i gotta stay high all the time to keep you off my

In rhyme lies a constant; a small drum clapping endlessly in the background, a rift following through the air. All things exist in the same scope as each other, therefore, all things are forced to co-exist. A world designed around itself – even that which is considered a breakthrough is still an imitation of something else, then something else imitates it, if only to destroy each other.

And so, the creationist telling of trust follows through. God invented trust to test man, everything is invented with the desired intention of trust. Car bodies trust their wheels to hold them steady, and laptop bases trust their desks in the same light. Trains trust the rails they glide along to hold them steady, and God trusts man to hold his resolve, even in the face of wicked temptation, coated in glossy red. Bright, glossy red. Apples, headphones, converse sneakers, inner rims of fashion-forward glasses, blood, apples again.

“Interesting, isn’t it?” Akira’s gaze shifts to where Goro stands a couple of meek meters away on the last evening train to listen to his proposition. “How these advertisers seek to trick us into believing their message.”

“Is it?” he says, with a feigned tone of disinterest. Perhaps this was just an attempt to throw Goro off, to try and shave a blunt edge off that sharp kitchen knife. A quick curveball to shake the tracks holding his steamrolling feet to the ground, ghosting delicately over the metal ones beneath them both.

As always, Goro only smiles, then looks curiously to the poster again. The corners of it had frayed in the rush of morning, afternoon, and night commuters, and the colours had only slightly begun to dull, but the message was still clear. Another cult beckoning people into the plush comfort of ignorant belief – ignorant trust – maybe the world was ending, or salvation awaits after death, or the truth is hiding in the small print of a thousand different multimillion company logos.

He reads the bold title again. ‘Hault!” it cries, in italicised capital letters.

“I’m rather fond of these kitschy posters myself,” Goro speaks quietly. He raises a gloved hand before them both, black in leather, to run it along the soft paper edges garnished with crude drawings of the damned. “They’re eye-catching, no?”

He could imagine they were both thinking of a hypothetical Yusuke’s disgust at such a statement. They were, for all intents and purposes, ridiculously ugly.

“It’s too much for me.” Obviously. “Why would they be so plain about their beliefs on a poster like this?” And it was a fair question, Goro wonders in response. Cults, renowned for their dark secrets and nervous shadows shouldn’t be this clear about their immoral standings. Rare for a cult to advertise itself on its peculiarities, he continued. But he was thinking too hard about this.

“You’re thinking too hard about this, Kurusu-kun,” he quipped, charming as ever, though he lacked the energy to add a quirky twinge to his voice or raise the corners of his lips, so he settles in doing neither. Instead he opts to stare at the poster, as if it was about to wiggle its way off the train window. “This isn’t a recruitment poster, is it? It merely offers the concept of change to the unthinking passer-by.”

Now he’s baiting Akira, and they both know this clearly enough. What else reflected change but the ghostly Phantom Thieves. Horrific monsters in the dark changing the world, deciding who deserves salvation and who deserves to be damned. But these aren’t single cogs spinning wildly out of place; Goro was baiting himself too.

He strokes the side of the poster again, pointing a long finger to the dancing politician at the bottom, and the guillotine next to him. “Reminiscent, aren’t they? Forcing you to remember a time, not in living history, but of turbulence and fear. A reminder of an age without laws and protocols, and the haywire of political paperwork.” He steals a glance of the side of Akira’s profile, just to make sure he’s looking at the right thing. He’s not. “Your average commuter doesn’t need to see the whole message, their attention can just be caught for a second with these, and then they take the idea of chaos with them to work. No recruiting, instead… should we use the word, ‘awakening,’ here?” Goro laughs at the end of that one for sure. It’s a little too long-winded for him to not try to dissuade any serious undertones.

Then the poster disappears anyway as the doors retract into their shells, and suddenly they’re at Yongenjaya.

“It’s interesting,” Akira smiles, stepping between the carriage and the platform as Goro does the same. “You’re right.”

 Of course I am.

The walk from the station to LeBlanc was always nicer at night. Cities seem to rely on the strange way their arms open themselves to those who wander after light, though perhaps Goro was romanticising it a little too much. He knew how dreary Toyko was in the rain, how sad it looked in the fog. He was tired of looking up and seeing murky clouds hanging over the polluted LED lights, wishing away his childhood dreams of being a knight, a saviour, a hero, and grew to replace those gracious outfits with black salary men suits, his sword turning into a steel case instead. Like every other one, too, sent home after accidently working a second shift, and then a consecutive third one.

He wondered if, given the change, they’d work forever. He knew he would. Sort of already does – wakes up at witching hours thinking about the wrong things.

Akira, not so much. They’d knowingly shared enough public spaces for Goro to see that he studies, but not enough for anyone hoping to make real, institutional change. Rather, he gives up quickly, favouring his phone with his endless texts, or twisting metal garden wires around themselves until he’s decided they’re ready for battle. That stupid cat seemed to be a fan of his little handicrafts in particular, waving his tail in the open air above Akira’s bag when he managed to fit one piece of shrapnel into another.

And this whole thing was obviously something far more fun than Goro was allowing himself to imagine it really was, but he was capable of the art of three-dimensional thought too. He could see Akira having fun with his classroom craft projects while also unknowingly ruining Goro’s life in the same breath. The more he thought about it, the easier he realised this must’ve been – an occurrence too common for him to have left slip for so long.

Akira leads him into the open door of LeBlanc in his leisure, pointing out a few other things he thinks of being noteworthy, telling Goro all about how different Toyko is to his home town. The lamp-posts covered in political stickers of radical support and the way their neighbours close the blinds at night, all so different and new. “But I guess you have to around here,” he shrugs, and Goro pays it no mind. Less onlookers means less rumours – less of these obnoxious ‘Detective Prince caught doing charity!’ headlines for him to worry about. It’s a good thing. He could do with less spam in his inbox about helping turn young convicts around. Idiots like that, ones who got caught, weren’t worth much more than a fleeting moment of his time.

