Archive of Our Own

The Tabetabe Diner was a diner on its last legs in a practically-abandoned strip of shops underneath another practically-abandoned strip of shops. On the street level, the stores sprouted brightly-colored flags and signs, declaring with their dying breaths that they were OPEN! CUSTOMERS WELCOME!! SALE SALE SALE!!!

If one took the stairs to the sub-level storefronts, though? These businesses had given up. Very few customers made it down the obscured stairway to the little alley with its row of grimy doorways. Weak overhead lighting flickered down on morose shops and food stops that were slowly dying; many of the underground stores were already dead, permanently closed with their locked doorways sealed over with VACANCY and FOR RENT signs. 

The diner, clinging to life at the end of the alley, was neighbor to two such empty storefronts. It had a grand total of two employees. There was usually a smattering of customers—more than two, less than seven, not enough to be making the business much money but just enough the patrons could sit removed from one another and ignore each other comfortably. The employees opened it at a random time early each morning and closed when they felt like it in the evening. Doubtless they were hoping for the day nobody showed up so they could call the whole thing a wash, but somehow there always seemed to be at least one poor soul nursing a truly shitty coffee in a back corner.

Today this was Dazai.

There were plenty of late-night diners in Yokohama. They were great for lingering into the witching hours. He’d spent a lot of time in the mafia and still as a detective holed up in some quiet spot—usually a bar, to be honest, but the occasional diner, too. The Tabetabe  Diner was his choice for when his lingering got so late it became early. If he hadn’t slept, and had been kicked out of whatever bar he’d been occupying, he’d wander by the alleyway and see if the Tabetabe  was open. If it was, he’d slump inside to a table and order coffee, attempt to convince the waitress to add some kind of alcohol to it, be told again they didn’t even have any alcohol, and then sullenly remain at a table long enough to agitate her. Sure it was rude to take up the seat for so long over a measly few mugfuls of coffee, but it wasn’t like other patrons were queueing up for the space. So he ignored the waitress’s glares and stayed until he could show up fashionably late for work.

On bad days he ordered food.

The Tabetabe had an extensive menu listing all kinds of foods, Japanese and Chinese and Western, but no real specialty. It was a classic hallmark of a bad restaurant: to have so many different menu items to potentially prepare, they had to be cutting corners with frozen or prepackaged food somewhere. Dazai assumed the wide variety was either an attempt to pull in as many customers as possible or some desperate effort for the chef to feel alive in his dying business. Whatever the case, none of it was very good. He’d once asked the waitress what she’d recommend and had been dryly answered with the most expensive thing on the menu. 

He’d just ordered coffee.

Today, though…today was bad. Not as bad as a few days ago, but definitely still a dark spot in a string of several of them in a row. Dazai had stared into the depths of his mug for a while before flagging the waitress down and requesting a curry set. As usual, the waitress huffed and clicked her tongue at his very reasonable request to order food in a diner, and trudged off to put his order in while he made faces at her retreating back. He quit a split second before the cook stuck his head out of the back and made eye contact with him, smiling brightly instead.

As he’d suspected, the curry took a suspiciously short amount of time to arrive. Dazai graced the waitress with another smile when she set it in front of him. For some reason, she went pale and walked away instead of smiling back. Dazai ignored that and turned his attention to the food he’d been presented with.

The curry was steaming hot—potentially from a microwave—and had been plated, at least, with relative care. He took a moment to admire, in a detached kind of way, the line between the rice on one side of the plate and the thick golden-brown sauce with its meat and vegetable chunks on the other. It looked picture perfect.

The taste, on the other hand.

…it wasn’t bad, per se. Dazai suspected the chef was former Navy staff, based on the Yokosuka style of the curry. Probably when he’d first made this batch it had been a nice meal. Most likely portions had then been divvied up, frozen for a time, and this particular one had been reheated for him in the course of a few minutes. When Dazai took a bite, the illusion fell apart as he chewed through oddly textured veggies and lumps of chicken that even the sauce couldn’t save from being dried out. The sauce itself was well-seasoned, but was already congealing in an unfortunate way.

At least the rice was fresh. Dazai allowed himself one bite of it before he started stirring everything on the plate together like a bored toddler. There was no point in not playing with his food, no point in pretending to enjoy the act of eating, when he was tucked away in the most remote back corner booth of this hidden-away diner, once again eating curry he didn’t like. Ending up in the Tabetabe  was already a bad sign for the start of his day. The rest of the day would no doubt be a sludge of unpleasantness, also. But if he could just finish the plate—

He was so certain of how this day was going to go that it took him a few seconds to register the flurry of motion across from him. His table was suddenly occupied by a second unlikely customer, and the last person he’d expected to see.

“Dazai-san!” Atsushi said, breathless and disheveled like he’d been running. “It took me forever to find you!”

Dazai, who had not expected to be found, stared back at him with a listless spoonful of rice and curry halfway to his mouth.

Atsushi, who was usually a very polite and unassuming young man, reached out and snagged his mug to gulp down the cold remains of Dazai’s coffee.

“Are you sure you should be consuming caffeine?” Dazai asked, but was spoken over when Atsushi tumbled into a rushed and disjointed interruption.

“I need—Dazai-san, I need your help with something, and it’s going to sound really weird, okay? But I’m being completely serious, even though it’s weird.”

Dazai put his spoon down, intrigued and slightly annoyed. “I love weird. I also love coffee, by the way, but I seem to have just lost all of mine.”

Belatedly, Atsushi made a face over the bitterness. “It wasn’t very good,” he said. Then he took a closer look at the other dish. “Are you eating curry? You don’t even like spicy food.”

“What can I help you with, Atsushi-kun?” Dazai said pointedly. He pulled his plate closer in case of further thievery.

“Right. Right, okay.” Atsushi took a deep and bracing breath. “Dazai-san. I am in a time loop and I need your help to break it.”

Dazai blinked at him. “Time loop…?” He thought about it for a second and found himself warming up to the idea rapidly. “Huh. Sure! This could be entertaining. How long have you been in a time loop, Atsushi-kun?”

Atsushi’s head tilted in that cute way that made his long sidebang look very grabbable. “I wasn’t really expecting you to believe me that fast.”

“Unless you’ve suddenly developed a taste for pranks, I don’t see why you’d say you were in a time loop unless there was really a time loop. You’re not much of a liar.”

He could see Atsushi bite his lip to hold back the automatic snarky comment.

“Unlike some people?” he guessed. “Atsushi-kun shouldn’t say such things to his mentor, who has so graciously agreed to help him with his time loop problem—”

“I didn’t actually say anything!” Atsushi protested.

“—but  if it will make him feel better then I ~promise~ I won’t lie while we’re in the Tabetabe. So!” He ignored Atsushi making another face at him over the wiggly way he pronounced ‘promise’ and pointed his spoon at him with enthusiasm. “Tell me about your time loop. How long? How many times?”

Atsushi hesitated, like he was waiting for Dazai to say ha! Nevermind, I think you’re a crazy person and time loops aren’t real!  When no rebuttal happened, he continued. “It’s about a day-long loop, and I’ve done it like 15 times now.”

“A solid two weeks!” Dazai whistled. “And how are you feeling? Going loopy yet? I know I would be.”

Atsushi shot a glare at him and didn’t dignify the pun with a response. “I’m fine. Are you okay, Dazai-san?”

He shrugged. “As well as can be expected in this fine establishment!” Atsushi was looking at him with increasing suspicion; he needed to tone it down some. “I’ve just been sitting here, Atsushi-kun.”

“Sitting here…eating curry?”

“Why, do you want some?” He’d just come to the abrupt decision he didn’t want the curry anymore. He shoved it over to Atsushi’s side of the table, dropping the spoon into the rice with a clatter. He could sense the waitress giving him the evil eye, and he waved her over without looking—too intent on watching Atsushi.

Atsushi looked between Dazai and the plate a few times but picked up the spoon. His brow furrowed as he gave the bowl of the spoon a particularly intense examination before shrugging and—licking the part that had been in Dazai’s mouth? What?—and then using it to scoop up some curry and shove it in his mouth.

Dazai wasn’t sure what to make of that. Probably nothing to be made. Still, he found himself at a bit of a loss until Atsushi started talking again.

“This isn’t very good, either.” He said that, but was still packing food away between sentences like he hadn’t eaten in…well, two weeks. “Anyway, it took me nine loops to find you. You’re not carrying your phone so Katai-san couldn’t track you, then I tried to ask Ango-san and he was super unhelpful, then the rest I had to track down Chuuya-san and convince him to help me and one of the loops he just threw me,” he gestured broadly with the spoon, “straight over three buildings and into the harbor because he thought I was helping you play a trick on him.”

Hm. A lot of different routes he could take here. Chuuya was low-hanging fruit and he didn’t want to get into the whole Ango situation so he went with the safe option. “I didn’t really feel like talking to anyone today so I abandoned my phone,” he sighed. “Sorry for the inconvenience, Atsushi-kun! But it sounds like this is the first loop you’ve managed to talk to me?”

Atsushi nodded, mouth full.

The waitress finally made her appearance at the table with a put-upon air. “How about something sweet?” Dazai asked lightly. “Can I get an order of the pancakes, please? And two glasses of water.”

She just sighed and walked off without a single word of confirmation. Atsushi watched her go and then shot Dazai a judgemental look. “Been here before, I’m guessing?”

“She has turned down my offer of a double suicide on multiple occasions,” Dazai confirmed.

Atsushi twitched and then tried to hide that he’d done so by taking another exaggeratedly large bite of substandard curry. “Great. So you’re available to help me with this time loop thing.”

“Sure.” Dazai poked at the handle of his empty coffee mug, turning it in a little semicircle; he should have ordered more coffee, too. “Any idea what’s causing it?”

Atsushi slowed. His eyes went a little distant—sunset through a haze—and he tapped the spoon on the edge of the plate as he responded. “If you mean like the actual cause…not exactly. It could be an ability or it could be, I don’t know. An act of fate?”

Dazai’s eyebrows shot up. “Fate?”

The haze cleared out and suddenly he was pinned by gold and violet.

“Something bad happens at the end of the loop and I’m trying to figure out how to stop it.”

The way Atsushi’s face changed when he was determined never failed to make Dazai pause in admiration. This time was no different. His eyes blazed with light and his expression was like carved marble—heroic, and untouchable, except for the impossible-to-banish conviction that he would be warm under Dazai’s fingertips, like Galatea come to life. 

“What happened that’s so bad?” Dazai asked, quiet.

Atsushi blinked. Suddenly he looked soft, and sad, and human. And Dazai hated it. “I…don’t think I should say. Um. I think it would work best if I can figure this out on my own.”

“On your own—?”

Atsushi spoke over him again, “I mean! Not on my own, I want your advice, but then I should handle it myself, to be safe.”

Dazai hummed, settling back in his seat as the waitress came back over with a plate and two glasses balanced on a tray. He waited until she was done putting things down and shot her a dazzling smile, which she rudely ignored once again, and picked up the fork that had come with the pancakes to poke at them. Jiggle. The waitress left, he poked a few more times, and then he shot a look at Atsushi through his lashes. 

“Kind of seems like this bad thing you’re trying to avoid involves me somehow. I feel like I could guess what it is, even. Hm? Atsushi-kun?”

Atsushi’s lips pursed. “There’s an ability user who’s going to attack the agency today, and hurt a lot of people, and I keep trying to fight him but I think the safest option would be to prevent him from attacking in the first place. You know, head him off before he starts. But I need your help with finding him.”

Dazai took a bite of the top pancake. 

…Way too sweet.

“Wouldn’t Ranpo-san be a better option for trying to avert a tragedy before it happens?”

Atsushi did his little head tilt again. Dazai took another bite of too-sweet pancake.

“Ranpo-san said you were the better option.”

Of course he had. Bastard.

“Okaaaaay, counter offer, why don’t I just come nullify this guy right when he shows up?”

Atsushi was already shaking his head, vehement. “You should stay here, Dazai-san! You—and Ranpo-san—are both, y’know.” His gaze flitted down to the pancakes. “Squishy.”

Dazai rolled his eyes and slid the plate over to Atsushi. He didn’t even get a no, I couldn’t possibly, are you sure? before Atsushi was digging in. 

“These are better than the curry, at least,” was his verdict, which Dazai couldn’t disagree with. 

He started nursing his water instead as Atsushi tore through the remaining one and a half pancakes. “Well you’re going to have to give me at least a little bit more information if you want to find this person. Although it sounds like you’ve already got a backup plan.”

Atsushi paused. “I do?”

Dazai spelled it out for him. “If you’ve found a way to get Chuuya to listen to you enough to help with finding me, you could probably also convince him to help you with taking out this ability user before he can do too much damage. He can squish just about any problem with a big enough piece of concrete.” He tapped his nail on the glass, the same rhythm that Atsushi had been tapping his spoon earlier. “How did you convince him it wasn’t a prank, anyway?”

“I had to get him to agree to tell me some kind of weird code word that nobody else, especially you, would know. And then in this loop I went back and told him what he’d said.”

“A time loop classic!” Dazai cheered. “See, I told you watching movies with me was an essential part of your education. You’ll have to tell Kunikida-kun I was right.”

“You can tell him yourself after I break this loop,” Atsushi muttered, muffled around the last gigantic bite of food. He drained half of his water and gasped for air for a moment. “Okay. I’ll try asking Chuuya-san, then. And you can stay here, and I’ll come find you afterwards and let you know how it goes.”

Dazai shrugged expansively. “I’ll be here!” When Atsushi shot him a dubious look, he amended it to, “I’ll be here unless something catches my interest. You know I’m a man of whims.”

Atsushi didn’t insist, but Dazai could tell he disapproved from the little divot between his brows and the way his mouth pursed in one corner, dimple-like. Dazai laced his fingers together to prevent himself reaching out and poking it.

