Work Text:
23 years 5 months 13 days 8 hours and 28 minutes into his life, Angel’s first love dies.
He's baking a pie for her— rhubarb, her favorite— when his childhood sweetheart collapses. A finger of lightning strikes their house and overloads their circuits, her charger sparks from its loose hold in the outlet, and her still-charging phone explodes. Angel drops his pie before it can even go into the oven and places his hand on her cheek, brown skin ashy and marred by the recent shock. He knows exactly what he’s doing. When she alives again, she knows exactly what he’s doing too.
“I don’t want this if someone else is going to die,” she tells him, and then leans in to give him one last kiss before she goes cold forever.
One touch and Angel can bring the dead back to life. Two touches and they’re dead. If they’re not dead again within one minute of being alive again, someone else goes in their place.
2 years 8 months 22 days 11 hours and 15 minutes after his girlfriend dies again, Angel alives-again his second and last love.
He’s taking the day’s trash out to the dumpster behind the shop when there’s a gunshot from the alley over. Angel, who has never heard a gunshot before in his life and never thought he would either, drops his trash all over the ground. As he stares at the peach pits and plastic forks in shock, footsteps sound clear as day from the same place. A murder if he’s ever heard one. Curiosity gets the better of him.
He leaves the trash spilled all over the concrete and his store still unlocked and books it to the next alley, only to trip and eat shit on entry.
“What the fuck,” Angel hears, and upon pulling his face off the pavement, sees a very handsome corpse. “What just happened?” The corpse swings its head around frantically, dark bangs falling into its shockingly blue eyes. It’s only when it notices Angel staring at the gaping bullet-hole bleeding a waterfall down its chest that it realizes. “Oh. Oh.”
“Sorry about this,” Angel says, and goes to touch it again, on the bruised temple that Angel had accidentally tripped over and where he alived-again. He should start wearing longer socks.
The corpse flinches back.
“Did you kill me?”
“No.” Angel frowns, leaning over to touch the corpse again at the same time that it moves further away. It has to be nearing a minute now. That’s not good.
“If you didn’t— were you the one who brought me back?”
“Yep. Hold still.”
“What are you doing?”
That’s when the corpse realizes exactly what’s happening, electric eyes going wide, stumbling to its feet. It was probably quite smart in its first life.
“You only have a few seconds left,” Angel tells it, getting to his feet too. “Just hold still, this won’t hurt.”
“No— no!” This time it’s Angel’s turn to flinch back, at the strength of the yell. “Not yet, I can’t die yet.” The corpse stumbles back into a wall, dribbling blood all over its pants and shoes. Angel screws up his nose at the idea of having to wade through the red puddle to touch it. “I have two kids to look after, what are they going to do? Shit. Shit! Fuck, I’m so stupid, I should’ve put some money aside. You can’t kill me.”
“It’s not killing if I’m the one who alived you again in the first place,” Angel points out, and then leaps. He makes it over the puddle and rams straight into the corpse with barely a few seconds left to spare— or would, if it didn’t duck out of the way.
For the second time in one minute, Angel eats shit.
For the first time in his life, Angel lets a human stay alive again, and someone else dies in their place.
Across the street, a convenience store explodes into a corona of flames, lighting up the night around it. Despite the close quarters, none of the other buildings around it catch a whiff of flame. The only person who dies that night is a 43 year old highschool teacher who went in to grab a pack of cigs. The underage worker on night shift, who briefly stepped out to check out the earlier gunshot sounds, watches the fire from so close outside that the heat makes her sweat through her apron. The flames singe the edges of her skirt. It’s a good thing she went home before her shift to change out of her school uniform, she thinks— that was the last thing her late mother bought her before she died—otherwise that would be ruined instead.
Back on his side of the street, Angel returns to his store and disposes of the peach pits and plastic forks properly, wondering what the fuck he’s supposed to do now.
Two days later as Angel is baking a classic apple pie, the door to his store chimes and he hears two very familiar customers. They are nightmares, but they are well-meaning nightmares.
“Hey Kobeni, where’s your boss?” Denji asks.
Before Kobeni can answer— because she could not multitask if her life depended on it— Angel yells, “In the back! I’ll take your order in a second!”
