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There was something strangely novel about the days when the entire Agency ended up squished into Yosano’s infirmary in the aftermath of a mission. Tanizaki, Kenji and Atsushi were lined up like ducklings along one bed, Ranpo and Kyouka sat on another, Kunikida and Yosano flitted around, and Dazai got a full cot to himself.
The others had already been patched up; a fractured arm, a mild concussion, a few torn muscles, all healed in an instant by Yosano once they had arrived back. Dazai was the only one still injured, though that was typical given his ability. With one hand – given the other felt like it might be broken – he typed out a message to Chuuya.
In the background, Kunikida filled with silence with an endless tirade about the reporting process, while Atsushi and Kenji shared a whispered conversation.
“Oi,” Yosano said.
Dazai moved his phone out of view as he looked up at Yosano with a grin. “What can I do for you , sensei?” he asked cheerily. It was hard to miss the sterile needle packet and drip line that sat in the kidney tray she was holding.
“Give me your hand,” she said.
Dazai offered his uninjured hand with a dramatic sigh. “If you wanted to hold my hand, you could just ask!”
Yosano scoffed as she set the tray down on the edge of Dazai’s bed and took out a sterile wipe. She dragged it over his skin, careful to cover every centimetre of skin in the area. “Shut up, or I’ll accidentally get the wrong vein a few times,” she muttered.
“You wouldn’t!” Dazai protested. He tugged weakly against Yosano’s grip, without any intention to really pull himself free. He would likely not get very far while injured, with a full repertoire of Agency members in the room.
Tanizaki frowned as he watched them. “Are you okay, Dazai-san?” he asked.
“Perfectly fine,” Dazai said with a bright smile. It was not like his relative vulnerability relative to everyone else in the Agency was any kind of mystery. “Look, Yosano-sensei is even giving me drugs.” He laughed at Tanizaki’s horrified face.
Yosano took advantage of his distraction to push a needle into a vein on the back of his hand. “Don’t listen to him,” she said, as she taped the site down and began to fiddle with the cannula. “It’s saline, because I have no reason to trust him.”
Ouch. Well, fair. But, still. He frowned at Yosano as she attached the fluids bag and set it up on the IV pole. He was, by far, the most common recipient of this treatment. Of most treatments, actually, but that was mostly because he was the only one Yosano could not fix with her ability.
“Doesn’t it hurt?” Tanizaki asked as he eyed the needle in the back of Dazai’s hand.
He shook his head. “Nope. Can’t even feel it.”
Tanizaki tilted his head to the side, looking thoughtful.
Dazai grinned at him and held his hand up, first to briefly look over the site, then to show it off to Tanizaki. It was neatly done, with the precision of someone who had done it many, many times before. “Why? Want to try one?”
“Nope,” Tanizaki said, shaking his head quickly, “I’m already too familiar with Yosano-sensei’s chainsaw.”
He ducked beneath a flick from Yosano, as she walked back to her desk to drop the discarded equipment and empty packaging in their respective bins. “I’m up for another round if you don’t watch your mouth,” she warned.
Tanizaki’s eyes widened.
After sending a quick glare in his direction, Yosano returned to Dazai’s bedside with bandages to brace his hand. She would probably try to send him to a hospital to get an x-ray, but Dazai usually ended up trusting her strapping to do the job. If it was that bad, then he figured he would know about it.
Atsushi observed them with mild interest. “You’re not getting painkillers?” he asked, as he followed the movement of Yosano’s hands.
“Nope.” Dazai tilted his head to the side slightly and looked at Atsushi. “Why would I?”
There was a beat of silence and then Atsushi’s attention jolted towards him. His expression was somewhere between confusion and alarm, as if he expected an intrinsic understanding of his rationale behind medicine distribution. “Well… Doesn’t it hurt?” he said slowly.
Ah, of course. Dazai moaned loudly. Unfortunately, one hand was restricted from any movement too drastic by the IV tube, and the other was being held between Yosano’s steady fingers, so he could not feign a swoon. “So badly!” he groaned, though he could not honestly say it had initially registered enough for him to complain, “ah, pain really is the worst, you know?”
