Chapter Text
Aki remembered being a teenager – as Himeno was wont to remind him, it really wasn’t that long ago, no matter how far away it felt.
He remembered what it was like, and he remembered it sucked. Everybody treated you like shit, expected you to carry the weight of the future, and thanked you for exactly nothing. And, on top of everything, you had to deal with hormones.
He couldn’t imagine it was any better when you were technically classed as sub-human, but up until recently Denji had seemed sorta pumped about all of it.
He’d bitched endlessly about school, and Aki’d gotten weekly calls from his teachers, but all those years spent alone in a shack living off Yakuza crumbs had clearly given Denji some kind of perspective. He’d even dated a girl for a while, and the fact that she was devil-possessed had only been a minor catastrophe.
After Makima, things had been – dare he say it – almost good. As good as could reasonably be expected.
Recently, though, things had gotten a lot less good.
It’d started out small, just little things: Denji rushing to the phone when a call came through, hanging back late after school. Power tormented him about it constantly, but that wasn’t new, and Aki couldn’t say he’d paid much attention. Then after a while he hadn’t needed Aki to tutor him anymore, because apparently someone else had volunteered to do it.
He’d been suspicious until he found out it was another Hunter, one who attended Denji’s school. Hunters were only marginally more trustworthy than the average population – still trending below zero – but after Kishibe had vouched for him, Aki had decided to stop worrying and let Denji make his own decisions. He was almost an adult, and if they were bad ones, they might serve as a lesson.
Aki wasn’t his brother, wasn’t his family. Whatever was going on in terms of guardianship, Aki was aware he was much closer to the guy with the nuclear codes than some kind of foster-parent. Which was good, because otherwise –
It would be weird, anyway.
But Denji’s temper had started getting – wonky. All the things that usually annoyed him didn’t. All the things that usually enraged him didn’t. And he’d started blowing up over nothing – a snide remark from Power, an accidental touch from Aki – and he didn’t laugh as much, seemed always distracted. And he’d been skipping a lot of school, and started flunking exams again.
It wasn’t Aki’s job to figure out Denji’s life for him. It was his job to put up with Denji’s shit, but he didn’t have to like it.
So when Denji got home close to midnight on the second school-night in a row, Aki waited up for him. He spent almost two hours stewing, and with all the hot-cold tension Denji’d been putting out, Aki had worked himself up for a fight, expecting Denji to act like an angry teenager and poke at him, petulant, or try to avoid him altogether.
But when Denji saw him sitting in the living room, he didn’t even blink. He just pulled a container of cold food out of the fridge, grabbed a pair of chopsticks, and sat down at the table like he was planning to chew his way stolidly through whatever admonition was coming. He looked like he didn’t care.
Aki’s stomach flipped. He stared at Denji for a long moment, grinding his teeth and trying to assess the situation.
“What’s going on?” he asked, instead of the laundry list of opening sallies he’d prepared, spent hours crafting and rewriting. “What’s wrong?”
Denji’s gaze was distant, unfocused. “Huh?”
“What’s wrong with you?”
Denji shrugged, his face pulling briefly before going blank again. He shoved another mouthful of noodles past his teeth, and worse, showed no signs of enjoying it.
Aki had made that meal for him specifically three days ago, but he hadn’t been around to eat it. It was Denji’s favourite, and his praise was never anything less than rapturous. If it’d been a test, it had sure proved something, Aki just wasn’t sure what.
“Did something happen?” Aki asked him.
Denji’s eyebrows twitched, almost an expression. Then he shrugged again. “Nope.”
Aki watched him for a minute, then two, listening to his chopsticks scrape across the bottom of the plastic container. His free hand sat limply in his lap.
“You’ve been off for a while,” Aki prompted, but Denji just nodded.
“Yeah, probably,” he conceded amicably.
He was clearly hiding something – but maybe he’d just found another devil girlfriend and was too embarrassed to admit it; maybe he’d gotten into drugs. He was almost eighteen and, as long as he wasn’t an active danger to the civilian population, it technically wasn’t Aki’s problem.
He was staring out the glass doors to the balcony, his school uniform raked with dust. The toes of his socks had holes in them. There was the tiniest spot of blood on the collar of his shirt.
Aki found, unnervingly, that he had no idea what to say to him. He decided to go with the simplest, most direct option: “You know if something’s going on, you can tell me. I won’t get angry.”