“They have chocolate pie!” Power gasps. Angel smiles to himself while he washes up because he knew Power would like that addition. He’d made it specifically hoping she’d stop by to have some. “Aki, you must get me two— no three!”
“I only promised you one,” a new voice says. Angel can’t quite place it.
“Yeah!” Denji responds. “If anyone should get two it’s me. I’m the one who just finished all my college entrance exams, not you!”
Angel comes out to the counter, kitchen doors swinging shut behind him, tossing a towel over one shoulder, and smiles. “Never thought I’d see the day when you willingly took exams. Did you apply for that one school your boyfriend’s going—” And that’s when Angel locks eyes with the person he alived again.
“He’s not my fucking boyfriend,” Denji complains, but the tea kettle-whine of him and Power arguing about his friend-boyfriend-whatever all fades into the background. All Angel can hear right now is his own blood rushing in his ears. And the alive-again man’s frail voice.
“Denji,” the man says, sounding choked. “Power. We have to go, something just came up— It’s urgent we— I’ll buy you pie from some other place—”
“No,” Angel interjects, and the conversation and the barkery as a whole all come rushing back to him. “You’ll get your pie here. What’ll it be?”
“Chocolate pie!” Power yells, pumping her fists in the air.
Denji falters. “Strawberry— no wait, coconut cream? Uhhh...”
While Denji thinks, Angel stares down the man who should be dead and watches him break. The lights cast a sheen of sweat onto his forehead. His expression is emotionally constipated. The man shuffles forward and asks, not very discreetly, if he can talk to Angel. Even though he is already talking to Angel, Angel decides to be magnanimous and grant him a private audience, because Angel is kind like that. Angel is also weak to handsome men.
“So,” He starts, sitting on one of the rare spots of counter in his kitchen not covered by flour or fruit. “What did you want to talk about, Mr. Dead Man Walking?”
The man winces. “It’s Aki. Hayakawa Aki.”
“Aki.” The name is short and sweet on Angel’s tongue. Tastes like a blackberry pie. “I’m Angel.”
“Angel.” The name is bewildered on Aki’s tongue. Sounds like how persimmons feel. “Is that some sort of joke? An angel brought me back to life?”
Angel sometimes wonders if his mother knew what she was doing when she named him that on her deathbed, alive again then not in childbirth. If she knew how many jokes it would cost him on his dead girlfriend’s laugh and this alive-again man’s confusion. “It’s not a joke.”
There’s a moment of painfully awkward silence that Angel breaks with a, “So, those are the kids you were talking about? I pictured some little toddlers you were the father of, not those menaces. Are you even old enough to be anything to them?”
“I’m 23,” Aki says, less like a defense and more like he’s buying time. “And I’m not their dad, obviously. I’m their brother.”
“Cool,” Angel says. He does not care. “You killed a man.”
Aki’s face blanches. It’s like he drains of blood, except he’s not really alive, so Angel’s not sure if he even has any blood anymore to drain, or if all that left out the bullet-hole in his chest. Angel continues:
“Two nights ago. If I alive someone again for longer than a minute, then someone else dies in their place. That’s why I was trying to touch you again, before you ran away.”
“Fuck,” Aki says. He’s quiet for a very long moment, staring down. Not at his hands, but at his torso. Like he can see the bloody wound that’s probably still under his sweater. “Who died?”
Angel recounts what he heard on the news today morning. “Some high school teacher. Luckily for you, he was a freak who was ‘having relations’ with one of his students anyway. At least you killed someone who deserved to die.”
Another long moment of silence. Then, Aki finally looks up to meet Angel’s eyes. “You think I deserved to die too.”
Angel shrugs. “I guess not. I’m still trying to decide if you deserve to live, though.”
Aki runs one hand through his hair, pushing the shaggy black strands out of his eyes. “It’s already done. The other guy won’t come back if you kill me again— will he?” Angel shakes his head. Maybe this power wouldn’t be that big of an issue if it really did work like that. “So let me live. Help me figure out who tried to kill me instead.”
Help him— help him?
Angel, for the first time since his girlfriend died, actually laughs.
“Good luck with that,” he tells Aki. “I’ll go get your pies.”
