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Kunikida has spent his whole life waiting for his soulmate.
In a city overrun by the tightly wound threads of time and fate, Kunikida was a model member of society even before his elementary school teachers sat them down and explained. The clock on his wrist was nothing more than an extension of his internal one, the backbone of a schedule kept precise and controlled. And Kunikida has always been a step ahead of the game.
The timers, they were told, were special. A series of dwindling digits burnished a brilliant blue, unique to you and another. Not everyone was born with one. Some would never find their soulmates at all. But for the lucky ones that did, it was said to be worth it.
Kunikida studied the numbers branded on his skin, a luminescent 07:10:04:06:11:31:43 that decreased by the second. Even then, he hadn’t harbored any sentimental notions on the romantic aspect of it. What he understood instead was that if there was someone out there who was destined for him, someone who embodied his criteria on what made two halves a whole, then it was up to him to be the ideal partner in return.
And so, an unspoken covenant was sown into the recesses of his young mind, a promise that would unconsciously color in the rigid borders that encircled and defined his adolescence and beyond.
He graduates at the top of his class, an offer for a place at a prestigious university in one hand and his notebook tucked into his back pocket. Based on his calculations, he should zero out by the end of his freshman year, so he doesn’t have that much longer. Patience, like everything else, is but a tried and tested tactic to him.
He majors in biochemistry with a minor in mathematics, subjects grounded in the physical sphere. Per the details of his plan, he’ll go into medicine and specialize in pediatric healthcare, a respectable career in a reputable field, and one whose routine duties wouldn’t hinder him from fulfilling any necessary familial obligations and would earn him a decent enough salary to cover the living and education expenses of three children.
And maybe sometimes, his fingers will twitch where they rest at his sides, tense and strained and restless as he hunches over a worksheet. Maybe sometimes, he’ll gaze out at the neon electric skyline and contemplate a world outside the realm of theory.
But these thoughts don’t linger. Because if there’s something Kunikida is determined to be, it’s a provider, a spouse that checks every box. He’s not going to settle for anything less.
He can only hope whoever it is thinks the same.
—
Dazai has absolutely no interest in his soulmate.
The very concept of it makes him want to crawl into a hole and die, and it’d be great, actually, if the universe could throw him a bone and let it happen already. He’s seen the countdown where it resides, of course, and no amount of carving over it has diluted its shine in the slightest. So he wraps himself up in layers of bandages, a barrier so thick it almost suits the external shell he wears to keep the dull, primordial terror that flows within him in.
This body he inhabits isn’t even his own, its limbs and all the joints they intersect at mechanical and weightless. The realization that it could also, potentially, belong to someone else has him clawing at his flesh like it’s something he can peel off, shed, and leave out for the person to stumble upon like an imprint of the ghost he is.
It wouldn’t be difficult. The Port Mafia’s influence is vast, its trenches dug and talons sunk deep into every hospital and birth records center in Yokohama. All he needs are resources, which Dazai, as its newest recruit, has no shortage of.
He plots it out carefully: a single order issued, a bullet borne from an assassin’s sniper launched at a distance. And then this specter, the faceless entity that hangs above him like a phantom of the unsung future, will be reduced to a spattered stain on the streets, their twin timers turned crimson.
Dazai is no stranger to red. Let him be coated in it.
But Mori merely smiles, eyes like liquid lead, and assures him he’ll grow to believe differently. Dazai glowers at the starched white fabric pulled taut to hide his own. Mori has his secrets. Dazai should be allowed his solutions.
Nonetheless, he abandons the idea.
One night, Dazai unwinds the mound of gauze and stares at the blinking 04:02:17:22:08:29:03 marred by spiderweb scars. It doesn’t matter, he eventually concedes. No use orchestrating an untimely demise when it’s his he’s betting on the most.
—
00:00:00:00:00:03:48
Kunikida has had the lilts and nuances of this day mapped out since he was eleven years old, but even he can’t ignore the stale bitterness in the air, a sensation of apprehension that dangles overhead like a Grecian myth as he strides with purpose towards the campus library.
He’s pictured this scenario so often it’s begun to feel like speculative fiction, the path between the aisles he’s selected for this occasion culled from the muscle memory of a mirage. His watch has been synchronized with his timer down to the nanosecond, each segment of it whittled away to the penultimate numerals.
