Work Text:
Atsushi sighs to himself, but it comes out much more exasperated than he intended.
In all honesty, it could be worse: sure, he’s partnered with Akutagawa again, which always puts a damper on the mood, but this is like any other typical stakeout. It’s a formula they’ve followed a hundred times. So why does he feel so bored ?
He slouches against the half-wall that he’s been leaning on for the past half-hour. Akutagawa stands an arm’s length away. Atsushi rolls his eyes.
The only sound is the crickets chirping in the nighttime air, a replacement to the cicadas which have long since fallen quiet. The city is never quite silent, Atsushi muses. As much as the reserved mafioso at his side wants to keep to himself, there’s a kind of comfortable feeling that forms between them late at night. Atsushi has always been talkative, but it’s different during missions like these. He’s content to just… exist , for a while.
It’s nice, he thinks. The crickets stop for a split second, in one of those rare moments when everything ceases its motion in pure coincidence. Atsushi looks up as they resume their eternal trills at the sound of rustling fabric as Akutagawa gingerly sits down on the top of the crumbling wall.
Bad idea.
Atsushi flinches at the mini-avalanche that ensues as Akutagawa puts his weight on the wall, disturbing the precariously balanced bricks and sending a whole section collapsing to the ground a few feet below, taking the mafioso with it.
Akutagawa looks, quite frankly, perplexed. He blinks once at the ground that he’s deposited roughly on top of, and then blinks once at Atsushi, whose lips are pressed together in a failed attempt to suppress a laugh.
Atsushi, however, prefers to live. It’s too late at night for him to be picking fights, so he masks his smirk with a cough deftly covered by his hand and decisively ignores the burning glare Akutagawa is sending to the back of his head.
Atsushi picks at the grass that he’s sitting on and sighs again. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the other man turn slightly at the disruptive noise. Neither of them have said a word since they’d arrived, and there’s been no signs from their radios or the gang that they’ve been following for the past few weeks.
And Atsushi takes back what he said earlier. The night is too quiet. It’s been a few minutes already since Akutagawa’s ungraceful fall, but both of them have elected not to mention it for their own sanity and self-preservation. The crickets just chirp tauntingly, begging him to speak up, to say anything that will break the silence that’s turning more dull by the second.
All he manages is another sigh.
And it’s enough.
“Do you have to keep exhaling so loudly?” Akutagawa grimaces. Atsushi turns to stare at him, but the other man refuses to make eye contact.
“Sorry,” he says. He doesn’t mean for it to be the end of the conversation, but his words ring with an air of finality and he doesn’t have the heart or mind to continue talking.
Instead, he focuses his attention on the grass.
Springtime is quickly approaching, though it doesn’t feel like it with the chilly March wind that envelops the night. Nature doesn’t mind, though. There’s a patch of flowers growing on his right, the small, white ones that he knows Dazai-san hates.
(“They’re weeds, not flowers,” he insists dramatically, plucking them out of the cracks in the sidewalk outside the agency building.
“I think they’re pretty,” Kenji interjects, to Atsushi’s nod of agreement. Dazai continues to bemoan the negative environmental impacts of invasive plant species in Japan. Atsushi can’t help but wonder when he started caring so much.)
They remind him of his past, the flowers that he’s seen in his life each time the seasons turn. They’ve been a constant in his life, a reminder that life goes on, by his side even in the hard times.
He remembers something that he used to do in the orphanage, before everything fell apart.
His fingers are reaching out to the flowers before he realizes that he’s doing it, deftly picking one from the base of its stem and falling into the motions that he’s practiced so many times before. The feeling of his thumbnails digging into the stem brings a nostalgia of similar nights from when he was a child, nights spent quietly keeping to himself and losing hope.
Except, this time, it doesn’t feel so lonely.
He can feel Akutagawa’s gaze following his hands as he threads the flowers together in a haphazard strand, slightly out of practice but relearning the process as he goes. He wipes his fingers on the fabric of his pants to rid them of the sticky honeydew that’s transferred by the flowers’ stems.
He brings the flower chain atop his head to test the length, nodding subconsciously in satisfaction as he finishes up the circle with a practiced knot in the flowers’ stems. He carries the completed crown delicately, resting it in the palms of both hands, and settles it atop his hair with care.
