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Experiencing derealisation is always very sudden.
You can be lying quietly in bed and then abruptly wonder where you are in the first place. You might be in the middle of work, when a sudden 'I think this has happened before' rushes through your head. Or that momentary sensation of something indescribable and unconscious that steals the flow of thought from your head and leaves you empty-handed.
The most trivial was loss in space. And déjà vu. At least for Doppo.
It was, more often than not, the most trivial things that had long since lost the meaning to record in the "Ideal". These are the actions of a normal, healthy person - waking up in his bed, buttoning his shirt, catching the train at precisely six forty-nine in the morning. Sometimes diluting the draught of the day with a bottle of green tea from the convenience store or having a bento lunch bought in advance.
The days differed only in a few points - like some dubious case that no one else in the Agency but himself could take on. He could do it alone. Otherwise, it was still the same routine that Kunikida could tell anyone who might wake him up deep into the night and make him talk.
He hated surprises. But derealisation in its purest form always appeared like a maiden of thoughts in snow-white silks almost every third Saturday of the month. It was as if on a schedule. These days were the most eventful - there was one or another important or unimportant scheduling event that jolted confidence in existence and space, made him look perplexedly somewhere through a wall, or the glass of a packed train, or a table, or the masks of failed criminals.
So, on September twenty-third of the year two thousand and ten, at ten fifty-four he is asked to enter the Fukuzawa-sensei's office.
"Kunikida," Ranpo throws into the silence of the office, occasionally diluted by the sound of paper shuffling, walking beside him having just returned from the same office he is to enter. "Fukuzawa-sensei asks for you."
"Is something the matter, Ranpo-san?" Doppo replies, barely lifting his gaze from his work.
"Someone's waiting for you," Edogawa says slyly, retreating down the corridor to another room.
He knows something again, but he's not going to talk about it. Either he gets the most unpleasant case or something worse. But the Ideal tells him to be useful in all the right things. So with a swift, calligraphic handwriting he finishes the sentence with a stroke of pen too long for the last character, Kunikida gets up from his seat and heads for the cherished room.
Shoulders almost relaxed, shirt perfectly pressed. His hair wasn't out of its ponytail, and his glasses weren't fogged up treacherously. Everything was ideal, just perfect, and nothing could interfere with this measured vicious circle. He knocked twice on the office door and, receiving a firm "come in," pulled the handle.
Instead of the usual one pair of eyes, there are three.
And they pierce a strange prickly feeling in his chest, more akin to embarrassment and misunderstanding than the usual déjà vu that must have been just in a few. Kunikida briefly salutes and bows with his entire body, somehow eliciting a slightly sarcastic smile from one of the attendees.
Doppo didn't pay him much attention, tearing his eyes away from the stranger's silhouette, which he tried not to look at. The only thing he had time to notice about the man who sat closest to him was the distinctly shabby beige cloak and bandaged body parts that were brightly wrapped around his neck and wrists. A patient to see Doctor Yosano-sensei...?
...It had better been a patient.
When this young man - Osamu Dazai - just falls into a chair somewhere and puts his feet on the table, Doppo goes berserk. Quietly, easily concealed, in his opinion.
"Don't be mad," Dazai says as if reading his mind a little wryly, smiling brightly at his new partner, should he pass the test at the Agency of course.
"Do I look like I'm angry?" Kunikida says with a deep sigh, turning back to his unfinished work. To get back on schedule, he needs to work faster and not be distracted by this bandaged guy, whatever he's doing.
"Very much so," Osamu suddenly begins and even stands up from his seat as he walks over to the man at work. He unbelievably turns Kunikida's chair slightly towards him in spite of a stunned 'eh?!' and begins to literally point his finger at the places he's named. "Your shoulders are tense, your eyebrows are drawn down to the bridge of your nose and you're breathing deeply as if you're trying to calm down..."
"God forbid, come on, I'm working," Doppo says with misunderstanding, huddling into the back of a chair and trying to leave some part of his body intact.
