Chapter 1: Paws & Saws
Chapter Text
Denji was twelve years old and he knew one thing; walking up this mountain sucked.
“Okay, would you rather eat a turd sandwich, but the bread is toasted— or a turd straight up, but you get a whole loaf after?”
“Woof!”
“Of course you’d go for the straight turd…”
“Wan!”
The heat sweltered the boys neck, a patch of red that irritated and flaked when he scratched at it. High above reefs of cloud rolled overhead like sheets of smoke blotting out the summer sky tree branches reached out above, dark and thin like tendrils of the night lying in wait to pluck two weary souls out from their vessels.
His ankles had been burning since noon, and his thighs were chafed and sore. The tennis shoes he wore were a size too big and he could afford neither socks nor underwear. He knew that when he pulled them off at night the flesh would be raw and blood would squint out from the wound. It would hurt until morning and the morning next and all mornings after, but that was alright. As long as he was alive, and his best friend was alive, he could hope that one morning things would feel okay.
The child was thin, dangerously so; a mess of spindly limbs and brusies and scars. His eyes were a dull brown, pronounced crows feet stretching from his eyelids. His hair was the color of wheat and he was kissed by the sun about the shoulders and legs, the skin dry and chapped there.
He sighed and looked up, his steps momentarily pausing. “Heard it’s gonna rain, bud, can you believe it? We need to hurry before you get washed up down the river.”
The pooch grumbled as he padded alongside the boy, his rotund body seemingly to wobble with each step. A flicker of annoyance passed through his big round eyes, strangely expressionless for their size. It was one time!
Denji huffed a laugh, dry past chapped lips that hadn’t seen a lick of water since that morning. The sun hung high in the sky now, and his tongue felt shriveled in his desiccant mouth.
He stole a look at his friend, his kith and kindred—Pochita. The pooch was filthy from the days job, his paws smattered with red up to his ankles and where his belly drooped low to the ground, brushing along foliage and tickling him. Their march up the mountain they called home hadn’t helped matters and now dirt patched his fur and greenery—grass, bracken, flowers withering on their stems and all manner of foliage the two had no name for and so remained alien to them, despite having squatted these inclines their, or rather the boys, entire remembered life—got caught between his fuzzy toes.
What really caught one's eye, though, and had the townsfolk who dwelled at the base of the mountain turning and walking away as soon as they saw it, was the foot-long chainsaw blade sticking out of his face like a terribly botched lobotomy. Bits of Devil flesh were caught in the teeth and the metal sides were faded with scratch marks and similarly smeared with flaking viscera. Pochitas face was dusted with life the color of terracotta clay that had him sniffling and sneezing the entire way up the trail.
His handles, located at his back and rear and cool to the touch, like smooth rubber, were clean save for the occasional crimson fingerprint.
“Though, maybe a flood or two would do you some good.” He flexed his hands, and dried blood crackled and split, charting maps in death to places the two had no hope of escaping to. Not with the debt hanging over their head. “Me too, probably.”
When the old man—whom he didn’t know the name of and never mustered the courage to ask—came knocking on their door, bringing word of a chump-change Devil not three miles out of town, Denji had initially considered his luck for the week spent.
Devils paid good. Or their corpses did, at least. Just one of them was enough to pay a month's installment, plus extra, plenty for a few loaves of bread if he scored a clean kill. If he did a good enough job, the old man would even spot him a ride home, and they could skip out on the bus fare.
Pochita hated riding the bus. Seemed to make him queasy, judging by how his tongue would poke out between his lips, and he’d roll over in his seat and rest in Denji's lap. He would tremble and whine quietly as he received head pats for a hard day's work. Murmurs of how ‘totally badass’ he was pulling him to sleep.
Unfortunately for the two would-be Devil Hunters, chainsaws did not make for clean work. Especially when used on the Watermelon Devil.
When the old man had come back around an hour after dropping them only to find them knee-deep in melon guts, he had been none too pleased. It was a lonely place with cobbled paths overgrown with weeds winding through rows and rows of gravestones left untended for who knows how long.
The old man had grabbed their attention with a whistle, walking up to where they were catching their breath and making sure to step over any gore on his path. He nodded at the surrounding carnage. “This it?” His voice was an exhale of smoke, ragged and bleak.
“Yep, Mister!” Denji got off the tombstone where he had been sitting to catch his breath. “So what do you think?”
“7,500.”
“Huh?”
“Your cut. 7,500 yen.”
“But the last one netted me 15,000!”
“The last one didn’t come in a dozen pieces. Can’t dissect what’s already butchered, and no collectors going to pay full price for a jigsaw they’ll need to piece together. You lose another 2’500 for wasting time.”
“W-wait…” He looked into the man’s eyes, chips of flint dead in their sockets behind prescriptions reading glasses, revealing nothing but apathy. Denji had given up long ago on trying to find anything else. He raised his arms defensively and smiled, wide and toothy with squinted eyes. “It's all good—really! 5,000 is plenty, Mister!”
The man, shrouded in untrimmed grey hair that peaked from his air and sloped down his jaw in an unruly beard, said nothing and turned out to lights of the city yonder the horizon of this violent spectacle. Whatever he saw there stayed unspoken as he then turned to the Chainsaw Devil rolling about and playing in the slaughter it had produced.
Denji tensed as he noticed his attention shifting. He could deal with whatever his debt holder saw fit to throw at him, but Pochita was tiny. Probably just a baby devil, if something like that even existed. He needed Denji to look after him and feed him, and he’d be damned if he let any Yakuza snatch him up as collateral.
Denji was only twelve years old, but he already knew that if it came down to it, he’d give up everything for Pochita.
He swallowed the lump in his throat as he stepped up to the older man. “Hey, Mister?”
His gaze flit back to Denji. “What?”
“When do you think the next job will be? I’m worried about keeping up with the water bill and,” he hid his hands behind his back to keep the old man from seeing they way they curled into fists. “And I don’t want you to have to wait too long for my next installment, either. I know you’ve been real patient with me.”
He hummed before turning back to the horizon, seemingly considering his words.
Denji felt a surge of confidence rush through him as the old man's eyes left him. It had worked!
The smack was more surprise than pain. The force the old man had used to strike him sent him stumbling back, cursing and cradling his cheek in his hand as the taste of copper flooded his mouth. Pochita yelped in concern, immediately abandoning the rind he had been using to tend his fangs to sprint over to his best friend's side. He slipped on a puddle of blood, however, and was sent tumbling to the ground just a few feet short of his goal. He scrambled to get up but stayed there when Denji held up a hand, muttering for him to stay down. He whined and pawed at the space between them, desperate to be at his side. He turned and growled at the man as he started speaking again, chainsaw starting to sputter into action as he bared his teeth.
“Try to brown-nose me like that again, and I’ll put you out on a corner as one of our earners. Understand?”
He prodded his stinging cheek and winced. “Y-yes, sir! Won’t happen again!” He stared at his shoes as he talked, knowing that trying to make eye contact would make things worse. He had learned that people hit him because they wanted to feel powerful, and he was perfectly happy to oblige if it meant they’d leave Pochita alone.
“You better.” He reached into the pockets of his heavy overcoat and pulled out a handful of bills before tossing them to the floor. “Take this and get out of my sight; you look disgusting.” He took a finger and pointed to the still-fuming Chainsaw Devil; its fur kicked up as the revving of its engine threatened to block out the old man's drawl. “And get that thing under control before I scrap it for parts.”
“Yes sir, thank you sir.” He stooped down and picked up the currency off the stone walkway, careful not to smudge their faces with his dirty fingers. He stuffed them into his shorts and, staying low to the ground, crawled over to where the pup lay trembling, tears building in his eyes, and scooped him up into a hug, not caring about how stained he got in the process. He walked away with his gaze to the ground, taking no notice of how Pochita kept his eyes pinned on the old man as they left.
Denji buried his face into Pochitas fuzzy neck while they waited at the bus stop, taking deep breaths to get himself back under control. He was warm, and very soft. He smelled like if you held a coil of wire over a candle flame, sharp and acrid and undeniably him .
The other passengers gave the two a wide berth as they walked down the aisle and collapsed into their seats, beginning the long drive back into town.
Pochita lay curled in his lap, drool dampening his chin as he daydreamed of chomping the mean man's face off.
Denji stared out the window, watching the world go by as he ran his tongue along his bloody gums, its flavor one he grew more and more used to by the day.
Denji was twelve years old, and he knew his mom died because her heart was rotten.
He knew he was going to die the same way.
------
They crested over a bluff on their way back, green and dotted with branches and insects scurrying. It was overrun with grass tall enough to swallow Pochita entirely, the pup only detectable by the swaying green and his tail poking out as he trotted after his taller companion, using his height to guide him like a ship to a lighthouse and yipping to let Denji know whenever he fell behind.
From his diminutive stature, all about seemed as if they were on a treacherous voyage to places unclaimed by man and, for that fact devils same. The grass turned to choking overgrowth and branches to felled giants he needed to clamber over and the trees to epic monuments to nature’s inevitable triumph. Just him and Denji against the vast, unknowable earth.
Eventually, the unknown became known, the roof of their abode eclipsing the vegetation.
Their home was a dismal thing; a ramshackle shed placed in the dead center of a patch of dirt. The walls were thin, constructed of tin, and mottled with rust near where it connected to the roof from rainwater ran over it. Various items were leaned against the outer walls—tarps and bits of wood scrap; a tractor tire that had been there since well before they’d taken ownership, the rubber grayed and sagging and logos long since faded.
Black garbage bags swollen with refuse—bloody bandages and old clothes past saving reeking up from their polyethylene tombs, leaned against the wall. If you stepped too close, the heady rank of feces steaming inside would waft up and sour the breath in your lungs. Denji would steal the newspapers off front porches and use them to wipe himself on the occasions he couldn’t make it to one of the few public parks dotted around town.
Every month or so, they’d take the bags down the mountain and dump them behind whatever establishment they felt they hadn’t done it too recently. Well, Denji did. It turns out having a chainsaw sticking out of your face made pushing anything fragile a treacherous affair, a fact they discovered rudely when Pochita ripped a hole in the bags and sent a waterfall of garbage spilling down a hillock.
Only one of the trinkets was of any interest to the two—an inflatable pool, baby blue and patterned with ducks. It was laid upside down into the grass in a feeble attempt to keep it clean. Instead, it merely seemed to invite various critters to take refuge under it. More than once did Denji and Pochita pick it up only to have a raccoon come scittering out and into the surrounding wilderness.
This time, however, it was empty, and Denji had no trouble flipping it over. It hit the ground with a ‘foop’ and sent a plume of dirt scattering across the clearing. Pochita sneezed, and Denji muttered an apology as he walked over to their water hose and began unspooling off the hook. It was a luxury, and it took an ugly bite out of their finances to keep on, but Denji didn’t regret having access to clean—well, not as dirty as it could be water.
Pochita sat patiently on his haunches by the pool, tail curled up politely. They used to use a river further up the mountain to bathe. Neither knew how to swim, so they’d lay in the river's edge, letting the stream wash over them. They’d shiver when they went in the mornings, the water still chilled from night's embrace, and they’d sigh in relief in the evenings once the sun had a chance to warm things up a little.
That was until one morning, the chainsaw dog was toppled over by a particularly strong current and sent howling down the mountain. He sprinted after him but was outpaced by the rivers wrath. It took until the sun was half overtaken by trees that he found Pochita, shivering and drenched and traumatized on the shore a few miles away, hiding under a bundle of a waterlogged branches. Denji had immediately ripped off his shirt and wrapped the poor pooch in it, carrying him the whole way home.
Ever since he adamantly refused to tread into any body of water deeper than his dense little body could walk through, thus necessitating Denjis acquisition of the inflatable pool from somebody's backyard.
“All right, Pochita. Are you ready?” The boy smiled and turned the knob, hearing the hiss of liquid filling the yard hose clenched in his small fingers.
“Wan!”
He started by spraying debris off the pup, splashing his blades, and making chunks of watermelon meat slide off and smack the dirt. Pochita closed his eyes as the cool water ran over his face, steaming under the sun, tracing rivulets over his chubby nostrils and beading up at his fangs. He didn’t have much sensation along his saw. On the occasions that Denji petted the armament—an act that worried the pooch to no end—it’d just be the phantom sensation of his touch, a shadow of love captured on steel evisceration.
When the teeth gleamed, and the chainsaw was free of all seed fragments and guts, Denji grinned to himself, something small and furled with a warmth he didn’t believe himself capable of.
“Hey, Pochita?”
The pup hummed lazily, smacking his lips like an old man roused from his nap with his tail beating against the ground with a drunken rhythm.
Denji giggled and stepped closer, careful to keep the angle of the hose steady so as to not give away his intentions. He crouched right next to him, the hound none the wiser, and, with garden hose snaking behind him, plugged it halfway with his thumb, turning the steady stream into a high pressure spray.
Pochitas eyes blew wide in surprise to the change, backing up rapidly as his chainsaw sputtered uncertainly. His paws slipped on the slick grass and he went tumbling onto his side. He lay there for a while, forzen in place like a deer caught in headlights. Eventually he regained motion and his eyes sharpened to annoyance as he heard Denji laughing at him.
“Oh man, oh man.” The boy wiped wiped the tears from his eyes, cheeks ruddy with humor. “You should see the look on your face! It was like—” He opened his eyes and mouth wide into a mocking expression of shock— “Bwah!”
Pochita got to his feet and shook the excess dirt off his coat before padding up to Denji, who, in his mirth, did not notice the dog's approach.
Then he reared his head back and smacked the boy in the knee with the flat of his blade.
-----
If there was only one thing Pochita knew, it was that he loved Denji.
Back where he was from, the place where doors led into doors and all was red with anger and sadness, Pochita wasn’t sure if he had had a single coherent thought.
Everything thing, every moment, was a rush of kill run eat hide revive . Over and over and over again for he didn’t even know how long. Too long. So long that his consciousness whittled to instinct whittled to something even smaller, more thoughtless than even the furry friends hiding under their pool.
Where he may have meant to take one step instead he tore across the plains, chainsaws roaring. Where he may have meant to comfort the crying souls he came across, instead he ripped them to pieces. His only companion was the copper tang of blood in his mouth.
It was so sad. Too sad. He didn’t like to remember it but if he forgot the loneliness he felt then so too would he forget to cherish the what his life was now.
In hindsight, the day when he was finally overrun and forced to retreat from Hell was probably the best day of his life. It was the day he met Denji, after all. The one that made it possible to walk again.
It was night now, and Pochita was snuggled comfortably against Denji's side, the boy lying somewhere in between sleep and wakefulness.
They were situated on a threadbare twin mattress. A blue tarp swaddled them in place of a blanket, smooth and cool to the touch but quickly warmed by their bodies; it crinkled as they adjusted themselves. Cardboard boxes towered over the two, stuffed with mechanical bits and bobs that they had no hope of understanding the purpose of. The air smelled dully of oil, and motes of dust danced about their prone forms, disappearing into the grey near dark of their surroundings.
Rain poured outside, pitter-pattering against the roof, and the wind brushed against the corrugated tin walls of their home. These sounds came together to sing a song that had Pochita nuzzling further against Denji as his big round eyes flickered closed.
Sound was maybe the hardest thing for Pochita to adjust to when he came to this world. It didn’t exist back where he came from, or at least not like it did here. Sound only happened when something made it happen; a laugh thick with cruelty, the tearing of flesh from bone, the screaming of being eaten alive. There was no rain pitter-pattering against the roof, no wind to sing you to sleep. When something wasn’t dying, Hell was a silent abyss waiting for its next victim to gobble whole.
Pochita thought back to his old form, black and hulking and entirely unhuggable, and he shuddered.
If there was one thing he knew, it was that he would rather give up bread forever than go back. Even when he’d felt its pull in his gut like he and Denji had scrounged up something just a little too green out of the garage, he would never accept it.
Denji wouldn’t love him anymore if he did. Who could love a monster like that?
But, more than even bread or singing winds, there was one thing this world had that Pochita loved.
Dreams. The one thing devils and humans shared.
“Pochita…” Denjis's voice was heavy and laced with drowse. “Tonight… let’s dream about a house. A big house where we’ll live, you and me.” He rolled onto his back, pulling Pochita onto his chest. The dog righted itself, sitting attentively, tail swaying across the boy's stomach. “What do you think of that?”
“Waf!”
“Yeah! And we’ll sleep on a bed made out of food, so if we ever get hungry in the middle of the night, we can just have a quick munch. With a big house we’d have to be super rich so we can just pay someone to cook us up a new one. Genius, right?”
The pooch nodded and leaned down to lick his cheek, the flesh sallow and swollen. The boy smiled and reached a hand under his friend's plump little body to rub at his belly. The fur there was softer, more lush than the stubby hairs found along the rest of him. Sometimes Pochita would let his use his belly as a pillow, on the days when he wasn’t sure if they were going to make it through, on the days when he messed up a job and one of the yakuza hit him so hard his teeth would ring, and his ears would pulse.
On those days, Denji would have a different sort of dream. A shameful one. Kept close to his chest, secret even to the one whom he shared everything with.
On those days, he dreamed of what it’d like to still have a family. People who would take care of Pochita when he was gone, give him baths and make sure nothing was caught up in his blade, feed him bread—two slices in the morning and one before bed. He didn’t need any for lunch, despite whatever protests he gave, as he had a habit of snacking on any flowers they came across in their travels.
Denji had heard that devils could eat each other, but he’d never seen the chainsaw dog take so much as a nibble out of their jobs. Even when he scooped up a gangly limb still warm from the cadaver and brought it to the little guy, he'd only take a few sniffs before turning away to study a line of ants marching along the sidewalk, woffing to offer encouragement to the little specks making their way back to their queen, carrying crumbs on their back for royal tribute.
Then he'd lap a few off the searing asphalt, and they'd all go scurrying into the fissures that were surely great caverns to creatures so slight.
Whatever, Denji scoffed internally and threw a hand over his head. Pochita didn’t need to eat anything he didn’t want to. He would never have to take the cigarettes out of men's mouths thrice his age mouths and pop them into his own, chewing and forcing a smile as they gathered around and laughed. He would never have to open wide and show them the ash stuck to his teeth, the thin paper roll up clogging his throat.
Denji grits his teeth. Never . He wouldn’t let it happen. Never ever.
But with his heart failing him, never ever was a mighty short time indeed.
“Hey, Pochita?”
The devil dog blinked down at him, tail coming to a stop as he took in the wetness building in his friend eyes.
“I’m sorry.”
Pochita cooed, eyes closing as he nuzzled Denjis cheek with his own, orange fur soaking up the boy's tears and taking them on as his own.
If there was one thing Pochita knew, it was that he never wanted Denji to be sorry. Not with him. Never ever with him.
The boy took a shuddering breath before wrapping his arms tight around his only friend.
He was so selfish, wanting a family when all he needed he already had. Only in each others embrace did the two lost souls find themselves at ease, and sleep did eventually take them to a restless goodbye with the wind and the rain and the smell of oil wafting from cardboard stacked as their sky.
------
And just as it quickly did it leave them.
Denjis eyes snapped open as the clatter of things tipping over and spilling along the ground came from outside. The tearing of plastic, the rustle of newspaper and investigative sniff before it’s tossed to the ground.
Denji felt the ice thaw from his veins, and his heartbeat settled as the familiar sounds filled the yawning night. It was just an animal—a raccoon or something. Nothing that could hurt them. They just needed to scare it off and they could go back to bed.
Pochita was already awake, Denji spotting him crouched by the wall, silhouette a sketch of the night against the wall. The boy crept closer, sneaking over magazines nicked from the storefront before being flipped through and left on the floor after no pretty girls were to be found inside.
“Hey, Pochita,” Denji put a hush on his breath, some notion of ‘better safe than sorry’ quieting his voice. He reached out with the back of his hand and pressed it against the devil's side, hoping to lower his hackles. “It's alright, dude. Just one of our squatters making a racket. Let's just go out there and—”
Pochita turned around to look at him, and he stumbled back, nearly tripping on the latest issue of Non-no, which he had snagged off the rack out front of a boutique the week prior. His pupils were blown wide, pools of tranquil dark that threatened to swallow the white sclera surrounding. He looked like a shark with blood in the water. The shadows penned malice sharply across his normally friendly features—rounded face turning angular, fur melding to an armor impenetrable to neither friend nor foe.
Denji had never seen him look like that, not even when they were elbow-deep in guts red and black as the hearts of those who owned them, panting and bleeding and sore in ways that promised an aching tomorrow. Not even when Pochita was forced to watch him grovel in the dirt, getting a swift kick to the ribs if ever he tried to stand without permission.
For the first time since the two found new life in each other on the grave of his father, Denji felt afraid of the devil.
At the boy's retreat, Pochita tilted his head and cooed. Where was he going? Did he not smell the curdled blood encroaching on their home, treading where they shouldn’t and taking what wasn’t theirs to have? Did the marrow in his bones not thrum with adrenaline as the monster outside grew suspicious of the presence of others? They were only safe together, and if something were to happen to Denji, he didn’t know what he would do. Probably cry forever and ever. He walked towards the boy, and that’s when he saw it.
The cold blade of fear cutting Denjis expression into something Pochita never wanted his friend to have to wear. Not with him.
Pochita realized that maybe it was the monster inside that the boy was more worried about.
All the blood thirst and frantic urges to protect Denji kill intruders drained out of Chainsaw Man, and he was just a pup once more.
He closed the distance between them and put his paws on Denjis' bare feet, flexing his toes to keep his claws from poking the sensitive skin too much. He looked up at the boy, determination filling his eyes.
Denji relaxed upon seeing the shadows leave his friend, and he stooped down to scoop the pooch into his arms. “What do you think we should do?”
Outside, all sound had ceased, save for the rain.
Pochita thwacked him in the arm with his rip-cord tail. Once, and then again, when Denji looked down so he’d know it wasn’t a fluke.
The boy pursed his lips and nodded his head in understanding. Setting the devil dog down momentarily to adjust his grip, he wrapped one hand around the handle protruding from his back, and the other around the one hanging from his rump. Once Denji knew he had a firm grip he lifted the pooch back up. Pochita tucked his paws under his body to center his mass and to help keep the boys swings steady.
Denji took a deep breath and exhaled. “You ready, boy?”
“Arf.”
Denji nodded and licked his lips. Reaching down, he took Pochitas rip cord in between his teeth, and pulled .
------
His bones are shivering in their sleeves of flesh and his knobby knees tremble from the roar of the devils engine. He nearly drops the poor pooch as he struggled to keep his grip. His hands are slick with sweat and lost nerves. Lost innocence.
