Work Text:
“Do you think you’re a good person?”
Aki’s eighteen when Himeno chews on the end of an unlit cigarette, her hands wandering through his hair. They’re both drunk, feet bare beneath Himeno’s low table, and she’s almost past the point of coherency. But then she pokes her tongue out, and the cigarette falls to the floor, and she asks.
“What do you mean?”
Himeno nudges his knee with hers. She’s draped over his shoulder, almost lying on top of him. “I mean, you’ve never said no to me before, not about anything. And you kill people while you’re on the clock, and your uniform costs more than some people’s salaries, and I keep telling you to quit smoking…”
She trails off. One of her hands is in his hair, scratching his scalp with a kind of tenderness he doesn’t deserve.
“Of course not,” Aki says. “None of us are. That’s why we’re in Public Safety, isn’t it?”
Himeno snorts. “Trying to atone for our sins?”
“Most of us, anyway.”
Himeno’s hair spills across the floor like silk. She’s beautiful, and Aki feels a deep, bone-crushing guilt at the fact that he can’t love her the way she needs him to. But Himeno deserves someone real, someone who will stand guard over her heart and kill anyone who tries to poison it. If she kisses Aki once or twice between murders, they can both pretend it’s just because she’s lonely.
“I’m sorry,” he says suddenly. Her hands are still in his hair.
“You don’t have to be sorry for anything, Aki,” she whispers.
“But I—I do want to…” His hands are shaking. “Fuck, I don’t even know. I’m just…sorry. For everything.”
“Aki.”
She takes one of his hands in hers. Her other hand comes down to cup the curve of his jaw, and she tugs him down until they’re both lying flat on the floor.
“Himeno—”
“Aki,” she says. “I want you to listen to me very carefully, okay? I don’t want you to apologize to me. Ever. I don’t care that you don’t wanna—”
“Himeno, stop—”
“No, you stop!” She squeezes his hand. Her left eye is bright, one tear away from spilling over. His own eyes are burning. “Aki, I love you, okay? Nothing’s gonna change that, and I don’t want it to. And if that makes me a bad person, I’ll take it, because it’s what I’ll deserve. But please, Aki, don’t apologize to me. Ever. Okay?”
“Okay,” he says dumbly. He’s only seen her cry twice before, and never like this, her face centimeters from his.
“Good,” she says, sniffling. She raises their entwined hands to punch him gently in the chest. “Fuck you, Aki.”
Aki isn’t a good person. He’s a risk-taker, gambling his life away on revenge, sticking his tongue down death’s throat every chance he gets. Death slips off his shirt and presses him up against his headboard, and Aki knows it’s only a matter of time before both of them are gone.
But it’s a dream, apparently. The Angel Devil dreams of death and Aki wants to shove his tongue down his throat without dying. Aki’s twenty and the only person who was ever in love with him is dead, and Angel’s listless grace makes something in his chest twinge.
“Do you think you’re a good person?” Aki asks him. They’ve been partners for a month. Angel has gone from a curse to an annoyance to something like a friend.
“Of course not,” Angel says, chewing on a fingernail. “What kind of question is that? I’m not even a person.”
“What about you, Himeno?” Aki had asked, back then. “Do you think you’re a good person?”
Himeno had laughed. She’d laughed so hard her voice tripped out of her mouth and bounced out of her apartment and down the elevator and into the ground. She could have caused an earthquake if she wanted to. She could have caused an angel to fall.
“Of course not,” she’d choked out. “Are you fucking kidding me, Aki?”
Aki thinks Angel’s a good person. Angel won’t admit it, certainly, but his devil status means nothing when he’s the devil of angels. Because to fear an angel means to fear hope, and hope doesn’t have chainsaws for arms or a chainsaw for a tongue. Aki would tell him this if there was any chance that Angel would believe it.
“I’m in love with you,” he says instead, running his tongue over his teeth.
“That’s okay,” Angel says. “You’ll get over it.”
“My old partner was in love with me, you know. And then she died, and it was too late to do anything. All she did was ask me to cry for her.”
Angel tilts his head, considering. “Did you?”
Aki glares at him.
“You can’t touch me,” Angel says. “You can’t kiss me, and you can’t have sex with me, and you can’t hold my hand. What sort of sick masochist would you have to be to love me? You must really hate yourself, Aki.”
“I’m…sorry?”
Angel sighs. “Look, no—don’t apologize, that’s not—Aki, I’m just telling you that you don’t need to do this to yourself.”
“But I want to.”
“Why?”
Aki can’t say that Angel’s a good person. Angel would kill him on the spot. But he can say that Angel’s, well, an angel. Angel first. Devil second.
“I just really love you,” he says, shrugging. “That’s all. Truly. Even if I can’t pull any of that shit with you.”
Angel’s expression doesn’t change, but he does step closer to Aki.
“Okay,” he says. His fingers dance along the cuffs of Aki’s suit jacket. “That’s fine, then.”
Move in with me, Himeno had said one night. They were both drunk again, Himeno more than halfway towards choking her dinner up in the toilet. She’d cracked the windows open, and the curtains had blown out around them. It had all been very cinematic, he supposed. A pity he’d have to ruin it by saying no.
Why? Himeno had asked.
She was too messy. And besides, they’d never get anything done if they lived together.
Aki. Move in with me. I’d take care of you.
He didn’t need to be taken care of.