"I can go on as long as I want, Kunikida-kun," the familial suffix is slightly unnerving.
He almost grinds his teeth. But takes a very elegant move - with as much disinterested face as possible, he turns back to his left in a sharp and smooth motion. Dazai, whose hands were precisely on the armrests, slips confidently from his position and the young man even mutters a curse under his breath, banging his forehead against the table with a resounding thud.
Doppo held back a chuckle as he continued his holy work with a focused look.
"Kunikida-kun is so mean," Osamu whines in a childishly resentful way, rubbing his bruised spot.
"There are enough bandages on you to wrap around your head. If you're so badly hurt," he draws out 'so', "then go to Yosano-sensei."
There was no response from Dazai. He just stood there for a few seconds, then turned away, sitting back in his new chair. In the reflection of the monitor Kunikida noticed that he turned slightly pale as if he remembered something bad.
Doppo doesn't give it much thought.
He's acting about normal. Well, almost, considering the fact that the very presence of an essentially stranger within a few metres of him is causing him a strangely seething sense of discontent.
He feels like this has already happened.
"Is this a date?"
"No."
"It sure looks like it..."
"Dazai, don't make me nervous. I just want to get to know a potential partner better."
"Potential partner you say?"
"Dazai!"
It was becoming unbearable.
Whatever - barely a word out of Doppo's mouth as Osamu winds up his pretend-joker, taking him out of the loop every time. Scheduling in shreds on every new mission, Dazai basically slacking off on his job.
And so it is every time. As soon as he tries to find out anything about him, everything goes to hell.
He doesn't think it's any use and why should he - it's still unclear how inhumanly he passed the Agency exam and how he hasn't been sacked yet with his work schedule!
(Fukuzawa-sensei said that Dazai is important to them. Maybe just because of the ability...?)
He feels like everything has spun since his arrival. Shuffled, shattered reality, broke into small pieces, leaving him on the edge. The snow-white maiden looks at him, squinting her eyes as if to tell him 'it's up to you, friend'.
He doesn't like it.
There is a heavy knock at his door.
Doppo first stops writing the to-do list for tomorrow, then listens. The knocking is repeated, the man at the door says something, but he can't make out what it is. He doesn't hear it. With an unreadable expression on his face he looks down the corridor of his flat, then gets up and walks to the door, opening the peephole.
Beyond the door a blurry display of Osamu's oh-so-obviously-drunk figure, who with a most pitiful expression brings his hand to the door again, about to bang on it once more. Kunikida at the same moment swings the door open too fast and almost unintentionally hits him in the process.
It's even getting ridiculous. Since his arrival at the Agency, these almost two years have been full of unintentional and intentional bashing of colleagues. Mostly, of course, Dazai.
"Kunikida-a-a," he drawls, rubbing his bruised arm and even frowning with a semblance of a smile. So, apparently, he's not just here to beat around the bush, but why so late...?
"Spare me the details at this hour and tell me directly what the hell you're doing here," Kunikida replies without fear of offending his partner.
"I was at the bar, and it's a long way home..." Dazai squinted his eyes to the side, staggering and gesticulating vaguely. Showed a barely perceptible combination of movements. Clearly, he's on to someone again. Either he was being followed, or he wanted to be followed. There was no third, only some in-between or hidden in these gestures.
Right, 40 metres, flies off the fingers and waving hands. And on the face of it, an ordinary situation: a drunken mate decided to spend the night close by and with someone. You know, a hangover. And if the poor one is also of the opposite sex, then...
"Let me in, I beg you, I promise to be good tonight," he says with a faint spark in his voice, squinting his eyes to the side again. That person is approaching.
Fucking hell, Doppo thinks, rolling his eyes irritably and stepping aside and opening the doorway. Dazai immediately thanks him cheerfully, continuing his circus until the door closes completely on and is keyed, protecting with not just the latch on.
