There is no paradise for you to escape to.

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i. all the earth was before you

When you were young, it was an unspoken, back-of-the-mind, fantastical daydream of yours that the world would go to shit. 

In that dream, the sky would stretch for as far as the eye could see. Brilliant, cloudless blue, with a white-hot sun shining down on unsullied sheets of snow. Endlessly flat, except for the distant curve of the apparently un-flat earth (a groundbreaking, prehistoric scientific discovery that you could never really bring yourself to care less about in third period geography—especially when preoccupied by thoughts of the broken-down heater back home, or the water that would soon stop running because the bills hadn’t been paid on time—but one you always learned to appreciate in the dream because there, terms such as asset and liability and budget had never existed). In that dream, you lie on the ground, spread your arms and legs before drawing them back to your sides over and over and over until you are permanently imprinted into the world. Wetness does not seep into your padded jacket, and your gloveless hands are never cold. 

In that dream, no buildings are left standing—they are brought to the ground. 

There, the only discrepancy that remains is the one between sky and land. There is no above and below, not between the crevices of the Earth, the dilapidated houses scattered on your street and the multilevel, gated estates occupied by your classmates. Not between people, not between your father and his college friends that remained in Tokyo with their high-status jobs, not between the letters printed on his official documents and theirs, not between the tatami floor and the wooden stool that your father’s feet climbed and thrashed above before finally, finally going still.

For a long time, at least, that was how you imagined it had happened: littered with spaces between movement, punctuated by heavy breaths, trembling hands. And even then, even with all those moments in between filled with terror and agony and dread, none of it had been enough for him to stop himself from jumping.

You hadn’t been enough. 

For a long time, you were angry. It was only three-hundred and ninety-two days after he’d died that you laid unmoving on the floor where the first responders had unwrapped the fraying noose from his body, and felt something wet on your cheek. 

“How scared were you, dad?” you had whispered, for no one to hear. 

In that dream, your father is still alive. 

ii. and it ran with rivers that none had ever stepped in twice

When Aki is eleven years old, the world goes to shit. 

Blinding white light, mushroom clouds, human skeletons glowing through skin upon blast impact. Television and radio screens flashing static and robotic warnings minutes before destruction, unable to offer any guarantee except for mutually assured destruction. In the aftermath: blazing fires beneath dark, overcast skies filled with falling ash and smoke and soot that would block out the sun. 

This is how the Hayakawa Aki of November 17, 1986, and all the years preceding, imagines the end of the world.

But come November 18, 1986:

Brilliant blue sky, endless plains of white. Taiyo’s pearls of laughter drifting through frigid winter air. Scattered footprints, hands shaping snow into powder fist-missiles, and the muffled whump of them disintegrating upon impact. 

His little brother’s voice had been colored with something pleased and wondrous that Aki did not understand. And as he spoke, he had curled the reddened tips of his fingers and grinned in pure awe.

It’s cold, he had said.

“If you get sick,” Aki had replied, drawing his hands away from where they had been resting on his knees, “I’ll be the one to get in trouble.”

Taiyo’s smile had faded then, giving way to something crestfallen. As though he had been reminded all at once that those hands—the ones he had been marveling at just moments ago—were hands that tired too easily, hands belonging to a body that never seemed to quite keep up. The expression took hold so quickly it made Aki wonder how many times it needed to have happened for it to look like instinct. 

Something in his chest squeezed.

And for some reason, before he knew it:

“Your hands won’t get cold if” —he had found himself beginning to ask, except it wasn’t so much of a question as much as it was an olive branch, dusted with the same flicks of Hokkaido snow littering their jackets. Something rare, something theirs— “we play catch, right?”

If only he hadn’t— 

Taiyo had waved to him before stepping inside to get their things, eyes bright. Only thirty-eight steps away, maybe thirty-two for Aki. And only thirty-two steps away, Aki had paused, then waved back. On his lips, a hint of a smile. 

 If only—

Unnatural, roaring gale. The sheer force of it had ripped the house from its roots, tearing through everything he had ever known. Wooden beams snapping, glass shattering. Before he can blink, all of it is swallowed by white.

This is how the Hayakawa Aki of November 18, 1986, and every day onwards, remembers the end of the world.

iii. it told you, “no man is an island”

As a devil hunter working in Public Safety, Aki has been told many things.

Namely, to embrace insanity (Kishibe), trust no one (Kishibe), tag along to all the singles’ mixers he can because there’s no guarantee tomorrow won’t be your last (Nomo), fight unpredictably (Kishibe), know the value of one’s own humanity (Kato), transfer to the private sector (Himeno). 

But, first:

“Forget about it and move on,” Kishibe tells him.

That day in the graveyard, his stare had been fixed somewhere in the distance, past rows and rows of identical tombstones. A long swig from his flask had left a sliver of amber liquid seeping down the scarred cleft of his cheek as he continued, “You’ll get yourself killed if you keep wasting time on what-ifs.”

Aki had stared at his mentor’s crouched form, squatted on the crumbled foundation of a long-worn cross, then down at his own hands: marred violet and deep green from hours and hours of relentless sparring. 

Forget about it and move on. 

Forget about it all. Forget about the house, the home he had torn away from him. Forget about his parents, his mother and father, who, despite having cast stern looks at his insistence on playing outside, had in the end told him and Taiyo to have fun. Forget about Taiyo’s face, lit with joy and delight before he had been blown to dust particles indefinitely suspended in winter air. 

Sometimes, Aki used to wonder what might have happened if things had been different. If he had let Taiyo mould all the snowballs he liked, like a kid his age should have. If he had for once brought the glove and ball from the beginning, instead of stubbornly insisting on playing alone, all childish resentment for the worry and concern his parents poured into Taiyo, not him, never him—

“You aren’t special,” Kishibe had stated, and Aki had known he was speaking the truth because he had come to believe it too. “There’s hundreds of kids that join Public Safety every year because of the Gun. Most of them die within the year.”

Sometimes, he used to think about what would have happened if he had gone back into the house with Taiyo. If he hadn’t had to stand alone in the aftermath of everything—of everyone.

But that had been before.

That had been before he had cut grief into his being. Before he had let the guilt and fear and self-condemnation harden into something that burned to the touch—a purpose that branded him in thirty-five strokes, and the day he first laid eyes on the kanji, he had known it spelled “vengeance”.  

If Kishibe, in spite of his decades of experience, misunderstood something about the rookie under his training called Hayakawa Aki, it would be this:

Aki could never forget. But he had long abandoned mourning what could have been. 

This was because he had the now: he had been 18 years old then, soon eligible as a devil hunter at Public Safety where the average life expectancy for new hires was three years. He had been learning how to wield a sword, and would soon be proficient enough to use the weapon on future missions. His government file read that he was a graduate of Morikawa High, and before that Moiwa Chūgakkō, located in Hokkaido Prefecture. A victim of the November 18 Gun Devil attack. Below the section labeled “immediate family”, three red stamps: deceased, deceased, deceased. 

But most of all, Aki had no longer wondered what it would have been like if he had died in that house with the rest of his family because by then, he already had what would be—

Within the next twenty four hours, he would meet his first assigned partner. In two days, he would meet the Fox Devil and receive the ability to summon it in exchange for portions of his body. Based on its past record, the devil was vain and preferred attractive people, and he was apparently good-looking enough to likely be granted permission to use its strongest attacks. If he was lucky, the Curse Devil would also offer the terms of a contract. He would accept.

He would then track down the Gun Devil, and kill it.

By the time Aki looked back up from his curled fingers, he found Kishibe had already been watching him. 

“So?” he had asked, stare half-lidded. In it: something unreadable. “Your answer, boy.”

In the summer of 1994, Aki is a devil hunter in-training. He stands in a graveyard full of devil hunter corpses that he will visit many times in years to come. Taiyo is dead, his mother is dead, his father is dead. Everyone he has ever loved is dead, and there is nothing left of the world he once knew. 

“I don’t plan on dying yet,” he said. 

iv. did you know the bell of the gion shōja echoes the impermanence of all things?

Between afternoon and sunset, the skies over Yokohama turn indigo and the streets of its Chinatown glow neon. Vertical kanji displays run up the facades of multilevel restaurants, towering and densely competitive. By the time he and Himeno step out of the 24-hour dim sum parlor into the alley below, it already hosts a steady stream of salarymen under rows of silk lanterns and flashing letters. Deep orange-reds, golds, and jade greens coloring intricately tiled roofs to signage to multilevel paifang—everything and everything and more of everything, all at once. 

Himeno finds it hard to believe that the kind of sight Aki is currently presented with has only become familiar to him in the past year or so. He realizes only after he meets her that, despite having lived nearly half his life in the city, he was for the majority of his existence a stranger to urban life. 

Aki has only ever moved twice in his life, and the first time was a given in the way that relocation was a given for all Gun survivors in the post-Gun world. Something certain, definite like the fact that there was nothing left of their homes. Evacuation to temporary shelters or government-run relief camps were therefore a foregone conclusion. So was being checked by exhausted medical staff for fatal injuries, days of waiting, nights of muffled tears, countless official forms and cold locker rooms filled with bustling, naked bodies. Only after all of this and a fear-ridden waiting period of two weeks were they finally allowed to leave—to find someone, anyone who could and would be willing to take them in until they would stumble to their feet and find their place in society again. Relatives, close friends, even the rare family that volunteered to temporarily house a Gun victim for a large government stipend, usually on the condition that they fulfilled several mental health checks. 

But for the children and elderly who watched their families disappear before their eyes, there had never really been any choice. 

The ‘1811 Generation’ was what they were called in quiet murmurs, official documentation, and by angry politicians on television, a collective term for the children that had been orphaned by the attack on November 18. In the weeks and months after the Gun Devil unleashes its gunfire on Japan for 26 seconds, there is anger and confusion and blame transferred from shoulder to shoulder and back, heavy with the questions “is this war against the devils?”, “what will be done about these kids’ educations?”, “how will they be housed?”, and most importantly, “will it come out of our pockets?” until, finally, it lands on the government.

Less than a day after the Gun Devil kills Hayakawa Aki’s family, he is automatically registered as a ward of the state. Three weeks later, he and twenty-three other parentless adolescents from the countryside are taken in by an orphanage in the capital city of Hokkaido called Sapporo Kita-No-Hoshi. When he looks through the crowd for any familiar faces, he finds none. He finds only gaunt expressions far too old to be worn by children and far too similar to his own.

Now, eight years after Aki has devoted the remainder of his life to killing the Gun Devil, he realizes that it was inevitable that he would remain an inakamono in all ways but mind. 

In practice, he had gone to school. Had been on cordial terms with peers that he had referred to as ‘friends’ to orphanage counselors because this guaranteed a pass on monthly wellbeing checks. Had gotten decent grades, maintained a decent social standing—even if students grew quiet sometimes as he passed by, or tried very hard to pretend as if they weren’t glancing at him at any mention of devils or guns in a new manga they had bought over the summer, he had never been the target of any overt harassment. 

Then again, perhaps he had never stayed long enough for it to happen. 

Regardless, there were no hangouts, no cheap student discount tickets for movies scheduled at dawn, no late night karaoke sessions spent singing into mics capped in disposable fabric covers. At least, not for Aki. He increasingly found that this was not the norm—not for people his age, and especially not for other kids in the city. The orphanage was no exception. Some kids at Kita-No-Hoshi did it all, and more: drinking, smoking, sex, secretly hostessing as minors. Others were too traumatized by the memory of 18/11 to even handle the breeze in the backyard. 

Either way, Aki had become gradually aware that his values and desires and dreams—if they could even be called that anymore—were overwhelmingly single-minded in a way that others did not seem to be. Even compared to the children at the orphanage. That said, maybe there had been others like him; it was possible they just hadn’t ever been as noteworthy as the kids who were harder to handle. 

“They only go two ways,” he had heard a cafeteria lady sigh one day. “Either Gun-shocked and incapacitated, or they run off with their street friends before they’re even eighteen.” A few clangs had rung out as she unloaded a tray of stir-fried vegetables into a disposal bin. “Some of them are even younger than that, and they don’t even come to the orphanage for dinner anymore.”

“Look at all that food,” another said heavily. “What a waste.”

“But,” one of the younger volunteers had said, voice laced with hesitation, “not all of them are like that. Nishino-kun always eats his veggies, and Hayakawa-kun always says ‘thank you’—”

Behind the wall separating the cafeteria entranceway and the food station, Aki had gone still at the mention of his name.

“Nishino-kun vomits every time he sees meat,” the words are punctuated by a tired draw of breath. “Look, I’m not saying they’re bad kids. They need help, and that’s why we get up day after day to feed them—”

“And Aki-kun?” the youngest asked, her voice pitched near defiance. 

“Aki-kun…” 

A moment of silence. Then:

“Aki-kun is special.”

The conversation had replayed for days in his mind.

Hayakawa Aki had long stopped considering himself extraordinary. As a child, he thought that the pleased sound his mother would make at his finished homework, his ability to outrun all of his classmates, and the amazement in Taiyo’s gaze at him showed that he was exceptional. Then at eleven years old, the end of the world proved him wrong, and the discovery that the world did not end for others in the same way it did for him only served to strengthen the realization. Aki had been so firmly certain of the fact ever since—to the point where anyone so surely opposing it forced him to stare at the dark space above his bed for several nights, lining the ridges of the words in his mind as he tried to discern their meaning.

In the end, the conclusion he arrived at only reinforced what he already believed: it was that he could have become anyone, and anyone could have become him. He could have become Nishino, whose stomach was unable to stand the sight of anything other than fruits and vegetables because he kept seeing the bleeding insides of his sister spilled onto his meal tray. Or Himuro, who made a living off of selling fake IDs and cigarettes to students because the government grants wouldn’t be enough to make up for the fact that her parents hadn’t owned anything worthwhile to leave behind for their daughter. If Aki had been as close to one of the zones of impact on November 18th as Takahashi, his mind might not have been consumed by revenge but instead resorted to erasing its own memories of aimlessly scattered flesh to cope with the aftermath. 

And in another life, any one of them could have been omitted from the group of parentless children called the 1811 Generation. After all, 57,912 deaths was a large number, but it represented only 0.05% of Japan’s population. Ultimately, that was all it came down to: time and place and coincidence and luck. 

Still—under the fluorescent radiation of Yokohama Chinatown, filled with laughing office workers and countless identical leather briefcases, Aki briefly wonders how many of the twenty-three children at Kita-No-Hoshi became people with somewhere to be.

He thinks Takahashi would have liked the red lanterns.

“—Earth to Aki. Hello?”

