Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The Armed Detective Agency is armed for a reason.

Kunikida might profess that the right world is one without violence nor arms, but he has to admit that the real world is one where criminals and Ability users alight upon the masses, which is why he checks out a gun from the Agency inventory every third workday at 10am sharp before going on his street rounds. He is well aware he could draw one from paper, should he need it, but having Dazai as his partner for a short amount of time has taught him more than one thing about having one’s guard up.

And Dazai’s been shot.

It is a black day in Yokohama. The night yawns and expands. The shifting of the wind tells Kunikida, vaguely, that the rain will stop soon—it’s been raining since 6:17 that morning, coming and going in drizzles—and while he’d like to corroborate his hypothesis with the sound of distant thunder, he can’t hear anything over the rush of the blood in his ears.

Dazai’s been—

Feeling far too distant and yet far too close to his own body, Kunikida calls him and Dazai a taxi. He rattles off the location on pure instinct, rain pitting his eyes, as the downpour threatens to slacken his blood-slick grip on his phone and Dazai’s shoulder. He needs to calm down. He needs to plan this out logically. The taxi’s coming; he needs to look out for headlights. Dazai would be good at—all of that. Dazai’s breathing is slowing. 

The world is not ideal. The world is not safe. 

And yet—

The taxi arrives. Kunikida doesn’t remember the turbulent march of his own thoughts—Dazai’s face scrunches up as he gets in the taxi, and Kunikida says, “To the Armed Detec—”

“Kunikida-kun, Yosano-sensei’s Ability won’t work, you know,” says Dazai, mumbling into Kunikida’s vest. His tone is even and measured, like there’s nothing wrong, and he didn’t just get shot when his partner was right there to prevent it.

Kunikida’s blood boils over until the only thing he hears is white static. Ringing. “We’re getting you to the Agency.” 

The Agency has—help. The Agency can help. 

The only thing keeping him from yelling this directly into Dazai’s ears is 1) page 93 of his notebook, detailing the ideal treatment of the injured, Dazai though “the injured” may be, and 2) the taxi driver, a stout and kindly old man, squinting concernedly over at his back seat. Right. The seats. They’re getting blood over the upholstery. Kunikida will have to file compensation. Something. He has work to do. He will have to do it at the Agency. He will have to get to the Agency.

Then Dazai says, faintly, “I’d like to go home.”

A bullet had embedded itself in Kunikida’s heart the moment he realized Dazai had been shot. It matched the bullet that shot Dazai down to the milimeter—it was the same model, the same make. The important distinction between the bullet that shot Kunikida and the bullet that shot Dazai, was Kunikida’s wasn’t real. 

And yet, it somehow found a way to lodge itself deeper.

“Home,” Kunikida says. He doesn’t know if he says it so much as thinks it with his breath. Dazai shifts in his arms. His breathing is still slow.

“I wouldn’t mind sending ya two to the hospital, ya both look terrible,” says the taxi driver. “Ay, is that young man bleeding? I’d call an ambulance—”

This is where Dazai performs his first extremely uncharacteristic act of the night. Had Kunikida the mind to write it down, it would have made it into his notebook posthaste. 

“No hospital,” hisses Dazai, and then, for all intents and purposes, he passes out. 

Yosano-sensei takes off her gloves and rubs at her face. The blue lights of the infirmary hallway at night make her look gaunt. “Well, I got more bandages on him, took the bullet out, and got some blood in him…”

“But,” says Kunikida, feeling insane.

“I really do hate to trouble you, Kunikida,” and Kunikida, feeling doubly insane, notes that she uses the tone normally reserved for panicking next-of-kin, “but I need to get you to stay over and watch him for the night. There’s an emergency with another one of my patients—”

Kunikida notes that nowhere within that string of words was, Your inadequacies have made it so that he has only 4 more hours left to live, go pay your respects. He should probably be able to calm down, now.  

Yosano-sensei is, certain surgical tendencies aside, the ideal doctor. Outside of her capacity as the Agency’s physician, she is almost always out in the city, doing her utmost to care for the injured of Yokohama wherever they may be. It is for this reason, not just the matter of their difference in years and seniority, that Kunikida respects her greatly.

“I need to bring him back to the dorms,” blurts out Kunikida. 

