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Aki wakes up on cold metal. But the memory closest to the surface is like a dream: sweating in his winter coat with his fingers and toes freezing. His brother is too sick to play again, and normally Aki would be outside alone, dragging heavy tree limbs down to earth or building snow walls just for something to do, but today he’s belly laughing with another kid—some version of Denji where his grin doesn’t have a manic edge and his cheeks are full, like someone’s been taking care of him, like nothing bad ever happened to him—
A distant crack of thunder has Aki blinking his eyes open at a grey ceiling. His head is throbbing. Something slips down his chest as he sits up—it’s a standard issue public safety jacket, smaller than Aki’s own, and when Aki moves it off his lap, his thumb passes through an ugly rip in the back.
Thunder growls in the distance, and it feels nothing like a bright winter day; Aki squeezes the back of his neck as he takes in a dimly-lit industrial elevator. Everything looks sleek and gunmetal, like he’s in some soulless corporate tower, except that one wall is metal-framed glass. The orange light of sunset bleeds in through the window, tinting a crisp white uniform shirt and a pair of soft wings warm.
“What are we—” Aki sits up, winces as he pushes himself up to standing. “What’s going on?”
The angel devil looks back at him, halo gently throbbing. It’s not a sunset outside—instead, the whole view is churning orange clouds, lightning spider webbing through.
“We’re still attached to her,” Angel says, and flashes of lightning play across his face. “Stuck. Maybe she’ll let us go when she’s done with us.”
“When what?” Aki reaches up automatically for his sword, but it’s not on his back.
Angel makes a sound in his throat. “It won’t matter soon.” His wings pull in closer to his body. “Get ready. We’re about to fall.”
“What?”
With that, the elevator drops. Aki stumbles in surprise, grabs at a handrail as they gather speed.
“WHAT IS—” he starts to yell, and before he can finish the elevator starts jolting, slowing with sickening lurches. Somewhere above, there’s a distinctive metal thrum, like a noise you’d hear from a suspension bridge in the wind.
Aki’s headache throbs. He waits, whole body tense, until they finally jolt to a stop.
“Are we done?”
“For now.” The devil pulls his wings in. They’re puffy, like they get when he’s in distress. “It’s a cycle. Falling, the chain catching.”
“What chain?”
Angel tilts his head toward the glass wall in response, and Aki steps over to join him at the window. Outside, the vista is endless. Dark orange clouds twist, lightning bursting in them like someone’s set loose fireworks in an infinite supply, and metal rectangles plunge through at intervals like falling meteors. Jagged brown mountaintops are barely visible in the distance, swathed in orange fog. It’s all unsettling somehow, ugly and endless. With white feathers taking up his periphery, it’s like being cocooned in front of some evil sight.
“I haven’t seen any of them break yet,” Angel says, tapping a finger on the glass to indicate a cluster of shiny rectangles that hang suspended from thick, long chains. Aki tries to trace the lines up, but they’re lost in the haze. “Maybe we’re here till she dies.”
“They’re like us,” Aki realizes. “That’s how we’re hanging here.”
Angel hums in affirmation.
“What makes us fall?”
Angel’s voice is toneless. “We’re being pulled down to hell.”
Aki raises his eyebrows, pushes his bangs back from his face. “Alright.”
“This might be the last bit of consciousness we have left.”
He starts to fix his topknot without thinking about it, dragging the elastic out with one hand and combing his hair back with the other, and that’s when it hits him, swift as a kick to the ribs. His hands. He drops them and looks at them, subsumed with a sudden feeling of wrongness.
“Angel.” Aki wets his lips. “Why do I have two hands? Why do you—” Aki has a sudden, vivid memory of the angel devil in a hospital bed, his sleeves empty.
A lightning flash throws the room into sharp relief.
“Angel. Tell me what’s happening.”
“I told you,” Angel says, voice distant.
“Are we…what devil were we hunting?”
Angel shakes his head.
“They must have stuck us in some kind of dream. Is this the eternity devil again?” Aki’s fingers are trembling; his hair elastic falls to the floor.
“Hayakawa, I told you. We’re going to hell.”
Outside, thunder growls like a many-throated beast. Aki realizes, as lightning slashes across the devil’s face, that Angel’s expression is something he’s never seen on him before. He looks stricken.
Aki curls his hands into fists, uncurls them.
“Have we tried the doors?” he asks abruptly. Angel doesn’t answer, and Aki steps over to push at the open door button. The circle around the button briefly lights up, but nothing else happens. The doors can’t be pried open either—it’s like they’re solid somehow.
“Did you think this was a real elevator?” Angel asks behind him, and Aki hammers the door open button with his fist, then hits what seems like the top floor button, though none of them are numbered.
A pleasant electronic voice emits from the speaker: “Going down.”
“How about up?” Aki mutters, hitting the button again.
“Going down.” Aki exhales sharply, hits the button next to it. “Going down.” For some reason he keeps trying them, all these useless buttons.
“Going down.”
