Exhaustion overcame me before I could keep processing the information.
A bed. A real bed, with clean sheets and a soft pillow. After the night I'd been through, it was almost a heavenly luxury. My body sank into the mattress with a sigh of relief, and my eyelids, heavy as lead, closed without asking permission.
I'll just rest for a moment, I thought. Tomorrow I'll have time to think about all this. About DxD. About Kuoh. About the demons. About...
Sleep caught me before I could finish the sentence.
---
I opened my eyes.
And I immediately knew I wasn't awake.
The place where I found myself wasn't my room. It wasn't any place I'd seen before. I was standing on a surface that looked like water, but wasn't. My feet didn't sink; they barely created gentle ripples that expanded in perfect circles toward a non-existent horizon.
I looked up.
The sky was purple. Not a soft purple, like sunset, but a dark, deep, almost threatening purple. And at its center, hanging like a cursed jewel, was a black sun with white outlines. A sun that emitted no heat, no light, that simply... existed.
"What...?"
My voice sounded strange, muffled, as if I were speaking through a veil.
Then I saw it.
To my left, about ten meters away, a figure stood motionless. It was the demon. The same one I'd killed hours before. But it wasn't the real demon, not its body of flesh and scales. It was a version made of shadows, static as a statue, with empty eyes and mouth open in an eternal silence.
I took a step back, instinctively.
And I heard the footsteps.
Behind me.
Fast. Furious. Coming straight at me.
I turned just in time to see the fist coming directly at my face.
I dodged it by inches, feeling the wind on my cheek. My body reacted instinctively, grabbing the attacker's arm before he could retract it, using his own momentum to throw him down against the watery surface.
The impact created ripples that expanded in all directions.
And then I saw him.
It was me.
No, it wasn't me. It was... Asher. The original Asher. The owner of this body. His face was mine, but his expression was different. Pure rage. Pure pain. Fury held in for hours, for what for him must have been centuries of powerlessness.
"GIVE ME BACK MY LIFE!" he shouted, struggling under my grip. "GIVE ME BACK MY BODY, YOU DAMN THIEF!"
I released him, stepping back a couple of paces with my hands up.
"Wait, wait, wait..."
But he didn't wait. He jumped up and lunged at me again. This time I couldn't dodge completely. His fist caught me on the cheekbone, sending me backward. The pain was real, too real for a dream.
"You don't understand!" I tried to say, while shielding myself from another blow. "I didn't..."
"SHUT UP!" he shouted, throwing another punch that I managed to block. "I was trapped! I saw everything! I saw you run like a coward, I saw you kill that thing, I saw my shadow eat it, and I couldn't do ANYTHING!"
Blow after blow. He didn't fight with technique; he fought with desperation. With the rage of someone who has lost everything.
"IT'S MY BODY!" he yelled, as his blows became more erratic. "MY LIFE! MY PARENTS! AND YOU CAME AND TOOK IT ALL WITHOUT ASKING!"
Finally, I'd had enough.
I dodged his next punch, grabbed his arm, and with a quick movement sent him to the ground again. This time I didn't let go. I sat on his chest, pinning him down, panting from the effort.
"ARE YOU DONE?" I shouted, my face inches from his.
He looked at me with eyes full of hatred, but also something else. Tears. Tears of pent-up frustration.
"What do you want me to do?" he asked, his voice breaking. "What am I supposed to do? Accept it? Let you live my life while I rot in here?"
"I don't know," I admitted, and my voice came out softer than I expected. "But hitting me won't solve anything."
Little by little, the tension in his body decreased. He stopped struggling. He just looked at me, with that mix of hatred and desperation, as his breathing calmed.
I released him.
I stood up and offered him my hand.
He looked at me with distrust, but in the end he accepted it. He stood up, brushing off his non-existent clothes, and for a moment we stood in silence, two versions of the same face, standing in the middle of that watery nothingness under a black sun.
"Who are you?" he finally asked, his voice tired.
"Good question," I sighed. "A few hours ago I was a normal guy from another world. Student. Boring life. And suddenly... I woke up here. In your body. In your world."
"Another world?"
"Another dimension. Another reality. I don't know for sure. I just know that you and I are... different versions of the same person. Same skin, different souls."
Asher was silent for a moment, processing the information.