A woman too elegant to do anything so uncouth as jolt, Yosano-sensei minutely twitches her fingers where they’d been rummaging around in her handbag for her phone. And then she processes what he said.

“What,” she says, confused.

“Yes,” Kunikida says, also confused. Feeling the rather disembodied wish to explain himself, or perhaps cut his own head off, he continues, helplessly, “He didn’t want to go to the hospital.”

“It’s a shame, but most of us doctors don’t really want people to go the hospital, either,” Yosano-sensei says automatically. She fishes out her phone from her bag and resumes herself in the business of, most likely, getting to her other patient, which Kunikida is—unideally—obstructing. “And I get it, I do, but the infirmary isn’t a hospital, honestly—”

Lost, Kunikida says, “He wanted to go home.”

Yosano-sensei’s eyes widen. Kunikida isn’t Ranpo or Dazai, but even he can guess why.

“...And that would be the dormitory?” Kunikida doesn’t know how to answer that. Kunikida should know how to answer that. “Well, then. Since it’s you, Kunikida-kun.” Pressing a hand over her eyes as if to fend off an approaching migraine, Yosano-sensei takes a deep breath and expels it in one short gust. “…I’ll write your orders.”

Kunikida bows deeply. “I would be indebted.”

“Tch.” The sound is—startling. He hasn't heard that one out of Yosano-sensei since before Katai joined. If he'd had any less discipline, he'd have straightened out of the bow in shock.

(Normally, Kunikida would be irritated. The only person anyone at the Agency should “tch” at is Dazai. Kunikida is an upstanding young man!

But Dazai’s been shot, and Yosano-sensei is just trying to help. Because—)

“Kunikida, what are you even thinking about? Raise your head. Honestly, it'll get stuck like that one of these days...” 

They both wait a moment. He hears the click of Yosano-sensei’s heels and the shudder of the infirmary door as she goes back in to get her clipboard to write down everything Kunikida needs to do to help Dazai recover.

He doesn’t raise his head. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.

The taxi arrives. It’s not until Kunikida shuffles Dazai out of the car—they'd changed him into one of the hospital gowns they keep at the infirmary, it makes how thin he is more apparent—and into a slow walk across the courtyard of the Agency dorms that he remembers—

“I’ve not visited your apartment,” Kunikida says, quietly.

He feels Dazai huff, as if in dismissal. The wind carries the impression of what he wants to say. You're worrying about something like that at a time like this, Kuni~kida-kun?

...Or maybe Kunikida is hearing things, because he is the type of person who wants to be righteous, and the type of person who wants to be forgiven, and the type of person who wants to see the world bend to his ideals, and so he will go so far as to mistake even the seaworn breeze for the answer he wants to hear.

He clenches his teeth. Yosano-sensei's words ring in his ears like the bells of judgment. Kunikida, what are you even thinking about?

He's seen the place before, of course. Dazai's apartment. The physical space before Dazai had taken it up.

He'd been the person to show it to him, after all.

Kunikida's been living at the Agency employee dormitory for a while. The fact of the matter is, the Agency itself has never had that many employees, and even now, the only occupied rooms aside from Dazai’s are his and Yosano-sensei’s—the A units on both floors. Besides those, there are only three other units in the building... and historically, the number of Agency clerks actually willing to take up residence nearby their eccentric detectives, workplace-provided housing or not, has never been that high. (Kunikida usually prides himself on his memory, but while "remembering the names of all your neighbors" is certainly ideal, it doesn't take much to remember that many neighbors. Especially when they also happen to be your coworkers.)

Case in point: right before Dazai joined the Agency, only two of their other units had been occupied. There had been a clerk living with his wife in the ground floor C unit, and a part-timer they’d rented the B unit to at a discount because she had a morning commute to Tokyo and cram school in Yokohama after work. The whole lot of them had moved out on the 1st of last month; Kunikida and some of the administrative staff had even come in after work and helped them with the moving. It is only ideal to extend a helping hand to a leaving co-worker as a show of appreciation and regard for their service.

(Kunikida, dutifully informing the clerk of his righteous purpose, had then suddenly received a crate of sake. He'd panicked—was there an ideal for this?!—but then the clerk said, warmly, "Congratulations on turning twenty, Kunikida-san. You'll make a fine adult. Good work."