“I have faith in your capability,” he said instead. “Or, let’s see, I have utmost confidence in your ability to do what needs to be done. Hmmm. I believe you’ll thoroughly kick ass?”

The tightness around his eyes hadn’t gone away, but Atsushi did smile a little, albeit wobbly. “You’re saying I can do it?”

Dazai had no doubt Atsushi could get Chuuya to help. Breaking the loop would be a different matter. But that wasn’t what he wanted to send Atsushi off with, so he just smiled back. “Atsushi-kun is like the opposite of Kenji-kun, much more powerful with some food in him.”

This, at last, made Atsushi’s previous misgivings disappear from his face as a slight flush crept over it instead. “Right. Sorry for eating your breakfast, Dazai-san. Maybe you can order something else while you wait? And I’ll see you later today.” He started moving to get out of his seat. Notably with no offer to pay for anything, which only caused a nearly-dizzying wave of fondness in Dazai. Whether it was a bad habit he’d picked up from Dazai, or the assumption that he had him covered, or just him being a little shit—any and all of those options made Dazai’s smile tick into something more genuine.

“Maybe,” was all he said.

Atsushi paused standing next to him; Dazai looked up at his tiger from his seat and thought once again about pulling on his hair, tugging him down and down and down. 

“Surely something on the menu is good?” Atsushi prompted after a moment.

Dazai sighed and picked up the menu he’d discarded from the other end of the table. “If there is, I haven’t found it yet. But if you end up back here, I’ll let you know.”

He could see Atsushi’s hand twitch, like he was about to reach out.

“I’ll see you later,” Atsushi said again. Firm, with conviction, like just saying it would make it true.

Don’t jinx it, Dazai didn’t say. He waved as Atsushi finally headed towards the door. Once the shock of white hair and the curl of his too-long belt were out of sight, he made eye contact with the waitress once again and pointed at his coffee mug. She ignored him.

He sighed, debating how long he was actually willing to stay in here if he couldn’t get more coffee out of it.

Ah. 

Well.

There was always tomorrow.

Notes:

Surely this time it will work out.

The Tabetabe Diner was a diner on its last legs in a practically-abandoned strip of shops underneath another practically-abandoned strip of shops. On the street level, the stores sprouted brightly-colored flags and signs, declaring with their dying breaths that they were OPEN! CUSTOMERS WELCOME!! SALE SALE SALE SALE!!!

If one took the stairs to the sub-level storefronts, though? These businesses had given up. Very few customers made it down the obscured stairway to the little alley with its row of grimy doorways. Weak overhead lighting flickered down on morose shops and food stops that were slowly dying; many of the underground stores were already dead, permanently closed with their locked doorways sealed over with VACANCY and FOR RENT signs. 

The diner, clinging to life at the end of the alley, was neighbor to two such empty storefronts. It had a grand total of two employees. There was usually a smattering of customers—more than two, less than seven, not enough to be making the business much money but just enough the patrons could sit removed from one another and ignore each other comfortably. The employees opened it at a random time early each morning and closed when they felt like it in the evening. Doubtless they were hoping for the day nobody showed up so they could call the whole thing a wash, but somehow there always seemed to be at least one poor soul nursing a truly shitty coffee in a back corner.

Today this was Dazai.

There were plenty of late-night diners in Yokohama. They were great for lingering into the witching hours. He’d spent a lot of time in the mafia and still as a detective holed up in some quiet spot—usually a bar, to be honest, but the occasional diner, too. The Tabetabe Diner was his choice for when his lingering got so late it became early. If he hadn’t slept, and had been kicked out of whatever bar he’d been occupying, he’d wander by the alleyway and see if the Tabetabe was open. If it was, he’d slump inside to a table and order coffee, attempt to convince the waitress to add some kind of alcohol to it, be told again they didn’t even have any alcohol, and then sullenly remain at a table long enough to agitate her. Sure it was rude to take up the seat for so long over a measly few mugfuls of coffee, but it wasn’t like other patrons were queueing up for the space. So he ignored the waitress’s glares and stayed until he could show up fashionably late for work.

On bad days he ordered food.

The Tabetabe had an extensive menu listing all kinds of foods, Japanese and Chinese and Western, but no real specialty. It was a classic hallmark of a bad restaurant: to have so many different menu items to potentially prepare, they had to be cutting corners with frozen or prepackaged food somewhere. Dazai assumed the wide variety was either an attempt to pull in as many customers as possible or some desperate effort for the chef to feel alive in his dying business. Whatever the case, none of it was very good. He’d once asked the waitress what she’d recommend and had been dryly answered with the most expensive thing on the menu. 

He’d just ordered coffee.

Today, though…today was bad. Not as bad as a few days ago, but definitely still a dark spot in a string of several of them in a row. Dazai had stared into the depths of his mug for a while before flagging the waitress down and requesting a curry set. As usual, the waitress huffed and clicked her tongue at his very reasonable request to order food in a diner, and trudged off to put his order in while he made faces at her retreating back. He quit a split second before the cook stuck his head out of the back and made eye contact with him, smiling brightly instead.

As he’d suspected, the curry took a suspiciously short amount of time to arrive. Dazai graced the waitress with another smile when she set it in front of him. For some reason, she went pale and walked away instead of smiling back. Dazai ignored that and turned his attention to the food he’d been presented with.

The curry was steaming hot—potentially from a microwave—and had been plated, at least, with relative care. He took a moment to admire, in a detached kind of way, the line between the rice on one side of the plate and the thick golden-brown sauce with its meat and vegetable chunks on the other. It looked picture perfect.

The taste, on the other hand.

…it wasn’t bad, per se. Dazai suspected the chef was former Navy staff based on the Yokosuka style of the curry. Probably when he’d first made this batch it had been a nice meal. Most likely portions had then been divvied up, frozen for a time, and this particular one had been reheated for him in the course of a few minutes. When Dazai took a bite, the illusion fell apart as he chewed through oddly textured veggies and lumps of chicken that even the sauce couldn’t save from being dried out. The sauce itself was well-seasoned, but was already congealing in an unfortunate way.

At least the rice was fresh. Dazai allowed himself one bite of it before he started stirring everything on the plate together like a bored toddler. There was no point in not playing with his food, no point in pretending to enjoy the act of eating, when he was tucked away in the most remote back corner booth of this hidden-away diner, once again eating curry he didn’t like. Ending up in the Tabetabe was already a bad sign for the start of his day. The rest of the day would no doubt be a sludge of unpleasantness, also. But if he could just finish the plate—

Ugh. He didn’t want to, though. Still, he kept picking at it.

He was so certain of how this day was going to go that it took him a few seconds to register the flurry of motion across from him. His table was suddenly occupied by a second unlikely customer, and the last person he’d expected to see.

“Dazai-san!” Atsushi said, breathless and red-faced like he’d been yelling. “What—you’re here.” His shoulders were heaving a bit.

Dazai, unsure what to make of this entrance, stared back at him with a listless spoonful of rice and curry halfway to his mouth.

Atsushi scrubbed his hands over his face. “I just—okay. A lot has happened. I need to explain something to you, and it didn’t go so well last time, not the explaining part, I mean, but afterwards—why didn’t you stay put?” He lowered his hands as he said that last bit, looking at Dazai with a beseeching expression he didn’t know what to do with.

“Coffee?” he offered, pushing his cup towards Atsushi’s side of the table. “Or maybe caffeine isn’t the best idea. Take a deep breath and then tell your favorite mentor what’s bothering you, hm?”

Atsushi’s face warped through several more expressions in rapid succession before he settled on a shaky smile. “Sure. Um. It’s good to see you, Dazai-san.”

Dazai just raised an eyebrow. “Goodness, it must be serious. No one is ever happy to see someone at the Tabetabe Diner, Atsushi-kun. It’s a terrible place.” He pointed with his spoon. “They don’t even have a decent curry.”

“Hard to judge when you don’t like spicy food,” Atsushi said. His shoulders had stopped shaking. He glanced down at Dazai’s plate as he reached for Dazai’s offered coffee. “You’ve only eaten a few bites. Isn’t it getting cold?”

Dazai shrugged and poked at it. “It’s early yet, I suppose. I have enough time to, ah, savor it before my plans for the day. Unless you want to help me finish it?”

“No, thanks. Listen, Dazai-san, about your plans—”

“Should we try something else, then?” Dazai cut in, looking towards where the waitress was loitering near the counter to wave her over. She made eye contact and went to check on another table, instead. Wow. Such bad customer service.

“Dazai-san!” Atsushi interjected. He sounded upset. Dazai turned back to him with a questioning look. “I need you to listen to me, and believe me when I tell you this, even though it’s weird.”

“Oh? I love weird.” He leaned forward to rest his head on hands, the picture of intrigued. “Hit me with it.”

“I’m in a time loop,” Atsushi said simply. He chugged the lukewarm remains of Dazai’s coffee and put the cup down with a shakier hand than was probably intended.

Dazai blinked at him. “Time loop…? Huh. Okay, sure! This could be entertaining. How long have you been in a time loop, Atsushi-kun?”

“Over two weeks now. There’s an attack on the agency later that I have to stop, but it keeps going wrong and I don’t know what to do.” Atsushi had started staring at Dazai’s hands and picking at his own. His nails weren’t sharp enough to draw blood but he was pressing them into the pads of his fingers in succession over and over, a loop of worrying motion. Dazai almost reached out to grab his hands and stop him but then thought better of it.

“Well, that’s why you’ve come to me! I’m sure I can rustle up some advice for you. Oh, but how many times have you told me about the loop before?”

Atsushi was biting at his lip now, too. He was really stressing about this, it seemed. “This is only the second time. It took a few loops to find you here—uh, to find you I had to—”

This was where the waitress finally decided to come and take his order, interrupting what would no doubt have been a riveting story. Dazai took a quick glance at the menu then asked for, “The double portion morning unaju set, please!” As was typical, he got no real acknowledgement of the order; she just walked away. 

When he turned back to his companion, Atsushi’s distressed expression had slackened into more of a puzzled one. “That’s not what you ordered yesterday.”

“You did just tell me we’re in a time loop,” Dazai pointed out. “I’m trying to switch it up for you. You like eel, right?”

“But how do you—?”

“Eel is what I would order on the second day of being told I’m in a time loop,” Dazai explained, a little impatient. “More importantly, if you came and asked my advice yesterday—last time?— what went wrong?”

“I took your advice and asked Chuuya-san for help. To stop the attacker.” Now Atsushi was staring at his own hands. Recollecting, picking his words. “And that worked fine. Stopping him wasn’t that big of an issue in the first place, though. I should have thought it through more, I was just happy I found you last time and I guess I went with your advice thinking I’d already solved the problem. Until it happened again.” He dropped into a self-flagellating mutter. 

Dazai honed in on this supremely interesting statement. “What happened again?”

He didn’t get a response. Atsushi wouldn’t even look at him.

Dazai hummed around the neutral smile he’d plastered on. “Ah. I feel like I can guess what the problem is.”

They both sat with it for a moment.

“Honestly, you should be used to it by now, Atsushi-kun.”

Sharp, tiger-gold eyes flit up to meet his gaze. Without saying anything, Atsushi’s displeased disagreement was obvious. For someone who came across as such a pushover most of the time, he was a surprisingly stubborn boy.

“I keep saying it. One of these days,” Dazai continued, unrelenting, “I’m going to pull off a pure, cheerful, and en—”

“This wasn’t any of those things,” Atsushi cut in, mulish. “This is someone killing you. In front of Kyouka, in front of me, and it’s painful and pointless and, and—” This time he cut himself off. Took a minute. Sighed. “It’s not cheerful at all. How could it be?”  

Dazai tapped his fingers on the tabletop as he considered what to say. “...alright. I suppose I don’t want to inconvenience the agency with my death. Atsushi-kun should consider that maybe it can’t be helped, though. Y’know.” He gestured dismissively. “Fate.”

“Fate. Right.” Atsushi’s scowl had turned into a kind of despondent grimace. Dazai was getting all kinds of expressions out of him today.

Speaking of fate! Their fated eel breakfast had appeared, borne to the table by the grudging goddess of terrible waitressing. She deposited the tray, which had the lacquered box with steaming rice and glazed eel on top, along with two small bowls containing some miso and pickles. And one pair of chopsticks. Before Dazai could request another, she’d disappeared once again.

“So how can I help you this time?” Dazai asked, placing the bowls on Atsushi’s side of the table and starting to poke at the eel with one cautious chopstick. “If brute-forcing it with the Chibi didn’t work, I could come with you to the agency ahead of time and maybe set a trap?”

“NO,” Atsushi said immediately. Too loud. He cast an embarrassed glance around, but nobody was looking. “No, you need to stay here. And actually stay.”

Dazai pouted. “I’m not a dog, Atsushi-kun.”

“I know, but—If you had just waited for me to get back, last time, it would have been fine. But you showed up anyway and the guy got in a lucky shot after I thought for sure we had him subdued.”

“Alright, fine. I won’t go to the agency.”

Atsushi perked up a bit. “Do you promise?”

Yikes, right into promises. But okay. “Fine, yes, I promise I won’t go to the agency. Atsushi-kun can’t just expect me to stay in the Tabetabe all day, though. I’m a man of whims.”

Atsushi finally smiled. It was a relieved smile, and it made his eyes shimmer in that terrible way that made it difficult for Dazai to swallow, like his throat was swelling up. Or maybe that was because the bite of eel he’d just taken was weirdly sour.

“Try this,” Dazai said, abrupt, and pushed the box over. He handed Atsushi the chopsticks and stole back the bowl of soup so he could wash down the eel. He should have also gotten some water, but he doubted he’d be able to get the waitress to come back over for at least another quarter of an hour. 