Atsushi did not seem particularly fooled by the performance. The crease between his eyebrows remained firmly stuck there. “So…”
Dazai’s smile softened. “Painkillers don’t work on me, Atsushi-kun.”
There was another moment of silence, where he felt multiple people who had not previously been interested in the conversation look towards him.
“Why?” Kenji asked. He blinked his wide eyes innocently, swinging his feet because his legs were far too short to reach the floor.
To tell the truth or not? There were probably plenty of lies that Dazai could play like a fiddle if he had been feeling the want to do so, but instead, he shrugged and returned an unnerving grin. “It was the cost of getting poison tolerance.”
Kunikida, who stood towards the wall, spluttered. “You’re poison resistant?”
It was always so easy to make him jump. Dazai smirked at him. “To an extent, I suppose. I mean, you could probably kill me if you force-fed me enough cyanide, but that would hurt, so please don’t.”
Yosano’s fingers faltered for just a moment. She looked up at him with fire in her eyes. “Why is that not in your medical file?” she hissed, withdrawing her hand. The medical tape hung from his thumb, only partially wrapped around.
Dazai tucked the end in for her, pushing the end of the tape just past the border of his bandages. It would have been easier for him to remove them, or at least push them back, but Yosano understood his reluctance with so many other people in the same room.
Even Ranpo wore a small frown on his face. It was not quite one of confusion or surprise, but Dazai liked to think it might have caught him a little off guard.
“What?” Kunikida repeated, sounding aghast. His knuckles were going white from the force with which he had his hands clenched into fists.
Dazai cooed at him, “Mafia things!” It was a shame he could not give him an accompanying thumbs-up to complete the image.
“I’m…” Dazai turned to Kyouka, whose mouth was turned down as if she was trying hard to recall something. “I’m not, though.”
Honestly, Dazai doubted that Kouyou had ever allowed her anywhere near Mori to have the chance to go through the training. And, even if she had, Kyouka’s ability was powerful, but not quite unique enough to warrant being turned into a person Mori would prioritise protecting.
Not quite like Dazai had been when he was still in the Mafia, anyway.
He wished he could pat her head, but settled for as reassuring a smile as he could manage instead. “Well, older Mafia things,” he said gently.
Yosano did not put up with the lie. She scowled at him and cut through a piece of tape with far too much force. “God damn it, Dazai,” she hissed between her teeth.
Dazai dragged his hand out of Yosano’s grasp just for a moment to throw up a surrender sign. Then, he returned it with a sigh and continued, “Okay, specifically Mafia executive things.”
“Mafia executive?” Kunikida spluttered. His became to turn a concerning fuchsia colour; for a moment, Dazai wondered if he should redirect Yosano’s attention to him.
However, Kyouka paled and Dazai’s stomach withered a little. Akutagawa was not an executive member of the Mafia, but he had no doubts that she had heard horror stories and grown to be wary of authority by proxy.
“Obviously,” Ranpo interrupted. Dazai watched him lazily glance around the room, propping an arm on his knee and leaning his face against his hand. It almost appeared like he was bored. “Haven’t you seen how friendly Dazai here is with the leadership?”
Dazai scoffed and waved his IV hand. It was probably worth trying not to irritate Yosano too much more, lest she decided to stick another needle in him and deliberately miss a few times. “We’re not friends,” he said with a sneer, “You should know, they’re all very annoying.”
Raising an eyebrow, Ranpo gave him an unimpressed look. “So annoying, in fact, that you know them all well enough to tell us that.” Though his expression suggested otherwise, his tone was full of a mischievous satisfaction.
There was an awkward silence as the room’s focus drifted from Ranpo and back to Dazai with varying levels of horror fixed on their faces.
Damn him. Well, in fairness, Dazai probably would have enjoyed throwing the same sentence around if their situations had been reversed. “Well, you know how it is,” he said, dismissive.
