somehow i'm moving on and it pains me

by warsfeil

Summary:

"Generally speaking," Dazai says, and he doesn't sound anything like the Dazai that Chuuya knows, "I can't imagine I'd go through the effort of faking my death when dying is both easier to achieve and more of a pleasant experience. Though it depends on the how and the why, of course."

"Bastard, stop talking in circles and–"

"Boss, huh?" Dazai says, and Chuuya breaks off. It sounds wrong, from Dazai, and Chuuya lets Dazai go. Dazai drops down to both knees, and then sits there, gazing past Chuuya and looking at the makeshift shrine on the imposing wooden desk. There's something dark in his gaze, and it's almost comforting. Almost, because it's familiar; it's a knife in the darkness that Chuuya has watched bring down hundreds of people.

"What," Chuuya snaps. "Going to tell me you want the position back?"

"Back," Dazai murmurs, drumming his fingers on his knees before he finally climbs back up to his feet. His hands go into his pockets, his posture relaxed and easy, and none of it makes any sense. "Chuuya, was I really?"

-

In which Dazai of the Beast light novel the Dazai of canon swap places and have to solve some mysteries to return home. Or try to, at least.

Chapter 1

feed the fire all you want
you won't take me
knock me down all you want
watch it save me
somehow i'm moving on and it pains me
maybe god'll let me die when my dreams go up in smoke
"smoke damage" - hi i'm case

 

Chuuya wishes he could dream.

If he could dream, then he could convince himself that this was all a particularly well-constructed nightmare of a reality that would never come to pass. He's read about that sort of thing, about the feeling of something horrible happening and of feeling like you'll wake up at any moment – but he can't relate. For him, sleeping transitions smoothly into waking back up to whatever degree of restfulness he's managed to achieve, and there's simply nothing in between.

This means that reality is reality, and that's all there is to the matter.

It still feels unreal whenever he looks at the photo of Dazai. It's one of approximately three photos that even exist of Dazai, because Dazai has only ever been the elusive and secretive Boss of the Port Mafia – but even Dazai was fifteen once, and he'd let Chuuya snap a grainy cell phone image of himself looking vaguely surprised after Chuuya'd beat him at a video game. So that's the one that Chuuya chose for Dazai's shitty little memorial, a photo and some flowers, hidden away in Dazai's old office, because fuck if Chuuya was going to use the same office and fuck if he was going to go give Dazai an actual gravestone.

So: Dazai is dead, this is reality, and Chuuya is the leader of the Port Mafia now.

Would it feel more real if he'd seen the body? Dazai must have known Chuuya wouldn't have let him die like that, so he'd sent Chuuya out of the city for that final confrontation. By the time Chuuya'd gotten back, there was nothing left but Dazai's ashes, Kouyou's immaculate concealer hiding red-rimmed eyes, and the opening for Boss that Chuuya was left filling.

Chuuya scrubs his hands down his face until the photo of Dazai blurs into the Dazai of his memory. Dazai, behind this desk, staring off into space like it would tell him all the secrets of the universe or whatever. Chuuya doesn't know what Dazai used to get up to. It sure as hell wasn't running the Port Mafia very well, because the state of things is a complete mess and Chuuya feels overwhelmed just trying to fix it, and–

"Chuuya?"

Chuuya has never dreamed before, but he thinks he must be, because there's no way that curious, lilting voice could belong to anyone but someone that's buried--

Chuuya whips his entire body around, half-prepared for a fight, and instead he sees…

"Dazai?" Chuuya says, disbelief high in his tone. It is Dazai, but it's Dazai in a way that Chuuya's never seen him before. Chuuya's never once seen Dazai wear anything but mafia blacks, and this Dazai is practically radiating "normal businessman", with his blue button down and his tan coat. He'd almost think it was some poor unfortunate sap that just looked appallingly like Dazai, if it wasn't for the bandages.

The bandages, Chuuya notes, that aren't covering Dazai's eyes. Neither of them. Both are fixated on Chuuya, and the cheerful, questioning tone that Dazai had spoken with – the idle amusement that had been on his face – is replaced with a much more familiar, sharp expression as he seems to take in everything about Chuuya.

"You fucker," Chuuya blurts, before he can even try and figure out what it is about him that has Dazai frowning. He just strides forward, grabbing a fistful of Dazai's ridiculous vest, dragging him down so hard that Dazai is forced onto one knee. Dazai allows it to happen, and Chuuya can feel the cool error message of No Longer Human seeping into his skin, locking away his ability. That's fine. He doesn't need it. "You faked your death?"

Chuuya shakes Dazai, and Dazai wobbles precariously, letting himself go boneless. It makes Chuuya's stomach roil, because he's expecting a rebuke, a denial, anything that might make the situation turn itself right ways up into something he could understand.

"Generally speaking," Dazai says, and he doesn't sound anything like the Dazai that Chuuya knows, "I can't imagine I'd go through the effort of faking my death when dying is both easier to achieve and more of a pleasant experience. Though it depends on the how and the why, of course."

"Bastard, stop talking in circles and–"

"Boss, huh?" Dazai says, and Chuuya breaks his sentence off. It sounds wrong, from Dazai, and Chuuya lets Dazai go. Dazai drops down to both knees, and then sits there, gazing past Chuuya and looking at the makeshift shrine on the imposing wooden desk. There's something dark in his gaze, and it's almost comforting. Almost, because it's familiar; it's a knife in the darkness that Chuuya has watched bring down hundreds of people.

"What," Chuuya snaps. "Going to tell me you want the position back?"

"Back," Dazai murmurs, drumming his fingers on his knees before he finally climbs back up to his feet. His hands go into his pockets, his posture relaxed and easy, and none of it makes any sense. "Chuuya, was I really?"

"Were you really what?" Chuuya asks. He feels off kilter. He feels out of step. He and Dazai have never been on the same wavelength before. He's never heard Dazai say his name like that– light and easy, like it's a normal thing to come out of his mouth. Even when they were fifteen, Dazai said his name like a curse instead of a promise.

"The Boss," Dazai says.

"What do you mean were you really the Boss?" Chuuya says. He steps back to Dazai again, and he reaches up. His hand hesitates halfway there, and then he keeps plunging forward as recklessly as ever, grabbing Dazai's face so he can see his eyes better. "Are you concussed? I'm not listening to your orders anymore, so don't even try."

"Chuuya's angrier than usual," Dazai murmurs, looking like he's starting to understand things. It makes Chuuya's blood boil, because Chuuya still doesn't understand anything, except that Dazai is still warm and alive where Chuuya's hand is still on his cheek. Chuuya snatches it back, and Dazai raises a hand to his chin, looking around the room one more time like he'll figure out its secrets if he tries hard enough.

"Of course I'm angrier than usual," Chuuya says, feeling a little like the anger is seeping out of him at a rapid pace. "You left things a mess."

Dazai nods, absorbing this information, and then fixes his gaze on Chuuya again.

"When did I become the Boss?"

"What?" Chuuya echoes. "...seriously, are you concussed?"

"I'm not," Dazai says. "How old were we?"

"We? I was– you were seventeen," Chuuya says.

"It was after Verlaine?" Dazai says. "But before Mimic?"

"...Mimic?" Chuuya echoes, because that's easier than thinking about the clusterfuck that had been Verlaine. Chuuya still aches for the idea, sometimes, that he might have been able to find out if he was human, if they'd done things differently back then. "Those guys you took down a few years back?"

"Chuuya," Dazai says, his voice very patient but lacking the condescension that Chuuya's used to hearing from him, "this is all wrong."

Chuuya can't help it. He snorts, an inelegant noise that perfectly conveys the fact that he's well aware of how incredibly wrong this entire situation is, start to finish. It isn't a dream, but it could still be a stress induced hallucination, he supposes.

"I joined the Armed Detective Agency two years ago," Dazai offers, and Chuuya can't help the way his brows crease as he tries to make sense of that one. "Mori is still in charge of the Port Mafia."

"You killed Mori," Chuuya snaps, because he'd seen the body, cooling and face-down on the carpet while Dazai dispassionately watched the blood congeal underneath him.

"I didn't," Dazai says, "but I'm sure that your Dazai did."

"My–" Chuuya echoes, and then, because he's tired of echoing the weird shit Dazai says: "He's not my anything. What are you trying to say here?"

"I'm saying," Dazai says, very patiently, "that I'm Dazai, but from a different reality."

"What."

"It's the only explanation!" Dazai chirps, cheerfully, and it grates down Chuuya's spine like a physical attack. "No one can modify my memories, and it's clear that your memories weren't modified, but your reality could have been– which means one of a handful of things."

Dazai beams, holding up a finger. Chuuya is startled enough that he just sits back, letting the leather of his gloves creak as he perches on the edge of Dazai's old desk. His Dazai's old desk? His Dazai (it's starting to sound a little less weird the more he repeats it) would never have been this open with explanations about anything, and it's a novel enough experience that Chuuya feels like paying attention.

"One, reality was altered. Since abilities don't affect me, I'm the only one from the 'real' reality," Dazai says. "Two, this was simply another reality in among the myriad of ones that exist without provable certainty, and for some reason, I've been brought into it in a way that isn't related to abilities. If your Dazai is dead, then it leaves a neat Dazai shaped hole that it's possible this reality needed to fill for whatever reason. Or, three, it's an intentional reality-altering move done by your enemies in order to make the Port Mafia fall into chaos during the power change."

"Sure," Chuuya says, once Dazai is done with his explanation. "It doesn't really matter, if you're not the Dazai I know. You said you didn't want the position, right?"

"Emphatically not," Dazai says, and his hands go back into his pockets. "But it doesn't matter what I want. If I'm dead here, and I simply pop back up alive and unharmed, there'll need to be a satisfactory explanation for my having faked my death. I can't imagine the mafia is particularly loyal to me over you, so the stability wouldn't be too much of a problem… Hmm, is Ane-san still one of the executives?"

"You still call her Ane-san and you're in the Agency?" Chuuya says, one eyebrow raised. "And she hasn't killed you?"

Dazai just grins. "I'm very good at what I do, you know. At any rate–"

Dazai is interrupted by the door opening without so much as a warning knock. There's no tension in Dazai's frame, but his eyes sharpen back into that familiar calculation. Chuuya can see the way Dazai starts layering plans on top of plans, making sure that there's enough contingencies for things to go the way he wants them. Chuuya lets himself fall into a more defensive stance. It's unlikely that there's going to be a fight here, in the empty office, but there's still a chance.

The young woman who steps inside looks deeply terrified to have walked in on the Port Mafia Boss when he looks like he's about to fight someone.

"Nakahara-sa– Boss! I'm sorry– I was coming in to clean the windows," she blurts. Chuuya can't immediately place her, so he isn't offended by the temporary fail in address – it's a transition for everyone, after all. He can see the glass cleaner in her hand, though.

"Oh," Chuuya says, and looks at Dazai. Dazai's eyes go wide and innocent, which is absolutely not the way he should look, and Chuuya can't help but glance back at the young lady, because even if she doesn't recognize Dazai explicitly, that kind of expression on the face of anyone in the mafia is suspicious.

She just wrings the rag in her hand anxiously, though. She follows Chuuya's gaze to Dazai, and then past him, to the window.

"Is this the one?" she asks, and then darts over to the window. She brushes past Dazai without so much as sparing him a glance, and Chuuya watches as Dazai's face turns thoughtful. Chuuya starts to speak, but Dazai holds up a hand, and Chuuya can't help but obey even if he doesn't have any reason to.

"Excuse me, miss," Dazai says. There's no response. She seems very intent on making sure the glass is fully clean. Dazai leans over her, letting his hand drop in front of her face, and she has absolutely no reaction. It's the kind of non-reaction that makes it very, very clear that she simply can't see Dazai.

"It appears," Dazai says, "that I'm something of a ghost."

Chuuya has no idea what to say to that. There's nothing he can say, either, without making the poor girl intent on cleaning the windows doubt his sanity, so he just gives Dazai his best unimpressed look (which appears about as ineffectual as ever), and then nods at the girl before he leaves without a word. She bows automatically, low and apologetic, and Chuuya beats down the urge within him that feels so ill at ease with it. He's the Boss now; he's going to have to get used to these things sooner or later.

Once they're out of the office, Dazai turns to Chuuya. Dazai falls into pace beside him – beside him, instead of a half dozen steps ahead, like they're equals instead of Chuuya backing him as a bodyguard, which is confusing in its own way – and then Dazai tilts his head.

"Where's your office?" Dazai asks.

"Under renovations," Chuuya says, shortly. "It's the other half of the floor."

"Did you move the server rooms?" Dazai asks, which is a pointless question that Chuuya doesn't need to answer, but he still hums a noise of assent anyway. Obviously he'd moved the server rooms. "It's nice that you felt so strongly about my death that you retired the office entirely."

Chuuya can't help it. The sentence triggers that rage within him, catches on the raw feeling of Dazai's death, of Chuuya's own grief, of the layers of it all that Chuuya can't even begin to unravel – betrayal and helplessness and desperate frustration – and Chuuya whirls around, grabbing Dazai by his stupid tan coat and shoving him against the wall.

"Shut," Chuuya says, "the fuck up."

"I'm not a member of the Port Mafia anymore," Dazai says, reaching a hand up to flick playfully at Chuuya's hat chain. "So I have no reason to listen to the Boss, and even less of a reason to listen to Chuuya."

"You expect me to believe that you really left to go join the Agency?" Chuuya snaps, and Dazai shrugs a shoulder up. Chuuya calmly pulls Dazai an inch forward and then slams him harder against the wall, until something approaching a flinch flies through Dazai's shoulders if not across his face.

"I intend to go back," Dazai says. "I might be a ghost here, but I'm not dead there. You can believe whatever you like, but it won't change the truth."

"The truth," Chuuya snarls. "You've never told the truth in your life."

"I tell the truth all the time," Dazai says, sounding strangely proud of this fact.

"Prove it," Chuuya says, flatly.

Dazai's gaze drifts away from Chuuya as he thinks it over, visibly. Chuuya expects him to give some sort of half-truth or obvious answer, something that doesn't mean anything. He expects him to act like his Dazai.

"We were partners until I left the Mafia, and even after that," Dazai says, instead, and the words hit so heavy that Chuuya feels like it's Arahabaki turning the world's gravity up until it's threatening to crush them both where they stand. Dazai reaches up and taps Chuuya's throat, taps the leather around it. "You must have been something like that, here, or you wouldn't still be wearing this."

Chuuya swallows, more aware of the collar than he has been in years. "We didn't have anything like that. He gave it to me because I was his dog and he was a dick."

"Then why are you wearing it when he's dead?" Dazai asks, and Chuuya punches him so hard it cracks the plaster of the wall behind him.

"Ow," Dazai intones in a complete monotone, raising his other hand to press over the rapidly blossoming bruise on his jaw. His other hand is still at Chuuya's throat, hot fingertips barely making contact.

"Sure, I'll believe you're not him," Chuuya says. "I'll believe you're some bizarre, do-gooder Dazai that's joined the Agency like it'll wash the blood off his hands. But you don't know shit about me."

Dazai's mouth quirks a little, like he's not sure if he should be smiling or not. "Now who isn't telling the truth?"

Chuuya releases Dazai with a disgusted click of the tongue, because the last thing he wants to deal with is Dazai analyzing him when Chuuya is still feeling so off-kilter.

"Partners," Chuuya says, testing the word. It conjures up a whole world in his imagination – where things went different, where he could trust Dazai. Dazai hadn't said they were friends, hadn't said they were anything but partners, and it's so easy to imagine that it makes Chuuya's mouth taste like bile. "So you're expecting us to work together?"

"Well, it would certainly make things easier," Dazai says. He pushes himself away from the wall, and Chuuya gives him a long look before he starts walking again. This time, Dazai lets Chuuya take point, and he's the one who trails a half-dozen steps behind. "Admittedly, you have less of an incentive than I do, given that I need to get back to my reality – alive – but I can't imagine you want me hovering around you in perpetuity, so we may as well figure this out together."

They get to the elevator, and Dazai ambles after Chuuya into it as Chuuya punches for the ground floor. Dazai doesn't comment on it, or fill the silence at all, and Chuuya mulls the entire situation over.

It's unbelievable. It's absolutely stupid, from start to finish – but Chuuya has a god locked inside of him, so his ability to believe things is a little different than most people. He still doesn't think it's a very good idea to believe Dazai – any Dazai – but it's also true that he doesn't want this bizarre version of Dazai hanging around him and annoying the shit out of him. Especially not if Chuuya's the only one that can see him.

Chuuya does not think about the idea of wanting his Dazai back. ("His", "his", and it's easier every time, isn't it?) That Dazai is dead, and can't return even if they figure out how to fix whatever dimensional wires were crossed to get this Dazai in the wrong reality. There's no use thinking about it. There's no use thinking about what could have been.

What was, in this Dazai's home.

Chuuya swallows it down the same way he does everything else, and makes sure that his voice is flat and careful when he speaks.

"You have a plan yet?" Chuuya asks.

"I'm working on a few," Dazai admits. "Ah, but it's hard to think on an empty stomach, you know!"

"You're a ghost," Chuuya says. "How are you hungry?"

"I'm perfectly alive," Dazai says. He taps the bruise on his cheek, which does prove that he's some degree of alive, if blood can flow like that, if skin can swell and break.

"You know, you're right," Chuuya drawls. "That means I can still kick your ass."

"Chuuya, that's mean," Dazai says as the elevator doors open, and Chuuya can't help it. He gives Dazai a small smile, and he jolts when he sees it returned. It's a different smile than Chuuya's used to seeing on Dazai's face. Softer, somehow. A little more genuine. Maybe it's all the more fake for it, and this Dazai is just better at things, but Chuuya doesn't think it's that easy.

The Agency, huh? Chuuya doesn't pretend to have the faintest idea why any Dazai would ever go for them, especially not when it sounds like this Dazai still started in the same place… but it'd cover the discrepancies, he figures.

"Chuuya," Dazai wheedles as they walk, following Chuuya as Chuuya makes a line straight for his motorcycle. "Chuuya, I'm not getting on that."

"Then you can stay here," Chuuya says, and tosses him a helmet. Chuuya's coat and scarf come off and get replaced with a biking jacket, because Chuuya thinks dying by getting his scarf caught in his motorcycle wheels might be the most undignified death possible.

"Chuuya," Dazai says, very seriously, "you can't use any of your gravity powers if I'm on the back of your bike."

"You know I can still drive, right?" Chuuya says. He swings a leg over his bike and fires it up. It took him two hours to even convince everyone that it was safe for him to still ride it. There was no precedent for a Port Mafia boss riding a motorcycle around the city, but it isn't like anyone can shoot Chuuya and actually nail him. They could try, but since no one else can see Dazai, he doubts anyone is stupid enough to try and take the opportunity. "C'mon, you said you were partners. You must have ridden before."

Dazai gets a weird look on his face at that. Maybe he never did ride on Chuuya's bike. Maybe the other Chuuya doesn't even have a bike. That'd be weird as fuck, but so is everything else about that.

"Don't crash," Dazai says, warningly. He sits on the back of the bike and seems to have no problems tucking his arms neatly around Chuuya's waist. It's the most physical contact Chuuya thinks he's had with Dazai since they were fifteen, and it feels like Dazai's skin could sear him through all their layers of clothing and bandages and everything else.

"Shut up," Chuuya says, and Dazai just huffs.

Dazai holds on a little tighter when Chuuya takes off. Chuuya's never bothered to care about the speed limit, and he's not about to start now, and it's gratifying that it seems to make Dazai just a little nervous. Good. Chuuya's been the one trying to recover his footing this entire time; Dazai deserves to have at least a taste of that.

The ride does a great deal to settle Chuuya. It's always been sort of meditative for him. It's different with Dazai's arms wrapped around him, but it isn't unpleasant, which is another thing Chuuya is not going to try and unpack right now.

Instead, he just pulls into the parking lot for a little izakaya. It's nothing much. He and Gin used to go periodically on the rare occasions that they'd both finished all of Dazai's stupid busywork. Tachihara'd join, sometimes, here and there. None of them had managed it for the past few months.

Chuuya'd never bring his Dazai here, but… this Dazai just slides off the bike, looks at the izakaya, and beams.

"Chuuya, you are going to buy me dinner!" Dazai chirps, and Chuuya rolls his eyes.

"You can't pay if no one can see you, right?" Chuuya says, and Dazai practically beams.

"Wow, I've never liked Chuuya before," Dazai says.

"I changed my mind," Chuuya says, stepping around Dazai to head inside the restaurant. "You can starve. I'm going to eat in front of you."

"Chuuya! I take it back! I don't like you at all! Your shoes are ugly! Your hat is gross!" Dazai says. No one in the restaurant reacts to Dazai's histrionics, so Chuuya supposes he really is the only one that can see him. They slide into seats, and Dazai immediately languishes. "Chuuya, I want sake and crab."

"I didn't say I'd get you drunk on my tab," Chuuya says, quietly. They're sitting away from most of the other patrons, of which there aren't many to begin withd, but he still doesn't want to be the weird guy in the corner talking to himself.

"Chuuya," Dazai says, dragging Chuuya's name out until it's several syllables longer than it should be. "Chu~uya…"

The waitress comes over, and Dazai spends the entire time dragging Chuuya's name out plaintively and kicking him under the table until Chuuya finally kicks back and orders sake.

"Are you a literal child?" Chuuya snaps, once the waitress is out of earshot.

"Children don't drink sake," Dazai says, imperiously.

"You did," Chuuya shoots back, and Dazai pauses.

"I was never a child," Dazai sniffs, as the waitress sets the sake down. Dazai immediately snatches the lone glass, and Chuuya watches as Dazai breaks every single etiquette rule by pouring the cup full, downing it in one swallow, filling it again, sliding it over to Chuuya, and then keeping the bottle.

"Oh, so you didn't meet your Chuuya when you were fifteen?" Chuuya says, and it hits him a few seconds later that the idea of your Chuuya is actually even more upsetting than the idea of his Dazai.

"That's a teenager, not a child," Dazai says.

Chuuya snorts, drinking his sake and holding it out for Dazai to refill. Dazai does, if a bit suspiciously, like he's trying to calculate how much of the sake Chuuya intends on drinking.

"It's my sake," Chuuya says.

"It's," Dazai starts, and then trails off. He doesn't stop pouring, and Chuuya curses.

"Dazai, what the fuck are you doing?" Chuuya smacks the bottle back upright and throws some napkins on the table to staunch the flow, and Dazai doesn't seem to react in the slightest.

"Odasaku?" Dazai says, very quietly. He's gone pale. He looks like he's the one that's seen a ghost, now, but it's just one of the guys from the Agency. Which – shouldn't Dazai just be friends with him, if Dazai's in the Agency? Why is he making such a big deal about it?

Except then the guy looks at Chuuya, then directly at Dazai.

"I thought you died," the man says to Dazai, sounding both unimpressed and hostile, and Chuuya nearly drops the sake bottle a second time.

-

Investigating a murder is, for the Agency, relatively routine. There's nothing too out of the ordinary about it, at first glance, and it's decided that Kunikida and Atsushi can go, since they're the two people that are most readily available at first glance.

"Has anyone seen Dazai-san?" Atsushi asks, cautiously, and several people look at him and shrug. This is also relatively routine, even if it makes Atsushi's stomach twist with anxiety. The last time Dazai had vanished long term, he'd gotten kidnapped, but it was on purpose, so… nothing to worry about?

In response to Atsushi's question, Kunikida snaps a pencil in half. They've stopped letting him have the mechanical ones, because this is hardly the first time it's happened, and since switching to standard wooden pencils the Agency office supply budget has gone down notably.

"He's vanished again," Kunikida says, his voice deceptively calm despite the fact that he'd just broken a pencil in sheer aggravation. He sets both halves of it down on his desk, very carefully, and then stands. "He'd better be actually dying this time. Come on, let's head out."

Atsushi scrambles to his feet and trails after Kunikida, who continues to mumble darkly under his breath about Dazai for the duration of the walk outside of the Agency headquarters. Atsushi only listens to bits and pieces of it – waste of bandages, hasn't done his paperwork, never around when we need him, running up his liquor tabs again – before deciding it, also, is nothing out of the ordinary.

He waits until the annoyed muttering trails off before he finally questions Kunikida.

"So," Atsushi says, "what are the details on the case?" And then, when Kunikida turns a deeply annoyed expression onto Atsushi, ready to chastise him for not being prepared, Atsushi hurriedly adds: "I was busy finishing the paperwork from the Ishihara case, so Ranpo-san told me it would be fine if you filled me in on the walk…"

If it had been a statement from anyone but Ranpo, Kunikida might have protested it more, but as it is he just swallows down his feelings on the situation with a quiet huff of exasperation.

"There's been a few suspicious deaths recently," Kunikida says. He's too careful to bother bringing any files with him, never willing to be careless enough to let them fall into the hands of random people, so Kunikida just punctuates the sentence with a decisive hand gesture. "The Port Mafia allegedly claims that they're completely uninvolved, and they aren't ability users, so there isn't a reason to distrust that. The police haven't found any leads."

"People… die in Yokohama a lot, right?" Atsushi says. "What makes these ones special?"

"There's no cause of death," Kunikida says.

Atsushi blinks, taken aback by that response. "Nothing at all?"

"As far as the coroner could discover, they simply ceased to live. The official statement is cardiac arrest, but there's no distinct reason for it. Only one of them was of an age where heart attacks are considered a normal risk," Kunikida explains. They're moving fast enough that Atsushi doesn't have to worry about anyone overhearing them. Atsushi knows vaguely where they're headed – towards one of the nicer residential districts that he generally avoids at all costs because he feels terribly like he sticks out like a sore thumb – but the foot traffic steadily starts to die down regardless. "One was a man in his fifties. He worked in financial advising, and was divorced. His ex-wife reports that he had no health problems at the time, but she wasn't surprised he'd died. The second was a young man in his early thirties, who worked at a local pharmacy. He was in the middle of the day shift when he simply stopped living in the middle of work. The final was a young girl in middle school. She went to sleep early intending to rest fully before a test, and never woke up."

Atsushi files all of this away dutifully. He's no stranger to death, in the business that they're in, but he still spends a moment to let himself feel the familiar grief for lives lost for no good reason. There's never a good reason, he thinks, but in this case there's literally no reason.

"Which one are we investigating right now?" Atsushi asks.

"A new one. A young woman in her twenties," Kunikida says. "She was found dead in her apartment by her roomate, a pot of water boiled dry on the stove and an unopened packet of instant curry in her hand."

Atsushi thinks that if he's ever going to die, he really hopes it's in some sort of heroic battle and not cooking instant curry. He immediately feels bad for thinking it, because he's sure the poor woman had no control over her death, and he mentally sends an apology into the universe. It's not that I was judging, or anything!

"None of them know each other?" Atsushi asks. He's been on enough cases that he knows the vague motions he should be taking to solve the case.

"No connections that we can find, save that they all live in Yokohama," Kunikida says. "Ranpo-san is heading to Tokyo later to see if there's anyone there that fits the same criteria."

"Do you think it's an ability user?" Atsushi asks, carefully. It would be more than a little inconvenient if they were dealing with some sort of instant death ability user when Dazai has temporarily escaped the mundanity of paperwork, but Atsushi's reasonably certain they can still handle it. "Did Ranpo-san try to solve it?"

Kunikida hesitates for the first time in the explanation. He doesn't reply for a long moment, and instead pulls up short at a nice residential building. It's elaborate and expensive; new construction, a bit ostentatious. The kind of apartments that go for more than some houses. It makes Atsushi tug on his belt to try and make himself look a little more presentable.

"At any rate," Kunikida says, and the fact that he didn't answer Atsushi's question does not go unnoticed, "we're here. I'll do most of the talking, but take a look around. There hasn't been anything at any of the scenes, but that doesn't mean that the police haven't overlooked something important."

Atsushi nods. He follows Kunikida inside, and immediately hears the sound of someone crying softly. He can see a woman crying in the corner– the roommate, he thinks. He feels even sorrier for his thought about dying while making curry when he sees her raw grief. Kunikida goes over to her, slipping alongside the policewoman who has abandoned the notepad in her hand to rub the young woman's shoulder encouragingly.

Kunikida's entire demeanor shifts slightly, like he's taking two steps into a different job. He softens his voice enough to sound understanding; his questions are gentle and patient. It's the Kunikida that comes out when he's dealing with this sort of thing – high emotions, important questions, fragile people. Atsushi watches for a moment before he steps into the kitchen.

Seeing dead bodies never really gets any less weird. This one is even stranger, because she really does just look like she's sleeping, dressed in a pair of jeans and a pullover sweatshirt with a cartoon bear on it. The pack of curry is still in her hand, the empty pot still on the stove, which has at least been turned off. Atsushi looks at her for a long moment like he might see her breath if he waits long enough – but of course she doesn't move.

Atsushi isn't really sure where to start here, and he's loathe to touch the body and risk winding up messing up that evidence, so he heads further into the apartment instead. There's two bedrooms, and he glances in one before deciding on the second one when he finds a plush bear that matches the woman's sweatshirt.

It looks like a totally normal room.

Well. Atsushi .thinks it looks like a totally normal room, but Atsushi doesn't really know, because he's never seen a totally normal woman's room before, but he thinks it would probably look like this. Her bed is unmade, the blankets piled into one corner, and there's a smartphone cord on the nightstand instead of an alarm clock. There's some dirty clothing in the corner, and a laundry basket with what's probably the clean laundry next to a dresser that's slightly overflowing with clothing. A bookcase with a variety of books indicating that the woman was probably studying psychology but seemed to have a fondness for popular shoujo manga, and a desk with some general items that he'd expect. A laptop. A notebook.

Carefully, Atsushi fires up the laptop, but is immediately thwarted by the presence of a password that is not "password". The notebook doesn't offer much more than a to-do list and some vague notes. Phone numbers, a few names. College assignments and a check list of places to apply for part-time jobs.

There's absolutely nothing suspicious about it at all, except for the fact that she's dead.

"Dazai-san would probably know what to do immediately," Atsushi says, sighing. He pulls out his flip phone and takes a couple pictures of the notebook contents to look up the names later and see if anything connects. He doubts it'd be that easy, but…

He starts to head into the other bedroom just to make sure there's nothing odd there, either, but draws up short. There's a weird smell that he can't quite put his finger on, but it's really familiar– blood? It's definitely the smell of blood, right?

He presses into the bedroom with more urgency, but a quick sweep of the room shows nothing out of place. The owner of this room seems to be considerably neater, with her bed made and her manga collection carefully organized, but everything is tucked away. There's no blood anywhere, that's for sure. Atsushi sniffs the air, trying to follow the scent, but it seems to dissipate into thin air. It's impossible to track.

By the time he heads back out of the bedroom, the smell has completely evaporated.

Atsushi heads out to meet back with Kunikida and discreetly let him know that he found absolutely nothing of worth, and Dazai slips, undetected, down from the bedroom balcony to the ground.

Dazai exhales. It was careless of him. He knows better than anyone how sensitive Atsushi's nose is. A year of knowing this Atsushi and a half-dozen of knowing his Atsushi on top of that, and he still didn't expect Atsushi to catch onto his presence that quickly.

Dazai is careful as he slips down to the ground level and then away from the building, mind spinning at a rate quick enough that he could probably power several nuclear facilities entirely by himself. He hates working without many of the facts, but the facts as he has them don't make sense.

Clearly, he's in the world that he remembers. The world that he prevented from ever happening. It doesn't make a bit of sense why he'd be here, and it makes even less sense why the other him – the him that belongs here – isn't here, as far as Dazai can tell. Dazai is reasonably certain that he could track himself down without too much difficulty.

He was that Dazai, after all, in a way. He certainly remembers the man's entire life up to 22– and then the memories end, conveniently, a few weeks before the current date according to the newspapers. It's two weeks after Dazai should have died by jumping off the Port Mafia building.

Did his world end in that time? It makes Dazai's stomach twist, the idea that everything he did has amounted to absolutely nothing. He's been avoiding going to Oda's grave. It must exist in this universe – there's no reason to assume this reality is anything but the one that he inherited the memories of when he was a teenager.

He doesn't want the proof, not when the last thing Odasaku said to him was–

Unimportant. It wasn't important.

What is important is figuring out if his reality is still intact. He's moderately convinced that the string of deaths must have something to do with it, given the fact that the Agency seems truly stumped on the subject. Ranpo wouldn't be doing a field trip for no reason, after all, and certainly not one all the way to Tokyo. If the deaths are somehow connected to his world, or to this world's Dazai's disappearance, or to the Book...

Honestly, Dazai feels a bit overwhelmed trying to solve this mystery. He feels a bit like he's gotten the worst of both worlds: there isn't a single person here that could ally with him. He's shed his overcoat and scarf, but it's obvious to anyone that knows him that he's still Dazai, and it's equally obvious that he's a Dazai that never bothered to try and dress in anything but the darkest of mafia blacks. Dazai would probably bleed black, if he was capable of it.

He isn't. That's obvious in the numerous injuries he's sustained. He assumes they're somehow connected to the fact that he died.

Dazai remembers dying, of course. Of course. He remembers the relief, the grief that he'd never read Odasaku's book, the hope that maybe he'd somehow see this world's Odasaku on the other side– then the searing split instant of pain, so overwhelming that there was absolutely nothing left but the feeling and the inability to scream.

Then he'd woken up, washed ashore in the warehouse district, bleeding from a few blunt force wounds and thoroughly bruised, but unfortunately, clearly alive.

Dazai thought, for a second, when he'd woken up, that maybe he'd miscalculated so drastically that he'd somehow lived despite everything. He'd started to go back to headquarters – Chuuya could be goaded into killing him, if Dazai was apparently incapable of killing himself – but he'd caught sight of the date on the papers before that, and then he'd rapidly realized all the things that didn't add up.

He'd been stalking the Agency since then. They were the easiest to tail, since Dazai still had all the memories of this world's Dazai, and it wasn't like the Agency was ever terribly paranoid to begin with. Getting Kenji to practice even the most basic of operational safety was a momentous task to begin with.

He still should have expected Atsushi to notice him.

Dazai angles himself straight through the most populated parts of Yokohama that are still as far away from wide angle security cameras as possible. He takes a circuitous route, and by the time he's done he has a healthy collection of cash from stolen wallets. From there, it's easy to find one of the seedier love hotels, slip enough cash for the rest of the day and most of the night through the automated system, and then slip up into the room to try and collect himself.

Dazai surveys the bed; the bath; the room itself. Finally, he settles on using the kitchenette to brew some truly atrocious coffee as strong as he can manage, flicking the television on and sorting through several adult videos before he manages to find the news. The more information he can get, the better.

He has to fix things. He has to make sure that the other reality still exists, that the reality where Odasaku lives still exists, because the idea that everything was for nothing makes him feel so sick it threatens to bring the coffee right back up.

Dazai brews another cup, instead.

-

"Odasaku," Dazai says, and his voice cracks on the name. Chuuya can't quite figure out what kind of expression it is that Dazai's making, but he knows it's one he's never seen on Dazai's face.

"I told you that my enemies have no business calling me that," Odas says.

"You can see him? You can hear him?" Chuuya says. It's a statement of the obvious, and the fact that Dazai doesn't call him out on it is disturbing in its own right.

"Enemies?" Dazai says, very faintly. He looks pale, even for Dazai, which is an accomplishment. "Oh. We would be, wouldn't we? That makes sense."

Dazai appears to be having this conversation with himself, because Oda looks eerily calm as a sharp counterpoint to Dazai having an edge of something like hysteria in his voice. Chuuya's never heard that tone in Dazai's voice, either. Is Dazai pretending?

Chuuya studies Dazai for a long moment. Dazai's hand shoots out, finally, grabbing at Oda's wrist; instantly, Oda has a gun out, held discreetly enough that no one outside of their booth would be able to see it but still pressed hard to Dazai's chest. Dazai's eyes go even wider, and he just clamps his hand down harder on Oda's wrist.

"You're really alive," Dazai says, and his voice wavers in the way that Chuuya recognizes as someone desperately trying not to cry.

Until this exact second, Chuuya genuinely believed Dazai wasn't capable of something like tears.

Oda, to his credit, doesn't waver in the slightest. It's more of a backbone than Chuuya would have expected from most of the Agency. He keeps his attention on Dazai for another long second, and Dazai looks like he's struggling to breathe. Finally, Chuuya clears his throat.

"So," Chuuya says, conversationally, and Oda looks at him calmly, "you're kind of threatening a dead man in the middle of a restaurant."

Oda appears to consider this. He looks at Dazai for another long moment, taking in all the same things Chuuya had– the tan coat, the bolo tie, his uncovered eyes. The way Dazai seems to shake with every breath, like it's a struggle just to control himself. His hand is still clamped around Oda's wrist. Around his pulse point, Chuuya realizes, belatedly.

"You're the new Boss, right?" Oda says. "Guess you're the one I should be more afraid of."

