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“Kunikida-kun, share a drink with me.”
“I assume I have no choice, given that you’re blocking the door to the office.”
Dazai smiled and pulled out a bottle of sake from god-knows-where. Kunikida looked up over his laptop, eyes narrowed as Dazai sauntered towards him and perched on the edge of his desk.
He held out the bottle. “I’ll give you the honor of having the first taste.”
“From the bottle?” Kunikida sounded disturbed.
Dazai blinked. “I don’t have cups.”
“It’s a good thing one of us is prepared.” Kunikida opened one of the drawers of his desk and pulled out two plastic cups. Dazai caught a glimpse of paper plates before the drawer shut again.
“I knew you’d have something.” Dazai poured them both sake. “Why don’t you go home?”
“Things are escalating,” Kunikida said. “I’m sure you know that I can’t afford to waste time.”
“But everyone else can? Come on, Kunikida-kun, the Agency won’t die if you sleep at night,” Dazai said. “Take a drink.”
“Dazai…” Kunikida looked into his cup. “Slacking off isn’t an option.”
“Of course not,” Dazai said, taking a sip of his own drink. “Think of it this way, Kunikida-kun, you’re not at top efficiency if you’re sleep deprived. You’ll make mistakes that the others will need to fix, or at the worst, will cost us something we can’t afford. Working constantly doesn’t always produce the best results.”
Kunikida glared at him. “Then what do you suggest? Lazing around, avoiding work like you often do, pretending that these things don’t matter?”
Dazai’s expression darkened for a moment. “You could never pretend like these things don’t matter to you.” His features softened. “But you need rest. The things that happened are things you can’t just recover from right away.”
“No,” Kunikida said. “The things that happened are things that the dead can never recover from. I, however, will survive, and I must make sure it never happens again.”
“People die,” Dazai said. “This is war.”
“We can prevent deaths,” Kunikida said, gripping his cup too hard. “It doesn’t have to happen again. We don’t have to sacrifice lives, especially not of those who are innocent—“
“Sometimes the lives of a few must be sacrificed to save the lives of many—“
“You may not give a damn about the death of others, but I do!”
Dazai’s voice rose. “And it’s breaking you.”
“I don’t want to become empty, unfeeling, like y—“
“Take a drink, Kunikida-kun,” Dazai said, his voice icy.
Kunikida stopped talking.
Dazai looked away for a moment. “The best way to not feel pain is to accept it’ll happen and feel numb to it. To distance yourself, rather than to bring yourself so close to the source of pain that it almost kills you.”
“How can you think like that?” Kunikida asked.
Dazai turned to face him. “How can you subject yourself to that much pain like that?” Part of his voice was sad for the pain that Kunikida went through, and part of it sounded like he genuinely longed to know what made someone brave enough to readily accept that pain.
“I want a better world,” Kunikida said. “I want to make that happen, and I can’t make that happen if I allow myself to accept that certain things are the way the world is.”
“It’ll kill you,” Dazai said. “And for what? Other people will still die.”
“Dazai—“
“Or worse, you’ll live like an open wound, and every single touch will cause you pain.”
“Dazai,” Kunikida said, “is there anything that you care about that you’d allow yourself to feel pain for?”
Dazai was quiet. Then he gave Kunikida the ghost of a smile. “Well, I’m willing to meet you in the middle if you want. But first, let’s finish our drinks.”
“I don’t think I can do that,” Kunikida said. “And that’s not really an answer.”
“You’ll just have to accept that it’s what I’ll give you for now.”
*
The real punishment of being in jail was having nothing to stare at but Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s face.
Dazai could look away, of course, but Dostoyevsky had a way of drawing attention to himself, and if Dazai wanted to win whatever game they were playing, he had to keep an eye on Dostoyevsky. He had to talk to him too, however distasteful as that was.
Not that Dostoyevsky didn’t provide entertainment. Dazai would have been bored to tears otherwise, or attacked by his own thoughts. He didn’t like being inside his head that much.
Dostoyevksy was also one of the only people who could keep up with him. The other two were Mori and Ranpo. Dazai wasn’t thrilled about how much he disliked two of those people, and how long it would take for him to be able to coordinate anything with Ranpo again.
One day (morning, afternoon, night--it was impossible to gauge time here) Dostoyevsky banged on the window of his cube.
Roused from a light sleep, Dazai sat up at the sound. “I don’t recall asking you to be my personal alarm clock.”
“I don’t recall volunteering,” Dostoyevsky said. “However, my sources from the outside have brought some interesting news.”
“What?”
“Kunikida Doppo is dead.”
Dazai’s heart skipped a beat before his brain immediately started to lock down against any sort of emotion that might show on his face. “You’re lying.”
“I have no reason to lie about something so specific,” Dostoyevsky said.
