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"Modern ovens don't even use coal gas," Mori grumbled, shaking his head as he bent down to pull the boy's face out of the small electric oven by the back of his collar the way one would scruff a misbehaving kitten. He sometimes hesitated to call this strange creature a boy - his singular wide brown eye and gangly limbs spoke of childhood but his sharp grin and intelligent quips seemed to hint at something much more insidious hiding beneath.
Dazai turned his doe-eyed stare on him and all thoughts of the boy's potential threat level vanished. It was hard to feel intimidated by something so…
"Mori-sensei," Dazai whined, "you're always ruining my fun."
… annoying.
"I need the kitchen to cook dinner." When Dazai continued to look unimpressed, he threw in a bribe for good measure. "There's crab involved."
Dazai's face lit up in one of those ridiculously fake grins, completely transparent, but Mori could appreciate the effort given. They would have to work on that at some point but for now he would take what he could get.
"There's paperwork from today's appointments that needs filing if you need something to keep yourself occupied. It'll be about an hour either way."
"I'll be downstairs then!" Dazai called cheerily as he headed for the stairs.
"Dazai-kun?" Mori asked, and Dazai spun back around to face him with a look of faux innocence. "If you decide to start mixing medications again, I'm taking away your video games for a month."
"Understood," Dazai easily agreed, but Mori could hear him stomping the entire way down the stairs and sent Elise to watch him anyway.
The first time Mori touched Dazai, he nearly had a heart attack.
Not literally, of course. But his Elise, his one constant companion, vanished in a flash of blue light and Mori had no way of knowing if she would ever return.
She did, of course.
Once Mori got done wrapping the child back up in clean bandages and lifted his hands from Dazai’s face, she reappeared with a soft pop and a face full of tears.
“Rintarou, it was horrible,” she cried as she crawled onto Mori’s lap, resting her head on his shoulder to continue sobbing. He ran a comforting hand through her hair, tucked his other arm around her tiny waist to hold her close.
“I was there and- and then I wasn't,” Elise mumbled through her tears. “And then I was back here. I don't know what- what happened.”
“I’m afraid I don't know much more than you do, darling,” Mori said softly, leaving a featherlight kiss on her forehead. “But we can figure it out together, okay?”
Elise noded, hiding her face in Mori’s coat. “It's that stupid kid's fault.”
“Most likely,” Mori agreed. “But what makes you say that?”
“He feels wrong.” At Mori’s nod of encouragement, she continues. “When I get close to him, it feels like I’m gonna get sucked in. Like a big vacuum.”
“Then keep your distance from him and you’ll be fine,” Mori reassured her. “He’ll be out of our hair soon enough.”
Dazai arrived in Mori's clinic the way patients often do - dumped on a cot, unconscious, by someone who shoved an excessive amount of yen in his hands before giving a bare bones explanation and leaving.
The difference between Dazai and most patients is that he was half their size, nearly dead of his own accord, and no one ever came back for him.
Honestly, within an hour of the boy waking up, Mori understood why. He truly respected whoever had tolerated the child for the first thirteen years of his life because less than sixty minutes in, Mori was ready to put him back to sleep, potentially permanently.
"How are you feeling?" Mori had asked, once the boy blinked his uncovered eye open.
"I'm still alive?" he questioned groggily. "I hate you."
Mori took a deep breath and tried not to scream. From the corner of the room, he could hear Elise giggling.
"What's your name?" he asked, as gently as he could manage.
That single brown eye locked in on him, sharpening with more intensity than Mori expected. If he was a less experienced man and wasn't being glared at by what amounted to an over-bandaged Bambi, he might've flinched back.
"Dazai," Dazai answered, with the cadence of someone who had never said that name before in their life.
"Okay, Dazai-kun." Mori smiled at him in that false, syrupy sweet way one approaches particularly annoying toddlers or misbehaving pets they're trying to bribe with treats. "Do you know how you got here?"
Dazai turned to face the wall, letting out a little huff.
"Do you know how to get home?"
More silence, a shuffling of feet beneath the sheet.
"We'll work on that later, I guess. Is there anything I can get for you right now?"