Oda sure doesn't sound very afraid, and Dazai finally breaks his grip on Oda's wrist, jerking it back like he's been burned. Dazai curls in on himself for a long moment, staring at the floor, until he stops moving entirely.

"That's not the worst assumption you've made so far tonight," Chuuya offers, and gives Oda a smile that's a little more full of teeth than is strictly necessary. Despite the threat, Oda seems unmoved, searching Chuuya's face for something that Chuuya can't even begin to guess at.

"Chuuya's not scary," Dazai says, finally, chiming back into the conversation. "But I'd prefer if none of us fought. Odasa…" There's a pause, during which Dazai visibly rewinds, his mouth sounding out the name before he manages to roll it back. "Oda-san. Were you in the middle of something?"

"I was eating," Oda offers, as though this is a complete answer to the question. Chuuya is starting to get the feeling that this guy is actually… weird as all hell, actually.

"Why don't you eat with us?" Dazai offers, and manages something that appears to be a smile. "It looks like we've got some things to talk about!"

Oda considers this. He looks at Dazai again, searchingly, and then at Chuuya again, far more calculatingly, before he draws his gaze back to Dazai.

"You're the one from the other world," Oda says, finally, and it isn't a question. The gun gets slipped away again, ferreted away into his clothing without as much as a tell-tale bulge to give away its location, and Chuuya relaxes a small amount, because the last thing he wanted to do was have a fight in the middle of one of his favorite izakaya.

"Yeah," Dazai says, and grabs the sake bottle off the table. He tilts it to his lips and then drinks it for a solid twenty seconds without breathing, and Oda's eyebrows raise slightly. He sets it down again, finally, and Chuuya flags the waitress down for another cup and a new bottle. She brings two, with a flirtatious smile that Chuuya doesn't manage to return in time, and Chuuya calmly starts in on his own bottle.

Oda glances at the sake for a second before he steps away long enough to swipe a rocks glass of whisky from where he'd been sitting previously.

"It's going to be all watered down now," Dazai offers. He doesn't seem to want to look straight at Oda's face, so he props his chin on his hand and gazes at other fixed points of Oda's body: his shoulder, his hand. Right over his heart.

"Worse to waste it," Oda says, simply, and takes a sip.

Dazai keeps staring at Oda's chest, and it's finally a look that Chuuya recognizes. Dazai looking through reality, staring off into some far off distance, some far off plan or reality that only he can engage with. Chuuya knows better than to try and jerk him out of this kind of trance, so he just turns his look onto Oda, instead.

"I'm pretty fond of this place," Chuuya offers, as diplomatically as he can when he's absolutely not a diplomat, "so I'd prefer if it could be considered neutral ground."

Oda seems to consider this. "They've got good curry," he says, finally.

That wasn't actually an answer in any substantial form, but Chuuya accepts it nonetheless. For now, at least, all the weapons are put away. It's a tenuous armistice that won't last longer than dinner, but it should hold for the duration of that, at least.

"Is that why you were here?" Chuuya asks. He doesn't bother to hide the fact that he's prying: he's never been one for subtlety or finesse when he can do the job bluntly just as easy.

"Yeah," Oda agrees. "Missed lunch, so I'm pretty hungry."

It's about then that Oda's food arrives, and Chuuya belatedly orders some dishes for himself and Dazai. The waitress makes some sort of comment about them being awful hungry, and Chuuya offers her a smile that's only a little strained. She doesn't seem to notice, whisking herself off to the kitchen with a laugh.

"Were you meeting Ango?" Dazai asks.

Oda looks surprised by this. One point in Dazai's favor, then, but hardly enough to tip the scales.

"Nice of you to rejoin the conversation," Chuuya says, not bothering to let it go under his breath.

"That's a pretty big assumption," Oda says, conversationally enough. He takes a bite of the curry. It's red enough that Chuuya's mouth burns just looking at it, but Oda eats it like it's the mildest flavor imaginable. "Huh. Less spicy today than usual."

"This place is between the Agency and the Special Divisions, and like you said. You like the curry," Dazai murmurs, drawing explanatory lines across his thinking. It makes something in Chuuya's chest seize up, because he can't remember the last time Dazai actually explained himself. Dazai operated on orders and using his position as the Boss in his favor to make sure no one would ever question him. To make sure he didn't need to explain anything.

"I was meeting Ango," Oda agrees. "He couldn't stay for a meal."

Dazai is quiet for another long moment, punctuated only by Oda eating his meal and Dazai taking another long drink of his sake. "What about?"

Oda looks at Dazai, volunteering absolutely no information, save for his apparently insane spice tolerance.

Dazai smiles, the expression wane. "Okay. Let's play catch up, then."

Chuuya straightens, automatically, because Dazai does first, and Chuuya recognizes the gesture. It's Dazai getting down to business. Dazai snags a pair of disposable chopsticks, breaking them in half and pushing the items on the table aside to clear an expanse.

"I'm Dazai, from my world," Dazai says. He sets one chopstick down, apparently representing himself. Chuuya has never seen Dazai use props like this before, but from the way Dazai is looking at them so intently, Chuuya thinks it might actually be for Dazai's own benefit. Just how upset was he about Oda being alive? "And you know the Dazai from your world, who was the Boss of the Port Mafia."

The other chopsticks gets set down a few inches from the first.

"The problem is," Dazai says, "that the Dazai you knew died–" He picks up the chopstick representing that Dazai up, and Chuuya presses down the flinch he feels at it being stated so bluntly. "--and for whatever reason, I arrived here. In my world, Odasa…"

Dazai considers for a moment, and then shakes his head. "In my world, Odasaku was my friend, and he died four years ago. I joined the Agency." Dryly, Dazai adds: "I'd actually rather die than take over the Port Mafia."

"Low bar," Chuuya says, automatically, because most things make Dazai want to die, like paperwork, or showering, or waking up in the morning.

Dazai waves his hand dismissively. "At any rate, I can't imagine my existence in this reality is terribly good for the world– and I was in the middle of several things back home, so I'd like to return."

It looks like this costs Dazai a bit to state, and his eyes flicker up to Oda, almost like he's seeking approval. Oda, for his part, looks like he's accepting this without any real complaints, save for his curry being not quite spicy enough. Dazai falls quiet for a long moment, and they're interrupted briefly by the delivery of the food Chuuya had ordered. Dazai ferrets a couple pieces directly off Chuuya's plate and onto his own, and Chuuya fights down the urge to indignantly squawk, because he's not going to get into a childish fight with Dazai in front of a member of the Agency.

Two members, technically, but Dazai shouldn't count.

"How do you think you can get back?" Oda asks.

"I haven't the faintest clue," Dazai says, and it's a cheerful trill that's obviously a lie. Both Chuuya and Oda look deeply unimpressed, but it doesn't seem to phase Dazai. It's clearly a lie he has no intention of hiding or elaborating on. "I figured I'd start with any strange occurrences – and if you're meeting with Ango, then there must be some strange occurrences on the Agency's radar."

Oda's quiet. He thinks this over as he polishes off the last bit of his curry and wipes his mouth. Dazai is pushing one of his crab cakes uselessly around his plate with his finger, like it's an edible toy car and he's a small child, but Chuuya's fairly sure it's just an idle distraction.

It's hard for Chuuya to say how much of this Dazai's restless energy is something he's putting on for show, and how much he just can't control. It's nearly inconceivable to think of a Dazai that doesn't have perfect control over himself, but Dazai had nearly started crying, and that didn't look fake.

Chuuya doesn't think Dazai knows how to fake that kind of grief.

"Shouldn't you start with the occurrences in the Port Mafia?" Oda asks.

"They're undergoing a leadership change," Dazai says. "So they're a bit busy. I doubt they're paying as much attention to the city as they are to each other. You know, different factions of power, sabotage, betrayal… You were in the… Were you in the Port Mafia?"

Oda blinks. "No."

"... huh," Dazai says, faintly. He looks very much like he's lost in a library, trying to find the appropriate shelf for a book that doesn't fit anywhere, and he shakes his head after a moment. "That doesn't matter. The point is – you're in more of a position to know about anything particularly strange well before the Port Mafia does."

"Unusual deaths," Oda says, finally. He looks at Dazai and then at Chuuya one more time. "You're the Boss, right? I'm not looking to work with the Port Mafia."

"He's," Dazai says, "a good person, even if he's the Boss."

"What," Chuuya says.

"Huh," Oda says.

"No, what the fuck, Dazai," Chuuya says. "You don't even know me. You've barely met me. I'm in the Port Mafia."

"You don't kill people unnecessarily, you help old ladies cross the road with their groceries, you feed stray cats, you give orphans money and make sure they get funneled into opportunities that don't involve them starving or getting trafficked," Dazai lists off, automatically. "You're loyal, you care about your subordinates, you…"

"Stop," Chuuya says. "Dazai. Shut up. This is the dumbest thing you've ever insisted on."

Except Oda is looking at Chuuya curiously, and Chuuya hates that look for reasons he's not about to start going into.

"I am the Boss of the Port Mafia," Chuuya stresses. He doesn't know he's the one who wound up feeling stupid in this conversation.

"An alliance between the Port Mafia and the Agency," Dazai says, "was always half the reason for the tripar– wait, that's not in place if Mori-san is gone. Well, the point is that the Port Mafia under Chuuya is a ruthless but not cruel organization, and the Agency with Odasaku using Ango as a contact has more fangs that it might otherwise, so…"

"Are you seriously trying to lay the framework for an alliance in an alternate reality you're trying to escape?" Chuuya asks in complete disbelief.

"Well," Dazai says, blinking at Chuuya. Chuuya still isn't used to the pressure of having Dazai's gaze on him, both eyes bearing down without being hidden behind bandages. "Yes. The framework was already there under Mori-san, so it isn't inconceivable, it's just that he's a terrible person."

"You'll have to go through my boss for any official alliance," Oda says, and Chuuya knows a lost cause when he sees one and resigns himself to working with the Agency. "But I'll tell you what I know about this."

"It's to help save the world!" Dazai chirps, and Oda looks, for the first time, the slightest bit friendly.

"Well, I don't know about all that," Oda says. "But there's been deaths."

Oda withdraws a folder from somewhere within his coat. He glances behind him, and Chuuya understands the look of someone making sure he knows exactly where everyone is in the building. Once he's made sure the waitress isn't planning to head over anytime soon, he opens the folder and spreads out a few images.

They're pretty graphic.

"These are murders," Chuuya says, because they blatantly are. A woman who has been stabbed through the chest, a man who has had his entire head removed, a kid who looks like he's been run over by a bus. None of them are normal deaths.

"They're not," Oda says. "The injuries just appear with no apparent reason."

There's a series of small, grainy images from a security camera, showing exactly how the man's head was removed from his body over a series of six agonizing frames and about as many seconds. It was exactly as said: one minute, he'd been sitting at his desk in an otherwise empty room; in the next, he was dead.

"An ability user?" Chuuya says.

"Could be," Oda says, but he sounds like it's a possibility he isn't investing much stock in.

"What does Ranpo-san think?" Dazai asks, and Oda looks briefly surprised again.

"You really are in the Agency, huh?" Oda says, and Dazai offers him a thin smile. "Ranpo… doesn't know."

Dazai's face goes slack. He looks at Oda for a long moment, and then down at the photos as Oda tidies them back up to put them away.

"He hasn't seen the photos yet," Oda amends, "but he said he didn't think they'd do any good. Said whatever was going on was bigger than he could figure out, and then he locked himself in the boss's office and started eating through all his emergency candy reserves."

What the fuck even is the Agency, Chuuya thinks, baffled.

"If Ranpo-san doesn't know what to make of it, then we hardly have a chance," Dazai says, explaining largely for Chuuya's benefit. Chuuya's never felt so out of the loop. He's never given a shit about being out of the loop where the Agency is involved, before, either. "Except that we're working with a little more information."

"Because of you," Oda says.

Dazai nods. "I can't share everything I know without risking sending this world on an unknown trajectory, and I'm loath to ruin what you have here."

"What we have?" Chuuya says, with a hollow laugh. "We've got a run-down alliance framework, a Port Mafia you– he– left in disarray, and a bunch of murders the Agency can't make heads or tails of."

"You're both alive," Dazai says, quietly, and when he looks at Chuuya, there's something in his gaze that punches the air out of Chuuya's lungs like a fire sucking all the oxygen out of the room and leaving him smothering. There's an intensity there: a longing, a grief, deep enough that Chuuya's surprised Dazai ever found his way out of it.

"You aren't," Oda says, gently, and Dazai offers him another one of those pained smiles.

"Well," Dazai says, "I have always wanted to die, so that's a good thing too, in my eyes."

Something about it rings a little hollow to Chuuya, which doesn't make sense, because it's true that Dazai has always been obsessed with suicide. His attempts petered off once he became the Boss, but it wasn't like Chuuya didn't still catch him staring wistfully at the roof of headquarters or longingly at the ocean.

Oda just makes a contemplative sound. "Let me know if you find anything out."

"Of course! I'll stop by the–"

Dazai cuts himself off, abruptly. "Even if they can see me, it would probably be regrettable for the former Boss of the Port Mafia to show up…"

"They don't know what you look like," Oda says. "Not up close, anyway, and especially not without bandages. Other people really can't see you?"

Dazai leans back in his chair, inhales deeply, and yells FIRE as loudly as he possibly can. Not a single person in the restaurant reacts at all, except for Chuuya, who can't help the way he twitches in response. He's actually not sure he's ever heard Dazai yell that loudly before in his life, so that's yet another thing to add to Chuuya's ever growing list.

Oda just glances around. There's no one even looking at them. There's a group of salarymen having drinks and a family having dinner, and then the waitress, who heads back over when she notices Oda looking around. He hadn't been summoning her, but he seamlessly gets the bill for his share and Chuuya digs some cash out of his wallet.

Chuuya scribbles a phone number on a napkin and slides it to Oda before the waitress can see and think it's meant for her.

"Since I'm not letting you near the Port Mafia, and I'm not about to go to your Agency," Chuuya offers. It's a short explanation, but Dazai and Oda both accept it without complaint, which is almost worse than if they had complained.

Oda stands, and Dazai tracks him as he leaves. There's something raw about Dazai's expression. It's too unguarded; it's too open. There's that grief that nearly collapsed Dazai in on himself like a burnt out star, and Chuuya can't decide if that open grief is worse than the fact that his Dazai is dead.

Chuuya doesn't want to admit they're both grieving, so he just stands up.

"You didn't even eat your food," Chuuya says. Dazai looks at him, then down at his food, seemingly surprised. "You're as shit at taking care of yourself as he was, aren't you?"

"Did you take care of him?" Dazai asks, curiously. He piles a few of the food items onto the plate and then simply absconds with the entire plate. Chuuya doesn't know what everyone else sees, but it can't be a floating plate of dumplings and crab cake because no one seems to notice it.

Chuuya snorts. "He'd never let me."

Chuuya brushes out of the door like he can outrun the growing storm inside of him, but he knows it's not going to work. He inhales the fresh night air once he's there– it's just dark enough for him to feel more comfortable.

"Did yours?" Chuuya says, finally, without looking at Dazai. With the light pollution from the city, there's no stars visible in the sky. It's just a dark backdrop illuminated by the thousands of humans going about their evenings. It always makes Chuuya think of Arahabaki.

Dazai is quiet for long enough that Chuuya thinks he might not bother to answer. "He did. Until I left."

It's a surprising enough answer that Chuuya turns to look at Dazai, and Dazai offers him a small smile. It's still too open, Dazai an exposed wire that threatens to turn every surrounding into an electrified death trap if they're not careful – but it still makes Chuuya ache, that any Dazai is comfortable enough to show a sliver of how broken he is inside.

"After all," Dazai says, "he couldn't use Corruption if I was dead."

It's like someone has run an iceberg straight into Chuuya's chest. He's been trying not to think about what Dazai's death means for him in terms of his ability, and the reminder brings the anger surging back into Chuuya's throat like bile. He grabs the helmet off his motorcycle and throws it at Dazai. The red glow of his ability dissipates the second it impacts with Dazai, but it still lands against his chest heavier than usual.

"I'll walk back," Dazai says, and tosses the helmet back to Chuuya. "I need to eat, right?"

He needs to get himself together, Chuuya assumes, so he nods. "Whatever." Chuuya isn't going to turn down the opportunity to have some time without Dazai, since he feels like he needs to sort himself out, too.

"Where are you staying? I can't imagine you agreed to live at headquarters," Dazai says.

"The new apartments. Two streets back," Chuuya says. "Top floor."

"Obviously," Dazai says, and then offers: "Chuuya likes to be tall."

It's such a childish remark that it takes Chuuya completely off guard. Dazai, the Boss of the Port Mafia– he'd let go of teasing like that years ago. It was just orders from him, all the way down, wielding his power. He didn't do anything to get a rise out of Chuuya, save for genuinely make Chuuya so mad he contemplated leveling the entire building, some days.

"Sure," Chuuya says, instead. "That's why you lived in that old shipping container, right? Because you liked to be trash."

Dazai bursts into laughter, and Chuuya memorizes it instantly. Rewrites it in his mind as deep as he can, because he may never see it again, and he knows that he'll want to keep the memory no matter what.

"Well," Dazai says. "You're not wrong."

There isn't anything else to say, after that. Chuuya gazes at Dazai just long enough that the eye contact starts to become awkward, and then they both simply go their own ways. Dazai will find his way to Chuuya's door sooner or later, and Chuuya can't quite put his finger on why he's so certain of that fact.

It isn't until he gets inside that he realizes it's their old, threadbare sense of trust.

-

Dazai is now intimately familiar with all of the trashiest love hotels in Yokohama, which is actually impressive, given he has not actually had sex in them a single time. He doesn't risk staying in one place too long. The Agency may not have noticed him, but there's always a chance that the Port Mafia has, and he wants to maneuver around a confrontation with Mori as much as he can possibly manage.

So: Dazai leaves the love sixth love hotel, feeling all the worse for the wear. He's never been good at sleeping, and it's that much worse now that he's doing it with his mafia instincts in a world that isn't his. He doesn't mind not having protection. He wouldn't even mind dying, if he's being honest, but that world that he'd saved–

He has to protect that, so he has to live for a little while longer.

Dazai's still operating with very little information, but he's good at what he does, and that involves being able to tail the Agency without being noticed. Which isn't exactly a claim to being very good at anything, given that it would take an act of god for Kenji or Naomi to notice someone following them. He's more careful now that Atsushi has caught his scent, but after dodging the boy for two days, Dazai feels secure enough to slip into the upper level of the warehouse not long after Atsushi.

The scene before him should be gruesome, for all intents and purposes, but it isn't, by virtue of the dead bodies on the floor below being as untouched as the previous ones. They look, as before, as though they're sleeping.

Dazai aches for that kind of oblivion. It seems like he's not allowed death even now.

Dazai closes his eyes for a moment. It's an old wound, his desire to die: it's one that he put behind him. He'd live for his plan, one phase after the other, and only after it was done would he allow himself to die. He longed for it, but never did more than gaze at the edge, the end still constantly out of reach until he finished what he was working on.

Who could have thought the end would still be out of reach?

It doesn't take long for Dazai to compartmentalize. He's spent the past five years shoving his emotions down, down, down. He wasn't good at feeling them to begin with, so their absence was barely noticeable.

Dazai is realizing he truly didn't have a contingency plan for not dying. How out of character for him.

"...do know each other, this time, because they're from the Port Mafia," Kunikida is saying, his voice stiff and a little stilted in the way that it always is when he's talking about the Port Mafia. Dazai clamps down harder on his feelings, burns away the fact that he still knows Kunikida as partner when Kunikida unequivocally hates him–

Or, he supposes, the Kunikida from his world does. Dazai can only imagine this one would hate him too, given what Dazai has become.

He doesn't particularly want to think about it, after the conversation with Odasaku in Lupin.

"Does the Mafia know?" Atsushi asks. There's hesitation in his voice.

"Yes," Ranpo says, immediately. His voice is hard around the edge in a way that Ranpo's voice rarely is, but it's almost certainly because, from the way he's playing with his glasses, he's failing to immediately solve the case. "They're hoping that we'll solve the case. They were already here."

This seems to alarm Kunikida, and he looks around like there might be Port Mafia grunts hiding in every shadow of the warehouse. Dazai leans further out of sight, slowing even his breathing in case Atsushi's sensitive ears manage to pick up on it.

"They want us to solve it?" Atsushi says.

"They were expecting Ranpo-san to solve it, I'd imagine," Kunikida says, his voice low. It's gentle; it's careful. It's the coddling that they all do around Ranpo.

Predictably, the reminder that Ranpo isn't managing to solve it does little but make Ranpo throw a bit of a tantrum.

"It doesn't make any sense!" Ranpo says, and his voice is loud enough that the warehouse echoes it back to him. "If they had any wounds, I could solve it– I know exactly who would have done it and how– but they're totally unharmed! They're just dead!"

"Could it be an ability post-death?" Kunikida asks.

"No," Ranpo says, shortly, without bothering to explain himself any further, and Kunikida accepts this fully at face value. Ranpo curls his hands into fists, frustration evident in every part of his posture. "I can't make it make sense."

"Ranpo-san–" Atsushi starts, but Ranpo just whirls hard on his heels and storms back out to the entrance.

"Maybe you'll have better luck!" Ranpo yells, and it takes Dazai a moment to realize he's not yelling at the Agency. Atsushi's yelp of you! is what gives it away, followed almost immediately by the sound of coughing.

Dazai peers over the ledge to see Akutagawa and a familiar shock of red hair.

Oh, he hadn't expected to see Chuuya. He hadn't expected to see Chuuya like this: the way he should be, all clean lines and confidence, dressed in his layers and pride. A Chuuya that Dazai hadn't methodically beaten down specifically to avoid that fragile, tenuous partnership. The one feeling that Dazai had never truly been able to kill in himself was his complicated world of feelings for Chuuya, or he'd have done something else to Chuuya far earlier and gotten him out of the way.

All of Dazai's plans feel like they've amounted to nothing but making things worse, and he realizes his breathing is unsteady and rolls back out of sight just in time for Atsushi to glance upwards. Dazai evens his breathing back out, mechanically.

"...just you two?" Atsushi is saying.

"There shouldn't be anyone else," Akutagawa says, and follows Atsushi's gaze. "We only needed two to collect the bodies."

"They sent you two for that?" Kunikida asks. An executive on a body retrieval mission is overkill, after all.

"Figured you'd be here," Chuuya offers. "Thought we'd get ahead of the problem. You done investigating?"

"Yeah," Atsushi says. He's still gazing up at the corner of the building, an indecipherable look on his face. He can't place the feeling, but it's the same feeling he had when he was in the dead woman's apartment before. There's no smell this time, but–

"Were-tiger," Akutagawa says, and Atsushi jerks his gaze to Akutagawa as Akutagawa looks at Atsushi, up to the corner, and then back at Atsushi.

"It's probably nothing," Atsushi says.

Akutagawa spiders out Rashoumon's tendrils, lifting himself up to investigate the overhang of the warehouse. There's nothing there. Akutagawa scrutinizes it for a long moment, like it might provide some extra clue – if Atsushi's tiger senses were firing off, then there must be something.

The single thing he finds makes him pause.

Akutagawa drops back down to the floor as Chuuya and Kunikida watch him, neither of them seeming particularly invested in an out and out fight right now.

"This was all that I found," Akutagawa says. It's nothing but a bit of fuzz, stuck to a nail.

Every person present immediately recognizes it as gauze.

"Do you think Dazai-san is investigating this case, too?" Atsushi asks. "Why wouldn't he help us?"

"Perhaps he's trying to test you," Akutagawa says, and to his credit, the words only come out a little vicious.

"Ranpo-san can't solve this case," Kunikida says, quiet enough that his voice doesn't carry to Ranpo. It's likely that Ranpo still knows exactly what they're saying, but his arms are folded and his gaze is downcast at the floor as he ruminates over the case details. "There's no reason to expect that you could."

"Is it," Atsushi says, carefully picking his words in the mine field of discussing Dazai with Akutagawa, "something he might have more information on, because of the Port Mafia?"

Chuuya's the one who shakes his head. "No. The Boss hasn't figured it out, either."

If Mori has no clue, and Ranpo has no clue, then it makes sense that Dazai, also, would have no clue.

"Well," Atsushi says, a little lamely. "Do you want to work together?"

"No," Akutagawa says, immediately. Chuuya gives him a long, exasperated look, and Akutagawa falters slightly. "... but if it's necessary, then I have no choice."

"The Port Mafia is invested in not losing anymore of our people," Chuuya says, "and you guys are invested in… solving crimes for the good of society, or whatever, so we've got permission to exchange information."

"I'll speak with our boss," Kunikida says. He clearly wants to turn the offer down immediately, but he doesn't. He glances at Ranpo out of the corner of his eye and seems to soften: a case that Ranpo can't solve is the kind of case where Kunikida will make exceptions to his morals, if he has to. It's only a matter of time until there are more innocent deaths instead of members of the Port Mafia.

"We'll schedule a rendezvous somewhere on neutral ground," Chuuya says, with a wave of his hand. He brushes across the bodies on the ground, and they're all surrounded by red light as they lift up effortlessly. "If you see Dazai, punch him in the face for me."

"I'll punch him more than once," Kunikida mutters, darkly.

They part ways again, no worse for the wear having avoided an all out fight, which is a relief in of itself, as far as Atsushi is concerned. When they're in the car, Ranpo's chin propped up on his hand, Ranpo finally comes to a conclusion.

"I think it's the Book," he says, and he sounds extremely put out by this.

"You think someone is using the Book?" Atsushi can't keep the alarm out of his voice, because that's– uh, jumping the gun a little, right? No one should even have the Book, so… "...to kill people?"

"I don't know!" Ranpo says, frustrated. "It doesn't make any sense! The Book could do this, but unless it's leading to something bigger, it doesn't make any sense for a motive! It definitely isn't any of the enemies we know, or they'd have hit the Agency by now! It just seems – random!"

"I'll get in touch with the Special Division," Kunikida says, and Ranpo turns his gaze back out the window, frowning.

-

Dazai makes it back to Chuuya's apartment sometime before dawn. He's not paying too much attention to the precise time; he spends most of the night wandering aimlessly around the city, visiting all the places of significance to see how they've changed.

Odasaku's grave doesn't exist, of course. Bar Lupin seems to be the same as ever. The world seems to be more or less similar, save for all the minor differences that revolve out from around Dazai himself.

Dazai can't imagine being the Boss of the Port Mafia, but if someone told him that it would have saved Odasaku…

He understands, at least. For this other Dazai to have known enough of the future to have decided to throw it all away… Dazai wonders if it's worth it. If Odasaku had lived, Dazai thinks he still would have wanted Dazai to become a good man eventually. Dazai thinks he might have even done it, eventually. Dazai hadn't cared enough about the Port Mafia; he was in it because it was easy and he still held onto the hope that it might mean something some day.

It's a bitter pill, that being in the Agency means more than his entire life previously, save for Odasaku and Chuuya. That Odasaku was right all along, but he had to die to prove it.

Dazai spends the night alone with his thoughts, and then breaks into Chuuya's apartment.

He doesn't need to break in. No one can see him, so he nonchalantly waltzes through the lobby door and rides the elevator by himself, and he knows that Chuuya would wake up for the doorbell, or even a nice friendly knock.

But that other Dazai– he probably never needed to break in. There doesn't seem to be a long, lingering history of Dazai breaking into Chuuya's home to sleep on his couch, replace his wine with water, take all his painkillers, and then throw up in his bathtub.

So Dazai breaks in, and is intending on doing at least one of those things, but he pulls up short when he just finds Chuuya asleep at his kitchen table with paperwork spread around him and a half-full wine bottle and empty glass next to his – ungloved – hand.

Dazai is barely a step into the room when Chuuya stirs, opening his eyes. Chuuya blinks at Dazai and then startles, jumping back to his feet as his tired mind tries to catch back up to the situation.

"Shit, it's morning. Were you out all night?" Chuuya snaps.

"Were you waiting up?" Dazai asks, carefully.

"Fuck, no," Chuuya says, and it's transparently a lie, because Chuuya is the kind of person who cherishes sleeping in his nice bed with his nice silk pillowcases and expensive sheets. He's not the kind of person who falls asleep at the kitchen table from half a bottle of wine.

Dazai reaches out, trailing his fingers across the papers to glance at them. Chuuya smacks his hand away, but the gesture is half-hearted.

"Those are private," Chuuya says. He starts to gather the documents together, and Dazai leans over his shoulder. Dazai is suddenly aware that he's too much in Chuuya's space, too close, too tactile when the two of them don't have the same shared history–

So Dazai just leans his entire body weight on Chuuya, leaning over him to tap at one of the pages. "I'd investigate this one more. The numbers add up, but they're too stable. There should be more variation, unless someone is skimming off the top."

Chuuya makes a guttural growling noise, bucking to dislodge Dazai. It doesn't work, but Dazai slithers off of him and into the chair and lets Chuuya get enough freedom to gather the rest of the papers up and slam them onto the bookcase.

"Yeah. Thanks. I know," Chuuya snaps. "It's almost like there was someone running the Port Mafia who didn't give a shit for the past several years."

"Ah," Dazai says. He looks over at the papers again, and then at Chuuya, and then he shrugs, helplessly, because there isn't anything he can possibly say to make anything better. The fact that he even cares enough to try and make it better is offensive enough on its own – Chuuya should never be this broken and Dazai should never want to fix him. It's more comfortable to stay the way he and Chuuya have always been: an antagonistic force against each other, who still trust each other more than anyone else in the world.

"Yeah," Chuuya says. He turns on his heels and storms into the kitchen like a localized hurricane, and from the sounds of it, he's using some kind of very expensive coffee maker. Dazai taps his fingers on the table, considering his options.

Chuuya comes back out and sets a cup down on the table in his spot, and then looks at Dazai.

"I don't know how you like yours," Chuuya says, and there's a steely resignation there: the admittance that he has no idea how Dazai likes something as simple as coffee, when Dazai knows that Chuuya has known that since they were fifteen.

"With alcohol, preferably," Dazai quips. "If Chuuya makes me make my own, I'll break his machine."

Something that had been hesitant between them snaps, finally, and Chuuya makes an annoyed sound, but he disappears again to make Dazai coffee. He slides it over, and it's exactly the way Dazai would like it, so it's true that there are certainly things that haven't changed.

"Did you find anything out while you were wandering around all night?" Chuuya asks. The coffee seems to be doing a decent amount to perk him back up; Dazai imagines that after a shower, he'll be back to something approaching normalcy. As normal as anyone can be when confronted with their alternate reality not-dead not-partner.

"There's another death," Dazai says. "It's being kept quiet right now by the government."

Chuuya's eyes turn sharp, and Dazai quietly feels thankful that this, at least, is the same. The rhythm of it – of figuring out a case, of weaponizing Double Black – is a balm for his soul. He wonders how long it's been, for Chuuya.

"It's someone important," Chuuya says, and it isn't a question. Chuuya had always been intelligent. He wasn't a demon prodigy, sure, but he could come to the same conclusions as Dazai if given a little more time. He just preferred to be the kicking one, if left to his own devices. "Have they disposed of the body?"

"No," Dazai says. "They're still in the process of… gathering it."

The nature of the death was particularly gruesome, and Dazai doesn't share the details, but whatever Chuuya imagines just makes him harden his gaze.

"We need to get in and see it," Chuuya says.

Dazai nods, and the two of them make eye contact for a long moment before Dazai offers, as a peace offering: "You're the Boss."

Chuuya looks so tired when Dazai says it that Dazai feels a pang of regret.

"Chuuya," Dazai says, delicately. "Did the two of you ever work together?"

There's a long, tense moment where Dazai thinks Chuuya might genuinely refuse to respond, but Chuuya finally just swallows and sighs. "When we were fifteen, sure."

"We kept working together," Dazai says, "until I was eighteen. Then there was a bit of a break, and then we picked up again four years later. We worked together as easily as we had back then, even if we still don't like each other."

"Wow," Chuuya says, flatly. "That must be so great."

"What I'm saying is," Dazai says, "if you pretend we're fifteen again, and go from there, it might be easier."

Chuuya looks at Dazai, blue eyes sharp and so furious. Chuuya is a wounded animal, and Dazai can't help but think that it's because of him. It's always because of him.

"Did you really not like him?" Chuuya asks.

"He's the person I like least of all!" Dazai chirps, automatically, offering a smile. He trails his fingertips around his coffee cup. "I don't like his voice, or his fashion sense, or his taste in alcohol or shoes. But… I trust him. He trusts me, even if that's always a terrible idea for anyone."

"Do you trust him because you just– manipulated him into whatever?" Chuuya asks. "Made it so the only thing he could do was listen to you?"

"Chuuya listens to me because my plans always work," Dazai says, loftily. "I manipulated him into things, but I was always very transparent about it. I…"

Chuuya looks at him, waiting. There's a decision to be made, and Dazai steels himself for it. He tells himself that he and Chuuya – this Chuuya – will figure out what's happening and Dazai will return to his world no worse for the wear, and his Chuuya will never know anything he says in this conversation, and Dazai will never have to confront the feelings he's confronted over the past twenty-four hours.

"Before the Agency, there were a very small amount of things I cared about. I cared about Odasaku, because he was my friend. And I… cared about Chuuya, because he was my partner," Dazai says.

"He didn't leave the Port Mafia when you joined the Agency," Chuuya says, and again it isn't a question.

"I didn't give him the chance," Dazai says. "I betrayed the Port Mafia and vanished for two years."

"Didn't he care?" Chuuya asks.

"He drank his celebratory wine on behalf of my presumed demise," Dazai says, dryly, "but I imagine he knew I wasn't dead. I'm sure he cared on some level, but he was always very loyal to the Port Mafia."

"Not to you?"

"I'm not worth loyalty," Dazai says, a little too quickly, and it gets a thin smile from Chuuya.

"Probably not," Chuuya says. "But it sounds like he had it anyway."

Dazai waits for a long moment, and then ventures: "Did you?"

Chuuya stands up, his coffee cup empty, and gives Dazai a long look. He raises his fingers halfway to the fabric around his neck before he drops them. "It doesn't matter."

"No," Dazai says, softly. "I suppose it doesn't."

Chuuya vanishes, and Dazai is left to gaze at his coffee cup and contemplate the reality of the situation while he hears the water turn on in the bathroom. Dazai waits until he's certain Chuuya is in the shower before he finally sets about being as invasive as possible to sate his own curiosity. At this point, Dazai feels like he's walking in a minefield with bombs set by his other self – so he intends to level the playing field a little.

He investigates Chuuya's wine collection, to start with. It's still vast, but he doesn't have nearly as many of the particularly expensive vintages that Dazai associates him with, and Dazai wonders if Chuuya wasn't an Executive. The idea is a bit absurd, but it would make sense – having the money of the Boss is still a new position for him, and he wouldn't have time to spend the money on wines yet when they involve research.

Chuuya's bedroom isn't terribly dissimilar to what Dazai knows, although there are absolutely no hints of Dazai or of anyone else in it, which Dazai finds moderately off-putting. He knows for a fact that Chuuya (his Chuuya, he thinks, possessively, and then refuses to dig into that deeper) still has bandage rolls stored in specific spots in his apartment; he knows that Chuuya also keeps a well-stocked drawer of condoms and lubricant for any one-night stands he might chance upon with his notorious charisma; he knows that Chuuya keeps photos of people in his personal files, candid shots taken when people least expect them, like Chuuya is afraid of losing his memories all over again.

There's none of that here. There's paperwork and more paperwork – half of it clearly busywork assigned to Chuuya when that Dazai was still alive, and half of it the mess that Chuuya inherited – and there's the signs of Chuuya living a lonely, angry existence. Dazai remembers when Chuuya was this angry all the time, and Dazai can't imagine Chuuya carrying the weight of that anger this long without cracking.

It's inspirational, in a sense.

Mostly, it's incredibly depressing.

Dazai has kept himself going in a sort of stasis, for most of his life: his feelings are always so muted and his desires and wants nearly nonexistent, and so he could hardly be called human in the first place. Dying didn't matter, because there was nothing worthwhile that would be lost when there was nothing that made him Dazai, in the end. He was an empty shell filled with a sharp intellect and nothing else.

Seeing this Chuuya makes him rethink a few things. The differences between the two Chuuya come down to nothing more than Dazai, what Dazai had and hadn't done, for Dazai's own reasons. For what Dazai had wanted.

A world where Odasaku lived, at the cost of everything else Dazai had ever cared about. Dazai wonders if the other him told himself that he hadn't actually cared about anything else after all – that he didn't catch himself smiling when Kunikida would start berating him about paperwork, that he didn't feel oddly touched the first time Atsushi brought him dinner when he noticed Dazai hadn't eaten, that he wasn't glad somewhere deep down inside of himself that even after everything, Double Black was still intact. Had he pretended none of it mattered, or had he just held onto the sharp pang of regret, weighed it against the grief of losing Odasaku, and decided it was still worthwhile?

