Chapter Text
You’ve about as little Japanese cash as you’ve knowledge how it works. Though you may have known once upon a time—you have this impression that you’re quite old—your memory is bad even by devil standards.
In any case, you definitely don’t know how Japanese cash works now. You barely even know enough about Chicago currency to pay money for pizza like a proper human, so you haven’t the least idea how much Japanese coin you’ve scraped together from the nooks and crannies of Tokyo, but mostly that one airport vending machine with the loose panel which you cracked open and pulled off with your teeth before emptying its coin compartment into your pockets.
All those coins jingle in your pants now, heavy though you’ve spread them mostly evenly between the pockets on either side of your pants. Your left side pocket is slightly heavier—there’s also a pouch of dark hair dye, not the cheapest on the seven-eleven shelf but almost the smallest and positioned in a corner where neither the clerk nor the store camera can see you swipe it. This way, you've saved all your human currency for the two cheapest boxes of neatly packaged candy, which your handler indicated would be a suitable gift for introducing yourself to your new neighbors.
The dye packet has instructions for coloring your hair. You read it twice. You do it right, you’re pretty sure—your hair is dark now, the hair color of most humans in this region. Your hands are dark, too, though—you don’t think that’s supposed to happen, but the color doesn’t come off, even under boiling water, so you peel off a layer of skin that you flush down the toilet. That gets most of the stain, so your hand is consistent in color with the rest of your human skin now. You double-check your reflection in the window again, because the bathroom mirror is too small for looking at your entire human body.
You should get another, bigger mirror. Your handler would know how to do that, like he taught you about the acquisition of human furniture. Wait, are mirrors furniture? Could you also ask your neighbors about how to buy them?
The little old human on your right tells you how to buy furniture, which, yes, does include mirrors. You go to her first so you can pet her dog, and you remember to shake her hand before leaving. Then, you go right.
The fiend opens the apartment door. You step forward and bow, standing close enough to smack the fiend’s face and soft, padded chest with the top of your head. She shrieks in pain, holding her nose. You thrust out the introductory gift as apology with force that topples you over, pushing the shorter figure onto the ground. The candy spills across the entryway. You roll off of her, but she grabs your hair, screaming. You jerk away, losing some of the precious dyed strands as you run into the apartment, straight into—
Ah, their human. Before you can collide with him, he grabs you by the back of your collar. Nope, that's not nearly enough physical contact, so you pull away and slip around him, pressing yourself against his back as if using him as a human shield between you and the fiend. The human reaches for you, but you're slippery so he ends up holding the fiend back from you instead.
She points, accusing you of attacking her. What's the right human response here? Oh! You burst into tears, blubbering about how you’re sorry and you're their new neighbor and you just wanted to introduce yourself and even brought food.
"Food?"
Then, the fiend is on the ground, picking through the spilled candy.
“Food?” Someone else says, echoing her.
You feel him behind you, the hybrid with the Chainsaw Devil heart.
You think you should be scared of him—everyone is scared of him. You do remember the sound of chainsaw—have you died before? But you don’t remember enough to know if you had been scared of the Chainsaw Devil at some point. Instead, he feels—sort of familiar.
The hybrid squats in the pile of candies beside the fiend before he looks up at you. You blink, putting on a smile because this is a friendly human expression. Then, the hybrid is in your face.
“You’re really pretty,” the hybrid says.
This is a compliment. You are supposed to return compliments, especially because your human form resembles their female sex. Human women are generally polite, though the human idea of politeness is rather inconsistent. That's okay. You are very good at human interaction.
"Thank you," you reply to the hybrid. "Your hair is very orange, and you have a face."
You nod to yourself. You were polite. That was a well-executed human compliment.
The hybrid is very close, so you brace your hands against his chest. Skin to skin contact is still better, though. You take both his hands and shake them with your crossed hands, though you are vaguely aware that this not how human handshakes work. You bow again, close enough that your head also hits the hybrid's chest. Then, you back into the human while holding the top of your head as if in pain.
