Chapter Text
chapter xx.
Case number: 7886990
Date: **/**/**
Report drawn up by: Ango S.
Confidential information acquired by: Dazai O., Nakahara C.
Signature: Mori Ougai.
On the twelfth of December of the current year — eighty-eight days since its beginning — the Dragon Head Conflict came to an end. The victim count is currently being analyzed by Section 57B, and will be reported by the evening, to be inserted in this — hopefully closed — file.
Five hundred billion yen richer and now lacking several members, the Port Mafia came out victorious.
While self-destruction was a major factor in the end of this Conflict, two other merits are to be signaled: the presence of Ability User Shibuwasa Tasuhiko — codename: White Giraffe — and the annihilation of the Five Moons. Apart from the numerous smaller organizations whose demise was brushed but not settled — the Hounds, the Black Widow, the Temple, and more — the Dragon Head Conflict emptied Yokohama of every major syndicate outside of the Port Mafia.
The KK Company was the first to fall; Shadow Blade followed; the death of the Takasekai’s leader by the end of American syndicate “Strain” (check file 67B0089) was the last drop in an overflowing vase. By the time the Three Moons were defeated, their codes laid in the hands of the Port Mafia; the Bishop's Staff held the Mafia’s and its own.
Hirabayashi Mitsuru’s competition is officially over. The prize, as far as our men report, is currently being divided across the Port Mafia’s international banks.
The destruction of the last Moon and of Shibusawa Tatsuhiko can be faulted tothe hands of Dazai Osamu and Nakahara Chuuya. Hereby, we begin an attentive reconstruction of the events that led to [...]
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•••
??? days before the end of the Dragon Head Conflict.
The moment his veins caught fire and tore his eyelids apart, he began to scream.
It was torn from his throat with relentless, abrupt violence — he felt nothing and heard nothing and was nothing; only the white noises making blood seep from his ears and land in his mouth from his vicious attempts to tear himself off any tactile surface, any pressing hand, any distant voice — he shrieked and screamed, legs kicking until the torn skin began to tear like fabric, spraying blood and scarred flesh like the scream out of his bleeding lip —
“ — him still —“
“ — trying, can’t you —“
“— is not — bleed out —“
“ — mushroom hallucinations?”
“ — steal — morphine —“
“— enough time —“
In the beginning, there had been a circular light, and the flies buzzing around it.
He hadn’t realized he remembered it. It pressed against his eyelids like a hammer, pressed harder and harder, harder and harder, cracking his skull as if it existed to render him a puzzle. A light on the ceiling, blurry through liquid and over a glass tank — flies buzzing and swarming and never dying, never dying, never allowed to —
He screamed until his throat was dry — he moved his body up and down, crashing it against the hard surface under his spine, bones, he thought, bones to break and body to dry, and kicking and punching and spitting and screaming, out of his mind with something so distant he couldn’t —
Lab-gloved hands appeared between the webs of blood and spit keeping his eyelids together, holding tools.
“No,” The voice didn’t even sound like his own. Panic had never been welcome in his bones — terror had been gulped down with gritted teeth; grief had been torn out of his veins. This was too different — it wrecked his chest and climbed out like a thing of flesh and despair. He was seven. He was five. He was dead. He would rather be dead than — “No, no, no, no, no —“
He kicked and he shook — he landed on the ground so harshly his entire body was rattled, and he crawled back, palms reaching for the slick ground — blood and others.
Hands cupped his cheeks.
Something in him — something somehow more primordial than the memories scratching at the bloodiest parts of his brain — expected silence. It didn’t come — all that came was a single eye, staring into his own — cheeks scratched in shapes he knew were his nails; a dangling band-aid from a rounded cheek. A single eye, staring.
“ — to stop,” a voice said, over the muddy waters of his own subconscious. He was in a tank. He was on the floor. He was just five, he had promised, and the man kept saying — “Time to stop,” the voice repeated, again and again, as if knowing he wouldn’t get it on a first try, “It’s time to stop.”
“No,” he croaked, shaking his head, breath short, N’s taunts and Verlaine’s promises — the spear through his chest lighting up his whole body for the world to see — to pick apart, to accuse — he begged, begged — “No, no, no, they’ll know, they’ll know —“
“They won’t.”
“They’ll know — they’ll know —“
The hands became talons.
They sunk into the sides of his head with nails — keeping him still so mercilessly that he heard his blood pump against his eyeballs. Skin and bandages and a wet fringe, and a single eye — the color of the tiles of the Old World; the color of a gentler sort of absence. It was colder than stone; with no space for doubt, it held him still.
“I’ll kill them,” Dazai promised. He was too close — their foreheads almost touched with every spasm of his own body. His sole eye was wide; was unmoving. “I’ll kill them if they know.”
Sincerity, someone had once said to him — sincerity is only honest when it has known blood. And then this: if you trust, let it be in death.
He stared, chest slowing. The hands had a heartbeat of their own; it seemed much more familiar to the thing inside his veins. It was good, he thought, delirious and floaty, head dangling back and forth inside a hoax, a stubborn grasp, it was good being touched. The Sheep had always been scared he would sink them in the earth. It was good being looked in the eyes. It was good not being feared.
He searched and searched until the whole world was the color of the Old World’s tiles — searched until his lips parted, dry and chapped, and no scream came out.
The eye grew blank. “Do it.”
One of the talons left his cheek so quick it dragged blood out — it was slammed on his mouth with no hesitation, pressing hard enough to break his jaw, breaking the inside of his lip against his teeth. A gloved hand sunk into his chest, soaked in something so blistering it was cold.
He shrieked so loud his back arched with it.
The hand didn’t yield, no matter teeth and screams — it crashed against his face with enough might to crack the floor under his head. Pain was a firework field all over his body, kicking his legs and drying his lungs. After some distant point that was no less ablaze than the others, he gave up on understanding which part was being slaughtered — what the boiling liquid being pooled on his wounds was. There was nothing but the ache, and his pounding head, and a thumb swiping up and down the side of his jaw — kinder.
“Shh,” someone said. There was a chin on his forehead; sharp and absorbed and hiding him. Fingers pulled soaked hair from his sweat matted cheeks; the hand stayed where it was even when his screams became nothing but whines, quiet and dying, attempting to tilt into sobs — falling before they could.
Never, he thought, Never again. A crying seaside brat. A man’s hand. Want to find your mom? A man’s hand — the blisters the glass of the tank made on his palms, pressed to wave at him.
He whispered something — attempted to. The hand was too suffocating; the light upon the ceiling was getting blurrier, swarmed by flies. All of them dead. All of him scooped out — left on the ground, next to the flesh someone had cut up to fit and forgot to take the sewing stitches out of.
“Shh,” the voice promised. The freezing tip of a nose brushed the end of his cheek; he thought it might have wiped a tear. Lips touched his ear, a mere touch where the hand shattered. The flies, spinning and flying and dying. “You’ll kill them. Shh.”
When his eyes and his head dropped, there was sand under his feet.
•••
21 days before the end of the Dragon Head Conflict.
The first thing he smelled was rubbing alcohol; the first thing he saw — stubble on a pointy chin.
Oh, he thought, floaty. Doc must have knocked me out for checkups again.
Dirty beige walls and a humid-stained ceiling peeked through the blurred patches in his eyes. His body was floating, held tight between fingers-stiffening cold air and a mattress that was all but soft. Pain had been locked in a soundproof bird cage — the echoes of it were a never ending cramp up and down his spine.
A wooden seat was stitched to the side of the bed; the intricate bundle of black and white seated on it stretched all the way to his pained lap — curled on himself, truly, small enough to fit in that space; a mop of dirty hair and play-pretend sleep. He wanted to push him off. He wanted his ears to stop ringing.
“Oh,” Rubbing-Alcohol-And-Stubble said, blinking at his struggles. “The mushrooms actually worked.”
His tongue was asbestos. What?, he didn’t manage to say, before the void swallowed him whole again.
•••
20 days before the end of the Dragon Head Conflict.
The moment his eyes opened, Chuuya was on his feet, cracking the moquette open.
The man was tall — tall enough to crank his neck, endless in his slim frame and general pointiness. Rusted copper in strands towered upon a remarkably normal face, with undeterred eyes and a carefulness someone actually normal wouldn’t have worn.
There were no weapons in sight — none except for the line of his shoulders. Chuuya recognized a threat with the ease of the changing season.
“You woke up,” the man said, eventually, once a quick glance had been directed to the destroyed lines of his floor. “That’s good. The Wound Reaper’s Ability is — devious. He told me you killed him?” An approving nod; starkly quick, as if he couldn’t be more aware of how little Chuuya would care about that judgement. “That’s for the better.”
“Who the f*ck are you?” Chuuya snapped, only glowing brighter with every word.
The texture of the bandages on his skin was driving him insane; the cold seeping through his newly made stitches seemed to drip from the walls of that old apartment, corroded at the edges and too small for that man’s presence. A jolt went through his legs — his knees wobbled, rattled by the aftermath of an electric shock.
Teeth gritted, he raised his hands, watching furniture begin to float menacingly around the man’s unmoving silhouette.
“Maybe you should sit down,” he said, eyes settled on the stitches he could feel reopening. He didn’t step forward; didn’t try to touch him. “Loss of control over your Ability wouldn’t be —“
“I’m not asking again,” Chuuya snarled. All shook: his skeleton and the house, and something in the man’s eyes — as if already seeing the end of something he hadn’t even begun. “Who —“
One paper wall away, the front door slipped open.
“Odasaku, I brought mochi!”
The cheerfulness of his tone crashed violently against the gun Dazai pointed at him, unmerciful and unhesitant. Not a grin lit up his pale face; his grip around the plastic bag in his free hand was relaxed. With earth-shattering finality, he put himself in front of Oda Sakunosuke.
“Chuuya,” he said, calmly. The tone he used with the Secret Squad; the eyes he wore when he was genuinely not lying. “Sit down. Now.”
“f*ck you.”
“Not with him,” Dazai’s finger slipped on the trigger, infinitely easy. He wondered, with a scientific curiosity of sorts, if a bullet shot by his nullifying hands would amount to anything. Had they never tasted that theory? They had pointed guns at each other with worrying frequency. “Never with him, Chuuya. Yes?”
He stared.
I can’t kill you, Dazai didn’t say. You can’t kill me. Here’s the ground rules, nonetheless.
Jaw aching, Chuuya lowered his hands, drowning the bedroom in darkness again. The moment the boy threw his gun on the mattress, he was on him.
Thump!, against the wall — vaguely wet fabric tight between his fingers, posing next to a bandaged Adam’s apple — Dazai’s eyelids, close enough to brush against his own. In the corner of his vision, Oda Sakunosuke didn’t move an inch.
“Don’t you ever,” he warned, barely a whisper, “Ever, threaten me again. I’ll kill you.”
A curled eyebrow. “Is that worse than threatening your friends, or are we on even ground?”
He pushed him against the wall again. On powerless ground, they both knew, Chuuya would always come out victorious.
“You left me unconscious with the nearest busybody you found,” he noted. An assortment of discomfort and rage and regret crowded inside him — things he didn’t want a stranger to see; things he couldn’t let a stranger smell; viscera that were only his to bleed out.
“You’re welcome,” Dazai sing-sang, teasing and sharp. “He saved your life. Where are your manners? With all the ouchies you got yourself in the last few years, you’re lucky not to be buried with those five graves you like so much —“
Anger blinded him. There was nowhere to turn; no other road to take. It was a game, like everything else. The blinding lights of the Arcade; a smirk that never was, because he was always pulling right where Chuuya couldn’t —
Mellower than he might have months before, he informed him: “Mori is going to tear us to pieces, and he’ll start with you.”
Glee disappeared from his face. All that was left was familiar; deaf to it, Chuuya tightened his grip — thought of the man Dazai refused to talk too much about, and yet had knocked at the door of, when the boy he wanted dead had walked too close to the edge.
“Great,” Dazai said, with a smile that sucked him dry. “Can’t wait, partner.”
Disgust overcame him with such viciousness he was left stunned.
Why save me?, he couldn’t spit out. Why save me, why not save yourself, why not care? What was the point of understanding the importance of stitching skin back together — of understanding how deeply death touched others, of insulting every grave he’d carved with his knees in the dirt in his face, of knowing the opposite of existence was something to be shaken by, if he didn’t even care when —
I’m not like that. I’ll never —
Chuuya let go of him, watching him drop to the ground between coughs. Only then did Oda step forward, offering him a hand to stand.
“Well, then,” he concluded, endless silent times later. He had no accent and no tone; when he cleaned dust off Dazai’s shoulder, though, he was a puzzle piece. “We should fix those stitches, before you stain the floor with blood again. It already took me some time to clean up.”
The sheer quantity of his wounds managed to leave him, too, speechless.
Nights upon nights with Arahabaki; the torture from the lab; the fight against Verlaine; the scratches and bullet wounds he’d gotten himself in Suribachi, before learning the art of untouchability — all of it had reopened in one go. Chuuya tried to recall a single moment of it, and came up empty.
He set his jaw, staring at the ground.
Oda Sakunosuke moved like a man whose first word might have mentioned a close friend’s demise. There were weapons all over his apartment; less than a man with no Ability would carry, though. When he introduced himself, unnecessarily, he didn’t appear bothered by Chuuya’s refusal to shake his hand.
Did he see them?, he wondered. The scars and the pain stricken features, the blood and the lines of codes. Chuuya had lost all pudor in the slums — but regained all strength of comparison when faced with a copy of himself.
He thought, uselessly, that he’d never be able to visit a doctor again.
The man didn’t talk as he fixed him up again for the second time; but he answered every question Dazai threw his way, as if there wasn’t a thing he didn’t consider worthy of analyzing. He didn’t flinch when the boy moved furniture and knick-knacks around his apartment; didn’t ask him to stop when he climbed on the table and stared right into the lightbulb, until his eye began to water.
“One of the legs is unstable,” he warned him, simply.
“Yes, Odasaku. Hey, do you think that thing outside is a sniper or a crow?”
“That’s a traffic light, I believe.”
Around that enigmatically plain man, Dazai was a dead flower someone had deemed pointless enough to paint. Laughter and endless curiosity; he stepped in and out of Oda’s space like a cat searching for sunlight in the winter; he looked up and down at him like a wide-eyed child who had never quite been taught that words could make songs.
Chuuya felt surges of ire even just looking at him. Chuuya couldn’t stop staring.
The moment he left the room, mochi between his lips and every source of water in the bathroom opened, he bit: “What game are you playing at?”
Oda’s perplexity seemed genuine — but nothing about that man could be called that. “Little Doctor, I suppose?”
“With the bastard.”
“Dazai tells me his parents were married.”
“You’re not funny,” he snapped. Parents. “What does an insignificant postman gain from hanging around with the Demon Prodigy? From humoring him? Are you trying to make him obsess over you? Because I can assure you — he is.”
A hum left his lips — he tightened a bandage around Chuuya’s elbow, where he’d torn his skin apart at nine years old, on the edge of a building in Suribachi City. “He’s my friend.”
“Your friend.”
“Is that hard to believe?”
“That someone would willingly associate themselves with that mental case?” He scoffed. “Yeah. He’s an asshole. You look like a weirdo, not a dick.”
A pause. “Is he not your friend?”
“No,” Chuuya made a face.
“I’m not taking advantage of him. Although, it’s nice of you to worry for your…”
The pause was heavy.
“Rival,” he landed on, eventually, painfully. “Pain in the ass? Mummified son of a bitch?”
Oda blinked. “He’s your mummified son of a bitch?”
“He’s not my anything. And I’m not worrying —“
“Dazai calls you partner,” he mused. There was a certain lack of impatience in him; as if he could have sat in front of that bed and tended to his wounds until the end of times, untouched by the explosions and shootings he could hear come from behind the windows, in the night. “He also called you his gravity boy, once, but I’m assuming you won’t react positively to the notion of me knowing much about you.”
“But there’s no need to worry,” he added, before Chuuya could open his mouth. “All I’m interested in is the ones I can save.”
Startled, he froze.
“Odasaku!” Dazai whined, from the other room. “Your late pets woke up! Tell them to shut up!”