“Going down.”
“Going down.”
“Your remaining existence is an illusion, like an afterimage when you close your eyes.”
Aki freezes, hand over the next button.
“I told you,” Angel says. “There’s no point in trying.” Aki hits the next button.
“Going down.”
“Going down.”
“Panic is a normal part of damnation.”
“Going down.”
“Damnation?” Aki mutters.
“If you require assistance,” the elevator says, “please pray to your angel.”
Aki turns on his heel, locking eyes with the devil on the other side of the elevator. “Is this…are you part of this? Are you taking me to hell?”
Angel shrugs.
Aki presses his right hand briefly over his eye, but the Future Devil doesn’t stir. “Will you just—will you tell me how we got here?”
Angel looks back out the window. “I don’t want to think about that.”
“About what?!”
Anyone else looking would think he had no expression at all. Aki used to think the same. “I don’t want to. Don’t ask me.”
“Angel, what happened? Last thing I remember was…something good. A snowball fight.”
“A snowball fight?”
Aki pushes his bangs out of his eyes. “Me and…some kid. Denji. It felt like a good memory. How is that possible?”
The angel devil’s halo throbs. “It isn’t.”
Aki steps closer to the window. “Just help me figure out what’s happening. I’ll get us out of this.”
Angel briefly closes his eyes. “Stop it, Hayakawa.”
“Makima must have some kind of plan.”
“Stop it.”
“She doesn’t do anything without a reason. We just have to figure out—”
“She took your life for fun!” Angel yells, spinning to face him. “You gave it to her just because she asked!”
Aki steps back in shock.
“She used you! She was always using you!”
There’s a pain that seizes Aki that doesn’t make sense, and then the memories come back—finding Makima on the beach, Angel looking determined and pale. The conviction that she must have a way, that if he could just make sure Denji and Power were safe, it would be worth it. Pain, blinding agony in his head—a feeling like the ground was dropping out from under him, like everything he’d believed in was a lie.
“She—” Aki’s eyes widen; his heart beats in his ears. “She did.”
“It’s my fault.” Angel says, voice jagged, and Aki needs his head to stop hurting, needs any of this to make sense. “I’m the one who trusted her. Isn’t that stupid? I’m the one who knew better.”
“I’m in charge here,” Aki says faintly. “If something went wrong, it’s my responsibility.”
“I should’ve tried anything else first. Anything. I was trapped.”
“Do you think—” Aki swallows. “Are Denji and Power ok?”
Angel seems to stop short. “I don’t know.” He leans a shoulder against the glass. “I’m…I wish I did. I wish I could tell you something good.” He tilts his head to rest it against the window, and Aki recognizes that hollowed out look in him. It used to drive Aki crazy. “Don’t stare at me like that.”
“Like what?”
Angel’s red eyes widen. “Hell’s calling us. We’re about to fall.”
Aki barely registers what he’s saying before the elevator plunges again. It’s violent, disorienting—Aki stumbles back and grabs blindly for the handrail, jams his shoulder into the corner with his shoes slipping.
He’d been so sure of everything. And he’d been in love, basically, in that way you love your heroes, or the way you love the only person who can give you what you most want. Aki dragged through his empty days following Makima like a north star, because she was pointing to revenge. A way to kill something unkillable. He’d been empty since childhood, and he wanted nothing else to fill him. The elevator picks up speed until Aki’s sneakers start to leave the ground, and Angel’s feathery hair drifts up away from his face. He looks at peace that way. Aki feels sick.
Then the elevator catches, like a yo-yo suspended mid-trick, and Aki slams into the ground and slides toward the window.
For a moment he stays there stunned. The chain is thrumming above them, and Angel’s yelling something, banging against the glass. Nothing feels real.
“Just do it already!” Angel hits the window like he wants it to break. “Hurry it up! Send us to hell!” Aki spreads his fingers on the rubber flooring, feeling numb, and Angel keeps hitting the glass with the heel of his hand. “Get to the part where I’m somebody else!”
Feathers brush the nape of Aki’s neck. Something thick works its way through him, an ugly kind of pain that he didn’t know he was capable of. He gets up, brushing against feathers and not bothering to avoid them, grabs Angel’s wrist in the air before he can bring it to the glass again. The palm of his hand crushes the fabric of Angel’s white button-down, but his fingers lay against skin.
Angel goes completely still. Then he yanks his wrist away, expression ashen. “Are you crazy?!”
Aki flexes his hand, like he can figure out if he’s just paid some terrible price. It doesn’t feel like he has.
“What is wrong with you?!”
“Whatever’s happening now,” Aki says. “I don’t think you’re taking my life.”
“I know that!” Angel gestures helplessly, backing away from him. “We’re dead!”
Aki rubs at his forehead, the spot between his eyebrows where his headache seems to originate. “So what does it matter?”
Angel edges further away from him along the window, like he’s dangerous. “It doesn’t! Just leave it!”
