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The Proposed Death of Higashiyama Kobeni. And Aldo too
Aldo did not like coming to the Public Safety offices when he didn’t want to, in fact if he had a choice he would rather avoid spending any time here to begin with, but sadly that was not the case. When you are a prisoner of the state, forced to work for their public devil extermination services at the threat of being locked up forever it was hard to really get any kind of say in where you worked. He had tried to ask if he could work from home, but they laughed at him for that because unless devils routinely went to the small apartment they had given him that was under surveillance he would have to kill devils on the street like everyone else.
Today however he’s not here for work, not this late in the night, which was actually worse when he thought about it because it meant that he technically had a choice, he could have not showed up, but in other ways that really wasn’t really an option for him either. The text he had received had been… worrying, to say the least, it had been demanding of his presence, but the thing that concerned him most of all was that it was filled with spelling and grammar mistakes.
“Cme to ofice NOW ALD!!! GOTA DI NOW FCK U PLSE CM HERE ! PLN!”
He had no idea what Kobeni was talking about, but he knew that it would be a better idea to come to the office instead of going to bed for the night. And so here he was, coming back to this place, this awful place that made him kill devils, far past its work hours, dragging himself to the corner of this building that served as Kobeni’s office. Despite her attempts to get herself fired, or at least demoted, she somehow managed to fail upwards in the Public Safety hierarchy. She had a number of pay raises, but that made her more miserable because it made her family more demanding.
Personally, Aldo wished he could go to bed and never return. That was the dream. A dead dream, but a dream nonetheless.
He knocked on her office door. “Kobeni? It’s me, Aldo, are you in here?”
There was the sound of someone causing a mess on the other side of the door, and fighting every urge to turn around, Aldo opened the door and entered Kobeni’s office.
Kobeni was, of course, in the office, sitting at her desk which was a mess of paperwork she hated doing, but also there were beer bottles everywhere. Typically she didn’t bring her drinking into her office like this. It’s not a surprise to see her here this late, she slept in her office more often than she stayed at home which according to her was one of the few perks of this job that they had showers and the cafeteria was not bad.
“Uh, Kobeni?” he asked, carefully approaching her desk, but she was face down, possibly asleep. “Are-Are you okay? It seemed like you really wanted to talk about something.” She gave no answer, making him more nervous. “Kobeni?” Slowly, he reached out to her, hoping-
She then suddenly cried out, shooting up in her seat with an anguished scream that caused him to pitifully yelp and fall back onto the floor.
“Aldo!” she rasped, pushing herself up from her chair, looking like she was about to fall down herself. “W-What are you doing here? Don’t scare me like that!” She stumbled around her desk to the opposite side to look down on him. “I-if you do that I’ll end up stabbing you! Do you-do you want to be stabbed?”
“No,” he groaned, his entire backside and skull in pain from the fall. “Why did you call me here?”
She stared blankly down at him, her eyes were bloodshot and watery, and he could smell the stench of cheap alcohol on her breath even from down on the floor. However the longer she stared at him, the more of a realization seemed to dawn on her before she gasped and knelt down by him and grabbed him by his collar.
“Aldo!” she yelled, pulling him up for an enhanced smell of her awful beer breath. “Aldo! It’s awful! The worst thing!”
“Did they promote you again?” he asked, and she looked like she was about to vomit, and he wasn’t sure if it was because she was drunk or because the idea of a promotion was just that sickening to her.
“NO! It's worse than that!” She dropped him, and again his head hit the ground while she stumbled to her desk, holding onto the edges to keep herself up. “My-my family! Something awful happened!”
Sitting himself into a sitting position, Aldo couldn’t help but wonder what could have gotten her this upset over her family, which was already not a very good subject for her, so he could only imagine what the problem was this time.
“It’s-it’s my sister!” she wailed. “She-she actually came back!”
“Which sister?”
“The one that ran away!”
“That doesn’t narrow it down.”
Kobeni let out an anguished sob and took a swig from one of the half-empty bottles on her desk. “You don’t understand Aldo, it’s not that she’s back, but that she didn’t come home alone!”
“...I don’t understand.”
Another sip, followed but a rough swallow. “She has a baby now, Aldo! The guy she left the family for! He died, or he had an affair, or beat her or something, I wasn’t paying attention to that part, but she has a baby!”
“Oh, good for her?” Babies were considered good news, right?
