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The note says Meowy isn’t a very complicated cat to handle in what Kishibe can only assume is Aki’s neat handwriting. Denji would never bother to use the word complicated, and Kishibe doubts Power knows how to write. All you need to do is feed her twice a day—best in the morning and at night—and clean the litter box daily. Don’t give her any tuna or she’ll vomit.
Yep, definitely Aki.
Kishibe runs a hand through his hair, staring at the small puddle on the carpet. Don’t give her tuna, Aki had said and conveniently left out the part where the cat barfs from everything else, too. Kishibe is eighty percent sure it only does that out of spite.
His eyes don’t leave the Cat while he gets the mop and some paper towels.
“You’re terrible,” he tells it. “You’re terrible. I should kick you out the window right now and get it over and done with.”
The Cat does what cats arguably do best: it ignores him.
Kishibe sighs. This is going to be a long three days.
Originally, he had hoped for these days to be the calm after the storm, the first breath of air after a disaster has passed (and Santa Claus was a disaster all right, with the way Kishibe can never seem to escape murmured Halloweens on the street). But instead, they drag him down like a vacuum, a bottomless hole, a weight he can’t seem to escape. When was the last time Kishibe had a day off?
Deep down, he is thankful for the temporary distraction that the Cat offers. As much as Kishibe wants to get rid of that nuisance, some part of him is almost glad every time it knocks something over. Picking up the shards of the ugly vase Mishimiya gifted him ages ago gives him the same liberating feeling as slicing a devil’s head clean off. But he can only collect porcelain off the floor, can only hang up the carpet to dry for so long and by noon, he finds himself turning his flat upside-down for the sake he knows he keeps somewhere.
It isn’t on the high cupboard in the kitchen, the one he never ever dusts off. It isn’t in the small storage over the toilet, where he keeps the prescription-only painkillers for really bad days, either. It isn’t in his wardrobe, or under his bed, or in the walk-in closet he never uses and never checks. The Cat is with him every step of his desperate way, following his search with flat yellow eyes. If Kishibe didn’t know any better, he’d say it‘s making fun of him.
“What are you looking at?” Kishibe asks at last, aiming for annoyed dryness and instead hits cynicism that is a bit too self-aware for his taste.
The Cat doesn’t respond—just watches him. Its stare haunts Kishibe as he continues to rummage through every cupboard the kitchen has to offer and every drawer of his desk.
It is, of course, in vain. Kishibe comes to learn that, despite their limited range of facial expressions, cats can look incredibly smug.
Several hours pass. Kishibe comes to the painful conclusion that, in a rare moment of self-inflicted pragmatism, he must have given it all away. When he is finally ready to admit this to himself, the sun has set and the stores have closed. Kishibe doesn’t feel like taking the train to the 24-hour one, so he begrudgingly submits to his fate.
He sighs. He sits down. He stares against the ceiling.
He still remembers every single member of his first squad as if they just died yesterday. Mishimiya, his stoic deputy whose sense of justice’s sharpness was second only to her sword. He still sees her in every single one of Aki’s movements. Hiroto, hair dyed whatever color he fancied that month and almost as pessimistic as he is, might be the one Kishibe misses the most. Quanxi was and will always be Kishibe’s one true love, but there is something to be said about the many nights he and Hiroto had spent in run-down bars all across Tokyo, preaching the end of the world in some way or another.
And Anri, youngest of the bunch and, regrettably, never afraid to speak her mind, would grin at him. You’re becoming a drunkard on your old days, Sir. What would Quanxi say?
Oh, shut up, he thinks, not without fondness. What do you know?
Day two finds Kishibe with a hungry cat scratching at his bedroom door, an instantly worse mood, and, for once, without a headache. Work still hasn’t called, so he spends the first few hours making coffee so strong it almost knocks his brains out and scraping cat food into a tin bowl. The Cat is wary at first, taking its time to carefully stalk closer and sniff at the weird-smelling mush. Ultimately, though, it decides that Kishibe doesn’t want to poison it just yet and contently gorges upon half in less than a minute. It reminds Kishibe of its owner in the worst way possible.
They eat their respective breakfast in silence, up there on the lofty tightrope between tolerance and reluctant comradeship. Kishibe’s attitude towards the Cat hasn’t changed—it hasn’t—and yet he can’t deny that it is nice to have company besides his own thoughts. Even if that company is a cat with a severe lack of table manners.
It’s almost a relief when the phone rings—at least until Kishibe picks up and a smooth voice greets him.
“Kishibe. Good morning.”
He swallows. “Hello, Makima-san.”
Kishibe is not a man easily scared, nor is he one to fear irrationally. But while he listens to Makima talking about nothing but the progress on cleanup, the status of Santa Claus’ dolls, and his return to active duty, he has to close his eyes and force his fingers to stop drumming an irrationally quick rhythm on the kitchen table. He sits down, takes a deep breath. If Makima knows of the effect she has on him—and, if Kishibe’s image of her is correct, which it is, she does—she doesn’t show it, just continues to talk in the same silk-smooth voice about work while Kishibe forces himself to listen to her.
“I know. Yes. Thank you. I’ll stay in touch.” A short moment of silence, then: “Goodbye.” With a sigh of what could almost be named relief, Kishibe ends the call at seven minutes, thirty-six seconds. Only now does he realize that his palms are sweaty. He has encountered many devils in his lifetime, but none of them have left an impression quite like this one.