Either way, it was a betrayal, but Dazai thinks this world might be worse.

Dazai has covered his tracks thoroughly by the time Chuuya comes back out of the shower looking considerably more lively. There's still that aura around him of frustration and anger, and Dazai wonders if there's anything Dazai can do that won't make things worse. It's a hard thing to think about, and so Dazai allows it to percolate in the back of his mind while he smiles at Chuuya.

"Ready whenever you are," Dazai offers as a bright singsong, hands in his pockets as he looks down at Chuuya.

"Whatever," Chuuya snaps. His hat goes on, but he seems loath to put on anything else that marks him so clearly as Chuuya; he foregoes any of his overcoats in favor of a black button-down shirt, and twists his hair back up into the sanctuary of his hat so the bright splash of color can barely be seen.

Dazai looks down at himself, consideringly. "Did your Dazai dress only in black?"

Chuuya glances at him out of the corner of his eyes. "Yeah."

"Then this should be enough of a disguise," Dazai says, cheerfully.

"If you really wanted to disguise yourself, you'd take off the bandages," Chuuya says, annoyed. "But I guess you're still a waste."

"You know, I wear fewer than I used to," Dazai says. "That's progress! Right?"

"Progress on what?" Chuuya snaps. "Not singlehandedly supporting the bandage factories?"

"Chuuya, the hospitals support the bandage factories," Dazai says, very patiently.

"Nah," Chuuya says, with an airy flick of his wrist as they set out. "They'll probably send you an award someday. 'Biggest Waste of Bandages and Money Ever'. With a thank you card."

"Ohh," Dazai says, spinning around to walk backwards as they head out of the apartment building. "If they included a fun prize, then I wouldn't mind winning!"

"Like what, a lifetime's supply of bandages?" Chuuya asks. "That'd last you six months, tops."

"Then I'd just have to start supporting the bandage industry all over again," Dazai says, unperturbed. There's a part of him that points out that a lifetime's supply is a lot smaller when given to him than normal people, given his desire to die– but also, he uses a normal lifetime's supply of bandages in under two weeks, more than likely, so he doesn't press the point even to himself.

Chuuya snorts, but there's an amused smile playing at the corners of his lips, and Dazai is more relieved than he wants to admit at the sight of it. It's something a little more normal; something that Dazai can cling to, if only to himself. He can't show how off-balance this entire reality has him, not really, not when Chuuya is walking wounded and Odasaku hates him. Dazai wants nothing more than to go out for drinks with Odasaku like nothing is wrong and tell him everything that's happened, but none of it would mean anything, in the end, in this reality.

Dazai tells himself that none of it matters and he just needs to use Chuuya as a means to an end to get home, but it rings hollow even to himself. The other Dazai had used Chuuya – the Port Mafia – everything, wrapped it all up into his plans and machinations with no regard for who he broke along the way. Dazai can't do the same thing.

He's still trying to be a good man, after all. Just because this Odasaku is alive doesn't mean his Odasaku isn't in some curry-based Odasaku heaven, watching Dazai as he stumbles through his attempts to be a decent imitation of a human being with morals and empathy.

Dazai's kind of getting the feeling that he's been pretending so long that he really does have the beginnings of those things, which is less than optimal, but not as bad as he was anticipating.

At least, it isn't so bad when he's only thinking about himself. Everytime he looks at Chuuya and the weight of his other self's sins crashes down into him, all Dazai can think is that he feels so strongly that it might suck the air out of his lungs more quickly than any of his drowning attempts ever have. Guilt is actually a terrible emotion, and he would like a refund.

"Our best bet is to intercept the transport," Dazai explains, into the silence that follows their almost-bickering. "Once they've done the work of collecting the body for us, we'll break into the vehicle and take it, depending on how subtle you want to be."

"Subtle," Chuuya says, immediately. "I don't want them tying this to the Port Mafia and thinking that we're responsible."

Dazai nods. "Then I'll drive the truck until it's safe for you to use your ability to drop in on me. For all purposes, it'll look like there's no driver at all… Probably."

"Probably," Chuuya repeats, something like disbelief coloring his tone. Dazai can't blame him. As far as one of Dazai's plans go, this one is… precarious.

Dazai shrugs. "I don't have a better plan, if we want to do this under the radar."

Chuuya curses under his breath, but he seems to resign himself to his fate of literally dropping into a moving vehicle.

"Can you even drive?"

Dazai swivels his head over to look at Chuuya, taking in the implications of that statement. "I can. Did he just have a driver?"

"No," Chuuya says, and it's a biting, waspish denial. "He barely ever left. He'd get some random grunt to drive him whenever he needed, which was rare."

Dazai tries to imagine a life lived in Mori's office, and feels something course through him so rapidly that he feels faintly ill. That's a sort of hell that he never wants to experience, actually. He's continuing to discover the minute differences between himself and this other Dazai. It all comes down to altering the future, and Dazai can't say he wouldn't have done the same if he had been the one who had known ahead of him.

That's rather the point of it all, he supposes: that it really could have been him. He hates the possibility as much as he hates the reality.

"I can drive," Dazai says. "Kunikida-kun never lets me, so it'll be fun!"

Chuuya looks deeply disbelieving.

This proves to be a correct assessment of the situation, because by the time Dazai slips inside, pickpockets the keys, and then takes the truck containing several body parts on an impromptu joyride, Chuuya is looking anything but happy.

"You're going to hit something!" Chuuya snaps. He leans over, wrenching the wheel away from Dazai.

"Chuuya, you care that much about traffic laws?" Dazai says, laughter in his voice as he simply lets go of the wheel entirely. Chuuya lets out an aggrieved noise, sliding closer into the seat before he finally shoots Dazai a furious, determined look.

"Move over there," Chuuya demands.

"No," Dazai says, cheerfully, but leans back in his seat.

There's a long pause where Chuuya seems to consider his options, but one of those options involves letting Dazai continue to practically drive them off of the freeway, so –

Chuuya simply bashes his leg into Dazai's hard enough that Dazai wails in despair, crumpling against the seat as Chuuya shoves his way into the driver's seat. Dazai is still occupying the seat, even if he's awkwardly squashed against the doorframe. Chuuya seems to be adamantly ignoring the proximity, but Dazai takes a moment, letting it wash over him like homesickness. Dazai drops his arm around Chuuya's waist like it belongs there, and Chuuya keeps his eyes on the road, lips pressed tightly together as he staunchly ignores Dazai.

So Dazai ups the ante: he drops his chin onto Chuuya's shoulder and watches the road from behind him.

"What," Chuuya says, flatly.

"Turn here," Dazai says, gesturing. Chuuya glances at him out of his peripheral vision, clearly debating on whether or not he should listen to this order. Disobedience wars with submission wars with common sense, and in the end, Chuuya turns, a half-second too late so the truck lurches violently. Dazai emits a quiet oof, finding himself in a situation where his stomach is getting very intimate with Chuuya's elbow due to how crushed together they are, but he can't bring himself to mind. "Here."

Chuuya turns just as savagely this time, and Dazai doesn't bother to brace himself. He takes the hit from the turn and just whines for it, letting himself go limp across Chuuya's back like a petulant child. Chuuya's resolve seems to be weakening, just a little, the anger seeping out of him ever so slowly. Internally, Dazai is elated; further internally than that, Dazai is terrified at how much of an effect he's capable of having on Chuuya.

"Left," Dazai says, "and then straight ahead."

Chuuya gives the last turn one final quick one, and the truck briefly goes up on two wheels. Automatically, Chuuya reaches out with his ability, but he's half in Dazai's lap with Dazai sprawled across him, so the red light gives way to blue almost immediately.

The truck comes back down to all four wheels no worse for the wear, and Chuuya slides it into the spot Dazai's selected, some garage that seems to specialize in food trucks.

"You'd better not plan on making jokes about eating the body," Chuuya says, twisting around to look at Dazai. Dazai beams.

"I would never dream of it," Dazai says. "It would be such a waste, when Chuuya is so small that two bites would fill him–"

Dazai takes Chuuya's punch to the shoulder with nothing but wheezed laughter. Chuuya didn't put all his strength behind it, and Dazai can decide it's because of how cramped they are in the cabin of the truck or if it's because Chuuya genuinely didn't want to break his collarbone. Dazai thinks both might be true in equal measures, actually.

Chuuya opens the door. "How long do we have before they follow us?"

"Under fifteen," Dazai says. "We'll have lost them, but they'll assume it's a rogue ability user. They'll want to mobilize before they get here."

Chuuya nods. Even Chuuya looks a little nauseated at the state of the body, once they uncover it, and Dazai can hardly blame him. Dazai has seen worse, but that's usually because he's been directly involved in it somehow. It's different to see it only in the aftermath, knowing that it happened just out of the cruel nature of the universe.

Dazai reaches out, carefully, nudging the face to the side with his knuckles to scrutinize what remains of the features. Dazai pauses, and the stillness is enough that Chuuya notices almost immediately, too keyed-in to Dazai to let it pass without attention.

"What?" Chuuya says.

"I know him," Dazai says, and feels like his body is saying the words while his mind withdraws entirely to run scenarios, to figure out plans, to try and put clue after aching clue into a spread that makes sense, yarn running through thumbtacks. Unraveling, unraveling. "That's Sakaguchi Ango."

-

Dazai destroyed everything he remotely cared about. He saw the future, and he saw the pain, and he made a choice: to condemn himself to unhappiness in favor of saving Odasaku's life; of cutting himself out of everyone like a cancer removed before it could become fatal.

Except–

"Ango," Dazai murmurs, softly, tilting Ango's face towards him. Ango looks like he's sleeping, save for the fact that Dazai knows through stolen memories that Ango tends to look stress even while he's asleep. "You left your glasses on again."

Dazai's gloves ensure that he leaves no fingerprints; his skill with lockpicking and spying ensures that no one will know he's broken into the government building to investigate the rumor about the Special Division being attacked. The rumor that has turned out to be entirely too real.

Ango does not breathe, or move, or think, or worry. It's a terrible combination. In Dazai's world, Ango might have anxiety, but he was alive. Dazai hadn't ruined him. Was this all happening because Dazai arrived here?

Dazai doesn't think that's quite it.

Actually, he's pretty certain it isn't it, because his borrowed memories offer him a much more obvious explanation: Dostoyevsky.

Dazai hasn't met his Dostoyevsky. Dazai was entirely too happy to die before he'd appeared, before the Guild had struck, before any of that. He'd made sure that Atsushi was a weapon that could keep all threats at bay, particularly when combined with Akutagawa, and then Dazai had simply left the mortal plane of existence.

He'd tried, anyway.

The fact that he's back and these inexplicable murder-deaths keep happening when this world's Dazai is conspicuously absent (and oh, isn't that a terrible thought, that he could be in Dazai's world, ruining the hard work Dazai had put in?) lead Dazai to the most obvious conclusion: it is, as many things in this reality are, Dostoyevsky's fault.

Dazai doesn't think Dostoyevsky has the Book, of course, because if he had the entire Book then this world would be in far more dire straits. Dazai's world would, too, given the precarious nature of its entire existence. A page, however, or even a scrap, would do the trick. How easy would it be to simply write in that the two Dazai would swap places, and then take advantage of that?

Dazai still doesn't know what Dostoyevsky's ability is, but he doesn't think this method of killing is entirely out of the realm of possibility.

"Keep Odasaku company for me," Dazai murmurs, quietly. There's no chance that anyone could hear him regardless of volume, but he doesn't want his voice to echo back at him in this empty, sterile room, where the only person present is one more person he's failed to save.

He slips Ango's glasses off his face. It's tampering with evidence, sure, but frankly, Dazai could not care less at this point. None of it matters when Ango is already dead. Dazai tucks the glasses away in his pocket.

It's a cumbersome task, getting ready for revenge when Dazai is hardly the best candidate for a one man army. He's even less fit than the Dazai that belongs here, and he thinks he might be even more depressed, if that's possible. He doesn't have any connections to the Port Mafia or the Agency or anything else.

He does, however, still know the codes for the Port Mafia armory. Mori's credit card numbers also still work, and in the end, it only takes him half a day to get the items and information he needs to plan his attack.

An attack is always easier if you don't intend on coming out alive.

He stops, only briefly, at Odasaku's grave. It sends an unpleasant, nauseating jolt through his stomach to see the grave.

Dazai inhales. Exhales.

He sets Ango's glasses next to the grave marker.

"Will you wait for me?" Dazai asks, quietly. It isn't his Ango, not really. It isn't his Odasaku, either, not really. He doesn't have an Ango or an Odasaku to wait for him, to greet him with smiles and the smell of cigarettes and bourbon.

He hopes they'll wait anyway. He'll take a punch to the face if it means being able to see them again, even if he doesn't deserve anything that pleasant in the afterlife, if there is one.

With that done, Dazai sets out.

All of his information points to Dostoyevsky, at present, being in one of several locations. He can rule a few of them out automatically from his knowledge of the future, and the rest he eliminates as steadily as fumigating a house to get rid of a pesky rodent problem.

A few anonymous calls to the Hunting Dogs; to the Special Divisions; to the Port Mafia. They attack simultaneously and relentlessly, and Dazai watches as theoretical hideout after theoretical hideout is shown to be empty and uninhabited by any Russians.

Except–

"There," Dazai murmurs. It isn't much to go off of. It's just a computer out of place, the empty information scrolling by, meaningless, like a child's vision of what a hacker might type in a science fiction movie. He watches as the mafia strike team discuss the apparently misleading tip and computer, deciding that it must be evidence. It isn't, of course; Dazai is absolutely certain that anything relevant has already been wiped clean from that computer.

It still shouldn't be there, from Dazai's memories. From his projections.

He waits until the team leaves before he reveals himself.

"You know," Dazai says, lightly, conversationally, in his best imitation of himself, "it would have been more convenient for both of us if you'd left me dead."

His voice falls into the empty room for a long moment. It drags out long enough that anyone else might think they were wrong, but Dazai simply waits patiently. He leans back against the metal table, holding onto the edge and listening to it creak under his weight.

Finally, Dostoyevsky appears. He isn't there and then, just as quickly, he is, stepping out of the nothingness of the ambient air into reality.

"You give me too much credit," Dostoyevsky says, mildly. "I'm flattered that you think I'm capable of this degree of puppetry, but I'm afraid even I have no control over life and death."

Dazai doesn't bother to keep the false smile on his face. Dostoyevsky's smile only sharpens when Dazai's face goes blank, and Dazai knows that he's dangerously close to losing this battle already.

He never meant for this to be a battle of wits, however.

"Hmm, I see," Dostoyevsky hums, looking delighted when Dazai pulls the gun out. "That would hardly hurt me, of course."

"You're right," Dazai says, and shoots the keypad next to the door. Dostoyevsky's smile only widens as the electricity starts to spark and then ignite.

"You know, they used to burn witches at the stake in some countries," Dostoyevsky says. The flames are small, but they're already spreading to cover the only obvious exit. The less obvious exit, Dazai is still waiting for. "I always found it somewhat reductive. If they were to burn a true witch, would the witch not be able to save herself?"

"You can always cut off a witch's access to her powers," Dazai says, and as he says it, his eyes follow the way the smoke curls delicately around them both–

He shoots.

Dostoyevsky's expression fades from delight to mild surprise as the bullet actually impacts with his shoulder.

"Oh?" he murmurs. He reaches out into the empty air between them, letting his fingers tangle into the nearly invisible thin metal string that's embedded itself into Dostoyevsky's shoulder. "Even this is enough?"

Dazai shrugs a shoulder up. "Surprise."

The air beside Dostoyevsky flickers again. Dazai thinks he knows which of Dostoyevsky's allies it is, but they're doing an awful good job of not showing themselves. Dostoyevsky continues threading the metal around his fingers, letting it pull he and Dazai closer.

"It isn't enough, of course," Dostoyevsky says, "but since you did surprise me, I'll reward you."

Dazai can't say that he's terribly surprised when he feels something connect with his neck hard enough that Dazai is standing one moment and on his knees the next with no memory of the space in between. The gun is on the ground, and he grabs it a half second after Dostoyevsky has unflinchingly torn the bullet back out of his shoulder by the wire. Blood drips off of his cut fingertips and stains the white of his jacket as Dazai moves to shoot him a second time.

Dazai has never been terribly good at hand to hand combat even when he can see it coming, so he doesn't do a terribly good job at holding his own when the invisible enemy lashes back out at him with a high-pitched giggle of delight. He's a few seconds too late every time he flings his own attacks out, and when he goes to shoot again, Dostoyevsky crushes his foot down hard onto Dazai's hand.

It hurts, which is a fascinating, clinical thought in the back of Dazai's mind as his brain presents the automatic I don't like pain response. It's a worthless retort, under this situation, but Dazai is low to the ground. There's pain spreading across his back, where the blows of his unseen enemy had rained down a quick succession of blows, and he's certain Dostoyevsky has just rebroken several of his poorly healed ribs.

Dostoyevsky does not cough from the smoke, but his frame does shake as he suppresses the urge to. He lowers himself down to Dazai's level.

"I'm not the one doing this," Dostoyevsky says, and he sounds too happy about it to be lying. His smile is too wide and his eyes are too dark, and he reaches out to grab Dazai's chin in a rough grip. "It's you."

It's impossible. It's impossible it's impossible it's impossible it's impos

"Did you think that you could meddle with reality without a consequence?" Dostoyevsky says, his voice a tender, reassuring croon that makes Dazai's skin crawl. "For an instant in that other world, you made an error, and it followed you… all the way here, to a different you. Now the Book needs equilibrium, and no singularity of yours can stop that."

Dazai's consciousness squares down into nothing but slowed down time and decisions. In the second that Dostoyevsky releases him, Dazai is moving, ignoring the grind of broken bones and what's almost certainly internal and external bleeding, and Dostoyevsky is a countermeasure, reading Dazai without any difficulties.

"You've unmade your own fantasy," Dostoyevsky says, pity high in his voice. Dazai gets a hand around Dostoyevsky's ankle and is promptly kicked in the jaw for it, and by the time Dazai's vision equalizes back out, Dostoyevsky is three steps away. "And now even this world will be your nightmare. How tragic."

Dazai gets to his feet seconds too late: Dostoyevsky is vanishing in a quick glint of clean air, and Dazai's shot goes wide, ricocheting off the stone wall. The door springs open seconds later, and the flames roar with the additional oxygen. The flames soar and then, with the sound of tearing fabric and a wordless shout, are extinguished.

No, that's not right. There are words, but Dazai can't quite get to them. He absorbs them and puts them deep in the back of his mind, the information spinning rapidly. It's impossible. It's impossible, it's–

"Dazai-san? Are you alright?"

"That's not Dazai–"

It's impossible, it's impossible, he has to fix it--

"--looks like him?"

"Yeah, it could be anything--"

"Dazai."

The chaos in the room settles as Kunikida takes a step forward. It isn't confidence that propels him, but the simple belief that he's absolutely right and there's no other explanation. Kunikida ignores the lingering smoke and the wounds on Dazai's body and the gun still held loosely in his hand, dropping his hand onto Dazai's shoulder.

Everyone watches as Dazai doesn't react for a long moment. He finally turns his gaze, wounded and raw, to Kunikida, and Kunikida meets his eyes without flinching at the pain there.

"You need medical attention," Kunikida says, firm, and Dazai allows his gaze to go wide. The emotion in his eyes shutters closed as he takes in the awkward combination of Port Mafia and Agency members that have assembled.

Atsushi looks concerned. Akutagawa looks disbelieving. Chuuya looks incandescent, which is almost reassuring, and Dazai feels Odasaku's absence too acutely.

"No, thank you," Dazai says, almost automatically, and then passes out.

He thinks Kunikida catches him, and the last thing he thinks is I hope he doesn't die, too.

-

Chuuya does not give a shit about Sakaguchi Ango, but he does, for whatever fucked up reason, give a shit about Dazai, even this bizarre alternate Dazai who has been sitting at his kitchen table with his hands tucked into his pants pockets and his eyes fixed on a distant nothing for the past thirty minutes. This Dazai clearly gives more than a few shits about Sakaguchi Ango, and even if Chuuya thinks the less interaction with the government, the better, he can't just overlook the way Dazai has gone completely inside his own mind.

It's too familiar.

Chuuya remembers calling for Dazai, over and over again, trying to get a crumb of the man's attention when he would sit at his desk, brooding. Dazai would always just ignore him, caught up in his own plots and thoughts and whatever else was going on in there.

"Dazai," Chuuya says, on impulse, and this Dazai takes a few heart wrenching seconds, but he turns his gaze to Chuuya eventually, and something deep in Chuuya's chest relaxes a little.

Dazai blinks: once to buy himself time, and then a second time, because it makes him look more human and approachable. Chuuya watches as Dazai transforms in real time, letting go of all the similarities that make him so much like the Boss of the Port Mafia and becoming this slightly off-putting Agency member that Chuuya is starting to get used to.

"Chuuya," Dazai offers, conversationally, cheerfully.

Chuuya wasn't actually expecting Dazai to reply so readily. He finds himself a little thrown, actually, so he compensates, automatically, in the only way he knows how: aggressively making sure Dazai stays alive.

"You want food?" Chuuya asks.

"No," Dazai chirps. "But if Chuuya makes pancakes, I'll choke them down."

Chuuya snorts, but Dazai keeps his gaze focused on Chuuya until Chuuya disappears into the kitchen, which is better than Chuuya's ever gotten before.

He makes waffles, partially out of spite and partially because filling the flower-shaped waffle maker that Lippmann got him years ago as a prank gives him extra time to be alone with his thoughts.

Untangling his thoughts about Dazai is something that Chuuya has refused to do for years. He knows why – he isn't stupid – and he knows that it was as much a self-preservation move as anything. He and Dazai had hated each other at fifteen, but they'd still–

They'd almost been partners, hadn't they? The possibility was there, reflected in this other reality, and it hurts in a way that Chuuya has been ignoring to the best of his ability. He loads the waffle maker up with more batter and clamps it shut as he lets himself actually feel that hurt, dissect it in the same way that someone like Mori or Dazai might.

For years, Chuuya operated on the belief that the only thing he felt for Dazai was hatred. He wanted to see Dazai dead, and he wanted to do it himself. That was an easy thing to think. It was comforting in its simplicity, in the cold anger that obliterated any further feelings. Things were Dazai's fault, and they would improve once Dazai was removed from the situation.

Except that Dazai had left, and with him so did most of Chuuya's anger, and instead of happiness, the only thing that was left behind was a desperate emptiness.

Chuuya thinks he can understand why Dazai always wants to die, if it's even a fraction of what Dazai feels on a regular basis.

Chuuya has never let himself think further than Dazai's death, and he has spent the time since then trying to figure out what he wants to do. He's the Boss, now, but what does that mean? He's never been able to care about the Port Mafia in the way he used to, not since the Flags died. He's never felt like it was anymore of a home than anywhere else, and he's never felt like a leader.

He was just going through the motions, wasn't he?

What was the point of any of it?

He sets the stack of waffles down in front of Dazai, and Dazai slides his gaze from the wall to the waffles to Chuuya, face going from blank to a put-upon pout. "Chuuya, I wanted pancakes!"

"They're the same thing in a different shape," Chuuya snaps, dropping a waffle onto Dazai's plate. Dazai, as fucking weird as always, simply picks the waffle up with his hands, completely bare of any toppings, and takes a bite like it's a sandwich. "You're so weird. You know that, right?"

Dazai smiles a smile that indicates that he is intimately aware of how weird he is.

"Says the little man who has a god stuck inside of him," Dazai says, once he's swallowed his bite of waffle, which is surprisingly polite, all things considered.

"Oi," Chuuya says. "That's still less weird than you, you freak."

"Ah, Chuuya says such sweet words," Dazai says, with a sigh. He rotates the waffle in his hands, flipping it around like a batter-based fidget toy and noticeably not taking a second bite.

"I can see you distracting me from the fact that you're not eating," Chuuya says.

Dazai frowns. "I don't really need to eat."

"If you don't finish your waffle, I'm not letting you day drink," Chuuya says.

Dazai raises a hand, counting on his fingers, and Chuuya elaborates: "I'm not letting you night drink, either."

"Chuuya can't reach high enough to stop me," Dazai sniffs, and Chuuya calmly throws the syrup at Dazai. It impacts and breaks open immediately, the momentum from Chuuya's ability immediately rendered null against Dazai's forehead, glass splintering. It leaves a tiny cut on Dazai's face and, more important, absolutely douses him in authentic imported maple syrup.

"I don't have to reach you," Chuuya replies.

Dazai's eyes are wide. Syrup drips down his eyelashes and hits the collar of his shirt, and Dazai reaches up, tapping the sugar-covered cut on his face and then shoving his blood-and-syrup covered finger into his mouth, curiously.

"That's even weirder," Chuuya says.

Dazai nods, more than willing to admit how weird he is.

Then he launches his waffle back at Chuuya. Chuuya yells out a wordless sound of annoyance, swatting the waffle away with a little more power behind it than necessary, before realizing that the waffle was just a distraction that he absolutely fell for as Dazai steps up onto his chair and then launches himself, syrup and all, bodily at Chuuya.

"Wait don't get it on my–" Chuuya manages, before Dazai impacts, and the two of them fall backwards. Chuuya's chair gives a decisive splintering noise as it gives up entirely on being a chair, and Dazai does his best koala impression as he rubs his syrupy face directly onto Chuuya's vest. Chuuya howls in annoyance, grabbing Dazai's hair and rolling them over, letting his hand go to smush down as hard as possible over Dazai's mouth and nose.

Predictably, Dazai licks him, but Chuuya picks up one of the waffles that had fallen in the chaos and folds it over, cramming it into Dazai's mouth the second he removes his hand.

Dazai's eyes widen comically, and he wheezes out something that has enough vowels in it that it's probably Chuuya's name. His mouth moves as he tries to chew through it as rapidly as possible, and when that fails, he simply spits it out as hard as possible and then slaps the soggy waffle against Chuuya's cheek.

"Don't be disgusting!" Chuuya says. He will deny until his dying breath that it was a shriek, clawing the spit-sodden waffle off of his face and slamming it against the floor with a soggy, wet noise that sounds absolutely vile.

"But Chuuya!" Dazai trills, cheerfully, and he looks–

– he looks alive.

Chuuya's breathing is coming in quick little bursts, adrenaline flooding into his veins even though the fight is for play and not for life. He's always felt alive when he's fighting, even if it's in videogames or sparring or…

With Dazai, Chuuya thinks. Back when Dazai had let himself do things like that.

Chuuya doesn't think he's ever seen his Dazai look this alive. Eyes bright, aware, locked in on Chuuya instead of a situation so far out of Chuuya's reach that he can never reach it. Mouth a little slack, corner turned up into a smile, heartbeat pounding enough that Chuuya can feel it even through all of Dazai's bandages–

He's leaning in before he can stop himself. The smile on Dazai's face looks so delighted, Chuuya wants to know what it's like--

"Chuuya," Dazai says, quietly, and Chuuya jerks back to himself. Dazai is tucking a long strand of Chuuya's hair behind his ear in a movement that's too tender. It makes Chuuya's skin crawl just as much as the realization that he'd nearly – he'd nearly almost kissed Dazai –

He'd nearly kissed him, and he hasn't pulled away enough yet to make it fully a past tense decision.

In the end, it's the knock on the door that makes the decision.

Chuuya springs away from Dazai like he'll be electrocuted if he holds on any longer, despite the fact that no one else can see Dazai. He wipes himself down until he looks relatively normal– tosses his coat around his shoulders to hide the worst of the syrup– and answers the door.

"Sir," one of the security detail offers him, her eyes cautious. "Nakajima-san is here to see you."

The words would leave Chuuya a little winded, if he hadn't just tried to make out with the alternate universe not-ghost of his Boss-slash-not-partner. Nakajima had vanished in the chaos following Dazai's death, and Chuuya hadn't cared enough to investigate, at that time. Nakajima had always been one of the few subordinates loyal to Dazai instead of the Port Mafia – Chuuya refuses to count himself among that number – so Chuuya hadn't cared enough to follow up, so long as he wasn't causing problems.

Dazai is pushing himself up off the floor and hovering behind Chuuya, but he makes no noise. He leaves it up to Chuuya. Chuuya aches to run a hand through his hair and show that he's out of his element, but he's the Boss now, isn't he? He can't have that kind of weakness.

So he just nods, short and firm. "I'll meet him at my office in half an hour."

His security nods and steps back, speaking quietly into her mouthpiece as she goes. Chuuya's strength lasts until the door is closed, and then he leans his head against it with a thunk.

"Such a loud noise for such a small hat rack," Dazai says, mournfully, but his hand is drifting over, twirling some of Chuuya's hair around his sticky fingers.

"Stop that," Chuuya says, swatting at him vaguely. It does nothing to dislodge him. "I'm going to have to wash my hair now."

"You were going to have to do that anyway," Dazai says, and there's something on his face that Chuuya can't begin to unravel right now. "Go take a shower, Chuuya. I'll clean up while you're drying your hair."

Chuuya grouses about it for a moment, because he's the Boss of the Port Mafia and shouldn't be taking directions from some half-rate bandage wasting detective Dazai, but the fact of the matter is that it feels nice. It's what he was going to do anyway, so having Dazai state it just reinforces that for once, Chuuya isn't doing everything alone.

It's bittersweet.

Chuuya spends about five seconds wondering how Dazai is going to clean up (probably using Chuuya's favorite jackets to mop up syrup) before he discards the idea and goes to take a shower. Most things Dazai does are repairable, and the things that aren't are technically the fault of a different Dazai instead.

So why does it feel so much like this Dazai is trying to fix them?

It leaves something ugly rising in Chuuya's chest. It reminds him of giving himself over to Corruption: that dark feeling of being controlled by something else, of a vast, untouchable set of emotions that he doesn't want to acknowledge.

He knows what emotions they are, but they don't really do him any good. What good is there in being jealous of another Chuuya in some other universe that he's never met? What's the point in being angry at his Dazai, who is already fully dead and gone, scraped off the pavement like his entire life amounted to nothing more than asphalt in the end? Chuuya's anger didn't matter. Chuuya didn't matter.

This Oda guy did.

Chuuya can't help but feel like even this other reality's Dazai wouldn't care so much about Chuuya if he had an Oda to focus on in his world. Chuuya's always pulling up second without even realizing they were competing, and isn't that just like Dazai?

Chuuya blow dries his hair to buy him a little extra time to stew before he heads back out. Chuuya is a master when it comes to boiling himself in his own anger when it has no outlet, and right now, that anger is a little harder to reach than he'd like. He's not stupid, though, and he'd rather take the anger and sharp irritation than the emptiness that threatens him like the darkness of his bedroom whenever he lets the world weigh down on him.

Gravity. Mass. Orbit. And then Dazai, the one thing that all of Chuuya's gravity can never pull close enough to matter.

Chuuya selects clothing that he doesn't mind getting messed up, since he feels like that's the general theme of this week, and heads back out, steeling himself to discover whatever horrible thing Dazai has done to his kitchen.

It's clean.

It's just clean.

Sure, the chair they'd broken is still broken, but it's been propped up next to the trash can. The syrupy remains of their meal has all been wiped up – with the appropriate cloth, even – and the dishes have been placed into the sink, where Dazai is washing them. The absolute freak still has his bandages on, and Chuuya can see the water slowly seeping upwards through the fabric, crawling a trail that must be unpleasantly moist against Dazai's skin.

"I've got a dishwasher," Chuuya says, for lack of anything else to say. He's certainly not going to say thank you.

"I don't know how to use it," Dazai admits, flickering his gaze over to Chuuya. He's wiped his face clean, but there's still bits of waffle adhered to his hair, and Chuuya rolls his eyes automatically.

"Go clean up," Chuuya snaps, because he can't be nice to Dazai. He can't. "I'll load the dishwasher. You're never going to win over a girl to kill yourself with if you can't even load a dishwasher."

"Chuuya, I didn't know you cared!" Dazai says, and Chuuya snorts, rolling his sleeves up and elbowing Dazai out of the way of the sink.

"Anything to get rid of you," Chuuya says, but it doesn't have any heat in it. Dazai, gracefully, does not point this out, but simply bends in on himself to escape the situation in a curious movement that makes Chuuya wonder if Dazai has more bones than a normal human. Like a cat. An incredibly bendable cat.

Dazai takes substantially less time in the shower than Chuuya, given how long it takes for the water to click off. He doesn't appear after five minutes, though. Or ten. Or twenty.

At which point Chuuya starts to wonder if he's made a mistake in letting Dazai into his bathroom with his shaving razors, so he marches over, letting his steps fall loud enough to telegraph his arrival, and opens the door. Dazai looks at him, a little bewildered, a towel wrapped around his waist, holding his shirt under the faucet to get the rest of the syrup stain out.

Chuuya's mouth goes dry.

"... what are you doing?" Chuuya asks, because he can't focus on Dazai when Dazai has this much skin on display. Chuuya doesn't know any of those scars. The ones that his Dazai had, Dazai'd never explained, and there's so many others– the gunshot wound through his torso, the knife wound on his side that looks suspiciously like it's from one of Chuuya's blades. There's so many little things written on Dazai's body in white tissue that mark him as different.

And Dazai–

Dazai isn't trying to cover them up. It's like it doesn't bother him at all to be bare in front of Chuuya like this, and it's a sign of trust that Chuuya can't recover from. He feels dizzy.

"My shirt is still dirty," Dazai says, mildly, "but we don't have time for laundry."

"I have clothes for you," Chuuya says, automatically.

Dazai blinks.

"... well, for my Dazai," Chuuya says. "So you'll have to deal with dressing in black."

Dazai pulls a face at this, but does not make more of a commentary than that.

"Your coat's clean, right?" Chuuya offers, unsure of why he's trying to comfort Dazai, who definitely does not need comforting in any way, shape, or form. Any emotions that Dazai is offering, including disgust, are carefully crafted and calculated to get the emotional response he wants out of whoever he's showing them to. Especially when it's Chuuya.

… except that it's hard to overlook the breach of normalcy that Dazai is presenting with all of that skin on display, his entire life story written on a layer of himself that he normally keeps so well hidden.

"Alright," Dazai says, with a sigh. "Chuuya has to buy me more shirts later."

"What, we'll have time to go shopping but not for laundry?"

"There's a Daiso near here," Dazai offers.

"I am not buying you shirts from Daiso."

"Why?" Dazai asks, brown eyes wide like he genuinely doesn't have a single clue why Daiso shirts are unacceptable for someone who is, in this universe, the former leader of the Port Mafia.

Chuuya doesn't say the words on the tip of his tongue – even you're worth more than one hundred yen shirts – but swallows them down. He turns on his heels, irritably, and gestures vaguely once his back is turned and Dazai and all of his scars is safely behind him where he can't see them.

"Just come on," Chuuya says. "Don't drip on my floor."

"I'm already dry," Dazai says. "The towel is for modesty, Chuuya."

"You've never been modest about anything in your life," Chuuya snaps.

"Well," Dazai says, "I don't have a lot I need to be modest about. I'm a very impressive person, you see."

"That's a really weird way to phrase 'useless'," Chuuya drawls, pushing his way into his closet. He has clothing for Dazai stored in the back. Dazai had never spent the night at Chuuya's, but Chuuya had been woken up in the middle of the night more than once to go get Dazai from some catastrophic problem or another that he'd been caught in, hoping to die, and Chuuya knew well and good that Dazai would rather stay in the middle of an active war zone than leave with his clothing or bandages torn enough to show skin…

So Chuuya had extra clothing.

"I'm impressively useless," Dazai quips, easily, and Chuuya's mind is dragged back to the conversation at hand and not the memories wrapped in the clothing still wrapped in the dry cleaner's plastic. He rips the plastic off in one annoyed motion and then tosses the clothing at Dazai.

"Put clothing on your impressively useless self," Chuuya says. "So we can go."

Dazai holds onto the clothing for a minute, seemingly weighing something heavily.

"Chuuya might be the only one that can see me," Dazai says, carefully, "but I'd still like bandages."

Chuuya didn't forget, exactly, that Dazai needed them. Of course he didn't forget, when Dazai always wears them like a second skin. It's just that Chuuya had so rarely seen his Dazai without all of his bandages… he'd let it slip his mind for a brief moment that Dazai couldn't just osmose them out of the air directly onto his skin.

"There should be enough in my first aid kit," Chuuya says, and Dazai nods.

They're running late, by the time Dazai emerges, all of his bandages in place and dressed in a dead man's clothing, and the similarity is so overwhelming that for a moment Chuuya feels like he can't breathe. He feels like he's the one plummeting down from the Port Mafia building, the air being dragged out of him until there's nothing left.

