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It was the worst possible scenario.
Chuuya had already believed he was experiencing the worst possible scenario when Dazai disappeared without a word after the death of his friend, Oda Sakunosuke. No note left on the nightstand, no voicemail from his phone, no indication of where he was going or if he was coming back. No goodbye. Just a cold, empty side of a bed that wasn’t filled for days and days until Chuuya gave up hope that it ever would be again. Just a broken heart that used to burn like a roaring fire.
But life had never, ever been kind to Chuuya. As a child he was tossed out onto the streets left to starve or freeze to death, whichever came first. When he was older he was taken in by Ozaki Kouyou, which was a curse disguised as a kindness; though he was fed, clothed, and allowed to transition into the man he’d always been on the inside, though he survived, he was thrown to the wolves and his Quirk was used and abused until he had no choice to believe that he was anything but a weapon of mass destruction. He became Dazai’s partner, and later, his partner, only to be left behind once again. But, unbeknownst to either of them at the time, Chuuya was not the only person that Dazai had left behind.
Chuuya’s immune system had never been the strongest, and was continuously deteriorating after the years that he’d been forced to push the use of his Quirk to the limit, but it was abnormal for him to become sick so suddenly with something that couldn’t immediately be self-diagnosed or that didn’t have particularly abnormal symptoms. He was woken up by nausea every morning without fail. He was constantly tired. His mood was more explosive than usual. Some days he wouldn’t eat. Others, he’d eat like he hadn’t had a scrap of food in weeks. It was insufferable, feeling like this. And Chuuya didn’t have a clue, for the life of him, what was wrong.
But out of all the ailments the Port Mafia’s physician could have diagnosed Chuuya with, pregnancy had been the farthest from Chuuya’s mind.
It was plausible, Chuuya knew, now that he had actually been forced to think about it. Even at his young age of eighteen he had long since been without his virginity, and the last time he and Dazai had slept together had been almost exactly a month before he had left the mafia. That put Chuuya at six and a half weeks now, if that were truly the case. But it was not something that Chuuya wanted to acknowledge.
Chuuya had hardly been fond of the idea of children in general before he had begun his transition, let alone afterwards and let alone his own children. The fact that he was eighteen, newly single, and the right-hand man of a mafia executive were not particularly selling counterpoints, either. In fact, there was absolutely nothing desireable about his position whatsoever.
Even if he had wanted to keep the child, the mafia was no place to do so. He couldn’t murder people for a day job only to return home to a sleeping baby who was more fragile than the glass bottles of wine down in Chuuya’s cellar. He couldn’t take care of a child while his hands were soaked in blood. He couldn’t even attempt so long as Mori Ougai was the Boss of the Port Mafia.
If Mori found out about the child, he would likely sentence it to death. Or he would sentence Chuuya to death before it was born. Or he would take the child from Chuuya and exploit it like he had exploited Chuuya. And Chuuya could not stand the thought of any of those things.
Getting rid of the child himself was also not an option, even if abortion was widely available in this day and age. As much of a cold-hearted killer as Chuuya was, he would be loyal to his family until his dying breath, and that included even the undeveloped fetus that currently resided within his womb. The fact that it could not even be considered a living being yet made the thought of doing away with it even harder than if it had been born already. It deserved as much of a chance to live as any other person in this world did, and if Chuuya only spared the life of a single person, it would be his unborn child.
He would have this baby, but it would have to be in secret, and he would have to send it away the minute it was born.
He bribed the physician with a hefty sum of yen not to breathe a word of his visit to anyone else in the Port Mafia, but left him with the threat that if anyone else found out, the physician would die the cruelest death that Chuuya had ever facilitated. The physician was smart enough to take the money and keep his mouth shut. Everyone in the underground knew that a death at Nakahara Chuuya’s hands would be nothing more than the most excruciating experience of their miserable, pathetic lives, and at the ripe old age of forty-six, the physician didn’t want his to be over just yet.
The only person Chuuya could confide in was Kouyou. She was his only family, after all. He called her his older sister because of how close they were in age, but mother was a more fitting name. She was the only person he could trust. Especially when the child’s sperm-donor had yet to return any of Chuuya’s calls.