There’s more screaming than you’d think.
The air is trash and copper and burning wire. The sun is eclipsed by tombs of brick and mortar, monoliths to capital. They are alone.
“Please, Mister.” Denji takes a hard breath and his throat burns, his lungs too, everything hurts. As if the world itself wanted him to cease being and turned the atmosphere to ash and cindered clouds. “Please, Mister, make me a devil hunter.”
Blood beaded up on the teeth of the devil's stagnant blade, extended out to twice the length of its body and slaked in red, before falling to the ground. His eyes like pools of the abyss follow its descent with no readable sentiment for it. His paws dangled; the devil dog unsure what to do with them.
The old man is a just a silhouette at the mouth of the alley they were in, themselves just sloping shapes of violence in his decrepit vision. He does not speak, instead trying to piece together the mess of flesh and bone at their feet, considering it’s worth.
“Mister?”
“Are you a killer, Denji?”
“Huh?”
“Do you enjoy it?”
“Enjoy what?”
“It wanted to live, I’m sure. With whatever mind those things can be considered to have I’m sure it spared a few thoughts to not wanting to die. But you killed it anyway. So, I’m asking if it felt good. I’m asking if it made you feel powerful to know there are still things out there you get to be stronger than. I’m asking if you liked it—the moment when it stopped fighting and started running. The moment when it could no longer muster that either. Did it feel good when it died?”
Denjis head was thrumming. He was tired and hungry and then smiling. A smile of broken teeth. “Yes, Mister. I liked it. I liked it a lot.”
“Good.”
As the man turned and left, Denji's face crumpled into something fragile and broken; the devil watched all the while.
------
Denji threw open the door with his shoulder and they spilled out into the dark. The rain poured and dampened his hair. His toes curled into the wet grass as he swung his head around. The night was hot and the night was lonesome. From where they stood out to the tree line was empty save for what their paranoia put there.
The purr of a chainsaw kept him grounded and reminded him that there was another set of eyes that he could rely on. “See anything, Pochita?”
“Ruff.” The pooch shook his head.
“Alright.” Denji paused and shivered from the raindrops trailing down his arms. It was going to take forever to get dry after this. “We probably scared them off.”
“Arf!”
“I know we gotta check.” Denji kept Pochita close to his chest as they rounded the corner of their home. Trash littered the ground, waterlogged and rancid. They took a wide arc around their home, keeping far from the walls to stop any ambushes from surprising them.
That’s the only reason they saw her.
Pochita spotted her—spotted it first, Denji too busy eyeing the space between garbage bags in the hopes that this could still all be chalked up to a raccoon. He barked to grab his attention, and the boy looked up.
And there she was.
Stood on the tin roof looking as if some ghoul crafted of the night itself, was a woman. Pale and naked, her back sloped with each knob of her spine seen clearly pressing against the skin. The rain battered her skin and carried away with it the dirt and blood that slaked her thin form.
And on her head, like knives whetted for the culling, were a set of horns poking out.
Metal creaked as she adjusted her feet and stooped low like an ape to inspect them closer. Her amber eyes, shaped like crosshairs, were pinned on the two peons who dared interrupt her.
“W-who are you?” His voice was the squeak of a mouse, and he stopped and cleared his throat. When he spoke again, he did so with a forced authority deepening his tone, an ill-fitting garment for the prepubescent. “What do you think you’re doing up there?”
She didn’t answer, and all his mustered machismo was quickly sucked out of him.
They pinned each in the others stare, Denjis wide and fearful, hers hooded and bored. Rain poured, cut through with the whir of a chainsaw. All this and something else. A scrunching sound like tearing rubber that grew moister the longer it went on. It came from the woman and Denji squinted up at her, trying to locate the source.
It didn’t take long. There, hanging loosely between her dagger teeth, were bandages—his bandages, bought with what little money he could spare and used up soon after and thrown in the garbage. She was chewing to soften them, then sucking back in her saliva along with whatever blood they pulled from the discount medical supplies.
“Hey, wait a minute!” He pointed a finger up at her. “Those are mine!”
She considered his words, gnawing her snack to ribbons before spitting them out at his feet. He backed up with a look of disgust smeared across his face. An expression the chainsaw dog in his grip shared, for no other reason than that Denji was making it, so he should too. “Nuh-uh.” Her voice was rough, dry with disuse.
“What do you mean ‘nuh-uh’ ? Those are totally mine, you thief! People go to jail for that!”
“Then what were they doing in my mouth?” She snorted.
“Say what! They were in your mouth because you stole them!” He let go of Pochitas's rear handle to hold a hand out to the woman, and the pup yelped as he tilted to the side. “That’s three hundred for each band-aid!”
The girl's expression twisted into a snarl. “How dare you! You should be honored that I, the mightiest of all devils, saw fit to dine on your ichor!”
“It's three fifty for making up words!”
“You would dare?”
“Hell yeah I would! Now cough it up!”
Her nose crinkled, and she stood.
“Hey, where do you think you’re—”
She braced her feet and jumped, denting the roof and blocking the moon from Denjis' view. She landed in front of him with a thud, and it was only then that the boy really took in the fact that she was very undressed right now.
“W-what the hell do you think you’re doing!? Put some clothes on!” He dropped Pochita outright, and the devil dog flopped onto the ground on his side, his blade sputtering to a halt before he quickly righted himself and shook off the excess moisture. He took a defensive stance between Denji and the vile fiend threatening him.
She sniffed. “Only a coward would be ashamed to bear their true form to the world.”
“And only an idiot would want to get arrested for indecent exposure!”
She froze, processing his words. Her lips began to twitch as her pale cheeks burned red. “Idiot? Did you just call me an idiot!?” She used her considerable height advantage to bore into him, jabbing his chest with her finger.
His own cheeks began to dust as she got even closer . He tried to back up, but she just pressed further into his personal space. “I didn’t mean it like that, ma’am! Promise!”
Her hair spilled down her back like a lion's mane, her back curled with lupine ferocity as she cut off his attempts to parley. “You think you can besmirch my honor and get away with it? Thousands have trembled at the sight of me on the battlefield! Billions! Trillions, even! I’ve slaughtered whole worlds for less, and you think you get to slink away into the dark with a simple apology?” She bared her fangs at him and relished the way his shoulder shrunk and shuddered. As he should! She was strong, and she was mighty! She was power itself given form—
Pochita bit her leg.
The sharp sting of her skin being pierced made her look downwards at the orange fuzzball now attached to her. His head was tilted sideways to make room for his chainsaw inbetween her legs. His round eyes were alight with fury, tail batting back and forth as he dug himself further in, galvanized by the flood of copper hitting his taste buds and setting his tongue aflame. It had nothing on bread, but knowing it came from someone who was trying to hurt Denji helped smooth out its acrid flavor.
Now, normally, an attack such as the one perpetrated against her would be nothing to the Blood Fiend. A mere scratch, nay, a tickle, if even that. But something in the way the steel blade protruding from her attacker’s forehead glinted in the moonlight, in how his teeth burned her skin reached something primal within her and he was eating her eating why her not her—
Denjis terror morphed into relief at Pochitas intervention morphed to a new kind of fear as the fiend’s mouth blew wide open and a horrible sound bellowed out of her.
“No! Get it off get it off get it off!” She hopped about the clearing on one foot, kicking and screaming and trying to shake her assailant off. It didn’t, only serving to make him growl and clamp down harder. Tears filled her eyes as she continued begging for help. “Do something! Please!”
“All right! Just stop yelling already!”
“Please please please please please!”
“Okay, okay!” Denji ran up to the two and waited for an opening to wrap his arms around Pochita. He seemed to be vibrating from the force of his growls. He didn’t stop even as he felt the boy's slender arms wrap around his dense little body, all thoughts subsumed by the unassailable urge to protect. “Hold still!”
“No! He’ll eat me if I stop!”
“No, he won’t!”
“You’re lying! The two of you are conspiring to kill me!”
“Am not!”
“Am too!’
The situation spiraled into a game of tug-of-war. Denji on one end gripping Pochita and the fiend on the other. Any passerby would have seen it as some strange dance fit to resurrect God's long-forgotten. Luckily, for both them and any theoretical witnesses, they were well and truly isolated on that mountain.
Blood trailed down the fiend’s leg and fell away with the rain. She had lost her words and resorted to crying and incoherent babbling. Denji's arms burned from the effort to separate the woman from his friend. “Pochita! The hells with you?”
He didn’t answer, only shaking his head and flinging crimson into the night.
Denji gasped as he nearly lost his footing to the slick grass and quickly lost whatever patience he had had going into all this. “Damn it, Pochita! If you don’t cut the crap, I won’t share any burgers I find in the garbage with you! Never, ever again!”
No more burgers!? Never, ever again!? That grabbed the pup’s attention, and he quickly let go of the fiend’s leg and nuzzled into the boy’s hold.
Unfortunately, said fiend had never stopped in her attempts to pull away from the two. So when Pochita released her, and she finally regained autonomy over all her limbs, she was also sent tumbling backward from the force of her own motion.
She made a good attempt to keep balance, spinning her arms and hopping around in some impromptu ballet routine. But sadly, it wasn’t enough.
She tripped on the toppled-over garbage bags and was sent crashing into their house, cracking the back of her head harshly against it. She tried to stand up but toppled over at her first step into the piles of junk lying about their yard.
She did not get back up.
Denji stood there, letting the rain and the realization of the situation they had just landed themself in dawn on him. “Oh, crap.”
Chapter Text
She galloped virile fields, the soil turned and sprouting a fair first harvest for the season. She knew not what was planted, cared not. Her hair, which was not quite her hair yet, whipped the wind behind her in the wake of her charge. Cattle, plump, delicious cattle, grazed along the fencing put up to block the roads from any bovine intrusion. They were her target.
She slowed to a trot as she came up to one. It was secluded from the others, perhaps thirty feet from the rest of the herd. Its ears flicked, and its marble eyes turned to her as she patted its side and grinned. "You'll do nicely. Tis' a duel, then?"
She won on the blow. As she always does.
Blood spilled as a torrent from its neck and watered the earth, turning it into mud as crimson bubbled and foamed where the ground would take no more. The cows shorn head hit the floor and rolled to stare at its killer, gaze dull and dead.
The woman squatted down next to the leaking stump and pressed her lips to it, sipping its ichor. Copper spilled down her chin and drenched her stomach, her feet. She gulped and licked and gnawed until the wound turned brown and gave no more to her.
When she was full she stood back up and considered the fallen creature. Behind her mechanical beasts, myriad in shape and color and size, roared past as a blur even she could not hope to keep up with.
She had tried. But they were cheaters and just went faster, the cowards.
She turned on her feet and stared out to the forest from which she had emerged. She squinted, hummed.
She supposed it would need to eat as well.
------
When the fiend awoke it was to a tin roof and dancing specks of dust. A weight of cool smoothness covered her whole body, swaddling her. Below lay something bouncy and soft. She sneezed and made to get up.
"Don't move."
She looked over in the direction the voice had come from and found the boy from last night sitting against the wall, dressed in shorts and thin-lipped bravery. His hands trembled, and she only had a moment to see it before he hid them in his lap. She scoffed at his command. "I'll do what I please, shorty. You think that this—" she gestured with her chin to the smooth plastic thingy entrapping her and perhaps to the squishy thing below as well. Big and comfortable—a nefarious machination. Too bad for stupid-face over there; she was much too intelligent to fall for a gilded cage. "This prison will hold me for long? Me!? I'll chew my way to freedom soon enough, and then we'll see just who'll be the one giving orders around here."
The fear shining in his eyes melted to befuddlement as her ranting went on. He found the fiend's threats hard to take seriously with her all tucked in, ready for a snooze. When she ran out of breath he found in the space of her huffing and puffing some words of wisdom. "Wow. You're kinda a weirdo, aren't you."
"W-weirdo!?" She exploded but made no attempt to leave his bed save for a few bounces. "You seek death, is that it? I'll have you know I am its greatest deliverer and will be happy to free you from that sad, saggy meat sack you call a body!"
"And you talk funny too."
"T-talk funny!?"
Their conversation was cut short when the shack door slammed open. The interior was illuminated for a moment by the grey morning before the small form of it waddled inside. Denji leaned over and swung the door closed again after its dramatic entrance. Its fuzzy face was all business, expression austere with fangs bared and eyes sharpened with righteous anger. Its ripcord tail curled over its back. The fur along its back and ankles stood on end, and a low growl emanated from the Devil's maw as it marched up to the fiend's bedside, his stride an authoritative waddle.
The fiend in question started to shiver at its approach, bunching up her tarp blanket and gathering it in front of her for protection. "S-stay away!"
Denji felt a pang of sympathy despite himself at her fear. "Hey Pochita, maybe go easy on her. I think she might be a little crazy or something."
The girl nodded feverishly. "Y-yeah, he's right!"
The pooch ignored them both, instead clambering his way up onto the mattress and into the fiends lap. He stared her down, abyssal gaze seeming to scry her soul for the truth of its nature. She shivered and turned to look at the boy, seeing him as her only opportunity to escape the hellhounds interrogation.
Denji grimaced at her trembling lips and terrified gaze. He pushed himself off the floor and walked up to the two. "All right. Pochita. I think that's enough." The devil dog barked with surprise as the boys arms wrapped around him and pulled him off of the fiend and to his chest. The boy sighed and looked down at the girl. "There, that better?"
She nodded nervously.
"Great. Then could you please get out of my bed already?"
"Your bed?" She seemed honestly confused. "But I woke up in it. That clearly makes it mine."
Pochita growled.
"Yes, sir." She threw off the tarp and got up to her feet.
Denji blushed and turned around, Pochita wriggling up to look at her over his shoulder.
"There, happy?"
"Y-yeah, thanks."
"Whatever." She sniffed and looked about the abode. "Do you live here?"
"I guess."
"Pathetic. My home would have at least two tires in the corner. Each corner."
"Grrrr."
"It's actually pretty nice now that I've had some time with it."
Denji giggled, sharp and bright. "Man, I can't believe you're scared of Pochita. He's tiny ."
Her hackles were immediately raised. "I am not scared."
He held Pochita out to her, his happy eyes and panting tongue turning sour when faced with the fiend again. She cringed and stepped back. "You are! You totally are!"
“Nuh-uh!”
“Yuh-huh!”
“Nuh-uh!”
Denji pushed Pochita at her, and she yelped.
"No! Keep him away from me!"
"Only if you admit you're a big weeny."
"I'm a big weeny! A big weeny!" She backed away, and he let Pochita back onto the floor. The pooch shook out his fur and stepped aside, trusting Denji to take the lead.
"The first step is admitting it."
Power grimaced, eye twitching under his belittlement. What had she done to deserve this? Nothing! "And what's the second step?"
The boy blinked. "I don't really know. He never made it this far. We're in real uncharted territory here."
That seemed to give the girl her energy back. She puffed a breath out her nostrils and thumped her chest with her fist, cheeks flushing with pride. "But of course! Who else would be fit to make such an excursion, after all? To sail the ebb and flow of the human condition and chart a map of my course. Who else, I ask you!"
"Right, yeah, okay. Whatever that second step may be, I don't think you're making it. Come on, Pochita. We need to go chop some trees to make up for yesterday. If we drop a dozen we'll even be able to afford to get the good bread tonight!"
"Wof!" Pochita panted and trotted after Denji, tail swaying with jubilee at the prospect of another day spent at the boys' side, no matter the tribulations to come, as he swung open the shack doors and stepped into the world lying in wait beyond. The sky was pale, and clouds like smoke blotted the horizon. The air was heavy with moisture and all about smelt like mulch, as if you had knelt to the earth with knees slaked in mud and tended its children. Petrichor, people far away from here call it, the ichor of stone. No wind blew as if that very earth had stood still in the night, a vigil unto this waning child and waning world, and no wind blew.
Power watched them go, fist still to her and with expressing balking. They were going? So soon? Didn't they want to hear her regale the tale about the time she saved Russia from Mongol invasion? Or how the president named her heir apparent the empire of America and the Prime Minister of the Chilean government?
The sight of the first human she had ever spoken to retreating, stupid and smelly though he may be, sparked a fire in her gut that had her running after them, waving her arms and yelling to flag them down. "Hey! Wait up a sec!"
They were at the tree line already, Denjis knees getting tickling by the dense underbrush that all but swallowed Pochita whole, his wagging tail that smacked aside branches the only indicator of his existence. The boy stopped and turned around boredly. "What is it?" He narrowed his eyes at the approaching fiend. "We aren't going to split our bread with you if that's what you're gonna ask."
The fiend slowed to a stop as she neared them, haughty disdain once again weighing her brow into a downward slant and crinkling her nose. "I don't care about your stupid bread. It's stupid and probably stinky and gross. I just wanted to tell you—" She stopped suddenly, at a loss for what words should come next."
Denji prodded his ear with his pinky and yawned. "Yeah? Well then what do you want? Me and Pochita got a strict schedule to keep. Don't we, Pochita?"
The bush next to him barked.
"See?"
The girl glared at the boy's worn-out sneakers and the strands of grass poking out from beneath them and squelching with each step. "I just wanted to say…I just wanted to say…" She grimaced and shot her finger out at him. "I just wanted to say that I leave first!"
"Huh?" Denji stepped back from her outstretched appendage, startled. "What do you mean?"
"You heard me! You stay, I'll be the one to leave and then you can go after."
"What the hell does that matter? Listen, lady, I have stuff to do. Business stuff. And it's on a need-to-make-rent basis, so don't even ask."
She scowled and stomped her feet into the damp ground. "I have business stuff to do too! Important business and it's on a need to know basis so don't even ask!"
"I wasn't going to!"
"Say what? But it's super interesting!"
"Is not!"
"Is too!"
"Is not!"
Pochita sat on his rump patiently, politely waiting for their conversation to end. His head swayed from Denji, to the fiend, to back to Denji. His ripcord smacked against the ground and lazily skittered over pebbles and bent blades of grass. He scratched at his cheek with his hind paw and studied his friend, how his face burned red with anger and embarrassment. It had been a long time since he had seen his friend look so animated.
"Fine!" The fiend eventually said after their shouting match went nowhere. She crossed her arms over her chest and pouted at the sun rising east over the little town at the base of the mountain. "If you really wanna know so bad, I'll tell you."
"I don't."
"You see, I have an accomplice waiting for me in the forest. I volunteered for a scouting mission to find a more permanent residence for us, and now I need to report back and share my findings."
"Okay."
A mischievous smirk curled her lips and flashed her eyes. "But you want to know the best part? This 'accomplice' of mine is actually a feast in the making. I've been fattening her up for weeks, waiting for the perfect to strike and reward my patience."
"Okay."
"So…" She began to lose steam in the face of his indifference. "So…so yeah! That's my plan. Now, if you'll excuse me…" She stepped past the two to begin a march into the surrounding forestry, her gait wide as she sniffed the air for her partner's scent.
Denji ignored her and squatted down next to Pochita. He leaned over to whisper conspiratorially, cupping a hand over his mouth. "Think she's gonna get lost?"
The chainsaw pup considered the words, rolling them around in his head as he looked up to the trees overhead. His black pupils turned to flat chips of slate in his skull as the light hit them. He looked at Denji and nodded confidently. "Woof."
"Yeah, I figured that too."
"What… Impossible…” Their conversation was cut short by the fiend's trembling voice.
Denji stood back up and looked over at her. "What's the problem now?" He quirked a brow when he got a good look at her.
Her confident expression had melted into something terse and low. A cold sweat beaded at her brow and trickled down, travelling the contours of her temple, the hollow of her cheeks, before endings it's journey at the tips of her chin. Denji studied the way it wobbled and threatened to fall as the fiend spoke. "Her smell—Meowys' smell, it's gone."
"And you're only just now noticing?" The boy cracked a smile that withered and died when the girl didn't take the bait. No, instead she stood there on the edge of boundless wilds, arms hanging loose at her sides and expression cracked with something strange. Something like loss, or longing. Denji sighed. "Look, her scent must've gotten washed away with the rain last night. It's no biggie, right? Just got to remember where you dropped her off."
No response.
Denji walked to the girl's side and smacked the back of her hand with his own. She startled and stared down at him. "Come on, where'd you leave her? Public Park? Truck stop?"
Still sweating, the fiend raised her arm and extended a finger out to the woods. "I placed her in a tree hollow, deeper in."
Denji blinked. "A tree? Just a regular tree? In a forest?"
She nodded, slow and jerky.
"Huh. Well, I don't think you're seeing your friend again." Her face crumpled, and he turned away from her. He didn't feel bad for saying it. He didn't even know that there was another way to say it. All news given to him throughout his short life; the death of his mother, of his father, of any hope he had of living like the kids he watched them party from behind glass in fast food playgrounds, had been given to him in the same matter of fact tone he had used with her.
So, no, he didn't feel bad about making a girl almost cry. Not at all.
He rubbed his nose and looked at the chainsaw pup still sitting patiently. "C'mon Pochita. Let's go thrash some overgrown shrubs and make our payday." He started to walk away, folding his arms behind his head and gesturing for his friend to follow, the loyal hound happily standing up to trot along at his side.
"Wait."
He stopped and looked back to the fiend. "What?"
She seemed so slight now, standing there nude amongst the trees. Before, her bravado had served to hide it, but with its absence, there was no way to ignore just how thin her arms were. How her ribs pressed against her pale skin patched with filth, and her gut was sucked into the cavity of her stomach.
She looked like she had been starving her whole life. Denji grimaced and glared at the floor.
"I need…" her voice shook and she swallowed. "You need to help me find her."
------
The fiend frowned and brought forward her hand again. It dripped with crimson, patching off and drying at her wrists. "Come on. You need to eat, don't you?"
The whelpy thing only mewed and coiled in itself, shivering in the grass even though the sun glared hot enough to peel the skin from her shoulders. It did that a lot.
The fiend growled and gripped it by the back of its neck, lifting it up and dangling her at eye level. "Listen, you. You need to eat, so you can get nice and fat, so that I can eat you! Got that?" She shook the cat back and forth and it whined something scratchy and pathetic.
The girl took her blood-slaked hand and prodded a finger at the cat's gums, trying to force it inside. "Come on, blood tastes great. You just gotta give it a chance."
The cat did not.
The fiend sighed in frustration. "If you won't take blood, then what will you eat?"
No answer.
The fiend looked over to the slain cow lying next to them. It had been dead for hours; its blood was cold and sluggish in its veins. She crawled over to it, the cat still in hand, and sat against its side, pressing her weight against the wall of meat.
