Chapter Text
I should’ve known something was up when Dazai didn’t have his usual sarcasm brewed with his morning coffee.
He just sat there in his chair, eyes drifting lazily across a sealed folder on his desk, fingers tapping a rhythm I hadn’t heard since the war days.
Slow, tense, calculated. The rain outside tapped against the windows like it was pacing with us.
“Spit it out already,” I muttered, slumping against the glass. The city below was drowned in fog, but I wasn’t looking at it.
I was watching the back of his head, the way he hadn’t moved in minutes.
“There’s a joint mission,” he said, not looking up. “The Agency and the Mafia. First one in five years.”
My blood ran cold, but I didn’t let it show. “…And?”
“You’re going.”
I laughed once — sharp and humorless. “No, I’m not.”
“You are,” he said, eyes finally flicking up to meet mine. “It was part of the terms for continuing the alliance. They asked for Chuuya Nakahara. So you’re going.”
I pushed off the wall. “No. You can send anyone else. Send Akutagawa. Hell, send a dog in a coat. I’m not going.”
Dazai didn’t flinch. “It has to be you. And Akutagawa’s going too.”
I knew that tone. The one where he’d already made peace with something terrible and expected everyone else to follow suit.
“I said no,” I snapped.
“It’s not just a mission,” Dazai said, quiet now. “It’s a symbol. If we’re ever going to keep the peace, people have to see it. ADA and PM. Side by side.”
I scoffed. “You really think peace starts with dragging me out into the woods with people who—who stood by while you were sent back here like a weapon?”
He exhaled. “They didn’t have a choice.”
“You didn’t either!”
His silence cut deep.
I turned away, fists clenched in my coat pockets. “I hated you for coming back, you know. I thought I’d finally be free. You were supposed to be free too.”
“I know,” he said softly.
“And now you’re sitting here playing the Boss, asking me to go smile at the people who made you what you are now.”
“I’m not asking you to smile,” he said. “I’m asking you not to start a war.”
I didn’t say anything after that.
But I went.
⸻
The mission went well.
Too well.
Yosano was as sharp as ever, slicing through the battlefield like she was doing surgery.
Kunikida barked orders and jotted down observations in his pristine little book.
Atsushi ran and bled and bruised and tried too hard, like always.
Akutagawa followed orders without question, colder now than I remembered, but still holding that same edge Dazai carved into him when he was a boy.
We got the hostage out by dusk. We took down the convoy. We didn’t lose anyone.
It should’ve been a victory.
But standing on the cliffside, overlooking the sea as the sun died behind the clouds, I could feel the weight creeping in. The one that settles in right after silence, right before someone says something they shouldn’t.
Kunikida did.
“How’s Dazai?”
I didn’t even turn around. “None of your business.”
He started to speak again, but Atsushi cut him off.
“We’re his friends,” he said. “We just want to know how he’s doing.”
And something in me snapped. But I didn’t have to say anything—Akutagawa beat me to it.
He turned on Atsushi like he’d been waiting five years for that exact sentence.
“You dare call yourself his friend?” Akutagawa snarled. “After what you did? After standing there and letting him be sent back here like trash?”
“Akutagawa—” Yosano started, but he wasn’t done.
“You all watched. You stood by, saluting your orders, letting him be dragged back into the shadows he tried to crawl out of. You let Mori have him again.”
“We didn’t want that!” Yosano snapped. “We didn’t want any of this!”
“You didn’t stop it either.”
That shut her up.
And then, Kunikida stepped forward.
“We never gave up on him,” he said. “We’re not giving up on him. No matter how long it takes.”
That was it.
I turned. I looked them in the eyes, all three of them. And I let the anger come.
“Then maybe you should realize something,” I said, my voice low, even, sharp like broken glass. “Your grip on him? It hurts.”
They stared at me.
“You think holding on means love. But with someone like Dazai, it feels like a chain. Every time you call him back to who he was, every time you try to remind him of your friendship, you’re dragging him back to the person he had to be for you. You don’t know what it’s done to him.”
Atsushi’s mouth opened. I didn’t let him speak.
“You didn’t see him in those first months. The way he flinched at your names. The way he smiled like it was a reflex but went silent the second you weren’t looking. You didn’t hold him when the nightmares came. You didn’t see him beg to be anyone but Dazai Osamu.”
No one spoke.
I stepped back. The sea breeze was cold.
“If you loved him,” I said, “really loved him—you’d let him be free.”
And I walked.
Because I wasn’t going to let them rip the scabs open just to feel better about themselves.
Some wounds weren’t for closure.
