There was screaming, yowling, and the shuffling of especially violent wrestling. A few knick-knacks knocked over, a drink spilled, and there was cat hair scattered across the room from meowy stress shedding. So, a fairly normal Tuesday in the Hayakawa household. Today's fight: Denji wanted to watch wrestling and Power wanted to watch a drama show (Something about the emotional conflict of the women on the show fueling her evil spirit?). Aki wanted to bash his own brains out against the wall, but he had work tomorrow, revenge to strive for and all that, so he mostly just watched so he could interfere before anybody bled, again. Around the time that Denji screeched like a demented barn owl and pushed Power onto the table infront of the TV and they started rolling back and forth over the remote, Aki stepped in and plucked it away from the querreling hell spawn.

"Hey!" The a pair yelled in unison before glaring at each other, with Power baring her teeth at him like a feral animal.

"If you two are going to fight like this, I'm going to choose. We are going to watching something with some educational value, if we can't send you two to school, might aswell do something to try and make you less moronic." There had to be a documentary on somewhere, right?

"No way!"

"Oppression! You Tyrant!" Power yelled as she rolled off of the half devil she'd been wrestling.

"Yeah, you can't just do that! Tyrant!" Denji jumped to his feet and pointed an accusatory finger at him.

"I'm not a tyrant, I just don't have the patience for this today."

"What, did you get demon guts on your favorite plain black tie? Lose your favorite hairtie?"

"I'm not giving you the remote."

"Give it!" The male blonde reached to snatch for the remote, with the the other cheering him on to 'free them from controler related opression'.

"Would you just-" He raised the remote over his head, before promptly getting a reminder he was fighting with Denji when he got kneed in the nuts. He managed to tuck the remote under him when he fell to the floor, only for Denji to sit on his fucking back. What were they, five years old?

"Get off me!"

"Give me the remote!"

"Fight fight fight!"

"Fuck off, stop sitting on me or-"

It was then that his tirade was cut off when he felt a puff of warm air from under Denji's ass and the distinct sound of a fart, and his body froze in shock. Aki could only assume it was it was his brain bracing itself for the unholy amounts of rage it was about to produce, but got an unpleasant surprise when all he got was trauma instead. In a flash, his mind reminded him of his brother, playing old memories out like a movie in fast forward. When his brother died, he was still at that young age where gas was still very funny, and one game he liked to play was 'Fart on Aki'. It mostly consisted of him walking up, farting at him and running away as fast as he could before he could catch him and threw him across the room; but if the opportunity arose to poot on him directly he would take it up.

Then the rage came.

"Fuck this, I'm out of here!" The demon hunter shouted, throwing off the hybrid and storming off to the balcony, hand already in his pocket after a fresh cigarette.

It was so stupid the things that triggered him. It'd only been getting worse since Himeno croaked. He could understand not being able to watch baseball, or snow making him want to cry, but really? This? It was such bullshit. And now all he could do to try and stop the onslaught of images of his brother- his family- from that day, was take as big a drag from his smoke as he could and ignore how that just reminded him of Himeno. The sounds of bickering and screeching came faintly from the closed patio door, and he was hoping that if he just ignored it that they would stop. Since the universe was a cruel-ass bitch that hated him, Denji walked out with body language that just beamed that he probably wasn't leaving soon.

"Alright, look, you know I don't like to do... emotion stuff, but that was really weird, and Power is convinced you have some sort of demon brain worm, so if I can't give her a good answer soon she's going to raze the appartment to the ground." Denji walked up, sticking his hands in his pockets. "So you want to tell me what that was all about?"

"I don't know what you are talking about."

"Please, don't make this difficult, dude." The chainsaw wielder whined. "That was abig overreaction."

"I get mad and go out to smoke all the time."

"Yeah, but there are levels. There is 'scoff and goes to smoke in your room' mad, and 'yell and goes to smoke on the patio' mad. Normally we have to like... set something on fire to get that sort of reaction."

"You ripped ass on my fucking back-"

"It was a little poot! It was an accident." He was whining again. "And who cares? Power actually rips ass like she's going to shit herself like twice a week and you only ever get room mad."

"..."

"Aki, please, you gotta give up something, Power is going to cleanse the place with fire if I can't give her something."

"I was just just... reminded of someone." He was trying his level best to not look at Denji.

"What does that even mean? Is it something with your tragic backstory? What does the gun devil wiping out your family have to do with pooting?" Goddamn that devil asshole for guessing his way to the goal but missing the point. Aki looked at him now, glaring more like it.

"Do you not have any siblings? Before whatever-" He flicked a wrist towards the younger one's chest. "Happened?"

"Huh? No." Denji got that clueless sort of look that told Aki from experience that he was either going to say something mind destroyingly stupid or heart breaking. "My mom died when I was really little. She had some sort of heart thing, pregnancy made it get a lot worse really fast. There wasn't really anytime for more babymaking, and my dad was a useless drunk so he didn't get to make any with anybody else before he killed himself."

Denji made it really really difficult to hate him. To think he wasn't human, when he said things like that.

"They are both dead? You're an orphan?" He was only barely able to not say 'too'.

"I mean, yeah? But that was forever ago." The other shrugged. "It's no biggy. What does that have to do with your little fit?"

"It just... You've never really brought that up. You just mentioned you were broke."

"You don't talk about your family, even though you built your whole life around getting revenge for them. We don't talk about stuff like that."

"..."

"Dude... Look, okay why don't we make a deal? Quip-Por-Whatever. You're a devil hunter, you get deals." Denji pushed through with his idea like he didn't just sprain Aki's brain with like dumbassery. "You tell me something, I'll tell you something. Trauma dumping, or something."

"Fine."

"So..."

"I had a little brother..." Aki muttered, resolutely not looking at the other once again. "We were four years appart, but when you're that small, it's all the difference in the world. I was eight, and he was four. I thought I was so big and mature because I had hit my first big growth spurt and could do simple chores. You know little boys, they think everything about bodily functions is so funny."

"He would fart on you?" Denji sounded as curious as he did sort of confused and disgusted.

"It was like a game to him. He was just a really sweet kid, who loved pranking his big brother, and playing games, when he wasn't sick. The day of the attack, he was just done recovering from a cold, and he wanted to play catch with his older brother. I went along with it, because my parents wanted me to. We ended up having a whole snowball fight before realizing that we forgot things for catch inside, and he ran inside to get it. He closed the door... and the house was completely obliterated." Aki took another long pull on his cigarette. It was all he could do to keep his tears away. "It's stupid, but when you- I just... keep seeing his face. He was... so small, when he died, but... He'd be your age now. I think that might be why I was triggered. I guess it freaked me out."

"Shit, man... I'm sorry. That sounds really rough." Denji put a hand on his shoulder in some small attempt to comfort him.

"It's not fun, no." Aki finally glanced at him again. "So, what about you? You aren't going to ditch on your part of the deal now that you have what you want, are you?"

"No, I'm sure I can think of something to share, I just have a little question. You remember the day well, right? That they died? Or are there... patches?"

"Patches?"

"Okay, so like... I'll never forget finding my father hanging from the ceiling, but the rest of it- whenever I try to remember the whole day, it's just gone."

"It's gone?"

"I remember waking up, to go get breakfast, and my father was there, it was a drinking morning so he was already pretty tipsy. He started with the normal stuff, about how I was peice of shit, it was my fault my mother died, I was good for nothing... And then it all starts to get all fuzzy. I think he started to hit me, but that wasn't that weird so I don't know why I'd not remember-" Denji removed his hand from the older boy's shoulder to rub his chin. Meanwhile, Aki felt like he'd been plundged into artic waters as the blonde brought up horrible physical and verbal child abuse like most people would talk about the weather. "But then it just sort of blanks out, and I guess I must have gone out, because the next thing I remember I'm opening the front door to dad just... hanging there. Is it like that for you?"

"No. I remember... everything. I wish I had that problem, honestly, not remembering. I can remember what cereal I had that morning, what we all were wearing, what kids anime I watched to wake up, the look on my brother's face when he closed the door, rumaging around in the rubble for them, finding the corpses, sitting with them until the authorities finally got out to see if the attack reached us." A tear might have slipped down his face as Aki felt himself get overwelmed, but Denji did the polite thing for once in his life and ignored it. "You really don't remember?"

"Nope. And I was like six yearsold, so I probably should be able to, but whenever I try, my head starts to hurt..." His face scrunched up, feeling the familar pressure as he tried to reach for that day in his mind. "But anyway, onto the actually crappy part... uh... So, my mom, right? She had a lot of medical bills, and dad borrowed money from the yakuza to pay them, then she died and he became a drunk, and when he couldn't pay bills he borrowed more. When he hung himself, the debt passed onto me and nobody was around to take me in, so I was just sort of left to myself to pay off the debt. I met Poochita and we moved into this shack on an abandoned part of a lot and started working to pay of the debt. Because I was so young, it took me a while to really start paying the debt off. Lots of manual labor, seasonal stuff. Odd jobs. We went to bed hungry alot. If my dad wasn't such a notorious piece of shit, I might have been able to get some pity food, but... nobody wanted anything to do with me. After the first couple years you could really tell people around time were affronted that I continued to be alive. Even after I started selling body parts, I only managed to get it down to around... 38 million yen-"

"What!?" The older ravenette shouted, prompting him to choke on smoke, drop his cigarette, and start hacking away. Denji rubbed his back. "What the fuck?"

"Was that about the amount of yen or the fact that I sold body parts?"

"Both!"

"Yeah, interest built up quickly, and also, organs are not that profitable. A perfectly good nut won't even get you 100,000 yen, it's criminal."

"You SOLD a testicle?"

"I got it back." Denji shrugged his shoulders before tapping his chest. "When this happened. I was also starting to die of some sort of heart thing, while we are just covering the terrible bullshit that led me to joining the commission. It's a good thing Poochita became my heart because that thing was starting to crap out on me."

"This story is about how you joined the commission?" Aki never so badly wanted to unknow something. Things were so much easier when he could hate Denji in peace, that'd be impossible now.

"You told me details about your tragic backstory that got you. Only seems fair." If Denji shrugged one more time Aki was going to break his damn arms. This was not a shrugging matter. "So, I owed them all this money, right? I killed devils for them. So, they drive me out to this warehouse to kill some devils, but that was a lie. They were just going to sacrifice me to this zombie devil as a part of a contract. I got chopped up into bits by zombies and thrown in a dumpster with Poochita, and, well... things got really ugly after that."

"That's why Katana man was after you, right? He was Yakuza."

"Yeah." The blonde started rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly. "Uh, sorry about that, I guess? We- well, you lost a lot of people in that mess. My bad."

"It was only a matter of time before any one of them died, this isn't a long term career. By most metrics most public safety devil hunters that don't retire after only a few months, die within eight or so years, and that's an average. Most go quickly." Annoyance started to blossom out of his shock and anger at Denji's upbringing and life, a familar sort of annoyance that had rarely appeared since his brother died. "You think that this is the first time a yakuza getting revenge took out most of a unit, or got people killed? Sure, it was more dramatic than normal with all the hybrids, but it happens more often than you think. Yakuza make deals with devils that require our intervention all the time. Sometimes they want revenge. Just because your a hybrid, doesn't mean you're special, it happens to all of us eventually. It's just the job, so don't go apologizing for it now."

"Right. Thanks, or whatever."

"Don't worry about it. I'm sorry, too."

"Sorry? About wha-" Denji's face scrunched up like he'd sucked a lemon before he started to screech and cover up his face. Aki couldn't stop his smirk even if he wanted to. "What the fuck!?"

"Quid Pro Quo. Turn about is fair play." He'd not even been planning for this, but when an opprotunity to end this line of conversation came up he took it. He'd cried and been upset enough in the past few weeks, might as well settle things like he might with brother, right?

"Fuck that! That's way worse than what I did." His eyes started to water and started to back away towards the door. "Are your insides rotting!?"

"Don't be so dramatic." Instead of pain, a weird sort of nostalgia fell over him as the younger boy screeched and carried on like his brother would in the face of butt retaliation.

"What was wrong?" Power called as Denji opened the door to make his escape.

"He was just angsting over his tragic backstory!"

"When I'm president, backstories will be-"

The door slammed closed. Aki lit up a new cigarette.

Author's Note:

Sorry about this. I just wanted to write something, I'm getting rusty. Review, or something. Favorite line/part? Bye, duckies.