00:00:00:00:00:00:14
Kunikida reaches for the handle. A beat. His heart in this throat. His chest tight with anticipation, on the brink of an explosion.
00:00:00:00:00:00:00
No—
An actual explosion.
—
Dazai lives to see his eighteenth birthday. Nobody is more disgruntled about this than him.
It also means it’s his final chance to set his scheme in motion.
“You could just, like, stay put,” Chuuya, as unhelpful as ever, points out. “There’s no entering the tower without access, and I fucking doubt it’s anyone in the Port Mafia.” He considers this and snorts. “No one’s unlucky enough to be stuck with you for work and life.”
Dazai resists the urge to stick his tongue out at him. “I’m not taking any chances,” he mutters sullenly.
Months of observation have made it abundantly clear that any attempt to evade your soulmate would only deliver them to you through increasingly bizarre circumstances. Whether it’ll be an urgent mission, a triggered fire alarm, or something as banal as a change in weather, fighting against it would be futile.
But inaction would be a death sentence. And not the kind Dazai is keen on.
“Wow,” Chuuya drawls. How did he even get in here? Dazai doesn’t recall installing a dog flap on the door. “Never expected panic to be so unflattering on you.”
The grenade Dazai had been examining hurtles in his direction, only to be stopped with a lazy flick of Chuuya’s wrist, the snares of his ability thrumming through him like static. In retrospect, Dazai should have anticipated this. Chuuya’s intrusion in his space is causing his brain activity to stagnate.
“Why would I be panicking?” he asks. Realistically, Dazai knows the soft-hiss cadence he adopts when he addresses his subordinates is as threatening as cotton candy to someone as unyielding as Chuuya, but he figures there’s no harm in trying.
True to form, Chuuya is undeterred. “Because you’re scared,” he responds, and it’s the effortless glide of this conclusion that grates Dazai to his core. “This is the one situation you have no control over, so you’re gonna weasel yourself out of it like you usually do.”
Dazai grits his teeth. If he wanted to be dragged to filth, he would stand in front of a mirror with a journal. “How astute of you,” he says dryly. “Tell me, is Chuuya bothering me in my office because you’re not important enough to have your own?”
It speaks volumes on the nature of their partnership how quickly Dazai manages to dodge the roundhouse kick Chuuya aims at his head. “Bastard.” There’s open annoyance in his expression, but at least he’s on his feet now, stomping towards the exit. “If this stupid plan of yours doesn’t kill you, I’m going to,” he declares. His fists are clenched, leather gloves riding up to expose the strip of blue.
Chuuya’s case is an interesting one, his clock having frozen at the exact moment of the eruption that freed him from his confinement at seven years old. By Dazai’s private estimations, Chuuya will be in his twenties when he’s supposed to encounter the unfortunate soul saddled with him for eternity. But apart from wishing them the worst, Dazai doesn’t have it in him to care.
Not when he’s got his own pressing problems to solve.
He’s an executive now, and the power he wields is a live wire through the nerves and synapses of the organization. He’s got the authority to do things like demand for an array of military-grade equipment, the blueprints of the possibilities ricocheting off of each other like pinballs in a machine.
If there’s no avoiding his soulmate, he’s just going to make it impossible for them to be alone.
—
Kunikida has never had a reason to drown, but he imagines it might go a little something like this.
The overwhelming pressure, his body caught in a maelstrom as he struggles to break the surface. He can smell the vapor that curls like moths to a flame, taste the acrid fear that bleeds through the horde as they’re shepherded towards the shoreline of safety.
“Haruko!” a girl calls out, pushing against a blockade of law enforcement as she tries to run into the blazing building. “Help! My friend is trapped inside!”
Kunikida moves on autopilot. “Where were you last with her?” he practically barks.
“In the reference room, she’d—” He doesn’t wait for her to finish.
The gust of heat that greets him as he races into the lobby hits him like a freight train, the cloying, claustrophobic fumes filling his lungs. The library is going fast: orange tendrils licking the walls to reveal charred beams, the wooden tables he frequents in the study chambers creaking and crackling at the hinges.
“Haruko-san!” he yells. His windpipe throbs with the effort. “Haruko—”
“Over here!” The answer is a searing rasp, hacked out from the left wing. Kunikida spins on his heels and sprints towards a woman no older than he is, clambering out from underneath a toppled bookcase. Its shelves have caught on a windowsill, offering her temporary shelter.