This Dazai doesn't have any bandages over his eye, but he does have a brightly colored Hello Kitty band-aid on the wound from the syrup bottle Chuuya had thrown. The band-aid itself was a crank gift from Chuuya's Dazai, back when they were fifteen. Back when there'd been a future for both of them.

"There's a chance that Atsushi-kun will be able to see me," Dazai says. "If Odasaku could."

"You think?" Chuuya says, because getting this Dazai to elaborate on his conclusions feels easier than looking at him. Chuuya leads them to the waiting car, this time, because he doesn't think letting this Dazai wrap his arms around Chuuya for safety is the smartest move under the current circumstances. (Which are what, exactly? Chuuya doesn't want to think about it.)

"So far, the only ones who have been able to see me are Chuuya and Odasaku," Dazai says. "Who are people who knew… your Dazai. Atsushi-kun may follow the same pattern."

Chuuya wonders if there's something more to it than that, but he doesn't get his hopes up. What is he hoping for – that Dazai'll say, "they're people I care about, so they can see me"? Dazai's not even from this world. He doesn't need to care about the people here.

But still–

"You wanna put more bandages on?" Chuuya asks, flicking his wrist to gesture at Dazai's uncovered eye.

Dazai shakes his head minutely. "No. I know I look like the Dazai that he knows, but I don't want him to think of me as him."

"It might make things easier," Chuuya says.

"Yes," Dazai admits. His eyes, whole and uncovered, drift to the ceiling of the car, and he seems to be thinking over how to phrase something. "But it would be an unnecessary manipulation."

"Huh," Chuuya says. "You really have changed."

Dazai's smile is thin and wane and all the more genuine for it. His gaze is too heavy when it lands back on Chuuya, and there's something there Chuuya's never seen on Dazai's face before. It feels too much like hope.

"I'm trying," Dazai says, mildly. There's layers there, and it's fascinating to see them on display with such frankness. It makes Chuuya want to figure out what's underneath them. Chuuya had always assumed there was nothing underneath Dazai's lies. That deep down, Dazai was nothing but an empty shell, and that was why he was always so keen to die.

Like many other things, Chuuya's realizing that's a lie he invented to protect himself.

"Doing a decent job from where I'm standing," Chuuya offers.

"You're sitting," Dazai replies loftily.

"Oh, fuck off," Chuuya snaps. Serves him right for trying to be nice, Chuuya supposes. Too far from normal; too clean when they're both so open and vulnerable lately. Dazai just smiles to himself, peering out the tinted window as they drive, watching the world go by. Chuuya wonders if it looks any different?

Headquarters sure looks the same, when they get there. Dazai trails behind Chuuya, as usual, his hands tucked into his pockets. His tan jacket looks desperately out of place when he's dressed in stark black pants and a bleached white shirt, but there isn't anything to do for it. It's not like he'd fit any of Chuuya's clothes.

The idea of any Dazai wearing anything Chuuya owns is a thought that Chuuya does not want to think about for a multitude of reasons.

"You can send him in," Chuuya says to the guard, once they're at the office. It's still under renovation, but it's functional enough: Chuuya favors a similar aesthetic to the rest of the Port Mafia, but with more Japanese influences. There's still an imposing desk and a chair, but they're laying in tatami mats and lighter colors, the smell of bamboo weirdly reassuring.

He's fashioned his office a little after Kouyou's, and it helps keep delineate things a little better for him.

Chuuya drops into his chair, feeling exhausted, and Dazai perches on the edge of Chuuya's desk like a disobedient schoolboy.

"Guess we'll find out how much of a ghost you really are," Chuuya says, to fill the silence, and Dazai's face stays carefully blank.

The door opens.

Atsushi walks in.

The door closes behind him, and Atsushi looks up and freezes with such a look of distress on his face that it's absolutely clear where he stands on the ability to see Dazai. His gaze flickers from Dazai to Chuuya and then back again, and he takes one step, then several more, his gait halting and unsure.

"You're–"

Dazai's gaze is darker than Chuuya's seen from this Dazai, when it lands on Atsushi. Dazai holds out his hand, and Atsushi moves forward with that same unsteadiness, responding to the unvoiced request. It'd be nauseating, but Chuuya knows he'd do the exact same thing if Dazai held a hand out like that to him.

Dazai's hand goes to Atsushi's throat, where the collar once sat. There's nothing there now but a row of scars and still-healing wounds, scabbed over and dark. The skin there is lighter, the sun never allowed to darken it, and Atsushi seems frozen shock still.

Dazai moves his hand up, after he traces against those scars. Chuuya watches, silent, as Dazai moves his hand up, and up, and Atsushi flinches–

But Dazai is just letting his fingers ruffle through Atsushi's hair in a comforting head bat. Atsushi keeps his head bowed, his eyes blown wide, and Chuuya can see the tears pricking in the corners.

"You've had it rough," Dazai says, quietly. "But you've done a good job."

Anything Atsushi might have wanted to say visibly dies in his throat. He squeezes his eyes shut. Chuuya distinctly feels like this is a scene he shouldn't be witnessing, but at the same time, he refuses to look away as this alternate Dazai unravels Atsushi on their very first meeting. How much can Dazai figure out, just by looking?

How many more reasons does Dazai have to hate himself, now?

All of this for Oda, Chuuya thinks, and wonders if there was anything that would have tipped the scales.

"I thought you were dead," Atsushi blurts, his voice shaking.

"I am," Dazai says, and Atsushi's head finally raises to look at him. Dazai drops his hand back to his side, offering Atsushi a cheerful smile, wide and easy. It looks out of place, but Chuuya is starting to realize that it's one of this Dazai's normal expressions. "Or, the Dazai that you knew is. I'm a Dazai from another reality! Don't worry, you don't have to believe me if it sounds too extraordinary."

"No," Atsushi says, very slowly, looking between Dazai and Chuuya one more time and seemingly finding something there. "That's… not exactly the weirdest thing you've ever asked me to believe."

Dazai looks a little surprised at this, letting out a quiet laugh. "Well, I suppose that's probably true. What was it you needed to come here for, then, Atsushi-kun?"

Atsushi blinks, and then reels visibly, like he'd entirely forgotten why he'd come into the office to begin with. He bows, awkward and low, to Chuuya, a flush on his cheeks. Chuuya understands being so derailed from everything by finding Dazai (alive, intact, well), so he flaps a hand to dismiss the situation.

Now that Dazai's dead, Chuuya doesn't feel the need to bully the kid nearly as much.

"Sorry… Boss," Atsushi says, straightening back up. When Chuuya doesn't say anything in either direction, Atsushi just takes in a breath, steels himself, and then offers: "Mori-san sent me."

Chuuya thinks that a bomb going off would have been less destructive. Chuuya is aware of himself in the third person: he is springing to his feet, hands pressed into the desk, and Dazai is stepping away from the desk as a red tint surrounds both Chuuya and the wood, giving away how much one simple sentence has gotten to him.

"Chuuya," Dazai says, quietly, warningly.

"Mori is dead." Chuuya's voice is very, very level, which is a sharp contrast to the fact that the wood under his palms is creaking and giving way, his body far too dense to be supported so easily.

"He isn't! I mean– he's alive," Atsushi says, holding his hands up and backing up a step, every inch the boy trying to placate the monster. "He's running an orphanage– my orphanage, the one that I was from, before– I woke up there after the fight and he told me he'd help me get control of my ability and then he sent me back here because he said you would need me–"

Dazai holds up a hand, and Atsushi falls quiet. Chuuya, despite himself, obeys in his own way: takes in a deep, steadying breath, letting the tell-tale tint of his ability fade into nothingness. The floor creaks underneath him as he recenters himself.

"No, this makes sense," Dazai says, quietly, and Chuuya hates how easily Dazai can unravel the secrets of a reality than isn't even his. Hates Dazai for doing it. "Mori-san has always been dedicated to Yokohama. If he was willing to remove himself from the playing field, then Dazai would have wanted to keep him in reserve for the fight."

"The fight?" Atsushi asks.

"The fight that your Dazai knew was coming," Dazai says.

Atsushi seems to hesitate on the edge of something, looking towards Chuuya again. Dazai nods, and there's calculation in his eyes. Chuuya can practically see the information spinning across the surface of Dazai's mind, thousands of facts and possibilities rewriting themselves into a new narrative, into plans and backup plans and intricate futures.

"For the Book," Dazai offers.

"I thought," Atsushi says, "that only two people could know?"

"That's news to me," Dazai says, without reacting to this fact that he allegedly did not know. "But if that's true, then if I exist within this world, I'm already breaking those rules. I assume that Akutagawa-kun is aware? Did Mori-san state anything about the Book explicitly?"

"No," Atsushi says. "He thought that Na… the Boss would know. That you– um, that Dazai-san would have left him some information, about what was happening. But– he said I was an important part of whatever was happening. He didn't tell me why."

Dazai crosses his arms, tapping his fingertips on his coat as he thinks his way through the problem. His gaze flickers to Chuuya. "Did he leave you any information?"

"No?" Chuuya says.

"Is his computer still in his office?"

"Yeah," Chuuya says. "I mean, the IT guys have already been in there, but–"

Dazai does not bother to let Chuuya finish his sentence. He's already moving, and Chuuya lets out a deeply annoyed sound as he falls into step behind Dazai. He realizes that he's giving Dazai the exact amount of space that he would if Dazai was still the Boss and immediately takes an extra three steps forward to close the space.

"You coming?" Chuuya snaps, and Atsushi practically jumps out of his skin as he rushes to follow behind them both.

"I'd have left you information," Dazai says. "About the Guild, and about the Rats, if not about the Book explicitly. It doesn't make sense that only two people can know about the Book. Our worlds have a lot of differences, but if he was preparing for something, then I know what it was, and they already know about the Book."

"So, what," Chuuya drawls. "You're saying Dazai'd just go out and lie to the kids? Wow. I never would have seen that coming."

"Hey," Atsushi says, quiet enough that he can be entirely ignored.

"I'm saying," Dazai says, sweeping open the door to his former office like it's every bit his and not the office of a dead double, "that I would have had a contingency plan, and it would have involved making sure you got information. How quickly was this computer secured?"

"The day he died," Chuuya says. "Gin-chan made sure everything was squared away before she left. Hey, is she with you?"

Atsushi shakes his head. "I got an email from her, though. She said she's doing well."

"At least someone is," Chuuya grumbles. Dazai is typing away at the computer. There isn't a frown on his face, but in the absence of all other expressions, Chuuya can't help but think that his blank face looks particularly grumpy.

"If the person I think is involved in this is involved, then any information that was left on a terminal connected to the internet wouldn't have been secure," Dazai says. "But if this terminal was immediately taken off, then…"

Dazai trails off, his rapidfire typing and clicking turning to silence as he clicks one more time, and then–

Dazai's voice fills the room, quiet and somber, coming from the speakers of the laptop.

"Chuuya," Dazai says – the Boss of the Port Mafia says – as Chuuya steps around the desk to look at the screen. "If you're watching this, then… I'm finally dead! Congratulations to me!"

Atsushi sighs in complete despair.

"But it also means you didn't get to kill me," the recording continues. It's nothing elaborate: clearly recorded from the same laptop that they're watching right now, set a foot away from Dazai while he sat at his desk, nothing but mafia black clothing and bandages hiding him away. "So I suppose I owe you an apology."

Chuuya is only aware that he's clenching his fists because the sound of leather creaking manages to make it to his ears. He doesn't bother to loosen his grip.

"You wouldn't accept it even if I offered it," the recording of Dazai continues, matter of factly, "so instead, I'm going to tell you this. Someone is going to come who is going to want to destroy the Port Mafia. Since you're invested in the Port Mafia, I figure this is something you'd like to avoid, and I'd like to avoid any collateral damage in the process, so I've left you information on how to avoid any disasters."

The recording is quiet for a moment, and a series of files flash on screen: Chuuya glances at Dazai, whose attention is fully focused on the screen, and Chuuya decides that's probably enough of a guarantee that he'll get all the important information.

"More than that," Dazai says, on the screen, "you should know that in these files is the location to two people from your past that you'll be very interested in meeting, I think. One is in the basement of the Port Mafia, and the other is in an orphanage near the outskirts of Yokohama."

Two photographs flash across the screen: Mori and Elise, at Atsushi's orphanage; Verlaine, talking to Gin in what must be the mentioned basement of the Port Mafia.

Chuuya stands very, very still.

"You'll need them if you're going to save anything," the recording offers. "Good luck… Chuuya."

The screen goes black.

Chuuya looks at Dazai. "Do we need this laptop?"

Dazai makes a few deft keystrokes, slipping a flash drive into the laptop. Chuuya watches him copy over several files and then eject the flash drive, Atsushi tracking Dazai's hands as the drive disappears into one of his pockets.

"No," Dazai says, cheerfully.

Chuuya punches it with enough of his ability backing it that it turns into a small orb of plastic and metal wreckage before it flies clear through the reinforced glass of the window. The glass was meant to stand up to bullets and explosions, but it was never meant to stand up to the sheer scope of Chuuya's gravity powers, and the window crumples, the glass spraying down onto the floor in harmless pieces.

"Good," Chuuya says.

"Um," Atsushi offers.

"Did you know?" Chuuya snaps at Dazai, letting his anger take his body in a whirlwind of emotion to Dazai. He overlays the wrong image– bandages over one eye, a dead gaze– and this Dazai, this foreign, alternate Dazai who still knows too much, smiles.

"Atsushi-kun," Dazai says, cheerful. "Don't get involved, alright?"

"When you say it like that–" Atsushi begins, raising his hands to placate both of them as Chuuya's hand finds it way to twist in Dazai's pressed, brand new button down shirt from Chuuya's closet.

"I didn't know about Mori-san," Dazai says, lifting his hand to put one finger down as he explains. "I knew about Verlaine, because there's no reason that would have changed." Another finger. "I still don't know everything that's in those files, so if you want a full count, you'll need to give me an hour."

Chuuya absorbs this information. "Sure," he says, easily, breezy. "Clench your teeth."

Dazai opens his mouth, and Chuuya punches him in the face. Atsushi lets out a yelp not unlike a cat who has just had their tail stepped on, and Dazai wilts within Chuuya's grasp, dead weight being held upright only by Chuuya's hand. Dazai works his jaw for a moment, testing to make sure nothing is broken – it isn't, because the last thing Chuuya needs is a whining Dazai who can't eat properly – and then lets his head dangle backwards to stare at the ceiling.

"Fair enough," Dazai offers, his voice a little off as he works around the new pain in his jaw. "We should leave, unless you want to explain why you pitched the laptop out a window to your security detail."

"Stand up," Chuuya says.

Dazai sighs, longsuffering and enduring. "You're not going to punch me again, are you?"

Instead of answering, Chuuya drops him. Dazai goes down in a pile of spindly limbs, and Atsushi rushes around the desk to drop down and check on him. Atsushi hesitates for a brief second, clearly trying to gauge whether or not it's overstepping, but then seems to swallow that down in light of this being a different Dazai. He checks over the bruise that's blossoming on Dazai's face, frowning at it and then shooting Chuuya an accusatory look.

"Look, kid," Chuuya says, "you can't tell me he didn't deserve that."

"This wasn't his fault," Atsushi ventures. He sits back to give Dazai space as Dazai clambers back up to his feet, stretching out all of his joints as though Chuuya's punch had done any real damage. Chuuya doubts it had even damaged Dazai's pride.

"So, Boss," Dazai says, conversationally. "Where are we going first? The basement, or the orphanage?"

-

Dazai does something he's been doing an awful lot of, lately: he wakes up. This, in of itself, is sort of regrettable, because he really wishes he could stay dead, or unconscious, or anything. Life continues to thwart him, however, and he wakes up– painfully, groggily.

"You're less resistant to painkillers than our Dazai," Yosano says, almost conversationally, once he's solidly in the realm of awake instead of hanging in a semi-conscious state.

"Less drug use," Dazai says, equally conversationally, because there isn't really any reason to do anything else.

"That's surprising," Yosano offers.

"I was busy," Dazai says. He pushes himself upright. He's still wounded in all of the same places, which means that none of his injuries were serious enough to warrant Yosano having to kill him and utilize that split-second loophole to bring him back to life. It hurts, but distantly, in the way that's common with painkillers: he can't focus on the pain and the memory won't stick in his mind, bleeding out like a wound.

"If you're feeling foggy, it'll wear off soon," Yosano says. She attaches her pen to her clipboard, and then sets it aside; Dazai can see that it's the medical chart that belongs to this world's Dazai with several areas circled in pen. The differences, he thinks. He can't focus on the text very well from here, not when Yosano shares the same handwriting as every other doctor on the planet.

"Of course," Dazai allows. "Then, if it's all the same to you, I'll be leaving."

Yosano leans back in her chair, lifting her eyebrows. Her hands go into the pockets of her lab coat, and Dazai is very aware of the fact that she's mirroring a pose his other self habitually adopts. He's very aware of the fact that this Yosano doesn't know him, and he doesn't, really, know her.

Technically, they've never met.

"It's not the same to me," Yosano says, her voice firm. "For starters, a friend of mine who looks just like you has vanished into thin air– which wouldn't be too much to worry about, except that you're his doppleganger, and you've been found at the site of a bunch of suspicious deaths…"

"If you were attempting to charge me with a crime, you would have already had me arrested," Dazai says. "So I'm concluding that I'm free to go."

"What good would it do to arrest you?"

The voice makes Dazai's blood turn to volcanic ash inside of his veins, a series of magmatic rocks tearing through his body and leaving nothing behind but ruined black char. Slowly, Dazai turns, the feeling in his veins red-hot and matching too well when he lays eyes on Chuuya. Jacket on his fingers slung over his shoulder, hand on his hip. Designer clothing from head to toe and exuding a casual confidence that seems so foreign on him.

Everything rotten inside of Dazai aches.

"You could break out of just about any jail on the planet," Chuuya continues. "If you're anything like the one that I know, anyway."

"I'm not," Dazai says, the words a little too sharp. Yosano looks at him, something calculating in her gaze, and Dazai can't help but think that here they are, two of Mori's greatest failures, pit against each other in a battle neither of them agreed to fight. "Which is to say, I could still break out. You're right about that."

Chuuya swings his jacket down onto the spare chair, and then, much to Dazai's horror, leans over to invade Dazai's personal space. Dazai's breath catches in his throat, and he can't quite force it back into being even, not with the slow drip of drugs in his veins pulling him down, down, down.

Dazai doesn't have two years spent in grief under his belt; he didn't have all that time to spend trying every drug known to mankind and then inventing a few new ones on top of it. He didn't spend months on end in an alcoholic spiral, hallucinating Odasaku and Chuuya and Ango there with him when he was fever-hot and vomiting in a shower long gone frigid.

No, this Dazai has several years spent as the leader of the Port Mafia, instead, and the only thing in his veins is betrayal.

"You really do look identical," Chuuya says, sounding impressed.

"I'm sure I have some differences," Dazai says, because he knows it's true. He knows the placement of every scar on his body and that of the Dazai that belongs here, and he knows exactly which ones are missing and which ones are new.

"You're still Dazai, though, right?" Chuuya says. It's phrased as a question, but it isn't, really: Chuuya sounds too confident about it. Of course it's Dazai, because Chuuya has decided it is; of course, of course. There's years of being partners between the two of them, and it makes Dazai's head spin, because it's never happened.

He made sure it didn't happen.

"More or less," Dazai lies, mouth acrid, and Chuuya snorts.

"Can't give a straight answer," Chuuya notes. "That's on brand."

"We're not keeping you prisoner," Yosano says, seemingly already tired of watching the two of them bicker, "but you are my patient, so if you try to leave, you're doing so against doctor's orders."

Yosano's face makes it very clear that doing this would be a very, very poor decision. Dazai is well aware of her skill with a chainsaw, and so he decides that he'd rather not invoke her fury on what is, again, technically their first meeting.

So he nods, instead. Plasters a smile on his face and tries to make it reach his eyes, the way his other self would.

Nobody looks very convinced, but Yosano stands up. She looks down at Chuuya. "Can you keep an eye on him?"

"Sure," Chuuya says, like it costs him nothing, and maybe it doesn't. Dazai doesn't want to think about how easy it is for the two of them to talk like this, when Chuuya is technically in enemy territory. When Chuuya is, in all likelihood, only here because of him.

"I'll go update everyone else," Yosano says. She lets her clipboard fall to hit, lightly, on the top of Dazai's head. "Expect that everyone's going to want to see you all at once."

"Oh," Dazai says, except it comes out less of the matter of fact tone he'd been aiming for and instead sounds very, very small. Chuuya shoots him a curious look, but has the decency not to say anything until the door clicks shut behind Yosano.

"So, what," Chuuya says, flicking his fingers against the bandages over Dazai's eye. "You're a Dazai that never left the Port Mafia?"

"...something like that," Dazai says. He reaches up to brush Chuuya's hand away, but the motion fails halfway through: he wraps his hand around Chuuya's, and Chuuya just lets him do it. Chuuya only watches, curious, no automatic anger in his eyes.

Just trust–

Dazai drops Chuuya's hand like he's been burned. Chuuya raises his hand back to look at it, like maybe there was something weird about his palm that Dazai had been entranced by, but it's just his normal skin. He seems to shrug it off.

"Look," Chuuya says, "I don't really give a shit if you're honest with me, but you should let them help."

A Dazai that had never left the Port Mafia. Is that what he could pretend to be? It's a mask he's never really tried for before. Sure, he'd never left, technically, but he still knew the Agency, he'd always– he'd always–

Reevaluate; build a new strategy. He can use them. He can use Chuuya. He can still salvage everything, can't he? He can still save that reality, he can still–

"Hey," Chuuya says, and there's leather-clad fingers at Dazai's bare cheek, there's blue eyes peering at him, too human. Dazai feels flayed open. This was why he'd pushed Chuuya so far away so quickly. "What's with you?"

"Nothing," Dazai lies, but Chuuya doesn't even bother to look unconvinced. He shifts even closer, and Dazai can't help it: he gives way. He backs up, pressing further into the pillows in the infirmary bed, and Chuuya's eyes go a little wider at the retreat. Chuuya's other hand goes out to grab Dazai's shoulder and hold him in place.

"I'm not your Chuuya, but–"

"I don't have a Chuuya," Dazai says. It's only half a lie, because there's a Chuuya in his world, sure, but he isn't Dazai's. Dazai might have possessed him, but he never had him, not like this Dazai had this Chuuya.

Dazai feels like he's falling from the top of the Port Mafia building all over again.

"The fuck do you mean you don't have one? Is he dead?" Chuuya demands.

"He's," Dazai says, and he's saved from having to lie by the door slamming open.

"Dazai-san!" Atsushi's voice is excited, and he bounds in very much like a cat. Chuuya doesn't jump away from Dazai: he drops his arm and steps backwards very calmly, utilizing everything Dazai ever taught him to make sure that no attention is placed on him.

"He may not know who you are," Kyouka observes, quietly, her hand drifting up to tug on Atsushi's sleeve as he perches at the edge of Dazai's bed.

"Nah, he knows who we are," Ranpo offers, and Dazai groans internally, because the last thing he needs is Ranpo to see straight through him when he's drugged to the gills. "Or he'd be fighting Mr. Fancy Hat more by now."

"Oi," Chuuya says, warningly, and Ranpo just turns an unimpressed look on him as he pops a piece of gum into his mouth to accompany the piece he appears to already be chewing.

"His hat isn't fancy at all," Dazai mumbles, faintly.

"You shut up," Chuuya says.

"No, let him talk," Kunikida says, arms crossed. "He has a lot of things to explain."

"Are you feeling okay?" Atsushi asks. "Are you feeling well enough to talk?"

"He's clearly well enough to talk," Kunikida says, gesturing as if to communicate the fact that Dazai has already spoken.

"Well, maybe he doesn't feel well enough to answer any complicated questions about alternate realities!" Atsushi offers. "I got really lost in Ranpo-san's explanation, and I'm not suffering from blood loss!"

"You're also not as smart as Dazai," Ranpo says, and Kyouka elbows him hard in the side. "What? It's true!"

"You can't just say it!" Kyouka says, and Atsushi gives the two of them a deeply defeated look. Dazai doesn't laugh, but he feels like he should. No, that's not right – he feels like he would have, if he had been the Dazai that belongs here.

He doesn't, and the sudden, ringing silence makes everyone look at him. A missed step; a cue gone unrecognized. Dazai trained himself out of reacting to anything based on the memories that he'd stolen from this world, and now here he is, stealing everything else in the poorest way possible.

"What have you already figured out?" Dazai asks, instead. He makes eye contact with Ranpo, forces his hands flat instead of folding the hospital blanket in on itself in infinite loops.

"Nuh-uh," Ranpo says, waggling a finger. "You don't get to know how much I know just so you can figure out how much to not tell us."

"Did that not make any sense to anyone else, or…" Atsushi says, trailing off, the turns of the sentence clearly having lost him somewhere. Kyouka mouths the sentence back to herself before nodding, successfully conquering Ranpo's twisting words, and Dazai feels so acutely lonely that he wonders how he hasn't died all over again.

"Then," Dazai says, "ask away." He manages a smile, but it comes out some gross caricature of the real thing: Chuuya's brows knit together at the sight of it, and Atsushi frowns.

"Who are you? –Don't just give me your name, you know that's not what I'm asking," Kunikida says, his voice waspish when Dazai immediately opens his mouth.

Dazai considers lying. He considers where he can go with this, and what he can do with this, and the possibilities in front of them, and then he… lets them go, when he looks at Ranpo. Ranpo's green-eyed gaze is entirely too smart for Dazai to manage much of a lie this late in the game, and that's operating on the assumption that Dostoyevsky hasn't already made things even harder.

"A Dazai who never left the Port Mafia," Dazai says, instead. "As Chuuya surmised."

Kunikida seems to be deeply uncomfortable with this revelation, pushing his hand up to his temples. If a headache is brewing, then Dazai can't help but think: good. Dazai has a headache at all of this, too.

"Is that it?" Atsushi ventures, carefully. It figures that Atsushi would be the one to cast it off so easily, as though a Dazai dyed even darker in his sins could be so easily forgiven. Of course it would be Atsushi.

"...no," Dazai admits, after a long moment.

Ranpo sighs, annoyed. "Listen up, because I'm only going to explain this one more time!"

Dazai feels that this is mildly unfair, because it's the first time Dazai has been present to hear the explanation, but he can only imagine Ranpo's patience being tested trying to explain anything to everyone else.

"We already know that you're from a different world from within the Book," Ranpo says. "You're obviously still Dazai, because your ability is the same and you look like him and ours is missing. But ours is missing, because he's probably stuck in your world, but the thing is that the two worlds are probably just going to–"

Ranpo makes a strange, loud slurping sound and slaps his palms together. "--like that!"

"Illustrative," Dazai chirps.

"No, shut up! If the two worlds merge together, then that means there can only be one Dazai!" Ranpo says, gesturing wildly in annoyance at Dazai's entire being.

"Ah," Dazai says. "And you're worried that it wouldn't be the one you like?"

"I wouldn't put it like that," Atsushi says, gently.

"I would," Ranpo huffs.

"Everyone else will get overwritten, too," Kyouka says, quiet and intense, her gaze meeting Dazai's without wavering. Kyouka has seen too much darkness to shy away from Dazai's, even if she's a creature of the light now. "People already are. We think… that's why people are dying."

Dazai thinks of Ango, and then, like a gunshot in his memory, thinks of Odasaku. If the worlds are equalizing, then it's only a matter of time, isn't it? He closes his eyes for a long moment. It's nice of the Agency, to not move, to let him ground himself. They shouldn't be doing it, not when Dazai is their enemy, but he supposes all of them are too good to think of him like that.

When Dazai opens his eyes, Chuuya is the first thing he sees.

"I didn't leave the Port Mafia," Dazai says, every word a declaration of intent. "I took it over."

There's a sharp inhale– Yosano, Dazai thinks, but he can't look away from the way Chuuya's eyes widen, the way anger immediately dilates his pupils.

"You," Chuuya says, the ring of red expanding, expanding, expanding until it's a thin sheen around Chuuya. "What?"

Then Chuuya lashes out, and Dazai flinches.

He flinches, and Chuuya's hand impacts with his shoulder, an easy jerk that causes no pain, and Dazai realizes how much he's just given away. Chuuya isn't punching him. He's holding onto him like Dazai will disappear if he doesn't.

"Why?" Chuuya asks. He's leaning in too close again, looking at Dazai like– like Dazai will disappear if he doesn't. Dazai finally places it: it isn't anger, it's concern that's painted across Chuuya's face. Concern like Dazai has never seen on his Chuuya. He has only the echoed memories of it: Chuuya, concerned when Dazai had overdosed at sixteen; when Dazai woke up after an explosion at seventeen; when Dazai's arm had seemingly been taken off by Lovecraft.

"Don't waste your worry on me," Dazai says, before he can stop himself. His voice is too hard, when he doesn't remember to modulate it. There's none of the gentle, lilting, teasing notes that all of them must be used to.

"I rather think you need someone to worry about you," Kunikida says, very carefully.

This isn't how it's supposed to go.

This was never how it was supposed to go. Why would it? Why would it, when Dazai so willingly threw all of this away? Their Dazai was their ally, but to see this level of trust and concern – Dazai is spinning so rapidly that he feels nauseated.

Dazai has to recenter himself. He has to figure out how to move forward, how to keep things going. He'll keep that other reality safe – with Odasaku alive and Chuuya fueled by fury and hating him. It's all he can do. It's all he's ever been able to do. Push away the few things that might have mattered so that when he's gone, he won't be missed – so that the world will continue to turn without him, a million revolutions ahead and none of them with any of the cancerous energy that Dazai always brings to any reality.

Dazai can't confront the idea that everything he's done is a zero sum game, or there's no point to it. There's no point to what he's become, when what he could have been is staring him down.

He wonders if the Dazai that belongs here knows that he belongs. Dazai never realized how unhappy he was until he was – here. Dazai remembers this reality, remembers feeling moments of peace, remembers the sparse seconds where he didn't want to die.

Dazai has always wanted to die, but now he just feels like he's splitting terribly down the middle.

Chuuya looks at Dazai for a long moment, searching. Dazai feels strangely exposed under his gaze, and feels worse still when Chuuya shifts backwards, seemingly having found what he was searching for.

"If you're the leader of the Port Mafia," Chuuya begins.

"I was–"

"Or if you were, I'm not arguing semantics with you, shut the fuck up."

"Chuuya's learned big words–"

"Then you can either talk to me," Chuuya says, raising his voice to speak over Dazai's pointless protestations, "because I still would have been in the Mafia with you, right? Or you can talk to them, because they're your…"

Chuuya trails off, looking a little uncertain and a lot like he's just eaten something incredibly sour.

"Friends," Atsushi says, firmly. He doesn't leave any room for argument, and he turns to look at Dazai with that determination. "We're his friends."

"We're also his coworkers," Ranpo offers.

"I'm his doctor," Yosano chirps. "And Kunikida's his partner. None of those things are mutually exclusive with friendship."

"I would like more painkillers, please," Dazai says.

"No," Yosano replies instantly, shooting down his hopes, and Dazai lets his gaze go wide.

"Nakahara-san," Kunikida says, after a long moment. "As loathe as I am to place him in your hands, I think you may have the best chance of getting anything out of him. As it stands, he has no reason to trust us, when I assume we were enemies in his world."

Dazai is quiet. He wants Kunikida to give up on him, but he has a terrible sinking feeling that what Kunikida's actually doing is just doubling down on some ideal of his. Some desire that says Kunikida has to care about this Dazai the same way he cares about his Dazai.

It's hard. It's insurmountably hard, because Dazai remembers. He remembers being their Dazai.

"That's fine," Chuuya says, at the same time that Dazai says:

"When I was fifteen, I created a singularity, and saw the future," Dazai says. Chuuya cuts off, looking at him in something that should be shock but reads much more like concern. "It was this reality, which I wanted to avoid, for reasons I don't care to discuss."

"You saw the future?" Kunikida echoes, a deep frown etched onto his face.

Chuuya seems to understand something. "The thing that made you leave the Port Mafia four years ago," he says. "You wanted to prevent it from happening."

"Yes," Dazai says, carefully.

"But you're happier in the Agency," Chuuya says, sounding exasperated. "Didn't you see that part, too?"

Dazai doesn't know how to handle the idea that even Chuuya thinks Dazai is happier in the Agency. Whether or not it's true (and it is, Dazai knows, even if he keeps trying to ignore it to pretend that he's perfectly happy being alone and semi-dead), Chuuya shouldn't be able to just say it like that.

"It," Dazai says, very carefully, "was more important, than being happy."

"...you couldn't stop it from happening and still be happy?" Atsushi ventures.

"Nah," Ranpo says. "I mean, he probably could've, but not if he decided that the only way forward was taking over the Mafia."

"Okay, hold on," Chuuya says. "That means whatever happened, you couldn't have done under the Mafia's current leadership."

"Chuuya," Dazai whines. "Stop connecting the dots. I'm not telling you everything for a reason."

"Yeah?" Chuuya shoots back, his voice challenging. "What's the reason?"

"Um," Dazai says, considering it. "You don't need to know?"

"We've just proved that we do," Kunikida says, firmly.

"...it could put you in danger?" Dazai says, weakly.

"Dazai-san," Atsushi says, and the absolutely exhausted annoyance in his voice cannot be understated. "You're not serious, are you?"

"He's serious," Kyouka says. "He's just also stupid."

"Kyouka-chan, that's mean."

Kyouka fixes Atsushi with a longsuffering expression, clearly unconcerned with the fact that she's being mean. She still amends her statement, offering, instead: "He's acting stupid."

"He's just allergic to honesty," Chuuya says.

"I have to have some secrets!"

"You have too many secrets," Kunikida says. "Stop having so many secrets. No, don't you dare give me that look. If you saw the future of this reality then you know it took me two years to find out you'd even been in the Port Mafia! You weren't even the one to tell me!"

"You do have too many secrets," Yosano offers, uncharitably, and Dazai shoots her a wounded expression, because if anyone should understand having a dark and traumatic backstory it's Yosano. She only arches one eyebrow. "What? You know mine."

"We're getting completely off topic," Kunikida says.

"No, this is fun," Ranpo says, gleefully. "Let him keep digging a hole."

"A grave," Dazai says. "The phrase is digging your own grave."

"Yeah, but you're not dead," Ranpo says. "So you're just digging a hole and trying to hide in it."

Chuuya snorts his laughter out of his nose and then covers for it by coughing, except Dazai shoots him a wounded look, and Chuuya only laughs harder.

"Dazai-san," Atsushi says, patiently, once Chuuya's laughter has died down to a volume that conversation can be had over, "I think you're trying very hard to convince us that you're an unfathomable version of Dazai-san that we shouldn't get to know, and you're really bad at it. You're still Dazai-san, right? I bet you know an Atsushi that's really similar to me."

Which – is true, Dazai supposes. Atsushi was frighteningly similar, it's just that Dazai managed to give him even more trauma in his world, which.

"If you knew the things I'd done to my Atsushi," Dazai offers, his voice artificially unbothered, "you'd be less quick to say that."

Atsushi looks at him. Really looks at him, his dual-colored eyes staring really deeply into Dazai's eye – into the bandages – into his clothing that Yosano has politely kept in monochrome black for him.

"The only way we'll know that is if you tell us what you did," Atsushi says, quietly, "but I bet that Atsushi doesn't hold it against you, either, if you did what you thought you had to."

And what is Dazai supposed to do with that? What is he supposed to say in response, when he's so transparent that Atsushi and Chuuya and Kunikida and the rest can all see through him without any effort? The only reason he'd been so good at keeping secrets in his world, Dazai realizes, is because he never gave anyone the chance to start learning anything.

Everyone here knows him far better than he'd anticipated. Dazai thinks they've all been letting their Dazai get away with quite a lot.

"I've been bamboozled," Dazai murmurs, staring at the ceiling. He works his mouth for a minute, trying to figure out exactly where to start, before finally he looks at Kunikida. "Is there still a whiteboard in the meeting room?"

"Yes?"

"Bring it in here," Dazai says, with a sigh. "We've… got a lot to talk about."

Atsushi smiles brilliantly, and Dazai feels like he might go blind from it.

-

Atsushi has gone back to visit Mori with a carefully sorted flash drive of information. Chuuya has ventured underneath the Port Mafia to meet with Verlaine, a reunion that Dazai gives equal odds to ending in tears or bloodshed.

Neither meeting appealed very much to Dazai, so instead, he steels himself and attends something he wants to see even less.

"Were you friends?" Oda asks, his voice quiet.

"With mine," Dazai replies. "I was."

"This world," Oda offers, quietly, his gaze still fixed on the headstone in front of him, shaded by a familiar tree. "He told me he'd done it to save me."

"Yes," Dazai agrees.

"Was Ango a price he would have paid?" Oda asks, and turns to look at Dazai. Dazai can feel his gaze on him, the quiet fury that rolls within Oda's veins, carefully contained. It's an assassin's anger, revitalized after all this time.

