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“Okay,” Denji says, scowling at the single-page incident report form sitting between them on the café table like it’s holding the secrets of the universe just out of reach. “What’s this one say? ’Day’…”
“‘Incident date,’” Himeno reads off upside-down, chin propped on her hand. “And then the next one is time, you can round it to the nearest hour. You know how to write ‘day’ and ‘month,’ right?”
“Of course I know day and month,” Denji grumbles, scribbling down a series of characters at least potentially legible as the previous day’s date before glancing briefly up and over her shoulder. “Waiter’s comin’ up on your right, by the way.”
Himeno blinks, braces just in time to keep herself from jumping when a few seconds later the waiter speaks from somewhere in the dark right half of her vision.
“All well here, miss?”
“Yes, thank you,” Himeno says, waving him off without looking away from Denji, glaring down at another empty form field.
“Okay, I know this one is ‘person’— what?” he asks, when he looks up and catches her staring, checking quickly over his own shoulder before looking back at her.
“Nothing,” Himeno says, shaking her head and tapping the paper. “That word is ‘civilian,’ you check it if there were any civilian injuries.” She pauses while he checks the box, and then, once she’s sure the waiter is out of earshot again: “Not many people would think to do that.”
He pauses, pen in hand, looking confused. “Do what?”
“Warn me about the waiter,” she says.
“Oh.” He blinks. “Uh, I just used to hate when people— like, came up next to me all of a sudden where I couldn’t see. Freaked me out.”
“Where you couldn’t see?” she echoes, feeling like she’s missing something.
“Yeah, I was missin’ my right eye for awhile,” he says, easily, like it’s nothing particularly upsetting. “It came back when I got— y’know, after I came back from getting my shit all fucked up the first time.”
She says, slowly, “How did you lose it?”
“Sold it,” Denji says, grinning a little. “Hey, same as you, yeah?”
“…To a Devil?”
“Nah, just to some guy. Needed money,” he says, and as Himeno stares at him, he downs the dregs of his coffee before glaring back down at the form. “What’s this big box? I don’t gotta fill this whole thing, do I?”
It takes Himeno a second to process the question. “That’s for a short description of what happened. A play-by-play.”
He frowns. “Man, that’s gonna take ages. You think they’ll be on my ass if I do it all in hiragana?”
She tries to imagine him wearing an eyepatch like hers. She’d like to think she would’ve done things differently, if she’d known how young he was from the start. “Here,” she says, and reaches out to pull the paper across the table. “I’ll do it for you.”