... His notebook, if consulted, cannot confirm nor deny the shedding of any tears.)

In any case, the sake shortly proved itself useful, seeing as he proceeded to meet Dazai the very next week.

All this to say that, upon arrival, Dazai had been given a pick of four units. Kunikida, as a responsible messenger of the Agency's available employee benefits, had tried giving him a complete tour of all the available apartments—there were important differences between the units, he had them recorded! How were you supposed to choose where to live if you didn't know your options?!—but as Kunikida would shortly learn, getting anything well-intentioned through to Dazai was like getting two horses to race each other up a tree.

Kunikida remembers that day with unnerving clarity. Dazai had been standing there in the courtyard, wordless and stock-still, right up until Kunikida had finished going through the inventory of dormitory facilities in alphabetical order and said, "Any questions?" Dazai had taken one step forward, and stopped.

“Kunikida-senpai,” Dazai had said, then, because at that point he’d still been trying to figure Kunikida out, and that meant lulling him into a false sense of security via illusions of workplace hierarchy.

Kunikida's schedule did not include repeating the dormitory tour just because the new guy wasn't paying attention. “What is it, rookie?”

“Could that unit be available, perhaps?” Dazai had pointed at the unit the clerk and his wife had vacated, face blank. "Who lives in it?"

“...A family used to live there,” Kunikida had said, slowly. Last he and the Agency had checked, there was nothing particularly strange about that unit, or its tenants—at least, nothing that warranted a reaction that bizarre. Kunikida, intent on figuring the rookie out, had quickly pretended to be doing something else—the pumps on the washing machines in the hallway needed checking, anyway. “The Agency helped them move out last week, if you're wondering. They took most of their things with them, though, so I suggest—”

“Oh.”

It had been a short sound. It lingered in the air for a quivering moment and then dispersed itself into the wind.

Kunikida hadn’t known Dazai very well or at all, back then. He hadn’t thought anything of the stricken expression that crossed Dazai’s face. And it had gone, like a shadow, in the next second; Kunikida was left blinking, wondering if it had been a trick of the light.

Then Dazai smiled.

“Apologies," Dazai said, recovering. "I was merely thinking that whoever lived here last must have loved flowers very much." The smile gained an agonized quality. While none of the man's muscles had moved, it looked almost like the wound that had cleared itself from his voice was trying to seep into the gaps of his face. Kunikida wondered if the rookie actually liked smiling that often. "They took most of their things with them, you said? But they left their flowerpots.”

Kunikida blinked. Certainly, there had been empty flowerpots stacked neatly by the front door, and it was true the clerk’s wife had been fond of gardening in her free time. He just had no idea what that would have to do with Dazai. The man didn't look the type to have planted anything in his life.

“They could’ve been pots for anything,” Kunikida remembers saying.

“No, no,” Dazai murmured. “They are for growing summer flowers. I’ll take that one.”

And so Dazai had become the next tenant of the Agency dormitory's Unit C.

He remembers the rest of that afternoon less clearly. Kunikida had asked if Dazai required any help setting up ("No thank you, you're very kind!"), if he would really be all right on his own ("Of course, I've troubled you too much today, senpai...") and then informed him exasperatedly that the Agency would go shopping for his furniture at the nearest available date, so he didn't actually need to do anything other than settle in for the day ("But how could I!"). Dazai had proceeded to evade and dismiss all of Kunikida’s follow-up offers, give nothing but flowery excuses in reply, and then told him to tell the Agency that Dazai would source his furniture himself, thank you very much, and so Kunikida ended up returning to the Agency not 10 minutes after giving Dazai the key.

...It was like fighting an old lady who was convinced you would die if you helped her carry her groceries.

Kunikida had a schedule, so he’d taken it as an unusual blessing that the rookie was just as proper-looking as his name made him sound. The downside of that, however, was... He wondered, vaguely, if he should worry about nipping any self-isolating or overly-independent tendencies in the bud before they became an issue with teamwork down the line... Ah, he would have to administer the man's entrance exam eventually, wouldn't he...? Well, he couldn't put it in his schedule yet, he'd have to wait for the President's orders...

Dazai had been awake, staring at the ceiling, when Yosano-sensei finally left to see to her other patient. The expression on his face—

He’d looked, simultaneously, both like he hadn’t been shot at all, and also like he’d been there, in that bed, in that infirmary, bleeding out blood nobody could see, somewhere nobody could reach since the dawn of time.