The last time Oda was this calm, he'd gone on a suicide mission and never returned. Dazai doesn't want that to happen again, but anything he could say to convince Oda not to do it turns to ash in his mouth, falls to the ground to mix with the fresh soil at Ango's grave.

"I don't know," Dazai says, quietly. "Ango would have paid it to bring Odasaku back, I think. I blamed him, for awhile, but I never wanted him to die. I never… thought that would fix anything."

There's a beat of silence, and then, a little more light-hearted, Dazai offers: "I did disable his airbags right before a non-fatal car accident, though. As revenge."

Oda doesn't laugh. There's no light of smile in his eyes, or on his lips, but his gaze turns back to the grave, and then up to the sky, and he exhales, slowly. Some of the tension and anger in his frame seems to bleed out with it, as though he can't quite hold onto it.

"Can we fix it?" Oda asks.

Dazai is quiet for a long moment. In truth, he doesn't know. His other self certainly had an advantage over him, with his foreknowledge, but Dazai doesn't know if knowing anything extra would help, when they're in such uncharted territory.

"There's a Book that can rewrite reality," Dazai says, quietly. "It does this by having infinite possible realities within it, and when certain requirements are met – the "real" reality and the "new" reality switch places. This can be achieved by writing the changes down into the Book itself."

Oda is quiet. He's always been quiet. He's always let Dazai talk, and talk, and talk, all the way up to the end, when Oda had said all the things Dazai had never wanted to hear.

Because we're friends, Dazai thinks, and continues.

"The Book isn't… an ability, exactly, but my ability doesn't follow the rules, either," Dazai says. "I assume that whatever rules there are, the Dazai that belongs here broke in order to save you. Taking over the Mafia, making sure that you didn't join, neutralizing Mimic entirely without you… And making sure that none of the events here would ever fulfill enough requirements to become the "real" world. You can't be brought back to life. Even the Book can't bring back the dead."

Oda's hands clench into a fist that Dazai can't help but let his gaze be drawn to. If it was up to Dazai, he would save Oda from this grief–

But it had been up to Dazai, hadn't it? Up to another Dazai, who had made his choices, and this was where it led. Dazai knows that he, selfishly, would prefer Oda to be alive no matter what – but he also remembers grieving Oda, grieving the charred remains of his friendship with Ango, the feeling of mourning whatever he'd had when Chuuya before he'd disappeared.

Dazai had only lived on because Oda had wanted him to, or he thinks the grief would have killed him.

"The thing is," Dazai continues, letting his tone turn deceptively flippant, like he doesn't care as much as he does. "None of this should be happening. I shouldn't be in this world. Ango shouldn't be dead. There's… a chance… that it can be fixed."

"Not a high one," Oda says, and it isn't a question. Dazai offers him a wane smile.

"Well," Dazai says. "It's worth a try."

"So we try to fix it," Oda says, working through it in his head, in his own way. "And it brings back the people who weren't meant to die– turns reality back– and sends you home?"

"Yes," Dazai offers, a little faintly.

Oda considers Dazai for a long moment, and Dazai allows the scrutiny. If anyone is allowed to perceive Dazai, then certainly, it's Odasaku, who has never once truly judged Dazai for any of his flaws or eccentricities.

"Do you want to go back?" Oda asks.

"Yes," Dazai says, so quickly that it surprises himself. He blinks, a little taken aback with the vehemence of the feeling. Dazai isn't used to feeling anything very strongly, much less something like this. "I made a promise, after all."

Oda looks at him with quiet intensity. He's curious, but he doesn't push, and Dazai lets the silence drag out between the two of them. It's comfortable.

Dazai absorbs it for a moment.

"He wanted me to do good," Dazai murmurs, quietly. "I joined the Agency because Odasaku died. I wouldn't have, if he hadn't."

"So that's the difference," Oda says. He looks at Ango's grave again. "I think I'd prefer to die, if it meant my friends were able to be happy."

"I…" Dazai starts, and then trails off. He doesn't know that he could say he's happy, but – he isn't unhappy. His suicide attempts have been half-hearted at best for the past year, and he's found that he likes to spend time with the members of the Agency. That he doesn't mind them picking up pieces of his past and hints of who he really is.

They keep accepting him anyway, the same as Odasaku.

"The problem is that we're all a little too quick to sacrifice ourselves," Dazai says, finally. "But I promised Odasaku, and I'm a member of the Agency. I won't turn my back on that."

Won't, instead of can't; willpower instead of ability. Dazai understands why this world is the way it is. He doesn't hate it, exactly: he thinks it's important that it exists. This one universe among an infinite set of possibilities, this one reality where Odasaku lives and Dazai doesn't, and isn't it ironic that it's this universe that makes Dazai realize how much he likes his?

The idea that his universe is better – that it's better with Odasaku dead – makes Dazai's chest ache so hard he can't help but bend, slightly, hands in the pockets of his coat. He lets out a short laugh, but it doesn't really sound very mirthful at all.

"I'm sure," Oda says, and drops his hand in between Dazai's shoulder blades, comforting and solid and alive, "that he's glad you found something."

Dazai's laugh turns a little strangled, and he squeezes his eyes shut. Phosphenes blossom and give way to the kaleidoscopic darkness that slowly fades, and with it, the burning in the corners of his eyes.

"You should let me read your book," Dazai says. "Before we fix this."

"Sure," Oda says. "I'll lend you a copy while we figure out a plan."

"I've got one," Dazai offers, and this is easier territory: this is familiar. "A plan, that is. Not a copy. I still want that. The plan involves sneaking into Ango's office before they wipe his files, though, so I'd rather read it before I run the risk of getting caught doing that."

Oda looks impressed when Dazai says his plan so easily.

"You think there's information there?" Oda asks.

"I think if anyone has information on the Book, it's the Special Divisions," Dazai says. "And if anyone has left a backdoor in, Ango would have done it for you."

Oda digests this for a long moment.

"Okay," Odasaku says. "When do we go?"'

-

"To summarize," Kunikida says, sounding very weary, two fingers pushing his glasses so far into the bridge of his nose that it's sure to leave an imprint, "you've done things in the most asinine and self-destructive possible way, and are now surprised that this has gone poorly."

"I wouldn't put it like that," Dazai says, mildly.

"That's because you're clinically insane," Kunikida says.

"I'm clinically depressed," Dazai says, "not insane. Probably."

Yosano looks away from the whiteboard and wobbles her hand as if to communicate that the jury is, in fact, very much out when it comes to that argument.

Atsushi is squinting at the whiteboard. He's been squinting at the whiteboard for awhile now, actually, his eyes absolutely glued to the 'Akutagawa joins the Agency' line, as though he can't quite make sense of it. Dazai supposes that's fair.

"Dazai-san," Atsushi says, slowly, turning towards the older man, "did you send Akutagawa to the Agency because you felt bad about what you did to him in this reality?"

"I," Dazai says, imperiously, and then stops.

"You could just apologize," Atsushi says in exasperation.

"I took you into the Port Mafia because you were easier to control," Dazai offers. It's a lie. He knows it's a lie. Atsushi, also, knows it's a lie, transparently and completely, and Dazai pulls at the fraying edges of his bandages for what feels like the nineteenth time in the last hour. He's going to need new ones, at this rate.

"Akutagawa listens to you better than I do," Atsushi offers, and Kyouka nods. Dazai does not, actually, have a rebuttal for that, because it's technically true.

"Atsushi-kun," Dazai says, "it is imperative that you do not tell Akutagawa-kun about any of this until you have your Dazai back."

Atsushi looks deeply unimpressed, but it's Chuuya that speaks.

"You're our Dazai, too," Chuuya says. He discarded his hat somewhere during the explanation of the alternate reality, Dazai's summary of 'how we got to this point' overbearing enough that Chuuya had felt the need to run his hands through his hair at least twice. "Isn't that the point?"

"Chuuya, I know you're not the brightest, but I don't know how that was the conclusion that you… Chuuya. Chuuya, stop looking at me like that."
'
"If we send you back," Chuuya says. "You're just going to be dead."

Chuuya seems like he thinks this is a suboptimal option, and Dazai can't help but bark out a laugh.

"Are you that upset you didn't get to kill me yourself?"

"If you're going to have your marital spat, can you have it after we figure this out?" Ranpo asks, waving his lollipop as punctuation.

"Our fucking what--"

"Marital–"

Dazai and Chuuya shoot each other twin horrified glances. Chuuya looks deeply disgusted. Dazai makes an overexaggerated gagging noise deep in his throat.

It feels so achingly comforting, like coming back to a familiar home that Dazai has never rightfully earned. It makes Dazai's wounds ache, every point that had once impacted with the ground under the Port Mafia letting him know how much he's failed; every throbbing broken bone a reminder from Dostoyevsky of how much he's ruined things.

The thought sobers Dazai up enough that he can't keep pretending that he's their Dazai, and so he lets it drop: the smile slides from his face like clothing worn too long, and he taps his marker on the whiteboard.

"At any rate," Dazai says, "the goal is to return reality to what it should be– both yours, and mine. I think… the solution to that lies in the Book, if the Book is what's doing all this to begin with."

"You created a singularity touching it in your world," Ranpo says. His green eyes slit open to look at Dazai, considering. "Do you think it's as easy as touching the one in our world to send things back?"

"I hope it's that easy," Dazai says, "but I can't imagine it will be. For starters, we'll need to go through Dostoyevsky. He wants to find the Book for his own reasons, none of which are good for the Agency."

"The Special Division knows about the Book," Chuuya says. "Right? Can you get an in there?"

"Not," Dazai says, "with Ango dead."

Chuuya accepts this too easily, and Dazai feels a little thrown by it, because Chuuya has not reacted at all to the – Dazai thought – relatively groundbreaking information that Dazai and Ango had been friends. Did Chuuya know that this whole time? Dazai had certainly never learned about it in this world, and so he hadn't thought anything of it…

Chuuya's getting too intuitive, Dazai thinks, and doesn't want to admit how fond the thought is.

"Shachou… might be able to," Ranpo says, very slowly, like he's reluctant to state any conclusion he isn't one hundred percent sure on.

"If he works on his avenue," Dazai says, "then it's possible. There's also… one more possibility."

Everyone looks at him, and Dazai lets the silence drag the words out of him, because they're something he very much doesn't want to say.

"Mori-san might have favors to call in," Dazai says, very carefully.

"I'll ask him," Chuuya says, just as carefully, like he's tiptoeing around the landmine of a Port Mafia affiliated Dazai being discussed with Mori. It's too considerate, and so Dazai only nods, permissive in the face of having no alternative.

Dazai can use Mori the same way Mori has used everyone else, can't he?

Will that even the odds any, Dazai wonders. Will that make anything that either of them have done seem any better, ache any less?

Dazai can't help but wonder if Mori moves forward the same way that Dazai had, once he'd taken over – relentlessly, without ever leaving room to second guess himself, with the knowledge that if his will stuttered for even a second, the weight of what he was doing would slam down on him hard enough to break whatever remained.

What regrets does Mori have? Dazai had never asked, because he had never cared. He couldn't leave the room to care.

All the things he's put off for years are coming back with a vengeance, it seems.

"Dazai-san," Atsushi says, hedging a little carefully. "You… still want to work with us on this, right?"

Dazai blinks. It takes him a second to track Atsushi's thought process – this is a Dazai who was never in the Agency except in the stolen memories of an alternate reality. This Dazai, technically, is with the Port Mafia, even if it isn't Mori's Port Mafia.

Atsushi's kindness has always felt like a tremendous amounts of metaphors that Dazai doesn't bother to try and explain. Odasaku's the writer, after all. What does Dazai know about beautiful words being tied together to explain how refreshing Atsushi is?

"If the Agency will have me," Dazai says, "then yes, although it's better to think of me as a temporary assistant than a member. However, if the Port Mafia needs anything from me for the purposes of this, I… will assist them, as well."

Mostly just Chuuya, he thinks, and Chuuya snorts, immediately shooting the idea down.

"Maybe I don't introduce my Boss to you when you killed him in another reality," Chuuya says, blithely.

"That's the smartest thing Chuuya's ever said!" Dazai leans over, invading Chuuya's space too casually, like he's a different Dazai in a different memory. "Is Chuuya going to get taller now, too?"

"Shut up, dickhead," Chuuya says, and pushes vaguely at Dazai, planting a palm firmly on Dazai's face. Dazai – because he is the semi-former leader of the Port Mafia and not the layabout detective of the Agency, despite his memories – does not lick Chuuya's palm. Chuuya raises his eyebrows when nothing happens, and then pulls his hand away, wiping it on Dazai's hair despite the fact that it has no saliva on it.

"Great," Yosano says, and she sets her clipboard down with a clack that echoes. "Then everyone has a task to do, and you can let my patient get more rest."

Everyone turns – first to Yosano, and then, with an in-sync swivel of their heads, to Dazai, as though they've forgotten he's hiding actual injuries under his bandages this time.

"We'll see you later," Atsushi offers, politely. He's the first to leave, Kyouka at his side, as they quietly discuss the revelation that they're still together in this alternate reality– I'm glad you're not alone there, either, Kyouka-chan, Dazai can hear, and see Kyouka's cheeks go pink as they pass through the door.

"Try not to injure yourself more," Kunikida says, his stern expression giving away his concern as obvious as anything. Ranpo just offers him a wave as the two of them leave, heading to Fukuzawa's office.

Yosano stands up next. She adjusts the bags on the IV pole, and Dazai idly looks at the names on the bags as she changes them. Mostly vitamins and fluids, which Dazai admittedly doesn't have enough of in his system, but she's kind enough to add in a low-grade painkiller, which slips, reassuringly cool, into Dazai's veins.

"When I come back, I'm making you eat," Yosano warns, once she's done due diligence on every readout, making sure that Dazai hovers, as ever, steadily on the side of being alive.

"I'd like crab soup," Dazai replies, and Yosano rolls her eyes, a faint smile on her face.

Then: it's just the two of them. Dazai feels anxious and relieved in equal measure, and Chuuya is pulling all of the pieces of his outfit back on like a mask, letting it reassemble into a complete whole before Dazai's eyes.

"You said," Chuuya says, carefully, flipping his hat in his hands, "that you didn't have Chuuya."

"I don't," Dazai says, honestly, because he doesn't. Not like they existed here. "Double Black never existed, and he never trusted me. He's alive, but he was never mine."

"He's still yours," Chuuya says, and the complete ease and confidence throws Dazai for a loop. His eyes are as blue as the sky and his hair is a burning red that's more passionate than Dazai's ever been about anything. Dazai watches as Chuuya reaches up, very deliberately, making sure that Dazai is tracking his movement, and touches the collar around his neck. It's not the same one Dazai gave him years and years ago, with a crowed accusation that Chuuya was his dog. Dazai knows he has several, careful to change them out to coordinate with this event or that, with this identical outfit or another.

To keep the original one from wearing out.

Dazai opens his mouth, but he doesn't manage to get any words out. He blames it on the painkillers and the slow, heavy feeling of sleep that's descending down on him, exhaustion from the entire day and the amount of damage he's done to his body overtaking him.

Chuuya watches Dazai for a moment, and then nods, as though he's understood something and left Dazai in the dark. Chuuya snags a piece of paper from Yosano's stack of printer paper, scribbling his phone number down.

"In case this is something that's changed," Chuuya says, folding the paper deftly between gloved fingers and tucking it by Dazai's pillow. "You can call me, or I'll drop in."

"Don't ruin the roof," Dazai says, moderately nonsensically, and Chuuya just lets out that inelegant snort again as he leaves.

Dazai, thankfully, sleeps.

-

To Chuuya's credit, he did not cry when Dazai died, or when he saw Verlaine for the first time, or when he saw Mori again, but it's a close thing on that last one, and Chuuya spends a solid twenty seconds staring directly at the sun until the burning in his eyes gives way to superimposed halos.

"I have the least amount of knowledge on what your government offices look like," Dazai is saying as he unfurls blueprints of said government offices. "With all the meddling your Dazai did, I'm sure it had rippling effects on the government."

"This is Ango's office," Oda says, tapping a marked room on the blueprints.

Dazai circles it.

"This is his storage," Oda continues, tapping an unmarked room. Chuuya squints, but Dazai simply dutifully circles that, as well.

"Did you still go to Lupin?" Dazai asks.

"No," Oda says, after a beat where he tries to place the establishment name. "Too close to Port Mafia territory, after he got out."

"That means you're the only one who might know his passwords," Dazai says. There's something on his face that's more than a little bittersweet, and his grip on the pen is a little harder than it needs to be, his knuckles white. Chuuya wonders, not for the first time, if this Dazai realizes how many people he actually cares about.

He wonders if his Dazai cared about them, too, in secret.

"If most people can't see you," Mori says, "then, Dazai-kun, you'll be the best option for infiltration."

Dazai shakes his head. "I'll need Odasaku with me. Even if the password was something I could guess, or that we could figure out through communication, it's Ango. There's a good chance that it's going to be locked behind fingerprints or a retinal scan."

"We don't have enough time to fake those," Chuuya murmurs, agreeing with the statement.

"It's terribly heavy handed, but a distraction might be our best bet," Mori says, hand curled at his chin as he considers the blueprints before him. He leans over, snatching up one of the pens, and starts to make a series of asterisks across the blueprints, denoting the various security systems in place. "I'm afraid that they'll certainly have changed the placement of their cameras, since Sakaguchi-kun's defection, as he'd leaked their locations, but these systems are harder to move."

"Can Katai get the information for us?" Dazai asks, glancing at Oda, who thinks it over for a moment before he nods.

"I'll need to come clean with the Agency," Oda says, "but I'm sure they'll help."

"If Ranpo-san has any input, that will also be helpful," Dazai says, "but we have to be careful not to implicate the Agency itself. The last thing we need is the government turning on them."

"How fast do their generators kick in if the systems are taken out?" Chuuya asks.

"Seconds, if it's a power outage, or…" Dazai trails off, considering something. He looks up at Chuuya, and Chuuya's stomach flips at how familiar it is, a situation that he's never encountered before: Dazai, leaning over plans that are being made in real time, including Chuuya in all of them. Listening to Chuuya. "Do you trust me enough to use Corruption?"

Mori and Oda are polite enough not to turn their attention to Chuuya, but he's certain they're listening for his response. It could make or break the plan, or Dazai wouldn't be asking.

Does he trust Dazai enough?

The answer is startlingly easy.

"Yeah," Chuuya says, and tries not to think about the fact that it's the same answer for both Dazai he's met. "If you're with him, can you get back to me fast enough?"

"There won't be anyone stopping me," Dazai says, his half-hearted invisibility coming in handy for the purposes of their plan. Dazai's gaze is steady, and it's too much when it's pointed at Chuuya like that, both eyes uncovered and honesty written in them. "I'll get to you in time."

There's nothing else to say in response to that. Chuuya's already said he trusts him, and Dazai sounds convinced that they'll pull it off – or he's a good enough liar that it doesn't matter. Chuuya can't quite tell where Dazai's lies turn into reality and when Dazai starts to believe himself, but there's merit to faking it until you make it.

"We need to make sure we aren't implicating the Port Mafia," Chuuya offers. "I'm much more visible than you are, especially with Corruption."

"Mind control ability, maybe?" Dazai says, and glances at Mori. Elise is still standing behind him, tall and mature, her childish looks traded out for the easy calmness of an adult who works with children like she once was.

"I'll need to be nearby," Mori says. "But that should be easy enough. If the Agency intervenes and 'kills' her to save the day, then everyone wins!"

"Rintarou," Elise huffs, pouting despite herself at the idea of being butchered for fun.

"It's for Chuuya-kun," Mori offers, and Elise's argument deflates a little. She'd always liked Chuuya a little too much, given that he wasn't liable to disappear her on accident and he'd started growing his hair out early enough that she could bully him into playing with it on a regular basis. She might look like she's an adult, now, but Chuuya knows that she's as fictional as ever, a character given skin in the real world.

"You'll get to pretend to be evil," Dazai offers, and Elise perks up at this.

"So," Oda says, his gaze still locked on the blueprints in front of him. "We break in while he causes problems, and we do it without anyone realizing what's going on. You stop everything and the Agency makes it look like they were the ones who did it, and I use the chaos to follow up on anything we need to."

"That's more or less the plan," Dazai says, with a small shrug. "We've pulled off worse."

"Have you?" Mori asks, genuinely curious, and Dazai falters for a brief second. Chuuya feels relieved that he's not the only one who keeps forgetting that their shared history isn't so shared at all.

"Double Black once fought a tentacle monster that wasn't created from abilities," Dazai offers. "We blew it up. That was after I joined the Agency."

Mori smiles, apparently delighted by this, and Chuuya frowns, because he doesn't know what to make of that, so he pretends to be studying the blueprints as intently as Oda.

"The tiger kid can be waiting outside," Chuuya says. "While you're on the way to me, he can go with this guy. People know he's with the Port Mafia, but no one actually knows what he looks like, so he can probably get away with it."

"We'll make sure the area is evacuated," Dazai says. "So none of you should have to kill anyone."

Oda nods by way of thanks, and Chuuya can't help but think how different it is that this Dazai is actively preventing bloodshed instead of taking the most ruthless route possible. If they decided not to preserve the Port Mafia, if they didn't care about killing people, if they didn't care about their strike team living – it would be easier. People would suffer and die, but it would be easier.

Chuuya's never known Dazai not to take the easy way out, right up to his death, and here he is doing it for people that he's technically never known.

"We'll regroup then," Oda says. "I'll make sure everyone's on board."

"I'll get communications set up," Chuuya says.

"I'm going to drink sake," Dazai volunteers, and laughs when Chuuya punches him in the arm.

-

Dazai spends a great deal of the following time period sleeping. Being awake proves to be painful on multiple levels. The physical, because he's still very wounded. The emotional, because his mind keeps insistently dragging him onto the most painful possible topics, and he can't simply jump out of the Agency window to make it stop.

Largely because they've nailed it shut, but also because he can't die until he's sure that both of these realities are safe. That both of the Agencies and both of the Port Mafias and both of the Chuuya are safe.

That Ango is safe, and Odasaku is, even if it's only in one world. Dazai hopes that whatever error brought him back to life can work for Ango. He doesn't dare hope that it works for Odasaku. Dazai knows too well what hoping will do to him when it fails, and it's only amplified when it comes to Odasaku.

Dazai stubbornly does not call Chuuya, but he finds the note with his phone number folded in a slightly different way than it had been before he fell asleep, so he isn't surprised when Chuuya turns up with the next Agency meeting. He's willing to blame Atsushi-kun.

He's well enough to go to the meeting himself instead of having the meeting come to him, and that's a very good thing, because when Fukuzawa and Mori walk in together Dazai puts as much space between them as possible in a fashion that's only halfway discrete.

"I have," Fukuzawa says, as introduction, hands in his kimono sleeves and the perpetual frown on his face, "a solid lead to get, at bare minimum, information."

"We'll be operating in a joint capacity again," Mori says, and his eyes flicker over to Dazai before they move away, seeming to refuse to linger on this Dazai for too long. Dazai doesn't blame him; their relationship has never been particularly good, and finding out that Dazai killed his alternate self is probably an interesting nail in the coffin.

Dazai hasn't bothered to admit that his Mori isn't actually dead, and doesn't intend to. The more proof that he's a terrible person, the better, given how kind everyone is being.

"Wo~w," Ranpo drawls, spinning slowly in his chair. "If both of you are going, then they'll definitely agree."

"You're coming as well," Fukuzawa says, and Ranpo pauses mid-spin, craning his neck to look back at Fukuzawa. "We'll need all the intelligence we can get, and we can't take Dazai."

Ranpo thinks this over for a long moment. The Book might be a blind spot for Ranpo, but that doesn't mean he's any less good at calculating how likely they are to succeed on things based around the Book.

"You should take him anyway," Ranpo says, after a moment. This makes Fukuzawa frown more, but Dazai clears his throat.

"We'll both go," Dazai offers. "How's that?"

"You're not gonna need me," Ranpo replies.

"Even you've been surprised before," Fukuzawa says, and his voice is oddly gentle when he says it. Ranpo takes that gentle voice and seems to wrap it around himself like a blanket around sulking kitten before he resumes spinning.

"Fine," Ranpo says, and this time there's resigned agreement in it. Better to waste his time than get someone (Fukuzawa, Dazai thinks) killed.

Yosano looks a little skeptical, but doesn't bother to point out all the reasons that Dazai should not go. Dazai is fairly certain she's seen her Dazai walk around with considerably worse injuries, so the few healing wounds he has are painful and inconvenient, but not remotely enough to stop him when he needs to get something done.

"The rest of you will wait outside," Fukuzawa says.

"In case you need backup?" Chuuya queries.

Fukuzawa seems to work over how to phrase his answer in a way that doesn't hit the impolite levels of 'backup but please do not kill the government workers', so Mori speaks instead.

"Too many of us venturing inside at once takes this from an alliance to a threat," Mori offers. "But that's no reason not to be prepared."

"Bleh," Dazai says, very quietly, because he hasn't had to deal with Mori in approximately a lifetime and forgot how annoying it was, actually. Mori raises an eyebrow, but doesn't press him, which is good: just because Dazai didn't actually kill Mori in his world doesn't mean he won't do it if pressed, especially in the world where Odasaku is dead.

It's actually significantly harder to hold that against Mori, now that Dazai is letting himself look at how badly Dazai himself has bungled things in his own universe.

"Let's go," Dazai says, cheerfully, in a way that he knows isn't reflected at all on his face.

-

Dazai does not, in fact, drink sake: he steals a bottle of mediocre whisky and leaves cash on the counter in return so that it's not really stealing, just paying for it in a different way. He does a shot straight from the bottle and then passes it over to Odasaku and Chuuya, who also do shots. Mori, surprisingly, tilts the bottle back and does considerably more than a shot without looking like he's suffering from the burn of it at all, and Dazai feels a little impressed despite himself.

"Hell," Atsushi murmurs, quietly, and takes his own sip from the bottle before making a face. Kyouka puts her hand over her mouth to cover her smile.

The earbud in Dazai's ear crinkles to life.

"We're in place," Kunikida says, shortly, and the group immediately disperses. Mori slips away to the vantage point they've secured already; Tanizaki falls into place next to him, an illusion masking them from view, as Elise moves to wait for the signal, dressed in elegant blacks and high heels, her hair done up in an advanced braid. She looks nothing like she used to.

Dazai leaves with Odasaku, though he watches Chuuya go and feels disconcerted about the entire situation. There's too many variables that none of them can control, and even having all of them working together doesn't mean nearly as much as it could if they're working against who he thinks they might be.

They don't have a choice, though. Dazai doesn't tell Chuuya anything: there are no good lucks or be safes to be voiced. Those imply there's a chance of failure, and Dazai doesn't allow for that. He can't. Not when it's Chuuya. Not when Ango is already gone here; not when Odasaku is already gone in his world.

"O grantors of dark disgrace…"

Dazai and Odasaku fall into a run the second the alarms start blaring. No one can see Dazai, and it's easy for him to signal Odasaku when it's safe for Odasaku to emerge. Odasaku stops having to run from room to room after a moment, when the halls are clear and they're allowed to move, Takai taking care of any camera footage in real time.

"Try not to get hit!" Yosano is yelling. "I can't do anything if you get disintegrated!"

"Sorry!" Kenji says, over the headset, and Dazai turns it off, because it's too heartwrenching a distraction for him to think about right now. They slip up to Ango's office. Dazai isn't reflected in the camera footage at all: a ghost in all but awareness.

"Okay," Odasaku says. "Where do you think the files are?"

"Here," Dazai says. He knows exactly where they are, and he knows a few of the passwords to get into some of them – things that haven't changed, like Ango's personal cipher, or the name of the first girl he ever had a secret crush on. The second room takes Odasaku's fingerprints without complaint, and Odasaku moves over to the computers.

"No," Dazai murmurs, faintly. "He always preferred things to be in hard copy…"

Dazai scans the books that line the walls. Some of them drag his attention more than they should – how did the battle with Verlaine go, here? how did Dragon's Head? How did Mimic? – but he doesn't pull any of those down, because none of them are what he's looking for.

He finds a book on himself: on the Port Mafia leader, risen after Mori's sudden presumed death. He takes it off the shelf, but it doesn't contain the information he needs.

"Dazai-kun," Mori says, his voice carefully level. That's the time marker. Dazai snaps the book shut and frowns for a long moment.

"I don't see anything here," Odasaku says, searching through the computer files.

"I–" Dazai starts, and then stops, his heart hammering up into his throat.

There's a photo of Ango and Oda on the desk. Of course there's a photo of the two of them on the desk, taken in a bar much more modern than Lupin but equally empty, both of them looking tired as they look at the camera.

Dazai's hands shake as he picks up the frame, but he ignores it. He twists the latches away, grabs the photo–

And a tiny card falls out.

"Use your phone," Dazai says. "He'll have information on where to go there."

Odasaku nods, trusting in Dazai and Ango in equal measure, and Dazai turns on his heels to flee out of that room that symbolizes all the things he's lost across two different worlds. Sand slipping through his fingers, glass shattering, worlds ending.

He has to get back to Chuuya.

-

Dazai didn't anticipate how out of place he would feel with both of his eyes exposed to the light. Yosano has, thoughtfully, packed him extra bandages into the voluminous pockets of his borrowed tan coat. He feels like an imposter imitating himself, which is – not exactly a feeling he's unfamiliar with, but he hates it all the same. Putting on this clothing makes him feel like he should be trying to be something more, like he should be honoring Odasaku's last words–

But Odasaku isn't dead in his world, and Dazai is still determined to save the world he came from, even if he isn't alive to see it. Especially if he isn't alive to see it.

The meeting is with Taneda: Dazai remembers the memories from this world well enough that it's easy to pretend he's the Dazai Taneda is familiar with, and he doesn't need to do anything other than that. Fukuzawa handles things; Ranpo handles things. Dazai merely needs to be present, physically, and allow himself to dissociate comfortably in the uncomfortable chairs in the office.

"...see the page," Fukuzawa is saying, and Taneda is hemming and hawing.

Dazai drifts in and out.

He thinks about Chuuya, age fifteen; holding hands for a moment in time to defeat Randou. How Dazai had felt – for a moment – a little more whole. Thinks about touching the book and making a decision in an instant: everything he had, the meager things he'd managed to gather, thrown away for an instant for a man he'd technically never met.

Now that he thinks about it, it sounds so absurd. He'd saved Odasaku, but not the Odasaku that was his – an Odasaku that hates him, and rightfully so. Odasaku was happy and Ango was dead and Chuuya was miserable and Atsushi was irrevocably broken and if Odasaku knew– if Odasaku really knew everything Dazai had done for him–

"...sent some of our people on a mission to retrieve it," Taneda offers. "They'll be back soon, and they're the best people to supervise you while you inspect it."

"I appreciate it," Fukuzawa says, polite and sincere and stern all at once.

Ranpo leans over to Dazai, as they all fall into step behind Taneda.

"It'll be the Hunting Dogs," Ranpo says, quiet enough that only Dazai can hear him. "You know that, right?"

Dazai hadn't known, exactly. He would have, if he could have calmed his racing heart enough, but he doesn't remember that far into the future of this world. He thinks he might have known a little about it, once – but time is constantly shifting and the worlds are hard to hold onto, and all the information that the Book wrote inside of him has been overwritten and misremembered so many times, the fallibility of the human mind overtaking even an object as powerful as reality.

"Don't worry," Dazai offers, cheerfully. "I can control my heartbeat! They'll never catch on to me!"

"An infant could catch onto you," Ranpo offers by way of critique, and Dazai can't actually be mad, because that's probably a very fair observation right now.

It's still –

Dazai feels a bit like he's having an identity crisis. He misses Chuuya, suddenly, and violently, as most things involving Chuuya are. Not this Chuuya here – all familiarity and easy points and concern – but his Chuuya, angry and brash and smoldering. He ruined his Chuuya, he'd absolutely shattered him, and Dazai is seized with such a sudden overwhelming desire to put him back together and see what he could become– what they could become–

Ranpo discreetly elbows Dazai in the side, and Dazai makes sure his heartbeat is calmed and his mind is blanked before they entire the room. He knows enough about the Hunting Dogs to know they'll be able to smell fear on him.

"It's been ages!" The leader roars, and even Mori takes a surprised step backwards when the grizzled man slaps Fukuzawa's shoulder hard enough that Fukuzawa's clothing sways slightly, even if the man stays still.

"It has," Fukuzawa agrees, monotone.

Mori's brows are lifted and Ranpo is frowning and Dazai suddenly feels like he's caught in between several generations of marital disputes, and so he looks over at the rest of the Hunting Dogs.

"Is that it?" Dazai asks.

"Don't try anything funny," one of them warns him, and Dazai blinks down at her. Red hair, but hardly bright enough; short, but like a child.

"...one of your men is eating an egg with the shell on it," Dazai observes, gently. "I don't think I'm the one doing things that are funny."

"Oh, but you could," offers the other member, who radiates danger loud enough that Dazai is certain everyone can hear it.

… well, everyone except the three people he came here with, given they're all still involved in whatever is happening with Fukuchi.

"I just intend to touch it," Dazai murmurs. "If that's alright, of course."

Two members of the Hunting Dogs observe Dazai critically; one continues to eat his egg, shell and all; the fourth slaps Ranpo on the shoulder so hard Ranpo faceplants straight into Fukuzawa's chest with a wheeze.

"Well," Teruko says, "it's more or less what they said you'd want to do… but you'd better not be try to steal it or replace it with a copy or anything."

"I have nothing up my sleeve," Dazai offers, flashing his hands. "Well, except bandages."

Teruko snorts, which is both a charitable reaction and one that's entirely too familiar to Dazai, so he steps forward.

The Page is in a normal looking briefcase, and Teruko is the one who opens it. Dazai is aware that everything in the room has gone very, very quiet, all the previous discussion falling silent as he reaches for the page.

His fingers clasp the edge of the blank sheet as he steels himself, and…

Nothing happens.

-

Dazai miscalculated.

Dazai miscalculated and Mori let him do it, because it was the only way they were going to manage to get the plan to succeed, but Dazai forgot– Dazai forgot that this Chuuya doesn't have years of utilizing Corruption under his belt. He doesn't have the memories of agonizing week-long recoveries, of all the times that Dazai would bring the latest videogames to Chuuya's room and then thrash him in every multiplayer, of learning to feel out the pain and every time understanding a little more, keeping a little more of himself alive in that dark abyss that Arahabaki offers.

This Chuuya doesn't have it, and he's bleeding out.

"Chuuya!"

Dazai can't get to him. He can't get to him when Chuuya's in the air like that, throwing a gravity bomb at the remnants of the building and laughing, laughing, laughing even while the blood is growing under his fingernails, dripping out of the corner of his mouth and out of his nose.

Chuuya's head snaps towards Dazai. Not because of any familiarity: he's just the most obvious threat, now that everything is evacuated.

Elise, dutiful and diligent, is saying something about mind control. She moves over towards Dazai so they're in the same line of fire as Chuuya propels himself forward, and Dazai bodily flings himself at Chuuya, impacting in midair.

The gravity bomb fizzles out as Dazai makes contact, and Dazai manages to turn them enough that when they land, he's cushioning Chuuya's fall a little – though it probably doesn't feel like much, given that Dazai is mostly bone.

"...huh," Chuuya says, his voice thick in his throat with blood and who knows what else. Pieces of lung, of heart tissue, of all the things that he needs to keep inside of his body that are currently being pushed out. "Feels worse th'n I remember."

"It's about to feel better," Dazai says, and no one will ever be able to call him out on the fact that he's hefting Chuuya up and cradling him a little. There's chaos around him, and he's banking on the fact that if he's the one holding Chuuya, no one can see Chuuya, either. It seems to be working, and Dazai makes a clean getaway out of the crowd.

"Figures," Chuuya says, "that it'd hurt… to be partners… with you."

He passes out, and Dazai lets out a helpless sort of laugh, because there's nothing else he can do. Of course it hurts to be partners with him, Dazai thinks; Dazai's the last person anyone should be partners with or care about.

By the time Dazai gets to Yosano, he's managed to school his expression into something totally normal. This turns out to have been a pointless endeavor, as Yosano looks straight through him.

"No, he's not here yet," Yosano says, sounding impatient, and her words are echoed in the earpiece Dazai is wearing.

Dazai inhales; exhales. He doesn't belong here; this isn't his Yosano. This isn't his Chuuya. This isn't his world to save, but it's still his job to save it.

He steps over to the portable infirmary bed that they'd set up expecting for this result and lays Chuuya down on it. He lets go and steps away – once, twice.

"--shit!" Yosano manages, when Chuuya must just suddenly appear in front of her, actively bleeding out. Her ability is activating before she even touches him, butterflies dancing around until his labored breathing becomes a little less labored.

Then she brings out the chainsaw, and Dazai decides Chuuya's safe.