Dazai laughed, leaning forward. “Yes you do. He’s my partner. He’s the one I worked with the most. Of course you’d want him dead. However, saying that Kunikida Doppo is dead is actually quite vague. Can you tell me how he died?”
As if to examine Dazai more closely, Dostoyevsky leaned forward as well. “I know you’re up to date on everything that’s going on, but this particular piece of information is brand new. Those in the Agency that aren’t on the run are with the Port Mafia.”
Dazai waved a hand. “Unsurprising.” He’d planned for that.
“The Agency made a deal with the Port Mafia that, if the Port Mafia were to rescue the Agency from the Hunting Dogs, the Agency would send one member to the Mafia for them to use as they wish,” Dostoyevsky continued. “Yes?”
“Of course.” That was also part of the plan.
“The Port Mafia sent a helicopter and an Executive to evacuate the Agency members,” Dostoyevsky said, his lips curling into a smile.
Dazai was getting irritated. “I expected that to happen.” He had also planned it.
“During the rescue, one of the Hunting Dogs used his Ability to attempt to stop the helicopter, and attempted to bring it down. Kunikida Doppo sacrificed his life to prevent that from happening. He strapped a bomb to himself and jumped out of the helicopter in order to give the others a chance at escape.”
“A strategy I discussed with him numerous times beforehand,” Dazai said. “I needed to ensure every player would play their part.” This response was on reflex, and Dazai’s brain was heading an entirely different direction.
That wasn’t part of the plan. Kunikida wasn’t meant to sacrifice himself for anything. Dazai had expected the Hunting Dogs to attack the helicopter, but having Chuuya there would have been sufficient to allow them to get away. Unless Kunikida didn’t know that, because he didn’t know Chuuya, and acted too quickly.
Dazai had told Kunikida to make sure the Agency was safe. Kunikida had been driven to more desperate actions in order to uphold his ideals, and this situation must have been the one that made him snap, that made him believe his life was worth sacrificing for the sake of letting everyone else live.
It was so stupid.
“What you’re saying is that Kunikida Doppo is alive and in hiding?” Dostoyevsky asked. “That would be impressive.”
“My plans are always impressive,” Dazai said. “In addition to where Kunikida is, I know who Mori will take into the Mafia. I know who Fukuzawa would have told him not to take. I know Mori will lie about it. I know that Fitzgerald will try to make a deal with Mori because Atsushi is with him.”
He knew all of these things, but he had no idea where Kunikida was, and the fact was clawing at his thoughts in a way that not a lot of things did. It would eat away at his mind if he let it, and he realized that the only reason it would was because he’d let himself care about Kunikida at all.
Someone he cared about enough to allow himself to feel pain for.
Dazai wanted to laugh at himself for being such an idiot. At the same time, he didn’t see himself making another choice.
“I’m glad you know all of these things,” Dostoyesvky said, shifting to lay down on his cot. “You’d be a terrible chessmaster if you lost such an important piece.”
Dazai didn’t give Dostoyevsky a response. As much as they referred to this conflict as a game of chess and their subordinates as pawns, Dazai didn’t see them that way. He might have when he was in the Mafia, but now he saw them as people, all of whom wanted to protect the same thing he did. His plan required a large amount of risk, but in turn he wouldn’t sacrifice their lives. Everyone else was fair game, but not the Agency itself.
Not Kunikida.
Dazai didn’t let anything show on his face or in his body language, but he felt more than he’d felt throughout this entire conflict.
To let someone else know that he cared about them would be to give them the knowledge that they had some sort of power over him that could be used. Or worse, to give others the knowledge of who could be used against him.
Dazai wished he had told Kunikida that he cared, that Kunikida was worth feeling pain for, because he knew Kunikida wouldn’t use that against him. Now Kunikida was gone, and Dazai could only hope that he would get the chance to tell him someday.
He hadn’t realized the pain of truths left unsaid to those he cared about was worse than the pain of taking the risk to say them.
*
“I trust you know what you’re doing.”
They had less and less time with each other now. Both of them were run ragged.
“This is going to turn into an all-out war,” Dazai said. “You need to listen to me this time--people will die. People will get hurt. Don’t let that kill you.” He almost said please but swallowed it down. “Make sure the Agency is safe.”
He opened the office door.
“You know I’ll do everything in my power to make sure that everyone lives,” Kunikida said. “No more innocents will die, and the Agency will be safe.”
Dazai sighed. His mind was overrun with scathing words that he could use against Kunikida to convince him that he was wrong, that his ideals were nothing more than quicksand that he stood upon. Cruel words cut the hardest, but he couldn’t do that.
Not to Kunikida.
When things calmed down, maybe he would allow himself to get closer, to allow Kunikida to understand him in a way that had nothing to do with strategy and Ability conflicts and things that caused them pain.
“Everything will work out,” he said, reaching out to squeeze Kunikida’s shoulder. “And then after, I’ll take you for another drink or two.”