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The whole fiasco starts at the grocery store. It’s a stupid thing to say, but it isn’t the stupidest thing that’s happened to Atsushi - it doesn’t even make the top ten.
Either way, he was just trying to run to the store to pick up another bag of rice and some fig tea. He finally convinced Dazai to let Atsushi show him how the rice cooker works and Akutagawa’s favorite brand and type of tea were on sale so Atsushi was going to get several bags.
Atsushi doesn’t bump into anyone, remembers the right change, apologizes for getting groceries at the late hour, and looks presentable enough to be in public - the whole nine yards.
And he still manages to get himself into trouble.
The trouble comes in the form of a knife being held to his neck and his grocery bag being shoved out of his hands, Atsushi’s back hitting the dirty brick sidewall of the store he’d been at; adrenaline rushes through his system in an instant, his vision slightly blurry, and his body instantly activating Beast Beneath the Moonlight -
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” hisses a voice, except it’s… oddly high-pitched, oddly feminine, and out of place in the situation.
It shocks him so much that he does as he’s told - he de-activates his ability before it’d even had the chance to transform him. When Atsushi’s vision finally focuses, he’s met with hair as dark as night pulled into a spiky ponytail, a white mask he recognizes, and black-as-night eyes that he also recognizes.
“Hey, Gin,” Atsushi says weakly, conversationally even as talking digs the knife into his adam’s apple. “Is, uh… is there a reason we’re… chatting right now?”
He laughs nervously, like it helps his subpar vocabulary.
Gin’s eyes narrow.
Atsushi wonders if his accelerated healing will help if the knife continues to stay buried to the hilt in his neck because he wouldn’t put it past Gin.
In fact, at the moment, with her eyes as stormy as the clouds above them, a chill running through the air due to the wind, Atsushi wouldn’t be surprised if Gin would commit several war crimes in several countries.
There are things he shouldn’t think about.
He just wants to know what he did.
Gin, at the very least, must feel merciful enough to speak again, her voice less confusing now that he knows who he’s talking to. “Don’t make us meet like this again, weretiger. Even your ability can’t fix decapitation.”
“Um… I - I won’t,” Atsushi says slowly, though he isn’t sure what made them meet like this in the first place.
Did he buy the wrong brand of rice or something? Does she not like that brand of rice, or is it the tea? Aw, man, he hopes a rock didn’t cut open the bag.
Gin’s intense, heavy gaze stays on him, the knife pushing deeper against his throat - just enough to draw blood - before she sighs and pulls it away from his neck. Quietly, as she sheathes the knife and Atsushi automatically rubs his throat, she says, “I warned you, weretiger. Don’t take me for a fool.”
Atsushi nods dumbly.
He leans over to grab his bag of groceries - and the rice and tea are alright, thank God - but by the time he stands back up, Gin is gone.
All that’s left of the encounter is Atsushi’s confusion, a bit of dirt on the bottom of his bag, and the wind that incessantly pushes against him to get him to go home.
“Hey, Akutagawa?” Atsushi asks, holding the phone up to his ear while he stirs the soup he finally got the recipe from Kunikida for, two days after the incident with Gin.
“What is it?” Akutagawa says, and while he perpetually sounds flat, he doesn’t tack on any unnecessary names or hostility. It’s a win on all fronts, according to Atsushi - they can have multiple civil conversations now, and they even have those conversations without Atsushi getting called things that would make sailors blush.
He kind of misses it, honestly. Though he does know that weretiger is here to stay - that one is just a classic, at this point.
“Are we fighting?” Atsushi asks, gasping a bit as the pot tries to boil over - shit, he’d been thinking too hard, Akutagawa might be onto something when he says that Atsushi shouldn’t do that - and he has to pull it away from the stove. If he fucks this up, he’s going to get irritated. He’s trying to make it to bring for lunch over the next few days.
Akutagawa makes that sound he always makes when he’s confused, like he’s tilting his head to the side and staring at Atsushi like a cat. It’s strange, the way that Atsushi can always imagine the expression on Akutagawa’s face when they aren’t even in the same room - it’s just a testament to how far the new Double Black has come. “If we are, I was unaware of such a thing. Why do you ask?”
