Chapter Text
ii)
If there is anything Akutagawa has learned over the course of his time in the Port Mafia, it is the necessary skill of being observant.
In his line of work, even the simplest of overlooked details would be enough to land him three bullets to the head. It’s a risk every mafioso knows intimately and has accepted regardless, whether it be out of loyalty to the Boss or their own destitution.
So when Akutagawa ends up partnering with the weretiger for the war and stays partners for months afterwards, he notices a few things.
Nakajima trembles, on the job.
Akutagawa isn’t concerned. He knows people who tremble on the job. Higuchi used to, when she felt like she wasn’t good enough and thought she didn’t have anything to prove. Gin used to, when the streets were burning against her bare feet and the both of them couldn’t find anything to eat but mandarins lining red-lit stalls. He used to, shocks running up and down his back as he tried to mete out some kind of control through the pulsing veins of his ability.
But here’s the thing. He and Gin and Higuchi all stopped their trembling, soon enough. You don’t live a life in the Port Mafia without learning to be reasonably calm on an assignment. You waver on the job, and the darkness will eat you whole. It’s a lesson he knows by heart. The weretiger?
The weretiger has been wavering since the day they first tried to kill each other.
(Sometimes, on his darker nights, he thinks that the only reason neither one of them had died that day on the bridge was because Nakajima was wavering back then, too.)
So, he asks.
“Weretiger,” he says, "why are you afraid of death?”
Nakajima doesn’t move. He does this thing where he goes very, very still, as if he’s trying to avoid being noticed even when Akutagawa is sitting five feet to his seven o clock.
“That is,” he says, carefully, like something might break if he pays any less attention, "a very sudden and very strange question."
"Humor me."
"I don't see why," Nakajima says, gesturing with his mug at nothing. "I'm afraid of death the same way and for the same reasons anyone else is. I like... living."
Akutagawa stares at him through the back of his skull. "Living."
Nakajima turns back to look at him, dismissing his papers with a small push. There’s a smile on the his face, but it’s—sad, somehow, with a bitter tinge to his brows. His mouth moves, but Akutagawa can tell his mind is elsewhere, distant. “It's not... dying, that I'm afraid of, really."
Akutagawa begins to feel impatient. "Then what is it?"
"Well," Nakajima says. "Do you like living without knowing why?"
"That is," Akutagawa says, "a very sudden and very strange question."
Nakajima has the gall to laugh. "Yeah! Yeah. Have I humored you enough yet?"
"Only if you tell me what that was about."
Nakajima's smile drops. "I'm not... the right to die is something everything has. The right to live is something different. And... I guess I'm scared of never being able to know that difference."
The right to live. Akutagawa goes still, and he doesn't know whether to be angry in his stillness or tired. It's the fucking right to live, again.
Every single day since they've begun to see each other more often, Akutagawa observes things about the weretiger. He observes and then he learns. This is what he observes now, one of the first observations he has ever made: there is a heaviness to him, and there is a guilt, and it is the guilt of living.
Akutagawa feels, like he has always felt about this issue, like he could make Rashoumon rip apart space-time just to find the man who did this and rip his neck off his body—the only difference now is that Akutagawa also knows why Nakajima doesn't feel the same way. That knowledge is heavy, and he feels it just as keenly and subdues it just as harshly as everything he feels about the weretiger.
("You don't bring people you hate flowers."
"...I know that."
"You're holding a bouquet.")
Then Nakajima claps, and that heaviness is broken for a moment. “Anyway, why do you ask?”
Oh. Akutagawa had nearly forgotten they were talking. They talk so often, now. “You shake, on missions," he says, and he keeps a careful watch on Nakajima's shoulders. "I don’t understand why you insist on pretending that you're weak even after proving yourself wrong.”
“Oh, that's what this is about.” Nakajima's shoulders tense, but not by much. His eyes are not on Akutagawa; he is staring at his feet. “I'm not... pretending to be weak. You know how I think you're stronger than me. It's... for all those reasons."
Tsk. Nakajima and his thinking. "Then why do you still shake, if not to feign weakness to yourself? Are you so unwilling to be strong?"