She let go of the stray and it bobbled around, taking clumsy steps until it found its way onto its master's lap. It was warm, and seeking that warmth it curled and buried its head against the girl's stomach.
The fiend tsked. "Pathetic. Do you truly believe such wretched displays will spare you from your fate? Get up."
The cat purred, a vibrating trill that tickled her belly. It was small and fragile, and it thought that by the fiends' side was a safe place to rest. How foolish.
Maybe just a minute or two more. She was a benevolent sovereign, after all.
The cat was warm, like fresh blood.
------
Denji was a sucker, born and raised. It was the only way to explain what had become of his morning.
"Ah-ha! I remember now, I left her in that tree over there! Come, my faithful servants, our journey nears its end!" She pointed to a tree off in the distance, to branches gnarled and bark greyed and sprouting lichen. She didn't wait for a response from the two before bolting to it, nimbly ducking under overhanging tree limbs and jumping over rocks like a true wild woman.
Denji and Pochita did not match her enthusiasm, instead keeping their lazy stride at each other's side. The little pup's fat tongue dangled from his mouth and bobbed with each step he took. His tail was wagging sluggishly and he panted under the beaming sun, his plump nostrils twitching with each breath.
This had happened innumerable times over the past two hours they had been searching, with each supposed sighting producing the same result—nada. Zilch. The last three trees didn't even have hollows in which to hide something.
And each time their status seemed to lower, going from their names, to cohorts, to apprentices, and now to servants.
"You see anything?" Denji hollered over to the fiend as she circled the suspected tree, her eyes furrowed and leg muscles coiled as if she expected the thing to sprout legs and make a break for it.
Her expression soured, her husky voice edging into a whine. "No. Nothing."
"That's a shame."
Her expression crumpled further, and she reared her leg back. "Die!" She yelled before delivering a kick with all her might to the base of the tree. She immediately cursed and fell to her knees, muttering and massaging the aching limb.
The boy sighed, and Pochita looked on, unimpressed. He was way better at that than her. The pooch sniffed imperiously and waddled off in search of flowers to munch on, smacking Denji in the leg with his tail to make him aware of his departure.
Denji nodded his approval—they did end up forgetting breakfast while dealing with the crazy chick; he couldn't blame the little guy for being hungry—and Pochita woofed happily before trotting off. The boy turned his attention back to the fiend, coming to a stop at her side. "Are you alright?"
"Of course I am," her voice wobbled and she screwed her eyes shut as waves of ache travelled up her leg. "It appears that this tree possesses advanced blocking techniques. It must, to be able to withstand one of my legendary kicks."
"I kind of think it just stood there."
"And what would you know?" She hissed and gripped her foot, curling her body over and stopping Denji from seeing the extent of the damage, like an animal hiding its wounds from the rest of the pack in fear of being left behind. She tensed when she felt his curious presence bearing over her shoulder. "Buzz off!"
He put his hands up defensively when she turned and bared her fangs at him, face screwing up into a snarl. "Hey! Easy dude, I just wanted to see what the problem was."
"There isn't any problem except for you sticking your fat face where it doesn't belong." Her reticle eyes were burning bronze with her hackles raised.
"Stop being a baby and let me look. We can't afford to wait here all day."
"I am not a baby."
"Oh yeah? Then show me your leg and prove it." He moved closer in and she didn't stop him. He kneeled at her side and gestured for her to uncover her injury.
With her lips sucked in between her teeth, she slowly inched her hands away and revealed her foot.
Denji sucked in a breath.
It hung limply off the ankle joint, tilted askew where the ball of her foot rested against the ground. The toes were smashed, and their nails shattered and were pressed into the tender skin. The glossy flesh of the nail bed winked at him from below the carnage, pulsing and painful. The limb looked like one massive bruise; the veins had burst from the impact, which caused blood to pool beneath the skin, purple and hot.
"See?" The fiend gave a shuddering breath, a cold sweat beading along her brow. "Not a problem."
Denji balked. "Your foot looks inside out!"
"And it's not a problem. For one as mighty as I, this is but a scratch." She collected herself enough to plaster a smug grin on her face. "This wound will heal right before your eyes; just you wait and see."
"You can regenerate?"
"Of course."
Denji dropped back onto his haunches and sighed. "Well, that's a relief. How long do you think it'll take?"
"Two or three days."
He exploded out of his reverie and back onto his feet. "That's way too long! What kind of devil needs a three-day notice for their powers to kick in?"
The fiend sniffed, offended. "Well, I don't see you magically recovering from your injuries."
"That's because I don't go around kicking trees."
"Yet another of your boundless shortcomings."
Denji growled and tugged at his hair with his small, calloused hands, the nails chewed short. "I don't have time for this—we don't have time for this. I need to have a hundred grand ready by the end of the month to make our installments, or we're screwed. And that's if we're lucky." His temple pulsed and the space behind his eyes burned where he thought his brains were supposed to be. He tightened his hold around his greasy locks and pulled hard enough to stress his scalp.
Cutting trees is sixty thousand. Devils are worth a lot more if he's luck but he's never lucky. What else can he do? What else does he have to?
The fiend looked at him before swerving her eyes about the surrounding forestry, noticing a distinct lack of an orange furry murder machine. "Hey, where is he, anyway?"
"Huh?" Denji looked at her.
“The devil. Pochita.”
"Oh." The boy swallowed and looked up at her. "He got hungry and left."
She stared at him for a bit before sighing. "Betrayed in my darkest hour."
"I'm sure he'll be back soon. Probably just went to find some flowers or something."
"Perhaps. But the memory of his treachery will remain forever."
Denji was going to respond when all of a sudden it felt like a hammer had struck his chest and the world went sideways. The sense of inertia sent him crumbling to his knees, and he started hacking—immense, brutal expulsions of air that scraped his lungs and throat raw.
The fiend watched curiously, lost as to what this display was supposed to signify. Was it an expression of dominance? But before she could answer his challenge with her own, a familiar scent invaded her nostrils.
Blood. Sweet, delicious blood that dribbled past the boy's cracked lips and dripped down his chin onto his lap.
Eureka.
"Denji, I'm a genius!"
"Huh?" His teeth were stained red as he gasped it out. He looked at her with shivering pupils, unable to do anything but watch as she dragged herself over to him in a strange backward crab walk, her ruined foot dangling out ahead of her.
She soon reached him and pressed her back against him to support her weight. She beamed a closed-lip smile at him. "I just need to drink some of your blood!"
"Say what?" He croaked, his chest still being squeezed. "No way!"
"Why not?" She seemed honestly confused, eyebrows knitted with consternation and lips pulled into a little pout. It would almost be cute, if not for her ruined foot creaking and the fact that she smelled like ripe death.
"Because, because…" He had to stop to catch his breath. Because that's something he had only done with Pochita, and only once at that, the first time they met. Ever since, the pup had adamantly refused any blood offerings from the boy, choosing to wear any scrape or bruise he got like a medal of honor. He'd sit and lick his wounds until they were called to kill a devil, and the opportunity came for him to suckle from its corpse.
It was stupid, but if Pochita wouldn't have it, he didn't want anyone else to get it either. But he couldn't very well go and just admit that, could he? "You can't have any because you probably got rabies or some crap. If you go munching on me, I'll get it too!"
She gasped, offended at the very suggestion. "How dare you! Ill have you know I have a clean bill of health!"
"Oh yeah? And when was the last time you got checked?"
"I check myself. I'm certified."
"Certifiably full of it, maybe."
She growled, cheeks flushing. "Fine then! I didn't want your stinky blood anyway. It probably tastes like poop."
"Damn straight."
"I'll just have to get some off the dog." She used her knees to steer herself in the direction the pup's scent was strongest.
"Damn—wait, what? No!" On instinct alone, Denji threw himself at the fiend, knocking her to the ground and landing on top of her.
"Owww…" The fiend grimaced and rubbed the back of her head, it having been jostled when she hit the ground. Luckily her foot sufferes no fuether injury. "Whats your problem?"
"Not Pochita," Denji gasped, nerves drawing his breaths short. He gulped and grabbed her by the shoulders, straddling her stomach. "You can't hurt Pochita, do you understand me?" He shook her her shoulders and she grimaced.
"What's your deal? Let go of me, or I'll annihilate you!" She tried to shake him off but couldn't get the leverage. She threw her head around, gnashing her teeth, hoping to get fingers, but he moved them away whenever she got close.
"I can't, not until you promise me that you'll leave him alone."
"I promise nothing!" She picked back up her struggling only to be met with the same results. "Ngh. Why do you even care what happens to him?"
"I care 'cause he's my buddy."
"That doesn't make any sense." A devil and a human? Buddies? Humans were only good for their blood. Devils too. What was the point of making friends with one when everything worthwhile about them could just be sucked out, and you could be done with it?
"I don't need it to make sense; I just need you to promise me. Leave Pochita alone, and I'll… I'll give you some of my blood."
The fiend pursed her lips and moved her head to the side as if in contemplation. Her eyes gleamed with desire—she couldn't remember the last time she'd gotten to dine on a human, having been relegated to farm animals ever since inhabiting this puny form. But the first rule of negotiation was to never let them know your hand. There's always a better deal to be found. "Hmmm…I don't know…"
"Are you kidding?" Denji barked down at her. "You were all over the idea just a minute ago!"
"That was the old me. You shouldn't stay stuck in the past like that; it's self-defeating."
"Well, this the only deal you're getting. Take it or leave it."
Second rule of negotiation; when the first step fails, take what you can get. "Okay!"
Denji watched as she rest her head against the ground and opened her mouth as wide it would go. Her fangs gleamed against the penumbral cavity of her mouth and he could faintly make put the wrinkled ridges at the roof of her mouth, the dangling uvula near the back.
She tried to speak through her yawning maw, but the words came out as garbled nonsense. "Uwry uh. Oot urts. Unry."
Denji looked in her mouth and swallowed his nerves. His eyes traveled up to meet hers, and he put as much authority into his voice as his little lungs could manage. "Do you promise?"
She rolled her eyes, then nodded.
"You have to say it."
"Ah Ahmise."
He thinned his lips and reeassed one of the hands that were grasping her bony shoulders. He clenched all its digits save for the pinky into a fist and brought it to her. "Pinky promise me."
"Ah?"
"I give you my pinky, and you give me yours and we'll swear on it." When she only stared at his outstretched finger in wide eyed confusion he reiterated. "Swear on it. It's the only way I'll believe you."
Slowly, ever so slowly, she brought forward her hand and curled all but her pinky, lanky and with the nail chewed short.
Denji nodded, then wrapped his around hers. "Now you do it."
She coiled her pinky until it smothered his own. This was stupid; there was nothing to stop her from breaking this child's whim. There was no power here, nothing to bind their words like a proper contract. She could give him all the words he wanted, then turn right around and munch on the little fleabag to her heart's content.
Regardless, and for absolutely no other reason than it amused her to do so, when the boy shook his pinky, she joined him. And when he swore, she did too in her slack mouthed gibberish.
Denji pulled back. "It's done then. You can't break a pinky promise or its ten-thousand years of bad luck." He had enough of that as it was.
“Ah coose, ah nu ah.” Even with her mouth held agape like a fish out of water, she managed self-importance.
Denji bared his forearm, holding over her maw and slowly lowering it to her. Her mouth trickled with saliva building at her gums, and her eyes honed in on his arm, a shark smelling blood in the water. He stopped his descent and she nearly whined. "Just a little, right?"
She nodded frantically.
"And just my blood? No finger-taking?"
Another nod.
And with that final reassurance, he lowered his arm the rest of the way until it pressed against her lips, and waited.
He wouldn't need to for long.
Her jaw clamped down like a bare trap, fangs piercing the skin of his forearm. Immediately, copper seeped down her throat, and she lapped at the little holes she had made with her teeth.
It hurt. It hurt way more than it had with Pochita. It felt like as though for every bit of blood drained from him, ice flowed in its place. Ice that burned and filled his veins to the point of bursting.
He sucked in a sharp breath and clenched his teeth, holding back a whimper. He curled and uncurled his hand to give him something, anything else to focus on except the freezing burning dying . He dug his toes into the soft, damp earth, where they had settled on either side of the fiend's longer ones, worming the digits down until the first layer of sediment stopped their excavation.
The fiend's chin was draped in a gossamer layer of red, a curtain that spilled down her jaw and dribbled along her neck before trailing to the ground.
"Agh," Denji groaned, a cold sweat beading on his forehead where a slow-growing ache had taken root. He reached blindly to slap at her shoulder. Stop."
Her eyes were wild, nothing but feral hunger in them, and the knowledge that every pint drunk from the fool who'd offered himself up on a silver platter would make her mightier than before—to hell with whatever promises made.
"Stop. You said you'd stop, please."
To hell with everybody, even herself.
"You promised."
But ten thousand years was a mighty long time indeed, even for one as long-lived as her. Who had the time for that nonsense?
She pulled her teeth free of him, and he all but flew off of her, exploding to his feet and stumbling back until a good twenty paces had been put between them. He held his arm and grimaced as blood continued to leak, weeping from the small holes in his forearm where her teeth had been. Droplets of red rained from his fingertips where little trails had wound their way down.
She watched their descent from where she lay. She felt caught between the urge to lick her lips and ask for seconds and a strange squiggly feeling in her gut as the boy turned to her with tears rimming his eyes—that itself a grey source of pleasure for the fiend.
"What is wrong with you!? Are you crazy!?"
"I was thirsty. And look!" She flexed her foot, now in tip-top shape. Small patches of red riding up the ankle were the only sign that there had been any injury at all. "I'm healed! The mission was successful!"
"Successful for you, maybe!" More blood trickled down. He squeezed his eyes shut and hissed. "Ow, shit…"
She stared at him. "I can fix it for you."
Distrust dimmed his eyes. "I'm sure you can."
"I'm serious. Come here." He didn't, and she growled, curling her back up before launching herself to her feet. "Come here ."
He shook his and took a step back. So she took a step forward, stride exaggerated to the point of nearly falling into a split and covering thrice the distance that his short legs did. He turned around and broke into a run. She gasped and started after him.
Their race was cut short when his foot caught on a protruding tree root, and he was sent sprawling face-first into the dirt. The fiend barked a laugh as she slowed to a stop next to him. "Fool. Did you really think you could outpace me, the eight-year consecutive champion of the hundred-meter dash?"
He didn't respond as he sat up and held his hand to his nose, a thin trickle of red leaking from his nose, aching like someone had pinched their fingers around the knob of flesh and attempted to pull it off. He squinted a glare at her when she kneeled down next to him and extended a hand, open with the palm facing outward like a shaman dispelling a curse. "Leave me alone!"
"Shut up." He struck out at her, the attack sloppy with panic, and she caught it easily in her free hand, enclosing his small fist in her larger. The other closed around the boy's face.
Denji struggled, kicking out his legs trying to scoot backward out of her hold but it was no use, and so he closed his eyes, getting ready to accept his fate.
Then his nose stopped hurting. And his arm stopped bleeding. He felt her hand leave him and he slowly opened his eyes to her sitting back with a smug look. She flexed the hand she'd lain on him as if to cool it off before settling it in her lap.
Denji stuttered. "What? But—huh?" He looked at his arm to find the holes filled in, a small secretion of coagulated blood stopping anymore from flowing out.
"Are you so surprised?" She had a Chesire grin as she took in his amazement, poking and prodding at his miraculously healed appendage. "Just one of my many amazing powers." She looked about ready to start flexing.
"But...but why?" Nobody ever did him a good turn, ever—especially someone who had just previously seemed about ready to eat him alive. This must have been against the rules or something.
She put her hands to her hips and glowed with pride. "Yes, yes, praise me more human. Regale to me the terms of my glory. I already know of my greatness, but I'd like to make sure you do as well."
His next words weren't quite what she was expecting and were laced with suspicion. "Why would you do that?"
The fiend blinked before looking at him. "I always repay my debts." She sounded oh-so holy as she said it.
His eyes flashed. "Oh yeah?" He held his open palm out to her expectantly. She eyed it wearily.
"What's that?"
"Four-fifty."
"Huh?"
"It's four-fifty for last night. The bandaids. Each."
She blinked before turning her gaze to the sky. She squinted, myriad calculations running through her mind before coming to one conclusion. She smiled and looked at him. "I have no recollection of such events ever taking place."
He stared at her for a moment, slack-jawed and a little impressed despite himself, before deflating with a sigh. "Course not."
Their conversation was cut short by the roar of an engine and little paws hurriedly scrabbling in their direction, crunching leaves underfoot. High-pitched yips pierced the clearing—the first and final warning. "Wof! Wof, wof!"
The fiend paled as Pochita broke into view. Dirt was scuffed along his side and underbelly and he held a bouquet's worth of flowers in his jaws, intending to share them with his best buddy and maybe the fiend who he was beginning to think wasn't quite so then.
But then he smelt the blood in the air.
His chainsaw was revving and spinning at a terrifying speed; his tail shot straight up as he made a beeline for her. His stubby fur was standing on end, and his eyes were crescents of rage.
The fiend cursed and started to run away. "Get away from me!"
Denji's lips twitched, a giggle slipping out, then another.
"Arf, arf, arf!"
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry! "
Denji watched as Pochita hounded her round and round the forest, the chase circling around trees and trampling over bushes. As they neared a tree, the fiend broke left suddenly, the pooch hot on her heels, unable to match the maneuver. He rammed blade first into it, getting his blade lodged into the stump of the great oak. A whine of confusion spilled from him as he tried to back out but found he could not.
She turned without stopping to point and laugh at the little devil, her chortles cut short as she ran right into a tree herself. She fell hard on her rump, her expression dazed.
For the first time in a long time, Denji forgot about his debt for a moment. He forgot about his failing heart and the hardships to come. He forgot about his dead father and mother barely a memory to him, just a smell of apricots and a wisp on a bed with itchy sheets. And he laughed like a child free of this world and its pain.
Notes:
Woo! And there it is, the second chapter of this--whatever this is. I hope you liked it! Chapter three will be out by the end of the month, though I don't have an exact day.
All feedback is welcome, positive or negative. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope to see you next time.
Next chapter; the search for Meowy continues. Will our trio succeed in their mission, or forget how to breathe and perish along the way? Possibly both. Probably both.
Chapter Text
It took them the better part of half an hour to collect themselves and continue in their search.
Denji was red in the face from laughing, his breath thin and chest drawn tight and quivering. He lay on his back, hands to his belly facing the swirling clouds above—bright and unformed by the atmosphere, broken up in his sight by the scraggle of tree branches hanging overhead.
Power had taken to pointing and laughing at Pochita’s predicament—after recovering from her own run-in with Treekind, of course. Her merriment wasn’t to last however as the little devil got an idea and, bearing his weight backwards and planting his feet into the damp earth, began to shimmy his way out. The moaning tree flesh being split was all the warning she was given before the chase resumed.
They ran around for a while longer before she got the idea that if running sideways wasn’t doing her any favors, then it was about time she started making her way up . With a hop and a skip, she narrowly avoided an emergency amputation via chainsaw and clutched onto one of the nearby trees. Gripping her claws deep into the moist wood, she scrambled her way up, grabbing branches to help with her ascent and, whenever those branches broke, throwing them down to smack against the evil barking up at her.
When she reached the top and felt some security in her new position, she started pointing and laughing again. “Hahaha! You idiot! Dogs can’t climb! Your stubby limbs are no match for a night prowler. Stay down there and seethe! Seethe!”
And Pochita did just that, stomping his paws and growling, blade sputtering along with the anticipation of violence. At Power’s continued mockery, his eyes narrowed. Tilting his head, he began grinding his blade up and down the tree at an angle, bits of bark breaking off to reveal the pale wood beneath.
Power watched the display uneasily. “H-hey, what’s he doing?”
“Huh?” Denji answered, pausing from his cloud watching to look at her. “Oh, that.”
“That?”
“He’s prepping.
“Prepping? For what?”
“To chop it down. He likes to clear away some of the bark first so it doesn’t fly into his eyes.”
“Say what!?”
“I wouldn’t worry though.”
“What the hell does that mean!?”
Denji flapped his hand about as if to shoo her questions away before he went back to cloudwatching. Oh hey, that one kind of looked like a corn dog.
“Denji!”
He sighed. “What?”
“Help me!”
“Why?”
“You owe me for tending your wounds. I saved your life, and this is how you repay me?”
“You healed me from the wounds you gave me. I don’t really think that counts—it totally voids the life debt thing. Plus, it was a pretty weak bite; no way it would have killed me.”
“It would have easily felled you had I not taken the inisha—initiative in saving your sorry hide.”
“Dumbass can’t even pronounce words right.”
“You dare mock me? You dare?”
“I do.” Denji’s gaze swung back to Pochita, and he blinked. “Oh. Guess times up.”
The little guy had finished his work, and a good two square feet of the surface of the tree had been cleared away. He admired his work for a moment, head held and blade seeming to shine in the sun's rays before he lowered his head—
“No, wait! I yield, I yield!” Power screwed her eyes shut and clutched herself against her only friend in anticipation of its timbering.
—And trotted back to Denji’s side, yipping when the boy gave his head a scratch. The boy's dull nails kneaded through the pup's dense fur and massaged his neck. The devil dog's engine gave a low rumble of content.
Power, after a moment or two of not crashing back into the earth, hesitantly opened her eyes. “Huh?”
“Got her pretty good, didn’t you Pochita?”
“Yip!” He wagged his rip cord and accepted more scratches.
Power wore a look of befuddlement as Denji called for her to come down so they could pick up the chase. She wore a look of befuddlement as she clambered down, her feet slipping on the peeled oak, causing her to hit the ground with a thump. She wore a look of befuddlement as they set out again, absent-mindedly pointing whichever way her nose guided them. She wore a look of befuddlement all the way up until they neared the edge of the forest, spilling out onto a road winding along the mountainside.
A drop of perhaps four feet blocked their march, the earth giving way to a steep slope of overgrown grass chocking the flowers between, robbing them of the sun.
Denji hopped down on the asphalt first without a problem. Pochita turned around and tried to slide his way down backward but underestimated the incline and slipped and tumbled the rest of the way. He picked himself up and shook the dirt from his coat, the pair turning to look up at their reluctant companion.
“Well?” Denji drawled.
“Wait a minute.” She held up a hand to silence them, theories and equations no mortal mind could comprehend dancing behind her amber eyes. Finally, they shone with the zeal of a thousand suns. A thousand very angry, very petulant suns. So perhaps not a sun at all. “You tricked me! No one tricks me!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Back in the forest, you and your leperous hound feigned an attack on me, and all for your own amusement. The nerve! You knaves, you swine, you back alley trollops!”