He blinks. The world rematerializes around him: flashing signs, rubber shoe soles clicking on tiled street, vendors shouting greetings to passersby. And, behind him—

Himeno, face contorting with a drawn out yawn as she shrugs on her suit jacket. It flutters slightly as she draws it over her shoulders, momentarily blotting out the congregation of phosphorescent lights in the background. 

“So,” she says, stepping towards him off the ledge separating the back entrance of the restaurant from its compact side street, “explain to me why we can’t just clock out again?”

“...Mission report,” Aki says for the third time, casting a brief glance at the sky above. Not too dark yet. “Makima-san wasn’t at headquarters this morning because of a meeting.”

If it is currently earlier than 8 PM like he suspects, it’s likely she’ll still be in her office by the time they arrive. It would take about forty minutes at the very least via Shuto Expressway, but evening rush hour could push it past ninety; walking to the station and transferring lines to Kasumigaseki station could be faster.

Himeno blows out a long, audible breath, all mock despair. “Do we really need to go all the way there? We could just call,” she suggests as they exit into the bustling main street. “She knows how to pick up a telephone, right?”

“You can go home if you’d like,” he replies. “I can tell Makima-san that you weren’t feeling well.”

“Nope,” she waves off without pause. When faced with his questioning look at her sudden change of mind, she just offers him a grin. “I can’t leave my treasured kouhai to do all the work alone now, can I?”

The squeal of vending machines and hiss of oil are punctuated by short bursts of irasshaimase! as Aki leads a path for them through the thickening crowd. The commotion is soon underlain by Himeno’s quiet humming as she settles into a space by his side. 

He holds out the pack of gum in his palm.

“Hm?” Himeno’s eyes fall between his fingers. Squints slightly as she skims the words spelled on yellow cardboard packaging. “...‘Lotte Cool Mint’... ‘fresh breath’?” 

Then, she pouts—nose wrinkling, cheeks puffing out with a slight frown—as if she hasn’t made daydrinking and evening-drinking a daily habit on the job. “Aki-kun, I smell?”

“Of alcohol,” he tells her, although it’s admittedly difficult to smell anything other than the aroma of frying dumplings drifting over from the next stall. 

A long, theatrical sigh. “You usually don’t mind it…” she halts, then points a finger at him accusingly. It almost pokes him in the eye. “You just don’t want me to make you smell boozy in front of your favorite superior, do you?” she asks. 

“That’s not it,” he says. 

The words settle into noise. When he looks back over at Himeno, she seems to be contemplating. 

“Is it really that bad?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Is it always?”

“No.”

“So I smell nice most of the time?”

He ignores this. 

She smiles at his outright refusal to answer. “Okay, fiiiine,” she relents. Her movements lull slightly, as if thinking. Aki has learned to anticipate danger at the slow redeeming of something baiting and playful in her gaze. 

“Then,” she says, “what does she smell like?”

Aki glances at her, slightly taken aback. “Sorry?”

“Ma–ki–ma,” she enunciates the syllables, one by one. He feels something ignite at the mention of her name, slow and warm and feverish in his chest. “Makima-san. What does she smell like?”

She must be drunk, he thinks. 

“I wouldn’t know,” he states. 

Himeno peers at him suspiciously. Dark green hair falls into her visible eye, the iris bright blue and disbelieving. “No way. You must have gotten a whiff of her when she passed by at least once or twice.” He internally winces at the idea. She looks entirely too mischievous with the half-lidded mirth in her expression and sharp, upturned corner of her lips. “Aki, I bet you’re the type to secretly want to bottle your crush’s scent.”

He gives her a silently reproachful stare at which she finally retreats with a grin, sheepish. 

“Sorry, sorry!” She laughs. “I was just curious, can you blame me?” A few moments of amiable quiet pass between them before she purses her lips, then mutters, this time in a lower voice barely audible over the commotion: “just curious why you’re all so obsessed with her…”

He hears the comment, but does not reply.

To Aki, it had never been hard to see that Himeno despised their shared superior. Underneath her compliance and affability, there was always something distrusting when she looked at Makima. He saw it in the way she never seemed to offer any more words than necessary during case reviews, every declarations that she needed a long drink after a joint meeting between Tokyo Division 2 and its head overseer, the very first time she would ask him to quit Public Safety and go private together, so that they could both live longer, safer lives—and the stillness in her tone when he had, for the first time out of many, refused.

“Is it because of her?” she had asked quietly. 

“No,” he replied. 

To this day, Aki knows this to be true. He is a devil hunter because he lives to die—he will kill the Gun Devil or he will die trying, because there would be no reason to live otherwise. He knows that is the core of why he has not up and left, like many of his surviving coworkers have. He knows this. 

Yet when he tries to imagine a life without pale auburn hair gathered in a braid down the shoulder, crimson-ringed eyes framed by long strands—

He can’t.

For Hayakawa Aki, quitting has never been an option. Not when November 18 took away any vestiges of fulfillment he could ever feel living an ordinary life. Not when Taiyo lies unmoving under Hokkaido soil, never once having had the chance to explore the world with the same anticipatory excitement he had absorbed bedtime tales. His favorite story had been the one of the proud, ambitious town mouse who constantly undertook dangerous adventures in the city, looking for something better, always better. Possibly because he never had the circumstances—body nor time—to live the life of anything other than the modest country mouse who had safety and nothing else. 

For Hayakawa Aki, quitting has never been an option. Not when Makima had found him in the aftermath and lended him—breathed into him—purpose. 

She had saved him.

Aki does not believe in miracles, but Makima fundamentally contradicts this. If he was religious, he thinks her existence to him would have been akin to that of a sacrosanct deliverer. And despite the fact that he is not—despite the fact that Hayakawa Aki believes only in revenge—she welcomes him anyway. And in return, he offers her everything he can give: devotion, trust, loyalty, and—most unworthy—himself. 

Unconsciously, Aki had not expected Makima to smell like anything. She seemed to be untouchable, unassailable, scentless. But she had. 

She was human, too. 

“Flowers,” he says suddenly. “Rose and peony.” Pauses. “And… some citrus.”

Himeno looks up from where she had been fishing for a cigarette from a pack of Wild Raven. They had long escaped the congested quarters of Chinatown’s central avenue, and were now surrounded by dimly lit streets leading away from the red-and-gold arch marking its main entrance. 

Her hand falters.

“Huh?”

A moment of silence, only filled by the sound of footsteps on the sidewalk. He’s not sure why he answered when it would have been perfectly acceptable to let the question fade into nothing. Maybe because Himeno was his partner, and partners were supposed to know things. 

“You asked,” he says, looking ahead, “about her scent.”

Her fall of her stride is unusually muted. When he finally turns to look at her, he finds her unusually silent. Her jaw works once, twice, as she adjusts the smoke between her fingers.

“Yeah,” she murmurs. “Guess I did.”

Inexplicably, his gaze lingers on her for a few more moments. 

Still, he doesn’t dwell on the words for very long in the end—not in the days, weeks, or even months following. 

He does, however, three years later. 

Three years later, he revisits the expression on her face—in that brief space between his words and another one of her smiles, bright and knowing—and finds it still vivid in his mind. Awash in neon light, she remains uncharacteristically still, as if unwillingly lost in thought. And there, he searches, and searches, and searches—

Until he realizes that her expression was one of anguish. 

Three years later, Himeno dies, and you tell Aki she loved him. 

v. and yet your heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of—

Golden light spills over Makima’s shoulders. 

It enshrouds her in something akin to a halo of dusk—knowing and calm, soft yet unyielding. Elbows on the desk, her fingers are gathered weightlessly in the space between the curve of her jaw and the line of her collar. Behind her, quadrate pieces of the Tokyo skyline line the distance beyond glass, then fall around her in tilted amber squares of late afternoon. 

Makima’s office has always instilled a feeling of timelessness. Aki thinks this is not just because of the relative bareness of the space but also the way she occupies it. Against the vastness of it, she has always been small—but never felt so.  

There is a bookshelf, filled with spines that never seem to get dusty. A lamp, always lit by 6 PM but never before. Some lone works of art: carved metal engravings, framed in black on otherwise empty gaps of wall. One depicts a sharp-winged figure plunging from the sky. Lucifer, he learns from a book he had spotted instinctively on display from the familiar artwork on its cover. The 1990 Japanese translation of Gustave Doré: Magician of Illusion and Faith, now slightly worn and marked on the page decomposing Satan’s descent to hell, rests on the leftmost end of the collection gathered on his living room wardrobe. Himeno had barely held in her laughs the entire time he had stood in a line full of unsettled civilians, Public Safety suit covered in blotches of drying devil fluids. He remembers thinking after that it was an uncharacteristically oblivious thing for him to do, but somehow, this had not once occurred to him in the moment.  

The same wetness now stains his uniform—this time the remains of an egg devil terrorising the Tokyo suburbs. He ignores his own acute awareness of the yellow sludge dyeing his clothes every time Makima looks at him.

“—that concludes my report.”

“Well done,” she says, and a wordless warmth encapsulates the thrum of his heart, slow and right. “It seems you handled the case with minimal casualties.” A hand travels to rest her chin in her palm while the other gently falls atop the muted yellow of a case file. “Other than that, there’s one more thing I’d like to ask you.”

He meets her gaze, waiting—

“Do you have a driver’s license?”

He blinks. For some reason, he hadn’t expected the request to be so mundane. 

“...I’ll be able to get one soon,” he replies. 

She smiles, and he finds himself unconsciously following the movement of it. “Is that so? I’m glad.” There’s leisurely brush of her hand across manila folder, and Aki fixes his eyes on her face to prevent his gaze from flickering between the two. “The devil hunter who previously escorted me to meetings is planning to leave Public Safety in a month.”

He pauses, then asks slowly, testing the words in his mouth: “You want me to drive you?”

“Occasionally,” she replies, eyes not leaving him. “Would that be suitable?”

He nods. Of course it is. “I’ll let you know when I’ve passed the test.”

She only tilts her head in acknowledgement.  

He stays for a few more moments in case there is anything else. When there is nothing, he bows once, excuses himself, and heads to the door. But before his fingers can close around cold metal—

“Oh, and Aki-kun?” 

He turns. 

When Makima speaks, there is a curve in the line of her lips. 

“Happy early birthday.”

vi. muscle memory, the last dream of a soul that did not remember dreaming

After the mission report, Aki spends the better part of an hour searching for her. 

Only after arriving at headquarters had he learned that Himeno acquired a bleeding gash on the side of her arm. She had maintained it would be fine for the short duration of a mission report—being cut by a mid-sized (by devil standards) piece of flying eggshell while evacuating civilians would not be a threat to her life, and was in fact what she was paid to do—but Aki had taken one look at the unsanitary muck tinting their uniforms and firmly told her to visit the infirmary. She had eventually conceded, expression softening imperceptibly at something on his face he did not see. 

Judging by the soiled blouse and tie thrown into the medical waste bin, she hadn’t completely ignored their agreement for her to go to the clinic, though her current absence there made it impossible for Aki to take her to the hospital as he had planned. He turns to the office doctor emerging from a hunter’s bedside, who at the sight of him shows a mixed look of relief and panic. Apparently, he had tried to get her to stay; she had insisted there was someone she had to see. Then she had just changed into a fresh suit and slipped out while he hadn’t been looking. 

An urgent mission, maybe, the doctor suggests. Aki thanks him for the information without mentioning that is her usual excuse when she feels the itch for a lone smoke. 

He checks all the usual spots. The corner behind the lobby; the discreet alleyway behind headquarters that she had introduced to him two months into the job; the smoke room three flights up, which she had told Aki was commonly empty because most of the higher ups on the floor preferred to puff in their fancy private offices. After seven minutes, he thinks to radio her, but stops upon realizing she would have turned hers in at the front desk before going to the infirmary. All the while, he’s checked the alley a second time before noticing he’s done so. 

Fifteen minutes, and he resorts to all the ashtrays in a 200 meter radius, which is to say almost every public counter or desk in the area. Three or four times, he double takes at a flash of blue, searching for English letters printed in bold italic; some of the packs are Wild Ravens, but none are held by Himeno.

By the time he begins to ask coworkers if they’ve seen her, the horizon is already bleeding into fiery gradients of amber. 

He stops a pair from Tokyo Division 2, a devil hunter from Division 1, then an administrative member of the organization who he’s seen speaking to Himeno at least once or twice. No, they reply. Sorry, Hayakawa. Maybe ask ___? He just nods and moves on to the next, never betraying the slow, creeping sense of urgency building in his throat. 

One of the devil hunters he speaks to is Shigure, a veteran who transferred to Miyagi Division 1 during the early days of Aki’s recruitment. When asked, Shigure responds in the negative to his question. But just as Aki gives him a short bow and is about to move on, he offers absentmindedly, “Hey, check the rooftop. She used to brood up there with the other rookies after every mission.”

-

He does, and that’s where he finds her. 

The doors push open to blustering wind. Streaks of cloud are illuminated by the sun dipping towards the Kanto mountains, a white-hot point in the distance ringed by deep orange that spreads to encase the lattice skyline. Tokyo’s amber hour contrasts the bite of frigid wind against his cheeks, and for a few moments the only audible thing is the sound of it rushing past his ears.

Beams snapping, shattering, howling tempest ripping a house from its roots—

And then he pauses, because he has long stopped letting the nightmares show on his face.

Concrete exploding, sudden heat searing, sonic shockwave in winter—

After the attack on November 18, there had first been shock. Even after he had been picked off the streets and transported to what the evacuators told him in soft voices was a safe place, that’s right you’ll be safe here there's no need to be scared are you hurt let me see, he had remained unmoving for what seemed like hours against the wall of a community gymnasium. He distantly thought he should be feeling something—possibly letting out cries of anguish like the women and men surrounding him for their mothers and daughters and fathers and sons and sisters and brothers—but there had just been nothing, overwhelming and numbing and swallowing every real thought into unbearable stillness. 

Then, sometime in the night when the gym settled into a silence filled with muffled whimpers, he heard a sound different from the rest. 

It had tinkled softly in his ears, made him feel as if he had been suddenly jolted awake from a long sleep. Seconds later, he caught the shift of padded jacket against lacquered floor—a slightly wavering shhhh, people are sleeping, yes that’s right darling, let’s be quiet now, no no don’t do that, oh god please don’t do that—

He realized it had been laughter. Young, childish, a pearl shining in the dark. 

Like Taiyo’s.

Finally, he had begun to cry. 