So it turns out, Hayakawa Aki is a private investigator. People pay him to dig up how their loved ones died. It’s good money— it’s more than good. It’s big money.
Angel cares very little for material things. As a man who, at his own insistence, has not felt true happiness since his childhood sweetheart and love of 17 years died, he cares for nothing at all including himself. However, his clumsy but sweet employee Kobeni works two jobs to provide for her younger siblings and could really use a raise. All he has to do is touch someone to alive them again, and then one minute later, touch them again. Being a private investigator is good money— helping out a private investigator for half an hour every few days is even better money.
“Some asshole drove their car straight into me,” the corpse Angel alive-agained says, and Aki notes down what it remembers of the license plate.
“Any last words?” Aki asks. Angel doesn’t get why Aki always asks. It’s not like anyone’s going to hear those words except them two.
When they exit the mortuary Angel yawns, already dreading having to open up shop all by himself again. Beam is out sick today and Yoshida only works evenings after cram school lets out. Aki glances at him and offers a handkerchief.
“You have a little blood on your neck.”
Angel accepts it, careful not to touch Aki’s bare fingers. “You know you could die again if you’re careless.” Not that Angel cares much if he does.
“It’s safe through cloth, right?”
The rest of the walk back to the store is silent. Angel doesn’t think too hard about why Aki’s walking him back when there’s really no need to, until Aki sets his hand on the door over Angel’s head. Angel tugs, trying to open it. Aki holds it closed.
“I guess I'm flattered, but if you try to kabedon me you’ll die,” Angel says. He turns around as Aki quickly retracts his hand, expression stiff.
“I need you to do me a favor,” Aki says. “Please.”
As far as Angel’s concerned, he’s been doing Aki favors since he first met him, but he lets this slide. “What is it?”
Aki pulls back the lapel of his suit jacket and reveals the red stain over his heart. “I can’t ask Power or Denji,” Aki says, and Angel finally realizes his permanent stiffness is repressed pain. “Can you take the bullet out?”
20 minutes later, the sign to the shop says they’re closed for the morning and Aki’s sitting on the kitchen counter, face shining with sweat and jaw clenched tight. Dawn comes in golden through the windows. There’s confectioner’s sugar dusting the thighs of Aki’s slacks and the air smells like the blueberry pie that’s baking in the oven. Angel’s food-safe gloves are slippery with blood. His fingers are inside Aki’s chest.
“How bad is it?” Angel asks. His fingertip brushes the end of the bullet, lodged deep, and Aki moans. Long, rough. He has a nice voice.
“Fucking awful. Probably— augh, probably not as bad as if I were still alive.”
“You are alive.”
“You know what I mean.”
Angel hums lowly. This is a delicate process that requires as much concentration as laying latticework on top of filling does. Aki curses under his breath, voice catching, arms trembling, and saliva pools in Angel’s mouth as he forgets to swallow. Finally, he gets the bullet in a precarious hold between his thumb and forefinger. Aki’s hand shoots out and fists in the front of Angel’s shirt. Angel starts pulling.
“Fuck,” Aki whimpers. “Oh my god, Angel, please— please, I—”
“It’s out!” Angel drops the bullet onto the kitchen counter, throwing his hands up like he's being held at gunpoint. It rolls around in the mess of soaked paper towels, a shiny little thing, leaving a thin red trail in a semicircle. Aki gasps and groans right in his ear. Too close. The hand clenched tight in Angel’s shirt quivers weakly, knuckles knocking into his chest through the cloth. Still too close.
“Do want to die?” Angel asks, and Aki crawls back, arm hovering over his bleeding heart, legs pulling up onto the counter, trying to get away from Angel’s touch. Relief replaced by panic.
“You said you’d keep me alive,” he pants.
“I am. I just did.” Angel gestures at the mess of blood on the kitchen counters that he bakes on. He’s going to have to sanitize at least three times before he’ll feel okay selling anything he makes on those again.
“Good,” Aki says. “Good.” And then he passes out.
Aki doesn’t find him again for an entire week after that, even when Denji and Power drop by to pick up pies, presumably out of embarrassment. When he does finally show his face, it’s just to drag Angel out to the mortuary again.
