Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“So what’s it like? Handling Denji?”

Denji?

Aki didn’t know how to respond. In fact, he didn’t know how to respond for so long that he started hearing Himeno on the other end jam the phone's disconnector as if it’s the landline's fault for his abrupt silence.

“It’s like.” He thinks about his first encounter with this boy just yesterday (and the horrible, mortifying realization that he’s only really handled this boy for less than twelve hours and already had half of his dignity and testicles decimated not just once, but in multiple consecutive hits, is starting to sink in). “It’s like watching a prepubescent brat.” He determines. Bingo, the boy snarked when Aki questioned with a censored variant if he’s only entering this field of work to ogle Makima (and people die. Maybe living on Earth, which is essentially a sentient chessboard between government, people, and devils, has desensitized even the general public to the concept of death, but Death is an unbreachable unknown, a concept rooted simultaneously in social perception and something biologically irreversible: it will therefore forever be unknown. And everyone fears the unknown to some existential level. So most people with at least some sense of self-awareness would understand to not enter a line of work where they must be at least partially suicidal to earn a monthly paycheck. And Aki does not know anything about Denji- he’s only interacted with him for a few hours. But he can confidently say that Denji does not have enough emotional depth to contemplate suicide as anything but a word).

Aki finally conjures a harsh elaboration for Denji that’s summarized from his accusatory entanglement of thoughts, as well as from a general sense of revulsion for bruising up his balls: “he’s a brat who lived his entire life without hardships, and therefore has no judgment as to what consequences are.”

Lived his entire life without hardships.

Aki stares, more astonished than anything as Denji just casually reveals he never attended any form of school.

And by logic, not attending any academic institute especially in Japan that offers public school is like, an indisputable sign of hardship.

However, in its own way, this piece of involuntarily learned information is absolutely random lore about Denji, who doesn’t even seem to be three-dimensional enough in the head to have lore to explain his character. His personality doesn’t have enough to substance to need explaining, proven by how that piece of information does not conform to anything Denji has to show. Anything except for his stupidity, but stupidity can be innate and Denji proves that with literally every single nonsensical thought that leaves his jagged mouth.

“…you seem like someone who’s never attended school.” Aki finally blurts out a compressed sentence of his entire befuddled thought process.

Aki barely has time to trip up the stairs as he sees Denji aim for his balls, once again.

“Well. Since I prolly turned into somethin’ like this fiend,” Denji gestures towards the lopped off head of the creature that thwacked against the floor upon impact. The axe in his hand shakes a spray of blood against the hardwood floor. “I guess I like. Wanted ta make it die less…painfully.”

Like that. Stupidity can be innate and Denji proves that with literally every single nonsensical thought that leaves his jagged mouth.

Like that fucking thought that is so insanely stupid that Aki finds himself bashing the stupid boy’s stupid head against the stupid wall and this kid is so emotionally stupid. From sympathizing with fiends and Devils despite the cruelty of its kind to joining the Hunter’s Bureau with a personal goal of chasing down Makima, he just-

Aki just stares at him like if he looks at him long enough, someone as hopeless as Denji will gain an iota of self-awareness and therefore for the betterment of humanity, self-implode and die. Maybe Aki's taking this too personally. Or not. Because Aki knows he is taking Denji’s inconsideration towards the atrocities of fiend against mankind too personally. But he has every right to because fiends have proven themselves time and time again to either be completely apathetic to their actions, or to actively indulge in them out of some primal disgust for humanity.

It’s like.

All of the work the Bureau does, all its goals and their rationale based in the horrible deeds that Devils have inflicted upon society-

Denji looks past all that through his own egocentric viewpoint.

Denji denies it. The Bureau, its philanthropy, and the very real devastation that Devils have ingrained in mankind's society.

Whatever words of affirmation to convey Aki’s feelings are absolutely rejected and spat on as Denji gives him a condescendingly dry gaze despite his vulnerability in front of Aki’s anger, as he says: “if there’s a devil that’ll be my friend, I’ll take it." ’Cause I never had any.”

“...you seem like someone who's never had friends.” Aki echoes his previous insult, retreating.

Selfish. A core trait of humans and Devil alike, except Devils have no sense of self-restraint through consideration and empathy, the way that humans do. According to Makima, Denji is half-devil and will be treated as such if he deserts the Bureau, but even with that over-looming blade precariously swinging above his nape, Denji still viewed being a Devil Hunter as means to a goal of some romantic spin-off of a comedy show. The brat even dumbs down his entire (already stupid) presence as a Devil-man-thing for his perception of reality that’s based on mimicries of human emotions such as romantic pursuits and closeness within friendships.

He wants friends, he wants to hug Makima, he wants things that are so distinctly human, yet with each (humanely) selfish desire, they only highlight his inhumanity as he actively pursues them with zero regards or consideration for anybody’s opinions or feelings outside of his own.

Really. It’s like Denji really is the product of someone who’s never seen a teenager in anything other than textbooks, trying to create one through the dictionary definition as to what a teenager is (“it’s like watching a prepubescent brat”).

Aki looks at Denji’s body crucified on the elongated tongue of a Leech Lady with four tits.

He contemplates letting her eat him. It’s a morbid and inappropriate thought, but Aki is convinced this entire scenario feels like a strange porn plot that only a degenerate like Denji would find some gratification in.

And if Denji goes, so does three-fourths of Aki’s suddenly spiking water bill. Aki’s blood pressure might finally stabilize, too.

“Aki,” Makima’s voice echoes in his brain. “I trust you.” Would she be disappointed, if he couldn’t even clean up after the mess of someone as insignificant as Denji? But to be fair- Denji is simultaneously the most low-maintenance yet high-maintenance bastard he’s ever met, being a coagulation of animalistic habits and animalistic needs. He doesn’t need much because he doesn’t know much, but that also means he doesn’t care about maintaining a certain standard that would be considered the bare minimum for any household.

Denji is a drain on finances and resources. But even worse than that? He’s annoying.

Aki grimaces.

Well. Accidents happen on field, anyways. Besides. Denji, even if he’s some…monster thing with like, a chainsaw or something in him(?), is a ragdoll right now. He’s barely recognizable from this distance if not for his straw-blonde hair, as every other feature of him is soaked iron red.  

Aki’s pretty sure he doesn’t even have an arm.

And Denji barely has any coherent or respectable dreams; dreams that if they go unfulfilled, he doesn’t seem relatively pressed about them, either.

If Denji dies, Denji himself doesn’t lose out on much. Which is a rather sympathetic fate given how he is a devil. At that, Aki hesitantly lowers the shadow puppet pinched out of his hands, no longer peering through the hole encircled by his thumb and middle finger.

Denji’s not even human. He barely looks like one, and definitely doesn’t act like one. And Aki doesn’t think he’s being prejudiced when he says that Denji doesn’t think like one, either.

But Aki is human. He cares about people, cares about what they think.

He cares about Makima and his goals. Denji is a pawn somewhere in a plan far greater than him and his needs, even if Aki himself does not think he’s a dog worth investing in.

Aki lifts his hand back up, magnifying the walking, breathing, cadaver in question. Definitely not human. Humans feel hurt, and react accordingly.

Denji has shown zero appropriate reaction to not just any social setting, but also to basic instincts of mankind, such as physical pain.

He grits his teeth.

“Kon.”  

Aki is starting to think all devils are just a variant of children, because just like most devils, children are also evil motherfuckers whose basic concepts of morality are completely rooted in hedonistic emotions as they’re not neurologically developed enough to extend their emotional awareness to perspectives outside of their own.

Exhibit A: Denji.

Exhibit B: Power.

“No. I don’t think you understand,” Aki does not talk back to Makima. He doesn’t think this is talking back, and rather, just him stating a fact calmly over the phone as he hears Power upon entering his (and his temporary new pet that he bought from Walmart: Denji's) abode, attempt to deconstruct his coffee machine to use its filter filled with moist coffee beans as a vaguely disturbing litterbox for her cat. “I am quite literally losing my mind,” he says with the pleasantness of a man who’s about to pull an insane, comedic turnabout on his life’s Tragedy route by finding a cartoonishly large rubberband to slingshot himself off his fifth-floor balcony.

“I’m sure if it’s you, you can handle it.”

“You overestimate my abilities,” he challenges, once again, not talking back to Makima who is kind and gracious even to his limitations of character. He just thinks she’s not fully realizing that his last nerve is thinner than his phone line cord, and that he may or may not commit homicide in the next five breaths if the Second Coming of Christ doesn't come down and reestablish his faith in humanity and god itself.

He hears Denji scream in tandem with a loud crash, followed by a sudden and unidentifiable audio source of gushing water. All within five breaths.

Or maybe Makima was right to give him more credit in personality: he’s not that much of a pushover.

Homicide it is.

“Aki.” Begins Makima’s voice. It’s rich and smooth and absolutely unlike the disconnected and jangled yelling match between two unhinged powerhouses with equal abilities to decimate an entire third of their district if they so will it. “I trust you.”

He doesn’t. Aki can barely trust himself from murdering Denji by bashing his head in with a rubber mallet from the hardware store. He also doesn’t trust Denji to not pull down his pants and shit on Aki’s own living room floor if he’s feeling particularly rebellious for one unfathomable reason or another. He definitely doesn’t trust Power to not just take a dump on his floor just because she felt like it.

Power stomps and trashes and reinvents the world like it’s her personal domain for the taking. This is proven by his first meeting with her that involved using one of the Bureau’s male-bathrooms and finding her punching celery sticks into the holes of one of the urinal drains like a toddler forcibly jamming in shaped wooden blocks into the wrong holes.

Quite frankly, he doesn’t trust anyone in his current house right now (cat included) to not be a victim of a hate crime in less than two hours.

But he hears the phrase coil down his ear with a seductive innocence of something so intimate (trust), and he swallows down his very reasonable complaints.

And he guesses that’s that.

Denji and Power being in the same room together, and therefore, unable to avoid consistent comparisons, has left Aki realizing a few surprising things about both of them, as well as himself.

1. Aki is less mature than he thought he was, because Aki from a week ago would not have lost hours of sleep contemplating if the public pound would truly take Denji, regardless of the absolute outcome of euthanizing that bastard if they choose to do so
2. Denji is surprisingly scarier than Power. Power is a fiend. Her level of (surprisingly low yet high) intelligence is unusual, but her kind has a precedence. She lives the lifecycle of a Devil whose origin is ironically inorganic in its natural creation from the innate fears harvested from humanity. She is understandable, and as a fiend whose literal quirky silly trait is dominant power, she is irrefutably evil in nature. And if biology doesn't prove it, then her personality does. 

Denji feels evil out of choice, in some sense. Maybe because he was once human, and therefore, had the option and exposure to what it’s like being one. Maybe. It’s like. He knows right from wrong, as proven through his experience with the Leech devil.

He did save humans. And Aki did run into another father and daughter duo who discussed another incident that he has never even heard of, one where Denji saved the little girl and loaned her his jacket.

But once Denji was dismissed from the hospital, Aki interrogated him about his choice to save these people. It didn’t seem he saved them with any human motive in mind. He just saved them because he could, not because he really cared if they died or not. Honestly, Aki can’t even give him too much shit for this belief: it’s not like most of his human coworkers have a moral compass or altruistic attitude either. It’s just. When he’s around Power, she does the obvious and expected out of her (and the standards for her are low. Not just in morality, but in general. Getting her to flush the toilet is like trying to bribe a particularly difficult child to not commit horrible acts of violence out of ethical oblivion in the playground’s sandpit). But when she’s like that, Denji suddenly becomes very complicated.

Denji becomes less readable, in spite of what his simplicity, straightforwardness, and just general lack of cognitive software behind any of his deepest potential thoughts indicate.

Aki doesn’t know how to feel about that.

Denji does things that only things with empathy would do, but he says and thinks in a way that only creatures starved of everything but basic instincts would even function within.

And maybe that’s what Denji is, Aki is starting to realize as he watches him blankly look at him as Aki yells at him to wash the dishes.

A creature who has never had the capability of reaching past the baselines of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Whose entire self-awareness and perception of reality revolves around just the bottom tiers of it: food, shelter, sex, and safety.

Does Denji even know there are tiers higher than those? Self-actualization, love, all that shit?

He barely has the common sense to exist as a Japanese citizen on the “basic necessities” level.

Clearly, as proven by how Denji’s shouting: “I DID was the dishes! See!” He huffs, pointing at the stack of greasy and wet plates.

“Soap, Denji!” Aki snarls. “You have to use soap!”

“How do you use soap on that in the first place? It’s a bar, Aki! A BLOCK! What am I going to do, scrubbing a hard block against that? HUH?”

Aki screams, frustrated, because he can’t. He legally and probably on some stupid moral scale should not be mad at some dumbass for not knowing what dish soap is even though it’s sitting right there on a shelf next to the sink, because how can he be pissed at some brat for not having common sense when common sense is fundamentally learned throughout the years through your environment?

But it’s like-

It’s like you would think Denji lived in a toolshed with the horrible lack of understanding he has to even mobilize his given resources to even just their basic efficiency. And Aki, quite frankly, refuses to believe a (questionably) cognitively functional young-adult found by Makima, cannot do that. Because even Aki who’s lived in Japan’s decaying foster care system for a couple years still retained enough common class from his old lifestyle within a simple, average family.

This kid worries about porn magazines. He worries about things that only people who have a stable lifestyle, worry about. But he clearly didn’t have any fundamental standing because then why does he live like a savage? He is quite literally a contradictory existence, which shouldn’t make sense because his entire stunted character does not have enough substance to even deny itself; he is quite literally a caricature of a hormonally insane teenager who cleans his room and showers only when his mom throws enough kitchen utensils at him. 

How could he not-

Whatever. Whatever.

Currently, being pissed off by Denji being uselessly unpredictable is not the problem.

The problem is his dishes.

“Denji. Listen. This.” He points at the dishsoap that sits innocently at the counter. He’s ready to chuck at the lazy ceiling fan and watch it launched across the room like a bubble rocket to make some amusing Shakespearan metaphor about how his own mundane life, punctuated with unsuspecting acts of brutal violence from an outside force, is a comedic sitcom for God to laugh at the same way Aki used to laugh at cable shows compiling clips of children falling and crying. “This is the soap you use for dishes. You pour a little- not a lot, just a dot, onto this sponge,” as he elaborates further, his voice tampers down as he sees the way that Denji, despite his inherently off-putting visuals (and it’s just his face, it’s just his face, it’s just his face. Aki cannot be discriminating against appearances now) and patronizingly casual disposition, is watching his every movement. “You then scrub all the dishes, and then rinse them off with water. You can set them in the washing machine to let them dry.”

“Huh. Why don’t you put some of the clothes in there, too?” Denji points at the washing machine.

“Would you dry your underwear next to the plates you eat your food off of?” Aki sneers.

“Yes? If they’re both clean????” Denji’s sincerity is somehow more insulting than if he just mocked Aki right then and there.