Over the years, Aki builds an altar for the dead in the recesses of his mind. There is not a single day he does not visit. The vividness of the day had never dulled: in the months after, it had sometimes arrived in the waking moments after nightmares; other times, halfway through a meal when he had realized his chopsticks had been naturally gravitating to the vegetables Taiyo used to push onto his plate. It had occasionally come in the space between school periods, forcing him to quietly sign out of class and cry in a bathroom stall before washing his face and returning as if nothing had happened. 

Sometimes, the memories arrive as a gust of air whistling past a rooftop in November, eight years after the day they are made. 

(Still, he finds that daily visitation to the altar has taught him, across the span of the near-decade of life he has lived in their aftermath, to keep it from showing on his face when they do.

Aki could never forget, but he had long abandoned mourning what could have been.) 

At nineteen years old, he is still learning; but by then, he has also learned much. The experience guides him in the present to remain standing where he is, loosely fix his eyes on the horizon, and let the memory of 18/11 fade into nothing. Until the wind is no more than sound in his ears, until he is standing on a rooftop instead of between cedar trees leading a path to his house, until the last two digits of the current year flip from eighty-six to ninety-five. 

He does all of this, then looks for Himeno. 

There is no one in the space that stretches to metal railing in front of him, but every rooftop has a back. It’s when he’s about to turn the corner of the stair bulkhead that he sees: 

Two figures, standing side by side. Their backs are to him. He tells Himeno apart by the dark strap of her eyepatch against the green of her hair, and the two-fingered tilt of her hand around a cigarette, unlit. The other is a woman—a Public Safety officer, by the looks of her clothing. The wind whips into their hair, the flaps of their suits, but they stand unmoving, as if they had long warmed to the cold.

Aki is about to step forward when he notices the straight, horizontal cut of Himeno’s dress shirt at the crest of her left shoulder. Below it, layers of textured dressing encase her arm from tricep to low elbow where she had been hit. A first aid kit lies a few steps behind their feet, accompanied by several disposal bags filled with soiled gloves, bloodied gauze, a pair of tweezers, and the remains of Himeno’s sheared-off sleeve. There’s also a scattering of several pieces of off-white shell—leftovers of the egg devil he and Himeno had eliminated only hours prior. 

His gaze refocuses on the bandage as he starts walking towards them. It’s secure, and no red has seeped through yet. As if the hand that wrapped it was well-versed in doing so.

First, relief—so quiet and sudden it surprises him. 

Then, Shigure’s words, ringing in his mind: she used to brood up there with the other rookies.

His eyes trace the amber outline of the other woman. It’s hard to tell if she is a devil hunter or administrative civil servant from posture and physique alone. Not a previous partner. All of Himeno’s were dead—

 “—hear I got a new buddy?” Himeno asks. 

His feet slow, then come to a stop.

The sound of a thumb pressing down on an ignition button is lost to wind, but the flash of light it produces is not. It stretches upward into a yellow-orange teardrop, flickering once, then twice under the sanctuary of the hand shielding it from the wind. The officer leans towards Himeno with the cocooned flame—a silent offering. 

“—told by Makima-san,” she tells her, voice carried away by gale.

Makima-san. The officer personally knows their superior; she’s on level enough terms with her to receive updates on her subordinates. Not a veteran, since she had likely entered the agency at the same age as Himeno—who is four years his senior—if they had regularly spent time together as new recruits. Possibly a division leader, though judging from what he’s seen, that seems relatively uncommon. He runs through the list of Tokyo Public Safety’s captains in his mind excepting his own, one by one: a woman, young, close with his partner. The most probable conclusion he can come to is that she currently is not deployed in the city. He would have recognized her otherwise. 

Himeno’s head dips the way it does when she hums, absentminded and low. She stoops over with two fingers to her mouth, nimbly positioned to light her stick; the tip of it glows as it meets fire. Her words, mumbled slightly, register as a question before the rest is lost to noise: “What else—?” 

What else’d she say? he imagines.

The officer seems to consider this. 

“—seemed to be getting on well,” she says, words drifting enough for Aki to hear.

“—right,” Himeno murmurs, tilting towards embers fading into the air. There’s a hint of a smile in her tone, barely discernible amidst the din. “—a real one.” Then her gaze turns towards the woman beside her, crinkling with what he knows from experience is mischievous, playful intent:

“Sooo,” she quips, head finding a place on the officer’s shoulder. From the officer, there is no jolt or shift to indicate the gesture hasn’t been experienced before.  “—about you? Surely” —a gust whistles in his ear, piercing the sound of her voice— “don’t plan on being partnerless forever.” The next time she speaks, a hint of a frown lines its edges. “—likes you, so where’s your handsome buddy?”

The other woman gently raises the flap of Himeno’s suit jacket. It flutters sharply when exposed to the wind. Aki sees a flash of a familiar light blue before the lighter disappears into his partner’s inner pocket. 

“—better alone,” she replies, drawing her hand back to her side. 

Himeno withdraws from her shoulder in response, seemingly to meet the officer’s gaze. 

“—lonely,” he catches. 

Must get lonely, her voice spells in his mind, suddenly stark from its usual lightheartedness. 

“Not very,” the officer says. 

There’s something still in Himeno’s tone when she continues, unrelenting: “—always away for too long.” A pause, then: “Don’t tell me” —it dips into inaudibleness before emerging again— “overseas again.”

The officer simply smiles. “—won't tell, then.”

They maintain eye contact for a few more moments before there seems to be a compromise, split-second and unspoken between the two of them.

A loud sigh escapes her as Himeno plucks the cigarette from her lips, wrapping her uninjured arm around the officer’s shoulders in a show of returning to her usual self. “—no one to have fun with,” she whines, breathing smoke, and although Aki is almost entirely sure at this point that Himeno is older than her friend by the all-too-familiar way she treats her as if she has known the officer her entire life, this is not nearly evident in the way she clings to her like a child. “—no one to drink with, or smoke with—”

“—minor, Himeno-san,” the woman reminds her, and Aki resists the urge to grimace. Reconstructs the words in his mind. Probably: I’m a minor, Himeno-san. 

She really should stop doing that if she doesn’t want to get into legal trouble. 

“—damn it,” Himeno says, quite unhappily. Then she snakes her right arm closer around the officer so that she can hold up her fingers against the darkening landscape—seemingly counting. A moment, then two pass before her expression visibly lights up. “Hey—you’re turning twenty next year!” She turns back to her, grinning. “—go drinking and smoking in 1996. Aki” —his eyes flicker to her at the mention of his own name— “gonna be legal then too—”

Now is probably the time to avert the conversation. Preferably before she says something reportable to HR for workplace harassment. 

“Himeno-senpai,” he says, moving forward in quick strides towards the two women. 

She whips around at the sound of his voice. 

“Aki!” she realizes brightly, then pokes at the shoulder of the officer next to her, whose back still faces him. “Great timing—hey, say hi to my new partner. He’s the same age as you.”

Same age? 

When the officer turns, and she is smiling, eyes still mirthful from her conversation with Himeno. Then that same expression meets him, and—

For some reason, his chest squeezes. 

“Hayakawa-san,” you say, holding out a hand. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

If he could have gone back all those years to the day you first met, he would have taken it in both palms, gotten on his knees, and asked you to quit. 

vii. for the end of all our exploring was to arrive where we started

In winter of 1995, nearly a year and a half after Aki meets Makima, he learns she has a right hand.

But first:

Come the second week of December, Himeno registers for a five-day leave to attend her sister’s impromptu wedding in Osaka. Her soon-to-be-husband, he learns through word of mouth (specifically Himeno’s mouth), comes from a family of devout Christians who goes to church every Sunday and believes marriage should happen as early as possible to “preserve the flame”, which Himeno personally thinks is bullshit. They were also, in her words, loaded. It was for this very reason her father had objected; strange motive, but hang on—he suspected the match was for the one-sided economic benefit of paying his medical bills, and despised the idea (a prideful man). Her sister had vehemently protested otherwise, and a huge fight ensued between the two. Ultimately, her father was helpless in stopping the marriage because they had waited until the moment parental consent was no longer necessary to “get hitched”, and in a perhaps equally if not more petty move, her father had declared he would not attend at all. And—well. That was all to say that Himeno really needed an extended weekend off to prevent her sister from having no maid of honor nor family to walk her down the aisle at her own wedding—and this is what she had told the lady at the desk in an attempt for sympathy when she handed in the official request, likely too late to proceed even with the division captain’s stamp of approval. 

Hours later, Aki finds her crouched in a loose-limbed, near-fetal position on the floor. After several moments of silence, she tells him that the Personnel Division haggled down the request to a two-day vacation or nothing. She had, of course, pointed out that practically half of that time would be spent traveling. In the end, though, they had not relented, and she had accepted their conditions—something was always better than nothing. 

This was her sister’s wedding, after all. 

“What to do,” she hums, a lone index finger tapping the hollow of her cheek. Her tone: two parts contemplation to one part genuine exasperation. “Hmm… wow, this is pretty bad. She does really need help with venue preparations…”

Listening silently, Aki slips on the scabbard for the Curse Devil’s nail sword. Meanwhile, Himeno casually laments ever believing those “two-faced snakes” in the administrative department would ever agree to a measly vacation after she’d ran through that large chunk of paid leave at the beginning of the year, when her father had been in a critical condition that had urgently required heart surgery.

“—if only there was a way to use up PTO from previous years,” she continues, seemingly lost in thought. Then, she finally buries her head into her knees and sighs—loudly. “This sucks… all this adult talk is making my head hurt.”

Despite never either having fully made use of his own paid time off, Aki is aware that publicly employed devil hunters are offered substantial benefits—an attempt to offset the fact that their death rates are likely higher than any other job in existence. As a devil hunter, dying tomorrow—or even on the mission he is deployed on today—would surprise no one. And if the cause was not being physically killed by a devil, it would be contractually. For this reason, most experienced devil hunters periodically took full-time breaks from work. Between the long hours and constant fatality risk, it was always uncertain when they would be able to see their family next—or if there ever would be a next time. 

After settling the strap across his shoulder and down to his waist, he finally spares a glance at her slumped-in figure. “It would have been better to request a longer period of leave from the start,” he tells her. 

Himeno’s hair flings upwards as she looks to where he stands, shooting him a look of exaggerated disappointment. “I know that now, Aki-kun,” she insists. Her head tilts to reveal a pout that curves the line of her face. “You’re my buddy, not the Personnel Division’s. Can’t you offer some words of comfort or something?”

You’re my buddy, not the Personnel Division’s.

One of the first things he had learned as a devil hunter was that different devils required different remittances in exchange for their abilities, and that there was no guarantee that two contractors would be charged the same. After all, each individual attaches unique value to their possessions. The only constant across all devil contracts is that whether it involves the exchange of a limb, eye, or loved one, it is always in the nature of a devil to try to gain more than they lose.

Himeno maintains that this is true not just for devils, but people. The common difference is that people can choose to be better.

A counterexample in point, supposedly, would be the Personnel Division of Tokyo Public Safety.

He pauses. Crouches, after a moment, down to her level—searching for something better to say than just sorry you can’t go to your sister’s wedding or, even worse: it’s part of the job. 

Himeno follows the movement with a single, half-lidded eye rife with playful curiosity, amusement, and the darkened vestiges of several sleepless nights. If she still had the other, he imagines it would be doing the same. As if playing a personal game to anticipate what his next words are, she gives him her full notice, rapt with attention.

It has always struck Aki as ironic that he pays for the Curse Devil’s powers with the years of his natural lifespan. This is because he holds no desire to live a long life. Nor is he interested in experiencing the so-called pleasures it has to offer, whether that be the booze, women, nicotine, or trips to distant, exotic islands his coworkers use to “take the edge off” of the grueling work they do on a daily basis. 

He has only ever used a small fraction of his total paid time off, and the sole purpose has always been to visit his family’s grave in Hokkaido.

“So?” Himeno asks. “Your verdict, Judge Hayakawa?”

Still, if Taiyo had lived—if he had grown up and gone to school, then university, taken a year off with the intention to explore the Earth in the way he had dreamed of when they were kids— 

Nii-chan, you’ll go with me, right? he had asked. Aki ignored the question, but from the next day onwards he had begun keeping a list of all the interesting places and countries he heard of from classmates, television, and even passing conversations on the street. 

If Taiyo had lived, traveled the world, and maybe even met someone that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with…  if the wedding was set in another country far, far away from Public Safety headquarters—

Would he have used it all?

The answer is obvious, he thinks: 

He would not have needed to, because there would have been no reason for him to become a devil hunter in the first place.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he states at last. “They’re the assholes.”

By the time Aki is nineteen years old, he has twenty-one more years left to spend, and only one thing worth spending them on. Twenty-one more years to invest in killing the Gun. It would be rational to be a more mindful consumer, but he has not known logic since 1986.

Truthfully, he thinks Curse Devil undervalues its abilities.

-

As a hunter in training, Aki had often heard from tired-faced seniors that the generous welfare packages that came with the job were more of a necessity than anything. 

The work killed people too easily to recruit otherwise, they remarked; if you lived to hit a year in experience, it quickly became apparent to many that the “exceptional” benefits were more remuneration for the daily horrors rather than anything true to their name. Aki had never heeded the muttered warnings in the halls or dingy 24-hour izakayas because he always thought that any devil hunter unprepared to be cut by a double-edged sword should not be one. 

But for some reason—some quiet, unknowable reason—as he and Himeno approach Makima’s office, he finds himself searching. Searching for an excuse, an explanation. Makima was never cruel without reason, but sometimes unique circumstances demanded necessary decisions. The issue was that there was no standard for normal in the world of devil hunting. If she was not willing to extend the leave by four more days upon first request, she would need to be convinced with proof that this was necessary. Possibly by a proof of performance. 

Paneled vinyl floor, stretching between them and the office. Only about twenty more steps in between. 

Think.

Nineteen. Eighteen. 

How many devil incidents had they neutralized in the last quarter?

Sixteen.

Fifteen incidents in three months. There had been minimal civilian deaths and property damage overall.

Thirteen.

The most notable cases had been the Centipede Devil, the Scaffold Devil— 

The door opens. 

The click of dress shoes sound against polished concrete—once, twice—before a figure steps around and guides it back shut. Pale midday light washes over a Public Safety trench coat, evenly separated into squares by the grid frame of the hallway windows. An instinctive, split-second glance reveals the level planes of a face, loosely set jaw, calm eyes deftly skimming both ends of the corridor. An officer: remarkably unremarkable in her uniform, but betrayed by an expression of ease so unusual for headquarters it makes her conspicuous.  

You.

“Himeno-san,” you greet, walking towards them with a pleasantly surprised look. To him, a small nod of acknowledgement. “Hayakawa-san.”