“This…isn’t very good,” Atsushi confirmed after a few bites. “The glaze on it has a weird flavor.”

“Right?” Vindicated, Dazai took another sip of the miso. “Their soup isn’t very good either, which is a travesty, because it’s miso. Every restaurant should at least be able to handle miso.”

“At least the rice is good?”

“At the very least.” Dazai pointed at the other bowl. “Actually they usually have good pickles, too.”

Atsushi ate a bite of pickled radish. “Oh! Yeah, these are much better.” He said that, but then he kept eating the eel. Dazai eyed him fondly over the soup. His little protege consumed food like a trash disposal.

For a few minutes it felt like they were out having a normal meal together. Dazai sipped at his broth and watched. He’d always liked watching Atsushi eat, ever since all those bowls of chazuke at their first meeting. It was Atsushi at his most single-minded, thought process easy to read on a face with food-rounded cheeks and a stray grains of rice stuck above his lips. Case in point, he saw Atsushi finish the eel, look between the remaining dishes on the table, and pull over the discarded plate of curry—leaving the pickles as a palate cleanser for the end. Zero thought given to whether Dazai wanted any, or who was paying for the meal.

“How would you describe how I died?” Dazai asked. He found himself unable to sit with a good feeling for too long.

The glare Atsushi shot him was indescribable. Even with his mouth full of curry.

“Was it at least a little cool and heroic?” Dazai continued. He was, alright, slightly cowed by Atsushi’s radiating anger, but unwilling to abandon the question. 

Atsushi chewed, slow and deliberate. He swallowed. “It was horrible,” was all he said. He put the chopsticks down. 

“...you didn’t eat the pickles,” Dazai pointed out.

“Dazai-san can have them.”

Ouch.

“Are you really not going to tell me anything else about this whole thing?” Dazai wheedled. Atsushi was already shaking his head before he even finished the question.

“I’ll tell you about it afterwards, if you really want to know.” He started shifting out of his seat. 

“Are you going to get Chibi to help again?” he pressed.

“No, I think—that’s just another variable. The less people involved the better. I did get pretty good at taking him down the first few loops, it was just a matter of doing it fast enough—but as long as you just stay here—” He was working himself back up again. Dazai held up his hands in surrender.

“Yes, yes, I hear you, I’ll let Atsushi-kun prevent my horrible death at the agency.”

“Thank you,” Atsushi breathed out. He was standing next to Dazai’s chair now; Dazai had to look up at him with the halo of terrible diner fluorescent lights behind his head. 

He could see Atsushi’s hand twitch, like he was about to reach out.

“I’ll see you later,” Atsushi said again. Firm, with conviction, like just saying it would make it true.

Don’t jinx it, Dazai didn’t say. He waved as Atsushi finally headed towards the door. Once the shock of white hair and the curl of his too-long belt were out of sight, he made eye contact with the waitress once again and pointed at his coffee mug. She ignored him.

He sighed, debating how long he was actually willing to stay in here if he couldn’t get more coffee out of it.

Ah. 

Well.

There was always tomorrow.

Notes:

Surely this time it will work out.

The Tabetabe Diner was a diner on its last legs in a practically-abandoned strip of shops underneath another practically-abandoned strip of shops. On the street level, the stores sprouted brightly-colored flags and signs, declaring with their dying breaths that they were OPEN! OPEN! CUSTOMERS WELCOME!! SALE SALE SALE SALE!!!

If one took the stairs to the sub-level storefronts, though? These businesses had given up. Very few customers made it down the obscured stairway to the little alley with its row of grimy doorways. Weak overhead lighting flickered down on morose shops and food stops that were slowly dying; many of the underground stores were already dead, permanently closed with their locked doorways sealed over with VACANCY and FOR RENT signs. 

The diner, clinging to life at the end of the alley, was neighbor to two such empty storefronts. It had a grand total of two employees. There was usually a smattering of customers—more than two, less than seven, not enough to be making the business much money but just enough the patrons could sit removed from one another and ignore each other comfortably. The employees opened it at a random time early each morning and closed when they felt like it in the evening. Doubtless they were hoping for the day nobody showed up so they could call the whole thing a wash, but somehow there always seemed to be at least one poor soul nursing a truly shitty coffee in a back corner.

Today this was Dazai.

Today this was Dazai.

There were plenty of late-night diners in Yokohama. They were great for lingering into the witching hours. He’d spent a lot of time in the mafia and still as a detective holed up in some quiet spot—usually a bar, to be honest, but the occasional diner, too. The Tabetabe Diner was his choice for when his lingering got so late it became early. If he hadn’t slept, and had been kicked out of whatever bar he’d been occupying, he’d wander by the alleyway and see if the Tabetabe was open. If it was, he’d slump inside to a table and order coffee, attempt to convince the waitress to add some kind of alcohol to it, be told again they didn’t even have any alcohol, and then sullenly remain at a table long enough to agitate her. Sure it was rude to take up the seat for so long over a measly few mugfuls of coffee, but it wasn’t like other patrons were queueing up for the space. So he ignored the waitress’s glares and stayed until he could show up fashionably late for work.

On bad days he ordered food.

The Tabetabe had an extensive menu listing all kinds of foods, Japanese and Chinese and Western, but no real specialty. It was a classic hallmark of a bad restaurant: to have so many different menu items to potentially prepare, they had to be cutting corners with frozen or prepackaged food somewhere. Dazai assumed the wide variety was either an attempt to pull in as many customers as possible or some desperate effort for the chef to feel alive in his dying business. Whatever the case, none of it was very good. He’d once asked the waitress what she’d recommend and had been dryly answered with the most expensive thing on the menu. 

He’d just ordered coffee.

Today, though…today was bad. Not as bad as a few days ago, but definitely still a dark spot in a string of several of them in a row. Dazai had stared into the depths of his mug for a while before flagging the waitress down and requesting a curry set. As usual, the waitress huffed and clicked her tongue at his very reasonable request to order food in a diner, and trudged off to put his order in while he made faces at her retreating back. He quit a split second before the cook stuck his head out of the back and made eye contact with him, smiling brightly instead.

As he’d suspected, the curry took a suspiciously short amount of time to arrive. Dazai graced the waitress with another smile when she set it in front of him. For some reason, she went pale and walked away instead of smiling back. Dazai ignored that and turned his attention to the food he’d been presented with.

The curry was steaming hot—potentially from a microwave—and had been plated, at least, with relative care. He took a moment to admire, in a detached kind of way, the line between the rice on one side of the plate and the thick golden-brown sauce with its meat and vegetable chunks on the other. It looked picture perfect.

The taste, on the other hand.

…it wasn’t bad, per se. Dazai suspected the chef was former Navy staff based on the Yokosuka style of the curry. Probably when he’d first made this batch it had been a nice meal. Most likely portions had then been divvied up, frozen for a time, and this particular one had been reheated for him in the course of a few minutes. When Dazai took a bite, the illusion fell apart as he chewed through oddly textured veggies and lumps of chicken that even the sauce couldn’t save from being dried out. The sauce itself was well-seasoned, but was already congealing in an unfortunate way.

At least the rice was fresh. Dazai allowed himself one bite of it before he started stirring everything on the plate together like a bored toddler. There was no point in not playing with his food, no point in pretending to enjoy the act of eating, when he was tucked away in the most remote back corner booth of this hidden-away diner, once again eating curry he didn’t like. Ending up in the Tabetabe was already a bad sign for the start of his day. The rest of the day would no doubt be a sludge of unpleasantness, also. But if he could just finish the plate—

Ugh. He didn’t want to, though. Still, he kept picking at it.

His plate jumped an inch into the air with a clatter when a pair of hands slammed down onto the table.

“Dazai-san!” Atsushi said, breathless and red-faced like he’d been yelling. “Why the hell did you leave?” His shoulders were heaving a bit.

Dazai, unsure what to make of this entrance, stared up at him with a listless spoonful of rice and curry halfway to his mouth.

“I’ve been here for hours?” he said questioningly. “What on earth are you so mad about?”

Atsushi gasped in one big, gulping breath and then slumped. He looked like he was about to fall over, so Dazai tapped him on the arm to direct him towards the seat opposite him. 

“Sit down, sit down. Have some coffee. Or don’t, maybe caffeine isn’t the best idea right now.”

Atsushi sat, grabbed Dazai’s coffee anyway, and rubbed a hand over his face like a beleaguered salary worker at the end of a long day. Dazai would be amused by the sight if he wasn’t slightly more worried.

Dazai looked around and met the waitress’s eye, signalling for two glasses of water. As usual, she looked away without acknowledgement, so who knew when those would show up.

Atsushi was raising the mug to his lips with a shaky hand. Dazai kicked him lightly on the ankle under the table in what he hoped was a reassuring manner.

“What is it?” he asked once Atsushi had taken a few sips. His breathing had calmed, at least. “It’s a little early in the morning to be so upset with me.”

Atsushi shook his head, then kept shaking it like he wasn’t sure what else to do. Dazai kicked him again, a little harder, and he stopped. 

“Why did you leave?” Atsushi asked again in a small voice.

“Leave where?”

“The diner!”

Dazai blinked at him. “...I’ve been here for hours,” he repeated slowly. “But, I mean. I do have to leave at some point.”

For some reason, this made Atsushi’s face scrunch up like he was about to cry. 

Dazai panicked a little and kicked again.

“Ow! Dazai-san!” 

“Explain,” he said, firm.

Atsushi sniffled a little but thankfully didn’t proceed to burst into more histrionics. 

“Okay. This is going to sound weird…”

“I love weird,” Dazai encouraged when he trailed off. 

“...I know. Okay. It’s weird but I’m in a time loop.”

Dazai squinted at him. “Time loop. Huh. Okay, that’s interesting. How long have you been in a time loop, Atsushi-kun?”

“Over two weeks,” he replied tiredly. “Someone is going to attack the agency today. Every time I go through this it ends with you dead, which I am not willing to accept. I’ve tried a couple of different ways to stop him, but you keep showing up and getting killed. Last time you promised you wouldn’t come to the agency, but then the suspect never showed up and when I went to look for you, he’d already gotten to you but it was nowhere near the agency or the diner. And I don’t understand why.”

“Last time? So you’ve come and found me before?”

Atsushi sighed. “Of course I have. For all the good it’s done.”

“Careful, that sounded a little rude. How many times have you told me about the loop?” he prodded.

“This is the third time,” Atsushi told him. 

“Surely with the new data you’ll be able to tell me more details,” Dazai pointed out. “Then my advice could get better, if it’s not working out for you so far. Or I could come help you—”

“No,” Atsushi snapped. It was definitely rude. Surprisingly, even.

“Orrrrr we could just keep meeting here, I suppose. Although if it’s really not working out then Atsushi-kun should maybe consider whether or not he believes in fate.”

Atsushi didn’t respond to that. He slumped completely, letting his forehead come to a rest on the table with a slight thud. After a moment he said, “It’s sticky.” A complete refusal to engage with Dazai’s “fate” idea. 

“It’s a diner,” Dazai told him, amused despite himself. Atsushi just grunted.

Dazai rolled more words around in his mouth. He was trying to think of what he could say that would be convincing, with the personification of the way the world kept refusing to let him die sitting right in front of him. But it was hard to argue for something as dramatic as a fated death when said personification of the world had his forehead glued to the table in a patch of old, sticky food residue.

“You okay, kid?” a new voice cut in. Atsushi bolted upright as the waitress appeared and set two glasses of water down. 

“Yes! I’m fine, sorry ma’am.” Atsushi turned his earnest eyes on the woman, who didn’t stand a chance. “Thank you for the water.”

“Not a problem, dear.” He’d been upgraded from kid to dear so quickly! Dazai was a little jealous. The waitress looked between the two of them, addressed her question to Atsushi again: “Did you want to order anything else?”

“We’ll take the Western breakfast set with hamburger, please!” Dazai chirped. Both the waitress and Atsushi shot him disgruntled looks—what? He’d even said please.

“I’ll bring that right out for you,” the waitress said. To Atsushi. 

Once she’d left, Dazai kicked Atsushi’s ankle once more for good measure. This time Atsushi kicked him back. 

“You’re wearing boots!” Dazai pouted when Atsushi dodged and his next kick thudded uselessly into the bottom of Atsushi’s booth seat.

“And you have weirdly pointy toes!” Atsushi argued. Dazai gaped in mock offense. This, at least, made Atsushi smile a little.

“Truce, okay, truce. No kicking! Tell me how I can assist. Think of it as a mission debrief, if that helps.”

Atsushi did straighten up, a little more composed, but he shook his head again. “I’m…trying not to get into too many details with you.”

Dazai raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

“’M trying to control variables,” Atsushi continued. “Isn’t that what you told me to do in a situation where there’s too many unknowns?”

“And I’m an unknown variable? That’s hurtful, Atsushi-kun. You’re lucky we’re under truce or I’d kick you again.” He pulled his foot back threateningly under the table despite the fact that Atsushi wouldn’t be able to see it.

Atsushi shifted like he was preparing to dodge, though. “There’s something about his connection to you, and your death, that’s not making sense. So until I can figure it out…”

“I’m being kept in the dark,” Dazai finished. “How untrusting. How unfair. Why do you get to have all the fun?”

Atsushi had so many interesting expressions. This one was a very clear combination of because you keep dying and does it look like I’m having fun? Ignoring that, Dazai moved on. “So you’re not here for my help? You’re just here to admire my suave air and effortless charm?”

“It seems to me like Dazai-san is not doing a very good job of charming this particular waitstaff, either. Do you even know the waitress’s name?”

“Nope!” he admitted. “But sometimes the fun is just in being annoying.”