“…well. This is my house, so I make the rules, so you can’t.” Aki answers with a strange sense of washed out calmness that may just be bone-deep exhaustion. He thinks he's hibernating every social component of his brain at this moment, because if he actually digs too deeply into this dumb conversation, Aki will surely No Longer Remain Cordial. 

“Wha- wait, that’s not fair!”

“Yes it is. I pay for its rent and all the bills.”

“I also paid for the rent of my house! I know what it's like to run a house, I can do it too!"

Aki squints.

And rewinds that sentence.

He slowly turns around until he fully faces Denji, whose chest is puffed out and chin is jutted patronizingly in his direction.

“You had a house?” That in itself is unbelievable. In this economy?

“Yeah! I paid everrry month! And, and, I was also paying off debt while at it too! See, I’m superrrr responsible, AND I know how to own a house like it’s my own, so you should let me do handle some of the stuff h-“

“Wait waitwaitwait,” Aki hisses, intervening immediately because Denji, once again, is unloading more backstory exposition that is unbelievable not in content, but in context because

1. Denji does not know how to use basic household appliances. Aki, despite living with him for a month already, is unconvinced that he knows how to use the washing machine. He had his suspicions after Denji asked how the detergent gets from one box into the giant, waterlogged box with holes like a metal Croc, after Aki caught him dumping powder straight into his clothes.
2. Denji having a house.
3. Denji having debt. Probably because he was stupid enough to have a house.

“Why did you have debt?”

“Dunno." Already a great answer. "My dad had it.”

“And you were helping your dad pay it off?” Makes sense. Parental debt often becomes a family debt.

“Yeah. Because the yakuza said I gotta because he’s dead-”

“Because the WHAT-” 

“But when I met Miss Makima, I killed the yakuza head so now my debt is gone!” Denji gives a signature peace-sign that’s usually done whenever he thinks he said something self-explanatory, except Denji’s logic is usually never self-explanatory and if anything, leaves the responder with a lot more questions than answers.

Therefore, his peace-sign pisses Aki off to a mortally existential degree. Horrible answer. He'd deducting 100 points from whatever the hell baseline Denji started off with, which probably was already in the negatives.

And the-

The Yakuza?

Aki stares, horrified not necessarily out of any appropriate emotion because that requires actually processing what Denji just said, and what Denji just said might as well been a giant crockpot of cowshit marinated in tomato sauce that is forced into a feeding tube that someone as controversial as Himeno has punctured into Aki’s rotten lungs. Rather, Aki’s horror might as well be from plain shock that has zero layers of sentimental concern.

Then he actually thinks about it-

“Wait where’s your mom???” Because who?? What? Who would just involve their kid in their shit? Or are both parents just equally irresponsible?

“Dead since I was a kid. Oh! I had a heart disease, too, ‘cuz of her-” And it gets worse, doesn’t it. “But it’s allllll gone since I got Pochita in me!” He proudly whacks his chest that leaves Aki flinching.

“Isn’t. That’s chronic, isn’t it?”

“Huh? No. It’s a disease.”

Aki takes a moment to recite the Buddhist scripture of I will not brutally beat Denji to death five times in his head. Aki is also very much not Buddhist, which is probably why the strange sensation of heartburn has not died down despite his monotonous internal monologue. “Chronic means lifelong.”

“Oh. I mean. Sure.” Denji shrugs with the confidence of a man who does not care about being wrong. "It was pretty long. But my life was pretty short. So maybe it wasn't lifelong, and just in that time period?" 

Aki swallows.

Taiyo was chronically ill.

Like Denji. Denji is also mentally ill, clearly, if that means anything. Taiyo wasn't, but still. Sucks to be Denji. 

“…how did you live?” Aki finally asks. 

“Uh. I dunno? Breathing?”

He recites the scripture a sixth time. “I meant,” he speaks, words mashed out the gaps of his gritted teeth like rotten fruit, “how did you live with a chronic illness?”

“Hm? The yakuza also gave me meds! They were assholes but they had everythin’ I needed to live, and I had Pochita to be happy, so I was good!” Another peace-sign. Another nonsensical sentence.

Aki’s eyes dart across the boy’s sloppy, ugly, and grossly self-reassured smile, degraded by his signature slouch that pinches his head in a drowsy hang between sunken shoulders.

He takes a second look, as if he would find anything deeper in this shallow boy.

“Ya know. Now that I think ‘bout it. They tried to kill me ‘cuz they signed with a devil or s’mthing. And then they actually killed me.” He says it so casually. He treats death so casually.

"Like. Killed you as in killed you?"

"Yah."

Almost hysterically, Aki recalls his first impression of this soggy napkin of a man. He thought Denji was someone who had no emotional depth or capacity to comprehend what the fuck he was getting himself into. That he was a two-dimensional caricature of a plot device who couldn’t understand how devastatingly and irreversibly final death is.

And wow. Aki should transfer to the managing department, since his eye for people was accurate.

Denji really does have a reckless regard for his mortality status, a view that Aki assumed due to ignorance and an absence of seriousness.

And he’s not wrong about Denji’s flippancy.

But Denji seems to comprehend death far better than maybe even Aki himself.

“But because of that,” and god, he’s still talking. His words are making Aki nauseous. “I fused with Pochita like a Power Ranger-” that’s it. Aki’s limiting his TV time because now he’s saying even stupider things that feel so grossly childish but in a human way, not in a ‘psychopathic way of a toddler who likes to knock down Jenga towers the way Denji can kick over an entire fifty-floor corporate tower,’ “and it fixed my heart because he is my heart!” He knocks his chest again, and this time, Aki snatches Denji’s fist.

Denji freezes, before batting away his hand with a glare, one that Aki recognizes now as rebellion out of annoyance.

Aki’s heart is playing his ribcage like a particularly demonic glockenspiel, and he can hear each banging key resound in the cavity of his melting cranium. Denji is a Devil. And his heart is no longer ill.

He still can’t help but think about how if Denji’s heart was beating as loud as Aki’s is right now, he once could’ve collapsed from it.

Taiyo couldn’t even play outside without wheezing. Much less smack his chest like a moron.

“But he fixed my heart, my eye, my testicle-” Aki’s decided to stop questioning everything Denji says and instead take it at face value, because for one Denji does not have the mental capacity to speak with any filter in the first place, and two, Aki’s job is already slowly chipping away at his sanity.

Losing whatever remains of it because of Denji’s seemingly incomprehensible obsession with balls, can and will not be the hill it’s buried on.

“-and I now gotta job, and a better home!”

Right. Home.

Full circle, Hayakawa Aki. 

“Your house. That you mentioned…what. Are you sure you had a house?” It’s just. So contradictory given how when Denji first explored Aki’s kitchen, he pointed at his coffee machine and asked if Aki stolen it from a restaurant.

That’s when Aki learned Denji didn’t know coffee machines were a common appliance that existed outside of business establishments.

It was a creepy and dumbfounding realization that left Aki wondering if Denji’s family lived in the woods with nothing but three bears, porridge, and an attack drone that gained Free Will to explain...whatever's wrong with Denji or something.

He’s now learning they actually might've lived in the woods, a dig's way under with zero headstone.

“Uh. I think so?” Denji hesitates, eyes flitting about. Then, more contemplatively but with the same unabashed loudness, “is this the average house of a person? I think it is, the more I walk around here. Or is it just how it is in the city?”

“I mean. I think my house is average nationwide,” Aki cringes. He doesn’t think he wants to know more about Denji. It doesn’t necessarily uncover anything about Denji- usually it leaves him with more absurd inquiries that leave him awake at night. It’s horrible, losing sleeping out of mere confusion.

Maybe gaining more exposition into Denji’s past might untangle a few misunderstandings he has about Denji, but honestly.

He doesn’t think Denji is worth clarifying in his head. It’s not like he particularly wants to like Denji, nor does he think he’s somebody he’ll try to. More importantly, Denji doesn’t seem to care about being understood or liked by others’ terms (another thing that’s eerily inhuman about him). He idealizes people instead, and wants that cherrypicked version to like him. He doesn't seem to know that's not how people work. He doesn't seem to care if he does know that. 

It feels somewhat pointless to try and know Denji as a person.

But Aki is very human, so even if Denji’s past holed itself up behind a barrier he should leave unopened, his curiosity urges him to give the door a few knocks.  “Did you think it was a house?” Aki inquires, intrigued.

“Oh. Well. I thought it was a house. It felt like home.” Denji shrugs.

“I mean.” Yeah. That’s how it’s always been. Denji lives by his own standards and terms. For all the shit Aki gave him for such an egocentric manner of thinking, it’s admirable in its own right. “I guess that’s all that matters, if it’s your life you’re living.”

“Mhm! But I like this house better. The toilet works!”

“…did yours not?????” Aki verbalizes what he has no words for in a pitched tone of garbled confusion.

“No, so I went outside with Pochita a lot.”

That’s. That’s so fucking gross. “Did you have toilet paper?”

“We had leaves!”

At least Denji had the instinct (manners? Aki’s not entirely sure by this point what seemingly normalized actions of any human creature is taught or not) to wipe.

“I mean. It sounds like you had a home.” But that’s not what I was asking. “But did you have a house?”

“Aren’t they the same?”

“Home is where you find comfort.” Denji, once again, is looking at him with unblinking eyes that are emptier than a work desktop’s screensaver. “It’s." He hesitates, before spinning a wack-ass comparison that Denji has enough background context to understand, "you know how Power lived in the woods with Nyako?”

As if hearing its name, Nyako crawls out from the cabinets it was clearly sleeping in.

Aki grimaces.

Being a feral cat, Nyako has the habit of shitting on the spot if she so feels like it, much like her owner.

He crouches down to peer into the cabinet. No funk wafts out. Good.

“Yeah.”

“Well. The forest is Power’s house. But the forest is home because Nyako is there. If Nyako wasn’t there, that wouldn’t be a home, just a house. A shelter.”

Denji slowly nods. “Then I had both!” He gives a third victorious sign of his fingers, and now Aki knows this boy doesn’t fully comprehend the nuances of his illustrative explanation. “Because I had Pochita, and a house that was a shelter!”

“Wait. So you actually had a house????” Aki, for some reason, just can’t believe it.

“Yeah. Got a roof and everything. I had to pay for it, too.”

“How much?” Aki is not buying this. Denji might be, but he is not.

“Uhhhh forty-two-thousand yen per month?”

Aki narrows his eyes upon that suspiciously low price. Aki is not buying this. Denji might be for 42,000 yen a month, but Aki is most DEFINITELY not. Especially if he’s mentioning debt and medication prices (and Aki doesn’t even trust the yakuza to be handing out legitimate heart medication, how would they even know which ones to give to Denji, who definitely couldn’t even afford a diagnosis at his age?).

“Your house had a roof. And?”

The infuriatingly blank look is back.

“A floor.”

“If you say you also had four-walls, I’ll get mad," Aki warns, using the same tone he uses before he actively turns their dialogue into a WWE commentary. 

“I had a window, too! Didn’t have the fancy stuff like glass,” oh my god, “but it was nice in the summer-”

“You had a toilet,” Aki says weakly in a consoling manner (and he's comforting not Denji- no, because Denji seems content- but himself), as if he’s trying to alleviate the sudden stress of hearing someone get so horribly ripped off for who knows how many years (not Aki; Aki is not going to start knowing because this story is already enough to ruin the day of any average Japanese salary-worker, and Aki doesn’t even have the mental stability on par with one).

“Mhm!”

Fourth peace-sign.

Fourth = death.

Ironic, because Denji is seriously killing him right now, and Aki is definitely feeling No Peace in his heart at this moment.

“Denji. You.” He finally begins, voice shoved through a presser and made into the most sour and thin cup of orange juice that could possibly exist. “Those yakuza. They’re all dead?” Aki is just asking for himself now, not too worried about Denji's response. If they're not dead, they will be. 

“Yah.” Denji smacks his lips, because he’s a boy whose anger only exists on a comically intense level when it comes to boobs and porn magazines and not at the injustice of poverty, exploitation, and systemic neglect even towards himself.

Denji knows right from wrong. But once again, as Aki sees the boy’s general apathy aimed towards himself, like anything that wronged him has nothing to do with his present-self, and therefore has no long-lasting impact on him as a person (but it does; it does and the apathy is direct proof), he thinks the boy does not care much about immorality in a personal sense.

Aki’s lips twist into a grimace.

“Dude. I told you. I know how to run a house, stop judgin’ me ‘cuz I don’t got the fancy shit you do-“

“I’m telling you, it’s not fancy-!”

“Jeez, stop yellin’ at me every time you get pissy! I dunno know why you’re being like this,” Denji snorts. And it’s the same. The same attitude of disregard that’s so annoying because what does Denji know? What does Denji know to be judging others like this, to look down on them with that snark when he doesn’t even know that human beings don’t even live like him? That he’s below human beings and lives like an unhinged sewer rat that belongs in a Studio Ghibli cryptic spin-off-

“Denji.” Aki begins his sentence and ends his thoughts. “You never attended elementary school. You didn’t know what a fiend was. You don’t know dishsoap existed. You didn’t know not to double-dip utensils into all my jam and jelly. I- you-”

“Ugh. Now you’re attacking my education? Jokes on you, I don’t give a shit! I’m too dumb to even understand why it matters. Can’t insult me if I’m ignorant of it!” Denji sneers, sticking out his tongue in a rudimentary and gross fashion.

“No, you don’t- it’s not that-” he’s sputtering. Aki Hayakawa is sputtering because of someone like Denji. Denji is certainly astonishing, and irrefutable at times because his logic is never on solid enough grounds to make a reasonable argument against, but this is the first time Aki feels at a lost for words on some temperamental way. In some way that leaves his brain fried and voice raspy and vision foggy from the accumulation of steam smogging up his lungs faster than his smoking would; it’s like a physiological mimicry of getting upset enough to sob, except Aki would never cry over a devil, or even worse, Denji.

“What’s going on?” A sudden short and snappish tone interrupts in its cheerful manner.

Thing 2 arrives at the scene, bounding over and immediately thwacking Denji on the back of the head.

The boy squawks, ripping his upper body around to face Power, who’s innocently standing there, unbothered by the fact that she basically tore through space and time with just her fist to give him the most unwarranted deck to the head.

Aki understood that punch on an emotional level.

“Aki is being a bitch!” Denji answers.

“Ugh. Homeowner!” Power raises a finger, “stop bullying Denji without me! I must be invited to partake on these activities, or else I shall put every single of your belongings in contract with the lightning devil into your bathtub!”

And honestly, that’s a very real threat from her.

Aki, at this moment, silently thinks that if he ever has to punish Denji, he might as well just sic Power, who is a natural repellant to any positive emotions in her five-mile radius, against him instead of putting himself in this situation ever again.

Two birds, one stone.

Except Power is less of a stone, and more like an entire cement block chucked at 80 miles-per-hour.

“If you put my toaster in the bathtub, Denji will no longer have his daily toast,” Aki begins hoarsely, too exhausted to feel mad. That’s been common, these days.

He’s not entirely sure if this is a sign that he’s adapting as humans do when placed in an emotionally distressing situation, or if he’s just losing his last bits of resolve and dignity as a product of mankind’s evolved form.