He nods shortly in response. 

Himeno’ expression brightens, then stills slightly as her gaze travels to the door behind you. “Back already?” she asks offhandedly. 

Your reply comes readily: there was something you needed to discuss with Makima-san. It is accompanied by the distinct sound of a cardstock folder shifting against the polyester-cotton of your sleeve; manila yellow stands starkly against the colorless backdrop of your uniform. You then pause, assessing—only for a moment, before the chance rises for Himeno to interrupt—before remarking curiously, “You look like you need a drink.” 

For a moment, Himeno’s face is unreadable. Between the two of you, an inaudible exchange seems to occur—the same kind of silence that had followed a similarly maneuvered question on a rooftop, the day he had met you—and disperses almost instantly the second it forms. 

Then, a sigh. 

“How’d you know?” she asks, leaning against the wall. Aki sees your eyes flick once to the shoulder she rests on—checking that it isn’t her injured side, he realizes. “Not because this place sucks the soul out of its employees, right?”

This draws a smile out of you. You mention a joint division gathering set for tonight: an early Christmas Celebration, taking advantage of the days before many devil hunters were set to take their winter leave. It had been a largely unplanned thing, only becoming something certain a few hours earlier. Seeing as Aki and Himeno had just completed a mission, you were assuming they had not yet heard.  

“If you plan on drinking tonight, consider letting Public Safety cover the bill,” you offer.

Himeno tilts her head upwards with an expression of consideration, chin balanced between her thumb and index finger. “Dunno,” she says casually, “I’ll go if you do.” Prompts a glance from Aki when she pokes his shoulder several times in succession. “Him, too.”

At this, a small frown creeps into the line of your lips. Almost as if omniscient, you ask if anything happened. And suddenly, an idea becomes apparent in Aki’s mind. 

Himeno responds with a sullen look and an effortless question of her own: did she now need a reason to even spend time with her “favorite coworkers”?

“Of course not,” you reply easily. “But it’s unusual for there to be any preconditions needed for you to drink.”

This leaves her speechless for an unprecedented sum of time, so before she can come up with the next words of protest:

“Himeno-san needs a week off to attend her sister’s wedding in Osaka,” Aki says. He remembers her requesting a smaller amount, but it would be naive to ask for the same after having it bargained down to less than half in front of her eyes. He continues even as Himeno’s head snaps to him with a look of uncharacteristically genuine surprise; your gaze turns to him only slightly, curious. “The Personnel Division is insisting on giving her only two days.” 

“Aki, what are you—”

“I see,” you say. “I’ll talk to them.”

“I don’t—huh?”

You hum. “Today is December 9th… you mentioned Sora-san is getting married on the 14th.” You seem to deliberate this for a moment before you ask, “Himeno-san, are your bags still packed?” 

She blinks. “Is this for real?”

“It’s probable I could get them to register you on leave beginning today, and ending on the” —you continue after a quick pause— “sixteenth.”

Himeno is silent for a long moment before telling you that she’s surprised your backside has no visible lipstick marks from all the “ass-kissing” they do to you here. Still, her voice is warm-tinted with affection when she finally adds: “Thank you, I love you.”

He expects your response to be an imperceptible curl of your lips, but instead you let out a small breath—barely audible, real, quietly steeped in mirth. 

“Of course.”

-

Himeno leaves within the day, and by night Aki is seated shoulder-to-shoulder and front-to-back between coworkers he barely knows. 

The izakaya: a single light bathing the restaurant’s entire side in dim amber, countless half-empty plates scattered across short-legged tables, shouts of mastaa! and the occasional finger being pointed at the vertical paper strips taped to the walls, handwritten with daily specials and cheap bar snacks. Tokyo Divisions 1 to 3 have blended into a single sea of black and white suits amidst haphazardly folded winter trench coats. A table down, there is the reddish-brown of Nomo’s hair. Someone calling for a plate of eihire, Kato’s preferred pairing with sake. A short, distinctive laugh likely belonging to Vice Captain Yusa several seats to his right, talking to a woman in a ponytail. 

You should come, Aki, he had said. It’s not often that you get a free-for-all singles mixer that you can put on the agency’s card. Even Himeno had told him to go before she had set off for Osaka, telling him it was lame to be at home instead of celebrating early Christmas like a normal person. Aki had responded that he had no interest in relationships unnecessary to devil hunting. Yusa had simply smiled, asked if that was the case, and left with an offhanded remark that Makima may be coming. 

It is too loud, and too cramped. Aki observes the condensation beading on his untouched glass—beer, not tea. 

“Drink up, rookie,” a voice drawls next to him. “There’s no saying if there’ll be a next time you’ll be able to get shit-faced drunk.”

“I’m nineteen,” he replies. He doesn’t bother correcting the man that it is about a year too late for him to be considered a new recruit.

A brief pause, followed by a shrug—loose-shouldered, uncaring. “Does it really matter? Seems meaningless to not let nineteen year-olds drink if you let ‘em die hunting down materialized concepts of fear on a daily basis.” There’s a shift of fabric as he leans backwards, chugging down the rest of his drink, then slams it back down on the table. The layer of thick white foam trembles in Aki’s cup from the impact. “Well, do what you want. I’m gonna go take a shit.”

“Take it easy and don’t clog the toilet like last time,” someone yells. 

“Yeah, yeah,” he grunts, stumbling to his feet in the congested space between two full tables. “Order the next round while I’m gone.”

Aki watches the man step off the zashiki and disappear into a doorway separated from the main dining area by a navy curtain. The commotion around him continues, undaunted. New dishes replace empty ones. A group near the entrance begins to sing “Innocent World”, and somewhere behind him, there is a man and woman discussing the merits of becoming a gravure model versus a devil hunter. 

“—and Makima-san?”

Just like that, his pulse jumps. Too quick, he glances to the entrance—only to find it empty. 

“Think they went for a smoke,” someone says. 

They. She had been here. With someone else. 

Who?

“She smokes? Didn’t take her for the type.”

A higher up? One of the captains?

“I’m just surprised she came at all. I think I’ve seen her once in the three years I’ve been here.”

Heat begins a slow crawl beneath his skin before he can think better of it. Simmers white-hot, hot enough to burn. He hadn’t noticed when she arrived. Someone else had; then likely sat next to her, talked to her, was now the one smoking beside her—

“Apparently, she’s not usually in town. Doing nationwide and international stuff. Big cases. Whatever.”

Would she have gone with him? If he knew how? Was old enough for it?

“Hey, isn’t” —he hears a familiar name that nearly fractures his train of thought— “her assistant or something?”

“Oh, yeah. She’s barely at headquarters either. Pretty young, too—”

But it’s something irrational that draws him up onto his right knee, places a hand there, and pushes him to stand on both legs. By the time the heads surrounding his seat come into focus, he is already walking towards the edge of the tatami-lined platform. The noise—the crackle of grilling meat, boisterous laughter from behind, the chatter of other walk-in customers seated on the restaurant’s other side—grows louder as he approaches the kitchen. Within a few moments, he finds his black and white sneakers amidst a sea of uniform others. 

“Where’s he going?” asks the devil hunter from earlier, turning to look at Aki’s vanishing back with a confused expression. 

“Dunno. Bathroom?”

Someone lets out a laugh. “Hey, kid, go a little later! It probably stinks in there—”

The commotion fades as he ducks past textile. He glances to both ends of a short hallway marked with dimly legible signs. To his left, the bathrooms, and a staff-only storage room even further down. To the right, a fluttering noren the same hue as the one he had just passed. 

A back door.

They went for a smoke. 

It’s something irrational that draws him towards it. 

-

“—get it to you by next week,” the other voice says. 

Even from behind the curtain, Aki can almost hear the gentle, upwards curve of her lips. “I'll hold you to that.” 

Something blooms beneath his skin, thick and honey-slow; possibly self-disgust, for violating the privacy of one of the people he most admires. Before it has the chance to take, however, there is the faint scratch of heel against concrete that he recognizes as the familiar sound of a smoke being stubbed out. He instinctively takes three silent steps backwards, reaching into the inner pocket of his suit as if searching for a pack. 

Fabric parts, and the woman that emerges gives Aki an assessing look as she sweeps past; he spares her an imperceptible nod as he does the same, out into the back alley of the izakaya. 

Coral-auburn, interlaced into a long plait. Two face-framing strands, visible beneath the underside of her jaw. Through the black outline of her trench coat, the subtle silhouette of her shoulders and back. Around her: empty crates of Asahi and Kirin bottles, some properly stacked and others cluttered. A soft, fluorescent hum echoes from a bulky cigarette vending machine set against the wall. 

“Makima-san,” he says after a moment. 

She stills, and he thinks there is an uncharacteristic amount of pause in it. 

Then, she turns. 

No—

You do.

-

You draw the cigarette away in a breath of white smoke, and if he hadn’t witnessed the rest, it would be believable to call it winter mist. Like exhalation condensing into steam, the way it used to before his eyes in the Hokkaido countryside. 

“I dyed my hair,” you say. 

Aki had never considered the possibility of mistaking another woman for Makima. She was irreplaceable in a way that was difficult to explain. But as his gaze falls to the color of your braid, the locks framing your face, he finds it mildly uncanny how alike you look to her this way. He isn’t sure why, or even how you’d managed to change the hue of your entire head in the few hours that he’d last seen you at headquarters. Still, the line of your brows is relaxed. Your eyes: calm and unworried. Despite suddenly donning the cut of your direct superior for no obvious reason, you do not seem to be undergoing an early-life crisis. The only thing out of place is the smoke held between your lips—edged with a round end, two-thirds white and one-third tangerine hue. 

Hey, say hi to my new partner. He’s the same age as you.

After that day, he had thought over Himeno’s words in his mind. 

Himeno was twenty-three years old. She had begun work as a devil hunter at eighteen: five years ago. You were nineteen. If it was true that you had joined at the same time that she had…

Fourteen. 

You would have been working at Public Safety since fourteen. 

He's not sure why the words leave his mouth, but they do. 

“I thought you were a minor,” he says, watching the tip ignite in soft flints as you inhale, a glowing point lit against darkened evening. The way the stick is held between the crook of your fingers is far too relaxed to not be a habit; he can tell from seeing the same kind adopted by a partner he spends the majority of his waking hours with. 

You follow his gaze to your hand, and smile. 

Ash falls with a gentle tap of your finger. As if contemplating which explanation to give, you hum slightly before offering, “Let’s just say I’ve become accustomed to the rules from somewhere far outside of Japan.”

Judging by your statement, it seems his suspicions for overseas deployment aren’t improbable. He had understood the agency, and likely by extension Makima, was heavily involved in international politics—after all, 18/11 was proof that devils could be used as weapons of mass destruction—but like the majority of devil hunters, he had never known which parts.

He remains silent as you take a final drag of the cigarette—long, quiet, and deep—before dropping it to the ground.

“I’d appreciate it if you could keep this a secret from Himeno-san,” you continue, putting it out in a soft scrape between your heel and dry alleyway. From behind the collar of your trench coat, you draw out a tin container and open it with a small, metallic click. Seconds later, the scent of mint saturates the air. “You see, I promised that my first smoke would be with her.”

I promised that my first smoke would be with her. 

He thinks back to dim light spilling over numerous plates, spread on a lacquer wooden table. There, enclosed by two sitting booths: chuka soba, annin tofu, gyoza on one side; fried rice, rebanira itame, hiyashi chuka greens on the other. Himeno’s face, illuminated from above in amber hues as she held out a stick towards him, telling him she got the feeling they were going to be working together for a while. The expression of sheer dismay on her face when he had told her she was kind of awful for making someone smoke below the legal age. Then, her reluctant demand for him to hand it back over.

Once you grow up and you’re ready to have an addiction, she said with a smile, I’ll give it back.

Apparently, smoking had not been the only bad habit Himeno could not resist. She also had a historical compulsion to advertise it to underage individuals. 

Soon enough, however, there would be no minors left in the division to break the law. In nine days, Aki would be legally old enough to smoke. Sometimes, he had considered what her reaction would be if he simply refused to, and strangely, he had always found himself arriving at the same conclusion. First there would be dejection, culminating in a deeply crestfallen pout; bargaining second (but Aki, you agreed to it, that’s really not fair you know, I was looking towards this for so long…); and thirdly, always acceptance. Possibly because even she knew those packs did nothing good for the body. 

But if Aki was being entirely honest, neither health risks or the law were reasons why he had refused that day. To him, their worst quality had always been the fact that they were a complete waste of time. They were cancer sticks that addicts paid for not just in money and bone density, but also spent lifetimes. For all he knew, they were worthless. 

And yet—

“Are they any good?” he asks. 

You still slightly, turning to him with a questioning glance.

He pauses. Then: “The cigarettes.”

He thinks something flickers across your face, too brief for him to name. He does catch, however, the softening of your features in the deep blue light until that, too, fades. 

“They rot my lungs and bones,” you admit finally, and he gets a sense that you are being distinctly honest. Seeing as there is no reason not to be, he is unsure why. “Still—”

Your eyes crinkle as you grin, and for a moment, he is reminded of that same sensation of something painful and unrealized the day he met you. 

“—They make for great conversation starters.” 

In winter of 1995, more than a year and a half after Aki meets Makima, he learns you are her right hand. You are practiced, polite, and move through the halls of Public Safety as if you were born in its walls. At any gathering, you are always the first to take Makima’s coat, always the first to calmly order each one of your coworkers’ favorite dishes, and always the last to leave. It’s largely by chance that he meets you at all: mostly by virtue of being Himeno’s partner and Makima’s subordinate, the former of whom refers to you as her “favorite shady person”. And even if he feels inexplicably unsettled—that strange, dully aching contraction of his body and mind when you say something completely unexpected—Aki, in the winter of 1995, barely knows you. The two of you are strangers. Coworkers. Civil servants, devoted to hunting down the race that is devils. 

Nothing more, nothing less. 

He’s not sure when it all began to read like a lie. 

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notes: hope u guys enjoyed! any and all feedback is appreciated <3

idk if this was noticeable, but the chapter title + titles of each part make up a poem; each part consists of this story's take on a notable literary phrase. if ur interested in reading it, here it is:

after life:

all the earth was before you,

and it ran with rivers that none had ever stepped in twice;

it told you, “no man is an island”.

did you know the bell of the gion shōja echoes 

the impermanence of all things?

and yet your heart has its reasons which reason knows 

nothing of—

muscle memory, 

the last dream of a soul that did not remember dreaming.

for the end of all our exploring was to 

arrive where we started.

