Work Text:
+
I’m not getting paid enough for this, Aki thinks, staring at the new pair of sneakers lying in the genkan. The shoelaces on the left one aren’t even tied — not because they’d been loosened for removal, but because they weren’t ever tied in the first place. Worse, in fact, is that he’s not getting paid for it at all. Not this time. His third stray — fourth, if you count Meowy — is his own cross to bear.
Angel follows him across the apartment, silent in his socks, but not into the bedroom. He peers in with a mellow curiosity from the doorway. His wings brush each side of the frame. Aki can still feel them pressed against his chest, can still feel with a mathematical precision the weight and cost of what it means to know that, tingling in the lines of his palm like he could still hold them there if he tries hard enough.
“Isn’t this your room?” Angel’s voice is a small breeze, a thin drawl as always, easy to hear given that Denji and Power are currently out on duty. Aki tries to relish in the quiet; it’s been a trying few days since that obscene showdown with the Bomb Devil, and his grocery bill has doubled trying to feed hungry, feral, healing, complaining mouths, and the grout in the bathroom tile is still stained an oxidized red no matter how many times he’s bleached it, or gotten Denji to attempt to without sneaking an exploratory sip from the bottle. He’s also used to it now, though. The chaos, the noise. He feels the boundaries of himself without it, feels his own body in this space like it’s compressed here, too conscious of it all at once. It’s him and Angel, in his bedroom.
He clears his throat.
“Denji and Power share a room.” He points to the futon folded in the far corner, a thick white stack, new from the home store. “We’ll share this one.”
Angel’s face is just large eyes and a small mouth, and when he nods it makes him look like a doll someone poked, like an outside force made him move since he surely wasn’t going to himself. It’s that inflectionless laze, ol’ reliable, that is just barely keeping Aki in his right place.
It’s easy to move him in. He has no belongings other than a bag half-full with clothes and underwear. A spare suit for work, holes cut custom into the back of the blazer and button-down. Aki hangs each piece in his closet. They’re almost half the size of his own. There’s also one item he hasn’t seen before: a large t-shirt, light blue, practically one-sided for how much the back has been opened. On the front is simple art of a teddy bear, only its head, and an English word: birthday.
Something flares in the pit of his stomach at the sight of it. He can’t imagine that this was part of the package Angel had been given when he was recruited into Public Safety. That fucking room — mildewed, utilitarian, windowless as a prison cell, the bare minimum handed to him in a cruel, unfeeling fist. Aki had seen it once, and that was all it took. Devil or not, human or else, Angel does not deserve that. The soft ball of warmth in the darkest part of Aki, the one that made itself known sometime in the last few days, is irrelevant to that fact. It should be, anyway.
He finds Angel on the balcony when he goes looking for him. It’s late in the afternoon at this point, enough that the overhang shadows him against the daylight just steeping pink at the edges. His halo is a cool ring of light above him, casting a sheen against the fresh blood of his hair. His wings are huge against his small frame. He looks like he could fly off any second. And that’s what gets Aki out there with him, carefully approaching the railing beside him, both hands set on top.
“I want you to stay here,” he says. What he’d meant to say was something else. Something less giving, less final. But the words are out, and he does mean them, and there’s not much he can do about it. “Even if you eventually get a new buddy, you should stay.”
“I don’t think that’ll happen.” He looks to Angel with the barest, slightest shock, almost not expecting him to respond at all, but only finds a short, delicate smile on his face while he stares out at their part of the city. Unscathed, somehow, by the damage of the bomb girl. “You’re stuck with me now.”
Aki’s eyes find his hands, Angel’s inches down the line. He could reach out and touch if he wanted to. He can’t, but he wants to enough that it feels like he should be able to. It’s worse, infinitely, than the itch for a cigarette. It’s almost funny, the thought of trying to preserve what life he has left. It’s slipping so fully out of his grasp the longer he stays breathing.
Angel’s pinkie slides just an inch to the right, closer, like he’s thinking the same, that the skin is right there, warm and alive. It’s easy to picture it: a world where they can stand side by side without that impossible space between them, thrumming like it’s alive itself, whispering with a cut: be careful. More careful than you’ve ever been.
It withdraws, slender bone and bitten nail and untouched skin. It retreats, and curls into its palm, and the chasm sighs open again, right between their feet.
