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When Aki left the room Denji picked up the scab and ate it. It was chewy and a little salty, like a stale potato chip. Aki was such an idiot. Why would anybody throw away something they could keep on using? Denji swallowed with gusto, opening his mouth to nobody, proving it was all gone, and the little piece of Aki disappeared into his insides. Yummy.
In the subway, on their way to HQ, Denji chewed the bubblegum Aki had given him as a bribe to stop singing the rap song he’d been listening to on the radio over and over, making up new words to replace the ones he’d forgotten. He pressed the wad up into the roof of his mouth with his tongue, luxuriating in the overpowering artificial sweetness, the syrupy pink flavor he could feel up to his nostrils and down to his throat. He sucked at the rubbery gum, using his own saliva to pull out all the precious taste he could, stuck two fingers between his teeth to stretch the gum out into the air and wrap it around his fingertips, then used his taste buds to re-investigate the new flavors of the subway car and his own skin that had melded into the fruity bouquet. As he was pressing it into the sharp teeth at the back of his mouth, he sucked a little too hard, and the gum shot past his tonsils and down his throat, into his stomach. Yummy!
Denji swished some spit around in his mouth, trying to taste the remnants of the gum. He thought about starting to sing the song again, try to get Aki annoyed enough to give him another piece, or even just to glare at him and call him a moron, but got distracted scratching at a calcified piece of shiny blue something stuck to the window next to him. When he finally scraped it off the metal, he held it to his nose, sniffed with his extra-strength thank-you-Pochita smelling powers. Denji’s suspicions proved correct almost instantly: candy! He popped it in his mouth. The sweetness this time was a little more subtle, infused with days or weeks or months of train smells and tastes, hands brushing by and commuters sighing and sneezing and smoking, a complex and powerful taste that didn’t gross Denji out so much as it gave him a painful pit of melancholy in the bottom of his stomach. He swallowed the candy—still pretty yummy, all things considered—and bent over, turning his head, trying to discreetly spit some of the aftertaste from his mouth. Before he could sit back up, he felt a thwap on the side of his skull.
“Denji,” Aki said to him, stern, brandishing the snobby magazine he’d used to whack Denji with. “That’s disgusting. The subway is a public utility. You can’t just spit on the floor. Come on, Denji, even a dog knows that.”
“Uncouth human!” Power pushed herself away from him on the bench and folded her arms haughtily.
“Jeez, sorry.” Denji slouched down, pouting at Aki across from him. “That really hurt, y’know.”
“Sorry,” said Aki after a moment. The cut on his arm where he’d scraped off the scab was still a little raw, a little red and shiny. Denji thought about the skin he’d peeled off, probably too early, how it probably hurt more than Aki had expected and how he hadn’t winced or said ow or anything, just kept his face hard and stoic like it always was until the scab was gone. Suddenly Denji was glad he’d eaten it, that now he had a little part of that side of Aki in him too.
“That’s okay!” Denji sat up straight again and held out an open palm. “Can I have another piece of gum?”
Makima’s office was always way too pristine to find anything to eat inside it—and make no mistake, Denji had tried. It had become one of his most precious dreams to come across an unfinished pastry or coffee cup on her desk, to put his tongue on something Makima’s had touched, even considering the world-class reaming from Aki that would absolutely follow if he stole food off Makima’s desk. As Aki listened for the day’s assignment, Denji, halfheartedly thumb-wrestling with Power, scanned the floor for anything he could sneak into his mouth: a fingernail clipping, a stray pink hair, some lint from a sock. Nothing. Then Denji perked up. He had an idea.
“Miss Makima!” He swatted away Power’s aggressive hand and ran up to her desk. “Before we leave, can I go buy you something from the vending machine? Like, to thank you for being such a cool boss? Please?”
Next to Denji, Aki scoffed. But Makima smiled, that sweet and motherly and perfectly opaque smile that made Denji’s stomach juices slosh around like they were in a blender. “If you’d been listening, Denji-kun,” she said gently, “you’d know I just gave your squad orders to head out on your mission as soon as Aki’s finished signing Power’s release papers.”
“Oh.” Denji looked at his sneakers, conscious of the heat in his ears.
“But,” said Makima, and Denji’s head shot back up. “I do have some technical concerns I should probably discuss with Aki sometime today. Why don’t you run down to the hallway and buy something while we talk about those, and then you can all be on your way?”
“Okay!” Denji nodded eight times in a row. “Thanks, Miss Makima! You won’t regret it!” And he bounded towards the door, taking literally Makima’s orders to run down to the machines at the end of the floor.
But he hadn’t thought far enough ahead. Once he picked out the snack he thought Miss Makima was most likely to enjoy—a Kobe pudding Kit-Kat, because it seemed like the most high-class item in the machine—he reached into his pocket to find three five-yen coins, a used tissue, two foil wrappers from Aki’s gum, and a broken rubber band he’d been using to shoot pebbles at cars with Power. Denji may not have been able to read all that well, but one thing sixteen years of poverty had taught him was how to count coins. And that was definitely not enough to buy anything for Makima.