“And if you put my television in the bathtub, you won’t get to watch Power Rangers or Doraemon.”

Power pauses. “The one with the cat?”

“Yep. The cat with the pocket.”

“…it…tis not even a real cat! It does not even have ears!” Power sneers. 

“Okay. Then do it. Put the television in the bathtub.” Aki says. He is past the point of caring.

Power looks at him, mouth as unhinged as her last two braincells that orbit around her walnut processing centers anytime it’s not knocked into Denji’s hollow cranium for temporary residency. She seems absolutely distorted by his urgings.

If Aki has not used up his entire week worth’s of compassion as a social creature in the past five-minutes of just talking to Denji, he might’ve laughed.

“I. I will refrain from putting the television in the bathtub,” she finally concedes. “The toaster must take the brunt, then.”

“Leave my toaster out of this!”

“It’s not your toaster, it’s mine,” Aki says hollowly, eyes glazed as they magnify the far distance.

He stares out the balcony, and at the sky towards a heaven he does not believe in.

Finding no salvation there, he turns back to the two irrevocably feral twerps now pulling at each other’s hair. He sighs. “Jesus Christ.”

“Huh? Geezers Cries?” Denji mumbles, blasphemous words muffled by the way his jaw is ground shut to its roof by Power’s head-crushing hold.

“Jesus Christ.” Aki reiterates, tired. He doesn’t even need to process the unseeing look on Denji’s face before immediately clarifying, “he’s some god in a religion.” And he’s not even batting an eye towards Denji’s lack of religious knowledge. Nothing about this boy screams he’s ever met the Lord and Savior or heard a single Biblical message.

It explains a lot about him, really.

“Aha ha!” Power cackles, grating and annoying as always. “I can beat him!” Then, clearly finding that not impressive enough, “I AM him!”

“God’s not real.” Denji retorts nonchalantly from his chokehold, only to be immediately murdered for that answer as Power wrestles him up to her face and screams: “LIAR! I AM GOD, YOU MORTAL!”

Aki sighs.

“There has to be a god, who created the world then?” Power huffs. “ME. I created the world.” Given how messy the world is, Aki is somewhat inclined to believe that a sentiency with the mental aptitude of a five-year-old really did scribble out the default settings of this Earth with crayons. She is power. And you do need energy to create things. And Power’s entropy rises faster than Aki’s bloodstream with each deranged sentence that leaves her mouth.

If some archaic variant of Power truly did give birth to the world in spite of it being something that definitely should’ve been aborted within the blueprint stage, he probably wouldn’t question it too much.

“The world? The world just exists, stupidddd-” Denji yawns.

“TOPKNOT, tell him that I am god!” Power roars.

“No.”

“Mortals fear me and are constant liars. You guys are my worst creations, I should have eradicated mankind-” do it, just do it already, “which I will do once I become the Prime Minister in the most needlessly slow and painful way possible through taxes- but because I am god, I have your life in my hands. I shall kill you and your mortality in a go!”

“Jokes on you, I’m immortal!” Denji lours.

Aki sighs. Again.

And stares out the window. Again.

God. It’s me. Again.

And Aki isn’t entirely a faithful man either, though he has fully come to terms that if there is god out there, it’s probably just another species that continuously defy universal laws the way that devils do. To him, god would not be some symbolic icon with any constant moral scales of judgment.

However, for an atheist, suspiciously after he’s met Denji and moved in with Power, he finds himself praying quite a lot these days.

“Right. I’ll just become a chainsaw if things go wrong.” Denji gives his thumbs-up.

Aki is quite tired of seeing his thumbs-up, because it’s nothing more than a harbinger of bullshit that is only mildly comprehensible by Denji or people privy to Denji’s outwardly incoherent logic (and being a member, believe it or not, is a status that Aki had absolutely no consent in gaining).  Or if you’re Power, but that’s just because Power doesn’t think either, so she’s just on the same intuitive wavelength as Denji.

Himeno blinks. Or winks. He’s not entirely sure.

She then doubles over, choking. “What? Is that a new saying? Slang phrase?” She stifles down another laugh that ends up erupting in a chain reaction of snorts.

“Huh? Should I make it my catchphrase?” Denji mutters, doing his own thing again of interpreting dialogue however the hell he wants like the moron he is. “’Going Chainsaw’?”

Aki doesn’t even verbalize how dumb it sounds, and instead, chooses to chop him on the head, ignoring the way Denji instinctively screams in response.

He’s so sick of this.

They’re stuck in a never-ending hallway of nothingness that cycles back into itself, and Denji wants to make a little jingle for himself like he’s a cereal advertisement.

He's sooooo sick of this.

“He seriously fell asleep.” Himeno murmurs, amused and bemused.

“Yeah.” Aki says flatly, no longer surprised. Denji is essentially a massive bundle of human instincts without a gag reflex.

He doesn’t even say anything as he reaches forward and grabs Power by the nape before she can leap onto Denji’s sleeping figure, presumably to do something insurmountably horrible like peeing on him.

“Denji’s special like that.” Aki explains without really explaining anything, which is something that Denji himself does quite often. Maybe he needs a vacation. He can't believe he's considering something that Himeno couldn't get him to do for years. 

“Isn’t he just a fool?” Arai puts it bluntly.

“He has no sense of urgency, huh?” Himeno mumbles. “You know. I got the feeling with how you described him like a wild animal, that he would have more self-preservation instinct.” She crouches by the bed, poking Denji’s cheek and evoking a particularly loud snore from his limp body.

Aki squints at that statement as he ignores Power who’s flailing about. He grimaces when one of her spasming legs smack him in the groin. He lets her go.

She does not let him go.

Aki's sheathed nail that encompasses an insurmountable power that's unconveyable by the cultural limitations of the mortal language is now used like a tree branch as he beats Power off of him. He responds to Himeno’s theory with a strained tone, “I mean. Yeah. He lives solely for survival and I don’t…actually think he knows what people do outside of that,” he admits. “But his self-preservation instinct…” he thinks about Denji who doesn’t hesitate to drink used bathwater. Or how he doesn’t hesitate to use secondhand bathwater because Power hates the sound of the drain. Denji, who doesn’t know how to package leftovers properly and instead leaves them to mold underneath his bed and still eats them. Denji, who leaps headfirst into danger with a reckless regard that comes from someone who doesn’t view their own life as valuable, and rather, values his own happiness instead.

He prioritizes feeling content and happy and fun, the way all humans do, but does not necessarily categorize “living” as a part of those options. It’s a paradox: someone who’s only lived for survival and is simply content with how things are going, but doesn’t see surviving as a condition to be content. “I’m honestly surprised Mother Nature hasn’t picked him off.” Aki deadpans. “Or society. I actually think he has been picked off,” he says the last part with a good amount of suspicion as he recounts everything he has involuntarily learned about Denji. “I’m not sure if it’s out of divine mercy or sadism that he’s...back(?) ...still(??) alive to today.”

“I- ugh. I want to be able to sleep well without a care, too,” Kobeni sniffs, eyes rattling in their sockets, water sloshing in her dark wells of ink.

Aki hopes she doesn’t cry. The only good thing about Power and Denji is that they haven’t cried like all kids do, in spite of their childlike demeanors.

Power, the Devil, does not cry. He’s pretty sure she can cry though if he does something that mildly inconveniences her.

Denji, the devil in personality, appearance, manners, and biology, does not cry. Surprisingly, it’s Denji’s personality that’s established from every (unwillingly) learned piece of information about his previous lifestyle, that convinces Aki he cannot cry, or has never felt the need to.

Kobeni, the human, has cried before and will cry again.

At that conclusion, he rounds to her to console her with a firm pat on the back, only to freeze, and close his eyes with an exhale of resignation.

Too late.

He closes his eyes as he hears an insufferably yet pitiful wail puncture the biscuit stale silence of their tense situation.

She’s already crying.

Aki decides Denji is useful.

He gets shanked for it.

As Aki flips onto his back and makes the most undignified gag as Power holds a hand up to his side, he sees Denji shoot him an unreadable look.

Distantly, almost manically (the pain must be getting to him, for real), Aki thinks it’s hilarious how juxtaposing Denji is, with his constantly unpredictable and unreadable actions that feels too complicated for such a thoughtless personality.

Denji’s eyes lower. It’s not out of guilt.

Rather, he looks at Aki with something akin to annoyance. “I don’t need anymore debt,” Denji says.

Ah.

Denji is transactional. Of course he is. That’s better for Aki, because he plans on using Denji to the fullest in the future for his own revenge.

He wonders if Denji considers feelings and emotions to be currency, as well. He thinks about Denji who doesn’t feel nor benefit from emotions, but understands how it has some value or intrinsic worth as he tries to gain affection or love as prizes for his actions. Denji was motivated by the idea of a kiss.

He initially thought Denji was horny. He is. That’s undeniable.

But there’s something weird about the way Denji perceives these things. How he wants Makima’s attention, wants to feel boobs, how he constantly gives Nyako bits of rice in exchange for a couple pets.

Didn’t he say something earlier in response to Himeno? That physical touch is special based on your relationship with a person, yet he immediately trashed that philosophy for the sake of Frenching?

Wow.

Denji sees intimacy on any emotional or physical scale as something capable of being traded off, as something as cold as cash. He only knows there’s a sentimental component to it because people told him there was one, but he has no true understanding or care for it.

What an inhuman way of thinking, Aki thinks rather objectively, as Power bends blood back into his traitorous body, as he hears the rip of a chainsaw echo from the pits of an artificial hell below.

Better for him. Aki, in some morbid way, has a feeling he might be more like Denji than he thought.

Power, like Denji, has little innate value for emotions. Even if she’s slowing his death with a surprising compliancy as she’s technically saving him rather than trying to kill him as her personality would dictate, she’s not doing it out of any love for him. She loves him the same way she loves the hand that feeds her, even if she feels entitled to being fed rather than grateful for its presence.

Except Power is Power. She is a Fiend.

Nobody’s trying to convince Aki that Power is human.

Power is drunk. Aki didn’t even know Fiends could get drunk- he kind of assumed with the way they possess and mess with a human body, she could metabolize alcohol like candy.

He wonders if there’s a science. If for her BLOOD = POWER, then does the alcohol percentage of her bloodstream impact her impact output?

He watches as she sings and twirls past his doorstep, and into his hallway.

He should’ve known better. He was keeping an eye out for how much she drank.

Strangely enough, it wasn’t how annoying a possibly drunk Power could be that made him watch what she consumed during the Division 4 afterparty.

It was his first thought that Power’s clearly a minor just by character and mind.

Which was stupid.

She’s as old as fears come, after all.

And she’s a Fiend. It’s not like it matters if she’s ethically compromised- she already is, with how quickly she’ll suggest murder as a solution to any given problem not even for efficiency, but for entertainment. The fact that she views murder with a recreational component is already telling enough.

“Denji’s not coming home?”

Too tired to snap that this isn’t her home, Aki unbuttons his white shirt as Power does a little shimmy, tearing open every single cabinet and drawer of his kitchen to find Nyako, as if she could fit into the utensil drawer in the first place. “No, isn’t he…” he blinks.

And suddenly sobers up.

“I. Why didn’t he come back with us?” Aki frowns.

“I dunno. He was with Eyepatch when we left.” Power says as she hops onto the counter, leaping around. She looks at Aki. “So when is he coming back?”

Himeno?

His mouth filches. Ah. Himeno was drunk if he remembers. No, he definitely remembers. She was plastered. Himeno is also irrefutably irresponsible, questionably so at times. And Denji is-

Denji is a Devil.

He is also very vulnerable, and very (in)capable of making decisions based off of emotions.

Denji’s emotions are also led by his dick.

“Shit. I- fuck,” he hisses, and rushes to his landline with an unexpected sense of urgency that from some third-party aspect of his frontal lobe, feels almost uncharacteristic. “Even if Denji is an adult, he’s still stupid, he’ll get himself in trouble-”

Or he finds himself in trouble.

Can he really blame him for getting himself in trouble when Denji’s standard of judgment was based on meeting basic needs or gratification?

Now that he’s instantly sobered up from the drive home and from Power’s obliviousness that alerts him that he is the adult here, he finds himself angry at the landline, at the beeping at the other end of the phone at-

Himeno, that-

Can’t she just answer her phone once-

“Adult? Denji is not an adult.”

The coldness that cleared his brain from the muddy heatwave of drunkenness immediately flushes through his stomach. It sinks down.

He was hoping that at the very least he was an adult. “He’s not eighteen?” He croaks.

“Ah. You’re lacking!” Power says because she cannot respond to him without being a bag of shit whacked a hundred times by a titanium baseball bat. “He’s sixteen! He said that tonight, you lackluster, ugly- super ugly- mortal with memory loss!"

“HE’S SIXTEEN?” And Denji felt like a teenager, a child, which is why he was freaking out. But he didn’t know he actually was one. With everything Denji went through, Aki assumed-

With. With his current job and lifestyle and-

He thought-

He just.

Just with the sheer amount of accumulated emotional damage that objectively exists in Denji’s history, he thought it was at least diluted through a good number of years-

And Denji was small for an 18-year-old, but he thought that was almost expected the more he heard about Denji’s lacking living standards-

Denji.

Denji is much much younger than Aki initially presumed.

“Yeah.” Power replies casually, like she did not nuke Aki’s entire brain surface and obliterated it into raw chunks of fat and MSG. 

He cusses into his hands. Ohhhhh my god. “Himeno, she doesn’t, oh no-”

“She knows he’s sixteen.”

Fuck.

The problem is Himeno is drunk and relatively questionable when it comes to morals even while sober. Constantly being on the verge of life or death with nobody to really intimately sympathize with the depth of your sense of loss and self might do that to you. It’s just how it is.

Not like it’s right. Or that it doesn’t have unforeseeable consequences on other people. People like Denji.

Which is why-

“Power, stay here, I need to.” Can I leave Power here alone? He watches as Power fills up his kitchen sink with water. “What are you doing?” He asks, stunned out of his panic for a hot minute.

“I’m going to wash my feet in it because I stepped in some of the vomit Denji had.”

“Denji drank?”

“No.”

“Wh- why’d he vomit?” Denji has a stomach of steel; the bacterial biome of just his gut lining can probably cure an entire onslaught of mutated viruses in this day and age.

“He didn’t. That was Eyepatch’s vomit.”

“I- what?” And Power also has the same issue as Denji, which is dropping one-liners that are so brain-rattling stunning, with zero awareness of the social standards that they would be perceived by.

“Himeno kissed him and puked in his mouth.” She narrates nonchalantly.

And oh my god there are so many things wrong with that sentence.

“…we’re grabbing Denji.” He finally concludes, jaw bolted and something insanely tense cracking across his brain.

He doesn’t know why he feels so hot. Like thunder cracked against his deepfried brain, illustrating itself in branches of lightning that splices across the side of his face and uproots the smooth expanse of his throat with a throbbing vein, severing his spinal cord and leaving his fingers numb and hot and overstimulated with emotions converted into physical sensations.

