Chapter Text
Brown-amber eyes gleam red in the dim streetlight. There is a body slumped on the pavement in front of him, face to the sky. From what is visible, the jaw is shattered, teeth displaced and digging into all the wrong places, eyes rolled back; there are three, bleeding bullet wounds in the body.
They shudder.
The demon in the place of their friend looks down disdainfully upon the body, contempt clear in his narrow eyes as the evening Yokohama air seems to get chillier by the second. It’s unbelievably frightening - he’s so unlike their friend; their coworker.
A sigh, and out of his mouth comes a cloud of warm fog into the cold air.
Then one, two-
Kyouka hides her face in Atsushi’s shirt.
-three, four, five-
Kunikida stares, horror clear and unable to look away. Kenji averts his eyes.
-six, seven-
Naomi and Tanizaki turn to hold each other.
-eight-
Yosano flinches. Ranpo moves to hold her hand, squeezing hard.
-nine, ten, eleven-
“Stop.”
Dazai’s eyes flicker towards them, lazily, and it’s so very clear that he knows that they were watching him the whole time. But the bullets, firing into the already dead body, have stopped.
“Please,” Atsushi, this time, not Kyouka, pleads. He doesn’t know what he’s pleading for.
“Hmm?” not-Dazai (because Dazai would never do what this man has just done in front of them, he would never, he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t-) hums. Without a response, he continues blithely, “Well, what did you need?”
Atsushi’s eyes are wide when he finally tears his away from the mutilated corpse on the ground to meet not-Dazai’s increasingly red ones.
“What…” he whispers, but it feels like the loudest sound he’s ever made. His gaze almost strays back to the corpse. “What did he do?” he asks, because Dazai is Dazai, even not-Dazai, and he must have a reason, a plausible, perfectly sane, completely reasonable-
“Alright, I’ll tell you what he did,” Dazai says, the edge of a child-like smile curling at his face, a cooling body ridden with fourteen holes laying at his feet.
Someone swallows, painfully loud in the silence of the still night.
The smile grows. “Nothing, really. I just felt like it.”
(Later, when Dazai tells Chuuya all about the strange encounter he had on the way to the Bar Lupin, the shorter teen replies with a scoff and a line about how crazy he is, and that of course he’ll never change, no matter what ‘the Agency’ had said.
“And besides, they’re dead now,” the chibi says.)