And, as she always was, Kouyou was quick to devise a plan to keep Chuuya and his unborn child safe. She sent him away to the city of Musutafu under the pretense of undercover Mafia work, where he was to live and see a private physician until the baby was born. And, once she was born, he would give her up for adoption so that she could live a long life, untroubled by the darkness of this world and unburdened by the dangers that Chuuya faced every day. She would be happy living with a family who was normal and loving and could care for her better than he ever could on his own. He only prayed that she would never resent him for what he had done.
The process of putting the baby up for adoption ended up being like any other closed adoption would have been. On the outside, anyways. Chuuya did not even give a name to the child when she was born. He cared for her briefly in the time that it took to find an agency to take her in, then planned on never seeing her again. He had no intentions of connecting with her new family, and should they ever ask for information on him, all they would find were the names of the child’s birth parents. She deserved to know that, if nothing else, if she ever asked. But Chuuya was not content not knowing where his baby had ended up, so through his own slightly underhanded methods, he made sure he knew she was being taken care of.
She was adopted by a young couple outside the city. Mister and Missus Uraraka. They’d been trying for a child since they had been married a year and a half ago but hadn’t had any luck. They lived in a small house with lots of land in the countryside. They owned an architecture company together.
They named her Ochako.
Chuuya already felt like she was never his.
---
It was that time of year again. The annual Yuuei Academy Sports Festival was being broadcast internationally, and the entire world was ready to watch. Children stayed home from school and adults took off work just so they could stay at home or go to a sports bar to watch the festival. And out of the billions of people in the world and the millions of Pro Heroes that were part of the population, only a select few thousand had the privilege of witnessing the events in person.
Chuuya certainly had the money for such an opportunity, but he prefered to keep his distance. Even if Ochako would be competing this year.
It had been fifteen years since she’d been born. Eleven years since Dazai had come back into his life. Five years since he had confessed to Dazai they had a child together. One year since Chuuya had decided to remove both his and Dazai’s names from the records at the orphanage he had given Ochako to, knowing that Dazai was getting close to figuring out where it was, and not wanting that man to have any contact with their daughter or to ruin the life she had built for herself.
She wanted to be a hero. Her Quirk manifested when she was four years old. Three months after the first time Chuuya and Dazai met again for the first time in one of the Port Mafia’s dungeons. It was a perfect combination of their own Quirks. She could nullify the gravity of anything that she touched. When he found the news out, he couldn’t help being bitter that she had inherited any of Dazai’s quirk at all. At the same time, he was praying that meant that she hadn’t inherited the curse that was Corruption.
She had been accepted into Yuuei at the beginning of the year, though the results of her entrance exam were a hot topic for the rumor mill for months to come. She’d been saved from severe injury by a boy named Midoriya Izuku, who was thought to have been Quirkless until it suddenly manifested in the days before the entrance exam. She and Midoriya were quite close. Chuuya hoped she was getting herself involved with the right people.
He sat with a bottle of wine from the year she was born and watched her compete from start to finish, never taking his eyes off of the TV screen while she was on it. He rooted for her as much in body as he did in spirit, shouting profanities at the TV when it looked like she was falling behind and singing praise to the Heavens when she pulled through. He wasn’t disappointed when she was finally defeated. He was only proud that she had come so far.
These days, he missed her more and more. His heart regretted the decision he had made even though his head knew it had been the right choice. But his head couldn't win when he was drunk and alone in his house that was too big for him and crying over what he knew a family was supposed to be.
---
Though she had only received twenty nominations after the Sports Festival, Ochako felt like she was being forced to choose between hundreds. It was a small amount compared to most of the other students in the class, but that didn’t make the decision any easier. As she read through the list of names her mind kept changing.
Magical Strike! I’d love to work with him!
Lucky Mole… Maybe she’d be a better option…
But I could learn a lot from Saberleaf, too.
Oh! Hypnoscout!? No way!!