"It's not something I can control," Nakajima hisses, but there isn't much heat to it. "I'm just... not used to thinking of myself in that way. In any of the ways you think about yourself, really. I've gotten better, but I'm still afraid of never getting to prove to... that I've changed." Nakajima is silent for a moment. "That I deserve to live. That's why I'm afraid of dying."
“But you are, indisputably, strong. You have let go of your past. The strong have no need to be terrified of death—it is essential to life, and the strong dominate all life. The same goes for living itself, with or without reason,” Akutagawa says. “That is how the world works. You made your choice.”
Nakajima lets out something that sounds like a cross between a chuckle and a sigh, something that brings all the air out of his lungs and ends with him smiling. Smiling. And Akutagawa is struck, for a moment, with this image, with this second, with Nakajima Atsushi backlit by the muted evening sun coming in through the window, hair ringed by a faint halo of light, the bright and boyish and life-loving smile back on his face, eyes kind and curious. An angel against the daybreak. An angel that feels the brush of death across his broken wings in every confrontation and can never fly away.
“I guess I did,” he says, smiling that god-awful smile, and he turns back to his paperwork.
Akutagawa notes that he's still shaking.
In a courtyard, sectioned off for counting:
"There are so many dead people," says Nakajima Atsushi. He sounds sad about it.
"There always is," answers Akutagawa.
They lapse into a momentary silence. "What will happen to them, after?"
"Their family members will be called. The mafia will settle their burials and compensation. We also handle the legal matters and the paperwork."
The weretiger swallows. The bodies stretch before them. "That's good, then. That's good."
"It's the least the mafia could do," says Akutagawa disinterestedly. "If they were any good at being part of this organization, they wouldn't have died. They're cannon fodder. This death is like change to me."
This only serves to make the weretiger sadder. It's disgusting. The empathy of a fool is disgusting. "No one deserves that."
"If they didn't bother to get stronger, then it's only their fault," says Akutagawa.
"I don't think that way," says the weretiger bitterly, not even trying to hide it. "It's not their fault, you know. Sometimes the only thing you can afford to be is weak. Sometimes you're forced to be weak."
Akutagawa frowns. He frowns a lot when he talks to Nakajima like this, recently. "You can never be forced to be weak. There's always a choice."
"If there's a choice," says the weretiger, carefully, "then why didn't I get one?"
"But you did," says Akutagawa. It should be simple. "You're strong now."
The weretiger looks at the bodies. "It doesn't feel like it."
"Then it will, one day," he says simply, walking away. "Until then, live with the knowledge that the weak are trampled. Until then, wear that bitterness of yours. Maybe it will do you some good."
He hears Nakajima Atsushi laugh behind him. "I don't get you sometimes. When I think I get you, you always... that advice was terrible."
Akutagawa doesn't move. "It worked for me."
Akutagawa doesn’t talk about it, after that. He feels that if he pries any more, Nakajima will forget that he’s not supposed to be broken and shatter. There’s an understanding there, the same kind that keeps Nakajima from asking too much about Dazai.
Thus, Akutagawa is left with no task but to observe how Nakajima’s pupils slit whenever something brushes past or hits something heavy, how his eyes flit across the room frantically whenever he hears something out of sight move, how he hides the tremor in his fingers by fiddling with his thumbs or scratching his head.
At first he thinks they're Ability-borne instincts of some kind, a built-in alarm, but it soon becomes clear to him that that isn’t the case. There is nothing inherently dangerous about grocery stores or tea houses or laundromats, no skeleton-shaking awareness or buried sixth sense that becomes apparent.
Nakajima is simply afraid, at all times, at all places.
(Sometimes—sometimes the weretiger stares at nothing. Nothing at all. He looks at the wall and sees beyond it, and Akutagawa can see him react to something that isn’t there. The worst of it is when he doesn’t react at all.)
He is in a state of perpetual tension that strikes his spine stiff and shoots his psyche to the ground. As if he is being watched, targeted, about to die. It’s infuriating.
Infuriating, because Akutagawa has seen this all before. This very same routine played out by the dead children that haunt behind his eyelids, the children he knew a lifetime ago.
