Chapter Text
Kunikida is going to strangle Dazai.
“Dazai, I swear to god, if your half of the report isn’t turned in by the end of the day, I will tie you to your desk so you’re forced to work on it over the weekend,” he shouts, storming down the agency’s hallway.
Kunikida had asked for the report on this morning’s raid three times this afternoon and received a sing-songy “In a minute!” each time. And now his menace of a partner has been absent from his desk for the past twenty-one minutes.
Kunikida has wasted the past nine minutes of his schedule searching for Dazai, checking the couch, kitchen, cafe, and rooftop with no luck. Tanizaki, noticing his ire, hesitantly offered that he’d spotted Dazai heading to the men’s restroom a while ago. It’s not one of Dazai’s usual hiding spots, so he hadn’t thought to search there.
Kunikida clenches his fists as he stalks down the hall. If Dazai thinks he can avoid work by hiding out in the bathroom until the office closes, then he is sorely mistaken.
Pushing up his glasses, Kunikida angrily shoves the bathroom door open, but stops short when it hits something.
He scowls. Did the waste of bandages push the trash can against the door? It will take more than that to save him from the lecture Kunikida has in store for him today. He sticks his head around the door to investigate the obstruction.
“What the hell are you—” Kunikida’s words die in his throat and plummet ice cold into his stomach.
Dazai lies sprawled on the tile floor on his side, his long legs blocking the door. His hands, curled loosely in front of him, are bloodstained. His dark hair covers his face, and a growing pool of blood collects beneath his head, sending cold fear washing over Kunikida.
“Damn it!” Kunikida curses, shoving the door open around Dazai’s legs and rushing inside.
He drops to his knees and grabs Dazai’s shoulder to roll him onto his back. The man’s head rolls limply on his neck as his blood-drenched hair peels away from the tile. The scattered contents of an overturned first-aid kit litter the floor around them. Used bandages pile in the sink, pink with blood.
Kunikida grabs Dazai’s chin to turn him toward him; the man’s skin is cool and clammy. His messy bangs fall away, revealing his ghostly pale face and closed eyes, his eyelashes resting delicately against his cheeks. The right side of his face drips with blood, matting his hair and making it shine under the bright fluorescent lights. Kunikida carefully sweeps the bloody locks aside and spots a small cut just above Dazai’s temple. The oozing crimson blood mingles with the perspiration on his brow.
“Hey, Dazai,” Kunikida calls, a worried edge to his voice. He pats Dazai’s cheek. “Open your eyes, you idiot. What have you done now?”
Dazai doesn’t so much as twitch—his eyes remain closed and his features lax.
Dread pools in Kunikida’s chest, acidic and heavy. He presses a hand to Dazai’s neck and heaves a relieved breath when he feels a pulse beneath his fingers. Kunikida also checks his breathing; his bloodless lips hang barely parted around shallow breaths.
As Kunikida releases Dazai’s neck, he spots a splash of red staining the bandages around his throat, half hidden by his coat. It’s not connected to the blood dripping from his head wound. Confused, Kunikida pulls the tan fabric aside to find Dazai’s shirt and vest partially unbuttoned. More bloody bandages wrap around his chest—the same ones he wears every day, though Kunikida never realized how far down they extended. The bandages near his shoulder hang torn and ragged, as if they were hurriedly cut away to allow access to—
“YOSANO!” Kunikida screams, ripping off his vest to press against the bloody blade embedded in his partner’s shoulder.
“YOSANO! SOMEONE GET YOSANO!” he shouts, the words tearing his throat as his mind reels.
A knife with a missing handle is wedged so deep in Dazai’s left shoulder that the tang is almost flush with his skin. Deep red blood seeps around the weapon, saturating the surrounding bandages, staining his shirt, and pooling in the folds of his coat.
Heart hammering against his ribs, Kunikida presses down on Dazai’s wound, desperate to staunch the steady flow of blood. He expects him to spasm or groan in pain. But he lies limp on the tile floor, and that’s so much worse.
Pounding footsteps sound from the hallway. “What’s going—oh!”
He wrenches his gaze up to see Tanizaki frozen in the doorway, mouth parted around a broken gasp. The boy stumbles back as if he’d been shoved.
