Work Text:
The first time it happens, nobody understands what they are seeing.
Not even Ryuunosuke Akutagawa.
One moment, he is standing in the middle of a warehouse with blood soaking through his sleeve, listening to the tail-end of a smuggling report. The next, someone drops a metal pipe behind him.
Just a pipe.
Just the sharp clang of metal against concrete.
And suddenly he cannot breathe.
The sound ricochets through his skull like gunfire. Like chains rattling underground. Like coughing in the dark. The warehouse vanishes around him, swallowed by damp stone walls and the stink of mildew and sickness and starvation.
The slums.
The room with no windows.
Children coughing themselves to death beside him.
Akutagawa’s vision tunnels violently.
“Akutagawa-san?” someone says.
Too close.
Too loud.
His heartbeat becomes unbearable.
Another clang echoes somewhere behind him and Rashomon erupts instinctively.
Black cloth tears through the warehouse like a living nightmare.
Someone screams.
There is blood.
By the time Akutagawa comes back to himself, one of the lower-ranking Port Mafia members is crumpled against a crate, throat shredded open—not dead, but close enough that the entire room has gone silent.
Akutagawa stares.
The man’s hands are clamped over his neck.
Blood slips between his fingers.
Everyone is staring at Akutagawa like he is a bomb that has just gone off.
And the worst part—the truly unbearable part—is that Akutagawa does not remember moving.
—
“You lost control.”
The words are quiet.
Measured.
Still somehow heavier than shouting.
Ozaki Kouyou stands near Mori’s office window with her arms folded neatly into her sleeves. The golden light outside paints the room warm, but it does nothing to soften her expression.
Akutagawa kneels in front of the desk, head bowed.
“I understand.”
“No,” Kouyou says softly. “You do not.”
Silence stretches.
Behind the desk, Mori Ougai sighs.
“The injured subordinate survived,” Mori says. “Barely. But this is the third incident in two months.”
Akutagawa’s fingers twitch against his knees.
Third.
He remembers the first.
A crowded hallway where someone grabbed his shoulder from behind.
He had broken their arm before realising who it was.
The second had been worse.
Gin had tried to wake him during a fever and he had nearly strangled her.
He still remembers her expression afterward.
Not fear.
That would have been easier.
Just quiet understanding.
Like she had expected it.
Like she had known one day he would become too damaged to control.
Akutagawa lowers his eyes further.
“I will accept punishment.”
Kouyou’s gaze sharpens faintly.
“There is a difference,” she says, “between punishment and treatment.”
The word treatment makes something ugly twist in his stomach.
He says nothing.
Mori steeples his fingers. “You will begin therapy.”
Akutagawa looks up immediately.
“No.”
The refusal comes too fast.
Too sharp.
Mori watches him carefully now.
“Interesting,” Mori murmurs.
Akutagawa’s pulse spikes.
“No,” he repeats, quieter this time. “It is unnecessary.”
“Is it?”
Rashomon stirs faintly at his back, agitated.
Therapy.
Talking.
Questions.
Being observed.
Every instinct in Akutagawa’s body recoils violently from the idea.
In the slums, weakness was something people smelled like blood in water. Vulnerability got people robbed, beaten, abandoned. The only reason Akutagawa survived long enough to escape was because he learned how to bury everything human inside himself.
Fear.
Pain.
Grief.
Need.
Especially need.
Needing people was fatal.
And now Mori is asking him to sit in a room and willingly expose the parts of himself he spent years carving out with his own bare hands.
“I am functional,” Akutagawa says tightly.
Kouyou’s eyes flick briefly toward the blood still staining his sleeve.
“Are you?”
—
The therapist’s office is offensively warm.
Akutagawa hates it instantly.
There are plants near the windows.
Bookshelves.
Soft lighting.
No exits visible from where he sits.
His shoulders stay tense from the moment he enters.
Across from him sits a woman who introduces herself simply as Hasegawa.
Not afraid of him.
Not impressed by him either.
That irritates him more.
“You don’t have to speak immediately,” she says calmly.
Akutagawa says nothing.
“Most people forced into therapy spend the first session deciding whether they hate me.”
“I already do.”
To his annoyance, she smiles slightly.
“Good. Then we’re making progress.”
The first several sessions are unbearable.
Akutagawa answers questions with single words when he answers at all.
“How have you been sleeping?”
“Fine.”
“When was your last flashback?”
“I do not know.”
“What do you feel when—”
“Nothing.”
Lie.
Lie.
Lie.
But lies are safer.