When Kunikida turned to the uninvited guest, Osamu sobered up in an instant.
(Maybe he wasn't drunk at all?)
"I'm waiting for an explanation," Doppo says briefly, then strolls back into the room, ignoring the already unhappy look on his partner's face.
"I didn't do it on purpose, honestly," Dazai exhales and sits down on the floor, resting the back of his head against the wall. He watches as the other man sits down at his low table in perfect seiza. "I even managed to write you a line or two, just so you know I'll be around!"
The latter, in turn, squints perplexedly in the direction where the untouched phone was probably lying. He turns his gaze back to the man who is looking at him with a kind of genuine frustration.
"Sorry, I've been busy," not that he was really feeling any remorse. But he twirled his pen over his open notebook anyway, gently hinting that he wanted to continue.
"Well you're the 'ideal' yourself, Kunikida-kun," he moves down, closer to the floor. At the same time moves closer to his workplace.
"There are some cases where even my perfection won't help. For example, a healthy sleep in twenty-nine minutes. Are you in for the night or is everything more or less adequate there?"
"Probably for the night. I don't think I can control the urge to... What was it you said once? 'Find some adventure on my flat ass'?"
"I didn't say that," Doppo replies with a slight bewilderment in his eyes.
"Liar! It was definitely you!" Dazai seemed to be amused by the situation.
He feels like this has happened before again. A strange feeling that is experienced in more like a mixture of lostness and something all too familiar. Kunikida sighs heavily, shaking his head lightly.
"You good?"
"Déjà vu."
"I see," Osamu only says, climbing up the wall again. He looks... Unhappy.
This was something he'd rarely seen him do. For Dazai, the Agency's somewhat lifesaving humour in the worst of situations, to be so shattered over something is on top of weirdness. Doppo notices this and writes about it in his notebook. Osamu knows about it but says nothing.
Actually, Kunikida has started writing much more often just about him. He doesn't know. Just because of something.
"Is everything all right?" he finally asks him.
"Nope," he answered. Simple. Empty.
"Do you want to talk about it?" after a moment of silence, Kunikida says into that void.
Dazai looked at him with eyes that looked utterly puppet-like: soulless and with feigned joy, cheap plastic and made of expensive glass, almost scratched off by childish hands and just lacquered by a hard master hand. Behind them lurked a triple bottom, through which no one had ever broken through and would ever do so. But one of them crumbled to pieces with a rattle like a favourite mug thrown to the floor.
Doppo looks back, squinting his eyes softly and not blinking. Absorbing every little movement, wanting to reach out in every way possible. To see no more of that completely lost expression on his face, which is always secretly framed by a rope.
Osamu stared down at his open palms and the bandages with blood. Doppo noticed it literally just now. Something really was wrong now. He looks up again, feeling the double burden on his shoulders. One a spiritual one that had been crumbling beneath him for years, pretending only to be a motherly conscience, and the other a stranger's hands.
"Take your time."
And, after a few minutes, Osamu began to speak.
It was, on the one hand, like seeing a therapist for a seriously ill man who had lost any spark that was burning within him. On the other, it was only a dark flat with a single evening candle burning, caressing their silhouette and making them stand out against the darkened walls of the night.
He could speak weakly and loudly, in a slightly trembling voice and firmly, grimly and with a rare half-smile, squeamishly and at length, quickly and with long momentary pauses that thickened the viscous silence of the room. At one point Kunikida put his arms away and Dazai nearly fell right on top of him, causing him to even let out a dry chuckle.
Osamu talked about everything and nothing: occasional mentions of past work, first suicidal thoughts, best friend, former partner, current attempts to numb the pain in his chest. Many masks had fallen from his saddened face, some already inhabited under his skin and felt like normal emotions and reactions. But it made at least some sort of person out of him.
When the longest silence came to help digest all that had been said, the situation before his eyes rose to its rightful place. Dazai now sat half sideways, arching his back and resting one elbow on the low table and turning his head towards Kunikida but looking somewhere through him. Or, more likely, just into the floor.