I could practice being a housewife, she’d said, grinning, but he’d known by then that that particular smile was more for show than anything else. Her racehorse hands clenched in his hair and he didn’t say anything. He didn’t apologize. How could he?
“Move in with me,” Aki says.
He has one arm. Angel has none. He’s held Angel’s hand once, and now he’ll never be able to again.
“Why?”
Aki shrugs. “I’m the only one with an arm, and I can cook. I’d take care of you.”
“I know you would,” Angel grumbles, burrowing his head deeper into his hospital pillow.
“Of course I would.”
Angel clicks his tongue. His hair falls across his forehead when he moves, and Aki is utterly powerless to do anything about it. Somewhere, in some other city, another boy is sitting at another person’s bedside, and he’s free to touch them as he pleases because the world doesn’t want to see him die. The other boy is wearing the same suit as Aki but he has two arms to fit into its sleeves, and he rolls them back when he washes his hands. He takes his shoes off when he walks into the ocean. He steps on seashells and his feet bleed into the water and he is the world, the center of the universe. He is everything Aki could have been. But Aki’s here instead, and he hasn’t seen the ocean since he was a kid, and he can’t touch the sun.
“I have a better idea, if you’re willing.” Angel says suddenly. He blows his hair away from his face. Aki looks away.
“Okay,” he says. “What is it?”
“Kiss me.”
Aki stands up. The shitty plastic hospital chair clatters to the floor behind him. He’s unbalanced without his arm, still unused to the lightness of this new body. Aki is turning into a ghost.
“Kiss me,” Angel repeats. “If you want to. It won’t hurt.”
“I’ve got two years,” Aki says. His head is spinning, but when he closes his eyes, he sees Himeno; her blue-black hair, her wide smile, her thin fingers. She was the only person he’d ever kissed, and the only person he’d ever thought he was going to. Angel was an impossibility in every sense of the word.
“Two years of suffering. Two years of pretending to be in love with your boss when we both know the only person you dream about is me.”
“Thought you said you weren’t a person,” Aki mumbles, crouching down to stand the chair back up on its uneven legs.
“Changed my mind when I fell in love with you,” Angel says. His face is perfectly blank. His lips are pink.
Aki sits back down. He runs a hand through his bangs, tugging at the tips.
“I don’t want to die,” he says quietly.
Angel bites his lip. He turns on his side so that he’s facing Aki, and when Aki meets his eyes, he feels something in his chest clench.
“I know,” Angel whispers. “And you’re so young, Aki.”
Aki’s never seen an angel cry before. If Angel had hands, Aki would probably try to hold them, but he settles for resting his arm across Angel’s stomach. Maybe this is how it feels to be one of those mythological star-crossed lovers; separated by a wall, or an order, or a prophecy. He and Angel are separated by death. It’s everywhere, tattooed into Angel’s skin, trailing behind him wherever he goes. And Aki knows he should be afraid, but he isn’t. How could he be?
“Why would you want to kiss me, then?”
Angel sighs. “Because I love you, Aki. And I don’t want to see you suffer like this.”
Nietzsche once said that to live is to suffer. And here is Aki, the boy who lost everything, carrying his anger around like a freight train. Sometimes he dreams about dying. Sometimes he dreams about kissing Angel. Sometimes the world hits him like a bullet train on the fast track to hell and he gets whiplash from how terribly, unshakably cruel it is. Aki, alone. A body in his basement. Tokyo crumbling at his feet.
“Two years is a long time to wait,” Angel continues. “I’m giving you an out, Aki. But only if you really want it.”
“You’re a shit kisser,” Aki says.
Angel is an angel. Angel is a devil. Aki has given up on his dreams of tearing the sky down.
“It’s my first time,” Angel says, his nose wrinkling. “You’re not great, either.”
He’s Aki’s first, in a sense; at least, in a way that matters. Angel keeps looking at him like he’s going to break, kissing along his neck with chapped lips. He’s got heaven in him, somewhere, when he sprawls out on his shitty hospital bed and his hair falls against the pillowcase, catching the evening light. Maybe he was always supposed to be there, suspended in that perfect infinity, laid bare by the sunset.
“You’re beautiful,” Aki tells him.
Angel groans. “You’re always so blunt.”
“You like it.”
Angel sighs heavily, reaching for Aki’s hand across the bedspread. “Yeah,” he says. “I guess I do.”
Aki lets him spread his fingers apart and slip his own through; Angel watches their hands move with his lip caught between his teeth, unblinking.
“How much time left?” Aki whispers.
Angel winces.
“I love you, you know,” Aki says, squeezing Angel’s hand gently. “And I—I don’t care if we’re both bad people. I’ll see you in hell someday, and we can fuck everything up again.”
“Aki.”
“And I’ll tell everyone I was touched by an angel.”
“Aki.”
“I love—”
You.
You grew up in a house with paper walls and paper doors. Your family had never seen you cry before. And then your world ended before it really began, and your life ended before you could be who you really wanted to, and you never had a backyard, or a pet goldfish, or a front door. But you woke up anyway, dragged yourself through the dirt each morning; you strapped that sword to your back even though you knew it would be the death of you someday. And you were so, so scared of being human.
And then you died a hundred smaller deaths. And then an angel fell down from the sky and told you that your sword was a promise ring. And then he kissed you and he pulled a matching sword from between your lips. Surprise, he said, sticking his tongue between your teeth.
I promised I’d come to see you again, didn’t I?