Chapter Text
Black.
Aki willed himself not to open his eyes. His head was pounding in time with his heartbeat, and for a moment, he was convinced that if he fell back asleep he would die.
It wouldn’t be so bad. He would slip back into the dark.
Aki remembered playing with Taiyo, with Denji. He remembered tears. He remembered Taiyo’s smile, clear as the day he died… Aki’s chest grew heavy again and he dropped the thought. The more aware he became, the worse his body hurt, save for his missing arm.
Taiyo’s smile was clearer in his dream than it had been in years. Aki had felt happy then. Denji, who had been older than him in his dream but only by a little, had been crying.
Slowly, Aki flexed the fingers of his remaining hand. It hurt, a bone-deep ache, but this confirmed that he was alive. He was aware that he needed to get up, but the thought exhausted him more than moving his fingers did.
Aki tried to open his eyes. His vision came, like a shutter opening upwards.
Slowly, he raised a hand to his face and touched the barrel of the gun protruding from his forehead.
Aki didn’t move. He didn’t scream. He didn’t do anything at all.
He slept as much as he could these days. He wasn’t sure how much time was passing. He didn’t dream. Sometimes he woke up to the taste of copper in his mouth. Sometimes light peeked out from the curtained window. Sometimes he heard footsteps and the sound of Denji shouting and singing. Aki didn’t know where he was, and normally his first priority would be to figure it out, take stock of his situation and plan for what would come next, but…
No, he slept as much as possible. He thought about what the Angel Devil would say, and wondered if he was still alive. The last time he’d seen him, they were with Makima.
Makima…
His memory was fragmented. She had been standing beautiful in the ocean, black dress set against hazy sunset water and the painted sky. He had begged her for mercy. Aki had tasted ice cream. Angel was drinking water from his hands. Makima helped them.
Then, black. Then, his dream. Then, he was here.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Aki knew that he should figure out exactly what was going on. The Gun Devil was still out there.
Except Aki had that gun sticking from his forehead. He had felt cold metal at his side, too. But he couldn’t be a fiend, or he wouldn’t still be aware of himself. What had happened? Was he like Denji now?
Aki slept.
Aki dreamt of the beauty of annihilation, of absolute destruction, and he woke up sweating, no eyes to form tears even as his mouth sobbed. He couldn’t see, so he supposed his “eyes” were closed.
The door opened. Someone grabbed his human shoulder and shook it, speaking to him, but he couldn’t hear over the noise he was making.
Aki turned his face to bury it in the pillow until the gun in his head hit it, and he recoiled. Denji’s voice grew into a cacophony that blew his headache even higher. Aki thought, I could kill him, and then a ragged screech left his mouth.
Denji’s hands were on his shoulders, one feeling wrong in a way he couldn’t explain. Aki knew he sounded like a dying animal, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.
“You’re awake!” Denji said. “You’re awake. Aki, please, calm down. Please.”
At the pleading insistence in Denji’s voice, Aki forced himself to concentrate on his breathing. The gun could wait— the gun was still there, and he screamed again, and Denji said more words in that horrible soft voice, and Aki would have screwed his eyes shut if he still had them but instead he forced himself to count to seven, then four, then back to seven.
“It’s okay,” Denji said. “You’re a fiend now.”
Aki wanted to kill Denji in that moment. He wanted a bullet between Denji’s eyes, a kill that would split his skull open, a kill that would be clean if not for Aki’s immense power, and his stomach lurched and he jerked up, hand over his mouth. Denji put a plastic bag in front of him, and he vomited red-brown-green into it and sobbed again.
“You probably feel like shit, right?”
Aki counted until he was stable enough to speak. He turned to face Denji, then remembered the gun in his head and turned to look somewhere he wouldn’t be pointing it at him. His vision turned back to Denji.
Denji, for his part, looked no worse for wear. Dirty white shirt, blue jeans, and no scars. But there was something in the way he carried himself, something in the tension of his shoulders and the way his head was held just a little more slack than normal, something that said something horrible had happened. Aki vomited again.