So it’s a wonder why he’s still following Akira to his carer’s stupid little café, but Goro considers it a non-issue. In a really distorted way, maybe he could call Akira a friend, or a faux imitation of one – Akira probably wasn’t too fond of him, and Goro wasn’t about to trick himself into liking someone he was trying to kill.

No, that would be really, plainly stupid.

But LeBlanc was warm all the same. The end of September was crisp and solemn, hands together in forgiveness for the cooler months topping and tailing the drawn out years, and Sojiro always knew how to remedy that away. Or Wakaba did at least, and he danced around in her shadow.

“—And I’m still learning, so my coffee won’t be as good as the old man’s,” Akira continued, because apparently he’d started talking.

Goro laughed. “You could be on the brink of losing one of your most valued customers, so be careful.”

Akira raised his eyebrow, though it was hard to see under that vicious mop of hair.

“Let’s say a reporter asks me where I find myself late at night,” Goro leans forward on the bar, lacing his fingers together. “They ask where Akechi Goro ruminates about the unstoppable crime rate of the city, and finishes all his last-minute assignments, A good barista would want me to say his place, you know. More customers tends to mean a bigger bone for the underdog.”

Akira smiles downwards, quietly, as though Goro wasn’t really supposed to see it. He briefly wonders what that meant, before he gives up on humouring Akira’s multifaceted personality and wringing it for all it had left. “Keep this between us, but I like the way it is now.” Double meaning? “Sojiro wouldn’t want all those customers here anyway, he’s not that great when people get snappy with him.”

What the hell does now mean?

He watches Akira pour the black coffee. He knew that Goro had been drinking his coffee black recently, as a change of pace. It wasn’t much of a reward for his sweet tooth, but that’s not why he was drinking coffee anyway. And if he appeased that part of himself, and came to LeBlanc to drink a sweet coffee and stare at the person he found himself dedicating a year towards killing, the whole thing would be a little too contrapuntal for his liking.

So, instead, he has to drink his bitter, bitter coffee out of the warm cup Akira had just hand-cleaned. And think about how horrible it felt that this was all so personal somehow. He envisioned the way his stomach much be twisting in disgust at the very idea of this, his fingers wrapped around the cup tightly, like the ghosts of Akira’s hands on it would shift themselves over his own instead. It was disgusting. How much he wanted to just reach over and—

Who knows. He realises as quickly as the thought began that it was better to let that fizzle out and die, too.

“And this blend is…” he asks, eyes as warm as he could muster them to be.

And Akira remains useless, smiling, pouring the leftovers into his own cup – another one in the long line of cups he washed, and of phantom hands. “My secret,” he grins. And Goro can’t be bothered to push it any further than that, because it only invites playfulness and banter, which he thinks he’s had enough of for one evening. The hypothetical hand he keeps outstretched for Akira’s friendship feels the same as it always has, like nothing’s changed.

Maybe.

Change is difficult to track though. Evolution happens so slowly and these things aren’t worth the energy it would take to monitor their agonising growth. And a part of him could recognise that he was wrong in thinking this, too. That if he turns a blind eye to things like this, he’s not really playing up the role of the detective prince, and if he plays dumb Akira will start to really think he is dumb, and then the circles and charts of who’s pretending to be innocent and who’s pretending to be a genius just grow more and more complicated, two idiots dancing to a song they’ve never heard before.

And it was nice to play dumb, too. Goro could feel like an average teenage boy messing with the feelings of the people he, too, likes, because in these alternative universes the outside is only nicer, and the inside is still complicated.

It was nice to left Akira brush his hand with his own a little too hard, too suspiciously for him to pass it off as the result of a full morning train, or a bump on the road. It was nice to let Akira stare too long at Goro’s profile, sincerely lost in the idea that Goro is too busy discussing cult posters or the design of bullet trains or deaf space and somehow misses all these obvious cues, steps over this puppy crush because he is an unfeeling, killing machine.

So he plays into it, just a little. Smiling too long, too sincerely. Letting Akira touch the small of his back when he pretends to not know which station they’re getting off at. Humouring the repeated knowledge he’s accumulated from Sojiro’s teachings, hearing all this useless trivia with a few new comments peppered in.

Somehow, the space between them gradually grew thinner and thinner. Maybe this almost obsessive measuring had started off in his head, but as summer turned to winter, Akira grew accustomed to the feeling of the backs of Ryo’s hands against his own as they walked together, the palm gripping the inside of his arm whenever he wanted to drag his attention somewhere else – something spring had never seen.

Platonically, of course. The whole thing was simple and free, man-to-man contact, an important part of any healthy friendship. As they shifted between awkwardly old kids to awkwardly young adults, their dynamic only shuttered in absence, never collapsed.

Perhaps it was only awkward on Akira’s end, though. His voice creaked into something new and, trailing behind, so did the rest of him. Taller, faster, stronger (but not by much) were all boxes he could tick, but it seemed his desires remained more-or-less the same; stagnant, almost reluctantly stubborn.

On the night before his seventeenth birthday, he copied his actions from his sixteenth; lying in bed and thinking about the last thing Ryo had said to him that day. To be fair, this wasn’t just a birthday ritual he’d conjured up, but a place-marker of every night he spent alone – always getting too caught up in whether or not Ryo had stolen a glance at him in class, or if he was just watching the flurry of birds rushing around the school roof. Was his gaze watching his fingers drag his leaking pen across his notebook, or was he merely comparing the way Akira held it to the way everyone else fashioned their hand around their own?

When it came to anything like this, Akira felt like he truly was the stupidest boy on planet Earth.

And then, moments later, it was actually Ryo who was the stupidest boy in the entire universe – in any universe. Ryo’s undivided attention towards his school work, or his father’s work, or the TV show they had decided to sit through, or the speed of wind and exactly how it hit the grass, or whatever it was that had grabbed his concentration, always shone out to Akira as a mark of his unrelenting mindlessness.