Ranpo shrugged and grinned at him. “Sure.”
“You were a Mafia executive?” Kunikida said slowly. He looked as though he might have an aneurism as he choked out, “You killed people?”
“Yep!” Dazai tilted his head and looked at him curiously. It was too easy to make him squirm. “Kind of thought you’d worked it out after Double Black was revealed, to be honest.” He refused to let his mouth twitch into a grin as he watched Kunikida struggle with himself, opening and closing his mouth at a frankly concerning speed.
Kenji frowned at him. “You don’t seem like you’d be a very good executive.”
Ranpo snorted.
“Should I be offended, Kenji-kun?” Dazai asked, holding a hand to his heart.
“No!” Kenji said, brightly. He continued, completely oblivious to the room around him. “Just that you don’t look like you’d enjoy it very much! It seems very cold for you.”
Dazai paused. What? This time, he could not entirely stop himself from frowning as he digested Kenji’s words. No one had ever said anything like that to him before. In fact, he had always been told – and known full-heartedly – that he was skilled at even the dirtiest bits of Mafia work.
The confusion did not leave him as he replied, “Nope, I was pretty good at it, you know?”
No one seemed to know quite how to respond to that, and the sentence hung in the word for a long minute until Atsushi interrupted. “Was that why Akutagawa was your subordinate?” he asked.
“Akutagawa, huh?” Dazai said bitterly, turning to Atsushi. It was better than whatever Kenji had been saying, but still a topic that he would much rather have never had to think about again. “I suppose,” he said and huffed to dismiss the rest of the question.
Thankfully, Kunikida, still wide-eyed, interjected before it could stain the atmosphere too heavily. “You were an executive,” he repeated, yet again, sounding just as confused as he had done each time before.
“Yes, Kunikida-kun.” Dazai simpered, “Do you want me to tell you for a fourth time?” It lingered just on the edge of condescending, but Kunikida seemed too absorbed in his own world to have registered that.
“I can’t believe they convinced you to do paperwork,” he said, faintly, staring into the distance.
The door swung open. “They didn’t.”
Dazai turned with a grin ready on his face. “Slug!” he called, and then pulled a face at him.
Chuuya stood in the middle of the doorway with his arms crossed and a scowl etched deep into his face. He jerked his thumb in Dazai’s direction. “This waste of bandages has never done a single day of paperwork in his life.”
That seemed to pull Kunikida back to Earth again. He choked around his words. “Why are you here?” he said.
Chuuya rounded on Dazai, taking a few steps closer, perhaps to give himself a slightly more imposing position. It was a lost cause. “Yeah, Shitty Dazai,” he said, “Why am I here?”
Dazai grinned at him. “You arrived!” he said as if he had never expected anything else. He had known exactly what he was doing when he sent the text message, and he knew that Chuuya knew, too.
Closing the last of the gap between them, Chuuya smacked his arm. “Of course, I’m here, you told me it was a fucking emergency!” he fired back. He held his arm aloft, ready to bring it down again, but Dazai dodged it.
“It is an emergency,” he whined as he pulled free of Yosano’s grip to show off the layer of bandages being wrapped around his hand. “Look! It’s broken! And Kunikida doesn’t believe me that I was an executive so I can’t have painkillers, so now my wrist just hurts!”
A beat of silence passed where Dazai took pleasure in watching the cogs turning behind Chuuya’s eyes as he struggled to make the connection. It left Dazai just enough space to also appreciate Kunikida’s mutterings alternating between irritated and befuddled, and the various confused looks being thrown around the room.
“Give me your hand,” Yosano snapped and yanked it back down to her eye level.
Dazai yelped but complied at the same time that Kyouka hopped down from the bed and walked across to Chuuya. She almost came up his nose and greeted him in a voice too quiet for Dazai to hear.
It had fallen to Kouyou to take both Kyouka and Chuuya under her care. It was not surprising that they knew each other, but Dazai watched the alarm grow on Atsushi’s face in real-time.
