archive of my yoshiden slashfic, which you can access here!
chapter 4: easy revenge
author's notes and warnings
there are lots of tws this chapter!!!! please please please stay safe!
tws: graphic descriptions of suicide, graphic descriptions of violence, drug abuse, allusion to past child abuse
˗ˏˋ★‿︵‧ ˚ ₊⊹this night has opened my eyes ; the smiths
fly me to the moon; yoko takahashi
October 1997
They call it Idyllic on the streets.
A murmured rumor here, a whispered tip there– a new drug on the market, smuggled in sealed glass bottles, see through liquid practically indistinguishable from water. Sold through proxies, known dealers that have lived on the streets their whole life and know how to keep their mouth shut, and bought by the richest of the rich.
Business conglomerate leaders blow thousands just to get a taste of Idyllic– liquid euphoria. Poor chasers have to make do with the leftovers, diluted with fent and tranq, powdered pill that melts like chalk when inhaled, but tasteless still.
Those are the ones that get people killed, found dead in their homes, eyes rolled back, mouth slightly parted. Heart attack, organ failure, stroke, the reports say, but those who keep up with the times knows that really, another kid got too high on a bad cut of Idyllic.
Fami wouldn’t be interested in the deaths– no, those aren’t as important. The real issue is that the police are catching on, only seconds away from finding out about Idyllic. If they connect the dots (and they will), they’ll know where to look.
Hirofumi’s phone buzzes softly as he calls Famine for the upteenth time in the past hour, low tone ringing in his ears before cutting off to voicemail.
It wasn’t called Idyllic before, not when Control was developing it. It didn’t have a name, at least, not one that he could remember. Control always called it the compound and everyone else knew it as just the drugs. The drugs that got Angel and Chainsaw killed, the drugs that Control killed to develop, and the drugs that everyone else would kill for.
Hirofumi and Denji had gone through hell and back to keep the recipe a secret, and now here it is, sold amongst the public, obscene price or not, open game to all.
The warehouse he’d been held in two days ago looms on a pile of rubble up ahead, half demolished. He only vaguely remembers the journey back, when he’d been clutching at his side and stopping at every streetlamp for support, running purely on adrenaline and instinct to survive. He’dfound his way back by tracing the tracker Famine had placed on the back of his phone, hunched in a safehouse, straining his eyes against the dim light of a borrowed laptop until the red squiggly line on the map made sense.
Of course, it didn’t add up at first. He had found his backpack only a few kilometers away from the warehouse, strewn haphazardly in a garbage dump. He hadn’t even walked for an hour. It hadn’t been gone through, at least, not that he could tell. His extra ammo was still tucked into the bottom, as were his backup pistol, change of clothes, and his phone. It was odd– like they wanted him to find the bag. He’d tossed the backpack, of course. Who knows what they could’ve done with it.
The phone tracker, a tiny chip tucked into the underside of the keyboard, was still on, its tiny red light blinking on and off frantically when he’d taken it apart. Aside from the odd placement of the backpack, this had bothered him the most. Famine was to be alerted every time he left his stakeout– the fact that he’d started moving without notifying her should have been suspicious.
Fami might be inexperienced, but she isn’t stupid. Not stupid enough to not check in when Hirofumi’s shaky red path stops in an alleyway on the map, and not stupid enough to infer that something must have happened.
She could have sent backup. She could have called for help. Hell, she could have gotten him a getaway car at the very least, God knows she has enough of Control’s old pawns to spare, but no. On her end of things, it’s radio silence. And now, she isn’t even answering his calls.
Hirofumi tosses his phone onto the floor and grinds the keypad under his heel into the gravel until the tiny light fizzes off. He stomps on it a couple times for good measure, nearly cracking the thing into two, before kicking it down the hill. It bounces off the train tracks, metal cracking metal, scattering into pieces of broken technology. He’d broken the tracker at the safehouse, snapping it between his fingers the moment the map data had finished uploading.
Something’s off about all this. Famine shouldn’t have– wouldn’t have– left him hanging like that. He’s been a part of the Horsemen for nearly as long as she has, and a far more integral part of Control’s career. And sure, he’s technically no longer on the same side as she is, but it’s not like he’s acted on anything. It’s not like she can read his mind. So why isn’t she contacting him? Why hadn’t she gotten him help?
With Control, Hirofumi might have been able to guess. She was manipulative, sure, but Hirofumi knows how to deal with manipulation. She was unpredictable, sure, but unpredictable in a predictable manner. Famine is a ticking time bomb, completely unreadable, emotions hidden carefully under wraps. She has no motivations that he can identify– no drive, no will for power, nothing.
At best, she’s an empty shell of who Control used to be, a pale mimicry with less experience.
Wind blows through his hair, cold seemingly draining the energy right from the marrow of his bones. The earliest trees are already shedding their leaves at the sign of autumn’s arrival, but of course, there are no trees in the industrial district, so the only sound is that of the wind whistling through the cracks in the swaying cranes ahead. The cold air stings at his cheeks, a harsh contrast to the almost too-hot throbbing pain in his side. Hirofumi had dressed the wound only this morning, but he thinks it might be close to infection.
He’s back– not for Famine, or the Horsemen, or even for Denji. No, he’s here on his own terms.
Because Idyllic , for all its history, complications, and monetary value, isn’t supposed to exist.
Not anymore.
He had destroyed it, every last bottle, before he left. He had sworn that the supply would be gone, linked pinky to pinky with Denji and promised that no matter what happened, the drugs would never be a part of Denji’s life again. And he’s sure that he’d gotten it all– he had personally overseen the entire operation, making trips from warehouse to warehouse, smashing bottles on floors and burning the rest.
And now, they’re back, like they never even left.
Denji’s withdrawal symptoms haven’t even faded yet.
Fuck.
Now isn’t the time.
Rubble crunches underfoot as he climbs, splatters of dark brown bloodstains his only markers for steady ground. His side and shins ache, and he doesn’t need to look in a mirror to know that the bruise on his eye isn’t faring much better either. His backpack– a cheap drawstring bag he’d bought to replace his old one at a convenience store– swings with each step, the metal receiver of his pistol digging into his back.
