Chapter Text
Makima stuffed her hands into her pockets. "Hello, Angel Devil. It's been a while," she smiled. "I don't suppose you've accepted that that won't be enough to kill you?"
At her voice, he shuddered, feathers ruffling, but he did not move his hands. He looked like a child playing peek-a-boo, left alone and waiting for someone to join him. His halo shone above him.
Makima squatted down in front of him and placed her palms on her cheeks, fingers splayed across the contours of her skull with the tips touching her hairline like some strange mask. Her pink lips stretched pale into an idea of joy. Her fingers were spread just so that her molten gaze peered at him through the cracks, like the flame in a lantern, cheater that she was. "You're like Ouroboros when you do this, do you know of his legend? The serpent swallowing itself ad infinitum, never quite being able to finish the job.
Its image is ancient, so much so that its original meaning has been lost, but throughout history it has been used to represent cycles, giving form to the idea that what has come before shall invariably come again. Destruction and creation. Death and rebirth. The moon and the sun. What do you represent, I wonder? Well, my little rat snake, any ideas?"
"Why," he rasped, then stopped. Coughed. His hands fell from his eyes to cover his mouth, a display of manners strange with present company. His eyes were ruby's dull with despair, or perhaps rather the acceptance of it. "Why are you here?"
"Because I need you, your power."
"You killed them." He had the most tired voice in the world.
"I did."
"I loved them, and you made me kill them."
No answer.
"Why? Why couldn't you have just left us alone?"
"Your people…they were illegals. Refugees from the Philippines washing up on Japanese shores in an attempt to escape the ongoing conflicts within their nation. The communist uprising by the New People's Army, the Moro Conflict, and various other ancillary factions waging wars under the call of gold and glory. Your friends sought to escape the trappings of their bleak existence and build a new life for themselves along the shores of the Kyushu islands."
"You didn't answer my question. Why did you kill them? Why did they have to die? Why did you make me?" his voice gave out, and he fell into sputters.
"I was told to remove them, so I did. Nothing personal. They shouldn't have chosen Kyushu as their final destination; it's a popular tourist spot, and Prime Minister Hashimoto didn't want vagrancy tarnishing our prosperous nation's image. They would have been better off sailing for the smattering of islands that freckle the waters between Japan and Great Joseon—make it a border dispute, muddy the waters. Neither nation would be liable to snuff out a group of refugees if it risked putting a military force in a neighboring country's territory."
"Why did you kill them?"
Makima blinked, her golden gaze shuttering behind her fingers. "I told you, it wasn't personal. It was their fault for trying to build a home where they weren't welcome."
"You could have just sent them away…could have just told them to go home...you didn't. Why? Why did you kill them?"
Makima stared at him, then dropped her hands. They hit the floor or her lap; she couldn't be sure. Bloody phlegm slithered its way down her throat, and she swallowed. Bitter. Tick-tock.
" ' Why, why, why' ," she intoned, head cocking to and fro like a pendulum. She rose to her feet and looked down on him, and the sight of him so small and pitiful did stoke the terrible flames of pride within her. "Have you any other word at your disposal, hm? Perhaps you'd like me to explain why it rains? Or why the sky is blue? In case you haven't noticed, there are more pressing matters for me to attend to than answering your insipid questions." She gestured to the cold corpse behind, barred behind her legs, its mouth dipped slightly open.
Angel looked at the body, thoughts obscured by the blank of his gaze, before sliding back up to Makima's. His wings shivered and tucked themselves closer behind him. "Why did you kill them?"
Makima stared at him. "I wonder, do you know of your own nature? Or has your many deaths obscured it from you?"
"What are you talking about?"
"I have had my eyes on you for decades, Angel Devil. Angel and Devil, hm—even your name is a contradiction. Tell me, are you aware of just how many times you've reincarnated over the years?"
"Why," he squinted, a sense of Déjà vu filling him. Then it was gone. "Why would I know a thing like that?"