Or, no, that wasn’t fair. If anything, Akira’s dismissal of it was really a sign of his own ignorance, and his dim-wittedness came out every time he proved himself willing to drop anything to follow that far blue gaze. His eyes always fell from the teacher’s blackboard to stare at Ryo’s fingers gripping at the side of his desk, or his shins folded over each other in some premature circus act under the desk.

Akira was just an idiot.

At least Ryo humoured him. When he had the seat in front of Akira, he’d let his hand fall to the side of the chair, and Akira always wondered what it would be like, to just reach out and take it in his own.

A bad idea, nothing more.

   I wish we were closer. The mantra almost drove him insane. They would sit and watch the TV screen from the opposite ends of the couch in their time spent alone, as the afternoon passed and neither of them bothered to turn the lights on. On the rare occasion he found them at night, Ryo’s father would guide them away from the fading green pillows to lead them outside, and busy them with an introduction to mountain formations speech he’d whipped up at the last minute.

It’s all about tectonic plates layered over the Earth’s heart. The final layer of skin around the explosive centre, Ryo had countered with, only for him to smile, nod his head, and continue. “These plates, you see, can’t do anything but collide into each other. Only with this friction, forces surpassing any notion of strength you might believe in, can the Earth shape the valleys and mountains that live among us.” Convection currents in the Earth’s mantle push them around; radioactive elements producing heart, producing movement, all leftovers from the formation of the Earth wrestling to find somewhere to belong.

It’s sort of cute, Akira thinks to himself, that the Earth had never really been finished.

The way Ryo hangs on to every word his father tells him, and turns to Akira every time he notices him falling behind in the dark, is sort of cute too.

A simpler life. No choice but to move against each other, like the Earth was created with this in mind, and then accommodated, even promoted, it. We can’t all be so lucky.

   The fourth day of living under the Makimura roof came and juddered into place. Akira felt the shift away from naïve excitement, and his body moved against the currents of unease that washed over his morning sheets. Living with a new family while his own ventured out of the peripheral borders of Japan was never going to be easy, but suddenly that felt like a hard pill to swallow.

Awake, in a bed he could hardly call his own, hours before anyone else would move into place, he missed his parents. The Makimura household were all very welcoming, but he missed them all the same. The way his father would call him down if he was taking a little too long to get ready for school, and the way his mother kissed him on the cheek before he left; her perfume mixing in the air with the smell of spiced meat every Friday night; the detergent they grew into a habit of using: all part of an impenetrable routine they’d fallen into.

But everything could change without enough force.

“Duty calls,” his father had told him, squeezing the space between his neck and his collarbone to rattle him around like a doll. And then, almost as quickly as he’d grown up, they left hand-in-hand to climb into the family car with the rest of their belongings, and drove their way to the company carpark, situated right next to the airport.

But, somehow, Ryo sensed that. He sensed Akira’s teetering sense of family and belonging, and just how much of himself Akira was trying to swallow down—the obnoxious notion of doing it all by yourself, and totally not missing your parents because you’re a teenage boy undergoing the most critical stages of puberty, seemed all the more obnoxious when he watched it in real time. When his parents would return to Japan, their dear son might be a foot taller than both of them. His voice could be deeper than the jet engines that carried them away from him, and his oily, acne-ridden skin could be just another embarrassing table-top story for an awards ceremony later down the line.

Secretly glad he was the one allowed to watch this all unfold instead, Ryo offered his bed on the way home, inviting him to stay the night.

And Akira, having decided that if he does not force these tectonic plates to budge, the volcanic ash would burst between them, nodded a little too eagerly.

They took the long way home, past the river and through the suburbs where they used to play as kids, under the maze of telephone wires that hung dangerously low in places, taut in others, with muddy shoes dangling precariously. Once, Akira had asked what they signified, hearing that they were some sort of signal for gang-territory wars. Ryo had shrugged in response, telling him that anyone could throw their shoes over wires, so it couldn’t be too important. Nothing easy to tamper with is ever on full display.

Funny, Akira had thought to himself. The shape of Ryo’s body was so hard to outline when he always wrapped himself in that coat.

After an hour of walking, Akira sat close to the middle of the Asuka’s couch, watching a dull movie with a lukewarm plot, far too riddled with loud action scenes to follow. He let his head fall back to the curve of the pillow, and watched the lights from the screen dance on the ceiling instead.

Then, almost as if he had been possessed, he let his head fall to the left.

Ryo didn’t even flitch. His heart didn’t stop, nor did he hold his breath – not in the way Akira had when he felt the soft fabric of Ryo’s shirt shift over his shoulder. Another loud bang on screen. He opened his mouth to force the air he’d been holding in to escape him. Gunshots. He followed Ryo’s eyelashes as they scarcely moved, while the dull climax of the movie raged on in the background.

As the credits danced their white characters over a black screen, neither of them got up. Akira wondered if Ryo was scared to move in the same way he was, and quickly decided that he was definitely not. Ryo wasn’t Akira. That’s what always made their friendship so outlandish and weird.

If Akira was feeling it, Ryo was not, and it was hard to pinpoint exactly what Akira was feeling, but he wished they worked a little more in sync. Wished, for once in his life, that Ryo was as bashful as he was, and then dispelled the thought as quickly as it came.

   Lying in Ryo’s bed again, they both stared up at the painted white ceiling. For the age of the mansion, Akira was glad Professor Asuka had a slight sense of home décor and was kind enough to change the palette of Ryo’s room to something a little more airy. Had the ceiling been that cedar wood instead, maybe it would feel suffocating.

“How is the Makimura family treating you?” Ryo asked into the silence, almost as if it wasn’t even for Akira.

Pause. Think. “They’re all nice… Miki especially. She’s so welcoming, even though she probably doesn’t really want a guy her age in her house.” Oh yeah, talk too much. That’ll win him over. “It feels like I’m crashing into her life, but it’s nice… to meet people who will let you do that.”

Wordlessly, Ryo reached to Akira’s left hand with his right, lacing their fingers together, bringing their hands up to lie in the valley between the pillows. Without daring to move, Akira listened to the sounds of Ryo’s breathing slow down until he was asleep, then, for a fleeting of second, touched his mouth to Ryo’s knuckles, calloused against his soft lips.