He turns to his partner for the first time since he started making the accessory and meets an expression that’s schooled into careful neutrality.
“How do I look?” He says softly, offering a tiny grin. He knows that the flowers have practically started wilting already, and that he probably broke off some of the petals while he was collecting them from the ground, but it seems like the best introduction to a conversation that’s been possible for the whole mission so far.
Akutagawa’s lip curls in what could either be a look of disdain or a convoluted half-smile. Atsushi’s willing to bet it’s the former, but who can really tell?
“I can’t see the flowers because it’s the same color as your hair. It just looks like a green ring of stems,” he says, so seriously that Atsushi can’t help but crack a laugh.
“Maybe it’ll look better if you wear it,” Atsushi says slyly. Akutagawa glares.
“Don’t,” he responds, an obvious warning in his voice. Atsushi, with limited regard for his own well-being, ignores it completely. He lifts the crown from one head to the other, giving Akutagawa the opportunity to lean out of the way or resist the motion in some way. Contrary to his words, though, the other man just rolls his eyes and sits stiffly as Atsushi's fingers adjust the flowers in his hair.
“Your head is smaller than mine,” he whines lightly, trying to prevent the accessory from falling off Akutagawa altogether. Akutagawa swats at his fussing hands and folds his arms into a standoffish pose. Atsushi snorts.
“You don’t look very menacing with flowers falling into your eyes,” Atsushi giggles. Akutagawa just glowers, handing the crown back none-too-carefully.
“They’re weeds, not flowers.” Atsushi has to suppress a laugh at his words, cynical just like his mentor’s. “And my head is smaller because it isn’t filled with so many useless comments, jinko ,” Akutagawa scowls. The detective isn’t convinced and merely smiles to himself as he dons the crown. And starts picking at the grass again.
Akutagawa sighs, already catching on. “Don’t-” is all he manages to get out before Atsushi interrupts.
“I’m bored, shut up. You can take it off before we fight anyone or you have to go home,” he says, scanning the ground below him. He’s used up all the flowers in the small patch by him that were still alive, but his eyes fall on another that’s on Akutagawa’s other side.
“Can you-”
Akutagawa just sighs loudly again, picking one of the flowers on his left and handing it across the space between them to Atsushi’s open hand. It becomes an assembly line, of sorts; a strange, rather absurd process of a childish activity shared by a murderous mafia member and a private investigator. Atsushi smiles at the thought.
When there’s a sufficient length of flowers in his hands, he leans over to his partner and circles the chain around his head to ensure the perfect fit. Akutagawa looks down at his lap as Atsushi ties it completed, refusing to meet his eyes until the weretiger settles back at a comfortable distance.
“There! We’re matching now,” Atsushi says. Akutagawa stares at him coolly, but Atsushi has been partnered with him for so long now that he can tell the difference between the mafioso’s ‘I-hate-you’ stare and his ‘I’m-pretending-to-hate-you’ stare. He just offers a crinkly-eyed smile in response.
Akutagawa makes no move to take off the crown of flowers as they drift back into a companionable silence. When the enemy gang finally appears, Atsushi loses his own accessory somewhere in between the fistfight and his transformation into the white tiger. He doesn’t notice this, however, until they’re both out of breath and recovering from a hard-fought battle.
Surprisingly, Akutagawa is the one to bring it up.
“Your crown is gone,” he states blankly. Atsushi looks up and pats the top of his head, feeling nothing more than the familiar texture of fine hair.
“Ah,” he says. “It’s fine, it was going to wilt soon anyways-”
Akutagawa reaches into the pocket of Rashomon, effectively halting Atsushi’s speech. He pulls out his discarded wreath of flowers that Atsushi had thought had gotten blown away in the midst of the fighting. He takes a few careful steps towards the weretiger and unceremoniously rests it atop his head.
Atsushi only manages to stare back at him, wide-eyed.
“It’s a little too small on you, but… thank you,” Akutagawa says softly. For the first time, he meets Atsushi’s gaze as he says something sentimental. Atsushi smiles brightly back.
“Anytime.”
And when he wakes up in his own bed the next morning and is met with the sight of withered flowers on his nightstand, he can’t bring himself to throw them away.