“NO IT’S NOT!” Kobenji wailed. “They told me that I’d have to help with the baby because I’m making so much money! I already support my entire family Aldo! But all my other siblings are in highschool! Meaning that even if it’s far off, there was some kind of light at the end of the tunnel, that all of this could stop before I get used dry! But a baby? Aldo! I can’t help with a baby! That’s eighteen years more of this!” She tried to take another sip, but the current bottle was dry, so she tossed it over her shoulder, letting it shatter as it hit the ground before picking up another one that was full. “Why should I help out with her kid? She left the family! She shouldn’t count anymore! But my p-parents were happy to welcome her home!” Another swig. “I hate her so much! Why does her kid have to be my problem! And that’s not even the worst thing!”
“It’s not?” Aldo wondered if he could slip out while Kobeni ranted, but he felt like if she suspected that he was trying to escape that she would cry harder than she already was.
The drunk woman haphazardly tore through the papers on her desk, picking up a stained folder before she threw it at him, the contents flying all over the room. She seemed uncaring for the mess as she took another swig, leaving Aldo to try and gather some of the papers papers up to try and figure out what it was she was trying to show him.
“What is this?” he asked, looking at one of the sheets he had gathered, and on it he saw Chainsaw Man’s faces, both his chainsaw face and his human face. “Chainsaw Man?”
“Him!” Kobeni hissed with a venom. “You know what they did with him? What they did with him when all that stuff with Makima happened?”
No, he didn’t, and he found himself not caring. He didn’t want to have anything to do with Chainsaw Man anymore than he already had. If they had never tried to kill him, his brothers would still be alive. Maybe they would still think they were immortal.
Kobeni didn’t wait for him to answer. “They just let him go! He’s a devil! He’s dangerous! But instead of working for this place like me, they just let him go and live some kind of normal life! He goes to school Aldo! Why does Denji go to school and not me! He couldn't even read the first time I saw him!” she sobbed as she fell to her knees.
“Why are you even screaming about him now?” Aldo asked, trying to push himself away from her, something telling him that getting close to her would be disastrous. She would either throttle him or cry into his shoulder and he wanted neither.
Kobeni then looked up to him, her puffy eyes with a sharp anger. “Because while you were having a vacation yesterday-”
“They called me in for annual evaluations!”
“-I actually ran into him on the job! He killed a devil and people were cheering for him! No one ever cheers for me! And then I-And then I had to know what had been going on with him!” She sniffled as she tried to gather up the papers. “I had to look up his files, Aldo, I had to do things I’m not proud of, but I got them, and it’s so much worse than I thought!”
Was Chainsaw Man actually in some kind of deep trouble? Was Kobeni concerned for this kid? That sounded too strange.
“Every report I read makes it sound like he’s having such a good time!” she cried out, throwing the papers to the ground.
No, no she wasn’t. That made more sense.
“He goes to school, he doesn’t have to worry about giving all his money to overbearing parents, he likes killing devils! And it’s worse! He’s actually raising the new Control Devil!”
“Your old boss?”
“And not just her, but he’s also raising the Gun Devil and the Blood Devil too! Three children devils! And-” For a moment she looked like she was going to throw up. “He even has girlfriends!”
“A girlfriend?”
“No! Two girlfriends!” she hissed with disgust. “That Bomb Hybrid that killed a bunch of people, almost me included, and that cult’s former poster girl! And it’s not fair! Why are all these dangerous people running around free while I’m stuck here with you? They should all be thrown into jail and the keys thrown away!” She finished off her bottle and threw it to the side. “I-I hick hate them! Denji and his girlfriends! I bet they have sex, ” she bitterly spat. “Sex ruins everything, it’s why my sister has a baby. The worst thing anyone can do is have sex .”
Aldo actually agreed with that. He and Kobeni had sex once. It was the worst thing to ever happen to him.
“That’s why I have a plan, Aldo,” she said through a burp. “I-I know what we can do to get out of this! It’s not fair that we’re stuck in Public Safety while hick people like Denji can run around free! You and me, we can’t stay here, because if we do, we’re gonna die one day, we’re gonna die and you know what’s gonna happen after that? All we’ll have is some shitty little empty grave because you know what’s going to happen to our bodies, don’t you Aldo?” She then crawled over to him with a frantic desperation that put a fear into his heart, before she came to him, her face all too close to him, invading his personal space and staring at his own with those tear-stained, bloodshot eyes. “They’ll stick our bodies into freezers, just so they can turn us into fiends, Aldo! I’ve seen it happen,” she said with a deathly seriousness. “The only man I ever liked was turned into a fiend.”
Aldo gulped. “The-the only-”
“I have low standards, Aldo. I only threatened to stab him one time.” She was silent, as if she was trying to think of something. “If he didn’t die to save me I would have used him as a shield.” Without breaking eye contact, she took another drink. “But I h-have a plan! I plan f-for us to get out of here!”