"Did you find anything?" Dazai says, instead, into the earpiece.

"Yeah," Odasaku responds. He's a little out of breath, but his voice is normal other than that: the same tone as always, moderated and casual, like nothing unusual is happening. Dazai keeps an eye on Chuuya and Yosano as he steps away to survey the greater scene and make sure that everything is ongoing like it should be. "I've got some paper for you."

Dazai has known Odasaku long enough to understand what that means, even if his Odasaku and this Odasaku are different people. They're cut from the same cloth, and both of them have a tendency to downplay their words, to state things so matter of factly even when they're extraordinary.

"We'll see what happens if I touch it," Dazai says.

There's a long silence on the other end, and Dazai imagines Odasaku in it: looking around corners to make sure he's still going unseen, the page folded in whatever pocket he has it stashed away in. One gun out, probably; hardly a need for two, with as much of a ruckus as they've kicked up.

"You sure it won't hurt you?"

Dazai is a bit flummoxed. "What?"

"The one that belonged here," Odasaku clarifies. "He was in pretty bad shape, for someone in his line of work. You're doing better. You sure touching it won't mess that up?"

"Ah," Dazai says, and then repeats the sound, letting it out as a long exhalation as he watches Chuuya's fingertips twitch with all the blood drying underneath his nails. "Well. I can't properly gauge the worst case scenarios, but I think I'll be fine. Ideally, I'll simply be returned to my world and all the damage will be undone."

"You're a man of ideals?" Oda says, and it isn't mean, exactly: it's the conversational equivalent of a head tilt, but it makes Dazai bark out a bit of laughter.

"My partner is," Dazai says, instead. "Perhaps he's rubbed off on me."

Oda's quiet for a long moment, and Dazai imagines he's running through it all to come up with the answer – that Dazai and Kunikida are partners; that Dazai is proud enough of that fact, most days, that he'll brag about it, in his own ways.

When had that happened? When had the Agency become as fundamental to Dazai as Double Black was?

When had the hole inside of Dazai's chest, aching and raw, had enough room for all of these people? All of them shoving greedy hands into his body to scoop out all of the blackened, cancerous parts, and replace it with the pieces of them, the pieces that made him so unwillingly better?

How much had Chuuya carved out, before Dazai even noticed?

"I'm almost to the side door," Oda says, and Dazai makes his way over, nonchalantly. There's nothing to worry about, since no one can see Dazai – the pursuit is more like a walk in the park, if Dazai was the sort of person to do such things. There's no one at the side door, and Oda peers around it before he makes his way out, his footsteps a snare rhythm down the stairs.

Oda is careful to get all the way to Dazai before he even reaches for the pocket he has the page stored in, and he shakes his head when Dazai reaches for it.

"Better if you don't touch it while I have it," Oda says, and Dazai realizes the why of it, his lips turning into a wry smile. Oda sets it, instead, on the raised wall that keeps the landscaping at bay, and Dazai waits a half-second before he swipes it up.

There's nothing on the page, of course.

Moreover, there's nothing happening. Oda glances around, but Flawless doesn't seem to be triggering: nothing, really, seems to be going on that's out of the ordinary, save for the slowly diminishing chaos around the otherside of the building.

"Well," Dazai says. "That's odd."

"You got a plan B?" Oda asks, and Dazai grins.

"I always do."

-

"--Not letting it out of the building–"

"--plain to see that it isn't–"

"--surrender it to the Port Mafia--"

The argument has been going on for at least five minutes, Dazai realizes. He'd stopped paying attention when he'd touched the Page and nothing had happened, and his mind had detached from his body while it slapped down question and answer in rapid succession, trying to figure out what was going wrong, how to fix it.

Did Dazai need to touch the entire Book? No. That couldn't be it; this was the original Book, and a single page should hold more than enough power. Did he need to write on the page? He might be able to fight his way out of the room, if Mori and Fukuzawa were willing to back him up – but when he looks up to consider this, Ranpo meets his gaze and shakes his head.

Dazai's hearing is still underwater, the argument between every single group of Yokohama's special interests carrying on and on and on into an infinity he doesn't care about.

Ranpo's gaze slides away from Dazai, and then–

"Young men!" There's the clack of wood on metal, and the room goes silent; Dazai's hearing snaps back with a pop like displaced gravity.

Natsume looks at all of them, unimpressed, and – Dazai is gratified to see – behind him stand Chuuya and Atsushi, with Akutagawa's dark form bringing up the rear, and of all people, Hirotsu.

Hirotsu coughs. "My apologies for the intrusion."

"There's no need to apologize, Naoto," Natsume says, and Dazai wonders, not for the first time, if Natsume isn't the sort of person who remains untouched by even the powers of the Book. To dodge all the organizations in the world and spend the majority of his time as a cat – truly, he has the ideal life, and apparently a friendship with even more people than Dazai realizes.

"I assume you're here to end the argument at hand," Taneda says, sounding exhausted. He's pulling a sake bottle out of his desk, forgoing absolutely all pretense and pouring it straight into his coffee mug. Dazai shifts, and Fukuzawa fixes him with a firm look that takes the wind out of his sails despite the fact that Dazai is not actually a member of the Agency.

He does not steal the sake, but he does continue to contemplate it heavily.

"You've all forgotten one key point!" Natsume proclaims, and it's a little ridiculous how intimidating a man with calico hair can manage to be with his hands resting on his walking stick. Everyone is quiet, but Natsume doesn't seem inclined to continue – in fact, he and Ranpo seem to be sharing some intense sort of genius to genius conversation entirely through squinting at each other.

Dazai watches this. He looks at Mori, who looks thoughtful; at Chuuya, who is giving Dazai a bewildered look; at Fukuchi, who has pulled up a chair to sit next to Taneda's impromptu drinking session and hold out a flask produced seemingly from nowhere. Then–

"Atsushi-kun," Dazai says, and the boy lets out a quiet me?.

"Correct!" Natsume says.

"The Guild was convinced he was the key to the Book," Mori says, considering it. "I'd thought they meant that he was the way to find it, but…"

"What if he was the way to use it?" Dazai finishes.

"Um," Atsushi offers, still pointing at himself. He looks at Akutagawa, who shrugs, like the matter isn't of any concern to him.

"Touch the paper," Dazai says, and holds out the page.

Atsushi's eyes dart around, nervous tension clear in his body, before he steps forward and places one cautious fingertip on the page.

And reality–

-

Gathering in the Agency is considerably more weird than Chuuya thought it would be when most of them can't even see Dazai, who is occupying his time doodling on the back of Kunikida's vest while Kunikida can't feel anything to stop him.

"So we did all of that for nothing?" Tanizaki says, sounding deflated.

"I had fun," Yosano offers, and Tanizaki looks deeply unsettled. Chuuya, for his part, having been the one under Yosano's expertise, just winces a little and flexes his fingertips. He hasn't had a chance to wash the dried blood out, so while he's scrubbed it off of his face in the bathroom, it's still matting down half of his hair and clothing.

He feels disgusting.

"He said he's got a backup plan," Oda offers.

"I still don't know why we're listening to the alleged alternate reality version of the former Port Mafia Boss," Kunikida says, arms crossed, sounding more than a little waspish. Dazai doodles a little version of Kunikida himself with a cartoony script about ideals spouting off in a speech bubble.

"You're not," Oda says. "You're listening to me."

"You're listening to him, so I fail to see the difference," Kunikida snaps.

"The difference is you trust Oda," Chuuya says, meeting Kunikida's gaze without flinching. "And we trust Dazai."

Kunikida is quiet for a moment, before Dazai leans away, listening for something and then popping the cap back on the marker.

"There you are!" Dazai chirps, as Akutagawa and Atsushi file into the Agency looking a bit worse for wear. To the surprise of no one, their fight had gotten – a bit out of hand – and they'd wound up a little later than anticipated. Akutagawa has a limp and Atsushi's clothing is ripped, but neither of them seem drastically injured.

"Dazai-san," Atsushi says, sounding exhausted but polite. Akutagawa just narrows his eyes, which is a pretty good response to have to Dazai as a concept.

"I've got a backup plan," Dazai says.

"Just one?" Chuuya says.

"Is he behind me?" Kunikida says, contorting himself like he might miraculously see Dazai after the man has been invisible the entire time.

"We're in the Greek alphabet," Dazai offers with a flap of his hand, and Chuuya grins a little, because that means Dazai's had to be thinking on his toes a lot more than he'd thought going into it, and Chuuya likes to see Dazai suffer just a little for his hubris. "The point is – Atsushi-kun, touch this."

Atsushi blinks. "Is this what we were looking for?"

He doesn't falter in the slightest when he reaches out to the take the page that Dazai offers him.

And reality–

-

That's because you're not living of your own free will, Akutagawa, the Dazai is saying, dressed in nothing but Port Mafia blacks that are too big for his young frame.

In the present, Akutagawa jerks, flinching backwards so hard that Atsushi reaches out automatically to steady him, hand on Akutagawa's back, and Akutagawa doesn't throw him off.

"No," Dazai murmurs, but it's too late. Chuuya slips beside him, bangs their elbows together for reassurance.

The surroundings flicker: they invert, nauseatingly, and then right themselves back up again.

My enemies have no business calling me that, Odasaku says, and the Dazai at the bar flinches like he's been struck.

"No," Dazai says, a little louder, a little more desperate.

Chuuya's fingertips – outside of their gloves – are warm where they rest on the back of Dazai's hand.

The bar fades in and out, a series of pulses, of heartbeats, of memories: Ango and Odasaku and Dazai all there, and then none of them; Chuuya and Dazai there, in a reality Dazai has never known; Fukuzawa and Mori there in a reality where they'd met younger, Mori's hair still pulled back into a ponytail and Fukuzawa offering a smile.

It twists, and reality rebuilds itself again, all of them falling: Teruko offers a screech and Akutagawa reaches out with an ability that's forsaken him, Rashoumon too far to reach when they're all falling inside of the Book.

Dazai turns to look, and sees himself on the ground below the Port Mafia, eyes wide open in death, forever, forever–

– but it's on a screen and none of them are falling, all of them are standing on the wharf, the smell of sea air flowing over them as Dostoyevsky sips from a teacup and closes the laptop in front of him. Dostoyevsky stands up, pulling out a gun, and Dazai realizes in an instant that Dostoyevsky is as real as they are –

He shoves Chuuya aside as the gun goes off and Dazai's world explodes, not for the first time, into pain.

-

"I will give you one," the Dazai is saying, a singular point of stasis in the whirling sea of realities, a young Akutagawa on his knees in front of him. Akutagawa screams, and Dazai steps back – not the Dazai before him, but the Dazai watching, bumping solidly into Kunikida, who looks at him in shock.

"I can see you–?" Kunikida starts, and any reply Dazai might have had is lost to the rapid turning of the reality, the churning as the memory-reality is swallowed down and something else is spat back out:

Dazai at a gravestone and Atsushi standing there, talking about friendship.

"This is your reality," Atsushi says, looking at Dazai, who looks dizzy and sick as the endless maelstrom swirls around them.

"I–" Dazai starts, but swallows the words down:

He and Chuuya on a field, the smell of smoke and blood in the air. Chuuya's weak fist bump before he passes out and Dazai looking at him with an expression so soft– partner, Dazai is saying in the scene before them.

Chuuya reaches out and clamps his fingers around Dazai's wrist like that might help, like somehow No Longer Human might affect the endless oscillations of reality, but instead Dazai just lets out a gasping sort of noise like a fish that can't breathe outside of water.

"Atsushi-kun," Dazai manages, and his eyes rove wildly until he finds the right one. "Let go of it–"

"I'm not holding it!" Atsushi says, helplessly, and there's nothing in his hands at all.

"Where the hell did it–" Chuuya starts, and Dazai jerks him backwards by their joined wrists just in time for a knife to sail through the air and land where Chuuya had been seconds ago. Dazai kicks the knife as the scene around them changes, and the knife remains.

"Dostoyevsky," Dazai says, and his tone is cold and icy and Chuuya can't make heads or tails of the way Dazai is standing in front of him like he can protect him.

"You can't blame me for taking advantage of the situation," Dostoyevsky says, his tone too chipper in the howling everything around them. "After all–"

-

"--it was you who created all of this in the first place," Dostoyevsky says, conversationally. "Why shouldn't I be the one to fix it?"

"Like you're going to fix anything!" Chuuya snaps, and Dazai is wheezing in his arms, every breath that's drawn in a little more labored than the last. This bullet was aimed carefully to maximize damage alongside pain: the intent for Dazai to live long enough to see whatever end would come.

"Oh, but I am," Dostoyevsky says, twirling the piece of the Book between his fingers. He produces the rest of the Book from nowhere, slotting the page inside of it, and everything comes to a rushing halt:

-

"You see, you altered reality without writing any of it in the Book," Dostoyevsky says, a mirrored image across the lines of time and space and reality itself, his voice echoing back. "Which means that one only needs to pick the correct reality and write it down."

"No!" Dazai yells. A Dazai – which Dazai? Which –

There's two, there's an infinite number –

-

"Only one reality can remain, so of course I–" Dostoyevsky says, and then stops.

He is alone in a thousand refractions of himself; universes fractaling out around him. A hundred allies and a thousand enemies, and he can't make heads of tails of them, can't make heads or tails of himself, suddenly, as everything merges and unmakes and reforms–

"If only one reality–" Dazai starts, shoving himself to his feet despite the bullet wound–

-

"--can remain–" Dazai says, shoving himself forward despite the weight of the universe bearing down on him, despite the cacophony screaming that it isn't right, it isn't right, it isn't right –

-

"--then obviously–"

-

"--I'll–

-

"--break it!"

Dostoyevsky leans back as there are two Dazai leaping towards him, a thousand other lifetimes reflected back in the endless faceted gemstone of realities.

(In one of them, a Dostoyevsky laughs, tucking her hair behind her ear; in another, Kunikida crashes through the ribbon at the end of the track to take first place. Atsushi is reading from a different, more unholy book as he watches a hand push through the unhallowed ground of the recent grave; Fukuzawa is a young man, bowing with his sword in his hands to pledge allegiance to a middle-aged Ranpo. Endlessly, endlessly, endlessly–)

And in some of them, even Dostoyevsky can see happiness.

He falters:

a brief second of time in that timeless place, held and looping back on itself, forever compressed into a second.

Dazai reaches out –

– and Dazai reaches out –

– the Book, simultaneously in every space and no space, made whole –

– they both careen into it.

And reality–

-

Chuuya wishes he could dream.

If he could dream, then he wouldn't have to doubt his sanity as he looks at the photo of Dazai, still as grainy and ancient as it was when Chuuya had printed it off in memorial. If he could dream, then he wouldn't think he'd just constructed a several day unreality within himself to cope with reality. If he could dream, then some of that could be real–

"Chuuya," Dazai breathes, from behind him, and Chuuya whirls, expecting to see two eyes and a tan jacket and seeing nothing but dark familiarity.

Dazai leans on the desk, red scarf still hanging around his neck and a series of minor wounds clearly inconveniencing him. Chuuya steps forward, recklessly – he stops for a moment, because the relationship between the two of them, between he and Dazai, this Dazai, is nothing but enmity–

And then he reaches out, determined, swinging Dazai's arm over his shoulder and wrapping an arm around the taller man's torso to guide him to the desk chair.

"C'mon," Chuuya growls, annoyed. "You've got a lot to catch me up on."

Dazai laughs, and it's a sound Chuuya hasn't heard in years. His Dazai, laughing as Chuuya drops him into the chair. The motion must jar his wounds, but Dazai ignores the pain to reach up, trail his fingers down Chuuya's scarf. Dazai's scarf. The Boss's scarf–

When Dazai raises his gaze again, he looks delighted.

"I'll give you a full report," Dazai murmurs. "Boss."

-

Dazai shoots upright so hard the world takes a second to right itself, last night's hangover still present in the throbbing headache and the bottles on the ground–

Except that had been days ago, so why was the taste of sake still so strong in his mouth? Dazai looks at the sun, long past risen, and then takes in the Agency dorm, cleaner than it was last week by virtue of Kunikida's patience being long past worn.

Dazai reaches out, hand slamming a few times before he manages to grab his phone and pull his legs underneath him. He types in a number he's had memorized for years, and waits–

And then lets out a sigh of relief.

"Ango," Dazai says, feeling the past several days catch up with him. "You'll never believe what happened to me recently. We should go out for a drink to talk about it."

Chapter 2

( epilogue str(a)y dogs )

Dazai is several overwhelming things, all at once, which is very unfortunate, because he's ill-equipped to have overwhelming feelings. His mind goes on auto-pilot halfway through getting dressed – twenty minutes late for work, which is still about an hour early, given when he usually wanders into the Agency – and doesn't click back on until he's looking at himself in the glass reflection of Uzumaki as he heads upstairs.

Dazai Osamu, member of the Armed Detective Agency. Back from – well, it probably wasn't a delusion. He can't imagine it would be, largely because (and this is important), he has never actually murdered Ango, even in his darkest moments immediately after Odasaku died.

Even then, Dazai knew it would only make him more lonely.

Still, there's a chance–

Up until he opens the door to the Agency and manages to get a single vowel sound out before he is tackled, bodily, by a blur of white. Dazai stumbles backwards, out of the Agency's door and against the wall, as he processes, as overwhelmed as he was an hour ago, that Atsushi has wrapped him in a hug so tight Dazai actually cannot breathe.

He wheezes, instead, and Atsushi continues to hold on for another ten seconds before he finally eases up, looking at Dazai. Were he not in direct contact with Dazai and his ability, Dazai feels like there would be two cat ears peeking up from his hair, but instead Atsushi just looks at him with enormous yellow-purple eyes.

"I'm glad you're back," Atsushi says, and Dazai can practically see a tail that isn't there rising into an affectionate curl.

"You know," Dazai says, conversationally, letting a hand drop onto Atsushi's head and rubbing lightly as he looks up to most of the rest of the Agency crowded in the space of the open door, "I had wondered if maybe it had been a particularly vivid dream."

"No such luck," Yosano offers, a smile on her face. "In fact, it was so real I'm insisting on you having a full check up."

Dazai makes a face, even as Atsushi releases him. "I'd rather do my paperwork."

"That can be arranged," Kunikida says. His voice is stern, even as he pushes his glasses up, but the twitch of his lips – minute as it is – gives away that he, too, is deeply relieved that Dazai is back. Something in Dazai's chest flips over several times like a heart attack, and he swallows down the feel of it all to be dissected and analyzed later.

"I did most of it," Atsushi confesses, quietly.

There are several avenues for Dazai to take. He can blow things off like usual – an insult here, a provocation there, a well timed joke thrown in for good measure – or he can be honest.

Usually, there'd be no competition. Dazai is practically allergic to honesty; he keeps so many secrets that he doesn't know where to start when it comes to revealing any of them. But–

But the memory of that Chuuya is still in his mind, a wounded animal in a wounded memory. Something that Dazai had created; something that Dazai had done by being even less honest than he was in this world. It's made Dazai want to double down a little; it's made Dazai all the more certain that Odasaku was correct, when he'd told him that things were a little less empty on this side of things.

"Thank you," Dazai says, to Atsushi. He can see Yosano's eyebrows rise, and he offers: "I'm fine, but I'll let you do a physical if you let me take the afternoon off." And then, before Kunikida can interrupt: "I'll do my paperwork, but I want to catch up with the rest of what happened in this reality while I was gone."

For a moment, there's a long silence as everyone processes that Dazai has just said several seemingly genuine things in a genuine way–

Then Ranpo snorts, indelicately.

"You want the short version before you make your rounds?" Ranpo asks, and it's one of the most gracious offers Dazai has ever heard in his life.

"I'll buy you a case of Puchao," Dazai says.

"I want the ramune flavor," Ranpo says. Kunikida hefts a sigh as though the idea of Dazai doing his paperwork tomorrow instead of today is an unforgivable burden, despite the fact that Dazai doing his paperwork at all is a shocking event, and Yosano wiggles her pinky finger to indicate that she's going to hold Dazai to his promise. Atsushi just grins, following Kunikida over to the desk to help him with… well, Dazai can only imagine there's actually quite a bit of paperwork after all this. He's very glad he'll be starting in on it a day late.

"I'll get you the ramune flavor," Dazai promises. Ranpo doesn't stop at his own desk – they walk straight into Fukuzawa's office, where a stack of paperwork is stacked, neatly and conspicuously, on Fukuzawa's normally minimalistic desk. Fukuzawa looks uniquely annoyed about all of it, but his expression levels out as he looks at Dazai.

For Fukuzawa, it's practically a smile.

"It looks like I've used up all my vacation time for the year," Dazai offers, hands in his pockets and an innocent smile on his face. Fukuzawa, for his part, doesn't react, save for a near-silent huff of air that passes a little too fast through his nose.

"What vacation time?" Fukuzawa says, and Dazai puts a hand over his heart with a fake gasp. He sits down across from Fukuzawa as Ranpo perches on the edge of the desk, flicking a gummy candy into his mouth and looking at Dazai. His eyes are open just enough that Dazai feels acutely seen.

"Oh, is it time to renegotiate my contract?" Dazai jokes.

"I don't think that's necessary," Fukuzawa says, too seriously to be serious. "Unapproved time off aside… It's good to have you back."

Dazai turns the words around in his head as much as he can. They're words he's not used to. He's not sure he's ever heard them about himself, before. Not at the Agency, where most of his disappearances were self-inflicted and kept as a joke; certainly not in the Port Mafia, where there were only a handful of people who would be even the slightest bit concerned if he vanished for good, and who were never tender enough to welcome him back.

Fukuzawa is a man of honesty and grit, which means that the words are exactly what they are, and Dazai presses them into his mind like a brand, the soft whisper of something rising within him. He can almost make out what it means, if he focuses.

"To tell the truth," Dazai says, which is already unusual, "I'm very glad to be back, sir."

"The other one was even more fucked up," Ranpo offers, and Fukuzawa frowns slightly at the language. Ranpo shrugs, helplessly. "What? It's the easiest way to put it!"

"He had certainly done quite a few things," Dazai says, hedging on whether or not he condemns those things or not. He does, but he also knows that the other Dazai was still him. The potential is there within him, even if he's moved past the viability of it. "Do we need to have a conversation about if I'm willing to do any of it?"

It's not a conversation that he particularly wants to have, but if the idea has been presented – that Dazai is capable of killing Mori and becoming the Boss; that Dazai is capable of ruining lives so steadily even after everything – he's sure that Fukuzawa will want to make sure he isn't intending to, and Dazai isn't, but–

"Do we?" Fukuzawa says, and the genuine surprise in his voice promptly derails Dazai's thinking. He realizes, with muted horror, that he was spiraling, which he hasn't done when it comes to Fukuzawa in years.

"Nah," Ranpo says, with such confidence that Dazai's head whips over to look at him. "What? It's not like you're above murder, but you'd do it for us or with us. You're part of the Agency, you know?"

Dazai wants to say that of course he knows, but if he's honest, he didn't until this exact moment. He was a member of the Agency, of course, but it was words on paper, officiality over sentimentality. He doesn't know exactly when it happened, that he'd choose a world with the Agency over one with Odasaku; where he's truly so allied with the Agency that all of his violence and cruelty can be repackaged as an asset for a last resort.

When had it happened?

When had – he changed?

"I do now," Dazai admits, softly.

"Then," Fukuzawa says, his own voice softened at the edges, impact blunted into a blow of force instead of the edge of a blade, "there's nothing more to be said on the subject of your loyalty."

What a concept that is, Dazai thinks. He muses on it for a moment and then nods, decisively. "Then, about everything that happened while I was gone…"

"Case of unexplained deaths," Ranpo lists off. He pulls a file out of the stack of paperwork on Fukuzawa's desk, offering it over to Dazai. "Buncha people dying with no cause or explanation. I couldn't figure it out, which is 'cause it was the Book, so it didn't have any evidence. Everyone's back now, though."

Dazai's eyes hover on the picture of Ango. Post-mortem, and yet Ango still looked like he was sleeping, except that Dazai knew for a fact that Ango never looked that peaceful when he was sleeping.

"Everyone?" Dazai repeats, a strange lump in his throat. He'd already talked to Ango, so he knew that; he'd assumed this Ango had died, too, but looking at the photo still makes it real in a way that Dazai could have done without, frankly.

"It's as though the past week never happened," Fukuzawa says. "We've done some investigating into it, and… for the most part, no one remembers it happened."

"I figure it has to do with the Book. Everyone that was there, or everyone that knows about it," Ranpo says. He waves a gummy candy around for emphasis, fox eyes closed again like he can't be bothered to care. "You can ask your friend if he remembers and it'll prove me right one way or the other."

"I'm sure it will," Dazai murmurs. Dazai flips through the rest of the file. There's some addendum notes on the overall case – time hadn't rewound, reality had simply been altered; they don't owe the Port Mafia a favor since they were equally invested in fixing things, but they do… "The Hunting Dogs were involved?"

"To get the Book, yes," Fukuzawa says. He looks exhausted at the mere memory, which is interesting. "Were you able to get to it without them?"

Dazai considers his words very, very carefully. "I don't think they would have helped the Port Mafia, under the leadership that it had been."

The Agency had barely agreed to help, and only then because of Oda – that Dazai had well and truly burned all the bridges that this Dazai can enjoy. Oddity after oddity, composing their own mystery that he doesn't know what to make of.

Something he could solve, if he was willing to look at the answer.

"Then," Fukuzawa says, with the deliberateness of placing a gravestone, "despite everything, I'm glad you were there to help. I'm glad to see you returned safely, as well."

Dazai swallows. He feels too put on the spot. His emotions are still circulating wildly, unable to truly settle down in his chest. How could they, when everything is still so raw, when he'll never know how things end for that other world? For that other Chuuya, who needed something so badly? (Who needed him so badly?)

"Thank you, sir," Dazai says, finally, ducking his head. He drops his gaze almost automatically, a small bow of his head, and Ranpo takes the opportunity to reach out, quick as one of Kunikida's punches, and deposit a small candy on Dazai's head. Dazai reaches up for it and looks at Ranpo, baffled. Ranpo just looks very, very smug.

"I understand that you've promised Kunikida-kun you'll do your paperwork," Fukuzawa says, and Dazai – automatically, habitually, familiarly – makes a face. "I intend to hold you to that, but take the rest of the day off. There are several other people that I believe will want to see you."

Dazai does not say that Fukuzawa is being too good to him, but the words are still there even if they're unsaid. They're obvious in the way his head tilts back up to look at Fukuzawa, like he's waiting for the other shoe to drop–

But there isn't one. There's just that stern kindness that manages to feel so abrasive and caring at the same time, radiating out of Fukuzawa.

"Well," Dazai says, and offers an attempt at a smile that takes him a couple tries to get right, "I should smooth over some relations with our allies."

Ranpo snorts.

-

Ango leaves work early enough that he makes it to Lupin at five PM exactly, after Dazai has had a very long day of doing absolutely nothing, because it turns out all the people he wants to see are insisting on putting in their fair share of work. He even doubled back to the Agency to do some paperwork, but Kunikida had driven him back out the third time he'd been caught doodling in the margins.

In Dazai's defense: it was very boring paperwork, given he hadn't been present for most of the events and was unwilling to detail too much of what had happened in that other world. He'd read the statement his other self had provided, which had made him annoyed enough that he kept drawing little cats with hats and off the shoulder jackets, and–

Yeah, he got to Lupin an hour before Ango.

He still gets Odasaku a drink; lets it sit there, melting, until Ango arrives, and Dazai raises a hand in greeting.

Ango pushes his glasses up. His eyes flicker to the whisky as it rapidly absorbs the ambient air, and there's still undisguised heartache there, an old wound he doesn't try to hide around Dazai.

"I wasn't sure if you were serious," Ango says, almost hesitantly. He doesn't cross the room until Dazai waves him over, and then he follows over to his habitual bar stool, unoccupied for so long. The bartender is still the same, after all these years, and delivers Ango a drink before Ango can try and order something non-alcoholic.

It's better, Dazai thinks. Ango will not want to be fully sober for this conversation.

"You can consider it information gathering, if you want," Dazai offers. It's easier if it's transactional. He knows that better than anyone. "I am here to find out how much you remember."

"Everything, up to the point where I died," Ango replies, a little tightly. There's a muscle in his jaw that works awkwardly before Ango relents, taking a long sip of his drink. Dazai follows suit, even though it isn't his first drink of the night. "I woke back up in bed like nothing had happened."

"How much have you found out since?" Dazai asks, tone carefully measured.

Ango is quiet for a long moment. "I heard that you worked with both the Bureau and the Port Mafia in order to fix things."

"Well," Dazai says. "Not exactly."

Ango looks at Dazai, flat and unimpressed. "Are you about to tell me it was all according to some plan?"

Dazai tilts his head, considering it. He picks up Odasaku's glass – pours half of it into his own, and the other half into Ango's, ignoring the way Ango looks appropriately scandalized at the action.

"A few days before you died," Dazai says, "I woke up into one of the worlds inside of the Book."

Ango looks at him for a long moment, as if searching for any truth or falsehood in that statement. Dazai has designed a dozen and a half tells to get people to think that he's telling the truth or that he's lying. He doesn't use any of them, now; just gazes back at Ango, even and calm.

"You weren't here?" Ango asks, carefully.

"Dazai Osamu was here," Dazai replies, his tone as airy as Ango's is cautious. "A Dazai Osamu that ruined himself in order to save Odasaku's life."

Ango's inhale is sharp. He drains his drink, then, his and the half of Odasaku's that Dazai had poured onto it. A second later he's taking his glasses off and massaging at his eyes, some of the tension in his frame bowing in so hard that he collapses under the weight.

"A world where he lived," Ango says, and it's wistful enough that it would be heartbreaking, if Dazai didn't know that tone so well. If Dazai hadn't lived it so long it had almost become numb.

"Sakaguchi Ango died in that world, too," Dazai says, and Ango turns to him. Without the safety of his glasses, Ango looks older; he looks tired. "Odasaku… You know, it wouldn't surprise me if they were even closer than we had all been. We broke into his office to get to the Book – it was a little less smooth than it was here, it sounds like."

"Were you – avenging my death?" Ango sounds surprised and dubious in equal measure, and Dazai laughs.

"I guess I was," he says. "After all, a world where Odasaku lived, and you didn't get to keep on living there with him? What's the point in that? And that Dazai went through a lot of effort."

Ango looks at Dazai for a long moment, and Dazai doesn't know exactly what he's looking for in Dazai's face. Dazai doesn't offer anything up, because anything he could offer would be a lie, would be Dazai trying to imitate something or someone else. Ango doesn't deserve that, if Dazai is going to have this conversation for real.

"It wasn't the three of us, was it?" Ango asks, and the weight of the question makes Dazai's head swim. He counts his heartbeats, reflexively – onetwo onetwo onetwo onetwo five, onetwo onetwo onetwo onetwo ten – to keep himself from leaving the conversation entirely.

"That Dazai," Dazai says, very carefully, "never met that Oda-san. I believe that Sakaguchi-san escaped the Port Mafia with his life and considered that a success."

Ango's expression wavers. He shakes his head, finally, leaning back on his barstool. He gives Dazai an awkward, lopsided smile. "He must have been furious with you."

"Apparently, he threatened to kill the other me," Dazai says, dryly, and Ango snorts, unceremonious and unrepentant.

"He wouldn't have," Ango says, with certainty.

"He would," Dazai replies, and Ango blinks. "He wasn't our Odasaku. He had more to lose. He'd joined the Agency, collected more orphans, started mentoring people… He'd absolutely have killed a stranger who was the leader of the Port Mafia, to help save that life he'd created. It would have been doing the world a service. Even if he doesn't kill."

Despite the alcohol, Ango's mind works rapidly. He puts together all the pieces: an Oda who would hate the Dazai he never met; a Dazai that took over the Port Mafia.

The bartender refills their glasses, and Ango's hand shakes for a brief second before he gets it under control enough that he can take a drink. He sips slowly, this time; Dazai watches him as Ango allows the alcohol to sit in his mouth, to burn his tongue before he swallows, chasing the sensation all the way down his throat. It's grounding, probably. Dazai can't blame him.

Dazai can't blame Ango at all.

"Did you think about staying?" Ango asks. It's not the question Dazai thought would be next, and he lowers his gaze to his own drink before Ango can catch the hesitation. It's a pointless evasion; Ango's in no state of mind to pry too deeply. But digging out secrets is engraved into Ango's bones, the same way it is on Dazai's, and Dazai understands human nature.

"I won't say that I didn't," Dazai says, carefully. He pitches his voice into the most casual tone he can manage, knowing it doesn't carry through the same. He gives Ango the same arguments that he gave himself, knowing that Ango will go through all the same refutations. "I didn't belong there." That's never stopped you before. "There was no place for me." You could have made one. "I wasn't the Dazai any of them knew, and…" Does anyone really know you? "Odasaku … wanted a different life for me."

It's the last one that Dazai had found impossible to repudiate. There was an Oda in that other world that he'd never made a promise to. There was no one in that world that could hold him accountable. Even so, Dazai hadn't wanted to let down his own Odasaku. He felt like – if he'd tried to stay there, it would be the same as forgetting his Odasaku. It would be like killing him all over again.

It would be like losing everything Dazai didn't realize he had, until then.

Ango is silent, for a long moment. Then, finally, he lets out an exhale: a long, drawn out noise that shakes on behalf of his now-stilled hands. "I would have been upset," he says, eventually, "if I'd come back to life only to find that you'd run off to some world you thought was better."

"Better, huh?" Dazai echoes, faintly. "I don't know if it was. He was alive, but…"

Ango turns to face him. Ango's eyes are watery, wavering in their intensity. Dazai doesn't know what emotions Ango is feeling. He can recite a psychology textbook about what he assumes Ango is feeling, the culmination of grief and desperation that Dazai himself feels in half-measures, but–

"There was a time," Ango says, quietly, "where you would have thought him living would be better, no matter the circumstances."

Dazai hums, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. "That's certainly what the "me" that was there thought."

"What changed?"

Dazai looks into his glass of alcohol for a long moment. Ango, knowingly, pours half the remaining whisky from his cup into Dazai's. The ice clinks together, and Ango scoops his back into his glass with an easy, deft motion.

Dazai is hardly about to turn the gesture down, so he offers Ango a bright, false smile.

"I suppose I did," Dazai says, false cheer all the way down, and then chases the words with the rest of his drink.

Ango studies him for a long moment, after that, and Dazai allows the scrutiny. Dazai could keep up the facade, if he really wanted to, but he doesn't; he lets it drop. Even he can feel the difference – a blank face now is different from the blank face that he had at ten, at fifteen, at eighteen, at twenty. Dazai still feels that longing for death, that swirl of darkness and despair that bubbles up in his throat if he isn't careful, but its progress is impeded, now. Every connection that Dazai has made, every person who has forcibly inserted themselves into his life and accepted him for whatever it was they thought he was, they've all set up barriers inside of him.

That darkness is a little less dark, maybe, or the despair is a little less unending. Dazai can't quite quantify it.

He knows it's different, though. He doesn't feel like he's searching so desperately, anymore. He feels like he's found.

"Well," Ango says, finally, with a smile. "Don't stop just because you started."

Dazai snorts, inelegantly. "That's unfair, you know? If I change too much, I'll be unrecognizable. I already offered to do my paperwork."

"Hm," Ango says, raising one thin eyebrow. "Did you specify that you would do your paperwork properly?"

"Of course not," Dazai says. "They'd be convinced I was still some other, weirder Dazai, if I did that."

"Can you get more weird…?"

"I'll have you know, I can get infinitely more weird. Because there are infinite realities! Theoretically."

"Theoretically."

"Theoretically!"

-

Dazai leaves from Lupin with a pleasant alcohol buzz in his head, a more pleasant (and deeply confusing) emotion in his chest, and dinner plans with Ango for next week, because apparently they're to the stage of life where they're both making amends by making actual plans.

Dazai refuses to purchase a dayplanner, however, so he's going to do his absolute best to forget about it when the time comes. He'll make Ango prove his affection by tracking Dazai down.

Speaking of tracking down –

Dazai gets as far as getting the pin out of his pocket to start picking the lock when the door to Chuuya's apartment swings open. Chuuya is standing there, and for a moment, Dazai forgets to monitor his heart rate or his facial expressions or his breathing, because it's his Chuuya, with his stupid uneven haircut curled up into a bun, bangs tucked back with an absolutely hideous barrette in the shape of a cat, dressed down in the clothes that Dazai knows mean Chuuya's planning to do absolutely nothing important for the rest of the night. The shirt hangs off one shoulder, and Chuuya makes no move to try and hide the skin from view even when Dazai's eyes linger there too long. Dazai lingers longer, still, at the collar on Chuuya's neck.

Dazai feels a little like a man possessed, but there's a certain degree of dissociation that's been present in him for most of his life, and his trip to an alternate reality had only made it worse. He doesn't mean to, not really, but he wants to – and so he reaches out, fingers skimming over the warm leather at Chuuya's throat.

