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“Ane-san,” Chuuya says, and Kouyou braces for impact. A year ago, Chuuya returned from Meursault and Double Black made an unexpected reunion to fight Dostoevsky. Six months ago, they decided to make their partnership a little more permanent. Which, of course, she’s happy for Chuuya. Of course she is. But—
“Can you tell Dazai mauled my neck last night?”
—but he’s gotten a little too comfortable regaling their sex life to her.
“I do believe I taught you the wonders of concealer all those years ago, lad,” she says, closing her eyes.
“The dumbass threw a fit last time I covered them…” Chuuya says fondly. It’s disgusting. She’s disgusted. She lives a godless existence. “I’m pretty sure he drew blood.”
Kouyou wishes she couldn’t see the faint blush spreading across his cheeks when she opens her eyes. She knows he likes it when Dazai’s possessive streak makes itself known. She hates that she knows this, but it’s better than him asking Verlaine these sorts of questions. Mostly because neither she nor Mori have the time to talk him down from committing gruesome murder, but she digresses. (And of course—it’s only really a problem if he murders Dazai because it would upset Chuuya, which is an entire other can of worms she doesn’t want to touch. Chuuya has made it clear that he will be the one to kill Dazai. She has no intention of touching that with a ten foot pole. No, thank you.)
“Yes,” she tells him. “It’s apparent what you and that man got up to last night.”
“Oh,” he says, actually sounding a little dejected. “I thought I put enough concealer on this morning.”
Kouyou sits there, silent. Waiting. Chuuya squirms just a bit, just enough that she’s watching him put the pieces together. She’s got eyes. She isn’t some blushing maiden.
“Just ask,” he sighs.
“What did you get up to this morning, lad?”
Chuuya’s face scrunches up a little bit. It would be cute, if she didn’t know what was coming next.
“It’s his birthday. It was just one round!”
“Ah, yes,” Kouyou says, exhaling. In the grand scheme of things, his little admission could have been so, so much worse. So much more explicit. “Perhaps you should apply concealer after your morning round.”
Chuuya frowns and says, “I told him not to leave marks—”
“And you believed him?” she asks flatly.
“When did he have the time?” Chuuya demands. “I had him face down—”
“No.” Kouyou has to take a stand somewhere. A line has got to be drawn. “No, I don’t need to know.”
Chuuya frowns. He keeps frowning. Distantly, Kouyou thinks that he’s going to get early wrinkles like this. If anything, he should break up with that man solely for the sake of his skincare regimen. It had been a peaceful four years.
Finally, Chuuya mutters, “Hm. Sneaky bastard,” before extracting a tiny pot of concealer out of who knows where to touch up the battle zone of his neck.
It’s only nine in the morning. Kouyou waves him out of her office and brews a cup of tea.
Dazai swans into the Armed Detective Agency and Kunikida’s bullshit senses immediately start tingling. It’s become second nature at this point: there is very little reason for Dazai to enter the building before ten thirty in the morning unless the city is on fire or he’s planning on causing problems on purpose.
The city is perfectly fine, so it’s clearly going to be the latter, especially since it’s the man’s birthday. If anything, Kunikida mentally wrote him off of the schedule.
“What,” he says, deadpan, “do you think you’re doing, Dazai?”
“Why, Kunikida-kun,” Dazai sing-songs, and Kunikida feels his blood pressure spike. “I am simply here doing my job.”
Which is all well and good—a statement that would usually have Kunikida jumping for joy and checking to see if pigs are flying—but there is something inherently suspicious about Dazai’s general… glow. Yes. Glow.
“Is that so?” he asks.
“I thought you’d be more excited that I am ready to commit myself to a day of hard work.”
“Are you on drugs?”
“Kunikida-kun!” Dazai says, clutching at his heart in mock offense. This is when Kunikida sees It.
It being Dazai’s normally carefully wrapped bandages haphazard around his neck. It being the fact the wrappings are approximately two centimeters lower than normal, and there is a large purple bruise on the pale column of his throat.