Kunikida stepped through the door with footsteps as silent as he could manage, trying to keep any and all expression off his face. He didn't know if he was dizzy because of how long he'd spent bowed in front of the door, or if it was something else, some other sickness. He'd collected Dazai’s clothes, folded them, taken them under his arm, and said, “I’m taking you where you want to go.”

Dazai hadn’t changed his expression, practically. He’d just shifted his eyes from the ceiling—that blocked sky—to where Kunikida was. Kunikida felt see-through. 

“That’s kind of you,” Dazai’d said. His lips twitched listlessly, like he hadn’t quite figured out what sort of face to make. “...Help me up.”

Kunikida thought, Can I? He helped Dazai put his weight on his shoulders. The smile Dazai had that day, thinking of a stranger's unplanted summer flowers, overlaid itself in frightening definition onto the smile Dazai had when he'd gotten shot. Can I really?

He hadn't known Dazai at all back then. As he led Dazai out of the office and into another taxi, he couldn't help but think he still didn't.

Agency employees should support each other, he’d written.

Look how that turned out.

Dazai has been acting strange.

Earlier that week, on the 18th, Kunikida had entered the office at precisely 08:00:05, only to be met with Dazai slumped listlessly over his desk, tapping a dull, loud metronome on the cover of a file.

To be clear, this was not an unusual scene. What had been unusual was—

“Dazai!” he shrieked. “You're early!”

“I've been early before,” mumbled Dazai. He screwed his eyes shut and stopped his infernal tapping before Kunikida could ruin his schedule further by spending time wrenching the file away from the man's desk.

“You were early for the duration of your probationary period,” Kunikida agreed, stiffly, “which was one week long. The last time you were early was—”

Dazai soundlessly buried his head in his desk. He didn't seem to be intent on getting up.

“—one month and four days ago, when you came in 5 minutes and 23 seconds before I did, because you wanted to disturb my ideal desk layout! You ran off as soon as I arrived! I have it recorded right here in my—”

A clerk tapped Kunikida discreetly on the shoulder. Kunikida cleared his throat and adjusted his glasses. “What is it, Takahashi-san?”

Takahashi, a kindly 61-year-old woman, had been with the Agency for a long time—longer than most of the other clerks, and almost as long as Kunikida himself. She'd been there when Kunikida had just been the president’s erstwhile disciple making sure Ranpo-san didn't get hurt on the job, and the president had still been a man of the martial world trying to wrangle an office. She'd been there when Kunikida failed his first client, when Yosano-sensei received her final physician’s certification, when Katai had resigned all of a sudden and Kunikida had nearly paced a ditch into the pantry floor from worry.

For years now, she's been mentioning about wanting to move back to the country and look after her grandchildren. The president, consequently, had Kunikida looking into whether they could afford to make her December bonus substantial enough that she could accept the Agency would be fine without her and retire. Ranpo-san leaves the room whenever Kunikida asks him about it.

“Dazai-chan came in earlier than all of us today,” said Takahashi-san, face calm. “It’s not good for his complexion. Kunikida-chan, send him home.”

‘Dazai-chan’, who would usually be thrilled with having his complexion mentioned, pretended he didn't exist. ‘Kunikida-chan’ pretended he didn’t have a splitting headache.

(Importantly, about Takahashi-san’s bonus: they've failed two Decembers in a row, now. Kunikida’s entertained the idea of just sending her back to her hometown with an armed escort and keeping her on the payroll, but he has 0.0003% confidence it would work, unless they all spontaneously sprouted more functional personalities. …Or the president got married.)

“He must be hungover, Takahashi-san,” Kunikida said, suppressing a cold sweat. Takahashi-san’s eyes carefully did not glint. “I offer my sincerest apologies. My partner has worried you. I’ll have him rest, I promise.” He turned to the man trying to melt into his papers. “Dazai!”

Dazai was asleep.

Kunikida and Takahashi-san exchanged worried looks.