“Are you kidding? That was like two hours ago! We already moved on from that!”
“Yet I have been forced to live in the shadow of that betrayal ever since.” She crossed her arms and stared hard into the distance in defiance of…something.
“What!? Don’t forget that the only reason we’re here right now is because you decided that hiding a cat in a tree in a forest was a good idea. Don’t go acting like a martyr now.”
Power closed her eyes and sighed wistfully like a martyr would.
“What the frick!? Stop!”
She did not.
Denji gritted his teeth, but before he could go on a tirade about crappy devil chicks and their crappy attitudes, he felt a pressure on his right foot, squishing the soggy leather of his sneakers into his toe. He looked down to find Pochita staring up at him, resolution shining in his big, round eyes.
“Ah, man, for real? You really think there’s no other way?”
Pochita nodded, plump nostrils held firm against his friend's mopey tone.
Denji sighed. “Ugh, fine. Yo, Power.”
The fiend stood solemn against the wind. It caught in her hair and spun what would have been a majestic arc were it not for the dirt and twigs caught in. “Yes, oh great betrayer.”
“I’m, ugh… I’m like friggin’ sorry, okay?” A fuzzy smack hit his shoe. “We’re sorry. It was totally uncool of us to prank while we’re looking for uh, um…”
“Meowy.”
“Yeah, that’s it! Meowy. So, why don’t you hop on down so we can find 'em, eh? They can’t be far now.”
Power held a hand over her eyes like a woman in grief. She sniffed, and when she spoke, her voice held a somber note. “You mean it? You’re really sorry about your jest?”
“Yuh-huh. Yeah, totally.”
“Well then,” She heaved a sigh, then uncovered her eyes. “That makes one of us then.”
Denji balked. “Huh?”
Power giggled at his confusion. “Hehehehehe, you fool! You have fallen for one of the classic ruses!”
“What!? No way!”
“Yes way! ‘Act pathetic to lower the enemies' guard.’ The oldest trick in the book!”
“Hey, that’s cheating! I can’t read! Stop reading!”
“You fool! You absolute blunderer!” The fiend swung her head back and cackled while Denji stomped his feet, cheeks red and puffy with all the impotent rage a child could muster. Pochita mimicked the emotions, tapping his little paws into the earth while he marched in a huffy circle, eyes sharp with annoyance.
“I take it back, I take back everything I said! I’m not sorry, and I’m not going to help you look for your stupid cat!”
Power's mad laughter subsided into a jubilee rosying her cheeks, though her voice still held the high-pitched mania of her sniggers. “Calm down boy. This just makes us even.” She hopped down onto the road with a flourish, kicking up dirt and causing Pochita to sneeze. “So, shall we continue our quest?”
The sun hung close to their backs as they walked down the road, peeling the skin of Denji neck and making Pochita’s tongue to loll out.
Power was the only one who seemed totally unbothered, arms crossed behind her head as she hummed a rhythmless shanty. “Pam pa ram, pam pa ram…”
No cars passed them on their journey. Any who may have had use for the road had already ridden it by the time the trio set foot on the baking asphalt.
Denji yawned, stretching his arms behind his head as he did so. “Hey, Power?”
“What?”
“You still got Meowy’s scent dialed in?” He tapped the side of his nose for emphasis.
“Of course I do, dummy. She’s just down the road, I’m sure of it. Her smell's been getting stronger as we’ve walked.”
“Just down the road, huh. That sure doesn’t sound like where a tree would be.”
“Well…well maybe the tree moved?”
“Moved? Like it grew legs and walked off? Like it just decided that it wasn’t feeling where it was living at before?”
Power bristled. “Maybe! I don’t care about how trees get around or how they feel about their sorry housing. I just want to rescue Meowy and continue with my business. Away from you two.”
Denji didn’t answer, instead stuffing his hands into the pockets of his shorts to hide how they had balled into fists.
They continued marching in the heat and in the contempt of each other's company.
Below them, past the guard rail and a sheer drop of certain doom, lay dense forest that stretched for miles and miles, further than the naked eye could see. Cicadas chirped from below like the sirens that led many a sailor to their grave, their many voiced song a dissonant hum. Denji looked out to all that vast vegetation, to the unknowability of it, and felt something heavy in his gut.
As they walked and the road curved the first sighting of civilization met them. A rest stop, a flat slice of blacktop boiling under the sun, the only refuge a building of cement and warm smells—food. Food that Denji couldn’t afford.
Denji’s stomach growled, and he slapped a hand over it as if in reprimand. “Stupid belly, why bother speaking up when it knows damn well food won’t come until Saturday. Unless,” And with that, an idea formed. “Hey, Power. You got any spare cash on you? We can set up a payment plan, and I should be able to get it back to you in the next two to three years.” He turned to look at the fiend—
But Power had fled from his side and gone galloping down the road at full speed, legs shooting forward with vulpine lunges. Her hair flew wildly in the wind and Denji did think for a moment of something majestic and pure when he saw that image of her cast in the mid-day sun. Not that he’d ever tell her of it.
Denji cursed and started after her, Pochita at his heels in pursuit. “Hey, where are you going!?”
The fiend didn’t answer, blind and deaf to all but where her nose led her.
She seemed as some pale rider, drifting across the lot. Hopping from parked car to parked car, denting in roofs, leaving dirty foot prints pressed into windshields, startling the families within. Those who sighted her, sighted the horns atop her head, screamed and ran, dragging their children back inside the rest stop. Power paid them no mind beyond a feral grin at the fear she was leaching from them.
“Shit, Devil! Run!” One young man yelled whilst grabbing a woman—a lover, perhaps—by the arm and running back to their car.
With a hop and a skip, she came to a stop at a food stall. A small building connected to the larger like a tumor, a banner was slung across its face, swaying in and the wind reading ‘Octo-balls! Udon! 350 Yen for a Stick of Three or 500 for a bowl!’ for anyone able. To the side, an illustration of an octopus, lavender colored and smiling, is rendered in a cartoonish style.
Power beat on the glass partition separating the customer from the worker, save for a counter held at waist height with a lot to slide orders through. Heaving hot fog against the clear surface, she brought her hands together to peer inside. Within lay unmanned frying stations, woks left untended, boiling pots of water plume steam up into the ceiling to get sucked up by the air vents. And there, crouched in the corner with her back facing the rest of the room, was a girl of perhaps twenty.
“Hey, you,” Power yelled, slamming her fist against the glass hard enough to rattle it. “I see you, open up!”
“We’re-we’re closed!”
“No, you’re not! I see you; you’re right there!”
The girl started to cry. “S-sir Octo is, is always happy to help a hungry fan, but he’s sick today. Please come by tomorrow.”
“I won’t! Tell Octo that if he doesn’t return what he stole from me, I’ll begin making reparations with your blood!”
“Octo-chan would never steal! It betrays the brand!”
Denji came running up from behind, nearly sprinting full force into the cement wall as he struggled to stop himself. In his arms he held Pochita, having snatched up the pup after its stubby legs proved inadequate for short distance running. The boy deposited the hound back onto the ground.
The boy hacked a dry cough as Power continued her tirade. “What the hell's going on?”
“Human! Our journey nears its end. These—these fiends haven’t taken Meowy prisoner, and are holding her hostage in this damnable box.”
“Huh, for real? How do you know?”
“I can smell it.”
“That’s just the smell of our delicious takoyaki, batter and fried with chunks of real octopus bought straight from Hokkaido!” The worker piped. “For just 350 you can have a stick of three! And don’t forget our delightful udon! Oh, but we’re closed today.”
“350 a pop? You could probably buy a house for that much!” Denji turned to look at his one-time accomplice. “You’re right, Power. These guys are thieves.”
“Told you so!” Power took the time to scratch under her nose, a glow in her cheeks at being vindicated.
“But uh, what now?”
“Now? Now, we…”
“Go home?” The stall worker spoke up hopefully.
“Not on your life.”
“Have you tried the door yet?” Denji gestured with his head to the back door, positioned to the rear of the store, visible through the window.
“Ah yes; doors, I forgot about those.” Power nodded with squinted eyes before the trio made their way around back.
The smell of trash furled bitterly in their nostrils as two dumpsters came into view. Flies gathered about, skittering over the black flip lids and flying in and circles above, building a dim cacophony of wings fluttering in their many. Denji made a note to have a looksy before they left.
The door was navy blue, and the knob brushed aluminum, hot to the touch under the sun's glare.
Power cared not for the heat as she gripped the knob and turned it. Click —It did not open. Frustrated, she rattled the handle. “Damnit it, it won’t open. Denji, explain yourself!”
“It's locked.” The boy was over by the garbage, lifting up the lid to peer inside. He had to perch up on the tips of his toes to see. Within lay easily a dozen black garbage bags, jagged and mushy, and each easily as big as him. A piñata was how he saw them; a dozen big piñatas just waiting to be cut open.
“Denji,” Power’s tone encroached on being a whine. “Stop playing with trash and help me get this door open.”
He huffed a sigh. “Fine, fine. Here, Pochita,” he bent down and scooped the devil, placing on top of the dumpster. “You stay and sniff out the good stuff while me and Power take care of the cat.”
“Wof!” Eyes hooded with determination, Pochita took on this sacred duty with the weight of a thousand knights kneeling before their king. He would find the good stuff, and he would get to eat all the banana peels he wanted.
Denji turned back to Power, the sound of paws rummaging through cans and old boxes of panko rising behind him. “So, what now?”
“Now,” a Cheshire grin curled along the woman's face. “Now is the time I reveal my true power.”
“Okay.”
“Watch now, human. And rejoice in the splendid that is the mighty Power!” The fiend cut her thumb across the wrist of her left hand, yet no blood dropped. Like a seamstress, she siphoned the yarn of her ichor from her own wound and, with a flick of her hand, forged a hammer tall enough to meet her reflection in its face.
Denji stood to the side, jaw slack and eyes brimming with childlike wonder. It was just about the coolest thing he had ever seen. She was like some comic superhero come to life, with her birthday suit for a costume and a propensity for extreme violence as a signature. “Holy hell, you a wizard or something?”
Power took in his awe and grinned. “Even better—I’m me.”
She gripped the handle and gave the thing a twirl, testing its weight. Deeming it satisfactory she planted her feet apart at shoulder width, making sure her body was in alignment with itself. Keeping herself loose she swung the hammer back, then paused. “Stand back.”
“Huh?” Denji balked. “No way, I wanna see.”
“Most understandable, but the mere force of my swing has been known to topple buildings. If you stand so close, you’ll surely be obliterated. A good master does not eviscerate their servants without due cause. That’s how unions get created.”
“B-but—”
“I hate unions, Denji.”
“Fine, fine,” Denji threw up his hands and turned and began marching himself back. “If you’re gonna be such a b-hole about it. See if I care.”
She nodded when she deemed his distance adequate. Focusing back on the task at hand, she readjusted her grip and swung.
Thunk!
Bits of cement chipped off from the wall and scattered to the ground, a faint dust blooming in their departure. From inside a scream sounded out, then the scrabble of manic feet against linoleum flooring. The door buckled under the weight of her blow like an aluminum can, bent into the doorway. But still it stood.
“That didn’t seem all that building toppling-ly.”
“Shut up. T’was the wind. It blew against my strike to weaken it.”
“Stupid wind.” He wanted to see a boom .
“See, you understand.” Grunting, she worked her hammer out from where it got wedged against the door, bearing her eight back wards to force it out. Once it was free, she got back into her stance.
She breathed in on the backswing, holding it in as her form coiled like a spring ready to let loose. She used her control over blood to boil the red that coursed through her veins, inflaming her muscles to artificially strengthen them, if only for a brief moment. It hurt like hell, but she felt a desire to impress the brat. He’d be begging to serve under her after this.
With what little breath was left in her lungs, she spoke to Denji. “Are you ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
And with that, she swung it forward.
Ka-boom.
It was the sound that registered first. The sound and then the dust in their eyes and eight feet of ten feet of cement was obliterated, flecks of grey sent smattering against her pale flesh, dimming it to ash.
The door, what was left of it, was sent careening inwards. It smashed against stainless steel cabinets, knocking pans off their hooks and sending utensil scattering to the floor. It wilted to the floor like a boxer hanging onto the ropes for dear life.
Fluorescent lights flickered and died into their cages, specks of glass falling to the floor and winking in the day light. Electrical wiring hanged from the ceiling, black and serpentine like tendrils of some monster come to slay them.
Power hacked out the dust coating her throat, bending over and arching her back like a cat with a hairball, the notches of her spine pressing against the skin. Water pursed in her eyes as her body tried to flush out debris.
She felt a warmth press against her shoulder and went stock still, eyes thinning with animal intensity . Dangerous danger smell no danger?
Her head whipped to find Denji at her side, his hand put hesitantly on her, and a weary something in his eyes. “Uh? You good?”
“Good?” She stared at him in bewilderment? Was she good? Had he not seen what she just did—she was more than good; she was perfect!
“I-I just know that when I start hacking, it can suck pretty hard, and uh,” He scratched at the back of his neck and elsewhere, anywhere but her.
“Did you think I was cool?”
“Huh?” His eyes flitted to hers for a moment.
“Did you appreciate my amazing, powerful Power hammer blow?”
“Oh, yeah, I did,” he grinned and patted her upper back. “S’was totally badass, dude.”
“Heh.” The warmth of his hand seemed to seep into her, sprouting a gentle glow in her chest. “We might make a proper servant out of you yet, boy.”
He huffed a laugh. “Whatever you say, bozo. Now, how about you get your head back in the game before she gets away.” He pointed off behind her.
Grunting in confusion, Power followed the digit's direction and spotted the stall worker trying to cram herself through the service slot.
The fiend exploded to her feet and ran inside. Hopping clear of the broken glass, she landed just short of the frantic woman. She desperately failed her legs as a last defense, but it was no match for Power’s superior reflexes. Gripping her by both of her ankles—one in each hand—she worked to pull the hysteric woman back inside.
“No! Please don’t kill me! I need this job. I-I’ll give you free takoyaki for life!”
“Shut up,” Power grunted as she finished wrangling the girl. She dropped her on the floor and watched with primal satisfaction as the pipsqueak backed herself into a corner, crying out when she smacked her head against the lip of the counter.
Power crouched down and slowly slunk closer, eyes shining with glee of a predator toying with its prey. She relished each tremble of the girls' lips, each bead of sweat and tears that rolled down her face. The fiend licked her lips and had to stop herself from lapping the liquid fear right off her face. To distract herself she focused in on the girl's mole, dotted just below her left and quivering on the skin.
“P-please…don’t…” The girl blubbered.
“Don’t what ?” Her voice lilted, almost a croon.
“Don’t kill me—”
“What’s going on?” Denji shouted out as he approached the two, rubbing at his red knees, which had just spent the better part of a minute clambering their way over cold steel counters. In order to avoid damaging his feet or the shoes they were houses in, he had climbed up onto the countertops and shimmied his way over to them. Being so small did have its advantages, after all.
Power flicked a finger and pointed to the girl, idly batting at the bang that was draped down her face. Brown, like silk to the touch and—she gave a sniff—smelling of strawberries. “This is our perp.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I can smell the guilt oozing out of her.”
Denji grunted and pointed to her exceptionally most face. “Can see it, too.”
“W-was our delicious takoyaki not up to our dear customers' standard?” The girl, not more than seventeen, blubbered. “I can help you file a complaint if you want? My manager says it’s the one thing I’m good at.”
“Silence, criminal! We are busy deciding your fate, and your ceaseless whining is a distraction.”
“My manager always says that, too…”
Denji watched the girl despair, something squiggly making its way around in his gut. She probably thought she was going to die. “What did you want to do with her, Power?”
The fiend in question hummed, pondering the possibilities. “What to do... What to do with a sniveling little cat thief…”
The girl perked up. “Cat?”
Denji balked. “You didn’t even tell her what was going on?”
“Alas, the thrill of the chase may have led me astray of my motives…”
“Is this about that cat I found on my three-minute break this morning?”
“Ah-ha! So you do know what this is about. See Denji, I told her!”
“Congrats.” The boy hunkered down at the fiend's side, their knees knocking together. He stared into the girl's eyes with as much authority as his tiny self could muster. “So…uh…”
She hesitated only a moment before speaking. “My name is Kobe—”
“Who the hell cares what your name is!?” Power grips her by the shoulders and shakes. “What’d you do with Meowy, huh? Thought you could post a ransom? Leach off of your betters? Huh? Tell me!”
“I don’t, I don’t…”
“Power, quit it. She can't say nothing if you keep shouting over her.”
She grimaced at being given a command but reluctantly acquiesced.
The girl hugged herself as she talked. “So her name is Meowy…
“Early this morning, maybe at five or six, I went to the woods to use the restroom. The manager doesn’t want us to use the restroom inside in case customers want to use it, so he makes us go out back. We get to bring toilet paper, at least, and we keep a community roll near the door. Or kept, anyway…”
So anyway, as I was going potty, I noticed this adorable little guy—”
“Girl.”
“Girl. When I saw her, all scruffy and hungry-looking, I couldn’t help myself. I snatched her up and brought back here.”
“Where is she now?” Denji asked in place of a Power that was grinding her teeth and making grabby motions at the other girl.
The girl scooched so that she was closer to Denji before answering, seeing him as the safer of the two. “I left her in my car with the windows down until I got off my shift.”
“And when was that supposed to be?”
She looked around. “Right now, I guess…”
“Then enough waiting!” Power got back to her feet and dragged the other two up with her. “Human! If you want to live to worship your octo-deity one more day, you best lead us to your automobile immediately!”
She nodded and hurried towards the door, glass crackling underway as the other followed her.
They reached their parking lot only to find it deserted, all cars save for one gone from the area.
“Where’d everybody go?” The girl asked.
“Crazy naked people are pretty scary, I guess.” Denji shrugged.
She nodded hesitantly.
When the trio neared the car, a faint meow could be heard, and Power bolted forward. She scratched at the windows, fuzzy paws matching her movements on the other side. She tried to dig her fingers between the crack in the window and force it down, but the space was too small even for her spindly digits. She growled. “Human, tell this nefarious creature to release Meowy this instant!”
She sighed. “Please don’t break my windows.” She rifled through her pockets before pulling out a set of keys. She unlocked the car and had to open the door for the fiend as she threw herself against the door.
With her path no longer blocked Power dove inside, wrapping her arms around something so warm and alive as to be mistaken for a beating heart.
She slowly made her way out of the vehicle, Meowy held firmly in her hands. She stared hard into the feline's placid gaze. “Where have you been, Meowy? I told you to watch the western perimeter!”
“Mrow.”
“And what of our acorn rations!”
“Mrow.”
“What do you mean the squirrels invaded!”
Denji and the girl stood awkwardly to the side, neither certain if intervening was the course of action in what appeared to be a manic episode.
“So, uh,” Denji started. “What do you think you’re gonna do now?”
The girl blinked before looking back to her ruined work. “I’m not sure. I don’t think I’ll be welcome around here anymore, though.”
“Huh, well, sucks for you.”
“Yeah, yeah it does.”
“Well, hey, if you figure your gonna be put out on your ass anyway…”
“Hm?”
“Why not fire up some food for the road. You owe me for keeping Power off your butt, and I’m pretty hungry.”
She considered. They were expressly forbidden from using any equipment outside of company hours. Her boss would freak when he found out. The thought made her smile. “Yeah, sure. Just need to pick the glass out of the oil first, and it shouldn’t take more than ten minutes for a batch of our fresh and delicious takoyaki.”
“Awesome.” He lifted his fist to her, looking for a bump. She stared down at it, bewildered, until he slowly started to drop it, the smile slipping from his face.
“O-oh, wait,” she quickly grabbed his hand and brought it back up and, with her tongue poking out between her lips, met his knuckles with her own. “There.”
“Sick.” She didn’t let go of his hand, and he made no move to take it from her, the notion of human contact unfamiliar to both. “Hey, what was your name anyway? Never got it the first time. Uh, my name is Denji, by the way.”
She had the kindest eyes he had ever seen; that’s what he thought then. He didn’t think nice people existed outside of the television programs he watched while spying through people’s windows. “Hi Denji, it’s nice to meet you. My name is Kobeni.”
“Kobeni?”
“Kobeni Higashiyama. And Sir Octo’s takoyaki sucks.”
------
When the takoyaki was crisp and placed piping hot in a bag, the three made to go their separate ways. Power and Denji took the road back where they came, while Kobeni got into her car and left.
Denji waved to as she disappeared behind a curve but he didn’t know if he saw her.
“The whelp was right, these do suck.” Power muttered as she spat out a half-chewed glob octopus and batter onto the road. “Not even fit for a pig. Here, you have them.”
“Thanks,” he muttered, snatching the bag from her outstretched hand. Pulling a stick out, he snagged one ball between his teeth and slid it off and into his mouth. He chewed, ignoring the heat. “I don’t think it’s that bad.”
“Says the guy who eats garbage.”
“Says the chick who drinks blood.”
“It is a sophisticated course, not fit for a plebian palate,” she said, offense coloring her voice. Meowy was perched contentedly on her bony shoulders and had been eyeing Denji with a distant haughtiness. No question where she picked that up from.
“Whatever you say, Power.”
“It’s nice to know that we’re on the same page for once.”
They walked further down the winding roads, a silence not quite so desolate budding between them. The sun hung warm and soft on the horizon, slowly being eclipsed by the tree line. Denji watched it wave goodbye, thinking about what a waste today had been. Or, at least, that’s what he wanted to think.
The takoyaki really wasn’t as bad as everyone was saying; they were just being snobs.
He had hardly thought about his debt at all today.
“Say, Power.”
“Yes, Denji?”
“How come you’re still walking with me?”
“...I don’t understand the question.”
“I mean, we found Meowy. Job’s done, right? Why don’t you go back to squashing bugs or whatever it is you do when you’re not busy losing your cat.”
He managed to evade the swipe thrown at him as he awaited her answer.
“Dunno,” she said eventually, her eyes pinched with something churning behind her gaze. “Guess I just don’t have enough of a reason to stop.”
“Oh.” He didn’t sound nearly as pleased by the explanation as she thought he ought’ve.
“ ’Oh’ ? What’s that supposed to mean? You should be honored to have one such as me to guide you.”