"Can I have a book to read?" The boy turned to give him what might have been a pleading look if it wasn't overdramatized to the point of looking nearly sarcastic.
But a book. That was simple enough, and would hopefully keep the boy occupied until whoever brought him here returned to collect him.
"Do you have a preference for what kind?"
"I'm not picky," Dazai answered with a shrug.
"A medical textbook?"
"Gross."
"War strategy?"
"Boring."
"Mathematics?"
"Even more boring."
"It seems like you are a bit picky," Mori said with a sigh.
"Am not," Dazai refuted, sticking out his tongue. Elise laughed again, and the boy's eye focused on her, appearing surprised that there was another child in what was clearly not an entirely legal medical facility.
Mori sighed again - he felt as though he'd sighed more in the last ten minutes than he had in the prior year - and reached behind him, grabbing a trashy romance novel that a patient had left behind months before. He narrowly resisted the urge to chuck it at the boy's head.
There's a reason he was an underground surgeon and not a pediatrician, no matter how much he enjoyed the company of his dear Elise.
"Read this then," Mori instructed. "I'll be back to check on you later."
Mori turned and left the room and Elise followed by his side, the heels of her little Mary Jane's clicking on the floor.
"That's a weird kid," Elise commented, echoing Mori's own thoughts.
"He'll be gone soon. Don't worry, darling." Mori patted her head with a soft smile, leading them to his private office in the back.
Three days later, Mori was rearranging the furniture in the study of his apartment above the clinic so it could function as a small, temporary bedroom. A month later, he was cooking the boy kanimeshi after pulling his head out of the oven.
Well, he had been wanting an accomplice for a while.
“Rintarou!” Elise cried with a stomp of her foot, seconds after appearing with a small pop in the center of Mori’s crowded back office. “He did it again!”
He had felt the slightly disorienting sensation of his Ability being nullified out of existence mere seconds before, but had hoped to ignore the problem until he was done with one last stack of paperwork.
“What happened, dear Elise-chan?” Mori asked, turning in his chair to face her. She closed the distance between them, pressing her face into the front of Mori’s white coat to cuddle against him. He wrapped an arm around her waist, rubbing comforting circles on her back.
“I just wanted a bite of his ice cream,” Elise whined, her voice muffled. “He wouldn't share.”
“So you touched him to get it?” Mori asked patiently.
Elise nodded into his chest, the pout never leaving her face.
At the same moment, the door slammed open, hitting the wall so hard that it shook.
“She's lying to you, Mori-sensei!” Dazai nearly yelled, still standing in the doorway.
Mori pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose and groaned internally. “Could you even hear what she said?”
“No, but I know she's a liar!” Dazai argued. “She tried to steal my whole bowl of ice cream and dropped it so I tapped her on the head so she'd shut up and stop crying.”
“I was not crying!” Elise snapped back, turning her head to face Dazai but still staying braced against Mori, as if for support.
“Yes, you were! Like a little baby. A whiny little - ”
“And did anyone think to clean up the ice cream?” Mori interrupted.
Silence was the only answer he got. Unsurprising, considering the children in front of him.
“Dazai-kun, go clean up the ice cream. Elise-chan… why don't you stay here and color?”
“But I never got any ice cream.” Tears welled up in Elise’s eyes, and what are those if not Mori Ougai’s greatest weakness?
“We can all go and get ice cream later.” Mori decided that he was not above begging. He had no dignity left when it came to these two little monsters anyway. “Just please. Please let me finish this paperwork.”
“Did you get all of that or do you need further explanation?” Mori asked, watching the boy before him continue to examine the chess board while mumbling under his breath.
“No, I’ve got it,” Dazai said with a surprising amount of confidence.
“I’m not going to go easy on you,” Mori said with a grin, picking up a white pawn to begin the game.
The game that Dazai won.
“Are you certain you've never played before?” Mori asked, searching Dazai’s face for any tells of a lie when he shook his head. “Beginner's luck, then.”
Until Dazai won the next two games.
“Did you read a book on theory, even?” Mori asked exasperatedly. “Or watch a video or something?”