“Takahashi-san,” Kunikida began. I don’t know what’s—

“He’s not well,” said Takahashi-san, shaking her head. “That boy…”

Under normal circumstances, Kunikida would have said, He’s never well, there’s something wrong with him, always, perhaps from birth, but he was too distracted by the the unnatural bags under Dazai’s eyes. Dazai liked to escape work and take naps during office hours and make Kunikida shake him awake within an inch of his life, but he never lost that carefully carefree look about him, even while asleep. And he never let anything ruin his face.

Kunikida, suddenly, had trouble swallowing. Dazai looked tired. He stepped forward, trying to get a feel for Dazai’s temperature, but Takahashi-san’s firm but faint touch on his hand stopped him in his tracks. Right. Dazai could be a light sleeper.

“You take care of him,” said Takahashi-san, lowly. A crease appeared between her normally smooth brows. “I’m checking him out for today. Don’t make him come back until he gets better.”

“Understood,” Kunikida replied, quietly. Takahashi-san left. The normal hustle and bustle of the Agency in the morning covered up the sound of Dazai’s shallow breathing. If Kunikida didn’t know better, if he applied the better powers of his imagination, he’d have said Dazai finally looked dead.

Kunikida sat down next to him, poured his coffee, took a sip, and got to work. Dazai had completed parts of his routine for him, almost as if in apology—the documents he didn’t need for the day had been tossed in the bin, the telegraph rack was empty, and most damning of all, the windows were open.

Beneath them, Yokohama offered nothing but the whistle of the harbor and the commotion of the petty. Kunikida’s fingers twitched with the sudden need to shut them.

“Keep them open,” Ranpo-san said, wandering into the office. He was snacking on the chips Yosano-sensei bought for him during her trip to Osaka, bag under his arm.

“Ranpo-san,” Kunikida bowed in greeting. Then he straightened. “Ranpo-san?”

He was early too—according to Kunikida’s schedule, he wouldn’t be due an appearance until 9:47AM, which was the usual time Ranpo-san got in on Mondays after a busy case, not quite ten minutes before the president’s occasionally-enforced Ranpo-specific clock-in time of 10:00AM.

“The wind helps,” Ranpo-san said, “and the noise,” and then he snatched a gulp of Kunikida’s coffee before Kunikida could warn him off it. Ranpo-san bleh’d, setting Kunikida’s thermos down on Dazai’s desk with a thunk, spluttering, “Kunikida!! How do you drink this stuff?! It’s worse than shachou’s, really…”

“I’m very sorry, Ranpo-san!” Kunikida’s head nearly hit the floor.

…Worse than the president’s…?

Dazai hadn’t woken up until 16:07:38. He’d fluttered his eyes open, blinked once, twice, and then swung himself upright as if buoyed by an invisible force. The papers and files on his desk helpfully swept themselves onto the floor with an appropriately theatrical crash. The second sentence he said to Kunikida that day was a perfectly normal, “Kunikida-cha~n, you care for my complexion?!”

Inaudibly and invisibly, the Agency heaved a sigh of relief.

“You hungover layabout!” Kunikida fought the fundamentally insane urge to get Dazai to tell the truth for once in his life and instead settled for lightly smacking him on the back of the head. Dazai gave his customary ow, ehe before Kunikida said, “You’ve ruined my schedule enough for today! Your precious complexion will be the same shade as the floor when I’m done with you!”

Dazai sighed dreamily. “You always say the nicest things.”

“I have plenty of nicer things to say,” Kunikida griped, whipping out his notebook and flipping through it at a rate of 27 pages per second. “But first! Your repentance!”

“Yes, yes.”

He slammed his notebook face-up on the table. “You must do exactly as I have outlined for you in my schedule!”

“Of course, of course, how may I help the wonderful and great Kunikida-kun today—?”

“Go home!”

Dazai blinked, as if he’d been hit. “Go…?”

Kunikida crossed his arms and started tapping his foot impatiently. “Go home,” he said. “You’ve been checked out for today. I’ll count it in your salary as long as you go home.”

Dazai looked around like he’d find a hidden camera somewhere. The Agency was engrossed in the office-wide activity of not looking in their direction. Dazai looked back at Kunikida and pointed at himself. “Me?” Kunikida tapped his foot faster. “But there’s… work?”

They had no incoming cases. Kunikida’d been checking for typos on his reports for the past twenty minutes.