His hand strays to his waistband, thumbing over the outline of his knives and his gun (fully loaded with ten rounds), for comfort. He isn’t quite sure what to expect– or what to do, really, at all. Does he rush in? Does he scope it out first? Have they even evacuated the area yet?
At once, it strikes Hirofumi how little of a goddamn plan he has.
Without someone ordering him around– or even someone beside him (like Denji, his mind helpfully supplies)-- he feels so... lost. Like a little kid, wandering around with a gun in his waistband, a little too trigger-happy to trust even himself.
He swipes an exhausted hand over his eyes, revelling in the little pocket of darkness it creates. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, doesn’t know what he’s going to do.
He doesn’t want to go back to the Horsemen– not now. Not while Famine’s stance is unclear. He can’t go back to Denji either, not if it puts him in danger. And the safehouse he’d been staying at for the past 24 hours only has enough food for another few days, even if he rations it.
And even then, what next?
As he drags his hands down his cheeks, he can still smell the faint sweetness of pancake grease, syrup, and powdered sugar. He can still smell Denji’s fabric softener. He can still smell sunshine streaming in from the balcony window.
It smells like happiness.
He slaps his cheeks with both hands, hard enough to sting. His face is cold and it hurts, but for once, the pain is welcome.
Next is for the future. Right now, he has a warehouse to infiltrate.
Yoshida didn’t show up in front of Denji’s apartment to walk him to school today.
Two bites into his bento box, Denji pauses, waiting for the door to creak open, waiting, waiting, waiting.
Yoshida doesn’t come.
Maybe it’s because Denji’s picked a more difficult classroom to get to, one further near the back, closer to the old school grounds. It’s harder to find, for sure, and across the campus from his homeroom. He holds out, poking at his lunch, waiting, breath bated, for those familiar footsteps to come tapping into the room.
Twenty minutes later (only four bites into his bento box), the intercom buzzes to life, broadcasting the end of the lunch period. The halls fill with the sound of footsteps, of laughter, of conversation, and yet...
Denji waits an extra two minutes (still four bites into his bento box), just for good measure, hanging onto that last bit of hope that maybe Yoshida is just running late. Really late. (Yoshida isn’t at school today, that much is clear. Denji isn’t convincing anyone, not even himself.)
When students start filing into his classroom and shooting him odd looks, Denji finally stands, jerking his chair backwards with a harsh rattle of metal legs on wooden floor. He shoves his half-eaten lunch back into his school bag, stuffing the barely used utensils in on top. For the first time in a long while, he doesn’t have an appetite.
Yoshida fucking Hirofumi, stalker extrordinaire for the past month or so, doesn’t just get to skip a day. Stalkers don’t have sick days.
Then again, it’s weird to feel bad for stalkers. Shouldn’t he be happy that Yoshida is finally leaving him alone?
He pauses in the middle of the hall, staring unseeingly out the window. It’s an overcast day– cold and windy and gray. Bits of orange and red flutter past in the breeze, leaving the bare branches of the trees shivering and exposed.
The last snippets of chatter float away as classes start.
Denji is alone.
Fuck, why does he feel so betrayed? Stupid asshole motherfucker, toying with Denji’s emotions like this. He’s probably enjoying this from whatever corner he’s hiding in, giggling to himself about Denji’s apparent reliance on his presence. Still– Denji can’t help the pang of disappointment that strikes deep in his chest, like someone has driven a knife past his sternum, and now he’s bleeding out in the middle of the hallway. All because stupid stalker Yoshida didn’t show up at school.
Denji glances furtively around for witnesses before scrubbing at the stray tears on his face that have somehow snuck there way out of his stupid fucking tear ducts that just won’t fucking close. And now he’s crying, crying for real, tears bubbling out of his eyes and streaming down his face.
He doesn’t even know why he’s crying, only that it hurts that Yoshida isn’t here. That a little part of him is worried that he’s going to go home and find out that Nayuta is gone too.
He covers his face as he walks, cheeks hot and sticky with tears against his palms. He’s not embarrassed, no, but if any girls see him like this... his chances at getting a hot girlfriend at this school are out the window.
Denji doesn’t stop walking– not when he ducks by his classroom and not when he passes by the bathroom, either. He hasn’t stooped low enough to crying on the toilet quite yet. No, he walks to the supply closet that has all the cleaning stuff– the mops and shit that they clean the school with after the bell rings.
The tears don’t stop either– not when he doubles around the next hallway to avoid a pair of girls gossiping while walking to the bathroom and not when he finally wretches to door to the closet open to reveal...
Denji is no longer alone.
“You,” Misaka– is that her name? Denji is pretty sure that’s her name– slurs, leaning heavily on the wall of the closet.
Denji looks behind him, wiping his face again on his shoulder just for good measure. He’s sure his cheeks are flushed, but maybe Misaka will see it as a rosy and healthy complexion for a really rosy and healthy guy. And his watery eyes are just a product of super hydrated... eyes. Or whatever.
“Um. Me?”
Misaka stumbles forward, tripping over her shoes, before catching herself in Denji’s chest. He’s only a little taller than her and it takes a couple wobbles backward to steady them both, but holy fuck, it doesn’t matter anymore. A girl is in his arms.
A real girl.
One of her fingers reaches up to toy with a strand of his hair, twisting back and forth between skin. “You... You look good. Hand sum.”
“Thanks,” he chokes out. He can feel her breasts pressing into his forearm.
“I’m Asa Mitaka,” she introduces, smiling wetly. Right. Mitaka. Not Misaka. “You are...”
“Denji,” Denji starts, but Mitaka cuts him off.
“My boyfriend.”
Huh?
Huh????????
“You. Me. Dating,” Mitaka finishes, pointing at herself, then Denji like he’s dumb or something. And maybe he is, because a girl just asked him out!!!!!!
Thanks Yoshida! Denji no longer feels a crushing pain that feels like his entire heart is getting yanked down and squished into tiny little peices– no, he’s on top of the world now. Thank God Yoshida didn’t show up today, or else Denji might have been toiling away in class, boring and single.