“Nope.” Dazai smiled that hopelessly fake smile. “But this is fun, I can see why you like it.”
When Mori finally won the fourth game and was patting himself on the back (for beating a teenager, how far he had fallen), Dazai went and ruined it.
“You could've won three turns earlier if you’d moved your bishop instead of your knight,” Dazai supplied unhelpfully, rearranging the pieces to perfectly match an earlier point in the game. “See, you’d just have to move your bishop there and your queen there and you’d have had checkmate.”
Mori stared blankly at him as Dazai’s words washed over him. “You let me win?”
Dazai looked down at the board again, avoiding eye contact. “Am I in trouble?”
“No, you're not.” Mori sighed. “You know, I think I might have a use for you after all, besides just helping in the clinic.”
“What is it?” Dazai asked, perking up.
“That's for me to know and you to find out,” Mori said with a sense of finality. “But I think you'll enjoy it.”
“Spit those out,” Mori commanded, holding one hand beneath Dazai’s mouth as the other gripped his brown hair tightly. The boy shook his head defiantly, swallowing in an over exaggerated manner. “Dazai-kun!”
Mori looked down at the empty bottle in his hand, wondering how many were left in the bottle before Dazai started eating them by the handful. They weren't lethal - the penicillin label made that clear - but they would still make him sick, and that was something Mori wanted to avoid.
“How many did you take?” Mori asked.
Dazai stuck his tongue out in defiance, trying to wiggle out of the grip Mori now had on his chin.
“You can't just help yourself to anything in the clinic when you feel like it,” Mori said, a familiar lecture starting. “I locked up anything truly dangerous but that doesn't make everything else safe.”
“That's the point,” Dazai said, finally speaking up. “Suicide. Dying. That's the point.”
“But nothing here will kill you!” Mori cried exasperatedly. “And now you're going to throw up all night and Elise-chan is going to make fun of you, is that what you want?”
Dazai’s confidence finally falters. “...no.”
“So stop stealing medicine from the clinic.” Mori let go of the boy’s chin, patting his cheek none too gently. “And go make yourself throw those up. I’m not listening to you whine later if you get sicker.”
Dazai gave him a half-hearted glare before turning to the stairs. “I do not whine.”
“Yes, you do.” Mori laughs. “Constantly.”
“Do not.” Dazai stuck his tongue out one last time, glancing back over his shoulder, before darting up the stairs.
It's a good thing Dazai didn't know how to pick locks or that could've been much worse.
Mori came upstairs to silence.
This wouldn't be concerning if he lived in any other household but given the loud nature of both Elise and Dazai, silence was cause for immediate worry.
Elise could be perfectly content for hours to color page after page or read her little books but knowing that gave no hint as to what mischief Dazai was up to.
When he entered the living room, he almost recoiled in shock - before taking out his phone to snap a few pictures.
Dazai was leaning against one end of the couch, knees to his chest, his breathing even. There were two cushions propped against his side and on the furthest one was Elise, curled into a ball with her head resting on the pillow, hair splayed around her face. She was deeply asleep, her little eyelids fluttering as she dreamed.
The camera flash prompted Dazai’s eyes to fly open but he didn't move, simply fixed Mori with a glare.
“Delete that,” Dazai commanded, his voice barely above a whisper.
“No.” Mori smiled as a light laugh left his lips. “You two are just too cute.”
“Delete that now.” Dazai sounded even angrier this time, but he still didn't move. “Or I’ll do it myself.”
“You’re welcome to try.”
Still, Dazai didn't move. He just groaned and closed his eyes again. “I don't want to wake her up.”
“That's so sweet of you, Dazai-kun,” Mori cooed.
“No way,” Dazai said with disgust. “She's just annoying when she's awake. I like her better this way.”
“Sure,” Mori agreed, still fighting the urge to laugh. “But she didn't have to fall asleep on you.”
Dazai stayed quiet, and Mori did allow himself to laugh.
“Well, you're welcome to go to bed now. I can carry her to her bedroom.”
“No!” Dazai said, a bit too quickly. “It's not for me or anything, she just seems comfortable. I don't want her whining to start again.”