"You wouldn't, I suppose. But I do. Over the twenty-three years I have been monitoring your existence, you have died and come back approximately forty-three times. One death every six and a half months on average—put next to even the most volatile of devils, this number is staggering. Even more so is the reason for it.
"Each and every time you come back into this world, you seek out a fragment of humanity, almost instinctively. It could be a widow, an orphaned child, the homeless, the diseased, the displaced. The form doesn't matter, their tragedy does." Makima fell silent, awaiting his response.
"I don't…what does this have to do with what you did? I don't care about my past selves, they aren't me."
"Oh, but they are. We can't escape what we are. Die however many times you'd like, you're of the same bones as me."
"Whatever," he scoffed. "Keep telling yourself that."
Her expression turned brittle, but she carried on. "I've watched your many incarnations scrape their way through this imperfect world. Each time they attached themselves to some downtrodden figure, watching over them like—well, a guardian angel.
"Tell me, Testuo, Misato, Mima, Kentaro, Josuke…do these names mean anything to you? Anything at all?" She looked at him with the closest thing to enthusiasm she had felt since the conversation began, a kind of childish curiosity in her expression.
Angel just stared at her, revolted. "They mean nothing to me. They're just the names of people who are probably dead."
Her eyes shuttered closed again. "Of course, my apologies for the strange question."
"Keep your apologies to yourself, they're the last thing I want, Conquest."
"Makima."
"What?"
"My name is Makima."
"Whatever."
Makima sighed. "Regardless. On the first day—you wake up. On the second, you find your ward. On the third, you die." With each day a finger was raised until three stand proud and she showed them to him, as if they were physical proof of his past. "A simple progression, don't you think?
"For decades, I watched this dance of yours. It plays out the same each time, over and over and over."
"That's fascinating, really, but please shut up about things that don't matter anymore. I told you—I don't care about my past lives, and I don't care how you feel about them. Just tell me why you killed Sampa, tell me why I had to be the one to do it."
His wings ruffled, an involuntary spasm of the back muscles. Outside, the symphony died down to but a few stragglers seeking applause. Makima bled.
"I suppose," she started, resting the tip of her tongue on her bottom incisor as she fought for the words she needed, fought herself to say them. "I suppose…I coveted you. Your nature."
"My nature?"
"Yes. I suppose, yes—the Angel Devil. Each time you came back, I watched, I waited for the time when the Devil in you would win. But it never did, not once. I waited and waited until I could wait no more.
"When you stumbled across those refugees, I wanted them to hate you, to fear you. Instead, they welcomed you into their ramshackle home. They weaved a wreath of flowers for your halo and crowned you family. They spliced your hair with strands of their own until red mixed with brown and grey and blacks. They built a home for you to live in and a bed for you to sleep on. They taught you to swim, to speak, to read, and to write. They gave you their traditions. Their elders offered you their right hands in pagmamono and let you place your forehead upon them, even knowing what you were capable of.
"Their love came so cheaply for you, flowed so freely. And you took to it eagerly. Like a starved animal to a hand scented with its last supper, you licked and slurped and had your fill. You never hated, did you? Never coveted? Never felt the impulse to wrap your arms around them and feel them draw their last breath in your hold?"
"W-what?" Angel stuttered, his serene features cracking from the mask of hatred he had worn ever since she stepped in here into one of fear. "What's wrong with you? No, I never wanted to hurt them. I couldn't imagine," his words faded, leaving only an expression of pain in their wake.
Makima studied his crumbling face, cataloging each wrinkle that creviced his pale skin, the dullness of his eyes. He looked like a puppet with its strings cut. To see him brought so low, to be sunken in the same depths as her…
She thought it would feel better than this.
"No, you couldn't imagine," she spoke with a voice so soft, so sweet. Her gaze was molten, the rings in her eyes seeming to sway and twirl, spin and whirl. They were the swirls of a great circus ring, a carnival calamitous where in their pitched tents bore the flames of Hell.
