Work Text:
“It feels warm.”
Those had been Kyouka’s words when Atsushi hugged her, a few minutes after finding out the truth about her parents. In that moment, he hadn’t given the matter much thought, but his mind tended to wander far away with the worst possible timing. And so here he was, a couple days later, unable to will himself to sleep or to control the random events that crossed his mind.
Not all hugs were warm, he’d come to that conclusion long ago (damned be the entire orphanage and his old director); still, it was a generic term, and, in the best cases, the understatement of the century.
Take Kunikida, for example. The man was stoic, awkward even, when it came to anything emotion-related, but that didn’t mean he showed no affection at all. His usual language consisted of quiet gestures, from curt nods to the occasional hand placed on any of his subordinates’ shoulders after a particularly difficult job had gone well. And it made the contrast of his actual hugs shocking, to say the least.
There was one in particular that Atsushi kept in his memory. A small gang from one of the lower neighborhoods had tried to ambush a few members of the Agency on their way back from a different mission. It wasn’t a great deal, but somehow they’d gotten the Port Mafia involved as well, leading to a shootout in plain daylight. Atsushi’s shoulder had been caught in the crossfire; it hadn’t been a serious injury in itself -nothing in the Agency ever was, unless they could actually die before getting to Yosano- but he’d lost his footing in the process and ended up falling into the water. His vision had gone a bit fuzzy for a few moments, and the next thing he knew, he had been pulled out and led to sit on the pavement of the already empty street. He’d taken a while to recognize that it had been Kunikida’s arms around him, but the feeling of being protected, of being secure, had never left him. Kunikida himself had only said something along the lines of “Don’t die, kid” , the stuff that Atsushi was used to getting from the older members, and yet, he thought, the warmth of that particular hug had managed to convey much better how the veteran cared for his teammates a lot more than he’d ever let on.
On the complete opposite side of the spectrum, you could find Tanizaki. The guy handed out bro-hugs on a daily basis, whether it was to celebrate a good move, a battle won, or just plopping down beside someone at their usual table in the cafe. Atsushi could have sworn that the entirety of the Agency had adopted him as their brother -or at least, he seemed more of a sibling to them than to his actual sister, but Atsushi was nowhere close to daring to ask anyone about the matter- and kindly returned every one of those hugs, each in their personal way, from playfully ruffling his hair to trying in vain to suppress a smile at the demonstration. It was evident that nobody could find it in themselves to dislike Tanizaki’s hugs, they’d become part of the paradigma of the Agency and they’d do whatever it took to keep it that way.
Next closest to the hugs-as-a-personality-feature side, he’d place Kenji, although, given his natural strength, one would definitely be out of breath once it was over. In addition to that, the boy tended to give a much more specific meaning to each of his hugs. True to his extremely sincere nature, the blond would stand in front of whoever whose turn it was, and brightly exclaim whatever it had been that earned them the hug they were about to receive. The most frequent ones were “Thank you for protecting me!” or “You did wonderfully back there!”, but Atsushi had also witnessed a few less common occurrences. There was, for example, the time that he’d congratulated Dazai on not dying, despite the method chosen being one of the most lethal known to science (how Kenji had acquired that knowledge, Atsushi never knew) or, most notably, the one where he’d followed Ranpo around for an entire day, hugging him with renewed enthusiasm every time the other solved a case. It had remained a funny anecdote inside the Agency, mostly because, as the day passed, Kenji got more and more hungry, therefore almost breaking Ranpo’s ribs by the time he was done with his work for the day. The latter had never addressed the topic, but Atsushi had seen him blush once, when Tanizaki joked about him not minding the physical contact.