“Very honest of you to admit that,” Atsushi grumbled. “Look, I don’t want to get too much into it, but I did want to ask you, because somehow either you ran into this guy or he went looking for you—”

“Where was that?” Dazai asked. “I’m curious, it sounds like you told me not to leave the diner in the last loop, and then I did—I’m a man of whims, Atsushi-kun, apologies—but there’s any number of places I could have gone from here, depending on what else you told me.”

“I’m not going to tell you where.” In case you go looking again, went unspoken. “I just need you to stay here, like you promised!” 

“I wouldn’t have left if I promised you, Atsushi-kun,” Dazai protested. “Or, well, maybe I had my fingers crossed under the table.”

Atsushi frowned. “No, I could see both your hands when you said it. Actually—” He stopped short. “Actually…you only promised not to go to the agency, I guess. And you didn’t go to the agency.”

“See! Atsushi-kun assumes the worst of me.” Dazai nudged Atsushi’s glass of water closer to him and was pleased to see him pick it up and take a few sips. 

“I didn’t mean to yell at you when I came in,” Atsushi admitted after a bit. “I just don’t understand…” He pivoted suddenly. “Do you know anything about a man named Hirahara?”

Dazai paused. His head tilted as he considered. “You know, just when I think I have a handle on you, you surprise me, Atsushi-kun. Yes, I do know about Hirahara. Big gambler, part-time gardener, supposed ability-user.” He leaned in like he was about to receive a particularly juicy piece of gossip. “Is that who keeps killing me?”

Atsushi didn’t respond but his gaze bored into him from across the table.

“Won’t even answer that?” 

…apparently not.

“Fine, fine. As you know I have a number of cases and persons of interest I keep an eye on, in a mostly off the clock kind of manner. If something comes up I sometimes deal with it myself, or if it gets too big to handle preemptively I kick it over to Fukuzawa to assign a team to it. I’ve been keeping tabs on him for, hm, about a month or so. He hasn’t done anything, yet, but I think with the gambling tab he’s racked up and the connections he has he might pick up some odd jobs for one of the growing rival gangs in this area. In which case,” he lifted his own glass in a mock toast, “I’d have the opportunity to make some connections of my own.”

Atsushi’s brow had furrowed as he listened to Dazai’s explanation, but he didn’t say anything even when Dazai stopped talking. 

“Did any of that surprise you? Are you impressed with your mentor’s work ethic and proactive thinking?” he prompted.

Atsushi asked, “And you learned he has an ability?”

Now it was Dazai’s turn to take a moment to think. “Yyyyyyes. There was a rumor about it. My tailing him didn’t indicate what it was, though.”

“Okay, interesting,” muttered Atsushi. He looked lost in thought, and Dazai pouted at being ignored after detailing his very cool and mysterious exploits. He clinked his glass into Atsushi’s, a few rapid taps, making those gold-violet eyes cut back to him. 

“I don’t understand why you won’t just let me come and help you,” Dazai said. “I can be helpful. Atsushi-kun is taking all the cool, heroic parts of the time loop for himself.”

Atsushi just gave him that fake polite smile—the one with nothing behind the eyes that he sported when he was about to sneakily shift Dazai’s paperwork back onto his desk from where Dazai had attempted to hide it with Atsushi’s.

Terrible, meddling little protege. Dazai couldn’t help the fondness creeping up the back of his aching throat and coloring his words when he sighed out, “Okay, for you, how about this time I promise I’ll avoid the agency and anywhere I know Hirahara frequents? Would that make you happy?”

Atsushi narrowed his eyes. “What if the place you were killed last time wasn’t a place you know he frequents?”

Dazai threw up his hands in defeat. “If you won’t tell me where I died last time specifically, then give me a direction! I’ll go the opposite way.”

“Or you could just not leave the diner,” Atsushi insisted.

“Atsushi-kuuuuun, pleeeeeease,” he whined. “I’ve been here so looooooong. I’ll get booooooooored.” He almost went to flop woefully onto the table but then remembered how sticky it was from Atsushi’s own earlier dramatics. 

“Food,” was all Atsushi said. 

Sure enough, the waitress was arriving with their order. This tray contained a plate with the hamburger and gravy, plus a fried egg and sausage links, and two smaller plates with a salad and a slice of thick-cut toast with butter. She set the food down between them, a little closer to Atsushi’s side, and Atsushi smiled up at her. 

“Thank you, Mari-san,” Atsushi said with a quick glance at her name tag. The waitress smiled slightly, which was basically like beaming from what Dazai had seen of her usual expressions. 

“Let me know if you need anything else,” she said before she left. To Atsushi. Dazai grabbed the toast and bit into it sulkily. 

Atsushi shot him a look, a little bit smug, and picked up the fork to take a bite of the hamburger.

“Verdict?” Dazai asked, watching him chew thoughtfully.

“It’s just okay,” Atsushi said. “Why do you keep coming here?”

“Great question!” Which he wasn’t planning to answer.

Atsushi rolled his eyes and made it through another few bites of hamburger and most of the sausage before he paused. “Why’d you order this meal?”

Shrugging, Dazai replied, “It sounded like you need some protein for the day ahead.”

“No, I mean, it’s different from what you ordered the last two times.”

“Hamburger is what I would order on the third day of being told I’m in a time loop,” Dazai explained, a little impatient. 

“Based on what? It’s not the third listing on the menu. Eel’s not the second.” Atsushi pulled over the discarded menu to confirm. “Do you…have everything on here ranked, or something?”

That made Dazai bark out a laugh. “I have been here a lot, but that seems convoluted.”

He could see Atsushi almost ask but then discard the question, visibly deciding not to pursue the line of inquiry any further. His expressions were so easy to read while he was eating.

Dazai ate the toast and the egg; Atsushi wolfed down the hamburger and sausage and salad. 

Atsushi was in the midst of politely stacking the plates when he broke the comfortable silence. “Did you mean it when you said you wouldn’t break a promise?” He was staring intently at the fork Dazai had used to eat the egg.

Dazai held his hands up where Atsushi could see them. No fingers crossed. “I’m at your disposal, Atsushi-kun. But please, have mercy on your poor mentor.”

Atsushi looked up and met his eyes. “I’m trying to decide if I should tell you the actual direction not to go or the opposite, in case you feel like being contrary.”

Dazai wiggled his fingers, delighted at this admission.

Atsushi just sighed. “If you absolutely have to leave, don’t go to the agency, and don’t go west, okay? Stay away from the whole area between here and the agency and the park where the crepe stand is.”

“Roger that,” Dazai said simply.

He could see Atsushi’s hand twitch, and then Atsushi reached out until just their pinkies were brushing together. Like he was about to ask Dazai to make a pinky promise with him.

“I’ll see you later,” Atsushi said again. A little tinged with desperation, like just by saying it he could make it true.

I appreciate the honesty, Dazai didn’t say. He didn’t deserve it, and he was sure Atsushi knew that. He waved as Atsushi finally headed towards the door. Once the shock of white hair and the curl of his too-long belt were out of sight, he made eye contact with the waitress once again and pointed at his coffee mug. She ignored him.

He sighed, debating how long he was actually willing to stay in here if he couldn’t get more coffee out of it.

Ah. 

Well.

There was always tomorrow.

Notes:

Surely it will work out this time.

The Tabetabe Diner was a diner on its last legs in a practically-abandoned strip of shops underneath another practically-abandoned strip of shops. On the street level, the stores sprouted brightly-colored flags and signs, declaring with their dying breaths that they were OPEN! OPEN! OPEN! CUSTOMERS WELCOME WELCOME WELCOME!! SALE SALE SALE SALE SALE SALE!!!

If one took the stairs to the sub-level storefronts, though? These businesses had given up. Very few customers made it down the obscured stairway to the little alley with its row of grimy doorways. Weak overhead lighting flickered down on morose shops and food stops that were slowly dying; many of the underground stores were already dead, permanently closed with their locked doorways sealed over with VACANCY and FOR RENT signs. 

The diner, clinging to life at the end of the alley, was neighbor to two such empty storefronts. It had a grand total of two employees. There was usually a smattering of customers—more than two, less than seven, not enough to be making the business much money but just enough the patrons could sit removed from one another and ignore each other comfortably. The employees opened it at a random time early each morning and closed when they felt like it in the evening. Doubtless they were hoping for the day nobody showed up so they could call the whole thing a wash, but somehow there always seemed to be at least one poor soul nursing a truly shitty coffee in a back corner.

Today this was Dazai.

Today this was Dazai.

Today this was Dazai.

There were plenty of late-night diners in Yokohama. They were great for lingering into the witching hours. He’d spent a lot of time in the mafia and still as a detective holed up in some quiet spot—usually a bar, to be honest, but the occasional diner, too. The Tabetabe Diner was his choice for when his lingering got so late it became early. If he hadn’t slept, and had been kicked out of whatever bar he’d been occupying, he’d wander by the alleyway and see if the Tabetabe was open. If it was, he’d slump inside to a table and order coffee, attempt to convince the waitress to add some kind of alcohol to it, be told again they didn’t even have any alcohol, and then sullenly remain at a table long enough to agitate her. Sure it was rude to take up the seat for so long over a measly few mugfuls of coffee, but it wasn’t like other patrons were queueing up for the space. So he ignored Mari’s glares and stayed until he could show up fashionably late for work.

On bad days he ordered food.

The Tabetabe had an extensive menu listing all kinds of foods, Japanese and Chinese and Western, but no real specialty. It was a classic hallmark of a bad restaurant: to have so many different menu items to potentially prepare, they had to be cutting corners with frozen or prepackaged food somewhere. Dazai assumed the wide variety was either an attempt to pull in as many customers as possible or some desperate effort for the chef to feel alive in his dying business. Whatever the case, none of it was very good. He’d once asked Mari what she’d recommend and had been dryly answered with the most expensive thing on the menu. 

He’d just ordered coffee.

Today, though…today was bad. Not as bad as a few days ago, but definitely still a dark spot in a string of several of them in a row. Dazai had stared into the depths of his mug for a while before flagging the waitress down and requesting a curry set. As usual, Mari huffed and clicked her tongue at his very reasonable request to order food in a diner, and trudged off to put his order in while he made faces at her retreating back. He quit a split second before the cook stuck his head out of the back and made eye contact with him, smiling brightly instead.

As he’d suspected, the curry took a suspiciously short amount of time to arrive. Dazai graced Mari with another smile when she set it in front of him. For some reason, she went pale and walked away instead of smiling back. Dazai ignored that and turned his attention to the food he’d been presented with.

The curry was steaming hot—potentially from a microwave—and had been plated, at least, with relative care. He took a moment to admire, in a detached kind of way, the line between the rice on one side of the plate and the thick golden-brown sauce with its meat and vegetable chunks on the other. It looked picture perfect.

The taste, on the other hand.

…it wasn’t bad, per se. Dazai suspected the chef was former Navy staff based on the Yokosuka style of the curry. Probably when he’d first made this batch it had been a nice meal. Most likely portions had then been divvied up, frozen for a time, and this particular one had been reheated for him in the course of a few minutes. When Dazai took a bite, the illusion fell apart as he chewed through oddly textured veggies and lumps of chicken that even the sauce couldn’t save from being dried out. The sauce itself was well-seasoned, but was already congealing in an unfortunate way.

At least the rice was fresh. Dazai allowed himself one bite of it before he started stirring everything on the plate together like a bored toddler. There was no point in not playing with his food, no point in pretending to enjoy the act of eating, when he was tucked away in the most remote back corner booth of this hidden-away diner, once again eating curry he didn’t like. Ending up in the Tabetabe was already a bad sign for the start of his day. The rest of the day would no doubt be a sludge of unpleasantness, also. But if he could just finish the plate—

Ugh. He didn’t want to, though. Still, he kept picking at it.

And picking at it.

And pushing the last pieces of meat around in the sauce.

And seeing how much of a mush he could make out of the soggy vegetables by grinding them into the plate. 

At one point an unusually firm carrot piece slipped out from under his spoon and skidded off the plate and onto the other side of the table. Dazai eyed it for a moment, then felt bad and signalled the waitress for a glass of water. And more coffee.

When she brought it over, a solid quarter of an hour later, he sent her off with the remains of the curry and a new order for something that would hopefully be more appetizing. He dipped his napkin into the water and used it to haphazardly wipe down the table. He may have also unobtrusively flicked the remains of the vegetable under the table for someone else to clean up later.

He was humming to himself and fiddling with the shredded remains of his napkin when someone slumped into the seat across from him and put his head down on the tabletop.

“Hey, Dazai-san.” Atsushi’s greeting came out as a kind of mutter-sigh. Dazai, unsure what to make of this entrance, stared at the spill of his silver hair with a handful of damp paper napkin strips twisted through his fingers.

“...want some coffee, Atsushi-kun? You look like you could use the caffeine.”

One of Atsushi’s hands crept over the edge of the table to gesture for the mug, but he didn’t raise his head. Not even when Dazai pushed the mug across the table and into his grasp. He just sat there, head down, with his hand holding onto the warmth of the cup like it was a lifeline.

“Rough start to the day?” Dazai asked. “Must be, if you ended up here. No one is ever happy to spend their morning at the Tabetabe Diner, Atsushi-kun. It’s a terrible place.”

“It is,” Atsushi agreed. Didn’t say anything else.

Dazai paused, trying to figure out what to do with this unusually downtrodden version of his protege. “Anything I can do to help? I’ve just ordered some food, if that will make you feel better.”

“The terrible curry?” Atsushi’s head shifted enough to look at Dazai, although his cheek remained pressed against the tabletop. Now that Dazai could finally see his eyes he was struck by the thought that they should have the bruising purple of tired bags under them to match the energy (or lack of it) that Atsushi was giving off. They didn’t, though. Violet-gold stared back at him unchanged.

