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I. VILE WOMAN, EAT YOUR HEART
There's blood in the water, and blood on the sand. Watch: a human, a devil, and the gore between them.
Makima pulls them apart at her feet, those beautiful fingers digging into Angel’s chest first, through the soft skin above the belly. Her nails brush his guts as she brings his insides to his outsides. The ocean tide washes over his face, slack with obedience, as his hair blooms underwater like a wound over his wings lying half-buried in the wet sand.
She goes into Aki second- bend at the waist, slide her hand under his skin like it’s a glove or a shirt, a wet piece of fabric instead of fat and muscle and skin. Her hair swings in the breeze, mesmerizing and ominous, almost a pendulum.
Makima rips apart his ribcage, turns it open, grips the pulsing, jerking livewire of his intestines as he lies, similarly pale and slack as Angel. Smiles faintly with her lovely mouth as she tears the organs apart, into halves and then chunks. Repeats the process with the Angel Devil’s, those concentric hypnotic-wheel eyes catching on his face as he blinks.
Blood pours. She proceeds.
Makima, of Control, of Perfection, puts the raw, sinuous, shitflecked chunks of intestine into her mouth and swallows. She doesn’t chew, for she doesn’t need to, for she never will need to, as her teeth are only there for show, and her eyes are the worst thing about her.
Everything is perfect. She is perfect. They become her, the Gun becomes him, and the tide swallows everything alive.
-
II. DREAMSCAPE OF THE DAMNED
They meet again in Hell. It's a surprisingly quiet affair.
Angel looks ragged and washed out in the long, quiet stillness of the nettled field. The doors above his head click and rattle, drip liquid and bones onto the withered grass. He’s standing next to a corpse, and the corpse has no eyes.
“Aki.” He says. His auburn hair falls around his face like blood, like intestines, like gore, like something sick and foul. The line of his mouth is so flat that it could collapse into itself like a black hole.
The corpse stirs, coughs. It’s not a corpse anymore, it's a man, and when he moves his head he reveals that he does have eyes, judgmental and blue. His tattered suit jacket and shirt hang in threads around his arms. “Denji,” he murmurs. “Power.”
Pause. And then: “Angel.”
The devil crouches down, touches the dark ends of the human’s messy, unbound hair very lightly. “She ate us, Aki.”
Aki. Aki. Aki, he says. Mouth molded around the ‘ah,’ tongue and teeth clicking over the ‘ck’, lips pulling back to fit around the ‘ee’. Sonorous. Bland. The sound of something biblical.
But that biblical voice is as flat as his mouth, as flat as a black hole, as flat as the sky, and so Angel says nothing else.
Aki fills the silence. “Are we in Hell?” It’s borderline rhetorical. He already knows the answer, remembers the doors and the fields. He just hopes that at least this time he gets to keep both of his arms.
Angel tilts his head back to look impassively at the wisps of cloud above them. The cut of his throat is stark in the white light. “I suppose. Maybe we’re in her stomach. Maybe we could see her heart if we tried.”
Aki looks at the doors as well, tries to imagine them as veins and arteries and flesh, the grass under them membranes, the clouds rolling across the sky under the doors acidic gas. He closes his eyes. The smell of sulfur is giving him a headache, a terrible one, an awful pounding at his temples. “Don’t be gross.”
Angel shoots him a put-out look which he cannot see, as his eyes are closed. A lull. Aki: “Jesus, it reeks. What the hell is that?”
“Probably rotting flesh.” So unsurprised, unimpressed.
Angel’s brought his knees to his cheek, absently picking at the grass by his water-logged sneaker. He smells like salt and iron and the heavy dampness of half-dried clothes. He doesn’t say anything more, and Aki feels enough like dogshit that he can’t find anything else to say, and so they don’t talk, long enough for it to vibrate.
Finally, Aki reaches up, snags a fingertip under the knot of Angel’s rumpled, half-undone tie, and pulls him forward.
“What are you doing?” Angel asks, almost sounding surprised. He leans forward until his face hovers parallel over Aki’s, hair fluttering over the human’s face, across his nose, down his cheeks, like blood and like intestine and like gore. Something sick and foul.
Aki lets his grip on the tie slacken, before he brings it to the very edge of Angel’s jaw, not quite touching. He doesn’t say anything.
“I see,” Angel says in response to his silence. Do you? Aki wants to ask. Do you really? I want to tell you that I wish you were the one who ate at me instead. That I wish you were the one who ate all of me.
But the words get stuck under the swell of emotion in the back of throat, where he could say nothing, taste nothing, be nothing except for that feeling. And he’s so tired, really, past the bone and into the nerves, his fingers still numb from that godawful snowball fight, Denji’s screwed up, snotty face still stuck in afterimages behind his eyes. Aki just wants it to be over with.
And so it goes like this, will go like this, has always gone like this: human nature is to long for, to want. To always be searching for something or someone to fill that specific gap in your heart. And Aki’s been wanting for a long time, because that’s the way the mind and soul work. See something, want something, acquire something, satisfaction. Rinse and repeat. But there has been no acquisition, no satisfaction, at least until now- where the knife’s edge of the ‘never touch’ that had always been a deterrent, because Aki didn’t have much life left to give as a sacrifice and Angel unwilling even if he had, now has worn away into something soft and pliable in death.