Muffled and distant, came a familiar sound — children crying.
Oda sighed, standing up. “If you’ll give me a moment.”
Eons might have passed between the first humidity stain he counted and Dazai’s appearance in the far corner of the room. He spent them in a haze, caught between a sharp answer he hadn’t been given time to wield and the unwanted weight of implications. Perhaps, he thought, it was the headache from Arahabaki’s attempts at smashing his skull.
“He’s being nice,” the boy asked. It didn’t quite sound like a question. Sat on the floor, he still sported bruises around the nose Chuuya had punched. “He doesn’t even trust you. Although, I suppose he doesn’t trust anyone.”
“Why does he have so many weapons around, if he doesn’t intend to use them?”
A shrug. “What makes you think he won’t?”
“Those hands haven’t pulled a trigger in years, at least,” Chuuya huffed. “Mock me about sh*t I don’t know. How did you end up idolizing a guy who won’t kill?”
The ones I can save.
“It’s truly a bother, isn’t it?” Dazai sighed, chin in hand, obnoxious and insincere and not your business. “He could have helped us blow up some more citizens. You know, a quarter of your squad was killed by the Reaper, before you impaled him,” A snort. “Maybe you can ask Q to join, instead.”
He studied him, over shushed crying and the echoes of conflict; pulled the gloves no one had removed from his fingers. He felt the weight, for once, of every scar that kept reopening, Ability or no Ability. “It’s f*cking annoying when you do that.”
“Do what?”
“Pretend you don’t give a sh*t.”
A hint of glass, behind secular curtains; not even the inside, but at least a reflection. It was gone before he could smear his dirty fingers all over it. “I don’t.”
Chuuya stood up; gathered his clothes. “I don’t believe you.”
When Oda came to open his front door, a kid was napping on his shoulder, peaceful and too tiny. He didn’t try to stop him — he did, for some reason, offer him a sugar packet. “In case your head feels light,” he said. “Chuuya.”
He hadn’t said his name yet. Chuuya found he would have taken it back, had there been a way.
This is the man he refused to let you know a thing about, he concluded. This is the man he rips the curtains off for.
“Thank you,” he managed to say. There wasn’t enough suspicion to wipe out a favor — not a life-saving one. “He shouldn’t have brought me here — but he did. And you had no reason to help out, but you did. I apologize if —“ Chuuya cleared his throat. There was no vocalization of what it meant to meet Dazai’s gaze. “Thank you.”
Oda blinked. “You’re welcome.”
He seemed perplexed.
“If you don’t trust me, why did you let me in the house where your kids are?” Chuuya asked. He thought back to bedtime stories; to the fate that had followed every kid he’d ever dared to walk next to. Had they seen him sleep? Had they seen him bleed?
A shame misfortune follows her so earnestly, he recalled Beatrice saying, distantly.
Oda shrugged. It reminded him, strangely, of Dazai. It should have been the opposite, he thought — should have been the so-called demon acting like a child, stealing life tricks off a man who he had yet to see fear him. Chuuya didn’t understand a thing about adults.
“Dazai trusts you,” the man answered, easily — and oh, Chuuya realized, and it was earth-shattering in its absolute irrelevance, and it was the most obvious thing this world had to offer, astonishing and there. Oh, he realized, he’s like the Flags. “Forgive the reasoning. But I do think that’s enough.”
•••
19 days before the end of the Dragon Head Conflict.
Kouyou was a golden flame, and the first time he embraced her, she was covered in blood.
“Not mine,” she said, even if there was no need. She was warmth personified — she smelled of ash and the artificial lakes of her home; so devastatingly alive it was breathtaking. Her hand cupped the back of his head; Chuuya sunk his nose in her shoulder and inhaled. “One word — fun. I couldn’t let you guys have all the fun, could I?”
Alive, he thought, and not even Arahabaki could long for her blood right now. Alive, alive, she touched me and she is alive.
He was quick to tear himself apart from her — bowed, as it fit his superior, and cleared his throat. “Good to have you back, Ane-san.”
“Good to be back, little god,” Kouyou replied. Behind her back, Golden Demon kept slaloming through the rows of Takasekai’s men, unforgiving and free and hungry. “But we should get to the Headquarters as soon as possible.”
Chuuya perked up. “Did something happen while I was gone?”
“No,” She raised her chin. “But I do know how to rescue your Yuan.”
•••
18 days before the end of the Dragon Head Conflict.
“The plan for the end of conflict,” Dazai said, legs dangling from the edges of his office’s couch, “Can be easily left to Mori. We’ve been doing so much in the past months, have we not? You and I have more pressing matters to worry about. Look at this.”
Chuuya settled his eyes on the photograph of a corpse.
Don’t worry, he remembered saying, a thousand eons before. People will win you this war.
“The Colonel’s dead?”
The words tasted like rust — like talking sh*t, in the way that would have made the man scoff and straighten his posture. He had been endless and powerful; he had told Chuuya those like them couldn’t be stopped by something as human-flavored as war.
He took a stop back. “Who — Who killed him?”
A blink. “The White Giraffe did.”
•••
[Report back to — 18 days before the end of the Dragon Head Conflict.]
— not what you should be saying,” Dazai brushed the matter away with a smile, the picture in his hand nothing more than a piece of evidence, the storm of viscera and soldier uniform inside it a far away ghost. “For us Executive candidates, it’s: ‘another Executive seat has opened’.” A too-smart gaze; lidded eye and the shameless lack of care he had sworn upon in his best friend’s home. “Right?”
I don’t believe you, he thought, in the way of misunderstandings, in the way of children, in the way of a boy who was angry, in the way of the envious.I don’t believe —
“I’m human too, you know?”
•••
[Report back to — 18 days before the end of the Dragon Head Conflict.]
— “No one would believe that sh*t,” Chuuya spat out, knuckles aching.
•••
16 days before the end of the Dragon Head Conflict.
“The White Giraffe has declared war against all organizations involved in the conflict,” Mori announced, boredly. His only Executives left exchanged a gaze. “Get rid of him, yes?”
•••
14 days before the end of the Dragon Head Conflict.
“— conflict has somehow managed to grow. We urge all citizens to —”
•••
146 days before the end of the Dragon Head Conflict.
“Nakahara,” The Colonel stared forward; something about his pallor was an omen. Chuuya wanted to leave. “Did Albatross die in peace, as far as you know?”
•••
13 days before the end of the Dragon Head Conflict.
“I’m sorry,” Koda said, distractedly, eyes on the floor. “I know I’m disappointing you.”
The squad was a circle of limbs and bruises on the floor of the hallway, sleeping the latest attack to the Shadow Blade borders off soundly. Tsuchiya’s head was in Noguchi’s lap — since she’d lost her eyepatch during a close-range fight, Kenta’s hand was dutifully hiding the missing piece. The sight of his free fingers hooked in Virgil’s jacket almost made him grin — the criss-cross of scars on Rin’s face almost paused that motion.
Chuuya recalled, vividly enough for his head to hurt, the clash and crash of their razor-sharp edges against the similar. They had fought his constricting hands until they bled; then they’d given up. Chuuya had felt a little less lonely.
It wasn’t about filling a missing space, he thought. It was about breaking his knuckles until his hands could create another hole in the wall — another family picture to hang.
“You’re not, Koda,” Chuuya replied. He turned to look at him — his arm was in a cast. “I don’t know if Uchiyama would want you to kill yourself over a ghost, though.”
His flinch sent him a few steps back.
“But if it’s me you don’t want to disappoint,” he continued, swiftly, settling his eyes back on the sleeping bundle. “If it’s us — would you mind not dying, Koda?”
Glossy eyes moved up and down his face, too quick to follow; a choked sound left his throat — something like thunder and like tears. His lips parted. “I—”
The entire city trembled.
•••
13 days before the end of the Dragon’s Head Conflict.
“— to report the collapse of the main building of the Mori Corporations’ five towers last night, with impactful consequences on the surrounding plaza and neighborhoods — Firefighters and policemen are currently still working at the scene, trying to — Survivors are few and in between, with an astonishing number of victims and still unfound. We encourage volunteers to —”
•••
9 days before the end of the Dragon Head Conflict.
The Bishop’s Staff’s sniper was praying.
Chuuya stepped over the mauled corpse left by Golden Demon, viscera squeaking under his polished shoes. His eyes stayed settled on the man’s crawling body. Voices and endings echoed across the collapsed walls of the Church — the cohesive attack had cost men and relevant territory; but the kidnapped women and Yuan’s stutters in the face of the Port Mafia’s rescuers would satisfy Mori’s hunger enough.
Fanatic blood would satisfy his own.
“God isn’t real,” he informed the sniper, holding his trembling skull between gloved hands. “But don’t worry. I’m close enough.”
•••
5 days before the end of the Dragon Head Conflict.
“My squad,” He frowned. “Ane-san, where’s my squad?”
•••
4 days before the end of the Dragon’s Head Conflict.
“We are even missing people from our Executive and associate-to-Executive ranks — Vice-Executives and guards,” Mori sighed, eyes running from Hirotsu’s frame to Chuuya’s own. “Including Dazai.”
Who cares, his mind retoriated. Hard-earned loyalty was to be left on less offensive altars. Hard-earned care was to be left to those who wouldn’t waste what they had been given freely. Chuuya had been sleeping alone. Hard-earned trust was to be given to those who —
“He bought a new microscope,” Hirotsu shrugged.
Oh.
— those who gave it back, once it had been bled dry.
•••
3 days before the end of the Dragon Head Conflict.
“Your friends all killed themselves,” the White Giraffe sighed, throwing another gem in the fire. “I had nothing to obtain from them. Meaningless and worthless…” He laid his chin on his hand. On the floor, Noguchi’s fishbone tattoo glistened, hit by the reflection of a sapphire. “Boring humans are boring even at death.”
•••
— — ?????? [Error?00?]
[More, Arahabaki murmured, and he was all he had left. More, little god.]
[—bringing him was a mistake. It was a mistake! I tried to tell you—“
“Agent Sakagu—“
“He was never going to work with—]
•••
À mon chéri Arthur,
[scribbled with a different pen][Oh, so you finally accept to call me by my name?]
I cannot say I am used to your absence [I thought I always slept long enough for you to rot?]. Although you always seem to be writing in that diary of yours, I must wonder if it ever feels as improper as these letters feel to me [That’s the point of a diary, Paul. I will explain more when I’m back]. Joint missions are much more amusing, anyway [They are, my friend. But I believe we have different reasons].
As you have suggested, I took a walk down that park you had seemed so enthusiastic about [I do not seem enthusiastic about parks, Paul. I simply believe it would do you good to find enjoyment in the everyday world] — the one with the ducks, and with the old ladies wearing that cotton you’re so envious of [Lies upon lies]. Beautiful trees and mesmerizing lakes, yes; but fate wanted me to interrupt a funeral. [Fate, or your own curiosity?]
It was a small event. No one we had… disposed of; I made sure to verify that [Not every ounce of blood has been spilled because of you, Paul. You need to stop assuming so]. Only a man, unremarkable and very much boring, but by the enticing name of Gaspard [Why do you like that name so much? You always mention it].Most of the chairs had been left empty— but, then again who will sit at our funerals, Arthur? Who, if not you and I, in the very remote possibility one of us survives to what might one day kill the other? And what could that be? Not an enemy, surely. Is old age an enemy? Is that something humans fear? Are we to presume my body will know death, as it very rarely knows blood? [Death is a very human concept. I assume you will fall victim to it, one day]
When I sat, I found myself particularly curious about the eulogy a young man offered. I do not know what Gaspard had been to him; I am even slightly confused about whether his words were meant to be a farewell or a curse [Most funerals follow this structure] . Here, let me recite them for you. (You can picture it. You are a smart man; picture me in front of you, talking). [I will picture you. I’m rather used to it. Do not judge me for it]
Though nobody would call me brave
And I have neither king nor country,
I went to war to find a grave.
Death did not want me, either.
Was I born too early or too late?
What am I doing in this world?
See AlsoHow I Learned to Write -- Part 1Help the larger cause · RENDEZ MA RÉVOLUTION!! · Change.orgI Have Never Heard VoicesSCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE 15I tell you all, I am desperate—
Say a prayer for poor Gaspard.
[This is tacky. Do not make me read it again.]
Are poems traditional parting gifts? Funerals among us Trascendents always seemed much more severe. If that would be to your liking, I will find the strength to write you a poem, the day of your inevitable demise. [I think I would like a poem very much, Paul.]
But this particular parting gift seemed rather self-centered to me. Did you get the same feeling? If not for that demand for a prayer, I would have thought this man was about to steal one of my guns and shoot himself in the head — there, in front of his already grieving family. I wonder if he would have succeeded. Death does not want him, after all. [Is that not a metaphor? Perhaps he is being self centered again. Death does not despise anyone. Injustice is offered equally to everyone]
I keep thinking about his words, though.
I do not know if I was born too soon or too late. I suppose, being created, I was created exactly when I was meant to. [Born. You were born] Errors come from man-made creations, and from wombs; I am not quite that [Source does not determinate result. We have talked about this, have we not?] . I do not know what I am doing in this world. Fighting. Searching for someone like me. Trying to listen to your words; to trust them. [That’s good enough, I think. Most people do the same]
I did not go to war to find a grave. I will welcome it, should it come. But not before my answers.
Death leaves me fairly untouched. Leaves are bound to fall; snow is bound to melt; and do we not call spring and summer beautiful? [We do] Is that something human beings are supposed to feel? I have a feeling it’s not. Perhaps the thing in my veins is too focused on his immortality, to care about decay. [Paul, you need to stop assuming human beings are good people]
I do not know grief. I have yet to find someone who would deserve it. People die everyday; war and famine and accidents and even old age. Does the act of dying itself demand respect? For pain? Were I to find a way to put an end to my own life — who would mourn?
You, Arthur. You have always been better. [Not better. Never better]
I do not worry about such things, though. Just as that selfish man on the stand, I know death does not want me. [I will stay unwanted with you, then. If you’ll have me].
I’ll sit here and watch the world die first, I suppose. [We shall]
À toi pour toujours (si la mort ne veut vraiment pas de moi),
Paul Verlaine.
[À toi pour toujours (toujours),
Arthur.]
[ONE WEEK AFTER
THE DRAGON HEAD CONFLICT]
“So, Chuuya,” the Social Worker said — tight smile and eyes settled on the hands Kouyou had yet to remove from his shoulders. “How do you like working at Mori Corporations?”
There existed, as he’d been recently informed, a thing called 'emancipation as a means of joining the workforce', which he was assumed to have taken advantage of. Suribachi City had lacked such notions. Chuuya had existed simply because he did — not even the occasional cops would have dared ask those kinds of questions.
Social Services, though. Those he was familiar with.
“It’s cool,” Chuuya answered.
The two men — perfectly bright and fairly interested — waited. There wasn’t a crack on their faces; undeterred, they attempted to find his eyes, dragging them off the shining edge of the desk. If he could have sat further away, he would have had.
A beat. “Anything else?”
There was a knick knack of sorts upon the desk — a silver slide with an automatic system of little spheres tumbling down. Chuuya had yet to look away — its motions were nearly hypnotic. The sharp sound of each ball was slowly, inevitably dragging him to insanity. His fingers spasmed against the armrests.
Curtly, he offered: “Pay’s good.”
Fingers on the endless piles of papers they had pulled up the moment Kouyou had welcomed them in, the men exchanged a glance.
Chuuya could see his face on most of the documents; it was more than the Workers had ever managed to obtain back in the settlement. He’d implemented a clear policy among his people — if you see the blue shirts, kick them in the dick and run the other way. He hadn’t been willing to lose any of them to the dangers of the underworld — even less willing to let a supposedly good-intentioned adult steal them off.
“And what about your guardian?” Worker One started again, just as enthusiastic as before. “As, ah — official as your relationship might be, given your independence, what do you say? Is she nice?”
Tell me she’s not, his eyes begged. He could imagine what reputation the Port Mafia had to have with such systems — unspoken secrets in all minds and no one’s tongue. He couldn’t decide whether managing to take Chuuya from them would have been a win for their morals or their hunger.