“How noble of you.” Mori grabbed the blankets off the back of the couch and spread one over each of the children. “Have a nice night then. Good luck sleeping in that position.”
He held in his laughter until he made it to the privacy of his own room and looked at the pictures captured on his phone screen.
It may have been worth having the little brat around just for moments like those.
“So that's your entire plan?” Dazai asked, his single unimpressed eye fixed on the papers spread across the table. “Messing up a tracheotomy and hoping they believe the word of a fourteen year old?”
“There's a bit more to it than that,” Mori defended. “I’ll be his personal physician, I’ll be trusted. It would make sense - ”
“For the Port Mafia boss, the most powerful man in Yokohama, to die a natural death via a slit throat by his newly promoted private physician?”
“Accidents happen.” Mori cleared his throat. “Sometimes. In emergencies.”
“And on top of that, you have no experience even remotely relevant to running an organized crime organization. Plus, who believes the word of a kid anyway?”
Mori sniffed and looked away. “I was in the military.”
“Yeah, that helps.” Dazai rolled his eye. “This is a stupid plan, Mori-sensei.”
“It’s not up for debate. This isn't a round-table discussion.”
“It should be,” Dazai mumbled under his breath.
“It's not,” Mori reemphasized. “I’m the one making the decisions here. You’re just my witness.”
Dazai snorted, leaning his face on one hand. “Then why even tell me in the first place?”
“So our stories match, of course.”
“Fine,” Dazai agreed, still looking unconvinced. It was frustrating to have the best version of your plan doubted so thoroughly by a literal child.
“I’ll look over the details again,” Mori eventually said. “Maybe we can push it back a few months for believability.”
“When you smile, you need to put your eyes into it,” Mori instructed. “It's not simply your facial muscles, it's your entire expression.”
“Like this?” Dazai asked, turning back to the mirror. He smiled again, opening his eye wider than before. Rather than looking happy, he looked like an absolute maniac.
“Maybe a little less eyes,” Mori quickly corrected. “Can you think of anything that makes you happy?”
“The feeling right before the sweet release of death is - ”
“Something normal,” Mori interrupted. As concerning as the constant suicide talk was at first, it eventually became repetitive. Like an overdone joke. Mori envied parents whose children babbled about things like books and video games, not the logistics of death by hanging.
“Crab is good,” Dazai eventually said, nodding.
“Okay.” Mori took a deep breath. “I want you to do the first smile you did, the small one, while thinking of eating crab.”
Dazai once again faced the mirror. This time when he smiled, his eye lit up in a way that didn't seem forced. It didn't quite seem natural either, but it was an improvement.
“Good job.” Mori ruffled his hair, earning a groan from the boy. “Now let's try it with a bigger smile.
Dazai beamed at the mirror, his eye brightening. It appeared more natural on his youthful face, making him look his age for once.
“That looks great,” Mori praised. “I think we’ve done enough for today.”
“So now do I get the new game you got me?”
“Yes, Dazai-kun.” Mori patted his head again. “You've earned your game.”
Dazai gave him another one of those fake beaming smiles in the mirror and it was contagious enough to make Mori smile back.
The first time his body jolted with the cold sensation of Elise being nullified, Mori easily ignored it. Dazai did it at least once a week - sometimes out of annoyance, sometimes just to be an annoyance.
But when Elise didn't immediately reappear by his side, stomping her feet and whining about Dazai and his “stupid annoying Ability made just to torture her,” Mori did start to question what could possibly be going on upstairs.
The second nullification made him put down his pen and consider going upstairs to check on them. Dazai never exactly made an effort to hide how cruel he had the potential to be, so who knew what the boy could have been doing to his poor Elise?
The third nullification had him rising from his chair, heading towards the stairs that lead up to their apartment. He could hear muffled thumps from above him, and it only made him hurry, taking the stairs two at a time.
He was not prepared for what he found.
Elise was running in circles on the living room ceiling, giggling louder than Mori had ever heard. Beneath her, Dazai was wobbling to keep balanced on the back of the couch, arms outstretched.
