πππ’ππππ π πππ. ( ζ©ε· γ’γ ) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
truncation) wrote2021-08-01 02:21 am
truncation) wrote2021-08-01 02:21 am
truncation) wrote2021-08-01 02:21 am
πππ π:
( they're devil hunters. they hunt and kill devils. they do not offer any incentives for the devils and fiends that they have so graciously extended (heavily conditional) clemency to because their first and foremost incentive for continued cooperation is not getting sent immediately back down to Hell where they belong. ever since its creation, the special division has faced a fair amount of criticism from both public and private sectors. maybe that's why they had leveraged aki's transfer: his unyielding stance on devils would mean he would do what needed to be done if it came to that point.
he doesn't have to turn to sense her footsteps shadowing his own, close enough that her presence was causing his honed-keen instincts to prickle along his spine. he does his best to ignore them. though, really, "uncouth to bear a grudge?" aki's life for the last thirteen years has been an extended grudge. and that's just the thing about humans and devils: their relationship is very simple, cut-and-dry, black-and-white. the threads of intricacy she's pulling at do not exist. devils kill humans and relish in their fear and suffering. humans do what they can to defend themselves (or in aki's case, scrape together whatever paltry revenge they can). there's nothing more to it.
and yet...
he goes still as her arms thread beneath his. he hadn't expected her to be this oddly gentle, the loose loop of her arms around him warm rather than constricting or controlling. her breath blooms against the nape of his neck, the touch faintly ticklish. for some reason he'd thought some part of him would buck at this amount of familiarity, this amount of intimacy, but it doesn't. that's the problem. he slowly exhales, placing his hands on the edge of the counter. )
We do get along. It's been weeks since we last got into a fistfight.
( the line between aki being completely serious and him indulging in bone-dry humor is so razor thin, it's often impossible to tell the truth. )
Power, ( his right hand moves to hers, taking it by the wrist. he tries to guide it away from him, the first step in their disentanglement, but he's not necessarily doing it by force. it'd be all too easy to resist it. ) Where's all this coming from? ( no, it's not uncharacteristic of her to attempt to use her wiles to get her way (whatever permutation that took), but she has rarely been so... straight-forward. )
no subject
He is too big of a conundrum for Power to resolve, yet when the blood fiend ventures outside her hyperactive head, she can't help but register humanity subverting the cut-and-dry distinction of his imagining at every turn: his people flirt with evil under the pretext of combating still greater evils; and to add insult to injury, his superiors conscript the murderous embodiments of the very fears they hope to overcome into their once holy crusade. The dichotomy between ally and adversary has abraded to the point of absurdity by humanity's own volition, and the colours of morality run grey. ]
The night's young. There is time enough to tussle with the champ.
[ Her syrupy grin is felt in her intonation; the fiend enjoys a good scuffle, yet some anomalous factor in her voice mollifies the brutishness that would otherwise accompany her proposal. ]
Yea!?
[ She responds to the invocation of her name with almost jarring immediacy. The fiend raises her eyes in an attitude of contemplation at his inquiry into the origins of her behaviour, as though he would subject himself to charting her thought process on any other occasion. It his only for her inattention that her wrist yields to his insistence. ]
So I was thinkin'... adopting a human is unlike adopting a cat since I care not if my human dies. Then I remembered that you're gonna die, so I envisioned this shabby apartment without topknot and my feeling was ofβ
[ Power's expression turns blank and her cruciform eyes roam as though in search of a tangible explanation for the feeling in question. Unable to grasp it, she falls back on familiarity: ]
I dunno... boredom? Anyways, it stands to reason I should max out your mileage while I can!
[ She revives her embrace of his figure, alighting an open hand over his heart, her cheek smushed against his upper back and her holding him greedily but not ungently. She is not as unobservant as she seems: ]
You like being held. Even by a woman from hell.
no subject
perhaps humans really are just that absurd, placing so much power in the concept of their own fears that they rise to draw breath and prey actively upon them.
he hums β it's something caught somewhere between an acknowledgement and an admonishment. though relatively common early on in her placement in his apartment, their quarrels have grown fewer and farther between, and even then had only ever been stand-in for communication when translation of thought to word failed. that they can joke about it (if that's what this is) now indicates how little lasting damage had been caused.