Just a tad defensive, Chuuya replied: “Yeah. Ane-san’s the coolest.”
Lithe fingers tightened around his shoulders, quick and affectionate.
The two men cooed. “That’s wonderful,” Two said. “I’m ecstatic. That means —“
“I know what that means.”
A strident sound; maybe his teeth. “That’s great. Does she take care of you? Makes sure you continue your studies?”
“I told you she’s great,” Chuuya insisted. The silver balls went up and down. “Want me to write you an ode, here and now?”
Uncomfortable laughter filled the room.
“Say, why did you choose the jewelry store?” Number 1 wondered, after a murmuring pause. “Mister Mori told us you were offered many possibilities among his — ah, possessions.”
“I like jewelry.”
“Do you? You’re not wearing any.”
“The pay is not that good.”
“Oh,” Two perked up. “Have you encountered any salary injustices?”
A sharp sound left Kouyou’s lips. Calling it exasperation would have been too nice.
Chuuya let his chair swallow him. Tin, tin, the spheres said — he sunk a bit deeper with each hit. “Calm down, jackass. They treat me just fine. I don’t even know the point of this tea time.”
“The point, dear, is evaluation,” Worker Two insisted, visibly scrunching up his nose at the insult. “Where would we be if we left our children unaccounted for? Emancipation gives you autonomy. It doesn’t grant you abandonment.”
Something cold pressed against his nape — one of Kouyou’s rings, sending shivers down his skin right as his feet moved to unwillingly crack the ground. He clenched his jaw to the point of pounding; clung to the ache to push the anger where it wouldn’t blow the meeting off.
“I don’t feel abandoned,” he managed to bite out, at last. “Thank you for the concern.”
“You’re welcome,” One replied. “You know, it would do you good to keep your language in check.”
“I talk how I talk.”
“Did you know that six in ten youngsters whose files describe them as irreverent are said to not pick a university career?” The man shook his head. “These are complicated times for successful lives. High-ups are looking for polite, polished young men. It’d be a shame to ruin what Mori Corps could give you.”
Tin, tin. The spheres slid down.
“Chuuya is a terribly bright young man,” Kouyou intervened, the longer his aggressive quietness lasted. “His future might be affected by many things, but his — choice of wordsisn’t among them. He’s one of the most promising pupils Mori has ever taken in.”
I don’t know if that much swearing is good for a teen, Virgil had said, once.
Bile drowned his mouth.
Some more mutter, some more borderline pitiful stares. The two workers put their heads close, searching through their papers for whatever would make that meeting last even longer. Chuuya knew they couldn’t do anything; knew the Mafia would intervene before they could report anything suspicious that would get an asset taken away so pathetically. Nonetheless —
Nonetheless,standing there, watching them discuss his existence —
“— a little worried about his socialization skills,” One murmured. Tin, tin, tin. “The list of his daily interactions is rather unhopeful. Almost no one is in his age range. Friendship is a fundamental step in full maturation.”
“Growing up in that dumpster can’t have helped,” Two agreed. “Wouldn’t it be better to make some — ah, some checks? Just to be sure everything works right, up there. I mean, his —” Tin, tin, tin tin tin tin — “Not to mention the attitude. Are we absolutely sure he can take care of —”
The world blurred at the edges.
There had been white sounds stuck in his ears for almost two weeks; he had grown used to the metallic screech. He only knew he had thrown the knick-knack across the room when he saw one of the silver spheres roll all the way to his shoes.
Silence fell.
Kouyou’s hands were nowhere to be found — endlessly marble-like, she looked at him with nothing under her eyelids. The absolute shock dripping from the men’s faces was diesel for his flames. It took the pain in his legs — a constant by now; gentle flames stuck at the junctures whenever he couldn’t afford it — to realize he was standing.
“Chuuya?” Worker One dared, staring.
His body was a few seconds too early — sound came later. Chuuya didn’t remember rising; couldn’t pinpoint what his intention had been.
Nonsensically, he thought: they should have sent Matsuda, if they wanted results.
He stuck his hands in his pockets; cleared his throat. “We’re done here.”
Rooms at Building Three were too big, he thought, among every other contracting idea crowding his skull. It took too long to get to the door. The acoustics were terrible — just enough to hear the stuttering, offended squeaks coming from the men; to hear Kouyou’s pointless reassurances and disgusted remarks.
“ — can’t just —“
“We have reports to —“
“— a better time,” Kouyou insisted, with the balanced murmurs she used to quieten down angry clients at the Pomegranate. One of the silver spheres had landed under his foot, Chuuya rolled it under his sole, back and forth — crushed it for the sake of it. Breathed from his nose. Did his best to recall what he was meant to be feeling. “I told you — almost everyone in the city is dealing with a personal loss. He’s just sixteen. Asking for some understanding shouldn’t be —“
The doorknob glittered golden under his palms. He counted specks of dust; watched them stick to his gloves like they weren’t physical.
Mori’s eyes were purple from up close.
Like the sky behind the factories at night, he had once heard Lippman describe it as — woefully poetic; elegant in all pretense. The crinkles around them made them a tad too friendly; like he might have just used his scalpel to dig them himself, for the sake of gain. All for gain, the doctor had said. He couldn’t recall when.
He couldn’t recall when he had opened the door.
“Apologies for my lateness,” Mori smiled. The trio at the desk had fallen quiet, eyes on him; all his attention was on Chuuya. “I did promise you I’d be here — construction has slowed down the traffic immensely. Chuuya, did I miss much?”
Had you promised? He couldn’t recall.
He straightened. “Just getting started, sir.”
The Boss’ presence was terrifyingly efficient in fastening the procedures the Social Workers had to go through. A nauseating mixture of respect and horror — decisively not shown in Kouyou’s presence — soaked their eyes. Clearly, it aggravated her just as much as it did him.
Chuuya got to sit in his chair, staring at the ground he wasn’t allowed to destroy — because renovations costed money, and because it wouldn’t make sense, and because he wasn’t a child. From the floor, rolling pathetically away from its slide, the remains of the sphere stuck to his sole sang: tin tin.
“Dazai won’t be joining us, today, no,” Mori was shaking his head, apologetically. The name had his fingers digging into the leather of the armrest. “You know how sick he gets. It’s seasonal, really. You can have your interview next week.”
The slam of the wooden doors against the wall would have been nearly comical — had it not been for the gun in Dazai’s hand.
“Jeffrey and Tom!” he exclaimed, tumbling in with his sole eye wide enough to appear to be pulsing, disheveled and so euphoric. “It’s been so long, oh fairy godmothers!”
To call what he did from the door to the desk a dance would have been too kind — there was a skip to his step that couldn’t be natural, and a lack of finesse to the splits and cartwheels he did — attempted — in the meantime that was glaringly obnoxious. The gun didn’t help his balance; the moment the Social Workers’ eyes locked on it, they jumped to their feet.
“Is that a —“ One thundered.
“Toy, toy, toy,” Dazai huffed, pirouetting all the way to Mori’s seat — leaning his crossed arms over its top, as the man did nothing but smile into nothingness. “This is a weapon factory, Lucius and Marcus. Do you think we have no prototypes?”
Hesitantly — only lowering into his seat once his colleague stopped gaping at the quick way the boy was spinning the gun trigger over his index — Worker Two sighed a: “Dazai, you know our names are —“
He burst out laughing.
His legs did their best to climb over the back of the seat — once he managed to be completely off the floor, hanging like a monkey, he sing-sang: “I was feeling a bi-i-it down, like Mori said. But when I heard Matt and Adrian were coming, I dragged myself by the elbows and the knees!”
“How enthusiastic,” One said, vaguely.
“I know,” Dazai dropped his head back. His voice got a rough note because of the strain. “I stopped by the sidewalk to try to hang myself, but this one university student dragged me down the light pole. He dropped me in a puddle! Look, I’m all dirty!”
A line of red divided his deadly pale, sweaty face in two — the spot where blood had stopped circulating. The closer he got, the more absurd his eye looked as it frantically studied the room — pupil blown so wide, he could have been one of Elise’s stylized scribbles.Deaf to the two men’s protests that one joke about America did not give him the right to mock them whenever they met, he took his place next to a stiffened Kouyou — all beads of sweat and harbored breathing.
Tin, tin — Chuuya frowned.
“I’m good, I’m good, you know I’m always good,” he insisted, leaning over the desk, chin in his hands. “Truly, you might as well stop wasting your time! Mori likes me too much. You’ll never find me dissatisfied! I get a roof and treats. Not even the Emperor’s dog is happier than me!”
Quick enough to snap his neck — for the first time since they had dragged themselves out of the building that had buried his squad’s bodies — Dazai’s eyes settled on him.
“On the matter of happy pets — have you met our latest one?” Conspiratorial, he wiggled his eyebrow. “Look at him. Hat and all! Between us, isn’t he absolutely enthralling?”
“Dazai,” Kouyou — careful to only pull him by the coat — forced him to sit down onto the chair again. Someone else might have failed to decipher the inch of worry in her eyes; Chuuya only failed to understand her decisiveness to ignore it. “Some demeanor, if you don’t mind?”
“You’re so boring, Ane-san,” he sighed. He was blinking incredibly fast. “If you intended to push your etiquette on me the moment you woke up, you could have just stayed sleeping! Sleeping Beauty and all. Beautiful and useless. Sorry,” He bowed to her. “My lady. Ma’am. E-x-e-c-u-t-i-v-e. Ought to respect you! Ought to respect your pet, too. Enthralling. Not like you. You’ve never even allowed me to ask Demon Golden if she could kill painlessly.”
There was a knife in each of his boots, Chuuya reminded himself, out of nowhere. There was at least one gun in that room, and Dazai was scratching the space between his eyebrows with it. His Ability wouldn’t work on Dazai — but he had other means to stop him.
“We were just talking with Chuuya,” Worker One confirmed, clearly used enough to whatever was happening to simply move on. Mori’s smile was sculpted on his face; he stared at the two men too insistently. “He’s a lively young man. You must be happy to have someone your age around, yes, dear?”
His next laughter might have just been a scream; Chuuya cringed away, right as everyone but Mori flinched. “Rick, you were always a funny one. He’s not even my age in dog years. Don’t be silly. My dog. By the way. He’s just Chuuya. Well — sometimes. Only sometimes!”
More laughter — when Dazai abandoned his hands on the edge of the desk, his fingers were shaking so violently the band-aids Elise had given him became invisible. Something in the back of Chuuya’s skull asked him to be enraged. He’d been insulted; more importantly, he’d been looking for an excuse to fight.
Chuuya clenched his fists. “What the f*ck is that supposed to —“
A white blister pack peeked from Dazai’s pocket. Then another; then another. With an unhurried, gentle motion — only the tip of one finger — Mori pushed them back inside.
His voice disappeared.
“— great friends,” the Boss was saying, one hand on Dazai’s shoulders. How he’d managed to keep him still enough to put it there, he couldn’t understand; his entire body was vibrating under his grasp, hyperactive and cheerful, feet tapping and fingers reaching and lips blowing raspberries in the air. “You’ve told me many times that Dazai might receive some — positive influence, from being around people his age. Chuuya was truly a godsend. His intellect and strength saved us from many sticky situations.”
He laughed; all polite, all head of Mori Corporations, nothing of the man who’d walked past his destroyed building and barely blinked at the smashed corpses stuck between the cracks. “To be fair, calling their relationship a good influence for either of them might be — slightly untrue.”
The Workers leaned forward. He could see their hunger sink its claws in the mahogany. “How come? Unhealthy environments might not —“
“They are both stubborn, proud boys,” Mori reassured them. “They’re young. It’s normal. Conflict is an important step in development — competition,even more so, is fundamental. Luckily, Chuuya and Dazai are mature enough to realize this.”
Worker Two snapped his tongue against the roof of his mouth, judgemental. “Maturity — an interesting concept. Your boys’ resourcefulness, their cleverness — all positive things. But they’re children, nonetheless.”
Kouyou’s smile slipped off her face.
Chuuya watched his own land on his lap; he stared at it, its uncomfortably shades of pointless anger. A default reflection, perhaps — technical defect. The non—understood was to be raged at. If he grew taller, he mused, on the shapes of Doc’s syllables, swearing anger would do him good — would they stop calling him a child?
More laughter erupted underneath Mori’s slightly disapproving grasp.
“Oh, no, no,” Dazai intervened, shaking his head vigorously. “It’s all fine. All fine. No need to worry. Children, not children — Terminology is the cage of man. Either I will kill Chuuya, or he will kill me. It’s inevitable! Like Christmas. It’s almost Christmas, isn’t it? We made a blood pact about it, anyway.” He turned around to wink at him. Chuuya could have sunk his fingers in the waters of his sole eye and never touched the floor. “You don’t have to worry about us at all.”
Chuuya stared back.
His eyes blurred. “Well, hopefully I’ll get myself first. That’s more important than any blood pact. You know how disappointing it’d be, if I —” Blindly, his hands reached forward, gun and all — hovering too close to the collector pens abandoned on the wood. “You know how — ha — How damn disappointing —“
Before he could even think about moving, Mori’s fingers were slammed on the desk — right where the pens laid, his gloved hand great enough to hide them from sight completely. Eye snapping open, dry and more focused than it had dared to be before then, Dazai — flinched.
Chuuya had to be losing his mind.
Their stare off was quiet; seemingly blank. A hint of petulance pulled the boy’s mouth down; even seated, Mori seemed endlessly tall.
Worker One cleared his throat. “If we may get back to living accommodations —“
Dazai raised his gun and fired into the space between the Social Workers’ heads.
What followed was a blur — the two men yelped high enough to break glass, as they jumped out of their seats with a mixture of fear and anger that didn’t seem to know who to push forward. A hint of amusem*nt colored Mori’s face; by the time Dazai had started humming some Hirose’s song and brought the gun to his temple — Chuuya’s own hand bumped against the doctor’s, as they both pushed it out of his grasp.
“You — in the hands of a —“ Two was stuttering, horrified. “You said — You —“
In a show of coordination, Kouyou slashed his head off with the blade hidden in her umbrella right as Mori threw his scalpel into One’s chest.
The thud! of their bodies landing on the carpets was nothing new. Chuuya only realized he had flinched when he felt Dazai’s gaze — pupil still blown; and yet now doubtlessly bored — swallowing him whole.
“Wonderful,” Mori sighed. “They’re sure to send someone else by next month, now.”
Just as mildly displeased, Kouyou hummed. He tried to stand; his body stayed unmoving.
At once, Dazai deflated.
“Whatever,” he huffed, throwing himself onto the desk, back up. His face had wiped itself clean. All that energy from before had to go somewhere, he thought. All the shake in his hands. All the pens no one had hidden. No human could turn himself off. No human could — “Mori, send Chibi and Ane-san out. We ought to fill Tom and Jeffrey’s reports — I don’t want them to hear me talk about how puberty is treating me. Shoo-oh!”
“How I hate faking Governmental papers,” Mori sighed, like nothing had happened.
Kouyou had to drag him out of the room; Chuuya hadn’t even realized his own hesitation, until his neck began to hurt from the effort to call Dazai’s lost attention to himself.
No one would believe that sh*t.
You are, he thought. It was nauseating; the layer of vomit Chuuya had felt stuck in his throat since the smell of bodies crushed under a building. He had yet to throw up. The knot in his chest was an assortment of too many things — the rage he’d put in that punch and the stubbornness with which he’d driven his bike to him and the smell of blood from his squad’s corpses and the green lights of a life he didn’t remember. You are and I’m not and how can you waste it like that?
Kouyou shut the door behind them.
His fists unclenched.
“Why did he have that many pills from the Infirmary emergency stash on him?” Chuuya hissed. “Are you kidding me? Boss has to know. He can’t know — he’s going to kill him if —“
She straightened up, brushing invisible dust off her kimono. The imperceptible worry she’d shown inside the room was nowhere to be found; with all the demeanor she’d demanded from Dazai, she began her march down the stairs. “No need to worry. In exceptional cases, Dazai is allowed to.”
“Allowed to?” Disbelieving, he widened his strides to catch up. “He was going to kill himself with a f*cking pen.”
“Mori knows how to stop him.”