Maybe he should have been. Maybe he should have been a lot of things, but he wasn’t. He was only himself. And as himself, all he could think of now was the old man, of what might happen if he saw him slinking around with a fiend. Slinking around with a paycheck waiting to be cached.
“Power...”
She groaned. “Yes? Oh, most incessant question asker?”
“I don’t think you should be around me anymore.”
“Nonsense, I go where I please.”
He grit his teeth, anger flaring. “I mean it, buzz off.”
“Nuh-uh. I was thinking about it before, but now I’m totally not gonna. Besides, that dinky shack you call a home is mine now that I’ve slept in it.”
They were going to chop her up into little pieces. Her head would be stuffed and hung on some old dude’s mantel. Her guts would be minced and made into hotdogs. All because he didn’t have the words to tell her to run.
Well, if she wasn’t going to.
He threw the bag at her and took off into a dead sprint, the fiend yelping from behind.
He ran and ran and heard her chasing after. She was yelling, screaming words at him that he couldn’t hear with the wind in his hair and his heart thumping his ears.
He felt her fingers graze the back of his shirt, and he bolted right, escaping her clutches. He may have been quick, but her legs were longer, and she surely had stamina enough to outlast his failing body.
It was time for a new plan. If he couldn’t out run the fiend, maybe he should try out jumping .
He made his way over to the guardrail just as he felt the grip of warm hand twist the fabric of his shirt.
He didn’t even take the time to look.
He felt fabric tear and saw for a brief moment the world in suspension as he hung in the air, aloft the laws of gravity. It was a sort of freedom he’d never know. Then everything blurred.
His feet jolted against the earth and he lost his footing, tumbling down a steep slope. His knees scraped against rocks and protruding branches slapped his face. He met the forest floor with a thud, and he lay there, listening and breathing hard.
No sounds of anyone falling after him. No sounds of haughty laughter mocking him for his stupid ideas.
He looked back up and saw nothing save a rusted guard rail and saccharine sky. He looked about the trees and saw nothing but dark oak and the leaves they kept.
He was alone now, thank whoever would bother listening. Now it was just him, the forest, and Pochita.
His eyes widened. “Oh sh—”
------
The way back up was decidedly more difficult than the way down. But he made it, after one or two more fast trips down.
When he reached the top, he saw no sign of Power, nor of the takoyaki he had sacrificed to make his escape.
Her grumbled. So much for not being fit for a pig.
Making it back to the rest stop only took about twenty minutes of running. His legs burned, and blood pursed in the scratches littering his body, but he ignored the pain as he had many times before. If you don’t think about it, you can’t feel it, after all.
The parking lot was still deserted as he made his way across it and around to the back of the food stall. No signs of the fiend reached him as he walked.
As he neared the garbage’s he could hear rustling from within, and the whir of a blade scratching against steels walked it didn’t have a hope of cutting through by itself.
Guilt settled in his belly like a lead weight as his fingers dug under the trash lid, and with a small grunt, he flipped it open.
Pochita lay inside, eyes dribbling tears and chainsaw flecked with bits of paint off of the dumpster walls.
Denji sucked his lips in between his teeth staring at his friend. His only friend. The friend that relied on him for protection. He was right to send Power away if he couldn’t even do this much.
“Let’s go and get you cleaned up, buddy.”
------
Denji lay in bed that night, exhausted and aching. And alone.
Pochita lay curled up by his lonesome in the ring of an old tire, not quite having forgiven Denji for leaving him stranded. And especially for not having any spare takoyaki left to share with him. That was perhaps the biggest betrayal of them all.
Denji turned on his side and tightened himself into a ball, trying to preserve his body heat on that windy night, the walls of their home all but defenseless against it.
In a space between dreams and reality, in the darkness he felt a weight settle at his back. More importantly, there was heat.
Denji smiled, half awake. “You’re such a softie, Pochita. Thanks for this.”
No response came, but that was hardly a surprise. The day had been long for both of them, after all. And he was so very, very tired.
He settled against that warmth and closed his eyes, ready for just a scant few hours of peace. He needed to be up bright and early, after all.
After all, tomorrow was going to be a busy day.
Notes:
Hello! Sorry for taking such a long time with this update.
I had a lot of fun writing this chapter. It let me let loose with my terrible sense of humor.
My plan for now is to get my other story, 'Dear Makima,' updated with two more chapters before I update this one again. At an estimate, I'd say this story will get its next update by April 10th, give or take.
As always, thank you for taking the time to check out my silly stories, and I hope you have a wonderful day. Feedback, positive or negative, is always appreciated.
Until next time.
Chapter Text
Denji turned over in his makeshift bed, held captive in the liminal space between sleep and the waking world, and looked to nuzzle himself deeper into the pudgy warmth of Pochita at his side.
His first sign that something was wrong was when Pochita wrapped his spindly arms around his head and pulled Denji into his chest. Pochita didn't have arms. He definitely didn't smell like fish guts left out to dry under the sun for two weeks.
His eyes blinked open and came face to face with Power's own amber crosses.
"Morning, peon." She smiled down at him magnanimously, pointy teeth on display. "When can I expect breakfast?"
Denji screamed and wriggled out of her hold. He tumbled to the floor, dragging the tarp bedsheet down with him.
Power grabbed at it with a growl. "Hey! No hogging the blanket!"
"What are you doing here!?" He pointed a finger at her accusingly.
"Sleeping, duh!" the tarp bunched at her waist as she sat up, seeing no point in going back to bed now that her sleep had been thoroughly tarnished. She stretched her arms high above her head and let loose a yawn, smacking her mouth to get the dryness out. "What else would I be doing?"
Denji blinked, then rapidly checked himself for bite marks.
Power clicked her tongue and crossed her arms over her chest, offended. "Are you done yet?"
Denji stopped his inspection short of shucking off his pants and shirt and breathed a sigh of relief. He was clean. "Yeah, I'm done. Thanks for not taking a nibble, I guess."
"As if I'd sink so low." She discretely wiped her mouth while he wasn't looking.
"Hey… where's Pochita?" His tire bed lay empty, scarce of but a few orange bits of fur.
"The mutt? It went out for a walk an hour or so ago. It probably couldn't stand the stench of your humanity."
"Shut up," Denji groaned, already tired of her presence. "And get out of my bed, already. And get out of my shed while you're at it."
"Our shed, Denji. Our shed."
"Whatever," he muttered. Standing up, he dusted himself off and found his old beat tennis shoes. Slipping them on, one hand pressed against the wall for support. "Didn't I tell you to get lost?"
She sniffed. "I've never been lost a day in my life."
"I think that means you've always been lost, and you're just too stupid to realize. When did you even get here, anyway?"
"Last night, when the moon hung high overhead and the cicadas serenaded my arrival. Did you not notice my embrace meant to carry you gently off to sleep? I am a generous sovereign if I do say myself."
"And you can keep saying it yourself."
"Well, after you've proved your utility in helping me locate Meowy, how could I possibly let such a valuable asset waste away? Even if he is derelict little thing, arrogant far beyond his measure."
He blinked and looked around. "Hey, where is that cat, anyway? Don't tell me you couldn't even keep your eyes on her for a day."
"Of course not. She's outside."
"If I recall, that's where you said she was the last time."
She growled and threw a moth-eaten pillow at him. It smacked against his face and fell to the floor, the boy stumbling a bit with the blow.
"Bwahahaha! Your face! Your face!" Power jabbed a finger at him and laughed, rocking back and forth on his bed, the pallets supporting the mattress creaking under the shifting weight. Her legs kicked out as she chortled.
"Yeah, yeah, you got me…" Denji leaned down and gripped the pillow in his hands, seemingly defeated. Suddenly, he wound his arm back and chucked at the fiend with all the might his little body could mister. It clocked her square the face, cutting off her laughter and shocking her still, expression frozen in mania.
Denji turned and ran out of the shed before she could compute what had happened. He found Pochita sitting on his haunches outside, near where they kept the inflatable pool stashed. The pooch was staring intently at something, eyes wide with curiosity and head tilted at an upward angle.
The sky was washed with gray and the clouds dead in the sky. Wind was absent and a moist heat lay in the air, cloying in Denji's hair. From below he could see the little town they haunted on their days off, itself leaden with naught but ghosts as most of the resident had driven off to the cities for their jobs.
Denji stopped at his side. "You could have warned me about her, you know."
The pup didn't let its eyes off its target. It's ripcord tail drifted across the grass lazily and it readjusted its paws with a nervous energy.
"Are you still mad about getting left in that trash can? I said I was sorry." No response. Denji sighed. "What are you even looking at?"
Pochita nodded his head, and Denji's gaze followed the gesture, gliding upward to find—
"Oh. Hey, little fella." There, laying comfortably in the grooves of the corrugated tin sheet roof, was Meowy. Her tail flicked back and forth lazily as she considered them both with empress impunity.
Denji raised his hand to wave when he was suddenly struck down with a pillow to the head. He fell to his knees as blows continued to rain down on him, mad cackles reaching his ears.
"Thought you got the best of me, did you?" Power laughed, keeping score with each hit she landed. "One point, two points, three points, four points!"
“Gah! Pochita, save me!”
The pup took one look at his plight, and went back to staring at cat on the roof. The cat met his gaze and he beamed up at her.
------
"I spy with my little eye…something green."
"The grass?"
"Hah, no. It was that bush we just passed. I win!"
Aki sighed, keeping his eyes on the road even as his superior took to waving her hands about like a lunatic in celebration of her victory.
"I win, you lose, I win, you lose."
"You're such a child."
"Only to a grumpy cat like you. Less cynical minds say I'm overflowing with youth. Positively effervescent." She leaned over and whispered the last word in his ear, and his cheek glowed beneath the heat of her sweet croon himself.
"Positively annoying, more like."
"Bah! More grump from the grumpy man." Himeno leaned back in her seat and hummed, deciding that she'd spent enough time riling up her newest buddy.
She'd only had him unceremoniously dumped under her wing half a year ago, but she figured she already had his measure, give or take a few inches. For one, he was prickly. Saddling up next to him was like trying to make friends with a cactus—it tended to end only in you getting hurt. Plus, talking with houseplants was for crazy people.
Shame nobody had ever accused Himeno of being sane.
She reached over and grabbed at a lock of his hair, twirling the silken threads between her fingers. He smelled nice, cool like way underground. "Don't you think your due for a haircut?"
"I don't see the need for it."
"Snip, snip." She mimed a pair of scissors as she closed her fingers around his hair.
"Cut it out." He shook his hair loose and sighed. "Why don't you do something useful and check to see if we're getting close?"
"Geez, fine." She leaned forward and pulled open the glove compartment. Rifling through old mission statements and progress reports, she pulled out a folded-up map of the area she'd nabbed at a resistor a few hours prior. Unfolding it across her lap, she put her finger down on it and dragged it along the winding lines that symbolized the roads. "Let's see…what was the last highway we got off of?"
"Exit forty-four."
"Right, right. Here we go." With her tongue poking between her lips in a faux display of concentration, she circled with her finge the area she believed they were in. A cliffside road winding along the edge of one of the many mountains in the area, nothing but a wall of rock to one side and a sheer drop and sprawling forestry to the other. "I'd say we're about another forty minutes out from where first contact took place."
"Good, the sooner we can get this over with, the sooner we can get back into the big leagues. Small fries like these won't get me closer to the Gun Devil."
Ah, yes. That was the other thing. His nigh suicidal pursuit of the Devil who had perpetrated the single most devastating attack against humanity in recorded history. Over one million lives were swallowed in just seven minutes. Over one million families shattered. They didn't even have a picture of the beast, just a blur of black captured by low-earth orbit satellites a thousand miles up. Not even the monster itself, merely its shadow. That same photograph sat nestled deep in the drawers of over half of Public Safety's new recruits over the past ten years.
It hardly took a day for Himeno to figure Aki among their number.
She heaved a sigh and fiddled with the radio, dialing through channels awash with harsh feedback, jumbled bits of music only occasionally breaking through. "Always getting ahead of yourself. You know, I don't think a devil attack with no fatalities is something to complain about. Not every incident needs to end in a new remembrance day. God knows I couldn't afford all those donation requests."
Silence, save for the gravel crunching below them. The radio was shrill with a distorted country music, haunting form it's valley of static.
Himeno winced. "I'm sorry, Aki. That was a shitty thing to say."
"It's fine." It wasn't, but it didn't matter. "Let's just get this over with."
The rest of the drive was had in awkward silence, neither knowing what to say. Neither knowing if they should say anything say.
They pulled off the road and into the parking lot of the rest stop. Himeno whistled. "Would hate to be on the business end of whatever did all that." She pointed to the mound of rubble gift-wrapped in police tape that hung off to the side of the larger building like a tumor.
A small crew of construction workers hovered about the area, wrapped in orange nylon vests and using wheelbarrows and shovels to haul away debris. A small man stood to the side, barking orders at them. Aki and Himeno stepped out of their car and walked over to him.
"You a Mister Sakamoto? You placed the call, right?" Himeno called out in greeting, stepping ahead of Aki to take the lead.
His yellow hard hat wobbled on his head precariously as he turned to face them, the undone chin straps drooping like animal ears down his pale cheeks. He held a clipboard in a white-knuckle grip close to his chest as if using it as a shield to ward off some unknown calamity. "Yeah. Who the hell're you?"
"We were sent by Public Safety to help assess damages and to find the Devil responsible. I'm Nakajima, and the man behind me is Hayakawa." She offered her hand to shake.
He batted it aside with the clipboard hard, and she shook the sting out of her hand before letting it fall back to her side, smile turning brittle. "Assess damages," he muttered. "Don't worry, I'm way ahead of you on that," he turned to the wreckage and nodded his head, humming considerately. "Hm. Yeah, I'd say it's pretty fucked. What good does pointing that out do me?"
Aki balled his hands into fists and stepped forward, but his path was barred by Himeno's outstretched arm. "If Public Safety determines the damages sufficient and that they are of Devil origin, they'll comp some of the reconstruction fees."
"Oh! So you are good for something!" He gestured to the building with a flourish, a pencil tie dangling from his neck like a noose. "Then, assess away."
He made to go back to the barking orders to the corral of men loitering about the place when Himeno stopped him. "Sir, you never answered the question."
He turned back. "Hah?"
"The call to Public Safety? Did you make it?"
"What? No. That was put in by our on-staff at the time—our formerly on-staff, I should say."
"Can we get a name?" She nodded to Aki, and he slipped a notepad and pen out of his pocket, ready to write it down.
"Girls name is Kobayashi. Kobeni Kobayashi. Mousy chick, young. Pretty tasty looking, if not for the fact she looks constantly ready to piss her pants. Can't even imagine the smell down there." He shook his head and smiled at them as if sharing in some inside joke.
Neither gave one back. "Where can we reach her?"
His leer died when he saw that his humor had gone unappreciated, and he scoffed dismissively. "Lives with her family in the town down the road, on the west side, near the water. Parents didn't figure out what a condom was—bred a whole litter between the two of them and now is struggling to make ends meet. Hence, I offered the girl a job. Look where that got me."
"Anything else?" Himeno was hoping there wasn't.
"Doesn't have a cellphone, so you can't reach her that way—trust me, I'd have known if she was lying."
"All right," Himeno clapped her hands together with the excitement of ending this conversation. "Well, that's everything we needed to get from you, so you can go back to work now."
"Gee, thanks. Just make sure you put in a good word with the pencil pusher in charge of paying for my store. Oh, and if you do meet with girly, feel free to be extra thorough in your investigation of her. I think she stole our community toilet paper."
Himeno blinked, but the man walked off before she could follow up on that.
"What a jackass," Aki murmured next to her ear, clicking his pen closed and slipping it into his breast pocket.
Himeno hummed, taking the opportunity to take a not-so-subtle whiff. Sandalwood worked well on him. "Well, that jackass's report back to brass about our performance will be what signs our checks, so maybe lets you and I keep that tidbit between us, yeah?" Another sniff. "Did you switch colognes?"
He blinked and then flushed but did not step away. "Is it bad?"
"Awful. So bad I'm paralyzed next to you."
"I—I'm sorry, I should have warned you—"
"Hey," she interrupted. His eyes were pools of deep blue, and she swam in them. She hovered a hand at his cheek but hesitated to make the connection. His gaze followed, quivering with a desire for something. It scared her, how much she desired. She let her hand fall back to her side and stepped away. "You smell fucking good, Aki. I'd make a candle out of you if I could. Now, how about we get back to work before your favorite person has an aneurysm."
He recoiled as if struck into a trance. "Yeah, um, yes, Miss Himeno. Let's do that. Work."
"Work," She repeated with a sly grin.
They ducked under the police tape and stepped into the ruined food stall, the smell fry oil rancid in the air.
"Oh, Himeno?"
"Hm?" She drew a flashlight and beamed it up at the exposed tile ceiling. Electrical wiring hung from it like tendrils, though none of them had been snapped. Interesting.
"You smell good too. I'd make a candle out of it. If I could. If you would be okay with that."
"Why, Aki, I'd love nothing more than to be kept at your bedside." Himeno, master of subtly, said.
------
"Leave."
"Nuh-uh."
"Leave."
"No can do."
"Leave."
"No way, Jose."
Denji felt his hands ball into fists, frustration boiling up inside of him. "You have to leave; you can't stay here. What part of that don't you understand?"
Power shrugged from where she lay on his bed, one foot dangled over the other and her folded behind her head. "The part where I have to leave, I guess."
"That's the whole part!"
"Maybe you just suck at explanations."
"Get the hell out of here!"
Power sighed exasperatedly, flexing her toes and examining them idly. "My, my, this human is petulant. Isn't that right, Meowy?"
A meow of accord sounded from the roof of the shack.
"This human is getting on his last—"
"Ah, hold that thought, my foot itches. Can you get it?" She waggled the appendage in front of Denji and the boy took in hand began to massage it, kneading his thumbs against the meat of her sole. He did not seem to realize what he was doing as he continued speaking.
"—nerves! How many times do I gotta say it before it gets through to you? You. Can. Not. Stay. Here."
"A little higher, please. Be sure to work between the toes." Power purred as he followed her commands, like a happy cat getting its favorite spot scratched. How could she ever let the royal treatment go now that she'd gotten a taste? "To answer your question, oh insolent one. I just don't see the reason why I should leave. If anything, my presence should count as a blessing to you. No sane Devil would lay a hand on someone marked with my scent."
"What—it's not your house! That's why!"
"I slept in it. Does that not make it mine?"
"No!"
"Hm. I find your logic questionable." She moved her foot from side to side, watching amusement as the tyke she had claimed as her own was dragged along with it.
"And I find a lot of things about you questionable." He finally let go of her foot, ignoring when she prodded his shoulder with it, waving her toes in an attempt to get him to continue the rubdown. "Forget it; me and Pochita have to head into town today and try to get some work."
"I'll go with you. It wouldn't do to leave my serfs to toil by their lonesome." She jumped to her feet and made to tag along before being stopped by Denji's outstretched hand.
"No."
"No? But—"
"No." He stepped away and made to go out the door, pausing in its yawning passage. "Just," he sighed. "Please be gone by the time I'm back. I don't want you to get killed."
Power watched his retreat in silence, the wheels in her head spinning.
------
Aki watched the ocean waves break against the tetrapod's lining the coast. The air smelled of salt and of moss. They had spent the better of two hours asking reticent locals about the whereabouts of their witness—each conversation inevitably weeding with a gasp and a 'oh, the crying girl' .
And so, here they were.
The place was a dump, the ocean breeze having done a number on the wooden exterior of the apartment building. Windows were covered with newspapers dated back years, and the stairs creaked precariously as Himeno set her foot down on the first step. They were of worn oak, logged with moisture that bubbled out as she put pressure down.
"Well, that's inviting," she said.
"Let's hurry on inside so we can get his over with." Aki stepped up to her side and gently prodded the weather-beaten planks with his foot.
"Aki, buddy, the last thing I think we should be doing on this thing is hurrying."
Aki shuffled past her, placing a hand on her shoulder to gently push her aside, and quickly ascended the steps. When he reached the top, he turned back to look at her. He was not smirking. He was intently not smirking.
"Show off," Himeno groused.
She joined him at the time in her own way—with both hands gripping the guardrail and cussing out the stairs each time they creaked.
"Good job," he said when she made it up.
"I'm jumping down when we're done here." She pushed past him and walked the outdoor hall down to apartment 205 . The number plates had been worn down by decades of salty ocean air and had become inscrutable, so she counted by the door instead.
She rapped on the door with a jaunty rhythm, choosing to ignore two the blinds for the window to her side shifted.
Silence reigned. Waves crashed behind them.
"Think anybody's home?" Aki asked.
"I'd imagine," Himeno muttered back.
Feet padded on carpet from the other side. Drawers opened, closed. Himeno leaned forward slightly, trying to listen in. Turn the silhouettes of sound into a full image in her mind.
She heard footsteps approach and quickly righted herself.
The door cracked open to reveal a pair of chocolate eyes staring up at them. It was a girl, a wee thing who reached no higher than Himeno's waist, clutching the doorknob, chocolate gaze eyeing them wearily. "Are you the NTA?"
Himeno blinked. "What?"
"Mama said you ask someone if they're with the NTA, they have to tell the truth. Are you?"
"No."
"Then who are you?"
Himeno took on an easy smile stooped down into a slouching sitting position, her hands clearly visible and sat in her lap. "Hello. I'm Himeno, this is my friend, Aki." She nodded to man behind her, who's whole body had gone taut at the sight of the little girl. "What's your name?"
"N-no—"
"No…" Himeno leaned in, single eye bright and wide with attention.
"No soliciting. Please leave." She began to shut the door.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Himeno jammed her hand in the closing doorway and let a hiss that chilled her teeth escape her when the girl closed the door on her. She wisely slid her hands out when the girl began to go for a second swing. "Just, just listen to me, kid."
"Stop soliciting me!" The girl stomped her feet and yelled, sounding positively scandalized.
Himeno cradled her throbbing hand close to her chest and took tight, controlled breaths. "Please stop saying that." She peaked at the rapidly swelling appendage and cursed. The skin was red and bloated, a constant thrum of pain electrifying her knuckles, ebbing and flowing but never dissipating. "Aki, a little backup, please?"
The man, not past his twenty-first summer, swallowed and took a step forward. He wondered what it would take for this building to be ripped apart. "Kid—"
"Kobana! What are you doing?" A pair arm looped under the young girls' shoulders, and with a cut off yell she was swooped back into the apartment.
The door drifted on its hinges. Himeno shot a look back to Aki before pressing her unbeaten hand against it and, as subtly as she could, pushed it open.