The candle was nearly burned out and barely exuded any light, so they were both bathed in the hazy brightness of the street from the uncovered window curtains.
He felt... Pity for him.
This twisted an unpleasant knot in his chest, adding to the pile of what had already accumulated deep inside. He usually felt this feeling only for the innocent and poor creatures who needed this pity. But for him...
"Can I hold you?" he doesn't have time to think clearly, because for the first time his tongue is doing something faster than his brain.
Dazai shook his head slightly in surprise at this strange statement, blinking stupidly. The look clearly expressed the question: why.
"You look like you need it."
"That's the flimsiest and most effective argument I've ever heard, Kunikida," Osamu exhales and literally piles on top of him in seconds, causing them both to nearly fall over.
Dazai bumps his shoulder somewhere and doesn't move again. His arms fall somewhere close by at his sides as if the puppet under his own control has finally had its' strings cut off. Doppo doesn't know where to put his hands so he slightly awkwardly places one on his back and the other on his own knee.
He doesn't smell like alcohol at all. Only something sterile and the cool, damp street. He's cold but his face is warmer than the rest of his body.
There was too much piled into the silence of his flat and to clear that pile would have to try harder.
"You're just like him sometimes," Osamu says quietly a little later, not raising his head, making Doppo barely hear what he said.
"What?"
"Nothing special."
Kunikida doesn't push. Doesn't desperately ask for a repeat, holding on to a phrase like some kind of lifeline that will prompt him to think of help. Doesn't change his facial expression, showing his faint dissatisfaction, which always comes when something doesn't go according to plan.
He takes it for granted. Like a kind of taboo that will come true after the cover of night would fall apart. He probably wants this information, yes. But he doesn't want anyone's suffering. Neither physical nor mental.
That's what his Ideal says.
It takes another year before anything changes.
At some point, life takes on its leisurely pace again. One day merges with another, flowing seamlessly from one event to the next. Yes, with the arrival of Atsushi and Kyouka there are now two people in the Agency who need an eye on but the "mother duck instinct" as Dazai said was in his blood.
("What 'mother duck'?!"
"The true one! A tall mother duck!")
But this exacerbated his past problem. The very "Saturday" that had knocked him out every time had lost its shape. It had become completely unperfect. That 'attack' could have happened at any moment: while he was filling out a report, while he was talking to someone, while he was investigating a case. And Dazai was always, just always there.
His haunting 'Kunikida-kun' out of nowhere seemed to activate a lever that reset his system and made him try to figure out what was even going on right now. And Osamu, as if he didn't understand, kept interrupting to ask if everything was okay and why he was so abruptly frozen.
"What is it? Are you alright? Hey-hey, Kunikida-kun, Earth to you!"
He started showing up at his house more often. It could have been anything: some business, handing over documents, just chatting about anything and everything (which started to happen quite often after that night's conversation), having lunch together.
It is as if Dazai has taken up residence in this house. If he comes here at various times of the day, he knows where, if anything, a spare futon lies, where this or that room is, what the "rules of conduct" in the house are. And when he exits this place, he leaves no trace behind. It's as he never was here.
He could come in at eight in the evening, say something, after which he would take the futon and go to bed almost immediately. Kunikida could work some more, no longer even paying attention to the sleeper. He always woke up alone in the morning - no matter what time it was. Whether it was nine on the rare weekends, six or seven on weekdays, he was never there, though he could arrive at the Agency much later.
Dazai never said where he was going. Never mentioned the exact purpose of his visit. He just... Was. Existing somewhere in the periphery, constantly flickering nearby, raising mixed feelings in his chest.
Annoyance? Confusion? Something commonplace? Everything merges into a general unpleasantness that already follows him on his heels.