The children that put on a smile even amidst trash heaps and rundown shacks with dirt and blood beneath their fingernails and in between their teeth, the children that wouldn’t allow themselves to be seen as if their very existences were wrong, the children who had backs made of scar tissue and nerves that would never recover, the children that were so determined to survive even as they choked on their last breath. The children that are always the first to die.
He sees those children in the weretiger now, and it sickens him. People like that aren’t supposed to be strong or concerned or joyful. They’re supposed to be—spare change. Cannon fodder. Collateral. Dead.
You can never be forced to be weak. There's always a choice, he had said, that day.
The weretiger’s words had confused him. Then why didn’t I get one?
If there’s always a choice, why didn’t I get one?
Akutagawa honestly doesn’t know what to say to him now. Doesn’t know how much time Nakajima’s got left before he snaps, and Akutagawa will have to be there to pick up the pieces.
They continue to meet in the in-betweens, and when they are officially meant to meet it’s on information runs and threat eliminations. The brokering isn’t half bad— Nakajima does surprisingly well with written information, considering his background, and it’s more often than not a simple file exchange.
The eliminations are a different matter entirely.
The Agency is different from the Port Mafia’s other branches in that it isn’t used to elimination. There is incapacitation and questioning and arrest where they can, absolutely, but there are no kills that do not involve the impending bloodshed of an entire town. Its assassins, Tanizaki and Kyouka, are more often than not kept for infiltration missions and reconnaissance. Paperwork, if the Agency has need of it. They do not shake on the job.
(He feels a bloom of pride at that, at Kyouka’s back as she walks away with Nakajima to the Agency, never once faltering, giving off nothing but determination. You did better than I ever could, he never says.)
The weretiger, in particular, is terrible at elimination missions, and never goes on them solo.
Shin Soukoku, of course, is an exception.
(Shin Soukoku is always an exception.)
“Dazai-san,” says Akutagawa, looking down at the two-inch-thick mission file Shin Soukoku has been given. This is the first time since the war that Dazai's come to him personally; leaning against a wall, the fear of five years for that cool gaze. “This is our assignment?”
Dazai grins. Akutagawa doesn’t know whether he should be terrified or eased. The man’s body language is different—has been for a while now, but he still wonders sometimes. “Of course, Akutagawa-kun~! Were you expecting something different?”
“Yes.”
“Oho~? And why is that, I wonder?”
Akutagawa sets down the mission file, red letters in small print staring back at him. “Shin Soukoku was made for the war. The war has ended, and with it the need for massacre within the city walls. Even if there are remnants...”
Dazai doesn't exactly clasp his hands together, but he inclines his head, shoulders lax and eyes glinting like he’s—like he’s... pleased? What the fuck. “Go on!”
“...We are unnecessary,” he says bluntly. “I could delegate this assignment to an amateur hit squad and it would produce the same effects.”
And he stops, for a moment, because he—he has just challenged Dazai-san’s judgement and authority. His muscles lock up and his entire body goes cold. Preparations for death. No, no, no—
And then, “Excellent observation, Akutagawa-kun,” says Dazai, and wait what.
Dazai steps forward and ruffles Akutagawa’s hair with a lopsided grin. “Atsushi-kun was right, you are making progress! You talked back!”
He waits for the blow, waits for the hand to tighten, but. No. Dazai-san's changed, hasn't he?
Release. There’s negative air above his head, staticky, and suddenly he remembers to breathe. He coughs instead.
Dazai’s voice seems far away, but his eyes are serious. (Not light-repellent, not malicious, not welcoming death.) “Do you want to know why I gave Shin Soukoku this mission?”
“Yes,” he says, because he can’t say anything else, Dazai is still too close.
Dazai opens the file and pulls out the picture of the base that Shin Soukoku is about to raid and clear. It's an orphanage.
“Atsushi-kun needs to make progress as well.”
A pause.
“It’ll break him,” Akutagawa finds himself saying, faint and a little unbelieving.
Dazai smiles. This is a tell he is familiar with, in the glint of his teeth and the curve of his eyes: danger danger danger. “I know. Can you make sure he deals with it?”
And because he can never refuse a request from this man, this man who broke him and expected him to pick up the pieces by himself, this man who didn’t know how to do anything else, he says: “Yes, Dazai-san. I will.”
