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Somehow, the space between them gradually grew thinner and thinner. Maybe this almost obsessive measuring had started off in his head, but as summer turned to winter, Akira grew accustomed to the feeling of the backs of Ryo’s hands against his own as they walked together, the palm gripping the inside of his arm whenever he wanted to drag his attention somewhere else – something spring had never seen.
Platonically, of course. The whole thing was simple and free, man-to-man contact, an important part of any healthy friendship. As they shifted between awkwardly old kids to awkwardly young adults, their dynamic only shuttered in absence, never collapsed.
Perhaps it was only awkward on Akira’s end, though. His voice creaked into something new and, trailing behind, so did the rest of him. Taller, faster, stronger (but not by much) were all boxes he could tick, but it seemed his desires remained more-or-less the same; stagnant, almost reluctantly stubborn.
On the night before his seventeenth birthday, he copied his actions from his sixteenth; lying in bed and thinking about the last thing Ryo had said to him that day. To be fair, this wasn’t just a birthday ritual he’d conjured up, but a place-marker of every night he spent alone – always getting too caught up in whether or not Ryo had stolen a glance at him in class, or if he was just watching the flurry of birds rushing around the school roof. Was his gaze watching his fingers drag his leaking pen across his notebook, or was he merely comparing the way Akira held it to the way everyone else fashioned their hand around their own?
When it came to anything like this, Akira felt like he truly was the stupidest boy on planet Earth.
And then, moments later, it was actually Ryo who was the stupidest boy in the entire universe – in any universe. Ryo’s undivided attention towards his school work, or his father’s work, or the TV show they had decided to sit through, or the speed of wind and exactly how it hit the grass, or whatever it was that had grabbed his concentration, always shone out to Akira as a mark of his unrelenting mindlessness.
Or, no, that wasn’t fair. If anything, Akira’s dismissal of it was really a sign of his own ignorance, and his dim-wittedness came out every time he proved himself willing to drop anything to follow that far blue gaze. His eyes always fell from the teacher’s blackboard to stare at Ryo’s fingers gripping at the side of his desk, or his shins folded over each other in some premature circus act under the desk.
Akira was just an idiot.
At least Ryo humoured him. When he had the seat in front of Akira, he’d let his hand fall to the side of the chair, and Akira always wondered what it would be like, to just reach out and take it in his own.
A bad idea, nothing more.
I wish we were closer. The mantra almost drove him insane. They would sit and watch the TV screen from the opposite ends of the couch in their time spent alone, as the afternoon passed and neither of them bothered to turn the lights on. On the rare occasion he found them at night, Ryo’s father would guide them away from the fading green pillows to lead them outside, and busy them with an introduction to mountain formations speech he’d whipped up at the last minute.
It’s all about tectonic plates layered over the Earth’s heart. The final layer of skin around the explosive centre, Ryo had countered with, only for him to smile, nod his head, and continue. “These plates, you see, can’t do anything but collide into each other. Only with this friction, forces surpassing any notion of strength you might believe in, can the Earth shape the valleys and mountains that live among us.” Convection currents in the Earth’s mantle push them around; radioactive elements producing heart, producing movement, all leftovers from the formation of the Earth wrestling to find somewhere to belong.
It’s sort of cute, Akira thinks to himself, that the Earth had never really been finished.
The way Ryo hangs on to every word his father tells him, and turns to Akira every time he notices him falling behind in the dark, is sort of cute too.
A simpler life. No choice but to move against each other, like the Earth was created with this in mind, and then accommodated, even promoted, it. We can’t all be so lucky.
The fourth day of living under the Makimura roof came and juddered into place. Akira felt the shift away from naïve excitement, and his body moved against the currents of unease that washed over his morning sheets. Living with a new family while his own ventured out of the peripheral borders of Japan was never going to be easy, but suddenly that felt like a hard pill to swallow.
Awake, in a bed he could hardly call his own, hours before anyone else would move into place, he missed his parents. The Makimura household were all very welcoming, but he missed them all the same. The way his father would call him down if he was taking a little too long to get ready for school, and the way his mother kissed him on the cheek before he left; her perfume mixing in the air with the smell of spiced meat every Friday night; the detergent they grew into a habit of using: all part of an impenetrable routine they’d fallen into.
But everything could change without enough force.
“Duty calls,” his father had told him, squeezing the space between his neck and his collarbone to rattle him around like a doll. And then, almost as quickly as he’d grown up, they left hand-in-hand to climb into the family car with the rest of their belongings, and drove their way to the company carpark, situated right next to the airport.