Angel tried to get away from her, his wings scraping along the wall as he pushed himself back. Makima noticed and gripped him by the shoulders, long fingers clenching about the fabric of his jumpsuit. He cringed, furious breaths hissing out between his teeth as his bones creaked beneath her weight.
"You couldn't imagine what it's like to live each and every day holding back what you are. What you were made to be. It was so effortless for you, each and every time, wasn't it? To love, to be loved. You've never had to dig in your fingers and squeeze ."
Angel groaned as his shoulders bent inward, the tendons straining under the pressure of Makima's grip. He shuddered and whined, feet scraping against the floor as his hands twisted into the mad woman's shirt, fingers clenching for purchase in the fabric. "Let go of me!"
Makima crooned against his ear, lips just short of making contact. "Tell me, do you feel it now? The thrum of inhumanity that connects the neurons within you? Do you want to kill me? Maim me? Take everything from me that I've taken from you?"
"Shut up!"
"Do you hate me?"
"I said shut up!" Angel shoved at her and lifted his hand into the air, "Usage: ten years!" From his halo sprouted the handle of a mace. He grabbed it, pulling it the rest of the way into existence, and swung.
Makima watched its arc, bore low and set to collide with her leg. She could have stepped out of the way. She should have.
A sickening crack echoed throughout the cell as the mace head slammed into Makima's knee, its flanged mass digging into her and carving the tendons.
She crumbled against the wall, caving against Angel's prone form, her leg snapped in half and connected only by strands of sinew. It looked like a sausage link with her tattered pants leg for a casing that grew damper and darker by the second.
Thin jettisons of blood shot out in pulsing waves, painting across the floor in hot spurts, looking like some form of ichor snake slithering its way about the room. A stray spray hit Himeno's body, a tendril of red smattering against her face. The polished sheen of cartilage winked from her wound, bright and glossy as pearls.
Angel cringed as Makima sagged against him, her hands clambering about him for purchase. He threw an elbow into her gut, and she staggered but did not fall back, merely digging deeper into his slender form.
Growing desperate, he curled into a ball, repositioning himself until his feet pressed against Makima's stomach. In one strong movement, his legs burst forward, slamming into her ribs and sending her flying across the room. She slammed into the wall hard enough to shatter her ribs and send bone fragments ripping through her insides like shrapnel.
Makima sagged to the floor, a bleeding mess of broken pieces, making no effort to defend herself. Angel stormed over to her, in his haste and in his anger forgetting about the dead woman laid in the center of the room. His foot collided with Himeno's head as he stomped over, whipping it to face Makima with a balking expression and the Devil's blood drying on her face.
Makima locked eyes with the dead woman, holding her dessicate gaze. She held it as Angel kneeled down next to her and wrapped his small hands around her throat. She held it as he squeezed, crushing her larynx to the back of her throat. She held it as Angel began to suck lifetimes out of her.
A man sits in traffic after the workday. The hours grew longer and his time with his family shorter. His wife's disappointment had turned to anger had turned to a stony silence. The kids would be asleep, fed and put to bed without him to kiss them goodnight. His wife sits alone at the dining table, telling herself that this will be the last time. It's a lie. She'll wait for him to come home this night and the next night and the next ever after for she loved him, and there wasn't a cure for that. The man is thirty-four, and then the man is dead. A horn blares out at the intersection between Fifth and Main. The car idles forward and rear-ends the car in front of it. He will never come home again.
A girl is in her room, kicking her feet up on her bed as she flips through the latest issue of ViVi. A child of fifteen, she wonders why her parents had to be such drags and what the other kids will think of her not attending Sachitori's party, if they'll even notice her absence at all. She didn't get it. What were a few bad grades to a lifetime of being a social outcast because she couldn't make it to the hottest hook-up of her sophomore year? She kicks her feet and sighs when she hears a knock at her door. She turns up her Walkman, the soulful tune turning into a baleful screech as the volume is pushed past her ear buds' ability to transmit, as her mother enters and shuts the door behind her. Her mom starts speaking and the girl takes a petty pleasure as she looks like a mute Muppet. She flips through another page and reads a few lines about a dating scandal between Akihiko Kaiba and Mitsuru Washima before the magazine falls from her hands. Her earbuds pop out, and the last thing she hears before she leaves this earth is her mother asking her what's wrong.
