When Fives gets to the cafe, someone else is at his table.

Not that table 8 is really his table, but - he’s a regular. Whatever that means. He comes in here every night and gets one little cup of espresso. Annie lets him put as many sugar packets in as he wants, and he stares at the flecked formica tabletop and tries not to think about the rest of his Legion, tries to exist for a while without clawing his soft brown topside skin off.

The guy is wearing a sleek suit so black it looks like you’d stain your fingers trying to touch him, a red-gold tie with a glinting fishscale pattern, and a heavy watch with some kind of ancient gold coin for the watch face. His hair is swept back and so glossy that it almost reminds Fives of home, the smooth implacable black glass spires of Dis, before - before. He’s drinking black coffee and reading The Wall Street Journal.

Fucker.

“Hey man,” Fives mutters as shuffles up to the interloper, and he means to say you’re at my table, asshole, but the man looks up at him, and it isn’t a man. For a second Fives can see the spokes of a fiery diadem, seething raiment and cavernous eyes. A general, he thinks, a Grand Duke of Hell-that-was, although he doesn’t know which one.

He chickens out. “Got a dollar?”

He hates the way begging sounds coming out of his mouth, but he figures he ought to get something out of this. He figures - yeah, it’s a gamble, it’s a stupid long shot, but what the hell has he got left to lose?

The general puts his paper down on the table. He looks at Fives for a long moment, eyes piercing even in his human guise.

“Is that what you really want, soldier?” he asks, with a voice like the low burn of smooth liquor, and Fives has to fight not to shudder or stand to attention.

“I -”

He doesn’t know how to answer. None of this is what he wants.

“Sit down,” says the general. “I’ll get you a slice of the pie.”

“They don’t serve pie here,” Fives says, because they don’t, it’s kind of a terrible diner. He likes it because it’s quiet. But he sits.

“Here’s your pie,” says Annie, because that’s just the kind of day it is, apparently, setting a wedge of something red and oozing in front of the general.

“Thank you, darling,” murmurs the general. “Another piece for my friend, please.”

“Sure thing, hon,” says Annie, shooting Fives a brief look he can’t decipher.

“But they don’t.” Fives can’t seem to finish his protest, staring at the pastry, at the wet ruby fruit. Cherries, maybe?

“It’s a special,” says the general, unconcerned. “Pie of the day, you know, so of course they won’t have had it before. I always order pie of the day.”

Fives is pretty sure that’s not what any of that means, but he doesn’t know enough about specials to argue.

“Now,” the general continues blithely, “What’s your name, soldier?”

He doesn’t know how he feels about being called that - he is, of course he is, he was built from blood and bile and brimstone to be a soldier, to march for Hell, one of the numberless Legions - but the war is over, and the Legion is gone, and he doesn’t know what he is, anymore.

But he likes, he thinks, that the general asked.

“I’m Fives,” he says, jerking his jaw up a little, because - it’s not much, really, it’s not striking or individual or clever. There were a lot of fives in his sigil, is all, it was easy and it stuck. But it’s his name.

“I like that,” the general says, and he’s smiling, almost sweetly, even if there’s something unnerving about the perfectly even line of his very white teeth, something unpredictable about the twinkle in his eyes. But for all that - Fives can’t find any hint of sarcasm, any mockery.

“What’s yours, then?” he asks, for something to say, when Annie comes back around with a second plate of pie, and Fives’ usual little espresso cup.

“Anything else you need, fellas?”

“That will be all, thank you,” the general says, before Fives gets a chance to say anything. He doesn’t know if that bothers him. He doesn’t know what he would have asked for.

“Thanks, Annie,” he says to be polite, and takes a sip of the dark-bitter shot without remembering to put his sugar in. It’s foul, but comforting, in a way that sticks to his ribs and throat, scalding and familiar.

“I’ve had a lot of names,” the general murmurs, one fingertip tracing slow whorls in the tabletop. Fives keeps expecting it to scorch, but it doesn’t. “These days - let’s say Jin Jedao. Eat your pie.”

Fives takes a bite. It’s - sweet, a deeper brighter sweet than the sugar, and tart at the same time, juicy and softer than flesh. The crust crackles and dissolves, crisp and then gone. Half the slice disappears before he realizes how fast he’s eating it, tries to force himself to slow down.

“What are you doing here, Fives?” Jedao asks, like he really wants to know, and suddenly Fives is just talking, rusty and lurching at first, and then faster and faster.