But, somehow, Ryo sensed that. He sensed Akira’s teetering sense of family and belonging, and just how much of himself Akira was trying to swallow down—the obnoxious notion of doing it all by yourself, and totally not missing your parents because you’re a teenage boy undergoing the most critical stages of puberty, seemed all the more obnoxious when he watched it in real time. When his parents would return to Japan, their dear son might be a foot taller than both of them. His voice could be deeper than the jet engines that carried them away from him, and his oily, acne-ridden skin could be just another embarrassing table-top story for an awards ceremony later down the line.
Secretly glad he was the one allowed to watch this all unfold instead, Ryo offered his bed on the way home, inviting him to stay the night.
And Akira, having decided that if he does not force these tectonic plates to budge, the volcanic ash would burst between them, nodded a little too eagerly.
They took the long way home, past the river and through the suburbs where they used to play as kids, under the maze of telephone wires that hung dangerously low in places, taut in others, with muddy shoes dangling precariously. Once, Akira had asked what they signified, hearing that they were some sort of signal for gang-territory wars. Ryo had shrugged in response, telling him that anyone could throw their shoes over wires, so it couldn’t be too important. Nothing easy to tamper with is ever on full display.
Funny, Akira had thought to himself. The shape of Ryo’s body was so hard to outline when he always wrapped himself in that coat.
After an hour of walking, Akira sat close to the middle of the Asuka’s couch, watching a dull movie with a lukewarm plot, far too riddled with loud action scenes to follow. He let his head fall back to the curve of the pillow, and watched the lights from the screen dance on the ceiling instead.
Then, almost as if he had been possessed, he let his head fall to the left.
Ryo didn’t even flitch. His heart didn’t stop, nor did he hold his breath – not in the way Akira had when he felt the soft fabric of Ryo’s shirt shift over his shoulder. Another loud bang on screen. He opened his mouth to force the air he’d been holding in to escape him. Gunshots. He followed Ryo’s eyelashes as they scarcely moved, while the dull climax of the movie raged on in the background.
As the credits danced their white characters over a black screen, neither of them got up. Akira wondered if Ryo was scared to move in the same way he was, and quickly decided that he was definitely not. Ryo wasn’t Akira. That’s what always made their friendship so outlandish and weird.
If Akira was feeling it, Ryo was not, and it was hard to pinpoint exactly what Akira was feeling, but he wished they worked a little more in sync. Wished, for once in his life, that Ryo was as bashful as he was, and then dispelled the thought as quickly as it came.
Lying in Ryo’s bed again, they both stared up at the painted white ceiling. For the age of the mansion, Akira was glad Professor Asuka had a slight sense of home décor and was kind enough to change the palette of Ryo’s room to something a little more airy. Had the ceiling been that cedar wood instead, maybe it would feel suffocating.
“How is the Makimura family treating you?” Ryo asked into the silence, almost as if it wasn’t even for Akira.
Pause. Think. “They’re all nice… Miki especially. She’s so welcoming, even though she probably doesn’t really want a guy her age in her house.” Oh yeah, talk too much. That’ll win him over. “It feels like I’m crashing into her life, but it’s nice… to meet people who will let you do that.”
Wordlessly, Ryo reached to Akira’s left hand with his right, lacing their fingers together, bringing their hands up to lie in the valley between the pillows. Without daring to move, Akira listened to the sounds of Ryo’s breathing slow down until he was asleep, then, for a fleeting of second, touched his mouth to Ryo’s knuckles, calloused against his soft lips.
Ryo and Akira. Akira and Ryo. They would always be a pair, drafted onto Noah’s ark and plunged into the cold world.
Sitting in the back of Ryo’s humming car, Akira ran the story through his head again. His father must have been standing right next to Ryo’s bed, right where Ryo’s eyes would drift when he was too shy to look at Ryo’s sleeping form, or too nervous share the sight of the ceiling with him.
Huh. Maybe if Akira wasn’t such a coward, he wouldn’t be thinking about how Professor Asuka’s shoes must have dug into the soft rug next to Ryo’s bed. Maybe if he had turned over to face Ryo more than once in his life, or took up Ryo’s offer to take up ‘as much of the bed as he wanted,’ he could be thinking about something else right now.
If he were someone else, maybe he would have laid his arms flat across the length of the bed, inviting Ryo to push him out of the way and back onto his side. If he were someone else, maybe all he would have done was rolled over, laughed nervously when Ryo raised his eyebrow at their proximity, but let him sleep there all the same.
Out of the window, he kept a vague eye out for any passing police cars chasing him down for his American license in place of a functioning Japanese one.
I wish we were closer, he thought to himself, chin digging into his palm. The backseat felt so wide. He didn’t realise how long a year felt until the seat next to Ryo was filled, not with a new best friend or a pretty girl, but with the blade his father had held over his sleeping body.
