Chapter Text
Go ahead, tell him you hate him—you hate his stupid blank-eyed expression and the way he spits out vulgarities like they’re his first language. His baths are too long and his temper is too short, and the mess, oh, the mess; he eats like a dog and he smells just as bad.
He’s overzealous and barbaric, idiotic and senseless. It takes something meaningless to make him laugh and something even less so to make him cry. When he cries, tears run down his face and into his mouth, where he licks them up like it’s the first thing he’s eaten in months.
When you look at Denji, the thing you feel is in your chest: white-hot and pinching, like the winding of a cord around a spool. It’s needles in your fingers and toes because you’ve been sitting on them too long and you can’t feel anything anymore. It’s painful and its name is bitterness.
Bitter because he loves her and Makima is yours to want from the foot of her bed. Painful because he is the one she feeds scraps of affection to while you are left with nothing.
“I hate you and I want you out of my life.”
You say the words and he doesn’t hear them, so you show your feelings with a fist.
He punches back with a grin.
Why don’t you just kill her? She’s a devil, surely she wouldn’t be missed too dearly, and God knows her behavior would excuse you from any judgement. She’s a liar and a thief, and she’s all too eager to ruin everything. She never flushes the toilet and leaves her vegetables untouched—pickier than that stray she holds onto.
She’s capricious and saccharine, air-headed and vexatious. She walks around naked like she doesn’t live with two boys and throws fits over taking baths. If you ask her to tidy up, she runs through the place like a storm and it’s worse than before she started. She’s a child in the body of a monster.
Power's voice, shrill and whiny, causes a reaction inside of you. Your head pounds like someone’s tied it up and started pulling it tighter—a stress migraine. It’s a pit in your stomach that grows deeper the more you think about her inside of your home. This feeling is painful and its name is exasperation.
Exasperated because she’s so careless and yet she sticks around. Painful because you know what her kind is capable of, really.
“Why don’t you go back to hell.”
You spit the words out like fingernails after you’ve bitten them to stubs.
She hears you loud and clear, and she only answers with a smile.
It’s a room without time where you learn what they’re all about. You’re trapped and she wants to pretend it's fine and he wants to sleep it off. To her, life is a cruel joke. To him, it’s a nightmare.
You take a knife for him and she saves your life.
How do you talk to him after that? How does he walk around while it's all okay? Perplexing...
You sit in the bathroom washing the bloodstains out of your clothes until it’s one in the morning. The door slides open and Denji stands in the gap wearing one of your shirts that hangs far too loose over his concave chest. I really should feed him more, you think to yourself.
“Can’t sleep,” he mumbles.
“Come help, then. This’ll bore you to sleep faster than a lullaby.”
Denji sits by your side with an old toothbrush, scrubbing away at your stained slacks. The two of you periodically went shopping to buy him his own wardrobe, but there was never enough fabric left behind to wash.
The next thing out of his mouth is an apology for the mess.
Sitting quietly like this, you realize for the first time that you don't know him like you thought you did. He's not some freak-of-nature screw-up, he's not a brainless delinquent, he's a human being who sits on his heels and scrubs for an hour to help clean your clothes. Maybe he’s obnoxious and a little crude, but he’s here in the middle of the night, and that’s enough.
It's strange, but when he isn't speaking, you can hear him the loudest.
I don’t want to be alone.
You drink enough beer to clear the sound from your mind, three days and three nights of screaming and machinery. Across the table, Denji laughs like a human, but you've smelled the blood and gasoline. It lingers in your bathtub where you used to feel clean and now you can only think of viscera.
You drink enough beer that you can't even stand and Makima and Power help you home. He isn't with you.
Tonight, you can't even take off your shoes and Makima is the one to undress you. It feels like you're still as old as the day you met her, maybe even younger. If it were any other night, you might have dreamt she stayed, held you a little longer and brushed your hair down from its post-ponytail slick. She sang you a song once, a song you hum to yourself as your eyes begin to close.
Makima leaves, and she carries your heart with her.
It's afternoon before you see him again. Denji returns slinking behind Himeno, and you wonder to yourself if he smokes cigarettes now. You recognize the stench of them following her, but he just smells like vomit breath. If she knew he was just a kid, maybe she wouldn’t offer him a smoke.
He and Power fight over dumplings and the soy sauce and you wonder what Makima was going to tell you about them. In the furthest seat across the table, Himeno looks like she might throw up again, and who can blame her?
There's a sound so loud it doesn't seem real. You can't quite place it, but it seems to ring a bell—ringing in your ears.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
"Taiko drums," Power says.
"A festival...?" You want to believe her. You want to believe the world is holding festivals out of season simply because it can choose to.
Bang.
