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Dazai had mentioned an old friend of his coming to visit from the Port Mafia – and had promised that this had nothing to do with any negotiations between the two organisations. They weren’t even meeting at the Agency. So she really didn’t know why she had had to come along with him.
That was more or less how Kunikida ended up squished into a booth in a dimly-lit restaurant one evening with barely half the amount of leg-room she could have done with.
Dazai, as usual, was chatting incessantly about something useless, his endless stream of fast-paced bullshit doing nothing to calm Kunikida’s nerves at the thought of meeting someone she’d never met without being on the opposite side of the battle to. The onslaught of words only served to drown out the possibilities of everything that could go wrong in the next few minutes.
Perhaps the man they were supposed to meet remembered her from some fight or other and decided that she’d done something unforgiveable that would ruin the night for Dazai (Kunikida was pretty sure she’d been recruited as a wing-woman to this unspoken date of theirs.) Or perhaps he wouldn’t hate Kunikida on the spot, but instead not realise that Kunikida wasn’t the man she had been a little while ago and blunder through things so horribly that she’d make a worthless support to Dazai.
Or perhaps a million other things that could possibly happen to cause this “Chuuya” person to hate either one or the both of them.
Dazai patted her hand. “Now, now, Kuni-chan,” he mewled, voice sticky and sweet, “you’re just here for a bit of fun. Don’t you worry about Chuuya.”
Had she really been that obvious?
“Oh, your nerves were only noticeable to my excellent intuition,” added Dazai.
She elbowed him in the side. “This is your date, not mine, Dazai. If you want me to stay, you’re going to have to” –
“Oh no. No, no, no!” Dazai shushed her with a single finger pressed to her lips. “This is not a date for me. It’s for you!”
She wrenched Dazai’s hand away from her face. “No. Why would you do that?”
“A beautiful woman like you shouldn’t be alone for long,” –
“I’d be perfectly happy being alone for the rest of my life. Especially if it meant I didn’t have to put up with you all the time.”
“You don’t mean that,” he pouted.
Kunikida scowled, then stood in her seat, preparing to climb right over the little shit that had trapped her in this situation. “I am not going on a blind date with anyone you recommend me,” she shouted, one knee coming down conveniently onto his groin as she squeezed past him.
He made no move to assist her, gasping as she leant her full weight onto his valuables. In fact, he did the very opposite, grabbing onto her and refusing to let her out. “Oh come on, old grumpy pants. Don’t you want to even give him a chance?”
“If you think he’s dateable, I think I’ll be better off finding myself a partner on my own, thank you very much.”
“But you thought that lady I was seducing the other week was pretty enough to meet your standards,” Dazai whined, still clinging onto Kunikida as she tried to wrestle herself out of his grip.
“That’s different, and you know it,” she grunted.
As she spoke, she finally managed to yank her skirt free from Dazai’s grip, pulling it with enough force that the fabric snagged and tangled around her legs, just as she was trying to edge away from the table.
She fell. Inelegantly.
Before she could hit the floor, however, another body cushioned her fall, though too small to do much more than slow her descent as they both tumbled to the ground.
She leapt to her feet the moment her sense of balance restored itself, ready to bolt for the door the moment she apologised to whoever it was she had sent sprawling. The longer she was here, the harder it would be to ignore Dazai’s intolerably loud guffaws of laughter. Better to make this quick.
The man, who still sat half-dazed on the floor, staring up at her, was a shortish man with a length of red hair mostly obscured by a dark hat that matched the black coat that hung from his shoulders. Chuuya. It had to be him; Kunikida had the faint sense of recognition as those grey eyes sparked at her angrily, as if possessed of personalities of their own.
He refused the hand Kunikida offered him, then wheeled on Dazai.
“This has got to be a joke, you bastard. Why are you here?”
“You were invited on a date, were you not?”
Chuuya’s scowl deepened. “Not by you, fuckhead.”
Dazai’s smile widened accordingly. “Of course not. I’d like to introduce to you my dearest partner, Little Miss Stickler-For Rules, otherwise known as Kunikida-chan.”
“She’s not Yosano.”
Kunikida wasn’t sure whether to run now or stick around just long enough to figure out what awful scheme Dazai had come up with.
“Indeed she is not. But I knew that you’d only come if she invited you. After all, you two did get to know each other rather well after she refused to join the Mafia.”
So that’s what he’d done. Stolen Yosano’s phone and let Chuuya be fooled.
“I’m leaving,” Kunikida. “It’s almost my bedtime anyway.”
“I will as well,” added Chuuya. “Enough of this bullshit, bandage-brains.”
“Well said.”
Chuuya sent her a quizzical glance. “After you, my lady.”
Kunikida choked. “Um, ahem. I don’t- I don’t think that” –
“Oh,” said Chuuya, voice even as if he weren’t watching Kunikida come apart after a single offhand comment. “I suppose you’re not my lady yet.”
She doubted that any of them were surprised as she ran to the door of the restaurant, dropping a small tip in the jar on her way out and not stopping to look back until she was out into the safety of the night.
All she spied upon looking back inside was Dazai laughing maliciously, and the form of Chuuya crouched on the floor in front of their table.