A few hours later, their fingers were covered in a thick, sticky substance, and Akakios took the initiative to stick it in his mouth. They licked and sucked off each digit before the demon was satisfied. He ended that sensuous exchange with a lazy smile.

  They had been touring the better parts of the castle and dined on the demon’s best chef’s best meal, which Akakios said was compensation for joining him in the dungeon earlier. He paid fair wages, he explained. He wasn’t going to force Mars on the clock without just compensation.

  Mars was pretty sure the demon was messing with him. Also, the human found the demon’s method of consumption less than desirable, but the sweet honey stopped him from shutting himself into the pocket dimension. He hadn’t had baklava that good since he lived at home.

  His family always bought some from this local Mediterranean bakery in the best shopping district in town. Which part of the Mediterranean? The human couldn’t say. It had been decades since the Lebanese diaspora in the strange, southern city had been a real community. There used to be a community center, with a pool and everything. That had been before he was born. And while a large population of Arab (and other southwest Asian ethnic minorities) still existed, his parent’s insistence on a Catholic education had ensured most of his classmates (and thus friends) were further on the European side of things than himself.

  He had no connection to the bakery owners. He didn’t know if they were from Lebanon. Actually, he highly suspected they weren’t. But his father insisted on buying “the real stuff” from “the fancy bakery” at every important occasion because Mars and co. were “a good Arab family” who were going to eat “good Arab food, goddamn it.” Just like they went to a Roman Catholic school 'cause they were a “good Catholic family,” despite the flagrant atheism in the privacy of their home. His father kept grasping at a history that his paternal grandfather refused to share, and Mars, too, became homesick for a place he’d never known.

  Now, he tasted that dream of a place once more. For the first time, “going home” was truly impossible. This was not for the mirage of it, but because even that mirage was set in another world. He was living a different broken fantasy. He would never “go home.”

  “What are you thinking about?” Akakios asked him, tracing patterns into the honey left on the place.

  He licked his once-more honey-sweet fingertip, and Mars had no choice but to answer in their head. “Home.”

  “Where is that home?”

  “...I don’t really know,” Mars said, meaningfully meaningless.

  “A different world…” the demon mused, anyway.

  “Mhn,” the human hummed in confirmation.

  “How did you learn our language?”

  This stumped Mars. He just realized he wasn’t speaking English. How the fuck was he speaking their tongue!? “Uh, maybe there’s a fish in my ear?”1

  “…” His headmate ignored that remark, and Mars could practically feel the demon’s gears turning in their shared head, like they were bumping against his consciousness. Even the incorporeal was crowded with the size of Akakios’ ego, pushing all else to the edges out of his way. “Your soul. It could take on some of the character of the original body. In our successful human-to-animal experiments, the animal bodies don’t lose their animal instincts when the souls are replaced. Then again, instincts are instincts… learned knowledge could be different…”

  “You’re very fixated on this project.”

  “Of course I am. Who wouldn’t be?” There was no intended humor there, no irony nor hyperbole. It was a statement of pure conviction. Who wouldn’t want to study the soul? Who wouldn’t constantly think about the possibilities?

  But if you gathered a hundred random people, could you find one who would dedicate their mind to this endeavor? Who would not balk at sharing a body, if there was knowledge to be gained from it?

  Mars, at least, may have discerned something useful about his close neighbor. Something they had in common, and it wasn’t a fascination with the soul. “I prefer other hobbies, myself.” Reading, namely. He would wait for the demon to ask.

  The demon didn’t ask, but he did snort.

  “Science was never my best subject.”

  “And yet you haven’t drowned in these depths. Did you understand what we were doing, back there?”

  “Uh, in the laboratory? Most of it.”

  “Exactly.”

  If Mars had to take a shot every time he didn’t understand what Akakios was trying to say, he would die a second time. “I think you missed my point.”

  “Your point was just boring.”

  A servant entered, and the demon stared at the young man longer than Mars would have liked. “Now that’s a body,” Akakios muttered. “You want it?”