Power can't love any human. It's not a flaw, not necessarily. You also couldn't love, for a while. Without love, the heart has no weaknesses. Without trust, the spirit is protected. But to be without love is to be without loyalty, and what use is a pet without loyalty?
She loves that cat, though. You see her with that stupid animal and wonder who owns who. Power would sell the world for that cat and that damn cat wouldn’t bat an eye at a world without her.
You wonder who you would sell the world for and the first woman to come to mind is surely the one. The second woman is a doubt like a migraine, jabbing at the back of your eye.
You sit in the hospital bed with your knees pulled to your chest. It’s the turning point of the performance—it’s your call to action, dear Aki—and here you sit, withering away, crumbling under pressure. Here, you can only think about her and how you never really loved her. She was tasteless and crude, but she was your mentor, your partner. Why didn’t you feel even the smallest bit of compassion? What’s so inhuman about you?
You can feel the cracks starting to form in the palms of your hands.
It’s a slow healing process.
Your table is set for three with American takeaway. Power’s taken a liking to greasy food, apparently. At least she eats her vegetables in condiment form. You still can’t eat much, but you force a few fries down and smile as Denji tries to figure out how to eat chicken wings. The two of them decimate what food you bought and there’s nothing but boxes left to clean, so he takes care of it for you.
This feels like something you knew. This feels like something you had, once.
You wrap your hands around yourself in the bath. Maybe you could sink deeper into the warmth if you just gave into the impulse. In the grout between the tiles and the screws in the faucet, you can see a rust-red residue.
You grimace and pretend you’re back in the womb.
A sea of blood surrounds you, fills your lungs so you’re almost weightless within the liquid. Drifting in front of you is family—they’re floating, warm and weightless too. If you open your eyes, you’ll leave them.
Someone grabs you some time later, wrapping her hands around your chest and lifting you out of the water. You open your eyes and see Power kneeling over you.
“You aren’t dead, are you?” She asks you with a quivering voice.
“I was only dreaming.”
Easy revenge.
Yeah, right.
The future sits in your right eye. It feels lighter than it should; for some reason, you expected all of your choices and consequences to weigh more. When you blink now, it sounds like the flapping of wings. Perhaps your own future is written in blood and taped to the foot of a hawk.
Somehow, you never foresaw yourself surrounded by devils. Two in your home, one in your eye, and one right by your side, just out of reach.
Is it tempting to reach out and grab the angel’s arm for a second? Do you think about ending your life the peaceful way?
Of course you don’t—you’re going to live for as long as you have left, every last minute of those two years. Then, you’ll lie down and take your horrible death.
And what of the angel himself, who so dearly wants to die? He’s a sadist, too. Of all the devils, you’d expect him to be kind, but that would be so, so wrong. The quintessential angel is anything but gentle, existing only as a mere instrument of God’s will. Angels are impartial machines of violence and action. He’s certainly one of the better ones on this side of humanity, all things considered. You need devils to kill devils. What has this world come to?
It’s fine by you, as long as he doesn’t have to crash in your apartment too.
One year and ten months.
His hands were so cold. Even the feathers rustling across your face were devoid of heat as you held him.
Is this another stray you’ve learned to care for? He’s certainly much easier to be around than the other two, even if you can never get too close. Even so, you find yourself wondering if it would really be so bad, to slip away with the simple touch of another being.
But really, how much more of your life are you willing to sacrifice for pathetic little Angel?
The cracks have spread to your shoulders now.
What do you believe in, Aki?
You filled that blank with Christian when you submitted your paperwork, but it’s been so long since you prayed that God has surely forgotten your voice. Is it right to still call yourself what you were raised to be, even though you can never crack open that book knowing the emptiness of ‘beyond?’ Hell is a truth, devils are a half truth, but what is the point if there is no heaven?
That’s not a Christian line of thinking, you know. People get so caught up on heaven and hell that they forget about the world as it is before them. Whether or not there is an Abrahamic God, people will never do the selfless thing for a selfless reason. It’s always about their own chance at a happy afterlife. That’s why religion doesn’t work how it’s supposed to. You’ve always known that.
So what do you believe in?
To you, the closest thing to divinity is…well, it’s love. The realization started with those two in your apartment and ended with your new partner. Love is shouldering Denji’s weight as he limps out of a fight, it’s tying Power’s shoes for her even though she’s much too old for it, it’s sitting quietly on a park bench with death itself and being content with not speaking a word. Love is stopping to bring flowers to Himeno’s grave every Sunday as a new type of worship. Love is everything you’ve ever felt for Makima.
You know you love them because you couldn’t stand to lose them.
Christianity’s supposed to be about love, isn’t it?
That’s good enough for now.