Chapter Text
The day after Mori dies, Dazai is nowhere to be found.
Correction.
The day after Dazai kills Mori, he is nowhere to be found.
<><><> <><><> <><><>
They discover Mori Ougai slumped behind his desk, throat cut clean— a mockery of something surgical. Blood stains the office in violent arcs, splashed high across the walls in a grotesque echo of the death that came before, the one that crowned Mori king,
the one that only Dazai witnessed—
There’s no trail. No fingerprints. No evidence left behind. Just a corpse and the quiet, suffocating certainty everyone’s carried for years: Dazai would be the one to kill Mori Ougai.
No one says it, but they all feel the inevitability.
Something’s off, though. Something’s different from all the predictions.
Dazai’s gone. Hiding or running or something else.
The shipping container stands abandoned, door creaking on its hinges like it’s calling out for him. His office is a wreck, with papers shredded and drawers apart, as if someone was looking for something they never found. The places he haunted— bars, alleys, rooftops— are left untouched, the air colder in his absence.
“Maybe,” someone whispers, too quiet to be heard by anyone but the walls still slick with Mori’s blood, “maybe he killed himself, too.”
For a day, the Port Mafia building holds its breath.
They whisper of Oda Sakunosuke— of the man who once treated the Black Wraith like something soft, something breakable. They whisper of how he died, of the bullets Mori orchestrated, of the way the Demon Prodigy pleaded for Mori’s mercy.
The facts unravel into shadows slithering through the halls. No one knows where Dazai was when Oda’s grave was filled. No one knows if he had already set his mind on Mori’s death. If he had already decided on his own.
They wonder if loss— Oda, Ango, Chuuya Nakahara— was enough to break him; they wonder if someone like Dazai could even feel the slow ache of grief, the gnawing and rotting weight of regret. If the emptiness finally swallowed him whole.
In a dimly lit room, the executives gather. Kouyou. Verlaine. Ace. Two empty chairs.
Never has a meeting felt so hollow.
There’s a shadow in Kouyou’s eyes when the discussion turns to Dazai’s potential suicide, the quiet resignation of having failed another child. Verlaine and Ace don’t share her silence. Their voices rise, sharp with barely concealed anger, with thinly veiled threats over who should lead and what must be done. The search for Mori’s will is frantic. A snapped curse echoes in the air when they find it— proof that he always meant to leave the Mafia in Dazai’s hands.
They’re interrupted only once.
Gin steps in, her bow deep but her voice steady as she reports that Akutagawa has taken charge of the search parties. That he’s on the streets like a rabid dog looking for anything that could lead him to Dazai, whether it’s his cruelty or his body.
“The others are afraid,” she says. “Afraid this is the end of the Mafia as we know it.”
Silence settles over the room. The walls expand with the weight of a hundred unspoken fears, a hundred whispers carrying Gin’s words over and over.
Kouyou exhales. Her fingers curl around the porcelain of her untouched tea, now gone cold.
“They’re right to be afraid,” she murmurs, her voice quiet. Distant.
Because whether Dazai is dead or alive, nothing will ever be the same.
<><><> <><><> <><><>
A boy is standing on a bridge, somewhere between day and night, between rain and sun. A boy not yet eighteen, draped in a jacket that will never quite fit, with bandages unraveling from his wrists like remnants of a life slipping through his fingers.
The world moves past him in a blur of indifference— Mafia grunts, government agents, men who owe their loyalty to Mori and their blindness to habit. None of them stop. None of them see.
It’s Hirotsu who does.
It’s Hirotsu who finds Dazai because he was the only one looking for a child.
It doesn’t take much to understand the thoughts coiled behind those empty eyes. The way his arms rest, bone-thin and fragile, against the railing. The way his dark head dips, strands of hair falling forward, casting long shadows over hollow cheeks and colorless lips.
He looks young. He looks dead.