It whined as it yawned wider open. The two girls were caught in a hushed argument and immediately stilled their gaze, shooting to the woman crouched on their doorstep.
Himeno stared. They stared right back.
"Is this the residence of Kobeni Higashiyama?"
The older woman, adorned in baggy pajama pants and an oversized sweater, nodded, sweat beading at her brow. "Y-yes?"
"Could we come in for a moment? I can't feel my hand anymore."
Aki slapped a palm to his and sighed gutturally.
------
They were sat around an old round dining table centered in the kitchen, Kobana having gone back to her room. Its dilapidated walnut veneer was pocked by the thousand idle scratches of children struggling their way through another despotic dinner. Their chairs moaned beneath their weight and each time someone walked across the room the walls seemed to shudder with a desire to collapse.
Drawings done in jagged swipes of crayon, as if resentful of their making, and penned in much the same illegible manner, were taped to the white refrigerator, which hummed and buzzed to fill the silence.
Kobeni picked at a loose thread on her sweater, eyes firmly on her lap. "Um…sorry about…before."
"It's all good," Himeno waved away her concerns. Kobeni had filled a sandwich bag with ice and wrapped it in a dish towel before giving it to the older woman with a muttered assurance that it would help with swelling. "A broken hand never hurt anybody, anyhow."
Kobeni sighed. "I'm sorry."
"You say that a lot."
"I'm—"
"Forget it." Kobeni slunk further in her seat like a sopped cat, and Himeno swallowed the trickle of guilt building in her throat. Okay, it's time to get down to business. “I’m Himeno Nakajima, this is my partner, Aki Hayakawa.”
Kobeni eyed the two wearily, the ties around their necks and how their suits were ironed free of wrinkles. "Are you two with the NTA?"
"No, we're with Public Safety. We spoke with Mister Sakamoto this morning. He's your old boss?"
"Oh, God." The teen put her head in her hands and pulled at her hair, voice trembling. "Oh God, oh my God."
Himeno was taken aback, sharing a look with Aki, who just shrugged his shoulders. He turned in his seat in a gain attempt to offer the trembling woman sitting across from him a modicum of privacy. "Kobeni, we need you to calm down, okay? Kobeni—"
"I'm sorry, it's just…I knew it was wrong, but…"
"But?"
"But toilet papers just gotten so expensive these days—"
"What?"
"A-and the store had so much of it just sitting there, so I figured if I stole the one we all shared that they could maybe just replace it and—"
"Kobeni."
"—Oh my God, my parents are going to be so mad at me—"
"Kobeni!" Himeno cut through her hysteria with a yell and leaned over the tabletop to grab the younger woman's hand, trying to ground her with a physical connection. The girl's eyes were quivering in their sockets, wet and bulging and manic.
Himeno used her thumb to massage between Kobeni's trembling knuckles, but her own hands were not the steadiest. "Are you good?"
She took a deep breath. Then another. She squeezed her eyes shut. Then opened them. "Yes. Yes, I'm okay now. Thank you."
Himeno let go and fell back into her seat. "You're welcome. Look, we aren't the NTA, or the—the fucking toilet paper detective agency, or anything like that. So just, like, chill out. Okay?"
Kobeni nodded her head. "Okay.
"Alright. So, as I was saying, I'm Himeno; this is Aki. We're with Public Safety; we're Devil Hunters. We were called in over an incident that took place yesterday at Shakitori rest stop. Sakamoto says you were the one on shift at the time of the attack. That true?"
"Oh. Oh." Kobeni started to hyperventilate again.
"God damn it." Himeno decided to just wait for this one out.
------
The man behind the reception desk took one at the pair and sighed. He was bald and overweight, his neck one big roll of fat splotched with age spots. It wobbled as if threatening to fall off as he shook his head. "Sorry, all booked out." His voice was deep and monotonous, like the treads of a tank, and just as unforgiving as it drawled on. "Big festival going, lots of people from all over. Lots of people need lots of rooms."
"Until when," Aki bit out, already having gone through this same conversation four times in the past hour.
"Until you two are gone." With that, the man picked up his monthly ViVi issue and ignored any further attempts at conversation.
Aki's teeth gritted, and he took one menacing step forward. Himeno held him back by the arm. Patting his head like a misbehaving puppy—an action that took all the wind out of his sails as he blinked owlishly. "Okay! Thank you for your time, Mister."
He grunted and flipped to another page, bidding no goodbye as the two government stooges turned and left.
Aki cursed as they stepped out on the street, tugging at his long locks and aching for a cigarette. The wind was dead as people shuffled past them. Or rather around—mothers taking one look at their uniforms, weapons concealed only plausible deniability, and grabbing their children by the hand and dragging across the street away from them. "This is total crap. No way they're everybody's that booked out. Not in a run-down town like this."
"Got it in one, tiger. But don't go blowing a fuse over it." Himeno slipped a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket and flipped it open. She pushed up a stick halfway and held it out to Aki in offering. He accepted it with mouthed gratitude and plugged it between his lips.
"Got a light handy?" Aki pointed to his mouth. "I left mine in the car."
"Sure thing." Himeno cupped a hand over her smoke and lit up, the small flame setting her face aglow, shadows intensified the sharpness of her features. The strong curve of her jaw, her small nose. Her eye caught in the incandescence like burning innocence, her eyepatch swallowing it all light that graced it. Her full lips chapped and pick as they suckled on nicotine. Ever so slightly parted, flashing pearly whites.
Himeno's eyes met his. He looked like a deer caught in headlights. She smiled. "Whatcha looking at?"
"N-nothing," he muttered, deciding his shoes were in desperate need of attention.
"Now that's just rude."
"S-sorry—"
"Oh, enough of that. I got my helping of platitudes from Miss Higashiyama." She blew out and plucked the cigarette from between her lips, holding it out to him. "Here, my treat."
He stared at it, then at her. "Huh?"
"Your light. You asked, and so I provided."
"Miss Himeno, that's a cigarette."
She rolled her eyes. "Genius observation, Aki. But it is also a light. I'm almost out of oil, got to be conservative."
She waggled the smoldering stick at him, and he stared for a minute longer before bending over and daintily meeting her cigarette with his own. He could faintly hear the crinkling of paper, the sizzle of tobacco burning and breaking off, tumbling like snow to the sidewalk.
When he felt he had a light, he righted himself, his cheeks burning. "Thank you."
Himeno nodded. "Sure thing, cowboy. The pleasure was all mine." She grinned, and he believed her.
Aki pulled the cigarette from his mouth and sighed, watching as volcanic ash bloomed from his maw and petitioned the empty sky.
Today, so far… had been a total waste of time.
"How's the hand,” Aki asked, seeking a distraction from his thoughts.
"Better," Himeno answered, nodding. "Better."
“It’s not the ghost hand, is it?”
She huffed a laugh. “No. No it’s not the ghost hand, Aki.”
Silence.
He pulled his notebook containing the transcript of the interview with Higashiyama out of his pocket and looked it over, scoffing. It didn't take a genius to figure out that she was jerking them around, mixing details of her stories like a child with Lego's.
First, the boy had been named Denji, standing at about ‘yay high’ (whatever that was supposed to mean, with her wagging her hand up and down with the fervor of a conductor mid-crescendo) and sporting a mean mane of blonde hair. Then, suddenly, he became Kensuke, again standing ‘yay high’ but now with glasses and shoulder-length frizzy brown hair. Then he was Shinji, and so on, and so on.
And yet, Himeno smiled through all of their bullshit, humming and nodding and asking for seconds, just like with all the hotels they had been not subtly told to get out of town by. He didn't understand her. Her patience, her kindness. Least of all her desire to spend so much of it on him, some punk with a death wish.
At least the Devil's description remained consistent. It had taken the body of a girl, perhaps fifteen in age, with a pair of red horns sprouting up from her head. Long, bright blonde hair that reached the small of her back and eyes like gems of amber resin. Apparently toted around a cat like the latest in fashion. Seemed to hold some command over blood.
The Blood Fiend.
Yeah, a name like that wouldn't look too shabby under his confirmed kills.
His fantasies of promotion and maybe finally getting clearance for a Devil contract—a topic Himeno had been increasingly spotty about—were interrupted by getting shoved from behind. He let out a shocked grunt, dropped his cigarette, and quickly turned only to find a scrappy kid who couldn't possibly be older than thirteen standing before him, mumbling an apology.
Aki relaxed immediately, checking to make sure his sword hadn't come loose from its sheathe on his back. "It's fine," he said after staring a minute or two longer than was considered polite. He was so thin, with crow's feet stretched across his eyes and dirty blonde hair. "Don't worry about it."
The boy stood with his chin tucked down to his chest and his hands behind his back as if expecting something. His clothes were filthy—brown shorts and a tank-top that may have once been white now patched with mud and grass streaks.
Himeno stepped forward, eyes shining with something warm and mouth open as if meaning to speak. Words that were lost when the boy turned on his feet and ran back in the direction he came from, beat up tennis shoes slapping against the pavement.
They watched him go, a somber accompaniment that had Aki's heart contradicting and the man not understanding why. God, he couldn't wait to get out of this town.
With a sigh he bent over to pinch the charring stub out of the seams in the sidewalk it had crawled into.
"That boy," he heard Himeno say.
"Yeah, what about him?"
"Aki, check your pockets."
"What?"
"Your pockets; make sure you have everything."
Her voice was stern, no room for nonsense. Aki took to feeling himself up, running his hands along the breast pocket of his suit, feeling the hard lump of his pen. Then he ran his fingers downward, checking for his wallet in his backpocket.
"Ah," he realized what Himeno had been getting at, feeling nothing there.
"Ah," Himeno repeated, bending down to snuff out her smoke on the sole of her shoe. "Well, doctors' been saying I could use the cardio."
------
Denji ran down the street, ducking and weaving around pedestrians as he turned into an alley. Pochita was waiting for him and gave a happy yip at his friend's return, his ripcord wagging.
Denji, flashing the rube's wallet. "Hit the lottery today, buddy. Dumbass didn't even see what hit 'em." And he didn't even have to take a hit, double win!
It wasn't often he got to take home a wallet. The town didn't get many visitors, and those who lived there belonged to the Yakuza just as much as he did, so robbing them would be akin to punching his ticket to hell.
Besides, the less time spent under the scrutiny of their cold contempt and distant disgust, the better.
Pochita barked and spun in a circle. He didn't entirely understand what Denji was talking about, but the boy was happy, and so he was happy, too.
Denji's joy was his joy; his sadness, dreams, hopes, and silly little eccentricities were his as well.
Denji bent down and lifted the pup up by the crook in his front legs, setting him down on a nearby trash lid so that they can be at eye level. Pulling out the wallet the boy set it down open faced next to Pochita so that both of them could look through their plunder.
"Let's see… driver's license, heh, he looks constipated. Hey Pochita, check it out." Denji took a moment to laugh, the chainsaw dog mimicking him, before continuing. He pulled out another photo of the man, this one more akin to the man he bumped into today. He was dressed in the same suit as today, with a stoic expression on his face. He looked like he hadn't had a single good day in his life. Denji hummed, considering the additional identification. What was this guy, some sorta NTA goon?
There were more photos, then. Polaroids tucked further back, wrinkled up, and thrown away only to be dragged out the trash soon after, over and over and over until it was more creases and tears than pictures. They were of children no older than he was now, though they had parents. There were words, too, scribbled in Sharpie in the white margins. 1982 was the only thing he could read. Nobody had ever bothered to teach him more than numbers.
He was smiling in these ones. They must have been some good memories.
Denji slipped them back into their pocket silently. Pochita cooed, paw patting the boy's wrist in what comfort he could offer.
"I'm alright, buddy, no need to worry," he gave Pochita a good scratch on his scruff. The Devil dog leaned into it; eyes flitting closed like a dying light bulb as his engine purred contentedly.
Pochita rolled over, imploring Denji to rub his belly. The boy acquiesced, huffing a laugh. "You know, you're starting to get pretty chunky."
Pochita huffed, offended. How rude! He was pleasantly plump at best!
"Whatever you say, your rotundness. You don't even have a neck."
Their respite was interrupted by yells from the street. "They said he went this way! Come one!"
"Oh, shit," Denji muttered. Pochita righted himself and stood up, eyes worried. "I guess that guy didn't enjoy getting his wallet stolen."
He picked up the stolen trinket and closed it, slipping it back into his pocket. Lifting up Pochita and feeling the pup settle his considerable weight against his chest, Denji wondered. He…might not be able to get away with Pochita weighing him down.
And Pochita was a lot of things—his best friend, a great nose for sniffing out the best garbage, and a surprisingly stubborn little fella when it came to things he cared about, like Denji getting at least one meal a day. But a long distance runner, he was not. Nor was he a short distant runner. He wasn't any kind of runner, really.
"Okay, here's the plan," Denji said, setting Pochita down on the ground. The pup tilted his head and yipped, confused. The footsteps were drawing nearer.
Denji lifted the garbage lid, and Pochita whined.
------
Aki took more turns in the seemingly endless number of turns that made up the alleyways. Buildings both old and new, built around each other with little thought for what came before or what might after.
"He's just over there. Take two more rights!" Himeno yelled.
"You know," Aki breathed rhythmically, lungs thrumming with exertion. "I might be able to help out more if I had a Devil contract!"
"No contracts here, just woman's intuition."
"Great, then, can you intuit a way for me to believe that?"
"No can do, Aki-man. Beliefs gotta come from within." Himeno blinked and nodded down the alleyway to their right. "Here's our stop."
Aki grunted in response. He should have picked a more comfortable pair of shoes.
Taking the corner, they spotted him immediately, his focus on the myriad garbage disposals littering the alley.
"Hey, kid!" Aki yelled.
The boy turned to look at them, eyes wide, before he spun on his feet and booked it down the alley.
"Hey! Wait up!"
He only ran faster.
"Did you think that would work?" Himeno muttered, breathing hard. She also wished she had picked a different of shoes. Oxfords were not made for cardio.
"Shut up."
Their conversation was interrupted when Denji suddenly veered toward the wall of one building much taller than the ones surrounding it, aiming for the ladder that led to its roof. Wrapping a hand about one its rungs he turned to blow a raspberry at them before hastily ascending three stories.
The pair slowed to a stop as they watched him go up. "Hell's he think he's gonna do up there?" Aki asked. "Idiot just trapped himself."
"Better safe than sorry," Himeno answered. She walked up to the ladder and began to climb, pausing only to yell for Aki to follow.
As she crested the roof top, she saw Denji standing at the edge, leaning over to gauge what Himeno could only were the chances breaking every bone in his body if he took the plunge.
She stepped up onto the roof, and he whipped around. "Stay back!"
Himeno did as he commanded, not taking a step as she raised her in a sigh for peace. He stepped further toward the ledge. She winced. "Woah, woah. Kid, chill out. I think we've reached your quota on stupid things today."
"You have no idea how stupid I can get!"
"Yeah, I'm starting to see that." Himeno heard Aki join them from behind and held her arm out to stop his approach. "Listen, uh, my friend here just wants his wallet back. That's it."
"Yeah, right," the boy yelled, clenching said stolen good in a white-knuckle grip to his chest as if it were something precious. "You probably just wanna keep it safe while you push me off the roof yourself!"
"What the hell are you talking about?" Aki piped up, eyes lasering in on his wallet so as not to take any more of the boy in. Keep him in his peripheral; keep him away. Don't think about Taiyo. Don't think about how little of a fall it takes for everything to shatter. "Why would we do that?"
"You're adults!"
"So that makes us suicide enthusiasts? You're crazy!"
"You bet I am! S-so stay back!"
Himeno took as subtle a step forward as she could, slowly, ever so slowly, lowering her posture to bolt forward. She kept her right arm trained on the boy all the while. "We will, we will. What's your name, kid?"
"Why's that matter?" He looked at her and his eyes bulged, recognizing the stance of a predator on the prowl. Of someone playing with food they knew had no hope of escaping the beating. "I said stay the hell back!" He backed up further until the heels of his feet hovered over empty air.
"My name is Himeno Nakajima. This is Aki. Just call me Himeno or—or whatever the hell you want. Just stop. Moving. Backward." Her tone held an authoritative edge she realized might not be the best tool for this job. "Please. Just, please don't jump."
He looked at her, eyes wet with fear and hesitation. "My name is Denji." And then he jumped.
Denji often thought that if it was between breaking and being broken, he'd much rather have the former. At least that way, he could pretend he had a choice in what happened to him. Day in, day out. Pretending, dreaming. It was all he ever did.
In the moment before the fall, when all seemed weightless, with his eyes squeezed shut, he thought of Pochita, left in another dumpster. He was going to be pissed when he found out just how badly he'd screwed things up this time.
Then he thought of Power and how she was totally going to squat in his house when he never came back. Hopefully, she'd at least let Pochita bunk with them.
In the moment before the fall, Denji thought of death. It felt like peace.
It never came.
He was flying. No, floating. Somebody was screaming.
He slowly opened his eyes, gasping when he saw the ground so far below and not rapidly approaching. The wallet slipped from his grasp, and he watched it plummet down. It slapped against the pavement hard enough to reverberate in the air and send coins skittering out and about the alley, rolling in diminishing circles before tumbling to their side.
Denji's first thought was that if this was how he figured out he had superpowers, he was gonna punt somebody into the sun. Preferably a certain someone who was probably rubbing her rabies-having ass all over his bed as they spoke.
His musings were cut short by the prickly prick—Aki, his mind supplied, his name was Aki Hayakawa—grabbing him by the front of the shirt and heaving him back onto the roof. Denji was propelled forward like a balloon on a string, having only minimal control over his destination.
He was stopped by Aki pulling him down into his face. "What the fuck is wrong with you!?" His face was molten ash, teeth grit into a wide grimace. "What the hell would possess you to pull a stunt like that!? Are you trying to get yourself killed!?"
"I was—I was just—"
"Just what? Going to kill yourself over some petty cash? Answer me!"
"Aki, you need to calm down." Himeno's voice was a cool wave to wash over his storming emotion. She put her left on his shoulder, keeping the right pointed firmly at Denji. "You're scaring him, you need to calm down."
When the static in his ears settled enough for her words to register, he took a deep breath and looked at Denji. The boy was biting on his lips so hard blood trickled down and stained his already disgusting shirt.
"I'm sorry about your wallet, dude. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he repeated the words over and over as if they were a spell to ward off bad omens. As if he had been trained to repeat them ad nauseam. Trained to learn they wouldn't help anyway. His small hands were balled into shaking fists that he held protectively in front of him.
Scared. The boy was scared—no, terrified of him. Aki felt his gut. "I'm not—"
Supports torn asunder, glass shattering a thousand times over, reverting back to sand to be swept up into the sky. Half a second. Bodies were never found. Just spools of hair tangled in the ocean from thousands of different people, spanning nearly half a mile. No one could explain how they got there. Maybe it was the Gun Devil's idea of a joke.
"Aki," Himeno's was soft, her hand massaging his shoulder, beckoning away the tension. "Aki, I think you should let go of him. Can you do that for me?"
He let go of the boy as if he were scalding, and stepped back, hands clenching and unclenching at his side. Denji stayed as some hovering martyr on the roof, not looking at either of them. "I'm… I'm sorry."
"Huh?" Denji peaked at the raven-haired man. Sorry? He was sorry? Since when did people apologize to him? He scraped at the air as if to scooch closer in order to better hear.
Himeno held back a chortle, silently swaying her hand to move him forward.
"I said I was sorry," his cheeks were dusted pink as the punk saddled up next to him. "You look like a drowning squirrel."
"Well, excuse me, I haven't quite gotten a hang of my mutant abilities. Ya jelly, or what?"
"No," he answered brusquely. He looked back to find Himeno staring with a Cheshire grin, slowing inching Denji closer and closer to the raven-haired man. "Can you just drop him, now?"
"Huh? Drop?" Denji asked.
Himeno huffed and sighed dramatically. "Fine…if you're so keen on ruining the moment." She gently lowered Denji until his feet touched the rooftop, then retracted her ghost hand entirely.
Denji blinked as he felt the ground beneath him again. He looked down at his feet before looking at them. He took a tentative hop into the air. Nothing. "What just happened?"
"Sorry to burst your bubble, kid, but you aren't Superman," Himeno nearly swooned at his pout. So cute!
"What? But, but the flying?" Denji held his arms up as if to prepare for life off.
"All the work of my," Himeno waggled her digits at him. "Magic fingers."
"Magic fingers?" Denji's nose twitched. So magic was real now, too?
Aki sighed, deciding that he'd have to be the adult here. "Don't let her fool you kid, it's just a Devil contract. Let's her move things without touching them."
"Just a Devil contract," Himeno mimicked mockingly. "Says the guy who can't get off my ass for ten minutes about when he'll get the opportunity to lop off one of his parts so he can shoot sparkles from his fingers."
Aki blinked. "I thought you wanted me on your ass?"
His frank tone of voice threw Himeno for a loop, a rare treat for the raven-haired man. "Well, yes, but that is…no…"
Denji's gaze drifted from the suddenly flustered woman to the total-business dude and back again. Yeah, he had no idea what was going on anymore. Today was a weird day and a bust from the looks of things. All he wanted to do now was scoop up Pochita and head back to the shack for a nap. Maybe give Power the what-for for that pillow bashing this morning. "So…am I good to go, or…"
Himeno blinked, startled out of her embarrassment. "Go? But we haven't even had lunch yet?"
A pause. "Lunch?"
Just then Denji's belly grumbled something fierce and he blushed. Himeno smiled like the cat that got the canary. "Yep, lunch. My treat."
Aki sighed, recognizing the look of startled defeat in Denji's eyes as his own. "Just give it up, kid. She's never going to let you go now that she's decided she likes you."
That only made him blush harder. Like? A super pretty girl that liked him? And he wasn't even wearing his unstained tank top?
He nearly yelped when Himeno took his hand into her own, not even grimacing at all the dirt caked in his nails or the dust that lined the creases in his palms. She gave him an easy smile and tugged him along after her to the ladder. "Come on, kiddo, let's fill you up."
Denji wanted to follow her and bathe in all the kindness she would offer a loser like him before realizing that he was useless. He also wanted to get Pochita and bring him along, but the words just wouldn't leave his mouth.
Aki followed behind the two, watching how the boy stared up at his superior. He smiled something small and sad. He could relate.
He was pretty hungry, too.
Notes:
Heyo, thanks for reading! All feedback, positive or negative, is always appreciated. Thank you and have a wonderful day.
Next chapter of Dear Makima out by April 23rd.