Kunikida pulls her upright. “Are you—” But the rest of his question is cut off by the noise of an earsplitting crash.
With a tremendous roar, a fiery two-by-four detaches from the ceiling and falls to the ground, black clouds of exhaust spewing forth like debris. Kunikida coughs, nostrils burning as he waves off the emitting smoke.
They make it in the nick of time, crowds jostling around them and Haruko’s friend calling out to her as they’re ushered towards an ambulance. While they sit on the ground with respirators over their mouths, the police take a statement from him.
“That was incredibly brave and foolish,” the head officer tells him sternly. His hair is flaked with grey, eyes crinkling.
“I don’t believe that,” Kunikida responds briskly. “A world in which innocent people aren’t saved from harm isn’t one I want to be in.”
“That’s one way to look at it,” the officer says before moving on to assess the damage. Yellow police tape has been drawn around the building, the masses congregating around them as they point and stare.
“Thank you,” Haruko says to him, turning with a wide-eyed glance. “You really did save my life in there.” She honestly is a lovely girl, all almond eyes and long lashes, the sort of features that are graceful and refined with all the facets of youth. She’d been in the reference section when the fire hit, which means she’s in an advanced enough course to need the higher research books that require borrowing from there. The sleeve of her sweater is charred, but not enough to hide the brilliant blue numbers that stand out against her pale skin. Numbers that are vibrant, turning, counting down.
“It was nothing,” Kunikida tells her, reality returning to him in waves. He glances down at his wrist, the expired line of zeroes turned black, ones that will continue to fade in age as the years go by.
Kunikida missed his soulmate.
—
Odasaku blinks at him. “How much damage did it cause?”
“No casualties, or so I was told,” Dazai says, the amber of his glass reflecting back into the excitement in his eyes, the ease of his stance as if a weight has been lifted off his shoulders. “The cost of rebuilding will be the most expensive, but since it wasn’t a national library, there weren’t many important documents in there.”
Odasaku doesn’t immediately respond, his eyes darting over to Dazai as he scrutinizes him in silence. He’s one of the people who knows Dazai best, but even so, sometimes Dazai feels like Odasaku wants something from him—something he doesn’t know how to broach yet. “And you’re happy about this?”
Dazai shrugs. “Sure, I am. Look at the line of work we’re in. It hardly seems like the type of thing to bring someone into.” He leans back in his seat, his head propped on his arm as he watches the man next to him with a curious expression. “I never thought you’d care about it that much.”
Odasaku takes another sip of his drink. “I don’t know, it might be nice,” he says. “Having someone who understands you around.”
Dazai shudders. There’s nothing worse, in his opinion, than having to unspool all the dark things that live in his head one by one and thrust them into the daylight to be examined and untangled by someone else’s grubby hands, dirtied and unclean. “That’s only if you’re planning to stick around.”
“For while you’re here, then,” Oda replies, as calm as ever. The balm to Dazai’s personal brand of dark humor and enthusiasm.
Dazai turns to him. “Isn’t that what you’re here for?”
Oda gives him a tight, fleeting smile. “Yeah, sure.”
—
In the aftermath, Kunikida takes matters into his own hands.
In a city as large as Yokohama, services and the like exist for this sort of thing. He charts down every missed connection gathering within the area, cross-references the list of universities surrounding the town. But as the days wear on, and all he’s faced with are tales of infidelity and forged identities, paid scammers meant to stand at the right place at the right time, he’s forced to come to the inevitable conclusion: whoever his soulmate is, wherever they are, they certainly aren’t looking for him.
He allows himself a period of thirteen minutes to mourn the loss of his efforts, and then he steels his resolve. The fire that had decimated the library was due to an explosion from a minor hand grenade, or so the statement the police released to the public states. Though the incident caused no deaths thanks to the quick evacuation of everyone inside, the ruin of a historic site is still a large enough cause for concern.
