Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There were a lot of things to hate about working for Public Safety. Having your nights off was not one of them.

It’s well past ten when Kobeni finally clocks out of her job at Serena’s. The all-night curry house had been one of her favourite places to kick back while she was still a devil hunter, and they’d welcomed her in with open arms when she’d asked for a job. Hours aren’t great—even with the extra change from her side gig at the Family Burger, she’s only making half her old salary—but she’s still faster with the knife than anyone in the kitchen, and it makes her happy to think of making some other hunter’s life a little easier.

Doesn’t hurt that now she comes home smelling like spices instead of day-old sweat and devil puke.

The parking lot out the back is one of the few benefits Serena’s has over Public Safety. Most nights she spends a few moments just taking in the ambience of the city before she starts the long drive back to her apartment, but there are exceptions to that rule: one of them being when there’s a certain pink-haired devil leaning on her car.

“You,” Kobeni squeaks out. She takes one step back towards the door; takes another; nearly trips over her own feet when she backs up into the brick wall. “You- what do you want? I’m not with Public Safety anymore! You can’t touch me.”

“Could so.” Power saunters up to her, unimpressed, and jabs her in the shoulder with a finger. “What’s with all the squealing, anyway? I thought humans loved surprises and presents. This is totally both those things.”

“Presents? But- it’s not my birthday, either...”

The devil blinks. “It’s not? I mean- yeah, of course it’s not, dumbass! This doesn’t have anything to do with your birthday, anyway. It’s for your car.”

She fishes in the pockets of her jacket and pulls out a crumpled, shoddily-sealed envelope. Scrawled on the front in barely-legible handwriting are the words “FROM THE PRESIDENT TO KOBENI.”

“Well?” Power asks, expectant.

Gingerly, Kobeni takes the envelope and tears it open with her thumb. Inside is a cheque from Power, for—

It takes three tries for her to be sure that the number she’s reading has the amount of zeroes she thinks it does. As her eyes scan over the figure again and again, she can practically feel the blood draining out of her face and into her feet.

—five million yen.

Kobeni opens and closes her mouth limply in disbelief, before shoving the envelope back into Power’s hands.

“I can’t,” she manages to stammer out.

“Cash it? Aki taught me how the other day, you just go to the bank a—”

“No, I can’t- it’s too much money, Power, I can’t just- why? Did he ask you to do this?”

“Are you kidding me? He can’t make me do shit. When I told him I was going to do this he went ballistic! Blah, blah, responsibility this, investment that.”

“But- but- this is half a year of pay!”

Power snorts and kicks a nearby puddle, sending muddy water splashing onto the asphalt of the parking lot. “Yeah, well, money’s stupid and so is Aki. But you’re cool, ‘cause you tried to kill Denji and you hit that other shithead with your car. So you can have it.”

“I—” Kobeni clenches handfuls of her apron in her fists, unclenches. “—okay. Sure.”

“You better not be arguing with me, or I’ll beat you up.”

“I’m not- I’m not arguing with you, I’m just saying it’s a lot, Power. You don’t have to give me this much.”

Power’s brow scrunches. Then she cocks back her fist.

“Alright, alright! I’ll...”

With trembling fingers, Kobeni takes the cheque back. Part of her still thinks this is the demon’s bad idea of a joke. The rest of her is doing the math on how much five million yen could do for her. How many repayments she could shave off her car loans. How many years of college she could put her brother through. How much time she could buy her sister before she had to join Public Safety.

It couldn’t make things worse, could it?

She stuffs it into the pockets of her apron as if it’ll disappear if she doesn’t. Then she takes a deep breath and gives Power her most practiced service-with-a-smile.

“I can’t just take this without paying you back somehow. How about we go out sometime? My treat.”

For the first and only time she can remember, the same thought passes through both Kobeni and Power’s brains simultaneously: what the fuck. Then realisation slowly dawns on the devil. “Is there gonna be food?”