Chapter Text
Denji could decisively say that a fresh hamburger was the best damn thing he had ever eaten. His fingers slick with grease, he licked them clean before regarding his strange benefactors, who had been staring at him in silence for the better part of two minutes. "What is it?"
Himeno chuckled, chin sat in the palm of her hand with her elbow leaning up from the pockmarked oak table. A cup of coffee steamed below her, pale as the moon with milk and sugar. Thin tendrils of steam rose up and weaved along the contours of her face, hazing gemstone eyes into something darker and more ethereal still than the powers she had called upon to stop him from plummeting to his doom not a day prior. She laughed a bell chime. "Nothing, kid. Just wondering if you were planning on buying that sweet thing breakfast in the morning."
Denji quirked a brow, the pinch of his lips stained yellow and red. He slowly raised the burger back to his face and took another bite, chewing.
Himeno laughed again, an easy affection in her voice.
Aki sat at her side, against the window, arms crossed as he pondered the pitch of his own cup; black as black and twice as bitter as he considered the means to avoid having to take a sip of it. He was silent, staring out onto the street they had left from the vantage of the table they had left it for.
The diner was old, a relic of times bygone, weathered to little more than nostalgia and the sentiments they inspired. Five grain-finish wooden booths lined the shop's façade, each of them save the corner table getting an unmitigated view outside. Thin wooden slats ran parallel down the bottom where cushions with cherry red vinyl covers had been placed. The whole of the booths seemed to tremble any time someone wiggled their butt or readjusted themselves. The place stank of must and sitting on these dismal arrangements for longer than thirty minutes would invariably result in a sore tailbone, but it was the best they could do in this town so eager to rid itself of them.
The first four spots they had tried had been a bust; either turning them right back out onto the street or otherwise telling them to get lost. At one of them, they had managed to acquire seating, only to be left ignored and unattended until they got the point and left.
Aki and Himeno had been frustrated but chalked it up to the general disdain instilled in people by isolation from the wider world.
All throughout this process, Himeno insisted on having Denji hitch a ride on her back. To dissuade him from attempting to run into oncoming traffic was the reason she gave when asked. She knelt down on the sidewalk and would not rise until she felt the boy's spindly arms wrap around her neck in a tight embrace. She smelled of vanilla and leather, though he did not know the words. Honey and tobacco. He felt the reverberation of her words in his chest as she bickered with the grumpy man. Her laugh and her sigh fed through to him as if they were his own joy and his own frustration.
It was the first piggyback ride Denji had ever gotten. She was very warm.
The folks who ran this diner, some mom and pop types who had for whatever reason decided that the ramshackle town of Ichiwa, with its population of just under six thousand, was the perfect place to slow things down and set up shop, were the first to not show he trio any immediate disdain.
Denji figured they must not have gotten the memo about him yet. He figured that would change by the end of the day.
In the corner, a box fan had been hoisted. It rattled and coughed and accomplished little beyond pushing the old musty air out of the way for new musty air to take its place.
An old man cleans the flat top in the open kitchen. A black slab invaded by splotches of brown and orange, remnants of the thousand meals it's cooked. The flames were turned high as they could go, the network of pipes below the grill hissing like some other beast entirely. The man took a clear squeeze bottle and squirted a layer of water onto the flat top. The liquid splattered and screamed, dancing across the surface in furious droplets. The man took a metal bench scraper and cleared the surface. It looked just a little cleaner. The process repeated. Aki watched him work with idle curiosity.
Himeno took a sip of her coffee. Denji was perturbed to the mug rising without a single hand to hold it aloft, her arms remaining stationary. That weirdo power again. "So, what do you do, kid? What's your nine-to-five?"
"Nine to…five?" Denji hesitated, setting his burger back on the plastic tray topped with parchment paper that it came with. He splayed his hands out in front of himself and took count of his stubby digits. "Seven?" He said uncertainly. "Seven is good?"
"Seven is good." Himeno nodded sagely, taking another graspless sip. She did it as a form of training, not yet fully used to her ghost hand and how far she could take it. Better to risk paying for a broken cup than a broken spine, and all that.
"She's asking if you've got a job," Aki supplied without looking at the boy. Water, scrape, water, scrape. Bit by bit, the work was done.
Outside, children laugh.
"I mean," Denji squinted. "I guess? I get odd jobs for the old man or his buddies for some dough. Robbing the occasional sucker from out of town helps too, so, no I guess I don't technically got a job."
"Suckers, huh?" Himeno folded her arms under her chest and leaned back in her seat. It creaked ominously beneath her weight as she considered the boy across from her with faux-tetch.
Denji all but burst out of his seat to reassure her. "No, no, no, not you, Miss Himeno! You're way too pretty and smart and kind to be a sucker!"
"Aw, shucks." Himeno put her hands to her cheeks, single cerulean eye wide and dollish in its socket. The eye-patch did little to damage her coquettish front. "Pretty and smart and kind? You saying I'm the full package?"
"Yeah, yeah!" Denji nodded emphatically at her. "The full package!"
"Aw, shucks. Aw, shucks. Didja hear that, Aki? He just said I'm the full package. And to think, I'm still on the market." She shook her head at the injustice of it all.
Aki grimaced, whether it be at his partner's idiocy or at the punk's unwitting fueling of her ego, he couldn't be sure. "Enough of this." He turned to look sternly at Denji. "Eat. All of it. I'm paying, so if you don't scarf it down to the last crumb, I'll take it as a personal insult—capiche?"
Denji narrowed his eyes to match the older man's glare. Being told to continue eating the best thing he had ever tasted in his life was probably the easiest order he had ever been given. But Aki wasn't paying him for the services rendered, so he could take his high-and-mighty attitude and shove it. "Not hungry anymore."
"What?" Aki balked. "You acted like you were starving just ten minutes ago."
He turned up his nose and looked away with a 'humph.' "That was then, and this is now. You can't keep living in the past like this; it's probably what makes you so easy to rob."
It was then, at this very critical moment, that his stomach chose to rumble with such intensity that the whole of his thin body seemed to shake.
Silence. Denji felt heat sear his cheeks, his lips trembling. He sucked them in between his teeth to hide his weakness and slowly, slowly, turned back to the others.
Himeno guffawed, hands slapped against her belly in a free expression of mirth that juxtaposed her dress breathtakingly. Her uniform, made to look like typical office wear: all white collared shirts buttoned at the wrist and black slacks and a blazer much the same and a tie that hung loosely around their necks like a noose. Formal, yet deceptively flexible in its material to accommodate their more athletic duties. It rippled like a fabric wave adorning her. Her brown Oxford shoes clapped against the dirty tiled floor in joyous disharmony.
For all the life that brimmed within her, she seemed fit for a funeral every working day she stepped out of her apartment. The irony was not lost on her and sat bitter as arsenic on her sober mind.
Aki, for his part, managed to keep a straight face. Mostly, there was a quiver to his lips that betrayed him. "That so?"
"Y-yeah," Denji said, swallowing the saliva building in his mouth. He eyed the remaining half of the burger with temptation and then some. As if of their own accord, his hands made to reach for the greasy delight. Maybe just one more bite would be okay…
‘Hey, Pochita? Just for once, I wanna try a hamburger that isn't rotten, you know?’
Denji's guts grew heavy, and his expression dimmed as he thought back to that day. Guilt, that's what he felt. Shame. It was a rare thing for him, weeks and then months and then years spent toiling in the dirt, getting beaten and kicked around just to smile and ask for seconds, being told to drink beer and then getting spun around until he vomited all over himself, the pictures, all of it had served to deaden his capacity for shame, for being normal. He had been trained well. Still, it gnawed him just the same. Here he was, living it up in a tacky diner with a hot chick and some dude, all while his buddy toiled about in the dumpster he had dumped the poor pup in. What kind of friend did that?
Denji had the thought then that he must be really quite a bad person, to have lived the silly life that he had up until now.
The storm must've briefly shone through because the merriment across the table died as quickly as it came. Dammit, he'd have thought he'd learned to hide it better by now.
"Hey," Aki's voice, softer than felt fitting for the man. "What's up with you?"
"… Nuffin'," he tucked his chin to his chest as he answered, fists clenched against his filthy shorts. He didn't think the two would hit him in so public a place, but he had learned not to take potential witnesses for granted. They wouldn't talk.
"Denji." Aki again, firmer this time. "What's the matter with you? Is the food not good?" He readjusted himself in his seat as if meaning to lean forward, but in the end he stayed himself.
"I already told you, not hungry."
"And I already told you that that's bull."
The boy's head whipped up and he locked furious eyes against Aki's dull ocean. The two stared each other down, neither willing to be the one who backed down first—an impasse, then.
Aki labored a sigh and massaged the space between his eyes. "Look, kid, you gotta eat something." He reached forward.
Panic clenched Denji's guts as the man labored toward him, hand outstretched like a spider waiting to grasp and choke and claw, and he made his move. Swiping the half-eaten burger from the table, he held it in both his hands and began to mold it like clay. He squeezed and rolled the lump between his palms until he was left with a wad of grease and meat. He took it and stuffed it into the pockets of his shorts, then looked across the table. Hah! Try taking his grub now!
Silence. A woman entered the diner and saw them and then left. A decorative clock meant to look like a cracked egg hung above the door, passing the time, its face the yolk and its wide frame the albumen. A photograph of Elvis Presley on the wall.
Aki stared at Denji in increasingly slack-jawed bewilderment. "W-what—why—for…"
Their stalemate was unceremoniously broken by Himeno clapping her hands, both jolting and turning to look at her. "Alright, that's enough," she said. "I don't like my boys fighting with each other, it's bad for morale—mine especially, because it's annoying. So cut the crap."
"But he started it!" They both shouted with an accusatory finger pointed at the other. "And I'm not yours!" This one, the both of them as well.
She decided to ignore that last part. “No whats, no buts. If you can't get along with each other, then I'll make you. Now make like Spartans and listen to the woman, why don't you."
They both stared at her in a mix of befuddlement and awe, one more than the other for the boy. Denji had never seen someone exude such an easy confidence, such a simple, profound belief in knowing what they wanted and knowing how to get it. It was strength without violence, authority without abuse.
He decided right then and there that Himeno was the coolest person he had ever met.
"Well?" She quirked her brow and slid her focus from one boy to the other. It was the closest to stern she had looked in all the short time Denji had known her.
They nodded their assent in tandem.
"Good!" She gave a mega-watt smile before honing back in on her newest little buddy. "So, Denji! You said you did odd jobs around town, right? For some grandpa and his buds?"
Denji saw the opportunity for distraction she presented and jumped for it. So grateful was he for the chance to avoid Aki's hamburger-related inquiries that he was completely blind to the sly edge that sharpened Himeno's single remaining eye as she asked the question. It was hardly his favorite topic, but beggars can't be choosers. "Oh, yeah, the Old Man. I do jobs for him every now and then for some money. It pays peanuts, but there are worse things out there." Like having sleep for dinner. "Why?"
"Just wondering. I used to be the neighborhood handy gal back when I still had a neighborhood. Had my own lawn mowing business and everything—Grass Munchers, I called it. At least before my dad blew a gasket and made me change the name, then it was just Himeno's Gardening Services."
Days spent toiling away, stinking of gas and sweat, having to sneak back inside the house to suck down a glass of lemonade before getting shooed back outside. The sun and its heat and the no wind, no clouds. All baby blue above like something pure yet existed in this world. The grass stains smeared along her sneakers, her socks, her lower leg uncovered by her shorts. Her tank top damp with sweat. Her sun scorched neck and her ball cap and her long hair, long like her mothers' who existed only in photograph; a ghost even to her memories, a shadow of a longing that held her long into the nights of her youth. Hiding in the shade of shimmering tree tops she was not yet brave enough to climb. The mower trembling and how her hands would ache in the evenings. Counting petty cash as Queen's spoils at the end of the day.
The memories came unbidden to her, and with them a terrible feeling of solastalgia. Home was where the heart was; she just wondered when it was last she had a place more than to lay her down at night. In the rubble, most likely. In the ten years passed. In the rubble and in its blissful plume and in the ash her father had become.
"Uh, that's neat." Denji's uncertain voice drew her back to reality, and she blinked, eyelash fluttering away the past. "What I do doesn't have a name or anything, it's not even a business, not really. It's more like," he shrugged, suddenly evasive. "It just is."
"Just is, huh?" Himeno drawled, chin rested in her palm. Her lazy gait betrayed the excitement in her eye as she examined Denji. "Well, I'm sure your folks appreciate you helping to chip in. It's a fine thing for a boy your age to do."
"Yeah," he laughed, choked on it. "They sure do." He couldn't tell them the truth—he knew the rules. Tell anybody about the people he worked for, and the cops wouldn't even find a finger.
Amongst the locals it was an open secret who owned the collar wrapped tightly around the filthy child living in the mountains, feeding on scraps.
Some say he would bite the heads off rats and suck out their innards through their necks. Others say he cannot speak but a few words and all other meanings are carried through growls and yaps and howls—the jerking, drooling calls of a savage. He's a killer, that boy, that dog, best to stay away from them. He lays with that dog, don't you know? You can hear them howling in the night as they rut. They say his first act upon being birthed into this world was to kill his mother and suck all the milk out her breasts until they deflated down her chest like depleted sacks of grain. He made short work of his father, too; oh, that poor lad, to be departed from his beloved in so cruel a fashion and be willed only with the Devil she had incubated inside her. Is it any wonder he would make friends of criminals? Rapists? Murderers?
The folly of the lies by those desperate to justify their inaction is incalculable. If a child is starving, and they do nothing to help, then surely that child must have earned his aching belly and sunken eyes.
He didn't know when it was that he had started crying. He knew only that he hated himself for it.
Aki turned slowly in his seat to face her, a heat building in his eyes. "Himeno," he seethed, his voice little more than a passing attempt at a whisper. "What the hell is wrong with you? Bringing a thing like that up?"
She slapped a hand to her mouth, singular eye blown wide with mortification. "Oh! Oh, I am sorry—I-I didn't think—"
"You've made a habit of that. Not thinking," he spat the words at her like a wad of tobacco juice before turning to Denji, his expression softening.
It hadn't taken long for the man to place the boy's origins. A dirty little rug rat left to wander a dilapidated township without a guardian in sight? It wasn't exactly an uncommon story; he'd be far from the first and never the last.
Out of everyone, Aki figured it must have been places like this, small rural communities just out of sight enough to be out of mind as well, that got it the worst when disaster struck. When the Gun Devil was let loose on the world for those terrible minutes, the carnage left in its wake was unfathomable. The costs of repairs, however, were all too fathomable, too high. Small places like this? With their humble people and humble tributes to the Imperial Dynasty? They were simply…left behind.
Families, dreams, cities. Millions of people erased—not killed, erased. When somebody was struck by the Gun Devils' power, nothing was left behind: no guts, no blood, no bones. It was simply as if they had never existed at all. He remembered what the headlines had dubbed it: The Most Peaceful Slaughter. The memory still brought bile to his throat. A part of him wanted to believe that his family, all those families, didn't have to suffer, but he knew the truth.
There was no peace in dying, only in death. And he feared more than anything that they were still out there somewhere, trapped in the rubble of his childhood home maybe, eternally suspended over that precipice before oblivion. Left to fall apart forever until he got the job done, or died trying.
He wasn't sure which one he really wanted anymore.
Himeno fussed over a miserable Denji, all but leaping over the table to dab at his tears and reassure him that she was just a big dumb idiot who didn't know when to shut her mouth, so don't ya go crying now, ya hear!
Aki found his attention drifting to the street. Laughing children, tutting parents. He folded his hand into a fist and pressed his knuckles to his lips. Laughing children, tutting parents, and…
"Hey, kid, hey kid, look at this!" Himeno put her thumbs in her ears and waggled her fingers. Sticking her tongue out, she made an exaggerated 'bleh!' as the boy across from her only wept harder. The old man had stopped what he was doing and stared at them plainly, annoyed at having the ambience of his store ruined by wallowing children and their impotent mothers.
"Himeno," Aki called, not able to take his eyes off the figure currently crossing the street towards them.
"Kind of busy getting my foot out of my mouth here, Aki. Not now." She had resorted to patting Denji on the head placatively, shushing as he bawled. "There, there, little guy," she said, soft as down. "It's all right, it's okay."
Cars jolted to a stop in the street, drivers at once distressed at having their routines disrupted quickly turned to dread as they took in the thing lurching across their windshield view. Slathered in red and brown, it looked like a baby born dead as it left bloody footprints in the hot asphalt, bits of dried gore, and flakes of mud sloughing off it as it walked. Step by step, it grew closer. Mothers pulled their children away as it marched, a crimson affront to God's sunshine.
"Himeno, seriously." His breath shuddered and he took deep, greedy breaths of air. Excitement and terror thundered in his chest in equal measure. Was he ready for this? He'd run the simulations back at the academy more frequently than anybody else, always desperate to push himself just that little bit further, yet in the six months he had been on active duty, he'd only seen live combat four times—each of those times the enemy was quickly dispenses by Himeno before he had the chance to do anything. He had no Devil contracts—outside of special conditions only those with a year or of service were allowed any worth having. Public Safety didn't like the idea of lending out powers beyond reason to people they had no reason to believe were the type of crazy they could use until they were wrung dry.
Would that be the reason he died today? Bureaucracy?
Himeno was now resorting to open bribery. "If you stop crying I'll buy you a thousand burgers—scratch that, ten thousand!"
"Himeno! Jesus Christ, Himeno!" But it was too late.
A knock at the window. Tap, tap, tap. Hot breath fogged the glass. Slowly, the other two turned to face the monster, all thoughts of sorrow and solace left behind as they met its gaze.
Power grinned as she made eye contact with Denji, blinded to his distress by the pride she took in finally locating him. "My wayward servant! We've come to rescue you!" In her hands, she wielded a familiar pooch—Pochita! The faithful pup yipped happily at his friend, his fur matted with grease and food debris, but still all but clean when compared to the depravity of the fiend who held him. She seemed as if constructed of viscera; her pale skin disappeared beneath layer after layer of cruelty.
Whatever she had been doing, a trail of gore had been left behind in her wake.
There was silence, and exchanging of glances, the assessing of the threats.
Fearing that she had been ignored, Power reached a hand forward to knock once again on the diner's façade. "Denji? Hell-oooh? Your God Empress is calling for youuu…"
"Denji, get behind me, now." Himeno's face was wiped of emotion as she slid out of the booth. She grit her teeth when the boy failed to follow her direction. She pulled him to his feet with a gasp, her hand like a manacle around his forearm. He cried and pulled to be free of her and she, with great deliberation, chose to loosen her grip. Squatting down to meet his gaze directly, she clasped his shoulders and said, "Listen, listen. You need to listen to me now, okay? I understand that you're scared right now. I'm scared, too. It's okay. It's okay to be scared. But you have to be careful to do exactly what I say, alright?"
He nodded dumbly, eyes drifting away from her to look at the fiend who was currently waving at him. "Okay."
"I promise to get you out of here alive. I promise, you'll be okay. I need you to get to the back of the store and find somewhere to hide. No windows; a storage closet, maybe. You got that?" From her peripheral Himeno could see the fiend still yammering, what exactly it was saying being muffled by the thunder in her ears. This one was a talker—that was good, if it could talk, then it could think, which meant it could be distracted. She could work with that.
Denji nodded, swallowed. "Okay, but…"
"But what? This is serious, you need the hell out of dodge, now."
"But what about Pochita?"
Himeno wouldn't get the chance to ask for clarification before the window was obliterated and Aki got sent flying over the service counter.
------
Power came up with a yawn and the sun's salutations. She stretched her arms high above her head until she felt a pop, then let them drop again. She smacked her lips lazily, tasting the blood of a squirrel she had eaten three days prior. She picked at the tufts of chestnut fur clumped between her fangs and looked about.
She drifted to sleep amidst an empty field, lulled by the stilt grass that shimmered in the wind and in the daylight. Waves of undulating, vibrant green stems and knife blade leaves that beckoned her to hide amongst their cloisters, swaying and dancing. The earth from which they sprouted lay cool in the shade of its children's shadow.
The saw grass swept across her lanky form, tickling her cheek and caressing her back and knobby shoulders. She swiped at it angrily, bearing her fangs when the verdure did not halt its trespass into her personal space. Finally, she bundled a bunch at the base in her fist and tore them from the ground. She eyed the nervous system of roots they were supplied nutrients by with a snicker, then tossed them away behind her, laughing outright now. Ha! Puny plants think they could stand up to her? Not on her watch!
The cabin she had generously allowed Denji and Pochita to cohabitate with her was a kilometer away, having long been swallowed by the forest, its trees and bushes, and deeper mysteries. Bird song warbled out from the surrounding holt, high and sharp. It twiddled then faded. A response came soon after, from another part of the wood.
Power stared out into the woodland, trying to pinpoint the various songs' point of origin. She frowned, then rose to her dirty feet.
The walk back to her abode was dull and uneventful. The path she took was dappled in sunlight and the shade of trees above her. She looked up and saw glimpses of baby blue, no clouds. She wondered if Denji and Pochita were back yet; they still needed to figure out dinner, after all. She hummed in thought. She began napping a short while after they left, before the sun had fully lain claim to the sky, and never napped long. Her survival instincts were far too honed to spend her days as a layabout. She imagined she couldn't have been sleeping for longer than three, maybe four days.
A choir of critters lent their voices to her trek: the chatter of squirrels, their movements frenetic as they zipped up and down trees and along branches older than any man; the mischief of raccoons, their gloved hand coming up to cover their titters. Field mice scurried and worried and saw nothing beyond the day as they lived it. There was the patient looming of deer, their heads held stalwart as their ears flickered at every crunch of leaf and branch below her feet, their marble eyes refracting the day back out from them, becoming the light they absorbed. In those eyes no fear was found; she was one of them, here.
Insects buzzed: bees and trilling cicadas and sanguineous mosquitoes much abreast with the fiend's nature, though her pride would scoff off the claim. Below her feet waged a war of a thousand ants. Nature was found in melodious madness.
The air smelled of flowers and the flowers of pollen, as if you rubbed a bud of lavender between your fingertips and held it to your nose. It smelled of peace and of tranquility. It smelled of something she had never known.
She hated it. How she wished to set fire to this menagerie of slights and watch the squirrels flee up into blazing treetops and watch the bandit dogs flee and burrow and cook into tender meat with the earth as their kiln. How she wanted to see the buck stand there, stare down doe eyes leaden with insolence, and count the seconds as it caught alight. Pray, would it stand there struck with dumb pride even as it crumbled to ash? Would the first and last thought to be conjured within the base confines of its skull be that the light was hurting it?
