All things considered, the city looked rather nice when it was from up above, but Maki hated when she was assigned to patrolling on the helicopter, sitting in the back and waiting to see the tell-tale sign that there was inappropriate activity somewhere before they landed. She would occasionally glance towards the pilot, completely obscured in shadows to keep their identity a secret from anyone who may see the helicopter flying around, before remembering that she and she alone was allowed to have who she was known by the public. As one of the few people authorized to deal with demons, she had a reputation that preceded her in every situation, and stopping fights was the biggest one of all.
"I think I see something over by the bay," she announced after noticing a spark of light shoot into the air on the water's edge—a flare being released to get her attention. "Must be something happening because the bars are closing. Damn demons, they sure do love picking on the drunks." The pilot did not verbally acknowledge what she had said but she knew she'd been heard when she could feel the helicopter beginning its descent, heading down to the landing pad that was closest to the bay. Once they were close enough to the ground she tossed the ladder over the side of the open door and climbed down it, used to having to adjust for the swaying that the rotating blades put her through as she descended, and once she was solidly on the ground the helicopter was disappearing into the night.
Grabbing the phone that was attached to her hip, Maki opened it and pressed several keys before slamming it closed and putting it back, having sent the call that she was en route to a potential demon encounter and to keep an ear out for a distress call. Her feet ran quickly across the cobblestone streets, the bayside neighborhood known for its bars, its quaint atmosphere, and its propensity for demon sightings. As she got closer to where she'd seen the flare shoot from, she could hear voices yelling and screaming, some in terror and some in anger, and she picked up her pace to arrive on scene as fast as she could.
The demon in question stood at least a meter taller than any of the surrounding humans, deep purple skin and matching eyes staring down at the crowd that had gathered around it. "Get back where you belong, scum!" a man wielding a large rake bellowed, pointing his makeshift weapon towards the demon, whose attention went to him. "We don't serve your kind around here, not when you've clearly not been humanized. Get outta here, before we call the authorities on you!"
"Too late for that," Maki muttered, knowing that she wasn't going to be heard by anyone in the crowd, especially not the man. More people were gathering by the second, and she knew that if she didn't move with haste she would potentially see an enraged demon lash out in confusion and anger at what was happening around it. Looking around for any way to get to it without needing to push through the crowd itself, Maki spotted a ladder up the side of one of the nearby taverns, a fire escape for the upper floors of the building, and she swiftly climbed up it until she was several stories up. Cupping her hands around her mouth to amplify her voice, she called out, "Everyone, back away from the demon at once. I am here to handle it, you do not need to worry any longer."
Everyone's attention went to her, and at her word many of the people gathered left, but there was still a sizeable group huddled around the demon, as if they were going to protect the world from it with their untrained minds. She sighed, hopping up onto the rail of the fire escape before leaping towards the demon, landing on its back and sliding down it, until she was able to grab onto its shoulders in a split-second motion. "I said, I'm here to handle this so don't worry, get lost!"
That was enough to get everyone, minus the man with the rake, to disperse. "Just who do you think you are?" the man asked, still wielding his rake like it was a weapon that could do anything to the thick skin of a demon. "Some little girl, deciding she's gonna play hero?"
"No, you moron, I'm Harukawa of the Demon Patrol Corps, I've trained all my life for stopping these suckers." She'd always made it a point to use her last name while on shift, just in case a demon was partially humanized and could understand what she was saying. This one, seemingly not caring that a human was clinging to its back, was an example of one that wouldn't have known a thing going on around it, but it was always better to play safe rather than sorry. "You'll be safer back in your home than out here watching me do my work, I can promise you that."
The man spat some curses and set his rake down outside his home before walking inside, slamming the door and causing the demon to jerk wildly at the noise. "Yeah, yeah, I'm sure all of that was just peachy for you," she said, letting go of her grip so that she slid to the ground. "Too bad that you got this far without being taught anything better, you'd make for a good demon model out in this world." The demon was turning around to see what she was doing, but she was quicker than its lumbering motions, reaching into the bag she wore on her back to retrieve a syringe and a vial, dipping the needle into the vial and drawing out the liquid without blinking. "Hope you pull a better straw in the next life," she told it, knowing it wasn't understanding her words, before jamming the filled syringe into its arm and injecting the liquid into its body.