He tries to explain about the table, about how it’s just a place he can be where nobody bothers him, and then somehow he’s telling Jedao about the war, about all the other imps in his clutch, the motherless brothers that crawled out of alchemy pits with him and ate the scraps and effluvium off his back until they were bare and raw as freshly hatched maggots, how they dried and baked dark armor out of their own skin. He tells him about the great blazing march - which he must have seen, from the head of some company, carrying some great banner - but from the view of a nothing war demon, in the middle of the endless teeming mass of the Legions, roaring with one roar together out of a million million throats to shake the pillars of Heaven, and how they died, how every one of his clutchmates was razed, skewered, smote or sung to pieces, wrenched back in moments to lumps of meat and clay and cracked dull keratin. He talks about how suddenly he didn’t even have anyone left to fight, how he has to wear two hands and no blades and no orders, how he ended up by chance in this nothing town with grey skies and cold rocky beaches and mean scarred-up fish cats that he likes to feed raw clams when he can dig them up, except the wet sand is so cold now and it gets everywhere, and one grubby, warm cafe where table 8 is always empty this late, except today it wasn’t.

He’s shaking. He clenches his hands into fists so he doesn’t wrench the table.

“Thank you for telling me,” Jedao says, and deftly plucks a sugar packet out of the caddy, tears, pours it in a swift white line into the espresso cup. Fives picks it up - always an absurd, dainty thing in his big hands, even aping human limits - and there’s still a meager thread of warmth to it.

“Why are you here?” Fives asks.

“I am here,” Jedao says, very precisely, “Because I am looking for something.” He finishes his coffee. He turns toward Annie, where she surveys the customers from behind the counter, catches her eye and lifts his empty cup. When he does, Fives catches the angle just right, somehow, sees under his guise again - longer, this time, more.

He sees coils, endless reptilian loops, with dappled scales of gold and silver and copper, scales, he realizes, of coins, some as ancient as the watch-face and some modern issue, shekels and dirhams and pounds sterling and fresh mint Sacagawea dollars. Fives smells tulips and yarrow and poppies and oil, and he knows, suddenly, which Archfiend he’s sitting with: Mammon, the Prince of Avarice, the lord of luck and wealth and worldly power, one of those demons who was some other, older, wild force before he answered Lucifer’s call, in the war long before Fives’ war, who followed Hell’s banner but never bent his knee.

“Why don’t we make a wager,” says Fortune, smiling like a shark.

“I don’t have anything to bet,” Fives says, and Jedao laughs.

“Sure you do. There’s you.”

“I’m not for fucking sale,” Fives hisses, because even if he doesn’t have a purpose any more, even if he never had a soul to start with, that doesn’t make him one of Mammon’s hollow coins.

“Everything is for sale,” Mammon counters, dismissive and steely at once, leaning forward with a fierce insistence - then leans back again. “But fair’s fair, I suppose. I’ll match stakes, then, self for self. Shall we say a century? If you lose, you be my soldier, and do anything as I command, for a hundred years and a day. And if you win, for a hundred years, I’ll belong to you.”

The absurdity - the audacity - the idea that a creature like him could have charge of a Prince - albeit an Ex-Prince, albeit none of them are precisely what they were - but Jedao is clearly adapting far better than most to the new universal order. It can’t possibly be anything but a trick.

“Either way,” Jedao murmurs, almost idly, eyelids half-lowered as he watchings Fives gape, “You won’t be alone anymore.”

He feels like he’s had the breath stabbed out of him.

He holds out his hand.

“Deal.”

Jedao smiles.

“Oh no, my dear, we don’t seal a wager like that. He stands and darts forward, seizes Fives’ elbow with a strength completely disproportionate to his slim earthside shape, and hauls Fives up, to his feet and half across the small table into a hard, harsh kiss. Jedao’s other hand seizes in Fives’ short, scruffy hair, and Fives can feel it down in his real shape, five impossibly sharp claws curling around the enamel of one of his heavy spiral ram’s horns like a hawk’s talons digging into a falconer's glove, notching the outer edge. There’s teeth in the kiss, and blood from both of them, and the taste of bonfires in autumn.

Jedao lets him go, and sits back down, perfectly composed. Fives - can’t back out of it now. He can feel the wager burning in the tiny nick on his lip, in the marks on his horn. Jedao produces two plain bone dice, rough cubes with dark burgundy-black spots. The ones each have pointed ovals etched around them, stained the same color. Snake eyes.

Jedao sets them on the table, and pushes them across.

“Should we...really use your dice?” Fives asks, weakly.

“Do you have dice with you?” Jedao asks.

Fives doesn’t.

He swallows. Whatever Jedao wants, whatever he does to Fives or with him, however afraid he is - and he is afraid - you won’t be alone anymore, he reminds himself. He scoops the dice carefully into one rough human-shaped hand, hides them from his view by cupping the other over them. It feels like the little cubes are about to burn right through his flesh and get stuck in the shoddy struts beneath, clacking and clanking against his knuckles like chains. He was born in smoke and sulfur but he can’t breathe.

He shakes the dice, fights not to flinch, and then yanks his hands away to let them fall. The clatter is incongruously quiet.

“Well,” murmurs Fortune, smiling again. “Look at that. You won.”