Aki’s following him without thinking about it, matching his steps until he has him looking up at him, red eyes sharp. He presses a palm to the glass by Angel’s elbow, can’t help but loom over him a little. “Will you just work with me for once? Instead of sabotaging everything we do?”
Angel shifts back, wings pressing against the window. “Not working isn’t the same as sabotaging you.”
It’s a well-worn path of mutual annoyance. Aki huffs. “I need to understand what’s happening. Where we are.”
“The afterlife.”
“I get that.”
Angel sighs. “It’s intended to be…unchallenging. Nearly instant. Some way of getting there that’s normal enough not to scare you. You half wake up, and it’s an ordinary day, except you’re falling. And then—” He drops one hand horizontally to hit the top of the other with a smack. “It’s over.”
“So you do know about this.”
“I was born here,” he says levelly. “I’m about to be swallowed up and spit back out again.”
“What about…what happens to humans?”
“Well.” Angel tips his chin up. His mouth is a flat line. “Torture, obviously. Endlessly, I guess, or until a devil ends you. That’s not very popular, though. No one wants to lose out on human suffering.”
“Right,” Aki says.
Angel blinks serenely.
“And if I ended things right now?”
“It has to be in hell itself.”
“Right.” Aki tries to process all of this, to feel fear or dread, but it’s just him and the angel devil right now in a broken elevator. Could be any bad day on patrol, when Makima was waiting for them to report back and Aki knew that he’d failed. “You were right about Makima,” Aki adds. “I was…I don’t know. Not seeing straight.”
Angel’s folded wings draw up high; flashes of lightning glow through the feathers. “Ok.”
“I would’ve done anything for her. Most of us would’ve. But you were never like that.”
“Do we have to talk about this?”
“I could tell the way you felt. I could tell you’d tense up around her.”
“Hayakawa Aki,” Angel enunciates, eyes burning. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
Aki’s brow furrows. “You want to talk about eternal torture, but not this?”
“Yes.”
“Hey.” Aki brushes a strand of hair out of Angel’s face, and the devil flinches back with nowhere to move, his halo clinking against the glass. “What’s—”
“Leave it.”
Aki tilts his head, bangs in his eyes. “You hate me that much?”
Angel makes a pained sound in his throat, turning his head away against the glass, and it’s like some strange instinct is taking Aki over—the need to pick at a scab, or to lean over a high railing as far as you can. Aki cages him in with a forearm on the glass. All the little hairs on his arm are raised.
“Tell me.”
Angel presses back against the glass, wings jutting up higher.
“Look at me, Angel. Spit it out.”
Suddenly Angel glares at him, like he’s reached a breaking point. “Every time I see your stupid face,” he snarls, “it feels like stabbing myself! It hurts worse than I ever imagined!”
Aki inhales in surprise.
“I wish we’d fall already so I never had to see you again!”
“What—why?”
“I watched you die!” Angel snaps at him. “And it didn’t mean anything at all! So it shouldn’t feel like this!”
“Oh,” Aki says, and some dark thing that’s been growing right next to his heart for a long time throbs. “Wouldn’t you like seeing that? Human suffering?”
Angel’s eyes widen with surprise, or maybe just pure pain, and Aki feels a twist in his gut, like he shouldn’t have done it.
“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Aki says, pulling back. “I didn’t mean—” Something stops him short; he looks down and realizes that Angel is holding his tie.
For a moment Aki just stares at his own tie stretched between them, at Angel’s hand on the fabric. Then he gets a feeling a bit like glass breaking in his own mind. “Angel.”
Angel’s hand tightens on the fabric. “It meant absolutely nothing.”
“Hey. Hey, hey, hey,” Aki says, nearly panicked, because Angel looks like he’s about to cry, and Aki has to stop it somehow. “Hey.”
Aki crowds him against the window with a forearm against the glass, tips Angel’s face up to him by the chin, and Angel doesn’t flinch when Aki leans down and noses over his cheek. He doesn’t flinch when Aki tucks the devil’s silky hair behind his ear.
Angel shifts up against him, and Aki realizes with a strange thrill that the devil is going up on his toes. He presses a kiss to Aki’s mouth.
Aki’s stomach is clenching with nerves. It doesn’t feel real, and then it’s over. He doesn’t know how to respond, the right thing to do, but one thing he won’t do is let a sliver of space between them. He chases Angel’s mouth, and then all he can hear is the crack of thunder and the rustle of feathers, the small wet sounds of their mouths parting and sliding together.
Angel sniffs a few times, wet, and Aki tastes salt on his cheek. “Go slower,” Angel says.
“I’m in charge here,” Aki says for some reason even though he’s already obeying him, coaxing a softness out of the devil’s mouth.
Angel sighs. “Better.”
Aki thinks of ice cream oozing down the angel devil’s knuckles, of the time he’d had one of Denji’s candies in his pocket and Angel had been the one who ended up with it clacking behind his teeth, and Aki kept wanting to teach him—something. A lesson. In a deserted alleyway. Aki finds a better angle, tastes more of him. He finds it again. He can’t think straight, headache pounding in his temples and heart beating too fast, and he remembers the crunching sound of Angel biting down on the hard candy, right by his ear with sirens in the distance.