Kunikida is not stupid. He is not unaware that Dazai has… an entanglement, shall he say, with the Port Mafia’s gravity manipulator. He has a support group consisting of himself, Atsushi, Kouyou, and Akutagawa that meets biweekly to discuss the new and fascinating ways in which they have been unintentionally terrorized. They have considered inviting both Fukuzawa and Mori. On multiple occasions.
(This is, of course, separate from his support group with Higuchi which meets weekly to debrief on the general hazards of working with insane people, and he has informed her on multiple occasions she is free to join this other, more specific, support group. Every time she looks like she’s about to pass away.)
“I see,” he says, defeated.
Dazai cocks his head to the side. He still looks sparkly. Sometimes, Kunikida hates his brain because he is putting two and two together very, very quickly. Post-coital glow, Yosano had once told him. There are no gods, or if there are gods, they do not love Kunikida.
“Oh?” Dazai intones. “Does Kunikida-kun know my fun-sized mafioso promised he’d hand feed me crab and rail me into the mattress if I didn’t show up late today?”
“Please remember,” Kunikida pleads, “that there are children who work here.”
It’s a good thing he remembered to buy more ibuprofen. He can feel the headache coming.
Akutagawa likes Chuuya.
He likes him quite a bit. He’s a wonderful superior and an even better… friend, he supposes, but that word feels strange on his tongue and in his brain so he avoids using it at all costs, even if that’s what they are. Friends.
Eugh.
Curse the weretiger for planting such seeds in his mind. He’s not the type of person to have friends.
That isn’t the point, though. No. No, the point is that Chuuya stops him when he’s about to head out to the Armed Detective Agency to collect their child laborer with superstrength for their appointment at the farm. Today, they will be planting rice. And playing with ducks. Because this is his life now.
He kills people, and extorts them for money, and farms with children and the elderly. And small animals.
God strike him down now.
“Oi, Akutagawa,” Chuuya says, holding a wrapped bento. It is painfully adorable with hydrangea designs. Perfect for the season. “You’re heading over to the Agency, right? Can you drop this off for me?”
Obediently, Akutagawa takes the bento. He knows he’s supposed to do something with his face, but he can’t bring himself to do it.
“Thanks, man,” Chuuya continues. “That idiot heap of bandages forgot his lunch again today. If he thought I wouldn’t notice because he managed to get another round out of me before we left for work, he’s a fucking idiot.”
Akutagawa is not particularly familiar with computers, since he is far more interested in things like slashing, slicing, and stabbing, but he has recently become familiar with the term “blue screen of death.” An error has occurred. This error being the physical manifestation of Dazai and Chuuya’s… care for one another. Affection. Proof of a relationship mired in things other than incredible violence. The violence is still there, of course, but there’s also softer things to contend with, too. Which, at the risk of being rude to his superiors and mentors, he cannot fully comprehend. Akutagawa dot exe has stopped working, so to speak, if he understands Tachihara correctly.
He liked it a lot better when he was more concerned with whether or not Dazai and Chuuya were having hate sex in Port Mafia closets that he might accidentally stumble into than whatever this is. Atsushi might call this “personal growth,” which makes Akutagawa feel something that is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but he also doesn’t particularly like the sensation of feeling.
“I see,” he manages to choke out eventually. Too much time has definitely passed. He tried very hard to sound normal, but he’s also almost entirely sure that Chuuya smells blood in the water (the blood, in this case, being his overall awkwardness). “I will deliver this to Dazai-san at the Agency.”
“Thanks again, man,” Chuuya says, patting him on the shoulder before hustling off to wherever he needs to be.
Akutagawa thinks, not for the first time, that life would have been far, far easier had he learned to just stay dead.
These days, more often than not, Atsushi has the spare cash to buy himself lunch at the café downstairs. It’s nice that he can do this one simple thing for himself and not have to worry about the financial repercussions afterwards.
Except now, Atsushi has discovered a new lunchtime activity to agonize over. Namely, Dazai’s near-daily homemade bentos.
