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Strangely enough, it’s just Kyouka in the office when Dazai drops in after the one job Kunikida had forced him into for the day. She’s…perched on Atsushi’s desk chair, knees to her chest, absently twirling her knife in one hand as she swivels using the other hand to push off the desk. The phone hidden out of sight.
He kind of wanted to be alone for a minute, but he can’t very well tell a fourteen-year-old to go away because he is steadily losing all will to behave like an actual human being and wants to become one with the floor.
“Oh, hey there, Kyouka-chan,” he beams instead, dropping into his own chair. Kyouka stops spinning and returns his greetings with a simple hello and nod of her head, inexpressive as always. Nice. “Whatcha doing all by yourself? No Atsushi to bother?”
“He’s on a job,” Kyouka replies, sheathing her knife. “Kunikida-san says my job is later in the evening, so I’m waiting for everyone to come back.”
“…I see,” Dazai ends up saying, because he genuinely does not know what to say to break this awkward atmosphere. Kyouka freaks him out a little bit. If only because— “That Kunikida-kun really loves working you the bone, huh?”
Kyouka frowns. “It’s not bad. I like the Agency.” Not what I asked—
—because she’s weirdly reminiscent of himself at fourteen, fresh off witnessing Mori’s takeover, yet even more withdrawn. He supposes seeing your parents die like that does things to a kid. She’s similar to Akutagawa, too, in the broad strokes. Cold, unfeeling at first; first response to anything being violence.
Kyouka is. She’s gotten better. Dazai had his doubts at first, but latching onto Atsushi has done her a world of good, better than when she was under Kouyou’s wing; she probably doesn’t need to hear that.
He wonders what Mori has done to her—or rather, if he did anything directly. Kyouka doesn’t react well to the topic of Mori, or Akutagawa, for that matter. She refuses to talk about Kouyou at all. The only thing Dazai managed to get out of her was that she trained under Verlaine, which explains her talent, and that was only because of an off-handed thing Chuuya said. At least she’s not as psychopathic as Verlaine was.
“…say, Kyouka-chan, what exactly do you like about the Agency?” Dazai asks. The question slips out before he can really think it through. Alarms fire off in his brain. Abort mission abort mission abort mission! Too late.
She blinks at him. “About the Agency?” she echoes.
“Yep,” he nods, because there’s no going back, so he might as well just commit to the bit. He would really rather die than talk about the Mafia with Kyouka. Why does he shoot himself in the foot at the most awkward of times? “As opposed to the Mafia, aside from your being little more than an assassin there.”
Some of the curious light dims in her eyes. Dazai should feel bad about that. He doesn’t. It is strangely unsettling to look at, though.
“I feel like,” she starts, stops, fingers the hilt of her knife. Dazai leans back in his seat, tilts his head back, and waits for her to find her words. Getting away from the Mafia is one hell of an achievement. “I feel like…like I belong here. More than I ever did there. Like…I can do better.”
“Even without Ane-san—Kouyou?”
She flinches, but takes it. “Yes. Even without her.” She hesitates again. “But…there were people who were nice to me. Who took care of me. If it weren’t for killing…I think I might have been happy there.”
Which is a contradiction in of itself. You can’t be with the Mafia and not kill; it’s basic math. Odasaku only ever got away with it because of his ability; Demon Snow is not that kind of ability. For Kyouka, staying in the Mafia would always mean getting her hands bloodier and bloodier every day. Whether she liked it or not.
“People who were nice to you, huh,” he echoes. “Such as? Besides Ane-san?”
“Nakahara-san was always nice to me,” she says.
“Really?” Dazai peers at her. “Chuuya was?”
She nods. “He talked to me whenever he visited. He gave me sweets many times, too.” She drops her gaze, but not out of fear or such. “I miss those sweets.”
Huh. Go figure. He’d always known that Chuuya was a much kinder person than him.
“It was just…Akutagawa, who,” her voice catches and she looks at him headfirst. He nearly flinches himself. He cannot fucking emphasize more than he does not want to be here. The guy he was chasing down earlier should’ve just shot him in the head. “He wasn’t always…violent, with me.”
“Akutagawa-kun has a propensity, for violence,” Dazai says, sitting up properly and twisting around to stare out the window. The topic of Akutagawa sits hotly under his skin. Akutagawa is the one person in the world who should hate him but does not. He does not want to talk about the guy, but he keeps talking anyway. “But he’s kind, when he wants to be,” especially with Gin, he recalls. Always with Gin.
Kind isn’t a word one would use to describe Akutagawa Ryuunosuke. Dazai was the one who beat the words kindness and gentleness out of him, after all. He sees it in the way Kyouka shrinks back when Kunikida starts yelling at him, whacking him upside the head, or when she screws up a job and hangs her head as if waiting for someone to hold a blade to her throat and tell her she’s worthless.
It’s. Weird, to see that in her. Echoes of his own violence, handed down like a screwed-up family souvenir. The worst kind of hand-me-down. He wonders if he should apologize to Kyouka, but that would make no sense to her. There’s no point in telling her that it’s almost his fault that Akutagawa treated her badly, even if the times he hit her were far and few in between—because that blonde woman, Higuchi, took the brunt of that.
Being a good person is so weirdly difficult. Logic dictates that he should be one to do something about that, but he doesn’t know what, and he would really rather kill himself than even try to search for a solution. It kind of sucks, really sucks actually, that some things don’t have neat, clean fixes for them. No pretty ribbon-tie or dead-end for it to bounce off of.
“He gets angry very easily,” she says, which. Theoretically should’ve been fixed by Dazai’s warnings and threats, but now he sees that his logic was pretty flawed. He could say that he was a child and didn’t know better, but he did know better. He was the same age Atsushi is now and that fixes nothing.
He should feel bad, right? Remorse, or something. Except he mostly just feels like he did something wrong and is irritated in the way that one feels when they drop and break a bowl or a vase and there’s no way to bring it back to what it used to be. Kintsugi doesn’t fix but modify; there’s no modification to be made here. No cracks to overlay with liquid gold.
Just a girl, seeking a new home. A new family.
“You used to be with the Port Mafia, right?” Kyouka says after a minute of silence. “Akutagawa was obsessed with hunting you down. He wanted to—”
“I know,” Dazai cuts her off. He does not want to hear the rest of that. The awkward atmosphere is suffocating, and god can he just die already. “I was his direct superior in the Port Mafia. He didn’t take it well when I left, obviously.” He sighs, theatrics and glamor.
He’s grateful that Kyouka isn’t the type to ask further questions, because she just nods and goes back to swiveling in Atsushi’s chair after that, apparently deciding the conversation being done with.
The silence in the office is suffocating after that. He pretends like he doesn’t notice, humming to himself as he slumps over the desk and waits patiently for someone, anyone to come back.
For once, he’ll probably just take some work to stop himself from actually jumping off a building this time.