The effect was almost immediate, as the demon's eyes widened and it let out a harrowing screech, flailing its arm with the needle still in it and running off into the night, Maki watching it with a sad shake of her head. "Well, that's not optimal, but it'll be fine. Maybe if it dies in whatever place it's been living in, its friends will realize that the human world isn't meant for them."
With that, she tossed the empty vial of the tranquilizer liquid into the first trash can she saw and began the walk home, sending the all clear message to her bosses as she traveled. It was a dirty job, but she hadn't been lying when she'd told the man that she'd been training her whole life for the job. Her parents, uninformed and well-meaning souls, had dropped her off at an orphanage that specialized in the process that was known as humanizing demons, raising them to be more in line with humans than the vicious and vulgar creatures that most people thought demons were. She'd been adopted into the care of the head technicians, growing up alongside the demons that they were treating, and it was only logical that she'd learned the ways of humanizing just like most kids learned how to play sports.
She'd never thought too much about how different her upbringing was compared to that of the other people her age, until she'd been faced with a demon and had to take care of it in the only way society deemed it acceptable to. Allowing a demon to run amok in human society, when it knew nothing of how humans lived, was seen as a threat, and the people like her who knew how to grapple with the demons were deemed the heroes in the situation. Maki usually didn't feel like a hero when she was doing the dirty side of the work her adoptive parents had raised her to do, but she didn't have a choice in doing it.
What made her feel heroic, though, was when she could interact with the demons she'd personally had a hand in helping integrate into society, the demons who could live around humans and not face the brutal consequences. They were the ones picked up as infants and toddlers and raised in orphanages, their skin a variety of purples, pinks, and blues, and she'd been able to watch them grow into towering monsters who, aside from their appearance, were basically normal, everyday humans.
Some were fashion models, some held desk jobs, some had picked up talents and gotten supernaturally good at them (which made sense, given that they were supernatural beings), but the demon that had Maki's heart completely on lock was the one that had been taken in months after she initially had, that she'd been raised alongside even after most other demons left to pursue their own lives. She only saw him on days when she wasn't working, just in case his curiosity got the better of him and he started rummaging through her work bag and accidentally injecting himself with tranquilizer, but she always looked forward to the days she'd get to spend in his thick, purple arms, feeling him hold onto her tightly and beg for his Harukawa to never leave him.
Sometime just before sunrise she made it back to the research facility, letting herself inside with a swipe of her ID card and stumbling in, tiredness overcoming her the moment she knew she was completely safe. It would have been convenient if someone would have been able to pick her up rather than making her walk back, but she knew that the helicopter was a limited resource and couldn't come back to pick up whoever it had dropped off, and asking anyone else to travel out in the dead of night was just too much, apparently. She made it to her bedroom, a tiny annex off the main lobby, and after making sure the door was locked she threw off all of her clothes, let her long hair free of its twin ponytails, and crawled into bed, falling asleep almost immediately.
She'd end up doing the same thing every night for the next two weeks, either going out on a demon hunt and coming back before sunrise, or sitting at the helipad waiting in case it was her turn to go up in the air. But once her long string of shifts was over, she was able to leave the facility freely for a few days, and those days were always spent sleeping on the couch in a shabby apartment usually lived in by demons, because she was not going to waste a moment with her demon friend.
His name was Kaito, he'd selected the last name Momota for himself when he'd aged out of the program and had been declared perfectly humanized, and he was the most gentle and well-meaning of demons that Maki had ever met. That being said, he was quite dense about most subjects and tended to get hot-headed when he was passionate about something, but his brilliance in terms of astronomy and related fields was what had earned him the title of being humanized. He always had Maki's schedule handy, so that he was available at his apartment whenever she arrived, and he would spend all of his time with her before she had to go back to work.
