Chapter Text
Anyone who ever told Sousuke he’d die alone surely never accounted for a public execution.
It isn’t the first time he has been ass up in a near death situation. While he holds no record among mankind in this world by any means, the count is certainly higher than average, he’d estimate, that he finds himself ass up in a near death situation. He has always managed to turn it around, to sit his ass back down on the ground so to speak, but something about this particular situation tells him his luck is run out.
To wit, it’s that currently Sousuke stands on raised gilded gallows bound in tarnished chains at his ankles and wrists, third from the front in a row of fellow ass up peers all tethered together, with no viable way out of it. He doesn’t know any of these other people, but they’re all peers insofar as they all fucked up real bad by being in the wrong place at the wrong time and they’re all about to die for it. As far as Sousuke can see as he squints into the square one hazy, late afternoon in late, arguably post, summer, everyone in Ota gets to watch it happen.
This spectacle is nothing new nor particularly rare. Sousuke’s been in that crowd countless times, both in Otaan uniform and out of it. Attendance isn’t compulsory but it is well understood to be strongly advised by whoever’s wearing Uriel’s name tag that year. Which, in this city, for an exorcist like him? Compulsory. He always figured that was because there was always a moderately-high chance he’d end up here one day no matter what he did, and the Saints of the Firmament wanted him to know what he was in for.
Sousuke’s been accused of heresy, which means nothing at all. What he actually did was get caught attempting to desert the Firmament and the Fury both, but that, surprisingly, isn’t immediately punishable by death unless one does so while also being an exorcist. Then it’s heresy. Which is punishable by death. In Ota, anything an exorcist does or doesn’t do is heresy. Their possession of a hell gate makes everyone a little bit paranoid. Sure, every exorcist in Ota’s golden grip fights for humanity if they themselves want to live. But sometimes they don’t. Sometimes an exorcist is a demon in human flesh.
Sousuke assumed an accusation of heresy would be the thing to do him in eventually. He just figured it would be over something frivolous, that he’d cross paths with a Priest having a bad day, but life happens sometimes. By sometimes, Sousuke means one day he’s a seasoned exorcist in service of the Fury of the Firmament, and the next day half the Firmament has been slaughtered by demons and he needs to abandon his post and pact to go after the people who did it. By sometimes, he means grief and anguish are wont to cloud his senses in that situation, and his plans will be half-baked as a result, and the bloodhound Harpies will catch him exiting the sewer. As all dignified men go.
Actual heresy, though? In that he was possessed by a demon and used his hell gate to summon more demons into a Holy place? That he orchestrated the attack on the Firmament, and was caught fleeing the city in the dead of night? No. He didn’t do that. He has every good reason to want to destroy the Firmament, but no. Wasn’t him. Sure doesn't look good for him, though. The circumstantial evidence.
It looks very good for the Saints, though, who owe Uriel answers for their failure to secure the Heart of Ota, the Holy Vanguard of the East, the Thin Golden Line holding back chaos for unity. Et cetera, et cetera. Sousuke Yamazaki and his co-conspirators, all damned to burn on the block before the Archangel of Ota themself. Hell of a crime—no pun intended—to pull off, given he’s never seen any of these people chained to him before in his short and meaningless life, much less planned to attack the country’s Priest-infested, Holy beast-guarded, military bastion with them. Why this many people stand with him is also good for the Saints. Otherwise they’d have to admit the whole thing didn’t need more than two people to pull off.
Sousuke isn’t blaming the Matsuokas for his impending death necessarily, but he isn’t absolving them of it either.
An older woman at the front of the procession is unhooked from the doomed daisy chain, unshackled, and brought to the marble pedestal by an acolyte. Sousuke thought he might go first, for being the mastermind and all, or last but not least for a grand finale, but they popped him in at random between a teenager and a beggar who keeps talking to himself. Which means his irrelevant position in the queue is either to use those ahead of him to warm up the crowd or because even accused of the most deadly attack in Firmament history, he is still nothing to them. Little more than another exorcist to be made an example of, decades of impeccable obedience and submission be damned.
He is an exorcist, marked at birth, cursed with being the bearer of all that is bad in this world, and allowed to live this long only by the grace of Ota in lifelong servitude to the Archangel’s Fury so long as he banished demons for them when told. They, the villains, the exorcists, are the only ones who can remove demons from this world just as well as they can bring demons into it. The Priests need them, and thus the Priests are afraid of them. The Priests are in charge and no one understands the depth of depravity it takes to hold onto that power better than an exorcist.