Ryo and Akira. Akira and Ryo. They would always be a pair, drafted onto Noah’s ark and plunged into the cold world.

   Sitting in the back of Ryo’s humming car, Akira ran the story through his head again. His father must have been standing right next to Ryo’s bed, right where Ryo’s eyes would drift when he was too shy to look at Ryo’s sleeping form, or too nervous share the sight of the ceiling with him.

Huh. Maybe if Akira wasn’t such a coward, he wouldn’t be thinking about how Professor Asuka’s shoes must have dug into the soft rug next to Ryo’s bed. Maybe if he had turned over to face Ryo more than once in his life, or took up Ryo’s offer to take up ‘as much of the bed as he wanted,’ he could be thinking about something else right now.

If he were someone else, maybe he would have laid his arms flat across the length of the bed, inviting Ryo to push him out of the way and back onto his side. If he were someone else, maybe all he would have done was rolled over, laughed nervously when Ryo raised his eyebrow at their proximity, but let him sleep there all the same.

Out of the window, he kept a vague eye out for any passing police cars chasing him down for his American license in place of a functioning Japanese one.

I wish we were closer, he thought to himself, chin digging into his palm. The backseat felt so wide. He didn’t realise how long a year felt until the seat next to Ryo was filled, not with a new best friend or a pretty girl, but with the blade his father had held over his sleeping body.

   Sabbath was…

It’s difficult to explain something so ferociously new. When it’s designed specifically to be forgotten, to be just another crazy night at the bar, it only makes the process of registering it in the first place harder.

Sabbath was fine, is what Akira told himself before they had even spoken to anyone there. It had to be fine, because Ryo was standing right next to him, and he seemed to know what he was doing. Ahead of them, a vibrant, pulsating crowd throbbed in exoticisms and the brightly coloured pill, forced into his mouth by a waitress who hardly knew what was about to happen, swam down his throat. There must have been some sort of metamorphosis taking place inside of him, his insides burning hot and his head feeling heavy—placebo, perhaps.

And standing there long enough let the thud of music drown itself out had to be worth something; noise cancelling noise, no overlay or crescendo necessary. The hyperactive bounce of electro-jitters crying through every speaker in sight, louder and louder, eating up the space in the air, and the crowd enveloped around it. They’d all swallowed more than Akira could ever dream of in just one night. Of course, they loved it. Maybe he could too.

In his hand, Akira felt the familiar brush of Ryo’s fingertips, looking down to see him push a drink into his hand. “It’s important that you drink this. Don’t leave a single drop behind,” he cooed, guiding Akira’s hand up so the glass met his lips.

Ever-trusting, ever-nervous Akira nodded his head and took a sip – disgusting – then decided the down the glass in one go. He’d heard that it was the most effective way of doing things from guys in his class, gloating about how much they could take out of one cup. The more you take at once, the easier it is – “It helps if you forget what you’re actually taking, you know?”

Help seemed like a funny word for the moment; subjective, of course, based what you actually want to achieve. For something to be helped, it must have a goal in sight.

Ryo’s goal was to summon a demon and create a Devilman, using Akira as bait and a host for one.

To an extent, Akira shared the same goal, but the sounds and smells of the club were so overwhelming, he wondered if his desires really ended just there. The buzzwords for the evening were impulse and control. Abandon everything you’ve learnt in school and society, taste the dangerous side of life. Follow that dirty human instinct of yours, that corrupt thing which forces us to behave. Kill, fuck, drink, desire became such a currency for transaction. He could lose his virginity, or commit his first offense of property damage, or his first homicide.

So, when Ryo sat on one of the velvet red couches outlining the room, Akira followed without invitation. He shakily took one step after another, lowering himself next to Ryo, the full length of their legs pressing against each other. There were, to be fair, a million and one excuses for this, so he didn’t need to busy himself and think of one. He didn’t need to worry about Ryo’s arm sliding across the top of the seat to lie behind Akira’s shoulders, or his fingers pressing into his side, pulling them together.

Next to them, a couple were having sex, maybe more or a quid pro quo which seemed to have little to do with each other existing and more what they could provide in their shared space. Admittedly, he caught himself staring, his eyes bending around the curve of Ryo’s nose to see what new and exciting engagement they’d assumed with each passing second. Hanging above them suspended on two ribbons, another pair was having sex. In fact, the wider Ryo opened his eyes, the more he realised he was in the minority—those not participating in anything more than nervous footsies.

But Ryo could remedy that. He always could. And as Akira turned to his right to meet Ryo’s eyes to ask him an empty question, Ryo pressed his lips against Akira’s open mouth.

Yes, he could fool himself into thinking it was a kiss.

The pill being pushed between Ryo’s lips and onto Akira’s tongue suggested otherwise, but the boiling tin can set to explode around them pumped a shot of adrenaline into Akira’s shaking hands. His green school jacket felt absurdly tight around him, and he tried to shrug it off, letting Ryo’s arms drop to hook his slender fingers under the collar to pull it halfway off him, until they grew tired and snaked back up and into his messy hair.

Dizzy, Akira told himself to relax, shrugging his shoulders up to lift his hands high enough to reach the space between Ryo’s neck and collarbones, and wrap his hands around it. The childish mockery of intimacy was just enough for Akira. Maybe everyone else in the club had hit puberty a little earlier than him, and hadn’t been mentally chasing their best-friend-stroke-childhood-crush around the world as he discovered these gruesome secrets of their collective history. Maybe he really was the only one who apprehensively flicked through cheap porno magazines just to see what he was missing, too attached to intoxicating dreams of his closest ally to let them go.

Maybe everyone in the club was just so far removed from humanity in the first place, so their eventual demise wouldn’t be such a tragedy—no, he couldn’t bring himself to believe that sort of reckless lie. Everyone in this room was about to die. Painfully, painlessly, it hardly mattered. Akira himself hardly knew what would happen when Amon decided it was time to rear his ugly head. He hardly even knew if it would hurt him at all (though perhaps one might assume that, yes, obviously, it’ll hurt… but then the question leads to where?). Does it hurt? For something intangible to be ripped out of you? Happiness and sadness, loss and victory, love… and love and love and love? Would he feel them torn out of him?