  “NO!”

  “Someone’s going to die to get you out. He might as well be attractive.” Then, he spoke to the servant, who was taking the empty plate. “I’m not done with that.”

  “I don’t want his body.”

  “Give me one good reason.”

  Well, there was the moral and ethical concern of cold blooded murder, but that was probably not going to sway the villainous, demonic war criminal. Instead, in their head he said, “He’s pink.”

  Indeed, the servant was flushed from his master’s forward remark. His skin was spotless and a cool pale. His hair was honey-colored and stick-straight. It wasn’t that he was not beautiful, but that that beauty wasn’t right. But there was still the whole murder thing or whatever. That sucked, too. That sucked more than anything else. Still, if he had to choose a vessel, if someone had to die, Akakios was right. Why not choose someone attractive? But also, why not choose someone that felt like him?

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “Sorry, Master Akakios,” the servant said shyly, putting the dish back down and almost bowing. The nervous heat of his face was so brightly displayed on his flesh.

  Mars wasn’t going to be pink. And while dyes could probably fix it, he was less compelled to go blonde, of all things.

  The demon still eyed the servant like a predator. Two fingers caressed the honey on the plate in a delicate motion. “That should be enough. You can take it now.” The demon’s tongue enveloped the nectar on his finger pads. The poor man shook under that sultry gaze, and his own thumb accidentally touched the honey as he grabbed the dish. As the servant rushed out, Akakios couldn’t help but be a little disappointed. It’s not like finding the perfect specimen would be so simple. At least he could narrow down his vessel search. Not so pale. “...noted.”

  The human realized his headmate had no idea what he looked like. He had no body, no hands, no face. At least, not one that he could call his own and only his own.

  “I’m Arab,” Mars said, once the fingers left their lips. “My dad is, at least.”

  “Sure.” Akakios could sense a hint of pressure in their voice. He didn’t want to press the wrong way, in case his headmate stopped talking.

  The demon didn’t know what that meant because of course he didn’t. There were cultural equivalents in this world, but it wasn’t a one-to-one match. Still, the human did his best to clarify, “It’s like Bayt.”

  “Ah.”

  “And I have red hair. Actually, more auburn. But red is fine too. I used to dye my hair cherry red with Antarctic Bear sometimes, though. My friends used to call me ‘red-40.’”

  “We can make dye.”

  “And I have green eyes.”

  “Oh?”

  “My mom’s eyes were green.”

  “Sure.”

  “She said it’s ‘cause she was Irish, but she got it from her dad. That’s not the Irish side.”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, she got it from both. But it was her dad that showed it. Which means my dad had green eyes tucked away in his DNA somewhere. A lot of Lebanese folks have lighter eyes, so it makes sense. My cousins have blue eyes. My sister’s are brown. She was always jealous of mine, but I used to be jealous that her eyes looked like our father’s. I think it was the dysphoria and all. I wanted to look just like him, because he was a him, right? But I like my eyes, now. I like looking a bit like her, now.”

  Their face was oddly warm. Why was it warm?

  “You know, they speak Arabic in Lebanon. My dad knows a bit of Arabic, but he struggled to learn. He went to the states so young, and his parents refused to let him speak it. My grandfather was already fluent in English. Why make his kid standout more than he had to? It was so easy to take one more difference away.”

  Akakios had stopped responding. He just waited for the next bit. Their face was still strangely warm.

  “I don’t know Arabic.”

  Something fell from their cheek, hitting the same two fingers that just defiled the last remnants of baklava.

  “I’m never going to be able to learn it.”

  They wiped the tear on their clothes.

  “I promised myself that I’d start when I got settled into my new job. It was one of those sweet lies you tell yourself when your brain doesn’t work enough to accomplish even simple tasks. I never keep up with anything. But, you know, I was almost awake for once in my life, and I thought maybe it was time. Maybe I could finally stick with it. Maybe I could at least learn my name.”