“Yeah! Okay Asa, yeah, I’ll be your boyfriend. I’ll be the bestest boyfr–” He scrambles to get it out before she can take her offer back because holy shit a girl just asked him out!!!!!!
He doesn’t get to finish (Mitaka seems to have a thing for cutting him off. Not that Denji is complaining, though) because Mitaka reaches out to hook an arm around his elbow and yanks him into the supply closet again.
And now he’s pressed up– really pressed up– against her in a dark closet, like in the movies. Her boobs are pressed up against his chest now, and holy shit that’s so fucking cool. Thanks, Yoshida, for not coming to school today. Talk about a dream come true.
“So–” he starts, voice lowered, then stops again. What do people say to their girlfriend? What do girlfriend-boyfriend people do? The guys at Eternity used to talk about sex– Denji’s seen the porn mags they carried too. But there’s gotta be some in-between things too.
Mitaka saves him the internal conflict by pressing a finger to his lips, shushing him when he opens his mouth to talk again. And then her eyes flutter shut, her mouth moves into a cutesy little pout, and she leans closer, and closer, and closer–
Denji exhales and tentatively shuts his eyes too. This is it. His first kiss ever. With a real girl. Even better– his girlfriend.
They inch closer and closer together and it feels like it’s taking forever, what with how close they’re already squeezed in the closet. Denji can feel her breath on his lips– it smells like... something familiar. But Denji can’t figure out exactly what for the life of him.
Maybe he’d kissed her at some point in the time he can’t remember. That has to be it.
And then she gags, pushing him away by the shoulders. Denji reels, stumbling backward into the door, and Mitaka throws up. All over him.
“Gross!” Shouting, he kicks himself further back as quickly as he can. His hands grapple at the walls of the closet, reaching for something to get the barf off of him, a seemingly visceral reaction. His hands gloss over what feels like a pipe and he grabs for it, only for a broom to come crashing down on the floor.
By the time he’s finally managed to find a handle of the door, he’s flailing, falling, and landing flat on his ass.
Mitaka, on her part, stands very, very still, stunned, before gagging against and sicking up all over the floor between Denji’s legs. “Gross!” Denji yells again, just for good measure.
She sways on her feet, unsteady, eyes glazed over. If Denji squints (and he does, just to figure out what’s wrong with his girlfriend) she looks a little bit like how Yoshida did two nights ago, when he’d been half dead from blood loss. But Mitaka isn’t bleeding anywhere. Maybe she’s sick.
Denji doesn’t notice that she is falling until she lands, with a wet thump, in a puddle of her own vomit. Gross.
The scent of her barf hangs acrid in the air and Denji’s entire uniform is soaked from the chest down in chunks of... he doesn’t want to know. It’s gross, is all.
For a moment, he sits there, staring. Everyone is still in class, so it’s just a vomit-covered Denji and a collapsed Mitaka in the middle of the hallway.
Denji doesn’t know what to do, but he isn’t an asshole. So he tampers the rising feeling of he doesn’t even know in favor of dragging an oddly heavy MItaka across the school to the nurse’s. It’s the second time he’s dragged a body across the floor and the familiar motion strikes an odd sense of deja vu, not unlike his weird premonitions. Or post-monitions, he supposes.
Mitaka’s shirt rides up the further he drags her, simple pink bra poking out from under her uniform, and normally, he would take a tiny peek, but today, he’s a little preoccupied. He’s taking the long way around, avoiding his classroom, a little too aware of how weird it looks for him to not only be skipping class, but dragging a passed out girl across the floor of his school.
The nurse’s room is empty when he finally arrives, panting and sweaty under the armpits. He hauls her limp body onto a cot. She’s still passed out, hair a little mussed from their long trek around the school, but oddly peaceful nonetheless. Every few seconds, her right thigh spasms, muscle tightening until it’s overloaded before releasing yet again. For a moment, Denji debates helping her change her vomit-stained uniform but it feels... wrong. Like he’s one of the old men that used to show up with Doll.
Instead, he finds a uniform in the lost and found and sits on one of the hard plastic chairs lined up by the end of the room, facing Mitaka’s tiny cot.
He sits there for a long time– long enough for the final bell to ring. Long enough for the students in class to pour out of the classrooms, laughing and gossiping on their way past the nurse. He even thinks he hears a shriek as someone inevitably discovers the puddle of vomit on the floor by the shoe lockers.
But instead, he sits, alone in the nurse’s office, waiting for his less-than-a-day-old girlfriend to wake up from her drugged up reverie of unconsciousness.
He hates doctor’s offices. It always smells like antiseptic, isopropyl alcohol and hydrogen peroxide, combined with a hearty dose of sanitization wipes. Sterile looking, too, all grey and white surfaces, too bright flourescent light drowning out the dim light from an already overcast sky. It reminds Denji of the sick-o-anal-sis sessions the police had him do over the summer. It reminds him of the surgery that he’d gotten when he just started Eternity– leg crushed under a car, not important enough to spend money on, so they’d skipped the anesthesthia and gotten right to the realignment of his bones.
And, of course, that niggling sense of something else. More memories, more doctors, hidden in the depths of his subconsiousness, remnants of a purged set of experiences still lingering behind. Discomfort.
It makes his heart pound in his chest once again, sweat prickling at the pores of his skin. And, like always, he wishes for someone with ice cold hands to tap at his cheeks from behind and pull him by the wrist into a dark alleyway– a sanctuary. He wishes for dark-almost-black irises to bore into his pupils, offer some sort of comfort.
Yoshida isn’t at school today.
As the seconds tick by, Denji focuses instead on the slow rise and fall of Mitaka’s chest as the breathes. The curve of her breasts under the covers are soft, as is the plush of her lips and the roundness of her cheekbone. Mitaka is all parentheses– from her messy braids down to the bump of her kneecaps– where Yoshida is sharp and angular like the accent.
Yoshida again. He isn’t at school today.
Denji tears his gaze from Mitaka’s sleeping body and fixes his stare to his fingers instead, watching as they tap against the plastic of his chair without his permission. They fidget, always moving– first with the holes on the underside of his seat, then with a stray thread hanging from the end of his uniform, then with a piece of dead skin sticking from his thumb...