He feels no pang of anticipation, no remorse when he lets his fingers touch the skin of Angel’s jaw. His heart is as steady as a rock.
III. THESE ROILING FIELDS
Freeze frame; record scratch. The landscape shifts, stretches, pulls apart like dough under their bodies, blood welling from the ground like a giant beading wound until it reaches ankle-height, uncomfortably warm. The sky is no longer a sky, and yet the doors are still there, but all of them are gaping and swinging, the blackness beyond them greasy, repulsive. A wind starts to blow, faintly, still carrying the smell of putrid flesh. The two of them don’t move from their positions on the ground.
Angel’s coin-flash eyes gleam like an animal’s in the hellish light. Carefully, Aki drags his fingers from his jaw to cheekbone, cheekbone to nose, nose to under-eye, under-eye to mouth. Feels the impression of teeth under his fingers, shudders when Angel opens his mouth and bites down, none too gently, onto his pointer. Blood pearls around the white cut of his right canine.
“Don’t stick your hand where it doesn’t belong,” he murmurs around the finger between his teeth. Aki’s blood turns them pink.
“I’ll stick my hand where I want to,” Aki croaks back, lets the rest of his hand mold loosely around Angel’s chin. The skin of his cheeks is soft and firm, feminine, but he looks all-devil under the reflected red of the viscous blood beneath them, that flimsy human mask of a meatsuit wearing thin in the hot light.
-
And so it shows, devil in angel in devil, envelopes those wings in violence like an embrace, cuts though that halo with love in Its mouth.
It; the capital I, the I in I/myself, the human I, the selfish I, the waiting I, because what is it that corrupts the biblical if not mankind? He who crucifies? He who perverts? And who is the most human of all if not Aki Hayakawa, the man who spews hate instead of arterial lifeblood, who traded an eye for a curse and an arm for a rifle, gave away his body and picked at his heart, and who never got to finish his, selfish, goal?
Selfishness, that’s it. The crux of the matter. It lingers on the surface of everything, like a disease, like gum on a shoe, like sand in hair: really, it’s the backbone of human order as a whole. But here, in Hell, where the ground is blood and the sky is wrong, where does selfishness insert itself? Where is the selfishness in suffering? Of torment?
It’s been said that to suffer is the most selfless act of all, to accept pain instead of affliction upon others. Perhaps Aki was sent here with a lesson to be learned, with Angel along to simply return to the womb.
-
There’s a pause, and then Angel’s pulling back and standing up, his hair whipping in the increasingly brutal winds, suit flapping against his slight frame. He’s smeared with blood- from the ground, from Aki. It’s sopping at his knees, tangling the ends of his hair, spattering against the white of his shirt, the white of his wings. Peeking through the divots of his teeth, turning them pinkish. That half-animal energy has receded.
The blood is rising, and the wind is howling, and everything is wrong in the world. But they’re here, and they’re together, so they’ll move forward.
Aki climbs to his feet, then looks down at his shoes impassively. The blood-soaked back of his shirt is rapidly cooling in the wind, and the fabric clings to every crevice and bump on his skin, intimate like a lover. The heat has engulfed his legs up to the ankle, his feet warm and sticky. It squelches as he moves. “Gross,” he says, and then they set on towards the smear in the horizon.
IV. I HATE EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU
Angel had never been one for affection, for touch, for anything gentle and sweet. He had recently begun to view love as something almost parasitic, pathetic in its longing for connection.
When he’d first been brought to the bureau, he’d been assigned to a buddy that had a wife whom he loved very much and a mouth that refused to stop talking. “Sometimes,” the man had said, always said, never stopping even as his teeth were gnashing through an overstuffed sandwich and his feet were resting on the chipped lip of their shared shitty office desk. “I wanna crawl inside her. Not in a fetish-y way, but in a ‘I always wanna be with you’ sorta way, you get me?”
Angel had swallowed the rice trapped under his chopsticks. He inspected the stray grains clinging to the cheap wood for a long time before scraping them off with his teeth. No amount of food could fill the hole inside of himself, the one that was surrounded by his shape and form, that yawning hunger. Some days it felt like there was nothing else inside of him except for the feeling, the emptiness. He didn’t have the space for another person.
“No. I don’t think I do.”
The idea of loving someone so much that you want to become one with them, them loving you enough to allow it, under the skin and the bones- it feels like a perversion. Of what, Angel’s not exactly sure. Maybe the idea of love in general. It feels like something not meant to be felt as gross and ugly as an invasion, or a subsumption. Angel looks at Aki. Aki does not look at him.
Aki, hair whipping around his face. Aki, those gunsteel eyes. Aki, his hand in his. It’s so odd to be in what is essentially your womb with your closest friend. Angel would not quite call what he feels for Aki love, because love is perversive, but it is perhaps affection.
