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Osamu Dazai wakes up cold, damp, and decidedly naked. Naked like he can't feel his bandages naked, or his clothes, or the warmth of the sun he remembers appreciating before being whacked in the head by something hard and swift.
(A bat, maybe? Depression? He's not sure.)
Dazai lets himself feel approximately seven seconds of blinding panic before he gets himself together. Whatever happened to catch him off guard and let his captors transport his unconscious body somewhere doesn't matter right now. This emptiness he feels where his bandages should be, the blood cooling on his head and dripping onto the floor underneath him – that needs his full attention right now, despite how disgusting he feels while he's so exposed.
Now is not the time for vulnerability.
The back of his head is sore from what feels like blunt force trauma, and his skin feels rubbed raw and cold and greasy, but he's alive.
Damn.
His head is swimming too much to be of any real use other than the steady stream of holy fucking shit this hurts, so he rolls from his back to his left side with a wheezing grunt.
He hasn't opened his eyes yet. He can't even begin to prepare for the swift kick to his gut, then to his ribs, then to his legs.
He blacks out, eyes still firmly clenched shut.
The next time Dazai wakes up, he's tied to a chair. He's still without bandages, but his captors have managed to put his boxers back on.
(Personally, he doesn't think his junk is that embarrassing, but everyone is different he supposes.)
Distantly, he thinks his nose is bleeding if the droplets of blood on his thighs are anything to go by, but his wrists are cinched tight behind the chair with ropes. Ropes are good, he can work with those. Through the pain in his body and the hatred digging itself up from a grave deep in his chest, he can't help but be impressed at this whole display. They must've put a lot of work into fucking with his unusually good mood.
Dazai doesn't even realize he's chuckling, not until a previously unseen lackey steps up and backhands him so hard he sees stars.
He gives himself three seconds to catch his breath. "That was nice. Maybe a little harder next time?" He rasps, dragging his eyes up to stare at the face of his assaulter. He isn't even cute, but Dazai keeps his eyes focused on the bigger man in front of him. He tries to keep his smile wide and passive, but he's tired. There's an edge to his look that makes the lackey visibly uncomfortable.
Unsurprisingly, the discomfort only lasts for a few seconds.
The next punch flies at him with enough force to knock him and his chair sideways. He tumbles, him and the chair landing on his arm with full force.
"How's that for harder, asshole?" The lackey spits. From this angle, Dazai can see clear up his nose.
It really shouldn't make him giggle, but it does. The blood from his nose and mouth pool under his head as he laughs, upper body shaking from both pain and amusement.
"Oh," he starts, his wheezing tapering off. "Oh, I see. I'm a message, right? To the Armed Detective Agency, maybe? Port Mafia? A high paying government official?" He taunts, grin still firmly on his face. If they were here to kill him and put him out of his misery, they would've done so already.
The kick to his already bruised ribs shocks him into a wheezing silence. The lackey, to be fair, looks furious that his play thing is openly mocking him.
"Shut the fuck up, bitch. As soon as Port Mafia gives us what we want, we hand you over to them. Until then, you're ours."
Oh.
Oh, this is hysterical.
Dazai tries to laugh harder, tries to get this giddy feeling out of his lungs, but he's coughing up more blood and can see the black and white spots dancing in front of his vision.
The last thing he says before he passes out again is as cutting as it is amusing.
"You obviously don't know who my coworkers are."
Dazai is in chains the next time he wakes up.
As in, half-hanging from the ceiling in metal cuffs, a skeleton hanging in a similar pair of chains next to him.
He can't help it; he laughs.
He laughs long and loud, laughs until it hurts too much to continue. He's still bared open to the world, but his boxers have stayed firmly on, despite them slipping low over his hips.
Really, there's nothing much else to do but to amuse himself.
Two hours later (or what he thinks is two hours later), Dazai names the skeleton Gene. It's (was?) a girl if the pelvis and bone structure is anything to go by, but he sticks with it. He's still half-delirious from pain and blood loss, but he still manages to come up with four semi-functional escape plans and ten far-fetched ones.
The only thing that's bugging him is the sluggish stream of blood sliding down his face and into his mouth. If he needed his vision tainted red, he'd rejoin Port Mafia.
(Dazai is steadfastly ignoring his dislocated shoulders. If he thinks about them, about how he's been balancing on his toes for a half an hour now, he'll get annoyed. He's patient. He'll wait this out.)
On the fifth hour (he assumes), Dazai is woken from his light nap with boiling hot water thrown over his head. He gasps awake, fully understanding that within seconds, the water will start to cool down and freeze him.
That doesn't stop his back arching away from the water, his dislocated shoulders almost too numb to let him feel the horrible spike of pain that crawls down his back.
He counts four men in the room with him. He doesn't exactly want to think of what might happen to him now, but he refuses to scream. He refuses to grant them the pleasure of witnessing him break from a few sessions of weak torture.
God, Kunikida's probably done worse to him in the last week alone.
Surprisingly, the chains lower enough to let his feet fall flat on the ground. He drops his arms, but the rest of his body drops with them. His legs aren't used to holding up his weight, not with how he's been held up for God knows how many hours. He realizes he's vulnerable a second too late when a knife presses to his temple. He can feel the sharpened blade dig in, just enough to draw blood, just enough to be a threat.