“Denji?” someone whispers. Feminine. Mitaka is finally awake.
“You threw up on me,” Denji responds, with all the tact he can muster. Which, clearly, isn’t a lot.
Mitaka’s eyes are squeezed shut, like she’s too scared to open them.
Silence.
For a moment, Denji thinks she’s passed out again.
Then it starts– not with the roar of embarassment or annoyance, loud like an explosion. It’s always loud, or at least, Denji had thought that it would always be loud. But with Mitaka, it starts with a sniffle. Her shoulders start to shake and her eyes squeeze even tighter, wrinkles forming at the space between her brows as her hands come up to tug at the bedsheets.
“Hey, crying is bad,” Denji rushes to console his girlfriend, running through a list of possible comforting things to say. What would Yo– he’s not at school today. “It’s not your fault that you... barfed... on me.” Well. It kind of was her fault. She maybe could have turned her head to the side a little bit.
At that, Mitaka cries harder, sobbing into the sheets. Mission failed.
Denji tries again. “It was mostly on the ground.” Not really. It was mostly on Denji’s uniform.
“Fuck you, Denji. You– I hate you. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.”
Denji tries to respond. He really does– mouthing words that do not appear while gaping like a fish– but his thoughts can’t translate well enough to language, only the cracking feeling of his heart splitting into two. So this is what they mean by broken-hearted .
It’s not like he actually like liked her or anything– after all, she was the one who wanted to be his girlfriend first. He’d just gone along with it ‘cos she was a girl. But it’s the first time anyone had ever chosen him, other than stalker Yoshida, and the rejection hurts like nothing ever before. LIke someone’s cleaved him in the chest with an axe, piercing through skin and bone, lodging deep between his collarbones, flesh spewing tears of sadness and anguish and fuck, Denji feels like he could compose poetry right about now, even if he sucks at all his language classes.
“What did you even do to me?” Mitaka chokes out between gasping breaths. Teardrops fall onto the sheets, staining white into droplets of grey. “I don’t even– I don’t even know who you are.” Her voice breaks, and she turns onto her side, pointedly facing away from Denji.
I’m your boyfriend , Denji wants to say, desperately. But he as he watches Mitaka’s trembling form under the thin covers of the nurse’s office, he realizes that boyfriend hadn’t meant anything to anyone except for him, not even for Mitaka. She’d never wanted him in the first place.
So he gets up, limbs feeling stiff and mechanical, to make his way to the door, too scared to look back. His ass is numb from sitting so long, prickling uncomfortably as sensation rushes back through his muscles. His chest still hurts like crazy— like the axe had popped a balloon full of soreness and sadness and it’d leaked everywhere, dripping like gasoline into his limbs, burning ice-cold fire as it follows the lines of his limbs.
As he leaves, he thinks Mitaka whisper, “It’s all my fault.”
He’d like to agree. But guilt– that’s what he’s feeling. The same feeling he’d gotten when he caught himself looking at Yoshida’s body a little too hard that a few days ago in the bathtub. Guilt keeps him looking straight ahead, eyes glued to the floor in front of his sneakers, at least until he lets the door to the nurse’s office swing shut beside him.
Mitaka’s sobs echo down the hall, a trail of sadness that Denji can’t understand that follows him as he walks.
The rest comes and goes in flashes: one moment he’s grabbing his bag from where he’d left it slumped by the lockers, the next, he’s downtown, tracing a familiar path through a hoard of people.
One moment he’s bumping into a guy with a pinstriped suit.
The next, he’s turning the corner at a building with glass windows that seem to... reach into the sky for forever with a paved path that leads to a smattering of now bare trees up front. Cherry trees, though Denji can’t understand for the life of him how he knows.
The subsequent alleyway is dark, a little shady. Bordered on either side by tall skyscrapers, it doesn’t seem to get even the tiniest crack of sunlight. The pungent smell of trash and mold is all too strong and it makes Denji’s eyes water.
His feet carry him past the two dumpsters lined at the entrance, then past the back of the building. Where he stops. What is he doing?
This was... his old route. With Eternity. But the shed he’d lived in with Dad was hours away from Tokyo and he doesn’t remember ever dealing here.
Something shuffles from the distance and a crouched figure rises from behind an open door, a curl of smoke floating up and up and up and...
Denji’s head throbs, it hurts. His ears are ringing, wincing, broken and everything is shattered, kaliedoscoped. He doesn’t remember, yet he does, and– and– and–
“Yo! Chainsaw!”
Chainsaw. Who is Chainsaw? Chainsaw is– Chainsaw is bright orange flashes, the smell of gunpowder and blood, metallic copper blooming bright red on a rising tide of crimson, nearly vermillion in the orange of a sunset sky. Chainsaw is the sound of an engine revving as an unnamed liquid splatters across his cheek, hot and sticky against his skin. Chainsaw is the boy in the mirror, the soulless machine he doesn’t recognize, the tool that got everyone...
...killed.
“You’re Chainsaw, aren’t you?”
Fade to black.
Everything comes and goes in scraps.
That’s how it’s been since... well, everything. Since Control died. Since Kishibe was killed. Since Denji was recruited. Like time has been slipping through his fingers like sand, kernels too thin to grasp, even when he tries to hold on.
Hirofumi doesn’t remember that he’s supposed to be tailing– stalking– Denji until it’s too late. And realization hits him like a fucking truck, because fuck, oh fuck, what the fuck is he thinking?
The ground pounds below his feet, passing by in a blur, soles slapping loudly on pavement underfoot. Hirofumi knows that he’s attracting attention as he pushes past crowds of businessmen on their way home from work, muttering quick apologies that pass by too quickly to hear.
But Denji. He has to know if Denji’s okay.
Fuck. What if they..?
This Denji isn’t as good at fighting as the Denji Hirofumi knew was– hell, the Denji back then wasn’t all that good at fighting without the drugs– Idyllic, that is– either, all swinging skinny limbs and desperation. Like how Angel used to fight.
This Denji... This Denji wouldn’t stand a fucking chance against gunmen, kidnappers, fucking yakuza leaders.