He doesn’t have time to care about Himeno’s questionable behaviors, doesn’t have time for Denji, doesn’t have time for-

He should go to sleep. 

His temper stops so suddenly at that startling revelation that he nearly throws up from the sudden punch of mental vertigo. 

“Why would Denji not come home?” Power looks at him. “Do we have to chauffer him? I am nobody’s errand boy!” She sneers.

Aki nearly bites out a scathing word of urgency, before he sees the genuine absence of care in Power’s hollow visage.

It’s the same, dumb, face that Denji wears.

The face of people who aren’t stupid, but don’t have enough experience to identify what they’re looking at.

The face of people who don’t really know what they’re getting into.

Denji doesn’t know what he’s getting into, and as much as Aki trusts her with his life, Himeno has proven herself time and time again to have zero sense of boundaries.

Aki trusts her with his life, because he knows her intentions, knows what she is to him, knows what he is to her. All of that is packaged into a very horribly treated doggy-bag labeled "buddy." Buddy can be a dog's name.

Aki does not trust her with Denji on any level. Denji is not her Buddy; he is some stray dog who people don't take a second glance at, and when they do, it's never to take them in. 

“No. Denji has to come with us.” Aki bites. “You’re coming with me.”

“UGH why do I have to go get him?”

Because you will use my living room rug as a litterbox for Nyako, and set it on fire if you so desire. “Because…” he grits his teeth, and he can’t believe he’s conforming to the arrogance of a Devil, “I need your protection as it’s nighttime,” he grimaces as he sees the way she huffs, satisfied with his proclamation as if it’s deserved when it’s most certainly not, “and because Denji can’t drive. So we have to grab him, because I can drive.”

“You make a good point, Houseowner,” she makes finger guns in his general direction.  “I can also drive, too! You are not special, not in the way that I am.”

He is going to snap her finger off and toss it to Nyako like a baby carrot.

He refrains himself from snapping her finger off and tossing it to Nyako like a baby carrot.

“TO DENJI!” Power hollers, marching towards the exit.

She doesn’t even bother putting back on her shoes, dashing out with bare feet.

Aki sighs, and pulls on his pair of house sandals. He guesses they’ll be designated for outside use, now.

To Denji, he thinks with less enthusiasm.

Aki looks at the letters scattered around them. They’re not addressed to him, yet, every other sentence is filled with thoughts about him.

I want Aki to leave. How do I get him to leave? He gets angry when I bring up the subject. Should I be more subtle? He will die against the Gun Devil. How do I stop him?

How useless.

He feels monstrous as he intrinsically knows how he’ll defile her emotions. Now knowing the true depth of Himeno’s light-hearted theories and dreamlike wonders of a peaceful future for them, he weaponizes them to push himself further down this route of going after the Gun Devil.

He takes all Himeno’s anxieties, concerns, and worries vomited into a twisted emotion that might as well be a form of love that only those in this line of work can truly understand, and tosses them into the bonfire of hatred settled in his marrow. Every fiber of his being has absorbed half a decade’s worth of resentment.

It wasn’t cigarette smoke that’s slowly killing him; it’s the smoke of a wildfire that never quite left, feeding off embers from charred family members and the cracked wooden frame of his family home.

Everything that stands in testament of Aki Hayakawa today is built from hatred, and he takes Himeno’s testimonies of love and scatters them like tinder.

He cries.  He cries for her death, for the unfairness of her life, for how the unfairness that will soon come as he desecrates her dying wishes.

“Do you miss Himeno? That night when I found you at her place, you were laughing with her," Aki mutters. Denji and Himeno were drunk (and he doesn’t even want to know why Denji was drunk), mumbling out bouts of laughter and kicking each other off Himeno’s bed.

He dragged Denji out her room, numb and almost angry with the way Denji staggered after him, scrawny and young. Power nearly knocked Denji over with a single dismantling hug.

Aki’s jaw locked upon seeing the defenselessness of the boy.

Then he saw Himeno, sitting upright drowsy and alone on her bedsheets, staring at their retreating figures with an odd expression.

He ended up camping out on the living room couch instead of leaving the vast, empty and impersonable skyrise of her house.

Denji and Power (after she raided the fridge) slept on a single sofa, not before fighting over blankets.

Denji liked Himeno. At least Aki thinks so.

“Hm?” Denji looks at him. “Her? Yeah. I mean.” He scratches his nape, tilting his head. “No? Not really? Even though she was the first person who wanted to be my friend. I don't miss her. But I liked her just fine."

Aki looks at him, and looks away.

He didn’t know what he expected. Didn’t know what he wanted to expect out of Denji.

“WHO? Eyepatch girl?” Power gasps. “What about her?”

“She’s dead, stupid,” Denji scoffs.

Power flips her hair over her shoulder. “Oh.” She says, like she forgotten about this piece of information.

Aki cried over Himeno. Sobbed, really.

Because Himeno was his partner, yeah, but it’s different. It’ll always be different. She was human. Sane. Normal. She’s a component to his being today that cannot be replaced; she’s hardwired into his concept of normalcy and bits of fun that exists outside of everything he lived for.

She didn’t want to die, either.

She didn’t want Aki to die. Not even for revenge, as something that’s the most important thing to him.

Power doesn’t even remember her.

“Oh.” Aki mumbles.

“She was cool, though. And pretty.” Denji says sincerely, like those are legitimately good words of comfort.

Aki kind of wants to punch him.

Not on Himeno’s behalf. Rather, it’s somewhat of an unfair anger he holds for Denji. He wants to punch him, for feeling so little; for failing the standards of empathy and emotional attachment that Aki has no right to impose onto anyone else, much less onto someone as messed up as Denji.

Whatever. So who cares if Denji is like that? It’s fine.

He thinks about his contract with the Future Devil.

At least this guarantees that once he inevitably dies in the worst way possible, he won’t be missed.

Himeno was the last person who would’ve missed him on this planet. He doesn’t have anymore years on him to even find someone who’d think of him once he passes.

Aki didn't realize part of his underpaid janitorial duties would be to stop Power from eating glue.

He does not stop Power from eating glue. 

He hopes her organs fail and she passes away.

That does not happen. Instead, his toilet is absolutely obliterated, and Power still has not adapted to the habit of flushing.

Next time, he will stop her from eating the glue.

Angel does not leave Aki unsettled, despite his bold proclamation of disdain for humans.

His apathy that lacks disgust yet speaks cruel and unusual punishment towards people like it’s a birthright is what is expected out of Devils.

Aki thinks he needs to be around Angel more.

This is what Devils should be like, he thinks.

Power and Denji fit in his original cohort of what Devils are, but they’ve expanded it too much; made it too flexible, too nuanced as concepts rather than fixed descriptions with fixed attributes.

It’s getting in the way of his sleep and work efficiency.  

Kobeni is an odd one, too.

Easy Revenge.

He didn’t even have time to dwell on the cigarette.

Instead, he has to quickly intervene with- “don’t kill her.”

Kobeni’s sweating, jittery, and her grimace is twitchy as ever. Her knife bites into the neck of the girl contracted with the Snake Devil.

“Why’d you stay in the Bureau?” He asks Kobeni, more out of intrigue than anything.

“….I was close to raising a bonus.” She meekly replies. In his head, a soundtrack plays. Astounding. Dumbfounding. A form of comedy, for sure.

Just like Denji. Gives straightforward and reasonable answers, yet, they’re completely bonkers to the point of incomprehension.

He wonders if he’s trying to see Denji in everything around him to prove the humanity in Denji’s character, or, if he’s not even being subjective. That instead, Denji was originally very, very human. He’s known Denji to be human.

Can’t deny it, and he’s not sure if it’s because of an internal bias or not.

But he still doesn’t know if Denji is just a sociopathic human. He has humanity, but Denji would not cry over anyone or anything. It’s unsettling, because any insight he has into Denji’s thought process before his merge with Pochita suggests that he was always like this. Was his general apathy learnt through his childhood? Or is it just who he is as a person?

Aki doesn’t like that he’s trying to convince himself that Denji is very capable of empathy to the degree that most people are (because he’s not devoid of it as Aki originally assumed- he is capable, it’s just to what extent that worries him. The fact that he's worried about Denji is also worrying in itself. Everything seems to worry Aki these days). He likes it even less how he’s subconsciously accepting Denji’s general indifference to morality. He catches himself growing fond of Denji regardless of his general moral standards that range from casual indifference of a sociopath to psychopathic responses whose techniques would not even be found in the CIA’s war crime torture methods.

Such as this.

Denji’s obsession with balls, and his general willingness to exploit it for even the smallest matters, might as well be a felony in itself.

“I’mma make him sing,” Denji jerks a thumb at one of Himeno’s killers. “He shot Himeno,” and without blinking, he says what’s probably the worst sentence that is composed of an implication that could never be found in the Holy Bible: “so I’ll make sure he’ll never be able to shoot anything but blanks again.”

He points like a child pointing at a peculiarly interesting yet random rock they found in a playground.

He points at the humanized (human? Is he-) variant of the Katana Devil.

Who’s naked.

And tied against a pole.

In the middle of nowhere.

Aki stares.

Denji stares back.

“So you gonna join or-“

Aki interrupts him with a long-suffering sigh of hearing the general sadism of any kid who likes to throw rocks at passing ducks. He then strains: “Denji. We’re not supposed to sadistically torture him for our own entertainment. We should hand him over to the Bureau.” Where he would simply go to jail. And not at all pay the grievances of killing Himeno.

Of killing probably the only person that Aki could ever hold a sense of intimate understanding of grief and loss with, the way she did with all her comrades.

Aki crouches down. “Himeno wouldn’t be happy for us doing something like this.” He mutters, head buried against his knees. He then thinks about the cigarette in his pocket.

Easy revenge.

And then he thinks more clearly-

No, Himeno would totally kick someone in the balls just for fun.

“…that so.” Denji mutters, clearly disappointed.

“Hey.” Aki stands up. “…what do I get if I win.” He asks. Easy revenge. It’s what partners of old buddies did to Himeno. It’s what he did to partners of old buddies of Himenos by spitting on their jackets.

All easy revenges, and they all made her laugh.

Denji grins, something feral and childlike and definitely evil in that sense. “Duh!” He sticks out his tongue in that undignified manner again. “Whatever’s lefta his balls!”

That’s so gross.

A horrible reward.

An unworthy investment.

Aki looks at him, then at the man who looks so reassured that Aki wouldn’t break the law.

And Aki takes the first nut shot.

Denji can have nightmares.

Which is astounding, because honestly, Aki was under the impression that Denji doesn’t dream.

In a literal sense. Not even in a weird, philosophical sense.

After all, he napped so hard that entire time they were trapped by the Eternity Devil, that he just kinda. He kinda presumed Denji just didn’t. Just didn’t have any distractions disrupting his sleep, whether that be dream or nightmare.

So it’s surprising that Denji had a dream that startled him so loud that it knocked Aki’s legs upwards, followed by a loud rattle.

Hissing, Aki sits jackknifes upright, heart pounding and a headache throbbing-

“Wh-”

He blinks.

It’s bright.

Very bright.

He’s in his living room-

He’s on his living room floor.

The artificial lighting of the lamp he forgot to turn off illuminates the sheer volume of trash mounded on his coffee table, ranging from empty beer cans to open squid packets and greasy chip bags torn into rumpled sheets. There are still dumplings and scallion pancakes and other finger foods sitting in Styrofoam cartons that they ordered the night before in celebration of capturing the Katana Devil.

“Wh- Denji?” He hisses.

Denji looks down at him.

His eyes are pinpricks in a sea of white, rattling hard to a vibration that shakes the boy’s entire figure.

“Damn,” Aki hisses, head stuffy. He blinks away the crust gluing together his lashes. He peers at the trash. “It’s a mess-”

“If a dog- no, your dog tells you to not open a door, what do you do?” Denji’s voice has its typical drawl, but his words are enunciated in a way that suggests an alarming alertness.

Aki blinks blearily.

Maybe he should just go back to sleep.

“I would not open the door.” He says dumbly. He goes with the safest answer, which is to agree with whatever Denji would like, and since Denji likes his dog, by transitive property, Aki should agree with the dog. Whatever that means.

“Really?”

“…what is this about?” Because last he checked, the dog was dead. Or at least. Kinda dead. He biologically lives in Denji’s body, but by all technicalities he is very much not a dog anymore.

“I had a dream my dog told me to not open a door.” Denji repeats calmly, like what he just said was sane when it absolutely was not.

After a moment of silence that Denji clearly does not feel shame in, Aki very patiently says, “I am letting you off because this is a dream. You wake me up like that again, and I will not let you off.” He glances at the digital timer of his VCR player.

Six in the morning.

Ugh.

And it’s the weekend, too.

He sighs.

Well. The room still smells like oily takoyaki and fishcakes. He might as well start tossing the litter and placing the finished alcohol into the sink.

Grunting as he stabilizes himself on sore limbs, he heads towards the kitchen to flap open a new trashbag.

He hears soft padding behind him.

It must be Denji. Power has no ability to not stomp and announce her presence. “Grab the empty bottles and put them in the sink,” he gruffly commands, voice hoarse from a night of drinking and an abrupt interruption of sleep.

And to his surprise, Denji actually starts doing just that.

Or maybe not to his surprise.

Unlike Power, Denji, for all his mannerless grace and general disdain towards all authority figures, is pretty obedient when it boils down to it. He’s not a pushover, and he doesn’t care about other peoples’ opinions and will actively insult them if he sees fit.

But he’s inherently go-with-the-flow and he’s not opinionated himself. His general lack of care for socialization or society is a double-edged sword: he doesn’t care about other peoples’ opinions, but he also doesn’t care about proving himself to even an expected and normal extent.

The number of times that Aki has seen Denji outright proclaim his capabilities as a dude who has chainsaws ripping through him, only to be outright denied as a liar or as delusional is enough times for Aki to consider this a long-running joke. Denji really can’t advertise himself as an enigmatic powerhouse without getting slapped with expressed patronization.

And each time, Denji didn’t really care. He doesn’t really give a rat's ass about being underestimated, and doesn’t give a flying fuck about salvaging his image.

It’s almost entertainingly insane. Like a comedic bit. Even Aki, who isn’t humble but certainly isn’t the flashy type, wouldn’t let slide even half of what Denji ignores.

“But what if. There’s something important behind the door?” Denji asks through the sunrise silence as Aki starts crumpling up all the snack bags and tossing them into the lime-scented trashbag he brought over.

“Well. Was there?”

“I dunno.” A pause. “I think so. I always dream it, so it has to be important, right?” He says this like a fact.

So Denji can have symbolic dreams; or at least dreams with enough substance to resurface in his subconscious. Odd.

"I don't usually have that." Denji continues, when nobody asked. "Usually I have random dreams. Like the other day I dreamt Power put birthday candles on my eyelids while I was sleeping and set them on fire, and when I woke up and opened my eyes I tore my eyelids off because the wax hardened over them."

"What the fuck. Are you sure that didn't happen in real life?"

"No. Because I asked her and she asked me what a birthday candle was."

A pause.

"So that means the one with the door. That has to be like. It's gotta mean something, unlike Power with the birthday candle, right?"

