Chapter Text
In the beginnings of the Great War, a family moved into a Victorian styled apartment. The mother didn't want her children exposed to the warfare happening, and the father wanted to escape from being drafted.
So they packed their things and fled like many other civilians, moving far from the seaside city their children had grown up in all their lives.
"Ugh! Mamaaaa, can you tell Shuji to stop poking me!?" The oldest child, a girl by the name of Tsushima Asaki, asked. Her little brother, Tsushima Shuji, was pestering his sister because he was bored of counting the raindrops that fell from the sky.
"Shu-chan, stop pestering your sister and read your books." His mother said, making a turn.
The little boy only groaned, kicking his father's seat.
"But I already read those over summer break and it's raining so I can't even see!!" The boy protested, huffing and whining.
"Don't you have your glasses, boy?" His father asked, raising an eyebrow at his youngest from the rearview mirror.
"In the trunk..." He responded, slumping all the way down in his seat.
"Don't do that. If I make a sharp turn that position'll lob your head off and it's gonna roll all over the car floor." His mother warned, making his sister snicker from behind her notebook.
Asaki was 15 years old and had a love for horror and gore. Every Halloween she made it her mission to terrorize her 7 year old brother, Shuji, who was squeamish when it came to blood and preferred to read comic books and draw. Their father always said their personalities had flip flopped on gender roles.
The boy huffed again and righted himself in his seat, going back to watching the droplets fall across his window and guess which one would make it to the bottom without falling into the air.
They were driving through some nondescript, random forest. Lame, as far as the young boy was concerned. His older sister liked it and was talking about all the ways they were never gonna find anyone who wandered on in, so that automatically made it boring to the boy, and also a waste of time to pay attention to. As far as he saw, it was just a lot of the same tree for miles and miles. And it was raining, which also made it worse. Shuji liked to be clean, he hates mud.
Just when he was about to start bugging his Nee-chan again, they arrived at a gate, which was open. He could have cheered in relief at his boredom being dispelled, but held it in least he accidentally hit Asaki and she start retaliating by smacking him.
"Anddd we are...here!" His father said, turning to the two and smiling like he wasn't worried about anything at all.
"Yayyy..." His sister muttered sarcastically, slumping against her door with a sigh.
Shuji shared her disdain, but in order to lighten his father's mood, he excitedly started to clap and smile.
Who knew? Maybe he'd actually have fun in this house. It was pretty big and Western styled, so there was probably tons of places to hide and scare his family that there hadn't been in their old house way back in Yokohama!
The boy unbuckled, grabbed his backpack, and bounced over to his mother's door, opening it for her with a big, face-splitting grin held up with a thin layer of practice from his mirror and how he's seen other kids at his school do it, grabbing at her buckle.
"C'mon, c'mon!" He said, laughing with his mother.
"Eager, are you?" The woman asked, smiling as she got out, followed by her husband and daughter.
"I call picking my room, you little idiot!" Asaki called from her open car door, grabbing her bag and shoving her things into her bag.
"Whatever! I bet I find some cool stuff before you, Asa-nee!" The boy yelled back, already sprinting up the steps of the worn-down, pink apartment. The mat said 'no mud', so he jumped up and down to rid his shoes of the substance, opening the door. The owner must have known the day they were moving in and unlocked it for them all!
Shuji slipped in, and started running around. It was super warm inside and full of hallways! And there were stairs!
He was already upstairs by the time his family came through the doors.
"Oi! Where'd you go, man? We aren't bringing in your luggage for you, dummy!" Asaki shouted out, causing her little brother to giggle.
"I'm upstairs!" He said back, poking his head over the banister to smile at her. "Anddd there's exactly three bedrooms, so we don't have to share!"
"Good. You snore." The older mumbled, stomping upstairs and passing him, letting herself crash into him, making the boy whine and follow the girl.
"Hey!!! You can't just do that!" He said, watching her go into the second-largest room and plopping on the bed.
"Uh, yes I can." The girl said, propping herself up and shaking her black hair out of her face. "Now get outta my room before I tell mom you stole my jacket."
Shuji stood there for a few seconds just to piss her off, smiling the whole time.
"Out!" She said, throwing her pen at him, to which he shrieked at and ran down the hallways to the stairs, skipping them and just jumping onto the landings.
"Papa, Mama! Asaki tried to blind me!!" Shuji whined, running around the corner of the downstairs and pausing.
The living room was, respectfully, very unassuming. Just some big, boring old room without even a single painting in it! All that was there was a fireplace and some random table.
And a small door.
He would have missed it, honestly, if there had been more stuff in the room.
He tilted his head, skipping over to the curious little out-of-place object, squatting.
"What's this I hear about blindings?" Shuji almost jumped out of his skin at his father's voice, landing on his butt and tilting his head way back to look at his father upside down.
"Nee-chan threw her pen at my eye and she almost blinded meee!" Shuji exclaimed, fully laying down and making a snow angel out of nothing but the dust on the floor.
The older of the Tsushima men sighed, putting his glasses up on his black head of hair. "I'll talk to her. You, up off the floor before your mother scolds you for playing in dirt and whatever must be encrusted on there."
Shuji groaned as the other sped off, flopping to his side and pushing off his hands, standing up. With one last, curious look at the odd protrusion from the wall, he sped off to explore the other parts of his new home and hopefully find some more much cooler things that he could actually use.