“The guy is suicidal two thirds of the week. Maybe put a lock on the cabinets?”
“We already have them,” she replied. “And as you might need to be reminded — as Dazaiknows —addiction isn’t allowed in the Port Mafia.”
He stared. “And what, assisted suicide is?”
“Don’t be silly,” She glanced his way with something like genuine confusion. “It’s not what you’re envisioning, Chuuya. You think the demon child would ever allow himself to die like that?”
“But —“
“Chuuya,” she admonished. A familiar tone — the symphony of yes, a shipping container. The world-ending orchestra of Dazai-related matters that they were all politely demanded to keep their noses out of. “Mori certainly knows better. If he lets him break into his cabinets once or twice, mix up medications in an effort to commit a suicide he will stop him from — perhaps that’s one of the reasons why the demon child hasn’t killed himself with a pen yet.”
From the floor upon theirs came laughter. Mori’s; the corpses’; fake all the same. They would be disposed of soon enough.
Chuuya couldn’t pick that battle.
But —
“I met Oda.”
Surprise slowed her down to a stop. “Oda Sakunosuke?”
He wasn’t sure of why the words had left his mouth. Yokohama was caged between devastation and the need to build something over it. Dazai Osamu was one problem too many to deal with. The only problem he had left, he considered.
“He’s a weirdo,” Chuuya added, eventually. “Lives in a sh*thole. Actually enjoys Dazai’s presence. Looks like he could kill me in a blink, but refuses to. It’s — ” He shrugged, uneasy. “It’s weird.”
“Dazai having a best friend?” Kouyou sneaked a glance towards the door. The Boss was the Boss. Dazai was Dazai. They could only look. “I understand the skepticism.”
Memories tickled his nape. “What did you mean that time?” he asked. “You said Oda Sakunosuke wasn’t the man you thought Dazai would pick as a best friend. Because of the killing thing?”
“Not exactly,” Her complicated look switched some colors up, turned some pieces around — then, it struck him, quieter than the deadliest arachnoid, brighter than thunder. “I assumed — feared — that he’d pick you.”
Wind that was not there hissed through the floor-to-ceiling windows. It tickled his nape, raising old, familiar goosebumps. Something fierce and scorching hot climbed up him, using his ribcage as holds, using his lungs as cuscinions — something he knew, because one could only look at the same mirror and feel the same thing so many times.
He wanted to wipe that idea off her mind. He didn’t know how. He didn’t know where he’d gone wrong.
“I could never,” he said.
Kouyou studied the busy crowd of the Entrance Hall; men discussing the fallen tower, men discussing the fallen. She offered a gentle smile to Madame Tanaki’s vigorous waving. “I cannot say it isn’t a relief, in some ways. Although, I suppose, Dazai…” Whatever she was thinking, she shook it away with a distracted motion. “Doesn’t matter. One might wonder what it is that you are.”
The doors of the office were long gone. He stared at the end of the hallway like he could knock on them, still — stare at Dazai’s gun, on the ground.
“His partner, I assume,” he offered.
Her next glance was the peak of astonishment — he paid it no mind, making his way to Madame Tanaki, ready and willing to let her chatter distract him from the mess that interview had been. Kouyou followed, eventually; he couldn’t quite shake her insistent gaze off of him. Couldn’t quite take what he’d said back.
Grieving, he thought.
Grieving, he tasted — how could he sit on the ground and do it again?
“Nakahara Chuuya?”
Round glasses and dossiers in hands; it took him a blink and a curled eyebrow to recognize the man appearing behind them. Sakaguchi Ango, member of the Intelligence, nodded in greeting.
“Forgive the interruption,” he said. “Boss would like to talk to you.”
•••
The moment Agent Minami sat down, she had a knife pressed to her jugular.
“You sit still and you listen,” Chuuya said, evenly, leaning his free hand on the armrest of her office chair. The skyline was a grey curtain behind the floor-to-ceiling windows, swollen with snow that refused to fall; it drowned the room in smoke-like light. In that haze, her choked breath seemed to stick. “If you call anyone,” he continued, “I will gut you like a pig. If you refuse to talk, I will gut you like a pig. If you do anything that even slightly pisses me off, I will gut you like a pig. We both know I don’t need weapons for that.”
Silence trembled between his fingers. She gulped, pressing her throat closer to the knife; her shoulders stood straight, still.
A nod. “Alright.”
Chuuya tightened his hold — just enough to draw a line of blood. When he let go of her, she coughed welty. He circled the desk and dropped on one of the guest chairs in front of it.
Muffled, frantic conversations echoed from behind the door — the Special Division HQs had been dealing with the aftermath of the Conflict with just as many sleepless nights as the Port Mafia. Some of the deeper lines of tension down the Agent’s frame had nothing to do with his arrival.
“Are you here to execute me?” Minami asked, eventually.
Dossiers and photographs occupied the length of her desk, highlighted and scribbled. His file, he thought, was probably among those. If he had believed to be on the tongue of the underworld before, he’d been soundly proven wrong. If his bounty had been high before —
“That would be fun,” Chuuya answered, crossing his ankles on the edge of the table. “I’d start with some waterboarding.”
Through controlled breaths, she waited.
“Dealing with the mess?” he wondered, nodding towards the papers. “The jewelry shop had to close for a while. We’re dealing with reconstructions. Conflicts like these are bullsh*t for sales.”
Confusion was a crease on her forehead — torturously slow, she straightened in her seat, clearing her throat. “Are you looking for a raise?”
“It’d help with the mechanic bills,” He shrugged. “The war almost blew my motorcycle up. Luckily, I know a guy.”
“A friend?”
Undeterred, Chuuya stared at her. “The father of a dead one.”
Her lips closed. She lowered her eyes to the papers.
“You know, we lost men, too. Good men,” she made sure to specify, vaguely defensive. “We did not bring the war. We were merely aware of its inevitable march.”
“My men died,” he replied. Each word was a bump against the glass — he was too far away to hear impact. He hadn’t stopped in days. “You people would have never classified them as good. Is their death somehow less worthy?”
“I’m not saying —“
“I don’t know,” His eyes searched the ceiling; not a single humid stain. Smell of money; smell of power, only the kind most people gladly accepted to be bent over by. “I don’t know if it is. I don’t think so. All I know is that your beloved information could have saved them. Or maybe not,” Pull of gravity, weight of necessity. “It’s all bullsh*t. They’re dead anyway.”
Although he did not look for understanding, he could not ignore the familiarity of her gaze. Still tense, still waiting, she softened at the edges — just enough to show days old mourning.
Chuuya wanted none of it.
“I’m here for a favor,” he said, eventually. “One you will do me.”
Caution soaked her tone. “Will I?”
“You owe me a favor.”
A curled eyebrow. “Owe you? ”
“I got rid of Shibusawa after you brought him here,” She stiffened so instantly her seat screeched. “Not to mention the Wound Reaper. You f*cked up, and I crushed the root of the problem under a skyscraper. I’d say you and your Agency owe me enough.”
Agent Minami raised her chin. “What makes you think we brought Shibusawa to Yokohama?”
“The fact that you don’t care about this city one bit,” Chuuya traced dirt lines on the wooden desk, cleaning his boots in lazy circles. “But you won’t admit sh*t to me, and I’m not here to waste time. If you want this to be more personal, then — we obliterated the Bishop’s Staff. I’m sure that must have painted a smile on your face, at least.”
Her mind traveled miles inside that small room, curving and intertwining possibilities, until she came to the only conclusion possible. Leaning back against her seat, she conceded: “What do you want?” Mock stuck to her letters. “Your freedom?
He tilted his head to the side. “My Boss will give me that, if he sees it fit.”
“He hasn’t broken our deal yet,” Minami scoffed. “Do you believe you’re worth that much?”
“That’s not for me to decide,” Chuuya replied. “But if I end up being worth an Ability Permit — you can be sure I’ll be damn efficient at what I do. Do not forget that.”
The same caution she’d worn with a knife to her neck returned; she tightened her lips, and waited.
He removed his feet from the desk, extracting a thin file from behind his jacket and throwing it onto the desk. “I won’t waste time introducing her. As one of the Dragon Heads, I don’t even want to imagine the information you have on her. But Yuan doesn’t have anything but her role — no personal documents, no home, no money, no anything. The Bishop’s Staff promised her all of that,” He tapped on the wood. “You, better than anyone, must know why she’s still in this situation.”
Minami’s eyes ran up and down her photograph, fingers tracing her lines. “You want me to legalize her, in short?”
“Yeah,” Chuuya said, pausing. “No. I want you to bring her to the light.”
Hesitation tightened her grip around the folder. “Talk.”
It was midday by the time he escaped the building — from the same exit he’d strided out of months ago, covered in blood that wasn’t his and reeling from weeks of necessary trial. No one jumped from the shadows to attack him. No one told stories in an alley.
No one came; Chuuya left.
Yuan found him near Building One, sleeves up and busying himself with the removal of the rubble and remains of the main tower. An assortment of Ability Users — the muttering men and women crawling past him, offering him a respectful nod and an occasional bow — would make the reconstruction quick and easy enough; reports assured full function of the base by the time January came around.
But bigger rocks were still bigger rocks. And he had an Ability made just for being useful.
“Hey,” Yuan said.
Her voice was still damaged from the fumes she’d inhaled after he and Kouyou had set the Church on fire. She’d cut her hair to her chin, just unruly enough that charred strands and tips had probably been to blame. It made her look older. It was still red.
Against the greyish sky, she was a vibrantly green stain: his leather jacket to blame. Seeing it around her shoulders was a complicated thing; he took it for what it was.
He laid a piece of concrete on the other side of the square, nodding. “Hey.”
Chuuya sat on the nearest block of metal. She followed. The foot of space between their thighs was no longer an uncomfortable sight — all he did was accept it. Dead bodies had to fit somewhere.
“Did you talk with the woman?” Yuan asked, as they studied the bustle of people in the plaza. Journalists were valiantly informing cameras of the current state of works. Almost no inch of the city had been left untouched by the war; Mori Corporations was more than glad to offer its funds for reconstruction.
He pulled the cuffs of his shirt. “Yeah. She agreed.”
Her breath caught.
An Ability User dug a hole through a tunnel of debris, cursing the sky. At the edges of the road, police cars stared at the mess.
“So what,” A shaky laughter left her throat; something as rawly enraged as her first words to him after a year. “What, I — I stay with the pigs and get trained to slam your ass in Ability Users’ jail? Get a medal and do paperwork? You want me to just pretend I’m like them?”
“You can do that, if you want,” Chuuya said, calmly. “But Agent Minami enrolled you in the local High School, for now.”
Yuan fell quiet, eyes widening.
Kicking rocks aside, he added: “She says you could go live with her, if you wanted. She’s got a whole penthouse — rich piece of sh*t. She has a brother your age, too, and — Well. She knows whatever the f*ck was going on with the Bishop’s Staff,” The other girls were mostly being handled by Kouyou; work, he knew, was work. “If it makes you uncomfortable, she can get you emancipated and find you a room. But she’s paying for your school career — and for the acceleration courses you’ll need to be admitted. And for whatever you’ll want to do after.”
“But,” she stuttered. “But —“
“She owes me a favor,” he reassured her. “All you have to do is collaborate. She’ll get money from the State for the great sacrifice of handling you, anyway. The rich get richer, and whatever. She’s an adult. She can help you.”
Her flinch knocked on some hollow part of his skeleton. Opening the door would mean facing the problem. He had yet to do much more than stand next to Yuan’s sobbing frame, as he delivered news and a missing corpse to her hopeful hands.
Nothing to be said. Nothing to be done.
“Chuuya,” Her voice was a murmur of wind. “Chuuya, what right do I have to this?”
He was getting tired of recalling faces he’d stuck in a shoebox — along with his bracelet, his jacket, and the knife that had torn him apart. But he’d opened it himself; had wrapped it around her shoulders and accepted to take care of a problem he couldn’t help but consider his own.
“The others wouldn’t blame you,” he lied.
Yokohama was being assembled again in front of his eyes — he thought about running up and down the roofs of Suribachi City, following orders and trying to ignore the ghosts through the streets. He felt nothing at all.“They were petty assholes, most of the time — but they’d be happy for you. Taking away good things from your own hands won’t bring anyone back.”
“But why are they dead?” The line broke. Glassy eyes stared stubbornly forward, fists tightening around the edges of her sleeves. “I don’t get it. I’ve tried to, but — why do I get good things, and they don’t even get a grave? Why are they dead, and I’m here?”
And wasn’t that the point, he thought.
Nothing to say; nothing to do.
“sh*t if I know,” Chuuya concluded. “All I know is you won’t get an answer, no matter how hard you ask. You live with it, the way you live with everything else. As selfish as it might be —“ He shrugged. “Isn’t it easier to just take it?”
Yuan’s eyes searched. He let them. Pretended not to see when she wiped a tear. Still and silent, her features firmer than they had ever been before, she offered: “Shirase was right about you.”
He paused.
“He said you’ve grown,” she clarified. Some kind of wonder overtook her; she studied the forest fabric of her first new property. “You’ve always been more grown-up than any of us. But you’ve grown,” A flicker. “No matter what we tried to do to stop you.”
Buildings and debris, mafiosi and journalists. It would take a while to wipe all the blood off the road. It would take a while for the ink-like streaks to completely disappear from the tips of his fingers — the spiral-like scars would never. But dust was never optimal; and he wasn’t quite ready to kill what was still alive. He thought about the box with what he had left of the Sheep — he dreamed of setting it on fire; keeping the ashes in a lock.
“I think he’d like it,” Yuan offered. “If you called him, I mean.”
He stared at the ground. “No.”
“Chuuya —“
“You know,” he cut her off. “I’ve killed a lot of kids.” He studied his gloves, and when the air broke his ribs — he breathed out. “I don’t know if Sheep are among them.”
Somewhere beneath the dust; beneath a cliff with a traitor’s grave and his first family’s demise; somewhere where not even gods could find redemption — Chuuya closed his eyes. He gathered the blood and the poison pooling down his side, and found he would never be able to tear his shoes off the rocks.
You owe them that, at least, he concluded. His death would serve no purpose. He’d haunt the house and be haunted in return. Only that.
Slowly — the time it took the world to exist — Yuan nodded.
“Me neither,” she whispered, lost. Her head landed somewhere on his shoulder; the texture of his old jacket against his skin did not start a fire.
This is Yuan, he thought, and perhaps never again. Perhaps they had nothing left to say to each other. Be nice to her.
“Me neither, Chuuya.”
•••
The cemetery had never been as crowded.
Frequent visitor as he was, Chuuya had never felt the vaguely distracting pull of questions, watching the floor of mourning men and women kneel in front of the endless new graves. Each picture was a bit younger than the one before; each sobbing face, he wondered if he’d been the one to kill the beloved they were wasting their tears on.
It was the lack of guilt that bothered him.
Unable to muster up tears, he vowed to send a thanking flower basket to the open sky upon his head, soaking him and the hurriedly escaping crowds to the bone.
The squad got no graves.
The graveyard was soon empty, abandoning his crossed legs to the muddy grass and the fake stones lacking the Flags’ names. Chuuya could hear thunder. Kanjis and numbers alternated in front of his eyes, curling and intertwining and stubbornly fighting the blur of the storm.
Don’t hurt yourself, Madame Tanaki had said, marching to her own ghost. They wouldn’t want that.
Well, Chuuya had wanted to say. He’d kicked and punched and destroyed the cars they’d abandoned at the street racing circuit until his body was numb. He’d spoken less than he had in years. He had no one to take out his bottomless unfairness on. There was no Verlaine around anymore. f*ck you, guys.
Not even Noguchi uttered a scoff at that.
He thought —
The first Physics book he’d stolen from under Kouyou’s nose — long before she’d begun to put them on his desk instead — had been a tedious, never ending, beautiful study on black holes. He had been curious enough to stay awake all night.
A black hole acts like an ideal black body, the book had explained, thankfully just humble enough not to use terms he would have to look up, haunted by his own pride. A black hole cannot reflect any light. They are impossible to be observed directly, partly because of their temperature. A region of space from which nothing can escape.
