal entity encased in putrid human flesh, yeah, but where is your spine? You used to take the intestines out of people for less.”
“Did you see that guy, Shawn? He weighs like three hundred pounds and probably bench presses dual oxen for fun.”
“More like one sixty and two helpless kittens” Shawn was already narrowing his sights on the man’s retreating back.
“Shawn, remember you have no powers,” Michael stated pretty sharply, but whatever, Michael was chickenshit. Shawn was already on that guy’s heels.
“Hey limpdick!”
Which absolutely did catch the retreating asshole’s attention, but after a very curt discussion, Shawn ended up dizzy on the pavement with an ache in his face and a ringing in his ears he had never experienced before. It was like a force of nature had decided to rearrange all the bones in his face like a k’nex set. Even his jelly brain was having a difficult time rebooting. He did process that Michael was lifting him off the ground while the ringing in his ear was becoming like a symphony orchestra.
“You alright? Say something!” Michael struggled to right Shawn. His knees were sorta bending in foreign ways.
“Sure showed him,” Shawn slurred dumbly.
Michael snorted and for a brief flash, smiled very brightly at Shawn.
For some reason, much to Shawn’s confusion, this failure with the asshole convinced Michael that Shawn could stay with him. Shawn wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth, but it made him uneasy to think about the vortex of bizarre motivations that lived within Michael’s decision-making.
And that’s how Shawn ended up on Michael’s couch with a bag of peas on his face.
“You should try to go to bed,” Michael contributed.
“Ick,” Shawn spit, “as if.”
“Seriously, it’ll take a while to even know what needing to sleep feels like, but if you don’t go through the motions, you’ll be all out of sync. Take the guest room. I’m going to get ready for sleep myself, it’s late.”
“You’re late,” Shawn sassed half-heartedly but Shawn was already down the hall.
Instead Jason the dog was there, staring at Shawn. Shawn hissed at the dog to scare it away, but instead, it loped closer and rested its big head in his lap. Shawn sighed miserably. If this dog licked his face, the first thing Shawn was going to taste was raw dog tongue. Thankfully Jason didn’t try.
This whole life thing may be harder than he thought.