Some wounds were just Dazai.
I hated that my feet knew the way before I even told them to move.
Same hallway. Same steps. Same damn brass door I always returned to — Dazai’s office.
Five years and nothing changed. He still made me report in person after every mission, even though I could just send the debrief by phone like everyone else. I used to think it was because he didn’t trust me to be professional. Now I knew better.
We both needed this. This space between us. To be able to talk when the blood on our hands was still fresh. It made everything feel less ugly.
I knocked twice, then pushed the door open.
Dazai didn’t look up right away, just raised a hand from behind his desk, beckoning me in like he always did. His coat was thrown over the back of his chair, tie loose, hair a mess. A coffee cup — probably his fifth — steamed at his elbow.
He looked like hell. I told myself I wouldn’t say anything.
“Mission complete,” I said flatly, tossing the report folder onto the desk. “No casualties. Target rescued. Yosano did some work on the kid’s leg. Atsushi was an idiot, like usual. Akutagawa nearly ripped a guy in half. Pretty standard.”
Dazai chuckled, finally glancing up. “Ah, I missed your lovely gift for summary. What would I do without your prose, Chuuya?”
“Probably pass out from boredom,” I muttered, dropping into the chair across from him like muscle memory.
He leaned back, sighing. His eyes — a little less tired than they used to be — focused on me.
“Thanks for handling it,” he said. “Really.”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t thank me. You know I hate those field trips.”
Silence settled between us like dust, the kind you don’t bother wiping away anymore.
Then Dazai spoke again, more carefully this time.
“Kunikida called me.”
I looked at him. He looked at me.
I already knew what he was going to say.
“He mentioned the… argument. Said you and Akutagawa got a little heated. That you said some things.”
I scoffed. “Tch. That bastard still calling to tattle?”
Dazai smiled faintly. “You didn’t have to fight for me, you know. It’s not worth the hassle.”
That smile.
That damn smile.
That fake, careful, dead-inside smile that pissed me off more than any insult ever could.
“I’m fine now,” he continued. “I’ve recovered. It’s all behind me.”
Something snapped in me.
I was up on my feet before I even realized it — both hands fisted into the front of his shirt, yanking him forward across his desk until our foreheads nearly touched.
“You bastard,” I hissed, voice trembling with rage I couldn’t swallow anymore. “You think this is about you? You think I fought with them because of some favor I owe you?”
He didn’t flinch. Not once.
“How can you be so fucking calm? So ready to forgive them—after everything they did? They watched, Dazai. They sat there while you were dragged back into this hellhole.”
“I made peace with it.”
“Bullshit!”
My voice cracked. My grip tightened. His eyes — soft, steady — didn’t move from mine.
“If it were me,” I choked out, “I’d want blood. I wouldn’t forgive them, not in five years, not in fifty. I’d curse their names with my last breath. And you—”
My breath hitched. My voice dropped.
“You ever think… maybe they were glad it was you?”
Dazai blinked.
“What if—what if they all sat there thinking, ‘Yeah. It’s sad. But it’s better him than us.’”
My throat burned. I couldn’t stop it. The words bled out like broken glass.
“What would you do, Dazai? If that’s what they were really thinking?”
He didn’t pull back. Didn’t raise his voice.
He just reached up, slowly, and uncurled my fingers from his collar. One at a time. Gently.
“If that’s what they were thinking,” he said, “then they were thinking about their own survival. And that’s human nature.”
I froze.
He sat back, smoothing the wrinkles in his shirt with a shrug.
“And a person like me,” he added, eyes flickering toward the window, “who’s been inhuman for a long time… would never understand thinking like that.”
The silence that followed was deafening.
I sat down.
Hard.
Because what the hell was I supposed to say to that?
I stared at the floor. My nails dug into my palms. My mouth opened, but nothing came out until I saw him—reaching for a napkin, quietly blotting away the tears that had started slipping down his cheek without him noticing.
He didn’t sob. Didn’t sniffle.
Just wiped them away like he was brushing off dust.
I swallowed hard.
“You put far too much trust into someone like me, Dazai.”
He looked at me.
And for a moment, just a moment, he looked young again.
Like the kid Mori molded into a monster hadn’t been completely hollowed out. Like something inside still wanted to believe in things he never let himself say out loud.
“I know,” he said quietly.
His voice didn’t tremble.
Mine did.
~~~~~~~
(POV RANPO)
I liked being the brains behind the desk. Solving mysteries no one else could. Getting candy as payment. Walking around town in my ridiculous hat and making people feel stupid in the best way.
But life doesn’t always care what you want.