Oh, how her blood bade for the letting, for more blood yet to be shed. Day after day, night after night, dawn after dawn. Oh, how she hated.
In a garden of flowers she could never be the rose, only the briar.
A peal of voices from further along the trail caught her ear, and she paused mid-stride. They sounded near the cabin.
Crouching low, she ducked off the trail into the surrounding foliage. Sweeping aside the brush, she cleft a path rounding towards the clearing where her dwelling squatted. Moving slow and steady so as not to break from the din of the forest and thereby be singled out from its choir, she crept along the moist earth, feet sinking into the sodden duff clumping along the forest floor, and crooned an ear and listened out to the increasingly intelligible voices sounding from beyond her visage.
"Little shits not here," this one a man, with a voice of tar congealed into a vile resin beneath the sun's glare.
"So what? We drive all this way and the kid ain't even here?" A younger voice this time, scratchy like a vinyl record improperly sat on the platter of the turntable. Orangey, Power thought, like rust. "Fucking where is he then?"
"Why would I know that?"
"I don't know. He was the one blubbering to Mister Yamashiro about wanting more devil contracts, and he ain't even got the decency to be here to hear about 'em. Assholes probably out fucking around with sticks or whatever the fuck."
"I'm calling the boss to let him know he isn't here, so do me a favor and shut up for a while."
Power met with the tree line and brokered a view. Sloping her pale belly along a turf tumbled through with roots, her toes clenched against the earth, and her haunches flexed, ready to bolt at a moment's notice. The streaks of dried muck striping down her thighs stretched and fractured with the tension. She spread apart the thicket obscuring her view and looked out into the clearing.
Two men were standing just short of the cabin, draped in dark heavy coats that mocked the glaring sun above. They smelled of leather and tobacco, Power's keen nose able to pick up the scent from where she hid. A creature idled restlessly behind them, tread marks in the grass wound from the only open trail leading back down the mountain up to it, marking its course. Black and round, its eyes shuttered closed. A growling beast of steel and oil, of leather and glass and the ghosts of dinosaurs. Chuffs of exhaust sputtered out from its undercarriage and carried itself against the sky, defiling the blue.
She bore knowledge of this creature, if not in itself than in the resemblance to its kin. A lowdown knave of no account; another one of the unseemly motorcades that had held her Meowy hostage so cruelly not a day before. Had it come to finish what its brethren had started? Hiring these goons to do its dirty work? It certainly seemed the boss of them at least; where the other two moved with a constant nervous energy, perpetually desperate to find justification for their having lived at all, the motor-monster stood back, coldly self-assured in its purpose.
The scratchy voice, lanky and stooped over as if his spine were unable to support his height, spat onto the ground and kicked petulantly at the cabin's walls. "Fucking fine. Fucking whatever."
"Go wait in the car if you're going to whine about it," Tarry groused, all rough edges and hulking corpulence. He plunged the pockets of his trousers for a cellphone and started punching in the boss's number.
Scratchy cocked his head back and groaned to the heavens. "Just make the call, man," he said eventually. "If this is a bust, I'm gonna head into the city and hit the cathouse—got some fine lays there, man, fine lays. I'm talking military-grade pussy." He stuck his finger out and grinned, wagging it to the austere man. "Ought to hit it at least once before you head back down south, man. C'mon, live a little."
The portly man snorted. He pressed call and the phone began to ring. He held it up to his ear and, with tilted forward and eyes wide with conspiratorial glee, said, "If all you're looking to do is get your rocks off, I would just wait for the kid to get back."
The other man froze, then began cackling. "With those teeth, man? No way!" He bent over, planting his hands on his knees as he howled his mirth into the earth.
So arrested by his jubilee was he that he didn't even have time to look up before a javelin born of blood soared through his temple and blew through the other side of his skull. It sailed away with its last thoughts— Hey man, if life ain't about pleasure then what's the point? —and plunged deep into a tree behind him. He sank to his knees first as if in prostration, mouth opened and closing in bald astonishment. His eyes lost their last light, and he fell into the mud, gurgling like a baby as he died.
Tarry shouted, the phone slipping from his grasp. It hit the ground with a dull 'thwap!' just as the call connected. "You know who this is. What is it?" a man on the other end said. His voice was of pestilence, flies swarming the did, his words hushed through a thick wave of receiver feedback. "Hello? Hello?"
Tarry lumbered first towards his dead friend and then faced where he thought the instrument of his demise had come from, turning just in time to see Power racing toward him. She loped low across the grass, moving like the shadow of a swooping hawk projected onto the land from so high above. She cocked her fist back as she neared and, with inhuman force, drove it forward into his gut. "Gotcha!" She cried.
She felt her knuckles thrum with blunt electricity as they buried into his stomach, the man not able to bring his hands up in time to block her. He bent over along her arm and let loose a flurry of spittle along her back, eyes bulging as the wind got knocked out of him. He placed his hands on her shoulders to catch himself and for briefest moments they together crafted the image of a king accolading an aspiring squire into knighthood.
The huge man brought his hands up and, interlocking his fingers until they formed a club, slammed them down against Powers' back. She gasped and buckled to her knees beneath the force but did not retreat, instead wrapping her arms about his waist and attempting to wrestle him to the ground.
"Ouch! That hurt!" Power whined as she pressed her cheek against her opponent's belly.
"You killed him. He was my friend. He was my friend and you fucking killed him." The man chanted the words like a prayer, raining his fists upon his killer over and over and over again.
“Ouch, ouch, ouch! That hurts, damn it! If it bums you out so much, just go and get a new one!" Seeing that she couldn't topple the behemoth with raw strength alone, Power cocked her head forward and skewered him on her horns.
The man screamed and wheeled back. He lost his footing and tumbled into the mud, grasping at his wounds. Blood leaked out from his belly and his clothes grew damp with it as it filled the air with sweet death. It spilled down his pants and ruddied the earth with wrath. "Bitch has a knife. She fucking stabbed me, crazy bitch fucking stabbed me. Oh my God I'm bleeding it's everywhere oh my God."
"Shut up." His time to bemoan his fate was cut short as Power dove at him, hands scraping and clawing at him. "You dare insult me!? The mighty Power will stand no slights upon her name—apologize right now! Apologize!"
More blood yet wept down his face like tears as it was peeled away in ribbons, becoming red and swollen like an infant having a tantrum. He moaned and pushed and clambered at her, desperately trying to get her off him. He babbled nonsense as his jaw was torn apart. "Pish shtubbed me. Ahm bleeding. Hersh, shop, hersh, shop. Ahm mad, ahm shorey. Shop."
But she would not, and when the crevices beneath her fingernails grew choked with sinew, she balled her hands into fists and began beating his skull flat against the ground. "Die! Die! Die!" She laughed and hollered and sang her malice to the innocent sky above as his pleas for mercy grew desperate, then grew strangled, then grew finally into silence. Still Power did not stop, not even as his heart gave its final beat and his mind its final thought of home and he released his bowels into his pants. The odor of his despair flooded her senses and burned her eyes with its acridity.
Oh, how sweet, this devastation. This desolation.
By the time she grew winded and the singing blood could egg her on no further, his skull had been entirely flattened, now no thicker than the hand that had dealt it its fate.
The bellicose beauty stood flushed and heaving over the carnage she had wrought, mouth stretched in a wolf's grin. Her complexion burned florid—be it with blood or her lust for it. Her chest and stomach were slathered with it, drooling down her menace and dripping down to feed the garden of weeds which bestrewed her palace's courtyard.
The hatred, oh, how it sang to her. Sweet hymns of bloody murder.
Her thirst was quenched for now. She licked her lips and combed her crimson fingers through her tousled mane, dyeing the mangy threads red. She set her gaze south to the smokestacks streaking their bleakness up the horizon, a tail for the dismal civility toiling below at the foot of the mountain.
Now, for the boy. Her delicate acolyte. She needed to find him, bring him to yoke for daring abscond his oath to her. After all, what was a princess without her loyal servant?
"Hello? What is all that noise? Hello? Answer me."
Power turned to where she heard the tinny little voice come from, idly wondering if there was a race of teensy tiny people running amok, and she just hadn't noticed. In place of the quick protein source she sought was a black brick half-buried in the muck. Squatting down, she plucked it out from the mud and dangled it between her fingers. She sniffed at it and bleghed. It was just large enough to fill her palm and was smooth to the touch, like frozen water.
"Hello?"
"Hello?" She repeated back.
"I can barely hear you. Speak up."
"Maybe you just need to get better at listening."
A pause over the line, then, "What did you just say to me?"
"Oh, now you can hear me. See, I knew you were just faking, you faker."
"Who the hell is this? Where's Sato? I give that screw-up a simple and goes and screws my girls instead."
"Who's Sato? That's a dumb name, should have called himself Stand-o—it's more imposing."
"Listen, girlie, get Sato on the line and get back to work. Giving me lip ain't what you should be using your mouth for, and if you need a reminder of that, maybe you need a week in the purple house to straighten you out. Or maybe I can make a trip down to Ichiwa and teach you some manners myself," his voice took on a hush dangerously close to nostalgic in tone as he continued speaking. "Yeah, it's been a while since I've tested our product for myself, even an old man like me has to take care of himself every now and then. Heard we got shipped a real pretty thing from our friends from up in The Union last month. Ah, is that you, baby girl? You looking for attention from the big man?"
Power grimaced and kept the phone at arm's length just in case the little gnome broke out of his containment. "Obviously not! You're the one yipping at me from your tiny box!"
"Bah, of course not. You ain't got that russkie rasp I've heard so much about—like charcoal and rum around your cock, apparently. Which means you're just a common bitch wasting my time."
"Excuse me!? There's absolutely nothing common about me! I'm glorious, resplendent, bashful, and elegant! Not common at all! I am at the very least mythical!"
"Hn, so you say. Tell me, where are you right now? Which house? I'll be there by tonight, and we can get started on your attitude problem. Lie to me, and I’ll force a rat up your ass and watch it chew its way out."
"I am a proud landowner and am at my own house, thank you very much! Now kindly go choke on your pot of gold and buzz off!"
"Don't you dare hang up on me, you little—"
"Die!" Power flung the black box into the ground and stomped into the earth, cackling as it shattered beneath her feet.
------
She set out after a brief check-in with Saint Meowy; she found the furry apostle sunbathing on the slanted tin roof, entirely ignorant of the pitched battle that had broken out below. After shaking her to startled waking, Power regaled the feline with all she had missed and told her of her intent to travel into the village below in search of her wayward peon. She had given a slow blink and a brisk lick of her palm in response—surely a gesture of good tidings for the journey to come. Leaving the feline behind with strict orders to oversee digging of the moat, the fiend set out down the mountain.
Paradoxically, the way down had proved a far greater labor than the way up, requiring a good deal more care and time on her part. The ascent she could take in leaps and bounds, climbing the treetops to hop from one summit to the next until all summits were bowed before her. As it was, her descent went in tumbles and stumbles, any attempts to hasten her journey only resulting in her tripping over an exposed root or rock and getting sent rolling down the hillside until she smacked into a tree kind enough to catch her.
She lumbered down like a bear, leaning back to brace her body weight as a counter to the incline, taking steps in an exaggerated tiptoe as if she were skulking about in a children's television program. After an hour of this bizarre circus routine, she reached the base of the mountain and took off in a loping sprint towards the town.
She soared over trickling creeks and rocks smoothed by eternities of erosion, through empty summer scorched fields, the ground dry and turned and sprouting potatoes, cucumbers, and onions at her feet, as she enclosed on Ichiwa. She came upon a culvert, carved through a hillock and topped by grey asphalt left untended for nearly a decade, cracked with fissures, weeds sprouting through, its road lines having long since faded into obscurity. It was used by the farmers to help with draining water in the spring thaw. Its maw was opened wide and dripping with algae and the dew of storms past. Through the other side showed a playground: chain link swings rusting from their scaffolds, whinging in the afternoon breeze.
Tenements lined the backdrop, hoary and red-bricked and constructed in a beige fashion. Tracks of turbid wept down from the roof, dark as pitch and staining the masonry a deeper dark still. The first-floor windows were covered in newspapers yellowed with age, telling the story of bad days long since made redundant with newer, worse ones. The whole building emitted a sense of paranoia, of xenophobia, as if the very supports that held it aloft against the earth were these sentiments, rather than concrete and rebar. A chain link fence separated it from the playground—the tension bands snapped at a low corner to provide passage for neighborhood children.
Power stepped into the culvert as if entranced, like a crab lured by the bioluminescent esca of an anglerfish. A glowing bulb loping in the dark, casting shadows on the nail-toothed monster it served. The roar of one of the accursed motor beasts overhead overwhelmed her as she stepped inside. She clasped her hands to her ears and murmured, working her jaw in fervent prayer that she could drown out the mechanical screams. The shivering of the world and saliva sloughing off the great metal mouth she had trespassed into. Then, it passed.
She stepped out onto the other side, stumbling where the pipe dropped off to land. She took in the sights before her: a blue slide faded to an almost green; held together by bolts and washers and spiraling down in two loops before spilling its rider out into the ground, divoted by many rough landings. Wood chips littered the grounds like a clumsy sand, enclosed by wooden logs stacked two high and bolted together. Monkey bars, the paint coating their handles cracked and chipped from a thousand sweaty hands, the metal revealed now rusting. A carousel, tiny shoes tucked beneath its carriage.
Children laugh here, she realized, startlingly. Every day, I hate. And every day, here, a child was laughing. They laugh and play and go home at night to…to what? What came after the dream?
Oh, how she hated.
She threaded through these instruments of joy, dancing her fingers over their rusting jubilee. A strange feeling arrested her; loss, or loss of the opportunity to have lost.
What was it, to mourn for something that never was? That could never be? She snorted quietly to herself—rank foolishness, that's what. May well as cry for the winds passing, for the slaughter of cattle, for the breaking of days. Cry, for nothing at all had transpired.
Oh, how she hated.
She sat on one of the swings, feeling the rubber bow around her rear as she rested her weight on it. She grimaced at how it constricted about her hips, the place where the chain link connected to the seat, digging into her. She kicked off the ground and swung her legs out, trying to build momentum, trying to rise, to fly far, far away.
Her gaze never met the horizon past the apartments.
------
She found Pochita wallowing in a dumpster. The smell of oil and acrid metal scraps clung heavily to the air, forming a trail almost pitifully easy for her to follow. She wound through back alleys and side streets, steam dancing up from grates and yet more motor monsters still in what she presumed to be hibernation. She kept to the shadows and hid with each skid of a can being kicked along the concrete and every tumble of voice as neighborhood teens took a shortcut to wherever it was they journeyed.
Power found herself in no mood to greet her subjects, her trip to the playground having stripped her of her enthusiasm. In those quiet moments of skulking about in the muggy heat, of playing at spies and pretending to be infiltrating behind enemy lines, she felt very much like a fool. She found her quarry in due time, but by then her feet ached and she very dearly just wanted to bring this stupid day to its stupid close.
She flipped open the dumpster's lid, holding a hand out when it clattered against the wall of the building it was saddled against and made to fall right back, catching it in her outstretched palm.
Pochita, curled up like a drunk with his bottle on the stoop of his dearly estranged, squinted his eyes against the day and slowly, slowly looked up. He had a banana peel pierced between his fangs, mottled brown with age and punctured a thousand times by the Devil, who had nearly gone mad with worry since being deposited here by his friend. The overripe fruit skin had so far proved an inadequate stress reliever.
The pup was positively filthy, like a basketball left in the yard to persevere through storm and drought, season after season. And then somewhere along the timeline a rabbit came and shat all over it. The fur along his belly and sides lay slicked with grease; the short strands clumped and coiled like ocean whorls. His once pretty pink toe beans were pitched with the muck of miles of asphalt and earth passed beneath them; his impromptu dumpster diving having done nothing to mend his pedicure. Bits of food sat caught in the teeth of his chainsaw: chips of eggshells, crumbs of moldy bread, a vague, meat-adjacent substance. Soda syrup had spilled down the sides of his blade like molasses, rendering it tacky to the touch.
"You really need to stop doing this to yourself," Power said, the faintest flicker of disappointment encroaching upon her tone. She had half a mind to drop the lid back on him, so great was her discontent." Where's the boy? Did he finally grow a mind and abandon you?"
"Wrooo…"
"I see," she said with a nod, not having any idea as to what that was supposed to mean. She spoke cat, not dog. "Well, since your previous master has seen fit to leave you in the gutter, might I interest you in serving under me? I find myself in need of a nail filer."
"Wrooo…" This one seemed somehow more despairing than the last. Pochita rolled over to face away from her, revealing the rotund expanse of his back. His handle was dotted with slimy fruit stickers. A half dozen dark skinned women balancing a fruit basket on their heads smile cheekily at Power, their features blurred with grime.
"Bah, whatever," Power waved off getting turned down with disdain. "Who needs you anyway? Certainly not me, and from the looks of things, certainly not Denji. Why, if you're so infatuated with your misery, I figure I ought to leave you here to wallow while I go hunt down the boy and make him my greatest soldier. I presume you won't mind?"
His mewling and subsequent scurry to rejoin the land of the decent stoppered her words. He clambered over the side of the bin and would have had a hard greeting with the ground had Power not caught him in her arms in instinct. He wriggled in her grasp like a particularly petulant mound of Play-Doh, and the fiend held him at arm's length out of fear of reenacting their first meeting.
"You're a miserable little creature, aren't you?" Power asked, a vicious mirth pulling at her lips to reveal the tips of her fangs. Reverse psychology had struck again! Truly, her mastery of manipulation knew no bounds! Pochita drooped in her hold and whined. Her cruel grin grew even crueler yet. She wafted him about, and his lower half slunk behind the motion like a glob of gelatin. "Oh yes, sad is the tale of the chainsaw dog who lost his master, but do not lay so low into despair just yet, for I hold the antidote to your woe!" Light entered the pooch's eyes for the first time since his excavation, and he gave a tentative wag of his tail. With a flourish, she extended her pointer and tapped it against her nose. "This sniffer right here, my pitiful peon, shall be your salvation on this day."
"Wof!?"
Ensuring she had a firm grip of his handles, Power set out to find Denji. The chance to show off her talents to someone had done wonders for her mood, and she found herself placing her steps with a hop and a skip.
Why, to her then, the idea of introducing herself to the local rabble struck her as positively titillating. Rejoice, peasants, for your Queen has found herself in so gracious a humor as to honor you all with her presence! Kneel, and scrape, and toil at my delicate feet if you wish to have a good harvest this year!
She bounded through more back alleys rank with the sweat of the world before spilling out onto the main street. Power stumbled to a halt, all dreams of sovereignty set aside momentarily as she was overwhelmed by the glory before her. The roads were hoary with a thousand somber evenings now shone bespoke with gold. Storefronts glittered in the sunshine and foisted jewels, clothes, supplicants of splendor entirely alien to the feral fiend, into her eyes, making them gleam with the greed of their makers.
The sky was blue and pure, and she did feel the strange need to take note of it, like a child finally putting their hand on the knob of a door they'd passed by countless times, never giving any thought as to what may lie behind. Today, they would not think but feel, is the day I make this house a home. For who could truly call a house a home without knowing the bones of it? The muscles and mind of it?
Then, of course, the people. They shined too. Like glittering monuments to avarice—bespoke in the latest trends and sneakers, clean and pretty people. Perfect people.
Power met the decidedly well-washed masses with all the regality she could muster: smile stretched until it hurt, right arm flying high above her head with frantic waves, the left kept to her side with Pochita dangling from it like a purse. "Hello, my sumptuous serfs! My delightful minions! I bid you good day, yes I do! How have the coffers been filling? 'Twas a bountiful fiscal harvest, I hope! If not, I'll have no choice but to rend a plague upon your pastures and set fire to those cubes you all seem to delight in dwelling so much. The geometry of them offends me—triangles are much better than cubes, you should have made triangle homes instead."
At first, the ramblings of the mad woman in the strange dress shambling down the sidewalk didn't garner much attention—just another vagrant indulging in their derangement was the locals' measure. Not until someone cared to take a closer look, not until someone saw that what she wore was not a red dress tattered to the seams, but guts and blood with an instrument of further violence snug against her hip.
"What the hell!?"
"Oh my god!"
"What the hell happened to her!?"
Under this immense wave of praise, Power could not but smile and wave, turning every which way to ensure each of her adoring fans got a look at her darling lips.
A young teen, head of hair a red frizz beneath her ball cap, wretched as the fiend drew near, a buzzing council of flies following her in procession. The girl herself against the brickwork as Power passed, eyes closed and nostrils pinched in an attempt to thwart the monster's presence from encroaching on her senses.
"Most gracious of you to rid the way of yourself, my little cottier." She mimed a curtsy and sent her words on fetid breath to the teen, who gasped and gagged as its rot infiltrated past her defenses.
"We draw near to him," Power said a short while after, her voice thick with a nameless tension. She took more sniffs and wrinkled her nose, amber gaze gleaming with anticipation. "As do we the eve of battle. There are scents with him, scents I do not know. Will you stand with me?"
"Wof! Woof waf worf," Pochita said, filled with determination. His googly eyes were honed in where Power pointed out his friend was—a run-down little shop just across the street from them. He gave a growl of determination and gestured that they continue their march.
As they closed in on their quarry, Power took Pochita about both his handles, adjusting her grip so as to bear him against their foes. He looked up at her questioningly, and she grinned. "I figure we ought to merge our strength. I alone would be enough to best them, but doesn't total domination sound much more fun?"
She found the ripcord spooling out from Pochita's rear and looped her finger through. As they began to cross the street and cars honked and drivers cursed, she found the blood in her veins singing once more. Sweet hymns of murder. Softest symphonies of depravity.
Oh, how she loved it. She took her finger at his ripcord, and she felt the strength of thousands in the potential it offered. She took one final breath to holler to her ward staring at her wide-eyed from behind the glass before being ushered back by a shaggy-haired woman, and then she pulled her arm back. The chainsaw roared to life and her hands trembled with its fury, and she shivered from fear cemented in incarnations passed.
And hell shivered with her.
Notes:
My sincerest apologies for taking so long to update this story. Hopefully its length helps to make up for lost time. As always, any and all feedback is greatly appreciated. Nothing is more motivating than hearing what people thought about a chapter, be it positive or negative.
Thank you for reading and be sure to stop in next time to see the world's fourth most civil custody battle. Until next time.
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