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When Mimic’s defeat first reached the Special Ability Department, Ango was cramming down an early dinner in preparation for another night of overtime. Taneda broke the news to him, and promptly sent him home to rest.
As Ango was packing up the rest of his belongings, he asked, carefully, “Were there any other—” he stopped. He drew steel over his face, and tried again. “Were there any other casualties?”
Taneda paused for a moment. “Mori took care to mention one,” he said. “An errand boy of some sort, he said.”
“I see.”
The sun sunk down with the weight of the day. The door of his room opened to its neutral colours, soothing in some ways: just the same as always. A framed picture hung on the wall. A vase of flowers on the desk. Somewhere along the way, hotel rooms had ended up feeling like home, even when the dying rays of sunlight splashed over them in blood red.
Even with Dazai in them, turning over to look at him.
He was framed by the glowing metropolis, sprawling in its monstrosity into the distance. A gun dangled from his fingers, like a toy. His eyes were empty. He was smiling.
“What a nice view,” he said pleasantly. “I wonder if it’s nice enough to be your last?”
“Dazai-kun,” Ango said.
“No,” Dazai said pensively. He nodded to himself, jumping up from the bed. He left the gun behind on its covers, silencer digging into the duvet. “I think I’d rather like to be the last thing that you see.”
Dazai didn’t need a gun to kill. Ango didn’t need a gun to kill, either. But they both knew that Dazai wasn’t going to die tonight.
Ango sighed, resigned. He walked further into the room, placing his bag onto the desk. He shrugged his shoulders, stretching out the kinks. Better get comfortable while he still could.
“Why are you here, Dazai-kun?” he said.
Dazai sidled closer, peering at him with open curiosity. “I can’t believe it. It’s not obvious?”
“It’s clear that you despise the sight of me. If you wanted to torture me or watch me die, you would have already started on it.”
Dazai was silent for a moment. “Hm, not bad. Well, I guess you did deceive us for so long. Still irritating, though.”
“I’ve never lied to you.” He thought that it was very important Dazai knew that.
Dazai ignored him. He pulled open a drawer under the desk, removing a sheaf of hotel stationery. Then he reached over and opened Ango’s bag, too, and extracted his pen. He laid them out and stared at Ango.
“Dazai-kun?”
“Did you forget his name, too?” Dazai’s voice was eerily clear. “O-da Saku-no-suke. Does that sound familiar?”
Ango swallowed against the sudden lump in his throat. He pulled out the chair and sat down, feeling the familiar weight of his pen in his grip before he wrote the first three characters. Odasaku. Ango paused.
“Finish it,” Dazai snarled. “You don’t get to call him that.”
Ango bowed his head and acquiesced. Oda Sakunosuke. He stared at the page hollowly. Funny, how his mind came up blank for this particular record, when he actually knew the individual in question. When he should have had the most material to draw from, to write down. He raised his eyes to Dazai, who was staring at the paper fixedly.
“I hate you, you know,” Dazai said, without looking at him. His voice shook slightly, and he was standing close enough that Ango could hear his unsteady breaths. “I hate you. I hate you.”
“Dazai-kun…”
“He was all that I had,” Dazai said, eyes very bright, “and you took him away from me.”
It was the first and only time that Dazai had ever truly sounded like a child. Against every single one of his finely-honed instincts for self-preservation, Ango reached out. Dazai stiffened as Ango’s fingers touched the crisp cotton of his shirt. He didn’t move away.
This Ango knew about Dazai: he was never one to concede. And although Dazai might hate him, he hated himself far more, with the precise sort of clarity that he couldn’t bear to face directly.
“What are you going to do now?” Ango murmured half-heartedly, not really expecting an answer. “Odasaku-san wouldn’t—”
“Shut up,” Dazai said.
“You know that you mustn’t try to oppose Mori-san—”
“I said shut up.”
“I’m worried about you, Dazai-kun,” Ango said earnestly. “You—” but then he couldn’t say anything more, because something raw had sparked in Dazai’s eyes, and then he was half on top of Ango, kissing him.
He was hot on Ango’s lap, and he threw himself into the abrupt kiss with a clumsy sort of determination. It felt good to be so close to another person — because after all how long had it been? far, far too long of this bureaucratic, professional impersonality that seemed to rule every aspect of Ango’s life nowadays — and it was a comfort to touch, to be touched: a reprieve, of sorts. A reprieve from everything.
Dazai used too much tongue, as though he was trying to bury his words into Ango’s mouth. He knocked against the frame of Ango’s glasses as he drew back for air, and a repeated “shut up” fanned out over Ango’s cheek, still defiant in its breathlessness. Dazai shifted his weight slightly, and there was a warm tug low in Ango's stomach when Dazai stilled, and then moved more insistently against—
In a brief catch of lucidity, Ango pushed him away. Dazai ended up hovering above him, backed onto the desk.
“He was just another human being, wasn't he?” Dazai muttered. He tried to twist closer, and his arms were tense on Ango’s shoulders. “And people die every day. Ango, why does it hurt so much?”
“Dazai-kun,” Ango said, trying to keep his own voice from shaking. His eyes were hot, and he removed his glasses when they began to fog. Dazai was close enough that he didn’t need them: around him, the hotel room was a blur. He felt too warm. “Dazai-kun, you’re upset. That’s understandable, so please calm down.”
The indignation rose in Dazai’s eyes. “You always think of me as a child,” he hissed. “Odasaku never treated me like one.”
“I don’t think of you as a child,” Ango said. He didn’t, not— not like this. “You’re not thinking rationally at the moment.”
“Rational!” Dazai laughed out harshly, the sound jagged through the air. “Ango, you’ve always been the one for useless sentimentality.”
Ango sighed. “What's happened to you?”
“I grew up.” Dazai’s voice was suddenly cold. “You’re worried about me, Ango? You shouldn’t be.”
Dazai straightened up, and carefully extracted himself from his position in a series of exact movements. Ango watched as he righted his collar and pulled the sleeves of his rumpled shirt to order. Strange — he didn’t seem to have his coat. Without it, he seemed smaller. More vulnerable.
He didn’t look once at Ango as he strode out of the room. For a long time afterwards, Ango stared at the blurred colours of generic picture on the wall.
*
What was that picture? Was it a print of a Van Gogh, or a photograph of the Yokohama skyline? Ango feels like he should remember, four years on.
What he does remember with a sharp clarity, though: the rosy light of a dying sun, an unfinished obituary on letterheaded stationery, the breath of a muttered ‘shut up’, warm against his skin. A gun, left behind on the bed, as though its owner had no use for what it represented anymore.
Today he has it unloaded, tucked into the back of his trousers. Usually, it sits in the safe of Ango's hotel room — just in case — and that’s a funny thing, too: in all of this time, hotel rooms never stopped feeling like home. Ango had thought that he'd get tired of them, eventually — tired of the idea of running, of forever being caught in liminal spaces. But the lack of physical attachments is freeing, in its own way.
His car nears the tall figure in the half-empty parking lot, slouched against the chain wire fencing with painfully familiar insouciance. Ango sighs and steels himself, before his bodyguard pulls the car to a halt. He opens his door.
“It’s been a while, Dazai-kun,” he says. “I was quite shocked when you contacted me.”