“You know Kyouka-chan?” Atsushi asked loudly.
Chuuya’s head snapped over to him and stared until Atsushi looked like he was wilting. “What?” he demanded. It almost seemed like a challenge to see if Atsushi was brave enough to ask the next question.
“Wait,” Tanizaki interjected, perhaps in an effort to save Atsushi from Chuuya’s wrath, “I still don’t get what this has to do with painkillers.”
What the fuck? Chuuya’s hands moved in a familiar pattern, just subtle enough to avoid drawing attention. His eyes narrowed on Dazai as he tried to figure out where the question had come from.
Dazai grinned at him and then turned to Tanizaki. “To build up a tolerance, obviously. It’s a lot harder to assassinate someone if all the covert poisons, painkillers and sedatives don’t work. Right, Chuuya?”
The dots seemed to be connecting in Chuuya’s mind and, though he still seemed a little bemused by the topic, he gave a response somewhere between a nod and a shrug. “He never did it to me, don’t know.”
Arahabaki, of course. There was no need to try building up Chuuya’s resistance to drugs when they could all be burned up almost instantaneously by the God that inhabited his body.
Dazai hummed in agreement. “Well, either way,” he said to Tanizaki, “Painkillers are useless on me!”
Perhaps it came out a little too lightly, because it did not abate the variety of concerned looks he was receiving. There were not many things that honestly made Dazai’s stomach turn, but he did not appreciate the way their expressions were moving dangerously close to pity.
Kenji looked confused as he asked, “But… They do that to everyone in the Mafia?”
“Don’t worry!” Dazai said, smiling at him, “only the important people!”
Kunikida, having found his voice again, looked at Dazai as if seeing him anew. “You were an important person?”
“Did you not pick up on the bit where I said I was an executive?” Dazai said, this time without hiding the patronizing tone.
Chuuya rolled his eyes and shoved Dazai's shoulder. “Yeah, right,” he said, “that’s why he did it. Not at all because you were meant to take over for him.”
Another silence followed Chuuya’s words, dragging on for an uncomfortably long time as everyone in the room slowly processed what he had said. Atsushi was going a faint shade of green, while Kunikida looked like a slate that had been wiped blank. Only Ranpo did not seem surprised by the revelation, but Dazai had no doubt that he had suspected that for years already.
“You were... what?” Yosano asked finally.
Dazai laughed to hide the awkwardness of the room, but even that sounded fake. His stomach buzzed with energy. “Kind of a need to know basis, you know?” He trailed off, not quite sure where to go.
Did you not tell them? Chuuya gestured.
It was difficult to move subtly with an IV in one hand and a strapping tape being applied to the other. With only one hand, Dazai did his best to reply. No? Why did you tell them?
You looked like you told them first! Chuuya huffed as he crossed his arms over his chest again like a cross child.
“What are you saying?” Kenji asked, looking between them.
Both Dazai and Chuuya snapped around to face him. “Nothing!” Dazai said, though even to his own ears, it sounded far too caught off guard for anyone to believe him.
Chuuya scowled. “Don’t mind it, kid.”
Ranpo interrupted before Kenji could speak again. He observed Chuuya with an almost uncomfortable interest. “So, Mr Fancy Hat, you didn’t get the poison treatment?”
“No,” Chuuya said, returning a level stare.
Eyes glinting, Ranpo hummed brightly. His fingers tapped on the bed sheets he was sitting on. “Interesting!” he said.
Dazai frowned as he looked at Chuuya and cocked his head. “But, you got the scars, right?” he asked. The poisons were one thing, but the defiance in his voice… He could not help but wonder.
Chuuya looked almost confused when he turned to Dazai. “I don’t know. Some, I guess,” he said, dismissive, which was enough of an answer. If Chuuya had fully grasped the question, then he doubted he would have received the same reaction. “Whatever. Why am I even here, Dazai?”
“It’s just a question!” Ranpo said brightly.
Chuuya sent him a quick glower and then returned to staring at Dazai. “…Right.”