If Atsushi had someone cutting his vegetables into cute little shapes and his sausages into octopuses, he would cherish each meal. Dazai, on the other hand, pushes them around and sort of glowers down at them before deciding that yes, he can eat them. They are, in fact, worthy of his stomach.
Then again, Atsushi has seen Dazai subsist on nothing but coffee, sake, canned crab, and pure vibes before, so the fact that he’s willingly putting any sort of vegetable into his body is a miracle. It’s a bit harrowing, honestly, especially when Kyouka does things like tell him about the horrors of scurvy. The last thing he needs is literal old scars reopening, thank you, and please stop unlocking new fears, Kyouka.
“Wow, Dazai-san,” he says while they’re eating lunch at their desks. “Those bentos are really beautiful.”
“My pet dog makes them with love,” Dazai replies, doing something complicated with his face. If they were downstairs at Uzumaki, Lucy would’ve smacked Atsushi upside the head for asking questions about Dazai’s love life without any tact.
“Uh,” Atsushi tries. “Right. Your, uh. Your dog.”
“Yes,” Dazai sniffs. “The little mutt who yaps in my ear all night and won’t stop slobbering on me.”
Frantically, Atsushi tries to search for Kunikida before remembering he’s out on an assignment in the city. The only person left in the office is Yosano, who sequesters herself to the infirmary anyway. Atsushi can’t blame her. Sometimes, Atsushi wishes he was her, because she is never subjected to whatever this is (this is a lie; there is no one in the Armed Detective Agency who likes to egg Dazai on more than Yosano Akiko, but she also cares about Kunikida’s blood pressure).
“That’s… nice,” he says. Once, Atsushi made the mistake of assuming Dazai was talking about an actual dog. He soon became privy to far, far too much information. Then, later, he called Dazai's bluff and asked him why he was referring to Chuuya as a dog, and felt his brain slide out of his ear and slam against the floor. Now, he knows to smile and nod. He has his biweekly support group to debrief with later.
Dazai pokes around at his rice balls (today, they are shaped like bears. If Kyouka were here, Atsushi knows Dazai would have pawned them off to her by now). He sighs, and because Atsushi is a good person who cares about his friends, he asks, “Is something wrong, Dazai-san?”
“YES,” Dazai wails. “My dog cut my carrots into stars! STARS! Atsushi-kun, it’s my birthday! Where are the hearts?!”
Atsushi wills himself to find inner peace. It exists within him. He knows it does. He knows it does.
“You know, Dazai-san,” he placates, “I think it's really lovely that… that someone makes you lunch every day. It must take a lot of work.”
Dazai is, unfortunately, still pouting. On some level, Atsushi thinks this has to be a performance for performance’s sake. For a man who likes to push his vegetables off onto Atsushi and Kunikida when they have dinner together, he seems to care an awful lot about Chuuya’s choice of shape for the day.
“Well,” Atsushi tries, “you shouldn’t waste food, Dazai-san.”
“This is the one day of the year my dog should show me unconditional love!” Dazai says, and Atsushi knows that yes, this is just dramatics, just Dazai saying things for the sake of saying them. More than anything, this is probably a birthday treat to himself, seeing how many outrageous things he can say before someone has a nervous breakdown. But then: “And I have to wait another”—here, he twists his entire body to stare up at the clock on the wall—“seven hours for him to hand feed me crab. And he’s making me work on my birthday, because apparently wanting to roll around in bed all day is an inappropriate use of PTO.”
“Well, I can’t say he’s wrong there,” Atsushi says.
“And he only let us go one round this mor—”
“Okay, okay, no, nope, noooo,” Atsushi interrupts, leaping up and almost sending his sandwich toppling onto his keyboard. The intricacies of Dazai and Chuuya’s home life are unbearably intimate, but Atsushi has heard them through the thin walls of their dorm, and he still gets flashbacks to having to lie through his teeth to Kyouka about what all that thumping was so she didn’t bust into his room with a knife. “Happy birthday again, Dazai-san, but I think. I think I hear Yosano-san calling me. Yes. Uh. I’m due for my annual physical. I forgot. Enjoy your meal, Dazai-san, I’ve gotta—go.”