“You missed the curry earlier,” Dazai said. “I ended up ordering something else to make up for it.”

Those eyes narrowed slightly. “That,” Atsushi said. He sat up. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Atsushi-kun is so polite. You know, if you don’t like the food, you can always send it back to the kitchen and get something else. It’s a restaurant, eating food is the point.”

Atsushi’s head tilted in that way that made Dazai want to grab at his hair. “I guess? If you say so, Dazai-san. What did you order?”

“It’s late enough to order off their lunch menu, so I’m trying something new! Speaking of being late,” he pointed, full of faux indignation—j’accuse! “Shouldn’t you be at work?”

Instead of getting the expected retort of shouldn’t you? Dazai was faced with the way Atsushi’s expression crumpled. 

“I really don’t want to go to the agency, Dazai-san.” He said it like he was confiding some horrible secret. Dazai, who had been aiming to cheer him up with some light banter, was left mentally scrambling for how to redirect this conversation into safer waters.

He was saved by Mari, bless her timing for once, arriving with his food.

The waitress set the tray down on the table, took one look at Atsushi’s despondent face, and then hurried off only to return moments later with a fresh glass of water. Dazai was a little insulted actually—he hadn’t known Mari could hurry. 

“Let me know if you need anything else,” she said. To Atsushi.

Atsushi gave her that smile that made clients and little old ladies and apparently terrible waitstaff melt. It was a little more wobbly at the corners of the mouth than usual, but the effort had Mari almost cooing at him. Dazai had a slight urge to coo over him, but his annoyance with the waitress overrode it. Thankfully. He did not need to start fussing over Atsushi now of all times, in the Tabetabe of all places.

When Mari walked away, they both examined the food. Once again, the diner had served up what looked like a very nice meal. Maybe the chef should go into food styling for commercials instead of cooking? The main plate had a breaded chicken thigh, cut into strips and glistening with some kind of sauce that the menu had billed as ‘Cantonese style.’ Dazai wasn’t sure what that meant in this context, but it looked like teriyaki to him. The other dishes had the usual white rice, miso, and pickles, plus one more with sauteed veggies. 

Wary of the vegetables after the curry earlier, Dazai snagged the bowl of miso and passed the provided chopsticks over to Atsushi. It took him a few seconds to take them, but he did use them to pick up one of the strips of chicken and take a tentative bite. 

He made a face.

“Uh oh,” Dazai said.

Atsushi passed the chopsticks back. Dazai bit off a piece from the one of the other strips and couldn’t quite suppress a wince. He’d been right about it being some kind of teriyaki, maybe, but mostly it was an insult to Cantonese cooking. He plunged the chicken into the bowl of rice and tried another bite with the grains sticking to the sauce when he pulled it back out. The rice did mitigate the unfortunate sauce a bit; he passed the chopsticks back to Atsushi and watched him follow Dazai’s example and eat the rice and chicken together. Dazai stuck to the soup.

“Why’d you order this one?” Atsushi asked between bites. Still quieter than usual. Eating less voraciously than usual, too.

“I’ve never gotten this dish before,” said Dazai. “Not planning to get it again in the future, but maybe eventually I’ll have tried everything on the menu and found something decent.”

Atsushi paused eating. “No, I mean, why did you choose this particular dish? Why choose it this morning and not something else?”

Dazai also paused, not sure what to say. 

Atsushi was staring at him again. “Are you…?” he trailed off. 

“Hm?”

“Never mind.”

Atsushi resumed taking glum little bites of chicken. Dazai watched him for a moment and went back to his soup. 

They very slowly made their way through the meal. Out of the blue and in the middle of chewing a piece of broccoli Atsushi started talking again, and this time he asked apropos of nothing, “Do you know any reason that Hirahara would be at the park near Chinatown?”

This was a completely unexpected direction. Dazai had to recalibrate before he answered. “Hirahara as in the gambler I’ve been tailing this past month? And the big park east of here? No. If anything I’d expect him to steer clear of that whole area. A bit close to Port Mafia territory for someone who owes that much money.”

Atsushi had a distant look on his face. “That’s what I thought, too. I guess depending on his route, he might pass pretty close to here heading towards the agency from where he lives, but there’s no reason for him to head east. Unless the timing was just right when you left and he happened to see—” He stopped, shook his head. “Dazai-san, I have to tell you something.”

“Is it about how you know about my erstwhile gambler in the first place?” Dazai asked, intrigued. 

“I’m in a time loop,” Atsushi said matter-of-factly. He stopped there.

“Are you joking or are you being serious?” Dazai asked when no further information was provided.

“I’m very serious. And I’m very tired.”

“Huh. If you’re experiencing a time loop then sure, I bet it’s very tiring. How long have you been in the loop, Atsushi-kun?”

“About a week,” Atsushi said. “I keep coming to find you to ask about Hirahara, but I can’t remember what we’ve discussed about him before.”

Dazai blinked at him. Atsushi stared back. He had a strange, almost challenging look in his eyes. “Alright. Did you want to compare notes on him again, then?”

“No, not really.”

There was another stilted silence. Dazai cleared his throat. “Maybe you should take a break, hm? Take a loop off and rest. You really do seem tired.” Atsushi was already shaking his head before he could finish the sentence.

“He’s going to attack the agency soon,” he explained. “Even knowing it won’t be permanent, I can’t just sit around while he hurts our friends.”

“I could come and—”

Atsushi practically threw the chopsticks down on the table. “No! Why won’t you—” He buried his face in his hands and took a deep breath like he was trying to stop himself from screaming. 

Dazai was completely out of his depth here.

“You shouldn’t go anywhere near the agency, Dazai-san,” Atsushi said eventually. “I can handle this myself.”

Dazai frowned. “You know, it kind of sounds like you’re asking me to sit around while he hurts them.”

Atsushi let out a hollow laugh. “I guess I am. And I know it’s hypocritical, but, it’s just—” He dropped his hands and leaned forward, all desperate and earnest, a combination that made him look soft and sad and too much like Dazai should reach out and hold onto him. “If you go to the agency, Hirahara will kill you. Isn’t it enough to want to help them, but let me take care of it just this once?”

Dazai had to chew on this for a minute. Atsushi waited, impatient judging by the way he shifted in his seat, but he didn’t interrupt his thoughts. “Atsushi-kun is asking me to do something very unimpressive. Uncool, even,” he replied once it looked like his seatmate was about to combust. “Cowardly, I could say.” 

“Since when are you so determined to be at the frontline of a battle? Shouldn’t you be jumping at the chance to shove your work off on me, like usual?”

More serious, Dazai met his gaze steadily. “What kind of person do you take me for?”

He was half-hoping and half-dreading that Atsushi would actually answer the question. He hadn’t realized until that moment, but he thought the answer would be, maybe, more accurate about the person he’d become in the last few years than he’d let himself consider. He thought Atsushi would probably be very kind about it. 

He had a sudden strong and unfortunate urge to be sitting together with Atsushi somewhere else other than this shitty diner.

But Atsushi just clenched his hands into fists and looked away. “You did look awfully pleased with yourself, that first time,” he admitted. “When you—I was holding you when you—”

“I’m sorry about that, if it’s worth anything,” Dazai offered. Then, unable to stand it: “I suppose if a double suicide with a beautiful lady isn’t an option, a heroic sacrifice in the name of protecting one’s friends is acceptable.”

Atsushi stood up so quickly he banged into the table and caused the plates to clatter.

Dazai thought he was going to scream for a minute, but the words when they came were nothing more than a harsh whisper of, “Not to me,” as Atsushi swept out of the diner.

Once the shock of white hair and the curl of his too-long belt were out of sight, Dazai avoided making eye contact with the waitress and considered the half-eaten food still in front of him.

Atsushi hadn’t made him promise to stay here.

He dropped some coins onto the table and made his own way back out into the alley, skirting Mari’s disapproving gaze the whole time.

He headed southeast, towards the docks.

The industrial piers ran mostly parallel to the shoreline, but some had arms that jutted out into the harbor. These had the best views, if one didn’t mind the multitude of warehouses and cargo containers around. By necessity for the large ships coming through, the piers had to be built where the water was fairly deep.

Dazai ignored the industrial sprawl, and the glimmer of the horizon ahead, and instead contemplated the water below his feet.

It was a little embarrassing, he thought, that even knowing that time as it stood right now was even more fleeting than usual—he couldn’t quite commit to it. He was thinking about Atsushi and his time loop, and an eventual point where someone hit play and the movie continued on and Dazai wasn’t there for the end credits. 

If Atsushi would even let such a movie exist.

He smiled, fond, as he stepped forward.

Ah.

Well.

There was always tomorrow.

Notes:

Surely this time it will work out?

The Tabetabe Diner was a diner on its last legs in a practically-abandoned strip of shops underneath another practically-abandoned strip of shops. On the street level, the stores sprouted brightly-colored flags and signs, declaring with their dying breaths that they were OPEN! OPEN! OPEN! CUSTOMERS WELCOME WELCOME WELCOME!! SALE SALE SALE SALE SALE SALE SALE SALE SALE!!!

If one took the stairs to the sub-level storefronts, though? These businesses had given up. Very few customers made it down the obscured stairway to the little alley with its row of grimy doorways. Weak overhead lighting flickered down on morose shops and food stops that were slowly dying; many of the underground stores were already dead, permanently closed with their locked doorways sealed over with VACANCY and FOR RENT signs. 

The diner, clinging to life at the end of the alley, was neighbor to two such empty storefronts. It had a grand total of two employees. There was usually a smattering of customers—more than two, less than seven, not enough to be making the business much money but just enough the patrons could sit removed from one another and ignore each other comfortably. The employees opened it at a random time early each morning and closed when they felt like it in the evening. Doubtless they were hoping for the day nobody showed up so they could call the whole thing a wash, but somehow there always seemed to be at least one poor soul nursing a truly shitty coffee in a back corner.

Today this was Dazai.

Today this was Dazai.

Today this was Dazai.

Today this was Dazai.

There were plenty of late-night diners in Yokohama. They were great for lingering into the witching hours. He’d spent a lot of time in the mafia and still as a detective holed up in some quiet spot—usually a bar, to be honest, but the occasional diner, too. The Tabetabe Diner was his choice for when his lingering got so late it became early. If he hadn’t slept, and had been kicked out of whatever bar he’d been occupying, he’d wander by the alleyway and see if the Tabetabe was open. If it was, he’d slump inside to a table and order coffee, attempt to convince the waitress to add some kind of alcohol to it, be told again they didn’t even have any alcohol, and then sullenly remain at a table long enough to agitate her. Sure it was rude to take up the seat for so long over a measly few mugfuls of coffee, but it wasn’t like other patrons were queueing up for the space. So he ignored Mari’s glares and stayed until he could show up fashionably late for work.

But Dazai was getting sick of this fucking diner.

He’d been here for way too long.

He’d half-finished his curry breakfast, sat around drinking coffee, and then decided to torture himself by getting one of the Tabetabe’s pizzas. He’d never ordered one before because they looked bad, even in the menu picture. Mari had seemed like she wanted to ask if he was sure about his choice when he ordered it. But she trudged away as usual and put the order in, leaving Dazai to his fate.

Dazai was still sitting there staring at nothing across the table when the pizza was delivered to him. Mari also brought him a glass of water, unprompted, which was not promising. He examined the dish as she left. The chef’s usual misleadingly nice plating was abandoned, and he was confronted with a misshapen circle of unfortunate cheesiness.

At least, he thought it was cheese.

It was a small pizza, at least. Plate-sized and divided into four slices. Surely he could manage at least one of them, just to say he’d tried the damn thing.

Surely.

He just needed to pick it up.

He was so intent on staring down his meal, uncertain of how this attempt was going to go, that it took him a few seconds to register that someone had quietly slipped into the seat across from him. 

When he looked over, Atsushi was looking back at him. And he was crying.

Flummoxed, Dazai watched silent tears roll down over pale cheeks. Atsushi’s face wasn’t reddened or crumpled the way it usually was when he cried. He looked more like a carved statue, raindrops rolling over the marble. Untouchable. One stray tear’s path curved and ended up at the corner of Atsushi’s mouth, sitting there as a little glistening bead of water. Dazai laced his fingers together under the table to prevent himself reaching out and wiping it away.

Atsushi didn’t say anything.

Dazai watched him cry for a minute in silence and found himself growing more and more agitated. “Atsushi-kun,” he said at last, a little distastefully. “Didn’t I tell you not to pity yourself?” The crying was beginning to feel like blatant emotional manipulation. The problem being that it was kind of working, and he was starting to feel bad.

Atsushi blinked a few times, sending a last wave of tears down his face before he finally moved to wipe them away. “You did. Sorry, Dazai-san.”

“Don’t apologize to me,” he said, uncomfortable. He’d been expecting more pushback. 

Instead, Atsushi looked away from him and at the pizza. “This looks really bad,” he said. His voice cracked a little on the word really. Still, he reached out and took a slice. When he looked up at Dazai again, uncertain, Dazai also picked up a piece. They both took a bite at the same time.

“Oh, absolutely not,” Dazai exclaimed, flinging it back down onto the plate. It was some of the most unreasonably bad food he’d ever had, which was saying something considering his teenage kitchen experiments. Squishy vegetables were hidden under half-congealed cheese and uneven gloops of mayonnaise, all on top of a crust indistinguishable from cardboard.

“It’s pretty terrible,” agreed Atsushi. But he kept taking mechanical bites until he’d finished the slice. Dazai watched in horrified fascination when he picked up Dazai’s discarded piece and started on that. “You got pizza this time,” Atsushi continued halfway through. “I still don’t get it. Is it a math thing?”

Dazai snorted. “Is what a math thing?” He smiled when his tiger shot him a wary look. Atsushi didn’t clarify his question.