“This is Arai,” Aki introduces the corpse. “I worked with him a few times when the police brought me on as a contractor. He passed away a couple nights ago while investigating the murder of a friend of mine.”
Angel watches Aki’s face. It’s surprisingly calm, for someone who just revealed all he did.
“When did your friend get murdered?”
“Four months ago.”
Still calm. Angel assumes either the friend didn’t mean much to him, or Aki is just very good at compartmentalizing.
When he touches the body Arai springs upright screaming bloody murder. Angel winces.
“Get away — what are you— you… huh? Hayakawa?”
“We don’t have much time,” Aki tells him. “Who killed you?”
“Who killed me… who… Himeno!”
“What?” Aki’s calm facade finally breaks, twisting into an expression of deep upset.
“No, her killer! He was that serial killer from the case with all the mothers, I found her notes and tracked him to his hideout and—”
“Where was the hideout?” Aki asks, and jots down what Arai lists off frantically.
“Aki,” Angel warns when there’s only a few seconds left on the clock.
Aki glances at him in irritation. “We’ll avenge the man who killed you, Arai. Did you have any other last wishes?”
“Last wishes? Um, let’s see…. Oh, that girl from the burger joint, the really clumsy one! I never told her I liked her—”
Aki glares at Angel as though his punctuality is a sin. “We didn’t get his last wish.”
“Yeah we did,” Angel says. He takes his hand away from Arai’s blue-purple neck— strangle marks. Nasty ones— and holds his fingers up to count. “Girl, clumsy, burger place, lost loves. Kobeni used to work at a burger place before my shop. I'll ask her if she knows anyone.”
Aki rolls his eyes and stuffs his notepad into his pocket. As they’re leaving the mortuary, he says, “We should head over now. The hideout is an hour away, but we should be able to make it before dark.”
Angel stops in his tracks.
“What?” Aki asks. “You have plans tonight?”
“Apparently I have a date with a serial killer, according to you. What do you mean we? I never said I’d go with you.”
“You don’t want to help? I thought we were a team.”
Angel, for the second time since his girlfriend died, laughs. “I hate working,” he tells Aki. “I hate going to morgues with you, and fingering your arteries, and having you assume I’ll start doing even more for you. I don’t think I’ve done this much for anyone before, ever. And you still want me to go with you to die?”
“We’re not dying.” Aki tells him this with so much confidence that Angel almost believes him.
“Great. So I’m the only one with a death wish and common sense here.”
He goes with Aki anyway.
After all, Angel did say he had a death wish.
The hideout is really just a house at the edge of some woods. It looks intimidatingly like a murder shack, which probably makes sense, considering what it is. All crooked siding on the exterior with vines crawling up the corners. Something bought new but decayed quickly from poor use. Angel follows Aki, who leads with the only flashlight, and waits while he collects some photographs of a nearby shed whose wood is stained deep red. There are multiple jars stuffed with human hair, which seems about right for a serial killer. What a freak. It smells tangy like iron and mold in there, so Angel shuffles back out of the shed for some fresh air when he’s suddenly lifted off his feet.
He kicks out, choking, and the heel of his shoe manages to hit something hard. This only makes the hands on his neck tighten. Angel’s vision goes spotty, and he thinks back to the blue-purple marks blooming all over Arai’s neck. What an awful way to go, he thinks. And then gasps as the hands briefly loosen.
Aki’s just hit the strangler over the head with a wooden board.
“Fuck! You little shit, you want your girlfriend to die faster—” the guy starts to ask, but then Aki tackles him to the ground.
Angel coughs and gasps as he rolls away, air finally rushing down his windpipe again. Out of the corner of his eye he spots Aki straddling the killer and pinning him down with a forearm on the chest. The killer thrashes around, hands feeling along the ground, dust rising like clouds. Angel yells out when his hands find a metal pipe. Angel’s warning turns out to be very unnecessary, as Aki just whips a knife out from under his suit jacket and slits the killer’s throat.
“What?” Aki asks calmly, noticing Angel’s stare. “He killed over 20 people.”