Kunikida can’t deny that in the wake of it all, a fire of some other sort has stirred within him. His response to the police officer wasn’t untrue—he’s always been a dedicated, visionary man—but as he reflects on the last few years of his life, he realizes that his principles were tailored and made for solely for his own betterment, those that would have made him the perfect partner and soulmate. Now, with that thread snapped, there’s nothing in the way of him wanting to unleash his values on society at large. Why should how he lives his life be tethered to him alone? Shouldn’t he want to take them out into the world so that he can create one where all people live life to the best of their abilities?
And that first occurs with finding the culprit. He tails the police as much as he can, but it soon becomes evident that a medical student with no right to be at the scene of the crime can do next to nothing, so he digs through his pocket for reinforcements.
“Hello?” he says into the receiver. “I need a favor.”
Katai meets him in a café on the outskirts of town, housed in the first floor of the building where he now works. The interior is homey and the booth seats cracked and worn, but the tea brought to them by a smiling waitress is warm and scalding, and Kunikida finds that he enjoys it.
“You won’t believe the amount of work they have me do,” Katai tells him, his head poking out of the folds of his futon, wrapped as always around his shoulders as he stirs his drink in nervous tension. “Day in and day out, it’s examine this, where are the cases on that? I have half a mind to retire.”
“You’re not at the right age to be retiring,” Kunikida points out. “At this stage, you wouldn’t incur the right benefits and you’d end up on the street.” His friend hasn’t changed at all in the ten years they’ve known each other, but he’s still one of the people who can read Kunikida best.
“Better on the street than being ordered around by that boy,” Katai whispers, almost to himself. Kunikida isn’t aware of the exact nature of Katai’s new job, only that it’s in some sort of conjunction with the city police, which is exactly what he needs.
“I’m sure you’ll live,” Kunikida replies flatly, aware that cutting Katai off before he launches into one of his tangents is a developed skill. “Do you have what I asked for?”
“Who do you think I am?” Katai asks, affronted. He digs into the folds of the mattress tucked around him and pulls out a sheaf of papers, fresh off the printer. “It didn’t take much effort, I’ll tell you that. Seems as if the police aren’t too keen on investigating further.”
Kunikida frowns as he spreads the pages in front of him. The bomb was deposited on a lone bookshelf around thirty minutes before the explosion hit, but for all intents and purposes, it was a regular school day. There had been no guest passes issued, which means that the perpetrator was either a fellow student or someone impersonating one. The explosive was detonated via a remote signal that had been traced to a nearby alley, but when the police circled the area, they had found no residue.
“There’s one other thing,” Katai says carefully, watching him. “The standard make of the bomb is unique to the Port Mafia.”
And that’s where this ends. The Port Mafia is as feared as they are infamous, the lines of their troops at the forefront of the dark underbelly of Yokohama’s trenches. Any involvement with them will only end in bloodshed, and if the police aren’t going to do anything about it, there’s nothing a student like Kunikida would be able to.
Suddenly, it seems as if he’s standing at the bottom of a large well, gazing up at a pinprick of brightness far above. His ideals had always been as lofty and enticing as the light at the end of the tunnel, but that was when he had a prayer of achieving them. Now, everything has turned on its head, and he’s left adrift, somewhere unmoored and weightless.
Katai, for as senseless as he is ninety percent of the time, still has the force of a decade friendship behind him when he says, “Did you know I work for a detective agency? One where we solve cases the police won’t touch. They’re a little on the darker side, and the pay will never make you rich, but it does a lot of good, it does.”
Kunikida stares at him, already planning in his mind how he’s going to right and rewrite his path. “What’s this place called?”
A few months later, he officially drops out of university and joins the Armed Detective Agency.
—
Isolation, it turns out, is more draining than anyone realizes.
Dazai spends the first half of it in a haze of alcohol-induced slumber, but when even the buzz of that wears off, he’s left painfully aware of his surroundings, of the things that touch him that can’t be touched by him, of his being wrenched into an existence that feels even more suffocating than the air that brushes his skin.
It’s been nearly two years since he left the mafia, and every day that passes is a struggle in remembering. Remembering what he’s doing and who he’s doing this for.
Sometimes, Dazai wonders if Odasaku knew, if he knew that Dazai would be navigating the world on his own, a world he’s forced to keep living in until he can fulfill his promise. If Oda damned him into existing because it was the only way one of them could keep going. He’ll become the good man Odasaku wanted him to be, and nobody will ever know it because the only person who held that right is buried six feet under.
And, hey, maybe Oda was right. It is nice having someone who understands you around.
