Chapter Text
The day began like any other for Dazai - quiet, still, and laced with a haunting sense of routine. He woke early, as always, sometime around 06:00 AM, long before the light bled over the skyline. His apartment was dim and cold, not out of negligence, but preference. A soft hum of the city filtered through the cracked window. He sat upright in bed, shirtless, blanket pushed down to his hips, head tilted back against the wall.
v
He didn’t check his phone immediately. He sat like that for ten minutes, unmoving, watching the ceiling as though expecting it to crack open and give him a reason to smile.
Eventually, he dragged himself from bed and to the sink, splashing his face with cold water. The sting was familiar. Reliable. The face staring back at him in the mirror was the same - messy hair, tired eyes, and a mouth that had forgotten how to smile without effort.
The agency was quiet when he arrived. A cold winter wind bit at his coat as he walked there instead of taking a cab. 07:32 AM. Most of the others weren’t in yet. Only Kunikida’s papers cluttered his desk, like always. Dazai poured himself a coffee and didn’t touch it.
He flipped through a few files without reading them. Work was the same every day - missions, tracking, interrogation, keeping Yokohama from falling apart one criminal at a time. But today was different. Not for what it was, but for what it had always been.
December 18th.
He didn't have to remember. The date lived in his bones, carved behind his ribs. Four years ago, at exactly midnight, he had walked away from someone. Not in body—no, he had left long before that. But in the soul. In words. In finality.
By 09:12 AM, Dazai had given up pretending to work. He left a note on his desk—"Out for a walk. Don’t call." He didn’t know where he was going until he was halfway there.
The street where the Port Mafia once had a side entrance. The one only Chuuya used when he didn’t want to be seen. Dazai stopped at the old intersection, where a broken lamppost still leaned from a forgotten car crash. Snow drifted slowly, resting in the corners of his coat. He pulled his scarf up higher.
The bitter wind felt like a punishment.
He ended up at the bookstore near the corner, the one with the warped wooden door that Chuuya always said he hated. He stepped inside and let the warmth swallow him.
He wandered the aisles without seeing anything. At one point, his fingers ran along the spine of a dusty poetry book, the same one he once saw on Chuuya’s shelf, never touched.
At 10:12 AM, his phone buzzed, properly Kunikida complaining about his absence. He ignored it. At 10:37, it buzzed again. This time, he looked too bored to ignore it anymore; he needed something to do, and if it was reading complaints, then so be it.
[To the dumbest idiot]
That was all he saw at first, and his heart stopped. The sender’s name, burned into his memory like a brand.
He opened the message, and time blurred around the words.
[Times flies before you know it it's already been 4 years since I had to put up with your shitty ass.-]
His fingers trembled as he scrolled.
[-I finally got some peace now that you're gone. The bomb wasn't hard to deal with, and a new car and parking space weren't hard to get arranged. Even gotta try out eye contacts in the process. It was a drag at the start, but I got used to it.]
[It's been so long, and I still see your pesky smile in my head when your name pops up. You're hands on my skin as you comb my hair through your fingers when you thought I was asleep. The time you got a trampoline to reach me when I was mad.
You're a stubborn thorn I can't get rid of even when the presence is no longer there.
What I meant to say is…]
[…I was never more grateful to have that thorn in my side.]
He sat down on the bookstore floor, back pressed to the corner of the aisle, elbows on knees. Something inside him cracked like glass under heat. The time was 10:41 AM.
He didn’t reply.
He couldn't.
He left the store at 11:00 AM. The wind was louder now. The city seemed to echo with everything left unsaid. His steps were directionless but heavy. He passed a group of children playing in the snow, their laughter like needles.
At 11:24 AM, his phone buzzed one more time. A coworker. Not important.
And then nothing. Silence.
He looked at the sky.
At 11:35 AM, he stopped walking.
He stood in the middle of a bridge, one hand resting on the icy railing. His phone was cold in his palm.
Instead, he read it again.
[…I was never more grateful to have that thorn in my side.]
His thumb hovered. Then slowly, he began to type.
[I don’t even know what to say.
No. That’s a lie.
I know exactly what I want to say, but I’m scared to hear myself admit it.
You’ve always been the only one who made this shitty world feel a little less
unbearable.
And I’m sorry it took me this long to say it.
I miss you, Chuuya.]
He stared at the message for a long time.
Then he hit send.
He didn't know what he did it but he did, he let his thoughts spill. He regretted it immediately, tapping on it trying to delete or at least change it, his phone died, a black screen staring back at him with a low battery icon, flashing a view times before it died.
He grips his phone tightly, feeling betrayed. “Traitor,” He muttered under his breath. But his frustration was soon shifted to surprise when he heard a loud sound in the distance behind him. That's unusual, he's at the edge of the city, where almost no sound travels. As he looks out into the woods, he can see far, far away in the distance a tree falls down, and then another, and another, like a force was ripping through him.
Chuuya
It's the last thought he had before he started running, his legs thinking why before he did, a muscle memory he never really tried to shake.
The sky darkened slowly. Wind howled through the streets like a living thing, and far off in the distance, through snow, through shadow, Dazai saw it.
A tower of light.
No, not light. Energy. Power. Rising into the sky like a flare from a dying star.
His blood froze.
"No," he whispered.
His breath burned his throat, each exhale sharp in the cold. He slipped once on the muddy ground and caught himself with a bloodied palm, but he didn’t stop. Trees tore past him as he left the streets and hit the edge of the woods. The city faded behind him, and all that remained was snow, branches, and the thundering beat of his heart.
The horizon lit up again, a violent shimmer of red and black.
"Chuuya-!"
He pushed harder, legs screaming, lungs aching. He didn’t think. Didn’t calculate. Just ran.
The world narrowed to one thing: reach him.
The corruption had started.
And Dazai wasn’t there.