Chuuya lets him. Chuuya moves, minutely, head tilting just enough to the side to be an invitation instead of a rejection.

"Hi," Chuuya says, flatly.

"Hi," Dazai echoes. "Was that supposed to come first?"

"Traditionally," Chuuya says, but there's warm amusement in his voice. "Traditionally, you'd have broken into my apartment when I wasn't already home. You could have just knocked."

"...no, I couldn't have," Dazai says, and he can't quite keep the bewilderment out of his voice. He and Chuuya might be about to renegotiate some – aspects – of their relationship that Dazai can no longer fully ignore given, you know, circumstances, but still. There's precedence.

Chuuya just snorts. He steps backwards, and Dazai follows, automatically, still not fully in charge of his own body. It's dangerous, he thinks. It would be dangerous, if it was anyone but Chuuya. But Chuuya makes no moves to kill or maim or hurt. He reaches up, wraps his hand around Dazai's and tugs him further inside without forcing Dazai to dislodge himself him where he's apparently adhered himself to the leather of the collar.

The door closes, and then Chuuya is just looking up at Dazai, patiently.

"You usually raid my alcohol when you break in," Chuuya says.

"Yes," Dazai agrees. "I could do that."

"Or," Chuuya offers, "you could raid my dinner, since it's almost done, and you smell like cheap whisky."

"It was expensive whisky," Dazai objects.

"My mistake. You smell cheap," Chuuya amends, with a smile, and Dazai can't help but feel some tension leak out of his frame. He straightens, finally, letting his fingers leave Chuuya's sphere of warmth and plunge into his pockets. Chuuya turns to head into the kitchen, his voice trailing behind him. "I'm sure the whisky was fine. Do you want expensive sake?"

"No," Dazai says. He kicks his shoes off, because he knows better than to traipse through Chuuya's place while still wearing them if Chuuya is offering to feed him. He takes his coat off, too, for good measure. He's not sure what the measure is, exactly, but– "I want exactly one glass of your expensive wine, and then I want your cheap sake."

"Lucky you," Chuuya says. "I'm down to the last two glasses of this bottle anyway. If you break my wine glass, I'm drowning you in the bath tub."

"I will not break your wine glass intentionally," Dazai promises, very carefully. Chuuya raises an eyebrow at the loophole, but doesn't comment on it.

Chuuya stands on his toes to get the wineglasses from the cabinet, and Dazai lets his gaze linger too long. There's no reason why he shouldn't, is there?

Dazai had reasons. Dazai has always had reasons. Those reasons are still there, they're still perfectly present and valid, but Dazai doesn't care.

Having seen what Dazai's particular brand of overthinking gets him in an alternate reality has made Dazai's priorities shift rather minutely in this one.

So he watches Chuuya as Chuuya gets down a spare glass and pours wine into it for Dazai. There is, in fact, dinner: Dazai can smell it. Something with meat and bread in it that's bubbling away in the oven. It's probably French.

"How late are you staying?" Chuuya asks. He leans back against the counter, letting the wine in his own glass swirl slowly.

Dazai bites down the urge to respond with a lie or a joke. He takes his own wine glass. It still tastes like grapes pressed through a dirty sock, to him, but maybe one day he'll taste whatever it is Chuuya tastes.

"Well," Dazai says. "I'd like to have … a conversation … with you…"

The face that Dazai makes is half because of the wine and half because of the words he's saying. They're awful in equal parts, which makes it easier to cover for the fact that he is offering genuine honesty. As genuine as he can, anyway; Dazai doesn't believe that he'll be entirely truthful at any given moment, but –

"Good. I'd like to have a conversation about you," Chuuya says. "It'll run late, so take a bath."

"It'll– what?" Dazai, for once, is the one lost in the conversation. He looks at Chuuya and blinks, and Chuuya offers Dazai a lazy, smug sort of smile.

"I figured you'd show up, so I left the bath full," Chuuya says. "And I figured you'd show up here last, so you'd need one by the time you got here."

"...Chuuya is very considerate," Dazai says, suspiciously, and it gets an actual laugh out of Chuuya. (It's good to see, Dazai thinks, and then rapidly tries to backpedal and delete the thought before he can dwell on it.)

"Self-serving. Don't want you stinking up my nice furniture if I'm home to have any say in it," Chuuya says. He waves his hand. "By the time you're out, dinner'll be ready. Then we can talk."

Dazai stares for a moment longer, and then, wisely, turns on his heel and makes a rapid escape to Chuuya's bathroom. There's clean clothing there. It takes Dazai a minute to place the clothing, because it's all too large for Chuuya, but it's –

It's from Dazai's old place. Before he left.

Dazai had set things up as best he could, when he left, but by the end of it he was working on sheer grief and desperation. He'd blown up Chuuya's car; he'd left enough clues to point at betrayal instead of anything that could implicate Chuuya; he'd made sure that no one save Mori knew the real reason for the defection.

He hadn't torched his old place, though. Why would he? Why would he bother? It was just some things, none of them with any sentimental value. The few things he had that he'd wanted to keep – matchbooks from Lupin, a single photo, some untraceable cash, a gun – were all things that no one knew to look for to begin with. It hadn't mattered when he'd left it behind.

The idea that Chuuya had gone there – after everything – that he'd rooted through the pieces of Dazai that Dazai had left behind, the pieces that Dazai had so easily discarded as unimportant –

Dazai sees that other Chuuya, for a moment. Sees himself, sick with grief after Odasaku. Wonders how much of that Chuuya felt, in Dazai's shitty room, surrounded by his shitty belongings without a hint that he was even still alive.

Dazai starts up the shower, because it's something to do with his hands, and doing something with his hands is always a surefire way to make sure that time is progressing and that Dazai isn't stuck in an endless bootloop of his own thoughts. He winds his bandages off and considers as he goes whether or not he anticipates winding them back on after the bath. Will Chuuya have new ones? How dangerous is it to assume? How uncomfortable, to be laid bare in words and in body, to plunge off of a cliff with only the raw trust that Chuuya will be there to break his fall?

There's a lump in his throat and a stutter in his heartbeat, and Dazai pretends that he's fine. He's fine, the way he always is, the way he always was–

It's fascinating, Dazai thinks, how simply seeing his own failures laid so bare can make him rethink everything. How looking through a broken mirror has brought everything else into such clarity that it's inescapable.

How long would it have taken Dazai to have reached these conclusions if the last several days had never happened for him? (Never, his mind supplies. He never would have let himself realize anything until it was gone, and he would have kept pretending afterwards, like if he pretended hard enough the grief couldn't get him, couldn't destroy him. Too much to live for, now, and isn't that ironic?)

Dazai's breath is eerily even, and he leaves the bandages wadded up in Chuuya's trash can.

The shower he takes is extremely perfunctory, an automatic series of actions that he can perform without thinking. He's trying very hard not to think at all, but it isn't working very well, so rather than trying to clear his mind he starts focusing on extremely small things instead. Prime numbers. Pi, as many digits out as he can remember it. The Cyrillic alphabet. The etymology of the word bouillabaisse.

He counts seconds until he reaches five minutes in the bath tub, and then he drifts out. He blow dries his hair, because he knows Chuuya wants him to, but he leaves it lightly damp as he shrugs the clothes on.

They're a little small, now. Dazai didn't realize he'd grown any since he was 18.

The clothes feel too strong on his skin, but he didn't put his bandages back on and doesn't intend to, when he's dressed in clothes he abandoned years ago. After a long moment of thought, he discards the shirt Chuuya had provided. He slips, silent, into Chuuya's room, instead, and steals one of Chuuya's oversized shirts that Chuuya always claims are for sleeping in, but Dazai knows well and good that Chuuya never bothers to sleep in shirts unless he's expecting someone to wake him up.

So Dazai wears a pair of semi-comfortable pants scavenged from the ruins of his past, and a shirt that smells like Chuuya and has the name of some stupid fancy wine brand on it, and feels like maybe he can handle having a conversation about – things – without running.

In part because he can't run and let anyone see him in this shirt. That would be simply the worst.

Chuuya raises an eyebrow when Dazai walks back into the kitchen, but doesn't comment.

"There's bandages in the medicine cabinet," Chuuya says, breaking Dazai's fall without even making Dazai jump.

Dazai has no response to offer, so he hums, instead. Can't go wrong with that. Chuuya gives him a look that's half-exasperated and half-searching, but Dazai doesn't know what Chuuya expects to find. Whatever it is, Dazai doesn't try to hide or offer up, and Chuuya seems to find an answer somewhere regardless.

"So," Chuuya says, setting food down in front of both of them. The sake between them is Chuuya's cheapest, and still manages to be worth more than Dazai's monthly Agency salary; Chuuya pours them both a glass and then sits, crossing his legs, all clean lines and lean muscle, and Dazai contemplates throwing himself out of the window.

He doesn't.

"So," Dazai echoes, instead.

"The other you," Chuuya says. "How much do you know, on your end?"

"I saw the end result," Dazai says, and his tone falls flat, as lifeless as it should be when describing the situation. He lets his gaze go wide, fixing somewhere on Chuuya's oven in the distance and then looking through it. "I didn't much care for it, but it was still me, in a fashion."

"It was definitely you," Chuuya says, wryly. He takes a bite of his food, chewing politely before he speaks again and gesturing with his fork when he does. "What's the difference between the two?"

"Time," Dazai says, immediately. Chuuya frowns, because it isn't the answer he wants, but Dazai knows when he shouldn't lie, and it's now. "He saw the future – this future – when he was young enough to change things and foolish enough to ignore the cost, and so he did. If I knew at that age everything that I know now, I–"

Dazai cuts off, the words in his throat suddenly strangling him.

Chuuya looks at him steadily, blue eyes gazing straight through Dazai. "You wouldn't, though."

"...no," Dazai says, carefully. "But I would have, six months ago, or a year ago, or two years ago."

It's still the wrong answer, but it's one that Chuuya absorbs easily. It certainly doesn't have any major effect on his appetite – how can someone so tiny have such an appetite, Dazai wonders – despite the truth being rather dark.

"But right now," Chuuya says, persistent, insistent. "Right now, the Dazai Osamu that's sitting in front of me wouldn't make that trade."

Dazai wants to lie, actually. He wants to tell Chuuya that he would make the trade, that he'd throw away Chuuya and the Agency and everything that Dazai has managed to get, every single shred of meaning that Dazai has managed to claw his way into despite the world's best efforts–

He can't. He wants to let Chuuya down; he wants Chuuya to decide he isn't worth it; he wants to disappoint Chuuya so thoroughly that Chuuya gives up, but Chuuya won't. That other world with that other Chuuya demonstrated that.

"I wouldn't," Dazai says, carefully. "I wouldn't trade this world for the sake of someone already gone."

It tastes like betrayal when he says it, makes Dazai feel like he's giving up on Odasaku in some way that he never has, before, but Odasaku would want this. Odasaku would want Dazai to have eked out this miniscule bit of something adjacent to happiness. Odasaku would – Odasaku might even be proud.

"Why?" Chuuya asks.

Dazai considers it for a long moment. Chuuya gives him that bit of grace; ignores the way Dazai tilts his chair back onto two legs to stare up at the ceiling. Chuuya's ceiling is impeccably clean. He wonders if he hires cleaners or if he has a really tall ladder somewhere.

"He wouldn't want me to," Dazai says, after a long moment. "That knowledge wasn't enough to stop me in that other world– but I think, in some way, that other me could do it because in this reality, I wasn't. That Dazai was aware that in this world, I had done what Odasaku wanted. I'm living the way he wanted me to. So it didn't matter what that other Dazai did, so long as one of us was doing it right."

Dazai has a wry smile on his lips that he can't quite get to go away. He lowers his gaze to Chuuya, who looks oddly stiff. His plate is empty; Dazai has barely eaten.

Chuuya looks like he wants to say something. Instead, he just stands up, taking his dishes into the kitchen. Dazai gives him a twenty second head start before he drifts into the kitchen after him.

"Chuuya?"

Chuuya sets the dishes into the sink a little too hard. "Good for you," Chuuya says, and despite the way his voice is pitched into habitual annoyance, there's something genuine in it. Something strained and tired that Dazai can't quite pick at to make sense of. Not right now. "Great job being the good one."

Dazai just looks at Chuuya. Chuuya does not look back at him.

"Look," Chuuya says, "was there anything else you needed to say?"

"Was there anything else you needed to ask?"

Dazai can see it, in Chuuya's throat, in the way he swallows. He can see it in the way Chuuya's thumbs twitch, a miniscule movement that gives away that Chuuya wants to ball his hands into fists with his gloves on and hear the leather creak. But Chuuya doesn't have his gloves, and Dazai doesn't have his bandages, and both of them are off-kilter.

Dazai has been too honest. He's given too much. He knew this would happen, didn't he? This is why Dazai is so careful not to tell people things. Not to let himself know it.

Dazai knows too much, now, and he can't unknow it no matter how hard he tries.

"Yeah," Chuuya says, finally, "but I don't want to ask it tonight. It's late."

It is, but not by Port Mafia standards, and certainly not by Dazai's. But Chuuya is turning on his heels, stiffly putting away his leftovers. He goes back to the table and reaches for Dazai's, and Dazai blurts, before he can stop himself: "I'm not done eating."

Chuuya's fingers freeze. His entire body freezes, an ending frame of something that Dazai didn't know he was watching.

"Put the dishes in the sink when you're done," Chuuya says. "I'm going to bed."

Dazai watches him go. Chuuya's door shuts behind him and no locks click, nothing for Dazai to pick, no way to intrude without intruding just to prove that he can.

Dazai sits on Chuuya's couch and eats his food. It takes him the better part of an hour – even with Chuuya's attention to Dazai's portion sizes, it's a lot of food, and it's gone half-cold already – but he finishes it.

He puts the bowl in the sink.

He fetches bandages from the medicine cabinet and winds them on. Slips his clothes back on, cheap fabric scraping across bandages, and delicately folds up Chuuya's shirt.

He rearranges Chuuya's wine cabinet and takes the second most expensive bottle of whisky.

He stands next to the front door, and he feels something very strongly, but he knows better than to give any words to the feeling. He shouldn't feel anything at all. He knows better.

(He'll lose everything that Dazai did, and maybe more.)

Dazai throws the pair of pants Chuuya had given him in the burnable trash as he leaves.

-

After that, life returns to normal.

Dazai goes to work as late as possible and does as little work as possible, Kunikida chastises him, Atsushi winds up doing half of Dazai's work. The world continues to move forward, and Dazai slowly stops feeling like there is glass embedded in his skin that he needs to claw out.

(He does get blisteringly drunk on the stolen whisky two nights in a row, but that's not too unusual.)

In the end, what changes things, is–

"Hey. Is Dazai here?" Chuuya's voice rings out across the Agency, and everyone stops what they're doing – or avoiding doing, in Dazai's case – to look at Chuuya. He looks innocuous, for someone that could kill a solid fourth of the room pretty quickly if he was really trying.

"No," Dazai says, immediately.

He is in plain view.

Chuuya, dressed down some horrible hoodie and jeans, still manages to radiate a terrifying enough aura that everyone scoots a few inches away from Dazai.

"You owe me something," Chuuya says, and Dazai starts to slither out of his seat and under the desk. Kunikida reaches out, grabbing Dazai by the collar before he can manage to pile himself on the ground.

"You haven't resolved things?" Kunikida asks.

"I've resolved everything!" Dazai says. He flings his hands up, helplessly. "I helped save reality as we know it! I don't think you're appreciating my hard work enough, you know!"

"Technically," Ranpo offers, conversationally, "the other Dazai did all the hard work over here, and you only did hard work over there, which means you resolved things for them, but not us."

Dazai frowns, and Kunikida wrenches him up to his feet. Dazai wobbles pathetically, but Chuuya is still standing there, arms crossed, one eyebrow raised.

"Nakahara-san," Kunikida says, as politely as possible, pushing his glasses up. "Please return him in one piece."

"It can be more than one piece," Yosano offers, helpfully, "so long as you bring them all back together!"

Dazai gets a very sour look on his face at the idea of being brought back from the dead by Yosano's particular ability. He does not want that. He especially does not want it if Chuuya is doing it because he's broken one of Dazai's arms off to beat him with it or made good on one of the other six hundred threats he made when they were kids.

"C'mon," Chuuya says. "Let's go."

Dazai whines, but he walks when Chuuya jabs him in the back. He watches, out of his peripheral, as Chuuya snatches Dazai's coat up for him. Nice of him.

Dazai waits outside of the Agency door, and Chuuya takes point automatically, always a few steps ahead of Dazai. It's the same way it was, back then, when–

Nope. Nuh-uh. Dazai refuses, because thinking about it last time just got him in trouble and he's not doing the nostalgic honesty thing again. He likes his arms attached to his body.

He follows Chuuya, though. He even gets into the car with Chuuya without complaint. He does look as miserable as possible up until the car is moving, and then he purposefully takes up as much space as humanly possible in the backseat.

Chuuya snorts. Dazai doesn't recognize the driver, but he can tell he's mafia; high ranked enough to be driving Chuuya around on his off days.

"I'm about to head out of the country for a few days," Chuuya says, "so there was something I needed to take care of first."

Dazai makes a noncommittal noise. It's not the first time Chuuya's had an away mission, and it won't be the last. Dazai doesn't know why Chuuya's offering the information up. Dazai has nothing left to say, unless Chuuya gets creative with his questions.

But Chuuya doesn't: he just sits there, patiently, until the car comes to a stop outside Chuuya's place.

"Stay here," Chuuya says, and Dazai frowns. The doors close, and Dazai tries to open them – they're unlocked – but it seems like the safety system is engaged. Short of jumping through the screen and trying to slide out past the driver, Dazai is trapped, insofar as he doesn't feel like going through the effort of breaking a car window.

It's a pretty lazy trap, so Dazai doesn't bother to do anything about getting out until the door opens again.

Akutagawa sits down.

The driver turns the car off and leaves, closing all the doors behind him.

Dazai tries the handle again a few more times.

"Akutagawa-kun," Dazai says, delicately, "is this car going to explode?"

"....no," Akutagawa says. There's a frown on his face, which is perfectly usual, but the notch between his brows gives away his confusion. His hands are in his lap, and he looks back down at them, awkwardly. "...Chuuya said you had something to say to me."

Dazai thinks, very loudly, and does not say: you call him Chuuya?

Dazai does say, at a much more reasonable volume: "Oh."

He doesn't actually have anything to say to Akutagawa. Akutagawa hadn't even been on his list– the sins of his other self seemed much more heavy against Atsushi, and he– and he–

Dazai tries the door handle a few more times. Akutagawa watches this, his brow furrowing further, before Akutagawa finally sighs.

A tendril of Rashoumon reaches out, skirting around Dazai to slide into the car door. Something clicks – the child lock, likely – and when Dazai tries the door, it opens.

Dazai closes it again. Akutagawa effectively has a single very long eyebrow at this point, despite the fact that his eyebrows have always been sparsely populated. Malnutrition hair loss, Dazai always figured, and–

"You've gotten better at precision work," Dazai offers. A peace offering.

Akutagawa looks back down at his hands. He's still frowning, but he doesn't look confused anymore: he looks miserable. "Not better enough."

Dazai hums for a moment. He looks at Akutagawa, and he sees that other Atsushi, scars around his neck screaming of loyalty, loyalty, loyalty in the same way that it's been branded into Akutagawa's soul. Into the posture he has near Dazai, hunched over and hurt, like he's trying to protect himself. In the way his fingertips twitch. He's swallowing too much. He hasn't coughed once.

"Akutagawa-kun," Dazai says, carefully, and Akutagawa looks up. "What is it you think I have to say to you?"

"I…" Akutagawa starts. He stops: Dazai had never been impressed with Akutagawa saying he didn't know something. This time, though, Dazai has four years on his past self, and he doesn't offer any commentary past silence. "I wasn't… any help to you. To the other you."

"Are you expecting me to reprimand you?" Dazai asks, and Akutagawa flinches like Dazai had aimed a gun all over again. That's exactly what Akutagawa expected.

"I–"

"You did," Dazai says, and puts a hand on Akutagawa's shoulder, "fine, Akutagawa-kun. You did good, I'm sure. I wasn't here to see it, but you've started working well with Atsushi-kun, and Chuuya seems to enjoy having you as a subordinate."

Akutagawa's gaze is open, his eyes wide where he stares at Dazai. "But… you–"

"I am not your superior anymore," Dazai says, and he means it on a tremendous amount of levels, actually, enough levels that there's a hysteric burst of laughter inside of him that he thankfully keeps a lid on, because the last thing he needs is to terrify Akutagawa even more.

"You're still Dazai-san," Akutagawa blurts, too earnest.

"What does that mean to you?" Dazai asks. Akutagawa just stares at him. "I'm Dazai, sure. But you didn't feel the same way about the other one, did you?"

"...no," Akutagawa says, slowly.

"So what am I to you?" Dazai asks. "I can't be your mentor. I was terrible at that. I was building a loyal weapon, not an autonomous human, and you wound up somewhere between the two. I did what I knew how to do, and so I made a few… errors."

"Errors," Akutagawa echoes, disbelieving.

"Positive reinforcement actually works better than negative," Dazai offers, "it's just that I'm terrible at it. I was worse, then. I'd never seen it in practice."

"...I've always been a disappointment to you," Akutagawa says. "I've always – only wanted to prove myself –"

"Find something else to live for," Dazai says, and Akutagawa looks stricken. "You don't need to prove yourself to me. Live for tea, or Atsushi-kun, or Gin-chan, or whatever."

Dazai is aware that this is a hilarious bit of advice to come from him, given he has contemplated ways to hotwire and crash the car into the ocean several times over the past few minutes, but he feels like the theory of it is still valid. Probably. Maybe.

He is bad at this. He does not know why people keep leaving him in charge of younger people with trauma, actually. How does this keep happening? Dazai is the least responsible person he knows, and he knows Ranpo for God's sake.

"What are you living for?" Akutagawa asks, his voice very quiet.

Dazai blinks. Akutagawa looks at him, very slowly, his face slack and searching.

"Cheap sake," Dazai says, finally. "Good crab. To annoy Kunikida-kun and Chuuya."

"You still want to die," Akutagawa says, carefully.

"That's," Dazai says, "an entirely separate matter from finding something to live for."

Akutagawa looks deeply dubious, which Dazai supposes can only be expected.

"People always think things like, 'why was I put on this Earth' when what they really mean is 'what should I be living for?'" Dazai offers.

"Then… you were put here on this Earth to bother Chuuya… and I was put on this Earth to… not kill people?" Akutagawa says, tentatively, like he's so terrified of getting the wrong answer. (Again, this is reasonable, but dealing with Dazai's past is harder when he looks at Akutagawa. When he thinks of that other Akutagawa, so similar and so much less broken.)

"Something like that!" Dazai chirps, as cheerfully as he can manage. It works fine, for Akutagawa: Akutagawa has never been very good at reading Dazai's tells, which is unfortunate for Akutagawa and extremely convenient for Dazai.

"Then you should bother him before he gets on his flight," Akutagawa says.

Dazai considers this for a long moment. Then he brightens.

"Did he already leave while we were talking?"

"...yes?" Akutagawa offers, a little uncertainly.

Dazai slaps the seat ahead of him in the car. "Then it's time for me to teach you one more thing."

Akutagawa doesn't need to know how to hotwire a car, but it's always something that's handy to know, Dazai feels.

He learns quick.

-

In short order, Dazai: discovers that Chuuya's flight has, in fact, already taken off; discovered where it's headed to; books his own ticket to Hawaii, under Mori's account, on the excuse that Chuuya leaving before Dazai could talk to him makes this a Port Mafia expense; and boards a plane before he can think the better of any of his actions.

He then has seven hours and change to sit with himself and the knowledge that this is, objectively, a terrible idea.

Luckily, Mori's credit card means that Dazai can get first class and a near infinite amount of alcoholic beverages during the flight.

"You sure can hold your liquor," says the young businessman in the seat next to him, and Dazai buys him a drink for the compliment, just on principle.

Once the flight lands, Dazai is vaulting out of his seat before the businessman can continue further conversation – unfortunately for the man, it's the one time that Dazai isn't receptive to flirting at all – and tracking down Chuuya's whereabouts. Akutagawa had given him the name of the hotel, and Dazai doesn't even need to worry about trying to hack things when hotels are notoriously week to social engineering.

Dazai knocks on Chuuya's door.

Very politely.

There's a shuffling of feet, and then a long, drawn out pause that must be Chuuya looking through the peephole.

Dazai doesn't comment at all on how this would go faster if Chuuya wasn't of such small stature.

Very politely.

Eventually, the door swings open. Chuuya is half-disrobed, his outer layers shed on the bed and his shirt half unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up to show the gap of forearm between their edge and where his gloves start. His hair is flat on one side – he must have been sleeping on the flight – and his designer pants are creased to absolute hell in a way that Dazai is sure will involve dry cleaning.

Chuuya opens his mouth, and Dazai kisses him.

"...the fuck?!" Chuuya manages, by putting his hands on Dazai's shoulders and pushing. It doesn't push Dazai back any, but it pushes Chuuya away, so Dazai closes the distance by shutting the door with his foot and kissing Chuuya again, grabbing Chuuya's chin with one hand and sliding the other around the back of his neck, resting on the buckle to Chuuya's collar like it might brand itself in on Dazai's skin if he lingers long enough.

"You taste like whisky–"

"Good whisky," Dazai corrects, because it's a point of contention, he feels. He hasn't slept in over a day, at this point; his clothing is even more helpless than Chuuya's– but he has to get this out. There's an emotion within him that's carrying him to the edge of something, and for once, for once, Dazai isn't going to walk it back.

He saw what happens when he doesn't let himself feel anything. He saw what happens to Chuuya.

He won't do that again.

"Every good thing I've ever had in my life, I've refused to want," Dazai says, and it's a whisper against Chuuya's lips, gaze locked onto his eyes. Blue, invaded by surprise, but no less focused. "If I want it, I'll lose it. The first time I considered someone a friend, I lost them."

Chuuya's face starts to harden, again, and Dazai headbutts him.

"What the hell--"

"You weren't my friend, you were my partner," Dazai says. "I hated you, and you hated me, so it wouldn't mean anything if I lost you, so I was allowed to keep you."

Chuuya stares at Dazai, brow scrunched as he tries to understand this logic. Dazai, personally, has had years of unthinking to figure himself out, so he doesn't exactly see the problem, but he's sure that for other people it's more of a struggle.

"So," Chuuya says, slowly, "you hate me."

"Yes," Dazai says, very patiently.

"You also want to kiss me," Chuuya continues.

"Yes," Dazai says, very patiently.

"But I'm," Chuuya says, "the only one you hate like this?"

"Yes!" Dazai says, brightly, and also: very patiently.

"Fuck, I hate you," Chuuya says, and kisses Dazai back.

-

Chuuya's room is non-smoking, so rather than lighting up in the afterglow, he twines Dazai's hair around his fingertips like it's a delicate thread.

"Before you left, that night," Chuuya says, "when we were talking."

Dazai hums, contentedly, from where he's curled up with his face pressed into Chuuya's side. It's enough of an acknowledgement for Chuuya to consider an affirmative.

"I wanted to ask you," Chuuya says, "why you didn't tell me when you left."

Dazai blinks, slowly. He's loathe to pull himself out of the pleasant place that he finds himself in for several reasons (including the sheets on Chuuya's hotel room bed, which are the highest Dazai thinks he's ever touched), but he also understands that he should, probably, try to answer, even if he thinks they've mostly got everything figured out.

"I did," Dazai says, slowly. "I blew up your car."

"I thought that was an enemy!" Chuuya says, and Dazai blinks like this didn't occur to him.

"I did a lot of other things," Dazai offers, after a minute, and then: "I spent most of the next two years trying every drug that existed and inventing some of my own. I don't remember most of it."

"Before the drugs," Chuuya says. "You could have told me. Even if you hated me, we were still partners."

Dazai is quiet for a long moment, pushing himself up to look at Chuuya. Chuuya doesn't look annoyed, even as his hand falls away from Dazai's hair. He just looks curious, and a little reserved – like he's bracing himself for an injury he hasn't felt yet, but already sees coming.

"We're still partners," Dazai says, carefully, slowly. "If I just left, we were still partners. We never stopped being partners, because I wasn't around for you to stop."

Chuuya digests this for a long moment. Mouths something to himself that Dazai can't quite lip read – he's pretty sure it's French, actually – and then he nods, sitting up.

"You're saying," Chuuya says, "that you vanished for four years because you were afraid I would break up with you?"

"...is that what that was?" Dazai says, like he's never considered it before. Which he hadn't. At least, not from that angle.

He isn't allowed to continue considering it, though, because in the next moment, Chuuya is adamantly trying to smother him with a pillow, which – in fairness – Dazai does deserve.

-

On the flight back, booked with Chuuya's card, this time, the endless supply of whisky replaced with fine wine and little cheeses, Chuuya glances out the window with a considering noise.

"Hmn?" Dazai offers, around a mouthful of cheese.

"Just wondering how the other ones are doing," Chuuya says.

Dazai wonders if the other him made it through alive. Wonders if seeing this Chuuya – whole and unbroken and beautiful despite everything Dazai has ever done to force him to the contrary – got to him, the way seeing that other Chuuya got to Dazai.

Dazai swallows his cheese, shrugs up a shoulder. "They'll figure it out."

"Yeah," Chuuya agrees, with one of his little half-grins, snatching the last of the cheddar off the plate before Dazai can eat it, much to Dazai's dismay. "I think they will."

Chapter 3

( epilogue (b)east )

For all intents and purposes, Dazai, Boss of the Port Mafia, is dead.

In reality, he's dead asleep in Chuuya's bed, looking more peaceful than Chuuya's ever seen him before.

Chuuya knows they have a lot they need to talk about. That much is clear, because Dazai's injuries are all half-healed injuries from where he'd killed himself, and then there's a brand new should-be-lethal gunshot wound on top of that. Dazai filled him in a little – that Dazai had been in some other world, that everything had really happened.

Dazai seemed as surprised as Chuuya that he was still alive, but he hadn't said one word about suicide all through Chuuya smuggling him back out of the Port Mafia and all the way home. Dazai had passed out sometime on the car ride back, and he'd stirred a little when Chuuya had set him on the stool in the bathroom to shower him down, but all Dazai had managed was a sleepy yawn and a vague noise of protest. He'd been out before Chuuya even finished washing his hair.

Chuuya had bandaged him up all over again, carefully wrapping the layers, hiding away all the scars from view.

Dazai shifts in his sleep, rolling onto his side with one palm against the blankets like he's searching for something. There's a crease between his brows, and Chuuya holds his breath as he slips his hand underneath Dazai's, letting Dazai's grip roll across familiar leather.

The crease evens out, and so does Dazai's breathing.

-

Chuuya tries not to sleep, because he's confining himself to his (admittedly comfortable, vintage) chair and not to his own bed and he knows if he falls asleep in it he'll get a hell of a crook in his neck – but Dazai has his hand, and then most of his arm, and somewhere along the way all the sleep Chuuya hasn't been getting catches up with him.

He wakes up with his neck on fire and the pattern of the gauze around Dazai's wrist imprinted into his cheek.

Dazai, at least, is still asleep. Or he's acting, but that's pretty admirable, given he was in a lot of pain and suffering blood loss, and that was discounting the fact that he'd probably gotten about as much sleep in his other universe as Chuuya had in this one.

Chuuya looks at Dazai for a long moment. He didn't think he'd ever be able to look at him again. He'd spent a lot of time drinking in the other Dazai, memorizing everything, inscribing it as deep as the code that made up Chuuya's core. He wanted, he realized, Dazai written on him, permanent and unyielding.

He wanted to be written just as permanently onto Dazai, like the scars that paint his skin.

Chuuya reaches up, letting his fingertips glide over the bandages around Dazai's eye. Chuuya's luck runs out: Dazai's other eye opens, though he makes no move to stop him.

"Chuuya," Dazai murmurs, and his voice is still thick enough with sleep that Chuuya knows he must not have been faking in the slightest. "Do you still have those painkillers…?"

"The shit I got after we fought Verlaine?" Chuuya asks. "Yeah, but they're expired."

"They don't expire," Dazai says, stifling a yawn in a way that makes his words nearly unintelligible. "They just lose efficacy."

"I'm still only giving you a normal dose," Chuuya says, and Dazai flaps his hand gently like he's shooing Chuuya out of his own bedroom. Chuuya goes, though, because he can see the thin tells in Dazai, now that he's looking for them. He can see the way Dazai's skin is corpse pale, the way he presses his fingertips into his own skin too hard, the way his muscles are tense with the pain that burrows deep into Dazai's body.

He gets the painkillers. He gets coffee, too – it's from yesterday, and it's cold as hell, but it'll do in a pinch. He doesn't get any alcohol, because Mori had specifically warned him against drinking on these pills back when he was a teenager, but he grabs a cheap can of tuna from the pantry.

When he gets back, Dazai has unraveled the bandages around his head, revealing the unscarred, unmarred tissue there.

Chuuya stops only briefly at this change, and then continues forward, dropping the can and pills onto Dazai and setting the coffee on the nightstand.

"Chuuya, I like canned crab, not tuna," Dazai says, his tone only mildly chastising. He pops the pills into his mouth and chases it with the coffee. He makes an overexaggerated face of distaste when he realizes the coffee is cold, and then keeps drinking it regardless.

"Fresh out of crab," Chuuya says. "Out of most things, actually."

Dazai tosses the can of tuna up in the air. Before he can catch it, Chuuya snatches it out of the air and tosses it back up instead. Dazai looks at him, and there's amusement on his face. Is he just letting Chuuya see it to manipulate Chuuya? Chuuya wants it to be real. He wants so many things to be real.

Dazai catches the can, and then tosses it back to Chuuya.

"Why don't we order in?" Dazai suggests.

Chuuya tosses the can up in the air to mirror Dazai's previous action. He keeps his face as cool as he can, under the circumstances. Kouyou had just started to teach him how to do it, after Dazai had–

"Sure," Chuuya says. "Whatever."

It's too much of a tell, he thinks. Everything Chuuya does is too much of a tell, when it comes to Dazai, so Chuuya just turns on his heel and goes to order in. Memories of another Dazai, covered in syrup, wide-eyed and alive, linger like ghosts as Chuuya walks through the kitchen. Chuuya ignores them.

What good are ghosts, when Dazai is still living? What good is any of it, when all it showed is everything that Chuuya doesn't have in this one?

Dazai is well-behaved for the entirety of the wait for food. He still occupies the place in Chuuya's bed, and eventually he draws his knees up, locking his arms around them, chin resting on top as he gazes unseeingly into the wall.

Chuuya opens his mouth to say something at least three times, but never manages to get a sound past the barricade of his throat, lungs seizing up whenever he tries. He looks at Dazai and feels only grief, like a terminal illness. The dying, if not the dead.

Dazai drifts out when he hears the door, staying well out of sight. It throws Chuuya for a brief moment before he remembers that yeah, the delivery guy and the guards stationed outside in the hall can both definitely see this Dazai. Chuuya'd managed to avoid anyone in the Port Mafia seeing him, but they hadn't been able to avoid every random pedestrian, and everyone had moved around Dazai's figure automatically with just enough of a glance to show that they saw him.

Back from the dead, after everything. There's something ironic about it – that the Dazai that was still alive was a ghost in this world, but the Dazai that should have been a ghost is alive. It burns Chuuya's tongue.

"Come sit at the table," Chuuya says, once he's got all the food and the door is shut. "You're not eating in my bed."

Dazai hums in response, then steps over to the table. His movements are stiff, but only to Chuuya's eye. He doubts anyone else would be able to tell.

Chuuya divides the food up. Pasta seemed like the easiest thing, and they had an option with crab, even if the real stuff is probably too ritzy for Dazai's taste. Dazai doesn't comment on it; he doesn't seem inclined to inhale it, either, picking the pieces of crab out and eating them, staring at nothing, gaze fixed vaguely on the far wall.

"You could at least say 'thank you', you asshole," Chuuya snaps, almost automatically. He starts to pull back from the statement – Dazai's still the Boss – except no, Dazai isn't, is he? He hadn't asked for the position back. He'd let Chuuya fill him in only vaguely, choosing to sleep rather than deal with any of the mess he'd left behind, and isn't that just fucking like him?

Dazai blinks. His gaze drags from whatever far away world he was thinking in, fixing on Chuuya with laser focus. "Thank you, Chuuya," he says, voice too chipper, too cheerful. He isn't wearing the bandages over his eyes, and both of them are staring at Chuuya and Chuuya doesn't want to see them.

"Don't," Chuuya says, shortly.

"Don't what?" Dazai replies, easy, voice lilting in all the right places.