Kishibe forgot when he first made the choice to kill Makima. Was it after he met Division 4? When Quanxi left?
Maybe it was even before that. After the death of his first squad, maybe, when their memory was still fresh and their blood still warm on his hands. Amidst all the gore, the raw pain where the left side of his face should have been, the despair that clawed at him, stood Makima: a grotesque angel, unbothered and untouched by the bloodbath around her. Her blouse was stainless and her touch soft as she ran a hand down Kishibe’s face, leaving a smear of bright red on her perfect skin. He shuddered; not at the touch, but from fear of how soft this man-monster’s claws could be if she wanted them to.
“It’s a shame,” she said and licked his blood from her fingers. “Tell me, how does it feel to want to die?”
She hasn’t aged a day since then.
Kishibe still tries, with no luck, to get her voice out of his mind when he falls asleep. It isn’t a pleasant night.
Waking up, Kishibe does something he hasn’t done in a long time: he thinks of Quanxi.
It’s not the conscious, calculated kind of Quanxi-thoughts he has trained himself to think, but of the moment blood had stained his face and he knew the next time he opened his eyes, it would be to a lifeless body. After thirty-seven years in this line of work, Kishibe doesn’t get haunted by death anymore. He’d be a hypocrite if he did. But waking up to remember Quanxi’s final and most significant death is the closest to a ghost he has ever felt.
Quanxi, Quanxi, Quanxi. It’s been years, decades, and they’ve both grown old; Quanxi has her job, and Kishibe has his job, they haven’t seen each other in forever and would probably have to kill each other if they did—and yet, somehow, she will always be the axis he revolves around. His first and only love, his first partner and the only one that will outlive him. That much, Kishibe is sure of.
Some part of him is still in love with her, maybe, but a bigger part has accepted the fact that she will forever be out of his reach. They will be acquaintances at best, and most likely enemies until they die, soldiers for rivaling countries even though he knows neither of them give a shit about what name they kill under. Yet, she still doesn’t leave his thoughts for more than ten minutes while he goes through his day. He stirs her blood into his coffee and it is her knife that cuts his hand when he tries to pick up the Cat to pet it, much to the Cat’s dismay. When he returns from the store, the food and bottles in his bags have been replaced with the heavy weight of her cut-off head.
There are other, better memories, too. When he chops up the salmon and vegetables for lunch, he remembers the last time they spoke without hostility or the threat of death hanging above them: in a bar deep in the underbelly of Tokyo. It feels like a lifetime ago.
The Cat audibly complains, so Kishibe sighs and drops a piece of salmon on the floor. It gets immediately devoured and the Cat snaps its head back up, staring at him accusingly until Kishibe feeds it another piece. He’s glad it’s the Hayakawa’s cat, not his—at least he won’t be the one who has to deal with all the bad habits it picks up.
Deep in Kishibe’s phone book, in between the contact information of people Kishibe doesn’t care about and people who are long dead, sits an unnamed number. He has never called it, and neither has he ever received a call from it, but he knows exactly who it belongs to—knows because he was there when Quanxi, well into her fifth drink of the night, right before she left for the continent, reached over and scribbled down something on a piece of paper.
“Here,” she said, shoving it into Kishibe’s hands like it was something she would regret in a moment. “Don’t forget about me, even if we end up as enemies, alright?”
Kishibe has never called. He doesn’t think Quanxi would want him to. Yet today, he finds his hands moving on their own, dialing the number he would never admit he knows by heart. The line rings. One, two. Neither anxiety nor excitement are speeding up Kishibe’s heart rate because he knows how this will end. Three. He sits down on the couch. His fingers don’t tighten around the phone because he knows she won’t pick up, yet he can’t stop his leg from bouncing.
Four. If Quanxi picks up—she won’t—what would he say to her? I’m sorry I didn’t stop Makima? I should have gotten you out of there before she reached you? All pretty lackluster, coming from the man who couldn’t save her if he wanted to, and who she wouldn’t have wanted to be saved by.
Five. The person you’re trying to call is currently unavailable. Please leave a message or try again later.
Kishibe sighs and puts down the phone. He allows himself to watch the screen for just a moment longer before he presses the red button that ends the call.
“You’re a sappy old man,” he scolds himself and puts the phone away. “Spend your time on something useful instead. God knows you need it before you die of old age.”
He sighs and stands up to dump more salmon in the cat bowl. “C’mon, eat up,” he tells the Cat, who stares at him with wide eyes. “You and me both deserve something good every once in a while.”
The Hayakawas return sometime in the late afternoon. Kishibe is supposed to meet them at the train station, for both their convenience. He looks at the clock—4 PM something, closer to 5. Time to get going.
He throws one last piece of salmon at the Cat, who immediately dives for it. Like it followed his train of thought it brushes closer, purrs against his shoe and digs its claws so deep into his leg they draw blood. Kishibe just lets it do whatever it wants. The pants have seen better times, and so has he. It’s not like the Cat, who has no apparent sense of danger and doesn’t even recognize a fearsome devil hunter when it uses his leg as a scratching post, would stop anyway.
He’s not charmed. He isn’t.
Kishibe looks at the Cat again. “Just to be clear, I still don’t like you.” At this point, he isn’t sure who he is trying to convince anymore.
Well—it’s not like it matters, anyway. He sighs and attempts to pick up the Cat. “Come on,” he says. “Time to go. Let’s hope your owner brought me some sake.”
It’s funny. For once, the thought of getting drunk isn’t all that enticing anymore.