“Sure. Maybe. What’s the door of?” Aki starts dumping all the leftover street food into one Styrofoam carton, and crunching the empty ones into the waste bag.

“It looks like the door to my old house.” Oh. His house that Aki occasionally questions the existence of and guesses its furnishings like a very broke and barren Jeopardy board. “It can’t be that bad, though. I remember tons of bad things behind that door as a kid, and none of them scared me.”

Aki almost makes the mistake of asking what those bad things entailed. He’s sure Denji wouldn’t mind- wouldn’t care sharing with his unbothered and insouciant demeanor of his.

Aki would care though.

Might care too much, to overcompensate for Denji’s absence of it. Aki’s not in any place to carry the emotional burden of anybody else, though. He’s already taken on Himeno’s baggage alongside the rest of his family’s.

Easy Revenge. He halts his cleaning for a second, before grabbing the trashbag and remaining containers of food over to the kitchen.

Himeno wouldn’t want a difficult revenge for him. He knows that. He knows. Aki is too selfish to not validate his existence with a difficult, unachievable, sacrificial revenge, though. He is too greedy to be satisfied with something easy; he can’t settle for less.

“Well. I mean. If your dog is telling you not to open the door, then don’t.” He advises. “Pochita seems to always know what’s best for you,” he says, eyes wandering to Denji’s tanktop where a ripcord should be innocuously tucked under. Denji nods in agreement as he places a bundle of beer cans into the sink, as well as a sake bottle.

“Why don’t we toss these? Are we reusing them like cups? I thought you wouldn’t do that, though."

“No. You have to wash them out before recycling them.” He elaborates.  At this, the boy turns on the tap to begin rinsing them. “If you don’t, they’ll attract bugs,” he says as he knots the ears of the trashbag he was lugging about, and leaving it next to the kitchen trashcan. He’ll toss them out later.

“Oh.”

Aki places the leftovers in the fridge. As he walks back to the living room with a wetwipe, ignoring Power’s legs that are sticking out from underneath the table, he begins to scrub the tabletop.

Power’s face is smothered by an entire couch’s mattress, but he hears snoring, so it’s fine. Actually. For a very impulsive moment, he considers stepping on the mattress. 

He doesn't though, because that would surely wake up Power, and therefore effectively ruin the rest of Aki's day. 

The table, fluorescent with spills and soysauce and puddles of grease, collect and reflect the sunrise in highlights of orange and pink.

He glances at the balcony sliding door, and at the way the horizon shimmers with heat and glitter.

It’s peaceful.

“Are you going back to your room after this?” A young voice asks from behind him.

“Hm? Yeah. I’m tired. I’ll sleep a couple more hours.”

Denji nods quietly, trotting up to him, watching Aki mechanically buff down the table.

“…what?” Aki sighs, seeing the clear distortion of his expression.

Denji bristles, and Aki regrets sighing. Great. Now he’s riled up Denji. “Nothing.” Denji snaps defensively.

“Is it the dream?” No shit it’s about the dream. He saw his dead dog. Aki's dumb. 

Really. If Denji ever spoke about anything with any emotional connection, it was the dog.

“I can’t sleep well after having it. Before Pochita became apart of me, sometimes when I woke up after it my heart’ll start acting up and I’ll cough blood,” he says this like it’s a mild annoyance, while Aki listens to another piece of unwarranted Denji lore that leaves him feeling like god or some other unfair deity took a plastic hammer and smacked Aki in the head with enough devastating force to shatter the Earth into a ton of pieces with enough leftover energy to recreate the Big Bang theory with the same fragmented smithereens of the planet.

“Denji. What?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t- don’t ‘yeah’ me.” Aki says, tone tightened. But Aki is not the type for comfort, and honestly, Denji is somewhat too far gone down…whatever the road his life is destined for to really…care about comfort in some twisted way. So Aki doesn’t really know how to convey his feelings.

They’re probably feelings of concern.

He doesn’t really know when it comes to Denji, some of the times.

“Denji. Are you tired?” He tries another route, instead. Denji doesn’t seem to understand comfort. But he understands rules. Commands. Solutions.

Denji, that stupid motherfucker, scratches his dry hair in a way that shows he’s thoroughly thinking about his response, before saying rather cheerily: “I don’t think so? I’m awake now.”

“…Denji. Get on the couch.”

“No.”

Aki stares at him.

Denji looks at him.

Aki squints harder.

Denji gets on the couch.

Aki goes into his bedroom, and grabs one of his lighter blankets, and walks out.

Denji is watching him, expression carefully blank. Almost calculative. Except Denji looking confused is also just a normal face of his, so there’s that.

Aki sits on the couch with a space between them, and tosses the blanket over their legs.

“If you have a nightmare, you’ll probably make noises or kick me.” Dogs do it, so why wouldn’t Denji? “I’ll beat you up when that happens so that you don’t wake up with a heartburn.”

“Wha- wait, what?! Why can’t I just sleep on my own, then-?!”

“Go to sleep, Denji.”

“No.”

Aki looks at him.

Denji sweats.

Denji then averts his eyes.

He then closes them.

Satisfied by the lack of rebellion this early in the morning, Aki closes his eyes, too.

“She has four horns!” Denji gasps. His feet are tangled with Aki’s in the most annoyingly intrusive way possible, as the boy had no longer stayed at his end of the designated sofa. Instead, he’s smushed close to Aki’s side in a hauntingly clingy fashion.

Aki’s eye twitches.

He then sees what the boy is referring to in terms of horns.

Now both eyes are twitching. Except because they started twitching at different intervals, it feels like his vision in a constant state of flickering like a malfunctioning camera shutter, and it’s giving him a progressive headache as it stimulates an artificial stroke.

“…is this another dream?” Denji mutters, staring at the four horns protruding from Power’s head.

And he gets immediately sucker-punched for that by one of Power’s flailing arms, and goes vertical into Aki’s ceiling light so hard that glass fragments rain down.

Aki stares at the flickering bulb that is now short-circuiting just like Aki’s eyes, then at Denji’s limp body, and at Power who’s mesmerized by her fist.

Aki, very slowly, lowers his face into his hands.

He screams.

Denji has been weird this past week.

Maybe it’s because Power has been lugged off get a blood drainage.

But he’s been floaty and ditzy…ier than normal.

Aki squints.

Well. He has more important things to worry about instead of Denji’s weirdly positive turn in nonchalance.

Like his Difficult Revenge.

Like his future, and exactly how limited his time is to complete the only thing he has going for not only him, but for his family and Himeno (because nobody will remember them. Nobody will cry for them. Nobody even knows about them past those who were witnesses to their short terms on Earth. If he kills the Gun Devil, everyone will remember them. Remember them as the driving force for his revenge: its just death will be their legacy).

Like his future, and what death he’ll face (if it’s the worst death possible, he worries. Because as much as death does not scare him once he’s resigned himself to its faith, failure does. The worst death as far as he is concerned, is a death where he fails; where his entire life, efforts, and goals are invalidated by a sudden and abrupt end).

Like Nyako who keeps trying to helicopter herself off his fifth-floor balcony as if she truly believes in the myth that felines always land on their feet, when he’s definitely seen Nyako tumble and rebound off the highest shelf of his spice cabinet before staggering onto her crooked paws.

Like Angel, who’s draining his wallet as a third mouth to feed (and Aki’s getting a slight suspicion that he’s starting to become the designated and unspoken babysitter of a shitton of freeloaders).

Like Beam, who’s Denji’s temporary buddy and swims around his apartment floor while singing jaunty tunes and tripping Aki anytime the Devil starts whirring around like a sentient Roomba.

(and as he finds himself filling a serving of curry within a dog bowl that Makima lent him for Beam, he’s realizing that no, yeah, he’s definitely being exploited as an underpaid nanny for these deranged and needlessly loud creatures. At the very least Angel doesn’t scream, but that means very little given how he’s only 1 out of the 4 charges who Aki was essentially tricked into being their moral custodians to do damage control. Besides. Any positive traits Angel provides were immediately balanced out by how draining his negativity is.)

Aki groans.

Right now, in his list of worries, Denji’s present jubilance doesn’t even make it past even his worries about the food bill he has for his sudden harem of squatters.

“My tongue got bitten off.”

Aki stares at at Denji.

Denji continues staring at the manga he’s lazily flicking through, skimming the pictures of the teenage-love plotline. It’s one of Himeno’s.

A lot of stuff from Himeno was legally left to Aki.

Including a ton of casual, feminine clothes clearly left for him as a joke. Joke. Jokes on Himeno- he just passed them to Power. Not like it matters, since Power seems to think she’s above mortal conventions, as well as public decency and clothes.

Random shoujo manga were crammed at the bottom of another box left for him.

“Are you talking to me?” Aki blurts. And rewinds the entire catastrophe that took down at least three towers, an entire third of this district’s population, and a handful of Aki’s old comrades (and as a Devil Hunter, he thinks his coworkers are always going to be more intimate than friends. He’s also just unsure if this belief comes from his lack of close friends, in the first place). “Your tongue got bitten off???” He echoes when he realizes that Denji doesn’t seem particularly sure what he’s referring to, probably because he has a memory of a Goldfish cracker soaked in apple sauce.

“Yeah. By Reze.”

And Denji barely refers to people within his own Division by their first names. Aki doesn’t even know if Denji knows their last names. Actually he highly doubts Denji knows Aki's last name. 

Denji remembers the name of this girl who tried to kill him.

“Seriously?” Aki says. He stares, unimpressed.

“Mm. She kissed me. You know. My first kiss was in puke.” Aki pauses his slicing of the apple. For some reason, the idea that Denji just had his first kiss is mildly astounding to him. It feels so astonishingly of-age, despite his entire life being a morbid macabre of things that are too inappropriate for children to involve themselves in.

Then again, his first kiss was allegedly a mouth chute for a handful of puke, so maybe it really isn’t age appropriate. Or just appropriate at all. Personally, if that ever happened to Aki, he doesn’t think he’d ever recover, but Denji looks like the type to peel cigarette butts off wet cement and eat it for sustenance, so he’s probably over it.

“My second kiss, the chick bit off my tongue and spat it out in front of me.”

Aki’s hand falters again. It then regains traction as he carves another pair of ears into the apple slice. 

“That’s rough,” Aki finally replies because honestly. What do you even say to that. Like. Even Aki had a normal first kiss, and his life involved an entire family massacre that became nothing more than an insignificant input of data in the government files of casualties; years of jumping through a foster system as he begged the Bureau to take him, a minor, in for work; and a number of dead coworkers who he can rattle off the top of his head without hesitation like a patternistic grocery list.

He's also got a dead buddy whose items are strewn around his house like a disorganized warehouse.

And currently, his life also involves babysitting two cartoon characters who lack the critical thinking skills or emotional denomination to avoid creating a crime scene with more than four mortal casualties within their given proximity anytime something irritates them to an insanely mild degree.

He hums thoughtfully, eating one of his apple slices.

Well.

At least his first kiss that involved a random stranger at a bar the first time he became of age, was pretty chill.

“You should probably stop kissing girls.” Aki finally advises. This would also significantly improve the life of any girl Denji encounters, so really, he's doing some political state-work here. 

“Should I kiss boys instead?” Denji retorts mockingly.

“No.” Aki says flatly. Girls are more likely to brush their teeth and have dental hygiene. Personally, Aki is of the opinion that Denji should not mutate his bacteria gut even more.

“Yeah. That’d be gay, duhhhh.”

Aki pauses his carving, glancing upwards, before deciding to not get into that. “That is what happens when a boy kisses a boy,” he settles for a neutral statement, instead.

Denji’s sticking his tongue out, currently trying to rip the stem off of the apple core that Aki has discarded on the plate, only to give up and pop the whole thing in his mouth.

“That’s gross!” Denji cackles like some hormonal, insensitive middle-school boy.

Aki hesitates. “The apple core or the gay thing?”

“Obviously not the apple core. It’s not even rotten. Tastes like candy.” Denji scoffs, snarfing down another apple core.

“Why?” Aki asks. He knows why. Denji was raised by yakuza. No wonder he has some questionable perceptions of sexuality and masculinity.

“’Cuz it’s sweet.”

“No- not the apple, forget the apple,” Aki snaps impatiently. “I meant the gay thing.”

“’Cuz only perverts do that.”

Wow. What an opening line. “First of all, you’re a pervert, yet you don’t kiss boys.”

“I’m not a pervert!”

“You totally are.”

Denji sticks out his tongue. “No. Old men who like young boys are.”

Aki, for the third time, nearly carves a jagged scar into his recessive hand. Wow. He can’t believe he, a professional Devil Hunter, is literally losing focus while skinning an apple to nearly stab himself. Maybe he really is losing it.

“Yeah. That’s because old people shouldn’t be going after kids.” Aki clarifies after a moment of pause. “Wait, what? How does that have anything to do with guys liking guys?”

Denji however, has lost interest in this conversation, and reprioritized it in the manga he’s flipping through. It’s annoying, because he’s not even really reading it, with the way his eyes flicker all over the page with no order.

“Denji.”

“What?” Denji murmurs snappishly, captivated by a scene where the two love interests kiss underneath cherry blossom trees.

“I. You know perverts don’t have to be gay, and gay people don’t have to be perverts, right?”

“Never met a gay person who wasn’t a pervert.” Denji mumbles, before frowning. “Though, not all the perverts I met were gay.” He says thoughtfully, like this is a new revelation.

New revelation or not, Denji clearly does not care that much, as he slumps further down the couch, holding the manga over his head.

“Yeah. Lots of people are gay and are normal.” Aki begins, stunned by Denji’s weird thought process. “Liking the same gender isn’t not normal. Remember Quanxi?”

“She was totally not normal though? She cut off my head!”

“Makima would cut off your head.” A pause. “A lot of people tried to cut off your head, Denji. That’s no longer a viable standard to determine normalcy on.” Aki chomps into one of the slices of apples he’s cut. “I would cut off your head.” He says, though he admittedly thinks that a lot less the longer he lives with Denji.

"Mm. That's how I died the first time."

"You got decapitated?" That's kind of metal.

"Yeah. The yakuza chopped me up like baloney and tossed me in a garbage can. Like a blender!" And Denji just learned what a blender is, and is unusually obsessed with the idea of it. He has to bring it up in every conversation. "'Cuz that's where Pochita was too, and we became a chainsaw smoothie together." 

Aki slowly sets down his knife and apple onto the plate balanced on his knees, and places his palms over his eyes. "Ohhhhhhmy god." Aki mutters. Then, as if nothing happened (and nothing did happen, because he is not dealing with this today), he picks up the apple and knife and returns to slicing them. "Can't believe I'm learning you got dismembered and trashed from a conversation talking about being gay," he mutters.

"I'm just saying. Gay people are weird. Like Quanxi."