“Get Yosano!” Kunikida barks. Tanizaki flinches.
“K-Kenji’s getting her,” Tanizaki stammers. “She’s in the cafe …” He trails off, wide eyes fixed on the mess of blood staining Dazai’s chest.
Kunikida bites back another shout. Damn it, Dazai can’t afford to have both of them panicking right now. Not when his blood is slowly soaking through the vest he’s pressing to his wound. The overturned first-aid kit lies nearby, but Kunikida isn’t about to risk infection with supplies that have touched the bathroom floor.
They need Yosano. Now.
Kunikida squeezes his eyes shut for a moment and sucks in a breath, forcing his tense shoulders to lower.
“Tanizaki,” he utters, fighting to keep his voice even and his expression composed. “I need your help. Check his head and try to stop the bleeding.”
Kunikida’s words break the boy from his trance. Tanizaki blinks, shakes himself, and hurries to crouch on Dazai’s opposite side.
Kunikida watches Tanizaki gingerly lift the man’s slumped head. Grimacing, Tanizaki reaches up to grab paper towels from the dispenser and presses a handful to Dazai’s temple.
Dazai remains unnaturally still under their hands. Kunikida wants him to stir—to twitch or gasp. Every silent second that passes has Kunikida’s lungs tightening with fear, yet Dazai remains utterly lifeless.
Not lifeless. Bad choice of words.
“There’s a cut above his temple,” Tanizaki says timidly after examining Dazai’s head. “Nothing else.”
Kunikida nods. “He must have hit his head when he fell,” he thinks aloud.
Warm blood seeps through the cloth beneath his fingers. He grits his teeth to suppress a shudder at the sensation.
Tanizaki gulps, voice quavering. “W-what happened?”
“He was stabbed,” Kunikida surmises. “It must have happened during the fight today.”
The raid on a smuggling ring operating out of an old warehouse by the docks had been fairly routine. Dazai slipped away from Kunikida at the start of the fight despite his insistence that they stay close. But at the time, Kunikida was too busy summoning a stun gun and meeting the attacking smugglers head-on to be angry at his partner.
The next time he saw Dazai was after the fight. Kunikida looked up from cuffing the last of his opponents and found him sitting primly on a nearby crate, watching him. At the man’s feet lay the unconscious bodies of two more smugglers. Dazai grinned and waved cheerfully, some quip on his lips that Kunikida couldn’t remember now.
Dazai had been acting perfectly normal—as normal as Dazai ever was. But now that Kunikida thinks about it, lingering on the memory of him lounging on the crate … had his coat been buttoned up? It hadn’t been that way before the fight. And he’d kept his left hand in his coat pocket while making his usual over-the-top gestures with the right.
But it had taken them thirty minutes to finish up at the scene before walking back to the agency, which means that Dazai had been waltzing around—joking, laughing, and annoying Kunikida as usual for over an hour—with a knife buried in his shoulder.
This is a goddamn detective agency. How had no one noticed?
How had Kunikida not noticed?
“Damn it!” he hisses, making Tanizaki jump.
Kunikida wants to be angry at Dazai for not telling someone he was injured. But he’s more angry at himself for being so oblivious.
Racing footsteps echo up the hall, and Yosano bursts in, stockinged feet skidding across the floor, her heels abandoned at the first word of an emergency.
“Shit!” Yosano curses as she falls to her knees beside Kunikida. Her black medical bag drops with a heavy thud beside her. “What’d the idiot do this time?!”
Yosano snaps on latex gloves as more footsteps approach. Kenji appears in the doorway. He gasps at the scene, hands flying to his mouth.
“Kenji, get the gurney,” Yosano orders, not even glancing at him.
Face grim, Kenji nods wordlessly and scampers off while Kunikida gives Yosano a rundown.
“Deep knife wound to the shoulder,” Kunikida rattles off. “The blade’s still in there.”
Yosano leans over Dazai’s wound. Kunikida peels some of the blood-drenched fabric away to give her a quick visual before applying pressure again.
Kunikida continues. “Also, a contusion to the temple, bleeding.”