“What is this?” Mori asked sternly. Neither of the kids stopped in their movements, but Dazai did turn to him, a wild grin on his face.
“Did you know Elise can control where she reappears?” he asked excitedly.
“...Yes,” Mori answered cautiously. “What are you doing?”
“Ceiling tag,” Elise said through her laughter, darting closer to Dazai only to jump back as he narrowly missed brushing the top of her head with his fingertips.
“Ceiling… tag…” Mori swore he had aged a decade in the months since Dazai moved in with them.
“You can't play, Rintarou, you're too tall!” Elise stopped in the far corner, away from any furniture, to catch her breath. Mori never knew she was capable of getting out of breath.
“You're cheating!” Dazai shouted as he leaped from the couch to a side table, knocking over a pile of books in the process. “You said you'd stay in the middle of the room!”
“Ceiling tag,” Mori mumbled to himself as he turned to go back down the stairs. “Those two should never have met.”
“Mori-san, come see what I can do!” Dazai called from his room.
Nothing good ever started with those words.
When Mori turned the corner to find Dazai sitting on the floor of his room, he didn't expect to see a pair of handcuffs and a handful of padlocks spread in front of him.
“Watch this,” Dazai said excitedly before clicking the handcuffs onto his wrists. Before Mori could even protest, he was twisting a bent bobby pin into the lock, wiggling it a bit before he twisted it. He repeated it on the other hand before lifting his hands in front of his face.
“Ta-da!” When Dazai snapped his fingers, the cuffs fell to the floor, as if by magic.
Mori had seen many handcuffs picked in his day but he had never seen that particular trick.
“Good job, Dazai-kun,” Mori said with a couple of polite claps. “Now can I ask why you're learning to pick handcuffs?”
“It's a useful skill to have, is it not?” Dazai answered cheerfully.
Mori eyed him warily. That wasn't the whole truth, but it would do. “Did you learn to pick all of these locks?”
“Yeah! Do you want to see?”
“Not today.” Mori leaned against the doorframe, considering. “This lock picking phase has nothing to do with the locked up medications in the clinic, does it?”
“Not at all, Mori-san.” Dazai gave him his most innocent smile. “It just seems useful if I’m going to be involved with the mafia.”
“You’ve been watching too many yakuza movies. I highly doubt you'll be breaking out of cuffs anytime soon.”
“But if I need to, I’m prepared, right?”
Mori just sighed. “That you are.”
“Now once we move into headquarters, you can't just nullify Elise-chan whenever you want,” Mori lectured the bored teenager in front of him. “You both have to act like normal children, and normal children don't disappear into thin air.”
“Dazai’s the one who can't pass for normal,” Elise said with a giggle from where she was perched on the corner of Mori’s desk. “I’m just like any other kid. Except better.”
“I can pass for normal,” Dazai argued. “I just choose not to.”
“You try so hard to be edgy that you just seem like a freak,” Elise teased, pointing at his bandages. “And you look like a mummy.”
“Well, you look like a doll,” Dazai shot back, leaning forward in his chair to glare at her.
“At least dolls are pretty.” Elise smirked. “You’re just jealous.”
“I don't want to be pretty.” Dazai fake gagged. “I’m handsome. Kouyou-san said so.”
“Kouyou-san is a liar, you look half dead.” Elise twirled the ends of her hair around her finger. “Rintarou, can we get rid of him once the - ”
“That's enough of that conversations,” Mori interrupted hurriedly. “Elise-chan, you're my perfect pretty princess. Dazai-kun, you do look like a gremlin who crawled out of a first aid kit, but you could be handsome if you tried.”
“But can we pass for humans?” Elise asked.
“Probably not,” Mori said with a disappointed frown. “But the Port Mafia isn't exactly full of normal people. You’ll both do great.”
He wasn't quite sure when this turned into a pep talk on humanity but when had any of his conversations gone according to plan with these two?
“So does this mean we’re both in the Mafia too, if we live there?” Dazai asked, his eye lighting up. Whatever thought was making him that excited was something Mori should be very wary of.