That should be enough contact for now. You brace yourself against the devil hybrid and back up, introducing yourself to the hybrid, the fiend, the human, and their cat—you apologize to Meowy for startling it—as their neighbor who moved in earlier today from Chicago.
“What’s that?” the hybrid asks the human. You recall seeing similar interactions: the human must teach the hybrid and the fiend on how to human in the human world, like their version of your handler.
“It’s a place in America,” the human says.
You nod eagerly, "The greatest city in the world."
He walks toward you. Human behavior would dictate that you walk forward too, because humans have this idea of personal space, but you maximize physical contact, staying in place until the human grabs your shoulders and steers you out of the apartment.
“Ah, the door,” you step outside and turn both ways, as if this could be anywhere but your same apartment, though space doesn’t work here like it does in hell.
You bow again at the entryway, “It was nice to meet you—" uh, what were their names again? The human said them, you think—the hybrid may have introduced himself, though.
Human names make no sense. Besides, it’s not your fault that they only said their names once. You were busy making physical contact. Human-shaped bodies are very small and inefficient
You skip repeating the non-sensical names that you don't know.
“Please take care of me as well!” You bow again and leave, returning to your empty apartment where you punch the air in the human gesture for victory.
You did amazing. You made all the physical contact. You are so good at human interaction.
……….
Everything Aki knows about his new neighbor, he learns against his will. After tripping through his apartment and claiming to introduce yourself despite never announcing your name, you turn up in their shared hallway, on the street, in the nearby convenience store at all hours of day. He’s not sure when or if you actually sleep, because no matter how early they’re leaving or how late they return, they’ve a fifty-fifty chance of running into you: delivering pizza, dropping off shipping boxes on your shiny white vespa, walking your other neighbor’s dog, feeding stray cats…
You work at least five jobs because you’re constantly short of money, but you remain constantly short despite all the jobs. Once, Denji ropes Power into helping you once for the money. Also, you're a very pretty girl. By the end of the week, all three of you end up on the run from creditors after causing more damage than you earned trying to window-clean the Metropolitan Government Building, and Aki realizes that you will always be poor from crippling stupidity.
The next week, he runs into you once in your shared hallway. You’re splayed on the floor despite wearing a French maid costume with a too-short skirt. He decides to try and ignore you, though that never works. You promptly walk up too close, shove a little book in his face, and demand:
“What is wrong with your country?”
You throw up both arms in frustration, “No one asked me to clean, so I find a job at a cleaning service. I show up in uniform,” you wave at your outfit, and he looks away from your bare legs. “They tell me ‘This is not that sort of maid service.’ What is ‘that sort’ of maid service? There no ‘sorts’ of maid service. I checked. See? ‘Maid’ has no subcategorical definitions. I checked multiple dictionaries,” and you wave the Japanese-English dictionary in his face.
He eventually comes to realize that you got a job at a maid cafe only to be surprised by the fact that their maids did not clean the lobby despite black mold growing in the corners. Therefore, you got another job at a cleaning service. You showed up in your maid cafe uniform. They told you to change, so you throw open the door to your apartment, drag him inside, and Aki's too surprised to leave immediately because your space is as pristine as a furniture showroom. In the bedroom, you throw open closet doors to an array of outfits organized by occasion, all of the hangers spaced evenly apart, and he wonders who cleans your space because you seem too physically inconsistent to be capable of—whatever this is.
"Here," he picks out a blouse and trousers, then has to turn away because you immediately start stripping despite the wide-open window blinds.
"Why do you like the same lady as your roommate?" your voice asks from behind him.
Who he likes is none of your business, but you're persistent, getting into his face though you haven't finished buttoning up your blouse. He doesn't look down, but that means he has to look at your face framed by frizzy, badly-dyed hair. Nobody your age dyes their hair black anyways.
"Why do you like the same lady as your roommate?" you ask again. "Because you seem like very different people."
"Why do you care?" Aki replies, startled into a response by the sensibility of the question despite you being—well, you.
You blink like you don't know, and then your eyes light up like you just figured it out.