On the walk back to the train station, Angel keeps rubbing at the marks on his neck. They feel raw and violated, bloody instead of bruised. He’d always thought he wouldn’t care much if he died; he had nothing left to live for after his first love passed. Now, his sympathetic nervous system won out. Angel realized in those few seconds of being strangled, that he really did not want to die.
“Why’d you save me?” Angel asks Aki.
“Did you not want me to?”
“You could have died.”
Aki suddenly looks uncomfortable. “I didn’t die though. We never touched.”
“We should have,” Angel states. “When you tackled that guy, you went in from my side. It’s a miracle we didn’t.” Angel stops walking and scrubs his hands down his face. There’s a faint tinnitus between his ears. “What were you even thinking?”
“I wasn’t,” Aki admits.
“You weren’t thinking about how you could almost die? Or you weren’t thinking about saving me?” Angel could justify that. Maybe he just wanted to avenge his friends’ killer. Maybe he was just blind with rage.
Aki replies, softly, with none of the above: “I just didn’t want to see you die.”
“Oh.” Angel says.
Oh. Angel thinks.
Aki cares for him. Angel wants to care back.
26 years 2 months 7 days 21 hours and 3 minutes into his life, Angel falls in love for the second and last time.
Aki, like instinct, saved him. Aki, like instinct, made him want to be alive again, for the first time since his girlfriend died. Aki will, like instinct, forever and forever onwards from then on, make him feel alive-again.
Angel is smitten.
“Hi Denji,” Angel greets. “Hi Power. Aki not with you?”
“He’s doing overtime,” Denji says, glancing briefly over the display cases at the register— and then doing an immediate double take. “Since when do you two work together?” He glowers suspiciously at Yoshida teaching Asa how to man the register. Asa is Angel’s new hire and pet project into giving a shit about the world again— she’s the girl who was working at the convenience store on the night it blew up (and Aki alived-again) last month.
Yoshida sets his arms on the glass display and leans over it, smiling with more suaveness at age 18 than Angel has mastered in all his years of life. “Hey Denji. Heard you applied to Todai with me—”
“Yoshida!” Power interrupts in excitement, rushing over. “I have new embarrassing Denji pictures! Pay me post-haste!”
“What the hell!” Denji yells, and Angel leaves the four of them to fight over Power’s phone, or whatever, interest waned now that Aki’s left the topic of conversation.
—Aki.
Part of him wants to see Aki because Angel’s heart aches. Aki lives in the space under Angel’s eyelids. He thinks of Aki day in and day out. He dreams of Aki.
Part of him wants to see Aki because Angel’s got a lead on who killed the man.
Angel doesn’t think he’s ever tried so enthusiastically for something in years, not since he set up his shop for the first time. But he asked around, talked to Asa and some others in the neighborhood about that night. He just needs Aki to put the pieces that Angel found together.
Angel sends Asa and Yoshida away that night to close up shop by himself, when the bell rings. The bell is usually there to signal that a customer has entered, but considering it’s closing, and considering Angel knows that gait and those shoe-clacks like the back of his own hand, tonight the bell is to signal that Aki’s just walked in.
“I thought you were doing overtime,” Angel calls out to the front.
“I was,” Aki calls back. “Can’t I visit?”
When Aki walks into the back Angel throws a clean rag at his face and sets him to work wiping up the kitchen counters. “There’s a pie at the end of this. Blueberry, your favorite.”
Aki holds the towel limply in hand. “You know my favorite pie?”
“Denji and Power always pick up a slice for you.”
“You’re surprisingly observant.” Aki’s smile, when Angel glances at him, is slight. He’s wiping the counters with tired hands and tired arms, but without complaint. His shaggy hair fall into his eyes and across his cheeks while he works, loose from its usual ponytail. His earrings glint in the light. His eyes are soft, for once, instead of electric and bright. Processed sugar, powdered instead of cane.
“Step back if this isn’t okay,” Angel tells him, and Aki glances up just as Angel grabs a roll of cling wrap and unravels it across his face.
Aki’s mouth is warm, even through the plastic. The wrap contours to the shape of his lips. His breath is indiscernible. Angel feels a bit like he’s on fire, leaning up on his tiptoes like this, mouth pressing hard but chaste against Aki’s. And then, after so long a moment that Angel thinks that maybe he’s made a mess of things, Aki leans down and puts his arm around Angel’s waist, hoisting him up on the counter he was just cleaning. Aki’s fingers burn through the material of Angel’s shirt, and Aki’s mouth is soft and supple and sweet through the plastic. Like blackberry pie and persimmons. Angel feels like something alive-again— someone bright and vivacious. Someone new.