Denji leaned his forehead against the cold glass of the vending machine. He felt like crying, even though rationally he knew it didn’t matter at all, that Makima had only been humoring him by agreeing and she didn’t care about eating stupid candy at nine a.m. She was a super-smart and professional girl, a woman, not some idiot slobbering half-devil teenager whose only instincts revolved around the next time he’d either eat or get his dick hard or both. Denji had the empty feeling in his stomach again, the same one he’d felt on the train, the kind that wasn’t about hunger but something deeper, the way he used to feel when he’d lie in bed with Pochita and think about all the money he’d spend his whole life trying to pay off. The longer he lived in the real world, the longer he was a part of society, the more he was realizing that even the normal people, even the ones with real jobs and parents and wives and husbands and stuff, felt that way a lot of the time too. He knew Aki felt it, maybe even more than he did, though Aki hadn’t exactly had a normal life either. He wondered if Makima ever felt it. The thought made his heart feel like somebody was squeezing it between a fist of claws.
“Denji?”
He turned, wiping his eyes with the back of a hand, to see Aki coming down the hall towards him.
“What’s taking you so long?”
Denji put his hands in his pockets and shrugged, staring hard at the inside of the vending machine to avoid facing the jerk.
“We need to head out and find our devil,” he was saying. “Can you be a little faster?” When Denji didn’t respond, he felt Aki coming up close, standing next to him.
“Denji?” he heard him say. “Are you alright?”
“Didn’t have money,” Denji mumbled, low enough to be almost unintelligible.
“You need coins?” Aki’s familiar sigh behind him, the familiar lingering smell of smoke and aftershave. Once, back at home, Denji had tried eating one of the cigarette butts Aki was always leaving out on the balcony, out of the misguided idea that they were made from tobacco and therefore natural and possibly even good for you, but it was so disgusting even the undiscerning Denji had to spit it out. “Why didn’t you come back to the office?” Aki was saying. “Did you think they’d just appear out of midair?” As he spoke, he loaded fifty-yen coins into the slot one by one until the machine began to groan and the shelves shifted to spit out Denji’s selection. Denji snatched it from the metal mouth and clutched it to his chest like someone was about to steal it from him.
“Thanks,” he said, grudgingly.
“Are you alright?” Aki asked him again, and tilted his head, looking into Denji’s face. His eyes were dark and deep, like a hallway that stretched farther down than it was possible to walk. Denji knew he was probably just asking for the mission, trying to make sure his underlings weren’t damaged in some way that would fuck it up or make more work for him to do. And he was still an asshole, anyway. But the question still made him feel a little bit better, if only because he’d so rarely had anyone ask it about him.
“Oh-kay,” he said, and held up a thumbs-up. “You know me. Ready to kill some devil motherfuckers.”
Aki rolled his eyes and turned back towards the office. As he walked away, Denji scooped up the change he’d left in the machine and pocketed it. Score.
“Hey,” said Aki as they left the scene of the massacre. Denji and Power had slain, surprisingly efficiently, three different giant oozing devils inside the abandoned train station. They stopped in the street, sirens wailing and black smoke drifting all around, and looked at Aki. He reached into his pocket and held out two lollipops.
“Good job today,” he said as they both reached for one, Power changing her mind immediately and trying to steal Denji’s flavor after she’d already picked the other kind. “I can tell you two have been training hard.” He paused. “Especially you, Denji.”
Denji blinked. Aki was looking at him, his face totally blank, but Denji’s mind flashed to the scab-peeling and his recent realization that Aki with no expression might actually be feeling a lot of different things. It was strange to hear praise coming from Aki. The only other person he’d ever heard it from was Makima, and when she praised him there was always something— different about it, something that made his head feel fuzzy and unfocused, which he loved, but sometimes made him feel confused, like she was saying two different things at once and Denji could only hear one of them. It made him feel like he hadn’t really earned Makima being nice to him at all. When Aki said it, Denji actually believed him—actually felt proud.
“Ha!” Power had wrestled the second lollipop out of Denji’s hand while he was thinking. He elbowed her, stuck his tongue out, reached into his pocket to fish out the inside-out wrapper of the Kit-Kats he’d presented to Makima before they left, and started sucking on it the way he had been all morning. Whatever chocolate residue had been left on the foil when he unwrapped it was long gone, but it was still comforting to have it in his mouth, to press the metallic crevices slowly against his tongue and think about Makima’s soft nice mouth eating the treat he’d bought just for her (kind of). Leave it to Aki to try and ruin his fun.
“Take that out of your mouth,” he said to Denji, and reached out an arm towards Denji’s face that he batted away in a panic. “It’s dirty.”
“You’re just jealous cause I got to share with Miss Makima and you didn’t.”
“You call that sharing?” Aki asked. “She gets a candy bar and you eat garbage?”
“I bet Makima didn’t even like your chocolate,” Power mused, stretching her long arms above her head. “She probably refuses to eat candy. Tasteless human.”
Denji ignored her—he’d been trying to push the same worry out of his mind all day—and wiggled his eyebrows at Aki. “C’mon, you saw her touch it,” he said. “Wanna lick?”
“That’s incredibly unsanitary.”
