Chapter Text
天使
It had been a long time since Aki Hayakawa died.
Not that Angel knew how long — he hadn't bothered to track the days. He found himself occasionally wondering why he'd never starved, or why a devil hunter had never seen fit to put some extra distance between his head and his shoulders. The curiosity never stayed for long, always pushed back into the malaise by the other thoughts that preferred to circulate in his head. Time had moved on and left Angel stuck in September of 1997.
Perhaps it was November. Perhaps it was February. Perhaps time had folded back in on itself and he'd get to experience the good-old-bad-old-days all over again. If that were the case, then Angel would have to find a way to join Aki this time around. Perhaps he could follow him. Perhaps he could speak his mind. Perhaps he could tell Aki to wait when he inevitably said that last goodbye. Perhaps he could die with him this time around.
'Perhaps.' Angel thought he'd like to wallow in that word for the rest of his life. It was as good a way to pass the time as any.
It had been a long time since Aki Hayakawa died, but in Angel's mind all of a single evening had passed.
Yet what an eventful evening it had been. He'd broken his wing, for one thing. Being made to focus on the sensation of pain brought to bear the other things he'd tuned out — hunger, cold, exhaustion, loneliness. The chill air carried with it the scents of charred street food, humans, exhaust, the fishy pollution that rolled in from the bay, and fuel.
He'd always hated the smell of fuel.
⁂
A disheveled, bloody Angel in a ragged tee and jeans had been standing outside of Chainsaw Man's apartment for the better part of three hours, now. Not the Chainsaw Man, of course, but the boy who was close enough to the original to have the moniker put upon him. Angel wondered if he was out slaughtering Devils. He wondered if he was at home, busy caring for that little rat of a girl. He wondered if he'd been seen as soon as he'd arrived, and the chainsaw boy simply hadn't deigned Angel worthwhile enough to address.
The last one made the most sense. The pair had barely said a dozen words to each other even when they were 'coworkers.' Angel no doubt would only serve as a reminder of that awful woman. He tried to find the comfort that sentiment should've brought. It was there, but buried under a frigid layer of ambivalence.
Angel asked himself again why he was here, staring across an empty parking lot at a crappy apartment, preparing to meet a boy he'd never known and had never particularly liked.
Right. Everyone else who might want to help him was dead. By visiting Chainsaw, he could kill two birds with one stone.
Perhaps he ought to try knocking.
Angel climbed a flight of shaky metal stairs to the second floor balcony and stopped outside their door. He listened for a moment. The door was thin and hollow, and Angel clearly made out the conversation on the other side. It was the boy's voice, and the kid's. They were discussing what movie they'd rent for the upcoming weekend. Chainsaw suggested Vampire Death-Hunter 4. The vile little girl seemed amicable to the idea, despite not having seen the previous three.
The place smelled like gasoline, like dogs, like Control. He stood there for a short time, hand raised to the door, recalling the feeling of a chain pressing through his skull.
Knock-knock.
The conversation paused. A deadbolt clunked and the door cracked open. The face that stared at him from the opposite side of a chain-lock was at once familiar and not. The softness of youth had all but vanished from him, and the tired dark circles beneath his eyes were some of the deepest that Angel had ever seen. Chainsaw's mouth hung open not in surprise, but as if he'd simply forgotten to close it. The boy — a man, now — stared at him, and Angel realized that even more time had passed since 1997 than he'd thought.
Angel avoided eye contact, his jaw tight as he made his request. "Chainsaw? I need help-"
The door didn't slam, but it closed with enough force to deliver a message. Angel ignored it and knocked again. There was a brief, hushed bit of conversation that Angel couldn't make out. The door opened a second time. Chainsaw stared at him with an expression Angel figured could've been revulsion.
"Please-"
"Go away," he said. The door moved to close again when Angel went for a pressure point.
"I have money."
Chainsaw lurched to a halt. There was another moment of near-inscrutable staring and the door thunked shut again. This time, it was followed by the clattering of the chain-lock. Chainsaw stepped out to meet him.
