Work Text:
Kunikida Doppo had days where the mind wandered.
This was one of those.
His life was not supposed to allow for such things. Discipline was the axis upon which everything in his existence turned. Discipline in time, discipline in words, discipline in the rigid lines of his notebook, each entry a stone carefully laid in the path toward the world he intended to build. A world of order, justice, and perfection.
And yet there were days—rare, unwanted, but persistent—when his thoughts betrayed him. They strayed from the page, drifted beyond the walls of the Agency, beyond the city itself. They became ungovernable, like smoke escaping a cracked lantern. Today, no matter how tightly he clutched his pen, no matter how many times he forced his gaze onto the numbers in the financial report, the smoke kept rising.
At first it was something small: the bay outside the Agency windows glittering with sunlight. He saw it and thought, How strange that light can make even polluted water look pure. That one thought was enough to start the chain. His mind leapt from the water to the idea of purity, from purity to his ideals, and from his ideals to their endless betrayal at the hands of reality.
He imagined—foolishly, shamefully—a world without betrayal. A world where every line he wrote in his notebook could be fulfilled exactly as it appeared.
In that world, no Agency mission would end with casualties. No child would weep over the loss of a parent. No criminal would escape justice because of legal loopholes or bureaucratic rot. His notebook would not be a set of fragile aspirations; it would be law, carved into the world itself, unbending, absolute.
But such a world was impossible. He knew this better than anyone.
Dazai once mocked him for it, smirking as though it were the simplest thing in the world: “You know ideals are like stars, Kunikida-kun. Pretty to look at, but you’ll never reach them.”
At the time, Kunikida’s answer had been sharp, defensive: “That doesn’t mean I stop striving.”
And it was true. He would never stop striving. Yet there were days like this, days when the effort of striving felt like pressing against the tide with bare hands, trying to force back the ocean. The futility gnawed at him.
His pen tapped against the margin of his notebook, over and over. He stared at the words he had written earlier in the day: Correct financial discrepancies without error. But what did it matter if the numbers balanced, when lives outside these walls remained unbalanced, teetering between safety and disaster?
He thought of the cases that had gone wrong—the faces of victims whose names he had not managed to write into the “saved” column of his private ledgers. They gathered in his mind like a crowd, silent and heavy, reminding him of every imperfection, every failure.
And then, treacherously, his mind wandered in the opposite direction, toward a vision he almost could not admit to himself. A cottage. A small house in the mountains, away from Yokohama, away from the endless machinery of crime and punishment. He saw himself waking to silence, to the smell of pine, to the creak of wood as he stepped outside. His notebook would still exist, but its contents would be humbler: Chop firewood before dusk. Tend the vegetable patch. Repair the roof before the rains.
The image was intoxicating, a balm against the chaos of his current reality. And because it was intoxicating, he despised it. He despised himself for even thinking it. A man of ideals could not long for retreat. To dream of escape was to betray his own oath.
“Kunikida-kun.”
The voice was drawling, familiar, and unwelcome. Dazai leaned against his desk, his bandaged smile sharp with amusement. “You’ve been staring at that page for quite some time. Planning the dimensions of your utopia again?”
Kunikida’s spine stiffened, his pulse lurching in guilt. He snapped his notebook shut with a crisp sound, as though to smother the wandering thoughts between its covers. “Don’t project your own laziness onto me. Some of us are working.”
Dazai tilted his head, the smirk deepening, but he did not press further. He sauntered away, hands in his pockets, leaving only the faint echo of his laughter behind.
Still, the damage was done. The interruption forced Kunikida to confront the truth: Dazai was right. His mind had wandered, and not to any noble battlefield of ideas, but to something perilously close to longing.
Longing was dangerous.
He told himself to focus, but even Atsushi’s arrival with new case files did not ground him. The boy’s concern—“You look kind of far away, Kunikida-san”—was a sting sharper than Dazai’s teasing. Because Atsushi’s voice was earnest, and earnestness made Kunikida feel the weight of his own hypocrisy.
Far away. Yes. That was exactly it. His mind had drifted too far away, into places where ideals twisted into dreams, and dreams decayed into delusions.
And yet—he could not bring himself to banish those thoughts entirely.
For in them lay something tender, something he rarely allowed himself: the hope that, perhaps, one day, he might see the world he wrote in his notebook. Maybe not exactly, maybe never perfectly—but closer, better. The wandering was dangerous, yes, but it was also necessary. Because without it, there would be no reason to keep striving.
So he allowed himself one more moment. Just one. His gaze slipped to the window again, to the sunlight spilling across the bay. And he thought, not with shame this time but with quiet resolve:
Even if it takes a lifetime, I will bring my wandering mind home to reality.
He opened his notebook. The pen moved. A new line appeared, simple but absolute.
Never abandon the pursuit of ideals, no matter how far the mind may wander.
And with that, Kunikida forced his thoughts into order again, ready to continue the day.