One thing is clear: this is no longer a simple working relationship. It's something more than that. Something they don't talk about or bring up. They're just feeling each other's feelings. All of this merges into another soulful nightly conversation that is no longer filled with awkwardness. Sometimes it is overshadowed by the alcohol that Osamu sometimes brings, sometimes they are as simple as ever.
Kunikida even likes them. All walls fall down at these meetings and he sometimes feels like he's found a real friend, even though he's not perfect. At all. Yes, two grown men chatting about this and that over a bottle of sake, why not? Yes, one of them clearly likes tactility towards the other and the other is willing to accept it, so what? It happens to everyone, doesn't it?
It's an unspoken agreement to be around at all times. Only it seems to him that subscribing to it is clearly not in his plans. At least not on a permanent basis.
When one of these days it happens again, Doppo just can't stand it. He massages his temples with his fingers, furrowing his brows and leaning over his desk while Dazai walks around the flat.
"You okay?"
There's that question again. God, please shut up already.
"Every time you're around, it happens! I can't get away from it!" he mutters in mild despair, trying to look as nonchalant as possible.
It doesn't work. He's being seen through.
"You're just tired!" Osamu snorted, stepping closer. "Derealization is often associated with depression or neurasthenia, I speak from experience. Either that or there's something wrong with your psyche."
"At what point did you become a doctor, Dazai?"
"Ever since you started reacting so strongly to all this!" he spluttered his hands. "Even though I'm a non-ideal person like you, I honestly feel anxious now! Appreciate it, I am so seldom able to do that."
Kunikida seems to have finally reached a dead end in his endless maze. What's going on anyway? Why is Dazai of all people so concerned? Is he hiding it so badly? No, he doesn't need help. He's fine, he just needs to... Rest. Yes. He's right to some extent. How do people have to rest? How long...?
"You're in your head again, Kunikida," Osamu sits down next to him.
"I'm perfectly fine."
He's not. He doesn't know what to do.
Then, there's something going on here beyond all cognition.
Osamu, without any warning, takes Doppo's hands and pulls them away from his face, then takes his head and turns it towards him. Leans over and, mother of God, kisses his forehead.
Softly, quickly and without a trace. But it feels like a real shot through and through.
"Pain, pain, go away, come again another day," he sing-songs quietly, removing his hands and pulling away. Then he looks at Kunikida's maximally puzzled face and smiles. "This is the most proven medicine, it has always worked with me..."
"What?"
He blinks his eyes. Dazai lets out a slightly nervous chuckle.
"What?" asks Osamu. "Did it help?"
Silence. It seems to have helped, Kunikida realises, feeling the knot that has been building up all these years begin to unravel.
"Again."
"What?"
"Again," his eyes finally stop to seem bottomless. Awareness, confidence, even a kind of adoration pops back into them. He understands something.
Osamu pecks him again. Now on his cheek, barely-there, like a faint breeze on a summer day. The one whose once dead eyes had burned piercing holes in him so many years ago looked with a rare concern, so faint, yet bright.
"Again," he leaned, finally building himself a ladder back to the surface and nailing one last bolt into the bridge over the hole he had fallen into all those years ago.
He freezes millimetres from Dazai, foreheads touching; with half-closed eyes he looks up at him, as if seeking permission in his coffee and autumn-coloured eyes. He stares back. His eyes close and Doppo feels cold fingers touching his jawline.
Osamu kisses him.
It felt like a breath of fresh air for the almost drowned. Almost, Kunikida reminds himself, setting all other thoughts aside. He, for the first time for himself, is living in the moment, not his to-do list. For the first time in his life he puts ideals on the back burner, not caring what he breaks, what he loses.
Now they both just are.
Two lost men, one more, the other slightly less. One to achieve the unfathomable, the other... The other exists for the first. In a way. For the first gives him some sense to live.
They pull away, and Kunikida is scared to open his eyes. He thinks he's dreaming all this now, that it's just another delusional vision. That if he looks into Dazai's eyes, he will see pure disgust and hatred in them.