But he doesn’t look like the terror they’re hunting, the demon they’re afraid to find.
As Hirotsu approaches, he only sees a boy waiting for the wind to carry him away.
Dazai lifts his head, his gaze catching on Hirotsu like a moth drawn to the glow of a dying lantern. Even with the wind pulling at him, even with the river stretching wide and endless below, he doesn’t look like someone who wants to jump.
He looks like someone waiting for a hand on his wrist, for a voice to call his name.
He looks like someone who doesn’t want to fall— someone who just wants to be stopped.
Hirotsu may not be the one Dazai is waiting for— red hair and sharp words, a ghost lost to time— but he reaches for him anyway because someone has to.
Dazai always looks like this when Hirotsu finds him alone. Too thin for someone so feared, drowning in clothes that don’t quite fit, limbs caught in the awkward stretch of growing up too fast. He never liked being called a kid, but that’s all he is. Just a boy with too-indifferent bandages wrapped around too-delicate wrists, a smattering of freckles no one ever mentions, teeth that should have had braces if anyone had cared enough to fix them.
Each day, the light in his eyes fades a little more, swallowed by something deeper and darker than even the Mafia knows. The way he frowns, the way his fingers curl in on themselves, like he doesn’t believe in the human Hirotsu sees beneath the shadows.
Once, there was someone who put light back into those black holes. Someone who saw Dazai as something more than a monster, more than a prodigy, more than a problem to be solved. Someone who might have saved him.
But that someone is gone.
And now, it seems, it’s left to Hirotsu to try.
After all, who does Dazai have left? Mori’s last schemes with Mimic this past week were designed to take the rest of Dazai’s relationships; even Hirotsu, standing on the outside, could see that.
No more Sakunosuke. No more Sakaguchi. And no one has seen Naka—
“Ango was keeping an eye on Chuuya for me.”
Dazai’s voice cuts through the silence, curling like the ghost of last night’s rain, soft and lingering, dissolving before it can be fully grasped. His arm lifts, bandages dragging across his face, catching something. Tears, maybe, though Hirotsu isn’t sure Dazai would ever admit to them.
The words don’t make sense, not yet, but Hirotsu doesn’t press. Instead, he slows to a stop just a few steps away, leaving space between them. Space for Dazai to fill with whatever he needs, whatever spirits still linger behind his tired eyes.
“I never asked him for details,” Dazai murmurs, his voice full of dreams too precious to be grasped. “I never actually wanted to know where Chuuya went because I knew how I’d be; I know that if I knew, the temptation to follow him would be too much. And I couldn’t. Not while he and Oda were still here. Not before I figured out how to leave without the weight of guilt following after me, without feeling like I was abandoning the future Mori was building.”
The words tremble as if they’re made of something softer than breath, something that might vanish if spoken too loudly.
“But then Ango betrayed us.” His voice turns sharper, cutting through the haze of memory, brittle edges glinting like shattered glass. “He left. But before he did, he gave me one last thing— a parting gift, I suppose.”
Dazai exhales, a humorless laugh twisting in his throat.
“I found a paper on my desk yesterday morning. A notice about Chuuya’s recent hire with some detective agency in the city.” There’s something distant in his tone now, something real beneath the forced amusement. “A funny thought, isn’t it? Imagining him with a magnifying glass, looking for clues? Silly chibis should be on the other side of such a tool.”
And yet, as Dazai speaks, something flickers behind his gaze. Something like longing, something like loss.
“He spent the past few years drifting through Europe— France, if I had to guess. Wasting his reserves on expensive wine and ridiculous clothes. He was never good at disappearing, not really, but somehow… this time, he did.” Dazai makes a sound that should be laughter but instead falls flat, swallowed by the hush of early evening. There’s nothing light in it, nothing amused. Just something empty. “He came back to Yokohama earlier this year. And I didn’t have a clue.”
The confession lingers in the air, heavy as the mist curling over the water.