Yosano scoots closer to Tanizaki and presses two fingers to Dazai’s pulse.
“Heart rate rapid and weak,” she murmurs, leaning down to listen to his chest as it rises and falls with shallow breaths. “The bastard’s lucky it didn’t puncture his lung.”
Sitting up, Yosano rummages through her bag, pulling out wads of gauze. She tugs Kunikida’s hands away from Dazai’s shoulder and replaces the blood-soaked vest with gauze, packing the wound carefully.
Kunikida sits back on his heels and watches her work. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, now that Yosano is staunching the bleeding. They hover, bloody and useless, in front of him. He doesn’t know where to look either; he can’t stop his gaze from traveling back and forth between the bloody gauze coating Dazai’s shoulder and his unnaturally serene face. The man is white as a sheet, the mess of blood and stained bandages covering his chest making him look even paler.
“Was he conscious when you found him?” Yosano asks, jarring Kunikida from his thoughts.
He shakes his head and pushes his glasses up with his arm. “He’s been out cold the entire time.”
Yosano nods to herself. “Penlight,” she orders. “In my pocket.”
Kunikida knows the drill. Careful not to jostle Yosano, he fishes the light out of her skirt. Then, Tanizaki holds Dazai’s head steady while Kunikida pulls up the man’s eyelid and clicks on the light.
Dazai’s brown eyes feel hollow and empty, like the stained glass of an abandoned church. Kunikida clenches his jaw and focuses on checking his pupils.
“Right eye isn’t responding to light,” he says after a few moments.
Yosano nods knowingly. “Asymmetric dilation?"
“I suppose,” Kunikida says, sitting back. He wipes his brow with his sleeve. “But doesn’t that typically involve the eyes dilating at different rates? His right eye won’t respond at all.”
Yosano’s tight-lipped expression twitches into a frown. Just then, Kenji reappears, rolling the infirmary gurney through the door.
“Kunikida, help me get him up,” Yosano orders. She gestures at Kenji with a bloody hand; the other remains firmly pressed to Dazai’s shoulder. “Kenji, bring it around and … Junichiro.”
Tanizaki jolts at his name, startling Kunikida. The boy had been so silent and still for the past several minutes that he’d blended into the background. But looking at him now, Kunikida can see the ghostly pallor of his face and the beads of sweat clinging to his hairline.
“Y-Yes?” Tanizaki asks, voice an octave higher than normal.
Yosano ducks her head to meet his wide eyes. Her voice turns gentle. “I need you to go out to the office and keep everyone out of the way. Can you do that for me?”
Tanizaki gulps. “Ri-Right,” he stutters, scrambling to his feet. “I can do that.”
Kunikida watches him race out the door.
Once he’s gone, Yosano explains, “He was about to be sick.” She hands Kunikida gauze to tape over Dazai’s head wound.
Kunikida winces, guilt creeping up his back and settling on his shoulders as he covers the sluggishly bleeding cut on Dazai’s forehead. He shouldn’t have involved someone so young in a scene like this. In his own panic, he hadn’t considered the student’s well-being.
“It’s not your fault,” Yosano murmurs like she’s read his mind. She meets his gaze briefly before refocusing on her patient. “Emergencies are never ideal. Now, come on and help me.”
Under her direction, Kunikida positions his arms under Dazai’s back and knees.
“Kenji, keep his shoulder and left arm stable,” Yosano instructs. “Kunikida—three, two, one, up.”
Kunikida lifts.
And he nearly staggers and exhales in shock at how little Dazai weighs. The man in his arms is far too light for comfort, even wrapped up in his many layers and heavy coat.
Ever so gently, he lays Dazai on the gurney. The man’s arms flop uselessly at his sides. His right arm slips over the gurney’s edge and dangles there, and his coat tails almost brush the floor. Kunikida picks up his arm and rests it against his stomach.
Together, Kenji and Kunikida push the gurney down the hall while Yosano jogs alongside, keeping pressure on Dazai’s wound. The man’s head lolls to the side, his bloody hair leaving red smudges on the gurney bed. His face is oddly peaceful.
The trip is eerily quiet, save for the muted roll of the wheels against the floor. Kunikida tries to ignore the trail of red splotches left in their wake as blood drips from Dazai’s coat, spotting the green tile and streaking under the wheels.