Fuck. And he’d forgotten all this for what? A wild goose chase across half of Tokyo, no trace of anything but the faint glitter of shattered glass and poorly patched gun shots on concrete walls? There hadn’t even been a fucking breath in the warehouse, no life, no anything.
Hirofumi hadn’t been looking for a fight, no, but he’d been looking for something , at the very least, and they hadn’t even left him that. And here he is, shirking his duties of protecting the one person he’d done everything for in the first place.
What good was it to chase down something that had already happened when he’d been dangling Denji like bait in front of all their faces for the longest time? Fuck, not even bait. Fish food. Prey. Defenseless and broken and weak. A trail of breadcrumbs leading to fucking nothing.
Fuck.
By the time he sprints up the stairs to Denji’s apartment, his left leg feels like it’s going to break in half. He stumbles, barely catching himself on the wall, and raps on the door as urgently as he can. “Denji. Fuck, Denji, it’s me.”
Footsteps approach the other side of the door. Slowly, it opens a crack, creaking hinges rusty and old. Little Control peeks a head out, eyes wide and worried. “Hiro?”
“Denji. I need Denji. Is he back yet?” It comes out desperate and shaky and weak. Weak, fucking weak and stupid and–
“No,” Little Control responds. She blinks, like she’s working something out in her head. “Is he in trouble again? With Makima?”
Yes, Hirofumi wants to say. Wants to punch someone. Wants to go back in time and beat those fucking fuckers all over again and again and again. What the fuck do you mean, I never kill?
But Little Control looks so small, there, squeezed between the frame and the door, looking up at him with big wide puppy eyes that seem to bore into his soul, looking all for the world like a Denji in Control’s body. “Nah, just a project together. See ya, Nayu.”
She opens her mouth to say something, but he pushes the door shut from the outside before she can get it out. And then he’s flipping the railing (wincing at the protesting pain in his leg when he lands) and speeding down the stairs again.
Denji. Denji. Denji. He’s not fucking back.
The sprint to school goes by in a blur. Hirofumi’s eyes catch on every flash of blonde hair he sees on the way, heart beating wildly with adrenaline. But Denji isn’t anywhere to be seen, and dread, that fucking octopus, fucking snake, has a chokehold on his heart, squeezing it with anxiety and worry and what if he really was kidnapped?
He slams through the doors of the school, panting. Rain had started pouring down halfway through his run, so he’s dripping wet, freezing, and limping every step. Each time the fabric of his shirt brushes against his side, he has to suppress a whimper of pain. Water has soaked through everything, even the bandages binding the wound, leaving the gauze peeling and a layer of sticky residue on his skin.
But the pain is practically nonexistent, his head just a stream of Denji Denji Denji Denji Denji because if Denji dead– even kidnapped– Hirofumi is going to be out for blood, his own life be fucking damned.
It all falls away when he catches sight of that familiar head of messy blonde hair bobbing from over the shoe lockers. “Denji” he gasps, willing his legs to take just another step. He’s sore all over, broken and barely pieced together, but at least Denji is–
“Easy there, Asa,” Denji says, the arm of a black haired girl slung over her shoulder. Denji is wearing a dark girl’s uniform and a pair of thickly framed glasses, propped up on a somehow upturned button nose.
So, not Denji.
Fuck.
“Tell me what happened again,” Not-Denji giggles, cupping the black haired girl’s– Asa’s– cheek.
Asa sniffles, reaching up to smear her forearm over her eyes, scrubbing aggressively. “I asked some guy out,” she sobs, turning to wipe her face on Not-Denji’s uniform.
“And he said yes?”
“Some loser blonde guy. Probably not even a real blonde like you,” Asa says, and sobs harder, if anything. Her words are slurred, thick tongued. And when she finally looks up, she’s a little cross-eyed, and her pupils are blown big. Way big.
Like...
Idyllic. The drug. The compound. Control’s compound.
“Asa. Hey, Asa,” Yoshida calls and stumbled forward, leaning heavily on the shoe lockers for support.
Not-Denji glances up and shoves Asa behind a locker, laughing awkwardly. “Hey, um...”
“Yoshida.”
“Hi, Yoshida. I’m not... I’m not Asa. It’s Yuko, nice to meet you. What’s up?”
The time for tact, sweet manipulation, coaxing answers out of people is fucking over. Yoshida is hanging on by a thread, and fucking Yuko or whatever isn’t going to be the one to cut it. “Your friend back there. What is she on?”
Yuko’s eyes widen from behind thick frames (and once again, Hirofumi is reminded of how much, from a distance, she looks like Denji) and she scrambles for words. “Friend? What? I’m alone! I mean, I left my glasses here after school and–”
“Idyllic?”
Yuko falls silent. And then Asa is stumbling out from behind the lockers, grabbing at Yuko and snivelling all over her uniform again. “Denji isn’t even hot. He’s just another loser and... and... and I asked him out. And... and I’m gonna–”
But all Hirofumi hears is Denji.
Denji.
Denji.
Denji.
Fuck.
“Where did you buy it,” he gasps, stepping forward. “Please, I need to–”
“Woah there. Druggie alert,” Yuko laughs, the sound easy and relaxed and fuck, fuck, fuck, if Denji’s gotten his hands on Idyllic, who knows what would happen. What would...
He thumbs over his pistol. It would be so easy to just shoot. Whip it out, hold them at gunpoint, and demand information. He doesn’t have the time for this right now. Denji doesn’t have the time for this.
“I’m not one to gatekeep, though,” Yuko smiles, shooting him a conspiratory wink.
“Yeah,” Asa butts in. “Be my boyfriend and... an’ she’ll tell you.”
And at that, Yoshida can’t help but laugh, though it’s more of a panic driven chuckle than anything else. “Asa, I’m taken.”
Denji.
Denji.
The red-haired lady from the photo is crooning his name, ruffling her fingers through his hair with soft, manicured hands. She threads the strands in a repetitive motion, back and forth and back and forth.
Denji keens into her touch, stretching his neck up to chase her touch, even after she pulls away.
She laughs, a soft, gentle, perfect sound, and resumes petting his head.