“Your sister tried to gut me like a fish in an alley the other day,” Atsushi shrugs, cursing as the phone nearly slips into the pot. For his health, he sets the pot on the stove and turns it down to a simmer. It’s going well enough, anyway. When has simmering ever hurt?
“I believe it would be ‘skin like a tiger’,” Akutagawa corrects. “Why would she possibly do that?”
“I don’t know,” Atsushi sighs, staring up at his ceiling like it might give him answers. It doesn’t, but it does let him know that the previous tenants had an incident with a frying pan and got grease on the ceiling. Great. He’ll clean that later. “That’s why I’m asking you. You’re siblings, shouldn’t you know?”
“The only reason I could entertain is…” Akutagawa tsks, trailing off. “Ah. You forgot to take your shoes off last time you were over. She despises dirt on the floor.”
“Enough to kill me?!”
“You’re not dead, so she certainly didn’t intend for you to be.”
“...Fair enough. I, uh, I guess I won’t forget my manners next time…” Look, Atsushi understands that being raised in an orphanage means he’s lost on most etiquette things. Akutagawa had been appalled when he’d learned that Atsushi didn’t see the point in house slippers, so he has his own pair that stay strictly at Akutagawa’s place.
Still, he doesn’t think leaving his shoes on in the penthouse with hardwood floors is enough reason to jump him in an alley.
“You best not. Are you still available for dinner tonight? We need to discuss the next mission Dazai-san has for us.”
“Yeah, might be late though,” Atsushi says, sliding the phone off his shoulder and into his hand, putting it on speaker. He eyes the soup carefully like it might try to explode. “I have some laundry I still need to fold.”
“That task should not take long enough to make you late.”
“I have other tasks to do first!”
Akutagawa sighs, exasperation clear. “Fine. Your inability to be punctual is such an annoyance.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Atsushi rolls his eyes. “I’ll be on time if you help me fold this stuff if it bothers you so much.”
“I’ll be over in an hour,” Akutagawa says simply, before hanging up.
Atsushi’s gaze is a bit too fond when he looks at his phone screen. Just think, the progress they’ve made - from trying to kill each other to Akutagawa coming over to help Atsushi fold laundry so he isn’t late for dinner.
The fiasco continues, though, past dinner, and past the next time that Atsushi goes over to Akutagawa’s place and remembers to take his shoes off and put the damn house slippers on.
He’s calling it the fiasco because that sounds more bewildering than incident, and it’s bewildering indeed.
Atsushi doesn’t know what he’s done to piss off so many Port Mafia members, but it seems they’re going back to the good old days where his breathing pisses off one mafia member or another.
Not that it’s a good thing. Not at all.
Just because he’s formed a partnership with Akutagawa doesn’t mean the other mafia members get less intimidating - that includes, of course, Executive Kouyou Ozaki.
He isn’t on the woman’s good side already, with Kyouka and all - and she’s just plain intimidating. She’s a beautiful woman, but she’s almost too put together. Atsushi’s seen her fight - and he’s never seen a pin come out of her incredibly well-done updo.
He fears the day someone pisses her off enough for her hair to look messy.
Either way, the woman scares the hell out of him and he really, really doesn’t know what he’s done, going over every interaction he’s had over the last three months when he’s cornered in the stairway of Akutagawa’s penthouse.
In the stairway, because she’d been coming out of the elevator when he went to get into the elevator, and so he naturally tried going the other way. What are twenty-two flights of stairs compared to Kouyou Ozaki?
“Hi,” Atsushi says weakly, putting his hands up in surrender when his heel nearly goes over the first stair of several flights.
He bends as far back as he can.
It is not far enough away from her or her gaze, which is somehow heavier than Gin’s. At least Gin offered to kill him quickly if she didn’t heed his warning.