President Fukuzawa’s coat was too heavy when I first tried it on. Symbolically, anyway. I didn’t take his actual coat — that’d be weird. But the weight of the job settled right into my spine the moment he told me I’d be the one taking over.
So now, every Tuesday and Friday — whether there’s a mission or not — I make it a rule that we all gather in the agency’s main room. Like a check-in. A roll call. Like counting your pieces before a game starts, just to make sure no one got lost.
Just a small thing to relive a bit of the pressure from Kunikida, just to make sure that he wasn’t overthinking anything when he went to sleep. Wondering if anything would happen if he wasn’t a 100% clear or thorough with his mission reports.
Today was no different.
Tanizaki sat slouched on the left couch, Naomi curled at his side as always, watching the room instead of him. Kenji was happily sipping from his thermos. Yosano sat with her legs crossed, boots tapping the ground. Atsushi hadn’t said a word since he walked in.
And Kunikida… well. His report was as dry and concise as usual, standing stiffly in front of the chalkboard as he summarized the mission in bullet points.
But it was all wrong.
The air in the room was heavy, even though we’d already won.
They were back. Mission completed. Target rescued. All limbs accounted for.
So why did it feel like everyone had left something behind?
I was spinning a peppermint between my fingers when I finally got bored enough to say what we were all avoiding.
“Okay,” I said, leaning back in my chair and raising a brow. “Is there something wrong?”
Everyone looked at me.
I gestured lazily. “Yosano’s tapping like there’s a metronome in her head, Atsushi’s staring at his knees like they’re gonna give him life advice, and Kunikida’s got that stick-up-his-ass posture dialed up to eleven. So, what gives?”
Kunikida opened his mouth. Probably about to start with some useless lie like, “Everything’s fine, Ranpo. We just need time to process.” Or something equally boring.
But then—
“It’s what Chuuya said,” Atsushi blurted, voice small.
He looked up — eyes wide, glassy. Like he was afraid of saying it aloud. Like the words were heavier than anything he lifted with his tiger strength.
His hands clenched the fabric of his pants so tightly I could see the tremor in his knuckles.
“He said… he said if we were really Dazai’s friends… then we’d let go.”
The room went still.
Atsushi swallowed hard, gaze locked on his lap. “He said that our grip — the way we kept trying to reach him — hurt Dazai more than if we just let him be. That we were the ones making it worse.”
No one spoke.
And then Atsushi lifted his head, slowly. Tears welled in his eyes but didn’t fall. Not yet.
“Ranpo… you always know what to say. What to do. What the answer is. So tell me…” His voice cracked. “Was it wrong? Was it wrong of me to keep hanging on to the image of him? Of the Dazai I remember?”
He looked at me like I had the answer to the universe tucked behind my glasses.
I didn’t.
For the first time in my whole life, I didn’t.
I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, the spinning peppermint finally still between my fingers.
“You know…” I said, quieter than usual. “I’ve solved murders with no witnesses. Crimes with no clues. I’ve picked apart people’s intentions like threads off a sweater.”
A beat of silence.
“But Osamu Dazai… is the only mystery I’ve never been able to crack.”
Atsushi blinked. Yosano stopped tapping.
“There are no edges to him,” I went on, voice even. “No clean border where he begins or ends. He’s not a puzzle, he’s… mist. You reach out, and it slips between your fingers. You see him laughing and think he’s fine. You see him smiling and think he’s lying. And maybe both are true. Maybe neither.”
I leaned back again, sighing.
“I can’t tell you if what you did was right. But I can tell you this: loving someone like Dazai — whether as a friend or anything else — isn’t about certainty. It’s about faith.”
I looked at Atsushi — really looked at him.
“The part of him you remember — the one who stayed up late researching cases with you, who threw pencils at Kunikida just to annoy him, who called Yosano scary but always trusted her in battle — that part of him was real. I saw it, too.”
Atsushi’s lip quivered.
“I can’t tell you what he’s thinking now. I won’t pretend to know if he’s healed or still hurting. But I do know one thing.”
I smiled, just a little.
“He’s never once asked us to stop caring. Even when he left, he didn’t burn the bridge. He just… walked too far for us to see him.”
And then, finally, Atsushi cried.
Quiet tears at first. Then louder. Yosano reached over and held his hand. Kunikida stood silently, jaw tight. Kenji handed Atsushi a handkerchief without saying a word.
Me?
I sat there, still spinning that peppermint between my fingers.
Even the greatest detective in the world can’t fix a broken heart.
But maybe, just maybe, he can help keep the pieces from slipping too far apart.