But only if they actually stay around.
Dazai isn’t going to make that mistake again.
—
Kunikida’s new partner is an utter disaster.
He’s never met anyone so unprofessional, lazy, and borderline narcoleptic. He spends the first few days of Dazai’s employment cursing his fate, all while the man laughs maniacally at him from behind pointed fingers, his smile more like something configured to express emotion rather than anything with weight behind it.
But then, they solve their first case, and with it, Dazai’s better traits are exposed, hidden as they are under a layer of bandages and his mysterious past, the better part of it shrouded in the way he masterfully evades any personal questions thrown at him. It doesn’t take long for Kunikida to realize that Dazai is as irritating as he is brilliant, someone who would rise up the ranks of any corporation and whose talent would probably be better suited elsewhere if only he were willing to put in the effort.
They don’t talk about soulmates at all until they’re sitting in a bar, Kunikida having wheedled the drink Dazai owes him out of the other man, all the while knowing he’s going to end up picking up the tab regardless because Dazai has probably plotted out a hundred escape routes since they entered.
His hands are still painted red with the blood of Sasaki, his mind still stuck in that abandoned hospital where she, in the same breath, praised and condemned his ideals, while Dazai did the same.
“You know, you surprised me, Kunikida-kun,” Dazai says. “Being willing to flirt with a woman like that. You strike me as the type to wait for your soulmate.”
“In any case, I would be, yes,” Kunikida admits, having once again been read to accuracy by his partner, who probably knows the answers to questions before they’re even asked, and only for the fun of proving himself right. “But as it is, I’m not waiting for my soulmate.”
This, if anything, is what causes Dazai to react with genuine surprise. “You mean there isn’t some woman out there whose hands you’re going to brush against in a stationery store as you pick out matching planners?”
Kunikida bristles at this. If he’s ever thought this exact situation would occur at some point, he’s going to keep it to himself. “First of all, my notebooks are handcrafted by a European artist and are made to house my ability, you uncultured cretin. Second, no, I’m not waiting for anyone. If you must know, I missed my soulmate.”
Somehow, Dazai appears even more delighted. “You missed your soulmate? You don’t look as if you’ve missed even a second of sleep in your life—”
“Getting at least seven hours is optimal for productivity—”
“How did you miss a soulmate?” Dazai goes on. “I must say, Kunikida-kun, I take it back. There is depth to you, after all.”
“I’m absolutely flattered to have earned that distinction,” Kunikida deadpans. “And I didn’t miss it so much as it was out of my control.”
“That makes more sense,” Dazai concedes. “And it can’t have been easy for you.”
“It wasn’t, but I don’t regret it,” Kunikida says honestly. “I’d been following a path that would have ultimately led me to a comfortable yet unsatisfying life, and now I’m in a position to pursue my ideals the way that I want to.” It’s a truth he’s uncovered over the years in the agency, and he knows if he could do it all over again, he wouldn’t change a thing. “Besides, now I’m free to determine the parameters for my ideal spouse—”
“Who doesn’t exist.”
“—since I’m no longer constrained by whatever plan the higher powers that determine our soulmates had for me.” He glares at Dazai. “I wish I could say the same for my partner, but we can’t have everything.”
Dazai flutters his eyelashes at him. “Aww, Kunikida-kun, no need to flatter me. I know how much more boring your life would be without me in it.”
“I’ll live,” Kunikida retorts. Though deep down, he doesn’t exactly deny it.
—
Dazai’s new partner is either a complex formula or a simple mystery.
Kunikida does things by the book, every second of his life mapped out in a way Dazai knows was probably done before he’d been aware of the soulmate system. He’s blunt, upright, and unapologetic, except when he’s talking to civilians and witnesses, gracing them with the sort of straightforward charm that would disarm anyone he spends his time rattling away to in the office.
He’s also someone who looks at Dazai like he’s trying to puzzle him out, like when Dazai says something and Kunikida will stare at him for a minute, as if discerning if he really means it. It leaves Dazai unprepared the first time it happens, a good few months after their initial meeting, because he was never aware that people knew there was more than one meaning to his words in the first place.