“Flowers,” the old woman near the gates called, near his cart. It gathered her some nasty glances. “Come get flowers!”
Too still to pay attention to the buckets of ice raining on him, Chuuya fiddled with his shoelaces. Koda would have batted his hand away. Koda would have told him to shut up, even if he hadn’t said a thing.
Sorry, he wanted to say. His lips wouldn’t move. His coat — Pianoman’s coat — was slipping down from his shoulders. I’m sorry.
Steps appeared from a distance; Arahabaki had been much quieter and then much louder — Chuuya had gained heightened senses in exchange, and an aggravating tendency to scratch his skin to raw blood. He felt each slap of the soles on the wet ground — felt it grow heavier and closer, until it stopped right in front of his hunched back.
A dome appeared upon his head, drying a column of existence right where he was seated. The tip-tap of raindrops on the black umbrella dug holes in some malleable part of his skull.
“Chuuya said no,” Dazai spoke up, at the end of the world. Barely louder than the rain; genuine in his confusion. Even the structure was meant to be perplexed; here’s the facts; why don’t I get them? “Why did you say no?”
He didn’t answer.
It took the boy a while to speak again. “It’s tragically low, even for you. I don’t like winning by default.”
Distant thunder; mud sneaking in his boots. Five graves. Eleven. A hundred. An Executive, Noguchi had told him, should save people. That’s what I think. Chuuya hadn’t found a new apartment yet. No place seemed big and small enough.
The chance to fight was right there.
Stand on his feet, push Dazai away until his pants were all filthy, scream in his face. You don’t get to decide, he would have snarled, you don’t get to be mad. You’ve never mourned a single person in your life. You’re going to die as alone and quietly as you wish, and no one will mourn you either. You’re gonna choke on that suicide book of yours and stick a bullet in your head and laugh as you waste all I’ll never have, and the Executive seat will be free again.
How’s that for a victory?, he thought.
Chuuya just needed a few breaths. He was a fast learner. He’d leave that graveyard and let it haunt the places no one else could see; he just needed a few breaths. He had never needed anything else.
“I’ll beat you some other time,” Chuuya concluded. “Any and all others.”
“That’s not —“
“Dazai,” His voice sounded disconnected to his own ears. He couldn’t tear his eyes away. He couldn’t stop thinking about black holes. “Leave.”
It thundered and it rained. Chuuya watched the chain on his hat dangle quietly in the corner of his eye, dripping rain from before an unwanted roof had come. Discomfort soaked Dazai’s final words; their lining was inevitably honest, unable to come to any other result, no matter his calculations.
Partner, he’d told Kouyou. What else?
“You told me to wait for you.”
A smashed microscope on the floor; the surge of understanding; the motorcycle he’d left in Noguchi’s father’s hands, still keeping his son a secret. Wait for me. Perhaps Hirotsu had told him.
Your friends are dead, Shibusawa had said, easily.
I’m sorry, Koda had sighed. Just don’t die, he’d replied. As if it was that easy. Just don’t die. Just don’t die. Not you too.
[Verlaine hadn’t needed to say a thing. He’d just opened his car truck, and —]
It thundered and it rained. Do you think you know rage?, Kouyou had asked. Shielded by an umbrella and a bandaged fool, Chuuya didn’t move — for a few breaths only. So little, they wouldn’t change a thing.
•••
[“You’re Glasses Guy,” Chuuya noted, as the Intelligence member led him to Mori’s temporary office. “Dazai’s buddy number two.”
“We drink together, sometimes,” he replied, hurriedly, staring pointedly forward. “My name is Sakaguchi Ango. I don’t think we’ve met before.”
“Have we?”
The rigid set of his shoulders told him he’d recognized the genuine question — Chuuya couldn’t shake the feeling of familiarity off his bones. Perhaps the library. Perhaps the archive. Perhaps —
“I think I would remember meeting the boy perched on every tongue of the underground,” he replied, pushing his glasses up his nose. The echo dissolved; he was left with nothing but empty hands, and the grim reminder of belated fame. “One of the two, anyway. Follow me. Boss is waiting.”
Mori’s temporary office was a less grand, less lived-in version of the well known and feared attic of Building One. Floor-to-ceiling windows and golden-lined velvet couches stood unchanged; but the never ending shelves of books — an assortment of medical texts, literature, and children coloring books — were nowhere to be found.
Unframed by that somewhat intimidating background, the Boss looked less like a statue bestowed with convenient — whether fair or unfair — judgment; more like a man who ruled the city in all the ways that mattered, still working his shoulders under the new weight.
Five hundred billion yens and no other Moon around any longer were doubtlessly a heavier crown. Mori’s glee was evident. His satiated eyes even more.
“Thank you, Sakaguchi,” he nodded, as the archivist bowed. “Leave us alone.”
Elise laid on her stomach on top of his desk, humming as she dangled her legs, focused on some probably relevant report she was dragging her crayons all over. Over the gentle, young lines of her silhouette, were the Boss’ intertwined hands, and the unwavering gaze he laid on him.
Chuuya stayed bowed, hat in his hands. He waited.
“Then,” the man started. His smile was teasing. It stopped at the edge of his lips, unfinished carvings; his gaze was focused. “Did you enjoy Social Services Day?”
He made a face. “Necessary business, sir.”
A huff of laughter. “Stand up, Chuuya. You did good. I apologize for the theatrics of it all.”
Mori patted Elise’s head, shaking his own, vaguely exasperated. “Coming to power taught me that most illegitimate activities only survive by playing clean in the fields’ they can afford to. I doubt the Government will ever bring the police to our doorsteps, but they might very well incriminate me for abuse and exploitation of minors,” His grin was pure camaraderie; Elise giggled. “That wouldn’t be ideal, would it?”
“No, sir.”
“Being infantilized can’t have been fun. Not for the most talked-about Ability User in Yokohama,” he noted. “Kouyou tells me they made some — insensitive comments.”
“Governmental officials have mouths to sh*t and asses to sit,” Chuuya quoted, tonelessly. At the man’s face, he cleared his throat. “It’s fine. Suribachi way of saying.”
“Rintarou said I cannot use those words,” Elise mumbled, dragging a violent red line down her drawing. “He says it’s not ladylike. That’s not fair at all,” She glanced critically at him. “Chuuya. Move closer to the light.”
“I especially wish to apologize for Dazai’s behavior.”
His head snapped up.
Mori’s entire self was apologetic. From the vaguely embarrassed tilt of his mouth, to his brushing-off motions; a parent, in the simplest way, paying for his son’s attempts to put the family name through the mud. He wondered, for the first time, if he had something like Kouyou’s fingers tapping her under-chin. Silent but necessary; unjust — for two people who only looked like children, but obeyed all the same.
“He’s been under a lot of stress, lately,” he justified. “His mind was certainly pivotal in this conflict. And right when the war ends, he loses that beloved pet of his. He didn’t look much bothered by the loss, truly — but I know him. He was always very attached to his creatures.”
It took Chuuya too long to understand. “Kazuko is dead?”
“Unfortunately,” Mori sighed. “She escaped Dazai’s home while he was busy, and some retreating troops from Takasekai cut her body up. Purely sad*stic, as far as I managed to understand. Dazai didn’t care much, but he was fixated on avenging the thing, no matter his own wounds,” Elise muttered something about stupidity; the ex-doctor smiled. “I had to calm him down, before he did something drastic. Forgive me, if you felt uninformed. I assumed, close as the two of you are, that he might have explained that he liked to experiment by mixing medicines. He has a particular fixation on muscle relaxants.”
His brain had been dumped in a cold lake; endless hours spent subjecting himself to a boa constrictor’s praises, endless bite marks on his calves, the unsettling joyfulness the boy seemed to show whenever that unconventional pet of his was mentioned — Chuuya couldn’t understand.
Dazai didn’t care much.
“And that’s alright?” he asked, uncertain.
Mori tilted his head to the side. “I told you a long time ago, did I not? Dazai is not stable.”
He thought of his body floating in the river; the distant light his eyes would get, sometimes, when he was pulled out. The frustration of it. “And just letting him try and try again to die is supposed to solve the problem?”
“If it keeps him alive, Chuuya,” the man replied, firm, oxymoronic — something else; something he wasn’t allowed to look in the eyes, “Anything is worth a try.”
He didn’t look alive, he didn’t say. He was breathing. Is that enough for all of you?
“But enough about him,” Mori leaned back on his seat, looking up at him with his sincerest smile yet. “Say, Chuuya. Are you ready to gain access to our investigations about your past?”
Sudden and unwanted, he remembered France.
Charleville-Mézières; the dusty furniture and ancient ceiling of a home he had haunted in the way of ghosts, too sagged with godlikeness not to make the floor creak — too nauseous with guilt, blood-food, and the poisons Mori had given him, to sleep soundly in the pushed-together beds. He had been sent to France to evaluate his abilities in the syndicate’s foreign deals; he had been sent to France because the high-floors needed more time to decide where their more-powerful-than-predicted tassel would fit.
He had come back, and he had sunk his head in the stream for an ounce of power in the city he wanted to be in — because if he didn’t care for answers any longer, he might as well care for a seat in the highest floors of Yokohama. If he couldn’t even buy furniture for his own apartment, he might as well vindicate a boy eating co*ckroaches and vomit, and drown in more than he would ever need. Because if he wasn’t real, he might as well be useful.
More, Arahabaki insisted, and he’d misunderstood him everyday of his life, had he not?
More.
“I don’t want it,” his lips carved in the air. Something around his rib cage shifted; tightened and released — and he was breathing, for the first time since he’d kneeled on another’s office floor, and sworn his life away again. “The Executive position. I don’t want it.”
Mori’s bewilderment was genuine enough to startle Elise, too; the sound of crayons on paper was cut short. “You don’t — want it?”
He searched for words. Actions were the one language no unstable family had ever needed to teach him; he’d known killing was a clear alphabet before he’d known what the sun was. Words were gloves on his hands, goosebumps on the decayed skin of his arms; Chuuya wished he could have read out whatever code had supposedly made him and have everyone understand.
“I don’t want to be given power,” he said, eventually, slow and careful, weighing each sound on the tip of his tongue, “I don’t want to be given power, only because I’m powerful.”
A flash passed on the Boss’ face — without a blink, Elise disappeared.
“I want to deserve it,” he added, frowning at the floor. Perhaps it wasn’t always rage, that violent shake in his veins — perhaps it was unmalicious stubbornness; perhaps it didn’t want him as dead as he had long believed. “We agreed I was — unfit to rule, when I first joined the Port Mafia. I have my faults for the Sheep’s end. But I never took the crown for myself. I had just been too powerful for anyone else to dare take it away.”
“I fought for Yokohama. I fought for the organization, and for my friends, and for myself. My strength shouldn’t steal someone’s spot,” Chuuya set his jaw. “An Executive should save people. I did many things, during this war — but I did not save. Being a soldier is easy enough. Being a leader is — something else. Something I haven’t learned yet.”
Mori studied him. He couldn’t decipher his face; he dropped his head down, huffing another laugh — as if he had expected nothing less; perhaps infinitely more.
“Chuuya,” the ex-doctor declared. “You will be given more power, whether you want it or not.”
He waited, shoulders straight.
“Neither you or Dazai seem to understand the mark the two of you left, during this conflict,” he continued. “I understand. You have both been busy. But I have ears everywhere this city dares to grow, and I know what they are saying,” His seat did not screech when he stood; he moved to the front of the desk, pensive and hungry. “You have, quite literally, captivated Yokohama.”
“There is not one, one, criminal — professional assassins and petty thieves alike — or organization, who isn’t whispering about you,” Pride overflowed from his lips; Chuuya could see it drip on the floor, red and black, black, black. “They warn their men. They tell stories about the god who annihilated an entire organization in one go, and the prodigy who seemed to have predicted this entire conflict from its first day. The shadows of the Port Mafia; never seen, never unsuccessful.”
Chuuya couldn’t speak.
“I visited the Infirmary, at the beginning of the week,” Mori said. “I had dozens of men demand you were rewarded for your efforts. Demand to be put under your command. You are as much of a myth as your origins are, and men want to touch the inhuman. It’s the way the underground has always worked. You want to deserve power? That is certainly noble. But you already have it, Chuuya. And I cannot take it away, even without a title.”
His body was ablaze. Pride, he thought. Terror. Vindication; the feeling of holding the city he’d bled for in his palm, and knowing few would be strong enough to dare —
“I had a title, in the Sheep,” Chuuya replied. “You called it undeserved, sir. Perhaps I can’t stop them all from talking — But I can learn. I can grow. I can —” He cleared his throat. “Shut less coffins, the next time danger comes.”
The man leaned against his desk, nodding. “Very well, then,” he concluded. His expression softened, imperceptibly. “For whatever it might matter, Chuuya. You lost the competition.”
He stilled.
His next smile was barely there; he reminded him, for some reason, of Virgil’s quiet seriousness — explaining academic concepts he had never learned in the slums. “There is one thing that separates you from every other man in this organization,” the Boss explained. “Not your Ability. Not Arahabaki. Not your story. It’s your loyalty.” He reached forward; laid a hand on his shoulder. “Unwavering and undefeated. You would tear your limbs to enclose Yokohama in a safety net, if you could. You’re loyal to the ground that raised you.”
“You were loyal to the Sheep, who were lucky enough to deserve it,” he went on. “So did the Flags, who you defeated your own brother for. You’re loyal to Kouyou, for taking you as one of her own. You were loyal to your squad, for standing next to you, even as most men of the syndicate refused to look you in the eyes. You’re loyal to Kajii, who you brought here. To Hirotsu, to Madame Tanaki — even to Q, at times. To me. You’re as devoted to Dazai as he is to you.”
Devoted, he thought. What a terrible word. Wasn’t he supposed to be the divine one? Wasn’t this supposed to be temporary?
“I’m not —“ he tried to interrupt.
“Do not fight me on this. Loyalty is inestimable,” Mori swore. “But only when it is given to something greater than people, as well. You lost many faithful friends. Should every person in this organization who you deem worthy of this loyalty of yours die — what would you do? What choice would you make?”
The hand on his shoulder slipped down; unmistakable, it pressed between his collarbones — where his tattoo rested. “Is the Port Mafia what you would die for, or are its people?”
Chuuya found he didn’t know.
Outside the windows, the sun disappeared underneath the waves, drowning the room in crimson and gold.
The Boss sighed. He fixed his coat around his shoulders; offered him a much less intense expression. “We’ll discuss more on this matter, anyway. The new year is coming. New responsibilities will come with it,” The man put his hat on top of his head; deja vu almost suffocated him. “For now, you should rest. And, maybe — have someone at the Infirmary check if those Corruption wounds of yours are healing correctly.”
His jaw brushed the floor. “But —“
“Rescinded privileges are — no longer rescinded,” Mori winked. “You boys did a good job. You are more than welcome — required, actually — to come to me, should this unplanned usage of Corruption cause you any sort of side effects. We had vowed to let you rest a little longer, but — Well. The war is over.”
He bowed. There wasn’t much else to do.
“And Chuuya?” Mori called, once he had reached the door.
He turned to look at him. His head was tilted to the side, pensive.
“No need to worry. You will not be punished for the medical consultation you received after the Reaper’s attack. It wasn’t your choice, after all,” A chuckle; Elise, he noticed, had reappeared. She waved her finished drawing at him; himself, covered in bleeding Corruption marks. “Dazai has already been — disciplined, for bringing you to that Oda Sakunosuke of his. No need to worry,”
It hadn’t been his intention, Chuuya thought. Something about it sounded wrong. Something about it sounded unfair. Kazuko, he thought, nonsensically. What about —
A closing nod. Mori’s scarf brushed the dusty floor; Building Two could have used a sweep. “I beg you to forgive him, once again,” he sighed. “That boy truly forgets himself, sometimes.”]
•••
Festivities came with little care for a city still struggling to climb to its feet.
It was a mixture of discomfort and delight. Between dazzling lights hastily thrown over every crack and wreck, and the Christmas decorations turning each road in a blinding ray of moonlight — most would have been hard-pressed to find every hospital in Yokohama was still filled to the brim. Choirs muffled the sound of underpaid workers; the smell of sweets and cotton was borderline nauseating.
