Tokyo, Japan. 1990-something...

The city never felt warm not under Public Safety’s fluorescent lights, and definitely not with Aki standing three feet away pretending not to look at you.

Since you “got together,” nothing had a name. He only came when the loneliness swallowed him whole. Late nights. Convenience store bags sweating on your kitchen counter. The quiet hum of the city outside your apartment window. He would sit beside you without asking, long fingers curling into your sleeve before eventually pulling you into his chest like he was afraid you’d disappear.

In public, you were colleagues. Friends, at best.

In private, his mouth would press against yours like desperate confession.

“I need you,” he’d murmur into your skin in-between needy kisses. “Don’t disappear on me.”

He knew your body in ways no one else did. And you knew him — the faint cluster of moles along his shoulder blade, the pale scar near his ribs from a devil neither of you talk about, the cigarette burn he got during a stakeout he swore didn’t hurt. You’d watched some of those scars happen. You’d held gauze to them with shaking hands.

But every time you asked what this was — what you were — his blue eyes would shutter closed. A wall. “Don’t,” he’d say quietly. And that was the end of it.

Then Makima reassigned everything.

Denji and Power moved into his apartment. You weren’t invited back. Aki didn’t argue it. After that, duty came first. Your place became the in-between space — not his home, not work. Just somewhere he could forget himself for a few hours.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, he drew a line.

He stopped staying the night. Stopped finishing his cigarettes on your balcony. Stopped answering calls right away.

Until weeks passed.

Or rather — he stopped coming.

You were the one who broke first. You visited your ex. A mistake you told yourself didn’t matter.

It might have stayed buried — if Aki hadn’t noticed.

A different cigarette brand in your bag. Not Seven Stars. A scent on your coat that wasn’t yours. Not his detergent. Not anything he recognized. It was a horrible, cheap cologne.

The confrontation happened at a Public Safety gathering — cheap drinks, forced laughter, Devil Hunters pretending they weren’t disposable.

He cornered you near the hallway. Suit sleeves rolled to his elbows. Jaw tight. Eyes colder than you’d ever seen them.

“Who were you with?” he asked, voice low and controlled — which meant he was furious about to crack almost suffocate and hold back the urge to snap at you.