----------------------------------------------------------

i. all the earth was before you

When you were young, it was an unspoken, back-of-the-mind, fantastical daydream of yours that the world would go to shit. 

In that dream, the sky would stretch for as far as the eye could see. Brilliant, cloudless blue, with a white-hot sun shining down on unsullied sheets of snow. Endlessly flat, except for the distant curve of the apparently un-flat earth (a groundbreaking, prehistoric scientific discovery that you could never really bring yourself to care less about in third period geography—especially when preoccupied by thoughts of the broken-down heater back home, or the water that would soon stop running because the bills hadn’t been paid on time—but one you always learned to appreciate in the dream because there, terms such as asset and liability and budget had never existed). In that dream, you lie on the ground, spread your arms and legs before drawing them back to your sides over and over and over until you are permanently imprinted into the world. Wetness does not seep into your padded jacket, and your gloveless hands are never cold. 

In that dream, no buildings are left standing—they are brought to the ground. 

There, the only discrepancy that remains is the one between sky and land. There is no above and below, not between the crevices of the Earth, the dilapidated houses scattered on your street and the multilevel, gated estates occupied by your classmates. Not between people, not between your father and his college friends that remained in Tokyo with their high-status jobs, not between the letters printed on his official documents and theirs, not between the tatami floor and the wooden stool that your father’s feet climbed and thrashed above before finally, finally going still.

For a long time, at least, that was how you imagined it had happened: littered with spaces between movement, punctuated by heavy breaths, trembling hands. And even then, even with all those moments in between filled with terror and agony and dread, none of it had been enough for him to stop himself from jumping.

You hadn’t been enough. 

For a long time, you were angry. It was only three-hundred and ninety-two days after he’d died that you laid unmoving on the floor where the first responders had unwrapped the fraying noose from his body, and felt something wet on your cheek. 

“How scared were you, dad?” you had whispered, for no one to hear. 

In that dream, your father is still alive. 

ii. and it ran with rivers that none had ever stepped in twice

When Aki is eleven years old, the world goes to shit. 

Blinding white light, mushroom clouds, human skeletons glowing through skin upon blast impact. Television and radio screens flashing static and robotic warnings minutes before destruction, unable to offer any guarantee except for mutually assured destruction. In the aftermath: blazing fires beneath dark, overcast skies filled with falling ash and smoke and soot that would block out the sun. 

This is how the Hayakawa Aki of November 17, 1986, and all the years preceding, imagines the end of the world.

But come November 18, 1986:

Brilliant blue sky, endless plains of white. Taiyo’s pearls of laughter drifting through frigid winter air. Scattered footprints, hands shaping snow into powder fist-missiles, and the muffled whump of them disintegrating upon impact. 

His little brother’s voice had been colored with something pleased and wondrous that Aki did not understand. And as he spoke, he had curled the reddened tips of his fingers and grinned in pure awe.

It’s cold, he had said.

“If you get sick,” Aki had replied, drawing his hands away from where they had been resting on his knees, “I’ll be the one to get in trouble.”

Taiyo’s smile had faded then, giving way to something crestfallen. As though he had been reminded all at once that those hands—the ones he had been marveling at just moments ago—were hands that tired too easily, hands belonging to a body that never seemed to quite keep up. The expression took hold so quickly it made Aki wonder how many times it needed to have happened for it to look like instinct. 

Something in his chest squeezed.

And for some reason, before he knew it:

“Your hands won’t get cold if” —he had found himself beginning to ask, except it wasn’t so much of a question as much as it was an olive branch, dusted with the same flicks of Hokkaido snow littering their jackets. Something rare, something theirs— “we play catch, right?”

If only he hadn’t— 

Taiyo had waved to him before stepping inside to get their things, eyes bright. Only thirty-eight steps away, maybe thirty-two for Aki. And only thirty-two steps away, Aki had paused, then waved back. On his lips, a hint of a smile. 

 If only—

Unnatural, roaring gale. The sheer force of it had ripped the house from its roots, tearing through everything he had ever known. Wooden beams snapping, glass shattering. Before he can blink, all of it is swallowed by white.

This is how the Hayakawa Aki of November 18, 1986, and every day onwards, remembers the end of the world.

iii. it told you, “no man is an island”

As a devil hunter working in Public Safety, Aki has been told many things.

Namely, to embrace insanity (Kishibe), trust no one (Kishibe), tag along to all the singles’ mixers he can because there’s no guarantee tomorrow won’t be your last (Nomo), fight unpredictably (Kishibe), know the value of one’s own humanity (Kato), transfer to the private sector (Himeno). 

But, first:

“Forget about it and move on,” Kishibe tells him.

That day in the graveyard, his stare had been fixed somewhere in the distance, past rows and rows of identical tombstones. A long swig from his flask had left a sliver of amber liquid seeping down the scarred cleft of his cheek as he continued, “You’ll get yourself killed if you keep wasting time on what-ifs.”

Aki had stared at his mentor’s crouched form, squatted on the crumbled foundation of a long-worn cross, then down at his own hands: marred violet and deep green from hours and hours of relentless sparring. 

Forget about it and move on. 

Forget about it all. Forget about the house, the home he had torn away from him. Forget about his parents, his mother and father, who, despite having cast stern looks at his insistence on playing outside, had in the end told him and Taiyo to have fun. Forget about Taiyo’s face, lit with joy and delight before he had been blown to dust particles indefinitely suspended in winter air. 

Sometimes, Aki used to wonder what might have happened if things had been different. If he had let Taiyo mould all the snowballs he liked, like a kid his age should have. If he had for once brought the glove and ball from the beginning, instead of stubbornly insisting on playing alone, all childish resentment for the worry and concern his parents poured into Taiyo, not him, never him—

“You aren’t special,” Kishibe had stated, and Aki had known he was speaking the truth because he had come to believe it too. “There’s hundreds of kids that join Public Safety every year because of the Gun. Most of them die within the year.”

Sometimes, he used to think about what would have happened if he had gone back into the house with Taiyo. If he hadn’t had to stand alone in the aftermath of everything—of everyone.

But that had been before.

That had been before he had cut grief into his being. Before he had let the guilt and fear and self-condemnation harden into something that burned to the touch—a purpose that branded him in thirty-five strokes, and the day he first laid eyes on the kanji, he had known it spelled “vengeance”.  

If Kishibe, in spite of his decades of experience, misunderstood something about the rookie under his training called Hayakawa Aki, it would be this:

Aki could never forget. But he had long abandoned mourning what could have been. 

This was because he had the now: he had been 18 years old then, soon eligible as a devil hunter at Public Safety where the average life expectancy for new hires was three years. He had been learning how to wield a sword, and would soon be proficient enough to use the weapon on future missions. His government file read that he was a graduate of Morikawa High, and before that Moiwa Chūgakkō, located in Hokkaido Prefecture. A victim of the November 18 Gun Devil attack. Below the section labeled “immediate family”, three red stamps: deceased, deceased, deceased. 

But most of all, Aki had no longer wondered what it would have been like if he had died in that house with the rest of his family because by then, he already had what would be—

Within the next twenty four hours, he would meet his first assigned partner. In two days, he would meet the Fox Devil and receive the ability to summon it in exchange for portions of his body. Based on its past record, the devil was vain and preferred attractive people, and he was apparently good-looking enough to likely be granted permission to use its strongest attacks. If he was lucky, the Curse Devil would also offer the terms of a contract. He would accept.

He would then track down the Gun Devil, and kill it.

By the time Aki looked back up from his curled fingers, he found Kishibe had already been watching him. 

“So?” he had asked, stare half-lidded. In it: something unreadable. “Your answer, boy.”

In the summer of 1994, Aki is a devil hunter in-training. He stands in a graveyard full of devil hunter corpses that he will visit many times in years to come. Taiyo is dead, his mother is dead, his father is dead. Everyone he has ever loved is dead, and there is nothing left of the world he once knew. 

“I don’t plan on dying yet,” he said. 

iv. did you know the bell of the gion shōja echoes the impermanence of all things?

Between afternoon and sunset, the skies over Yokohama turn indigo and the streets of its Chinatown glow neon. Vertical kanji displays run up the facades of multilevel restaurants, towering and densely competitive. By the time he and Himeno step out of the 24-hour dim sum parlor into the alley below, it already hosts a steady stream of salarymen under rows of silk lanterns and flashing letters. Deep orange-reds, golds, and jade greens coloring intricately tiled roofs to signage to multilevel paifang—everything and everything and more of everything, all at once. 

Himeno finds it hard to believe that the kind of sight Aki is currently presented with has only become familiar to him in the past year or so. He realizes only after he meets her that, despite having lived nearly half his life in the city, he was for the majority of his existence a stranger to urban life. 

Aki has only ever moved twice in his life, and the first time was a given in the way that relocation was a given for all Gun survivors in the post-Gun world. Something certain, definite like the fact that there was nothing left of their homes. Evacuation to temporary shelters or government-run relief camps were therefore a foregone conclusion. So was being checked by exhausted medical staff for fatal injuries, days of waiting, nights of muffled tears, countless official forms and cold locker rooms filled with bustling, naked bodies. Only after all of this and a fear-ridden waiting period of two weeks were they finally allowed to leave—to find someone, anyone who could and would be willing to take them in until they would stumble to their feet and find their place in society again. Relatives, close friends, even the rare family that volunteered to temporarily house a Gun victim for a large government stipend, usually on the condition that they fulfilled several mental health checks. 

But for the children and elderly who watched their families disappear before their eyes, there had never really been any choice. 

The ‘1811 Generation’ was what they were called in quiet murmurs, official documentation, and by angry politicians on television, a collective term for the children that had been orphaned by the attack on November 18. In the weeks and months after the Gun Devil unleashes its gunfire on Japan for 26 seconds, there is anger and confusion and blame transferred from shoulder to shoulder and back, heavy with the questions “is this war against the devils?”, “what will be done about these kids’ educations?”, “how will they be housed?”, and most importantly, “will it come out of our pockets?” until, finally, it lands on the government.

Less than a day after the Gun Devil kills Hayakawa Aki’s family, he is automatically registered as a ward of the state. Three weeks later, he and twenty-three other parentless adolescents from the countryside are taken in by an orphanage in the capital city of Hokkaido called Sapporo Kita-No-Hoshi. When he looks through the crowd for any familiar faces, he finds none. He finds only gaunt expressions far too old to be worn by children and far too similar to his own.

Now, eight years after Aki has devoted the remainder of his life to killing the Gun Devil, he realizes that it was inevitable that he would remain an inakamono in all ways but mind. 

In practice, he had gone to school. Had been on cordial terms with peers that he had referred to as ‘friends’ to orphanage counselors because this guaranteed a pass on monthly wellbeing checks. Had gotten decent grades, maintained a decent social standing—even if students grew quiet sometimes as he passed by, or tried very hard to pretend as if they weren’t glancing at him at any mention of devils or guns in a new manga they had bought over the summer, he had never been the target of any overt harassment. 

Then again, perhaps he had never stayed long enough for it to happen. 

Regardless, there were no hangouts, no cheap student discount tickets for movies scheduled at dawn, no late night karaoke sessions spent singing into mics capped in disposable fabric covers. At least, not for Aki. He increasingly found that this was not the norm—not for people his age, and especially not for other kids in the city. The orphanage was no exception. Some kids at Kita-No-Hoshi did it all, and more: drinking, smoking, sex, secretly hostessing as minors. Others were too traumatized by the memory of 18/11 to even handle the breeze in the backyard. 

Either way, Aki had become gradually aware that his values and desires and dreams—if they could even be called that anymore—were overwhelmingly single-minded in a way that others did not seem to be. Even compared to the children at the orphanage. That said, maybe there had been others like him; it was possible they just hadn’t ever been as noteworthy as the kids who were harder to handle. 

“They only go two ways,” he had heard a cafeteria lady sigh one day. “Either Gun-shocked and incapacitated, or they run off with their street friends before they’re even eighteen.” A few clangs had rung out as she unloaded a tray of stir-fried vegetables into a disposal bin. “Some of them are even younger than that, and they don’t even come to the orphanage for dinner anymore.”

“Look at all that food,” another said heavily. “What a waste.”

“But,” one of the younger volunteers had said, voice laced with hesitation, “not all of them are like that. Nishino-kun always eats his veggies, and Hayakawa-kun always says ‘thank you’—”

Behind the wall separating the cafeteria entranceway and the food station, Aki had gone still at the mention of his name.

“Nishino-kun vomits every time he sees meat,” the words are punctuated by a tired draw of breath. “Look, I’m not saying they’re bad kids. They need help, and that’s why we get up day after day to feed them—”

“And Aki-kun?” the youngest asked, her voice pitched near defiance. 

“Aki-kun…” 

A moment of silence. Then:

“Aki-kun is special.”

The conversation had replayed for days in his mind.

Hayakawa Aki had long stopped considering himself extraordinary. As a child, he thought that the pleased sound his mother would make at his finished homework, his ability to outrun all of his classmates, and the amazement in Taiyo’s gaze at him showed that he was exceptional. Then at eleven years old, the end of the world proved him wrong, and the discovery that the world did not end for others in the same way it did for him only served to strengthen the realization. Aki had been so firmly certain of the fact ever since—to the point where anyone so surely opposing it forced him to stare at the dark space above his bed for several nights, lining the ridges of the words in his mind as he tried to discern their meaning.

In the end, the conclusion he arrived at only reinforced what he already believed: it was that he could have become anyone, and anyone could have become him. He could have become Nishino, whose stomach was unable to stand the sight of anything other than fruits and vegetables because he kept seeing the bleeding insides of his sister spilled onto his meal tray. Or Himuro, who made a living off of selling fake IDs and cigarettes to students because the government grants wouldn’t be enough to make up for the fact that her parents hadn’t owned anything worthwhile to leave behind for their daughter. If Aki had been as close to one of the zones of impact on November 18th as Takahashi, his mind might not have been consumed by revenge but instead resorted to erasing its own memories of aimlessly scattered flesh to cope with the aftermath. 

And in another life, any one of them could have been omitted from the group of parentless children called the 1811 Generation. After all, 57,912 deaths was a large number, but it represented only 0.05% of Japan’s population. Ultimately, that was all it came down to: time and place and coincidence and luck. 

Still—under the fluorescent radiation of Yokohama Chinatown, filled with laughing office workers and countless identical leather briefcases, Aki briefly wonders how many of the twenty-three children at Kita-No-Hoshi became people with somewhere to be.

He thinks Takahashi would have liked the red lanterns.

“—Earth to Aki. Hello?”

