Work Text:
“I love you,” Himeno blurts out one evening while they are on the balcony of her apartment.
Aki freezes, forgetting what it is they are talking about: bills, work, life and death, all of the above or something else entirely. He glances behind them at the beer cans lined up on the floor and counts three of his and four of hers. She’s working on her fifth right now, and there’s a hesitancy in her as she over consciously shifts it on the railing this way and there.
“I love you,” Himeno repeats without looking at Aki. She puts out her cigarette in the ashtray without realizing a good half of it has not burnt out. She blows smoke with a shuddering breath. She shifts her weight from one leg to the other. She rubs her eye patch gingerly. “There. I said it.”
The alcohol makes it hard to collect one’s thoughts. “You’re drunk,” Aki murmurs as he puffs away at his own smoke.
“I am,” Himeno admits. “I am absolutely shitfaced, I’m seeing double right now, and I love the both of you.”
“Stop saying that.”
“Why can’t I say it? If it’s the alcohol talking, then pay me no mind.”
Aki shakes his head. “Was this why you invited me over tonight? To confess?”
“No.” Himeno covers her mouth to stifle a hiccup. “Actually, yes, but not for the reasons you’re suspecting.”
“Which are?”
“Not carnal desires.”
“That’s good, because I was about to bolt for the door.”
Himeno laughs and it comes from deep in the throat. “Is the idea of shacking it up with me really that horrible to you? We’ve slept together before.”
“Not in that way.”
“There’s more than one way?”
“Now you’re just being obtuse.”
“Whereas you,” Himeno teases. “Are so cute when you’re shy.”
They’re both right. The two have shared space in each other’s beds, in Bureau issued patrol cars, on the couches in the break room, and even a hospital cot after Aki sustained a gunshot injury and Himeno hid under the sheets so the staff wouldn’t find her and make her leave when visiting hours were over. Usually these are accidents where they’re both so exhausted after a fight that they’d slump and sprawl over each other, or when they'd go on a drinking bender and get themselves sloshed to the point that they’d pass out within arm’s reach.
While rarely, when there’s been the occasion where there are sparks of attraction, one of them has always been quick to stamp them out before they lit up into something that cannot be undone.
Yes, they have slept together but they have never slept with one another, and that’s the difference that makes it so that they have always remained partners that never quite became a couple, even if they’ve behaved in many ways that resemble the latter.
“I can’t explain this at the moment because you’ve caught me off guard,” Aki says softly. “But there are some complicated reasons why I don’t think we should ever go down that path.” Even as he speaks, he thinks to himself that he has picked his words wrong.
It’s just hard for him to contemplate a romance with a woman who’s not really his mother, but who has in many ways raised him since he was a teenager, and who he has in turn assisted many times in loudly hurling her guts out over a toilet seat lid.
Aki compares it to catching feelings for an older sister, decides that would be very inappropriate, then considers what it would be like if the woman in question is his unmarried aunt, and shuts down that train of thought before it goes any further. It's not filial, it's taboo, and he sees any temptation in that direction to reek of a desperate need to clutch for any kind of intimacy long since denied by a job that is as deadly as it is stifling, no matter how wrong the companionship might be so long as it offers some kind of warmth from the the cold breath of Death falling over one's neck from behind.
Never mind the fact that there are many kinds of love that exist out there, and the one Himeno has given him from when he was a boy has been one where she helps him put on a tie in the morning before work to be the man he has grown up to be, rather than anything that has to do with people frantically groping and shedding each other's clothes in the dark of night.
Worst part is it's been so long since that fateful morning on November 18 when his home was blasted to pieces, that sometimes when Aki thinks of his long dead mother sitting up in bed with his brother Taiyo as she reads him a book about a town mouse, he sees Himeno's face with two eyes instead of one.
“Well, rest assured your chastity is safe from me,” Himeno says coolly as she reads his face. “But the real reason I am saying how I feel about you is so you can hopefully understand the favor I’m about to ask.”
“What’s that?”
She breathes in deeply. “I want you to quit your job,” Himeno says, and pushes on as Aki frowns to himself. The words come quickly, and he sees she’s doing her best not to slur them. “Don’t make that face," she mutters. "I’ve been trying to nudge you to do this for years now, and I’m sick and tired of you ignoring every hint I drop about getting out and finding something else to do with your life, whether it’s going to the private sector or just any regular boring day job.”
