Work Text:
"My trousers don't fit me anymore."
That was the last sentence Kunikida expected from Dazai, standing in his doorway at nearly 11pm.
"...What?" he asked in confusion, trying to search Dazai's expression for any hint of humour, waiting for the usual loud and obnoxious joke before Dazai would walk away again.
He didn't know why he still got up when Dazai knocked on his door at ridiculous times at night.
Something about the usual pale face and shaky hands as he chattered about something entirely nonsensical.
Something else about the way his eyes would shine if the light caught them right, and he'd have to stop talking to take a sharp inhale, like he didn't know how to breathe.
"They don't fit. Around my waist. My hips, really," Dazai said again, and he pushed past Kunikida, welcoming himself inside.
"Yeah, sure, come on in," Kunikida muttered with half hearted annoyance, closing the door anyway and following Dazai, brushing past him and gently taking him by his upper arm to pull him into the kitchen.
"Did you know that some jellyfish are immortal? They can regenerate their cells back to the state they were when they were younger and virtually cheat death to live forever," Dazai said, standing awkwardly in the doorway as Kunikida abandoned him. "You should write that down."
"Is it true?" Kunikida asked sceptically, shooting him a look.
Dazai shrugged.
"I read it online."
"In that case it must be true then," Kunikida said sarcastically. He frowned, looking at Dazai, who was wringing his hands and humming as he looked around.
"...Are you hungry?" Dazai immediately shook his head, adamantly.
Kunikida blinked in surprise, but sighed. "Thirsty, then?" he asked.
Dazai considered that, and shrugged.
"Maybe. What can I have?"
Kunikida got out two mugs, one with cats on it and the other with squirrels.
"I have hot chocolate. You drink that a lot." He didn't wait for Dazai's answer before beginning to prepare the drinks, filling the kettle and getting out milk and sugar and the tin of hot chocolate powder.
Dazai's slightly troubled expression was completely missed, and he moved to hover over Kunikida's shoulder, watching him measure out the powder and sugar and--
"I don't want any sugar."
Kunikida immediately looked at Dazai like he'd grown a third head.
"You don't want any sugar?" he asked incredulously. Dazai simply nodded.
Kunikida hesitated, pausing for a moment before putting the sugar bowl down.
"Why?" he asked suspiciously, regarding Dazai with an expression that was somewhat perplexed. "Everything you drink is ridiculously sweet. Why the sudden change?"
Dazai shrugged, and he smiled a little.
"Sugar is bad for your heart, right? And then your body stores it as fat, and not only will you die in an untimely manner due to heart disease, you'll look ugly while doing it," he said, tone confident and assured. He tilted his head. "I knew someone once who ate so much sugar that her heart exploded."
Kunikida frowned deeply.
"I highly doubt that is true," he said, levelling Dazai with a stern expression. "And sugar isn't only bad for you. In excess, yes, but you don't eat that much sugar, I'm sure. If you have balanced meals around your sugar intake, and remain active -- which you do, as a detective -- then you'll be fine. You're not going to die from eating sugar. Not at your age."
Dazai simply pouted at him.
Kunikida shook his head.
"Go sit, trust me to make you something to drink without slowly poisoning you," he said with annoyance.
Dazai lingered for a moment, hesitating, looking at the cups with a strange expression for a moment before huffing dramatically and turning away, wandering off to no doubt make himself comfortable on Kunikida's couch.
Kunikida put some sugar in Dazai's hot chocolate anyway, feeling a little bad for ignoring his request. But there was something about Dazai's demeanour recently, and not his sudden declarations this evening that was throwing him of and making him think that maybe Dazai did need a little bit of a nudge to keep the sugar in his drinks.
After he had finished making the cups of hot chocolate he brought them into the living room, setting them down on the table and pushing Dazai's legs off the couch so that he could sit down too.
Dazai didn't say anything, staring at the ceiling quietly and frowning, and Kunikida didn't make him, even as he glanced at the clock, skin prickling with the knowledge he was supposed to be sleeping just now, and that now his schedule for the next day would likely be sub-optimal as he couldn't work at his full efficiency levels while tired.
But Dazai was rhythmically tapping his fingers on his arm, over and over, pausing whenever he would lose the rhythm to pull at his bandages and shift them like they were sticking to his arms.
Kunikida took a steadying breath.