(Define hurt for a second, please. Is this really something he’d really never faced before?)

To the sound of Ryo humming into his mouth, pulling him by the waist to sit in his lap, Akira wondered exactly what it would be like to be a Devilman. A Devilman. Just the title felt silly, like an underdeveloped villain from someone’s diary. A degenerate version of an actual superhero—well, a Devilman wasn’t a superhero at all. It was just a fickle creature, undecided as to who exactly it was and what exactly it should be.

And heroes… feel. They do feel, don’t they? They must. Guided by no one apart from their own righteousness, surely it is within the genes of a superhero to feel so intensely about the world.

So, quietly, as he closed his eyes and lied to himself that the kiss Ryo was giving him was true and sincere the way he wished it to be, he reminded himself who this was all for. If Ryo told him, in his Devilman form, to lick dirt off his shoe, he has to do it. This is all for Ryo. This is all so Ryo can save the world from untimely peril. For this to work out, Ryo was going to play the part of his moral compass.

And maybe it was a good thing after all. Ryo always seemed to lust after the dangers of life, drawn to anarchism and thunder. If he became a Devilman, if he lost his sense of self, would Ryo prefer him like that? If his body held everything Ryo seeks, then surely it would be a perfect way of keeping him close. Oh, to change the self to fit a pre-designed mould sounded somewhat neurotic when he thought about it like that, but how much was really being changed, when he felt as though he had spent his whole life trusting Ryo’s judgement and following his beck and call. What harm would one more deal be?

Maybe Akira wasn’t so good at this whole ‘getting out of his head’ thing he was supposed to be doing right now.

To Ryo, outwardly at least, the way he was acting right now was him losing control of himself, wasn’t it? Ryo didn’t know that this wasn’t something that had never crossed Akira’s mind. This wasn’t animalistic instinct; it was human instinct, closeted for years out of the fear of taboo rejection. To trust Ryo without really understanding, to accept any glass of water without checking for chemicals inside, was hardly new.

“I missed you… I’m glad you came back,” he murmured into Ryo’s open mouth, feeling his hands gripping his shirt under his school jumper, soaking up the unsightly sweaty from his hormonally crazed body. To act on his own deep-seated hunger, that had only ever thrived during 5AM winter mornings and the setting summer sun, alone in his room under the sheets. Was that enough?

“I need you,” he thought he heard in response.

Then, maybe this was fine. He was allowed to abandon his humanity for five minutes to indulge his passions (his passion, singular), before giving up all elements of his real humanity for good. Ryo dragged a kiss down his chin, sliding his mouth under Akira’s soft jaw. Human instinct based on the heart—could those things co-exist? That stupid striped shirt of Ryo’s felt so soft under Ryo’s fingertips, ghosting over the neckline, and he couldn’t even bring himself to look down at his high-waisted trousers folding between them.

It was fine. The feeling of Ryo’s legs under his body, slightly muscled from whatever it is he spends his free time doing, was a reminder of just that. The brown triangles of his jacket collar leapt up from his figure, teasing the sides of Akira’s neck to welcome him into Ryo, his best friend, untouchable and frightening to walk past on the street.

Ryo pulled away for a moment, smiling up at him. Reaching his hand around, he brushed the hair behind Akira’s ear, as though he were a fated stranger, and swiped his thumb across his cheek two times, the once more.

“He should be here soon…” he pondered aloud, close enough to Akira’s ear for him to catch the breathiness behind his façade. He was right. The party was in full swing, which meant conditions were perfect. The demons would arrive soon, and Akira Fudo would die.

But he was happy all the same. Putting himself in Ryo’s safe hands, knowing he wouldn’t really… die… he’d just… develop? It was hard to say exactly what was going to happen, and maybe he would die, but he wasn’t too concerned about that anymore. It was Ryo’s time of need and, as always, he would step up to his side. He hoped, as Ryo’s hands moved down to his hips and pushed Akira to take his place on the couch while he stood up, that they would never be too far apart in the new world they were constructing. That a demon-free world would be kinder to them than one riddled with anger and punishment. Hoped that Ryo would still look at him for a second too long in class, that his hands would still linger in Akira’s messy hair at night.

Hoped that the pill would kick in soon, and he wouldn’t have to remember any of this.

In front of him, Ryo bent over and picked up a blue bottle, thick at the bottom with a thin top. Swishing it around for a moment, he drank what was left in it, then smashed it on the ground.

“Let’s bring some life to this party.”

And so it went, the beginning of the end.

Where the sky kissed down onto the horizon, Midori knew that it would soon start fading to black. The insides of the school would be swept to silence as the light was to be pushed back to the western front, and he would follow the breadcrumb trail home.

Not that it was bad place to be—home was comfortable and warm, offering all the things school liked to pretend it did. Even when he’d sit long hours arranging the farm produce, standing at the till, and watching person after boring person struggle to find exact change, pretending he knew what each and every button on the cash machine actually did. His parents never scolded him either, just opting to show him such grating familial love that he stood no chance of pulling back from.

School was the opposite.

Shinobu was excitable. He wasn’t quite sure why he’d started talking to him- choosing Midori out of all the other students to drop every word that came out of that giant mouth onto- but he wasn’t about to complain. If his parents saw him leaving for one road, while Shinobu the other, maybe they’d stop asking him such annoying questions about his social status. He was tall. And no one bullies the tallest kid in the grade- no matter how much he might beg for it.

Really, this was the better solution to anything. Sit with Shinobu at lunch; learn how to put out fires when no one was looking. It was simple enough plan not to collapse in on itself, and Midori watched as it came to coil around and around itself into daily routine.

And he had no protests. School was school, a surface to stick onto until someone dragged you off by the neck.