The main office is empty as they pass through; Tanizaki had worked fast. Kunikida heaves a relieved sigh. He knows that Dazai would rather die (and Kunikida means that in a very literal sense) than have people staring at him at a time like this.
The group arrives. Kenji throws open the infirmary door as Kunikida pushes the gurney inside.
“Surgical suite,” Yosano orders. And the two men steer the gurney into the room attached to the infirmary.
While Kunikida carefully transfers Dazai to the table, Yosano turns to Kenji.
“Thank you, Kenji,” Yosano tells him. “Why don’t you check on Junichiro?”
Kenji blinks up at her with wide, innocent eyes. “Will Dazai be alright?” He sounds hesitant—something Kenji never is.
Yosano smiles and gives a good-natured scoff.
“Don’t worry about this idiot,” she assures him. “We can take it from here.”
Kenji’s tight shoulders slump in relief. The boy gives her a blinding grin and a thumbs-up.
“That’s good!” he says cheerfully. “I hope Dazai feels better!”
Kenji hurries out. As the door shuts, Yosano turns back to Kunikida.
Her smile and levity have vanished, replaced by a cold, stony look.
“I need a second set of hands,” she announces, tone clipped. She throws open cabinets, yanking out supplies. “Scrub up. Now.”
Understanding, curdled and sour, settles in Kunikida’s chest.
Yosano lied. They should be very worried about Dazai.
When Kunikida finishes washing up and putting on gloves, he returns to the suite to find Yosano hard at work, inserting an IV line into the back of Dazai’s hand. She’s already got heart rate and oxygen monitors clipped to his fingers.
Dazai’s dark, wavy hair fringes his pale face and circles his head like the shadow of a halo. His bangs, stringy with sweat, cling to his forehead and splay over his closed eyes. The overhead lights of the medical suite wash him out even more than he already is, making him look translucent and sickly. The bright red blood stands out against his skin like ink splattered across a blank canvas. His blood-soaked coat lies sopped and deflated on the table, outlining his slim form in a way that almost makes him look skeletal.
“He’s not going to wake up for a while,” Yosano says, answering the question Kunikida didn’t ask. “I’m keeping him under while I remove the blade. It won’t be fun.”
She peels open a fresh needle package. “Cut the bandages off his inner arm—right side.”
While Yosano sets up a blood bag on a second IV pole, Kunikida finds a pair of scissors on the rolling tray of instruments beside the operating table. Then he carefully takes Dazai’s hand.
The man’s fingers are freezing, which shouldn’t be a surprise given how much blood he’s lost, but it still makes Kunikida wince. Dazai feels like a corpse.
Stop it. Don’t think like that.
Kunikida breathes through his mouth as he focuses on pushing up Dazai’s rolled sleeve. He turns his elbow up and carefully slides the scissor blade under the tightly wrapped bandages in the crook of his arm. With a snip, the gauze unfurls like a flower and drops to the table.
Kunikida chokes on a gasp.
Dazai’s arm—the small section freed of bandages—is covered in scars. Pale lines overlap over and over until it’s impossible to tell where one ends and another begins. Some are neat and surgical, others are jagged and raised. Dozens of old injection marks litter his elbow. His skin is almost white, like it hasn’t seen the sun in years. Kunikida pulls away the loose bandages draping his forearm, looking for an end to the marks. But his gut lurches as he spots long, ragged scars marring his wrist—gouges long healed but still red and angry.
“—kida.” Fingers snap in his face.
Kunikida jumps at his name and looks up to find Yosano beside him. He opens his mouth to say something—what he doesn’t know—but she grabs his shoulders and forces him to face her.
“Kunikida,” Yosano snaps, her voice a blade.
“W-What…?” His tongue feels thick in his mouth.
“Listen to me,” she growls, hands gripping his shoulders and pinning him in place. “Either you take a deep breath and get your head on straight, or you leave. I do not have time to worry about you when I have a patient on the table.”
Kunikida struggles not to glance at Dazai from the corner of his eye.
“Did-did you know about this?” he asks, breathless.
