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Miss Makima calls up Aki and gives him this really cool thing called “sick leave” which snowballs into “semi-medical retirement” after it becomes apparent his severed arm isn’t reattaching itself to his body. At first, Denji calls the leave ‘cool’ — y’know, getting paid real actual live money to stay at home, what a fucking dream — but he bites his tongue and shuts the fuck up when he sees how far Aki’s face falls at that comment.
After a few weeks, though, they get better. Aki’s less … egg-shelly. Power’s very egg-shelly, but while she’s screaming her head off and sleeping really badly, Denji’s learning how to make fried eggs and poached eggs and scrambled eggs all without the little bits of beige shell in it. He piles them high in stacks on pieces of golden toast that are not even burnt, not one bit. Aki’s has chilli flakes on top, because that’s how he likes it, and Power has that stupid American smokey barbeque sauce, because she’s properly demented. After the bad nights, he cooks up a storm in the kitchen, and Aki says thank you, Denji, and Power grunts something that sounds maybe a little bit similar, and they all sit around the chabudai to eat, and Power is okay and Aki is alive, and even if they’re both a little bit shattered, Denji takes that as a 100% certified win. Hell yeah, Chainsaw Man.
“We should get out of here,” Aki says, when Denji’s done licking his plate and Power has upended her bottle of barbeque sauce into her mouth. “Let’s go out.”
Power drops the bottle, squeaking. It’s a fearful little noise — like the ones those guinea pigs make on TV. Denji will make fun of her for it later, but he shelves the blackmail for now and holds her a little tighter in his arms, one hand brushing out the matted ends of her hair, the other firm against her ribcage just how she likes it. Enough pressure against her vital organs to know she still exists.
Aki’s whole face shifts. It’s been doing that, lately: his eyebrows do a little wiggle and then the ends go all funny. His mouth turns down and his eyes relax, deep and sweet. It’s a new thing. “Nothing will happen,” he says, voice all soft and comforting and shit. “The sun’s up, and we’ll stay by your side the whole time. Come on. You guys should experience things that aren’t Public Safety. Let’s go out. I know a place.”
“What,” says Power, defiantly. Under his palm, Denji feels her heartbeat calm. “Is it a devil? Is it a human? Tell me what foul beast I must annihilate!”
Aki grins. “How do you feel about conquering the aquarium?”
“No eating the fish,” Aki reminds them. He scans their paper tickets, and ushers them both in before himself — Power first, then Denji. “I’m serious, Power. These fish are here for reasons — usually because they’re endangered.”
“What’s en-dane-ger-ed?” Denji sounds out.
“It means there aren’t many of them left. Usually because humans have overfished them to the point of extinction.”
“So if I eat the fish, I become their conqueror?”
“If you eat the fish, you get marched out of the aquarium, and I make you eat vegetables for dinner for the rest of the year.”
That shuts Power up. They walk through the lobby, past little groups of school kids all holding hands, past a bloke who’s dragging his missus off into a darkly-lit corner. Genius. The entry door swings open, and —
“Woah,” says Denji.
The tanks are huge. Denji’d thought — well, he hadn’t really thought anything. He hadn’t known what an aquarium was, but it’d sounded fishy — aqua, right? He certainly wasn’t expecting huge tanks. Floor to ceiling tanks. Glass, stretching right around the room, and a soft, warm blue bubbling behind it.
“Cool?”
“How the fuck did they get an entire ocean in there?”
The schoolteacher hisses in their direction. Aki whacks the back of Denji’s head. Denji doesn’t care. He presses both hands to the glass and rests his head against it.
There are so many fish. Little ones. Big ones. A whole group of them swim by, all wiggly and friendly, sticking with their own buddies and paddling frantically away from ones that don’t look like them. There are yellow ones and blue ones with yellow stripes, triangle-shaped ones with black and white stripes, big long ones that are ten thousand million shades of grey. Denji’d never thought grey could be a pretty colour.