"Do you want to go out sometime?" you ask excitedly.
"No."
"Because you like someone else, right? Why do you like her?" you ask again and again, until there's a nagging feeling in his mind.
Why does he like Makima? She's a competent, capable superior. She's calm and even tempered. She's pretty, but so are you, and he doesn't like you.
When he tries to think too hard about why, his thoughts slide off the question like water from a smooth stone. But what you said first, how he and Denji are very different people—his mind latches onto that idea, somehow. They don't really like any of the same things except Makima, and that does seem odd, doesn't it?
"People date people they don’t like," you continue to yourself. "People don't date people they actually like. People try to link romantic feelings with relationships, but that's not how it works with people."
You take his wrist again. Aki pulls his hand free this time. You stop by a desk to slide the top card from a stack of business cards, and he recognizes the logo from one of the hostess clubs that Kishibe frequents.
"I started working here last week. You should come by sometime. Dates can be fun, yeah?"
You reach down to put the card in his pocket. He stops you, crumpling the card in his hand.
You remind him of Himeno. That's what gave him pause about you. You're not flirtatious, but you're constantly touching everyone in a way that he's not experienced since she died. And thinking of Himeno now, he realizes that he loves her. Loved her. He can describe the reasons why in a way that he can't with Makima.
It makes no sense. The feelings that he's preserved for Himeno—when he considers them independently, without associating her with them, Aki wouldn't describe those feelings as other than love, but he didn't just lack their name. He never identified his feelings until just now, while he thought that he liked Makima despite remaining unable to name his reasons.
"Are you all right?" you ask, and Aki finds that he's followed you downstairs while lost in thought.
He's heard of hunters fighting devils that messed with memories. He's never fought one, but would he remember if he had?
"Ahhhh, Mr. Kitty. Good job!" you kneel to pet the stray cat that drops a squirming rat. Before it can run away, you step on its tail, and then stomp it into the ground with your other foot, your movements quick and brutal, with more dexterity than he'd ever guess that you possessed.
"Goodbye, Missus Rat," you scoop the broken corpse off the ground, toss it into the nearest dumpster, and wipe your hand on your slacks. When some gore remains, you lift your palm to your mouth, lick it clean, then dry your hands on your slacks again.
Something is wrong with you, Aki realizes. Your behavior reminds him of Denji and Power, but you can't be a fiend or a hybrid—though you said that you're American, America also registers their devils. Public Safety has an agreement with the U.S., and several international treaties govern cross-border travel of fiends, hybrids, and devils. He'd know if a devil showed up in their apartment complex. Devils don't travel unescorted, and they certainly don't just move in next door. Your behavior is strange—maybe in an inhuman way. Maybe you're just foreign, and strange. A devil would've hurt somebody by now. You haven't, except maybe yourself.
He doesn't see the need to report you to Public Safety, but he'll keep an eye on you anyways, just in case.
……….
The hostess club invited you for an unpaid, trial shift, where you slipped and flung a tray of champagne over the trio of Devil Hunters entering the club. Then, the club owns you. You're indebted to them for the cost of the champagne, which has many less digits than the number that they give you on their invoice for the night. They claim that you're indebted to them for a month, but you only work two days before you're over the equilibrium. Then, they owe you, though they won't admit it and you just have to somehow figure out equivalent exchange without their cooperation.
You hate people. They claim to love you, but then live lives ruled by debt, obligation, and attachment. That's why you exist, like that story about the human who claimed to love their mythical dragons but wept and run from fear on seeing one. Yes, earth has pizza, but everywhere you have to navigate the disgusting sensation of the chains that people impose around their own existence. You'll be homesick soon, so you'd like to end this quickly.
Hostess work is fine. Lots of people touch you, many of them thinking you owe them something, but they're wrong so it's fine. You wait for the yellow-haired devil hunter who looks dead inside. He arrives with your neighbor. You drape yourself over the older human, slipping the business card for the pizza place into his pocket. Instead of settling in his booth, your neighbor goes to the bar.