It was no exception on this occasion, as Maki trudged up the rickety stairs to the top-floor apartment Kaito called home, him claiming he wanted to be as close to the stars as possible when he'd picked the place. She got to the front door and gave a single knock, her personal belongings in a bag slung over her shoulder, and he opened it immediately, a large grin on his angled face. "Harukawa!" he barked, his whole body shaking with excitement. "You came back! I thought you were gone forever!"
"You knew when I'd be back, don't lie to me," she replied, coming inside to a home that looked similar to one a human would live in, except all of the furniture was scaled to be much larger than humans needed. "Besides, I have four whole days off shift this week. You know what that means, yeah?"
"We're gonna go see the stars together!" It was something that Kaito had looked forward to ever since Maki had first suggested the idea to him, years before; if she ever had more than three days off in a row (which required a blessing, even if the people who scheduled her were her adoptive parents), she would take him out away from the city and they'd go stargazing together. "I've gotta go pick up the telescope, I bought a special one from a guy who said that it'd be perfect for my eyes! You'll wait here when I go do that, won't you?"
She knew why he didn't want her to go with, because a member of the Demon Patrol Corps entering a demon marketplace would be a cause for concern. "I'll wait here for you to get back, I won't even think about leaving while you're gone." Talking to him was so similar to talking to other humans that, as long as she wasn't looking at him, she could barely tell he was a demon, but then she'd see his purple skin, hair, and eyes, the claws on his giant hands and the feet that couldn't fit shoes due to how oversized they were, the teeth that could tear apart human flesh instantly, and the way that towered over her (he was easily three meters tall, dwarfing her by quite a bit). "I promise I'll still be here when you get back, Kaito. I've never left you before, have I?"
"Only when you have to go back to work," he recalled, a sharp claw brushing against his chin. "But you won't be going back tonight, so there's nothing for me to worry about! I'll go tonight when the sun's down, so that the human people don't freak out when they see me in the streets!" There was always a positive lilt to Kaito's gruff voice, and it was enough to melt Maki's heart every time she heard it.
Why, oh why, did she have to have fallen in love with a creature that she was supposed to protect the humans from? "If you're worried about people freaking out, you can always wear a vest that says you're humanized, they'll back off in that case. I know you don't like calling yourself out like that but it'd solve your problem."
"No, Harukawa, I can't do that. I got this telescope from a guy who's, uh, one of the demons you do your thing with. If he knows I'm with the human people, he'll not sell it to me and we won't be able to see the stars." The dejection in Kaito's voice was obvious, and it hurt Maki to hear him talking about potentially losing something he'd been looking forward to. "I will go after dark, and everything will be fine."
"Then what will we do before dark?" It was barely noon, she was exhausted from her shift the previous night, and she knew what she wanted to suggest, but it was up to Kaito to determine what they did. "Do you have anything that needs to be done that you can't do yourself, or…?"
He thought for a second before jumping onto his oversized sofa, his large feet flying into the air and nearly knocking her out of the way. "Nap time! It's been so long since we last got to cuddle, we should do that first!"
"You've read my mind," she said, stifling a laugh as she set her bag down and came towards him, his arms reaching out to grab her and pull her into his chest, easily her favorite place in the world. She was naturally comfortable around all demons, even the ones that could kill her if they thought to do so, but there was something about Kaito in specific that made her feel safer and warmer than she ever had anywhere else. If it were up to her, she'd give up her profession to live with him full-time, being his human companion for the rest of his life, but she couldn't abandon the family that had raised her, even if she would have loved to have been able to call him family.
The fates had a cruel way of playing with the hearts of heroes, though, and that night long after the city had fallen asleep, she was still sitting awake in his living room, impatiently waiting for his return. If she had brought her work phone with her she would have done a check to see if any patrol members had been dispatched that night, but she was completely in the dark as to what could have been going on. That changed when the front door came flying open and Kaito came inside, his face and neck covered in blood and the pieces of a broken telescope resting in his arms. "Someone called your friends on me," he explained, spitting out a tooth and a glob of blood onto his floor. "Got me real good as I tried to tell 'em that I'm with you, that you're with me, that I'm humanized, that—"
"They should have stopped when they knew you were humanized, which is obvious just looking at you, but they didn't listen when you said you're with me?" Jumping to her feet and rushing to check Kaito's wounds, Maki's eyes were instantly drawn to a mark that she knew to be caused by a tranquilizer injection. "They got you with the tranq too, huh? Oh, Kaito, I should have gone with you, you big dummy!"