Chuuya had always liked the end of the year.
“The Sheep knew when to leave me alone,” he narrated, bending to pick up a fallen frame from the floor. Albatross’ apartment had been left a mess after the intrusion — glass shards and ripped curtains and dangling posters. He had taken Ōmu off the floor already; had thrown his ashes in Albatross’ favorite vehicle dumping site. “But I would still wait for them to be asleep to leave.”
He would circle their perimeter like a starved beast — sure there would be no fools brave enough or brave ones foolish enough to dare, but unable to risk it all. “I’d find the tallest mountain of sh*t and rubbles in Suribachi, even if it was filled with so much snow I would freeze my ass off — and I would sit and watch the Christmas lights.”
“Not that there were any in Suribachi,” He kicked the side of a couch, pushing it back to its original place — floated broken cutlery off the counter with a touch. The lights had overfilled Yokohama with borderline tackiness — too pretty to grimace at. An unreachable skyline; a tasteless joke at the expense of a kid who could fly — just not quite that far.
“Some of the older kids tried to get me to believe in Santa,” Chuuya scoffed. Lippman’s eyes stared back, grinning. “I didn’t even have the face to tell them I had no idea of who he was.”
One of the windows creaked, pushed open by the winter wind. He nudged some glass with his sock; sat down a few inches off the floor, crossing his legs. Tsuchiya’s eyepatch was wrapped around his wrist; he pulled at it, lithe.
Last December, the Flags had dragged him to some precocious Christmas Festival. They had refused to stop waddling around until their feet were numb and he couldn’t see straight. They’d all made him a gift — except Lippman, who had finally dropped the Nakahara, after months of his snarls.
We’re doing this again, Albatross had warned him, dragging him home on unstable feet, So get ready. As soon as New Year comes around! Koda had begged them to join him and his brother to go witness the fireworks on Mount Omaru. Chuuya can finally experience being tall, Kenta had sighed.
Then they’d been dead.
A knock came on the ajar door.
“Merry Christmas,” Hirotsu said, peeking in. His scarf had been substituted by a green one; he offered no judgemental gaze to the chaos of the room — instead, he studied the space between the ground and his legs. “That is quite the nice trick.”
“You should see me when it rains,” Chuuya replied, rolling glass under his index. “You’ve got some face showing up here.”
“Me or you?”
He let the shard fall. Hugged his shoulders in; tilted his head to study the picture stuck to the kitchenette. Soft steps grew sharper; the sound of ruins being crunched under Hirotsu’s foot, as he picked up his abandoned broom for no real aim. The warmth of his body settled behind his back — never touching; but present. He reminded Chuuya of the makeshift canopies in Suribachi City.
“Chuuya,” the Commander said, gentle in that gruff way of his. “He won’t let you stay here.”
One of the shards had dug a small hole on the middle finger of his glove; he poked it.
“Chuuya.”
“I’m not staying,” he lied. “I know. Tanaki gave me a pamphlet of free apartments in our territory. She wants me to get a penthouse.”
She had been there with him, locked in the bathrooms of Building One, with nothing but a pair of scissors and a lighter in her hands. She had let him pick the strand he wanted to burn; Chuuya had smelled the ash in his hair for hours. Why do you think we do this?, he had asked her.
Her shrug had been vacant. The strand of hair in the back of her skull hadn’t regrown yet; the tips still looked tortorously black, in the light. Isn’t doing nothing worse?
His scoff must have been louder than he had predicted; because a small wave of amusem*nt curled at the man’s feet. “Seems a bit much for your taste.”
“Yeah, well,” Chuuya shrugged. She had been rather enthusiastic about it; had pressed her side against his under her desk with the papers in hands, like there was nothing to fear. Not afraid I’ll explode?, he had wanted to ask. But almost nobody had time to fear him, these days — they were too busy mourning those he had killed. It was only him who could hear the incessant beep. “Maybe I need better taste.”
The man’s pause lasted a bit too long. He cleared his voice; it sounded awkward.
“You know,” he started. His tone had him blinking. “Kajii tells me the Old World has some truly nice drinks to its name.”
Chuuya stared.
“I’m just saying — should you ever need a drinking buddy, I would greatly —“
“Gramps,” he cut him off, speechless. “Put yourself out of your misery.”
The Commander’s shoulders sagged with relief. “Very well.”
He frowned at the ground. “I know,” he muttered, very low.
“I beg your —“
“I said I know,” Chuuya said, a bit too fast. The man’s eye was still a bit scarred, behind the monocle — all of him was a tad too thin. Chuuya had never even seen him sleep, before the accident. He met his gaze with defiance; with acceptance. “I know, Hirotsu. Of course I do.”
The man was the one to stare.
He snapped his gaze back to the floor; stood up, and threw the spare broom into his arms. “Get that look off your face and help me clean up.”
•••
Christmas was spent at Kouyou’s mansion, twirling wine in one of her tall glasses and losing his voice in a screaming match against Kajii.
“Won’t Miranda miss you?” he asked Hirotsu.
Yuan had sighed about Christmas being a romantic holiday every year since they’d met; this one in particular, he had watched her banter with Agent Minami in front of the woman’s apartment, hands full of mochi and her face slowly, slowly, melting. He hadn’t said anything. Shirase hadn’t called. Adam had sent another pop-up postcard.
My information tells me some religions believe this festivity to be the birth of a creator, he’d written. Do you know what androids call their creator? Da-ta.
“She can survive a few hours,” the man replied, easily. “She is very independent."
They played Igo until the choirs outside got too tired to sing, and Kajii drunkenly offered him one of his lemon bombs as a present. Madame Tanaki kept him on the phone for more than an hour. Kouyou kissed his forehead before he could leave; he felt himself blush to the tips of his ears, and dropped some too-obvious scoffs about it.
Chuuya was too drunk to even think. It wasn’t until he landed on the guest bed Kouyou had reserved for him, that he found himself wondering what demons did for the holidays.
“Hey,” he muttered, when Kajii threw his door open to scream his good nights. “Where do you bury snakes?”
Very confusedly, he told him he did not know.
Works at Building One were still on — the journalists in the area lowered in number day after day, though. TV News slowly began to change their first segments; protests in front of the Special Division HQs came to an end with eerie ease. Few people bothered being courageous under shining Christmas trees. Yokohama wasn’t gentle enough not to threaten itself into normality.
He thought he should have been more surprised about how quickly the city seemed to forget the months of hell; Mori shrugged, when he admitted it to him.
“What else should they do?” he questioned.
Given the circ*mstances, it was decided the annual New Year’s Eve party would be hosted in Building Two instead. The event was meant to fix a common problem throughout the organization: the solitude most of its members experienced on such a family-like festivity. A bit too nice for a criminal organization — a show of trust and welcome, from the Boss most had hated, at first.
Wrapped in the maroon kimono Kouyou had thrown his way before he could escape, Chuuya stared at the hastily hung pictures on the hallway, pretending the laughter from behind the ballroom doors did not shake the ground.
He’s grieving, he had heard both Kouyou and Tanaki insist, again and again, to every voice wondering about his unusual quietness. The holidays are complicated.
The pictures had been saved, he assumed — or Mori owed multiple copies. Severe and slightly malicious faces, straight shoulders — the something in their eyes that told the thing in his veins they knew blood intimately.
The Colonel’s face was solemn. It hadn’t been visible in the picture of his corpse.
The nearest of them, almost eye level, was all cracked glass and slightly blurred outlines — ruined by the shivers. The golden plaque on the frame read: Randou.
At the bottom — a waiting frame.
“There you are,” Dazai exclaimed, appearing from the end of the hallway. “I thought I had smelled dog and kadomatsu up the stairs.”
Two rows of suited men followed him; he didn’t recognize anyone from the Secret Force.
“You can go,” he told them, as he skipped to him. His kimono looked offensively expensive, and Chuuya didn’t doubt it was — in shades of cobalt and grey, it gave him and his bandages a ghostly appearance; right out of Rin’s horror stories. “Do you need to check the air I breathe? How will I ever commit a peaceful suicide, with you ninjas stalking me?”
“Boss’ orders, Executive Dazai,” the woman at the front replied, undeterred. She bowed. “You will find us inside.” A respectful nod was directed to Chuuya’s own way. “Vice-Executive Nakahara.”
He thought about correcting her. He wouldn’t know with what, though.
Dazai’s sigh was endless. The moment the unwanted crowd disappeared, all childish obnoxiousness slid down his face like melted wax; the thing left under it made Chuuya more uncomfortable than he was willing to admit.
Not honesty. Never that. But —
“I thought I’d smelled dead fish and bullsh*t,” Chuuya replied, tonelessly. “But now that you’re here, the self-satisfaction has muffled everything else.”
Dazai hummed. His pupils had abandoned their overtaking quest, sometime during those last few weeks of December; but color had yet to return to his cheeks. He sneaked a glance at the photographs; seemed to change his mind about commenting. “No hat,” he noticed, instead. “Did you hit your head hard enough to heal?”
“Ane-san said it would clash,” he replied. “f*ck you.”
“Did you burn a strand yet?”
Defensiveness stiffened his shoulders. “It’s none of your business.”
“You’re one for customs,” Dazai said, as if he hadn’t heard a thing. “Personally, I never got this one in particular. How are you meant to decide who’s worth the flame, anyway? The Port Mafia was deprived of many men. You might be out of hair too soon, have you thought about that?”
His teeth clenched so tightly he almost bit his tongue off. “I’m not responsible for every corpse on this earth.”
“Only you who doesn’t know it.”
“‘You makin’ shoes out of Kazuko, or just using her body as a low-cost hanging rope?”
Muffled laughter appeared from behind the doors; a cheer and a toast, as some kind of classical music managed to make even the walls tremble. They stared at each other. Neither one of their kimonos was unfit — tailored to the skeleton. Nothing more useless than the knives hidden underneath the robes.
Wordlessly, Dazai offered his hands, palms up.
I’ll kill him, he recalled. Once there is no need for a cage. I’ll kill him.
Arahabaki did not answer, because he could not answer — because he wouldn’t care to, anyway. Sorry, he couldn’t say — he wouldn’t say it either. Kazuko was no matter at all, according to Mori. Sorry, I know she was something. Sorry, I never understood what.
He removed his gloves with his teeth, and laid his hands on his waiting palms. “Ain’t you gonna get a second tattoo or something, anyway?” he asked, planting his feet on the ground not to turn that small concession to gravity — not gravity — into something greater. “Executives’ inks are different.”
“A detail is added, yes,” Dazai studied the bluish paths up his knuckles, searching for black roads he did not find. “Nothing much. Nothing that could kill me, unfortunately,” Usual glee — the underline of whatever had been rotting him inside for so long, he couldn’t remember when it had started. “On that matter. You still owe me —“
His head pounded.“If this is about that now I can boss you around sh*t —“
“Chibi, where’s your heart?”
“ — I will gladly remind the nose I made bleed just a week ago of why you’re not allowed to be a piece of f*ck about this —“
The doors slipped open. Rose-pink and red appeared from the slot; Kouyou’s eyes fell on their joint hands, cutting off the words visibly perched on top of her lips.
They jumped back as if burned.
“Ane-san,” Chuuya snapped.
“Boys,” she offered. One of her eyebrows was dead set on brushing her hairline — hiding a strange expression behind a fan as decorated as she was, she nodded. She hadn’t brought a jacket; he made a mental note to steal one for her. “You’re awaited. Come in.”
Fresh pine branches, bamboo decorations, straw ropes, and kagami mochi; the explosion of colors and trinkets in the ballroom pressed against his eyes like fireworks. Maroon curtains hid fogged up windows — the chandeliers were shinier than they’d ever been, raining golden light on the long tables filled with food dividing the room in two.
A small classical band was playing, in the far corner of the room, easily ignored by the crowd of gut-wrenchingly richly dressed people — mafiosi, associates, investors, and families; dripping in diamonds and gems and the softest fabrics for the most elaborate traditional clothing.
At the dead center of the central table, pierced by a spear of sorts, standing tall enough for every guest to see as it bleed recently-dried blood on the cloth — was the Boss of the Bishop’s Staff’s head.
“How tacky,” Dazai commented, not bothering with lowering his voice. “Hatrack, remind me not to eat any dessert.”
“So they did kill him, eventually,” Chuuya replied, observing the brutally torn apart caves where his eyeballs had once been. Not one of the silent waiters gave more than a glance; some of the younger members ogled it with smirking scoffs, like children with a stuck fly. “‘Thought Kouyou might just drag it out longer.”
“Even her sadism knows bounds. How surprising,” the boy replied, but it soon blurred off somewhere, sometime — as every head in the ballroom realized who was standing there.
Silence did not fall.
It would have been distasteful. The swarm of sounds lowered to a pitiful volume, dragged down by the falling smiles of the guest’s faces — but only for a blink, before it climbed to its most normal semblance. Decay and torture on the table, he considered, and fear settles on the brats in festive kimonos?
Decapitated heads could not kill, was the immediate reminder. And they had spent the last few months proving just how willing they were to. Their eyes told him they knew.
He stuck his hands in his obi, pretending it would count as pockets. “Boring,” he huffed.
Then, he stalked towards the refreshments.
Stuck between preening and rolling his eyes when people parted and flinched and offered his bows, he felt Dazai’s presence like a shadow. “Are you not close enough to a god to appreciate worship?” he asked, stealing his Champagne glass from his hand the moment it was in it. Executive Dazai echoed from the widening circle around them.
Chuuya took his glass back after a sip. “Are you?”
Celebration moved forward — music and drinks and talks of victory, as the streets outside the window shone with belated Christmas lights; the head stayed in the eye of the storm. At one point, Ace fed it grapes.
Every mouth in the room laughed.
“Bet they wouldn’t, if we did that,” Dazai said.
They bet some more — somehow, Chuuya ended up being the one to do it. Predictably enough, wide eyes and steps back welcomed his fingers on the lifeless flesh. They will line up to light your cigarette, Kouyou had said. As the crowd offered charmed, terrified approval for his every move, he thought he understood.
Hirotsu had officially begun a search for two co-commanders for the Black Lizards; he made sure to offer a place to Chuuya, addressing him as Vice-Executive with the clear expectation of a refusal. Madame Tanaki was dealing with the aftermath of her divorce; she was thinking of getting herself a dog, or perhaps a firearm of sorts — whatever would guard her new mansion better.
Kajii was muttering under his breath; something about these parties being too similar to his parents’ events. Kouyou, when she floated their way, admitted to be wasting most of her days away on relocating the Bishop’s Staff’s women and their children. Mori would want either; she would give them to him.
As an endless violin piece came to an end, small arms wrapped around his legs.
“Nii-san,” Q said.
The smell of blood was so thick it made his head swarm. Their kimono hung off their shoulders, sweeping the ground with its greyish hems. The hat was still in place — their hand tight around the edge of Elise’s unchangeable red dress.
“I did not see you.”
He knew they didn’t mean now.
“‘Lise!” Dazai exclaimed, reappearing from whatever horror story he had been cheerfully offering to the nearest teeth-trembling pair. He dug some envelopes from the back of his kimono, crouching in front of her. “How repulsive you look. Did Mori buy you another dress, after you murdered the boss of the Bishop’s Staff?”
She humpf-ed. “Two of them, actually. You still owe me for throwing up on my dolls.”
“Oh, that,” He shook his head. “Kill me, and I’ll make it up for you.”
Some more dances began; some more toasts. Some Black Lizards began peeling away pieces of skin from the face of the room’s sacrificial lamb. Perhaps it was necessary; perhaps it was too much, asking a crowd of men who lived off blood to stand in a room and play pretend for all those hours without something to rage over.
You know, he had heard two men whisper, dead eyed and white-smiling. I almost miss the conflict.
Chuuya let them fade in the corner of his eye; Q was still staring up at him.
“Sorry, kid,” he said, at last. A grave, a face; why wasn’t Koda with you; what were the last words he said; why did you kill our own men and then cried about Hell? “I’ve been busy. I hear Mori might give you a new room, though. Very soon.”
The idea made him uncomfortable — hypocritical to the bone.