The life-siphoning was cut mercifully short as Angel was thrown off of Makima, a brutal force smashing into him and sending him hurdling across the room. He rolled once, twice, before catching himself and trying to clamber to his feet.
He didn't make it off his knees before Denji's foot collided with his skull. His nose was crushed into a geyser of blood and jellied cartilage, the ruin of which drooped down his face like some obscene ornament as he tumbled back down to the floor.
Denji stood over him, seething like a bull ready to charge. In his hand, he clenched a black garbage bag in a white-knuckle grip. His shark teeth were grit into a snarl that warped his face into a creviced rage. "What did you do?" he growled and stepped in between Makima's ruined figure and the prone Angel, gnashing his teeth like a dog protecting its litter. His chocolate eyes were brewed dark and flat like two little black holes; a singularity of violent intent that seethed and whorled, as if rebelling from their sclera captivity. "What did you do to her, you fucking—"
His tirade came to an abrupt end when he felt a hand grab the back of his shirt, fingers curling in the fabric. He looked back to find Makima looking at him.
"Stop it, Denji. There's no point in making this a fight," she spoke with no issues in spite of her throat, the column of hardened cartilage crushed flat with the thin paper skin twitching and bulging from the shattered pieces within. Her head seemed like an oversized bauble left thoughtlessly attached, the proportions maligned in such a manner as to approach absurdity, a notion only bolstered by her indifferent, almost serene expression.
"Yeah? I think it's a little too late for that, Miss Makima. Oh, shit, what did he do to you?" Denji kneeled down and took her head in his hands. He cradled her skull and searched her eyes, his own aglow with a sorrow so warm and mellow. "What did that asshole do to you?"
"Nothing." Perhaps she should have stopped playing at injury, heal herself anew and carry on with it. But she just couldn't be bothered. Her blood dribbled and leaked from her in sad spouts, and she found it to be an altogether not unpleasant sensation.
"That looks like a hell of a lot more than nothing."
"I mean it. It won't be me who suffers the consequences."
"What does that mean, Makima? Can you please just say something straight?"
"I have a contract with the Prime Minister of Japan. In its terms, all attacks levied against me shall be transferred to a random Japanese citizen."
Denji stared at her, something terrible dawning in his eyes. Makima stared back, somehow defiant.
"So as I said, nothing happened to me. Isn't that right, Angel?" Her gaze slid to the prone Devil, Denji's eyes following.
He was clutching at his head, babbling apologizes as he crawled along the floor like a beggar. "I'm sorry, I didn't want to, I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry." Tears clung to his eyes but would not fall, would not be shed of their bearer and relent him of sorrow. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."
"Don't be sorry, Angel. Apologies are always too late to mean anything."
He pulled at his hair and groaned, a wounded animal noise that ground his voice into something unrecognizable. His toes clenched and scraped against the ground. "I can't, I can't," A dozen lives flashed behind his eyes at once, each life taken a life absorbed, their memories, their ambitions, their dreams. How was he to know? How was he to know that Sampha wanted to…
"I know, you don't have to say it. I understand," cradled in Denji's lap, Makima spoke, her voice soft, a sadness she could not explain within her words. "I'll help you, Angel. I'll save you from your ghosts. But first, there's something I need you to do for me."
------
Denji did hear for briefest moments the howl of Hell as the incinerator roared to life. Smoke took the skies and Makima took his hand and though he glimpsed within those ruinous flames and ash his fate yet to come and perhaps the fate of all men, for now the night was warm and the night was kind and all that mattered was now for the future bore no promises of but grief greater than the heart can fathom. Though perhaps the heart can never fathom pain, merely weather it.