But what intrigues Dazai the most about Kunikida is his utter lack of interest in finding his soulmate. He doesn’t understand how a man as principled as Kunikida is hasn’t overturned every nook and cranny in Yokohama trying to find them. Instead, he’s rolled over and given up, chalking the experience to something out of his control when it could very much be back in his control.
Dazai has seen the numbers, faded to a dull gray in the rare moments Kunikida lifts his notebook in the air, when he tosses a paper aside as he speaks its contents into existence. The zeroes that mark his wrist, stark against his palm, as quiet as his appraisal of Dazai when he thinks he isn’t watching.
Kunikida intrigues him, and that, in itself, feels like the most damning sort of thing that could have been inflicted upon him.
It’s brought up again one night, in what has become somewhat of a habit between them at the bar nearest to the agency office, one where Dazai’s nonexistent funds and Kunikida’s carefully budgeted salary won’t necessarily tip them over the edge. Even if Dazai drags Kunikida here more than he offers, the times he does initiate the invite always leaves a sour, stinging edge straight in the center of Dazai’s chest.
“I was thinking,” Dazai starts. “About your situation.”
“I wasn’t aware you thought of anything beyond harassing beautiful women and the best way to inconvenience me,” Kunikida responds, peering into his drink like he’s counting the bubbles that have fizzed into his glass and found the number to be accurate. The sinking, clawing feeling in Dazai’s ribcage constricts.
“I can also drink an innumerable amount of sake, but you aren’t ready for that conversation,” Dazai says cheerfully, and then plows on before Kunikida can launch into another lecture about the importance of safe alcohol consumption. “No, but has it ever occurred to you that you’re being somewhat of a hypocrite?”
If there was anything Kunikida expected Dazai to say, it certainly wasn’t that. Dazai prides himself on still being able to pull the rug out from under him, which is to say, most of the time. Except that it’s no longer always, and he wouldn’t even be able to pinpoint when the shift happened, if there was one at all.
“And what makes me a hypocrite?” Kunikida asks, his tone tinged with genuine interest.
“You not seeking out your soulmate is the opposite of everything you stand for,” Dazai declares unswervingly, clinking the rim of his bottle against the table to emphasize his point.
Kunikida blinks at him. “I don’t follow.”
“Oh, come on, you’re seriously going to sit there and tell me that after having missed your literal soulmate, your solution was to... give up? That doesn’t sound like you at all,” Dazai says.
If anything, Kunikida appears amused. “I didn’t just ‘give up’,” he says, the emphasis on Dazai’s choice of words definitely a little mocking, but he’s willing to let it slide. “I did spend some time on it, but I realized I was better suited to other things. I don’t regret the work we do, and it means I get to make this city a safer and more comfortable place for people to live with their soulmates.”
“I had no idea you were so altruistic,” Dazai says airily.
“Anyway, what’s it to you if I missed my soulmate or not? Do you really want me to be with someone that badly?” Kunikida asks, eyebrow quirked.
And Dazai—doesn’t know. He can’t tell what it is about this that bothers him so much, only that sometimes he wonders what Kunikida would be like with someone the universe, or some higher power, deemed would be made for him. If Kunikida’s version of care extends into something more than midday rants and extra meals and clockwork calls that Dazai missed more often than not, just to see if Kunikida would do the same the next day—and he always did. And all the ways in which he lectured Dazai about the importance of keeping fit, like Dazai wasn’t born on this earth just to try and erase himself from it completely.
Some more ungracious part of him hopes that whoever Kunikida’s soulmate would have been, they’d be as unbearably stuck-up as Kunikida is, and Kunikida would eventually tire of them.
He’s intensely grateful for his sporadic bouts of candor when Kunikida carries on, interpreting Dazai’s silence as an unwillingness to respond rather than the inability to.
“Besides, does it matter?” Kunikida continues, adjusting his glasses so that the light reflects off his lenses. “You’re clearly not looking for your soulmate, either.”
“Oh?” Dazai sprawls across the booth, the lazy drawl to his voice tipped into the question to disguise how much he actually wants to know the answer. “And what makes you say that?”
But Kunikida only frowns at him with the mildly annoyed expression he wears around Dazai more and more these days, which mostly means that Dazai hasn’t been completely useless by his standards. “Because you’re Dazai,” he says, tone as serious and hardwired as the rock-solid foundation he’s hewn from. A statement, a fact. “I can’t imagine there’s anything you wouldn’t be able to do, if you really wanted it.”