“No, you're just my wards. My daughter and my assistant.” Dazai looked fake-heartbroken for a moment before his face fell back into his normal bored expression. “My wards who are normal, human children.”
“Dazai-kun, you're still too young to carry a gun. I’m not changing my mind on that.”
“You’ll regret this.” Dazai shot him a glare as he left the room. The boy's glares would be threatening enough to a stranger, but to Mori he was just a child having a tantrum after being denied the toy he wanted.
Thirty minutes later found him dragging Dazai out of the bathtub he had been holding his breath in, still fully clothed. He pulled him out by the collar, once again getting the feeling he was scruffing an oversized, now soggy kitten.
As Dazai coughed water up into the tub, Mori pushed his hair back from his face, checking for a fever under the soaked bandages.
“And what were you hoping to accomplish with this little stunt?” Mori asked, once Dazai caught his breath. “You really thought that trying to kill yourself would convince me to put a weapon in your hands?”
“I thought that trying to kill myself would kill me,” Dazai snapped. “And then I wouldn't care if I had a gun or not.”
Mori eyed him dubiously. “So you did want the gun to shoot yourself.”
“No, I want a gun because everyone else has one and it's not fair.” Dazai whined the second half of the sentence, his face turning down into a dramatic pout. “I should get one, too.”
“Do you even know how to use a gun?”
“You point it and pull the trigger,” Dazai said, as though the answer was obvious. “It doesn't take a genius.”
“There's more to it than that.”
“Then I can learn.” Dazai gave him the sad kicked puppy pout that he quickly picked up from Elise. “Please, Mori-sensei.”
“Go a month without a suicide attempt and we’ll revisit the topic.” As if that was even a possibility. Mori patted himself on the back for putting off the conversation indefinitely. “Now go change into some dry clothes.”
Dazai let out an affronted little “hmph” but got up off the floor and walked out, leaving puddles in his wake.
He had his very own mafia-issued handgun a month later.
“Idiot Rintarou, I want the red dress!” Elise stomped her foot, glaring. “Not the ugly blue one.”
“But the blue one looks so beautiful with your hair,” Mori said, holding it up against her. It was a beautiful pale blue velvet with white lace trim - perfectly complimenting her eyes and hair. “Right, Dazai-kun?”
Dazai rolled his eye, not even looking up from his handheld game. “I like the red one.”
Elise smiled at Mori menacingly. “See, even stupid Dazai knows the red one is better.”
“What did you bribe him with?” Mori asked suspiciously.
“I don't know what you're talking about,” Elise said with a huff. “He just has better taste than you.”
“Dazai-kun?” He turned his stare on the teenager.
“I’ve suddenly developed an affinity for fashion,” Dazai deadpanned.
Elise giggled and gave him an air high-five, which he returned with an air fist-bump, their hands just barely avoiding meeting in the air. Mori had no idea when they started doing that, but it must have been a while since Dazai did it without looking up from his game.
“The children are unionizing against me,” Mori moped.
On the way out of the store, holding a bag that contained the red dress (and all the matching accessories, of course), he spotted Elise drop a thousand yen note that Dazai immediately picked up off the floor.
He really shouldn't have taught Dazai all of those negotiation tactics.
“So now that the Port Mafia is yours, what are you even going to do with it?” Dazai asked as the blood was still drying on the old boss’s wall.
“Make it better.”
“And how does one make a mafia better?”
“You’ll just have to stick around and find out, won't you?” Mori slipped his bloody gloves off to ruffle Dazai’s hair with one hand as the boy groaned in annoyance. The wholesomeness of the moment was slightly marred by the blood streaked across Mori’s face.
“I’m not dying anytime soon, am I?” Dazai asked defeatedly.
“No,” Mori said fondly, aware that his tone was far too lighthearted for the situation or the conversation. Weeks, if not months, of tension were relieved by his success and he was surprisingly excited to have Dazai to share this new start with. “I do still need an assistant.”
Dazai groaned as he pulled away from Mori’s touch to go look out the window at the dark expanse of the Yokohama skyline. “At least it might be interesting.”
“You’ll just have to wait and see.”