Kouyou’s posture never falters, still standing tall with her gaze narrowed. “Stand up straight, it’s abysmal you have such bad posture anyway. Look me in the eye when I speak to you.”
Atsushi, nearly bent over backward in his effort to get away from the woman and yet not fall down the stairs, slowly straightens himself out and blinks at her. It’s kind of hard to keep her gaze.
It’s as if he’d managed to stab Ranpo to death and then talk to Fukuzawa, that’s how intense it is.
Atsushi offers a nervous smile.
Kouyou’s look alone makes him quit.
“Do you, Atsushi Nakajima,” Kouyou starts, her voice polite and yet with an undercurrent of seething that Atsushi and his frantically beating heart do not appreciate. “Understand that should you misstep intentionally or accidentally, your very soul will be so unrecognizable that the most merciful God will discard it?”
Atsushi makes a remarkably uncourageous squeak. “What - what are you talking about?”
Kouyou’s right eye twitches. Atsushi appreciates his lungs while they still work. She doesn’t outright stab him, but he can see the way she bites her tongue.
“Are you really so dim?” If Atsushi were any dumber, he might call her expression incredulous. He isn’t that dumb, though, and if anything, it’s slight confusion that she allows to show.
He doesn’t like the insinuation he’s that dumb, though, but really - two Port Mafia members in a week?! That’s bad odds, even for him.
Atsushi doesn’t answer her, finding that his vocal cords staying in his throat is the ideal outcome of this interaction, which is most likely to occur if he doesn’t say anything she doesn’t like.
“Unbelievable,” Kouyou murmurs, still staring him down like he’s roadkill or something equally as appalling and fascinating. “You cannot be serious. Do you take me for a fool, boy?”
“I - I really don’t, ma’am,” Atsushi says, swallowing hard. “I don’t… know what you’re talking about. I told Akutagawa I was going to get take-out, I promise I wasn’t here for anything, um, antagonistic.”
Kouyou stares at him flatly. It seems to be her signature move if not outright hostility at this point. “You could stupify a sloth. This is - unbelievable.”
“I’m sorry,” Atsushi says simply because he doesn’t know what else to say.
Kouyou, seemingly absent-mindedly, the most distracted thing he’s ever seen her do, moves out of his way without any prompting whatsoever when Atsushi tries to edge his way back into the proper hallway.
This take-out better be worth it. It’s some a Thai place that Akutagawa likes - he’d been appalled when Atsushi said that of course he hadn’t had any, so Akutagawa ordered some. Great, now Atsushi might be late for pick-up.
He puts the encounter at the back of his mind for further investigation later.
“Seriously, are you sure we aren’t fighting?” Atsushi asks, batting at a stray piece of rice stuck to the side of his mouth, sitting cross-legged on Akutagawa’s rug with the man next to him.
Akutagawa contemplates this, glancing up at the ceiling before furrowing his brows and taking another bite of his food. “I’m quite sure. Would you… like to fight? Is it possible to postpone such a fight until after food? Rashoumon works best on an empty stomach.”
Atsushi scoffs. “You mean Rashoumon works best when you’re agitated.”
“Perhaps,” Akutagawa says, taking another bite of his food. “Why do you keep asking this? I thought we’d previously established that no, we aren’t fighting, so unless you would like to -”
“Kouyou cornered me,” Atsushi shrugs. “And then she called me dumb - well, not in those words, but isn’t it just like adding insult to injury?”
“Did she specify why she cornered me?”
“Uh… just to threaten me? That’s the point we got to before she called me dumb. She was in the elevator in your building, I thought she was coming to talk to you.”
Akutagawa makes that stupidly endearing confused sound again, like a cat that needs reassurance that it isn’t a house pet with its hunting instincts stripped away.
(Actually, where is Akutagawa’s cat? It’s been a while since Atsushi’s said hi)
“I haven’t seen the Executive since she returned from her mission up north several days ago.”
“Women are weird,” Atsushi shrugs.
Akutagawa nods in agreement.