8PM, Shuji' Bedroom
It was his bedtime, unfortunately. He'd found nothing else cool, and he refused to go outside until the mud was all dried up and he could coexist more peacefully with nature. Who knew, he might find that well his sister had heard was around.
"Need anything before you go to bed, kid?" His father asked, poking his head into the room. Shuji shook his head.
"Nope, I'm just tired." The boy said, blinking his big eyes at the older. The man just chuckled.
"Alright, get some sleep, Shuji. See you in the morning." He said, turning the light off and closing the door.
Shuji turned over and grabbed his little cat plush, closing his eyes shut super tight and waiting for sleep to come.
Shuji's eyes opened at a unknown time, to what he had no clue. Could have been a noise, could have just been his body.
He let himself listen for things around the house, telling his blood to stop being so cold, and that it was just the house settling. It was old, his mother had told him a lot that old houses creak and groan because their bones don't know how to settle right. To which his sister had chimed in that it meant the house would break and collapse on him.
So, focused on ignoring his sister's words from his memory of dinner, he grabbed his plush to his chest and slipped out of bed, tiptoing along the floor boards quickly and poking his head out the door. He would just go to his parents room and say he couldn't sleep.
Just when his hand rested in the door handle of aforementioned room, he heard a thump at the story above him. He immediately froze, flattening himself to the wall.
After his blood pressure went down for a second time in the past five minutes, he remembered they were in an apartment. That was probably just a neighbor.
Until there was a creak at the stairs.
Naturally, Shuji immediately ran for his room, closing and locking the door quickly and getting straight into bed, hiding under the covers.
10AM, Kitchen
"You wanna go outside and see if we find any wells?" Asaki asked in-between bites of her peanut butter sandwich.
"Nope! I'm staying mud-free and looking for a key to the door in the living room!" He responded cheerfully, eating his alphabet noodles with enthusiasm.
"O...Kay?" The green eyed teen said, slow blinking at her little brother in confusion. "Have fun with your weird ass project then?"
"Language!" Their mom called from the hallway. Asaki simply made a noise of relent and plopped out of her chair, opening the door and going out into the cold place that was the current outside.
Shuji shivered exaggeratedly and closed the door, putting his bowl in the sink and heading over to the key drawer he'd found yesterday afternoon.
"Green, green, boring, white, red..." He muttered, counting all the keys. "Boring, boring, stupid, blue, and- Oh!"
He grabbed the odd looking key, one with a button on the end of it.
"What're you?" He asked, tilting his head at it and blinking.
He ran over to the living room, sliding on his knees to the odd door and comparing it to the key.
Remembering, when he attempted to fit the key into the lock, that it was essentially plastered even if he had a weird key, he ran back into the kitchen for some scissors, holding the yellow-handled object carefully by the blade and running back. He knew it was bad to run with scissors, but he had wayyyyy too much energy to walk back. He wanted to get to whatever was behind the door now!
He stabbed the outline of the door, surprised at the amount of immediate give he received. He probably could have used the key for this...
Tracing the door through the boringly faded wallpaper, he popped the keyhole like a bubble wrap, inserting the key immediately after and turning it. Just as he has hoped, the odd key went in the odd door! He's sooo smart!
He flung the door open, finding...
Bricks?
"Hey, what are you ru- Shuji!" His mother's voice made him immediately see that he probably shouldn't have done that... "You can't just destroy the wall like that, what did y-"
"But there was a door!" He protested, frowning.
"And? It's bricked up!" She said, gesturing to the bricked up wall.
He sighed, hanging his head.
"Go run some laps around the house, unpack, something!" She said, watching him stand in annoyance. "Just don't touch anything else, 'kay?"
"Okay..." He mumbled, pouting and running upstairs.
11PM, Kitchen
Shuji was getting a midnight snack, hungry from a dream where he'd been winning a game of tag, when he heard noises in the living room. Like the feet of small animals.
He poked his head around the open kitchen door, looking both ways in the hallway, and found no one. He carefully padded to the living room, and almost tripped over a mouse.
"Ew!" He grumbled, taking a few steps back and frowning. "Vermin."
He was about to go get his mom, but decided against leaving the mouse to just exist. It could disappear by the time he got back!
So he followed it all the way to the wall watching it slip behind the half-open small door.
"Heh, gotcha..." The little boy mumbled, quickly slamming the door shut. That would kill the mouse and he could go back to eating his snack!
Except he didn't hear the sound of a desperate squeak or feel the door flatten a mouse.
"What?" He mumbled, taking a step back, very confused.
Hesitantly pinching himself told him he was not sleep deprived. So, as one does, he opened the door again, expecting to find that the mouse had slipped through a crack of some sort in the old bricks.
Only to find a very odd tunnel.
"A tunnel?" Kyouka asked, tilting her head at the 22-year-old.
"Yep, a tunnel!" Dazai confirmed, smiling back at her.
They'd gone about 3 pages into the little black book, and about an hour of storytime had passed. Speaking of things passing, the storm has cleared enough that Kunikida was probably going to yell at him soon...
"How about this, Kyo-chan!!" Dazai said, poking his Junior's forehead relentlessly. "Before Kunikida-kun comes to yell at me, we're going to end the story here! Next break or tomorrow, I'll continue with Shuji-kun's adventure!"
Kyouka blinked her bug eyes at him, before nodding.
To his surprise, the girl gave him a hug before wandering off to the infirmary for Yosano. He smiled and closed the album, putting it back into his drawer.
Kyouka was a good kid. He felt safe sharing his story with her. Maybe he'd even show her the things he escaped with.