“Wonderful.”
That tone—it’s grateful. Like thanks.
It’s not quite the word he wants, but Akutagawa—
Dazai has never thanked him before, has never sounded relieved. Akutagawa leaves before he can think about it, coat heavy on his shoulders.
“Hey, Akutagawa,” says Nakajima, snapping his fingers with the free hand not holding the tea cup. “You’re looking kind of spaced out there. You okay?”
“Look at who asks me that question first, you damned hypocrite. I take proper care of myself, unlike a certain—"
“You know what, I was totally concerned for like two seconds, but now I feel nothing but raging apathy.”
Akutagawa coughs. ”I don’t think you even believe in vegetables.”
“Hey! I so do!” At Akutagawa’s dubious stare, Nakajima adds, “Carrots. Kyouka-chan packs them for me at lunch.”
“There will come a day,” Akutagawa warns solemnly, “when Kyouka will put styrofoam in your bento, and you will eat it, and you will die a terrible bento-induced death. When that time comes, I will laugh at you.”
“She would not, and don’t you dare!”
Akutagawa huffs. Tell that to his stomach. Kajii didn’t stop laughing for weeks .
“And besides,” adds Nakajima belatedly, “I would never eat styrofoam. Carrots and styrofoam smell plenty different! I know that for a fact!”
“Kyouka is a devious child, you fool. She will find a way to get around your man-tiger senses.”
Nakajima scoots back two feet, like he’s trying to absorb Akutagawa’s couch. He looks absolutely mortified. “Oh my god, never say ‘man-tiger senses’ again. It makes me sound like some sort of wildling creep.”
“I see no point in retracting my statement, weretiger. You are a wildling creep.”
“That’s… that’s so…” he waves his hands about, like vague gesticulating will make his point for him. “It’s unmarketable! It’s not cool!”
Unmarketable.
“Weretiger,” he says solemnly, “you are by nature unmarketable. You can barely walk down stairs without tripping over your own behind, you are always barely on the side of punctual on a good day, you always take too long in formulating a—”
“Fancy words for someone who could set water on fire with just the force of his ego!”
“No,” says Akutagawa, recalling something. “That’s Dazai-san. You are confusing me with Dazai-san.”
Nakajima just looks plain perturbed. “Eh?”
"You don't want to know." Akutagawa remembers several things about Dazai’s apartment. Primarily that it is the very definition of “absolute train wreck”, which more or less reflects the personality of its owner perfectly, but still does not bring the true nature of the apartment to justice.
"No, I'm pretty sure I want to know."
“There was wax on the floor of his apartment from candles he lit because he couldn’t find the light switch,” says Akutagawa darkly. “Heaps of trash taller than me. No dishes, no food. It smelled awful, and I will not go there again.”
Or, as Chuuya put it, ‘shit smells like the back of some fucking cultist’s jeep carrying dried herbs, formaldehyde, sum total of all the bullshit that’s had the mercy to come out of his stupid mouth, and the distilled essence of goddamn Cthulhu,’ right before righteously picking up a broom and cleaning the place out, but Akutagawa isn’t going to go that far for anyone, Dazai or no.
Nakajima is making a very disturbing face. It’s not disturbing as in 'disturbed', it’s disturbing in the way Akutagawa knows every pull and every crease instinctually, like a man looking into a mirror. It’s the ‘Ah, Dazai-san.’ face.
“You know what,” he says, “I’m not sure whether to be unsurprised or horrified.”
There’s a small vibration in Akutagawa’s pocket—new notification. He holds up a strip of Rashomon to stop Nakajima from making any more pointless commentary and checks his phone.
From: Unknown number.
Akutagaaaawa-kuuuuuuuun
From: Unknown number.
We’ve received intel from a scout that the remnants will return to the confirmed base in approx. two hours from now
From: Unknown number.
Atsushi-kun’s copy of the file will be on my desk at the Agency. You have time to get it don't youuu
From: Dazai-san(31)
Do your best~!
To: Dazai-san(31)
Understood.