"They stuck a needle in my arm, yeah. Kinda made me feel weird, then they beat me until I was seein' blood, and then I played dead and they left me alone." At once he dropped what remained of the telescope and he slumped to the floor, more blood dribbling out of his nose and mouth as he continued talking. "If that's what you do to demons like me, I don't think I want to be with you anymore, Harukawa. That really hurt."
She was on the verge of tears as she looked him over, seeing evidence of there having been actual weapons used in the assault on her dearest demon. "We're not supposed to use true violence against demons! The first thing they did wrong was not listen to you claim to be humanized, they have ways of checking that! The second thing was ignoring that you're with me! And the third, the third…" She sniffled, the flood gates opening and her cheeks becoming covered in streams of tears. "The tranquilizers don't do anything on demons who have been raised to resist them. They should have known then that you were meaning no harm to anyone, they should never have raised a hand or a weapon against you."
"But they did, and it wasn't very nice. Plus they broke my telescope, and I was gonna use that this week." He spat out more blood, a second tooth coming with, before giving her a wary smile, allowing her to see that between the missing teeth and the broken ones, he had about half as many as he should have. "I'm not a bad demon, am I, Harukawa?"
"Not at all, Kaito, and whoever did this to you…they deserve to pay." In her heart Maki knew who had been so vicious against the demon she loved, even if she couldn't put a face or a name to the assailant. She knew it was someone the family that had raised her would have set up for the job, for the purpose of keeping her from going off and spending time with the kind of creature she'd been trained to dispose of. The fact that she'd worked for them, with them, for so long and had been so proud of her role as a member of the Demon Patrol Corps, only for them to turn their backs on her just because she had feelings for a demon, was a gigantic slap to the face. "I'm not returning to my job, not after they did this to you. You never meant harm to anyone, and they caused harm to you."
"So what're ya gonna do then? Just stop showing up to work? Aren't they going to find you?" Kaito raised a good point, even in his semi-delirious state, and she hadn't quite worked through the solution to that problem. She still had a few days before she was expected to go back, and she assumed she'd find the answer to the question of what she was going to do in that time.
Before then, though, there was something she'd promised him she'd do and she wasn't going to let it be ruined by some nasty plot to separate them. "I'll figure out what I'm doing later, right now let's get you cleaned up and go out to the roof. We might not have the best view since we're in the city, but maybe we'll see some decent stars up there."
"We're gonna stargaze tonight? Oh man, that's super exciting!" Kaito needed help back to his feet, a task that Maki could barely manage being so small compared to him, but he was soon back to standing and they went to the kitchen to wash off his face and allow her to get a better look at what they'd done to his handsome visage. For being a demon he'd always looked rather human-like in terms of facial features, his nose rather small and his mouth only somewhat larger than usual, but with how swollen everything was she couldn't tell how damaged any of it had gotten. One of his eyes was puffed out further than his eyebrow bone usually was, and she could tell just looking at it that it had been cracked at minimum. Cleaning the blood off of him took some time, and he had to go change into a different outfit completely so they could toss the stained one out, but after the work was through he looked relatively normal, all things considered.
To get up to the roof they had to climb out the window and hope for the best, something that they'd done before for picnic dates underneath the stars, and Maki made sure she was securely on his back before he threw open a window and squeezed out of it, getting up onto the roof with the help of his long arm span. Once they were up top, she climbed off of him and turned her eyes to the sky, seeing the flashing lights of the patrol helicopter and feeling a sickness in the pit of her stomach. "Yeah, I can see a few constellations myself, but I'm sure you with your much better vision can see more," she said, hoping to draw him into what they had gone outside for. "Tell me all about what you see, Kaito. I love to hear you tell me about the stars."