As you've worked the hostess bar, you've come to realize that you were mistaken. You remembered being good at human interaction despite having forgotten how to be good at human interaction. With the skills you've started to relearn here, you assess your next steps.
Your neighbor slouches at the bar. You should speak with him. Your handler suspects that he considers you to be other than a normal human woman, though he has not reported your behavior to authorities because you have been saved by two circumstances: first, your neighbor is a devil hunter who resides with a fiend and a hybrid. His standards for normal human behavior are incorrect.
Second, he is a young, heterosexual man. Your handler took the liberty of replacing all your clothing with shorter, thinner, smaller, and skimpier versions, except for the pizza delivery uniform. While you do not recall the rituals of human seduction, you have been told frequently, repeatedly, and with great enthusiasm by a plurality of humans that your mere physical presence is devastating. You are a distraction despite appalling social graces, which are rapidly improving.
The human is adjusting to your charms, you think. You are so normal—or, er, you can be?
"Hi," you say. The human neighbor nods, looking anywhere but at you. Weird. You are nice to look at. You have made it so. Does he have bad taste?
You sit beside him and describe the activity of the local stray cats, none of which Power has devoured. Yet. She did eat two pigeons, but they were raw. Denji grilled his pigeons first—no, not on his stove, or with his cooking tools. You have your own, which Denji used. Meat tastes better cooked, he said, which is why he had three pigeons.
Your neighbor swigs his drink. You describe trying one of Denji's pigeons, which just tasted burnt. You've never understood why people like the taste of flesh, because meat's never really tasted like anything to you.
Your neighbor opens his mouth as if to ask a question, but the bartender approaches first.
"Are you going to buy her a drink?" the bartender asks your neighbor.
"But I don't want a drink?" you reply.
Your neighbor is not indebted to you. If he buys you a drink, you will be indebted to him. You may already be indebted to him, slightly. You have no wish to increase your attachment. You do not like to be indebted.
"You're in debt," the bartender reminds you.
"No, I'm not." The hostess bar is indebted to you for the costs of your labor. "The accounting overvalued the champagne I dropped. That was weeks ago."
The bartender snorts. As you've repeated your case over the last week, the humans here have stopped trying to argue with you.
'Your funeral,' one of your coworkers had said, which you found hilarious, because funerals only happen when humans die. Devils don't get funerals. You get parties.
The bartender leaves. You describe the tracking and capture of urban birds until it feels as though you have spent a socially appropriate amount of time with your neighbor. He is not listening to you, but frowning towards the bar. This is all right. You are speaking to establish rapport and not to communicate information.
"It is always nice to see you," you tell him before you leave. Your repeat human customers enjoy when you say this, though you realize now that you had not meant it as you do with your neighbor. Your customers expect something from you, and here you feel no such obligation.
The night sets in. The crowds swell. You slide though, touching everyone who doesn't touch you.
You've completed your passes thrice over when you feel it seize you. You've incurred a debt, the largest since you were summoned to earth. It makes you turn to the bar, where you find your neighbor speaking with one of the humans who claims to own this place.
Your neighbor meets your gaze. He pushes through the crowd to you. His fingers close around your wrist.
"C'mon," he says.
"My shift's not over?"
"You're done," the owner shouts across the crowd at you, "Get out of here."
Your neighbor pulls you away from the press of bodies and attachments. You're out in the night drizzling rain. The yellow-haired devil hunter's here first. He glances at your neighbor's hand around your wrist.
"We're going home," your neighbor tells his coworker.
You lean closer to look at him, really look at him. His face is frowning. His eyes are concerned. He stares back at you uncertainly, then suddenly drops your hand like it burns.
"Hey, sorry—"
"Excuse me," you tear off your thin-heeled shoes, then turn and kick the bar doors back open.
The crowd reels from the rush of cold air. You dash into the created space, shove through the remaining stragglers, and vault the bar, passing your hand over the alcohol display until you hit the top shelf and feel the bottle that nearly evens the bar's debt to you.