He was distracted for a while by the horrifying pizza consumption, but he could only hold in his own questions for so long. Starting with, “Are you going to answer that?”

Atsushi’s phone had been buzzing almost non-stop for a few minutes now.

“It’s just Kunikida-san,” Atsushi dismissed without even checking. He didn’t elaborate.

“Oooookay. And are you feeling any better? You know you don’t have to keep eating that. If you don’t like the food, you can always send it back to the kitchen and get something else.”

“No. It’s fine.”

“Right, right, sure. And, hm.” He considered how he wanted to phrase his next question. Atsushi was staring off into the middle distance with an absent expression and just. Eating. Well, maybe better to be blunt, then. “Are you aware you have blood under your fingernails?”

This did get a reaction. Atsushi’s gaze sharpened and flickered to his nails, then back to Dazai’s face. “...he’s not dead,” he said.

“Who’s not dead?” He watched as Atsushi’s face started to scrunch up and turn pink. “Don’t cry. Just tell me what’s going on with you!”

“’S a time loop,” muttered Atsushi. He clenched his eyes shut, obeying the direction even while Dazai felt bad about giving it. “I attacked a man this morning, but he’s not dead.”

Dazai stared at him. “Time loop. Okay. And being in a time loop has somehow led you to attack someone. Which I assume is why Kunikida-kun is trying so desperately to get a hold of you.”

Atsushi merely shrugged.

This was getting frustrating. Dazai tapped his fingers on the table impatiently, which only made Atsushi take another bite of pizza.

But then he caved in the face of his mentor’s obvious agitation. “What do you want to know?” he asked. 

“How long have you been in a time loop?” The questions flew out of his mouth. “And how many times have you told me about it? What time is it resetting to, and where are you when it starts? Does it end when something happens or at a particular time? Do you know what’s actually causing the loop? More details about what you’ve done about Hirahara so far would be helpful.” 

Atsushi’s rote chewing slowed. He was thinking. He swallowed and answered—for a given sense of the word answered, at least—“I guess it would be confusing, from your point of view, being in a time loop. Because you can only know what I tell you?” The last bit had the slightest intonation of a question. Annoying, considering he hadn’t answered any of Dazai’s.

Feeling like he’d misstepped somewhere and with his anxiety about it only ratcheting up as each minute passed, Dazai motioned for Atsushi to hand over his phone when it started buzzing again. He did so with great reluctance.

“Kunikida-kun!” Dazai crooned into the receiver as he answered. “How lovely to hear your voice!”

“What the hell—where are you? Is Atsushi with you? And why don’t you have your damn phone on you, I’ve been trying to get ahold of you!” 

“I didn’t really feel like talking to anyone today so I abandoned my phone!” Dazai said cheerfully. “Atsushi-kun and I are on a super-secret and exclusive date right now so he’s not available to talk. Can I take a message?”

“You—he can’t—!” Kunikida’s stilted raging was even more choppy than usual. He was really upset about something. “He attacked a civilian, Dazai. This is serious! I just need him to come talk to us.” He paused for an answer, but nobody was getting any of those today. “I know he wouldn’t do something like that for no reason but the agency needs information in order to protect him.”

“I have it handled,” was all Dazai said. He went to hang up, thought better of it, and repeated, “It’s good to hear your voice, Kunikida-kun. Bye-bye!”

He hung up and turned off Atsushi’s phone, slipping it into his pocket. 

“That’s taken care of for now,” he hummed. “Now. About your time loop situation.”

Atsushi’s dejected air had started to turn a little…sullen. Dazai got the feeling he was channeling the tiger as he ate, although there was no real outward sign of it. It was just that his eyes on Dazai felt a little more intense. His teeth were maybe a little bit sharper as he tore off bites.

Hm. Definitely miscalculated somewhere.

“You’re not going to tell me anything else about it, are you?” Dazai asked.

Atsushi slowly shook his head. “You drowned, in the last one,” he said. “Hirahara had nothing to do with it.” Nothing else was forthcoming.

Dazai sat and pondered the idea of time loops while Atsushi finished his pizza.

Dazai was someone who would languish in a doomed time loop, he thought, if he could get something out of it. Even to the point where he was just wasting the fake time away. He’d long thought through every possibility, every slight deviation that could have changed what happened to Oda. If he’d had a way to reverse time back then…Ah, then again, thinking through the same days over and over like that was kind of like its own doomed loop.

On the other hand, he’d always admired Atsushi as someone who moved forward. Someone who gently pulled others forward with him, like he had with Kyouka.

It would be a shame to keep letting Atsushi waste his time. And time and time and time.

Atsushi was wiping his fingers with a napkin and picking at the dried blood under his nails when Dazai refocused on him.

“I think…Hirahara isn’t who I have to beat, to fix this,” Atsushi was saying. A little distant, like he was thinking out loud. Suddenly he reached out and grabbed Dazai’s hand in a tight grip. Startled, Dazai let him. “Will you wait here until I get back? I have to go check something.”

“Something about the loop?”

Atsushi nodded.

“Well, you know—”

“Whims, yeah, sure.”

“...sure. But I think it will depend entirely on how much trouble you’re in.”

Atsushi let out a little huff. “Just wait here for me, Dazai-san. I’ll be back.” He stood up and let go of Dazai’s hand. And he left.

Once the shock of white hair and the curl of his too-long belt were out of sight, Dazai avoided making eye contact with the waitress and considered the empty plate in front of him. It amazed him, what Atsushi was willing to consume.

He sighed, debating how long he was actually willing to wait when there was an easy solution for getting Atsushi out of trouble just waiting for him outside. Not very long, he decided, and stood up.

Ah. 

Well.

There was always tomorrow.

Notes:

Surely...

The Tabetabe Diner was a diner on its last legs in a practically-abandoned strip of shops underneath another practically-abandoned strip of shops, et cetera et cetera, Dazai didn’t feel like doing all this again.

He was only a few bites into his curry when there was a flurry of motion across from him. His table was suddenly occupied by a second unlikely customer, and this person looked kind of pissed at him.

“Atsushi-kun,” Dazai greeted him cautiously. “First of all can I just point out that it seems a little early in the morning to be upset with me.”

“I’m not upset,” said Atsushi. Dazai blanched.

“If you say so. I’m glad! Would you like some curry?”

“Not really. It doesn’t look very good.”

Dazai would protest that the curry looked just fine. The taste was the thing that was lacking. He got the feeling that this barely-restrained version of Atsushi wouldn’t appreciate the distinction. “I guess not,” he said.

Atsushi smiled. “But hey, it’s a restaurant, right? If we don’t like it, we can always send it back to the kitchen and get something else.”

“That’s true!” Dazai admitted. He cleared his throat nervously. “What would you like instead?”

Atsushi pushed the discarded menu over to Dazai’s side of the table with two fingers. “You choose,” he said.

Dazai signalled for the waitress; Atsushi’s ominous aura lightened conspicuously when she came over to take their order. 

“The karaage set with radish, please.” Dazai watched for Atsushi’s reaction out of the corner of his eye but got nothing more than a slight twitch. After Mari walked away with the discarded curry, he asked, “Atsushi-kun likes karaage, right? Maybe some nice fried chicken will settle these nerves you seem to be having.”

“Nerves, sure. Is that how you’re choosing? Based on how stressed out I look?”

Dazai couldn’t think of a way to answer that didn’t feel like walking into a trap. He tried anyway. “The last thing I want is for you to feel stressed out. Is it anything I can help with?”

Atsushi leaned back in his seat. Gold-violet eyes pinned Dazai in place. “I’m having a time loop problem,” he said. He continued before Dazai could ask any followup questions. “I’ve been doing this loop for a while now but I can’t seem to get it to go how I want it to. And I’ve been coming to you for help.”

“Have you?”

Atsushi amended, “I’ve been coming to you for advice. It just seems like none of your advice has been working.”

“Careful,” Dazai said. “That sounded a little rude.” The admonishment came out very half-heartedly. He was too fascinated by the way Atsushi was starting to look a little wild behind the eyes.

“And another thing!” No acknowledgement or flustered apology over the rudeness. “I was thinking about phones, in the last loop.”

“Phones?”

“Phones,” Atsushi repeated. “I am one hundred percent, dead positive that you had your phone with you the first time.”

Dazai sucked in a breath. “The first loop, you mean?”

Gesturing impatiently, Atsushi clarified, “Before the loops started. The first time. You died, and I was holding your body, and your phone was in your pocket. I remember—I remember every—every, awful, stupid detail. It was digging into my ribs, the way your coat kind of scrunched up when you fell and I caught you.”

“You sure it was a phone?”

Now Atsushi was tugging at his own hair, frustration boiling over. “It was the pocket you always keep your phone in. It was the right size. It had to have been your phone. Dazai-san. Do you have your phone on you right now?”

“...No,” he was forced to admit. “I didn’t really feel like talking to anyone today, so I left it elsewhere.”

Atsushi made a strangled noise and yanked even harder. “Are you—are you not concerned at all? About dying? About the loops?”

“I’m concerned about you,” Dazai told him, leaning forward. “Dying, not so much. The loops? Eh, kind of. If I were Atsushi-kun, I’d spend less energy in a time loop on impossible tasks and his suicidal mentor and more on getting away with shit.”

Atsushi just gaped at him. “Getting away with shit,” he repeated blankly.

Dazai spread his hands wide to indicate the vast possibilities going untapped. “Sure! If you’re in a time loop, and you know it’s going to reset and no one will remember and there’ll be no consequences, why not do something crazy? Rob a bank and spend a bunch of money on fancy clothing. Break into a zoo enclosure and pet an exotic animal. Steal a yacht, maybe.”

“Those are all crimes!”

“With no consequences in a time loop!” Dazai reminded him cheerfully. “Isn’t there anything you want to do while you have the chance for a clean getaway?”

Atsushi slammed his hands down on the table. His face was turning red like he’d been yelling. Between one breath and the next he’d gotten up out of his seat and climbed over the top of the table to deposit himself in Dazai’s lap, where he proceeded to smash their lips together in a desperate kiss. 

Dazai hadn’t been expecting that at all. His brain scrambled to connect all the different sensations: Atsushi’s teeth accidentally scraping across his top lip—hands clutching at his shoulders—warm, solid thighs bracketing his own—the way his whole form was trembling ever-so-slightly—

Atsushi pulled back, and Dazai finally reacted. Without conscious thought, his hands came up and grabbed onto Atsushi’s waist. “Hold on, hold on,” he said. His body was catching up and leaning into Atsushi’s space; Atsushi bent with him pliantly until his back was pressed to the edge of the table and Dazai had him pinned. “Hold on, you might be onto something here, Atsushi-kun. Maybe this time loop thing is a true love’s kiss type situation. Maybe we should make sure.” He leaned in and delighted in the exasperated warm breath that Atsushi sighed out before he pressed their lips together again.

Kissing Atsushi was—ah, he couldn’t lie here. He’d thought about it before. There had always been plenty of good reasons to resist the urge, although he couldn’t remember them right at this moment. Atsushi was warm and soft and responded beautifully under Dazai’s hands and mouth, shifting exactly how Dazai wanted him to at the slightest touch. It felt like they’d kissed before, it felt like they’d been kissing forever, it felt like this was the very first time he’d ever been allowed to touch a human being.

His Atsushi was so smart. This was the perfect thing to do in a time loop.

They parted enough to breathe. Atsushi’s hands came up to cradle his face. Galatea, uncontent to be stone, reaching out to touch. He was pressing small, brief kisses to Dazai’s Cupid’s bow even as he gasped for air. Dazai was struck with that nearly-dizzying wave of fondness—shit, the word wasn’t fondness it was—

Atsushi’s grip on his face tightened. He was still panting, but he stopped leaning in and instead breathed a question into the space between them. “What would Dazai-san do if he were in a time loop?” 

Dazai almost choked on the answer. Atsushi showed no mercy.

He couldn’t lie. Instead he said, “I think you already know the answer to that.”

Atsushi made a pained noise. His hands spasmed and released, wrenching away. Dazai moved his head and pressed his cheek into one before he could get too far, desperate for it.

“Atsushi-kun—”

There was an extremely pointed thud as a box was dropped onto the table. “I’ve brought your takeout order,” Mari said loudly. “Thank you for your patronage.”

Atsushi scrambled out of Dazai’s lap and out of the booth. Within seconds he was bowing to the waitress with what was, in Dazai’s opinion, way too much remorse. 

“I am so, so sorry, Mari-san. We’ll take this and get out of your way,” he told her.

Dazai frowned. “We didn’t even order this as takeout.”

Both Atsushi and Mari ignored him.

“I—I swear I know better than to behave that way,” Atsushi continued to babble, bowing again. “It’s just that he’s driving me crazy and I let that interfere with my better judgement.”

Even in such a situation, Atsushi’s natural charm saved him because Mari softened. She shot a glance at Dazai and told Atsushi quietly, “Just don’t do that again, alright? He’s not worth the fuss.”

“I’m going to do it again,” Atsushi said, sounding abjectly miserable about it. “Ah! But not here! I’m so sorry, again, so sorry!” With one last low bow, he grabbed the box of food and high-tailed it out of the diner.

Once the shock of white hair and the curl of his too-long belt were out of sight, Dazai made eye contact with Mari and smiled. She grimaced and scowled at him as he made his way leisurely out of the booth and out the door.

Outside, a red-faced Atsushi was waiting for him just at the top of the alleyway staircase back to the main road. 

“Shall we find a place to eat?” Dazai asked. 

“If you suggest that park, or the docks, I’ll kill you,” was all Atsushi said through gritted teeth. Still, he trotted docilely after him as Dazai led the way to a different park to the south of the diner.

