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The first thing he tries to eat from Makima are her ears. They’re easy to remove compared to everything else, and he boils them and slices them, and eats them with soy sauce.
Cutting her apart makes him nervous, and not because he can’t stomach cannibalizing her.
Denji knows plenty about killing but nothing about butchering. Makima can’t be scavenged from like fast food from the garbage—she deserves a proper meal.
He drains her of her blood by slitting open the vein in her neck, and fills gallon jugs from the grocery store with it to fuel him over the following days, when he needs to bring out the chainsaw. There’s notches in the cheap linoleum on the kitchen countertops from sawing through her bones.
The bones, he takes out to boil on the stove for broth. He cuts strips of meat off her limbs and freezes them, and grounds the rest.
Makima is roughly 128 pounds. Her hair weighed about 14 ounces. Her bones weighed about 23 pounds. If he eats half a pound of her a day, it will take 208 days for him to eat her completely.
After the head, the limbs are easy—all muscle, fat, and bone. Butchering is a delicate art, not like killing. It takes a careful eye to see where the grain of muscle is, where the boundaries of all the muscle groups are, where the fat pads lie.
It’s the torso that gives him a headache. There’s organs there he doesn’t know what to do with. He could make yards of sausages out of her intestines, sure. Liver and the lungs can be edible too. A stomach can be filled with ground meat from other places. But it’s far more complicated.
By day three, he still can’t figure what to do with the torso sitting in his fridge. But to save her, he needs to eat every part of her he can with nutritional value.
As it is now, it’s cool and stiff to the touch, upright and taking up all the space.
Although she might still be in parts and not able to glue herself back together with her own blood, whatever judge of the conditions of the contract that gave her such fast regeneration abilities doesn’t seem to consider her current state as a breach. Her neck is saran wrapped, dark blood-juice like new veins visible through the translucent thick layers.
Corpse as she is, she still looks alive, her skin covered in gooseflesh. He takes her out and lays her on the plastic kitchen table. When he presses his head between her breasts, he can still imagine that he hears the baseline of a small heartbeat. As if she were resting, or comatose.
“Ms. Makima,” he says quietly.
The apartment is quiet, too quiet.
“Still in there?”
Makima's left calf is sitting in his stomach still in a blend with sauteed onions. His stomach felt full and warm with her.
Even if he couldn’t let her have Pochita’s heart, she could have the rest of him like this. All of her would go into his body, and then she would become him. It was an act of love. Makima might disappear, but she would live forever through him.
Maybe she never took notice of him in life. But he can feel her abdomen ripple with a spasm when he runs his fingers between the jut of her hip and the mound of her pelvis, and sees the gooseflesh rise with something else than the chill from his fridge.
She ripped his heart out and tried to steal it, in their final fight—this is what he remembers when he runs his fingers up the bare flesh of her breasts, her pert and pink nipples, and then down again on her hairless pussy. She’s clean and still smells like soap, like her apartment, like herself. When he kisses the surface of her skin he thinks of thrusting his hand inside of her. What is the control devil’s heart shaped like?
Standing before her, he submerges his left hand’s finger into her pussy, which is slightly warm, still wet and velvet. He lays a delicate kiss on her soft stomach, and lets his finger, then fingers, reach deeper in her, curling upwards.
He allows himself to taste her then. Really taste her. He licks around her vulva like she’s a dessert, and then dips his tongue inside, just a little. She’s slightly salty and sour, a bit musky, a bit metallic.
If this doesn’t work—if eating her doesn’t stop her from reviving, somehow—would her body regrow inside him? And how? Would she erupt and tear him apart from the inside?
Her cunt drips onto the table while he unzips his pants.
You blasted Power apart in front of me, he thinks, and then shoves his hardened cock inside.
And yet, he can’t help himself from rocking inside her gently, instead of pounding in her with abandon. He massages what remains of her thighs. He makes love to her. Slow and sweet love to her.
Eating her was just another way to make love to her, he thinks. It would be crueler to let her rot in the ground. If she were going to be reborn inside him, so be it. He’ll give his body up to her if she needed it, open up his body just as he opened up his mouth for another bite.
Another bite. He nibbles and sucks on her breasts, nipples still tensing up, responding mechanically. You will recognize me by my bite.
The only thing he mourns is not being able to keep something more of her as a souvenir. A lock of strawberry hair kept as a keychain might be the normal thing, but even that will lose her scent eventually.
Maybe it was selfish. It was selfish to think that he could ever mean as much to her as she meant to him—the first to show him any affection at all, after Pochita. And unlike Pochita, she had ulterior motives with him that went to an extent that his stupid, stupid, ass never could’ve predicted.
Straightening himself and gripping her hips strongly, he thrusts himself deeper into her. She receives him easily, her slick shining on his cock, dripping onto the table.
When he touches her, her body is glowing with warmth. In her unconsciousness she's dreaming of Chainsaw Man.
He wants to tear out his chainsaws and fuck her with them.
Instead he slams her body onto his cock, his hand gripping her harsh enough to leave marks, marks he follows up with kisses, then with harsh bites that leave more marks.
She would have never wanted Denji here, doing this to her. And he would never forgive her.
But he couldn’t live without her, just like he couldn’t, wouldn’t live without Pochita. Pochita was his heart, but Makima could be his body. He hopes that’s enough solace for her.
Denji leans over her until there’s no distance between them, his cock buried deep, the tip of him pushing against the pit of her. He’s surrounded by the smell of her skin, anchored deep within her, a single being.
He ruts against her like a dog—and that’s what she would like, wouldn’t she? A dog, a stupid dog, one that howls for its master after the master’s long gone—and his eyes are closed, thinking of Makima on top of him again. And he lifts her, and she’s so light now it’s easy, and lays her back onto his stomach, just like how she was those many months before.
I wanna be your dog, he asked, the one wish she couldn’t grant. The one request she couldn’t force into reality. Because she could never control Chainsaw Man, but Denji would still play that role, just for her.
The weight of her over him is comforting, and he wants to cry with gratitude that he can hug her while he’s fucking her, moaning into her cold skin and squeezing her like a vice without mercy. She’s still soft, so soft, perfect Makima.
We could make ourselves over again, we could make something new.
“I love you,” he tries, his voice barely making it out alive between his groans of pleasure, and the gritting of his teeth. I’d give you another chance. I’d give you all the chances in the world.
Any request in the world. It’s only fair.
As if waiting for her permission, he releases in her.
***
After that Denji leaves her in the fridge again, still not sure of what to do with her body.
A few weeks later he begins to notice there might be something strange going on.
At first he thinks that him taking her out of the fridge caused her to spoil, because her stomach feels hard and bloated to the touch. But there's no other signs beyond that. She still seems eerily alive in there, flush and just slightly cool.
As he watches her over the next couple of weeks, he observes her abdomen growing. Just slightly every day, until he struggles to close the fridge door on her. He debates if he should chop her in half then to make room, but a nascent anxiety holds him back.
A few months later, and her abdomen is round and moon-shaped. It would take an idiot to not realize what was going on, and even though Denji might be that idiot, he wouldn’t own up to it.
Nayuta is born on his kitchen table, nine months from the start of it all. He spells it out with katakana, because he doesn’t know any other ways to spell and he wants her name to be unique.
Makima’s body is entirely spent after that. When he puts her away again she looks lifeless and pale and cold. When Denji holds Nayuta for the first time, he cradles her head and presses his thumb against her cheek, attempting some facsimile of fatherhood he’s never known for himself. She bites his thumb, her eyes peeking open with Makima’s brilliant whirlpool of gold.