The other groups were welcoming enough too. He stopped telling them that he’d accidently signed up for the course after Wataru, an upperclassman, had told him that it was fate at work. “Like how once, I took the part of the antagonist in the Summer play, I- too- found myself in those stars! There is nothing to fear about the unknown, for it is better than you, and I, and even he who claims eternal life..!”

‘He’ being Rei, who came in only to complain about the loud noise against his aging ears. When Wataru saw him approach, he presented Midori like a peculiar looking rock a child picked up from the beach, and Rei commented something that the other two could only pretend to vaguely understand. “Young man…” something, “you must understand,” something, “destiny does not play around,” something else, regurgitated lines from those cartoons they all used to watch when they were younger, but no one said anything. Midori left as clueless as he had come, vowing to stay as far away from the third years as he could get.  

By this point, winter had already grown on the thermometers, dragging mercury down to its icy grave. For him, this season only ever meant fewer customers during his shift. The sun would fall early and he, in a reminiscent daze, would take five times longer to get home, and this year it meant he would have officially been a member of the idol course for a few months now.

Long, tiring months he didn’t want to look back on too much before pushing his head into the soft back of the plush grocery store mascot. An oddly shaped creature, a physical form of the design he and his parents made when they were much younger.  

But recently, the cogs had been turning. Shinobu was trying to recruit members for his clan of sorts, telling Midori over lunch that it was simplyimperative that he was able to grow his numbers. That you didn’t know who or what could pose a threat to their safety, and he needed to be at thepeak of physical fitness if he were to protect their class, the school, Ryuseitai, beloved Midori.

Overhearing this, Chiaki jumped in from a few meters back. He’d taken it up on himself to sort out the wires that someone had tangled, probably his own doing- but Midori didn’t want to get involved in that. “If you’re looking for physical fitness, you should definitely join the basketball club! We do that- that jumping stuff, yeah?” While Chiaki was stuttering in his speech, Midori looked back to him- the cords having taken a firmer grasp around each other whilst they withered to defeat in his hands.

“I can’t do that! We have specialist skills, those that only history and heritage pass down. Basketball may be good when you’re fighting with a rubber ball, but only education and patience can win on the real battle field!”

Midori angled his head up, closing his eyes and sighing quietly as Shinobu rambled on. Being a ninja, if it could really be considered that, seemed like the worst type of preoccupation to have.

“Midori-kun,” Shinobu announced. “From now on, while I’m busy with my duties, I would like to request that you walk home with Taichou-dono!” Leaving no space for question or complaint, he nodded to himself keenly, jumping up from where he sat to stretch out his legs.

Soon enough talk of practice flooded in (uninvited in its own home). The others walked in and Midori didn’t try to throw the conversation back to where he’d fallen in, feeling the nudges from Chiaki against his side when Kanata attempted to rearrange positions for, at least, the thousandth time. But he had no spine to swing, no sword to unshealth, and so the machine powered itself as it always did.

Chiaki walked a little further than Shinobu, and Midori found himself wondering why he’d never asked to walk home with him before. If anything, Chiaki was far more the person to push his way through the crowd and catch up with them- but he never had done. For what reason Midori never cared to find out, imagining the conversation that’d they’d have to have before and after. It was the type of suffocating conversation you’d sooner jump off a bridge than be faced with, let alone have it while you’re walking home during the abnormal darkness that was a January 5PM.

What he had found though, was that night was cliché, this awfully embarrassing state of mind where you sit in silence and pray to the powers that may be that nothing interrupts it.

Of course, someone would. And it was glaringly obvious that this someone would be Chiaki, even before he’d opened his mouth.

Today they’d taken a detour. Chiaki mentioned something- Midori had stopped listening at some point or another- about how tonight was the clearest night of the whole year. Not much of a feat, for they were hardly through it in the first place, but a feat to the upperclassman all the same. He’d led the other to some kind of park near the old field, one that used to be dominated by farmers but had become some kind of public wasteland with benches placed awkwardly around the perimeter. If you had to walk a dog, you’d go there. Likewise, if you had an old washing machine that no one would buy off of you, you’d go there too.

“Y’know, Takamine.” Midori felt the thump from Chiaki’s falling to the bench in his bones. “It can’t really be that bad, can it?” He held his hands to the back of his head; a pillow to rest on.

Midori didn’t really know what Chiaki was referring to, or trying to at least, so he stayed still. The warm breath from the back of his throat became visible in the open air, water vapour turning into millions upon millions of finite crystals.

Reaching over to the back of Midori’s head with one arm, and dropping his other to his side, Chiaki angled Midori’s face towards his own. “If you really don’t want to be here, like you’d rather drop dead than stay another day, you can go.”

There was a hint of pause in his voice, one that Midori quickly, though diffidently, settled on not to looking into. The thought of getting emotionally invested in small details seemed like it’d only exist sustainably in a world heavily governed by paper people, standing on their fold-out podiums as the pages of the book flipped over.

Midori dropped his gaze. Not as though he had met Chiaki’s in the first place, but more so now. “It’s not that,” he muttered, as monotone and quiet as he always had done. “If I drop out now, it’d be a lot of… grief to deal with. Finding a new course to fill the block, catching up with the new one, explaining to people why I dropped out of music…” Midori found himself trailing off, the backs of Chiaki’s fingers still pushed lightly to the side of his face.

He didn’t pull away, for this all came naturally to him. Skin on skin contact: footballers slapping each other’s backs, brushing strangers’ hands at concerts, little girls kissing each other good luck, stray cats rubbing themselves to your leg for reclamation of whatever damned street the fabric of your second-hand clothes came from. He paid it no mind with the excuse that it was all merely part of the natural sequence of events, those that made up the very core of Chiaki Morisawa.

As for Midori- not so much. The warmth felt like an invader, not a foreign one but a new one all the same, seeping past the weak barricade of skin and into his lungs, suffocating.