When they pull away, Angel is breathing hard and Aki’s face is flushed bright red.
“That— since when—”
“A few days now,” Angel says plainly. “I’m in love with you.”
“Oh.” Aki sounds absolutely winded. “I don’t know if I…”
“I just wanted to tell you,” Angel says. “You don’t owe me anything. We’ve only known each other for a month.” Oh, shit, Angel forgot all about last month and Aki’s little murder mystery. Before Aki can even respond to what he’s said, Angel hops down from the counter and digs the old bullet out from a drawer. “I think I figured out who tried to kill you. You were tracking down another serial killer right? You probably forgot all about it in the pain, but you should really get this bullet checked out. I have reason to believe someone from the police shot you.”
Aki, thoroughly whiplashed, struggles to follow. “Okay,” he finally says, taking the bag with the bullet. The rest of the night, Angel explains all his amateur detective work over a shared slice of blueberry pie.
Three days later, he’s taking the trash out to the dumpster when he hears a gunshot from the alley over. Angel, who has heard a gunshot exactly once before and never thought he would hear a second one, drops his trash all over the ground. He doesn’t waste time staring at the peach pits and plastic forks; like instinct, he moves, booking it over to the next alley, only to trip and eat shit on entry.
This would be familiar, if Angel didn’t fall face first into a warm chest instead of pavement.
“So this is why you didn’t die,” he hears from behind, and shit, Angel really does need to invest in longer socks at this rate. He raises his face from the chest only to see Aki staring at him in shock. There’s a gun held loosely in his hand, on the ground, and blood splashed across his face. Not Aki’s blood. The voice sounds again from behind Angel.
“How fascinating that I’m not dead yet. Is it even worth it trying to run away?”
Angel tries to get up but Aki raises the gun and shoves Angel’s head back down onto his chest, one arm held over his head protectively.
“Why’d you do it?” Aki asks, voice trembling. Presumably facing his killer.
“Oh, Aki.” The voice sighs. “It was never even about you. Don’t take it personally. Since you’re alive, though, I’m sure we could come to an agreement. Say you’ll help me—”
A corpse is talking and Aki lets it, like the words mean anything, instead of shooting with the gun in his hand; so Angel reaches out and blindly waves his foot around, straining to stretch his leg. His bare ankle hits what might be some fingers, and there’s the dull thump of a body falling over. Aki is so shocked that his arm falls slack and Angel can pull himself out of the hold.
“Don’t listen to a murderer,” Angel tells him. Aki still stares at him in shock. Angel stands and stretches, glancing out of the corner of his eye at the body beside them. A police badge is pinned to the jacket. Some higher-up or something. Angel couldn’t care less, now that he knows Aki’s safe. “You need a body bag?”
“A body bag,” Aki repeats faintly.
He finally struggles to his feet, leaning a hand against the brick wall flecked by blood. “You’re helping me cover up the murder of an officer?”
“I’ve helped you with plenty more than that,” Angel reminds him. “This seems pretty inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.”
“...Right. Hey Angel, you got a handkerchief?”
Angel digs one out of his pocket and hands it over, careful not to touch Aki. Aki takes it, equally as careful, and unfolds it. Then, he steps forward and spreads it over Angel’s face, crashing his mouth onto Angel’s.
The cloth isn’t as thin as the plastic wrap, doesn’t fit into the contours of Aki’s lips. The heat is finally there, though. Angel can feel every warm puff of breath out Aki’s mouth through the cloth, can feel the wetness of his kiss. He can taste him. Blackberries and blueberries. Cigarette smoke. Soft sugar. Aki tastes like pie. Aki tastes like finally being able to love again. Angel’s heart pounds so hard it physically hurts.
Aki pulls away and says, very quietly, out of breath, “I think I’m in love with you too.”
“Okay,” Angel says, heart somewhere up his throat. “Alright. Kiss me again.”
And they do.