"Where to next?" Makima asked, voice a more solid thing than Denji felt himself to be. "The night is still young."
He thought about it, in the heat of the ash and of the smoke. "Do you think it's going to be alright? With that guy? With Himeno?"
Makima thought about it, contemplating the flames as they flickered over her face. "Yes, I think so."
"But how do you know?"
"I know because Devils are selfish creatures. I know because I am a Devil and his is the choice I'd make in the same circumstances."
Silence. The heat of the night. A sky full of stars. "Okay."
Denji looked at Makima and she looked back and there in so delicate a fury were they damned.
------
It was never going to stop. The revelation carried with it no particular feeling.
The sea whorled and foamed between Denji's toes where he stood on the coastline. His feet sunk into the sands, carving the earth in his own image. The waves bit at the shore and wimpled and faded and came again. Ebbing, flowing, never going.
His head felt waterlogged, flooded by something surreal and vicious and so, so heavy. He imagined taking his chainsaws and carving hole after hole into himself, draining himself of everything that was wrong with him.
It was never going to stop.
Makima stood leaning against the hood of her car, parked along the dunes. She watched him in silent consideration, arms crossed, beach grass grazing along her legs in the gentle ocean breeze. Her hair was undone and dancing. The car idled in park and chuffed plumes of exhaust into the hazy grey morning sky. Thin reefs of cloud stretched across the horizon, containing their whole world within.
She leaned to the side and checked the time on her dashboard. She sighed. "Don't you think it's about time you get out of there?"
"I get it now," he spoke, to her or to the water or to the nothingness inside himself.
"Get what?"
He ran his fingers across the surface of the undulating sea, rising and falling as if with breath. His fingers dipped in, then out. "Makima, is there a Hell?"
"Why do you ask?"
"Is there?"
Makima dragged her thumb along her jawline, gaze drifting to rising sun. It transmuted the waves to gold in its dawning furious, brilliant burning. The air was cool. A thin fog clung over waters surface. "Yes, there is."
"What's it like?"
"Hell?"
"Yeah."
"It's," Makima closed her eyes, trying to summon forth memories of lives long past. It came in flashes and momentary sensations—a numbness in her wrists, smoke in her lungs—rather than concrete recollection. "It is not a good place to be. It is a place of deafening silence, of impossible isolation. I remember feeling…so lonely…so…scared."
"You were scared?"
Admitting made her bones thrum, like her skeleton was trying to claw out of her. But she wanted to tell him, that was the strange thing. She wanted him to know that she, too, was capable of fear. "Yes. Terrified, even."
"What happens in Hell?"
"You die."
"Oh."
"It's a slow death. Drawn and quartered over a year's time. Boiled until your skin shrivels off and you're made to crawl until you can crawl no more. It's a place not devoid of hope, but rather one that understands how to dangle it in front of you just so that you may stretch yourself further to its whims. It is horror."
Denji heaved a sigh. "I'm glad."
"I struggle to see the jubilance in my words."
"I'm glad to know that no matter how much of a piece of trash coward I am, it'll all get evened out in the end." He stepped further still out past man's land. "I couldn't be a friend to Himeno. I couldn't be a friend to Power and Aki. I couldn't be a boyfriend. I couldn't keep my promise to Pochita. I can't do anything. I have fucked up everything I have ever tried to do. I'm glad I don't need to try anymore."
"Denji," she drew his name past three caresses of wind. "You aren't going to Hell when you die, if you even can die. It is the domain of Devil's, a prison, a place of penance for our nature. Or perhaps a womb with which to incubate it."
For a time he ignored her words, lost as he was in the push and pull of the depths below him. Then he spoke with his hand on his heart. "No, Makima. You're wrong."
Makima stood at the shoreline in an instant. "You need to get out of the water, Denji. You can't swim."