He remembered last sports day, when Chiaki had pushed himself too hard and sprained his right leg. How Midori had come into the infirmary to deliver a message from Tetora somehow resulting in him sitting there for longer, an hour and then some. The last puffs of the sun were heaved out as it finished its own marathon, and the two students slept, their chests rising and falling out of sync.  Other than the times he was young, and he’d have nightmares and ask to sleep with his parents, that was perhaps the first time he’d slept besides somebody else.

“So—,” Midori looked back to Chiaki, his face contorting with an ugly concoction of confusion streamlined against halfwit determination. “It’s a matter of effort? I can help if you want!” Pulling his hand away, Chiaki leant forwards. “We still need our star player on the basketball team anyway!”

“Well… yeah, but…” Chiaki lost his point in speech, head tilting up to find stars. “I don’t know, really. You’re a good member- a good player too- and I don’t think get how this was really a mistake.”

Now it was Chiaki’s turn to play the game; pretend he didn’t have the slightest of ideas as to how eye contact was to be held. Midori stayed quiet.

“You’re really tall,” Chiaki mused. “The girls must love you.” Pause. “Girls love a lot of things, not just looks, but they don’t not love looks.” Pause again. He lifted the same arm he’d used before and wrapped it around Midori’s neck, yanking him over wit sudden voice to meet his chest. “But I’m totally the same! Looks aren’t everything, but the closer you get to someone, the more you love about them- right?”

“I want to die.”

Throwing his head back, Chiaki laughed against the rickety panels of the bench. Though Midori struggled against his hold, morbidly paranoid that the wood could easily snap in two, it was no easy task to break free from someone who actually kept an eye on their muscular physique. Holding Midori still, he commented, “You and Akehoshi are both riots! If only the rest of the basketball club were into singing,” before throwing a bright smile.

Moments passed. He wasn’t quite sure how many, but certainly more than what should’ve been allowed. Chiaki brought up his other hand, running his fingers through Midori’s hair until the very last echo of styling was pulled out. He looked bedridden with illness, and Chiaki let himself quietly slip into wondrous debate as to whether or not someone with eyes that bright could ever really look that sick.

In a gravely childish way, Chiaki was jealous of Midori. A first year but perhaps more appropriate than Izumi to be the male model type, somehow uncomfortable with the way the bricks had been laid. Then he felt something biting at him, the very edges of that desire he’d caged away so long ago, and he pulled back, hesitantly.

Pulling out his phone, Chiaki hummed. “It’s getting late- super late even. You might think I’m being silly, but I stayed out way too much as a first year; now I’m basically racing to get my grades up!”

He held out his hand to Midori, trying to pull him down from cloud-whatever and back to the park with the rusting machinery watching their every moves.

Looking to him, Midori stood up too. Only a few centimetres difference in height and no one ever noticed things like that. Midori had long legs and Chiaki had back muscles that flexed under his shirt, and he liked taking it off during class because someone always commented.

They walked back in near silence, Chiaki spitting in the can to keep it full. He asked about Midori’s classes, if he had any friends in them, told him how cool it was to live right above where he worked. And when they approached his work-house, as Chiaki had so poorly deemed it, he kept his eyes to the ground in his fair biddings.

Every time Neil’s eyes fell to the overflowing bookshelvespushed to the far back of the crèche, he subconsciously compared them to theones he knew well. Despite not being much of an elitist himself, there was an unshakable difference between those he recalled and those that he hears through his office walls.

 “Wouldn’t that just be due to the fact you’re… from a different time, Captain?” Brett mused, rustling for a pen he’d momentarily misplaced. “I was led to believe that things passed by mouth are often altered as the community and culture changes as well.”

 Neil nodded to his thoughts, and vaguely to Brett himself. For it was true that years were mere catalysts for change of all sorts- from evolution to planet alignment- but for him they felt like messy scoops of days pushed and pulled from his memory. The lengthening of what lays ahead only makes the past and present seem far more… fleeting, he presumed, as to not overwhelm himself with thoughts of boundless prospect—not that 100 or so years hadn’t already given him a steel shell to things of such nature.

 Brett held the pen between his forefinger and thumb; found and returned to its’ rightful home. He looked at Neil in the same way he’d watch one of the orphans struggle through a maths question. Painstakingly.

 “Really Captain, I wouldn’t concern yourself with it. Especially not while you cast such a shadow of authority over everyone here. Your history is something that should bring you strength and light in times of dark, right?”

 Turning to Brett, Neil hummed short and silent agreement. He was technically correct; and even if he wasn’t, in comparison to Neil’s lifespan, it would be only the time it takes to walk down a busy street until he too passes away, leaving Neil alone. Again. “Right- oh.” The topic was begging to be changed, “Speaking of light. Was any shone on the recent case in the town of Proteus?”

 Finding comfort in his work, Brett shook his head and proceeded to answer in a way Neil would have to ask him to explain once more in a few measly hours. This was either because he wanted to hear Brett’s voice again in a way that would remind him of the untimely nature of youth, or because he wanted to colour in a little more of his memory with the present moment in which life was nothing more than friends and acquaintances. He wasn’t quite sure which. Sometimes when Iris spoke to him in long breaths of exhaustion from work, he would try and remember everything she said so he could write it down and remember it well. Sometimes when his co-workers would invite him out for drinks, he would order only water to savour what incidences he would try to inscribe into his memory.

  He wasn’t quite sure why. If you asked him if he was concerned, he would say it stood on neutral ground with him, and that his thoughts right now were deeply encrusted within his busy line of work. But like many have said, human and dragon alike; we all want to remember our lives as they are, and as they have been.

 Neil was not desperate to die, he was desperate to remember. Sometimes he did think about the effects of him simply picking up a gun, placing it between his eyes, and shooting, but the outcome was predictable. He would be, inevitably, fine. His clothes would need washing. The other dragons in the force would be concerned about how fit he is to work. The orphans would cry from the loud noise. Brett would give him the same look as before. Life would go on, and the earth wold keep spinning, and another case would come in.

 Sometimes he feared that he was perhaps becoming too used to this cycle of repetition; the same actions and duties following each day in merely different locations with different situations. It was a harmless fear, if anything, for there would be no time in his life where he would have to forcefully abandon it due to mortal issues, like old age or health.