Their executioner of the day is a Priest fully anonymized in ornate white robes and a bucket of a hood all embroidered on the seams and flat panels with the various golden regalia of the Firmament. This position rotates and is assigned just as custodial duty is assigned, just as acolyte intake is assigned, so every Priest above a certain rank gets a turn. Sousuke has heard the Priests complain about it over breakfast in the Nave. Not that job again, they would sigh. Why not take care of it in Confessional like they do the rest of them. The robes get so hot up there.
Rin never complained when it was his turn. Rin didn’t say anything about those shifts at all.
The woman steps up onto the pedestal on quaking, fearful legs. The bottoms of her bare feet are black with the ashes of the one who went before her still scattered on the platform around it. Sousuke has forgotten their face already, in fact he isn’t sure if he ever actually saw it. He’s trying not to look too closely at any of his co-conspirators, because when he does, he is forced to learn they’re murdering a child and a beggar for the sins of the Matsuokas, for instance, and he does not want to carry that weight for them.
The second robed figure on the platform is the towering, ceremonially armored Saint of Absolution, who reads aloud the charges and recites the Prayer of Absolution and some other hokey pokey shit with stupid titles. The damned are given no last words, and once the prayer is complete, the executioner does some unnecessary performance art with their hands and arms when all a Priest really needs to do is summon the fire where they want it to go, hands only needed to conjure it in concentrate before it leaps and spreads to where it is intended for. Which they do without hesitation, once the showmanship is done. Fascinating what they do to distract the audience from the fact that this power is being used on their own kind more than it is used on demons anymore. It’s fast, golden-white and blinding. Blink and he’d miss it, but he’ll always smell it. The noxious scent of heated metal and boiling fat that stays in his nose for hours and hours and
Sousuke does not look away where, along the daisy chain, he feels the pull of everyone else flinching and turning. Sousuke has seen a smiting hundreds of times and it has never shocked him, even when it was new. The man behind him talks louder in the argument he is having with an invisible friend. Hopefully they settle the issue soon.
“Step forward.”
The procession does so to the rattling of chains as the unshackling acolyte hurries from the shadows to sweep the pedestal of the old woman’s remains. The ashes pile onto the platform with those of the previous heretics.
By now Sousuke would’ve figured he’d feel something about dying after the teenager ahead of him is unhooked and brought forward. But there isn’t anything kicking around in his rubble other than how tacky all this is, and wondering how he put up with it all these horrible years and these miserable years, and why he knew Rin was unwell for so long and did nothing to protect him even when Gou begged him to help.
Ah. He spears that one from his thought stream like a fish from a river. There it is. Maybe he deserves this.
The teenager begins to weep and refuses to step onto the pedestal once the shackles drop. Her golden hair is brassy with dirt, uneven and broken. The rags they put her in are practically disintegrating off her in real time. She’s bruised and frail, and has surely been held in Confessional longer than the few weeks Sousuke has. He’d take her place if it would make a difference. But like most of what Sousuke has done in his life, it would make no difference at all.
So that the Priest and the Saint do not sully their precious hands, two additional, burlier acolytes move forward to address the snag. They grab the girl by her brittle arms and force her onto the pedestal as she wails and kicks. Sousuke envies the fight in her. Sousuke grew up forced into stoic silence. Sousuke’s never had a lot of fight in him, given the people he was told to fight for.
The girl throws her head back and screams, but the screech that fills the air does not come from her.
Abruptly, the gallows shake and the orange summer afternoon falls dark. The murmuring crowd, the Priest, the Saint all look up as shadow consumes the square. Sousuke already knows what it is; he felt it weeks ago. It awoke him from a dead sleep in the Firmament dormitory. His left arm thrums and pulses in the presence of a demonic horde, his Hell gate thrown wide open in anticipation of use, rattling against the bars of the ward the Firmament wrapped it in. Just as then as now, there is barely a moment, maybe half an inhale, before the world detonates all around him. The Otaan citizens can barely shout in warning before the flying behemoths rain hellfire down on their heads and everything else.
An audacious attack in broad daylight, and a certain escalation of war, all for the head of Uriel who descended from their fortress to generate some good PR.