It feels good.
It feels warm and wonderful and broken and fragile, like the moment could shatter with just the barest tap.
It feels... perfect.
His stupor is broken by the sound of a muffled whimper and a thudding at his feet. Slowly– almost clumsily– he glances down to meet the panicked gaze of another woman. Denji doesn’t recognize her from the photo, but he knows her face nonetheless. Something about that look of determination and anger, the splay of her hair on the floor as she writhes, even the faint sound of her voice through the gag stuffed in her mouth... Yes, Denji concludes, he knows her, though he can’t remember her name.
Again, she whimpers. A plead, perhaps. One of her eyes has been gouged out, lying a few meters beyond her head in a scarlet pool of old blood. Her other eye darts frantically around the room, searching desperately for an escape.
Occasionally, it lands on Denji.
He is an escape.
The soothing combing ends abruptly as red-haired lady digs her fingers into Denji’s scalp, yanking his head up by a handful of hair.
Denji, do you love me?
Denji, you love me right?
Denji loves her.
Denji loves her.
Denji... Denji..
He nods jerkily at her question, a shaky up and down as quickly as he can what with the tight grip she has on his hair. It yanks at his scalp with each movement, but he does it nonetheless, too dumb to speak properly.
She smiles by way of response, cherry red lips curling into the barest hint of a pleased smile, and ah... it feels like the sun has broken through the clouds on an overcast day, her smile bearing rays of perfect light down upon poor little Denji, deprived of everything up until she appeared.
The woman at their feet lets out another muffled yell, twisting around her restraints. Tears are pooling out of her eyes– even the one that’s nothing but an empty socket.
Would you do anything for me?
No.
Yes.
No.
Denji shakes his head– that’s what they used to say.
They. They. Who is they? Before he can gather his thoughts, she speaks again.
Would you do anything for me?
No.
Red-haired lady frowns, pouting her lips out. They are plump and shiny, glossy and sparkly and Denji wants to reach a hand out and touch them. Part them. Maybe reveal a mouth full of perfect, pearly teeth.
Denji, do you love me?
Yes.
The answer comes easy this time.
Denji, if you loved me, you would do anything for me, right? That’s how you’re supposed to treat a girl.
A girl. He wants to treat her like he’s supposed to. He wants to do the right thing.
Yes.
He nods again.
Then would you do anything for me?
Yes.
No.
Yes wins this time. He nods, albeit slowly, shakily.
Good. She smiles, releasing his hair and letting his head drop, petting at the spot where she’d grabbed him. Yes. Good. He’d done well.
Denji, I’m going to kiss you.
Kiss you.
You.
Kiss.
Lips on his, plush and soft and beautiful and perfect and warm and sweet like honey. They press into his own insistent and controlling.
He waits for the pain to come, muscles braced and teeth clenched.
But it never comes.
The pain, that is. It remains blissfully pain-free; the only movement she makes is to tilt her head and deepen the kiss and Denji is kissing a girl. A girl who likes him, for real, not just someone from... from...
From them.
Them. Who is them? Them.
Finally, after what seems like an eternity and nothing, all at the same time, she breaks away. Denji lets a flood of oxygen back into his lungs, gasping for air that he hadn’t known he needed while they were kissing.
She licks her lips and smiles.
Are you happy?
Yes.
Yes.
Denji doesn’t even need to think.
Yes.
He tries to nod his head without disrupting the red-haired lady’s hand through his hair.
And then she leans in close.
Denji, if you’re happy, I want you to punch that woman in front of you.
Go on, punch her.
Punch her.
Punch her.
Denji doesn’t want to punch her.
He shakes his head and the red-haired lady takes her hand away.
I make you happy.
She makes Denji happy.
Happy.
Happy.
Denji nods. Yes.
She puts her hand back onto his head and licks her lips, circling cherry red with peach pink.
The sun comes out of the clouds again. Denji’s heart swells so big it feels like a balloon in his chest, like he might fly into the sky, through the clouds, and pop into a burst of latex or rubber or whatever the fuck a balloon is made out of.
He steps forward and drives his fist into the woman’s empty eye socket.
October 1995
He hadn’t meant to find her body.
But Himeno hadn’t been in her bedroom.
It’d been early– too early, in Aki’s opinion– for a mission, but Control had called him from Tokyo with orders to pick up the prospect from Bat.
Well, formerly Bat. Allegedly, she’d taken her newest little experiment to the meeting with Bat and he’d destroyed the entire group. Which, good riddance, because all the Bat higher ups are a scumbags, but also what the fuck. From what Aki’s heard, the kid is barely 15, which is still better than Angel, but still.
Angel isn’t happy about it, that much is obvious, even when he tries his best not to let it show. Angel doesn’t really let anything show these days, not even around Aki, but they’ve been together long enough for Aki to tell.
So he’d been up at exactly 5:30 in the morning, dragging himself out of bed and hauling himself across the room to put on his suit. He’d be taking his squad, of course, even if it was experimental.
Angel was already awake– he always was– so all Aki had to do was wake up Himeno and Kobeni.
He hadn’t meant to find her body, but he knew it was bound to happen at some point or another. She’d had it coming; they both knew it.
A locked supply closet, on the upper floor of the building. He wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary had he not walked past it every day on his way to the elevator– the door had always been ajar.
But not today.
Today, the door was closed, and when he stepped forward to jitter the handle, panic slowly rising, it did not give way. No; this door was locked, and it should not have been.
Aki had been given keys, keys to anywhere except out, long ago. It’d been an award for good behavior and a compensation for giving up school. He hadn’t ever used it– shortly afterward, Control had switched to a scan system– but it feels like it’s weighing him down today.
If he opens this door, he knows what he will find. Control would have meant for him to find it, he knows. Still, carefully, he sticks the key in the lock.
And turns.
The smell hits him first. Like old blood, like rot, like a weak-old dead body, which doesn’t even make sense, because Himeno had been at breakfast just... just... Himeno hadn’t been at breakfast yesterday. Or the day before that. The last time they’d met was Friday of last week, when she’d bought him a pack of cigarettes and a beer and...