“You don’t get to decide that for me.”
“Yes,” Himeno snaps. “It’s your decision if you want to quit, just like it’s mine if I want to stay.”
Something in her tone makes Aki hesitate. “What exactly do you-“
“There’s an envelope in my desk, all ready to go. If you don’t resign by next year, I will.”
There’s nothing funny about what Himeno’s saying, but Aki hears himself cackle anyway. “You’re not serious,” he hisses, feeling ambushed, feeling betrayed.
“I’m deadly serious.”
“Fine. If you want to quit, go for it but don’t hang that over my head. You’ve done a lot for me but I don’t owe you this.”
Himeno swallows, leaning back as Aki leans forwards before she retaliates. “Watch me,” she promises. “I’ll drop that letter on Makima’s desk and make it the last day I ever set foot in that building.” Himeno closes her remaining eye. “Aki, I would like nothing more than to protect you from every Devil out there that might hurt you.” Her eye opens. “But I realize now you’ve got so much anger in you that all you want in life is to fight every Devil out there because you’ve got it into your thick skull that they all owe you a blood debt, and I don’t think I can be a part of that anymore. So if I can’t save you, then I’d rather leave so I don’t have to watch you charge headfirst into an early grave. Because I am tired of visiting cemeteries, and my happiest mornings are when I show up to work to find that you are not at your desk because you called in sick or on leave.
“You’re right that you don’t owe me anything, but I think if your family were still here, they’d tell you that you owe it to yourself to let them go, and if you hate me for bringing them into this, then I’m sorry but I’m ready to lose our relationship if that’s what it takes for you to see sense.”
She falls silent. They remain on the balcony for a long time. Himeno lights up a new smoke but after a few second she grimaces and puts it out early before tossing it over the side, where it plummets to the earth beneath them.
They listen to the sirens, the neighbors, and the chuff of spinning rotors from a passing helicopter. Aki turns Himeno’s words over and over in his mind as he waits for all the fury and hurt and bitterness in him to calm like a tsunami crashing onto the land, crushing everything in its path before it reverses and flows back out to the sea.
She has no right, he tells himself as he squeezes his cigarette tightly between his fingers. She has no right to decide what he should be doing. Even if she thinks it’s what’s best for him. Even if it might be what's best for him. It's his life to live and it's his life to throw away.
He is startled out of his reverie as Himeno grabs his wrist to check on his watch. She’d brought it for him for one of his birthdays and never wore one herself, always using him to look at the time. “It’s getting late,” she says. “Want me to call a cab to get you home?”
Aki looks at her. She thinks this is her way of allowing him to go home and sleep on their conversation. An offering of a truce. “I’ll be fine," he says.
"You sure?"
“Do you not want me here?”
Himeno hesitates. "I would not mind you being here," she says.
“Do you want me to stay?”
“It’s up to you."
“Then I want to stay.”
Himeno stares at his face, searching for something. Then she nods and gestures at her apartment with her now empty beer can. “I’m going to head back inside and figure out dinner. You coming?”
“I think I’ll wait out here for a little.”
The two exchange small but uncertain smiles. Himeno squeezes his arm before collecting the empty beer cans. Hugging them to her chest, she leaves him alone on the balcony, cursing as she drops one on the floor. Aki remembers her joke about the mornings when she tosses out the trash as being her walks of shame. Because oftentimes she’d run into the neighbors or even the garbage men while wearing nothing but a tank top and shorts and carrying a plastic bag in each hand filled with the results of her fast food dinners and binge drinking. He covers his mouth to stifle the laughter.
He thinks of his family’s graves in Hokkaido and tries to remember the last time he’s seen them. He decides it might be overdue for another visit, and he wonders how Himeno would feel about joining him and if she minds the cold and if it would be morbid to ask her to visit another graveyard. Especially during the Christmas season.
One way or another, he promises himself to make his decision about whether he should quit only when he’s standing before the headstones.
Aki hears Himeno loudly scrunch up the cans and toss them down the bin one by one. “Hey,” he calls out as she starts dialing for takeout.
“What?”
“We’re still friends, right?”
Himeno laughs and starts ordering as the restaurant picks up. Aki promises himself that if she says yes, the first thing he’s going to do in Hokkaido is have a snowball fight with her like he wanted to with Taiyo.
He puts out his cigarette, leaving it in the ashtray as he comes back in from the cold.