“Yeah!” Kobeni blurts out. “We can visit the hawkers, drop by the arcade, get some ice-cream...”

Before she can react, Power drapes an arm around her shoulder and pulls her in for a sidehug. “Ha! I knew one of you humans had to be good for something eventually.”

“U-uh—” Kobeni gulps down a quick breath on the off chance Power decides to strangle her. “—sure! Totally. Um. When are you free?”

Power stares up at nothing and mutters to herself as she counts the days on her fingers. “Ssssssssssssaturday? Next week.”

“Cool. Cool. I’ll, uh, do you want my number? So we can meet up.”

“Your phone number...” Power squints at Kobeni for a long, dangerous moment as she scribbles her number on a page from her notepad. “...wait, I know what this is. This is a date or something, isn’t it?”

“Excuse me?”

“Yeah! Yeah, this is totally a date! Well, joke’s on you, ’cause I don’t need to go on dates to touch boobs.” As the devil proudly demonstrates this fact, Kobeni tries to figure out whether or not it’ll be more offensive if she doesn’t stare at the display. She decides to play it safe and pointedly fixate on the knot of her tie, despite the best efforts of her eyes. “So there better be something else to this dating shit, or I’ll beat you up for real this time.”

Kobeni swallows so loudly she hopes the neighbors can’t hear her. “...right. Have- have a good night, Power.”

“See you then. Dumbass,” Power adds for good measure, before snatching the paper and skipping off into the night.

For a solid minute Kobeni stands there in total silence, eyes moving from the rain-slick floor to the starless night above as she considers what she’ll do come Saturday. Then she runs to her car, the world off her shoulders for just a week.

Chapter Text

Power’s eaten her way through one yakiniku stand’s entire stock and is halfway through its neighbor’s when she finally gets sick of all the beef. Kobeni was half-worried that she’d end up blowing all five million of her newfound yen on grilled meat. Now she’s worried what the devil’s going to do when she finds out it costs money to play at an arcade.

Thankfully, the crowd tonight’s a little thinner than usual—hard to blame people for being cautious after a disaster like the one at the mall last month. That has a couple of upsides: firstly, carting a devil around isn’t going to land her in hot water from less open-minded members of the public, and secondly, Power isn’t going to kill anyone to jump the queue for DDR.

So at least for now, she can eat the last of her yakiniku in peace as she sits back and watches her ‘date.’

The way that Power bounds between each new source of flashing lights and sounds reminds Kobeni of her cat back home. It’s admittedly kind of adorable watching Power press her face up against a claw machine and bat ineffectively at the controls; it’s less adorable when she yanks the knob hard enough to nearly tug the electronics right out. Then again, it’s not like anything here was built to withstand people in their profession—

She catches herself again. She isn’t a devil hunter, not even if she still carries the knife—

—not even if you're still under the contract—

—Power in her periphery, snapping her fingers. “Kobeniiiiiiiiiii. Kobeni, hey.”

“Huh?”

“You gonna eat that?”

Marinade dripping onto her hand, the meat greasy and cold and pale in the neon of the arcade. Her appetite’s gone.

Kobeni shakes her head and lets Power snatch the skewer from her as she rummages in her bag for her hankerchief. She tries to ignore the chill that coils in the pit of her stomach when her fingers brush against the knife and its holder. Old instincts die hard, every nerve in her body tells her that something terrible’s about to happen, something like—

—Power grabbing her hand to lick it clean.

The only reason Kobeni doesn’t scream is because she’s taking a breath out when it happens. She ends up making a noise like a rubber duck getting stepped on instead.

Power, still slurping the grease from her fingers, gives Kobeni a sidelong look. “What’sh the problem now?”

When she talks, her teeth jab into Kobeni’s hand just hard enough she’s worried they’ll break skin. She half-thinks she can still feel the wood of the skewer getting crunched around in there.

“That’s- that’s my hand,” Kobeni says, dumbly.

Power rolls her eyes. She’s still not letting go. “I’m not shtupid.”