"Do you need Dr. Yosano?" he asked, as Dazai scratched through the bandages again. "Or clean bandages, or just antiseptic?"
Dazai shook his head, sighing emphatically before responding in a light and airy tone.
"No. It's just scratchy. Healing."
Kunikida tried not to frown and point out that perhaps having the bandages on wouldn't be helping, that exposing the healing wounds to the slightly cool air might help with the itching, but he knew that Dazai likely wouldn't appreciate the advice, and Kunikida had other things he was slightly more worried about right now.
"I see... What was it you had said when I answered the door?" he asked, trying not to sound too concerned. That would send Dazai running. "You said your trousers don't fit?"
Dazai sighed again and nodding.
"Such a shame. Terror upon this mortal plane. How will I ever recover?" He frowned at the ceiling. "How dare this occur. We ought to be burning the streets in response to this tyranny."
Kunikida blinked, raising an eyebrow in response to Dazai's melodramatic spiel.
"I suggest, for your 'recovery', simply buying new trousers? Or wearing ones that fit?"
Dazai shook his head.
"Ah, you simply don't understand. I fear you never will. As such, I must take matters into my own hands." He sat up, reaching for his mug — the one with the black cats, obviously — and blowing the steam from the top. "I must begin planning at once," he declared.
"Planning for what?" Kunikida asked with irritation, watching Dazai tentatively sip on his cup.
Immediately Dazai wrinkled his nose, but tried to mask it, too used to having his drinks overwhelmingly sweet, finding the bitterness of the chocolate unappealing but refusing to let it show on his face.
He put the cup back down quickly.
"Well, you see, I need to get my trousers to fit again," Dazai began, ignoring Kunikida's muttered 'just buy new ones'. "This will require rigorous planning and extensive training."
Dazai grinned, sitting up.
"You see, I could go to the gym, but that's too much effort and I'm far too lazy for that. Plus, that makes you weigh more even if you do lose fat, because muscle weighs more than fat," he said importantly. "Even then, I suppose at long as I..." He trailed off, thinking for a moment as his expression dropped.
Kunikida watched the moment of vulnerability, but it was gone as quickly as it had come, and Dazai shook his head to dissipate the thought.
"Sugar. I have far too much of that. Along with bread, I think. I like pastry too much." A kind of gleam was in his eyes, one like excitement or anticipation. "Less adding things to drinks too, less milk or cream or sweeteners."
Kunikida furrowed his eyebrows, listening to Dazai's list before interrupting him.
"Hold on. Dazai, listen to yourself," he said, tone serious and firm. "You're talking about cutting out half of your diet because you've outgrown one pair of trousers? That's insane. You need sugar, you need carbohydrates, you need dairy and protein, you can't just cut something out completely like that. There's nothing wrong with liking pastries."
"Until I go up clothing sizes, Kunikida," Dazai insisted like it was obvious. "Then, I have a problem. I just eat too much."
Kunikida was baffled. He hated that he could have seen this from miles away, but to hear Dazai talking about it so clearly, like he had thought it out for hours and believed Kunikida would agree with him was far from what he expected.
"Dazai, you don't eat enough!" he immediately interjected. "It's taken me years to ensure you're consistently eating three meals, and even then you don't finish things and you don't eat much for breakfast, and really you should be having all those meals and more snacks through the day given how active our jobs can be."
The moment Kunikida began speaking, he could see the glimmer of satisfaction in Dazai's eyes as he had gotten what he wanted, the confirmation that he was ill and didn't eat enough already and that restricting more would make it worse.
Kunikida had to take a sharp breath.
"Dazai, doing all of this over one pair of trousers is insane. I don't know what else to tell you, but you should know by now I won't just stand back and let you starve yourself or purge your meals or whatever else you can think of to do and try and avoid gaining weight or putting on muscle or fat in places you don't want."
"But do you really think that you could stop me if I started?" Dazai asked, raising an eyebrow and sitting back. "I don't think you could. I'm very good at this kind of thing."
Kunikida sighed.
"That isn't something to brag about," he said, having to pause and think.
"I probably couldn't stop you. But you know I'd try. I'm not going to sit by and let it happen."
"Yeah, that wouldn't stand with your ideals, would it?" Dazai asked, tilting his head to the side slightly as if that would mask the slight hint of bitter accusation behind his airy tone.