“What are they called?” he asks. He can’t take his eyes off of them. In his peripheral vision, he sees Power equally entranced: she picks a fish and follows it as they swim, running alongside it. It takes him a moment to realise she’s racing them — and losing.
“The exhibits have placards.” Aki points to a white plastic card fixed to the outside of the tank. The black symbols swim across it, faster than the fish. Denji stares. He’s about to shrug it off, swear or run or do something stupid to get Aki’s concerned gaze off of him, and then Aki steps forward and ruffles his hair and plants himself right in front of the card. “What one do you want to know about?”
Pochita feels very light in his chest. “Uhhh… the little blue guy? With the yellow stripe on its ass.”
“Tail,” Aki corrects, but scans the information card all the same. “It’s a — Jesus, how do you say that — paracanthurus? Or a blue tang.”
“It’s a loser,” Power screeches, racing back from the other side of the room. The blue tang has just reached the edge of the tank. Her hair is all askew, drifting over her face. She’s already lost one of her clips, and Denji hears Aki sigh next to him. “I just beat it! BOOYAH, FISH!”
The aquarium is not just fish. There are huge tanks filled with a thousand different corals, all a million shades of sunset orange and soft skin pink. There’s a dolphin exhibit — one launches out of the air and splashes Aki, and he walks around with a face-splitting frown for the next ten minutes, all sodden. There are huge spherical tanks filled with bright, multicoloured jellyfish that flop and drift and flop some more. There’s even a weird pirate exhibit that Power has the time of her life on, pretending to man a plastic ship that she says is “headed for America, where she will drain the blood from the tyrants living there.” Denji wants to look at every fish, and both Aki and Power let him. Aki reads out the placards and Power names them or calls them stupid or assigns them roles in her cabinet for when she’s Prime Minister Slash World President. The South China Giant Salamander is offered a role as Minister for Terror. It’s a very lucrative position, says Power. He better be happy with it.
And it’s weird. The time goes so fast it feels like a blink — and Denji feels nothing but good the whole time. When they stumble over down the hall toward the last exhibit, his face is genuinely aching, and it’s not because there’s a knife sticking out of it or a Devil’s cursed him or something — it’s because he can’t stop fucking smiling.
“Almost done,” says Aki as Power pushes open the door. “And then we can go somewhere for lunch.”
A trip and lunch. Denji’s face aches again. “I want seafood,” Power exclaims, and the perennially serious Hayakapitan actually laughs.
The last tank is fucking massive. It’s this big glass tube with a walkway through it. Aki reads out the little sign next to the exhibit — apparently, it spans 20 metres, which is like, ten Denjis side by side. Damn.
A stingray floats overhead, tail trailing. A school of fish follow, twitchy and quiet. They’re chased away by a big grey guy — a lengthy, skinny thing with a flat bottom and a rounded top. It’s a shark, except for its long, thin nose, which protrudes straight out of its skull, edges covered in sharp, white barbs.
“It’s a chainsaw fish,” Denji gasps.
He presses both his hands against the glass. The fish comes right up to him. His nose pokes the glass and he follows it, swimming over the curved bit that reaches over Denji’s head. Denji can see its white underbelly — the soft flesh of vulnerability, the little half-moon smile of a face. Its chainsaw taps the glass again. There is no movement. No thrashing. No violence. No escape.
“It’s a longcomb sawfish, or a green sawfish,” Aki reads from beside him. “They’re found in tropical and sub-tropican waters of the Indo-West Pacific, in mainly coastal marine, mangrove and estuarine habitats. Their maximum age is unknown, but their lifespan is significantly less caught and brought up in captivity. They’re critically endangered now.”
The sawfish is fully stationary, sans an occasional spasm of its fins. It floats down the tank with the man-made current, and then twitches back to life and circles back over with a few lazy kicks of its tail. When it turns to the side, Denji sees its smile again — stuck in that permanent upwards-ticking crescent. The sawfish bumps the glass with its nose again.
“He wants to get out,” says Denji.
Aki makes a noise. “He’s safe here,” he says, softly. “Look — the attendants are coming around with the food now.”
