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His mother told him he was born in fire. That lightning clung to the air and set the sky ablaze. She said even the dogs by her feet lay quiet and let him break the silence with his first, aching breath.
His mother, when she was whole and loving, when her hand still held his in the shadow of his father, told him she would keep him warm.
The last time he visits her grave, he brings his own flames.
He asked to go alone, and so Aki comes with him. It will take two to carry, he says, and together they bid Power goodbye at the door.
Aki prefers silence, and Denji would rather drown out everything with music he will not listen to nor try to, so they sit in a medium of stilted conversation.
Aki tells him of his day and the groceries he stopped for on the way home. He tells Denji there’s construction on 6th that made traffic unbearable and that he wishes he walked home, stuffed grocery bags and all. He doesn’t tell Denji everything, but he has not yet scrubbed all the blood from beneath his fingernails, and Denji can’t say for certain it was an accident. When Aki catches him staring at the crimson trapped beneath his skin, he doesn’t hide it, and this is how they talk about it.
The devils Aki hoards don’t live under his chest, they are not writ in his skin the way Denji’s are, but they haunt him all the same. He doesn’t know how they hurt and tear, just that they do, and Denji wishes he could offer solace that soothes, the way Aki has for him, time and time again. Even when he didn’t deserve it. Especially then.
Aki’s car is old and cherished, and it rattles down familiar, bare-boned roads. It jolts to a stop at the bottom of Senji mountain, Aki’s white-knuckled grip on the gear shift holding them still. This is as far as it will take them. Even Aki’s car, barred of any living flesh to know fear, knows not to wander close.
Winding trails, overgrown from disuse, beckon them closer. Though his footprints have long since eroded, Denji can’t stop himself from searching for them. He was here once before. The scars he wears tell him so, but to see no signs of his existence but the ones etched in sorrow weaken his already unsteady steps further. He left nothing but his cracked and crying heart, but the mountain holds no memory of him.
They make new prints in the melting snow.
Denji is not dressed for the cold. He has lived in it long enough that the winter wind on his bare arms feels more like a caress. It is Aki, wrapped to the neck in thick wool, who shivers.
Denji offers him a pair of gloves from his pocket.
“Jesus, kid, no. You keep them,” he says. “I’m getting cold just looking at you.” Aki calls him that often. Kid. Denji doesn’t think he notices. He says it gently, too. Says it the way he says family or snow or Denji. He isn’t sure how to hold it, this kindness Aki offers him so willingly. He wants, so badly he trembles with it, to press it into his chest and let it warm his cold, cold bones. But nothing is given for free, and Denji can’t afford something so lovely, so he lets Aki’s kindness tumble between them and be buried in the falling snow.
“You’re still driving home if your fingers fall off,” Denji says, but he tucks the gloves back where they came from. He trusts Aki to know his own limits. Trusts himself to watch for the cracks anyway.
“I wouldn’t let you drive my car if both my arms fell off,” he says, and stops at the divergence in the path. He stands on the side of Denji’s blinded eye, but his gaze is palpable. Today Denji is given the reins.
He takes them right, because it is longer. Both lead back—and it is always back and never home—but he needs a bit more time.
“I don’t think you’d have a choice,” Denji says, and he pushes through the thick brush of leaves and lets the heavy branches swing back on Aki. Beneath Aki’s curses he continues, “I could take you with no arms.”
“You could try,” Aki says, and picks a stray needle out of his hair, missing three more. Denji doesn’t tell him. He has always loved the evergreens that dot the mountain. They linger year-round. They stay, bright and full, through sweltering summers unto frigid winters.
He stops them atop a plateau. It’s a false summit; the real danger hides like a tiger in the grass just beyond.
“We don’t have to, if—,” Aki starts and does not finish. If it is too hard, if the past hangs shadows too dark for Denji to see through. And it is, it does, but Denji is tired, so he pushes onward on knocking knees. Aki steadies him with a hand on his back.
They climb higher, over rocks that threaten to crumble and roots that cling and hold their weight as they pull themselves up. It had not always been this difficult, coming back, but change has washed itself over Denji’s mountain in tidal waves. Earthquakes and landslides erased the paths Denji could follow by sightless touch, and now they must scale the earth like outsiders.