 Years passed quickly for Brett, but quicker for Neil, and soon Brett stood at what ultimately was an unchanged height, at 19 years old. His birthday party wasn't much of one; the children giving him homemade gifts while his co-workers went above and beyond-- so he said. Neil rubbed a thumb against his cheek and commented on how far he's come since they found him, before sharing what details he remembered of that place that sat so predominately in Brett's memory, and then left to use the toilet before his co-workers’ eyes started watering.

 It was for the best.

 When he returned, the room's atmosphere had changed, but Brett was the same as he had always been.

 This was also for the best.

 Spurred onwards from this celebration, months later would fall Iris’ birthday, then various other members of staff and orphans. One mentioned how they never celebrated his own birthday, and suddenly it was a very real thing that he only smiled and nodded to. Blue banners (and other colours, but blue was clearly the most overriding one of all) that spelt out varying degrees of happy birthday- with letters painted over and crossed out- were strung around the work place, and Neil smiled and thanked the orphans for their hard work, only to later that night spend his time with the other members of the force trying to get paint off the rug. They, too, gave him a pat on the back and a thanks for all his hard work; Neil smiled and told them that they were the ones he should be thanking for keeping the force as flourishing as it is today. This isn’t a one man effort, of course.

 That night, Neil dreamed about what it must be like to be dead. He saw calm waves of silence beneath his feet and a sense of impending darkness. Really, it felt just like how life had: eternal; undesirable. Woken by his consciousness at the earliest peak of the morning sun, Neil rolled out of bed and sat on the edge. Beyond the police station, there were a cluster of homes that belonged to each officer, respectively. Pulling back the blinds covering his window, he could see Brett was already awake (something he had made a habit of upon first arriving as a young boy), and all other officers were asleep.

 He got dressed, if not quickly but messily, and crept his way into the main building as quietly as he could.

 William, who was only staying in their hands for a week for his final part in formal training, was standing out in the hallway as if he was waiting for something, snapped his head across when he heard the hushed footsteps of the captain. “I—I promise I wasn’t doing anything bad, Captain Neil!”

 Slightly confused, but not awake enough to inquire deeply into the matter, Neil bent down onto one knee in front of the young dragon. “There’s nothing to be worried about, William,” he assured. May I ask what you’re doing up so early? As a growing dragon, it’s important to get a good night’s rest so that you may grow to control your powers.”

 William was already making good progress in his development of skills, but that was a fact outside of the situation. Neil and William both knew this well.

 “Ah… Oh, I was asleep but…” He paused for a short moment, opened his mouth to talk, and paused once again. “I had a bad dream. It was about someone a bit like me! But not… quite. It was a dream eating… animal of some kind, and a little girl kept asking it to come eat her dream, but… it wasn’t satisfied with just the nightmare. So instead he—” pausing” again, William looked left, then he looked right. In something akin to a whisper of the winds themselves, he muttered, “He… ate her hopes and ambitions as well. She was nothing more than… um… nothing, I guess.”

 Looking displeased with himself for talking so much, William averted eye contact with his senior and instead found comfort in letting his vision run along the floorboards amongst the dust that had collected overnight.

 Neil gave him as sympathetic of a smile as he could muster. He had researched an animal of folklore that was similar to that of William’s dream; a spirit that was created out of leftover parts of all other life, one who feasted on nightmares of those who did not desire them. Yet, rightly so, there was a twist. Some were manic with hunger and would eat dreams of all types. Aspirations and hope would stay no longer once they had been devoured by such a beast.

 Unsurprisingly, this was not something he wanted to tell William. Fear-mongering in children was not something he took pride in doing.

 He kept his smile spotless towards the boy, and told him, “Creatures such as those aren’t very common nowadays. Surely it’s a blessing to know you come from such a noble heritage, no?”

 William’s eyes brightened ever so slightly; a child whose naivety is his best trait is one easiest to convince. “Yeah…!”

 “Now, ah,” Neil shifted his gaze to follow up the corridor to check for any lost souls. “Rest a little longer and I’ll see you a little after work. By the way, are your lessons going smoothly?”

 The younger took to describing how the teacher looks at him with eyes that feel far too soft for someone like him, and how he’s glad he’s going to go home soon to see Sophia again, and that he’s very thankful for being offered this short class because he was worried that something might suddenly happen and his powers would go completely haywire. Then he opened the crèche’s door- patterned with various drawings the younger ones had done- and disappeared.

 Afterwards, the day past post-haste, though perhaps it was passing like so while the conversation was taking place regardless. The sun had begun to set when Iris told him about the new case she was working on, and about how she was getting slowly angrier at how incompetent some of the lower-down officers were. Neil reassured her that they were merely trying to keep up with her fast analysis. Officer Ashberry only half-heartedly agreed.

 The sun rose once more. William had long left and Brett’s physical age had caught up with Neil’s visual one. Together, they looked like long-time friends bronzed by the golden sheath of age. Apart, they were co-workers.

 Teobaldo Leonhearts had, apparently, died. The funeral was short-lived and hushed, and the few people who did show up gave unsure, shaky praise to his rotting body lying in its casket. Neil rubbed Efina’s hand as she told him how unexpected it was, and that she’s scared for the future. He offered her a temporary place to stay while she gets back on her feet, but she politely declined, proclaiming she had to see the rest of the world.

 “There’s no need to rush yourself, but I’ll respect your decision with all my heart. Drop by if you need anything, of course. You’ll know where to find me.”

 Efina grinned, as did Neil back at her. His ribs crushed and tore into his heart when he remembered that he will witness her death as well. He did not frown. Teobaldo Leonheart’s colourless face had been crafted into an uncharacteristic smile.

 At the end of the year, Neil would visit a graveyard of his choosing. He was not one for higher deities (for if they really are up there, would it be his own sin keeping him alive instead?), but oddly he was one for prayer.

 This year, like all others, he returned to the previous captain’s hometown, knelt before her grave, and pushed his hands together in silence.