Denji just said “Yep,” and got up to throw out the empty container. The tap ran for a second as he washed the chopsticks, then he showered and went to bed, making as little noise as possible.
Aki was really, really worried.
+
Power wasn’t exactly eager to be helpful. He knew pumping her for intel was ethically dubious, but he wasn’t sure he had another option. That was a lie, he had plenty of options – but this was closest to getting it from Denji himself, in terms of violations of privacy.
“Just tell me what’s going on,” he told her, holding the pack of A8 Wagyu at arm’s reach. Her eyes glittered, mutinous.
“I’m no snitch,” she told him archly, but he could see from the way her gaze was cutting to left that she planned to rush him. He yanked it away just as she lunged and snatched, palming her face in the opposite direction, sending her careening into the table.
She turned and blinked up at him innocently, injured.
“This is a trade,” he told her sternly.
He knew by now that he couldn’t mock her openly in these kinds of situations, but the urge was high when she still telegraphed this strongly. Maybe it wasn’t a total miscalculation though, because the moving blot at the corner of his eye told him that Meowy was planning a pincer attack from the top of the kitchen counter, and his change in direction had made that a lot less obvious.
Power grinned wolfishly.
Dumb. He sighed.
The cat made a disgruntled noise when he knocked it out of its leap, but landed gracefully anyway, immediately turning the tumble into an excuse to groom its paws and hindquarters.
“Power,” he said. “This is important. What’s wrong with Denji?”
Her grin widened. “Wouldn’t you like to know, Topknot?”
“Yes,” he sighed again, feeling aged by a decade. “That’s why I’m asking.”
She eyed the steak, lids narrowing. Aki bet Denji had extracted promises, but they all knew what those were worth. It was wrong of him to test it, force the situation, but – if Denji had found another girlfriend that was trying to kill him and steal his heart, he really had to know.
It wasn’t even self-interest, not really; it literally was his job, and he’d given up on Denji a long time ago. Those brief flickers of interest he’d noticed – the blushing glances, awkward postures, maybe flirtations, maybe come-ons – had been hopeful confirmation bias and egotistical conjecture.
Denji liked girls. Denji wasn’t into Aki. He’d made peace with it because he had no choice.
And frankly Denji was extremely weird and off-putting, so the fact he’d nursed any attraction in the first place was probably a sign of insanity. And he was technically Denji’s guardian, even though Denji wasn’t a person, and more of a bomb.
“Is he seeing someone?” Aki pressed.
Power raised her shoulder, bobbing her head as if in triangulation. She’d gotten less feral in the time that he’s known her, but he guessed some things never changed.
The look she shot him was knowing. “And if he is? Does that concern you?”
He didn’t like that she said it in that tone of voice. “If she’s trying to kill him and steal his heart, it is. It’s my job to care about that.”
She made a magnanimous gesture, almost anticlimactic. “Then fear not, his paramour intends nothing of the sort! I have a nose for these things and, unlike some, am not a doddering simpleton.”
She held out her hand in expectation of reward. He guessed that was fair. But he waited.
“You’re sure?”
She didn’t even have to think about it, and he knew his question was answered. Conclusively.
A sharp nod, “Undoubtedly.” Her mouth twisted, “Pay up!”
+
The thing with Denji was – stupid, Aki knew that. It was juvenile and embarrassing.
When he was honest with himself and seeing clearly, he knew it was a simple equation. He’d lost Himeno, his whole life had fallen apart in flaming wreckage, and as much as Denji was the objective cause of all of it, he’d also been there the whole time, a constant presence.
Almost everyone Aki spent time with these days was a devil, so his standards had dropped, but that wasn’t the whole of it. Not really. Denji hit every checkbox in terms of attraction-repulsion, repulsion-attraction: he was too loud, too mouthy, too dirty, too young. He was also dumbly sweet, awkwardly considerate, irritatingly funny, occasionally respectful, and called him Haya-pai in a tone that did weird things to Aki’s insides. He even looked – pretty. From certain angles.
It didn’t help that he was also exactly Aki’s type and seemed to have no concept of his own body. He was always half-naked, sprawling lewdly, making ridiculous sounds of gratitude, and walking around with his dick out. Aki must’ve seen it a hundred times by now, and on some level he was numb to it.