“You’re too tall,” Angel complains just before Aki silences him. Strands of hair stick to Aki’s face, laying across the corner of his mouth, and when he pulls back momentarily to push them back—he doesn’t think he’s ever kissed anyone with his hair down, and that’s a strange thought—a string of saliva stretches and breaks between them. Aki wipes it off Angel’s lower lip with his thumb and then kisses him messily again, feels Angel move up against him like he’s getting as high on his toes as he can. Aki moves to put his free hand on the window and instead finds the inside of a wing, spreads his fingers in soft feathers.
“You’re so—” Aki chokes back the word ‘pretty,’ takes Angel’s lower lip instead.
“So what?”
“Nothing.”
“Liar.”
Aki drags his hand up the inside of his wing, lightly ruffling the feathers, and Angel lets out a noise against his mouth. Aki moves his hand down to the small of Angel’s back and crushes their hips together.
“Hell,” Angel warns against Aki’s mouth. “Hell’s calling.”
Aki hums and tugs him in harder. It’s excruciatingly good, in the moments before Angel shoves him back and the floor drops out on them again.
Aki grunts in pure frustration and careens back, losing his footing. They’re falling fast, faster—the outside corner of the elevator hits something with a loud bang, and it sets them spinning. Aki slides, grabs for a handrail and misses. The extra jacket flies into his face, and he wrenches it aside, slams against the wall and tumbles again.
He can hardly make sense of where he is beyond trying not to crash into walls that become floors and then walls again, but he catches sight of the angel devil jumping and hears his wings beating in the air, strangely massive, like there’s a power Angel’s never showed him. And why would he, Aki thinks, disoriented. The devil was working for public safety against his will. Aki finally grabs on to a handrail, wrenches himself closer to the wall, but what he’s thinking about is Angel in an ugly holding cell, night after night, sleeping there no matter whether he’d cooperated that day, no matter how much Aki had lectured him over ice cream and bloated devil corpses that he had to listen, that he was going to be disposed of like any other devil as soon as he stepped out of line. It occurs to Aki, as he slips down the wall, that maybe someone who built his whole life around hate deserves to go to hell.
The wind from Angel’s wings is catching Aki’s clothes, his hair, when the chain drawing out their deaths catches them again.
They swing out, clouds pressing against the window and dissipating as they move, and then they swing back in, gaining speed until the underside of the elevator thumps jarringly on something outside. Whatever it is, it seems like they’re stuck on it; Aki grips the railing as the room starts to tip. The floor tilts to become a wall, and they’re held in place like that, metal chain thrumming outside. Aki almost lets go and then grabs the bar again, because Angel is just below him, sitting on the glass with his wings large enough to hide him.
Aki hangs in the air, and the view the window reveals now is straight down—beneath the angel devil, orange clouds seethe their way along ugly brown crags, lightning chaining around dark holes in the cloud layer. Vertigo swirls in Aki’s stomach.
“We’re stuck on the foothills,” Angel says, and his wings are still big, bigger than Aki’s ever seen them. “Hell’s not happy about it.” He draws his knees in, expression pained, and then hides himself completely behind white feathers.
“Angel—” Aki’s grip is slipping. “Angel, watch out, I can’t—” He loses his grip on the rail, and a wing flares out to break his fall.
Before Aki can really process it, he’s lowered easily down. He rolls off feathers and onto glass.
“Thanks,” Aki croaks. Below his spread fingers, orange clouds roll, and something in his gut pulls toward the black spaces in between. He remembers, before the snowball fight, a feeling like something was being ripped straight out of him, and it seems somehow like it’s down there.
Aki sits up, head pounding. “You’re right,” he says. “There’s no escape.” He fixes his jacket collar, tugs the ends of the black sleeves down. “None of my contracts are working down here, but I know you’re strong enough. You could break the glass and end this.”
Angel is hidden behind his wings, a tent of soft white feathers that barely rise and fall with his breathing. Aki’s brow furrows.
“Hey.” Aki crawls toward him on glass. “You good? Angel—”
“Since when—” Angel says faintly. “Since when did I have a name?”
“Angel. You ok?”
White wings fold back slowly to reveal the devil sitting with his knees pulled in. His lips are a little swollen, kiss bitten, and there are faint teartracks down his cheeks. Aki sits back in surprise.
“Fine,” Angel says. “I’m fine.” He loosens his tie, tugging at one end until it slowly comes undone, and drops it on the glass. It’s practiced, a move he must have made every day after patrolling, after Aki left him in a public safety cell alone. “We can break the glass if you want. I want to.”
Adrenaline is still working its way through Aki’s body. “I shouldn’t have kissed you like that,” he says. “You didn’t have to let me.”
Angel sniffs, the whites of his eyes a little red. “It’s fine.”