“Okay,” Denji said. “Hold on.” He placed a hand on Aki’s back and rubbed it.
Aki wanted to say, what’s made you so responsible, but the thought choked him up. He swallowed it down.
Now Aki was well and truly awake. He laid back down and tried to slip back into the dark, but he couldn’t.
“I’m going to get some water, okay?” Denji said. “Just wait here.”
As if he could have run.
Aki was a fiend. He surveyed what this meant. He was dead. Or, rather, Aki Hayakawa was dead, and the being currently awake, the Gun Devil, was possessing his corpse. That meant that he was the Gun Fiend now.
The creature in Aki’s place would have screwed his eyes shut if he still had them. He thought about the bloodlust that he felt when he saw Denji, and he knew that Aki was well and truly gone. And the Gun Fiend, no matter how much he wanted to believe he was Aki, was only a mockery of the man who had set out to kill the Gun Devil so many years ago.
Aki was dead. He slept.
The next time he woke up to copper in his mouth, it occurred to him that the red in his vomit probably wasn’t his own.
At some point, he stopped being able to sleep the time away. His legs grew restless.
He couldn’t just kill himself, he knew that much. After what the Angel Devil had told him, the cycle of reincarnation, he couldn’t risk letting the Gun Devil free into the world again, even if he was only 20% of it. He thought about turning himself in to Public Safety, but then he’d be in the hands of another government, ready to cause violence. It made his mouth water, but it wasn’t an option.
So the only thing left to do was to keep himself in the place he knew was safest: with someone who could kill him at a moment’s notice.
Aki’s brain was apparently still mostly intact, given how much of it still seeped into his thoughts. He must not have been dead for long. Aki would have taken it upon himself to bear the burden as long as he needed to, and the Gun Fiend was, mercifully, still under Aki’s influence.
He pulled the blanket off, swung his legs over the bed, and counted to ten. Then he placed his feet down and stood.
He looked down and realized what the metal he had felt against his side was. The M4 was about the length of a human arm, and Aki — no, the Gun Fiend — had to clamp his human hand over his mouth to keep from screaming again, somewhere between horror and delight. It was long, black metal. Cold. A tool of violence. He could gun down a million people with this. He could kill Chainsaw Man with this. He could not kill himself with this. The Gun Fiend forced himself to open the door with Aki’s hand, step out the door with Aki’s feet, walk down the hall with Aki’s legs, and call out “Denji?” with Aki’s mouth.
He heard something crash, then Denji swore and opened a door somewhere behind him. The Gun Fiend turned to face Denji and saw him running, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and panting, and the Gun Fiend realized that it was still the middle of the night and his guilt grew worse. But he had a job to do.
“Denji,” he said. “You have to kill me if something happens.”
Denji blinked. “Huh?”
“You have to,” he repeated, and grabbed Denji’s arm with his hand, and thought about how easy it would be to tear flesh from bone. “You have to...”
His knees gave out beneath him and he crashed to the floor.
Denji dragged him into the living room and propped him up again the couch. The M-4 lay awkwardly against the ground.
“You just woke up?” Denji asked.
He tried to say “Yes”, but all that came out was a garbled groan. Instead, he tilted his head up and down in a small nod.
“You’re still weak,” Denji said, and the Gun Fiend wondered what had made him so responsible. “You need more blood. Here—“, and Denji stood up and went to the kitchen and procured a knife, then came back. The Gun Fiend’s lungs heaved as they did when Aki used to cry as Denji sliced his own palm open and tilted the fiend’s head back, then poured blood into his open mouth.
He tried not to swallow. He really did. But the blood tasted so warm, so sweet, so metallic that he couldn’t help but drink it down like a dying man. He shuddered, and then Denji let go of his hair and licked his wound until it stopped bleeding. The Gun Fiend eyed the droplet of blood falling down Denji’s wrist, then came back to his senses and let his head fall against the couch. He did feel more stable now, as awful as that was.