+
Dinner is a determined effort to make, but still a pleasurable task regardless; it’s ready before the kids get home, which means Aki can send their dirty asses right into the bath without much fanfare. They take one together despite clearly having a contentious day, though of course there’s more splashing and grating reasons for his neighbors to issue another noise complaint than anyone would like. He has to yell back more than once before they’re done and sitting cross-legged around the table like nothing happened, arguing harmlessly about the correct way to hold chopsticks (neither of them is right, for the record). Angel hovers around, less uncertain and more dissociative, not sure where to situate himself. He eventually settles for the empty space that’s always been open. Without even knowing it, too — Aki always sits in the spot to his left. Maybe, he thinks, he’d made the right choice, staring into the rotting mouth of that excuse for a place to live. Maybe it was always going to end up this way, whether he liked it or not; a home full to bursting, a heart threatening to keep up the same.
“Eww,” Power says halfway through downing another bite of tamagoyaki. “I sense something green within.”
“It’s nori,” Aki tells her flatly, like they haven’t been over this a hundred times. Denji decides to chime in, chopsticks stabbed through his own roll of egg.
“You ate nori on the onigiri we had earlier, dumbass.”
“There was tuna in the onigiri,” she counters, turning her chin up even though there’s rice stuck to it, “and don’t call me a dumbass, you ingrate.” She wrinkles her nose, frowning around pointed teeth, pawning her half-eaten piece off to Angel. “You eat it, skinny.”
Angel stares at it like a dead body just landed unceremoniously on the table. “I’m…good. You eat it, Chainsaw.”
Denji cackles, skewering it on top of his other piece. “Score!”
In spite of this, everyone seems to get enough to eat: Power’s devoured most of the meat available, Denji has eaten his share and then whatever is left in Power’s bowl, and Angel is surprisingly unpicky, probably spurred on by the slight heavy hand of sugar and mirin Aki had allowed into the meal. Part of him almost wishes there was ice cream in the freezer. The logical part of him is grateful for the lack of pandemonium that would inevitably ensue if there were.
He quickly runs another bath while the dishes dry — thankfully Power hadn’t broken any this time, which was nothing short of a miracle. Angel waves him off with a casual hand when Aki offers for him to go first, but even then Aki doesn’t take his time or linger. He likes to be efficient with it, even when there’s no one waiting. He tries to be efficient so he won’t think about how those wings will fit in the tub, if they’re meant to at all, or what that frame that felt so delicate in his arms might look like slipped beneath the water. Regardless, ridiculously, his face is a shameful temperature when he finally pulls himself out of it.
Once he’s clean and dry and dressed, sweatpants and a comfortable t-shirt, he takes the hair dryer, feeling like a cowboy with a revolver, and summons what minuscule little seems to be remaining of his willpower.
“You first, Denji,” he calls, watching Meowy make biscuits on Power’s back while she lays prone on the floor. The cat, however, darts at the sight of the thing being plugged into the outlet; Denji groans but complies, as always, and crawls over to where Aki sits against the wall.
Denji’s hair is only half-damp at this juncture of the evening, so it’s relatively quick to get it dry and futilely brushed. He gabs about something or other as if he can be heard over the whir of the dryer, and Aki nods like he can hear it, instead noting how the texture of Denji’s hair has improved in the last few weeks, surely in large part to balanced meals and water and probably a lot of blood, too, if he has to think about it. Either way, he’s satisfied enough that he even dares to make a vague plan to take Denji for a haircut on their next off day. Maybe if Makima suggests it, or even takes him herself…hmm. Something to think about.
“Pow — no, damn it, just stay there.” He still doesn’t know how she forces her body weight to do that, to become a hundred times heavier when he and Denji try to drag her by the ankles or pick her up or get her to do literally anything on Earth.
“Heh,” she snickers triumphantly over his sigh. “Bow to my whims, human.”
He ignores that, kneeling beside her, and gets to work.
Power’s hair is always a tangled heap no matter what, fine as cornsilk and too long to control on the best of days. Aki relishes the chance to get it some semblance of straight, even if it’s only until the next morning, or at least halfway to it given how much she thrashes in her sleep; she kicks her feet in the air and watches her program without complaint, some bright and stimulating thing he doesn’t have the energy for, until her hair is fully dry. Denji rolls onto the floor beside her, burying his face in it, leeching off its warmth.
Aki is just clicking the dryer off when Angel steps out of the bathroom.
He’s wearing that shirt. The birthday one. It sits loose and easy on him, long enough over his legs that it could be a nightgown. His legs, slim and bare and pale as peach flesh. Okay, Aki thinks, and the thought is aborted before he can finish it. He doesn’t even know where it was headed. He glances instead to the towel Angel is using to dab at his hair, which stains his collar wetly with a darker shade of blue.