He knows how to survive with lies.
Hasegawa never pushes hard enough for him to lash out. Somehow that almost makes it worse. She waits through silences without discomfort, like she has all the time in the world.
Akutagawa begins noticing things despite himself.
The clock ticking softly.
The way she never moves suddenly.
How she keeps her hands visible.
How she never stands between him and the door.
Like she understands that some part of him is always preparing for violence.
One day she asks, “What happened when you were young?”
Akutagawa’s expression goes cold instantly.
“Nothing.”
“You lived in the slums, correct?”
Silence.
“You do not need to tell me details,” she says carefully. “But trauma does not disappear simply because someone survives it.”
The word trauma sounds wrong attached to him.
Too soft.
Too human.
He survived.
That was all.
Children who could not survive died.
Simple.
Necessary.
Natural.
His chest tightens unexpectedly.
Hasegawa notices.
“You learned very young that emotions were dangerous,” she says quietly.
Akutagawa’s eyes snap toward her.
For the first time since therapy began, genuine emotion cracks through his expression.
Not sadness.
Not fear.
Anger.
“You know nothing about me.”
“No,” she agrees. “I don’t. But I think you spent a very long time becoming someone nobody could hurt.”
The room feels suddenly too small.
Rashomon flickers violently behind him.
Hasegawa does not flinch.
“And I think,” she continues carefully, “you no longer know how to stop surviving.”
The words hit harder than any attack ever has.
Because somewhere deep beneath the rage—
Akutagawa thinks she might be right.
—
The breakthrough happens accidentally.
It always does.
Session eleven.
Rain taps steadily against the windows.
Akutagawa is already irritated from a mission gone poorly and a sleepless night spent coughing blood into a sink.
Hasegawa asks an ordinary question.
“What did you want as a child?”
Akutagawa goes still.
The question feels absurd.
“What?”
“When you were young,” she repeats. “What did you want?”
Nobody has ever asked him that before.
Not Dazai.
Not Mori.
Not even Gin.
Wanting things had never mattered.
Food.
Warmth.
Safety.
Those were fantasies, not goals.
“I wanted strength,” he says automatically.
Hasegawa watches him for a moment.
“No,” she says softly. “You needed strength. That’s different.”
Something twists sharply in his chest.
Annoyance floods him immediately.
Dangerous.
This conversation is dangerous.
“I fail to see the point of this.”
“The point,” Hasegawa says gently, “is that children are not born believing they must become weapons to deserve survival.”
The words land like a knife sliding between ribs.
Suddenly he is back underground again.
Cold.
Hungry.
Holding Gin close while she shakes from fever.
Someone stealing food from them.
Someone laughing while another child coughed blood nearby.
Akutagawa remembers the unbearable helplessness of being small.
Weak.
Useless.
The memory crashes into him so violently he stops breathing.
Hasegawa notices immediately.
“Akutagawa.”
Wrong.
Wrong wrong wrong.
The room tilts.
His pulse roars.
Rashomon explodes outward.
The walls split apart with a deafening crack.
Bookshelves collapse.
The lights shatter.
And suddenly Hasegawa’s wrist is trapped in black cloth sharp enough to sever bone.
Akutagawa freezes.
The office is silent except for his ragged breathing.
Hasegawa is pale now.
But still calm.
Still looking directly at him.
“Akutagawa,” she says carefully, “you are having a flashback.”
The words cut through the panic slightly.
His grip trembles.
“She was dying,” he hears himself say.
The sentence escapes before he can stop it.
Hasegawa does not move.
“Who was?”
His vision blurs unexpectedly.
“Gin.”
The name hurts.
“She was sick,” he whispers hoarsely. “And I could do nothing.”
Rashomon loosens fractionally.
For several horrible seconds, Akutagawa cannot understand why his face feels wet.
Then realisation hits.
Tears.
He jerks back like he has been burned.
Disgust crashes through him instantly.
Weak.
Pathetic.
Humiliating.
But Hasegawa’s voice remains steady.
“You survived by burying everything,” she says quietly. “But buried things do not stay dead forever.”
Akutagawa cannot look at her.
His entire body shakes with the effort of holding himself together.
After a long silence, he says in a broken whisper—
“I do not know who I am without it.”
Without the violence.
Without the anger.
Without survival.
If he stops being the thing the world forced him to become—
what remains?
For the first time since therapy began, Hasegawa answers without analysis.
Just honesty.
“I think,” she says softly, “that terrifies you.”
Akutagawa closes his eyes.
And finally—
finally—
he nods.