Yosano’s eyes tighten.
“No,” she admits. And for a second, her mask cracks, and Kunikida can see she’s shaken too. But like the lid of a trunk slamming shut on bad memories, her poised doctor persona slots back into place.
She shakes her head. “But it doesn’t matter.”
Yosano releases him.
“Take a minute,” she murmurs, the gentleness in her voice forced and fleeting. “Breathe.”
Kunikida does just that, stepping back from the table while Yosano works, her body blocking his view of Dazai. Kunikida breathes and tries to slow his racing heart.
Calm down, he orders himself. Kunikida has attended hundreds of crime scenes, witnessed bloody injuries in the field, and seen gruesome deaths firsthand. Why’s he falling apart like a day-one police cadet?
Because you’ve never needed to worry like this before, his mind supplies.
Yosano’s skill is the agency’s ultimate failsafe. Gunshot wounds, broken bones, missing limbs, and even certain death mean nothing under her hands. Any injury short of clinical brain death can be undone, as if it never happened. It’s a comfort to all members. It allows them to pursue justice with trusting tenacity, knowing Yosano will back them up when it counts.
Dazai doesn’t have that luxury.
Dazai’s ability doesn’t discriminate between enemy attacks and helpful hands. Yosano can’t heal him in an instant. Kunikida can’t toss him a summoned weapon in a fight. Kenji can’t pull him out of the way of danger. Tanizaki can’t shield him.
Fearing an agency member’s death like this—drawn-out, bloody, and above all, painfully human—is a foreign feeling that wraps icy fingers around Kunikida’s lungs and squeezes tight. He wipes his forehead with his sleeve and forces himself to breathe through it.
Their skills can’t help Dazai right now. Dazai needs them as people. As fellow agency members.
Yosano finishes inserting the blood line and looks at Kunikida. He notices that she’s rewrapped Dazai’s exposed arm with fresh bandages—a weak attempt at privacy now that the scars below have been revealed.
“Are you leaving or staying?” she asks. Her voice carries no judgment, ready for either answer.
“Staying,” Kunikida answers immediately.
Yosano nods. “It’s time to get to work.”
For as much as he’s read on the topic, Kunikida’s knowledge of emergency medicine ends at on-scene first aid. He doesn’t understand exactly what Yosano is doing, hunched over Dazai’s injured shoulder, removing gauze and poking and prodding the wound with metal forceps. But she’d instructed him to take care of the man’s head wound, and that he can do.
Peeling the gauze away from Dazai’s temple, Kunikida finds the bleeding has slowed considerably. Wiping away the congealed blood reveals a small wound—not even needing stitches. Kunikida disinfects the cut and closes it with a butterfly bandage.
“Done,” Kunikida announces.
“Good work,” Yosano says, not even glancing his way—a rare display of trust. “Stay right there and be ready to hand me tools.”
Kunikida obeys. He hands over scissors as she cuts Dazai’s shirt and vest away from his shoulder. She does the same to his signature coat, and Kunikida frowns sympathetically. He’s hardly ever seen Dazai without his coat, so watching Yosano slice and peel away the man’s second skin feels like watching an autopsy—
Don’t think like that.
With half of his chest exposed, Kunikida can see that Dazai’s bandages extend all the way down his abdomen. Yosano cuts away the blood-saturated wrappings from his chest, removing the torn strands. As she wipes away the caked blood surrounding Dazai’s wound, Kunikida spies more overlapping scars covering his chest. Some are precise, others jagged, and still others tell the stories of bullet holes and blades aimed for his heart. One particularly nasty scar runs from his shoulder to his opposite hip, disappearing beneath the bandages at his waist.
Kunikida doesn’t know what to think. So he tries not to think at all, instead focusing on handing Yosano tools and avoiding looking too closely at what she’s doing.
It works until he glances briefly at Dazai’s pale face. Kunikida does a double-take, sucking in a harsh gasp.
Dazai’s eyes are wide open. His gaze is not glassy or distant; it drills into the ceiling with an unfamiliar emotion on a familiar face.
Fear.
No.
Terror.
Terror, deep, raw, and bleeding.