"I'm a terrible person." Now to his neck. The waves lapped at his chin.
"No, you're not. Please get out."
"I lived with Aki for months. I ate his food, he unclogged the toilet when I stuffed it with my shit. I think he loved Himeno. I think he loved her like I love you. Like you say you love me—now she's dead."
"There's nothing you could have done for her. You didn't kill her."
"No, you did. You killed her, and when you told me, the only thing I could think of was getting off. Then I helped you get away with it. It's so strange, I feel like I'm dead." Salt water filled his mouth, burning him clean of his sins. Higher and higher he fell.
Makima spoke but the words weren't there, just noise. Noise that gave way to the ocean in his ears.
The sea shriveled his eyes and he welcomed the agony for letting him feel anything at all. He walked until he could walk no more, the ground sinking below the certainty of his feet and giving way to vast levity, to the suspension of bone and muscle and flesh.
He was adrift, he was alone. He was so unimaginably, totally, irreversibly bored.
Water salty as tears flooded his lungs and bubbles burst against his throat. He wondered if the ocean was where all the sadness went. That tears once wept built the sea from a puddle and would one day come to drown everything.
Denji felt not for the first time that pain and suffering were the one true constant in life, and that everything else was privilege.
The world darkened, his vision eclipsed by a world below.
He was so close to being free.
He felt a strong arm looped about his waist and pull him up. He struggled and they only held him tighter, desperate to not lose him. His head broke the surface and he took a choking gasp of air. The sky was blazing in his deprivation, brilliant ash and stretching angel wings set against his insignificant being.
He was screaming.
As Makima pulled him to the surface, one arm about him and the other treading the waves, he screamed. As she laid him on the shore and punched his ribs and gave copper kisses, he screamed. He screamed for Himeno, for Aki, for Makima, for Power, and for himself.
Against this vast and terrible world they shared, against all its indifference and petty cruelty, Denji could do nothing but scream. A searing cry petitioning the beatless heart of creation to shed unto his self some inkling of divinity and reason for their pain.
He received no answer.
"—Breathe…Denji, you need to…" The words came as a siren song meant to lure him back to the land of the living. He wanted to ignore it, sink deeper into oblivion. But that voice…
He trusted that voice, didn't he?
"Come back…Denji, you can't leave me…"
He felt his ribs cracking, pressed into by an immense force that surged against him in desperate, powerful bursts. The blood vessels in his eyes burst, and red pooled in his vision. He coughed, pink-stained water trickling from his nose, carving a trail down his sand-crusted cheeks.
All was light, furious and radiant light.
The hands left him, and he groaned for their return. "Do' 'o," he sputtered. "Do' ‘eave me. Do' 'unna be alone."
Deep breaths above him, sad breaths. The ocean grew fuller still.
His soaked shirt was peeled off him like snake skin being shed, and his chest erupted in goosebumps. It caught around his head and smothered his face. Frustrated tugs jostled his skull, and he whined. Finally, he was torn free from his prison with the sound of ripping fabric.
He felt fingers claw at his pull starter, crooking about the handle.
"You can't leave me, Denji." Then she pulled.
Pain blurred the edges of what was left of his mind into searing infinity as his body ate itself back to life. His flesh gave way to roaring steel, and each thought stretched itself past the confines of his consciousness.
------
He dreamed and it was not a dream.
Alone at home for days he stayed on the couch, waiting until there was nothing to wait for. The radio blared from its place on the end table, crying news of a world far beyond his childish imagination.
"And so the alien invasion is underfoot! The glorgoobs have taken the white house and now hold the lady president hostage in their tentacled grasp! Will our chiseled hero be able to save the damsel and our democracy? Find out next time, on Science Fiction FM!"
Commercials cued, hair products and coffee shops. He hoped the president was okay. Those glorgoobs sounded like real jerks, he was happy they didn't have any of them where he lived.
There was no food. His father was gone, his mother lost to the sands of time.