“Every time it seemed like you couldn’t do something, it was just pretend. You could’ve ended me with a single touch, but instead you let me drag you around Tokyo.”
Angel’s mouth tugs up. “Hayakawa. You’re babbling.”
“I’m just saying—you were always holding back. All I ever did was push you.”
Angel pulls his knees into his chest. “I didn’t think anyone would ever touch me like that,” he says. “Least of all you.”
“Oh.” Aki grimaces in embarrassment. “Sorry about that.”
“You’re a mess, you know. Look at you. Public safety’s number one devil hater.”
“I’m aware.”
“Isn’t it true?”
“Do you really mean—” Aki tries not to finish the thought, can’t help himself. “You mean no one else ever—?”
“You think I sucked the life out of people for fun?” Angel asks, chin resting on his knee.
“No, I—” Aki did, actually, because of something Makima had said. He turns that over in his mind for a moment. “Of course not.”
“Liar.”
Aki exhales and shifts closer, close enough to brush aside that strand of hair that’s always in Angel’s eyes, and Angel catches his hand before he does. “So it’s true,” Aki says. “No one else.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“You’re oddly fixated on this.”
And it’s always been this way, a current running under everything—one of those things that Aki would’ve chalked up to some sort of entrapment technique, when he was stewing about it every night in his small apartment, cataloguing Angel’s sins, except that the devil always seemed fundamentally, genuinely unaware of it. Angel turns Aki’s hand palm up, presses a thumb to the inside of his wrist, and the faintest, willing touch from him has Aki’s blood going hot.
“I can feel your pulse,” he says.
“Angel.”
“What?”
Angel lets his knees fall open, and Aki plants a hand between them and leans in to kiss the corner of his mouth. He moves over to kiss the edge of his upper lip, the soft of his cheek where it still tastes like salt. Angel’s fingers drag tentatively down Aki’s neck.
“I wanted you. All the time,” Aki admits. “I was sick with it.”
“Ok,” Angel says, with the edge of hell spread out beneath him.
Aki leans in again, head tilted for him, and Angel’s hair feels soft, his fingers uncertain on Aki’s collarbone. Their lips almost catch, and Aki can feel him breathing. Aki bumps them nearly together again, yearning, and finally the angel devil takes his mouth with a hiss like water hitting a hot pan.
Aki pulls him by the waist until he’s lowering himself into Aki’s lap, calves bracketing Aki’s thighs as he kisses him, and Aki takes him by the back of the neck like he needs him even closer. Angel thumbs at Aki’s earrings, slides a hand under his jacket collar, over his shoulder until he’s dragging it off of him. Aki moves automatically to help the devil get the sleeve down over his elbow, heart hammering, and he wonders faintly how much lifespan he would’ve lost by now, if he’d ever let himself get this close, if he’d snapped that day it rained buckets on them and dragged him into a phone booth.
Aki feels delirious with the weight of him in his lap, the way Angel kisses with an edge of tongue—Angel doesn’t complain this time when Aki kisses him hungrily, when he drags his hands heavily down his back, fabric of his stiff white shirt wrinkling under Aki’s palms. Aki doesn’t realize that Angel has the front of his shirt unbuttoned until the devil is touching him, fingers sliding over Aki’s pecs, down his taut stomach. Aki feels sick with desire, tongues into his mouth until Angel’s arching back so far that Aki follows him to the glass.
If it felt before like picking at a scab, now it feels like scratching it open bleeding; Angel squirms against him, breathing hard, fingers catching on the waistband of Aki’s slacks. Aki’s obsessed with how unhelpful and sensitive the devil is, the way he clicks his tongue in annoyance when Aki does something wrong, squirms so much under him that Aki pins him down. Angel lets out a muffled sound of annoyance when his mouth is stuffed with Aki’s tongue.
“You’re gonna tear my shirt,” Angel complains later into Aki’s shoulder.
“Wow, great point. That’s so important for when you’re going to hell.”
Angel groans. “Never mind. Shut up.”
“All the other devils’ll make fun of you if your shirt is torn in hell.”
“Ok, it was stupid! You win! I said something stupid!”
Aki tugs up the right side of Angel’s button-down until he can slide a greedy palm along his skin. Angel rocks his hips up, knee against Aki’s ribs, and it’s the kind of reaction Aki wouldn’t have been able to imagine on his most shameful late nights, when his brain had spun around and around on Angel’s indifference, the way the devil was always looking at him but never listening to anything he said—nights when he’d got himself off so stupidly fast at the memory of his fingers through cloth, would lay there afterward with his stomach sticky and wonder if he should resign, because how could a devil hunter think this way. Aki slides his hand up under his shirt to touch his ribs, drags it back down over so much soft skin, and Angel turns his head away from him, breathing heavily.
“I’m always nice when you say something stupid. You say stupid things all the time,” Angel tells him.
“Oh?”
“I’m really angelic that way. You should be grateful.”