Actually… Maybe Magical Strike is the best after all…
She weighed the pros and cons of each possible mentor as she went down the list and got no closer to eliminating anyone even as she reached the very end. Still, there was one nomination that stood out to her among the rest, and it wasn’t because of how prestigious the nominator was. In fact, she’d never heard of it at all.
Most of the Pro Heroes who had nominated her had an office assigned with them, but this particular nominator was an office without a specific hero assigned to it. The Armed Detective Agency, it was called. It was located in the city of Yokohama.
The name itself was enough to invite curiosity, but the fact that there was no Pro Hero attached to it made it all the more intriguing. Ochako wasn’t any closer to making a decision, but she figured that this Armed Detective Agency was worth an investigation. So as soon as she got home from school that day, the first thing she did was sit down at her computer and find out what she could about that mysterious nominator.
The agency had been founded twenty-two years ago by a man named Fukuzawa Yukichi. Despite the fact that the man was a Pro Hero himself, the agency was not legally a hero office, and none of its other members were certified. And yet, they were allowed to use their quirks to help the police and the military solve difficult or morally-grey cases. They were, in a sense, government-sanctioned vigilantes.
Edogawa Ranpo, Yosano Akiko, Kunikida Doppo, Miyazawa Kenji, Tanizaki Junichiro, Nakajima Atsushi, Izumi Kyouka, Lucy Montgomery, and Akutagawa Ryunosuke were most of the detectives in the agency, and none of their names brought up any sort of familiarity to Ocahko. Nor did the names of the several office clerks who were listed as part of the staff. But the name Dazai Osamu certainly did ring a bell.
Ochako realized with sudden alarm that the reason the name sounded familiar to her was because it was one of the two names given to her a year ago when she had asked the agency she had been adopted from for information on her birth parents.
Dazai Osamu was the name of one of her birth fathers, the other being Nakahara Chuuya. No birth mother had been listed. It wasn’t a particularly uncommon occurrence, but fostered Ochako’s curiosity all the more. Unfortunately, the agency had no other information on her birth parents, and she hadn’t had time to look into either one of them, as she had been preparing for her final year in middle school and her (hopeful) subsequent transfer to Yuuei Academy. By the time she had gotten around to trying to find any information for herself, her parents names had been removed from the records.
Ochako knew it meant that at least one of them still had to be alive, but with nothing else to go off of other than names she could hardly remember, digging up anything about her parents seemed a futile mission. Now, though, maybe she had a chance. Maybe this was her father’s way of calling to her. Maybe she’d finally get the answers she so desperately wanted.
---
The cab door opened, and Ochako’s feet hit the pavement not a moment afterwards. She almost forgot to close the door behind her, stuck marvelling at the medium-sized building in front of her which bore two signs; one for the Hazel Gardens café, and one for the Armed Detective Agency. Her moment of truth was here, and once she stepped through that door, her life would likely never be the same.
As the cab drove away, she steadied herself with deep breaths, straightening her back and putting on a brave face. She was a long way from home. There was no point in turning back now. Even if she was terrified.
She took deliberate steps as she walked towards the entrance and opening the door. The lower floor of the building was completely taken up by the café and there was no clear access to the Agency’s office, so after working up the courage to ask a waitress where it was, she finally made her way up the stairs to the fourth floor and walked down the hall until she found the door to the office. She took one more deep breath before pushing the door open and stepping into the room.
A head turned, looking up from his desk, and Ochako’s eyes were met by honey-green ones behind rectangle lenses. A stern and searching look. Ochako swallowed hard.
“Is there something we can help you with today, young lady?”
“I… Um, yes, I… My name is Uraraka Ochako. Your agency nominated me for an internship after the Yuuei Sports Festival. I came to speak with whoever it was that sent in the nomination.”
The bespectacled man raised an eyebrow. “Oh, that’s right. You are Miss Uraraka,” he said, recognition now clear on his face. “Very well. Have a seat on one of those couches in the corner. I’ll bring Dazai out to speak with you momentarily.”
Ochako’s heart leapt into her throat. “Y-yes, sir,” she managed to say around the lump, then walked on shaking legs over to the couch and plopped down just a little harder than she should have. She waited in agony for the man who had greeted her to send Dazai to see her.