On another level, he was alone and touch starved, riding out his early twenties without anyone to fuck regularly, much less romance, and had a full-time job that’d come home and stayed. For years.
Basically: it was pathetic, he was pathetic, and he’d just latched onto the nearest warm body. It probably would’ve burned out fast if he’d acted on it, or Denji had left, or he’d found someone else to focus on.
He couldn’t say that he’d ever cared much for the idea of a relationship, and he still didn’t – there was too much going on in his life, and however alienated he’d been from people before Denji had showed up, it was a million times worse now. He and Power were an absolute deterrent.
He did fuck people, sometimes, when it all got too much. The itch would start up in his gut and he’d find himself wanting so much it made the world distant, greyed out, and he’d have to get it out of his system. But it was never as satisfying as he wanted it to be, and the relief never lasted as long as he thought it should.
Blonde twinks weren’t hard to find, but that just made him feel worse in the end, chafed in ways that weren’t worth articulating. Knowing that if he ever did fuck Denji it would be a guaranteed disappointment – that was just how these things worked – didn’t do much to alleviate the urge.
So he just ignored it. There wasn’t anything else he could do. Denji was straight. Denji was into girls. Girls who were untouchable and/or murderous, and out to murder him specifically.
Some guys were just like that.
There’d been moments where he’d thought –
But that was stupid, too.
There’d been a moment where they’d been arguing at the dining table and Denji had looked at him, spiteful, dropped back on his elbows and sneered down his nose at Aki between his spread his knees – as if the insult was enough on its own to make the point – and Aki had thought: I could crawl right between them and fuck him silent. I could make him shut up so easily.
And he’d thought that was exactly what Denji had wanted, but the moment had passed, and once it had gone, he could never be sure that he’d read it right. It was too easy to imagine, too easy to get carried away.
Or all the times he’d walked naked into Aki’s bedroom to rifle through his laundry basket, ass bare and pale as the moonrise, and Aki had thought: provocation. He’d grabbed his arm the first time and thought about dragging him onto the mattress, shoving Denji’s little cock into his mouth, but then he’d left – every time he’d left – and in the end it’d come to nothing.
Denji wasn’t subtle. If Denji wanted something from him, he’d let Aki know.
Aki’d walked in on Denji masturbating a hundred times at least too, and it was only once he’d rolled his eyes and whined. Then he'd avoided Aki like the plague for a whole month straight, which had also been an answer to his question. That obviously hadn’t been intentional.
That image of him – slender muscled thighs, big hand stripping his cute little cock – would be burned into his mind forever. The sound he’d made –
It was stupid, and had all happened a long time ago. It wasn’t happening now.
People remembered what they wanted to remember, and Aki was no exception.
+
“I’m concerned,” Kishibe told him the very next day, sliding into a seat across from him, “about Denji and Yoshida.”
Aki was in the cafeteria, reading reports while he ate his lunch. It was only 11AM, but Kishibe already had his hip flask out. His expression was serious but uncommunicative.
“Oh?” Aki asked, blinking. It took him a moment to catch up.
Yoshida was the Hunter from Denji’s school, and his tutor. Aki only remembered him vaguely.
Was that who Denji had been spending all his time with?
Aki frowned.
Kishibe nodded. “I asked him to keep tabs to ensure operational security.” He tilted his head, “I think things have developed.”
Aki stared at him. He very much did not want to understand what he was being told. He wanted, very badly, to misunderstand it. “Can you clarify, Sensei?”
“They’re fucking.”
Aki swallowed, wracking his brain for anything he could remember about the kid. Tall; contract with the Octopus Devil; very handsome, if deeply unsettling. He’d taken an interest in Denji, but they all had: that was just part of the job.
Aki tried to think, but his brain was stalling. He suddenly wasn’t hungry.
“And that’s a problem?” Aki asked. He was trying to be objective about this. He needed to be objective.
Kishibe looked at him calmly, assessing. He seemed to think for a moment before he spoke. “Hunters are hired for their ability to kill devils, and their high tolerance for the inevitability of death.” He paused, grimacing a little. “That doesn’t tend to overlap with scruples.”
Aki knew that. None of them would be in this job if anyone expected them to be good people. No matter what Himeno had said, had thought, he knew he wasn’t, and a lot of the rest were worse. Most of the time, it just didn’t matter
“My information’s good,” Kishibe said, his hand waving in a dismissive gesture. “But you should look into it anyway.”