Aldo tried to think of something to say to get out of this, because as much as he wanted out of Public Safety he had a feeling that following Kobenji wouldn’t end well for him, but he felt like if he openly opposed her she would bully him into agreeing with her or at the very least make him feel guilty for not agreeing with her plans, whatever they might be.
He gave a nervous groan as he surrendered to the inevitable. “Fine, what can I do to help?”
At the very least, thankfully she moved out of his personal space, but that was more about her falling backwards, barely able to catch herself before she ended up sprawled out on her back. After she managed to keep herself from falling backwards, she pushed herself up, with great effort to not fall down, and ended up standing up once again. “You have a contract with the Skin Devil? Right?”
“Yes?” Why was she asking this? She knew that.
“And it lets you look like dead people you’ve touched?”
“Yes?” She knew that as well.
“Okay…” Another sip. “This is- hick- this is what I need you to do, I want you to try and adjust your contract, so you can-and this this the important part-make dead people look like living people!” She then threw her arms out, like she had made some great statement worthy of praise and applause, and his apparent confused silence was enough for her to consider it an insult with how she suddenly scowled at him. “We’re gonna fake our deaths Aldo!”
“What do you mean by that?”
“What I mean is that we’ll take a couple of the bodies Public Safety has on ice, they have plenty to spare, or maybe even some random people on the street who get killed by devils, and we use your contract to make them look like us! Then we’ll put them some place a devil attacked, maybe even find a way to blame it on Chainsaw Man!” She took another drink, but it was empty too, and thankfully she dropped it in the trash bin this time but he thought that maybe that was more of an accident than anything before she retrieved some fresh bottle. “Then by the time that anyone finds out about those bodies we’ll uh, we’ll be long gone!”
“But where would we even go? We don’t have any money or any-”
“Shut up Aldo you’re ruining this!” she cried, almost on the verge of tears. Or rather fresh tears. “You just need to turn corpses into us!”
“But the Skin Devil doesn’t do that!” he argued.
“I don’t care! Talk to it and make it change things up!”
“But-!”
“Just do it! Don’t-dont’ you want to be happy Aldo? Don’t you care about what happens to me?” she sniffled, new tears pouring down her cheeks. “Do you really want me to get killed by this job one day? Is that what you want? Are you trying to kill me? Is that it?” Her pathetic grief was replaced with pathetic anger as she took out her knife and pointed at him with a drunken swagger. “I knew it! You’ve been trying to kill me from the start! How could you do this to me!”
“Okay! Okay!” Aldo begged, his hands shooting up as if to protect himself from her, though he knew that wouldn’t help him here. “I’ll talk to the Skin Devil!”
“Okay, okay…” she said, slumping forward as her knife-wielding arm limply fell to her side. “I knew you were good, Aldo, so go ahead and talk to the Skin Devil. I don’t care what it wants from you, but I know you’ll be able to give it to them, because that’s what’s important right now.”
He wanted to try and argue with her, he wanted to say that even though he got off rather lightly for his contract with the Skin Devil, he knew that trying to negotiate his contract would be a nightmare. Devils did not so easily change the stated terms of their contracts up, for even the slightest adjustment they asked for so much more than you would have been prepared to give. Even under the best of circumstances he doubted that this would be an easy thing to accomplish.
But Kobeni might stab him if he didn’t tell her something she didn’t want to hear, so he relented and tried to contact the Skin Devil. He reached out to it, thinking about the devil, he felt his skin prickle as it answered his call, and he tried to think of how to open this conversation.
Hello there, Mr Skin Devil.
It said nothing to him, but he could feel it.
Would it be okay if we make some alterations to our contract?
…
Mr Skin Devil? I-
I’m not interested, you have nothing more I am interested in. The contract remains as is.
And then it was gone.
Kobeni wasn’t going to like the fact that the Skin Devil didn’t even give him a chance to make an offer, and he knew that she was going to yell and cry and maybe stab him. He wasn’t looking forward to this conversation.
“Hey, Kobeni,” he said with a sigh. “I talked to the Skin Devil and it-”
That was when he saw her, sitting at her chest, slumped in her chair, passed out.
He carefully got up from the food and approached the chair. “Kobeni?” he asked, expecting her to lash out at him, but she seemed dead to the world in all but the most literal sense.
For a moment he considered what to do, even thinking he might wake her up, but he thought against it, and left the office turning the light off and softly closing the door behind him, careful not to wake her. He didn’t want to deal with angry, drunk Kobeni anymore for the night, he had enough of that.
The next morning he was relieved to see that she had no memory of their last night conversation, and instead of trying to avoid fighting devils like they usually did, they hung out in the park for their morning patrols while Kobeni tried to sleep through her hangover.