#BUT they do know for sure that yoshida is a public safety devil hunter and then this bitch is still like ‘i’m in charge’ HUH

[lesbianpegbar]

also can i just say how funny it is that the two people who actually know what’s going on and how to deal with the infinity devil, yoshida, a professional public safety devil hunter, and denji, who worked in public safety and sent the infinity devil to hell and is literally chainsaw man, have just decided to sit back and observe normal ass high school kids try to deal with this. that one kid who is like “okay im president of the devil hunting club so i’m in charge” sir there are literally two professional public safety devil hunters right next to you. chainsaw man is in the room. sir.

[mikanotes]

remains

denji x gn!reader — 1.7k words

genre: angst comfort, platonic (probably)

warnings: csm pt1 spoilers, mentions of death, grief, anxiety, not really canon compliant (written before pt2 came out), talks of marriage, suicidal ideation and depression.

synopsis: the aftermaths of denji’s time as a public safety devil hunter, and the pain that comes with.

author’s note: edited repost from an old sideblog of mine because it was too good. i wrote it before part two came out so obviously a lot might seem ooc bare with me please and thank you… that’s all actually. yay!

Denji steps out of his apartment, sighing and shaking his backpack on his back a little. He sighs and huffs and does all sorts of disgruntled expressions as he walks down the stairs.

“Nayuta, hurry up already.” he yells, jogging down. The girl sighs in annoyance as she closes the door to their apartment.

You laugh as you watch them bickering while they walk down. Once they reach the streetwalk, Denji’s face lights up.

“Finally!” he exclaims, smiling widely. He runs up to you with an exaggerated crying expression and open arms, before engulfing you into a suffocating hug. “I missed you!”

“It’s been two days.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

He pulls away and smiles still. You chuckle and shake your head, before turning to his little sister. “Hi, Nayuta.”

“School.” she says, before walking away. You stare at her with furrowed eyebrows before turning to Denji.

“Uh?”

“Kobeni takes her to school now.” he says, blankly, “She needed a job. She’s still broke.”

“And you’re not?”

Denji makes an exaggerated shrug of his shoulders and begins walking away in the direction of the path to your high school. You shake your head to ignore the hundred questions you have to ask and run up to catch up to him.

For over five months now, Denji has been silent.

Sometimes, he’s overbearingly loud and present— Makes a show out of reminding everyone around him that he exists. He’s joyful, and acts like his stupid, idiot teenager boy self. It’s Denji. It’s him. But it’s different. He’s craving attention; he’s craving comfort, company. He was alone before and he was used to it, but then he got a family, love and company, and it was all ripped away from him— his life— so fast and easily, like it meant nothing. He needed someone. Something. To hold onto.

And so sometimes he’s dreadfully quiet. He doesn’t say a word and practically only replies to questions with nods, shakes of his head or hums. He mumbles his way through his sentences and walks to school like heavy chains are on his feet. He’s visibly unwell. He doesn’t really sleep. It shows on his face— and Nayuta told you.

He misses Aki and Power.

Makima, almost. In spite of everything.

He misses the daydream that his reality had become, for a while.

And he’s quiet when you walk to school. You know he’s glad to have you with him because you were part of the Public Safety Devil Hunters, but you attended high-school at the same time. That meant once he finally enrolled, he wasn’t alone. Yoshida Hirofumi was there, too, but he wasn’t in the same grade and he was also deemed “creepy” by Denji, which earned him a lighthearted hit to the back of his head. The point is that Denji is glad he isn’t alone, and that someone from what one could call his previous life is still there. Alive. Standing. Doing well. Someone who knows about everything, and who won’t ask about anything. Someone who understands him without needing him to talk.

You.

“You’re crying.” you say after a good fifteen minutes of silence and walking to school. Denji is looking ahead and only wipes his tears with the back of his hand.

“Not.”

“Sure are.”

“Shut up.”

You don’t mention it again. Not even when you hear him try to stifle his sobs during fifth period at school. Not when he spaces out and doesn’t eat his lunch to stare out the window without moving. You figure he needs time, still.

When the school day ends, he walks slowly as he exits the gates. You look at him from a few meters back and think for a moment, before jogging up to him.

“I’m staying over at your apartment today.” you say, walking ahead of him and skipping through your steps. You hear a familiar scoff and then him running up to catch up to you.

“No, you’re not.” he scoffs, walking next to you with his arms crossed. You look at him with raised eyebrows and he side-eyes you. He sighs quietly, pursing his lips. “… Will you help me cook? Nayuta keeps complaining.”

You scoff in victory and hold up your fist. He bumps his own into it.

“Deal.” “Deal.”

So you stay there the whole night.

You cook some instant ramen Denji has because you’re actually not much of a better cook than him, but it seems Nayuta prefers it when you’re the one who makes it. He sits on a chair next to you and dully watches you cook. You turn to look at him, “What’s up?” you ask, and he shrugs.

“Can we, like, get married, or something?“

“The hell?”

He shrugs again and closes his eyes, sinking down on his chair. “I dunno. I’m like, alone, y’know. I don’t know, I just think it’d be nice having you over more often. And the kid likes you. I just thought about it.”

You laugh because marriage is so far-fetched when he could just ask you to be roommates. You know marriage’s an oath— You’re supposed to be together forever, or something. Denji probably thinks it means security. To stay with you. To not be alone ever again, even if it wouldn’t change much from what you already have and you both know that. You know that what he’s trying to say is that it’s harder than he pretends to live alone. To live alone again. Nayuta isn’t enough to complete the hole that Aki and Power’s death left in his chest. And as innocent as she is, she reminds him of the nightmare that destroyed all of it. Makima. Sometimes, he purposefully takes too long to come back home after class so Kobeni takes care of her longer and he can spend longer without seeing those damned eyes, even if it means paying Kobeni double. You know because when he isn’t staying alone in some street, he’s with you in a park or at your place.