“Be afraid,” says Akutagawa, tongue like sandpaper in his mouth, pushing his phone back into his pocket and tugging Nakajima off the couch by his jacket collar, tea nearly spilling onto his floor. “Speak of the devil, and he will come.”
“Akutagawa?!”
“Shin Soukoku have a mission.”
“From? ”
“Dazai-san,” he says, just as he uses Rashomon to wrench open his apartment door. He can’t see Nakajima’s face right now, but the weretiger is probably staring at him like he’d had an abrupt personality swap with Kajii and was in the middle of advertising black coats to the police force. Or something.
“But Dazai-san hasn’t given us a mission in months ,” says Nakajima. “Didn't we clear out everything? What brought this on?”
And Akutagawa, for some reason, wants to tell him, but he bites his tongue and grits his teeth and pretends to be annoyed. “Do as Dazai-san says. The mission file is in his desk at the Agency. We will rendezvous at the warehouse district, the usual place. I will send for transportation. If you encounter any difficulties, contact me. I’m going to alert the boss.”
“Hey now,” says Nakajima, “what’s it about, first? Hey!”
“Threat elimination,” he answers. “A mercenary group from the war have escaped Port Mafia confinement—rat network—and are attempting to escape notice. A scout reported the location of their next base; an orphanage on the outskirts of Tokyo. We were given express permission to dispose of them.”
Nakajima’s eyes go harsh.
Even when he does not kill, even when he sends the unconscious bodies to the Port Mafia to interrogate, even when he leaves the room to let Akutagawa handle the useless living, Nakajima always shakes the most on elimination missions.
“Can you make sure he deals with it?”
Dazai intended to make Nakajima clear the base.
Akutagawa clenches his fists.
“We will complete it with no trouble,” he says, finally, and somehow manages to shoo Nakajima out of his apartment.
It’s for Dazai-san, he thinks, and no, that can’t be right.
Nakajima... has to improve. And if Dazai says he can do that, then Akutagawa will play his part, if it means he’ll stop seeing dead children in gold-purple eyes wherever he turns.
It’s sickening, he thinks, how far he is willing to go for that man.
(He isn’t sure which man he means, and that frightens him all the more.)
His phone is ringing.
An hour before they are to depart, Akutagawa looks at the caller ID with stony eyes.
Click.
“What is it.”
Nakajima’s voice is quiet and out of breath. “I can’t go on this mission.”
“What?”
“This mission,” he says, monotonous and chopped in a way Akutagawa expects more from Gin than anyone else, much less the weretiger. “I can’t. You can do it alone. I’m not going.”
“But Dazai-sa—”
“I don’t care about—I don’t care what he thinks is, is necessary, it’s not. It’s really not. And I know that, so I’m not going.”
Akutagawa grips the fabric of his black coat to avoid aggravating the crescent-shaped wounds he’d reopened on his palm. “Weretiger,” he warns, “you know nothing."
“But I do! I do know, Akutagawa. I know where the base is, and I. Am not. Going. Never again back to that—to that place. Never again to him. Dazai-san can come himself if you need the manpower."
“The man is dead,” snarls Akutagawa. “It does not matter whether you see him or not, if he lives on within you or not, the man is dead and the fact does not change, weretiger. That you let it get in the way of—”
“Akutagawa…”
A single, trembling breath in a long moment of silence.
"You know jack fucking shit."
He hangs up.
Akutagawa stares at his smartphone for a long, long time. He calls again, and the automated voice asking for a message has never felt so distant.
“...Nakajima,” he says, “trust me.”
Click.
You have one voice message from: Nakajima.
Play message?
“I hope I’m not making a mistake, Akutagawa.”
You have no unread messages in your inbox.
It’s been an hour.
The Port Mafia helicopter flies them to the outskirts of the forest near the orphanage’s location. Nakajima does not look at him, does not look at anyone. His hands are atypically stiff at his sides, so it makes the shaking all the more prominent.
“Get a hold of yourself,” he snaps. The rest of the usual threat—If you’re slow, I’ll leave you behind—is left untouched. It sticks in his throat and climbs back down into his chest.
Nakajima doesn’t respond.
When Akutagawa steps off the helicopter, Nakajima follows, but that’s it. His face is closed off, shut down, unseeing.