They ate fried chicken and shredded radish together on a secluded park bench off the main path. The park was full of tulips in full bloom, in all kinds of colors. Mari had packed only one pair of chopsticks into the takeout container but Atsushi seemed content to use his hands. Dazai watched him lick his fingers clean out of the corner of his eye. He was a little jealous of those fingers.

Between the lovely scenery and his lovely companion, the excursion might have made for a nice date. 

So of course that was when Hirahara found them. 

Ah. 

Well.

There was always tomorrow.

Notes:

Fuck!

Inside the Tabetabe Diner, Dazai drank his coffee and managed a few dutiful bites of the obligatory curry. He lingered there far later than he usually did—well past the time he would usually suck it up and put in an appearance at the agency. Mari’s scowls and pointed lack of a refill became more and more obvious as time passed. 

This sucked. More than usual, even. Truly the Tabetabe was a terrible place.

Dazai toughed it out for another half hour before deciding trying to order another meal wasn’t worth it. He dropped some coins onto the table and made his way towards the door, ignoring Mari right back the whole time. He was a few steps away from exit when it occurred to him that he could have just stiffed her on the bill. Ah. Well. Next time, then.

He exited the diner, considering where to head next, only to come to an abrupt halt.

Outside, a stone-faced Atsushi was waiting for him just at the top of the alleyway staircase back to the main road.

Dazai looked up at him from the bottom of the stairs. Atsushi was limned from behind by a halo of afternoon sunlight that made it hard to see his expression. Dazai squinted and was about to speak when he heard Atsushi say, barely audible, “Please don’t leave.”

What was he supposed to do with that?

Still squinting, he shot a glance at Atsushi’s hand gripping tightly onto the railing. Atsushi caught him looking and said a little louder, a little defensively, “I’ve been here all morning.”

“Waiting on me?” Dazai asked. “You shouldn’t have.”

Atsushi’s hand let go of the railing; he practically leapt down the stairs and came to a stumbling stop in front of Dazai. Both hands came up to grip at the lapels of Dazai’s coat, instead.

“Can’t you just stay here?” Atsushi asked.

Dazai considered him. Bright-eyed and slightly wild-looking, as always. “Certainly not by myself,” he conceded. Atsushi’s shoulders sagged and he let go to follow Dazai back into the diner.

It was a little awkward. Atsushi was dogging his footsteps at uncomfortably close range—not that Dazai was complaining about the closeness. More about the implied expectation that Dazai might make a break for it. They went right back to the booth that Dazai had just vacated, where Atsushi hesitated like he was about to climb over him and into the seat next to him before he gave up and slid into the one across the table. 

They stared at each other for a moment before Mari made an unusually fast appearance. “I just cleaned this table,” she said.

“That’s great!” Dazai smiled up at her. He was aiming for his Charming smile, but he must have ended up somewhere closer to Threatening because she went pale and turned to Atsushi instead.

“Could we have a pot of tea, please?” Atsushi requested. Mari nodded and left in a hurry.

Atsushi’s eyes hadn’t left Dazai’s face the whole time. He continued to stare, and Dazai graciously allowed it since he recognized this as Atsushi’s thinking of what to say expression. A little more intense than usual, maybe, but a good excuse to stare right back. Violet and gold, the curve of his cheek, the grim set to his lips. The little divot at the corner of his lips. The pale pink color of his lips. Ah, fuck.

Thankfully, tea arrived.

Mari provided a trivet, a pot, and two cups. When she hustled away again, Atsushi finally looked away as he moved to pour for both of them. From the determined way he pushed Dazai’s cup over to him, Dazai assumed he’d figured out what tack he wanted to take and he took a bracing sip to prepare for it.

The tea was surprisingly nice. The nicest thing he’d ever had in the Tabetabe.

“What do you think about fate?” Atsushi asked. He was holding his cup in both hands and contemplating the liquid inside with a frown on his face.

This was not what Dazai had expected him to start with. “Why do you ask?” he pressed. 

Atsushi frowned when Dazai didn’t immediately launch into an answer—he could be such a stubborn guy when it came to expecting things of Dazai!—and he twisted the teacup in two sharp, semicircle clockwise bursts before elaborating. “Fate is like, a predetermined result, right? Something that’s going to happen, no matter what. What do you think about it, as like a thing that exists or not? And you have to be honest.”

Amused, Dazai turned his own cup twice counterclockwise. “I think real life is a little more complicated than something like ‘fate.’ It’s a convenient term, though.” Atsushi opened his mouth; Dazai cut him off and continued. “I don’t believe in it, necessarily, but there are…patterns. Like a river running a course, a groove in a stone. An easy path to follow. The arc of a story, maybe.”

This was interesting. He’d never had a metaphysical discussion with his protege before. Atsushi was looking at him like he’d said something profoundly stupid, though.

“A story based on what? Told by who? My whole—my whole life—” He was getting flustered. “—there was always, there was an expectation, laid out, something like a ‘fate,’ right? Everyone expected it to go a certain way, the orphanage director and the others and even me, and it would have made sense if I’d just. Died on the street. But it changed. You changed it. And wasn’t that a choice? Isn’t all of it?” 

There was a kernel of a good argument in there, although poorly conveyed. Dazai smiled. “Sure. But sometimes even making a ‘good’ choice doesn’t get the happy ending. There are sad stories out there, too, that we choose. The choice is important, isn’t it? A graceful bow out! The culmination of a redemption arc, you know. A justified, heroic death.”

Atsushi took his hands off the cup entirely. His face was turning red as he got more frustrated. “You keep not listening to me! You’re making, stupid—comments, in your head, and you’re not SAYING anything. You keep making this a story. So fucking serious, a tragedy. But you’re not a character, you’re a person. You’re my favorite person in the world.”

Okay. That was…a nerve, struck.

Dazai let go of his own cup. “Fine. I’ll say something. What person? It makes more sense to describe myself as a character when it’s—” He shook his head. “It’s masks all the way down, Atsushi-kun.”

“It’s functionally the same thing!” Atsushi insisted. Dazai’s heart jolted in his chest. Because of the way Atsushi was raising his voice, and not any other reason. “I don’t understand the focus on what you are. What’s the difference between—” and here he was losing the thread of his own argument — “being and doing. They’re the same, aren’t they? Being good and being good? You’re a good person already, because you’re doing good, and what you are doesn’t matter if you’re being.”

“...I’m not sure if that makes sense,” Dazai said, because it was kind of making sense and he didn’t like it.

“I am trying,” Atsushi told him, “really hard.” He kept gesturing for emphasis and curling his fingers, in and out. Little tiger claws.

“Someone like you couldn’t understand—” Dazai started to argue.

“Do you realize I can tell when you’re bleeding?” interrupted Atsushi. He barreled on with a defiant look in his eyes. “Like when you come into the office and you have it under the bandages I can still tell, because I can smell it. And I don’t know what to say about it. Yosano-sensei has offered three different times to put me on anti-psychotic medications and I think it means she wants to insist but I don’t like thinking about my own stupid brain. Also, I like how your spit tastes.”

Okay. Atsushi had him there—he had no idea what to say to that.

“You think you know everything about me and what kind of person I am, but you don’t,” Atsushi fumed. “And I just want to talk this through with you, but you won’t say anything except what you’ve said before—”

“It’s a little late,” Dazai cut in, “to be so upset with me.” He thought for a second that Atsushi would leap across the table and strangle him. He kept going, aware that his tone was getting more hostile and unable to help himself. “If Atsushi-kun wants to have a conversation, I’ve been sitting right here the whole day.”

Atsushi slammed a hand down. “The first time you didn’t,” he ground out. 

Dazai leaned forward. Looked him in the eye. “What can I say, Atsushi? I’m a man of whims.”

Atsushi hissed through his teeth. His teeth which looked sharper than usual. “Again? Okay! Fine! Dazai-san, would you tell me if you were experiencing a time loop?”

“...Probably not,” Dazai said. Which was technically not a lie. Atsushi’s eyes fluttered closed like he was in pain, so Dazai pushed it further. “Are you experiencing a time loop, Atsushi-kun?”

“This is going to sound weird,” he said, like reading a script. “But yes, I’m in a time loop. And I need your help to break it.”

“How interesting! How long have you been in the loop? And how many times have you come to talk to me about it?”

“It’s been three weeks. And this is the seventh time.” Atsushi picked up his teacup again with a careful grip that belied the way he slammed the drink back like it was alcoholic.

Dazai hummed. “Well, if you’re asking for my advice, I’d maybe start with figuring out the mechanics of the loop itself. Is it an ability user? Is it some kind of magic? Fate, maybe?”

Atsushi shook his head. His expression was like a storm. “I already know how the loop works.”

Wait, what?

“What?” Atsushi asked, challenging.

“You said that—uh. You said that in kind of an odd way,” Dazai responded slowly.

“Did I.”

Dazai could not think about anything else besides Atsushi at this moment, not even if the diner had been on fire and Fyodor Dostoevsky were outside on a loudspeaker proclaiming the end of the world. Atsushi, who apparently worried about his bandages and still had problems with hallucinations and wanted to drink Dazai’s spit or something. Atsushi who had lied to him at least once in the last few mornings.

“Are you the one causing the loop?” he demanded.

“Are you?” Atsushi shot right back. 

Hirahara isn’t who I have to beat. Dazai was much less certain about his chances of beating Atsushi, who would hold something tight in his teeth and not let it the fuck go.

“As your mentor,” he started, and ignored Atsushi making his indignant hissing noise again. “I would encourage you to think on the illusion of permanence, and the benefits of practicing non-attachment—”

“Say it like you mean it,” Atsushi said with narrowed eyes.

“Fine. You should just let me die.”

Their conversation only devolved into shouting from there.

“Why would you say that? That’s not a fucking rhetorical question, why would you say that to me? When I started this loop—”

“You seriously—? Fuck! Do you have any idea what this has been like? What the hell did you do to repeat this stupid day over and over—?”

“You’re the one who made it terrible!”

“Just end it!”

“You don’t get to ‘bow out’—!”

“Says who? You? Don’t make me laugh, Atsushi-kun.”

“I can’t do this with you right now!”

“WHEN THE HELL ELSE COULD WE POSSIBLY—”

Notes:

This fucking asshole.

The Tabetabe Diner was a diner on its last legs in a practically-abandoned strip of shops underneath another practically-abandoned strip of shops. On the street level, the stores sprouted brightly-colored flags and signs, declaring with their dying breaths that they were OPEN! CUSTOMERS WELCOME!! SALE SALE SALE!!!

If one took the stairs to the sub-level storefronts, though? These businesses had given up. Very few customers made it down the obscured stairway to the little alley with its row of grimy doorways. Weak overhead lighting flickered down on morose shops and food stops that were slowly dying; many of the underground stores were already dead, permanently closed with their locked doorways sealed over with VACANCY and FOR RENT signs. 

The diner, clinging to life at the end of the alley, was neighbor to two such empty storefronts. It had a grand total of two employees. There was usually a smattering of customers—more than two, less than seven, not enough to be making the business much money but just enough the patrons could sit removed from one another and ignore each other comfortably. The employees opened it at a random time early each morning and closed when they felt like it in the evening. Doubtless they were hoping for the day nobody showed up so they could call the whole thing a wash, but somehow there always seemed to be at least one poor soul nursing a truly shitty coffee in a back corner.

Today this was Dazai.

He’d placed his usual order and Mari had delivered it to the table, but he hadn’t been able to force himself to eat even a single bite as anticipation roiled in his gut. He was waiting for something to happen. (Said something was really keeping him waiting, it seemed.)

Finally, there was a flurry of motion across from him. His table was soon occupied by a second customer, and the very person he’d expected to see.

“Dazai-san,” Atsushi greeted. “I brought you something.” He placed a little figurine he’d been grasping in his first onto the table between them.

It was a crab. It appeared to have little adjustable joints to move the claws around; currently they were straight up in the air like the crab was railing why me? against the heavens. The crab was seated on a plastic rock that had the words “I’m crabby!” on it. Dazai could feel his mouth twitching as he fought against a smile. 

“Were you taking your time so you could buy me a souvenir? You’d think you had better things to do.”

“I’m sorry for yelling, last time,” Atsushi said, abashed. “I mean, you were being terrible, but I don’t like yelling. And I didn’t go shopping, I actually had this in my desk so I stopped by the agency to grab it.”

“In your desk?” Dazai poked at the claws and moved them until it was more like the crab was shrugging. What can you do?

“I was saving it,” explained Atsushi. “I was either going to give it to you, or give it to Kunikida-san while you were there. I thought it might cheer you up if you were, you know, having a bad day.”

If you smelled like blood, he didn’t say. Dazai didn’t say: getting this from you would definitely cheer me up. That felt like it would be admitting weakness at a critical juncture.

“Do we have to do the whole thing again?” Atsushi asked. He glanced at the curry with wary eyes, then back to Dazai. He was normally a very polite boy, who only looked at Dazai like he was insane when he was really hamming it up. Right now he was looking at him like he was a puzzle to be solved, which Dazai didn’t appreciate.

Dazai sighed. “I suppose not. Shall we compare notes then, Atsushi-kun?”

Atsushi straightened in his seat. “Yes! I’m ready.” And then he didn’t say anything.

“...Oookay, guess I’m going first. So. I was having kind of a shitty day, in a string of shitty days, and I ended up in the Tabetabe at, oh, six in the morning? Ate some curry, drank some coffee, loitered a bit. I ended up walking to work a little after nine, just to put in an appearance. When I approached the building, there was some kind of altercation going on right outside. I recognized Hirahara from tailing him over the past month.” He closed his eyes, picturing the scene. Not looking at Atsushi. “He was yelling, trying to get Naomi to tell him where I was. I think one of those rival gangs I mentioned must have offered to forget his debt if he just got rid of me. Making a statement to the Port Mafia, maybe? That they should be taken seriously, were capable of disposing of an ex-executive.”