The door to another office opened a few minutes later, revealing a man with short, bouncy brown locks and eyes of the same color. He was draped in a beige trench coat, and his wrists and neck were bound with gauze. Despite the soft smile on his face, his expression was unreadable.
“So…” he began, taking steps forward until he was right in front of her, looking at her, eyeing her up and down, “you’re Uraraka Ochako. Chuuya’s little girl.”
Ochako found it strange that Dazai referred to her as Chuuya’s little girl, but not his own. She’d never met Chuuya before. She had no relationship with him. She’d also come to this agency of her own volition, without any influence from anyone else. It made her wonder if her birth parents were even still together anymore. Or if Chuuya was even still alive.
“...Is he here right now?” she asked quietly, hesitantly, almost afraid of the answer.
Dazai shook his head, that unreadable smile still plastered on his face. “No, unfortunately not. He doesn’t come around to see me too often. He doesn’t actually know that I invited you here.”
Ochako pursed his lips. “Are… you going to tell him?”
Dazai nodded this time. “I will tell him. But if you’re hoping to get a chance to meet him, I doubt that chance will come any time soon.”
“Why?” Ochako asked. “Does he… does he not want to see me?”
“Oh, I’m sure he’d like very much to see you. The trouble is that he’d rather you not see him.”
“Why?” Ochako asked again.
Dazai chuckled quietly. “You’re a curious little bird, aren’t you?”
A small pout pulled at Ochako’s lips. “I was given up for adoption at birth and now one of my birth parents has asked me to intern at his vigilante agency fifteen years after the fact. How could I not have questions?”
Dazai laughed again. “Spunky, too. I like it. You’ve got his personality. And his looks… and his quirk…”
“I look like him?” Ochako asked, for some reason, more interested in that than in the quirks that either one of her parents had. She didn’t look much like her adopted family at all. Some people said she even looked foreign. It made her wonder what Chuuya must look like.
“Oh, yeah. The red hair with the weird style, the baby face, you’re even about the same height as he is. But you get those eyes from me.”
Ochako blushed, a little embarrassed as Dazai continued to list off her traits, though she didn’t exactly know why. “So I’m… both of yours? Biologically? I don’t have a mother?”
“You got it,” Dazai confirmed.
“So, why doesn’t he want to see me, again?”
“It’s not that he doesn’t want to see you, it’s that it’s… Well, it’s complicated.”
Ochako pursed her lips. “I hope you don’t think I came all the way out here to find more closed doors. I didn’t come out here for the internship, either. I want to become a Pro Hero, not a vigilante detective. I came here to talk about us.”
Dazai hummed quietly. “I would have sent you away if you had come here for the internship. The truth is, as fun as it would be to mentor my long lost daughter, I didn’t nominate you to give you a place to work. I don’t want you to intern here. I only put in that nomination because I knew you knew what my name was, and I knew you would come down here to talk.”
Ochako narrowed her eyes. “You knew I was looking for you?” she asked in disbelief.
Dazai nodded once again. “I have known for a long time.”
“Why didn’t you come and see me yourself, then? Or why didn’t you send me a message before now, or something?” she questioned, clearly hurt by the revelation.
“I had to do it in a way that Chuuya couldn’t have intercepted,” Dazai explained. “I had to be absolutely sure that he wouldn’t catch me. He never wanted me to know that you existed in the first place. He’d raise hell if he knew I was trying to get to you.”
Ochako’s expression softened. “Did you not… know, when I was born…?”
Dazai shook his head. “Unfortunately, no. By that time, Chuuya and I had already gone our separate ways. I had no clue that we had a child together until he revealed it to me during an argument when you must have been about ten years old. After that, he did everything in his power to make sure I never found you. But I’m quite a lot cleverer than he gives me credit for.”
Ochako looked at her lap, fussing with her fingers. “Why doesn’t he want me to have contact with either of you? Does he really hate me that much?”
At that, Dazai lowered himself to his knees so that he was at eye level with her. He cupped her chin with his fingers and tilted her head up to meet her eyes with his own. “Hey, don’t look so distraught, Ochako. Chuuya loves you. I can promise that much.”