“I- then why are you eatin- licking it?”

“Uh, ‘caush that’sh where all the saush went?” After what feels like a small eternity, Power finally releases Kobeni’s fingers from her mouth with a wet pop. “That’s the best part. Keeps it juicy. You work at a curry place and you don’t know how meat works?”

Kobeni snatches her hand away and gives it a thorough scrubbing with her hankerchief. It’s not that she’s trying to clean the sensation away or anything: to the contrary, it felt weirdly comfortable having Power trying to eat her hand, which is itself a deeply uncomfortable realisation.

She decides to ignore any significance that revelation might hold for the time being and focusses on getting the last strands of devil drool off her fingers. “You- no, I’m, I’m well aware, thank you, but- please don’t do that again.”

“I won’t do it again if you don’t waste perfectly good marinade again.” Power folds her arms and licks a stray bit of sauce off the corner of her mouth. “Anyway, what’s the point of this ’arcade‘ thing if all the machines are broken?”

“Did you put any money into them?”

“I didn’t bring any. I thought you said you were paying for all this.”

“...oh. Right. Um.” Kobeni wracks her brain to think of a way this doesn’t end with her wallet in Power’s hands. “How about this: you just show me what games you want to play and I’ll pay for them. Sound alright?”

“So long as you’re paying.” Power grabs her by the wrist and hauls her bodily towards the bank of claw machines. “Hurry up already, someone’s gonna get the shark plushie before we do.”

“That’s probably been in there for weeks now. All these machines are rin- rigged.”

Abruptly, Power drops her hand. “I bet you’re just saying that ’cause you suck.”

“Excuse me?”

“What’s so hard about it? It’s super big, so that means it’s gotta be easy to grab, right? Should be no sweat for a devil hunter like you.”

“I’m not—”

“I saw the knife in your bag.”

Silence.

“I said I wasn’t stupid. You’re a hunter. Aki’s a prick and Denji’s a moron, but they’re not like—” Power jabs her head in the direction of the rest of the crowd. “—they’re not like the rest of this meat.”

Kobeni realises her hand is balled tight around a fistful of her skirt, and it takes far too long for her to get her fingers to unclench. Breathe, she tells herself. You knew this was what you were getting into.

The devil claps her hands down on a gnat and flicks the crushed body in her direction with practiced, perfectly infuriating carelessness. “You’re not, either. Are you?”

In that moment Kobeni comes to two realisations. The first is that she’s so obviously being baited it’s insulting. The second is a little surprising and a lot scarier: at this point, she’s had enough of Power that she doesn’t care. Someone’s going to give. For once it’s not going to be her anymore.

Her hand is already reaching for a coin before she can think better of it.

“Never,” Kobeni says, and rams it home into the slot.

Chapter Text

Every time , Kobeni’s common sense says. Every time you’re around her, you do something like this. You don’t think this is a bad sign?

Maybe, her lizard brain replies. Or maybe it’s a sign I’m having fun for once.

For the first time ever, she understands the appeal of places like this. It’s hard not to feel a rush with the music blaring, the lights flashing, and Power pressed tight against her back, trying to peek around her to watch the claw in action. Sure, if she was anyone else, she might as well be throwing her yen into a pit, but ‘anyone else’ didn’t hold a knife to the throat of the most wanted demon contractor in Japan.

“Judgement,” Kobeni says.

Power notices it first. The fine pink hairs on the backs of her arms stand up and her eyes dart around the arcade as if she’s just heard someone pull a gun. Something about seeing the devil genuinely off-guard for once–putting her on her back foot instead of vice versa–flushes her cheeks a little. Part of her thinks it’s shame. The rest of her knows it’s illicit satisfaction.

Soon enough, though, a plague of cold feet strikes the arcade’s population: a few people just step away from the controllers mid-game to stumble out of the building, pale-faced and bug-eyed. Conversations stop dead in their tracks, and resume halting and tentative. 

One of the players at the nearby air hockey table looks around and whispers to his opponent, “An angel just passed.”