They simmer on it for a moment, before Akutagawa sighs, tossing a throw blanket at Atsushi that had previously been folded in the corner. “It’s getting late, and with your luck, you’ll run into another hostile if you attempt to take the bus back to the Agency dorms. Stay here for the night.”
Simply because Atsushi learned months ago that trying to fight Akutagawa when he’s made declarations like this - that Atsushi is staying over, because fighting it is useless and wastes both of their time.
Atsushi moves the blanket off of him, batting it away. “At least let me finish my food before you put me to sleep!”
“Oh, so I bore you to sleep now?”
“That isn’t what I meant -”
The final straw for Atsushi during this entire fiasco is when he’s minding his damn business at the Agency, at the job he gets paid to be at, and then suddenly he isn’t.
Suddenly he isn’t, because the Agency’s window is blown out - dramatic, he knows - and Atsushi’s being grabbed by the back of his neck like a damn kitten and suddenly he’s floating in the air, being pulled out the window the intruder had come from.
Honestly, he isn’t surprised that it’s Executive Chuuya Nakahara staring back at him when they land on a nearby roof.
Nakahara’s ability is always disconcerting, and Atsushi nearly falls back before he gathers his bearings and corrects his center of gravity.
Atsushi glares at Nakahara, turning the tide, dusting off his shirt. “Look, I am not doing this again. You’re going to threaten me, I’m not going to know why, you’re going to tell me that I’m dumb, we’re going to move on, we’re both bewildered, alright? Can’t you at least wait for my break?”
Nakahara blinks.
Atsushi blinks back.
Just as he’s starting to wonder if that isn’t what Nakahara was going to do, and he just yelled at a Port Mafia Executive -
Nakahara smiles, clapping slowly. “I just can’t believe it. I came to see for myself.”
“Did you have to break the window? We don’t really have the budget to be paying for all this broken glass…” Atsushi says, avoiding Nakahara’s gaze.
Seriously, what the fuck did he do to piss off the Port Mafia?
“I’ll cover it,” Nakahara hums, waving it off. Atsushi wishes he could wave off property damage the way Nakahara and his Port Mafia salary can. “You seriously don’t know? You’re not fucking with me?”
“Can you - can you look at me?” Atsushi says, watching the way that Nakahara gives him a once-over once he’s been given the prompt. “Great. So, you can clearly see that I’m not suicidal enough to try fucking with you, no. Just what is going on? First Gin, then Kouyou, and now you?”
“You must have a death wish, talking to me like that.” Luckily, Nakahara doesn’t seem pissed off. Several craters on the outskirts of Yokohama are the remains of his rage, and Atsushi does not want to join them.
“You’re after Kouyou,” Atsushi says plainly.
Nakahara nods in understanding, then he laughs, again. “So, guess I don’t need to knock you into next week.”
“I’d prefer if you didn’t,” Atsushi says, awkwardly scratching at the nape of his neck, because what do you say to a Port Mafia Executive who kind of kidnapped you to have a conversation and you’re still on the clock? “Can you explain what’s going on? By chance? Please?”
“Atsushi,” Nakahara says, his smile fond and amused. “Are you aware of what a shovel talk is?”
Atsushi’s brows furrow. “Yeah, of course. I was raised in an orphanage, not a sewer.”
“I’d debate that.” Atsushi does not like how quickly Nakahara moves on that. “More importantly - are you aware that you’ve been on the receiving end of two, now three, shovel talks?”
“Shovel talks…” Atsushi starts, “are for people in relationships. You guys have missed the mark there - I’m not dating anyone, and if I was, why would I get the shovel talks from the Port Mafia?!”
“You’re not dating anyone?” Nakahara sounds skeptical. He should not sound skeptical, because Atsushi thinks he’s the leading expert on who he is or is not dating.
He narrows his eyes. “Who do you think I’m dating?”
“Akutagawa.”
Nakahara says it so flippantly, and Atsushi - well, Atsushi thinks.
I warned you, weretiger. Do you, Atsushi Nakajima, understand that should you misstep intentionally or accidentally, your very soul will be so unrecognizable that the most merciful God will discard it?