He flopped onto the roof and leaned his head back, resting his arms behind it for a little bit of leverage. "There's so many, I don't even know where to start talking," he admitted, as she curled up on his chest, wanting nothing more than to hear him talk about what he loved in that moment, as a reminder that he was okay. "Tell me which ones you know, Harukawa, and I'll tell you the ones you're missing."
There were words on the tip of her tongue that she kept trying to ignore, but it became too much to keep pushing past them to talk about the starry sky. "Please, call me Maki. There's no need to have me keep going by my patrol name when I'm not one of them anymore."
"Maki? Like…the food?" She could hear him lick his lips at the mention of food, and she laughed and told him that he was correct. "Oh man, I wish I could have a cool name like Maki! Is it too late to change mine to match yours?"
"It is, but I was thinking that, since my old name is possessed by those monsters who did this to you, maybe I could take your name as an alias? People won't know who I am right away if I'm using a different name." There were so many flaws in her plan, but Maki knew enough about the way human-demon relationships were meant to work that she knew asking for anything else from him would be illegal. "Then, when we get somewhere that isn't crawling with people who'd want me dead, we can reevaluate things."
"So I can't be Kaito Maki, but you can be Maki Kaito?" he asked, confused at the name she was referring to, which again made her laugh and have to explain that she meant the name he'd picked for himself. "Ah, so you'd be a Momota too, is that right?"
"For now, yeah. At least until we're somewhere that we'll both be safe." It was funny, Maki had spent so much of her life thinking that she needed to be hero for the humans from the non-humanized demons, but now she was embracing the fact that she needed to be a hero for her favorite demon. "Who knows when that'll be, and what we'll be like when we get there. Could be this week, could be in a couple years, but we'll find that safety somewhere."
He moved his arms so that he could wrap her up in them, pushing her deeply into his strong chest that she loved so much. "I thought you always said you felt safe when I held you like this, so I'm giving you that safety right now."
"I do feel safe like this, but I need you to feel safe too. With the people who raised me around, I don't think either of us will actually be safe, so we need to find somewhere new to spend our lives." She sighed, taking in the smell of his demon skin as well as the remnant blood from before, as she nuzzled herself right into his collarbone. "But that's something we can worry about later, tell me about the stars up in the sky right now."
After taking a moment to enjoy how they were positioned, Kaito went right into rattling off all of the space facts he could recall in that moment, occasionally pulling an arm off of Maki to point at a specific area in the sky. She was listening to his voice but not his words, her mind running wild with all of the logistics of what she knew they needed to do. Safe havens for demons were easy to come by, but for demons who were attached to humans it would be less likely to find anywhere, even if she could promise that she knew how to protect herself and others. Kaito's humanization would be helpful in getting him into a human settlement, but there would be prejudices from any other humans and she wasn't sure she'd be able to be civil if someone tried to pick a fight with him when she was around. Plus, once anyone found out about their dubiously romantic relationship, there could be a lot of issues that rose from that, and she wasn't giving up her love just because of the stigmas.
She wasn't stupid, after all, and she knew that there had been plenty of illicit human-demon romances across history. She could play the role of his hero and his lover at once, and despite his demon label Kaito was quite the hero himself, having saved her from herself time and time again. They were an inseparable pair, and they were going to make their lives work one way or another.
"Are you listening to me, Haru—Maki?" Kaito asked, snapping her out of her thoughts and bringing her back to their nighttime excursion on the rooftop. "I was saying that there's a constellation that looks kinda like a hand and that I wanted to hold it. But I can't hold the hand of some stars, so can I hold yours instead?"
He was so charming, so loving, and so perfect, hating him for what he was just didn't seem plausible to Maki, and she knew she was going to make everyone who'd hurt him pay. "Of course you can, Kaito, always and forever."
A/N: this fic is my only dual-prompt fic, filling both hero and demon!
the other notable thing about this one is that between this and both of the ones tomorrow, I think I hit on most of the things I've already tread this week, except in completely different ways c: