“You look tired,” Makima leaned forward, “If you want to call it a day…”
“I’m fine,” I waved off her concerns — well, maybe calling it concern would be a bit much. She didn’t look too worried, but she dropped the smile that was essentially her default expression. It hadn’t been that long since our relationship had… evolved, and while the way we treated each other remained the same most of the time, whenever Makima stopped smiling it meant we were having a more serious conversation.
“No, you’re not,” she sighed, “Your comebacks and insults have been very weak today.”
“No, they’re not.”
“See? On a good day you’d say you’d rip my head off or something more aggressive.”
She was right. I was tired. Really tired. I wasn’t entirely sure why, maybe helping Makima out with her desk work was boring me to death. “I just need to take a break, I’m not exactly cut out for this kind of boring work.”
“That’s alright, sorry for making you help me out with this.”
“Don’t apologize. It creeps me out.”
“Sorry,” she apologized again with a smirk on her face.
“I’m going to snap your neck.”
“Alright, alright…” Makima chuckled, “We can take a break.”
She motioned to the couch at the side of the office and walked over. It was big enough that someone of my size could lie down on it with some space left. She plopped down on the couch before I could, and after I gave her a confused stare she tapped her lap. I was taken aback for a second, was she really proposing that? Whatever our relationship was, it was getting stranger by the second.
After a bit of reluctance, I laid down on the couch, using her lap as a pillow; I figured there was no harm in doing so. Makima and I might not exactly have gotten along like normal people, our relationship was built on mutual antagonism, after all, but I could tell she had no hidden intentions with this — she told me herself, once, that the reason she interacted was not the same as why she interacted with anyone else; according to her, what she got from talking to me wasn’t closer to her goals or anything of the sort… She struggled, as surprising as that might be, to find the words to explain it, but I understood what she was trying to say. She had fun talking to me. And although I didn’t want to admit it, I did, too.
We stayed silent for a while. I had my eyes closed as Makima caressed my hair. It felt nice, though I couldn’t help but be a little confused.
“What if the chainsaw boy waltzes in and sees us like this? Won’t this mess with your plans?”
Makima chuckled, “Since when do you care about my plans?”
“I don’t, but shouldn’t you care?”
“How sweet of you, worrying about me.”
“I’m going to beat you to death.”
“It’s alright,” Makima laughed. I still wasn’t used to hearing her laugh so earnestly. “It’s his day off, and even if he were to see us, I’m sure it wouldn’t matter.”
“Well, if you’re sure…” I sighed. The way she talked about that boy like he was one of her pets, made me uncomfortable. I guess I wasn’t that much better, then, since I kept my distance from him, too, trying not to care about him; I told myself I didn’t need to know anything about him other than the fact his devil was the chainsaw, and that Makima had something horrible planned for him.
“You don’t need to worry about him,” Makima said in a soothing voice that sent chills down my spine.
Silence returned to the room, though I didn’t feel like closing my eyes anymore. I shifted around a bit, turning my head so that I was looking up at my red-haired boss. When she didn’t look like she was about to kill someone, she actually looked very pretty…
“……” Makima caught me staring, and my cheeks grew slightly red. She didn’t tease me like I expected her to; rather, she had a guilty expression on her face, and for a moment I was confused… Until I realized she was also staring at me, staring at— “Do you still resent me for what happened?”
Ah…
She was talking about what happened back then, when we started working together… Though it became way less common as time passed, there was a time when Makima would take part in actual devil hunting. Well, saying she took part in it might be an exaggeration; She mostly watched and gave instructions. — It was actually on one of these occasions that I killed her. — A particularly nasty devil had been causing trouble, and they asked Makima to deal with it. Makima insisted on having me go with her, we weren’t officially partnered up but we worked together often — when she found out I hadn’t made any contracts with any devils, back when we first started working together, she looked visibly baffled. If it wasn’t for her insistence, things likely wouldn’t have happened the way they did.
Long story short — because it is far too long — while we managed to kill the devil, in the end, I was no longer fully human. The devil had fused with me in a last-ditch attempt to ensure its own survival. At a glance, people might not even realize anything happened at all — unless you actually got a good look at me, it was almost impossible to see any differences. The most drastic physical differences didn’t really bother me; because of the nature of the devil, my body was now both a man’s and a woman’s at the same time. I never cared much for gender, so adjusting to those changes wasn’t much trouble. The problem was the painful reminder of my experience with the devil, of the feeling of my body being broken apart and then reformed; my eyes had changed to look like the devil’s own eyes, and took a crimson coloration. I was also slightly more durable and could heal by consuming blood, but I didn’t get any sort of cool powers — I wasn’t human, but I also wasn’t a devil.
“I…” I paused for a moment. While yes, it was sort of her fault, — she was the one who insisted on us going to fight that devil — there was no changing what had already happened, so there was no point in getting mad at her because of it. Besides, there were far better reasons to hate Makima. “No… I don’t resent you for what happened.”
“…I see.”
“What’s with that pause? Were you worried about what I’d say?”
Makima shook her head. “Not worried, just somewhat curious.”
“Then, if you don’t mind, I’d love if you stopped staring at my chest like that,” I lightly tapped Makima’s cheek, chuckling, “My eyes are a bit higher up.”
Makima’s face reddened slightly as she realized she had, indeed, been staring. While a tad strange, as I hadn’t fully gotten used to it, it was quite refreshing seeing Makima like this. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she lied, turning her head to look away.
I let out a soft laugh. I wondered briefly if she had actually gotten that flustered over being caught, or if she was just playing it up so we could keep our banter going. It didn’t really matter which one it was, I suppose.
“I don’t mind it, by the way.”
“Hm?”
“You, staring at me.”
“I wasn’t staring. Just observing.”
“I see…”