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There are moments wherein Atsushi had looked at Fyodor, and for a second so brief it could have been an accident, he saw Dazai standing in his place.
It was, in many ways, as comforting as it was jarring, if only because Atsushi made it so. Dazai, to whom he looked up and Dazai, who had saved him when the world chewed him up and spat him out and Dazai, who brought him back down to earth when his mind got away from him. Dazai is many things; a mentor, a friend, a part of his family at the Agency, and maybe, on the rare occasion that Dazai let his walls down long enough for Atsushi to catch a glimpse, they were something stronger than all three of those things sewn together. Dazai will deny it, but he is gentle when he needs to be, he is considerate, and while his methods may be entirely unconventional, he cares about his coworkers such that he would give himself willingly any time, any day, to protect them. Of course, that is often in the form of suicidal tendency and twisted compliments, but it’s the thought that counts, and Atsushi sees that.
The caveat is this: Fyodor was none of these things. He was not a mentor, nor a friend, and if Atsushi were to count on all of his fingers and all of his toes just how many times Fyodor had effectively made an effort to prove that the Headmaster was right about him all along, he would need a second, a third, a fourth set of limbs. Fyodor had long since surpassed ‘enemy’ or ‘rival’; for all his talk of God’s world, Fyodor himself was the foil. Fyodor was Lucifer sat comfortably on a throne built from the corpses of the gifted, over centuries of heinous judgement. Atsushi does not know how long Fyodor had been alive, all that he knows is that Fyodor refused to die on the principle of delivering God’s vision under guise of destruction. Atsushi never believed much in God, - how could he, when God never bothered to come for him? - but he knows this much: God would not condone Fyodor’s conquest.
But Fyodor was also cunning. He was several steps ahead of his opponent’s every breath. He observed enough of his surroundings that he could recite back to you every little detail in perfect measure without a second thought, and it was frightening, how much he seemed to inherently know. Atsushi refuses to think of himself as stupid, he is not stupid, but he’s fine to admit that he’s not nearly as smart as Fyodor was. A detective, yes. Perceptive, most definitely. And yet he could not hope to catch a fraction of what Fyodor might have at any given time. Where Atsushi is confident that he could dominate Fyodor in a fight hand-to-hand, a metaphorical game of chess would spell out a sentence for his death without ever allowing him the chance to try.
This is the part of him that Dazai shares. Or maybe Dazai invented it, he isn’t sure when or who began the battle of wits between them. Nonetheless, there is nothing that Dazai cannot accomplish with strategy and craft alone. He never makes a move before he’s determined the end result; the outcome of any given move is whatever he makes of it, and he adapts to the rare unforeseen complications of a plan quickly enough that anyone who does not know him already could mistake any fumble in between as having been intentional. Pitted against one another, Dazai and Fyodor were practically a moot point; they were walking contradictions and they were identical twins. They were living on the exact same higher plane of reality, one that nobody else in the world would ever be permitted to reach and yet, their morals drew a thick line in the sand that could distinguish the goodness that Dazai would forever deny from the violent atrocity that was Fyodor’s world vision.
Sometimes, Atsushi wonders if this is a carefully constructed byproduct of their circumstances, - Fyodor’s strange ability, Dazai’s rein in the Port Mafia - or if they were merely born geniuses. The truth is that he will never be allowed to know. Dazai is not transparent enough to tell him, and Fyodor, well-
Fyodor is dead.
It’s a difficult truth to face, because Atsushi still can’t go to the grocery store without getting half-a-dozen odd looks wondering if his wanted poster is still valid. The Agency is on hiatus, Chief Taneda is pulling every string he has to prove the criminal trial in the favor of their innocence, Dazai remains missing in action, - or so Sakaguchi-san tells him - and even though Fyodor’s death saved the world over, the Page was lost firmly with him. Days and weeks have passed, and yet while Yokohama around him recovers with a firm hand, Atsushi remains stagnant, trapped in a conspiracy that has made every valiant effort to tear his home, his family, away from him.
The Agency remains as together as the trial will allow; some days, they meet for lunch, or dinner, solely because it’s uncomfortable not to see one another every day of their lives. They try to talk about things other than the judgement of the court system hanging over their heads: Kunikida’s conquest to find anything to do in his sudden ‘unemployment’, Kenji’s frequent trips home to help his father who just recently sprained his ankle, Naomi’s return to school that has proven fairly normal for her age in spite of everything. There’s a strange balance between the lingering civilian aspects of their lives, and the looming question as to whether or not any of them are terrorists. Atsushi doesn’t have much to offer himself, but he finds some comfort in knowing that there is a part of the mundane that they are still allowed.
It helps to distract him, for a few hours here and there, from his helplessness to do anything but testify when called, and from the unsettling realization that Fyodor’s defeat has left a part of him feeling strangely empty.
Atsushi does not miss Fyodor, nor does he wish to have done things differently. He’s not so lost in himself that he could ever believe differently. The problem is, when Fyodor was still alive, when the Decay of the Angel still tormented his every waking moment, Atsushi continued to feel, in some twisted sense, as though he had everything he had ever wanted. He had a purpose, a goal to reach, a reason to live. He had a family standing at his back ready to fight for him, to fight with him, and because they were fugitives, what they did to protect that only mattered so much already. Now he walks on eggshells. There is no mission because the court is in charge, and the Agency is forced to behave accordingly so long as they are at the mercy of a judge. Kunikida is woefully unemployed and Kenji has more time to spend at home and Naomi actually goes to school instead of hanging around the Agency all day and it’s… weird. It’s abnormal. It’s nice, in its own sense of domesticity that they are usually denied, but it’s not them.