“I bet if Miss Makima asked you to lick her wrapper you’d be—”
“Shut your mouth.”
Denji giggled, delighted at having gotten a rise out of unflappable Aki. “Try it,” he said, waving the wrapper in the asshole’s face. “It’s all wet and sticky and it tastes real good, just like—”
“Moron.” Aki snatched the foil away before Denji could stop him, and shoved it in a nearby public trash can. Denji shrieked, indignant, but Aki kept walking, dragging Power along with him, leaving Denji to run and start rifling through the trash to find his lost keepsake. In the end, though, the joke was on Aki, because Denji, the genius, in addition to retrieving his precious wrapper, also dug up a pretty clean banana peel and a fast-food bag with almost three bites of a burger left inside. Score!
“Unnnngh,” Denji groaned to himself, holding himself up with one arm on the bed, brow pressed against the headboard, staring down at the dirty magazine spread open under his knees. “Makima...” he mumbled, trying to keep quiet but longing for the feel of her name in his mouth. He still wasn’t quite used to living with roommates, and it was harder than he would have expected to break some long-ingrained habits, such as moaning and grunting loudly while he jerked himself off. He pressed his left hand down, covering the face of the naked girl on the glossy page, trying to imagine Makima-san’s above her pale neck. It wasn’t working as well as it usually did. He kept drifting off and thinking about weird stuff, about the sad people on the subway, about Power chopping off some creepy devil’s head, about Aki expressionless and peeling off his scab. He shut his eyes and tried to focus. Sometimes he felt kinda guilty for making Pochita watch him jerk off so much, now that he was inside Denji’s body and all, so he usually spent a few seconds picturing the dogs that humped each other out in the alleyway by the apartment, something for Pochita to enjoy. That really didn’t help.
Denji flopped down on his back on the bed, held the magazine above his head, lifted one knee up and felt around inside his boxers for a better grip. He pictured himself staring up at Makima above him, her long pink hair falling around his face, smelling her syrupy-sweet scent. Denji always imagined kissing Makima would be like eating candy, like the bubblegum Aki bribed him with—sweet, so sweet, sweeter than anything in nature could be. He stuck his tongue out, tried to conjure up the taste. Makima pressing her body against his, feeling the softness of her boobs. Makima caressing his face with her gentle hands, stroking his hair, telling him he was a good boy. Unggghh. Good boy, Makima said. Good dog. Especially you, Denji.
Huh? Denji scrunched up his face, shook his head to clear it, tried to recalibrate without losing the rhythm of his hand that was finally starting to work for him. He moved his tongue around in his mouth. Makima. Pink. Sweet. Good boy. He flipped around onto his stomach, pushed his underwear to his knees, made a circle with his fist and tried to fuck it clumsily without chafing himself. “I love you Miss Makima,” he whispered into the pillow, panting, his wet teeth staining the fabric. The magazine was somewhere on the floor, discarded. Denji stuck a dirty finger in his own mouth as he humped his hand, pretending it was Makima’s, that she was letting him suck on her hand because he’d been such a good boy, aghhh, fuck, Denji groaned against his fingers, he could almost taste the pink bubblegum flavor, so heavenly, he was really really close, and then God he could really feel it like the powdery sweet stick was being placed right on his tongue and it was melting on there and he knew he was good and somebody was proud of him and he looked up and Aki was giving it to him putting the candy in his mouth and saying Denji good job and you worked hard and you made me proud and I’m proud of everything you’ve done and Denji was nodding hard and he was really close and when he closed his mouth and swallowed the candy it was salty and chewy and it tasted just like Aki and it tasted good and Aki was proud and Denji came all over his fist and his sheets like fuck.
He stayed in that position for a second, breathing hard, until his arm started to hurt and he had to sit back against the wet pillow. Hmm, he thought. Well. That was kinda weird. But also kinda the best one he’d had in a while. “Pochita,” he began to say out loud, “what’s it mean if you, like...if you, uh....” But he gave up. It wasn’t like Pochita would know about it anyway.
Denji’s heart was still beating really fast, and he felt winded, like he’d just worked out. Which meant only one thing: time to eat. He lifted his sticky right hand to his mouth and started sucking on it, the familiar sour taste strangely comforting, Denji having done the same thing dozens, hundreds, probably thousands of times since starting puberty. That taste to him meant he’d just been feeling really good, that he’d done something fun, and that he finally felt satisfied, even if it was only for a few minutes. And it meant he was doing something good for himself, now, too. Because this was a type of food that just had to be nutritious—it was the stuff babies came from! What could be healthier than that?
Denji licked his hand clean, letting the secret ritual clear his mind as he did. He imagined the yummy Denji stuff going down his throat, down into his stomach, seeping into his tissues and making him stronger and more manly and virile. He imagined it swirling down and around the Aki scab already in there from this morning, soaking and dissolving it, the Denji stuff and the Aki stuff melding into one big mush of cool kick-ass-ness. He wished he could thank Aki for letting Denji eat a piece of him. He was okay sometimes, really. And Denji was okay, too. At least a little more okay than he’d been that morning. And wasn’t that something to be proud of?