“Then why is he trying so hard to keep us apart?”
Dazai sighed quietly. “Well, on my end, he’s afraid that I’ll selfishly try to stop you from achieving your dreams. He’s immensely proud of you for getting into the top Hero program in the country. He wants you to have the life that neither one of us could have. He wants you to be better than both of us, and he was afraid I’d try to stop you from doing that.”
“And on his end…?”
Dazai’s expression suddenly grew more serious. “I’m not going to lie to you, Ochako, and what I’m going to tell you about your father won’t be easy to hear. He’s been a member of a criminal organization called the Port Mafia since he was twelve years old. He gave you up because he didn’t want you to grow into being a criminal yourself. But he still lives that life, and he doesn’t want you to have contact with him because he would be a danger to you.”
Ochako’s heart skipped a beat, then started pounding in her chest. Out of all of the reasons she had theorized for why she had been given up, out of all the occupations and situations her parents could have been in, she’d never dared to believe that her parents could have been villains or even lower-class criminals. Now, she was facing a harsh reality, and she didn’t know how to react to it.
“But--” Dazai quickly began, knowing that he couldn’t send her home with a crushed spirit when she had come all the way out here for some hope, “--I’m working on a plan. To save him.”
Ochako looked at him again, blinking out of her daze. “Save him…?”
Dazai nodded. “I’m trying to get him out of the mafia. I managed to pull myself out of that organization before you were born. That’s why he and I parted ways. I left that criminal organisation and became the vigilante I am today. I pulled two colleagues of mine out of that criminal organization, as well. I can certainly do it with Chuuya. I just need more time.”
“Well--can I help?” Ochako asked, a little desperately. “Th-there’s gotta be something I can do! Maybe if he saw me again, it would help! Maybe I can--”
“No, Ochako,” Dazai denied solemnly. “I agree wholeheartedly with Chuuya’s decision to give you up as he did. The Port Mafia is not an organisation I would ever let you associate with. This is one thing that I will force you to keep your distance with.”
“But…”
“Besides,” Dazai continued, “you have more important things to focus on. This meeting wasn’t to put a halt to your life, Ochako. I never wanted to do what Chuuya was afraid of me doing. I want you to put your heart into your studies and to keep making us--and your parents--proud. This meeting was just so… you’d have an answer for your questions. And so you could know that we’re still around, and we still love you.”
Ochako laughed shakily, reaching up to run a hand through her hair. “You say this meeting was to answer my questions, but I feel like I’m going to leave being even more confused than when I came…”
“Maybe so,” Dazai said, “but this certainly isn’t the last time you’ll see me. Rest assured, I’ll send you home with my contact information. You can call me or message me whenever you’d like. We’ll keep talking, and I’ll keep you updated on Chuuya. In time, I will answer all your questions. And in time, hopefully Chuuya can answer a few himself.”
Ochako nodded, then went silent for a while before asking “So… what now?”
Dazai glanced at the clock, then back at Ochako. “I’d hate for you to have come all this way just for me to send you back home half an hour later,” he said. “Why don’t you let me take you out to lunch? Then I’ll make sure you get back to the station safely instead of sending you by yourself.”
Ochako’s face flushed bright red again. “O-oh, Mister Dazai I couldn't ask you to do something like that, you probably have a lot of work to do and--”
Dazai laughed and patted the top of Ochako’s head. “I’d much rather take you out to lunch than sit around this office all day. Being a vigilante is surprisingly boring.”
He pushed himself to his feet and stretched with a sigh. “You can call me Osamu, by the way,” he said as he walked around the couch, then beckoned for Ochako to get up and follow him.
“You look like the kinda girl who likes tea. I know a couple nice places around town. Sound good to you?”
Though she was still blushing, Ochako bounced up from the couch and smiled at Dazai. “That sounds great, Osamu!” she exclaimed as she joined him at his side.
Dazai smiled at her, and he realized in that moment it was the fondest smile he’d ever given anyone in his life. He knew in that moment that he loved her. He knew in that moment that he loved Chuuya, too.