The trek to the orphanage is a long one.
Akutagawa doesn’t so much see the explosion as feel it.
There’s the burst of sound, yes, but with it comes wind. With it comes the scent of sulfur—sulfur and earth and iron and something else besides, something rotting. It’s familiar in a way that makes his eyes water involuntarily. All he needs to complete the picture are haphazard shacks and sewer water and he would be right at home—
Nakajima sucks in a breath behind him.
Shit. “Weretiger, don’t—”
His attempts are futile. Nakajima rushes ahead with a leap louder than the explosion, an expression of pure fear on his face. Akutagawa can only follow. He’s never been more grateful for Rashomon.
They arrive at the orphanage. What’s left of the orphanage.
Blood coats Akutagawa’s boots. The grass is absolutely stained with it.
The children are here. Some of their eyes are open. None of them see.
They were too slow.
Akutagawa hates being too slow.
Vaguely, he hears the thud of Nakajima falling to his knees, the clap of his de-powered hands covering his mouth, the choked-off screech.
And despite how much Akutagawa hates being too slow, despite how much he hates making mistakes in missions, despite how much he hates the circumstances that brought them here, despite how much he wants to take it out on anyone, anything else—
He can’t. The scathing, second-nature words have rubbed out against the wall of his throat.
So he focuses on what he can do. It feels like nothing.
“Oi,” he says. Hoarsely. “They’re escaping.”
The weretiger’s still staring at the ground.
“Oi, weretiger—”
“You said I could trust you.”
There it is again—that quiet, bit-off tone, the hint of a growl. Akutagawa covers his face with a hand. “I did.”
“Is that still true?”
The ash settles. Akutagawa coughs once, lets the hand drop, watches Nakajima rise. It’s slow. It’s quiet.
“Always,” he answers. The honesty in the word blindsides him. The insults he used to drop like coughing fits have burned away to an echo at the base of his neck, and all that’s left is a well of something like—he doesn’t know what it is.
(Akutagawa figures it out much, much later. Pity, he’ll say. Respect, he’ll say. I should have figured it out sooner, he’ll say.
Fear, he thinks instead.)
“I keep thinking,” says Nakajima, brushing the dust off his arms, the tremble fading, “about all the choices I’ve made.”
“...And what conclusion have you come to?”
Dazai would give a wry smile and ask him a question in return. Nakajima does him no such favor, and responds with the same brutal honesty that’s always affixed itself to their relationship. “None, not yet,” he says. “I think I’ve got something like it, though.”
For a moment, the weretiger says nothing. Then, he points to their three o’clock, eyes somewhere beyond the tree line. Akutagawa has a feeling that’s not all he’s seeing.
“There’s a route out there I saw in the file, to an old supply line. I have a hunch that they’re using it. If I don’t hurry, I’ll be late.”
The weretiger crouches, the tension like a lighting flame and the disturbed wind all telltale of the incoming burst of power. Nakajima turns his head halfway to face him, and there is nothing surer in that moment than the fact that those eyes will haunt him forever.
“Hey, Akutagawa?”
“Yes?”
“The choices I’ve made, I don’t regret them. I can’t regret them. But I don’t know if I’ll end up regretting this one. So I’m giving you a choice, too.” His next words quiet to a whisper. “If you ever feel the trust you have in me waver, then… put me down. like any other weakling afraid of death. Can you do that for me?”
Nakajima must have found his answer somewhere in Akutagawa’s face, because he leaves without giving him a chance to speak. Akutagawa makes no move to follow.
He is only vaguely aware that he should be satisfied with this outcome. He has no doubts Nakajima will handle the threat completely. This is listed as a Port Mafia elimination, so the Agency will not be harassed for the casualties. All collateral damage, easily swept under a rug and forgotten about, an unwritten history no one will remember save him and Nakajima Atsushi and Dazai-san.
But it doesn’t feel anything like what a victory should.
“Bastard,” he hisses to the remains of the orphanage clearing. There is no one to hear him. His voice echoes. “That’s not a choice.”
At some ruins in the forest:
“You dug them graves.”
“Are you surprised?”