“What scars?” Kyouka asked quietly. She still stood close to Chuuya and even had her back slightly turned on him. It was an implicit indication of trust, Dazai noted.
Chuuya’s hand lingered above her shoulder in reassurance. “Don’t worry about it,” he muttered.
It was strange. On one level, Dazai had always known the level of training that he had received personally from Mori had been because he was being moulded into the perfect second hand, a leader who could function in a pinch without betraying Mori.
Once that last part had gone wrong, though, Dazai had expected someone else to replace him. Chuuya had seemed the most likely candidate. Loyal as a dog, uncompromising with his morals, strong and charismatic… But, perhaps Mori had pushed someone else into the role. Or, maybe it had just never been filled again.
His blood ran cold.
Perhaps, one last test…? His hand crept up to the bandages by his neck and pulled it down just low enough to see some of the scars that he usually tried so hard to keep hidden, just high enough to hide all of the self-inflicted ones.
“See?” he said emptily, “You get personalised training in the Mafia to teach you what hurts.” The scars that were showing were ones he knew were old, silvered and likely as faded as they would ever be. Nothing bad in comparison to what he could have put on show, but when he glanced around the room, the others looked pale.
Kyouka and Yosano, who were closest but also former Mafia members, even paused. Yosano let out a long, slow breath, though Dazai knew she had seen the scars before.
Chuuya whacked his shoulder. “Shut up,” he said.
“Are you sure it wasn’t just you who got that… training?” Yosano asked after a minute. She dropped Dazai’s hand onto the bed, fully bandaged up.
Dazai turned to Chuuya, waiting for his confirmation. “Not just me, right, Chibi?”
Chuuya raised his hand and rubbed the back of his neck. He looked uncomfortable. “I guess,” he muttered, and then picked up the rest of the sentence in gestures. There’s a reason that you were the expert for torturing people. You know that, right?
So that’s how it was. Dazai blinked at him a few times and then hummed in understanding. He knew no one had taken over his position after he left the Port Mafia, but he had thought that someone would have been forced to become the new interrogator. And, logically, that person would have had at least some similar training.
“Well, whatever,” he said, and pulled the gauze around his neck up again. He smoothed it until it would stay in place and hid everything. “You don’t want to see that!”
Atsushi was still frowning. His eyes were concerningly damn. “Do all your bandages hide scars like that?”
Dazai raised an eyebrow. They were in a detective agency, right…? He would have thought it was obvious what the bandages were hiding from view, but perhaps not. Or, maybe, Atsushi just wanted some reassurance. “Something like that,” he said.
In the corner of his eye, he could see that both Ranpo and Yosano were standing very still.
It took a moment longer for Atsushi to process what he had asked. Then he swung his hands up in front of himself and frantically tried to excuse himself. “I didn’t mean to pry!” he cried, “It’s just. I mean, just,” he paused just long enough for it to become obvious that he was trying to think his words through carefully, “I have scars, too! And I’d never thought about it before!”
Dazai waved his hands dismissively. His stomach felt like there were live snakes inside. “Atsushi-kun, don’t worry so much,” he said, and forced a laugh that did nothing to reassure either of them, “Trust me! You’d just rather not know!”
Atsushi swallowed and stared at the ground. “Oh.”
Chuuya made eye contact with Dazai, and Dazai hesitated before sighing. “Ah, not like that,” he said. He kept his voice as light as possible, though it was becoming harder to. He should have waited to get Chuuya alone before he asked those questions. “I wear them for a reason, though. You can understand that, right?”
“Right,” Atsushi agreed stiffly.
The air suddenly felt much too thick.
Taking his opportunity to scarper, Ranpo stood up and grabbed Kenji’s shoulder. “I’m going home!” he announced to the room, “Kenji, you’re showing me the train route.”
Tanizaki, too, stood up. “I need to meet Naomi after school,” he said loudly, avoiding looking at either Atsushi or Dazai. His gaze remained stuck on the wall as he walked out of the room, even at the expense of bumping into a chair.