He blinks. The world rematerializes around him: flashing signs, rubber shoe soles clicking on tiled street, vendors shouting greetings to passersby. And, behind him—

Himeno, face contorting with a drawn out yawn as she shrugs on her suit jacket. It flutters slightly as she draws it over her shoulders, momentarily blotting out the congregation of phosphorescent lights in the background. 

“So,” she says, stepping towards him off the ledge separating the back entrance of the restaurant from its compact side street, “explain to me why we can’t just clock out again?”

“...Mission report,” Aki says for the third time, casting a brief glance at the sky above. Not too dark yet. “Makima-san wasn’t at headquarters this morning because of a meeting.”

If it is currently earlier than 8 PM like he suspects, it’s likely she’ll still be in her office by the time they arrive. It would take about forty minutes at the very least via Shuto Expressway, but evening rush hour could push it past ninety; walking to the station and transferring lines to Kasumigaseki station could be faster.

Himeno blows out a long, audible breath, all mock despair. “Do we really need to go all the way there? We could just call,” she suggests as they exit into the bustling main street. “She knows how to pick up a telephone, right?”

“You can go home if you’d like,” he replies. “I can tell Makima-san that you weren’t feeling well.”

“Nope,” she waves off without pause. When faced with his questioning look at her sudden change of mind, she just offers him a grin. “I can’t leave my treasured kouhai to do all the work alone now, can I?”

The squeal of vending machines and hiss of oil are punctuated by short bursts of irasshaimase! as Aki leads a path for them through the thickening crowd. The commotion is soon underlain by Himeno’s quiet humming as she settles into a space by his side. 

He holds out the pack of gum in his palm.

“Hm?” Himeno’s eyes fall between his fingers. Squints slightly as she skims the words spelled on yellow cardboard packaging. “...‘Lotte Cool Mint’... ‘fresh breath’?” 

Then, she pouts—nose wrinkling, cheeks puffing out with a slight frown—as if she hasn’t made daydrinking and evening-drinking a daily habit on the job. “Aki-kun, I smell?”

“Of alcohol,” he tells her, although it’s admittedly difficult to smell anything other than the aroma of frying dumplings drifting over from the next stall. 

A long, theatrical sigh. “You usually don’t mind it…” she halts, then points a finger at him accusingly. It almost pokes him in the eye. “You just don’t want me to make you smell boozy in front of your favorite superior, do you?” she asks. 

“That’s not it,” he says. 

The words settle into noise. When he looks back over at Himeno, she seems to be contemplating. 

“Is it really that bad?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Is it always?”

“No.”

“So I smell nice most of the time?”

He ignores this. 

She smiles at his outright refusal to answer. “Okay, fiiiine,” she relents. Her movements lull slightly, as if thinking. Aki has learned to anticipate danger at the slow redeeming of something baiting and playful in her gaze. 

“Then,” she says, “what does she smell like?”

Aki glances at her, slightly taken aback. “Sorry?”

“Ma–ki–ma,” she enunciates the syllables, one by one. He feels something ignite at the mention of her name, slow and warm and feverish in his chest. “Makima-san. What does she smell like?”

She must be drunk, he thinks. 

“I wouldn’t know,” he states. 

Himeno peers at him suspiciously. Dark green hair falls into her visible eye, the iris bright blue and disbelieving. “No way. You must have gotten a whiff of her when she passed by at least once or twice.” He internally winces at the idea. She looks entirely too mischievous with the half-lidded mirth in her expression and sharp, upturned corner of her lips. “Aki, I bet you’re the type to secretly want to bottle your crush’s scent.”

He gives her a silently reproachful stare at which she finally retreats with a grin, sheepish. 

“Sorry, sorry!” She laughs. “I was just curious, can you blame me?” A few moments of amiable quiet pass between them before she purses her lips, then mutters, this time in a lower voice barely audible over the commotion: “just curious why you’re all so obsessed with her…”

He hears the comment, but does not reply.

To Aki, it had never been hard to see that Himeno despised their shared superior. Underneath her compliance and affability, there was always something distrusting when she looked at Makima. He saw it in the way she never seemed to offer any more words than necessary during case reviews, every declarations that she needed a long drink after a joint meeting between Tokyo Division 2 and its head overseer, the very first time she would ask him to quit Public Safety and go private together, so that they could both live longer, safer lives—and the stillness in her tone when he had, for the first time out of many, refused.

“Is it because of her?” she had asked quietly. 

“No,” he replied. 

To this day, Aki knows this to be true. He is a devil hunter because he lives to die—he will kill the Gun Devil or he will die trying, because there would be no reason to live otherwise. He knows that is the core of why he has not up and left, like many of his surviving coworkers have. He knows this. 

Yet when he tries to imagine a life without pale auburn hair gathered in a braid down the shoulder, crimson-ringed eyes framed by long strands—

He can’t.

For Hayakawa Aki, quitting has never been an option. Not when November 18 took away any vestiges of fulfillment he could ever feel living an ordinary life. Not when Taiyo lies unmoving under Hokkaido soil, never once having had the chance to explore the world with the same anticipatory excitement he had absorbed bedtime tales. His favorite story had been the one of the proud, ambitious town mouse who constantly undertook dangerous adventures in the city, looking for something better, always better. Possibly because he never had the circumstances—body nor time—to live the life of anything other than the modest country mouse who had safety and nothing else. 

For Hayakawa Aki, quitting has never been an option. Not when Makima had found him in the aftermath and lended him—breathed into him—purpose. 

She had saved him.

Aki does not believe in miracles, but Makima fundamentally contradicts this. If he was religious, he thinks her existence to him would have been akin to that of a sacrosanct deliverer. And despite the fact that he is not—despite the fact that Hayakawa Aki believes only in revenge—she welcomes him anyway. And in return, he offers her everything he can give: devotion, trust, loyalty, and—most unworthy—himself. 

Unconsciously, Aki had not expected Makima to smell like anything. She seemed to be untouchable, unassailable, scentless. But she had. 

She was human, too. 

“Flowers,” he says suddenly. “Rose and peony.” Pauses. “And… some citrus.”

Himeno looks up from where she had been fishing for a cigarette from a pack of Wild Raven. They had long escaped the congested quarters of Chinatown’s central avenue, and were now surrounded by dimly lit streets leading away from the red-and-gold arch marking its main entrance. 

Her hand falters.

“Huh?”

A moment of silence, only filled by the sound of footsteps on the sidewalk. He’s not sure why he answered when it would have been perfectly acceptable to let the question fade into nothing. Maybe because Himeno was his partner, and partners were supposed to know things. 

“You asked,” he says, looking ahead, “about her scent.”

Her fall of her stride is unusually muted. When he finally turns to look at her, he finds her unusually silent. Her jaw works once, twice, as she adjusts the smoke between her fingers.

“Yeah,” she murmurs. “Guess I did.”

Inexplicably, his gaze lingers on her for a few more moments. 

Still, he doesn’t dwell on the words for very long in the end—not in the days, weeks, or even months following. 

He does, however, three years later. 

Three years later, he revisits the expression on her face—in that brief space between his words and another one of her smiles, bright and knowing—and finds it still vivid in his mind. Awash in neon light, she remains uncharacteristically still, as if unwillingly lost in thought. And there, he searches, and searches, and searches—

Until he realizes that her expression was one of anguish. 

Three years later, Himeno dies, and you tell Aki she loved him. 

v. and yet your heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of—

Golden light spills over Makima’s shoulders. 

It enshrouds her in something akin to a halo of dusk—knowing and calm, soft yet unyielding. Elbows on the desk, her fingers are gathered weightlessly in the space between the curve of her jaw and the line of her collar. Behind her, quadrate pieces of the Tokyo skyline line the distance beyond glass, then fall around her in tilted amber squares of late afternoon. 

Makima’s office has always instilled a feeling of timelessness. Aki thinks this is not just because of the relative bareness of the space but also the way she occupies it. Against the vastness of it, she has always been small—but never felt so.  

There is a bookshelf, filled with spines that never seem to get dusty. A lamp, always lit by 6 PM but never before. Some lone works of art: carved metal engravings, framed in black on otherwise empty gaps of wall. One depicts a sharp-winged figure plunging from the sky. Lucifer, he learns from a book he had spotted instinctively on display from the familiar artwork on its cover. The 1990 Japanese translation of Gustave Doré: Magician of Illusion and Faith, now slightly worn and marked on the page decomposing Satan’s descent to hell, rests on the leftmost end of the collection gathered on his living room wardrobe. Himeno had barely held in her laughs the entire time he had stood in a line full of unsettled civilians, Public Safety suit covered in blotches of drying devil fluids. He remembers thinking after that it was an uncharacteristically oblivious thing for him to do, but somehow, this had not once occurred to him in the moment.  

The same wetness now stains his uniform—this time the remains of an egg devil terrorising the Tokyo suburbs. He ignores his own acute awareness of the yellow sludge dyeing his clothes every time Makima looks at him.

“—that concludes my report.”

“Well done,” she says, and a wordless warmth encapsulates the thrum of his heart, slow and right. “It seems you handled the case with minimal casualties.” A hand travels to rest her chin in her palm while the other gently falls atop the muted yellow of a case file. “Other than that, there’s one more thing I’d like to ask you.”

He meets her gaze, waiting—

“Do you have a driver’s license?”

He blinks. For some reason, he hadn’t expected the request to be so mundane. 

“...I’ll be able to get one soon,” he replies. 

She smiles, and he finds himself unconsciously following the movement of it. “Is that so? I’m glad.” There’s leisurely brush of her hand across manila folder, and Aki fixes his eyes on her face to prevent his gaze from flickering between the two. “The devil hunter who previously escorted me to meetings is planning to leave Public Safety in a month.”

He pauses, then asks slowly, testing the words in his mouth: “You want me to drive you?”

“Occasionally,” she replies, eyes not leaving him. “Would that be suitable?”

He nods. Of course it is. “I’ll let you know when I’ve passed the test.”

She only tilts her head in acknowledgement.  

He stays for a few more moments in case there is anything else. When there is nothing, he bows once, excuses himself, and heads to the door. But before his fingers can close around cold metal—

“Oh, and Aki-kun?” 

He turns. 

When Makima speaks, there is a curve in the line of her lips. 

“Happy early birthday.”

vi. muscle memory, the last dream of a soul that did not remember dreaming

After the mission report, Aki spends the better part of an hour searching for her. 

Only after arriving at headquarters had he learned that Himeno acquired a bleeding gash on the side of her arm. She had maintained it would be fine for the short duration of a mission report—being cut by a mid-sized (by devil standards) piece of flying eggshell while evacuating civilians would not be a threat to her life, and was in fact what she was paid to do—but Aki had taken one look at the unsanitary muck tinting their uniforms and firmly told her to visit the infirmary. She had eventually conceded, expression softening imperceptibly at something on his face he did not see. 

Judging by the soiled blouse and tie thrown into the medical waste bin, she hadn’t completely ignored their agreement for her to go to the clinic, though her current absence there made it impossible for Aki to take her to the hospital as he had planned. He turns to the office doctor emerging from a hunter’s bedside, who at the sight of him shows a mixed look of relief and panic. Apparently, he had tried to get her to stay; she had insisted there was someone she had to see. Then she had just changed into a fresh suit and slipped out while he hadn’t been looking. 

An urgent mission, maybe, the doctor suggests. Aki thanks him for the information without mentioning that is her usual excuse when she feels the itch for a lone smoke. 

He checks all the usual spots. The corner behind the lobby; the discreet alleyway behind headquarters that she had introduced to him two months into the job; the smoke room three flights up, which she had told Aki was commonly empty because most of the higher ups on the floor preferred to puff in their fancy private offices. After seven minutes, he thinks to radio her, but stops upon realizing she would have turned hers in at the front desk before going to the infirmary. All the while, he’s checked the alley a second time before noticing he’s done so. 

Fifteen minutes, and he resorts to all the ashtrays in a 200 meter radius, which is to say almost every public counter or desk in the area. Three or four times, he double takes at a flash of blue, searching for English letters printed in bold italic; some of the packs are Wild Ravens, but none are held by Himeno.

By the time he begins to ask coworkers if they’ve seen her, the horizon is already bleeding into fiery gradients of amber. 

He stops a pair from Tokyo Division 2, a devil hunter from Division 1, then an administrative member of the organization who he’s seen speaking to Himeno at least once or twice. No, they reply. Sorry, Hayakawa. Maybe ask ___? He just nods and moves on to the next, never betraying the slow, creeping sense of urgency building in his throat. 

One of the devil hunters he speaks to is Shigure, a veteran who transferred to Miyagi Division 1 during the early days of Aki’s recruitment. When asked, Shigure responds in the negative to his question. But just as Aki gives him a short bow and is about to move on, he offers absentmindedly, “Hey, check the rooftop. She used to brood up there with the other rookies after every mission.”

-

He does, and that’s where he finds her. 

The doors push open to blustering wind. Streaks of cloud are illuminated by the sun dipping towards the Kanto mountains, a white-hot point in the distance ringed by deep orange that spreads to encase the lattice skyline. Tokyo’s amber hour contrasts the bite of frigid wind against his cheeks, and for a few moments the only audible thing is the sound of it rushing past his ears.

Beams snapping, shattering, howling tempest ripping a house from its roots—

And then he pauses, because he has long stopped letting the nightmares show on his face.

Concrete exploding, sudden heat searing, sonic shockwave in winter—

After the attack on November 18, there had first been shock. Even after he had been picked off the streets and transported to what the evacuators told him in soft voices was a safe place, that’s right you’ll be safe here there's no need to be scared are you hurt let me see, he had remained unmoving for what seemed like hours against the wall of a community gymnasium. He distantly thought he should be feeling something—possibly letting out cries of anguish like the women and men surrounding him for their mothers and daughters and fathers and sons and sisters and brothers—but there had just been nothing, overwhelming and numbing and swallowing every real thought into unbearable stillness. 

Then, sometime in the night when the gym settled into a silence filled with muffled whimpers, he heard a sound different from the rest. 

It had tinkled softly in his ears, made him feel as if he had been suddenly jolted awake from a long sleep. Seconds later, he caught the shift of padded jacket against lacquered floor—a slightly wavering shhhh, people are sleeping, yes that’s right darling, let’s be quiet now, no no don’t do that, oh god please don’t do that—

He realized it had been laughter. Young, childish, a pearl shining in the dark. 

Like Taiyo’s.

Finally, he had begun to cry. 