And now, Nakahara dragging him through the window.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Atsushi says, but his tone is flat and they’re both certain that neither is kidding. “I’m not dating Akutagawa. Why would I date Akutagawa?”
“You stayed at his place last night,” Nakahara says.
“It was getting late, he didn’t want me getting mugged.”
“You bought his favorite tea.”
“It was on sale and he wanted me to taste it!”
“You had dinner together this week.”
“We needed to talk about the mission Dazai has for us. And we did, by the way.”
“He came over to fold your laundry.”
“He didn’t want me to be late - hey, how did you know about that?”
Nakahara just scoffs, and Atsushi figures he isn’t getting any inside information on the Port Mafia’s gossip circles. “Well, I wouldn’t fold anyone’s laundry if I wasn’t dating them. I only throw Dazai’s laundry, and I’m married to him.”
Atsushi’s eyes widen. “No, that’s not - I can’t - That’s not what that was.”
Nakahara tsks. “Did he set aside a couple of garments for you to iron later?”
“Oh my god, I’m dating Akutagawa,” Atsushi says with dawning realization.
“I told you.”
“You - can you bring me back to the Agency? I need to make a call.”
The moment Atsushi’s phone call connects, he speaks, cutting off anything that Akutagawa may or may not say.
“We’re not fighting,” Atsushi informs him, incredulously. “We’re dating.”
For a moment, the line is quiet.
“...Yes? What about it? And what does our relationship have to do with this inane question you keep asking me?”
“What - are you not surprised that we’re dating?” Atsushi asks, and he doesn’t squeak, not again, but he is still in the Agency’s office and Tanizaki is staring at him like he’s grown an extra limb. He checks - he hasn’t.
“We’ve been dating for a month,” Akutagawa says slowly, like Atsushi is stupid. “I’d thought you would know this, considering you’ve been present for the entire month.”
“We have not,” Atsushi says starkly. “How did you ask me out?”
“I courted you with the jacket I gifted you,” - Atsushi has that jacket, he thought it was an odd but sweet memento from Akutagawa and a sign of their blossoming partnership - “and when I asked if you’d like to visit the restaurant with the best chazuke in Yokohama, you said ‘ of course I would, it’s a date.’”
Atsushi remembers this.
Atsushi and Akutagawa have been on very different terms of what partnership they have.
Atsushi sighs, somewhat close to banging his head on his desk. “I bring it up because Gin, Kouyou, and now Nakahara weren’t mad at me, they were giving me the shovel talk.”
“The what?”
“Y’know, the shovel talk? The whole ‘if you hurt him, I’ll bury you six feet under’ talk?”
“I have no clue what you’re referring to,” Akutagawa says confidently. It’s a step up from a year ago when he’d rather die than admit he was wrong about anything. “It can’t be that important, though, if they didn’t bother to tell you what it was.”
“You didn’t bother to tell me we were dating!”
“You were the one who said it was a date -”
“It’s an expression!”
When Atsushi gets most of his pressing questions answered - I was under the impression you wanted to move slowly, of course I didn’t kiss you - and the day is done, he sits in Akutagawa’s bed, in Akutagawa’s penthouse, wearing pajamas Akutagawa bought for him, and he watches the uncertainty, the insecurity blossom across Akutagawa’s face like a bruise.
Before it can fester, Atsushi smiles at him. “Before you ask, I’m staying.”
“The night?” Akutagawa asks hesitantly.
“No, I’m staying with you. We are dating, aren’t we?” he asks slyly, watching the relief that takes the place of all the insecurity. The fact that Akutagawa is relieved that Atsushi wants to date him - it’s… it’s an odd feeling.
Not that Atsushi is complaining.
He needs someone to want to fold laundry with him.
“You think you could get rid of me that easily?” Atsushi asks playfully.
“Many things can happen after you realize your partner has failed to realize you were dating -”
“It wasn’t very clear!”
“It was all very clear to me.”
“Maybe that’s because it was transparent!”
“Now your arguments are getting nonsensical.”
“You’re impossible -”