“I’d have thought you’d call for a cleanup and then have them throw the bodies into some large pyre to sate your bloodlust, or something. You could call me surprised.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. They died like rats. Burying them like people is... the least one can do. They had no choice."
“You said everyone got a choice, once.”
“Neither one cancels out the other. If nothing else, they deserve this much.”
“I never thought I’d hear you talk about what people deserve beyond ‘Grr, people are ungrateful, face the wrath of my coat. Grrr.’ ”
“Stop whatever affectation you’re adding to your voice. Stop it right now.”
“' Grr, I’m an emo bastard with no feelings, I eat souls for breakfast and poems for lu—’ Urk! What was that for?!”
“You know what that was for, now stop it!”
“You’re a real comedian, you know that.”
“No I am not, I’m a mafioso. You are impossible.”
…
“Hey, Akutagawa?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you."
“You know,” Atsushi says, the curtains of Akutagawa's living room windows closed and two mugs of tea billowing steam across the table, “I mind it a lot less than I thought I would.”
Akutagawa looks up from his book. Atsushi doesn't recognize the book, but he's sure it's some kind of ancient literature. Akutagawa's reading glasses are slightly askew from the strange angle he’s been sitting at. His voice isn't soft, but it's a lot less grating than Atsushi is used to. “Mind what?”
“This partnership thing,” Atsushi says. "Us."
Akutagawa pauses, for a moment. If Atsushi had paid any more mind to what Akutagawa was doing with that stillness, he would have noticed his brows drawing together, and the grip on his text go white.
"Is there a reason for you to be saying that?" Akutagawa asks. His voice is still doing that not-soft, not-grating thing. It's measured.
"I've been thinking about things," Atsushi says, vaguely.
Akutagawa brings his tea up to his lips. He still hasn't let go of the text. "Concerning. I can't believe you're admitting to being capable of thought."
Atsushi resists the urge to swat him. "Hey, I'm trying to be serious here."
"Well, you're failing. You are coming off as quite strange."
"...You saved me from falling off a building yesterday."
"I've saved you plenty of times. When we were still fighting, even."
"Yeah, but you saving me from falling yesterday reminded me of all those times, and I've just been thinking." Atsushi drums his fingers across the glass. "You're not too bad."
"When I said I was tired of flattery, I did not mean for you to attempt more of it." Akutagawa is hiding his face with his book, now. "You're quite bad at it."
"Hey, you were the one who told Higuchi to set up training sessions with me," Atsushi says, a little offended. He braces himself for an Akutagawa impersonation session and reaches across the table to poke Akutagawa's book right in the center. The bastard's eyes cross. Hah. "And then you didn't even speak a word unless it was something like, 'Adequate'. Or 'Foolish'. Don't give me shit about being bad at flattery. I haven't forgotten."
"That was because I was, obviously, not attempting to flatter you," Akutagawa grits through his teeth. "And, for the record. That... debacle... was the combined effort of Dazai-san and Higuchi. It had nothing to do with me or any initiative on my part."
"Well, that's not true. Higuchi-san told me you told her to do it."
"I was under duress."
"You could've stopped showing up at any time."
"I don't not show up to a summons. I'm not the irresponsible one." He's drinking his tea again, this time smugly, because of course Akutagawa would invent a smug way to drink tea out of a cat mug. To a summons, he says. Pretentious ass. "You were the one who left me wandering around for an hour while you were at Starbucks, once."
"That's because I knew you would find me."
"And because you're a shit."
"...You know, the Agency still have that video."
"I'm still of the opinion that you deserved it."
A lapse of silence.
"We're drinking tea together," Atsushi says, eventually, in wonderment. "We're in your apartment. It's daytime."
"It's 10AM on a Saturday, Nakajima. That we are."
"Look, you even called me by name."
"Dazai-san told me to. It stuck."
"I don't believe that."
"You have no grounds on which to not believe me."
"Hm." Still. Dazai's fond of ordering around someone who can't refuse, but that alone hasn't been his game recently. He wants to make this partnership something organic. Regardless, if Atsushi points it out, the gig is up, and he'll be "Weretiger" until the heat death of the universe, so he keeps his mouth shut.
And then Akutagawa says something that makes Atsushi nearly choke on his spit.