It was true that Ranpo tended to snap at whoever tried to get their hands on him, but, now that he thought of it, Atsushi just couldn’t seem to recall Ranpo ever actively pushing someone away from him. The man used his own hugs as a bargaining chip, or, more accurately, as a part of his usual begging when he ran out of snacks and everyone else had something better to do. Granted, it was usually Kunikida who found him at his feet, since he’d placed himself in charge of shopping -mostly due to everyone else’s incompetence, he claimed-, but they had all had it happen at least few times, and agreed that a hangry Ranpo was, generally, a bad thing to have in the office. Perhaps, Atsushi concluded, that was the reason for him not to get away when anyone else hugged him, despite how much he claimed not to enjoy it. He was sure Ranpo appreciated the Agency much more than he intended to demonstrate, and preferred to keep that kind of warmth to himself.
Kyouka wasn’t wrong, Atsushi thought, hugs were indeed warm. And yet, every member of the Agency had their own unique way of channeling that warmth in a way that could only be associated with each of their personalities. Even Yosano, whose hugs more often than not tended to resemble an attempt to assassinate them by suffocation, or Naomi, who would take her time warming up to anyone that wasn’t her brother, but ended up being quite physical with all of them regardless. Even the president, who had his own special ritual of welcoming the new members to the family with an embrace not unlike the one a father would give his children. Atsushi took pride in identifying their ways of expression, however intentional they were. It gave him a weird sense of belonging, getting to know their behavior and noticing the minutiae of everyone’s own form of affection. Everyone, except…
Dazai remained a mystery to him, no matter how hard Atsushi tried to comprehend what happened behind the man’s head. Much like Tanizaki, he treated everyone else equally, he was friendly and outgoing, and trustworthy to a fault. Much like Ranpo, he seemed to lack any semblance of shame or comprehend the concept of personal space. He had Kenji’s way of delivering the bluntest words with a smile that looked permanently plastered on his face, and Kunikida’s ability to reassure anyone after a tough moment with the slightest of touches or a few well-placed words. He could be frequently found throwing himself on top of anyone unlucky enough, just for the sake of annoyance, and yet, Atsushi had never received or even witnessed Dazai properly hugging… well, anyone.
In an effort to jog his memory, Atsushi recalled that once before he’d heard Dazai tell someone -probably Kunikida, given the outlandish nature of the discussion- that he was “saving himself for someone special”. Atsushi had taken it the natural way, assumed that Dazai was merely on the lookout for a future partner, but, in hindsight, that hadn’t been the theme of the conversation at all. His previous words contained nothing about a romantic interest, and not even the slightest mention of suicide, which was usually at the very tip of his tongue, especially when it involved a pretty girl of any sort. No, if Atsushi remembered correctly, Kunikida had found out about Dazai’s previous job as a member of the Port Mafia not long ago, and took every chance he got to blame his partner’s scandalous demeanor on them. He’d been chastising Dazai about the very particular way in which the latter had chosen to welcome him back after a long mission, one that involved Dazai hanging himself from the ceiling, upside down, and letting himself fall in front of Kunikida the moment he opened the door, nearly scaring him to death. Over twenty minutes of uninterrupted yelling had followed, Kunikida ranting about how literally anything else would have been a more suitable greeting (“... saying hello, saying nothing at all, shaking someone’s hand, even hugging someone like a normal person!...”) . That’s when Dazai had finally decided to intervene, to retort only to that very last point specifically . He’d gone on for a while, talking about how personal and intimate hugs were, how warm they felt and so on, and thus Atsushi could only infer that, while Dazai had hugged people in the past, he refused to do it unless under very specific conditions.
Not that Atsushi cared, he decided after a while of pondering the issue. Dazai didn’t need to hug people to make them feel cared for, the proof lived in himself and in everyone who, more or less consciously, cared for Dazai in return, valued his presence and his advice, and put their lives in his hands over and over again, with the blind trust that things would turn out right, because that was how things worked in the Agency. They had each other’s backs, no matter what. In time, Kyouka would learn to see it and feel as warm as she’d ever been, not just from Atsushi, but from every single, different member of their weird, dysfunctional family. She would see just how much she belonged, and that was enough.