Kunikida almost physically recoiled, like he'd been hit by Dazai's words with the force of an actual blow.
"No," he immediately retorted. "There's actually nothing in my ideals about what to do if you decide to start starving yourself, I don't plan for you."
He stopped the moment he said it, realising how that would come across.
"I mean..."
Dazai just watched him with a blank and expectant expression.
"My ideals are selfish."
It was something he knew, deep down, that they existed to serve him, because he wanted to have his moral code written out, he would act on it as he saw fit, his 'ideal' often clashing with the world around him and inconveniencing people frequently.
No matter how he reframed them to be selfless, no matter how many times he risked his life to follow his ideals, they were ultimately selfish and infuriating for many reasons.
And ideally he'd help anyone who needed it... but there were then people like Dazai.
Beyond help. The kind of person where instead of pulling them from a river, they'd pull you in. And Kunikida knew there were things he couldn't help with, people he couldn't save, no matter how much he'd deny deny deny if confronted with the reality of it before his face.
Frustratingly, he'd avoided trying to develop his ideals past the 'help anyone where you can' so he could take advantage of the 'where you can' over and over again to turn a blind eye to the people he didn't have the capacity to help, in his own self-interest.
And perhaps that was something he had fallen victim to more often when he was a child, or a teacher, when there were more people he couldn't help, where he had to watch the injustices of the world without having a means to help over and over to the point he had become somewhat numb to the kids he couldn't help.
Defending his classmates against unfair circumstances and rules had only ever gotten him in trouble, reporting the signs of suspected abuse or neglect while teaching had often resulted in kids returning to class even quieter and more subdued than they had been before.
Even Rozuko, his constant concern for the kid, was fed by selfishness, his own guilt over his father and his own desire to prove that he could do good. If he removed his guilt, if he made peace with the death of Rozuko's father, would he do half of the things that he did for that kid? He wonders and considers the possibilities but the guilt comes back to haunt him at every corner of his self investigation and coaxes him back to his natural position of displaying a front of selflessness that covered his self interest.
And maybe that guilt pushed him back into that place of apathy and careful lack of observation he had grown accustomed to at various points in his life when he learned how powerless he truly was to have an affect on the lives around him. Perhaps, the guilt of being prepared to shoot Dazai dead in seconds weighed on him more than he would ever admit.
Perhaps that guilt was the reason he never interfered with Dazai's self destructive and suicidal tendencies — and that lack of interference would now be why Dazai was telling him this in the first place. Maybe Dazai had been waiting for him to do something about it, or say something or just acknowledge that there was something wrong, which Kunikida had so painstakingly avoided to prevent the backlash harming him as well.
He wondered if Dazai was worried about hurting him with his own self hatred as well.
Whatever Dazai's thoughts were, it was clear to Kunikida at least that his ideals were selfish and they had no room for saving someone like Dazai, who he had at some point in time that he couldn't remember began to think of as another failing, another person that he couldn't save, despite how the other man was sitting on the other side of the couch, waiting calmly for a response to his self destructive spiel.
But even with the knowledge that Dazai was beyond his ability to save, despite he knew that Dazai was the drowning man who would pull his saviour down with him, and the tricky loopholes he found to avoid it, Kunikida had been pulled into the river with Dazai. Quite a few times. Literally.
Because despite everything, he pulled Dazai out of his drowning attempts and wrapped his arms up in silence in the dead of night.
His ideals are planned for himself, but he still fits time into his schedule every single day to check in on Dazai. To make sure he'd had something to eat, to check up on him if he hadn't come in to work, to boss him about and ensure he was taking care of himself.
And Dazai just wanted to know he cared.
As if the various things that Kunikida had done over the years wasn't enough proof of that, the frustrated teaching of almost everything that Kunikida had taken knowing how to do for granted.
For all that he had said to Atsushi about being cautious when taking Kyouka in, he had certainly thrown most of that to the wind when Dazai joined the Agency.
Kunikida couldn't figure out how to build the sentence he wanted to say, how to pronounce his overwhelming concern and sympathy, two things he knew Dazai hated, in a way that wouldn't send Dazai running.
"I do have time in my schedule for you. Despite not having it in my ideals to specifically look out for you like that. I plan my schedule in advance knowing that you'll try and throw me off." He paused, furrowing his eyebrows.