Atsushi wants things to go back to the way things were. Not when Dazai was arrested, not when the Jester broadcast his murder on a live feed, but to the ‘before’. Before Sunday and before Fyodor. If Fyodor had only been wiped out sooner, every day of Atsushi’s chaotic life before would still be abstractly intact, just the way he liked it.
Some days, he doesn’t know who to blame for it. Deep down, he knows that only Fyodor can truly be held accountable, even if he had accomplices, even if he manipulated his way through human building blocks to get what he wanted. But Atsushi’s woeful self-esteem makes a regular argument against him: you should have been stronger, you should have been faster, you should have been smarter, you should have tried harder. Some days, he looks at himself in the mirror and he wonders, ‘could I have killed him sooner’, while knowing better now that Fyodor’s ability was practically omnipotent, and he would not have been an exception without sacrificing himself. That would have made a great many people unhappy, least among them himself, cowardly as he may appear for it.
Sometimes, just because he can, or when he’s especially frustrated with the way things turned out, he decides that Akutagawa is to blame. Akutagawa could have been stronger, faster, smarter. If only Akutagawa had been more cooperative during the cannibalism. If only Akutagawa had listened when Atsushi gave him instructions. If only Akutagawa hadn’t been captured by the Vampirization. Et cetera. Et cetera. It’s therapeutic in the moment, but it doesn’t hold water, and he knows it isn’t fair to pin him while he had done everything he could have to do right by the world. Even on good days, it’s hard for Atsushi to decide how he really feels about the boy who took his leg clean off when they first met, but he knows deep down that Akutagawa is trying to be a good person. Akutagawa is trying to change. And that is something that Atsushi understands; he would disabuse him the notion that he isn’t getting better.
If Dazai were here, now, he would know what to do.
How to fix things.
How to move on.
Who to blame.
He would promise Atsushi that none of it was his fault. He would give Atsushi permission to breathe properly again.
It’s shameful, perhaps, that he still needs permission to live. But Dazai was the first person to ever give him a fair chance, and it’s been so long since he last saw Dazai, spoke to him, that as the precise memory of his voice fades further into the obscurity of Atsushi’s memories, he wonders if Fyodor was, at some point, a shoddy excuse for his substitute.
Fyodor could never replace Dazai. The gap between them was just wide enough that Atsushi could not have mistaken them if he tried, and yet when Dazai appeared to him in his absence, a hallucination befitting his every conscious plea for a direction, it felt like a part of him was still here in Yokohama. When Fyodor stood across from him at the airport, there was a flash of something akin to recognition on his face, that moment right before a prodigy topples his inferiorities, where Atsushi thought, ‘this is familiar’. It was the same look that crosses Dazai’s face right before he’s won at something.
Standing here now, among the rubble of the ruined airport, Atsushi can’t help but wonder if Fyodor’s death, and the startling absence of the wispy Dazai leaning over his shoulder, aren’t related to one another. He wonders what would have happened if he had managed to take the Page back from Fyodor before he tore it apart; if the Agency would have been amicably cleared, if Dazai would have come home already. Would Dazai have approved of his cowardice, his willingness to sacrifice his dignity to kneel at Fyodor’s feet and beg for some compassion, even knowing that he would not find solace in whatever immorality must have preceded Fyodor’s conditions for surrender? Fyodor certainly hadn’t. He had called Atsushi weak, unworthy, pathetic. Dazai wouldn’t have been so harsh, but he’s sure the sentiment still would have been the same. Disappointed. Gentle, but disappointed.
A disappointment was leagues worse than whatever Fyodor he had seen him for.
There is a bouquet of flowers tucked in the crook of his elbow, while he stares out at the ruins of their battlefield. Fyodor’s final resting place. Where his head had rolled and his body had folded over like a paper doll soaked in blood. The flowers are not for him. Atsushi fears if he holds onto them for much longer, he might crush them by mistake somewhere between trekking down memory lane and wishing Dazai were here to pat him on the head.
He bends down, placing the flowers - pure white lilies, gorgeous and freshly cut on that morning, the gardener told him - down beside a slab of cracked concrete. These flowers are not for Fyodor, but they are meant as an offering to those who lost their lives here because of him. Countless civilian victims, Port Mafia casualties, and military personnel who had never imagined the severity of what their assignment would one day become. Men and women whom Atsushi could not save, no matter how hard he had tried. He would regret it for the rest of his life, and yet as he stared down at the bouquet by his feet, he hoped they might for forgive him one day, if only so he would be allowed to move on.
‘Keep moving forward. Tread a path even I never knew.’
In the eerie solitude of the wreckage, Atsushi hears a voice that should not be. He stands up quickly, nearly kicking the flowers and missing them by one merciful centimeter. He swore he was alone when he got here. He’s in no position these days to relax. He spins on his heels, hackles raised. It couldn’t possibly be, and yet whoever this was, they had almost sounded like-
“Are you okay?”
Kyouka is quiet when she approaches him from behind. Atsushi finds her in the same moment that she speaks, her footsteps soft even when the Tiger perks up her ears to listen closely. The steeped crimson of her kimono catches the sun. A breath leaves Atsushi’s lungs almost like a sigh, relieved to know that he’s only among family, but the tension weighs steadily on his shoulders even as he manages to smile when she stops in front of him, eyes glossed over with a gentle concern that Atsushi scolds himself mentally for having caused.
“Kyouka-chan,” Atsushi murmurs, nodding his head. The mild afternoon breeze pushes his bangs over his forehead, while the long side brushes against his shoulder in the crude imitation of a hand resting over his arm. It’s a featherlight touch, almost like a shadow, but the feeling it allows him is not unfamiliar. Perhaps someone is still here after all, even when he can’t see them. Atsushi can only hope it’s a ‘someone’ with good intentions.
Ah, well, that’s what he’ll choose to believe.
“…Yeah, I’m alright.”