Uriel’s shrouded balcony on the Holy tower across the square comes under black fire. Sousuke cannot give a shit about it as so do the people, and the gallows, and the faces of the buildings lining the perimeter. Sousuke is thrown onto his side, then thrashed around, as he and eight other people all pull on the chain link tether in opposite directions. Some citizens climb and clamber across the raised platform in their hurry to get out of the square, trampling anyone on the tether who chances a hand out too far. No one can get back up, not with the ground moving and such short chains limiting their legs and arms. Disorientation and panic among the others makes it worse, as they forget they are all chained together, and thwart any attempt Sousuke makes to, at the very least, get onto his knees.
This is a profoundly stupid way to die.
Black flame eats its way across the platform over to him. It won’t be nice and quick like a smite would’ve been. For him specifically, with demonic energy woven into his soul, it will probably suck. He can’t prove it, but anyone he’s seen killed by hellfire screams a little louder than when burned slowly by Holyfire, and he swears the exorcists scream and writhe the longest.
As he hyperfixates his gaze on the creeping black flame, Sousuke becomes vaguely aware that he is being jostled, and looks up belatedly to see the teenager pulling on his upper arm, face twisted into knots with tear tracks carved through the dirt, trying and failing to move him backwards to win him space. He helps her help him, for whatever reason she is doing so, and for lack of a higher thought telling him to do anything other than lie there and burn.
The sound of overlapping hymn choruses carries over the pitched shrieks and low bellows of the flying hell beasts and Sousuke moves back faster instinctually to get away from it in futility, knocking into the girl who has frozen in place and turned wide, terrified eyes to the sky that she did not grant to the hell beasts. Sousuke agrees with her; the sound of choral singing is the single most terrifying sound in the world.
The Firmament has sent in sin eaters to fight their hellish counterparts in the sky, and soon all of this will be ash beyond the wildest hopes and dreams of the demons who showed up to do the same. Their grotesque, marble-white and vein threaded chimerical bodies are a repulsive sight even from the ground, the heat and intensity of the Holy flame spewing from their many mouths and heads gusts downward and kicks up dust and debris. The Archangel summoned entities, chimerical nightmares of vaporizing Holy energy and insanity-inducing sound, send all creatures cowering, even demons smart enough to know what they’re looking at. They’re collared with golden wards to curb the friendly fire, but it hardly protects anyone once they start singing. They are also effectively indestructible, absorbing any standard Priest’s flame no matter how hot or intense and bowing only to the prowess of an Archangel. Sousuke now fervently wishes he had been first on the block. Better that, he now wishes the kid had been smited before all this shit started. Could’ve spared her a lot of pain.
Amidst the explosions, the beasts dogfighting above their heads, the scramble and panic of thousands of Otaan citizens running more fervently in all directions and yet never managing to get anywhere, Sousuke would’ve missed the gold-white flash to his right if it weren’t for the beggar crawling onto him, screaming and shouting, as if he only showed up to the show just now.
The Priest, Sousuke recalls. They aren’t at the pedestal anymore he confirms with some difficulty around the beggar’s flailing body. The Saint is nowhere to be found. Is this mercy then? Are they walking up the line and finishing their job before attending the demonic incursion? The beggar and the girl block his sight down the line and occupy his arms and legs, the newly hysterical man now calling for help as the Priest gets nearer to them and the girl trying to separate them. Priests are never merciful, and how dare he allow it to give him hope if even for a moment.
A flash of white-gold, one by one, quickly and precisely. The blasts of heat get closer, last longer, burn hotter, and Sousuke similarly feels the black flames in front of him. Sousuke’s composure reaches its limit to be hunted by hellfire, waiting for the smite of the Holy flame and miserable either way over what will take him first. All while clawed to ribbons by a frenzied man and becoming the subject of a dead girl’s hopeless fight to help him to the tune of a thousand voices singing discordant hymns in the heavens above.
The Priest grabs the beggar and pulls him off Sousuke. They struggle, the beggar doing everything to get away from the Priest and the Priest bodying him to the ground, the tether yanking Sousuke around by his arms all the while. The gold-white flash pops and the beggar still stands. No heinous smell. Alive and fighting. Something is off, something isn’t right. The Priest isn’t wearing a robe.
He is then abruptly and violently cut away from all of it.