“You probably have a lot of questions,” Denji said in the usual bored monotone he put on when forced to do chores he didn’t want to, but the Gun Fiend detected strain underneath it, and hated the fact that he still had Aki’s love for the kid sitting in front of him. “You died. The Gun Devil overtook your body. We fought and you lost, but at the end you weren’t really dead yet so I brought you back here.”
“You’re an idiot,” the Gun Fiend hissed.
Denji shrugged. “I figured Power wasn’t that bad so you might not be either.”
“You kill fiends. You’re supposed to kill them.”
“But you’re not just a fiend. You’re Aki.”
He bit down a snarl. “Aki is dead.”
“Yeah. But so was I before Pochita rescued me, and I dunno, you just had this look on your face like you were... depressed?”
“That’s not a good reason to keep a fiend alive.”
Denji grinned. “But I did! And you weren’t around to tell me no!”
The Gun Fiend was suddenly very aware of the silence between their words, and his jaw slackened. “Where’s Power?”
Denji rubbed the cut on his hand. He looked down at it, away from the Gun Fiend. “She died too.”
The part of him that used to be Aki couldn’t move a muscle.
“But we made a contract,” Denji said, and the Gun Fiend was brought back to the present moment. “She gave me some of her blood powers, and now I have to find her.”
“In Hell?”
“When she comes back, I think. The contract hasn’t kicked in yet, so I figure that’s gotta be it.”
The Gun Fiend wanted to go back to sleep. He understood Angel much better now. Speaking of which. “Where’s the Angel Devil?”
“Uh, alive somewhere I think. I’m not too sure.”
The Gun Fiend exhaled. Even if he could never see him again, at least he hadn’t been taken out too. “What about Makima?”
“She’s dead,” Denji said, and leaned against the couch with the Gun Fiend.
“I don’t remember what happened.”
“She, uh, put the Gun Devil in you,” and the Gun Fiend couldn’t bring himself to correct Denji, “and then sent you after me. I beat you, then I fought Makima, and I beat her too.”
“How?”
Denji flashed a sick grin and a peace sign. “I ate her.”
The Gun Fiend should not still be surprised by things like this. “Why?”
“It was the only way to kill her. Uh, she had a contract with someone.”
Aki raised his eyebrows. The Gun Fiend did not. He was too worn out to react.
“But yeah, that’s... probably enough for now?” Denji furrowed his eyebrows. “You should go back to sleep or something. You’re still injured.”
“Okay,” he said, and lets Denji walk him back to his room, wrapping his human arm around the boy who had changed so much since he last saw him.
The house was quiet without Power. Occasionally he’d wake up screaming as flashes of memories he didn’t quite grasp came back, then Denji would come to check on him and he’d shoo him away.
He realized he knew now why Aki had loved Makima, and he thought of Himeno. He wondered if his self-hatred was enough to compensate for defiling Aki’s memories.
Denji was being maddeningly quiet about the whole thing, presumably to keep what used to be Aki placid. As it stood, he had no idea what had happened after Aki’s death and before he woke up. He remembered Makima standing in the ocean, the slam and the pressure of the bullet that killed Aki Hayakawa, the chains that swept out from her waist and speared him and the Angel Devil. But that was it.
The Gun Fiend knew that he was missing a lot of the Gun Devil’s memory. Since he was only 20% of it, he supposed it made sense. It was probably a blessing anyway; he wasn’t sure he could handle it if he knew how many people he had killed. Then again, would he care? Or would Aki have drowned underneath the devil’s consciousness?
A blessing indeed. The Angel Devil was still alive after everything that had happened, somehow. He had been right there with Makima too. His partner was still alive, and he wanted to know why. But he couldn’t risk going out.
One day over dinner, the Gun Fiend cleared his throat. “Denji,” he said. “Do you want to kill people?”
“Sure,” Denji said through a mouthful of noodles, and slurped one up. “Anyone who’s in my way.”
It was a disconcerting answer, but it certainly aligned with everything else Aki had known about Denji. The Gun Fiend cleared his throat. “Did you always feel that way?”
“Yeah.”
No, Denji was not a fiend, and the Gun Fiend knew this. It was stupid to ask. If only Power were around. They ate in silence.