Angel turns his head to the other side, messy hair in his face, and Aki thinks: this is getting to him. He slides his hand slowly, slowly up, Angel’s shirt bunching on his forearm, until his thumb catches the hard bud of his nipple. Angel lets out a noise of surprise, and that black thing by Aki heart is smouldering now.
Aki noses at his jaw and kisses him messily, skims his thumb back and forth over his nipple, just barely catching at it as he sucks at a spot on his neck, and Angel’s never still, tensing up under him and relaxing, pushing at his chest like he wants him to stop and then turning his head to give him more access. At some point, Angel gets pissed, rolls him over with his wings puffy and large behind him and bites and sucks at Aki’s neck until Aki’s twitching with sensitivity, and his weight in Aki’s lap is heavenly.
“You out for blood?” Aki asks, his own voice distant sounding, and Angel moves up to look at him.
“No,” Angel says, hair messy and gaze direct. “I could bite you open a lot faster than that.”
Aki becomes vividly aware, in that moment, that his dick is fully hard. He rolls Angel onto his back and stares at him in consternation; Angel slides a finger over Aki’s lower lip, and Aki bites down gently.
“I’d do it from your wrist, anyway,” Angel says, “if I wanted blood. If I wanted flesh—”
Aki turns his head until Angel’s finger slides out of his mouth. “You don’t need to tell me all this.” He lowers himself over him and gets just a shade more friction against his dick as he moves.
“You asked.”
“You need some tact. Humans don’t like hearing the sick stuff you get up to.” Aki wets his lips, hovers over him on one elbow to thumb open the button of Angel’s slacks and drag the zipper down.
“If I wanted flesh, the neck would be a good place to start,” Angel says, eyes lowered.
“Disgusting.”
Angel prods at a sore spot by Aki’s collarbone. “You held really still for me, actually.” The outline of Angel’s dick in his underwear is as large as Aki would’ve guessed, from the way it’d felt against his stomach, unmistakably hard.
“Will you get my pants?” Aki mutters, and Angel looks up at him like that’s a ludicrous request.
“Me?”
“Who else?”
Angel drops his arm to the glass by his head. “Can’t you do it? I think you can handle it,” he says, voice lazy, and Aki thought he’d had a handle on all the varieties of lust that one revenge-obsessed virgin with his own bedroom could experience, but he was dead wrong. Blood pounds in his ears; he yanks the side of Angel’s shirt up higher, until he can see all the way from his pale stomach up to the purple of an areola, lays his tongue over his nipple and feels Angel twitch under him. He licks messy and long, dragging the hard bud to one side and then the other, brackets him with his teeth, and Angel squirms.
“Can you imagine—” Aki slides his hand past Angel’s open zipper to cup his balls, and Angel lets out a noise of quiet anguish. “--if I’d ever gotten you where you should be. Can you imagine—”
Angel ruts prettily against Aki’s hand. His crumpled button-down is riding down, but Aki can still see the edge of his nipple, shiny from spit; he cups more of Angel’s balls in his palm and lowers himself to make that nipple redder. Angel feels like a handful, unhelpful and sensitive, in his mouth and against his palm; he slides his hand up to Angel’s cock, and Angel starts making these small, desperate sounds as he grinds against him.
“Just get my pants off,” Aki grunts against his chest. “It’s not a request,” he adds, but it’s a bit rich coming from someone who immediately swirls his tongue over the angel devil’s areola again.
“You gonna make me?” Angel mutters vaguely, face obscured from Aki by layers of crumpled white shirt. Aki moves his free hand to drag one side of Angel’s underwear down past his bony hip—Aki has so much of him, just on one side, and all frustrating fabric on the other.
“Do it and I’ll get your dick out for you,” Aki says between swipes of his tongue.
“You—you already did.”
Aki curses, sliding his hand from his upper thigh to discover the curve of it, head poking out of his underwear, and he slides Angel’s cock the rest of the way out even though he did have some sort of half-formed plan to make Angel do something for him. He feels heavy and good and Aki’s hand.
“The other side of my chest. Will you—” Angel starts, and Aki drags his shirt up with his teeth and presses his tongue to him.
“Oh. Oh,” Angel says, just a pitch away from monotone, and Aki would think he was making fun of him if it weren’t for the raggedness of his breath.
“I got you. Relax,” Aki finds himself saying, as if Angel has been doing anything at all, and he finally just sits fully up on his knees to unbutton his own pants.
“Hey,” Angel snaps, hips bucking up into nothing before he drops them heavily down. He glowers up, arms laid softly by his head and halo bringing out the highlights in his hair.
“Don’t ‘hey’ me. This is your fault,” Aki says, dragging his pants and boxer briefs down over his calves, and Angel’s shirt is crumpled like he was sleeping in it, his wings half folded, and then lower there are teeth marks on bare skin, a red trail of hair down from his navel, and his dick curving off center against his stomach. The sight has Aki hissing through his teeth as he slides Angel’s discarded jacket under him so he’s not laying on glass.
“You even need to be touched? It doesn’t seem like it,” Angel says, and Aki wants to curse him out and also stuff him in his mouth.