Atsushi is hightailing it out of the Agency, but he hears Dazai shout, “That’s not the way to Yosano-sensei’s office!” while laughing behind him.
“It seems Chuuya-kun has requested the day off tomorrow,” Mori says over the phone.
“Mori-dono,” Fukuzawa groans. “This cannot be why you decided to call me.”
“It seems peculiar that he wouldn’t request today off, seeing as it is Dazai-kun’s birthday,” he continues. “And Dazai-kun sent a rather threatening voicemail this morning about Chuuya-kun’s overtime habits.”
Why do you feel this is necessary, Fukuzawa wants to ask.
“I suppose so,” he says instead.
“I just wanted to know if Dazai-kun also requested tomorrow off.”
“…even if he did, I’m unclear as to why you think I would speculate with you as to what my employees get up to in their free time.”
“Oh, I’m sure we aren’t the only ones speculating.”
“And yet, you are the one calling me.”
“Oh, Fukuzawa-dono. Surely you want to relive our glory days? Surely you see as much of us in them as I do.”
“Thank you, Mori-dono,” Fukuzawa says. “This conversation is over.”
“Are you happy now?” Chuuya asks from the kitchen. Dazai has been banned from entering the kitchen when Chuuya is cooking since the early days of their partnership, more because of Dazai’s penchant for being a menace to society than anything else.
“Hmmm,” he hums. “Not yet, I don’t think.”
Chuuya rolls his eyes. He honestly wasn’t expecting anything different because he has not yet fulfilled his promises of hand-fed crabs or a continuation of the morning’s adventures. Still, by the time Chuuya got home from work, Dazai seemed content, or at least as content as he allowed himself to be. Small victories, perhaps, because for as long as Chuuya has known him, Dazai has never been particularly fond of this day.
“Did you have fun mauling my neck this morning?” he asks instead, and Dazai visibly brightens.
“Oh, so your hat hasn’t eaten all of your brains, eh, Chuuya?”
“How the hell did you even manage to do that, you bastard?”
“Ooooh, you silly little man, why would I ever give away my secrets?”
“I don’t think Ane-san was too thrilled about it.”
“Not my problem, Chuuya!”
Reasonably, Chuuya knows most of his complaints are pointless. Dazai is rather transparent about how much it thrills him to terrorize their coworkers with details of their newfound domesticity, and he trusts that Chuuya won’t call him out on it. Mostly because Chuuya also enjoys it. Less so for watching his friends and colleagues squirm a bit (except for Hirotsu, who does not even bat an eyelash anymore) and more so because he likes when Dazai wants things.
(Even if those things might fall under being an emotional terrorist. Better the Agency than him.)
Dazai watches as Chuuya pokes at the crab as it boils. He knows the mafioso is thinking about making soup stock; the summer is humid and sticky but he’s not one to waste food, especially not after having grown up with the Sheep. It has led to some rather creative meals, many of which Dazai would prefer never to eat again, but then, he’s not the one who’s skipped meals out of necessity. For a moment, Dazai worries that he won’t actually be able to eat the sheer amount of food that Chuuya is preparing. And despite his jabs and insistence that Dazai go into work today, he still wants to spoil his partner, and will risk the possibility of food uneaten. They both know, of course, the effort will be made.
The sun’s lonely descent colors Chuuya’s apartment, pinks and yellows and oranges painted through the windows. There is sake chilling in the refrigerator. Dazai is freshly showered, free of his customary bandages, in soft pajamas.
From his seat at the counter he thinks: it took quite an awful lot of violence to get to this place. I don’t know who I would be without it. I don’t think I want to. Who else would I ever trust my heart with? Who else could ever know me down to my very bones?
(To be loved is to be known, as wretched as it may be.)
He closes his eyes and waits.