Sure enough, the aquarium staff are: little pellets of food are raining from the surface above the tank. A few of them hit the little school of fish in the heads, and they go scattering across the constructed tank floor. Two of them ker-plunk on the sawfish’s nose. It makes no move to retrieve them. Instead, it keeps staring at Denji, eyes wide. The water ripples.
“Still got four walls, dun’it?” Denji says. “Even if they’re helpin’ him — he can’t…” he licks his lips. For some reason, his throat’s gone all dry. Weird. He had water this morning. “Doesn’t he — doesn’t he miss the ocean?”
Aki’s hand settles on his shoulder. It feels heavy but impossibly light, all at the same time. When he speaks, his voice is all quiet. Like the nice nature documentaries Aki makes Power and him watch when they’re all wired up and jumpy. “Usually, when an animal enters human care, it can’t live without it. It becomes domesticated. Unable to fend for itself in the wild. The fish is… it’s safest here, Denji.”
The man-made water current has swept the sawfish down the tank again. Denji puts a hand to the glass. The thing comes swimming right back, like a dog to a bone. Its gills wrinkle.
Aki thumbs at the nape of his neck. “Hey,” he says, softly. “We’re not talking about the fish anymore, are we?”
It’s Denji’s turn to feel egg-shelley now. He feels his breakfast flip around in his stomach. Saliva pools in the back of his mouth. He bites down on the inside of his cheeks — the fleshy part — but it does nothing to stop the nauseous feeling rising in him, or the way Pochita suddenly aches in his chest, all cracky and fragile and weird.
“Denji?”
He opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again, and says, “they feed me.”
“Who does?”
“I — like, Public Safety.” It feels like he’s forcing himself to speak. Like the words are there in his head, but he’s gotta reach inside and tug them out and force them through the prison his teeth are making. “Y’know. Makima.”
The chainsaw fish twitches. Aki’s hand remains firm on his shoulder.
“What — what do you mean?”
Denji shrugs. The crack in the egg runs right down his chest. If he was making scrambled eggs, there’d be a billion little beige bits in the bowl. He’s not sure where to start. There’s too many to pick out.
“When we lived in the shack,” he says, slowly, “it — it fuckin’ sucked balls. There was — well, like, the Yakuza, and the debt, and we had no food, and I was hungry all the time and worried about Pochita the rest of the time. But… it made sense.” He licks his lips. “I don’t … it’s all fuckin’ upside-down.”
Inside the tank, the little pellet feed is still raining down on the fish. They’ve got rocks and fun little sunken-ship caves and tall braids of seaweed and each other. The sawfish is staring at him.
“It’s still a cage,” Aki surmises, quiet. “The shack was a tank, and … Public Safety is too.”
Something burns behind Denji’s eyes. He licks his lips again. When Denji turns to look at him, Aki’s eyes are trained on the sawfish.
“I don’t think I would’ve understood a year ago,” he says. “But I think I get it, now.”
The sawfish wriggles back up, through the current. Denji feels a weight on his other shoulder — Power, resting a bony chin over his collarbone, sharp teeth gnawing at his shoulder bone. Aki’s hand is steady on the other.
“You know I grew up in Hokkaido,” he murmurs, after a long moment. “It’s nice, this time of year. Cold, but good.”
There are four sides and a glass bottom, but tanks don’t have a roof. Underneath Denji’s ribcage, Pochita feels — different. Good. Hopeful, almost. Aki’s hand squeezes. He jerks his head towards the exit. “You ready?”
Denji tears his eyes away from the sawfish. He nods. Power, now clinging to his hand, bobbles along. “Lunch?”
Aki grins. “Lunch. And then — we’ll talk.”
She doesn’t need it, but Denji holds Power’s hand the whole way out. He doesn’t need it, but Aki stays close enough that their shoulders keep bumping. When he steps under the glowing green light, he looks back.
The sawfish is watching.
“Bye,” says Denji, and follows Aki and Power outside.