As you grab it and run back outside, you realize that you detest the taste of human alcohol. Your neighbors don't drink, either. But the yellow-haired devil hunter—you saw him drinking with your former coworkers, so you shove the bottle in his hands. Now he owes you a debt, which you will be able to extract later this evening.
"Hey!" the bartender shouts behind you. You grab your neighbor and run, splashing through the streets, down into the underground, and across all its staircases until you crash to a stop in the open seats of last cab in the subway line home.
The darkness of the underground tunnel and the lights into the subway make the window opposite you into a mirror. Your neighbor's work uniform is rumpled and your loose hair's even wilder than usual.
In the reflection, you touch your grin, feeling how human joy reshapes your face. Your neighbor glances at you from the corner of his eye, sighs, and takes off his uniform jacket, spreading it over your lap, where your short dress has ridden up your thighs.
You beam at him. Your human neighbor is like your human handler. Despite unusual youth and gender for such labor, he fulfills the role of mother in his household. Though you don't like people, you have found that you tend to like mothers who insert no obligation into interactions with their children. You are not bound by them, so you climb the balcony into your left side neighbor's apartment for dinner sometimes. It's not pizza, but their mother cooks well.
Your human neighbor walks you to your apartment door. Inside, you pull the curtains since he yelled at you once about that. You change into the pizza parlor uniform and toss your bar dress onto the ground, having recalled that messiness rather than order is the default state of the human habitat. When the restaurant calls, you drive the vespa to pickup and run the order to the yellow-haired devil hunter.
Your handler tells you he is the strongest, but humans have such vague and inconsistent understandings of strength. What you find remarkable about this demon hunter is that he's worthless, with nothing more that he can offer a devil. This suggests unusual skill—that a human understands your kind enough to engineer trades such that he can extract maximum value from himself in exchange for the skill and ability to hunt. The cleanliness of the trade makes you wonder who he contracted with and what he asked for with that flavor of wondering which suggests you knew the answer once, but can no longer remember.
"What devil are you?" he asks flatly.
You know how to answer this question. Ha! When your handler asked, your initial answer had been a shrug—your name is one of those things that you can't really remember, which is odd. Devil names aren't like human names. This is very important information, so your handler told you to not say whatever you did which was basically, "I don't know" followed by a bunch of sensible guesses.
"That's classified," you recite cheerfully, as your handler had instructed.
The worthless hunter grunts. Your handler expected that the splinter cell of Japan's Public Safety organization would not trust you. You remain unsure as to what extent you can trust them.
You check the control devil's awareness. When you confirm that she controls nothing near you, you share your current timeline for making physical contact with those under her control. While you can pick when you remove her effect, you must have touched them before, so that's your agenda for the next weeks, unless he or his faction have other recommendations.
"Why are you doing this?" he asks.
The terms of your contract were included in the briefing. You did accept a pan of pizza sauce as your price for killing the control devil, but the worthless hunter is correct in assuming you had other motives. The pizza sauce that the former lawyer made wasn't very good, being both over-salted and using inferior varieties as well as pickings of tomato.
There is no bad pizza sauce—the very idea is an oxymoron. If it's bad, it's not pizza sauce, and if it's pizza sauce, it won't be bad. But the pizza sauce your handler concocted really left something to be desired. It very nearly challenged your conception of how mediocre pizza sauce could be, but the terms of his proposed contract—you had to accept because they were really very well-written. That's the bulk of the reason you're here, because—
"My favorite chef is American and old by your standards. I want to kill the control devil before the President contracts the gun devil. You know, a year off all American lives and all."
The worthless hunter stares you down impassively.
"You're lying," he says.
"How dare you. I do not lie about pizza—wait, no."
You scrunch your nose. He's right. You do have this nagging feeling—you're here for another reason. An important reason. A very important reason. What is it?
"What’s your business with Hayakawa?"
You frown, "Who?"
"The other devil hunter at the club. He paid your debt."
"His name is—"
"Hayakawa Aki."
……….
"You are called Hayakawa," you declare, you voice a stage-whisper given the hour.