“No- I- Quanxi is weird because she can morph into a horribly deformed hybrid of multiple manmade weapons melted into a mobile existence and still somehow function and interact with the world around her for a thing that has no eyes or five senses. She's also weird because she gets along with Kishibe, and...holding normal conversations with Kishibe...that just...not right. That's just not normal." He elaborates, mildly impatient. "Her liking girls just happens to be another part of her and has no part in all that." Damn. Quanxi was a horrible example. Aki immediately conjures another one. "I mean. I think Yoshida is fine with any gender, too.” Maybe. Actually. Yoshida feels fine with any gender the same way that a researcher is relatively indifferent to the qualities of a test subject, as long as they procure necessary results. It might not be attraction Yoshida feels, and rather, observatory intrigue.

Nevermind. Scrap Yoshida. Horrible representation of not just a sexuality, but of just a human being. 

Denji however, probably doesn’t even remember who Yoshida is, so he guesses that's fine. “Himeno liked both men and women.” Aki finally settles with. He thinks so. He’s not entirely sure, but she has implied she’s been with women before.

That, and at this moment, he’s trying to provide healthy examples of non-hetero people to Denji, and therefore he’ll full-heartedly toss someone like Himeno under the bus for something as relatively nonconsequential as this. Himeno would be glad to hear he’s using her name for the greater good.

“Well. I guess." Denji shrugs. He's also now munching on the apples that Aki is peeling, so now he's just being a nuisance. God. Why does Aki ever engage in conversation with him. "Ugh. Whatever. I’m just sayin’ that I’m straight. Being gay’s got nothing to do with me. All the dudes I met that were gay though, were all old. But maybe there’s a ton of them that aren’t old and normal. Dunno, don’t care.”

Something he’s picked up about Denji, who proves himself to be human as it possibly gets by being a creature of habit, is that if Denji is saying something nonsensical, it means he’s stating it like a general, normalized fact.

Meaning this isn’t something that’s out of the ordinary to him.

“Denji. When you said old men and young boys. What did you mean by that?”

“Hm? Like ya know. Sometimes ya gotta whore yourself out, you know. For money. Not like I ever did it, cuz they’re always men. Never really met a women who wanted anything. If it was a woman, I’d probably do it.” Denji’s voice dies out as he flips to another page.

Aki’s blood flushes cold.

It’s hilarious.

Fucking hilarious.

Because his entire head is doing that thing again, that thing where his mind is melting out his ears and his eyes are fried eggs with dribbling yolk and the protein of his brain is denaturing into irreversible strands of unintelligent thought as-

Aki was always driven by revenge, but the root of that is always wrath. The ‘a’ in ‘Aki’ didn't stand for anger- Aki is not partial to anger. It's hilarious, given how he has a nasty temper. He hated bullshit, hated nonsense. He was always the first to lose his cool; even against Taiyo, when he was a kid.

He’s never really grown out of it.

“Denji.” And something must show in his voice. Aki wouldn’t know. He can’t even hear anything past the roar of blood in his ears. But Denji is staring at him, mouth bolted into a thin line, eyes wide and reflective and Aki can’t see himself in them because his vision is jittery and unfocused like someone gave him four consecutive whacks to the temple with a random rock they found outside.

Aki is a little violent. He knows that. Maybe slightly unhinged. He knows that.

When Sato in fourth grade bullied him, Aki pushed him into a lake near the school, knowing full well the kid couldn’t swim.

Aki, after years of working as a Devil Hunter, a profession that legally allows him to carry around a very sharp stick and beat things with it, has only enabled his innately murderous tendencies.

But Aki, for a man who’s sought after revenge for his entire life, never truly felt instantaneous and immediate anger out of nowhere. It’s usually something wined after an accumulation of years, a type of feeling brewed and simmered into its own spoiled mixture of swampy decay. But anger was never something natural; it was always a side-product of something else. Whether it be hopelessness or sadness, rage was never his firsthand response. When his family died, first came shock, fear, and a broiling hopelessness that grabbed him by the lungs and overwhelmed him with a paranoid shutdown of all his emotional and motor functions. The intense, unbearable sadness eventually mellowed out into a depressive undertone that now overwrites the way he sees and do things. And then came the anger it coexisted with.

Himeno’s death was a shock. A shock followed by a listless melancholy. He coped with violence, but Aki is a man not built for fury, even if he has a short fuse. Sadness was always the common denominator of all his negative emotions.

This is the first time he skipped everything, straight towards anger. Especially for Denji, and not because of him.

“Denji. This might not mean much to you. And you might not take it seriously. But honestly,” Aki speaks the way he always does. Dry, a little bit annoyed, and casual. He thinks he sees enough red that one stab to his eyeball and he can squirt out an entire blood packet for Power as an on-the-road juice box. “But I would kill whoever told you that, regardless of how young you were when you said that.”

“Young? Nah. It wasn’t too bad. He brought it up a couple times. The last time he said it, it was the day he turn’d into a zombie.”

"...he turned into a zombie?"

"Yeah. The Devil he contracted with was this disgusting mound of the undead."

Oh. That was this year. This year. Couple months ago. Quite literally when Makima picked Denji up like the stray he is. 

Someone told this to this Denji. This Denji that Aki himself has had the (dis)honor of knowing; the one that is Aki’s Denji. The one living in his house like a criminal on parole. The one that Aki is talking to and can imagine responding and hearing those vulgar phrases.

Denji needs to stop talking.

Aki doesn’t think his heart can take anymore of this. He slams his fruit knife into the flesh of one of the whole apples sitting in the fruit basket.

He looks at it. He then punctures it a second time.

The yakuza head is dead.

Denji said so himself.

They only reaffirmed it the second time around.

He thinks about the Katana Devil. Who shown that picture of his grandfather who he claimed to be the head. The grandpa with a fedora hat of some sort.

The man said this dude wasn’t a good person, but had his own morals: rarely killed women and watched over his own men and family.

What about Denji?

Didn’t touch women, but what about children? Watched over his own men, but what about Denji who was indebted to him as a birthright inherited from his fucking deadbeat father who-

Calm down. Aki breathes.

Denji’s father died with debt. Doesn’t make him a bad person. Probably.

Aki doesn’t know. And honestly, he doesn’t really care if Denji’s dad was a good person, or even a good dad. All he knows is that Denji got saddled with this stupid-ass debt, and it ruined him for life. It killed him, at the end of the day.

And Denji's dad left it to him. 

“…yo, Aki, what’s with your expression-”

“When we kicked that Katana Devil in the balls, I should’ve gutted him. He would’ve healed," Aki blurted, feeling repulsed by his lack of self-control, by the sudden flurry of overwhelming outrage that crackles like electricity down the grooves of his mind, sparking his entire cranium on fire like an overheated lightbulb. Sure, it wasn’t that Katana bitch's fault that his deranged fucking mob boss of a grandfather discarded Denji as lower than trash. But if Denji had the burden of his father’s crimes, then he can take a couple stabs for his grandfather.

“…yeah, I mean. He did kill your buddy. Lost a hot lady. If you wanted to, you should’ve.”

“No.” I would’ve done it for you. Denji never does anything for himself. It’s in his nature to not give a flying fuck.

Aki can’t do that, though.

“Denji. You know prostitution is super fucked up because it’s usually never done out of free-will, and for you, it was because you were a kid, you know.”

“…what’s prostitution?”

“I- that term you used. ‘Whoring’ yourself out,” and even that vocabulary leaves a wretched twist in Aki’s gut like he swallowed glass. There’s just so many things inherently wrong with it in social context, and in Denji’s context.

“Oh. I mean.” Denji shrugs. “Gotta make money, ya know,” he pinches his fingers together, giving Aki a sleazy grin. “Like I said. It’s not like I actually did it- I’m not gay, like I said-”

“Denji, that’s not the point. It doesn’t matter that they were dudes, it doesn’t really matter if you’re gay or not, it matters that you were a kid. You still are a kid. And they were adults they should’ve-” What? Protected him? Helped him? Not asked for services?

He could list all those things, and he can already imagine Denji’s indifferent expression, a shrug, or a thumbs-up (that stupid thumbs-up) as he remarks: well, still gotta make money somehow, right?

Denji understands that activities are legal, or illegal.

Aki isn’t entirely sure if Denji realizes there’s a moral scale that differentiates them, as well.

Aki hates learning new things about Denji. 

“Denji. If an adult, no matter their gender, starts asking you for sexual favors, you have to turn them down and tell…” a responsible adult? Does Denji even know what a responsible adult entails? Every single adult he’s encountered as a child failed him, and now, as a Devil, there won’t be anybody who would believe he deserves human rights. A responsible adult is a concept learned and understood through experiences. Denji's most responsible adult in his life is probably Aki, and Aki quite literally has a bucket list with personal ways he wants to kill Denji on it because Denji is technically immortal, and theoretically the world's sturdiest punching bag. “Tell...tell someone like me. I guess." 

“Nah. If the lady is hot, I'm not turning her down, ya know. Like. Money and a hot chick? C'mon.”

“Denji.”

“Whaaaaat?” Denji moans, no longer sounding carefree, and instead, irritated. “What’s it gotta do with you, anyways?”

Nothing. Really. Just moral obligation as an adult, he guesses. But he can’t force Denji to listen to him. “Denji.” He buries his face in his hands. “Please.”

“…I never hear you say please.”

“I’ll beg you, really, if it means you’ll do this one thing for me.” And he doesn’t even know if Denji will be in a state of maturity where he can be trusted to make these decisions of self-autonomy even once he reaches legal age, but that’s a concern for another time. Or not. Aki wouldn’t have to worry. It’s not like he’ll last that long to see it. But Denji can certainly make decisions on his own, especially when it concerns his body: his anatomy splices into segments with extended chainsaws, after all. He grew up dicing Devils for illegal cash since he was a child from what Aki’s gathered. He sells himself out for exploitative labor in his quotidian childhood. 

But Denji, for all his fighting and physical experiences, has zero experience in healthy relationships, sexual or not.

“Well. I kinda hate that you said ‘please.’ I don’t really care that you said please, and it pisses me off that you think it means anything to me.” Denji drawls. 

“I’m not saying ‘please’ for that reason, I’m saying ‘please’ out of desperation, really,” Aki mumbles.

When Denji doesn’t bite back with a scathing remark that’d leave Aki waking up in sweat like a real parent who realizes they have zero control over their teenager who’d definitely sneak out the window at night, he hesitantly raises his head. Denji is looking at him weirdly.

Or maybe that’s just Denji’s face, being weird.

“I mean. I’m kinda sick and tired of girls and stuff.” Denji finally says. “All their kisses suck. And they all try to kill me. Even Makima.” Wow. What a banger haiku. Denji really should be the star of a romantic comedy. He’d be an emotional support clown for the audience, really. “I guess you’re right. If I had sex with any of them, they’d probably cut off my dick. And if it grows back, they might harvest it to sell.”

And honestly, Aki’s thrown-off by whatever the fuck he just said, but as long as Denji can convince himself to avoid sexual relationships, Aki will take it.

“Yeah. I would’ve done it in the past, too, if I could.” Denji gives a sorrowful sigh. “I already sold my left testicle and eye and some organs for a lot- regenerating would’ve sure been helpful back then. Would’ve paid my debt off smooth.”

This time, the fruit knife goes straight into Aki’s wrist.

“So THAT’S what you meant by Pochita fixing your testicle???”

“Wha- did you think I meant he became one of my balls or something?”

The Violence Fiend saved Aki’s ass. More than once, really. Voluntarily. Out of some personal will. All the other Devils he’s worked with were a Devil in personality; something about them was inhuman, a hardwiring in their beliefs that were fundamentally off-putting and uncompromisable as a member of mankind. Uncanny Valley effect: where something seemed human, acted human, looked like a human, but to everyone else who was human, instinctively not a human.

Violence Fiend was not like that. He is so convincingly humane, even if he was not human. And Aki, strangely enough, thinks that's all that matters, really. To be good-natured.

He saved Aki as a teammate. Actively pulled his weight or more.

And bought ice cream for Kobeni.

He’s a comfortable personality.

Aki instinctively knows he can get along with him. He doesn’t acknowledge it, though.

He wonders how his personality from a month ago would think seeing him now.

Because he doesn't know how he feels, seeing himself.

"She's so picky. It's like. Her pet cat would eat vegetables over her. The cat. Who biologically cannot digest plants in an efficient manner." Aki takes another dramatically long sip of his drink.

"Can I go now?" Angel asks.

"The carnivore who will probably have really hard shits or bad vomits if it eats vegetables and has no instinctive urges for them, wants to eat the vegetables over her." He scowls.

"You know there are books in the library for parenting that probably talk about raising picky-eaters, right?" 

"I am NOT their dad and I am NOT going to check out something like parental guidance books for a bunch of grown assholes-"

"Parenting books? They're in the lifestyle aisle," the librarian points, eyeballing Aki who blatantly ignores her curious gaze. "Anything specific?"

"For picky eaters."

"Ah. My nephew is a real picky eater, it's a pain," she sympathizes. "How old are your kids?"

Sixteen and a thousand-years old. 

"Three," he answers. Do. Do three-year-olds eat solid food? He nervously averts his gaze. "...and six." Maybe he should shoot older. "...teen. Sixteen." Well. He's a bad liar anyways. Might as well give partial truth.

"Oh! Oh? Oh?? Six...sixteen?" She echoes. 

She then suspiciously squints at him.

He sweats.

"...how old are you?"

Aki falls quiet.

And grimaces. She's going to see his library card and information, anyways. "Twenty-four."

He sees the calculations run through the librarian's head as its account is visibly conveyed through her expressive countenance.

He also sees when she's found the answer, as her face blatantly dips through all seven stages of twisted grief, punctuated with at least eight different variants of confusion all in one second.

"...I don't think I understand." She finally settles with, a perfectly neutral statement that tells him she's been in the customer service line of work for a long time. 

"Yeah. I don't really understand either," he remarks hollowly, thinking about every single decision he's ever had the clear mistake to choose, if the outcome is being an involuntary parental figure to two rabid, marsupial, trashcan brawlers who clearly have no concept of parental figures or authoritative guidance in their entire lifetimes, and aren't willing to accept them now. "Anything else?"

Something must show in his gaze, because the librarian doesn't ask anything more. 

"Hope you find everything that you need," she blesses him awkwardly.

"Oh, I know I won't," what he needs is a gun. And a priest. 

But no, he's going to check out a book targeted to parents of kids who eat only Dino nuggets and ketchup, when he has a child who refuses to eat anything but chunks of raw meat from the hide of a ten-week-old deer cadaver she found in his neighborhood woods, and another child who had considered his lavender shampoo a condiment that's applicable for daily digestion. 

"Thank you," he says to the librarian, whose eyes have not blinked during the entire conversation the moment it started turning for the worst.

"Good luck," she says.

"Thanks." Aki's friend and partner died. Aki's friend and partner lives in the corners of his home like a third, unwelcomed roommate. A ghost of her presence, that tells him she knows what he's doing; that he is corrupting every emotion she had wasted on him in just how he lives, how he thinks. 

What does the dead do, though? They can't do anything.

Even Denji and Power have more of a grasp over him. He's getting books to train them to not eat random shit off the floors, and to eat all their veggies.

"I'll need it." 

“A TRIP TO ENOSHIMA? HELL YEAHHHH!”