"I..." he began, then stopped. He sighed. "I was walking home. It was late; I'd been at the library studying. And suddenly, that thing appeared. It hit me. So hard I felt like I was breaking inside. And then... darkness. And when I woke up, I was here. Watching everything through your eyes. Feeling everything. But unable to do anything. Like a ghost in my own body."
"Do you remember how you died?" I asked.
He shook his head.
"I don't think I died. I think... I think that thing knocked me out. Left me unconscious. And in that state, you came. You became me. And I got trapped in here."
His words clicked in my head.
"The demon," I said slowly, connecting ideas. "It attacked me too. As soon as I woke up, it was there. As if... as if it had been waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
"I don't know. Maybe... maybe the demon knew? Knew I would come? Knew your body was... a magnet for something like me?"
It was crazy. But in a world of demons and angels, what wasn't?
"This is all bullshit," Asher muttered, running a hand through his hair. "My life was lonely enough without this. And now I have to deal with a me from another dimension living in my body."
"Technically, we both live in your body," I corrected.
He shot me a murderous look.
"You're not helping."
"I tend to do that."
Another silence. But this time it wasn't tense. It was more... reflective. As if we were both processing the absurdity of the situation.
"Now what?" Asher finally asked. "Are you going to live my life while I stay here watching? Are you going to meet my parents, use my memories, pretend to be me?"
"No," I answered, and the word came out with more certainty than I felt. "I can't. And I don't want to."
He looked at me, surprised.
"You don't want to?"
"Look," I said, sitting on the watery surface. "I didn't ask for this. You didn't ask for this. But it's happening. And what I know, because I've read it in stories and because it makes sense, is that a human body can't have two souls forever. Sooner or later, something will have to give."
Asher sat down beside me.
"So what does the expert propose?"
I smiled at his sarcasm.
"A fusion."
"A fusion?" he blinked. "Like in Dragon Ball?"
I shrugged.
"Maybe. Or maybe one consciousness consumes the other, absorbing their memories and personality like nothing. Or maybe we both disappear and something completely new emerges. I don't know. There's no manual for this."
"What a tempting offer," he muttered. "Possibilities: A, we fuse like in an anime; B, one eats the other; C, we both die. You're really selling this well."
"It's all I've got," I admitted. "We can stay here, trapped in this limbo, watching your body live without us. Or we can try something. Become something new. Something that includes both of us."
Asher was silent for a long moment. His eyes scanned the non-existent horizon, the purple sky, the black sun, the shadow statue of the demon.
"If we fuse," he finally asked. "What would we be? You? Me? A mix?"
"Both. All three, counting whatever emerges. We'd be Asher. But an Asher with my memories and yours. With my personality and yours. With my strengths and weaknesses and yours. We'd be... us."
"How poetic," he murmured, but this time without sarcasm.
Another silence. Long. Deep.
"Do you think it'll work?" he asked.
"I don't know."
"Do you think it'll hurt?"
"Probably."
He sighed deeply.
"You know, my life was shit. Absent parents, zero friends, constant moves. Sometimes I thought it didn't matter if I existed or not. That no one would notice my absence."
I looked at him.
"I used to think that too," I said quietly. "In my world, I was just as invisible. Just as alone. Maybe that's why... maybe that's why we ended up here. Together. As if the universe gave us a second chance. Both of us."
Asher looked into my eyes. For the first time, I didn't see hatred in them. I saw curiosity. I saw hope.
"How do we do it?" he asked.
I smiled.
I extended my hand toward him.
"I guess like this."
He looked at me for a moment. Then, slowly, he extended his.
Our hands touched.
And then, it happened.
It wasn't pain. It wasn't exactly pleasure. It was something in between, an indescribable sensation that coursed through every fiber of my being. As if my soul, my essence, my everything, was breaking apart and reassembling at the same time. As if millions of puzzle pieces spun in the air seeking their place.
I saw flashes of his life. His lonely childhood. His moves. His nights locked in his room. His desire to be someone, to have friends, to be important.
And he must have seen mine. My equally empty life. My same longings. My same frustrations.
We were the same.
We always had been.
The last image I saw before darkness enveloped everything was his face, mine, smiling. Not with sadness. Not with resignation. With something akin to peace.
And then...
Nothing.