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Aki is—
Insane, yes. He has to be. After all, he’s a devil hunter: desensitized to blood, to gore, to the sight and sound of broken ribs piercing through flesh, skin torn from muscle torn from bone. Marrow, spills. Drip, drip.
If he were to peel off the top layer of skin, the epidermis, Aki thinks everything would look normal. But if he stabbed a fork into his eye, clawed the remaining mess out, cleared a ragged hole so the inside of his skull could be seen, there’d be something there, pulsing. A constant, steady pulse. Green, squeeze. Contract. Blue, squeeze. Expand. Over and over, in the very center of his mind, surrounded by brain tissue, something alien. The fluid would leak out, carve a trail down one side of his face, spill. Drip, drip.
When was it planted? This seed that contains the colors of the earth. This seed that sprouted roots nearly a decade ago; weaving into the creases of his brain, cementing its hold.
A part of Aki, the only part of Aki that’s sane—what a paradox, because for him to claim sanity this part of him must be the most insane of all—finds out, as he watches Denji open the door. As he watches himself shoot countless passerby, bodies jerking and convulsing as his bullets ravage their bodies.
The day the Gun Devil ripped through his town. Demolished his entire family so thoroughly he had trouble finding even a toe in the aftermath; he remembers scrabbling through the rubble, tears running so hot and thick he was nearly annoyed by his inability to see, fingers scraped bloody. A scrap of fabric, in the end, was all he had. It could be his brother’s shirt, his mother’s handkerchief, the kitchen tablecloth. It hadn’t rained afterwards, but the scrap had turned sodden. Drip, drip.
He loves Makima, different from how Denji loves her, but a type of devotion nonetheless. Trust freely given. Trust easily abused. The spine-chilling realization of what Makima is only hits later, after his death; and it’s surreal, almost, to die so easily in her skilled hands. Aki has lost more than he can count on his five fingers: family, friends, his arm, his lifespan. Never his resolve, never his life—yet, he says only a single sentence and he’s stolen. Gone.
Even thin air no longer holds him; what’s down there, fighting his dearest friends, is only his reanimated corpse and an echo of his past self.
He realizes with his death: Makima has never had a heart.
And now, and now. He watches, caught between heaven-hell-earth-space-time, as the being he’s wanted to kill most possesses his own body and destroys Denji. Denji kills him, but the Gun Devil destroys Denji.
Denji is whole and healthy and immortal after the encounter. Aki has destroyed him.
It rains like the sky’s got a vendetta for the chaos below, after Denji releases the last fragment of Aki, and all the blood spilled runs down the sidewalks a transparent pink, pours over the curb. Drip, drip, dripdripdripdrip
Well,
Aki is—
Dead, anyway. D-e-a-d. Not breathing. Not wet from the rainstorm. Body gone, lost to the enemy he’s sworn to cold murder. He’s got no more life than a rock on the street, a crumpled newspaper left in the gutter turning soggy at the edges. Wonderful.
No, he’s never been one for sarcasm. This is not wonderful. He can see his family now, probably, see them happy and angelic with open arms, and he can watch a horny Denji break down in the soft lap of Makima. Watch him undergo a few realizations of his own, the kind that can leave a man house-bound for seven years. He can watch an unsuspecting Power get her head shorn off. All from heaven, all from up high.
High so safe. High so happy. Cheer his friends on, wish for their ultimate happiness. Languish in the arms of his family, his hand returned.
Does he even want to go to heaven?
Hell was decidedly hell, and worse than that, and though he wasn’t (wasn’t) a devil and couldn’t feel the presence of the strongest beings in that landscape like the Fiends could, Hell was one of the worst places Aki had ever visited. Second only to the moment burned in the seed, in his core: family and home, to dust. To dust.
In a Hell worse than hell, Aki can arrive at the conclusion that Heaven must be better than heaven. He can’t see his hand right now, can’t feel it, but it's bloodstained. And it won’t wash off; not with water, not with soap; his skin is soaked and tattooed with crimson red. Someone who drips blood in his wake belongs nowhere near an angel. The only thing that can get rid of these stains is hellfire.
He’s known this for years, the skin around his nail beds always chapped and dry, beginning to crack from scrubbing so hard. They match the manic light in his eyes, the pulsing blue-green seed, the set to his jaw that belongs to someone twice his age. He’s arm-deep in red, like he’s stuck his arm into a devil’s gaping wound and fished around inside for hours and hours, days and years. Searching for bones, searching for answers, searching for hearts.
Hellfire is all his erasure.
Aki is—was, is—
A friend, a buddy, a teammate. Denji is five, ten, an infinite amount of times more insane than Aki, and Power carries no humanity and vomits everywhere. He’d raise up the world, scrunch and compress it into the size of a building, make it dense as a neutron star, and throw it. For them, anytime. Even as Denji hardly sheds a tear for the dead and his always-open mouth only knows the word tits, even as Power cares not a jot for innocent lives taken and refuses to flush the toilet, even as they are monstrous, they smile, at Aki.
So Aki would swell up many times over and stomp upon the world, to hold them safe in his hands.
A brother, a son. Aki tells himself that he is forever his mother’s son, his father’s son, his brother’s brother. As long as he lives—no, for as long as he is Hayakawa Aki, and there is the inescapable curse of memory—these familial bonds blaze.
A something, to Angel Devil. Acquaintance wouldn’t be right, and friend would be pushing it, but two months were given without hesitation. The feel of Angel’s smaller hand in his own, his life force draining away, is imprinted in Aki’s mind; he thinks he wouldn’t mind holding that hand again, now that he’s dead. He’s got nothing left to give. Pity that if he were to hold Angel’s hand now, the arm wouldn’t be connected to a torso. It’d be a limp, decomposing hand, rotten flesh falling away as soon as he tries to intertwine their fingers.
Angel angel angel. Devil devil devil. Cross one cross two cross one-two-three. Aki clutches the slim bones crumbling in his hands and wishes he had a heart instead. Maybe Angel’s. Maybe a spare for Denji.
There’s cigarette smoke in his lungs. It must be Himeno calling him.
Aki is—
Aki is—
Aki is—
Dripping blood from his eyes, his head splitting open with the force of green on the right and blue on the left, fingers and palms and wrists stained with red, staggering through this unforgiving world with his head bathed in the angelic white of heaven and hellfire licking the soles of his feet.
He has no more time left, but he is not yet done.