Aki scratches his head at that.

Hah.

And watches as Power and Denji pick through Denji’s bedroom, ripping open drawers.

“YOU HAVE TO BRING THIS, DENJI!” Power gasps, holding up one of Denji’s few pairs of clean underwear. “And this, and that- OH you have to bring Nyako’s stuff, too-!”

Aki bites into his pear, leaning against the doorway as Denji holds up one of the cardboard boxes that was originally used to ship some of the few furnishings used in this room. “Here, here,” Denji coaxes Power to fling the clothes into the box. “We’ll bring it with us to En-oh-oh-oh-shima!”

Haha. Hilarious.

Aki chuckles, blissfully thinking about their reactions once they realize that there’s no real trip.

He then thinks about who has to deal with their reactions.

He stops laughing.

“WHAAAA look!” Power gapes at the amount of manga that Himeno left behind. “We have to bring all of these- I’ll read them all the time for you- ta-dah!” She then grabs one of the shirts that Himeno left behind. A pair of overalls. “THESE! They’re amazing! You don’t have to really wear pants with these on, they’re like underwear on their own!”

Aki frowns at her cackled proclamation, standing upright from where he’s slouching. Because no, you should still be wearing underwear with those, and now he’s very concerned about how she’s been previously using them.

“Uh-huh, look, we’ll bring a buncha food,” and Denji pulls another cardboard box from underneath his bed, revealing a stack of stashed foods that he sworn he never took in the first place. Aki scowls.

At least the foods are all processed, and Denji’s no longer shoving cartons of degradable produce or meals underneath his bed. Bastard was growing his own biohazard underneath his bedframe, and Power was only enabling it out of sheer joy in retaliation to Aki’s very natural response of absolute disgust.

It was after Aki told them that if they continue to grow their own sentient CDC outbreak underneath the bed, Nyako might get into it and experience liver failure.

Denji stopped hiding things after that.

“TOPKNOT!” Power bounds over. “Look at THIS!” And she reaches into the pockets of the overall she had tossed aside, and pulls out a handful of dirt, and a single flower in it.

The flower has zero petals.

Aki stares.

Power, with a very glittery gaze, stares back.

Slowly, when she doesn’t move, he holds out his hand.

She dumps the flower and all that soil, right into his palm.

Crumbs of dirt scatter onto the floor.

He slowly slides his gaze down at his hand.

“You’re welcome.” Power says forwardly without batting an eye. “You should be honored that you’re receiving anything from me at all.”

“…thanks.”

“You should be.” And she returns to fucking up the room with Denji, even more than it originally was. Thank god Denji has like, nothing in his possession, to really make an initial mess. Even Power’s stuff has been thrown around in here even though she has her own room. Power basically sees this entire house as her singular bedroom. She gravitates towards Denji’s room because to her, it’s the epicenter of entertainment, as it contains Denji, her favorite punching bag.

Aki looks at the flower. And the dirt. And the pear core in his hand.

As he walks out the bedroom, hearing them bicker and shriek with delight(?) in the background, he walks over to the kitchen trashcan.

He dumps everything in his hands into it.

He needs to start checking all the pockets of Power’s clothes before he puts them in the laundry.

“THIS WASN’T A TRIP?”

“THERE’S NO REAL TRIP?”

Denji just looks shocked.

Power on the other hand, immediately decides that this reveal of displeasure warrants a sudden bout of violence. She jerkily stands up, and kicks the television reporting Chainsaw Man as a suspiciously friendly presence.

Her temper is then immediately muted by Makima’s gaze.

Wow. And Aki admires Makima, for sure, but this has also to be one of the first times he’s felt genuinely envious over her, too.

He wishes he has the capability of making someone as insufferable as Power do chores. Power, by default, will not listen to humans unless if she’s amused by their request either through trickery on the mortal’s end or sadism on hers.

First and last time he told Power to do the dishes, somewhere in her mind, rather than “clean the dishes = no more dirty dishes = doing the dishes,” she only really encompassed the latter part of that equation.

Aki received a noise complaint that day.

Apparently, neighbors reported that he’s been throwing bucketloads of porcelain plates off his balcony, chucking them like frisbees to knock pigeons out of the air.

Not only was he allegedly being annoying, causing property damage, and being a general public nuisance via unprecedented acts of explicit violence, but he was also littering.

He had to go pick up porcelain fragments up until midnight.

That’s when he realized that asking Power to do chores often results in more of those for him.

Yeah.

He doesn’t just wish he was with Makima, but that he was her, at times. It’d be a double win, since even Denji would listen to him without argument, too.

“AKI!” A sudden squeal warns him of impeding doom, but he still didn’t have enough time to duck as a warm, fifty-kilogram sack of flesh smacks him in the face. Scowling, he grabs it by whatever shape it holds, and peels it off his upperhalf.

Power stares back innocently from where his fingers dig underneath her armpits. “SEE, HUMANS ALLLLWAYS LIE!” She roars, spittle splattering against his face.

He feels something link his legs together, and tiredly, he looks down.

Denji has DIY’d himself into handcuffs around his ankles, using his entire body weight to sit on Aki’s dress shoes.

Aki is going to kick him.

He is going to kick him, and toss Power at the singular TV in this room, and visit them every two weeks to see if they evolve in the darkness of this basement like the pair of illegally kept exotic pets that they are.

“YOU LIAR LIAR LIARLIARLIARLIARLI-“

“Power, I won’t bring down Nyako if you keep doing this.”

Power instantly goes stiff in his arms, and maybe she is tamable.

Power then immediately launches one of her dangling legs upwards, cracking her knee against the bottom of his jaw and smashing his false that she’s capable of the concept of learning. Immediately releasing her due to the eruption of pain and just from the general shock of her audacity, he nearly trips and falls over Denji, who clings tighter onto his legs, cackling like the goblin that he is. “Jesus Chri-“

“SHUT UP, I’M BETTER THAN HIM! CAN JESUS CHRIST HIT YOU LIKE THAT!”

Aki is pretty sure Jesus Christ isn’t supposed to be hitting anybody, but what does he know.

Power isn’t even making human noises anymore, by this point.

“The decision is all yours, Chainsaw Man. You can choose to stay here until this all blows over, or you can reveal yourself in spite of the assassins that other foreign powers will send after you,” Makima reiterates, because like the goddess she is, she is absolutely unfazed by the mating call of a species too dumb to produce a next generation.

“Please just choose to stay here for the rest of your life,” Aki whispers.

“FUCK THAT! As if Chainsaw Man will ever be confined to a basement!” Denji loudly proclaims.

Aki hopes the assassins get to Denji. Maybe in the chaos of it all, they’ll both get lucky and take down Power, too.

Yoshida is somewhat of a weirdo.

He’s only a high school student yet he’s on par with Quanxi, who’s an ex-buddy of Kishibe. And Yoshida’s relationship with Kishibe feels off, too.

Whatever.

Devil Hunters are a small circle; despite their community networked and stretched thin by distance and countries and oceans away, there’s nothing as strangely intimate as skirting life and death in tandem with their circadian rhythm.

Besides.

Quanxi has a little…doll…furry…thing who just says Halloween. Yoshida is definitely not the weirdest existence out there. And Aki has Power.

They go to hell.

They go to hell.

Aki doesn’t think it’s just his arm that didn’t come back with him.

Power didn’t really come back, either.

Denji did.

Denji, Aki has known with an odd sense of dissonance, always comes back from anything. He’s nature’s punching bag. He goes through traumatic events like it’s a tedious Sunday sermon hyped up by a choir of harmonized screaming, and comes back by every afternoon like nothing’s happened.

And Denji’s not smart enough to hide any trauma. Maybe subconsciously he’s repressing something, but if he is, then its grave is buried so far down that it’s practically negligible in his daily life.

Because as Denji sighs, shoving a spoonful of curry-sopping rice into Power’s unhinged mouth, only for the spoon to rattle down her throat like its a garbage disposal as she begins to spit and sputter and scream about the power of darkness rejecting her from eating when Aki is pretty sure that’s just her choking-

Denji mutters, “damn. Rejected Miss Makima’s date for this?”

“A date?” Aki reiterates, eyebrow cocked.

“Yeah. The Enoshima trip.” That trip was real??? “She said while you two are recovering, we could just go alone,” he huffs. So it wasn’t a real date. “But it’s a date!” Totally wasn’t. “‘Cuz she said the two of us!” He points accusingly at Aki. It’s not a date. Makima wouldn’t engage in a date with someone as…questionable as Denji. Not just because of how he’s within the vulnerable population, but also because Denji has genuinely zero redeemable qualities in him to be worth evaluating as boyfriend material.

“Why didn’t you go?” Aki asks, truly confused. If Aki could scour every single alternative universe out there, he can say with utmost, arrogant confidence that in no world other than theirs would Denji ever turn down a trip with a “hot” lady.

“…Powy’s not doing so well. She was screaming allllll night last night,” Denji grumbles, glaring at her.

“You could’ve left her with the Bureau.”

“….nah. I wouldn’t leave Pochita with s’mone else if he was having a rough time. And Powy is basically like another dog.” And something about that logic doesn’t feel right, but he’s also most definitely not wrong. Power also doesn’t deserve human rights by default due to her personality, so Aki isn’t going to start defending her from Denji’s demeaning comparison. “But. Pochita is different. So I don’t…really know,” Denji grumbles, looking at Power who’s now barfing up a concoction of soda and whatever drink exists in Aki’s household that is not comprised of more than sixty-percent water. “Ugh, Power, stop, you won’t clean that up!” He conks her on the back, only for her to cry-

“The Darkness Devil is hitting me!”

“No, it’s me.” And being hit by Denji versus the Darkness Devil in just ten times worse on an insulting level.

Aki sighs. “You’re sad about not going on the trip?” And he feels almost bad. Almost. Barely. Not really. A bit. Mostly because a part of him understands Denji went through quite a lot. Aki was out after their express trip to hell (you know, a little Magic School Bus fieldtrip as one does), but he’s heard stories about it afterwards. Denji getting decapitated (again), being set on fire (probably again, he wouldn’t be surprised), getting murdered by women (definitely again).

It’s just hard to sympathize with Denji when Denji naturally does not sympathize with himself. In retrospect, it’s somewhat eerie, how unbothered the boy is with everything going on. He’s part Devil. He died in Hell. Or at least Aki believed so.

Right. And Denji died (again again again). With Power.

Aki drops his spoon.

“Your arm still healing?” Denji gestures towards his fumbling.

“It’s fine. At least I still got one arm. Angel’s got none.” Angel, similarly to Denji, is rather apathetic to his own fate. Angel had simply glanced at his armless state and solemnly said: “well, once I die, I forget everything about this godforsaken world and get my arms back, so I don’t really lose anything.”

His optimistic outlook was very Denji-like.

Aki isn’t sure when he started labelling certain behaviors as a Denji or Power thing.

“Dennnnnnnnjiiii,” Power begins to sob into her bowl. “The Darkness Devil is in Topknot’s hair!”

“I always had dark hair,” he snaps, ticked that he’s suddenly the target of this nonsense.

Denji however, simply gives a tired sigh that’s reminiscent of Aki whenever Denji starts saying some of the stupidest shit that could possibly be strung together from the 130,000 commonplace words within the Japanese language, and pats Power on the head. Power climbs into his lap like a lumpy and oversized Nyako.

Denji lets her.

Huh.

Denji is surprisingly tolerant of her.

Then again, Denji is pretty tolerant of everything. But with her, it’s less of a tolerance built from indifference, and rather, because it is Power; there’s no way Denji would let someone else treat him like a scratching post if he wasn’t attracted to them, yet he clearly finds Power more of a nuisance than an interest.

“I need to piss.” Denji announces crudely, standing up with Power impressively still looped around his neck like a monkey.

“NOOO DON’T LEAVE ME!”

“It’ll grab you from the toilet and drag you innnnnn! The darkness is in the pipes!” Now Power is sobbing.

“Power.” Aki begins with a reprimanding tone. “Come here.”

“NOOOOOOO!”

Wow. And it seems like her general disdain to listening to Aki overwhelms any traumatic impact that dying and reviving in the worst possible way within the cesspools of the limbo between hell and whatever’s below that could have.

Aki hesitates.

He’s close to Power the way he reels her in with a leash, letting her scrabble at his hands and flail around in his grasp.

He’s not.

He’s not Denji close, whatever that entails.

“Powy,” he uses Denji’s weird name.

Power stops trying to suffocate Denji who looks like he’s ready to astral project off this planet’s atmosphere and fling himself into the sun.

She sniffs.

His heart doesn’t twinge at the sight of her bulbous tears or dribbling snot. Actually, he kind of finds it gross.

But something about the sincerity in her tears, in the shamelessness of it all because having the audacity to do whatever she wants is just a part of her, makes his feel bad for speaking so harshly. “You can sit with me. I can protect you from the Darkness Devil.”

And her next words, he takes them in a way that punches the air out of his lungs, ruins him in a way he never thought possible or could’ve foreseen, even if it’s just another factoid that means little to her if her large wailing indicates anything-

“Protect me?? I died before you could protect me! Denji died before you could protect him! Humans are so arrogant! What can you do if even I, the great Power, can’t do anything?”

“Will Beam reincarnate?”

“Huh?”

Denji scratches his exposed hip, waiting for Aki to answer.

Aki, dick in hand, peers at the boy standing at the bathroom door that he swung open at three in the morning.

“Wh- what?”

“Will Beam reincarnate?”

Beam? The Shark Devil? “….yeah. All Devils do. Not with his memories.” A pause. “Can you get out?” He asks, annoyed as he finally digests this entire situation. Aki is quite literally trying to pee right now.

“But he worships Chainsaw Man.” Denji says, completely steamrolling Aki’s concerns. “Beam was so annoying. And gross. He kept clinging on.” And this is an irrefutable fact- Beam could be a Chainsaw Man Cult Figurehead if he felt like it. It’s also a fact that he was extremely annoying, using Aki’s floors as a swimming pool that he would occasionally leap out of like a piece of turd splashing into toilet water. “So he’ll remember Chainsaw Man even if he reincarnates.”

Aki thinks about Angel’s confession.

How all Devils intrinsically recognize the rip and roar of Denji’s chainsaw as the creak of the door hinges that mark the threshold into their new life.

“Yeah. Probably. Do you miss him?” He’s never heard Denji ask this before.

“No, he was obnoxious, for real.” Denji shrugs. A pause. “He saved me a tonna times. He was kinda like another dog. I like dogs. But it’s not like he really ever liked me- he never called me by my name.” Oh.

Ohhh.

This talk is catching him off-guard, and honestly, Aki is not in the mood to be having some sort of insightful discussion about Denji’s identity crisis right now, not while he’s in the middle of flushing his piss down the toilet.

“But I think he accepted that I was Chainsaw Man.” And Aki wasn’t even aware that Denji even perceived himself as a separate entity from Chainsaw Man. Or maybe this is a new revelation he’s having. Aki doesn’t really know. “So he really likes Denji!” He says victoriously with a peace-sign.