He heard Atsushi hum an encouragement but didn’t open his eyes.

“You and Kyouka were coming back from somewhere and interceded. It devolved into a fight. I stayed hidden and watched for a few minutes since I’d never seen Hirahara’s ability in action before.”

“It was like slots,” Atsushi offered. “He made this hand motion, and three symbols appeared, and something different happened each time depending on what combination he got.”

“Looked like it,” Dazai agreed. “Sometimes there was a flash of light to disorient you, sometimes a weapon would generate out of nowhere, something small with only a few bullets that he’d discard after firing. And when he got three of the same symbol, there was a localized explosion.”

Unable to help himself, he opened his eyes. Atsushi was chewing on his lip, looking stressed just at the recounting of it. Well. He wasn’t going to like this next part.

“The thing about casinos,” he continued, “is that the games are rigged. And I watched him use his ability and realized I could anticipate when he’d get which combination.”

“There was a pattern to it,” Atsushi realized. 

Dazai gave him a little celebratory jazz hands. “Jackpot!” Hm. That joke didn’t land well based on the glare he got in return. “Anyway. Yeah, I figured out I could time it where I went to tackle him when he was about to hit the explosion combo. My ability can’t cancel an explosion that’s already started.” Pause. “It was painful, sure, but I thought it was very…hm. Heroic?” It still felt off to use the word to describe himself. He kept going, trying to justify it. “Former mafia leaps in to save three young members of the detective agency, even at the cost of his own life. That kind of thing.”

“It was heroic but it wasn’t necessary,” Atsushi protested. “We could have handled it.”

Dazai just shrugged. “I told you. Bad day.” As expected, this was where he was losing him. 

“What was it about this particular day?”

Dazai gestured at nothing, at his own temples, shrugged again.

“...okay. You knocked out Hirahara but you were caught in the explosion. I—I caught you, but the burns were—Yosano-sensei said that it would have burned the inside of your throat—” Atsushi was starting to sound a little choked up. Dazai didn’t want to think about that part, so he kicked him under the table.

Atsushi took a deeper breath. “You died. And then? What did you think when you woke up again?”

“Atsushi-kun.” Dazai gave him a serious look. “I woke up on the stairs outside the Tabetabe. I thought maybe I was in hell.” That joke got a slightly-watery smile, at least. “Or maybe purgatory, when I tried the same thing again and died and still couldn’t manage to stay dead. Woke up there again. And again. The fourth time I got so mad when I checked the date on my phone that I broke it in half and threw it away.”

Atsushi opened his mouth and closed it again. 

“You were actually standing very close to my broken phone lying in the street last time.”

Atsushi shook his head. “And you just kept doing that? Kept coming into the diner?”

“I did! For two weeks! That’s cruel and unusual, if you ask me.”

Atsushi, notably, did not apologize. “That first time, when Yosano-sensei couldn’t do anything, I uh—went a little crazy,” he began explaining. Dazai hummed in encouragement. “But then Ranpo-san suggested I go talk to this low-profile contact the president has for what he called ‘extreme emergencies.’ Honestly I thought he was just trying to distract me but I went and talked to her and it turned out she owed Ranpo-san a favor, and he said I could cash it in. So I asked her to start a time loop for me.”

Huh! Dazai had not known they had a time-altering favor on deck. He waited as Atsushi stole a sip of his cold coffee before continuing.

“Her name is Ozeki, and her ability can repeat a day starting from the time she woke up until the time the loop was set, as many times as she wants, until she voluntarily cancels it.”

Okay. Questions, questions! “She must be an early riser, then. I keep showing up here at six A.M. So the loop goes until about three P.M., when you got her to use her ability?”

“A few hours after you died,” Atsushi confirmed.

“And you wake up in the dorms?”

“Yes. The first time—the first loop, I mean—I went to look for you at your place and couldn’t find you. I figured I could stop Hirahara faster and prevent you from dying, at least, but then you kept dying anyway!”

“I thought the changes to how you were reacting during that fight were because of how I was changing my actions each time,” Dazai mused aloud. “I had to keep adjusting my plan to account for you. Two weeks of trying to die the same way, and I’d really gotten it down to an art! I just kept waking up outside the Tabetabe, though.”

“I tried stopping Hirahara, and I tried preventing the fight from even happening, but I didn’t have enough information about him. I told Ranpo-san about the loop and he said the best thing to do would be to consult you because you’d been investigating Hirahara and would know more about him.” Yeah, that was exactly Ranpo-san’s style of hands-off directing. “And then, you know this part, I had to try and track you down because you didn’t have your phone on you. And then I found you here.”

Dazai pouted a little. “It feels like Atsushi-kun is skipping a bunch. I want to know what else you tried, and what you did when you left me to fend for myself here each loop.” He could see Atsushi about to make an excuse so he asked, “Wait! So last time we hit the time limit, the time that Ozeki started the loop in the first place. You said she has to end it? So it’s not a matter of making it past a certain point?”

“No, I have her phone number. She’s waiting for me to let her know she can drop the loop.”

Blinking, Dazai asked incredulously, “So she’s aware of the loop, too? What is she doing with all this extra time?”

“Stealing a yacht, maybe?” Atsushi suggested.

Dazai snorted. “Sure. And why am I also aware of the day repeating?”

Atsushi shifted nervously. “I was maybe not in a state to be super clear with her, when I asked her to start it. I told her I really, really needed you to be alive. I think she assumed you’d be on board with that and made us both aware of it.”

He guessed that made sense. As much as any of this made sense.

“Last question.”

Atsushi looked at him, expectant.

“Uh. So. I’m your favorite person in the world?” His throat closed up around the words, like swelling after being burned, and they barely escaped. He couldn’t believe he’d just asked that. 

Atsushi’s gaze was steady. “Yes, obviously.”

Dazai groaned and slumped over until his face was pressed to the table. The tabletop was gross and sticky, because he hadn’t wiped it down. “Why do you have to make everything so complicated?” he complained.

He heard Atsushi tsk and mutter, “You’re the one making it complicated.” But there was a rustling noise and then Atsushi’s hand was running over his hair in a little soothing motion. “You could have done something else at the start of each loop,” he murmured. His voice was soft. “Instead of coming into the diner. Was dying like that really the only thing you could think of to do in a time loop?”

He’d been so sure he could manage it, with all the time in the world. In a way befitting of his character—better than his character deserved, even. Except it kept not working, and he’d kept going through the motions, and by the time Atsushi had found him he’d been breaking his phone and trudging down the steps to the diner and ordering the curry like he was performing the same role in a long-running play. A river running a course, a groove in a stone. An easy path to follow, the arc of a story.

Dazai selfishly let himself enjoy the petting for a moment before speaking into the tabletop and not looking at him. “If you’re waiting to break the loop until my urge to die goes away, we’re going to be here for a long time.”

“Okay.”

 Nothing else. Dazai let out a long sigh.

“Should we order something else?” Atsushi asked after a few minutes of blessed silence. Dazai didn’t answer, but he felt Atsushi’s hand leave his hair and a few moments later heard the sound of Mari approaching the table. 

“I’m sorry, Mari-san, he’s going through something and I wanted to make him feel better so I was wondering, if it would be possible, and it’s totally fine if it’s not, but would we be able to get two bowls of chazuke?”

Dazai held back a laugh, barely. That was not on the menu. But true to form, Mari made an exception for Atsushi’s cute earnest face and said she’d bring something out.

They were left to sit in silence again. Dazai finally raised his head and made eye contact again. “This isn’t going to end with me promising anything,” he told him.

Atsushi frowned, then smiled, then frowned again.

“I just…want to sit in this shitty diner with you, Dazai-san. If that’s okay.”

That, at least, seemed manageable. He could maybe do that. Sit in a diner, sit with Atsushi, until food seemed appetizing again. It hadn’t been in a long time.

Dazai was unsure, as he’d always been, how to handle Atsushi when he was being earnest. Considering he’d been dealing in half-truths and obfuscation this whole time. Although Atsushi knew that about him already, and apparently he was still his favorite person in the world.

It was possible that Dazai was very stupid, when it came to Atsushi. 

Atsushi would absolutely waste away in a doomed time loop, if he could get something out of it. Atsushi could wallow with the best of them (by which he meant himself). Atsushi didn’t just gently pull, he yanked others forward with him. Expecting him to leave Dazai behind had been a recurring exercise in futility. He’d pull Dazai out of a river; he’d pull Dazai into a time loop.

“This is the most batshit insane intervention I’ve ever had to sit through,” Dazai decided. “And that is saying something. Atsushi-kun always surprises me.”

Atsushi glanced around. When it became clear no one was watching, he scrambled over the table in a flash of motion and sat himself in the inside part of the booth seat right next to Dazai. He scooched in close until their sides were pressed together. Dazai could feel himself immediately melting a bit. It felt natural. Beside him was right where Atsushi was supposed to be.

“You could have just stood up and come around, I would have moved over,” Dazai told him. 

Atsushi shrugged noncommittally. 

Shortly afterwards Mari delivered two steaming bowls of chazuke, topped with a healthy amount of pickled radish, without commenting on Atsushi’s change in position. Once she’d left again they both took a few bites. Dazai indulgently allowed Atsushi to swap chopsticks with him.

“This is actually good,” Dazai commented. By far the most surprising thing to come of all this was that the Tabetabe Diner was capable of producing a nice meal.

Atsushi paused. “Hang on,” he said. “I’m…trying to make a metaphor. Or maybe it’s an allegory? Uh.”

“Don’t hurt yourself.”

“Don’t be a jerk. Anyway. The chazuke,” he gestured with Dazai’s chopsticks, “it’s, you know. The nice things we had, the tea and the rice and the pickles. You, you can get something good out of this terrible diner if you keep trying. And stop ordering the fucking curry.”

Dazai was trying very hard not to laugh at him. Atsushi’s cheeks reddened and he puffed up indignantly. “Dazai-san! Chazuke is different every time! It’s the same thing but depending on the toppings—”

“Okay, okay, I got it. Please, no more.” He sighed. “It’s exceptionally on-brand for Atsushi-kun to try and make a metaphor out of a bowl of tea on rice—”

“Well it’s just like Dazai-san to be torturing himself in a shithole without talking to me—!”

Dazai couldn’t help the dizzying wave of fondness (still wasn’t the correct word, but the other word was too big for right now) that washed over him. He grimaced. “At this point,” he had to admit—he was defeated, he was beaten, it was Atsushi’s win—“I think I’m going to live. Probably.”

Atsushi’s breath hitched; he turned those wide violet-gold eyes on Dazai within close range to heartwrenching effect. “That’s—! Hold on, you don’t have to make such a weird face about it.”

Dazai deliberately cycled through a rapid series of ridiculous expressions.

Atsushi tried to put on a disapproving air but it melted into a relieved smile. 

Dazai didn’t bother getting into how long he could keep such a resolution up right now. That could come later, and no doubt Atsushi would have Strong Opinions about it when the time came.

They sat together and ate chazuke, not speaking but occasionally digging an elbow into each other’s sides just for the moment of attention and touch. 

“Oh,” Atsushi said eventually. He pulled out his phone and sent off a quick text. Dazai wasn’t sure who it was sent to until he felt a weird sensation around his wrist, like a watch being put on too tightly and then releasing.

“Ozeki-san?” he asked.

Atsushi was rubbing at his own wrist as he nodded.

“Hopefully she didn’t steal any yachts today.”

Atsushi laughed. His phone buzzed a minute later and Dazai read over his shoulder—not Ozeki, but a text from Kunikida saying that Hirahara had been apprehended outside of the agency and was now in custody with the Special Division. Huh.

He realized Atsushi had broken the loop before that was confirmed. I appreciate the trust, he didn’t say. Maybe this time he could deserve it.

He wasn’t sure if he’d had any life-altering revelations today, any of these “today”s, besides the fact that Atsushi was a little insane about him. But there was something there, he thought. Not just Atsushi, but his stupid metaphor. Making something good out of a lot of bad, to still be able to be surprised by something.

But especially Atsushi.

Dazai said, “So, Atsushi-kun wants me to stick my tongue in his mouth, right? Am I understanding this correctly?”

A beautiful, predictable reaction: Atsushi turned bright red and started stammering. 

Not what he’d predicted: after a moment Atsushi glanced up at him through his eyelashes and murmured, “Um, yes, and. And maybe the other way around, too?”

Now Dazai was thinking about Atsushi’s tongue in his mouth. A little flustered, he briefly tried making another ridiculous face, the most unsexy he could think of, with his mouth open in a gross way and his tongue stuck out. But Atsushi just looked intrigued by the idea of Dazai’s chazuke-tinged spit, and Dazai found himself blushing. His brain helpfully extrapolated that kissing Atsushi somewhere in private would probably be very wet. Filthy, even.

They needed to get out of here.

Maybe thinking the same thing, Atsushi asked, “Do you want to go home?”

“And sit in my apartment all by myself? No.”

“I’ll stay with you,” Atsushi promised. “And…we’ll see everyone at the agency tomorrow.”

That did sound nice.

“Atsushi has to make me breakfast in the morning,” Dazai bargained. “And!”

Atsushi tilted his head curiously. Dazai was absolutely going to grab his hair later.

“And, you have to kiss me here in front of Mari.”

Atsushi went all red-tinged again. “Dazai. If I do that we’ll never be able to come back to this diner again.”

Dazai beamed.

“You are the most frustrating person in the world,” Atsushi told him, but he was smiling and leaning up to kiss him while he said it. Dazai swooped down to close the distance between them.

They did in fact have to leave the diner, leaving the last of their meal behind. 

It was a shame, because Dazai was in the mood for more chazuke. But! Well.

There was always tomorrow.