"Get up," the man sneers. Well, isn't that rude?
"Didn't your mother ever teach you manners?"
The words are out of his mouth before he can censor them. His voice sounds rough and scratchy even to his own ears, but he doesn't bother clearing his throat. It'll hurt too much.
The group of men have fun carving new scars into his body. He doesn't scream.
Kunikida and Yosano end up finding Dazai strapped to a medical table in a warehouse at the outskirts of town.
Dazai doesn’t know how long it's been, hours or days or a week, maybe. He's lost more blood in the time he's been captured since his Port Mafia days, but that doesn't stop his mind from helpfully supplying that he's being unbound.
Something, someone, touches his thigh and he flinches so hard he has to grind his teeth together to keep from screaming.
He hasn't once, not yet. If there's anything Dazai can thank Port Mafia for, it's the rigorous training for kids like him; kids that were meant for destruction and death and a high tolerance for pain.
When he feels arms scooping under his legs and back, Dazai squeezes his eyes shut and lets himself be swallowed by the silence of unconsciousness. He trusts these people to take care of him from here, trusts them to keep his mutilated body away from Kyouka and Kenji and Ranpo.
("To torture, you must first be tortured. What would you be if you didn't know what it feels like? Where would your reputation lie if you went into a situation like that blind?" Mori had instructed him. Dazai still remembers the snap of his latex gloves, the clean shine of his scalpels as he was tied onto a table not unlike this one.
Every time he screamed during their sessions, the torture would progress for an extra hour. He was twelve and already planning on killing himself, so why not just go along with it?
If he was going to learn, might as well make the most of it, right?)
Dazai wakes up in the hospital (what he thinks is) two days later. He's not sure how he got from being strapped down and tortured to bandaged and clean, but he's warm and feels safe and his eyes have adjusted to the light streaming in through the windows. His arms are bare from his elbows up, but someone has made the valiant effort of wrapping his forearms in bandages.
His groggy groan is what disturbs the two people next to him.
Kunikida is up in a flash of pale skin and blond hair, having jerked awake when he heard Dazai. Ranpo is more hesitant to move from his chair, but he scoots it closer and sits on the edge of his seat.
Dazai belatedly realizes that they probably haven't slept in days.
"You two look like shit," he croaks, closing his eyes when a sudden wave of nausea rolls over him.
"You look worse," Kunikida snaps, irritated. Dazai knows he's not actually angry, but he still flinches.
The room is quiet, but he keeps his eyes closed. If he ignores them, if he can't see them, he won't have to look Kunikida in the eyes.
He wonders, briefly, if Odasaku suffered like this in death, if he felt like he was burning from the inside out, if the need to sleep and never wake up was this strong after so much blood loss.
"They wouldn't let me see you at first. They told me to watch the kids and Atsushi." It's Ranpo that speaks after several moments of heavy silence, his voice low and quiet. it's like he's trying not to disturb the air around them, but Dazai knows him. He knows how fragile Ranpo can be after a scare like this.
"They?" Dazai asks just as quietly. He forces his eyes open, rolling his head to one side so he can see Ranpo. Now that Dazai is looking, he's at least 90% sure that’s his sweater.
He's also at least 90% sure that that particular sweater was on the back of his chair in his apartment, where he last put it.
"Everyone. Paramedics, Kunikida, Yosano, Fukuzawa. All of them. I didn't want to understand why until I snuck in here, when I saw you, it-" he cuts himself off, heaving in a gasp of air and looking away. "I tried to wrap you up again," Ranpo frets. Dazai's never seen him this concerned with health before. With Ranpo refusing to look at him, he sneaks a glance at Kunikida. Tall, blonde, incredibly pissed off Kunikida.
"I must've been really close to death to get you both in here," he jokes half-heartedly. It's definitely in poor taste, but he can't do anything else. Not when he's so close to this sort of emotion, not when he's unused to this type of care. Before Ranpo can retreat back into himself like he does when he's been slighted, Dazai reaches a bandaged hand out and waits for Ranpo to take it. "Thank you. For doing this, I mean. I've learned that nurses will rarely indulge my vulnerability, despite my charm."
Ranpo grabs his hand like he'll lose Dazai if he lets go, but Ranpo looks up at him through big green eyes and Dazai never stood a chance.
He can only smile when Kunikida dismisses himself to head back to the ADA, grumbling something about overdue paperwork and Dazai disrupting the flow of the agency yet again.
(Of course, he wouldn't be Kunikida if he didn't give a lecture before he left. Dazai doesn't know where his partner goes off to when he feels the weight of a half-crushing hug curl around him and hold him despite his injuries. It doesn't make him emotional. It doesn't.)
When Kunikida is finally gone, Dazai opens his arms. Ranpo doesn't need further prompting, standing up from his chair and crawling into the uncomfortable hospital bed, half on top of Dazai and bony knees almost crushing his pelvis. For a split second, he feels like he's home. He doesn't even try to resist the urge to press a kiss to Ranpo's head.
They'll be okay, he thinks.
When he gets out of the hospital, he'll show Ranpo all the cool new scars he's collected. He'll exaggerate and laugh at all the clever taunts he used on the lackeys, and they'll work through it.
They'll be okay.