The number of people in the room was not much lower than it had been before, but it was composed only of people who had either seen what was under Dazai’s bandages before, or were probably far too aware of the things that could lead to them.
“It’s fine to ask, Atsushi-kun,” Dazai said. His fingers played with the bandages at his wrists for just a moment, but he could not bring himself to undo them. Showing Atsushi the scars that others had inflicted on him was one thing; showing where they overlapped with ones he had made himself was quite another.
Finally, he pulled his leg up in front of himself and rolled up the cuff of his trouser leg.
“Oh my God,” Chuuya muttered, “No one wants to see your foot.”
Dazai elbowed him as best he could in return. Then, he pulled his sock down just far enough to show a gap of skin around his ankle.
“See?” Dazai dragged his finger across a series of jagged and intersecting lines. Most had healed well to the point of faint lines, but other points were slightly puckered.
Atsushi crept closer to look. His breathing was terribly loud.
“I was taught how to locate all the tendons. Which stop a person from walking, how to make it hurt, how to make it permanent.” Dazai’s finger paused on a particularly poorly healed part, and he used the pad to hide it from view. “As I said, special scars, right? Just would rather no one else had to see them.”
He glanced up and wished he had not. Kunikida, even on the other side of the room, looked horrified and Atsushi’s hands fisted his t-shirt far too tightly. Chuuya bumped against him gently. He wore an impassive expression, but Dazai could see him swallow heavily.
After unrolling the cuff, Dazai moved his leg under the bedding again. He tried to grin at them. “No need to look so worried about it. If anything, it’s good! I could probably do some badly executed emergency surgery on you if worst came to worst!”
That did not seem to reassure them, either. If anything, Atsushi looked even more concerned. “But-.”
“It’s just part of the past,” Dazai interrupted before he could finish. He laughed softly, bitterly, and had to force himself to look back at Atsushi.
Atsushi’s lip trembled. “But, you don’t just forget that stuff,” he said. Everyone in the Agency had their own demons in their past, but there was no doubt that Atsushi had some particularly horrible ones.
“You don’t,” Dazai admitted.
There was a moment of silence. No one seemed to want to cut off either Dazai or Atsushi and let time drag as Atsushi thought. “Doesn’t it still hurt?” he asked.
Dazai gave him a tight smile. “There are other things that hurt worse than that, Atsushi-kun.”
“Oh…”
“People deal with things differently,” Dazai said with a shrug. His body seemed to jitter as he tried to piece his words together just right. “Don’t worry too much about it. You won't see it the same as me, and that’s fine, too.”
Atsushi nodded slowly. “But… Are you really okay?”
Dazai glanced at Chuuya and then turned to Atsushi again. “It’s better here than it’s been in a long time.”
“Really?” Atsushi seemed cautious. Probably fair enough, given Dazai’s track record for lying.
Dazai smirked. “Yep!” he declared. It was easier to push up a façade when he could deflect to someone else for a bit. “The slug over there can even confirm it for you!”
Chuuya looked up between them with what seemed like distaste. “Yeah, sure, whatever.” His glare landed on Dazai for a moment too long. Nuisance, he gestured.
Aw, Dazai replied. It was still hardly discrete, but at least no one else understood.
Fuck off. Chuuya glowered at him.
Love you, too.
He turned back to Atsushi. “Okay?”
Atsushi nodded again, but he seemed a little more resolute this time. At a bare minimum, the wetness of his eyes had dried up. “Okay,” he agreed.
“Alright, just don’t go spreading it around, right?” Dazai said, with a small hum of satisfaction and a smile in Atsushi’s direction. “I have to keep my mysterious veneer somehow.”
“What mysterious veneer?” Chuuya scoffed, thwacking his upper arm. “You don’t have any.”
Dazai whined up at him. “So harsh, slug.” He turned to Atsushi with a roll of his eyes. “You see what I have to put up with?”
A small grin grew on Atsushi’s face and he held back a laugh. Which was-. Not perfect, but okay. Dazai would take it.