A noise like the creak of new leather boots being broke in, coming from upstairs. He stood. Dressed only in one of his father's t-shirts, the hem reaching his knees, he padded out of the living room and down the hall. He padded past the kitchen with its broken refrigerator, little more than shelf space, and the faucet. The water bill hadn't been paid in two months. Drawings sketched in crayon cling to the walls, depicting happy suns and happy people and happy lives.
The creaking grew louder. It was coming from the bedroom he shared with his father and his father shared with his father before him. He stepped up to the sliding door, opening it a crack.
The heat and the smell. These were the first things Denji noticed the first time he saw his father having sex.
He was on top, clawing and bucking and bearing his beer gutted weight onto the woman below him. She seemed a strange sight, a thing of beauty beheld by walls so barren. Her lips were red and pursed, her expression bored. It was not passion, it was not love. It was just weight on top of her.
------
When he finally came back to himself, he was on his knees facing the ocean. He blinked, cringing at the musk of flesh coating his tongue. And the blood.
Familiar blood.
He dabbed his fingers along his lips, and they came away coated in crimson. Slowly, ever so slowly, he turned around.
He found himself a supplicant of the garden of limbs strewn along the shore, staining the sands red. All about lay fingers dug into the earth like budding stems. Eyes and noses and ears and cheeks dotted the land. Arms and legs littered the ground, bleeding and twitching and clawing as nerves contracted muscles in a last gasp of oblivious, primal existence.
The waves came to sup at the shore and went back out scarlet and seething. As though the brutality itself was an infection seeping into everything it touched, a wound on this very planet.
The stench of ozone galvanized the air with electric clarity. Chlorine in his mouth, blood on his tonsils.
He tried to breathe but only coughed, something clogging his airways. He hacked, beating at his chest in an attempt to force the thing back up his throat. When he felt it bulging against his uvula, he plunged his hand into his mouth, pinching the obtrusion between his fingers. Tears built in his eyes, and he gagged as he worked it out, feeling as if his insides were being scraped clean. He pulled the mass free and held it out in front of himself. He stared, uncomprehending.
It was hair, clumped and soiled, and red. Red like coxcomb.
"I see you've finally come to your senses."
He blinked. Swallowed. "Makima."
She was sat against the front tire of her car, watching him. Expression the shadow on the cave wall. A strange beauty in the midst of horror. "You've been out a while."
“What…what…”
"You were drowning. You tried to drown yourself. I pulled you from the water, tried to resuscitate you. It didn't work. I resorted to more drastic measures."
"And?"
"It worked."
Denji staggered forward, gaze sweeping the plane of viscera before him. Lips peeled from their face twitched and jittered from where they lay in the sand. "What…what is all this?"
Makima pressed a hand to the ground and pushed herself back to her feet. She slipped her hands in her pockets, thumb hooked in the hem, and watched him. "It's me."
Denji staggered, a balked, loping movement. "What?"
"When you first regained consciousness," she paused. Took a breath. Her hair coiled about her face like splatters of blood, and she cleared them with her hand. "When you came back to me, you weren't yourself. You were…something else."
"Something else," Denji echoed, hollow as he grazed the plain of his depravity. The longer he stared, the more the details came together. Eyeballs crusted with sand and dry, bearing a golden sheen. Those lips so pink and soft, lips he knew. His knees hit the ground, and he grabbed at his face with a desperate, clawing grip, as if wishing to rip the knowledge from his head. He bore himself as a supplicant to his own iniquity. Genuflected in the sands, he did not take notice of Makima's approach.
She placed a hand on his head, ruffling the buckwheat strands. "It's okay, Denji. I'm not mad. I'm not going to hurt you."
"Why? Why didn't you just leave?"
"You said you didn't want to be alone," she admitted, eyes darting to the floor and then back to him. "You didn't want me to leave. I didn't want to leave you."
'It won't be me who suffers the consequences.'