“….that’s great, Denji.” Aki says dryly.

He washes his hands.

Denji does not leave.

Aki feels peculiarly murderous at this moment, even if it’s his fault for not locking the door.

“Powy wouldn’t remember me if she died.”

Aki freezes. “Huh?”

“She’s having it rough. She asked me to bathe with her, and she was so annoying. I wish she would go back to the usual Powy.”

And the usual Powy entails the same things as she’s doing now: throwing around her food, screaming, throwing tantrums, doing whatever she wants, throwing more things. Except now she’s crying while doing them.

Aki squints at that thought.

Wow.

What the fucking hell has he been actively living with every single day for the past three months???

“If I killed Powy, she would reincarnate. She’d forget all the bad stuff. But she’d forget about me and you.” And Aki’s chest does something funny as someone as emotionally disconnected as Denji casually tosses Aki into the mix. He feels weird, knowing that someone like Denji thinks Aki is an important cornerstone in Power’s character and memories. “I don’t think I can do that again.” And Denji quite literally has never admitted defeat to any phenomenon. It’s like a slapstick. It’s what makes his entire existence as an unbreakable being who sticks his middle finger up at any given trauma or horrible, life-altering event with zero repercussions.

Denji, who can literally go through the most gut-churning, repulsive deck of cards that mother nature could grant him, and still come out with his cheesy thumbs-up and lopsided grin, cannot go through a couple months of reinventing a friendship a second time.

“I mean. First of all, you shouldn’t really be killing Power for any convenience of yours.” Aki says.

“I said I wasn’t, god!”

“Secondly. I think Power wouldn’t be happy losing all the memories she has of you, either.” Aki hesitates. “Why were you thinking this in the first place?”

“Powy keeps kicking me. And crying. And she asked me before she finally fell asleep if I hated her because I made her miss the trip with Miss Makima.”

And Power can self-reflect?

Aki hums at that surprising tidbit of information that Power cares about the opinion about anyone other than herself. Cares about in a way that’s not rooted in fear, the way she is with Makima.

He feels weirdly proud upon learning that.

Like a proud dad whose child used to smack other children at daycare in the head with a wooden block, and has now gained enough sentiency to know not to do that.

“I hate it.”

“What?”

“I want her to stop crying.” Denji mutters.

“Is she annoying you?”

“Yeah.” A pause. “I don’t get why she’s upset.” Aki has a feeling that most people would be more startled by the fact that Denji is less upset about the whole situation, given how he basically died twice, was used as bonfire fuel, and was essentially mangled and chewed up by life like a rubber dog toy. “I really wanted to go on that trip with Miss Makima. But when Powy said she didn’t want me to hate her for not going, it’s like. I wasn’t mad at Powy. I’m not mad at her. I was annoyed at her because she kept spitting food everywhere and crying but she’s always like that so it’s not like today’s any different. I’m not more annoyed at her for her being upset.”

“Right,” because Power being a general nuisance is an unchangeable variable of living in this household. “If you’re tired, I can take over and sleep with her.”

Denji shakes his head. “It feels wrong to not sleep with her after she fell asleep knowing I was there.”

Aki remains quiet at that admission.

“I don’t know why she’s so scared about the Darkness Devil. He’s gone now. It’s all gone. It’s all over.” Denji says, being the young, sixteen-year-old boy, whose concept of trauma extends as far as mainstream media could imprint on him. “Why cry about something that doesn’t matter?”

“Well. Not everyone can just move on so easily, Denji. You might be the only person I really know who can do that,” Aki confesses.

He can’t do that.

His fixation on revenge is a sign of that.

Denji, by most emotional standards, is a complete nutjob.

Screws loose? The ones who get far without dying or resigning are those who are a little knocked in the head?

Maybe Denji truly is the only person he’s ever met quite like that. Kishibe, too, perhaps.

“I also drank Power’s blood.”

“That’s so gross, why would you do that?” Definitely a few nuts loose in there.

“Dunno. She thinks it’s an offer of apology.”

“That’s a horrible apology.” Aki thinks it’s more along the lines of a punishment if anything.

“She cries so much. I wouldn’t cry this much even if Power died, I think.”

Aki would once glance at Denji, who speaks every word with a nonchalance and sincerity of irrefutable belief that catches most people off guard, and take statements like these as another sign of inhumanity.

Now he just sees it as a toddler navigating new and unfamiliar social situations with nothing but precedence, when the experiences he’s had are so far removed from normalcy that they can’t even be applicable to basic, human interactions. These past couple months Denji might as well be the subject of some unethical social experiment testing how trauma and safety respectively impact the emotional foundation of developed children.

Aki, too. He feels like the fucking control variable of an experiment testing how stress impacts peoples’ emotional development.

“Did you cry when Pochita died?”

“No.”

Now that surprises him.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. I mean. I think it’s because I knew he was a part of me. You know. And it’s like.” Denji shrugs. “Dunno. People die. I thought I was gonna die, too. Since I didn’t, I didn’t. No point in forcing myself to be sad about something, that’s mad depressing.”

“…right.”

And just as Aki’s about to coax the boy back to his bed, he hears a loud, shrill, shriek from Denji’s bedroom.

“Ah. She woke up.”

The bed is hot, sweaty, and disgustingly cramped.

Aki sighs as he feels Denji squirm closer around his midriff, using his stomach as a pillow.

 He grimaces, as Power’s hair goes flying into his mouth as she wildly rolls around in the blankets, messing up its formation once again.

He should’ve just gone back to his bed.

Kishibe is holding the fat cat.

The fat cat meows.

“…whatchu want for a souvenir?” And it’s Denji who surprisingly asks, even though Aki thought he and Kishibe weren’t all that close. It’s also kind of irritating, because this is his personal visit to Hokkaido, and Denji and Power, who suddenly decided to tag along 3.4 hours ago, is acting like this is their important trip.

“Alcohol,” the man says.

And then they’re on a train.

Alcohol. Well. Aki will just find some fancy brand with a high content.

“Powy has recovered.” Denji narrates, pointing to Power, who’s now cracking open cans of tuna on the bullet train. The smell wafts from the back seats that they’re in, and Aki cranes his neck over, hissing, embarrassed that the oily scent of tuna is going to now invade every passenger’s privacy.

And the moment he looks over, he sees Power immediately splatter a handful of tuna into Denji’s hair, and Aki stares, horrified.

Holy shit.

This was a horrible idea.

A horrible idea, Aki thinks as Denji holds up Power who’s throwing up over the boat deck and into the ocean. “Gahahaha!” Denji gestures Aki to come over, pointing at the waterfall of vomit. “She ate fish, now she’s sending them back home!”

“Tuna doesn’t live in-“ Aki’s unhinged statement of astonishment gurgles out into an infuriated noise of incoherent syllables. “….give her water once she’s done.” He flinches as a particularly large glob of tuna tumbles out Power’s mouth. “And gum.”

Denji snaps his head up, offended, “wha- I WANT GUM, TOO!”

Aki slowly lifts his head up, tired as the small bus jolts against the countryside road, his head banging against the window, as he hears a harmony of cackling gremlins.

Denji is clapping to a beat that resounds in the underworld as Power begins to do acrobatics on the tiny bus’s hand railings.

“STOP THAT.”

Aki, quite frankly, thinks he’s losing his mind.

He continues walking as he hears a war cry from Denji in the background.

He feels something cold, hard, and icy splatter against the back of his head, exploding into smithereens of snow within his peripheral vision.

Oh my god.

Hands clasped, eyes lowered, Aki murmurs a prayer: “Mother, Father, Taiyo. I brought two….kids…” and saying ‘devil’ might as well be an admission to betrayal that he’s friends with those who killed them, “please. Grant me strength so I don’t have to buy out two more plots in this cemetery by the end of this day.”

He lifts his eyes and head, and immediately sees the most sacrilegious act against the undead.

“What the fuck ar-“

And Power, for the second time today, barfs. Straight onto the strip of snow in front of the Hayakawa Family Grave.

“Wh- POWER.”

Denji on the other hand, continues to munch on the…riceball?...with little reaction.

“What is that?” No, that’s not even important- “where did you get that?” Aki asks tonelessly, any color of life in his voice absolutely stolen from him the day he’s had the horrible introduction to Denji.

“Grave offerings we stole from the crow,” Denji says the most blasphemous statement that conveys a type of sentiment that surely isn’t illegal but certainly very unsettling for anybody with an inkling of emotional intelligence.

Aki has no words.

“HURGH,” Power says. Seems like Power also has no words. She continues to spit blobs of mashed up food that splat against their own puddle of muck and saliva, “’tis was rotten! The power of the Darkness Devil!” She hollers in the middle of the cemetery filled with the dead who if they haven’t passed into the afterlife before this, most definitely have now. No witness to this scene would have anymore lingering sentiments for this world.

Denji chuckles. “Figures.”

Aki slowly looks between them, then at his dead family, then at the upchucked offerings at their feet.

His eyes roll up to the clear, blue sky to a god who is certainly not there and if He was, has a lot to answer for, and sighs.

Dinner was just as bad.

He watches as Power, once again, sinks her teeth into Denji with the infallible belief that he is her blood bank whenever she has nothing at hand except for literally every single dish set out in front of them.

Aki stares at the vegetables. And he told her to give him anything she refuses to eat.

She gave him everything in general.

And for a moment, he understands Power’s sentiment of throwing food all over the walls in a fit of sudden and impulsive recklessness.

“…whatchu doing?”

“Staring out the window,” Aki answers politely. Denji’s sleep schedule leaves him waking at the worst moments, catching Aki in an odd headspace.

Except is it really odd to contemplate leaping out of this inn’s second-floor window after everything that’s happened today?

“There’s nothing to stare at. It’s all snowy. You can’t see crap.”

“Shut up.”

Aki takes another sip of the fuzzy beer. Holy shit. I totally should jump.

If he jumps, he’ll meet his family again (except he won’t. He never believed in a positive afterlife, and that was only reconfirmed after quite literally going to hell). Except when he sees his family, he’ll have to tell them he brought two deranged little motherfuckers who ate offerings off of their neighbors burial porches, and then puked it all up in front of them.

Even his own family won’t forgive him for that, and he survived the thing that wiped them the hell out.

“You know.” He mutters, reconvening his thoughts with a mild, morbid sense of humor. “I used to be all depressed, revisiting my family’s grave during their time of death. I would think even more about revenge.”

He stares blankly out the window.

“You guys were such fucking pests this year, I didn’t even have a chance to get lost in that,” even now, tipsy and gloomy and with two kids previously asleep, he couldn’t even get into the mood of seasonal grief.

And Denji, as eloquent and emotionally competent as ever, stares at him for a very long second, before saying with an offensively unsure tone: “you’re welcome…?”

Nyako seems to like Kishibe more than him, given how in her transportable cage, she keeps rubbing up against the direction where Kishibe is, on the other side of the café table.

“Those two are a handful. I’m surprised you brought them to something as solemn and private as a grave visit.” Kishibe says, announcing his knowledge of social etiquette and humaneness, when they both know that Kishibe is the type to piss on graves if he suddenly recalls an event of annoyance concerning the person six-feet under.

“I’m surprised, too.” Aki mutters. But- “Power didn’t throw vegetables at the table. She just gave me whatever she didn’t like, and then threw a tantrum about it. But she didn’t throw them.” Which is a major improvement. Like. Major. Like a milestone in cognitive development. “Denji was also less annoying.” He doesn’t know how Denji was less annoying, he just was.

Maybe Aki is growing more tolerant.

He thinks about it.

He’s very tolerant of them.

To the point where he stopped thinking with desperation about the future when this temporary living arrangement ends. Actually. He forgot it was temporary, up until now.

“…Captain Kishibe.” He also retrieves the nice brand of whiskey he bought from Hokkaido, distilled by the locals, and places it on the table.

“I’m not taking Power in.” Kishibe instantly says while snatching the bottle and shoving it under his arm.

“I- okay, that was not what I was going to suggest.” Mixing together Kishibe, a man who can verbally and physically commit enough human right violations that couldn't even be found in the CIA handbook for how to handle war prisoners back in the 70s, and Power, who might as well just be human rights violation in personification, just feels like an act that would get Aki permanently locked out of heaven on Judgment Day. 

“That’s good. Because Yoshida is already a handful.” And he’s taking care of Yoshida? The dude with a ton of piercings and an eerie smile? Okay. “He is also actively antagonistic and would definitely try and kill Power to see how she’d react.”

Aki doesn’t quite know what to think about that.

“…I just wanted to ask. The upcoming expedition to kill the Gun Devil. Can Division 4 withdraw?” Aki asks, losing momentum for the decision he’s spent nights thinking of in the hospital, at home, in Hokkaido, and now. The moment’s over and ruined by his strange discussion about Yoshida, but he still has to ask.

Kishibe goes still. So still, that Aki’s lungs inflate with a stale sense of nervousness. No. What if Kishibe says no? But why would he? No way he would say no, it’s not only unlikely for his character, but also just illeg-

“Yeah. Okay.” Kishibe gives him a long, long look.

Or maybe just a look. Kishibe seems like the type who blinks every five minutes, like those TV show hand puppets that have no sentiency yet express so much unimpressed disdain with nothing but a stare. 

“You’re not gonna try and convince me to stay?”

“I mean. You’re the one with a hard-on for the Gun Devil since joining.” Aki makes a face at that. “Everything I have to say about your decision, you definitely ran it through ten times before you went to sleep.”

He did.

Aki really did.

He even considered resigning the day after the expedition initiated, so that he can receive intel about it just in case. But Aki is obsessive; the moment he has insight into even the opening, he’ll think about it. Knowing the blueprint of something is going to happen, and understanding he’ll probably never know the finished product, the ending of the expedition, what happened in it and ultimately if the Gun Devil was defeated, will haunt him in his dreams.

He barely has two years left of dreams.

He’s already invested more than three-fourths of his lifespan to this stupid Gun Devil.

Hasn’t he already given enough?

He can’t afford to be wasting more of his time on a Devil that ultimately gives him nothing in return- he currently has two more stupidass devils to be splurging his time on.

“What made you back down so far into your goal, though?” Kishibe asks.

Two more years.

Ugh.

He has to figure out how to send Denji to school. Denji will be an adult in two years, thank god.

Or not. The brat barely had a childhood, and all his sensitive periods where he should’ve developed socialization skills have been done with nothing more than a flea-bitten dog and a mob boss as his frame of references. Denji, for legal purposes, should not be allowed to be an adult or make any adult decisions for the safety of himself and those around him.

“Not sure.”

He thought Denji was done for. Denji, supposedly immortal, with his face planted on the ground and spurting blood. Power, who is a Gatorade bottle of nuclear waste that was shaken super hard, was cold and listless for the first time he’s ever seen her. She’s not even still in her sleep.

“Guess I got cold feet.”

Power and Denji fit in his original cohort of what Devils are, but they’ve expanded it too much; made it too flexible, too nuanced as concepts rather than fixed descriptions with fixed attributes.

It’s getting in the way of his sleep, work efficiency, and most surprisingly of all, his need for revenge.