“Idiot!” Kunikida whapped Dazai on the forehead. His temperature was normal, but Kunikida didn’t believe in the ability of Dazai’s temperature to tell the truth any more than he did Dazai’s stupid mouth. “You think it’s anywhere in my ideals to have a coworker come in sick?!”

Dazai didn’t blink this time, still looking incredulously at Kunikida for an answer. ...Actually, he looked more like Kunikida had just told him with full seriousness that his notebook came from the moon, and that he would be taking the next week off to claim a new one. “Sick…?” he repeated, waveringly.

“You think we didn’t notice?” This guy, really. “Come in when you won’t fall dead at our feet, God damn it!”

“You’d deny me my dreams, Kunikida-kun, how cruel,” Dazai said, on reflex. Then he remembered what situation he was in. “But Kunikida-kun, I’m not sick.”

“I don’t care!” Even Kunikida was losing the plot now, evidently. “My schedule says Dazai will return to his house once he wakes up, and that was two minutes ago, so you’ve put me two minutes behind!”

Something weird happened to Dazai’s face. “Why is…?” Dazai reached out a hand to check Kunikida’s temperature. The nerve. Kunikida allowed him one second and a half of contact—he’s not sick either!!!!—before swatting his clammy hand away. “Kunikida-kun, you’re burning up!”

“I’m not,” Kunikida bit out.

“Dazai-chan,” Takahashi-san said, appearing out of nowhere. “Thank you for your hard work today.”

‘Dazai-chan’ paled. “Thank you for your hard work today,” he mumbled back, bowing, and the next thing Kunikida knew, he was out of the office.

Kunikida looked at Takahashi-san. Takahashi-san looked back at him, pointedly.

Kunikida got back to work.

Takahashi-san coughed.

Kunikida got up woodenly, and bowed. “Thank you for your work today, Takahashi-san.” He turned to the Agency. “Thank you for your work today.” Ignoring the chorus of replies, he packed up his things in record time and chased Dazai out the door. “Please send my apologies to the President for going first!”

He didn't manage to find Dazai at the dormitory—he had half a mind to remove the day from Dazai's salary, for not going “home” (he wouldn't)—but he did find Dazai at one of his usual drinking holes later that night, and after failing to dodge paying for half of Dazai’s drinks as usual, Kunikida went home mildly buzzed, thinking Dazai would probably go back to normal after he got over whatever it was that had him dead to the world for the length of an entire night's sleep.

21st 

O God, tell me this—

Shall I ever find naught but hopelessness in myself? 

Once more, I grasp for the answer to righteousness, and find only mud.

The next morning started out fine, for all that a lack of Dazai at his desk when Kunikida clocked in at the Agency meant things were “fine.”

“I'm gonna wring his skinny neck,” grumbled Kunikida, slamming the receiver back into place. It was supposed to be a follow-up call with the municipal police on a minor case he and Dazai handled last week. Apparently, the victim's mother wanted to give Dazai a handknit sweater, but Dazai had told her to drop it off at the ward police station in a stout box, and one thing led to another until ultimately, Kunikida spent nine minutes getting scolded by an officer because his coworker had set off a fake bomb alarm.

“Did Dazai-san do something wrong, Kunikida-san,” one of the newer clerks asked him, quite innocently. Someone shushed him.

“What doesn't he do wrong,” Kunikida groaned into his palms.

“Speaking of which, where is Dazai-san today?”

“Late again, no doubt, or in the river,” Kunikida said, and checked his schedule. Dazai tended to come in at 9AM on Tuesdays. He frowned at his watch. 09:24:57…

At the very least, a late Dazai meant a normal Dazai. Maybe he'd even taken Kunikida's advice (or more likely, Takahashi-san’s strong suggestion) and stayed home after he got back from wasting his night away.

Or maybe he really was in the river again.

Kunikida eyed the phone on his desk.

Calling Dazai would be worse than useless.

Calling the coast guard would put a dent in his schedule.

…

…

“He's not in the river,” Kunikida mumbled listlessly.

“Why would he be in the river,” the same clerk wondered. He got shushed again, louder.

Another clerk, phone in hand, asked, “Is Dazai-san out? One of the detectives from last week wants to speak with him.”

Kunikida rose to his feet. “He's not in, I'll take the call, thank you.”

Hours trickled by like that. He was packing up to go downstairs for lunch at 12:17 when his schedule was interrupted again.