“D-Dazai?” Kunikida stammers, ice dousing his veins and freezing him where he stands.
Yosano looks up—an angry order dies on her lips as she follows Kunikida’s gaze.
“What the fuck?” she curses, eyes narrowing sharply. “I anesthetized him. He can’t be awake.”
Yosano’s confusion pulls Kunikida from his trance. He leans into Dazai’s vision.
“Dazai?” he repeats, steadier this time. “Can you hear me?”
The skin around Dazai’s eyes tightens as he stares through Kunikida, transfixed on something he can’t see. Dazai clenches his teeth so hard that the muscles of his jaw twitch in protest. His breathing picks up, hissing between his gritted teeth. Dazai turns stiff as a board, every muscle locked and trembling with exertion. Kunikida spots his right hand gripping the edge of the table with shaking, bloodless knuckles.
“I’m increasing the dosage,” Yosano announces, stone-faced as she inserts a syringe into the IV line.
Kunikida swallows thickly. “It’s alright, Dazai,” he tries to reassure him, the words catching in his dry throat. “Y-You’re in the infirmary. Yosano’s going to take care of your shoulder.”
He watches Dazai’s face, his own heart threatening to hammer out of his chest as he waits for Dazai’s tension to bleed away as the drugs take effect.
Instead, Dazai’s eyes widen impossibly further. His grimace twists into something pained as he tosses his head back with a swallowed gasp and shudders against the table.
“Damn it! Kunikida, hold him down,” Yosano orders, dropping the IV line and grabbing a set of forceps.
Kunikida braces an arm across Dazai’s clavicles, mindful of his wound. “What’s happening?”
The heart monitor begins to beep incessantly as Dazai’s breathing turns shallow and panicked.
“I don’t know,” Yosano admits, eyeing the heart monitor, “but the anesthesia isn’t working.”
“C-Can’t you sedate him?” Kunikida asks breathlessly. Beneath his arm, Dazai’s chest stutters up and down with uneven, gasping breaths.
“He’s on as high a dose as I’m comfortable administering outside of a hospital,” she says. She clenches her jaw, and a frustrated noise escapes her nose. She shakes her head. “Try to calm him down. I need to get this knife out now before he starts swinging and injures himself further.”
“R-Right, shit. Okay.” Kunikida takes a deep breath, focusing back on Dazai, whose eyes remain locked on the ceiling.
“I-It’s alright,” Kunikida assures him shakily, feeling like a terrible liar. Nothing’s alright, everything’s wrong, and he has no idea what to say or do. “You’re, ah, in the infirmary. Just breathe. You’re … You’re alright.”
A small, wounded noise bubbles up Dazai’s throat but is choked back before it can escape.
“I’m starting,” Yosano announces from over Kunikida’s shoulder and out of sight. “Get ready.”
Kunikida gulps. Shit.
“Dazai—look at me,” he coaxes.
With his free hand, Kunikida gently tries turning Dazai’s head toward him. The man’s gaze slides right past him like oil on water. He shakes with stuttering, shallow, half-breathes that don’t reach his lungs. His whole body quivers with tension.
“Breathe,” Kunikida murmurs, a plea. “Please. We’re trying to help you.”
He hears a wet noise behind him, and Dazai’s jaw unlocks with a wordless, aching cry. His neck arcs; his head weakly lifts from the table before falling back with a thud. Dazai’s face contorts in pain for a few long shuddering breaths before being shuttered with a grimace. Sweat rolls down his forehead in rivulets.
Kunikida keeps his arm braced across the man’s shoulders, but shockingly, Dazai doesn’t fight him, just lies on the table, tense as a bow string and trembling.
“Dazai, hey, Dazai,” Kunikida begs softly, brushing his partner's bangs from his eyes and running a hand through his hair. “You’re okay. Look at me.”
“… sorry …,” Dazai slurs around panting breaths, blinking hard, “‘m sorry … ‘ll be … q-quiet …”
“Don’t apologize. You’re okay.” Kunikida continues running his hand through the man’s sweat-soaked hair, mindful of the tangles. He doesn’t know if it’s helping. But for all the shuddering and shaking Dazai is doing, he hasn’t pulled away, and that must be something.