Sabbath was…
It’s difficult to explain something so ferociously new. When it’s designed specifically to be forgotten, to be just another crazy night at the bar, it only makes the process of registering it in the first place harder.
Sabbath was fine, is what Akira told himself before they had even spoken to anyone there. It had to be fine, because Ryo was standing right next to him, and he seemed to know what he was doing. Ahead of them, a vibrant, pulsating crowd throbbed in exoticisms and the brightly coloured pill, forced into his mouth by a waitress who hardly knew what was about to happen, swam down his throat. There must have been some sort of metamorphosis taking place inside of him, his insides burning hot and his head feeling heavy—placebo, perhaps.
And standing there long enough let the thud of music drown itself out had to be worth something; noise cancelling noise, no overlay or crescendo necessary. The hyperactive bounce of electro-jitters crying through every speaker in sight, louder and louder, eating up the space in the air, and the crowd enveloped around it. They’d all swallowed more than Akira could ever dream of in just one night. Of course, they loved it. Maybe he could too.
In his hand, Akira felt the familiar brush of Ryo’s fingertips, looking down to see him push a drink into his hand. “It’s important that you drink this. Don’t leave a single drop behind,” he cooed, guiding Akira’s hand up so the glass met his lips.
Ever-trusting, ever-nervous Akira nodded his head and took a sip – disgusting – then decided the down the glass in one go. He’d heard that it was the most effective way of doing things from guys in his class, gloating about how much they could take out of one cup. The more you take at once, the easier it is – “It helps if you forget what you’re actually taking, you know?”
Help seemed like a funny word for the moment; subjective, of course, based what you actually want to achieve. For something to be helped, it must have a goal in sight.
Ryo’s goal was to summon a demon and create a Devilman, using Akira as bait and a host for one.
To an extent, Akira shared the same goal, but the sounds and smells of the club were so overwhelming, he wondered if his desires really ended just there. The buzzwords for the evening were impulse and control. Abandon everything you’ve learnt in school and society, taste the dangerous side of life. Follow that dirty human instinct of yours, that corrupt thing which forces us to behave. Kill, fuck, drink, desire became such a currency for transaction. He could lose his virginity, or commit his first offense of property damage, or his first homicide.
So, when Ryo sat on one of the velvet red couches outlining the room, Akira followed without invitation. He shakily took one step after another, lowering himself next to Ryo, the full length of their legs pressing against each other. There were, to be fair, a million and one excuses for this, so he didn’t need to busy himself and think of one. He didn’t need to worry about Ryo’s arm sliding across the top of the seat to lie behind Akira’s shoulders, or his fingers pressing into his side, pulling them together.
Next to them, a couple were having sex, maybe more or a quid pro quo which seemed to have little to do with each other existing and more what they could provide in their shared space. Admittedly, he caught himself staring, his eyes bending around the curve of Ryo’s nose to see what new and exciting engagement they’d assumed with each passing second. Hanging above them suspended on two ribbons, another pair was having sex. In fact, the wider Ryo opened his eyes, the more he realised he was in the minority—those not participating in anything more than nervous footsies.
But Ryo could remedy that. He always could. And as Akira turned to his right to meet Ryo’s eyes to ask him an empty question, Ryo pressed his lips against Akira’s open mouth.
Yes, he could fool himself into thinking it was a kiss.
The pill being pushed between Ryo’s lips and onto Akira’s tongue suggested otherwise, but the boiling tin can set to explode around them pumped a shot of adrenaline into Akira’s shaking hands. His green school jacket felt absurdly tight around him, and he tried to shrug it off, letting Ryo’s arms drop to hook his slender fingers under the collar to pull it halfway off him, until they grew tired and snaked back up and into his messy hair.
Dizzy, Akira told himself to relax, shrugging his shoulders up to lift his hands high enough to reach the space between Ryo’s neck and collarbones, and wrap his hands around it. The childish mockery of intimacy was just enough for Akira. Maybe everyone else in the club had hit puberty a little earlier than him, and hadn’t been mentally chasing their best-friend-stroke-childhood-crush around the world as he discovered these gruesome secrets of their collective history. Maybe he really was the only one who apprehensively flicked through cheap porno magazines just to see what he was missing, too attached to intoxicating dreams of his closest ally to let them go.
Maybe everyone in the club was just so far removed from humanity in the first place, so their eventual demise wouldn’t be such a tragedy—no, he couldn’t bring himself to believe that sort of reckless lie. Everyone in this room was about to die. Painfully, painlessly, it hardly mattered. Akira himself hardly knew what would happen when Amon decided it was time to rear his ugly head. He hardly even knew if it would hurt him at all (though perhaps one might assume that, yes, obviously, it’ll hurt… but then the question leads to where?). Does it hurt? For something intangible to be ripped out of you? Happiness and sadness, loss and victory, love… and love and love and love? Would he feel them torn out of him?