Aki's still wearing his pajamas, but you're in that pizza place's uniform despite the early morning. He steps back from the doorway out of habit, and you step into the apartment, peering around as if preparing for the appearance of Power or Denji.
They're both asleep. Meowy goes to you. You sink into the ground, patting the purring cat in your lap. Aki opens the balcony door, and then starts the water boiling for coffee. You pick up the cat, following him to the kitchen.
"I owe you a great debt," you whisper-yell, and then bow with Meowy still in your arms.
He's not awake enough—it takes him a second to recall the hostess club last night. Kishibe said that they're not affiliated with the yakuza, but these clubs all have thugs on staff and you have enough creditors already.
"It's fine," he says.
They were trying to rob you blind. He talked down the debt to a reasonable amount, not that much money. Negligible in the grand scheme of things, nothing against what he makes in a week.
How long does he have left? Less than two years, now, maybe, depending on how Curse rounds.
What Himeno said hasn't changed his goals, but he's been prompted to look past his determination to succeed at what will happen after he's dead. Denji and Power can't live on their own. Public Safety will have to assign someone else for looking after them. He should update his will, too—leave something for them, as well as Himeno's family.
You hover over his kettle. He nudges you back, so you don't get burnt by the heat and the steam.
You're not his problem. Aki's kept an eye on you over the past weeks, just to make sure you're not a threat. He's not sure what was happening when you first met, but as you've settled into Japan, you seem to have become steadily less eccentric, and it's not that he worries about you, exactly, but you don't really seem to have anyone, and the world can be a pretty dangerous place for a really pretty girl who doesn't seem to be all there sometimes.
"Your feelings don't matter," you whisper from beside his shoulder, still petting the cat. "Money is received for goods and services. Years of life constitute the value of salary income, especially when it's earned at great risk given the nature of your work. I would like to repay you."
He quirks an eyebrow at you. You're dirt poor. You can't hold down a job. He cooks and cleans more than you do—except for that first time he saw your apartment, which must've been a fluke that he still can't comprehend. He can count on one hand the number of times that he's been able to see the floor of your bedroom underneath all the mess. Aki's pretty sure that you still don't know how to run the laundry, though your clothes are almost always clean.
"I can take care of Meowy," you offer, inordinately proud as if you've spent hours coming up with this idea.
"You can clean your apartment," he retorts.
The water's hot. He makes the coffee, and you follow him outside, standing close enough that your arm brushes his shoulder.
From when you fell through his apartment entrance until now, you've always been touchy. At first, the touching seemed oddly intentional, like you were maximizing skin-to-skin contact somehow. In the weeks since you've met, the touches became less calculated, almost affectionate—an arm slung over Denji and Power's shoulders, your sides pressed together in the subway car last night. It reminds him of Himeno when she's not flirting with everyone else, when she's just unguarded around him.
He wonders if he would've reciprocated had he known then what he knows now. He's still not sure that he knows how.
"Hey," the memory of her makes Aki tips his head up, towards you. He's not sure how to ask this—
"In that time that we've known each other, have I felt—different? Like I've forgotten something?"
He, Denji, and Power are devil hunters. You're not. They could have come under a devil's influence, and you might've noticed something different.
You raise a finger to your lips, pointing at the bird standing on the balcony next door.
A cat darts in, smacks the bird down with a paw, and tears out its throat. Aki grimaces, but this is far from an uncommon sight now. The apartment's gathered a lot of strays. You feed them, but they still hunt like they're hungry.
"Do you think you've forgotten something?" you ask him after.
"I don't know," he replies. "We've seen devils take people's minds and affect their memories. So I've wondered. I've been wondering."
He's gone through his memories and Public Safety's records of the devils they've taken out—him, Power, and Denji's records. He wrote those reports himself. Nothing looks wrong or different from what he remembers putting down.
"Are there patterns for what memories feel wrong? What or who you misremember?"
Aki hums, staring through his newspaper without reading as he thinks.
"I'd be careful," you add quietly. "If something can get in people's heads, then you never know who or what might be listening, you know?"