Over the years, Aki builds an altar for the dead in the recesses of his mind. There is not a single day he does not visit. The vividness of the day had never dulled: in the months after, it had sometimes arrived in the waking moments after nightmares; other times, halfway through a meal when he had realized his chopsticks had been naturally gravitating to the vegetables Taiyo used to push onto his plate. It had occasionally come in the space between school periods, forcing him to quietly sign out of class and cry in a bathroom stall before washing his face and returning as if nothing had happened. 

Sometimes, the memories arrive as a gust of air whistling past a rooftop in November, eight years after the day they are made. 

(Still, he finds that daily visitation to the altar has taught him, across the span of the near-decade of life he has lived in their aftermath, to keep it from showing on his face when they do.

Aki could never forget, but he had long abandoned mourning what could have been.) 

At nineteen years old, he is still learning; but by then, he has also learned much. The experience guides him in the present to remain standing where he is, loosely fix his eyes on the horizon, and let the memory of 18/11 fade into nothing. Until the wind is no more than sound in his ears, until he is standing on a rooftop instead of between cedar trees leading a path to his house, until the last two digits of the current year flip from eighty-six to ninety-five. 

He does all of this, then looks for Himeno. 

There is no one in the space that stretches to metal railing in front of him, but every rooftop has a back. It’s when he’s about to turn the corner of the stair bulkhead that he sees: 

Two figures, standing side by side. Their backs are to him. He tells Himeno apart by the dark strap of her eyepatch against the green of her hair, and the two-fingered tilt of her hand around a cigarette, unlit. The other is a woman—a Public Safety officer, by the looks of her clothing. The wind whips into their hair, the flaps of their suits, but they stand unmoving, as if they had long warmed to the cold.

Aki is about to step forward when he notices the straight, horizontal cut of Himeno’s dress shirt at the crest of her left shoulder. Below it, layers of textured dressing encase her arm from tricep to low elbow where she had been hit. A first aid kit lies a few steps behind their feet, accompanied by several disposal bags filled with soiled gloves, bloodied gauze, a pair of tweezers, and the remains of Himeno’s sheared-off sleeve. There’s also a scattering of several pieces of off-white shell—leftovers of the egg devil he and Himeno had eliminated only hours prior. 

His gaze refocuses on the bandage as he starts walking towards them. It’s secure, and no red has seeped through yet. As if the hand that wrapped it was well-versed in doing so.

First, relief—so quiet and sudden it surprises him. 

Then, Shigure’s words, ringing in his mind: she used to brood up there with the other rookies.

His eyes trace the amber outline of the other woman. It’s hard to tell if she is a devil hunter or administrative civil servant from posture and physique alone. Not a previous partner. All of Himeno’s were dead—

 “—hear I got a new buddy?” Himeno asks. 

His feet slow, then come to a stop.

The sound of a thumb pressing down on an ignition button is lost to wind, but the flash of light it produces is not. It stretches upward into a yellow-orange teardrop, flickering once, then twice under the sanctuary of the hand shielding it from the wind. The officer leans towards Himeno with the cocooned flame—a silent offering. 

“—told by Makima-san,” she tells her, voice carried away by gale.

Makima-san. The officer personally knows their superior; she’s on level enough terms with her to receive updates on her subordinates. Not a veteran, since she had likely entered the agency at the same age as Himeno—who is four years his senior—if they had regularly spent time together as new recruits. Possibly a division leader, though judging from what he’s seen, that seems relatively uncommon. He runs through the list of Tokyo Public Safety’s captains in his mind excepting his own, one by one: a woman, young, close with his partner. The most probable conclusion he can come to is that she currently is not deployed in the city. He would have recognized her otherwise. 

Himeno’s head dips the way it does when she hums, absentminded and low. She stoops over with two fingers to her mouth, nimbly positioned to light her stick; the tip of it glows as it meets fire. Her words, mumbled slightly, register as a question before the rest is lost to noise: “What else—?” 

What else’d she say? he imagines.

The officer seems to consider this. 

“—seemed to be getting on well,” she says, words drifting enough for Aki to hear.

“—right,” Himeno murmurs, tilting towards embers fading into the air. There’s a hint of a smile in her tone, barely discernible amidst the din. “—a real one.” Then her gaze turns towards the woman beside her, crinkling with what he knows from experience is mischievous, playful intent:

“Sooo,” she quips, head finding a place on the officer’s shoulder. From the officer, there is no jolt or shift to indicate the gesture hasn’t been experienced before.  “—about you? Surely” —a gust whistles in his ear, piercing the sound of her voice— “don’t plan on being partnerless forever.” The next time she speaks, a hint of a frown lines its edges. “—likes you, so where’s your handsome buddy?”

The other woman gently raises the flap of Himeno’s suit jacket. It flutters sharply when exposed to the wind. Aki sees a flash of a familiar light blue before the lighter disappears into his partner’s inner pocket. 

“—better alone,” she replies, drawing her hand back to her side. 

Himeno withdraws from her shoulder in response, seemingly to meet the officer’s gaze. 

“—lonely,” he catches. 

Must get lonely, her voice spells in his mind, suddenly stark from its usual lightheartedness. 

“Not very,” the officer says. 

There’s something still in Himeno’s tone when she continues, unrelenting: “—always away for too long.” A pause, then: “Don’t tell me” —it dips into inaudibleness before emerging again— “overseas again.”

The officer simply smiles. “—won't tell, then.”

They maintain eye contact for a few more moments before there seems to be a compromise, split-second and unspoken between the two of them.

A loud sigh escapes her as Himeno plucks the cigarette from her lips, wrapping her uninjured arm around the officer’s shoulders in a show of returning to her usual self. “—no one to have fun with,” she whines, breathing smoke, and although Aki is almost entirely sure at this point that Himeno is older than her friend by the all-too-familiar way she treats her as if she has known the officer her entire life, this is not nearly evident in the way she clings to her like a child. “—no one to drink with, or smoke with—”

“—minor, Himeno-san,” the woman reminds her, and Aki resists the urge to grimace. Reconstructs the words in his mind. Probably: I’m a minor, Himeno-san. 

She really should stop doing that if she doesn’t want to get into legal trouble. 

“—damn it,” Himeno says, quite unhappily. Then she snakes her right arm closer around the officer so that she can hold up her fingers against the darkening landscape—seemingly counting. A moment, then two pass before her expression visibly lights up. “Hey—you’re turning twenty next year!” She turns back to her, grinning. “—go drinking and smoking in 1996. Aki” —his eyes flicker to her at the mention of his own name— “gonna be legal then too—”

Now is probably the time to avert the conversation. Preferably before she says something reportable to HR for workplace harassment. 

“Himeno-senpai,” he says, moving forward in quick strides towards the two women. 

She whips around at the sound of his voice. 

“Aki!” she realizes brightly, then pokes at the shoulder of the officer next to her, whose back still faces him. “Great timing—hey, say hi to my new partner. He’s the same age as you.”

Same age? 

When the officer turns, and she is smiling, eyes still mirthful from her conversation with Himeno. Then that same expression meets him, and—

For some reason, his chest squeezes. 

“Hayakawa-san,” you say, holding out a hand. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

If he could have gone back all those years to the day you first met, he would have taken it in both palms, gotten on his knees, and asked you to quit. 

vii. for the end of all our exploring was to arrive where we started

In winter of 1995, nearly a year and a half after Aki meets Makima, he learns she has a right hand.

But first:

Come the second week of December, Himeno registers for a five-day leave to attend her sister’s impromptu wedding in Osaka. Her soon-to-be-husband, he learns through word of mouth (specifically Himeno’s mouth), comes from a family of devout Christians who goes to church every Sunday and believes marriage should happen as early as possible to “preserve the flame”, which Himeno personally thinks is bullshit. They were also, in her words, loaded. It was for this very reason her father had objected; strange motive, but hang on—he suspected the match was for the one-sided economic benefit of paying his medical bills, and despised the idea (a prideful man). Her sister had vehemently protested otherwise, and a huge fight ensued between the two. Ultimately, her father was helpless in stopping the marriage because they had waited until the moment parental consent was no longer necessary to “get hitched”, and in a perhaps equally if not more petty move, her father had declared he would not attend at all. And—well. That was all to say that Himeno really needed an extended weekend off to prevent her sister from having no maid of honor nor family to walk her down the aisle at her own wedding—and this is what she had told the lady at the desk in an attempt for sympathy when she handed in the official request, likely too late to proceed even with the division captain’s stamp of approval. 

Hours later, Aki finds her crouched in a loose-limbed, near-fetal position on the floor. After several moments of silence, she tells him that the Personnel Division haggled down the request to a two-day vacation or nothing. She had, of course, pointed out that practically half of that time would be spent traveling. In the end, though, they had not relented, and she had accepted their conditions—something was always better than nothing. 

This was her sister’s wedding, after all. 

“What to do,” she hums, a lone index finger tapping the hollow of her cheek. Her tone: two parts contemplation to one part genuine exasperation. “Hmm… wow, this is pretty bad. She does really need help with venue preparations…”

Listening silently, Aki slips on the scabbard for the Curse Devil’s nail sword. Meanwhile, Himeno casually laments ever believing those “two-faced snakes” in the administrative department would ever agree to a measly vacation after she’d ran through that large chunk of paid leave at the beginning of the year, when her father had been in a critical condition that had urgently required heart surgery.

“—if only there was a way to use up PTO from previous years,” she continues, seemingly lost in thought. Then, she finally buries her head into her knees and sighs—loudly. “This sucks… all this adult talk is making my head hurt.”

Despite never either having fully made use of his own paid time off, Aki is aware that publicly employed devil hunters are offered substantial benefits—an attempt to offset the fact that their death rates are likely higher than any other job in existence. As a devil hunter, dying tomorrow—or even on the mission he is deployed on today—would surprise no one. And if the cause was not being physically killed by a devil, it would be contractually. For this reason, most experienced devil hunters periodically took full-time breaks from work. Between the long hours and constant fatality risk, it was always uncertain when they would be able to see their family next—or if there ever would be a next time. 

After settling the strap across his shoulder and down to his waist, he finally spares a glance at her slumped-in figure. “It would have been better to request a longer period of leave from the start,” he tells her. 

Himeno’s hair flings upwards as she looks to where he stands, shooting him a look of exaggerated disappointment. “I know that now, Aki-kun,” she insists. Her head tilts to reveal a pout that curves the line of her face. “You’re my buddy, not the Personnel Division’s. Can’t you offer some words of comfort or something?”

You’re my buddy, not the Personnel Division’s.

One of the first things he had learned as a devil hunter was that different devils required different remittances in exchange for their abilities, and that there was no guarantee that two contractors would be charged the same. After all, each individual attaches unique value to their possessions. The only constant across all devil contracts is that whether it involves the exchange of a limb, eye, or loved one, it is always in the nature of a devil to try to gain more than they lose.

Himeno maintains that this is true not just for devils, but people. The common difference is that people can choose to be better.

A counterexample in point, supposedly, would be the Personnel Division of Tokyo Public Safety.

He pauses. Crouches, after a moment, down to her level—searching for something better to say than just sorry you can’t go to your sister’s wedding or, even worse: it’s part of the job. 

Himeno follows the movement with a single, half-lidded eye rife with playful curiosity, amusement, and the darkened vestiges of several sleepless nights. If she still had the other, he imagines it would be doing the same. As if playing a personal game to anticipate what his next words are, she gives him her full notice, rapt with attention.

It has always struck Aki as ironic that he pays for the Curse Devil’s powers with the years of his natural lifespan. This is because he holds no desire to live a long life. Nor is he interested in experiencing the so-called pleasures it has to offer, whether that be the booze, women, nicotine, or trips to distant, exotic islands his coworkers use to “take the edge off” of the grueling work they do on a daily basis. 

He has only ever used a small fraction of his total paid time off, and the sole purpose has always been to visit his family’s grave in Hokkaido.

“So?” Himeno asks. “Your verdict, Judge Hayakawa?”

Still, if Taiyo had lived—if he had grown up and gone to school, then university, taken a year off with the intention to explore the Earth in the way he had dreamed of when they were kids— 

Nii-chan, you’ll go with me, right? he had asked. Aki ignored the question, but from the next day onwards he had begun keeping a list of all the interesting places and countries he heard of from classmates, television, and even passing conversations on the street. 

If Taiyo had lived, traveled the world, and maybe even met someone that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with…  if the wedding was set in another country far, far away from Public Safety headquarters—

Would he have used it all?

The answer is obvious, he thinks: 

He would not have needed to, because there would have been no reason for him to become a devil hunter in the first place.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he states at last. “They’re the assholes.”

By the time Aki is nineteen years old, he has twenty-one more years left to spend, and only one thing worth spending them on. Twenty-one more years to invest in killing the Gun. It would be rational to be a more mindful consumer, but he has not known logic since 1986.

Truthfully, he thinks Curse Devil undervalues its abilities.

-

As a hunter in training, Aki had often heard from tired-faced seniors that the generous welfare packages that came with the job were more of a necessity than anything. 

The work killed people too easily to recruit otherwise, they remarked; if you lived to hit a year in experience, it quickly became apparent to many that the “exceptional” benefits were more remuneration for the daily horrors rather than anything true to their name. Aki had never heeded the muttered warnings in the halls or dingy 24-hour izakayas because he always thought that any devil hunter unprepared to be cut by a double-edged sword should not be one. 

But for some reason—some quiet, unknowable reason—as he and Himeno approach Makima’s office, he finds himself searching. Searching for an excuse, an explanation. Makima was never cruel without reason, but sometimes unique circumstances demanded necessary decisions. The issue was that there was no standard for normal in the world of devil hunting. If she was not willing to extend the leave by four more days upon first request, she would need to be convinced with proof that this was necessary. Possibly by a proof of performance. 

Paneled vinyl floor, stretching between them and the office. Only about twenty more steps in between. 

Think.

Nineteen. Eighteen. 

How many devil incidents had they neutralized in the last quarter?

Sixteen.

Fifteen incidents in three months. There had been minimal civilian deaths and property damage overall.

Thirteen.

The most notable cases had been the Centipede Devil, the Scaffold Devil— 

The door opens. 

The click of dress shoes sound against polished concrete—once, twice—before a figure steps around and guides it back shut. Pale midday light washes over a Public Safety trench coat, evenly separated into squares by the grid frame of the hallway windows. An instinctive, split-second glance reveals the level planes of a face, loosely set jaw, calm eyes deftly skimming both ends of the corridor. An officer: remarkably unremarkable in her uniform, but betrayed by an expression of ease so unusual for headquarters it makes her conspicuous.  

You.

“Himeno-san,” you greet, walking towards them with a pleasantly surprised look. To him, a small nod of acknowledgement. “Hayakawa-san.”