That buddy of his had eventually died, eaten up by the Needle Devil, and Angel remembered having reached his hand in the mangled mess that used to be a body, watched as his hand twisted and tore under the huge, sharp mass of the hellish corpse, watched as he had taken the man’s wet, mangled liver and tore a chunk off with his teeth. Back then, he had been a little more scrambled up, more devil than he used to be. A chain around his heart, attached to someone who liked to tug at it. Angel had observed at the pulp that used to be his buddy as he chewed thoughtfully, blood smeared from his ruined hand and from the ruined liver, and thought about the wife.
He wondered if she would cry. He wondered exactly how her face would scrunch up, how her chin would tremble, how her hands would come to cup her mouth and how she would drop to her knees. He had tried to mimic the way he imagined her face would crumple, but couldn’t quite manage. He thought about what she might say if she knew he had eaten her late husband’s liver. You sick, sick thing. Maybe I was the one meant for him to crawl into , he’d thought humorously, even though he’s always hated seeing his buddies die.
Angel had wiped the leaking blood from his wounded hand on the sidewalk as he stood from his crouch, and then left. He still thinks of the wife from time to time, that pretty brown-haired woman from the photos he’d been shown, and wonders how she is. He thinks of her again as he and Aki work their way through Hell. Maybe he’s exactly where she had expected him to be, doing exactly what she had expected him to do.
V. TEETH AND SPIT
Eventually, as all things do, the blood and wind came to an end. In the latter half of their trek, creatures start to form under their feet. It was at first just organs like guts, eyes, hearts, until full limbs and bodies appeared so thick it was a struggle to get through at all.
And yet, Aki forged on: eyes focused on the end of all the blood, hand clasped firmly against Angel’s. His skin was cold from the wind, and clammy- but his fingers were strong and sure, and he did not tremor at all. Angel let himself be tugged forward with his eyes trained impassively on the bodies below him. Devils.
They were monstrous, grotesque like not many things are. He watched as the carcasses crumpled beneath his ratty sneakers, concepts that ranged between young and old, powerful and weak. Sinkhole and Blade and Pig and Chemical and Eggs. Sex and Trout. Asbestos and Teeth. Bone and Ketchup and Love. Their skin was so soft and weak it sank immediately beneath his meager weight, withering out into the blood like ink in water. Flies and maggots clung to his shoes and the bottom of his pants like gum, and Angel absently picked them off and ate them. Food is food is food. The hole inside of him hungers like a beast.
Aki thunders on. They don’t speak. Angel looks at the back of Aki’s head, the matted swing of his loose hair that just brushes his shoulders, the stiff posture of his back, the unkind jut of his shoulder blades through his blood-soaked shirt. Aki does not look back at him, not once, but holds his hand as tightly and as kindly as a mother guiding her child through a crowded station.
The comparison makes Angel think, a little amusedly, of Aki’s wayward charges. So insanely loud. Fighting till they were dead, getting up like it made them alive. Aki had mentioned buying leashes more than once, and threatened to kill them at least twice a day, but he seemed really fond of them. They made his eyes brighter than usual.
“Aki,” he said, flat. They were closer to the end than ever before. “Do you miss them?”
Aki still didn’t look back when he answered, a long pause in between as he seemed to think something through. “Of course. More than anything.”
-
The end was simply Darkness. From one liquid to another, it spilled like oil in water, corruptive. Before the threshold, they stopped, looked at one another. Their hands were still clasped, almost chaste. “I can’t go in there again,” Aki said.
“We’ll suffer,” Angel agreed. "I hate pain." There was silence. The void watched them like a waiting animal. More silence. It went on for quite some time, long enough for anyone else to become uncomfortable. But not them.
“I think that, somewhere inside me, I love you,” Angel said plainly. He had come to a realization, somewhere along their trek. Maybe it wasn't love that was perversive, but him. Maybe it was all he would ever be. His voice was all wrong for the words, unromantic, bored and almost annoyed– and yet, the sight of him still hurt, so beautiful even through the blood.
Aki watched him, silently. He didn't smile, but his eyes were very fond. “You suck at confessions,” he said. “You know I love you too.”
He wordlessly cupped Angel’s cheek, pushing their foreheads together. The tips of their noses bumped together, smushed. Gunsteel met coinflash.
They met somewhere in the middle, mouths pushing against each other, sharp and hot and wet. They did not move for some time, simply pressed against each other, clothes whipping in the wind, blood around their ankles, darkness before them. Their faces met together again, bodies so close they were practically one thing, a single terrible entity.
Their kisses tasted like blood, like rot, like goodbye. It was goodbye. “Hell Devil,” Angel said, slightly breathless. His eyes moved across Aki’s face, like he wanted to memorize it, burn it into his brain. The ever present hunger within him is gone, like it was never there. Finally content.
“I’ll give you all of me. Take Aki Hayakawa back.” He meets Aki’s eyes, resigned, and smiles very faintly. “Sorry.”
And thus, the sword pierces, the hand descends, and Aki Hayakawa wakes up in a dumpster, seven blocks from his ruined apartment. It is not the first time he cries for someone, and it will not be the last.