“We’re not getting married, you fucking idiot.” you mumble, laughing still as you pour the ramen into three bowls. You exhale and focus your gaze on the food, “I’ll just come over more often.”

“I don’t want you coming over more oftennnnn.” he damn-near whines, “You piss me off.”

“You said you wanna get married.”

“Yeah, but still.”

You scoff and bring the food on the counter. “Nayuta. The food’s ready.” you say, and the girl looks from her spot on the floor, where she lies down on her stomach while reading a manga magazine. The dogs seem to all wake up at the same time as she gets up. There’s sliced bread on the side of her bowl and she takes it with her teeth before walking off with the bowl in hands. The dogs follow her.

Denji turns on his chair and leans his arms on the counter before putting his head on them. He stares at the side of his bowl and you lean against the counter, taking your own. You mix the ramen with your chopsticks a bit and sigh.

“You should eat.” you say.

“I will.” he says.

“Before it gets cold. Or else you’ll complain.” you add. He sighs and gets up enough to spin his chair so it faces the counter and sits back down, before eating. He finishes the bowl pretty fast and then he’s back to leaning on the surface of the counter. You tilt your head. “The…” you hesitate, “The dogs should probably go out for a bit, right? Wanna go walk them together?”

He nods a bit.

Nayuta falls asleep. You head out with the dogs. Denji holds half of them, you the other. The night is cold. Denji doesn’t seem to mind, or to realize. You’re not sure.

You walk to a small bench next to a vending machine. You sit down and Denji buys drinks. He hands you your favorite and keeps his own in hand. The dogs are seemingly enjoying the night breeze much more than you are. You’re cold.

“You know.” Denji begins, “I came here after Aki died. This exact fuckin’ place. I ate ice cream. And Makima found me, somehow. And she brought me to her place. That’s where I met those dogs for the first time, too.”

You hum.

“Then she killed Power.” he says.

You nod slowly.

There’s silence and it isn’t uncomfortable but it’s heavy. If you couldn’t feel Denji’s grief before it was all you could feel now. Like it hung in the air, suffocating. You knew Aki, and you were acquainted with Power. But you didn’t know either of them half as much as Denji did.

It hurt when they died, but not half as much as it did for Denji.

You could feel his hurt now. It made you wonder how he kept living. It was grief so terribly painful and overwhelming that anyone would rather kill themselves than keep enduring it. But Denji was… Denji. You figured he was just different. Nothing really new.

“I thought to myself, I killed Aki.” he says, then sighs like it was hard to breathe properly, “So it was easy for me to think the same for Power, y’know? ‘It’s my fault. I killed them’.”

“I understand.”

“Mhm.”

He uncaps his can of soda and drinks around half of it in one go.

You two go back home.

The dogs went to sleep fast, Nayuta was still asleep, and Denji was worn out. So you cleaned up the place, put his coat on the coat hanger for him, and put his shoes properly at the entrance where he’d taken them off messily. You put a blanket on him and readjust the one on Nayuta. Then you lay down next to Denji.

He opens his eyes a bit and just looks at you. There’s silence. He hugs you and hides his face in the crook of your neck.

“We should really get married.”

“No.”

“Man. Fuck you.”

He holds you, still, and you hold him. He fell asleep before you did. You spent a while carding your fingers through his hair and rubbing his back, making sure he was really asleep. Making sure he wouldn’t suddenly jump because of a nightmare (it had happened before). And then you allowed yourself to fall asleep.

When the sun was up and you were all awake, Denji was back to being loud. You figured he was okay. It was enough for now. He was alright.

[aliennazero]

If it turns out it was Public Safety and Devil Hunters scope of work that "trains" Yoshida to only use coercive tactics to get what he wants and to basically never ever directly show his desire (thus making him one of their trained dogs), I will never forgive them.

We talk about how Yoshida's action kind of parallel to Makima. But we never talked about the abusive hell of an institution behind them and how it affect both Makima and Yoshida's pattern of behaviour aren't we?

Why? Is it because it's political? So it should stay on the background forever? Or because we underestimate them as a controlling institution because what we have been shown so far is their failure to keep devils at bay? Are we forget how even Makima is scared to those higher ups and about Kishibe's whole motives to gave Nayuta to Denji so she doesn't turns out like Makima?

Abuse is a very terrible act, and I understand why not everyone want to discuss it. In Chainsaw Man however, it's a big part of the story. Denji's early life is full of abuse, Asa got "abused" later on after her family and everything was taken from her, and Makima is implied to be abused in the past by the government in order to "tame" her.

So that's why, I don't want to play blind on Hirofumi. I know we laughed over him. We laughed over his jobs he had failed and been done so far. But damn, are we really ever think about it? How he, a new 17yo recruit, is tasked to protect Chainsaw Man + keep an eye on Famine Devil + prevent the doomsday scenario, all in one and being left alone to handle that? Even his co-worker is hinted to dgaf about him and do not take him seriously, although it looks like a gag.

That's... that's sounds sad, man. It's basically violating child labor law all over again. Yoshida overworked himself and it's very clear. But apparently, because "Devil Hunter" is seen to be "heroic", at the side of humanity, is it suddenly become a good kind of abuse? Of course not!

Yoshida's whole weird and offputting personality makes me wonder about this. His "mature" act actually set my alarms on. He's "wrong", but there's seems to be more motives and more gunpoint behind it. I wonder if this institutional, systematical abuse is going to be very relevant or not to his character in the future.

I'm afraid of this implications, but I think I need to make myself ready for it, to see more of Chainsaw Man government horror if we get any more glimpses of it (that I'm sure will happen sooner or later).