He towered over Angel at least as much as Aki ever had. Perhaps he'd even be a touch taller if he ever bothered to stand up straight. He didn't, though. Instead, Chainsaw carried himself as if a heavy weight hung around his neck, always on the verge of pulling him to the ground. There were faint bloodstains on his jeans that had only mostly scrubbed out. His tee was clean — not counting the thin dusting of canine fur that had accumulated across his clothes from head to toe — and emblazoned across the front in blocky katakana were the words, 'Chainsaw Man.' Whether that was a little joke on his part or a statement of deliberate intent, Angel hadn't a clue. With Chainsaw's presence, the scent of fuel grew a little stronger.
He gave Angel a blank look, or maybe just an exhausted one.
"What do you want." He said the words much more than he asked them. His voice creaked with weariness, as if he'd spent much of the day shouting or screaming.
'I want to rip your throat out,' thought Angel. He kept that little secret to himself and gestured at his right wing. While his left was tucked up against his back, the right was stuck out at an angle, a wince-inducing bend in its shape.
"I fell out of a tree and broke my wing. I need help, and I have 32,000 yen."
"I don't know what the hell you want me to do about it. Go to a hospital."
Angel studied his face for a moment. He wondered what the odds were that Chainsaw genuinely didn't remember him, that he wouldn't care one iota for Angel any more than he would a random stranger. Probably higher than he'd like. Angel scowled.
"You won't call the devil hunters on me. A hospital would."
"You sound pretty confident."
"Oh, I'm sure you'd just love to call them," scoffed Angel. More bite carried through in his voice than he'd intended, but the vitriol was already pouring forth and there was no stemming the tide. "And I bet they love you over at HQ, too, after your little lovers' quarrel that got half the hunters in the city killed-"
Chainsaw was already gone. Angel stared at the door with hatred burning in his chest, nails biting into his palms as his hands clenched into shaky fists.
Coming here had been a terrible idea. It was time to go.
チェーンソー
Denji trudged back inside and sank to the floor beside his roommate — a young, pale-faced girl about ten or eleven years of age. She wore pastel pink pajamas, and her dark hair was still damp from that evening's shower. Her bright green eyes were downcast at the manga in her lap.
"How did that go?" she asked, not looking up.
Denji leaned back against the wall and and stared off into space. For a moment, he didn't reply. He still wasn't used to Nayuta being an active party in conversation, but she was adapting to her life with Denji whether he was ready for it or not.
"Huh?"
"With that devil outside."
"Eh."
"Do you know him?"
Denji shrugged. "…Eh."
"Thirty-two thousand yen is a lot of money," she said.
"Hey. I told you, no eavesdroppin' on people."
"The walls are thin and the door was open. I'd have to plug my ears to not hear anything."
She was right. Nayuta had a habit of being right. "Sorry. I'll try to quiet down," Denji said. He groaned and rubbed his face. "Still. The hell am I supposed to do? I ain't a doctor. Or a vet. Or whatever the hell's supposed to know how to fix a busted up wing."
"He's a devil. He probably just wants some of your blood."
"Can't he get it somewhere else?"
"I think most people wouldn't want to give blood to a random devil. Maybe he'd rather get it from someone he knows."
"He doesn't know me. And I don't know him."
Nayuta finally looked up from her manga. Her bright eyes met Denji's. She seldom blinked, but he'd grown used to that particular oddity.
"Well, I wanna get the newest volume of Shark Kick," she said. "And if he tries to pull something, you can slice him to pieces."
Denji glanced at the volume she held. The pages were crinkled at the edges and the spine had become a mess of cracked glue and discolored paper. The pair had read through it at least a dozen times each, along with the other handful of volumes stacked haphazardly on their shelf.
Denji sighed. He wanted the new one, too. He wanted to go out to eat somewhere that wasn't a convenience store. He wanted a new pair of shoes after slicing through his only spares last week. Thirty-two thousand would let them do all of that, and they'd even have some left over. Which meant that Nayuta was right again. He headed for the door, pausing when Nayuta spoke up.
"He called you Chainsaw. Are you two really strangers?" she asked.
Denji thought about it, then packed those thoughts up and shoved them into a dark little corner in his head.
"Yeah."
天使
Angel sat facing the street on an uncomfortable metal bench, his body in a miserable slump. Despite the small golden disc that hovered above his head and the wings at his back, nobody stopped to give him a second glance. He imagined that he looked particularly dejected. Maybe that's why he'd lived so long — he was pitiable enough to ignore.