Because he didn’t want it — the violence, the blood — he told himself. And Q didn’t either — someone who cried about their own sins so deeply couldn’t. But they enjoyed it as it happened; left the sorrow for the aftermath and the corpses.
Don’t we?, Arahabaki scratched.
“Are you scared?”
He was startled. “Excuse me?”
“Are you scared?” Q insisted, gripping his clothes. It didn’t appear as if the possibility tormented them. “Your friend was. I’m sorry he’s like the corpses. It wasn’t me,” Their lips trembled; for a moment, their intensity seemed too wide for the room. “It wasn’t me. I promise. Promise.”
“Don’t talk about him,” Chuuya ordered, abrupt and rude enough to make them recoil. “Don’t —“
“And Q, you too!”
Bandaged fingers appeared; Dazai kneeled in front of them, shoving another envelope in their pale hands, and closing them around it.
“Here’s your present,” he explained. “New Year is a child’s paradise — that’s what Odasaku said. We don’t get gifts. But you do! Isn’t that great? I apologize for the lack of viscera and men on the border of insanity,” His smile took a sharper turn. “We all know how much you like those.”
“Hey,” Elise whined. “These are empty!”
It didn’t take Q long to notice the same; Dazai gleefully let the two children lament the deception as he snickered, before holding out a hand to Chuuya. He blinked.
“What?” he protested. “I’m not your wallet.”
“Didn’t you grow up around poor, sad, little orphans?” the other hissed. “Where’s your soul? Where’s the goodness of heart those mafiosi keep talking about? Or are you that irrelevant your pay can’t afford some New Year’s presents?”
“You,” Chuuya breathed. “You bandaged bitch, you don’t have the money either —“
He stood up, quick enough to startle both children. “You lost the last Motor Race round.”
He stared.
He slapped some yen on his palm.
“Come on, stop crying,” Dazai chanted, patting the kids’ heads, offering them the money. “It was just a prank! It made everything funnier, right? I wouldn’t have left you without money on New Year. What am I, a monster?”
Elise kicked her feet. “Yes!”
“Vile,” he muttered, crossing his arms to his chest. “I knew Chuuya had the money, obviously,” With a poisonous glance his way, as cruel as every remark about his burned hair, he added: “We’re partners, haven’t you heard?”
Chuuya opened his mouth, unsure of what to say. Gloved fingers laid on his shoulders; Mori’s voice shook his chest, rumbling against his spine with a little too much joy. “I believe everyone in the underworld of Yokohama has, by now, Dazai. I hear they even gave you two a name.”
Every motion of his face stilled.
“What a town of gossipers,” he lamented, less than a note of piano later. Mistake was written all over his frame, bright and frantic, insulting its own master. “First the bedtime stories, now the workplace relationship speculations? This city’s obsession with two children could be considered scandalous, in another world,” Dazai tilted his head to the side; he smiled. “Right, Mori?”
The grip on his shoulders did not tighten, did not widen. Mori chuckled. “It’s not children it’s obsessing over. Yokohama appreciates those who are willing to destroy it in the name of its protection, I assume.”
“Certainly,” the boy agreed.
Every dance, every toast, every laughter — there came the epicenter. There came the man who might put another head on the table, if someone got the choreography wrong. He was standing proud and satiated with the best dancing monkeys of the evening — Chuuya knew the gazes he felt had nothing to do with Arahabaki.
“Yokohama could stand some f*cking minding its business,” Chuuya muttered.
The threads of tension between the doctor and the boy shattered.
Another chuckle. Something sharp pressed against his clavicles; his eyes settled on the old-style camera hanging from the man’s neck.
“Oh, this,” Mori said. Elise was pulling at the purple fabric of his kimono, whining about some gift. “Our new Executive will need a picture for the wall. Tradition wants the Boss to take care of the formalities. Perhaps we can worry about it once this little party is over?”
Dazai stared at the camera. “I suppose.”
“Wonderful. May I have your attention?” Mori raised his Sake glass and his voice, calling every eye in the room to himself. Music fell quiet; he smiled amiably at his guests, eyes not pausing when they traced the head on the table. “I propose a toast,” he called, “For our new Executive. A wish of prosperity, and of good work. Raise your cups, would you?”
A hundred shiny glasses shone underneath the chandeliers, liquid brimming in the same shade as blood, upon the carefully blank faces of every high-name in the syndicate. Belatedly, Chuuya realized they were standing at the dead center of the room, surrounded by no one and nothing.
The head was still on the table. Someone had scribbled a kanji on his face, with something that might have been spit or might have been champagne.
Retaliation; always.
“Too kind,” Dazai said, eyes of steel.
Mori’s smile softened.
“And to his partner!”
A murmur went through the crowd. Head snapping up, Chuuya frowned, searching the faces for the parted lips to blame — the only thing that welcomed him were the raising voices. The waves at the port; the faraway lighting — it grew slow and untouched, syllable after syllable, until it was too loud to be understood and too attached to the glasses to be taken back.
It took him eons to shape the words.
“To Double Black!”
“To Double Black!”
Applause and cheers rained down on them — and he was seated on the muddy grass of a cemetery, he was stumbling at the very end of a crater to be burned alive, he was flying on the wing of an airplane with a man to kill and the world under his feet. He had wanted this.
For a speck of a second — he looked into Mori’s eyes before the doctor could look at him.
“Soukoku?” echoed the only other voice in miles, just quiet enough to beat the roar of the crowd. “What a tacky name.”
Clapping hands and artificial smiles and terrified eyes. Why did he look like that? He nodded. “Bet they’ll forget about it in a week.”
“No,” Dazai replied. “I don’t think so.”
A flash went off.
He cursed under his breath, scrubbing his eyes. When his vision managed to overcome the blurriness, he saw Mori’s humming smile — perfectly normal; perfectly undisturbed at the interruption; why had he looked like that? — as he waved a photograph around to make it develop fully. When he met their disconnected gazes, he winked.
“One or two pictures will not make much of a difference,” he said. “Dazai can keep you company on the wall, until you earn your own Executive seat. Right, Chuuya?”
He looked at the piece of paper and longed, agonizingly and nonsensically and with a ferocity he could barely explain to himself, to tear it into pieces. Someone threw a grape onto the head. Celebration went on, and the guests gulped the blood — Port Mafia black, always and anyway, only because it was theirs — in their mouths.
He enjoyed fame until the flattery took the cadence of Virgil’s comedic novellas.
He thought Lippman would have criticized the fireworks he could see lit up the sky behind the windows. He thought about asking where the secret Executive was spending his New Year. He thought about questioning who had come up with a name like Double Black; whether it was someone they had torn apart or ignored. He thought about Verlaine — wondered if he’d put Dazai among his killing list, were he to come to drag Chuuya away from his home now.
That partner of yours, Noguchi had spat out, once. Koda had been plotting to kill him. He would have failed.
”To Double Black!”some drunken voice insisted, belatedly.
Chuuya hadn’t stumbled on his feet since he was eight years old. He walked out of the room without a tremor in his calves; without breathing.
Before his lungs could maim him for it, he was inside the elevator.
There was nothing to think about — there was no hypnotizing, endless hum; no silver at the corner of his vision; not a sign of Dante’s voice. He had either been born into a cage or locked into it — it had been glass and it had been darkness and it had been all. He spread his palms on the glass doors as they closed, crystallized ice muffled by his gloves and sinking inside his veins all the same. His reflection was the same as it had ever been — was him but wasn’t; was bleeding and was grinning and was sporting an ember eye set on fire. He wondered if at least one member of the squad had been alive to see him rage — if their last movement had been to flinch. If they had tried to call him.
He sat on the floor.
Spine against the wall — whether the rattling feeling came from his bones, or from the metallic wires pulling the elevator up. The lights outside spun and twirled, as far as they had been from the mountains of trash of Suribachi City.
He didn’t move when the doors opened. He knew the sound of the heels pausing on the glass — the smell of her perfume; the way she fit against him when she dropped next to him.
Tanaki didn’t speak as they climbed the sky. He sunk his nails into his calves. There was no liquid to drown into — there were no blinking numbers to follow with his eyes, counting and counting until he fell asleep or simply didn’t remember. No accusing mirrors; no lab coats who might have put his parts together or torn them apart.
Impostor, Dante’s voice swore. Impostor.
Chuuya stared forward. Sunk his nails in his calves. Waited. He had destroyed that tank; he had killed the only other who knew how it felt. He had burned a crater into existence to let himself breathe in the open air. Kouyou called him little god. Yuan had said his name was pretty. They had called him Vice-Executive. They had called him Double Black.
f*ck you, he mouthed, taunting, between gritted teeth.
“You know,” Tanaki said, very low, “I used to blame myself for it.”
Cement had dried between Chuuya’s teeth; it hurt his jaw to let out: “For what?”
“Wanting to be needed.”
He spied her way, chin half hidden behind his crossed arms. The curve of his legs was starting to ache. Chuuya wasn’t made for small spaces. “I don’t think that’s fair.”
“The Port Mafia gave everything to me,” Tanaki insisted, eyes set on who knew where. The emerald shades of her kimono made the x scar on her face look silver, instead of aging. “A home. My people. My safety. At first it seemed reasonable — I merely wanted to foot the bill. It’s why I returned so soon after…” Her fingers reached for nothing; the spasm reminded him of his own hands, forever cursed by an electrified spear. “Then I discovered — there was selfishness in it.”
Chuuya didn’t know how she had ended up there. She made it sound like she had been saved; then again, he considered, few mafiosi ever talked about the syndicate in any other way. Salvation was only shaped differently.
“It isn’t selfish,” he scoffed. “It would be wasteful, otherwise — having something to give.”
“The things we lose,” she insisted. “People. Values. All of them — there is no erasing them. No amount of good work — no amount of, next time, I won’t let it happen. Next time, it will be different,” Tanaki’s eyes traced the Ferris Wheel, its lights moving from red to green to golden. “This is a home, despite the blood. It deserves better than to be used as an attempt to erase our guilt.”
He frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m saying they can call you a god all they want, Chuuya,” the woman told him, leaning her face close enough for him to study the white roots of her hair. “You don’t owe this place any divinity. Bleeding yourself out for this organization — It won’t give you back what you’ve lost. It will only make you feel like you aren’t doing enough to.”
There was probably a more suited answer than staring. Chuuya couldn’t find it — he couldn’t focus on the staggering beat of his heart enough to say that the elevator didn’t horrify some deeper part of him, still.
He couldn’t understand how one could be given a hand and not die for it.
“I want you to believe this place — your Flags, your squad —“ If she noticed his flinch, she didn’t let it interrupt her; refusing to look away from him, Tanaki’s eyes and voice grew fervent, “I want you to see this — they didn’t die so that you could bleed out in their name. They died so that you could live.”
He knew his words would be cruel before he could even taste them. “They died for nothing,” Chuuya said. He didn’t remember how she had screamed when he had hit her — he remembered how she had breathed when she had been robbed, though. Remembered the pointlessness.
“But their deaths are something,” Tanaki replied, undeterred.
The floor was transparent — the gallery of darkness and cables under them was deeper than Suribachi, and three times more unknown. If they were to fall, it would hurt. But Chuuya could fly. He had never worried for anyone but the ones who couldn’t. “We are mere tassels for this syndicate. I know. We allow it to place corpses in our hands, and to steal our past from our fingers —“ He sucked in a breath, eyes widening in alarm. “But it’s more than most get. Chuuya, in the end — all people like us are, is something someone will mourn. Not everyone is so lucky.”
Would you die for the Mafia?, Mori had asked, smiling, like he knew, or for its people?
“So?” he asked, voice hoarser than wanted.
Tanaki shrugged. The flames in her gaze softened endlessly — the talons that had been reaching for nothing at all settled on his knee; tapping one, two, three times. “So step inside the elevator all you want — but don’t stay here.”
His reflection tilted his head when he did. The blood was lost amongst the red lights of the skyscrapers outside, turning his eyes the same color. For a moment, he was just a person.
When the elevator slipped open — the third time he had let them, after Tanaki had left — the doors to Mori’s temporary office were ajar.
He didn’t wander out for a reason. There were no guards in front of the doors, for once — unsure if he wanted to wander like a ghost or graffiti the walls, he simply stood, until hushed voices caught his attention. Floating to the slot to ensure his steps wouldn’t echo, he squinted, searching the blindingly illuminated room.
“— brutality,” Agent Minami was hissing.
Chuuya didn’t breathe.
“This organization has always prided itself in regard. Displaying your enemies for the masses to spit on?” There wasn’t any respect in the distance she kept from the Boss of the Mafia; the gun in her hands didn’t shake. “I might not be one of the officers on your case, but you are very much challenging the ease I could incriminate this whole building with right now.”
“Certainly,” Mori agreed, hands intertwined. “But the masses need something to spit on, Agent. After such intense weeks — even more so. Otherwise, they might grow restless and cause more problems than either of us desires. As for your little threat,” he continued, once her hesitation lasted too long. “I believe you should use some of that intellect I heard so much about.”
“Do you know how an illegal organization manages to stay alive for such a long time?” Lithe steps; back and forth, like a teacher, a congressman — maybe even a doctor. “By taking precautions. By having something on every someone who dares to pass through the door frame. And if you have no such thing, you build it for yourself.”
Mori offered her a polite tilt of his lips. In some indescribable, unreachable corner of himself, Chuuya thought it a cruel sight. In every other — he knew it to be earth-shatteringly clever.
“For example,” he started —
•••
The furthest side of the dumping site had been turned into a vehicles junkyard.
It was another mountain of sorts — tall and mechanical and glittering weakly with all its rust underneath the moonlight. When Chuuya picked up a discarded, sharp-edged pipe from the ground — something too burdensome to lift without Tainted, and a wonderful excuse to try all the same — and began smashing it on some old Toyota’s window, the entire mountain seemed to shake.
Chuuya was floating. He only regained physicality when his phone, abandoned on the edge of a vehicle, offered, after a three minutes long rant: “— So yeah, I’m fed up with the prank calls.”
If the nasal tone of his voice was to trust, Shirase had gotten sick during the holidays again.
It was a gradual thing — he felt the cold, first; pungent and muffled over the parts his kimono didn’t hide, whipping the newly burned strand of his hair against his nape. “ — call people who will find you, you son of a bitch, and then we can have a talk in person, instead. You think I’m scared? I haven’t been scared since the womb!”
And then the sweat down his palms; the unjustifiable grip of his fingers around the pipe. Chuuya smashed a back wheel. At the edge of his vision, he could see the monotone edges of the shipping container.
He heard the steps even through the mess of well-planned smashing, because Chuuya heard everything — he recognized them, toes unhesitant on the descent and heels digging the metal.
“You know, he would probably answer, if you actually spoke,” Dazai said, gingerly dragging his fingers near the speaker button of his phone. He wouldn’t unblock it, probably — he only enjoyed entertainment when he was far away from it. Chuuya was still relieved when he shut the call off instead. “Not that I would dare assume you know how phones work. Dogs are yet to develop opposable thumbs.”
Undeterred, Chuuya kept his eyes on the car hood in front of him — the crack at the center, widening a bit more with each strike; the lines of metal curling upward in razor-sharp lines.
Tainted could have cut through just the same. Kenta had been buried under maceries and a metal foil from the vents.
“How come,” Dazai insisted, tone a tad too jovial for someone who had escaped the HQs in the middle of their celebrative frenzy, “Someone who’s lost almost every friend he has refuses to do something to keep the ones left?”
The car good gave up under the rainstorm of the pipe’s bent edge; a panel of it flew upward, and Chuuya struck it as if a baseball ball — watching it fly part Dazai’s frame, a mere breath from his side.
It landed onto the side of the mountain with a roar. Dazai didn’t even flinch.
Chuuya threw the bat away, unimpressed. “How come someone who goes around boasting about partners has no trouble keeping secrets?”
The boy tilted his head, owlishly. He didn’t seem concerned. “Secrets,” he spelled out, like the word held no meaning — only sound.
It echoed. Chuuya tried his hardest not to care — he knew he had failed by the time the words fell out of his lips, quivering like magma underneath the concrete. “Did you know?”
Dazai did nothing but look at him.