Denji ached. Gasping breaths stuttered past his lips as he sagged against Makima's legs, pressing his forehead into her thigh. His fingers clutched into the fabric of her dress pants, and he moaned, hot and heavy into her. "Please, Makima," he begged. "Please help me. I can't deal with this anymore."
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Their nude forms coiled on that gnarled landscape, huffing and groaning like the dead to be. Seagulls circled above, squalling and swooping down and plucking bits and pieces of Makima off of the ground and carrying them off into the horizon draped in their beaks.
Denji was spreading her legs and grabbing at her tits and stroking her hair and they are holding hands and the dimensions of them disappeared. The borders of their bodies melded, amorphously expanding in heat and lust.
Denji had sex, but he was on top this time. He was a big man now; nothing could hurt him here.
They were kissing, but this time he knew how it felt. It was the death of his father, the return to his mother's womb. Her love, so ethereal and true. Umbilical fascination.
"Do you like it?"
She said yes, eyes screwed shut and hair a curtain around her neck and face as they entwined.
He growled and cried and they coiled in mindless, selfish pleasure. He moved against her without rhythm. "Tell me you like it," He begged. "Tell me how good I make you feel."
She wrapped her legs around his waist and let him in deeper. She felt nothing of what she had in their prior encounter. Just pressure that increased and decreased, machine pistons and groping hands that sought only themselves, their own heart. Just weight on top of her. Blood poured from her nose. "You are wonderful, Denji. You make me feel like no one else."
Love is destruction. Love is evil. Love will destroy you. Man can only betray what it loves and no one is better off for having been here.
This story has no reason for being. These words bear no weight. Nothing will have changed for their being here.
We eulogize our loneliness and spite it in equal measure, as do we spite all who would reach a hand into our wretched chest and hold our scarred hearts. We are the serpent swallowing itself ad nauseam. We are the snake that bit its own tail, lying dead in the road.
Yet still in all our arrogance and all our vanity will we prophesize of a love that is selfless and pure.
So may the weary traveler awake from the dream? May we ever?
Denji moaned into the sky and the sky did not answer. He came weak, drooling spurts inside Makima that ached like a bitter aftertaste.
He pulled out and rolled off of her to his side, heaving. For a brief few moments did he know relief.
It felt like giving up.
He sighed, rolled his hips, and looked at Makima. Jism trickled down her thigh, eroding trails through the sand that coated her sweaty thighs where she lay on the beach. Seeping out of her like pus from an infected wound.
"I'm sorry," Denji said after a period of silence. He didn't know what for, but he was.
"It's okay."
"I don't deserve to love or be loved."
"That's alright. I don't either." Her eyes rolled to nearly meet her eyebrow. The screech of tires and the crunch of gravel. The slamming of car doors. Frantic footsteps. This was how the world ends. "They are here."
“Who?”
“Hayakawa and the Blood Fiend.”
"Ah." He supposed he should have cared. He should have panicked. He should rush them to get dressed and get in the car and go.
But the sea air felt so very nice against his skin. Footsteps stamped their way over the dunes behind them, twigs snapping under their frantic march.
What a strange thing, to reason a feeling rather than evoke it.
Denji took Makima's hand in his own. This, too, is how the world ends.
"Over here! I think they're over here!" Power yelled.
They must have used her nose to track them. If she could sniff out where Aki hid the treasured gum sticks in his room she could probably find them. He felt a bite of something warm despite himself.
"I see them!" Aki yelled. "I see…"
Denji wondered what it was that put his words to a stuttering halt. The guts? The blood? The smell of their sex?
Denji leaned his head back and saw them, standing with the beach grass shimmering about their ankles. The sun shaded their features into clandestine specters come seeking restitution for his sins.
He rose to his feet to meet them, pulling Makima up with him.
They were still dressed in their pajamas, the sight almost comical when composed with the severity of their expressions. The rage. The confusion. The betrayal.
"Hey guys," Denji saw their pain for a companion and waved to it. He smiled. "We have something to tell you."