It’s hot and humid in the closet, and disregarding the smell, it’s still difficult to breathe. Aki staggers a few steps back, whether intentionally or not, the still air like a physical wall that knocks him back.
The worst part is her.
She’s hanging from the ceiling, for one.
Limp. Short hair barely obscuring her face. A puddle of mystery liquid pooling on the ground.
She’s naked, too, clothes scattered across the room, ripped and torn and blood soaked. Long dried rivulets of blood run, cracking, down her forearms. Her thighs look like they’ve been run through a paper shredder, skin (where it’s visible over the exposed flesh) far too pale to be normal.
A course rope circles her neck, bruised an ugly unnatural purple. Her head is bent forward, like she’s taking a nap, but the bone juts out in the back at an awkward angle– it’d probably borken at some point, splintered into two.
He had long expected this– maybe that’s why he doesn’t feel as horrified as he should.
Slowly, he steps closer, avoiding a haphazardly tossed bra, wrinkling his nose as the stench grows stronger. It’s disgusting– now that he’s up close, he can see all the little details of her body, from the way most of her skin has been mutilated beyond recognition, whether by blade or just bruised, to the way her eye has somehow been gouged out of it’s fucking socket.
It’s not a clean job by any means. In fact, it feels deliberately messy, both in execution and violence.
There are still bits of eyestuff left in the socket, the image probably seared permanently in Aki’s mind now that he’s seen it. But the slits on her wrists and thighs are so exaggerated they are almost comical, not to mention the bruises all over her naked torso.
Aki’s been in the yakuza long enough to know a punch when he sees it.
And that isn’t to mention the fact that the closet had been locked from the outside. A fucking supply closet.
A little belatedly, Aki realizes that he’s sad. He’s really fucking sad. His throat hurts with the effort of holding his tears back– tears that he hadn’t realized he’d even had. She’d been his friend.
Sure, they’d only known each other for a little over a year, but she’d been the first person in his unit other than Angel to speak to him like a human being. She’d taught him to cook, taught him to smoke, taught him to kiss like a man– and fuck, now she’s dead, killed in the shittiest suicide cover up in the history of the world.
And Aki doesn’t have to guess to know who’d done it.
He shifts aside a couple boxes on the wiry shelves nailed to the walls to climb until he’s eye level with her dead body. A single empty eye stares right at him.
A shaky hand reaches out to tuck a lock of her hair behind her ear. It falls forward again, almost immediately, and Aki lets out a watery laugh at the memory of her haircut. She’d asked for layers. Her hair had been too short.
Her mouth is slightly parted, dry lips as pale as the skin around it. There’s something tucked into her mouth, probably post-mortem. Swallowing his nausea and the thick feeling of tears in his throat, Aki gently thumbs her mouth open.
A cigarette falls out of her mouth– crumpled and still a little damp. It tumbles out onto the concrete floor below, landing somewhere beneath a pair of discarded bloodstained underwear.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
A tear lands on the ground below, too, followed quickly by another.
Fuck. Aki is crying. What kind of a man is he? It’s not like it’s the first time he’s ever seen a stupid dead body.
But– But– But Himeno had been his friend. It’d always just been the four of them: Aki, Angel, Himeno, Kobeni; their own stupid little experimental unit, and now Himeno was fucking dead.
He doesn’t know when he’d climbed down from the shelves, but soon, he’s knelt on the ground. Her underwear is lacy, lingerie, scarlet blood-soaked.
Red is the sexiest color, she’d always said, slinging an arm around his shoulder and sending him a wink. She’d been his first kiss too, though they were both drunk out of their minds, a sloppy makeout in the backseat of whatever taxi.
That had been when Aki had been allowed out.
He smooths out the cigarette, his hands still shaking unreasonably, to see the words scrawled across the body, drying ink tapering out just before the filter.
Easy revenge!
And he sobs.
Denji wakes with a gasp, heart pounding.
It is morning. The sun streams in from the gap in the curtains, the distant sound of the city awakening below muffled but present. Under his cot, Octo– Hirofumi shifts on the futon, decidedly not trying to murder him.
Exhaling loudly, he lets his head sag backwards, resting on the pillow behind him, adrenaline slowly making its way out of his body.
But Denji can still feel Hirofumi’s phantom hands, loosely cradling his windpipe, pressing just tight enough for oxygen to strain, can still taste the salt of Hirofumi’s tears on his tongue.
He lets his eyes drift shut again. Fragments of the dream are already fading away– he always forgets– but the distinct feeling of terror is everpresent. He’d been fucking scared– so scared he’d woken up shaking and sweaty.
God, he’s glad it’s over.
Hirofumi’s phone rings from his backpack not even moments later, and the other boy wakes with a groan, yawning widely while trying to detangle his legs. It’s a little funny, watching always cool and composed Hirofumi stumble across the room, bedhead and all.
“Hello?”
And oh. Hirofumi’s voice is deeper in the mornings. More gravelly, a bit of a gutteral quality to it. As Hirofumi nods into the phone, Denji tests his own voice as quietly as he can, under his breath.
“Hello?” Nah. Still normal pitched. Fuck, Denji can’t wait to start turning more manly. He bets his voice would be deeper than Hirofumi’s, even in the mornings. He tests it again. “I am the manliest man.”
Hirofumi turns, mid-conversation, to shoot him a quizzical look, and Denji flushes. Now he feels a little stupid. More than a little stupid.
“Alright, I’ll let him know,” Hirofumi finishes, flipping his phone shut with a long exhale.
“Who?”
Hirofumi yawns widely again, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Fox. Apparently Control wants us to go to meeting with his unit.”
Fox. Fox. Fox– right, that guy. He’d been the one in the office, speaking to Miss Makima, when Claw had first brought him in. The guy with a stupid haircut, the back tied up so high it’d practically been on his forehead and the front hanging down over his eyes in shittily cut bangs.
“Kay,” Deji nods.
Hirofumi makes his way to the dresser and Denji watches as the other boy bends over to rifle through a drawer at the bottom.
“Denji,” Hirofumi says, halfway through putting his dress shirt on. He hasn’t buttoned it up yet, and Denji, who hadn’t even noticed he was staring, quickly averts his eyes.