“Kunikida,” called Yosano-sensei from the front door.

Kunikida stood up. “Wait, Yosano-sensei, isn't it your day off?”

“Oh, yes. I was just dropping by to pick up some supplies I left in the office,” she said, which was about the limit of what Kunikida wanted to know. She gestured lightly to the duffle bag of “supplies” slung over her shoulder. Yosano-sensei’s definition of “supplies” was… broader… than ideal. “I nearly forgot, so I came to tell you.”

Kunikida had a bad feeling about this. “Yes?”

“Dazai told me earlier,” Yosano said, confirming the bad feeling. Kunikida braced himself for whatever Dazai had cooking for him after yesterday’s incident. “He'll be coming in late today.”

What. “He's coming in?” Wait, no. “Was he all right?”

“He looked weirder than usual, if you were wondering,” Yosano sighed. Her eyes fluttered closed for a moment. “I caught him alone in the shopping district. He was looking at the display for a men's boutique before he noticed me passing by.” She looked away and put a hand to her mouth in thought. “It must have been… 11AM?”

“I see.” Kunikida was careful to keep his head down. It was unfair to twitch his eye at Yosano-sensei when the intended recipient was out clothes shopping. “...He must've woken up late this morning.”

“He might have,” Yosano agreed easily. “But to tell you the truth, I don't think that Dazai sleeps all that much.”

This was news to Kunikida. “...Yesterday, Yosano-sensei, you weren’t in,” he began. She raised an eyebrow. “He came in earlier than everyone—even Takahashi-san—and just slept.”

He must have not been able to keep the concern out of his voice. Something like the light caught in Yosano-sensei’s eyes, but instead of frowning, she just raised her other eyebrow. “For how many hours?”

“Eight hours and three minutes,” Kunikida recited faithfully.

Yosano-sensei half-whistled. She hit the wall behind her with her duffle bag of “supplies” as if to punctuate the sound. “He listened to my advice, then.”

…Kunikida was going to collapse before he reached lunch. “Your advice, Yosano-sensei?”

Yosano-sensei twirled the ends of her hair with her fingers for a moment before looking straight at him. Her gaze was clear. “Kunikida-kun, you remember how I have trouble sleeping?”

“...Yes. I remember.” It had been much worse, once. When Kunikida was just getting used to the reality of the world, setting out as one of the Agency’s detectives, he’d spent many a still night looking out the window. Yosano-sensei’s window above him would always be open. He’d look up, and she’d wave at him, once or twice, before the sun rose. They’d never spoken about it—he’d never even recorded it in his notebook—but the sentiment had been comforting, somewhat. Two figures of the twilight, struggling against the dusk.

Eventually, Kunikida had gotten enough control over his body to sleep a set amount of hours every day, but on the days when he couldn’t, when he needed fresh air and the salt in the breeze, he saw Yosano-sensei opening her window less and less, too.

“Our bodies are wired, generally, to sleep when it is dark,” Yosano said. She looked away from him, eyes half-lidded. “The night is good for that. …But the dark, when it is quiet, is also good for remembering. I think you know how it is.”

A shadow crossed Kunikida’s heart.

Nights spent awake, vigils over his inkstone, faces flashing behind his eyelids. He knew exactly what Yosano-sensei was referring to.

Abruptly, what Ranpo-san said yesterday came back to him. The wind helps. And the noise.

Then—a new thought. It built up, like sand, at the bottom of his throat, and unfurled in the space between his mouth and his heart. It rested, heavy and burning.

“I told him to try remembering in the daytime,” Yosano-sensei said, breaking the strange mood. Kunikida had to blink several times to rid himself of its remains. She was squinting at the sun streaming into the office from the open windows. “I guess it works for guys like him, too.”

He felt, keenly, the absence of anyone else in the Agency save him and Yosano-sensei. The noise from the streets rushed up to them, all at once, in one sudden gust. The wind of human life.

It was a bright day for October.

“That’s all I wanted to tell you.” Yosano-sensei reshouldered her bag. He hadn’t even noticed her setting it down. “See you, Kunikida.”

It was a full five minutes before Kunikida felt himself unroot from his spot at his desk and walk down to Uzumaki. The thought in his chest trickled, slowly, into a visible shape.

What could Dazai possibly be remembering…?