His house is a little more than a shack, weary and drooping now that Denji is not there to care for it. He had tried, in the beginning, to bring it color. He planted stolen petunias and dianthuses seeds from the weekend markets he wandered through.
His flowers were annuals, and they were dead before their second spring. Denji didn’t know then why they had died. He thought they might be able to feel his father’s malice and ran from the mountain where Denji could not. But that was a child’s thought. Now he is sure if they could sense the venom in his father, they never would have taken root.
He never buried his father. He thinks he should feel guilty. He toys with the thought for a moment longer than his father deserved, and decides a pyre suited him fine. Devils must be burned once for each cardinal sin committed, to ensure they don’t come back. Denji lit and lit the bones of his father seven times.
He thinks of his father, dead without a soul to mourn him, and wishes tears did not prick at his eyes. Hasn’t he taken enough of him? Must he take his sorrow and the little love he has left to give, too? Denji wishes he had a father worth crying for; he wishes he did not hate himself for not missing him. He came back when he heard of his father’s death, was that not enough?
Sometimes he wishes he was the one to kill him, and thunder crackles in his veins.
Sometimes he thinks he was, and the blood on his hands cracks his heart clean open.
Denji takes a deep breath, and his lungs fill with mountain cold and the ghost of his father’s ashes.
The air beside him shifts. Not everything is like before, he thinks. Before he was scared. Of the creak of the floorboards, of his father’s voice, his hands, his cigarettes, his wicked, wicked vices that he pushed on Denji.
Now he is older than he ever thought he’d be. Now the man standing next to him wraps his strong arm around Denji’s shoulders and not his neck. Now Denji fans the fire his mother gave him and is thankful it kept him alive.
“She’s over here,” Denji says, because they did bury his mother. Him and his father.
Denji cannot bear to crack open her dirt, so Aki kneels next to him in the mud and does it for him. The blood under his nails mixes with earth and he digs a hole only deep enough to hold the small iron cross Denji hands him. It leaves his hand feather light and blazing cold when Aki takes it.
“My mom gave it to me,” Denji tells him, though he’s sure he knows. This, the shack and the mountain and the shallow, shallow new grave, was Aki’s idea. He tells him again anyway because Aki’s warmth invites confession.
“She didn’t believe in God, neither of them did, but she baptized me when I was born. She never was, though," Denji says. "Did you know that if heaven is real, if God does exist and he cares enough to sort us after we die, we wouldn't be together? I wonder if she knew that.” Denji thinks she did. Because although his memories of his mother are golden-warm, although she never raised a hand to him except to hold him tighter, she still married his father. She still stayed, even when Denji begged her to leave.
It was his father who carved into his skin and did not stop come pleas or racking tears, but his mother still slept beside him after it all, and somehow, he hates her the most.
They bury the cross with his mother. Him and Aki.
It is Aki who leads them back down the mountain. He walks with purpose but little direction, and soon they stand before sheets of glistening white.
“My family was from the north,” Aki says, and it is so odd to hear him speak of his family that Denji falls silent beside him. “And it snowed often. But the snow’s different up here. It’s—”
“Quieter?” Denji asks.
Aki breathes a dragon’s breath between them. “Yeah. It’s like the world doesn’t exist beyond this little plot of land.”
“No world means no school,” Denji says. “I’m gonna sleep in ‘til four.”
“School’s on a different plane of reality. It’s still there,” Aki says. He walks to the center of the clearing, his footsteps crunching the snow like fallen leaves. Denji follows behind, walking in his prints.
“I always wondered how anything survives in a place like this,” he says. “It’s so cold, and everything but the trees are shriveled and dead.”
“Some of the animals have evoked to live in the mountains,” Denji says.
Aki corrects, “evolved,” and then lets Denji continue.
“So, they’re used to it,” he says. “They couldn’t live anywhere else. Put a snow bunny in the desert and it’ll die.” He tried to bring a market mouse back with him, once. It was spring, and frost still painted itself on their windowsill and across the packed dirt peeking through the floorboards. He slept curled around it, the haggard blanket enough for Denji. It died while he slept, and Denji woke to a stiff body cocooned in his hands.
“Still,” Aki says. “Just because they’ve adapted to it, doesn’t mean it was easy. Nothing lives out here because it wants to.”