He tried moving his broken wing to better assess the damage. Something grated and pain shot down the leading edge of his wing and into his shoulder blade. His back muscles clenched up and he hissed through his teeth. His radius was broken. Probably the ulna, too. The grinding made his stomach twist, and he resolved to hold the wing very, very still. He panted for a few moments, his breathing shaky, and wondered how the hell he was going to make it through this nightmare.
Beyond that, he wondered if he even wanted to. It wasn't like he could just walk up to a human and ask for their blood, and unlike most devils, he'd seldom felt that intrinsic desire to physically attack people. With one notable exception.
Angel scented Chainsaw before he saw him. Gasoline, metal, blood — he smelled like an auto shop fresh after a workplace accident.
"You here to help?" Angel groaned, "Or are you here to finish me off? Either way, get it over with."
Chainsaw hit the bench beside him. "What? No. I ain't here to kill you. Just gimme the cash."
Angel fished around in his pocket for a worn-out old wallet, gingerly angling himself around to not aggravate his wing any further. He set it on the bench and pushed it over with his index finger. "It's in there. All of it."
Chainsaw thumbed it open and rifled through the bills, doing a few seconds of mental math.
"How'd you break it, again?" he asked.
"I told you. I fell out of a tree."
"Damn. That's crazy," Chainsaw said.
Angel couldn't tell if Chainsaw believed him. Really, he expected him to get up and leave right then and there. To his surprise, Chainsaw didn't just stay, but tossed the wallet back over with five thousand yen still inside. It wasn't enough to buy much, but maybe the gesture was supposed to be nice.
Angel looked over at him. He was counting the bills again, wearing the same dead-tired look on his face. He crumpled the money into his back pocket. A moment of stony silence passed between them, interrupted by the sound of a passing car.
"So, what? You want blood?" asked Chainsaw. He looked at Angel. Angel avoided his eyes.
"I need two things," he said. "Blood, obviously. And I need you to set the bone. I heal slower than someone like you does. I'm about a millimeter shy of a compound fracture and I don't want to spend an hour in agony while my wing drags itself back into place. You can do that, right?"
Chainsaw shrugged. "I'm a lot better at takin' devils apart than I am puttin' em back together. But I can figure out what's supposed to go where. I think."
Angel withered. "Fine. Do you know anywhere nearby where we can get some privacy?" he asked.
"Privacy? Why can't we just do it here?"
Angel scowled with an ire that made Chainsaw shrink back. "Because," he said, "when you set the bone, I'm going to start screaming. And the last thing I need is for a bunch of humans to start staring at me."
"Oh. I hadn't thought about that, yeah."
'He's an idiot,' Angel thought. 'A moron.' "What did he see in you?" he mumbled under his breath.
"Huh?"
"Nothing. Can we go already?"
チェーンソー
There weren't a lot of free, well-isolated places in the thick of Tokyo. Denji's apartment was a bust on account of the too-thin-walls — not to mention Nayuta — and anywhere that might have decent soundproofing was either too expensive (costing any money at all), or wouldn't let a devil in, or both. But Denji knew the nearby maze of alleys like the back of his hand, and he led Angel to a place where the odds of being spotted were as close to zero as they could reasonably get.
The grimy concrete on either side of them was layered with pipes and AC units and junction boxes. Wires crossed overhead and broken glass crunched underfoot. A cadre of ancient metal trash cans sat unused, long-forgotten by collection services amidst central Tokyo's never-ending construction. Taking the lid off of one, Denji did a quick check to see if his stuff was where he'd left it.
Angel eyed him with distaste. "What are you doing? And where are we, anyway?" he asked.
Denji glanced up, caught the look, and shrugged. "I don't like goin' home drenched in blood after doin' chainsaw stuff. It gets in the carpet, so I keep some spare clothes out here where nobody'll find 'em. Never seen anybody else around while I'm changing, so I figure it's a pretty good spot to do whatever we gotta do." He eyed over Angel, whose own clothing was streaked with blood. Most of the stains were old and discolored, but some still glistened with fresh, lustrous red.
'Maybe I should give him a shirt. He looks like he's been wearin' that stuff for months,' Denji thought. Putting the lid back on the bin, he rejected the idea. If he started giving away free shit like that, he'd end up even broker than he currently was. He was already kicking himself for leaving a sixth of the cash behind.