(Define hurt for a second, please. Is this really something he’d really never faced before?)
To the sound of Ryo humming into his mouth, pulling him by the waist to sit in his lap, Akira wondered exactly what it would be like to be a Devilman. A Devilman. Just the title felt silly, like an underdeveloped villain from someone’s diary. A degenerate version of an actual superhero—well, a Devilman wasn’t a superhero at all. It was just a fickle creature, undecided as to who exactly it was and what exactly it should be.
And heroes… feel. They do feel, don’t they? They must. Guided by no one apart from their own righteousness, surely it is within the genes of a superhero to feel so intensely about the world.
So, quietly, as he closed his eyes and lied to himself that the kiss Ryo was giving him was true and sincere the way he wished it to be, he reminded himself who this was all for. If Ryo told him, in his Devilman form, to lick dirt off his shoe, he has to do it. This is all for Ryo. This is all so Ryo can save the world from untimely peril. For this to work out, Ryo was going to play the part of his moral compass.
And maybe it was a good thing after all. Ryo always seemed to lust after the dangers of life, drawn to anarchism and thunder. If he became a Devilman, if he lost his sense of self, would Ryo prefer him like that? If his body held everything Ryo seeks, then surely it would be a perfect way of keeping him close. Oh, to change the self to fit a pre-designed mould sounded somewhat neurotic when he thought about it like that, but how much was really being changed, when he felt as though he had spent his whole life trusting Ryo’s judgement and following his beck and call. What harm would one more deal be?
Maybe Akira wasn’t so good at this whole ‘getting out of his head’ thing he was supposed to be doing right now.
To Ryo, outwardly at least, the way he was acting right now was him losing control of himself, wasn’t it? Ryo didn’t know that this wasn’t something that had never crossed Akira’s mind. This wasn’t animalistic instinct; it was human instinct, closeted for years out of the fear of taboo rejection. To trust Ryo without really understanding, to accept any glass of water without checking for chemicals inside, was hardly new.
“I missed you… I’m glad you came back,” he murmured into Ryo’s open mouth, feeling his hands gripping his shirt under his school jumper, soaking up the unsightly sweaty from his hormonally crazed body. To act on his own deep-seated hunger, that had only ever thrived during 5AM winter mornings and the setting summer sun, alone in his room under the sheets. Was that enough?
“I need you,” he thought he heard in response.
Then, maybe this was fine. He was allowed to abandon his humanity for five minutes to indulge his passions (his passion, singular), before giving up all elements of his real humanity for good. Ryo dragged a kiss down his chin, sliding his mouth under Akira’s soft jaw. Human instinct based on the heart—could those things co-exist? That stupid striped shirt of Ryo’s felt so soft under Ryo’s fingertips, ghosting over the neckline, and he couldn’t even bring himself to look down at his high-waisted trousers folding between them.
It was fine. The feeling of Ryo’s legs under his body, slightly muscled from whatever it is he spends his free time doing, was a reminder of just that. The brown triangles of his jacket collar leapt up from his figure, teasing the sides of Akira’s neck to welcome him into Ryo, his best friend, untouchable and frightening to walk past on the street.
Ryo pulled away for a moment, smiling up at him. Reaching his hand around, he brushed the hair behind Akira’s ear, as though he were a fated stranger, and swiped his thumb across his cheek two times, the once more.
“He should be here soon…” he pondered aloud, close enough to Akira’s ear for him to catch the breathiness behind his façade. He was right. The party was in full swing, which meant conditions were perfect. The demons would arrive soon, and Akira Fudo would die.
But he was happy all the same. Putting himself in Ryo’s safe hands, knowing he wouldn’t really… die… he’d just… develop? It was hard to say exactly what was going to happen, and maybe he would die, but he wasn’t too concerned about that anymore. It was Ryo’s time of need and, as always, he would step up to his side. He hoped, as Ryo’s hands moved down to his hips and pushed Akira to take his place on the couch while he stood up, that they would never be too far apart in the new world they were constructing. That a demon-free world would be kinder to them than one riddled with anger and punishment. Hoped that Ryo would still look at him for a second too long in class, that his hands would still linger in Akira’s messy hair at night.
Hoped that the pill would kick in soon, and he wouldn’t have to remember any of this.
In front of him, Ryo bent over and picked up a blue bottle, thick at the bottom with a thin top. Swishing it around for a moment, he drank what was left in it, then smashed it on the ground.
“Let’s bring some life to this party.”
And so it went, the beginning of the end.
Though his own eyes, he watched the tragedy of the Devilman as though he were an audience member sitting at the back of an empty theatre.