“Get ready again,” Yosano says, and Kunikida has no idea what she’s doing behind him, but that hardly matters when Dazai is shaking apart in front of him.
“You’re safe,” Kunikida soothes, fumbling for words to distract the man. “Breathe, Dazai. You’re safe.”
Yosano must be doing something particularly painful because Dazai jolts so hard that the table creaks. He swallows a garbled noise before sucking in heaving gulps of air like he’s drowning. All the while, he stares through Kunikida with fearful, watery eyes.
“P-pector-toralis m-minor,” Dazai wheezes, the words sounding scraped out of his throat against his will.
“You’re—” Kunikida falters, his hand stilling in surprise. “What?”
Dazai flinches and squeezes his eyes shut as if braced for a blow.
“Pectoralis min-nor,” Dazai repeats desperately, voice high and thready. His eyes fly open again as he continues in a frantic chant, barely pausing to breathe. “Corac-coid process … clavi … clavicular h-head o-of pectoral-lis major … teres minor … infraspin—spinatus—”
“Yosano, what’s happening?” Kunikida asks, over Dazai’s stuttering incantation.
Kunikida glances briefly at Yosano over his shoulder and catches an uncharacteristic stricken look on her face.
“I don—” she stammers and falls silent for a moment. Then, she tries again. “He’s … naming anatomical parts of the shoulder. Shit, shit …”
Yosano trails off before her voice returns, steady this time. “Ready? Three, two—”
Kunikida hears a gross squelch. Dazai convulses, hand scrabbling against the table and legs kicking out. His chanting cuts off as he throws his head back with a loud, drawn-out keen. Then he sags against the table, chest heaving.
“Got it. It’s out,” Yosano announces. Kunikida hears the clatter of metal as she tosses the blade onto a tray.
Kunikida droops in relief but continues to run his quivering hand through Dazai’s hair as his head slumps in Kunikida’s grasp.
“All done,” Kunikida breathes, unsure whether he’s reassuring Dazai or himself. “It’s out—you’re okay.”
Dazai’s eyes flutter open, lashes wet with unshed tears as he pants.
“Permiss—” Dazai coughs, voice weak and cracking. “P-Permission …”
“It’s over,” Kunikida soothes. “You’re okay.”
“Permission … to s-stand … down.”
The hairs on the back of Kunikida’s neck stand up.
“W-What?” he gasps.
Dazai’s eyes keep slipping closed, but he forces them open again. His mouth twists.
“P-Permission to stand down,” Dazai pleads like a prayer, his gaze glassy. “Permission to stand d-down. Permissiontostanddo—”
“Dazai, stop.” Kunikida takes his face in both hands, trying to meet Dazai’s watery stare. “You don’t—you don’t need permission. It’s okay.”
Dazai bites back a noise that sounds suspiciously like a sob as he fights to keep his eyes open with a terrified desperation Kunikida has never seen from him before.
For the first time since waking up, Dazai’s gaze lands on Kunikida instead of traveling through him.
“Please,” Dazai begs—truly begs. Tears break free and pour down his temples. “Permission to stand down… please.”
Kunikida’s heart breaks.
“P-Permission granted,” he answers breathlessly. His voice breaks as he tries to find the magic words that will make Dazai alright. “S-Stand down, Dazai. Stand down.”
Dazai lets go with a whine of relief. His eyes roll back. His body’s tension snaps like a thread. He slumps to the table, every limb sagging, every muscle spent. His gasping catches in his chest and goes silent.
Kunikida releases him in shock and steps back. Dazai’s head flops against the table, sprawled like a puppet with strings cut away.
For a horrifying second, Kunikida’s panicked brain tells him that Dazai just died in front of him. But the heart monitor that Kunikida had tuned out to keep his sanity beeps a steady rhythm into the otherwise silent infirmary.
With a trembling hand, Kunikida pushes up his glasses, more out of habit than need. Yosano stands perfectly still, bloody gloved hands held in front of her, as if she tried to reach out to Dazai at some point but couldn’t manage it. They both stare at the man on the table, perfectly still, save for the slow rise and fall of his chest.
“What,” Kunikida whispers, voice ragged, “the hell was that?”