“I suppose it's because I trust you," admits Akutagawa—
—and he takes Atsushi's hand. Pulls it toward him, palm up. Atsushi feels like his head is made of cotton from shock, and Akutagawa drops out of his vision as he looks at his hand in Akutagawa's. Only vaguely does he register Akutagawa's touch—it feels the same as his voice. Measured, careful. Not gentle, not rough, but it feels like electricity all the same.
"Why are you holding my hand," says Atsushi, because he is an idiot.
Akutagawa doesn't let go. Atsushi needs to breathe. "You shook my hand, on the bridge."
"What?"
"On the bridge. Before we fought, you shook my hand. This is the hand you shook with."
Atsushi lets his vision refocus, looks at his bare palm a sight longer than he means to, and nods, but. "That wasn't a handshake."
"I already shook your hand back then. I just..." Silence. "Wanted to see that hand again. You wear full-length gloves these days."
"You are so weird," Atsushi says, shaking his head. "I have a restoration ability, it hasn't changed. And. You know where my scars are."
"I know," Akutagawa says, "more things about you than I probably should know. You're my partner."
But then Akutagawa releases Atsushi’s hand from his grip and leaves the room, abrupt. A sudden emptiness. The Headmaster is just gone with Akutagawa's words, and Atsushi is left alone in a living room far too large for just one person. It strikes him that Akutagawa must be alone, too, in a place like this.
He's not sure what to do with that, either.
So Atsushi thinks about Akutagawa.
He's impatient. Quick to anger, quick to judge, with a coat that smells of blood and an ability that screams for it. He's a dog of the Port Mafia and does things Atsushi would never dream of doing. He fought together with Atsushi in the war, and they did things Atsushi would never be proud of. He has an ideology that makes Atsushi go batshit just thinking about it. He isn't kind. He's someone that Atsushi can barely tolerate, much less work with.
Yet.
They've been working together this whole time, haven't they? Even when they were fighting, even when they fought, it was for their own reasons of living.
The truth is you are here in front of me.
They trust each other.
They trust each other to do the right thing when it comes to lives at stake and Yokohama’s safety, when it comes to watching each other’s backs, each other’s lives. It is a wild, almost tentative kind of trust, built on battles fought together in both senses of the word, brought to life by a man that has saved them both, continued by stubborn circumstances and an innate compatibility and a strange, strange form of companionship.
He is lost. He is lonely. He is rash. He is angry, and spiteful, and bitter. He's saved Atsushi's life, and tried to kill him. Atsushi's shared pains with him that he doubts he could have with anyone else, if only because they're so similar. He stopped killing for six months because he's a man who keeps his word, and six months after that because- well.
Atsushi stands up and goes to find Akutagawa. The apartment is big, but not that big, and if Dazai finds out they've verbally acknowledged trust of any kind, they'll never hear the end of it.
Akutagawa wonders when Nakajima realized it was okay to trust. When he realized that the prospect of a petty 'defeat' was worth less than the something that was between them now, the something that binds them together like a cord.
He wonders when the weretiger had become Nakajima to him.
Akutagawa wonders if that cord is what others would call fate. It doesn't feel like fate. Fate chafes. This something, now—it feels like a choice, like a change, like something they've earned. He wonders if Nakajima's realized that, too.
He is unaware, of course, that Atsushi has always realized, right from the beginning. His voice is the one that echoes, in a tone of complete faith.
The relationship between strength and weakness is not how you see it. The truth is that you are here in front of me.
The new double black is different from the old double black. There is trust: that is the same in every incarnation. But there's something else, as well. Like a sprouting bud, something quiet, unfurling. Like familiarity. But not quite.
This is what their partnership feels like:
It is a subtle thing made out of subtle things, soft tones and warm breaths and slow pulses of life in burning wrists; quiet and easily missed by the people who don’t look for it. They pull the curtains closed and let no sound walk in, as if what they have will break the moment reality intervenes. It is recognition and respect and then it is a fragile kind of understanding, the kind that only truly breathes when their eyes meet and it is as if they are saying, “I know you,” while walking separate paths. “I know you, because you are like me.”
This is how Shin Soukoku is born. It feels like a remaking.