Angel scraped his shoe against the filthy concrete and pushed away the worst of the broken glass, mouldering magazines, and god-knows-what-else that was stuck to the ground in front of him. He brought himself to his knees and hunched forward with a deep breath.
"Let's get it over with," he said. "First the bone. Then the blood."
Apprehension grew in Denji's chest as he shuffled up behind Angel and dropped to one knee. What if he fucked it up? What if he made it worse?
He had a nice voice, even if it was mostly just a tired deadpan. Denji didn't really want to hear it scream.
天使
Angel felt Chainsaw approach him from behind. It was hard to believe that he was the same person as that scrawny boy he'd once been not-so-familiar with all that time ago. Chainsaw's hands hovered above his wing. Angel noticed that they were trembling. Unease rolled through his chest, and the scenario of Chainsaw mucking it up grew substantially more realistic in his mind. He'd never get this done if he was in too much pain to think straight.
"You're going to have to touch me," he said. "But as long as you only touch the feathers, you won't lose any of your lifespan."
Chainsaw paused and his hands withdrew. "Lose — huh?"
Angel's jaw tightened up. "Nothing. Just do what I say and you'll be fine."
'He really doesn't remember me. There's no way Aki never told him,' Angel thought. 'Did he really care that little? Were we that meaningless to him?'
"Lay your hand over the leading edge of my wing. You'll feel where the bone is grinding. I don't care if it's clean. Just make it quick. You're not going to kill me."
⁂
"Denji's going to kill me. He's going to kill Power, too."
Aki sat across from Angel in the empty breakroom. A limp, loose sleeve hung at his side where his left arm had been severed at the shoulder.
"Chainsaw?" Angel didn't understand. They were close, weren't they? The way Aki talked about the boy made it seem like he'd lay down his life for him, but… "Is there a chance the Future Devil's wrong?" he asked.
Angel was familiar with Aki's eyes. He knew how they looked when Aki spoke of someone he cared deeply for. He knew the subtle way they lit up on the rare occasions when Aki took interest in something that wasn't the grim task of his job. He knew the sorrow that lurked there, just beneath the surface, even in his happiest moments. That sorrow was in the open now, naked and plain. It told Angel everything he needed to know.
He tried to process it. A minute eternity passed. Fear began to claw at the inside of his ribcage. He pressed his eyes shut and gripped tight at the edge of his seat, as if the tension would shield him from the feeling. In the swimming dark behind his eyelids, Angel saw them — vague, formless faces staring blankly back at him. His eyes snapped open again and he did his best to ignore the sickness creeping through in his gut.
"So, why are you here?" he asked. "Are you asking me to stop fate from happening?"
"No," said Aki. "I'm here to talk about what's going to happen after. If the operation to kill the Gun Devil goes poorly tomorrow, there won't be a Division 4 anymore. Even if you live through it, all devils associated with the project will likely be put down."
'Then we both die. It's not the worst fate in the world.' The thought trailed through Angel's head and the guilt in his stomach worsened.
Aki reached into his jacket and laid an envelope on the table between them. "But if that happens, give them this. Can't hurt to try."
"What is it?"
"A letter of recommendation from me and Master Kishibe. You might be able to stay alive by making a contract with Public Safety."
Angel stared at the ticket to his survival. He should've been grateful, but all he felt was a pained tightness in the back of his throat. "Well, aren't you nice?" He swallowed back the urge to cough. His face grew hot and he blinked away the tears that had begun to blur his vision. "I've heard that Aki Hayakawa is Public Safety's number one devil hater," he murmured. "You're not what the rumors say."
Aki stood. He was stiff and tired, like a weak tree on the verge of winter. "Tomorrow, we'll be hunting the Gun Devil. If there's anything you have to say, now's the time."
Bleak silence filled the room. Aki took a deep breath, gave Angel the smallest of nods, and turned to leave.
"I'm sorry," Aki said. "Goodbye."
The future didn't wait until the next day to come for him. It didn't even wait an hour.
It was blind fate that had brought Angel close to the only man he'd ever loved. It was that same fate that stole him back just as quickly, leaving Angel with a thousand unsaid words and a single cold, sickening hate.