Dazai suddenly regrets bringing up this topic at all. It’s been there, of course, that sinking, niggling feeling at the back of his head, a tickle in his throat whenever Kunikida actually looks at him, instead of past him, when his humorous remarks and singsong notes bounce off him and he responds with reassurance or repetition or whatever it is Dazai is subconsciously asking for. In this moment, he’s sort of glad for the glasses Kunikida wears, the temporary reprieve they provide from his probing glance. Unused as he is to the sensation, it never sits right with him. Odasaku’s care had been the twin sharp points of an inscrutable gaze that cut open like a knife. Chuuya’s had been a bright blue blaze that had the terrifying certainty of an X-ray. Kunikida’s is something a little milder. Easing open a grimy windowpane and stepping into the sun.
Two years ago, the idea of it would have made him want to peel back his skin and dunk his head underwater so that the crush of the waves would drown out all the screaming in his head. Nowadays, he mostly wants things to stop, and sometimes not in so permanent a way that he won’t be able to come back.
What had Odasaku told him? Having someone around who knows you. Well, the only people who know him are dead, and one good as gone, having disappeared from his radar over the past few years. The track record of those who dared toe the line was reason enough for him to keep pushing back. But Dazai has been pushing back against Kunikida for as long as they’ve known each other, and while the other man has undoubtedly snapped, it’s always with one foot pressed to the ground, immovable and North Star constant. Frozen solid, a sinker of ships.
Dazai doesn’t try too hard to unpack what that means.
“Well,” Dazai manages at last. “I try not to. It never seems to end well for me.”
Kunikida scoffs. “That just means you haven’t tried hard enough.”
“Working hard for something?” Dazai asks.
Kunikida looks at him straight on. “Wanting them.”
And, oh, Dazai would tell him. Would ask Kunikida if he can hear the resounding emptiness in his bones, that high and lonesome sound.
Lately, just lately, that emptiness has started to feel a bit more like longing, but that’s the way life goes, he supposes.
Later, Dazai unwinds the layers around his wrist for the first time in a long while and looks, really looks, at the zeroes branded onto his flesh, their faded color almost identical to the ones that mark Kunikida’s bare skin.
Once again, he wonders: where was Kunikida four years ago?
—
There’s a heart-stopping moment where Kunikida is actually afraid.
“Dazai!” he calls, the sounds of his footsteps echoing along the warehouse floor, long shadows casting out behind him. The light from the moon has vanished, the windows high where they rest in the darkness.
The worry quickly turns to irritation when he sees his wayward partner standing next to an unconscious teenager looking for all the world like he’s taking a midday nap.
“Oh, you’re late, Kunikida-kun,” Dazai singsongs, and Kunikida would punch him if his knee-jerk reaction wasn’t a sigh of relief.
It’s almost uncanny how much Dazai has wormed his way into his life and under his skin, as if it should come as a surprise that the man who expertly manipulates his way into and out of situations should have had the same impact on him. Dazai walks into a room and takes all the space right out of it. He does the same thing inside Kunikida’s head.
He could pretend, of course, that this is something he would do for any member of the agency, and to an extent, it is. But Dazai had somehow crossed the threshold of his ideals long before now, and while those ideals extend to a society in which no one dies in front of him, there’s another smaller notch added onto the blueprint of principles that comprise his life: that to him, Dazai in particular could not die.
Sometimes, he finds himself pondering on who Dazai’s soulmate is. He’s known from the jump that Dazai likely isn’t interested, and he’s certainly never seen the digits where they lie hidden beneath his sleeves. But it’s hard not to contemplate on whether they’re burned bright blue or scorched red, if there’s still someone out there searching futilely for the man and the myth that is Kunikida’s current partner.
He also wonders if there’s a key to extinguishing the thick darkness that often lingers in the other man’s expression. There’s light there, more than the shuttered abyss that had seemed omnipresent in the beginning, and it causes something heavy and unsatisfying to churn in Kunikida’s gut to know that someone else might have the power to excise it completely.
He knows Dazai as much as Dazai allows him to, certainly more than anyone else in the agency, but on a level in which he’ll never reach considering how well attuned Dazai is to him. It doesn’t matter, though, because they understand each other. Despite the fact that Kunikida often daydreams about his hands around Dazai’s neck more often than he imagines them anywhere else. And he still doesn’t know what it is that led Dazai down this path, but he can’t say he minds when it’s worked out so well for them, all things considered.