He nods shortly in response. 

Himeno’ expression brightens, then stills slightly as her gaze travels to the door behind you. “Back already?” she asks offhandedly. 

Your reply comes readily: there was something you needed to discuss with Makima-san. It is accompanied by the distinct sound of a cardstock folder shifting against the polyester-cotton of your sleeve; manila yellow stands starkly against the colorless backdrop of your uniform. You then pause, assessing—only for a moment, before the chance rises for Himeno to interrupt—before remarking curiously, “You look like you need a drink.” 

For a moment, Himeno’s face is unreadable. Between the two of you, an inaudible exchange seems to occur—the same kind of silence that had followed a similarly maneuvered question on a rooftop, the day he had met you—and disperses almost instantly the second it forms. 

Then, a sigh. 

“How’d you know?” she asks, leaning against the wall. Aki sees your eyes flick once to the shoulder she rests on—checking that it isn’t her injured side, he realizes. “Not because this place sucks the soul out of its employees, right?”

This draws a smile out of you. You mention a joint division gathering set for tonight: an early Christmas Celebration, taking advantage of the days before many devil hunters were set to take their winter leave. It had been a largely unplanned thing, only becoming something certain a few hours earlier. Seeing as Aki and Himeno had just completed a mission, you were assuming they had not yet heard.  

“If you plan on drinking tonight, consider letting Public Safety cover the bill,” you offer.

Himeno tilts her head upwards with an expression of consideration, chin balanced between her thumb and index finger. “Dunno,” she says casually, “I’ll go if you do.” Prompts a glance from Aki when she pokes his shoulder several times in succession. “Him, too.”

At this, a small frown creeps into the line of your lips. Almost as if omniscient, you ask if anything happened. And suddenly, an idea becomes apparent in Aki’s mind. 

Himeno responds with a sullen look and an effortless question of her own: did she now need a reason to even spend time with her “favorite coworkers”?

“Of course not,” you reply easily. “But it’s unusual for there to be any preconditions needed for you to drink.”

This leaves her speechless for an unprecedented sum of time, so before she can come up with the next words of protest:

“Himeno-san needs a week off to attend her sister’s wedding in Osaka,” Aki says. He remembers her requesting a smaller amount, but it would be naive to ask for the same after having it bargained down to less than half in front of her eyes. He continues even as Himeno’s head snaps to him with a look of uncharacteristically genuine surprise; your gaze turns to him only slightly, curious. “The Personnel Division is insisting on giving her only two days.” 

“Aki, what are you—”

“I see,” you say. “I’ll talk to them.”

“I don’t—huh?”

You hum. “Today is December 9th… you mentioned Sora-san is getting married on the 14th.” You seem to deliberate this for a moment before you ask, “Himeno-san, are your bags still packed?” 

She blinks. “Is this for real?”

“It’s probable I could get them to register you on leave beginning today, and ending on the” —you continue after a quick pause— “sixteenth.”

Himeno is silent for a long moment before telling you that she’s surprised your backside has no visible lipstick marks from all the “ass-kissing” they do to you here. Still, her voice is warm-tinted with affection when she finally adds: “Thank you, I love you.”

He expects your response to be an imperceptible curl of your lips, but instead you let out a small breath—barely audible, real, quietly steeped in mirth. 

“Of course.”

-

Himeno leaves within the day, and by night Aki is seated shoulder-to-shoulder and front-to-back between coworkers he barely knows. 

The izakaya: a single light bathing the restaurant’s entire side in dim amber, countless half-empty plates scattered across short-legged tables, shouts of mastaa! and the occasional finger being pointed at the vertical paper strips taped to the walls, handwritten with daily specials and cheap bar snacks. Tokyo Divisions 1 to 3 have blended into a single sea of black and white suits amidst haphazardly folded winter trench coats. A table down, there is the reddish-brown of Nomo’s hair. Someone calling for a plate of eihire, Kato’s preferred pairing with sake. A short, distinctive laugh likely belonging to Vice Captain Yusa several seats to his right, talking to a woman in a ponytail. 

You should come, Aki, he had said. It’s not often that you get a free-for-all singles mixer that you can put on the agency’s card. Even Himeno had told him to go before she had set off for Osaka, telling him it was lame to be at home instead of celebrating early Christmas like a normal person. Aki had responded that he had no interest in relationships unnecessary to devil hunting. Yusa had simply smiled, asked if that was the case, and left with an offhanded remark that Makima may be coming. 

It is too loud, and too cramped. Aki observes the condensation beading on his untouched glass—beer, not tea. 

“Drink up, rookie,” a voice drawls next to him. “There’s no saying if there’ll be a next time you’ll be able to get shit-faced drunk.”

“I’m nineteen,” he replies. He doesn’t bother correcting the man that it is about a year too late for him to be considered a new recruit.

A brief pause, followed by a shrug—loose-shouldered, uncaring. “Does it really matter? Seems meaningless to not let nineteen year-olds drink if you let ‘em die hunting down materialized concepts of fear on a daily basis.” There’s a shift of fabric as he leans backwards, chugging down the rest of his drink, then slams it back down on the table. The layer of thick white foam trembles in Aki’s cup from the impact. “Well, do what you want. I’m gonna go take a shit.”

“Take it easy and don’t clog the toilet like last time,” someone yells. 

“Yeah, yeah,” he grunts, stumbling to his feet in the congested space between two full tables. “Order the next round while I’m gone.”

Aki watches the man step off the zashiki and disappear into a doorway separated from the main dining area by a navy curtain. The commotion around him continues, undaunted. New dishes replace empty ones. A group near the entrance begins to sing “Innocent World”, and somewhere behind him, there is a man and woman discussing the merits of becoming a gravure model versus a devil hunter. 

“—and Makima-san?”

Just like that, his pulse jumps. Too quick, he glances to the entrance—only to find it empty. 

“Think they went for a smoke,” someone says. 

They. She had been here. With someone else. 

Who?

“She smokes? Didn’t take her for the type.”

A higher up? One of the captains?

“I’m just surprised she came at all. I think I’ve seen her once in the three years I’ve been here.”

Heat begins a slow crawl beneath his skin before he can think better of it. Simmers white-hot, hot enough to burn. He hadn’t noticed when she arrived. Someone else had; then likely sat next to her, talked to her, was now the one smoking beside her—

“Apparently, she’s not usually in town. Doing nationwide and international stuff. Big cases. Whatever.”

Would she have gone with him? If he knew how? Was old enough for it?

“Hey, isn’t” —he hears a familiar name that nearly fractures his train of thought— “her assistant or something?”

“Oh, yeah. She’s barely at headquarters either. Pretty young, too—”

But it’s something irrational that draws him up onto his right knee, places a hand there, and pushes him to stand on both legs. By the time the heads surrounding his seat come into focus, he is already walking towards the edge of the tatami-lined platform. The noise—the crackle of grilling meat, boisterous laughter from behind, the chatter of other walk-in customers seated on the restaurant’s other side—grows louder as he approaches the kitchen. Within a few moments, he finds his black and white sneakers amidst a sea of uniform others. 

“Where’s he going?” asks the devil hunter from earlier, turning to look at Aki’s vanishing back with a confused expression. 

“Dunno. Bathroom?”

Someone lets out a laugh. “Hey, kid, go a little later! It probably stinks in there—”

The commotion fades as he ducks past textile. He glances to both ends of a short hallway marked with dimly legible signs. To his left, the bathrooms, and a staff-only storage room even further down. To the right, a fluttering noren the same hue as the one he had just passed. 

A back door.

They went for a smoke. 

It’s something irrational that draws him towards it. 

-

“—get it to you by next week,” the other voice says. 

Even from behind the curtain, Aki can almost hear the gentle, upwards curve of her lips. “I'll hold you to that.” 

Something blooms beneath his skin, thick and honey-slow; possibly self-disgust, for violating the privacy of one of the people he most admires. Before it has the chance to take, however, there is the faint scratch of heel against concrete that he recognizes as the familiar sound of a smoke being stubbed out. He instinctively takes three silent steps backwards, reaching into the inner pocket of his suit as if searching for a pack. 

Fabric parts, and the woman that emerges gives Aki an assessing look as she sweeps past; he spares her an imperceptible nod as he does the same, out into the back alley of the izakaya. 

Coral-auburn, interlaced into a long plait. Two face-framing strands, visible beneath the underside of her jaw. Through the black outline of her trench coat, the subtle silhouette of her shoulders and back. Around her: empty crates of Asahi and Kirin bottles, some properly stacked and others cluttered. A soft, fluorescent hum echoes from a bulky cigarette vending machine set against the wall. 

“Makima-san,” he says after a moment. 

She stills, and he thinks there is an uncharacteristic amount of pause in it. 

Then, she turns. 

No—

You do.

-

You draw the cigarette away in a breath of white smoke, and if he hadn’t witnessed the rest, it would be believable to call it winter mist. Like exhalation condensing into steam, the way it used to before his eyes in the Hokkaido countryside. 

“I dyed my hair,” you say. 

Aki had never considered the possibility of mistaking another woman for Makima. She was irreplaceable in a way that was difficult to explain. But as his gaze falls to the color of your braid, the locks framing your face, he finds it mildly uncanny how alike you look to her this way. He isn’t sure why, or even how you’d managed to change the hue of your entire head in the few hours that he’d last seen you at headquarters. Still, the line of your brows is relaxed. Your eyes: calm and unworried. Despite suddenly donning the cut of your direct superior for no obvious reason, you do not seem to be undergoing an early-life crisis. The only thing out of place is the smoke held between your lips—edged with a round end, two-thirds white and one-third tangerine hue. 

Hey, say hi to my new partner. He’s the same age as you.

After that day, he had thought over Himeno’s words in his mind. 

Himeno was twenty-three years old. She had begun work as a devil hunter at eighteen: five years ago. You were nineteen. If it was true that you had joined at the same time that she had…

Fourteen. 

You would have been working at Public Safety since fourteen. 

He's not sure why the words leave his mouth, but they do. 

“I thought you were a minor,” he says, watching the tip ignite in soft flints as you inhale, a glowing point lit against darkened evening. The way the stick is held between the crook of your fingers is far too relaxed to not be a habit; he can tell from seeing the same kind adopted by a partner he spends the majority of his waking hours with. 

You follow his gaze to your hand, and smile. 

Ash falls with a gentle tap of your finger. As if contemplating which explanation to give, you hum slightly before offering, “Let’s just say I’ve become accustomed to the rules from somewhere far outside of Japan.”

Judging by your statement, it seems his suspicions for overseas deployment aren’t improbable. He had understood the agency, and likely by extension Makima, was heavily involved in international politics—after all, 18/11 was proof that devils could be used as weapons of mass destruction—but like the majority of devil hunters, he had never known which parts.

He remains silent as you take a final drag of the cigarette—long, quiet, and deep—before dropping it to the ground.

“I’d appreciate it if you could keep this a secret from Himeno-san,” you continue, putting it out in a soft scrape between your heel and dry alleyway. From behind the collar of your trench coat, you draw out a tin container and open it with a small, metallic click. Seconds later, the scent of mint saturates the air. “You see, I promised that my first smoke would be with her.”

I promised that my first smoke would be with her. 

He thinks back to dim light spilling over numerous plates, spread on a lacquer wooden table. There, enclosed by two sitting booths: chuka soba, annin tofu, gyoza on one side; fried rice, rebanira itame, hiyashi chuka greens on the other. Himeno’s face, illuminated from above in amber hues as she held out a stick towards him, telling him she got the feeling they were going to be working together for a while. The expression of sheer dismay on her face when he had told her she was kind of awful for making someone smoke below the legal age. Then, her reluctant demand for him to hand it back over.

Once you grow up and you’re ready to have an addiction, she said with a smile, I’ll give it back.

Apparently, smoking had not been the only bad habit Himeno could not resist. She also had a historical compulsion to advertise it to underage individuals. 

Soon enough, however, there would be no minors left in the division to break the law. In nine days, Aki would be legally old enough to smoke. Sometimes, he had considered what her reaction would be if he simply refused to, and strangely, he had always found himself arriving at the same conclusion. First there would be dejection, culminating in a deeply crestfallen pout; bargaining second (but Aki, you agreed to it, that’s really not fair you know, I was looking towards this for so long…); and thirdly, always acceptance. Possibly because even she knew those packs did nothing good for the body. 

But if Aki was being entirely honest, neither health risks or the law were reasons why he had refused that day. To him, their worst quality had always been the fact that they were a complete waste of time. They were cancer sticks that addicts paid for not just in money and bone density, but also spent lifetimes. For all he knew, they were worthless. 

And yet—

“Are they any good?” he asks. 

You still slightly, turning to him with a questioning glance.

He pauses. Then: “The cigarettes.”

He thinks something flickers across your face, too brief for him to name. He does catch, however, the softening of your features in the deep blue light until that, too, fades. 

“They rot my lungs and bones,” you admit finally, and he gets a sense that you are being distinctly honest. Seeing as there is no reason not to be, he is unsure why. “Still—”

Your eyes crinkle as you grin, and for a moment, he is reminded of that same sensation of something painful and unrealized the day he met you. 

“—They make for great conversation starters.” 

In winter of 1995, more than a year and a half after Aki meets Makima, he learns you are her right hand. You are practiced, polite, and move through the halls of Public Safety as if you were born in its walls. At any gathering, you are always the first to take Makima’s coat, always the first to calmly order each one of your coworkers’ favorite dishes, and always the last to leave. It’s largely by chance that he meets you at all: mostly by virtue of being Himeno’s partner and Makima’s subordinate, the former of whom refers to you as her “favorite shady person”. And even if he feels inexplicably unsettled—that strange, dully aching contraction of his body and mind when you say something completely unexpected—Aki, in the winter of 1995, barely knows you. The two of you are strangers. Coworkers. Civil servants, devoted to hunting down the race that is devils. 

Nothing more, nothing less. 

He’s not sure when it all began to read like a lie. 

----------------------------------------------------------

notes: hope u guys enjoyed! any and all feedback is appreciated <3

idk if this was noticeable, but the chapter title + titles of each part make up a poem; each part consists of this story's take on a notable literary phrase. if ur interested in reading it, here it is:

after life:

all the earth was before you,

and it ran with rivers that none had ever stepped in twice;

it told you, “no man is an island”.

did you know the bell of the gion shōja echoes 

the impermanence of all things?

and yet your heart has its reasons which reason knows 

nothing of—

muscle memory, 

the last dream of a soul that did not remember dreaming.

for the end of all our exploring was to 

arrive where we started.