«If only they knew.»  

The Judgement Devil murmurs the words directly into Kobeni’s internal monologue, but Power flinches as if it’s been blasting every syllable over the PA. This thought is all Kobeni, though: the look of surprise on Power’s face is delicious .

She flexes her hands and gives the joystick a couple of test wiggles, feeling the machine in her fingers. “Shall we?”

“Who- who was that?” Power hisses. 

“Nobody you need to worry about.” 

«For now.»

Power turns around to survey the area one last time before nestling in closer against Kobeni, teeth slightly bared and hackles still raised. When she clenches her fingers around Kobeni’s arm, tight as a tourniquet, the silent message to the invisible trespasser is clear: fuck with me and I’ll cut her.

«As you wish,» Judgement replies.

Kobeni signed away every part of herself as a representative for Judgement’s will on the Earth. She’s a thrall down to the drops of sweat starting to bead on her forehead. The devil is a devouring, starving thing, eager for every scrap of sin and wrongdoing it can sniff out in the world of man: even a crime as minor as a simple deception could draw its hunger, if committed over a long enough span.

And a machine like this might’ve been in service for years…

“Is anybody watching us?” Kobeni asks.

Power’s eyes narrow, but she shakes her head slowly.

“Good.” Her free hand dips into her bag. “Shut up a second.”

A laugh like a machete gouging chunks out of a tree. «You’ve been wanting to say that for a while.»

“You too,” Kobeni murmurs, before drawing her knife.

In a single deft movement, she scoops the film of sweat on her cheek onto the tip of the blade, and jabs its point into the gap where the joystick sticks out from the cabinet–just deep enough to let a few droplets in. The light clack of steel on plastic might as well be deafening in the quiet she’s cast over the arcade, but it doesn’t matter. By the time people have turned to look, the blade’s danced its way back into its sheath, and all they’re seeing is a perfectly innocent girl and her far too clingy friend.

At Kobeni’s command– «and my, aren’t you enjoying it»– the devil stays dead-silent while she parks the crane right above the stuffed shark. Once she’s done with that, though, it only takes a few moments of waiting before Power speaks up again. 

Still, her tone’s shaking a little. It’s the first sign of actual hesitance Kobeni’s ever heard in her voice. “What now?”

«I hunt.»

If she concentrates, Judgement’s hunger rings so strongly in her own body that it becomes a physical force, strong enough for evil to pull at Kobeni’s body like a magnet pulls iron filings. Extend that to even her stray sweat droplets, and she might be able to bend their trajectory towards the («deceiver, traitor, usurer») circuitry just hard enough to...

For the briefest moment, the claw twitches.

A smile finds its way onto Kobeni’s face: hesitant at first, then triumphant as she slams down on the joystick’s button and the claw descends. It judders a little as it moves, but for a hack job conducted with a bead of sweat, it’s going better than she thought.

Power’s grip on Kobeni’s arm falters as the claw clamps down hard on the plushie. “You… did it?”

Kobeni lets out a long-held breath. She’s suddenly keenly aware of how much sweat is rolling down her forehead; a couple more drops has splattered onto the cabinet’s controls. “Y-yeah? Yeah! Yeah, I–”

Bang.

A thin wisp of smoke curls from the gaps in the machine’s case. So much for a gentle touch.

One of the attendants jogs over to them. “Ah, shit— what luck, huh? I’ll get the manager to open the cabinet up, get your… uh…”

Faced with Kobeni’s increasingly tetanic grin, his words come to a stammering halt. Kobeni tries, and fails, to get the smile off her face; all that does is make the corners of her lips twitch and tremble. 

Not again. Not again! I’m not getting humiliated by this piece of shit machine—

–«where did that come from?»–

–fuck your manager and your rules, I’m getting this goddamn shark.

“D-don’t worry!” Kobeni blurts out, words tinged by the start of manic laughter. “I’ve got this.”

And then she drives her fist through the glass of the claw machine.