How did he come to live like this? Why did he do it in the first place? What...
"Doppo."
Not a surname. Not a suffix. Just a name. He speaks in a tone that makes it impossible to know what he means without making eye contact.
Kunikida opens his eyes cautiously, but finds nothing wrong. Dazai is embarrassed. His sharp cheekbones are covered in a slight blush that cannot be confused with any drunkenness. It's pure embarrassment. It's a notion that doesn't even sit well with him.
"Yes?" he finally asks.
"Once again," says Osamu, pulling him towards him again by the red ribbon of his tie.
The white maiden watching this stepped back for the first time in his life.
The door closes, but there is no thought.
"Kunikida-kun, you're swimming again."
"What?" asks Doppo honestly, blinking incongruously a few times.
Think, think... You've just come home from an undercover case report, you've extracted the most important information and caught the culprit, pinning Atsushi to the job, Dazai joked that he almost jumped off a bridge again... But why does everything feel so strange in his head, like the floor has just fallen under his feet?
"Doppo..." Someone's hand touched his cheek gently, which no longer felt foreign. The rough surface of his palm and fingers stroked affectionately across his cheekbone, rubbing his hair near his ear. "You..."
"We...?" through a shroud of incomprehension Kunikida suddenly utters, trying to move forward in thought. Trying to break the cobwebs holding him back from the truth.
"Home," Osamu says in a confident tone, pulling away understandingly, and taking off his cloak to hang it on the hook in the hallway. "We're home now, back from a terrible long job with three whole days off in our pocket. And I'm not letting you in the Agency, not even at gunpoint! Nobody got hurt, nobody died, I didn't get any new scars. I didn't even swim in the river! You told me off on the way as usual, grumbled about a screwed-up schedule and promised to cook crab with me tonight."
An answer comes only in silence, in which Kunikida unknowingly removes his outerwear with crisp, memorized movements and just as memorized reaches the coat rack, continuing to stare blankly somewhere ahead. Dazai is used to it. At least these situations were becoming less and less frequent - he was clearly getting better. And Dazai is certainly proud of himself and Kunikida especially.
"It's okay, Doppo," and he really does seem to have a vicious circle blurring in his mind.
"Yeah, yeah... Sorry, I forgot that it still can..." he begins mumbling, putting his hand to the bridge of his nose and closing his eyes.
"Things happen, don't you worry so much. It's the least I can do after all the things you've done to me," Dazai hummed
I'm home, flashes in my head, everything's fine, everything's normal, I'm here, Osamu's here, everything's done....
Yeah. It's fine. He doesn't get lost so much anymore, doesn't freak out over little things. What would have happened to him if it wasn't for Dazai? Right, he'd probably burn out or something worse. Probably would have thrown his ideals out the window. Now he'd just brought them down a notch, finally thinking of them as something not extraordinary and what needs to be highlighted.
Hm. Sounds like a good figure of speech. He should write it down...
"Has the ship sailed?" Osamu pulls him out of his thoughts, smiling lightly at him.
"It did," he tilts his head slightly, stealing a kiss inadvertently.
He is answered with the same undisguised tenderness, allowing him to remember again the feel of another's warmth, the arms wrapped around his neck, the scars on his wrists, no longer covered by ragged, sterile bandages. His eyes closed on their own, replaying the same picture in his head.
Love. That's what had bound them together for a year now since that moment. From that culminating point that finally brought them both down from heaven to finally sort themselves out. They are grateful to fate, even a little bit.
Now he feels like a dolphin in the ocean, ready to splash around in the silent azure water for all eternity.
"Doppo, if we move at this waltz pace, then we won't be cooking just crab tonight," Osamu mutters grudgingly, still playfully flashing his eyes and stroking his shoulders with his hands.
And he smiles at him. Clearly and with the same sparkle in his eyes that he's adopted from Dazai. Kunikida takes his hand and pecks the back of it.
"Sure".