Denji bends down and lays his hands across the snow. It’s been a while since it’s fallen; the snow is rough and icy beneath his fingers, catching on his skin when he runs his hands over it.
“Don’t think the animals had much choice, Aki. Bet they’re just glad they found a way to live at all.” Sometime between the car ride and finding Denji’s house Aki’s hair has fallen out of its elastic, and he shakes it out of his dark, dark eyes.
“Can’t there be a middle ground?” he asks. His head is tilted towards the white sky. It’s going to snow again soon. “Between being alive and being content?”
“Dunno,” Denji says. He scoops snow so cold it burns his hands hot. He molds it into a loose ball. “I’ve never seen a mountain bird cry, so they can’t be that sad.”
“I’ve never seen you cry before,” Aki says. “And the snow carved your heart out.”
“Wasn’t the snow,” Denji says. “It was the cold.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?” he asks. Aki’s still not looking at him. Denji doesn’t think he’s seeing the sky either. Not really.
But Denji shakes his head. “My dad was cold,” he says. “My mom was so hot it felt cold. Like when you wash the dishes but your water heater’s going so it comes out scalding and you know it’s burning your hands cause they’re red and steaming but you just can’t feel anything anymore. They were so cold they made me forget what it was like to be warm.
“But snow’s never done that,” Denji says. “The snow just made me want to lie under it and fall asleep.”
“That’s dangerous, too,” Aki says.
Denji laughs into the quiet brought by the snow. “Snow’s not dangerous, Aki.” And to prove it he sends the ball crafted by his own hands into the weeping face of his brother.
It shatters on impact, a hundred crystalized tears springing to life. For a moment Denji thinks he’s going to crumple under the weight of guilty memories, but then Aki turns, finally finally, to face Denji, and there is a smile buried beneath it all.
“It’s about to be,” he threatens, and dives into the snow to make a ball of his own. Under the winter cold, Aki’s tears dry.
They fight until the sun hangs low in the sky, until they are both soaked to their marrow, until they are falling over each other in laughter, struggling to catch a breath not riddled with mirth.
Denji catches his smile and fans it into a grin. “Aki,” he says. “I don’t mind the snow.” Not when I have someone to warm me. “But I want to get off this damn mountain before the wolves come out.” I want to go home, and Aki leads him the rest of the way down.
They do not talk on the ride back, but the car is not silent. Aki plays low, crooning music that, even through the haze brought by heated, recycled air and the too-big jacket thrown over him, Denji can hear him sing to. He misses more notes than he hits, more enthused than talented, but Denji taps his foot along anyway.
They stop for food in the middle of dry roads and waning sunlight.
Aki waits for the waitress to drop a stack of pancakes between them before he speaks. “Your father,” he starts, and this time Denji lets him finish. He fills his mouth with warm, golden dough and licks heavy syrup from his fingers while Aki mulls his words. He speaks to Denji so carefully sometimes. As though he’s letting his thoughts grow and mature before he talks. Denji would accept them in any way they came.
“He’s dead, you’re sure of it?” He doesn’t ask if Denji killed him. He also doesn’t say sorry, because Aki is detached enough not to be. He’s lucky enough to have a father who is easy to miss.
“Pretty sure,” Denji says. “Saw his body ‘n everything.”
Aki sits back in his seat. “Good,” he says, and picks up a fork to join Denji. “Good.” And though Denji is not brave enough to say it, he thinks so, too. It is getting easier to think like this. To hate not only his father’s actions but the man, too. Aki has told him not to separate them before.
He has encouraged the heat that builds when Denji thinks of his parents, though now it is fueled by something softer, something kinder. Something a little like the warmth that settles deep in his belly when Aki smiles or Power’s laughter chimes throughout their apartment. Aki lets his fire blaze and flare but never, not once, has he let it burn him.
If Aki wilts in the cold, then Denji thinks he festers in flames, and he promises himself he’ll share this heat. But it is not so bad, he thinks, watching Aki cut neatly into his stack and set aside the rest for when Denji’s stomach settles. This heat is not the kind that kills. It blisters but never boils. It has kept him alive before, and Denji thinks it is enough to warm the frozen heart he reclaimed from the mountainside.