When he wandered off, he left a packet of documents on the table. Aki had to remind himself that Denji was his job, his job, his job, before he could force himself to read through them. He wished he hadn’t.
+
He was going to be objective.
Most of the surveillance data logged in the early part of the file was his own, and it was weird to see his own work laid out like this, constellated with everyone else’s. He wasn’t usually privileged to that kind of overarching access, at least when it came to Denji.
Makima had trusted him a lot, or seemed to, but Kishibe was more circumspect. He’d told Aki up front, soon after he’d taken over the department, that he thought Aki was compromised. He was too close, and that made him a better handler in some respects, but also meant he was fundamentally unreliable. He couldn’t be trusted to report truthfully, or without bias.
That had been a wake-up call, had shocked him out of a lot of his worst habits of thinking, behaving.
It had also meant there were a lot of data streams he’d suddenly been cut out of. He was a node, a contact point and nothing more. At the time it’d felt like a demotion.
Now he knew it was a demotion.
Kishibe had only given him a portion of the surveillance data, but it was still a lot. Besides Aki, there had been a rotating roster of Hunters sent out to keep tabs on Denji as he went about his life, track his movements. Yoshida was just one of three Public Safety Hunters working at close range inside the school, and there were a dozen other informants who were normal students and teachers.
In broad terms, Aki had known that this kind of thing had to be happening, but somehow he’d forgotten. Denji was Denji – he wasn’t a danger anymore, not really. He was trying to live a normal life.
He was not living a normal life.
The sheer number of devils he’d killed was staggering. Aki knew he was freelancing, saw it in the news regularly enough, but that didn’t even scratch the surface. He was doing the job of 20 or 30 Hunters easily, taking out multiple devils on his slowest day. Apparently that was why he was missing so much school: because he was prowling around and killing things, and he’d only gotten more efficient.
More disturbing, he was doing it without getting paid. Aki got a stipend for his and Power’s upkeep, but after he’d left Public Safety’s employ, Denji didn’t get a wage. That alone made Aki’s stomach turn.
What the documents were actually tracking, at least in how Kishibe had compiled them, was Denji’s relationship with Yoshida.
In terms of actual details, there were close to none. Aki’s eye snagged on terms like copulate and performed oral sex – but as confronting as they were, they told him nothing. Yoshida had hung around Denji because Public Safety didn’t want him left alone, not even at school, or maybe not there especially.
At some point their relationship had developed, changed, but Aki couldn’t know what that meant without seeing them.
He was being objective.
Yoshida’s address was in the file. Kishibe had asked him to investigate, implied he should intervene. But why? Was it just that Public Safety disapproved of their employees getting overly familiar with the enemy? Or was there some other kind of danger?
Denji had been off for a while, but maybe he’d just moved on. Maybe Aki and Power weren’t enough anymore. He’d found something he liked better.
Maybe Denji had been forced into something he didn’t want to do.
+
Aki was being objective. He was trying.
He’d expected to have to wait ‘til after school got out for them to show up, but it was much, much earlier. Through his scope, he’d spotted them walking down the street at only 2PM.
Yoshida’s body language was relaxed, but Denji was cagey. He was always cagey these days – Aki didn’t know what that signified. It was obvious, just from their expressions, that he was talking back, giving him shit. His brows were knit, and his fists were shoved deep in his pockets.
Aki missed a part after they got through the front door, but when they showed up again through the screen of the window, they were kissing. There was nothing sweet or innocent about it.
Aki didn’t allow himself to feel surprise. He’d already known.
What shocked him was the way Denji moved, his hands fisted in Yoshida’s hair. Dragging him in, even as he stumbled back, pulling Yoshida with him. Tearing at his clothes, desperate.
The apartment was small and Aki’s vantage was good. He saw all of it.
Yoshida’s teeth on Denji’s chest, the open pant of his mouth. The lust and reverence in every gesture. How Denji arched and writhed.
Denji was still giving him shit – still being a shit – but when Yoshida kicked his pants off and sat back, beckoning, Denji didn’t hesitate.
Aki covered the scope. Removed the temptation.
After a while, he got up and went home.
Whatever was on his face, Power didn’t seem tempted to fuck with him. That was fine anyway, because he stayed in his room.
He barely noticed the hours pass.