  He slid the side of his hand right below his eye, displacing the new tears that threatened his cheeks.

  “I never even learned how to write my name. Not my new name. I know my old one. I know how to write my old one. I don’t know my new name.”

  They curled in on themself, tucking their knees right below the chin.

  “I’m never going home,” Mars’ tears fully broke, like a crack in a dam. He sat there for a few minutes, exhausting their body with the unfettered flow.

  In the middle of a particularly anguished hiccup, their body stilled. Akakios took back the reins, breathing slowly until their heart beat normally once again. He produced a handkerchief from his pocket, and de-teared their face. It was puffy. He didn’t want to look in the mirror, and startle the poor human, but he was probably pink.

  “How are you feeling?” the demon asked, undemonically. Almost gentle. Almost sweet.

  “Tired.” Mars couldn’t even maneuver their vocal chords anymore, even as Akakios pushed his own will to the side to let him. Realizing the human couldn’t take him up on the offer, the demon flooded their synapses, completely cutting the other off.

  “We can sleep. It has been a long day.” The human made no indication of agreement, but he also didn’t argue. He didn’t say anything at all, actually. The demon figured that was good enough of an assent, and they headed off to Akakios’ bed chambers.

  They were back where Mars first met this world, as their body plunged into the silk sheets of the demon’s ridiculously luxurious bed. If one were to rank spots to rot in a depression-induced stupor, this would be near the top of the list. A prime location for a brain vacation. The perfect zoning out kinda zone.

  The human was really tired.

  “You may want to leave the headspace for a second, Mars,” Akakios said, adjusting his body in the bed.

  “?”

  “I have a sleep routine.”

  “Mn.” Mars was too tired to care what that meant.

  “If you want to stay for it, be my guest,” the demon said, a bit nervous. Which was a strange reaction from him, but it’s not like they’d known each other more than a day. Mars couldn’t learn everything that was strange and everything that was normal in that time. Then, their fingers fondled the buttons of their silk trousers, slowly maneuvering them open.

  Maybe he slept naked. Mars wouldn’t care even if he wasn’t exhausted.

  Except the fingers kept fondling.

  Oh. Oh. Oh no.

  It was the weirdest feeling, as his body prickled with a horniess he himself did not possess. There was a genuine fire burning in whatever Akakios was imagining to get it up. It had grown harder in their hands. Mars had wanted the feature for so long, and it was now within his grasp. But it was actually in their grasp, and that was an important distinction.

  Even in their lethargy, the human’s soul was able to plunge back to that other dimension. It was only fair to give the original owner some privacy. And it’s not like Mars wanted to be there.

  [Welcome, back!]

  “Uh, hi. I’m going to be here for a minute.”

  [I know.]

  “...right, you can see out there.”

  That was mortifying. On the brightside, maybe Ryzhik could monitor the situation for him.

  And on the other side of things, Akakios’ body flooded with a bunch of lovely chemicals and his mind flooded with a bunch of lovely thoughts. Most of them featured a human, with freckled, darker skin and bright red hair. His headmate had never told him about his super special protagonist violet eye, so the human he dreamed of had two green eyes.

  Mars was pinned beneath him, begging him to keep going. Faster, harder. There, right there. Oh my gods, there.

  He wasn’t bright pink, but blood still warmed every lovely place it should. He moaned the demon’s name. And then he moaned without saying anything, as his thoughts were left too frazzled to come up with anything but the gasps of feral ecstasy.

  The pleasure that overcame his body at the end of it sent him toppling into his pillow. It was the best fuck he had in months, and he fucking fucked himself. It was such a shame Mars didn’t stick around. Though, it was probably for the best. The human must have had such a strange day and probably didn’t want to try dual-soul masturbation after all the other novelty. He’d still reap all the benefits, as their body was already relaxing after that delicious release of tension.

  Besides, they had time. He could try again later. Test this human’s line until they’re both moaning with desire. He could be patient. He could wait. It’s not like Mars could leave.