You raise a hand to your ears.
Aki's eyes narrow. You have moments of insight despite general ditziness, almost as if you live in a different version of the universe except for the moments when your understandings align, but now he wonders if yours is the obfuscating sort of stupidity.
The guy who'd lived in your apartment broke his lease after Denji and Power moved in, but he hasn't gotten more noise complaints from your side. Maybe you don't know how to make them. You haven't knocked on his door to complain, either.
Maybe the noise is insignificant to you, because your top priority was living next to a trio of devil hunters. Aki's heard of foreign agents, working with or against Public Safety, but those issues are usually Makima's level or somewhere above that. She's not said anything to him.
He could say something to her or someone else, seeing as his messed up memories—many of them are around how he feels about her. She should know if she's wrapped up in this, but if she's wrapped up in this—telling her could also be dangerous.
Aki's been going in circles in his mind, weighing the pros and cons. When he was younger, he used to think that killing devils was straightforward—dangerous, but in a purely physical sense. He came to understand that some devils are more insidious. They wear on the emotions—devils feed on fear, after all.
He sighs, fingers twitching for a cigarette. He misses when he was younger and this job seemed at least straightforward, if no less dangerous.
You squat, the position enabling you to look up and examine his face, your head positioned somewhere around his knees as he sits.
"Get up," he says, hating how his voice comes out slightly hoarse.
He's not sure you heard him, but you spring to your feet, nodding as if satisfied by whatever you found in his expression.
He doesn't know what he was thinking about you being a devil—well, he does, but you're ridiculous. If he's wrong, reporting you would make him look like an idiot, or paranoid, unreliable. He swallows the nervousness rising in his throat at the thought of coming across as incompetent now. He doesn't have much time left, and with Denji around—they could be close, so close. He's not screwing this up now.
"Hayakawa," you hum, as if testing out the sound of his name. "Would you like to come over for lunch sometime?"
"Sure," and then he narrows his eyes at you.
Sometimes, you've a look like you know something he doesn't, and he thinks you might actually be quite intelligent before immediately questioning his intelligence at the thought, but he agreed before he had that second thought, so you ask—
"Like a date?"
He scowls. He hasn't even dated—not Makima, because he doesn't even really like her that way. He owes her a debt, maybe—but that's another one of those sentiments that, if he thinks about it, he experiences it without any good reason.
Himeno, though—so many of their interactions could've been, should've been, weren't. Aki first had this feeling as he was reading her letters home. He feels it again, now, alongside his grief. There's what he should've known, how he should've felt, and unmet obligations that he's still sorting through, will be sorting through for who knows how long.
He's in no state to date anyone right now. He probably won't be in any such state before, well—
There is an innocence about you. You live in the world like it's new to you, with fresh delight at even horrible experience, like that hostess bar, but his life's practically over. He's lived and loved. His relationship with Himeno—they fought alongside each other for years, built up something over time that he no longer has.
Aki's got two years to live, but he doesn't like to burden others with that knowledge.
"I could die tomorrow," he says instead. You know what they do for work. America has its own devil hunters, apparently, though you haven't a particularly high opinion of them.
"Anyone could die tomorrow. People die all the time," you shrug.
"Yeah," he says, though he's unsure if he's agreeing with you or agreeing to you.
Sometimes he thinks you inhabit another world. You've mentioned memory issues—sometimes he feels like a part of you is missing and not just hidden, because you'll come with these attitudes about death like you know it better than him when he's seen it all around him since he was a child.
In his distraction, you nab his mug and try his coffee. You do that sometimes, like you're looking for something though you always end up grimacing at the bitterness.
"Bleh," you stick out your tongue and replace his mug. Aki sighs.
The wind rises. You turn into it, your hair whipping wildly around your head, in your face, everywhere. A stray sunbeam falls, lighting your one exposed iris into the bluest eye, and it feels like one of those rare moments when you're all there, lucid.
"Death has always been a part of life," you tell the open sky. "That's never kept anybody from living."