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The foreign clients—an Englishwoman with a cigarette case full of opals and a tall Russian man with a face like a stone carving—barely stay long enough to explain themselves.
They want the Agency to retrieve a box, metal, no larger than a briefcase. It was left in the ruins of a military installation near Suribachigai, a site evacuated in haste toward the end of the war and later buried in red tape and silence.
“They say it’s just for sentimental value,” Fukuzawa says, his voice unreadable. “I don’t believe them. But we’ve taken their job.”
Yosano is polishing a scalpel with an absentminded kind of menace.
“I’ll go,” she says too quickly.
“I’ll accompany her,” says Kunikida, already halfway through scribbling their mission objectives into a new page of his notebook.
Then, from the corner:
“Can I come?” Dazai’s voice is far too cheerful for someone not invited. “It sounds nostalgic.”
Fukuzawa doesn't ask why. He just nods.
The ruins are dead quiet.
The wind carries dust and the low groan of bent metal. They take a train, then a bus, then walk for nearly an hour through rusted fencing and collapsed cement. The landscape is a palette of greys, sun-baked earth and debris, the bones of forgotten ambitions.
Yosano walks ahead like she knows where she’s going, though she’s never been here. The place smells like singed electricity and old blood. Kunikida notes how the shadows fall across the burned-out watchtowers, how the sky stays pale even when the sun reaches its highest point.
Dazai, in contrast, meanders. His coat flaps open, his hands are behind his head. He hums softly—something European, something old.
“Do you have to do that?” Kunikida snaps at him eventually. "This is a professional investigation."
“I’m absorbing the atmosphere,” Dazai replies, twirling on one heel like a child. “This place has layers.”
“Please fall into a hole,” Kunikida mutters.
Yosano laughs, just once. She keeps walking.
They find the vault.
Or what's left of it. Twisted rebar, half a steel door, scorched marks along the edges like something exploded from the inside out. The floor is partially caved in.
“I’ll check the lower levels,” Yosano says, tying her hair back. “Kunikida, stay here and catalog. Dazai—” She pauses. “You’re with me.”
Kunikida eyes her. “Are you sure that’s wise?”
“Of course not,” she replies, smiling like a threat. “But I’m curious.”
Dazai grins. “I’m flattered.”
The descent is treacherous.
Ladders that flake into rust beneath their hands. Rooms caved in. Walls scrawled with numbers and old memos in ink faded to ghosts.
Yosano walks with clinical calm, stepping over debris, careful where her boots land. Dazai follows her more like a shadow than a partner, his usual chatter gone quiet in the dark.
“You’ve been in places like this before,” she says without turning around.
“So have you,” he answers.
They find a corridor warped by heat. Burn marks climb the walls like veins. In one of the side rooms, long-abandoned beds are still lined against the wall, sheets stiff with age. Yosano stares.
“There were people here,” she says, softly.
“They weren’t supposed to be.”
Dazai’s voice is low now, too.
He steps beside her, not quite close, but closer than before. His hand brushes one of the bedframes. It creaks.
“They burned the base down to bury what they did,” he says. “The people. The tests. The silence afterward.” He shrugs, like it’s just history. “It worked.”
Yosano studies him carefully. Not with pity. Not with sympathy. Just with interest.
“Do you remember it?” she asks.
He meets her eyes. His smile is razor-thin.
“Not enough,” he says.
They recover the box.
It’s lodged in a collapsed office near the sublevel morgue. Half of the building has folded in on itself like a broken lung. Kunikida swears when they return, covered in ash and mystery. He insists on sealing it in a double lock case for the train ride home.
Yosano lets him handle the logistics. Her thoughts are elsewhere.
Dazai stretches out on one of the wooden benches near the old checkpoint, hair catching the afternoon light. His hands are folded behind his head again. He looks twenty and tired.
“You know,” Yosano says to Kunikida, “I think he’s trying to disappear into a narrative of his own design.”
Kunikida raises an eyebrow. “You’re analysing him?”
Yosano offers a shrug and a smirk. “He’s a walking case study. Morbid curiosity.”
“He’s a pain in my ass,” Kunikida mutters, slamming his notebook shut.
That night, they stop at an inn.
It’s a quiet town near the coast, all salt air and moss-covered shingles. The Agency has a longstanding agreement with the owners, which means rooms are cheap and the whiskey is good.
Yosano drinks slowly, perched on the wooden steps of the veranda, watching the sea glint through darkness. Dazai appears beside her like a ghost conjured by thought.
“Can’t sleep?”
“Don’t want to.”
He hands her a cup. She drinks. The alcohol is smooth and warm, burning enough to feel real.
“You’re not what I expected,” she says after a while.
“Disappointed?”
“No. Just... surprised. You’re clearly dangerous. But it’s like you’re daring someone to confirm it.”
Dazai smiles at her sideways. “And you’re not just a doctor. You’re a resurrectionist.”
Yosano stares into her glass. “Not by choice.”
“Neither am I.”
The silence stretches.
Then Dazai says, “Do you think people like us can actually change anything?”
Yosano finishes her drink. “Not the world. But maybe each other.”
Dazai goes very quiet. The wind smells like iodine and damp wood. A dog barks in the distance.
“Do you like it?” he asks. “The Agency?”
“I believe in it.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Yosano turns to him. Her voice is gentle, but firm.
“I like not having to kill people unless they really deserve it.”
He snorts. “Reasonable.”
A pause. Then—
“Would you kill me, Yosano-sensei?”
She considers it. Thoughtfully. Like he asked her what flavour of tea she prefers.
“Only if you asked nicely.”
He throws his head back and laughs—loud, too loud, full of something unhinged and bright. The sound startles a few birds from the trees.
They sit there a long time after that. Yosano doesn't ask him about the war, or the fire, or what happened to his wrists under those bandages. Dazai doesn’t ask her what it’s like to bring people back from the brink, only to have them hate her for it.
They don’t need to. There’s an understanding. Fractured, reluctant. But real.
In the morning, Kunikida finds them both asleep on the porch.
Dazai’s coat is draped over Yosano’s shoulders. Yosano’s scarf is wrapped around Dazai’s neck.
Kunikida sighs, pinches the bridge of his nose, and mutters something about “goddamn emotional children.”
But he leaves them alone for five more minutes.