The world is in triplicate when he opens his eyes. Unbearable heat batters his skin. Dirt and blood make a paste in his mouth. He labors off his back, sitting on his heels and nearly folded forward over his knees with the effort it takes to do this. He looks up and around as his senses reset. The gilded gallows are now in front of and above him, totally ablaze and collapsing in on itself from the rogue blast of a sin eater. The girl, deathly still and turned away a few feet from him with a head at too wrong an angle. The beggar, nowhere to be seen. The Priest—
A man from down the daisy chain Sousuke can only identify by the state of the rags that he wears coughs and wheezes and holds his hand to a wounded arm. He wrangles his bearings and looks up at the same things Sousuke just had before settling wild, wide green eyes on him that punch through a stripe of glistening blood flowing from his forehead to beneath his chin. He immediately makes his way to Sousuke, words on his lips that Sousuke cannot hear in his ragged state where everything has reached a monotonal ring. Sousuke cannot fight him off either when he grabs the chain hanging between the shackles on his wrists, his attempt amounting to little more than a twitch in his shoulders. There is a flash and then Sousuke is looking down between the shackles around his wrists at a tether that he is no longer leashed to and a severed chain, the melted ends still orange as the setting sun had been what feels like hours ago by now.
The man talks again, gesturing his uninjured hand wildly, looking up at the beasts and around at the fires and the stampeding crowds, and Sousuke takes another lifetime to figure out he wants to sever the chain at his ankles, too. Sousuke swings off his heels and plants his ass back on the ground and watches, muddled and uncomprehending, as the man severs this with a concentrated, skillful pop of Holy flame as well.
The Priest in rags takes Sousuke by the shoulders and shakes him. He takes Sousuke’s left arm, wrapped tight in wards, and burns them away like they’re paper. He shakes his shoulders. He takes the left arm back and shakes that when the shoulders do nothing, pointing at the chaos, speaking in growing distress that builds and builds until it finally pierces Sousuke’s fugue. His straining voice is clarion through all the flat and muddy noise pollution filling the square that is making tuning forks of Sousuke’s bones.
“—lease! Hello! Are you okay?! Can you hear me?!”
Sousuke rips his arm from the Priest’s grasp, remembering to be self-conscious of the telling dark script walking up his forearm and bicep. He nods.
The Priest slumps forward with relief. “Are you from here? Is there—”
The screams around the square heighten and startle him out of his questioning; hundreds of demonic figures drop from the underside of the wings of the hell beasts in the sky, land in tucked rolls, and immediately launch out of their protective tucks and go after the nearest person they can sink their claws and fangs into. It is the second phase of a standard demonic attack, and something about recognizing that pattern peels Sousuke’s brain splatter off the inside of his skull and sticks it back into his uniform, where he is trained, where he is a stoic servant of Ota who has protocols and an intimate knowledge of the city’s infrastructure and a cursed soul with the ability to flatten at least some of these pests back into the hell ditch they crawled out of.
Through the heightened noise, the Priest asks louder, “Is there a way out?!”
He asks while he helps Sousuke to his feet and the shadows shift just so. Sousuke, without needing to think about it, grabs the Priest by the arm and pulls him hard to the right while he thrusts his left arm into the space where the Priest’s head just was. A leaping demon, jaw unhinged and long leathery arms extended with claws, eats all of Sousuke’s fist up to his forearm, biting down. It shrieks around his arm as momentum swings its underside forward, then scrambles to backtrack because it knows what’s in its mouth, but Sousuke’s arm is already awake. He slams the demon back through the hell gate, a sharp rend in space splitting out from his palm and dragging the beast into it in a black blink.
Sousuke shakes out his arm to rid it of the demon’s tarry saliva. The puncture wounds from its teeth are a dull ache more than anything else he’s dealing with, the burn of the tar a singe he is more than familiar with. The Priest only then comprehends he about lost his head and grips at his neck then chest with his uninjured arm to ensure it is still attached, widened eyes bouncing from Sousuke’s bloodied limb to his face still in wait of an answer his expression says he would surely be fucked without.
Other hellions in mid-devour of their prey felt the banishment, and turn to them with hackles up and mouths wet with gore. The Priests of the Fury have arrived with their fire bombs as well (what’s left of them, anyway. thanks rin.) and are not known for their restraint in the presence of citizens. The battling beasts overhead bring their fighting closer and closer to the ground as they weaken. One by one, the exits fall blocked as the archways collapse, to say nothing of the state of the city beyond the square. If he’s going to make a run for it, it needs to be now, before he encounters another ass up situation.
Lately it's been a pain in the ass, to talk. He’ll have to for now if he wants a Priest on his side for once. This one’s all fucked up, in peasant rags, and no friend of the Priests in the square. Better an ally if only temporary. Sousuke’s voice is scorched from the heat and rough from weeks of disuse. He keeps it short.
“We can make one.”