“He’s been with the agency for a month now.” Dazai’s voice wavers, almost imperceptibly, as though the words themselves ache to be spoken. Something crinkles in his hand— a page with Ango’s writing on it. It doesn’t take much for Hirotsu to assume this is the report he left for Dazai to find. “He’s doing well. They… They like him there.”
There should be more. There is more; Ango must have left him with more than this. But Dazai’s voice thins out like smoke, unraveling into nothing. The silence that follows is not thoughtful, not deliberate, but hollow, like a story cut off before its end. Hirotsu shifts, waiting, but the emptiness stretches on.
Just a report on a boy lost to time. Just an echo of someone Dazai once called a friend— someone, some whisper, he once called more .
“You could…” Hirotsu hesitates, his voice thick with smoke and the knowledge of what Dazai’s answer could mean. “You could join him.”
The suggestion lands between them like a stone in deep water.
“Go to that agency,” Hirotsu says, quieter now, as though speaking it aloud might undo something no one can put back together. “Work in the light. No one here would have any reason to chase you.”
Because no one here would know to look for him.
Because Dazai is already half-buried, assumed dead, and if he wanted— if he truly wanted— he could rewrite himself completely. No one would find him.
Dazai turns, and for the first time, Hirotsu sees him clearly. The bandages on his face are gone.
His skin is unmarked, smooth in the fading light; it makes him more fragile, more human. It unsettles something in Hirotsu’s chest, this sudden clarity, like he’s looking at a boy who’s already slipped through his fingers.
For a moment, Dazai just stares. Not at Hirotsu, not at the bridge, but at something far beyond them both. Something only he can see, something that creases his brow and steals a breath from his lips.
The sky behind him is bleeding out, streaks of pale red stretching over a dying blue.
“I have lost everyone I have ever loved because of the Mafia,” he says at last. His voice is steady, but it’s not strong. It drifts, weightless, like words spoken to an empty room. “No one I care about will be safe until the Mafia is fixed. Someone needs to take control.”
He sounds like he’s reading from a script, a role he’s cast himself in, speaking words he only halfway believes.
Hirotsu steps closer. “That doesn’t have to be you.”
But Dazai is already shaking his head.
“It was always going to be me.”
He doesn’t say it with regret. He doesn’t say it with pride. It’s just a fact, as certain as the sun sinking before them, as if Hirotsu is foolish for questioning what was always inevitable.
“There was a time, maybe, where I dreamt otherwise. But now…”
His fingers loosen, and the paper slips from his grasp— not discarded, not thrown, but released with such careful, deliberate gentleness that it almost looks accidental. It flutters downward, catching in the dying light. Dazai watches it fall with an intensity that unsettles Hirotsu, his dark eyes tracking its descent like he longs for something he cannot follow. Like, if he watches closely enough, he can trade places with the paper as it sinks and dissolves into the water below.
The ink bleeds as it touches the surface, reds and purples spilling across the page just as they spill across the sky. The last remnants of the sun vanish, swallowed by the horizon, and Dazai lifts his hand— slowly, absently— to his lips, fingers pressing there as if trying to remember something. As if replacing something that has been lost.
A flicker of something crosses his face. A memory, perhaps. A ghost of another life. Whatever it is, Hirotsu is not meant to see it. He looks away as though he’s intruding on something sacred.
“Hirotsu.”
Dazai’s voice is quiet, stripped bare. When Hirotsu turns back, his stomach twists at the sight of him. There’s nothing in his eyes now. No longing, no grief. Only the emptiness of something abandoned.
“Come along.” Dazai steps past him, barely more than a whisper of movement, his voice drifting through the thickening dark. “The Mafia does its best work in the shadows.”
A pause.
“And I have so much work to do.”
He disappears into the night, silent as a specter, and Hirotsu is left standing on the bridge, staring into the water below.
The last of the ink dissolves, and the rest of the paper falls into the dark.