aki wouldn't have been able to say what he expected out of her answer. it's correct that he wouldn't have bothered to ask in any other circumstance β power was, in a word, incomprehensible, in word, deed, motivation... and yet she spares thought for an answer that seems unsettlingly direct and honest, far separated from her typical bombast. aki thinks about grousing about being adopted, like a pet, but any light-hearted complaint dies in his throat at the casual mention of his impending mortality. a chill passes through him. his muscles lock, body growing rigid. it's not something he's talked about with denji and power. it's not something he talks about at all. but the keen-eyed can track down the signs: himeno's former insistence at his keeping the Curse Devil's weapon undrawn, how he no longer carries that nail-like sword with him now (having precious little to offer to Curse, highly specific devil that it was). and even besides his wanton truncation of his own lifespan, devil hunters don't have much by way of life expectancy to begin with, and one can only imagine worse for those with their eyes foolishly set on Gun.
boredom. well, given what he knows about power, he supposes he should feel touched β he imagines to be bored was one of the worse outcomes she could imagine. he'd previously been able to separate her hand away from him, but it slips away from him now; she holds him close, head resting in-between his shoulder blades, one hand resting over his heart. he doesn't move to stop her. really, for a long moment, he doesn't move at all.
and when he does, he β ignores her. turns on the faucet once again, testing the temperature of the water. )
I meant what I said earlier. It's inappropriate. I couldn't, even if I wanted to. ( a beat. then, a little more lightly: ) Also, you're mixing up your metaphors. Am I supposed to be a pet or a car?
( is what he says. but what is one to believe, easily-falsified protestations of the mouth and brain or the thrum of his heart? just a few centimeters beneath her hand, shelled in flesh and bone, it remains steady as ever, but its pace has been definitively quickened ever since she had stepped forward to wrap her arms around him. his blood certainly doesn't sing any song attempting to deny what she says. )
no subject
But therein is the distinction that pulls Aki from the throng of unremarkable faces: he is a stranger no more. In Aki, her irreverence towards human life is confronted with a familiarity completely novel to her during her tenure on earth, giving rise to the schizophrenic mΓ©lange of callousness and affection that colours her perception of the Hunter.
The delicacy which she lacks in every respect but this one would not have been possible without Nyako's influence; in an alternative timeline an overenthusiastic Power has already crushed his organs in her embrace. For a time they are suspended in stillness, her unconscious of the solemn complexity of the feeling that grips him, but perhaps her full understanding is not required for him to draw solace from her arms.
Her forehead resurfaces bearing wrinkles. ]
Huuuh? You hit your head or something? There's no use in being good if you got nothing to show for it!
[ A posthumous medal for following protocol is hardly worth the price of obedience in her book. Oh, but she is attuned to the transit of blood in his veins and how it rushes counter to the rhythm of his words. Power hoists herself on the toes of one foot and leans askance into Aki with her lips pursed in the manner of a duck and annoys his jawline with little smooches. ]
Kissy-kissy-boy-Hayakawa~
[ Just when the limits of her daring appear established, Power outright grabs his shoulders and turns him bodily to face her with such might that his hair whips the air. Her dress shirt presses to his chest as she locks lips with Aki. Contrary to her manhandling of him, her kiss is soft, like a sudden switching of the gears, and deep enough to justify the tilt of her head. ]
no subject
traitorously, he sometimes wonders if these tenets should be considered as immutable, resolute. he has seen enough change in the devils and fiends he spends time around that it has given him a half-second of pause and enough doubt to slip in through that gap in his logical defense. but even then, his doubts end up piggybacked with doubts. at the end of the day, the non-human members of the special division are pressganged into their positions; it would be foolish to think that any changes in their behavior might happen in different circumstances. perhaps they stemmed from survival instincts. perhaps it was a defeated sort of affection, like the bond one might form with a rodent sharing their home that they do not yet have the equipment or opportunity to kill.
he leaves it all aside. despite it all, he doesn't try to remove her, quietly (and selfishly) appreciative in the silent, slow moment. it does feel nice. and there is β a marked difference to it. power is devoid of the expectations and burdens a human might bring to this. he didn't have to shoulder her pity or sorrow at his impending death. he didn't have to concern himself with this serving to deepen a future wound of bereavement because it wouldn't exist in the first place.
it feels like a dangerous train of thought to consider. no, his obedience to protocol, to so-called decency, to sense offer him precious little in actual return, but pride in his adherence to Public Safety had been one of the few things that had truly been his, these past ten or so years.