He’s not gay, for fuck’s sake. Wouldn’t want Hirofumi thinking otherwise.
“Hirofumi.”
Hirofumi sighs, thin fingers slipping the bottom-most button into the cut on the other side. “I’m not mad at you, y’know.”
Denji swallows. His throat feels tight– like dream-Hirofumi is still pressing his fingers around his windpipe. Slowly, he nods, and it feels like his head is filled up with water, sloshing around inside his cranium.
“Don’t call me Hirofumi outside of this room, okay? I’m Octopus.” Hirofumi finishes buttoning his shirt and starts sliding a tie around the neckline.
Denji watches, mesmerized. He’s always forgone the tie in the uniform– he’d never learned how to knot it. “Why? That’s stupid. Octopus is a stupid name,” he murmurs, nor particularly focused on what he’s saying. Not that he’s ever focused on what he says. “It’s a piracy thing, isn’t it.”
Hirofumi snorts, tightening the tie until it’s practically choking him. “ Privacy, Denji. But yeah, most people have... nicknames, I guess. Supposed to keep your family safe and stuff.”
“But you don’t have anyone to protect.”
“Myself? And you, now,” Hirofumi shrugs. “You should come up with one too, y’know, Denji?”
He slips his dress shoes on by the door. “I’ll meet you in the lobby. Be quick, ‘kay?”
“‘Kay,” Denji responds. He waits for the door to click shut before flopping back onto his pillow, defeated.
Hirofumi. Octopus really is such a stupid name.
Hirofumi’s shoes squish with each step he takes.
He’d done a big load of laundry the moment Control had let him out of her stupid meeting, but it hadn’t been enough to get the bloodstains out of his suit. So he had to take a spare pair, one that Kishibe had given him when he first joined.
It’s a little small, but he wears it nonetheless, pathetically. Because the last scrap of dignity he had was lost when he sobbed into that clean-pressed dress shirt in the middle of an empty locker room, mourning the death of the man he killed.
His shoes, too, had been an issue. He’d taken toothbrush to leather and scrubbed (but not too hard) for nearly an hour last night, trying to get the stupid muddy brown stains out. It’d worked, to some extent, but the part he’d washed is just a little rougher than the parts around it. And of course, it hadn’t dried, not even after leaving it out overnight.
Denji walks a little to the right of him, humming a melody under his breath. It doesn’t have much of a tune to it, and any other day, Hirofumi would be up the wall with annoyance. Today, though? He appreciates it.
Denji jabs a finger into elevator button for down and stares Hirofumi down, accusingly. “So.”
“So.”
“So you aren’t mad at me.”
Hirofumi shakes his head. He’d been thinking about it all morning, from the moment he’d woken up. Yeah, he can’t understand Denji– can’t understand how he can sleep so easy at night, can’t understand how he looks in the fucking mirror and doesn’t want to reach in and strangle the reflection, can’t understand how he doesn’t see Kishibe’s face around every corner– but...
But he’s human, just like Hirofumi, and he’d been a fucking asshole not to see that.
“But you were mad last night.”
Hirofumi doesn’t respond. He doesn’t know how.
“You were, weren’t you. You came out of that meeting with Miss Makima looking like she’d kicked your dog, which would be a really awful, horrible thing to do, but Miss Makima wouldn’t ever kick a dog. She told me so, y’know.”
Hirofumi doesn’t respond to that, either. He doesn’t even know if that word vomit even warrants a response.
“But you walked out of her office looking like she kicked your dog and then you wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the day. So. As your employer, your sir, your master, even, I order you to tell me.”
“I’m not telling you anything,” Hirofumi groans, something to say, finally, as the elevator dings and the doors slide open.
Denji pushes past Hirofumi to enter first, taking post beside the buttons. The doors slide shut, and Denji moves to block him. “Uh-uh. You’re telling me, because I’m your boss and you’re supposed to tell your boss everything, Miss Makima told me so.”
It’s silent inside the elevator.
Hirofumi squeezes his eyes shut– thinks about his last conversation with Kishibe, right here. It still smells faintly of Mevius cigarettes. Fuck. Fuck.
“I killed someone yesterday,” he whispers, under his breath, and Denji tilts his head.
“Wha’d’you say?”
“I said someone died yesterday. I was— he was like a dad to me.”
“Not your dad?”
“No. Definitely not my dad,” Hirofumi laughs, and it’s a little forced at first, but soon he’s really laughing. Kishibe? His real dad? He can’t even imagine it.
“Oh.” Denji looks like he’s at a loss for words, fidgeting tightly with his tie– which he’d tied like a fucking bow around his neck– before stepping forward like he’s about to give Hirofumi a hug. He seems to change his mind, last second, and curls his hand into a fist to punch Hirofumi in the shoulder instead. “Cool. Thanks for telling me, dude.”
And he turns to press the button for the basement, shuffling his feet awkwardly, and Hirofumi can’t help but laugh a little harder at the absurdity.
“You ordered me to tell you, Denji.”
“Yeah.” A pause, and the elevator groans to life, tinny music playing out of the speakers as it finally begins moving. “Sorry, dude. It was probably stupid of me to... I dunno. Push? I mean, it was the wrong time to push, is what I– fuck. I’m sorry, Hirofumi, is what I’m tryin’ to say.”
“Octopus,” Hirofumi corrects, but it’s a little half-hearted, none of his usual intensity as he smothers a smile.
author's notes
yes i KNOW the last few 1995 chapters have been really slow but TRUST ME they are definitely picking up next chapter!!! i have so so so so so much planned for this next mission you guys have NO IDEA!!!!
also, asa makes an appearance? and yuko? excuse me? and an aki pov chapter? what!!!!!!!!!! and i'm very very very sorry that i had to kill himeno; she is a morally flawed character who i appreciate the existence of, but you have to understand that it HAD to be done.
as always, PLEASE comment thoughts, theories, ideas, criticisms in my guestbook... TELL ME IF YOU LIKE IT OR IF YOU HATE IT PLEASE I LIVE OFF OF YOUR COMMENTS :))))))