It took him a few moments, but he managed to find a way to verbalise his thoughts.
"I don't do those things because it's stated in my ideals. I don't check up on you just because I want to have some 'saviour' role. I wouldn't try and help you if you started to indulge in unhealthier eating habits because of my ideals. I'd do it because you're my friend."
He cleared his throat, and nudged his glasses slightly further up his nose.
"Without my ideals, I'd still do my best to stop you from doing something so idiotic."
Dazai blinked, dropping his mask of expectant indifference for it to be replaced with a mix of surprise and vulnerability.
He fumbled for a moment, expression twisting various ways as he tried to find a response.
Dazai didn't cope well when confronted when other people's emotions, at least when they were about him. Gratitude and concern were things he seemed unfamiliar with, often mistrustful of, like he was bordering on scared of it.
He likely didn't cope well when confronted with his own emotions either. Which, judging by his sudden rapid blinking, he might have just been hit by.
"...Somebody is awfully sentimental this evening," Dazai eventually said, fighting through the strain in his voice to laugh. "Something happen to tug at your heartstrings, hm?"
"Yeah," Kunikida said, frowning. "My friend woke me up to explain how he was going to start starving himself. It made me think a little."
Dazai paused, and he looked away again.
"Listen..." He hesitated. "I don't... I'll be fine in the morning, I won't be thinking about it then, I'm sure. You don't need to get all emotional about. I was expecting you to tell me I was being stupid and send me away."
"I might have," Kunikida admitted. "But then in the morning when you are still thinking about it? What then? Because I don't think you wouldn't follow through with it then."
Dazai shrugged. He smiled, and tilted his head.
"Would it be such a bad thing? You haven't seen me naked, you don't understand how much I would benefit from a little diet."
Kunikida's face immediately flushed a red colour, and he shook his head.
"I highly doubt that's true. I'm quite sure that there would be other intentions much more prevalent than determining whether you require a diet or not if that situation arose," he defended quickly.
Dazai grinned as Kunikida grew visibly flustered, but Kunikida sat up, instead swapping their cups on the table over, so that his — the sweeter one for once — was in front of Dazai.
Dazai looked at him, his expression turning to something more questioning.
"You were rather obvious about how much you didn't like it without as much sugar as you'd normally have. Just accept you like it sweet and have mine instead," Kunikida said, sitting back on the couch again.
Dazai let his face fall slightly, looking uncertain for a moment. Then, with a sigh, he picked the mug up.
Kunikida watched carefully as Dazai began drinking, satisfied as he settled again, relaxing slightly.
"... Isn't it past your bedtime?" Dazai asked, his usual teasing tone coming back into his voice. "You're going to be cranky tomorrow."
Kunikida felt the smallest of smiles pull at his face, before he scoffed.
"And who's fault will that be?" he responded, voice laced with irritation. "You're the asshole that woke me up."
"You let me in anyway," Dazai pointed out.
"You shoved your way in," Kunikida corrected. "There was no permission granted at any point in your invasion of my home."
"I figured I got permission when you started making me a drink." Dazai shrugged. "Not my fault you're sending me mixed signals. No wonder you're still single."
Kunikida bristled.
"You worthless cat! You know nothing about my dating life!"
"Ah, because Kunikida is cruel enough to not include me in it..."
Kunikida spluttered with indignation, sitting upright. "And why do you think that is? Nowhere in my ideals do I have space for a—"
"A man? See, Kunikida! I've found a loophole. You don't have an ideal man. You'll clearly never find a woman who fits those ideals, so I don't mind if you settle for m—"
Kunikida hit Dazai around the back of his head, light enough that it wouldn't hurt, and Dazai laughed as he ducked away.
"You're insufferable!" Kunikida yelled, cheeks a frustrating shade of red.
"Yeah, but you love me anyway," Dazai said with a pout, looking up at Kunikida with dark eyes that sparkled in the dim light, and slightly flushed cheeks himself.
Kunikida just scoffed, and stood up, shaking his head.
"Just finish your drink and decide if you're staying or not. It's late."
Dazai hummed, and Kunikida paused in the doorway to look back at Dazai as he seemed to contemplate his options.
Something in his chest ached, and he took a deep breath, turning away again.
Dazai seemed to be an exception to his ideals in many ways.