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Apparently, species aside, a poisoned knife to the gut will take someone out for a while.
Chuuya’s first introduction to the Port Mafia headquarters is the infirmary. And his second, and his third, and however many times his heavily medicated IV drip loses against his vivaciousness.
It’s too many times. It makes Dazai wince even thinking about a needle in his hand for that long.
“Think of it as your grace period, Dazai-kun,” Mori offers, ever the interpersonal genius, as if that doesn’t make things worse.
“I quite like him anesthetized, actually.”
Mori smiles, and the low light of his personal library seems to dim. “I know you do, but the Mafia doesn’t.”
And that the Mafia evidently does not. They dislike it so much, actually, that Dazai himself is tasked with finding a larger sample of the poison to aid Chuuya’s recovery. He doesn’t understand why. He probably would if he listened to Mori at all.
Something of such low importance is not, however, worth a year of tuning into Mori’s informal and esoteric lessons scattered about like rusty nails. He has better things to think about.
One of them is the whereabouts of Shirase Buichirou.
Luckily, he doesn’t have to think too much about that.
Dazai likes having the GSS as an enemy organization; they’re tough, they’re tricky, they’re resourceful, but they’re organized in essence. Organization is parsable by brute force logic.
All the Sheep did was improve their PR, really.
Upon receiving the task, Dazai pilfers some speed from Mori’s stash. It then takes him the lesser part of a day. They aren’t stupid enough to keep Shirase in headquarters, so it’s embarrassingly easy to send in a few electrical experts, reroute some signals, and hope that somebody’s flip phone charging on the sixth floor doesn’t set the whole complex on fire.
With step one’s surveillance, he finds Shirase on the fourth, in an empty hall–save several large blocks of styrofoam–practicing his knife throwing. He kind of sucks.
The alarms are as good as dead, but Dazai decides to make his entrance from a ceiling beam anyways, for the drama of it all.
He pops in through a high window, then situates himself, kicking his feet. Shirase throws his last knife. Stupidly, he stops to eye the angle and the grouping from afar.
Dazai jumps down.
“Hey.”
“What the FUCK–!”
Dazai dodges the roundhouse kick coming for his right shoulder, and jumps back out of range.
“How are you so capable but so stupid?” Dazai muses, tracking Shirase’s hand as it digs into his back pocket. “Don’t bother. Nobody of yours that can help is nearby, and I’ll be out in sixty seconds if you cooperate.”
Visible panic flashes across Shirase’s eyes.
“What the fuck do you want?” He half-says, half-growls, emphasizing Dazai’s point. Smart enough to know he’s in a twist, but too dumb to restrain himself from acting macho anyways. Too bad for him that it won’t do shit. He reminds Dazai of Chuuya.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, because I could really care less if your aggravating, dwarf-shaped ex-king lives or dies, but what did you put on that knife?”
Shirase falters only a little. Dazai notices that the faux fur on his hood looks cleaner than it did.
“What, your big, all-powerful mafia guys can’t figure out how to treat him?”
Dazai commits to omission. “No, actually, they can’t.”
Shirase blinks. Dazai stares, and adjusts his arm in his sling.
“Is that really surprising to you?”
Shirase suddenly and curiously looks several times more offended. “What makes you think I’ll just tell you that for the fuck of it?”
Dazai plops down onto the windowsill behind him and crosses one leg over the other. “Well, if we want to get into it, I really doubt you’d want him to die by your hand,” he tries, quirking his visible eyebrow. “You’re enemies now, but that’s two weeks you’re pitting against the better part of a decade. It hardly seems fair.”
Shirase snorts, mirroring the eyebrow. His aggravatingly cocky smirk has taken root in his stance. “You really think I’d hesitate to off a fucking traitor?”
Dazai has to suppress a shiver.
“You tell me.”
There’s a resounding silence.
Shirase’s knuckles are satisfyingly white.
Dazai grins disarmingly, digging around for something in an inner pocket. “Well, that settles that. If you can’t provide a sample, I would also appreciate a supplier, or if you just happen to know the chemical composition off the top of your h–”
Shirase has him by the shirt collar before he can register the other has moved, and the loud impact of skull against glass leaves his head spinning on an axis that is certainly not the usual one. He reaches for his gun, as unnoticeably as he always does, but there’s an awful lurch, and the next impact of his head is against the floor, and just maybe he should have drank some water to prevent the way his vision violently sways.
“You’ve learned a few things,” Dazai comments. Spit lands on his cheek.
“You know what you’re doing,” Shirase growls. His full weight is on Dazai, and the shitty concrete floor has too much friction. He can’t get away until something changes.
He can’t help but think that he deserves this.
“Enlighten me,” he drawls, frame limp. His voice feels far away, but Shirase isn’t moving to widen the distance, so he’s not worried in the slightest.
“Is Chuuya just a fucking tool to you?”
“Yes.”
Dazai gets a whack across the face for that, and tastes blood. He smiles.
“It would save you the effort to just tell me.”
“It’s more of an effort to not kill you,” Shirase growls.
“Killing me would be welcome, really. Anything short of it is definitely something I’ve already survived. Give it up.”
“That’s not the trophy you think it is,” Shirase says. His voice breaks.
Dazai pities Shirase for pitying him. What a loser.
“Whatever you say, charity boy,” Dazai sing-songs. “Do you wanna tell me or not?”
“I’m trying to show you some empathy, moron,” Shirase spits. He presses his knee harder into Dazai’s gut.
“Save it for your traitor when he goes comatose.”
Shirase stills.
“It’s that bad?”
“How bad do you think it has to be for a mafioso to personally come and beg you for help?”
“You can’t be human,” Shirase says, and there’s almost awe in his voice.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
Shirase punches him in the face again. His ears ring.
Once they stop, the hand is back in his collar, and he’s wrenched into a sitting position.
Maybe it's his half-consciousness, but it strikes him how strong Shirase must be. That, or Dazai is much smaller than he thinks, but he’s not quite sure he considers his body to pertain to a size in the first place.
Shirase’s so close to him, lightly panting from exertion. Dazai can’t remember the last time he felt somebody’s breath on his skin.
“It’s really not the trophy you think it is, you poor fucker.”
Panic rises like a flash flood when Shirase leans in the rest of the way.
It vanishes when their lips brush.
There’s a hand on his face for a split second, then it ends, then footsteps, and he’s alone, with a new weight in his coat.
Dazai’s men find him fifteen minutes later. He passes off his dazedness as a concussion.
It takes a month, but he eats his words a little.
Silver and grey-red make a home in the corner of his eye.
He can’t find it in him to mind.