“Lucky for you.”
“Yeah. I think we could’ve made this work regardless. Could’ve just watched you.”
Aki hums in annoyance, as if Angel’s proposing something that might actually happen, like the devil will hang back while Aki’s making his reports after patrol and watch Aki get himself off when the office is empty.
“It’s not enough,” Aki says, almost angry with it, and lowers himself onto his forearm, chest over Angel’s head so he can bring their cocks together and grind.
Angel hisses, nudges Aki until they’re aligned the way he wants, and maybe Aki would be annoyed except it’s like sparks down his spine to see Angel’s apathy melt again, to feel his knees pressing against Aki’s ribs, his fingers dragging over Aki’s tense stomach and pushing Aki’s shirt down over his shoulders until he can touch his biceps—all hands, for once, and moving with him.
Aki gets annoyed at his own pants, mutters an apology as he pulls off him to yank off his shoes and get his slacks and boxer briefs the rest of the way off, and when he’s crawling over him again, Angel is wiggling the rest of the way out of his own underwear. Aki feels punchdrunk, seeing the angel devil’s legs bare under his rumpled white button down, feathery hair messy and eyes following Aki’s every move as he settles over him. All of this should be impossible, like a dream Aki would wake up from hard and ashamed, but the most ludicrous part is Angel wanting him back.
Aki rubs Angel’s dick with the flat of his hand, holds it and grinds against him with one arm holding him up and Angel’s red eyes devouring him, and it’s like the first good drink he’d ever had, or the time he realized at an izakaya with division 2—all of them dead now, every last one—that when he stepped outside to light a cigarette it was relief, not just an attempt to act older than he was. It’s like that first cool smile Makima had given him, and the first time Power had eaten her whole plate of curry without complaining, the night he realized he didn’t hate how loud his small apartment had become, even though every time Himeno had crashed there before he’d been itchy with the need to be alone. Denji was tearing every cushion off the couch to throw at the blood fiend one by one while she screeched at him from on top of the fridge, and all Aki had to say, almost at random, was, “I heard they invented a new gum flavor that’s better than any gum flavor they ever made before,” and Denji and Power had both stopped cold and looked at him like he held all the wisdom in the world. They’d gone out to a convenience store, late night and the weather just starting to turn, and Aki had chosen some novelty gum flavor with barely a moment of deliberation, and it completely worked, Denji laying on his back in the apartment afterward chewing a whole wad of it and saying it was the best thing he’d ever tasted and Power cackling beside him. The angel devil, who Aki was sure he hated, lets out a noise of quiet agony under him, slides his knee up so he can lay a bare calf over Aki’s back, and Aki’s doing all the work here but he’d do more.
Angel shudders, when Aki gets something right—it’s hardly been minutes, but Aki’s right on the edge. Angel tightens his leg around him, and Aki rubs against him shamelessly, sweat helping him move; he imagines out of nowhere, the thought sticky and spreading, what it would be like to be lodged deep in Angel’s ass, his hole tight but taking him in, what it would be like to thrust deeper and meaner with Angel still making these sounds—Aki gasps and comes against his stomach.
It’s a punch of bliss like nothing Aki’s ever felt. He rides it out, eyes prickling with tears.
“Just like that, Hayakawa,” Angel’s saying, “just like that. You’re doing so good,” which doesn’t even make sense because Aki’s the one taking care of him. Euphoria bangs through his every nerve ending—it’s stupid, that Aki never told him he’s beautiful, so stupid that he never even tried—followed swiftly by exhaustion. Angel rolls them, sits on Aki’s hips and watches him with his hair over one shoulder, wings blocking the metal box from Aki’s vision. It smells like cum.
“You finished now?” Angel asks, voice light and his dick rigid against Aki’s hip, and Aki’s mouth tugs up with amusement because nothing could keep him from this.
“Turn over,” Aki says, voice scratchy.
“For what? You’re spent.”
“Lemme—come here.”
Objectively, it’s a little embarrassing to lay stomach-down on his jacket, sensitive dick pressed to the fabric so he can kiss and bite his way down Angel’s thigh, one hand pressing behind Angel’s knee to give himself room—his other hand is halfway under him, fingers splayed on his bare back; he drags himself closer and curls over him to get the head of Angel’s cock in his mouth.
“What are—oh,” Angel says in that perfectly flat way even as his thighs squeeze in. Aki works more of him into his mouth, and just—gives himself over to it for long minutes, sucking him in and dragging up and down, tongue working at him. He can hear Angel’s ragged breath.
“Hayakawa, I’ll—I’ll—”
Aki glances up to see Angel curling partway up, skin flushed and chest heaving, propped on his elbows to look at him. Aki’s stomach tightens with need. Eyes watering, breathing through his nose, he slides further down.
“Aki,” Angel says sharply just when Aki’s finding his rhythm again. Aki glances up at him. “Slow down.”