He traced the hems of his kimono, blowing with the winter wind. There had been almost no snow yet that year; the tips of his hair twirled into knots — shining a candid white in front of the half broken car lights of a Camaro.
[“If you refuse to hand me the recording device hidden in your pocket, Agent Minami,” Mori said, smile untouched and eyes hard, “I will order the sniper in front of your apartment to put a bullet in Yuan’s head.”
Chuuya’s feet dropped to the ground.
The line of Minami’s shoulders stretched to the ends of the earth. He couldn’t see her face — he could recall the way she’d looked at Yuan, day after day he went to check up on them. She had bought her some gifts for Christmas; Yuan hadn’t laughed, but she hadn’t left either.
Even if it wasn’t, he thought, humbly. Even if it wasn’t — people from the light wouldn’t let someone die. Even if it wasn’t —
Chuuya thought about killing Mori.
Too late. Too unconvinced. The woman fished a metallic square from her pockets, throwing it at his feet. “And you’d kill me before I could leave the building,” she concluded, bitterly.
Mori’s smile was brilliant. “Precisely.”
With utter clarity — because he had thought about killing him four times, since the first time his name had been whispered; because Chuuya never, never could — he understood.]
Fake snowflakes and something in Dazai’s eye, too unending to be fake. Chuuya only figured out the ache in his jaw when he heard himself laugh.
“He had it all planned,” he snorted, head thrown back, spine aching and scars burning. He could have flown with it — the sheer exhilaration of a magic trick; the flicker of the last piece falling where it was meant to and spelling out a life sentence — a life. “The son of a bitch had it all planned — from day one. He was testing me,” He kicked a loose wheel; insisted, threatened, spelled out: “Did you know?”
The record started again — Dazai’s face was wiped clean of any wrinkle resembling a beating heart, and he shrugged. “Does it matter? He did.”
Body swinging as if paper, he walked across the metal parts and airless wheels, until he could cross his arms behind his back and lean forward, blinking obnoxiously too close to his face. “Don’t tell me you thought your little bottle-redhead had found time to leave a dead sheep on your mourning ruote?” A sigh. “Oh, well. Guess that’s why I’m Executive and you aren’t.”
The thick smell arose from his memory, sagging his throat. Bait and bite; rinse and repeat. Breathing shallowly, Chuuya concluded: “I’m not doing this.”
Dazai hummed. “When’s your transfer to the Special Division, then?”
Something settled inside his skull; it began to be rattled by his own lungs, a melodic tin! that made him think of Social Workers and the face the boy had made with a gun to his temple. “I’m not doing this,” he said, again. Then he turned, and he made his way through the scrapped cars — away.
“Not many would be so glad to be manipulated,” Dazai called, scratching his ankle with his other foot — the way he did when he was hiding a gun there. He was following him.
“This is his game,” Chuuya replied, eyes on the junk — eyes on the shipping container. The bright fireworks in the sky; the distant decorations. “This is his city — this is his game. Did you ever think I didn’t know?”
Their steps matched — the boy was too lazy to find the best places to walk on not to disrupt the mountain, and too annoying not to pretend he didn’t know that place by memory.
“Chuuya,” he asked. The wind and the silk caressed his skin; Kouyou’s gifts and the feeling of Dazai — the idea of something leaving. Temporary and amnesiac — quiet. Always quiet. “Do you think you’re going to kill me?”
The wind not brushing his nape was still an unfamiliar sensation — his hair, he had noticed, was growing with urgency. It would be long again soon. He would still be there.
He felt his smile land on the ground. When it rolled down the trash, leaking pipes baptized it in something a bit realer — stuck it to his face as the hopeless nothing stuck under his nails. “You’re not this stupid.”
“Maybe not,” Dazai admitted. Like you’d ever let me. Like anybody could. “But I heard what you said to the Bishop’s Staff. Tell me this — do you feel powerful?”
He stared at his shoes. He climbed the crater. He always had. “I know I am.”
“Divine, then.”
“That wasn’t —“
“I’ve got other synonyms,” he insisted. Dazai had longer legs. He could have caught up with him. “I know all of them. Holy. Celestial. Almighty. Mythical. Otherworldly — Do you feel otherworldly, Nakahara Chuuya?”
Fireworks pounded against his eyelids. Chuuya was still in the elevator — still in the ballroom of cheering mouths; still stuck in the slot of Mori’s door; still curled up under a plastic roof, being told his name for the first time. “What the f*ck are you talking about?”
“Do you think you could do it?”
“I’m not playing this game.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No,” Chuuya stopped; turned. None of the crazed, blown-out-pupils haze was left between Dazai’s ears; something calmer had taken all the space, bleeding down like vomit. “No. Have one of your moods somewhere else.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve never wanted to see me bleed out,” Dazai insisted, stepping forward. He had the same look Mori had had — only from the other side. “Don’t tell me this isn’t maddening — me in your seat. Me with you, in the title the underground has decided to fear.”
“It’s consequential.”
“It’s inescapable.”
“I don’t run,” he snapped. “You do.”
“I’m not running,” the boy let him know. His eye seemed to dig through the barely reconstructed skin of his scars, poking at the brink. “You told me you don’t dream — do you think you’d dream of this, if you could? Maybe more theologically,” Out of nowhere, he dropped to his knees, good fabric in the mud and trash, clenching a death grip around the edges of his sleeves.
“What are —“
“With altars and worshippers,” The light of his pupil was psychedelic. “Bleeding me out for a cause?”
“I’m not —” Chuuya spelled out, startled — attempting to pull himself out of that horrifying picture they painted, “— doing this, Dazai.”
“Why? Do you think Mori would be mad?” He didn’t laugh; the curve of his mouth was nearly invisible, but sharper than the moon. Why did he look like that, Chuuya had wondered, meeting Mori’s eyes, as they chanted. Why did he look — “Don’t be so disappointing, now. What else have you been snooping around my business for?”
“Don’t f*cking try to shoot yourself in the open air if you don’t want people to get their brains moving,” he hissed.
“Alright,” Dazai promised. The like of the shipping container appeared from each of his ears; there wasn’t enough blood. “You do it instead.”
Chuuya’s teeth were aching. His head was right by his hands — if he could have touched him, he could have made his brains leak out of his eyes. “Don’t tempt me.”
“You keep saying Arahabaki is nothing at all,” he insisted. “You talked a lot in the aftermath, you know? Merciless, you said. He doesn’t care about anything. He lacks the pure notion of caring. But he would murder me with his bare teeth, if he could manage to escape you for a second too long. You swore that. It’s why you did the heartbeat thing, yes? Because it might keep him at bay. Because you fear you won’t be able to do it, one of these days.”
“Dazai.”
“You think you can kill me?” He seemed sincere in his marvel. “I’m not a quarter as special as any man in that ballroom is convinced of. Neither are you. I don’t need Arahabaki to kill you — you said that. You could shoot me. You could rip my heart out with your hands — you wouldn’t even need to take the gloves off. You wouldn’t even need to clean up — the goons begging to watch you maul someone into pieces would do it for you.”
Chuuya could feel his heart in his throat. He didn’t know if it was anger. He didn’t know if it mattered. “What are you doing?”
“Drop me from a building,” he listed off, a bit closer, a bit lower with every syllable. “Push me off into the bay. Accuse me of betrayal — tell the entire organization I attempted to steal Mori’s seat. Let them burn me alive. Set me on fire yourself. You think you need Arahabaki? You think Arahabaki needs you? You think Mori does?”
He held his breath.
“You think there’s a corner of this earth,” Dazai whispered, pulling his sleeves until he had no choice but to bend — he always did. “A corner, Chuuya — one where you can live knowing you aren’t needed? One where you wouldn’t let that hunger kill you? You think you can kill me?” He smiled. “I think I can kill you. I think Arahabaki can kill you. I think your squad —“
Chuuya kicked him right in the middle of his chest — in a whirlwind of dust and metal parts, he landed through the unstable floor.
He exhaled.
It came winding down quietly, after.
The world stopped being blurred and red at the edges. Another memory laid over it all — one of the alleys of Suribachi City.
A morning of old smells, when some of the kids on patrol had come to tell him about visitors. Chuuya stuck his hands in his pockets; made his way to where Dazai was laying in the dirt, and set his shoe in the middle of his ribcage.
“He called me invaluable,” Chuuya let him know, easily. He felt him stiffen even through his sole; could have found something in his eye, if he had bothered to let it linger — he didn’t. “He told her the deal was off. Nakahara Chuuya is, frankly, invaluable.”
Dazai looked at him like he was waiting for the punchline.
A singular red line chased the top of his nose, landing in gentle droplets onto his Adam’s apple. The fireworks rained down in kaleidoscopic shards. They painted gentle landscapes on his bandages; when Dazai blinked, it all made him look a tad too young for a framed picture in the Hallway.
If the price is reigning it in, Chuuya didn’t know how to explain, then I can never let it flood again.
“Of course he did,” Dazai said — a tad too quiet. He hadn’t changed a bit since Suribachi; he was a crafty stranger in skin Chuuya knew better than his own palms.
It left his mouth before he could stop it — it had been stuck in his teeth since that summer morning in Kouyou’s bed. “Just why do you live here?”
The boy still seemed deep in thought — in a strange kind of resignation. Chuuya didn’t enjoy being looked at like a caged thing. Chuuya wasn’t stupid enough not to believe it true. “Why do you care?”
I lost them the moment I set my eyes on that bandaged bastard, he had explained to Noguchi, once, over stories of his Sheep. All he had tried to quieten the buzz of power with was covered in the half moons of his nails.With revolting certainty, despite its untruth roots — it’s just us, he had said — Chuuya watched him bleed and concluded: you’re all I have left.
Dazai sat up — still locked underneath the grasp of his shoe. “Do my tattoo.”
A pause. “What?”
“You lost our bet,” he insisted. He cleaned the blood from his forehead; studied the red tips of his fingers with something akin to wonder. “I bet you I would become the youngest Executive in the Port Mafia’s history. I am.”
He squinted. “Technically, I forfeited.”
“I don’t care.”
“And my punishment is completing your tattoo?” Chuuya eyed him, skeptical.
“So you shall look what you lost right in the eyes, yes,” He raised a hand, waiting. “And because Ane-san will kill you if you get it wrong.”
Invaluable, he tasted. They had called him Vice-Executive.
Something cold settled on his calf, under the hems of the kimono. The shape of a thumb pressed against a vein; the fingers curved around his ankle like a bracelet. It was a strange point to be touched — nothing compared to viscera; everything to the strange way Dazai stubbornly met his gaze.
“Has he been quiet?” he questioned.
The silence had come so suddenly it took him a momento understand. “You saw it. No black lines,” Chuuya replied. “I think he disliked being used as a training exercise. He wants to taste air that’s a bit more — purposeful, I suppose.”
He tapped his thumb. “I thought he didn’t want anything.”
“He doesn’t. But I do,” He shrugged. “And he’s as me as I let him be.”
Dazai let go of his calf. He sat up more — Chuuya took his leg back, and tried to figure out how much glass from the cars they both had stuck under their soles. “As I let you be.”
He set his jaw. Didn’t answer; which was an answer enough.
“I don’t want to touch your slimy skin,” he informed him, when Dazai dangled his raised hand in front of him, quietly requesting.
He curled an eyebrow. “You’ve touched my slimy skin countless times.”
“Are you admitting you’re slimy?”
“Are you admitting you touch me a lot?”
“Me?” he spluttered. “You hang off of me like a — like a goddamn koala or something —“
Eventually, because there wasn’t much left to do, Chuuya grasped his hand, and they made their way to the entrance.
He studied the electrodomestic parts underneath their feet — the barbed wire; the dying shadows from the old neon signs. Moss grew between the metal, and Dazai’s steps at his side were too familiar — and he thought of the serpent tattoo on Rin’s middle finger, crushed underneath rubble. He thought of his cheek against Dazai’s leg, and the sound that he hadn’t allowed his ribcage to expel when his eyes had opened to the end of the world.
There was ivy between the junctures of his shoulders — burdensome and inevitable in the hollowness of the bones; it might always be there. So would the Port Mafia.
Invaluable.
Despite of, he could imagine Mori tut, with that smile of his. Not because of.
“I’m going back,” he declared.
Squinting, he could see the scaffolds on Building One in the distance. Kouyou had to be drunk, by then. Tanaki could be convinced not step on his feet too much, if she truly wanted to dance. The Flags’s fake graves had to be covered in snow — his squad’s had to have landed in the depths of the Bay. The people could talk all they wanted.
Dazai crossed his hands in his obi; he played Hopscotch like he did when he was going to meet Oda Sakunosuke. “I know you are.”
A slug charm dangled from his phone, new and shiny. Chuuya blinked, belated.
“You —“
“Ah, yes,” Dazai commented, locked in his Hopscotch, with faux innocence. “I forgot to tell you. I finally found my souvenir from France.”
Chuuya gaped like a fish, feet locked to the ground. He had to run to catch up with him, eyes so wide they ached, following the swing of the slug charm like one might a pendulum dangling to the hour of death. “You — that was in —“
“In your office,” he agreed, helpfully. “You didn’t think the new lock would keep me out, yes? Or the code on the safe — this is the sixteenth time, Hatrack. There is a finite number of Kouyou’s birthday combinations you can use.”
“You had no right to — that is not —“
“I didn’t bring you a present,” Dazai continued, undeterred, stalking to the makeshift gates. “But that’s fine, because I gave you a birthday present, and you didn’t —“
“You refuse to tell me when your birthday is —“
“Not my fault if you can’t guess. By the way, I took the initiative to hang your own on your phone. Since you bought us —“ Dazai’s lower lip trembled. “Matching phone charms.”
Horror sagged his veins.
Laughter exploded from his sickly, bandaged lungs. “You bought us —” Dazai chuckled, skipping like a schoolgirl, mock radiating off of him in waves, “Matching phone charms. Matching phone charms. That’s pathetic!”
Chuuya couldn’t scramble for his phone fast enough — the new hanging fish charm stared back at him, still smelling like the Parisian roads he had bought it from. Passersby and tourists had paid no mind to him; it was a summer morning, and traces of fault did not show on body.
For the first time since he’d flown from Yokohama, eyes on a souvenir stand — he had wondered if Dazai even knew he had left.
A senseless thought. Perhaps it was Arthur’s home — Arthur, who had called Verlaine his partner.Dazai, who had never gotten a present, and had only started to play Hopscotch on all streets after seeing Chuuya do it, and refusing to ask him what it was.
“f*cking fine,” he muttered, staring at the moon like it might offer him mercy. “Now shut the f*ck up. It was just — shut up. f*ck you. It was funny, alright, so I bought it — I was drunk, anyway, so it’s not like — Give it back.“
“Are you kidding me? I’m gonna wear this forever. You’re absolutely embarrassing. Everybody deserves to know just how loyal my dog — hey!”
Despite the protests, Dazai didn’t seem to mind the hits to the knees much. He was busy studying the small item in his hand, devastatingly silent, as if struggling with the concept of it.
Double Black, Chuuya tasted. Bile and blood; stuck, like all of them. Double Black. Double Black.
“They will forget it,” he said, offhandedly. He didn’t know who he was trying to reassure. He thought of leaking pipes at the Headquarters, an infinity ago; Dazai’s wet fringe hiding the crease between his brows. If we’re doing this partner thing — “They’ll get bored of this, too.”
Somehow, Dazai knew. His phone lit up with the name Odasaku. His fingers twirled in the air, eye distracted by the lone firework dying out. They could never get bored of power, he signed.
He scoffed. The boy hummed.
Blood sticking to his soles, Chuuya said no goodbye, and made his way to the Headquarters.
•••
[Continue reading]
[…] as far as our analyses go, there is no other interpretation of our current predicament. Inevitably — putting aside the lakes of blood left in their wake and any moral consideration regarding the dynamics of this conflict — we are to thank Dazai Osamu and Nakahara Chuuya for this final result, and for the balance they brought to this city after eighty-eight days of chaos.
Or — as the underground appears to have begun to call them — Double Black.
Special Ability Department Agent.
Intelligence Archivist 061, Ango Sakaguchi.
end act one.