“I’m going to make him one of us,” Dazai declares with utter seriousness, and Kunikida’s face falls.
“Are you crazy?” he demands.
It’s times like these that make Kunikida consider what his life would be like with a normal partner. Does such a thing even exist in their realm? He thinks back to the week before, when Kenji had turned up and calmly announced that the cow he illegally kept in his dorm room was on the verge of giving birth, leaving Tanizaki to man the phones because Naomi had forbade him from being anywhere near a woman in labor, never mind that the woman in question was a Japanese brown.
Yosano was in her element, eyes alight at the sight of the machinations and intricacies that preceded birth, while Kunikida had been dragged in to help after Kenji produced a calving rope and Ranpo had promptly fainted on the spot. For his own part, Dazai had just watched the entire ordeal, nimbly jumping over the unconscious detective and pointing out with tremendous glee that Kunikida didn’t seem so composed himself, and Kunikida had turned around with a newborn calf in his arms, sleeves pushed up to the elbows and covered in blood, and very clearly thought: If it had been anyone but you, I—
No, he eventually decides, it couldn’t be anyone but Dazai.
—
The café is in full swing, and the agency’s newest member drinks it all in, catlike eyes turned to the group of people assembled in front of him.
The timer on Atsushi’s wrist is down to its last few hours, the progression of numbers on it startlingly similar to ones Dazai has seen on an even paler wrist in the past. If all goes as it’s supposed to, they should be bracing for some kind of attack sooner than expected.
But that would take the fun out of everything, so he relaxes into the seat behind him.
“What did you do before joining the agency, Kunikida-san?” Atsushi asks, talking over Tanizaki and Naomi, both of their wrists flashing bright blue as the older boy scoots away from the ministrations of his younger sister. Dazai imagines it must have come as some kind of disappointment to the girl that they were simply not born with their wrists at zero.
“He was a math teacher at his old school.” Dazai takes great pride in mentioning this because it’s one of the things about Kunikida he finds the most jarring, despite it making the most sense.
Atsushi makes a very unconvincing show of surprise. “R-really?”
Kunikida sighs, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Yes. And before that, I was a student at YNU.”
The smile on Dazai’s face freezes in place. In all the time he’s known Kunikida, he had somehow neglected to mention attending the same university Dazai had—
“I didn’t know that,” Dazai swoops in, talking over Atsushi as he leans forward. “You’re a proper scholar, then, Kunikida-kun.”
“I dropped out,” Kunikida tells him, bored. “An incident occurred, and it was what made me realize my talents were better put to use elsewhere. Which is what we’re all about here, kid. Making sure you use your abilities for…”
But Dazai tunes him out, the roaring in his ears all too familiar and all too much. There’s just no way, absolutely no way. Things like this don’t turn out for him the way he wants them to, as much as he’s avoided even wanting in the first place.
“What about you, Dazai-san?” Atsushi asks.
Kunikida scoffs. “It’s no use, kid. His former job is one of the seven mysteries of the agency.”
Atsushi blinks at him, the very picture of naive interest. “Okay, let me try and guess!”
Dazai makes a snap-second decision. “Actually, I used to be in the Port Mafia.”
Late, too late, he thinks, because he knows Kunikida, and Kunikida is good. And perhaps Dazai just wanted to cut that last bit of wistfulness out, to carve over it like he does everything else, so that Kunikida would stop staring at him the way he is now, like he’s seeing right through to something that shouldn’t exist within Dazai, something that, over the past two years, he’s learned might.
Hope isn’t something he was familiar with before the ADA, but he doesn’t think it’s supposed to taste as acidic as it does, building up in his throat. Because Kunikida isn’t leaving. He isn’t sneering at Dazai the way he does at the criminals they condemn, like they’re nothing to him.
Kunikida works a muscle in his jaw. “I don’t suppose one of the many crimes you probably committed happens to be arson at a public university, does it?”
The seed of hope that had dropped into the pit of Dazai’s stomach takes root and flourishes. Strangles. He’s used to this sensation. He could stand to get used to it a bit more.
Dazai smiles. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you, Kunikida-kun?”