“Sit,” he commands before he can change his mind, pointing to his own space at the table. Angel blinks those wide, half-mast eyes, and surprisingly does what he’s told, though not without a slow shuffle toward it.
In theory, he knows Angel’s hair is safe to touch, that it has none of the effects of his skin. He’s been told that explicitly — it’s dead, and therefore it cannot pull life. In practice, Aki’s fingers are unsteady with the brush, clumsy in a way that Angel thankfully cannot see. It’s something close to fear, just as tremulous and warning, but a hell of a lot more green. He swallows around a thick tongue.
Angel’s hair smooths with each pass, shines with moisture, somehow easy to get through despite how disheveled the layers of it usually seem. Dark, almost brown, almost human. Angel is lazily obedient to the ministrations. His head bobs around like he’s listening to music, body swaying gently not far behind it, along for the ride. At one point Aki sees a glimpse of his face and notices his eyes are closed, and it makes his gut wrench like someone had grabbed it to keep from falling.
It’s over quickly, faster than Aki had anticipated. The room feels startlingly quiet when he kills the power, unplugs it from the wall. In the wake of all the sound and movement is sleek red hair and the circle of hot air fading around them.
Angel turns his head back like he’s just woken up. His bangs are brushed off his forehead, and he looks startlingly open, younger and so much sweeter than the devil he is. It’s arresting, honestly — Aki can’t look at it, but he also can’t tear his eyes away.
“That was nice,” Angel tells him, a gracious curl to his mouth. The words reverberate until Aki understands them, a whole blink later. His responding question is a stupid one.
“Getting your hair dried?”
Angel nods, and his bangs start a slow ripple down his temples, back where they belong. “I’ve never done that before.”
It’s not one, at least not intentionally, but it feels like an admission. Aki wonders, perhaps for the first meaningful time, how long Angel has been around, what kind of loveless life he’s lived. Not that this is an act of love. His mouth opens, and then immediately closes.
“Too bad yours is already done,” Angel continues. “I could’ve worn gloves and everything.”
His voice is sleepy in a way that feels acutely like childhood. Taken care of. Aki cannot fathom that feeling, having lost it a lifetime ago, the brutality of how it left him. That careful warmth in him, hesitant and small, aches like a sudden open wound. Want is forcing it all apart. In a moment of weakness, he relents to it, to the eyes that wait for him to accept what’s being offered.
“Next time,” he says, and it comes out like a promise. He really needs to stop making those. One of these days, he’ll have to.
+
Sleep is never the easiest time of the day. Especially since he quit smoking — his body craves that first hit of a cigarette every time, the dilation of his nerves, the grounding taste of smoke. Without it, he’s more alert, more restless. Unfolding Angel’s futon by the wall opposite his bed, and later watching him flop into it before the lights go off, is a strange thing. It’s a balm knowing he’s here, stretching his toes out past the length of his offered blanket; it’s also like Aki is holding the muscle of his heart between two fingers, like he doesn’t know what the hell to do with it, even though it’s still attached by the veins.
Maybe the apartment is too quiet with Denji and Power asleep. Neither of them is even snoring tonight. Maybe he’s never noticed it quite this powerfully. He can hear Angel’s breath a few feet behind where he attempts sleep, and can’t tell if it is slowing or not. After what feels like an hour with his eyes closed, he turns around, the rustle of the sheets giving him away.
It’s not as dark in here as it usually is. Angel’s halo is a soft glow, warm in the dark, a beacon to something holy and safe. If only. If only, if only. Aki sees his lashes before the stare of his eyes, which shine almost timidly in his own light.
“Is it like this every day?” he asks, like they were already in conversation. The quality of his tone, more alert than it should be, suggests he’s been staring like this for a while. “Here, I mean.”
Aki grips his blanket in a slow clutch. There is a right answer to this question, and he is positive it cannot be the honest one. He wants to be right so badly.
“Pretty much,” he confirms anyway. “Yeah.”
Angel’s eyes close when it lands, and for a terrifying moment, Aki is sure that was the wrong thing to say.
“Okay,” Angel says instead, though, right into an indulgent yawn. “That’s good.”
He rolls over then, like that was the final piece of the puzzle. His wings flutter for half a second before they rest against the floor, bigger than they have any right to be.
Aki hears his own exhale leave him, the relief better than a drug. Eventually, he lets himself fall asleep.