his motions slow to a halt as she stretches tall enough to lean over his shoulder and peck a series of kisses into the line of his jaw. irritation sparks and takes hold within his ribcage; it sweeps away any of the contemplation that had begun to flourish in the vacuum of silence. another sigh rattles through his throat. ) What do you think yβ
( the rest of his sentence is yanked just as forcibly as he is, spun to face her with such speed and precision that he has no leeway to react, let alone resist. the words are supplanted with a nonverbal, "mmf," as their lips lock β but there's nothing in it that harkens back to the almost cartoonish nature she had been worrying at his jawline just a moment before. her lips are soft and warm against his, the kiss confident enough to make him question just where a fiend had picked up on all of this. no, he doesn't kiss her back; he is characteristically and frustratingly stoic, made all the more baffling for the way his heart races. after a moment's hesitation, his right hand raises to her face; the thumb finds the delta of soft flesh beneath the sharp delineation of her jaw, his fingers brushing past her ear and into her hair. with this purchase, he pushes her back to grant him an inch or so of space, but only just that. for a moment he stares into her cruciform eyes, his own depicting an internal riot.
and in the end...
fuck. ) You can't breathe a word about this to anyone. ( though hushed and low, the tone is serious. his left hand finds her hip; still damp, it causes the fabric to cling to her skin. ) The second you sense that Denji's home, tell me.
( really, he feels that his conditions are relatively simple and understandable:
1) obviously Public Safety cannot become aware of this because he would most likely, at best, be removed from his position, and,
2) he will not deal with whatever denji might say or do if he became aware of it, because he's already enough to deal with as he is.
humans can impose contracts of their very own. )
no subject
Hence the fiend's malformed, almost child-like conception of Aki's forthcoming departure from life, which her imagination illustrates as emptiness where there was once presence. She pictures neither the funeral nor the grief. On the other hand, if Aki wished to confide in Power and the blabby devil resolved to keep her trap shut, he could tell her anything without fear of being patronised on the grounds of his terminal prognosis.
His cool reception does not offend; instead she pushes her cheek into his hand like a beast seeking its caress. ]
Gyahaha...
[ She is warded off and peers back at his mask of stoicism with giddy curiosity. The grinning fiend indulges his demand for secrecy by fastening her lips with a phantom zipper. Despite her perfidy, the observance of contracts is an instinctual compulsion for her kind. That is to say, she gets it. ]
Fret not for I'll smell him from a mile away!
[ Her hands descend and her fingers pass through the gaps in his and she lifts Aki's hands and moves in slow tempo to the evening radio filtering through their balcony from below. She speaks as she motivates his limbs to pulse along with success or without: ]
Sneaking around sounds fun! but don't you want Denji in on it? We could be likeβ
[ Power outstretches their fingers and connects their hands into a kind of lock meant to represent something, where hers and Aki's hands are surrogates for each respective party. ]
this.
no subject
aki has little to say about his own future. bizarrely enough, he views it largely like power does: there will come a day where he will be an absence where once was, and if there was anyone left to mourn him as he had mourned dozens throughout these last thirteen years, he would be blind and deaf to them. as soft-hearted as he really is, still able to feel the unfathomable shear of loss just as keenly now as he had felt it watching his childhood life scattered to the winds right in front of his eyes, he tries not to think of that part. perhaps aki withdraws because he doesn't want to leave behind pain like that; it had made sense for himeno (even if she had ended up going before him), but... with power, it's less of a concern. he couldn't believe that the fiend would mourn him.
oddly enough, that makes it easier.
there's something feline in the way she presses into the touch of his hand; it isn't the first and won't be the last similarity he can see between her and the familiar that she had brought along with her. he eases visibly at her agreement to his terms, lapsing into a momentary passivity that allows for her to take his hands and lead him slowly through the steps of an impromptu dance set to the music he can hear filtering in from somewhere outside; he doesn't feel cut out for something like this, but he at least tries to play along. aki moves with all the alacrity of a wooden toy soldier, creaking and sticking at the joints, but he does move. )
Absolutely not. ( as if his diction isn't enough to close that door, he clearly enunciates each syllable to punctuate it.
he allows her to bring their hands together into... what she must think is some sort of explanation, or example, but it does little to budge the frown etched nearly permanently into aki's expression. he grouses, ) Aren't we already enough like that? ( he feels like he lives with these two practically under his skin already, and besides, there's absolutely no way he can think of injecting denji into this situation that doesn't make it either exponentially more awkward, more difficult, or more stiflingly uncomfortable. this is already enough of an imposition as it is, having pried aki partially out of the bounds of what he feels is either permissible or safe or both. )
He's difficult enough as it is. ( power is as well, but her methods are seemingly more effective on him. )