Aki pulls off and takes a deep breath; the head of Angel’s dick is red and glistening with saliva. “You want something else?”
“Your shoulders look nice like that,” Angel says, like he’s dazed, and Aki almost laughs at him.
“Alright.”
Angel reaches for something and pulls it toward him—the bottom of Aki’s tie. It’s loose but still in place under Aki’s collar, and when Angel pulls, Aki moves with him. He plants a hand by Angel’s hip, another by his ribs, crawling up him to kiss him on the mouth. Part of him feels deeply exhausted, and the other part imagines fingering him open, pressing until he slips inside. The kiss gets needy; Angel rolls him over onto his back, and Aki strokes his cock while they kiss and feels Angel’s hips respond.
“I would’ve died this way,” Aki says while Angel drags himself in and out of Aki’s hand, eyes wet and shockingly red. “It would’ve been worth it.”
“Shut up,” Angel rasps. “Humans are so stupid.” The tip of his dick bumps Aki’s stomach. “It would’ve been a disaster. You have no idea what you want.”
Aki drags him in for a filthy kiss, and he wants fucking everything, wants to be inside him, wants to take him to Hokkaido and see what he makes of the curled up, burned out remnants of Aki’s soul. Angel’s exhales are audible, shading into something like moans against Aki’s mouth.
Aki strokes up his spine, hand under his stiff shirt, and Angel’s right that he’s stupid, but he’s wrong that he wouldn’t have given him everything.
Angel’s hips stutter, and then it’s like he’s chasing something; he makes an agonized sound against Aki’s cheekbone and comes in sticky spurts on his stomach.
The angel devil finally stills, catching his breath, and Aki strokes slowly up his back again, back down to get a handful of his ass before Angel sits back on Aki’s hips.
“You’re half hard again,” Angel says, hair sticking to the sweat on his cheek and collarbone.
“I wonder why.”
Angel scrunches his nose, and Aki feels the thought settle heavy on him that he may only get to see that once. He watches Angel’s breathing even out, watches him crawl back and lower himself, deliberate, until his face is between Aki’s legs. Aki breathes in sharply, almost bewildered with need, closes his eyes as Angel teases his sensitive dick with his tongue.
He’s kittenish about it until he isn’t, and suddenly Aki’s sliding in—Angel’s mouth is hot, his tongue flat against him. It’s like something takes Aki over, the first time he rocks his hips up to get deeper, and Angel only flinches back once before he starts taking it. He lets Aki fuck his mouth, his hair spilling over Aki’s inner thighs, halo floating between Aki’s knees.
This time it feels like it lasts forever, as Aki grows fully hard in his mouth. He’s so close to snapping, the first time Angel moans around him, so close to tumbling him over and getting him belly down, ass up, finding his way inside no matter what. Angel sucks him off like he’s never had a gag reflex—maybe devils don’t, Aki thinks, and then Angel starts kneading at his ass with one hand, fingers slipping between Aki’s cheeks, and Aki doesn’t have another coherent thought until he’s coming in the angel devil’s mouth. Angel pulls off afterward, wiping his cheek with the back of his wrist, clambers onto Aki’s hips and gets himself off matter-of-factly on Aki’s chest.
“You’re actually an angel,” Aki says stupidly, and Angel rolls his eyes and kisses him.
Time passes strangely for a bit. Aki feels like he was dragged behind a car, but he still can’t stop touching him. They end up yanking their slacks back on, buttoning their shirts over dried cum because it’s getting cold, and Aki wants to give Angel his jacket, but he doesn’t want to hurt his wings. Angel pins him down and tells him he’s decided he’d eat Aki’s thighs first, actually, and Aki tells him that’s inhumane and tries not to get hard again.
“You ready for hell now, human?” the angel devil asks him eventually, sitting on his hips.
Aki rubs a hand up the devil’s thigh, can’t find an answer.
Angel plants a hand by Aki’s head and leans over him, strands of red hair hanging between them. “I knew what despair was, and agony and shame,” Angel says. “But you taught me about regret.” Aki’s hand tightens on his thigh. “Now I know how it feels to lose something I never had.”
His halo is bright like this, hair coppery red. “I don’t want to watch,” Aki admits.
“Close your eyes,” Angel says, and Aki does.
“Usage,” Aki hears, “two years,” just before the glass breaks.
Aki wasn’t ready. It’s too many sensations at once—the vicious bite of glass against his thigh, and then the cold, the crack of thunder, the whistling wind as they plunge down, a freefall unlike anything he’s ever known. He wants to say something that matters, to do some meaningful thing in his last moments before damnation, but he can hardly open his eyes in the wind. Angel has an arm and both legs hooked around him, and they’re the only warm thing here.
Aki will never see, will never get the chance to understand, but just as they plunge through the last wisps of orange cloud and into the inky depths of hell, smell of sulfur and smoke swirling around them, the strange calls of every shape of devil that human fears have ever summoned, the angel devil flares his wings wide, grimacing in pain, and plunges his javelin straight through Aki’s heart.