"Don't act like the other one," Chuuya says. One of the disposable chopsticks in his hand cracks; he drops it onto the table without bothering to acknowledge it.

Dazai looks at him for a long moment. There'd been a sort of artificial cheer about him, but it melts away, leaving only familiar blankness behind. "Didn't you prefer him?"

Chuuya's hands slam down on the table as he stands. Too hard; too obvious. Everything rattles. Dazai just looks at him, cold pasta on a plate in front of him.

"Sure," Chuuya says, after a minute. He meets Dazai's gaze; refuses to flinch away from it. "I did prefer him. You're right. I preferred a Dazai that gave a shit about other people."

Dazai's gaze is dark and hollow. He doesn't say anything.

"Don't worry," Chuuya says, grinding the words out. "I don't expect you to be that guy, so don't try."

Chuuya spins on his heel, leaving his own apartment. He goes for a walk to cool his head, because the last thing he needs is to kill Dazai all over again.

Dazai isn't there when Chuuya gets back.

Chuuya tells himself he doesn't care as he throws Dazai's plate into the garbage.

-

Dazai doesn't reappear. After a few days, Chuuya stops waiting; he still has a Port Mafia to run. He can't spend all his time waiting on a ghost that might never come back.

It's harder, now that Dazai is alive again. Chuuya can think about him without his chest seizing up, because he isn't dead, but he's also not around anymore, and Chuuya feels the absence incredibly distinctly. It's like a piece of him has been removed, and doesn't that just sound disgusting?

Chuuya drowns himself in work. It isn't like there isn't enough to go around. The Port Mafia recovers from Dazai's death like it's a living thing, like a wound closing up; it's only a dozen days or so before it's back to normal. Healed up without even a scar to tell the story of the previous Port Mafia Boss.

Dazai was always reclusive. He was a shadow, a threat given form only by reputation. For years he did little more than rule from the darkness, and Chuuya and Atsushi were always the ones doing his work in his stead. Atsushi kept to himself, but Chuuya – Chuuya hadn't, and he'd gathered friends and allies as quickly as he'd disposed of enemies. He's accepted as the new Boss, and he makes only the smallest concession to trying to get away from the front lines.

Even without Dazai – even without Corruption – Chuuya is still one of their strongest fighters.

He's got a lot of irritation to work out, too, which is what finds him on Yokohama's outskirts, blasting an up and coming gang's hideout into smithereens. Chuuya's specialty isn't interrogation, so he leaves a couple of them alive for Kyouka and Kouyou to go at, later; the rest of them, he works out his aggressions on.

Atsushi is watching with his eyebrows raised, mouth hidden behind the voluminous collar of that coat he always wears.

"What?" Chuuya snaps, flicking the worst of the gore of the last man off his gloves. Chuuya had punched straight through his chest, which was satisfying, but the end result is always messy.

"Boss," Atsushi says, as carefully and diplomatically as possible, tugging the collar of his coat down to offer Chuuya a placating sort of smile. "I don't want to sound like I'm questioning you–"

"Then don't," Chuuya snaps, without any real heat.

"--but I don't think you actually needed me here for this," Atsushi says.

Chuuya frowns for a second. He flexes his hand, but his glove is too wet; Atsushi, helpfully, presents him with another pair of gloves and a delicately embroidered handkerchief. The handkerchief has little tigers and rabbits embroidered on it.

"I'll destroy that," Chuuya says, staring at the handkerchief.

"I'm very good at getting blood out of fabric," Atsushi counters.

"When the fuck did you get so bold?" Chuuya asks. It's half rhetorical, but he snatches the gloves and handkerchief anyway. The gloves get tossed onto one of the bodies for the clean up crew to dispose of, but he uses the handkerchief to clean his hands as best he can from the blood that had seeped through the leather. He offers it back before he puts the new gloves on. His hands are still sticky, but they aren't wet, so he'll take it.

"Mori-san has been helping teach me a lot," Atsushi says, with such genuine honesty that Chuuya feels a little sickened by it. The kid is so fucking pure, Chuuya doesn't know how Dazai ever thought making him into a weapon was a good idea.

"You can stay with him, you know," Chuuya says, voice a drawl. He doesn't make eye contact as he says it; looks at his phone, instead, ostensibly checking on the pickup vehicle.

"I know," Atsushi says, slowly. "But… this is still my home."

Chuuya doesn't know what to say to that, so he doesn't say anything. He scratches at the back of his head – his hair is disgusting – and watches the helicopter zero in on their location, starting to land. Chuuya steps towards it before he realizes Atsushi isn't following.

"You coming, kid?"

"If it's alright," Atsushi says, delicately, "I was going to come back tomorrow."

Mori's orphanage isn't too far from here, Chuuya knows; it makes sense that Atsushi would want to stop by. Chuuya considers it for a long moment, head cocked to the side, watching the way Atsushi shifts uncomfortably under his gaze. Atsushi doesn't flinch away, though; he doesn't radiate fear the way he used to.

"Sure," Chuuya says, and Atsushi breaks out into a smile. Chuuya's body glows faintly red as he activates his ability, aiming himself to the helicopter. Before he takes off, he adds: "Just be back tomorrow. I need to introduce you to the rest of the Executives, since you're getting promoted."

"W–" Atsushi starts, but doesn't get any further, any of his panicked objections lost to the wind as Chuuya shoots himself up, tapping down gently into the helicopter as it turns back towards the Port Mafia headquarters.

Back towards home.

-

By the time the meeting hits – the Executives all gathered, all the way down in the basement so fucking Verlaine doesn't have to leave, and Chuuya's still mad about that in all sorts of ways – everyone's cleaned up, well-rested, and ready to face a new… afternoon.

It looks like Kouyou's gotten her hands on Atsushi, because when he enters the room, he's dressed wildly different than his normal attempts at looking like a mythical wraith. He's dressed in a smart business-casual fit, with a button down shirt and pants that fit him, with a heathered grey knit cardigan that gives him an extra layer to the outside world. His hair has been tamed, just enough, slicked back on one side and pulled into a small ponytail in the back since the last time he'd had a haircut was clearly awhile ago.. Before Dazai died, Chuuya assumes.

It's a good look on him, even if he keeps shifting nervously, tugging at the sleeves of his cardigan until they cover his shirt cuffs.

Kyouka is there, too, which is fine; Chuuya hadn't explicitly appointed her as an Executive, but there's still an opening. He knows her loyalty isn't to him, but it's to Atsushi – and Atsushi's loyalty, it seems, is the Port Mafia, despite everything else, even if Atsushi still thinks Dazai is still dead for real.

Verlaine, Kouyou, Kyouka, Atsushi, and Ace. Privately, Chuuya notes that Ace is going to have to face a tragic and unexpected accident wherein his chamber in his cruise ship will unexpectedly explode with him as the only notable casualty. For now, it's fine.

"This meeting," Chuuya says, "is to welcome our two new executives."

Kyouka looks a little surprised that she's included; Kouyou looks pleased as anything. Atsushi flushes a little pink, and then shakes his head, minutely, trying to get ahold of himself. It's admirable, even if everyone can see straight through him.

Ace frowns, ever so slightly, but doesn't do more than that. He might not respect Chuuya, but he's not out and out suicidal. He's seen Chuuya clear an entire battlefield in a manner of minutes before, so the threat of Chuuya's ability far outweighs the fact that Chuuya is the Boss now.

Yeah, definitely going to meet a tragic fate in international waters soon.

-

Chuuya's phone rings with an unknown number displayed on it, which isn't so weird, given how many burner phones are involved in the everyday Port Mafia productions – but it's been different, these days, since he's the Boss; there shouldn't be a lot of unexpected phone calls from unknown numbers. It could be all sorts of dangerous options, but being the Boss hasn't exactly made Chuuya any less reckless, so he answers it, shoving the phone between his ear and shoulder as he rifles through Ace's financials.

"Hey," a voice says, deep and graveled and radiating calm. Chuuya places it instantly, but Oda still offers: "It's Oda."

"Hey," Chuuya replies, dragging it out a little. "How'd you get this number?"

"Couple geniuses in the Agency," Oda offers, just enough information to appease without giving too much away. It's fine; they're not exactly officially allies yet. "Wasn't too hard. Are you busy?"

"No," Chuuya says, which is a lie: he is going to find a way to destroy Ace in full view of the rest of the Mafia, to make an example out of him, and even after he's done going through all the documents he needs to meet with approximately eight other people to make sure people are doing their jobs. Kouyou has assured him that he'll have to monitor people less and less as time goes by and respect for him builds, but he's already tired of it, and tired of the casualties involved in the Boss changing. He's had to crack way too many skulls lately.

"I'd like to talk about a case that involves your group," Oda says, his words just vague enough that Chuuya admires his discretion. "Thought we could discuss it over lunch."

Chuuya is supposed to do several things today at lunch. Instead: "Sure," he says, and mentally clears his schedule.

-

It turns out that when you're the Boss, you can instantly clear your schedule and have your loyalists (namely, Atsushi, Kyouka, and Kouyou) carry out all of your other tasks. It also turns out that you can't "just drive yourself" to your lunch appointment on questionable territory.

"No disrespect, sir– Boss," the driver says, carefully, "but is this the place?"

Chuuya frowns at the building. It's a bit disheveled, but there's a sign advertising curry out front, so – yeah, it must be the right place.

"Kick rocks until I call," Chuuya says, instead, because the car will do absolutely nothing but draw attention in a neighborhood like this. It already is, if the stares of schoolkids are anything to go by. The driver straightens in a hurry, taking the car to go do slow laps around the area until he's needed – or park and play video games in a parking garage; Chuuya doesn't really care.

The bell of the restaurant jingles when he walks in, and Oda, sitting at the front counter, turns to offer him a nod. There's a man at the counter, offering a smile and a hearty greeting – the entire place smells like curry and more spice than Chuuya has had in a meal in awhile.

"Glad you could make it," Oda says, as Chuuya sits down.

Chuuya dressed down for the meeting, because nothing but Port Mafia blacks and designer wear was going to be out of place no matter where he met Oda, but he still manages to feel like he's been thrown off. Oda's just in his normal clothes – a cheap button down and his slacks, coat folded on the stool next to him – and Chuuya's shirt definitely still costs more than Oda's entire ensemble, without even mentioning that Chuuya is wearing leather gloves inside.

Chuuya does, at least, take his hat off; he might be the Boss, but he's not going to be fucking rude.

"It'd be impolite to refuse, after the help you gave us," Chuuya offers, diplomatically, because Kouyou's careful teaching can't go entirely to waste.

"I seem to remember you helped us out, too," Oda offers. The restaurant owner slides two glasses of beer in front of them – cheap glass, cheap beer; but it's clean and the beer is cold and rapidly followed by a plate of chicken skewers. "Figured you didn't want a heavy lunch."

Chuuya doesn't know how he feels about the fact that Oda can guess things that accurately, but he still grabs one of the skewers. It tastes a little nostalgic; it's not dissimilar to the skewers he'd eat back with the Sheep, when they'd rustle up enough change to get food from the food trucks. "You're not getting curry?"

"Already ate," Oda replies, easily, and Chuuya snorts. Chuuya doesn't ask what it was Oda wanted to talk about: he lets his gaze go a little wide, glancing at the restaurant owner, who holds his hands up.

"I'll be in the back," the owner says. "Don't forget to check in with Sakura before you leave; she wants to show off her new project."

Oda nods, and the owner vanishes. Oda's gaze travels to Chuuya, and Chuuya feels vaguely exposed: Oda has a way of looking through him in a way that implies he's categorizing everything without intending to use any of it.

"He's trustworthy," Oda offers. "So long as trouble doesn't get brought to his doorstep. He's been helping me with the kids."

"Right," Chuuya says, a little slowly. Adopts orphans, he remembers Dazai saying. The bizarre Dazai that offered information, that Chuuya can't help but trip over whenever he thinks about him and then thinks about the Dazai that belongs here. The Dazai that isn't his, no matter how easy it is to think about him like that. "They all stay here?"

"Nah," Oda says. "Only a couple still stay here. Not big fans of change. I've got a few other places they stay at – there's a lot of good people in the city, if you're willing to look."

Chuuya doesn't know if he believes that or not. He thinks Oda might just have a preternatural ability to draw good out of people, if Dazai's anything to go by.

"You want me to let you know when we find groups of 'em?" Chuuya asks. "I don't know what your criteria for adopting orphans here is or anything, but–"

"Sure," Oda says. "Your old boss is helping change more of the orphanages around. He said something about groundbreaking research – I didn't really understand most of it, but the kids at his place all looked happy."

Chuuya is quiet for a minute after that. He takes a sip of his beer, and then runs a hand through his hair with a ragged sort of sigh, because all of this shit is absolutely beyond him. Nothing makes sense about the reality he knows, and even less makes sense about the reality he doesn't know, and here he is, trapped in between the two with all sorts of forbidden knowledge that he never wanted.

It's very cool. He's very happy that he became the Boss and had to deal with the absolute garbage fire mess Dazai left him. Couldn't be more excited.

"So," Chuuya says, "what did you want to actually talk about?"

"There's a case we think involves your people," Oda says. Even with the assurance that the owner is trustworthy, they're both still letting some vague phrases do a lot of heavy lifting. "My boss figured since we're trying for an alliance, we should give you a heads up about it."

"Right," Chuuya says, slowly, dragging the word out. The way it's all phrased makes him immediately suspicious. He might not have been the Boss for long, but he was Dazai's unofficial overworked right hand before that – he can read between the lines. Some of the Port Mafia people are fucking up, and he needs to take care of it internally before the Agency has to get involved.

Fuck, he hopes it's Ace.

"Hit me," Chuuya says. He expects a file folder or a flash drive or something, but there's none of that: Oda just takes a chicken skewer, eats a bite, swallows, and then lays it out verbally.

"There's a group that's been harassing us off and on for a while. We're not worried about them normally, but they went dark recently," Oda says. "Then they started showing up carrying out suicide missions. It's all petty crime, so far, but each one ends with the criminal dying and no real intel into who is pulling the strings."

"And you think we're involved?" Chuuya hedges, carefully.

"Ranpo does," Oda says. "Said you'd want to take care of it yourself."

Chuuya carefully does not get his hopes up. "Are there any reports of the culprits wearing collars?"

"Sure are," Oda says. "There's never a body left behind, though."

"There wouldn't be," Chuuya says, internally elated. Time to murder Ace and sink an entire fucking ship. Oh, it's going to be such great stress relief. "Thanks. This actually helps me out."

Oda nods, seemingly satisfied. "In return, Boss said he wants to offer a formal alliance – nothing where we're stepping on each other's toes, but we've each got our specialties."

Which is to say that sometimes, extremely illegal means need to be used for the greater good of Yokohama. Chuuya is all about extremely illegal means. He's been feeling like bringing down a building lately.

"Sure," Chuuya says. "You want paperwork?"

"Verbal agreement," Oda says, instantly. "Figured you could stop by after you finish cleaning up on your end."

Chuuya nods. He falls quiet for the length of time it takes him to finish the last chicken skewer and the beer that's gone lukewarm, and then, carefully, he ventures: "Have you… seen Dazai, since everything was finished?"

Oda blinks, looking surprised for the first time in the conversation. "He's alive? Huh. Didn't figure that one."

"Yeah," Chuuya says, the word more of a heavy exhale than anything else. "He split pretty quick, though. He's still wounded, as far as I know. He's the shitty one from this world, so who the fuck knows what he's up to."

"If he's the one from this world," Oda says, "then it's no surprise I haven't seen him. We weren't friends."

Oda says it with such an easy finality that something in Chuuya's chest clenches. That other Dazai – Chuuya has been overlapping him too much. That Dazai was just a brief moment in time; he was practically a figment of their imagination. A shared hallucination.

The Dazai that's here now is the Dazai that's always been here. Chuuya knows that. Chuuya knows they're not friends. They've never been friends. None of them– ever–

Fuck if Chuuya doesn't wish they could have been more like the other ones, though.

"If anyone can find him, it'd be you," Oda offers, when Chuuya continues to stare at his empty beer cup.

Chuuya looks up at him. Blinks once. Processes a few things.

"You know," Chuuya says, "you're right."

He stands up, a little too quick, and slaps down a ten thousand yen note despite Oda's immediate protestations. "Thanks for lunch," Chuuya says, and peels out the door without calling his car back. He'll deal with that later.

-

Dazai isn't in any of the safe houses that Chuuya knows of, and he's not in any of the safe houses that Chuuya isn't supposed to know about, either. Chuuya runs through some camera footage and finds nothing – unsurprising – before he finally settles on a very short list of places Dazai might be. If Dazai is currently having half the existential identity crisis that Chuuya thinks he is, he'd go somewhere uncomfortable, familiar, far away from cameras, and far enough in the past that no one would think to look for him.

So Chuuya waltzes into Dazai's old shipping container through the door, corner store bag floating behind him.

Dazai looks at him. Dazai's got a gun out, safety off, but it isn't pointed directly at Chuuya. It's almost like it's there to reassure Chuuya that he would shoot, if it had been anyone else, even though Chuuya thinks he's the only one who would intentionally seek Dazai out here.

"You smell like shit," Chuuya says. He floats the corner store bag over and drops it next to Dazai: a peace offering of liquor and cheap food.

"That's the dump," Dazai offers. He takes out the alcohol and food items one by one, squinting at each one in the dim, flickering candlelight before he finally selects a chuhai that Chuuya had gotten from one of the vending machines on the way over.

He opens it and drains it in under thirty seconds. Chuuya's not entirely sure Dazai bothered to breathe. He tosses it behind him – Chuuya can't see in the dim light, but the clattering indicates that it's not the only rubbish behind him – and then opens another one. This one he doesn't immediately down.

"Have you just been laying here trying to die of alcohol poisoning?" Chuuya snaps, despite himself.

"No, that sounds awful," Dazai says, which answers Chuuya's question without really answering it. Dazai doesn't bother to look at Chuuya: he sips his second drink and stares, vacantly, behind Chuuya. "Why are you here?"

"To get you," Chuuya says. Dazai's gaze flickers back over to Chuuya – he still has one eye bandaged over, but it's the wrong one, wrapped around his right eye like they're fifteen again.

"Why?" Dazai asks, simply.

Chuuya steps over to Dazai. Dazai doesn't bother to move, but he at least looks at Chuuya, watches as Chuuya leans down to swipe his own can of chuhai from the bag. Might as well act like he's fifteen again, too. He tosses his coat and scarf down and drops his hat onto the pile, loosening his tie, and then sits across from Dazai and his stupid candle. It's not even scented, not that it would help.

There's a lot of things that Chuuya could say here. He's had a few hours to pick over his own words, try and analyze them, try and figure out how Dazai can turn them around and weaponize them.

He doesn't say any of those words.

"I'm gonna bring down Ace's boat while he's on it," Chuuya says, instead. "Thought it would be fun to use Corruption."

Dazai's eye widens for a fraction of a moment. Chuuya doesn't know how honest a reaction it really is. Dazai stares for a minute, and then stares back at the open door to the shipping container. His mouth is moving like he's reciting something, but Chuuya can't follow the words – he can make out Corruption and that's about it.

"Did you use it?" Dazai asks. He meets Chuuya's eyes, and elaborates: "When he was here?"

Dazai doesn't specify who he is.

"Yeah," Chuuya says, easily. "Turns out, they've got a whole partner thing going on where they trust each other. But you already knew that, right?"

Dazai is quiet. No: Dazai is silent. He drains his second chuhai and digs around in the bag for a minute, coming up with a bottle of sake with a much higher alcohol content and going to unscrew it.

"You're not him," Chuuya says. "But you could have been, if you– just give me the fucking bottle, Dazai."

Dazai, unable to gain the leverage necessary to get the lid off his sake when he's still covered in injuries that Chuuya doubts he's taking care of, frowns at the bottle. He offers it over to Chuuya after a second, and Chuuya cracks the seal without any difficulties.

Dazai glares at the bottle like it's personally offended him, but he drinks from it anyway.

"I could have been," Dazai agrees, in a tone that Chuuya is starting to recognize as if I'm enough of an asshole you'll just hate me and let me get out of this conversation. "I don't want to be."

"Good," Chuuya snaps. "I don't want you to be him, either."

Dazai looks – again – taken off guard, and then he lets out a startled little laugh. "He's a better person than I am. A better partner."

"Right, right," Chuuya says, flapping his hand. "I don't give a shit. I'm not that Chuuya, either. When you look at me, you're not thinking about the other one, are you?"

Dazai doesn't reply. He stares at Chuuya, bringing the sake to his lips and drinking without breathing. His gaze lowers: it sticks on Chuuya's neck.

"So," Chuuya says, "why do you think I'm always thinking about the other one when I look at you?"

"Chuuya is Chuuya," Dazai says, a little darkly. "It's different."

Chuuya raises an eyebrow. "So you don't want to help me kill Ace?"

"I didn't say that," Dazai says, which is honestly progress. He frowns. Takes another long sip of sake. His hands are still steadier than they should be. "You'd have to trust me to follow through."

"Yeah," Chuuya says. "I'm aware of that."

"You have no reason to trust me," Dazai says, and he finally sounds a little exasperated, like he's having to spell out all the reasons Chuuya should be avoiding him.

"So give me some," Chuuya says.

"What?"

"Give me some reasons to trust you," Chuuya says. "I'm the Boss, now, not you. You did all the shit you were trying to accomplish. Oda's safe and out there adopting more orphans, the Agency is doing great, Nakajima's an Executive now, Mori's apparently making groundbreaking research in child development. The world's doing great, and the only collateral damage was–"

"You," Dazai says.

"--us," Chuuya finishes, firmly.

"I knew what I was doing," Dazai says.

"Yeah, yeah, you're a real suicide maniac, out here self-sacrificing for a better world you don't get to see or whatever," Chuuya says. "The world isn't dissolving, by the way, so you don't get to kill yourself on the basis of the Book again."

"Well, Dostoyevsky–"

"Is a huge threat that'd we'd be better able to fight if we had someone who had way more information than he's meant to," Chuuya interrupts, and Dazai gets an extremely sour look on his face. The amount of sake he's putting into his body is impressive, all things considered.

"Look, I'm not forgiving you, I still hate you, I'm going to kill you twice over since last time you decided not to let me be the one to do it," Chuuya says, "but second chances and all that shit. Oda wants the tripartite agreement to take place in this world; you know him better than I do. He'd want you to go out there and try and undo all the horrendous shit you've done."

Dazai finishes the sake. He licks his lips.

"Be rational," Chuuya snaps, finally. "Weigh the odds and shit and tell me how working with me benefits you or something. Stop making me be the voice of reason."

"Chuuya has always been more reasonable than me," Dazai says, deceptively mildly. "This doesn't benefit me."

"Sure it does," Chuuya says, and when Dazai turns an unimpressed look on him – nose scrunched in distaste, eyebrows knit together – he looks so much like the other Dazai that Chuuya is struck, again, by the fact that what could have been isn't so different from what still can be. Chuuya probably just has to break Dazai's nose or a few ribs or something. "You want to see me sink Ace's boat. You hated him too."

There's a long pause where Dazai does not change his facial expression. Then, finally, his face scrunches up even more – before he finally relents. "I do want to see you sink Ace's boat. You'll need to get everyone else off, first."

"Great. I've got a plan for that," Chuuya says. "I'll fill you in later."

"You can fill me in now."

"You're drunk."

"I'm–" Dazai frowns. He holds his hand up and wiggles his own fingers, like he's making sure he isn't seeing double.

"It's not gonna work with your eye bandaged," Chuuya drawls.

Dazai – Dazai sulks at him. "It's always worked before. I'm fine. I'm barely drunk at all."

Dazai's bottle of sake would imply otherwise, so Chuuya shifts until he's not directly in the path of the candle and then leans over, holding three fingers up a foot away from Dazai's vision. "Tell me when they get blurry–"

Chuuya's intending to move back out of range, but before he can, Dazai whips his hand up, effortlessly closing around Chuuya's wrist without looking, gaze still locked on Chuuya. Chuuya's words go dead in his throat as he looks into Dazai's visible eye. It feels like falling into an abyss.

"I'm not drunk," Dazai says, quietly. He reeks of alcohol, but he reeks in general; Chuuya wants to drown him in the Yokohama bay until he smells better.

"You can be functional and drunk at the same time," Chuuya replies, quietly. "You're not proving anything I didn't already know."

"I actually," Dazai says, "didn't drink much, when I was the Boss."

It's –

Honest. It's too honest. Chuuya knew that, of course; he and Dazai outdrank each other when they were fifteen and stupid, and then suddenly Dazai was sober and Chuuya was doing everything on his own. Moreso, after the Flags, which he still hasn't forgiven Verlaine for, but Chuuya's got a laundry list of sins himself.

The other Dazai drank, though. The other one drank with a tolerance that showed that he was hardly a teetotal. This Dazai, though– had Chuuya ever seen him drink, once he moved up?

"Good," Chuuya says, his mouth moving on sheer autopilot, words spilling out before he can finish thinking them. "Makes you a cheap date."

Dazai's face shifts, just a little. Chuuya doesn't know what he should make of the facial expression, because he can't even quantify what exactly has changed. Dazai hasn't softened, exactly, but he hasn't hardened, either. He looks –

He looks familiar. Not like the other Dazai: like the Dazai that Chuuya had known.

Chuuya might control gravity, but he doesn't control anything when Dazai is touching him, so he has no excuse for the way he drifts in closer like Dazai is an event horizon. Dazai moves, too, the hand on Chuuya's wrist shifting until their fingers almost line up, until they're almost linked together, like they did an eternity ago fighting Rimbaud, and has Chuuya been Dazai's for that long? This whole time?

Was Dazai Chuuya's, and Chuuya didn't even see it?

Their fingers link, and Dazai leans in.

The candle goes out.

Dazai pauses; Chuuya can feel the warm shifting of air as Dazai breathes. Neither of them move. Chuuya can see it in his mind's eye; can see him leaning in to kiss Dazai, even when Dazai is filthy and they're surrounded by a literal dump. He can see it more clearly than he could when the candle was still burning.

Maybe that's why they don't do it. Dazai's hand falls, fingers slipping away from Chuuya's like they're nothing but the last drags of sand in an hourglass, whispering that the time is over, the time is up.

"I need more matches," Dazai says, a somewhat bizarre statement, but Chuuya only snorts.

"Yeah, you need a lot of things," Chuuya says. "Try not to kill your liver with all that alcohol. Eat the crab."

"I don't have a hotplate," Dazai says. "I'm going to drink by myself in the dark."

"Wow, yeah," Chuuya says, "I'd be depressed too if that was my night."

The moment is over, though, and there's nothing to be done for it. Chuuya's rational brain is kicking back on, notifying him of all the things he has to do and the fact that making out with Dazai in a disgusting heap of trash was something he wouldn't have done at fifteen much less now.

Chuuya stands up, stretching in the open space of the container. He can feel Dazai watching him, even in the gloom, the only light what passes in through the gaps in the door.

He tosses Dazai a pack of matches from his pocket as he grabs his clothes and throws them over his arm. "Use the candle and you can heat the crab up. Really. Slowly."

Dazai doesn't answer, but once Chuuya has exited and closed the door behind himself, he hears a match strike from inside.

-

The proximity alarm for Dazai's old office goes off to signal intrusion, and then immediately stops, as though it was an error. It does this a few more times, the alarm little more than a discrete signal on Chuuya's computer, completely silent. The beats vary; not quite Morse code, but a different code they'd devised years ago in taps and sounds and hand contact. What's the plan?

Chuuya exits his own office and travels to the one with Dazai's memorial in. And Dazai himself, it turns out: he's cleaned up, no bandages around his face at all, and the ones visible at his neck and wrists are fresh white. He's dressed like he's young again, with black slacks and a dark blue button down shirt that shoes more regard for fashion than Chuuya thinks Dazai has ever shown before, but then, Chuuya used to have to make sure Dazai just had seventeen versions of the same outfit to wear so he didn't need to think about it.

He doesn't have a coat or a tie.

He looks so much younger. No – that's not quite it. It's just that he'd looked so much older than he was, when he was the Boss.

Dazai leans against his old desk in a pose that should be casual but comes off distinctly awkward. "Hey," he offers, which does nothing to mitigate the awkwardness. "Hat rack."

"You haven't called me that in half a decade," Chuuya says, bewildered and endeared in equal parts, which is an extremely confusing set of feelings to feel about Dazai. "Suicide freak."

Dazai's lips twitch for a second, and then, looking like he's as confused about it as anyone else, he smiles. "If it's any consolation, I'm not in a rush to kill myself again."

"Wow. I take back what I said last night; the world must be disintegrating after all," Chuuya says, and the back and forth is easy. Easier than it should be.

"No," Dazai says, softly, "no, I think we're stuck with this one, now." He reaches out, grabbing the photo of himself that Chuuya had taken so many years ago. One of the only photos in existence of Dazai, as far as Chuuya's aware. "I remember when you took this."

"Yeah, I kicked your ass," Chuuya says, letting all the latent smugness of his fifteen year old self infuse his voice.

"Only once," Dazai says, sounding a little petulant. "I didn't think you'd use this to…"

"Remember you?" Chuuya says, when Dazai doesn't seem to be inclined to finish his sentence.

"I'd thought," Dazai says, articulating the words with an emphasis that says how heavily he's thought about them, "that I'd been successful in my bid to make sure no one would want to remember me."

Chuuya knew that's what Dazai has doing, of course, but hearing it laid out so plainly – it makes him furious. Chuuya tries to swallow the anger down, because the electric anger that courses through him is hardly befitting the Boss of the Port Mafia, but he rapidly decides fuck it, striding over and grabbing Dazai by the shirt.

"Well, you fucking failed," Chuuya snaps. "Even if you hadn't come back from the dead, I'd still remember you, and I'd still be pissed that you died."

"Because you didn't get to kill me?" Dazai offers, the excuse an easy way out. Chuuya rattles Dazai, and Dazai's fingertips twitch, reminding Chuuya that Dazai is still wounded, even if he's had a bit of time to heal. Broken bones and gunshot wounds take more than a week or two.

"Because we were partners once," Chuuya says, firmly, "and I never found out why that stopped."

"You know now," Dazai says, quietly.

"Yeah. Now all that's over," Chuuya says, "so–"

"You're just going to take me back? Chuuya, I knew you were a loyal dog, but that's–"

Chuuya pulls his fist back, preparing to punch Dazai, when Dazai's gaze snaps over Chuuya's head to the door at the same time that Chuuya hears a gasp and the distinct sound of shattering porcelain. Chuuya whips around, one hand still fisted in Dazai's shirt, to see Kouyou standing in the doorway, a tea tray laying in the carnage that was once a tea set on the ground, her fingers limp.

"Ane-san," Chuuya says, and Kouyou swiftly kicks the tea set further into the room and shuts the door behind her before anyone can come to investigate the noise. She recovers from her shock in record time, striding over to Dazai and grabbing him by the chin to stare at him. Chuuya, obligingly, lets go of Dazai.

"Ane-san," Dazai echoes, carefully, like he's not actually confident of where he stands in the situation.

"I saw your corpse," Kouyou says. "I identified you and picked your bones out of the ash."

"Oh, did you have a full ceremony?" Dazai asks. "That's sweet. Was it just you two?"

"Nakajima was there," Chuuya offers, meeting Dazai's airy tone before he focuses back on Kouyou. "He did die, Ane-san. It's just that some things… happened. It's why I was working with the Agency recently."

Kouyou does not release her grip on Dazai's chin, looking both unimpressed and skeptical.

"The short version," Dazai says, his voice artificially cheerful, "is that when I died, the composition of this world compensated by putting my soul in the wrong reality and dragging a different Dazai here, and when that was fixed, the side effect was that I'm alive again! It's very unfortunate."

Kouyou looks at him for a long moment, then finally drops her hand. "Are you intending to reveal that he's alive?"

"Not immediately," Chuuya says. "I'm going to bring down Ace. He's using the power vacuum to cause problems, so I'm going to obliterate him as evidence – then we can reintroduce Dazai and say this was all just a ploy to make sure the executives were actually loyal."

Kouyou looks approving, and Dazai looks floored.

"What?" Chuuya asks. "Did you think I hadn't given this thought?"

"I didn't give this thought," Dazai says, sounding a little petulant.

Kouyou looks pained. "For the moment," she says, "why don't we return to your actual office and get some tea?"

"Sure," Chuuya says. Dazai slinks out with Chuuya when there's no one watching, and Kouyou walks out after them, confidently distracting the guards with a story about dropping the tea set and won't someone clean it up for her, thank you.

Chuuya drops into his chair and spins as he waits for Kouyou to catch back up. Dazai stands at the side of his desk, frowning faintly.

"What?"

"You have a spinning chair?" Dazai asks. "You're the Boss. You shouldn't have a spinning chair."

"It's comfortable," Chuuya shoots back. "And I can be trusted not to spin myself constantly during important meetings."

Dazai frowns even more, because it's absolutely true that if he had a spinning chair he would spin during entirely too many important meetings and lose all respect he'd gained. Which was already on thin ice, given that he made so few public shows of support for the rest of the Port Mafia.

"Are you really going to say my death was faked to bring down Ace?" Dazai says.

"Yeah. I'm going to say you were angling for me to be the Boss all along, because you hated it, but we needed you transitionally," Chuuya says.

"...Chuuya, you've gotten good at politics," Dazai says, voice held in a way that makes it sound like it isn't a compliment at all.

"Yeah. I promoted Nakajima and Kyouka, by the way," Chuuya says. "So you're taking Ace's place."

Dazai looks well and truly flummoxed by this, but he's saved from having to formulate a response by Kouyou entering the room again. The tea tray this time has a sake set, instead, and Dazai visibly brightens. Kouyou watches this happen and glances at Chuuya, who just shrugs.

"When he's unemployed he acts like a teenager," Chuuya offers, helplessly.

"Which is why I should stay unemployed," Dazai offers. He steps over to the tea tray, but rocks back on his heels when Kouyou fits him with a scathing impression. She sets the tray down at Chuuya's meeting table, pulling up a chair. Chuuya's office lacks the minimalist Japanese aesthetic of Kouyou's, drifting towards a more sleek, industrial look, albeit with a large collection of vintage wood items. Chuuya can't go completely off-brand, after all. It does mean that Kouyou looks ever so slightly out of place sitting in the – also spinning – chair at the table, rather than perched in seiza at a chabudai.

"No. You don't shower enough when you're unemployed," Chuuya snaps, waspishly, taking the sake cup when Kouyou offers it.

Dazai takes the bottle before Kouyou can pour another cup, deftly reorganizing the hierarchy as he pours Kouyou a cup and then serves himself. Kouyou raises an eyebrow at this, but she doesn't comment; Chuuya knows that the action doesn't go unnoticed. Dazai would never have bothered with the slightest bit of etiquette previously.

"There wasn't running water," Dazai offers, once they've all had a sip. "You want me to go bathe in the ocean? I'd smell worse."

"Right, and you suddenly have no money with which to get a hotel room," Chuuya says. "Of course."

"Didn't you take over all my bank accounts?" Dazai offers.

"There's no way I found them all," Chuuya says. "Mori-san had to tell me about the ones under Tsushima."

"Oh, did you take those?" Dazai asks, his tone deceptively flat for the way his eyes are focused on Chuuya as he takes a surprisingly delicate sip of sake.

"No," Chuuya says. "They were doing fine on their own, interest wise, so I left them and the house alone."

"Hm," Dazai says.

Kouyou looks like she's only partially following the conversation, her brow knit slightly as she ventures: "You two seem to get along much better, now. Was it death that changed things?"

Dazai and Chuuya both look at her, then at each other.

"You could have told me that the past several years have been a ploy," Kouyou says, "and that you've secretly been friends this entire time–"

Dazai makes a weird noise at the word friend, and Kouyou ignores him entirely.

"--and I would believe you," she finishes. "You could tell me this was all a machination from our previous Leader, and I rather think it would sound more believable than what you're telling me now."

"Mori-san helped," Dazai offers.

"He," Kouyou starts, and then stops. "What?"

Chuuya inhales. "So, making Dazai's short story a little longer, he faked Mori-san's death…"

Kouyou looks at them both. Primly, she reaches up to massage her temples as she shotguns the entire cup of sake. "Start from the beginning," she orders, as she holds her cup out for Dazai to refill.

Chuuya does.

-

It's several hours of explanations and planning, and an accompanying several bottles of sake, before the three of them feel like they're all appropriately up to speed and no one will need any further information. Kouyou approves of the plan of murdering Ace – of course she does; Chuuya doesn't think there's a soul out there who finds that man even remotely tolerable – and there's an appropriate set of steps to delegate all of Ace's work. Chuuya thinks that Atsushi might be charismatic enough, now that he's not quite so traumatized, that he can run his own division of something like the Flags; there'll be several candidates to join the ranks, once he gets Ace's division taken down.

Kouyou leaves them at the end of the conversation, stating something about making sure Kyouka is also caught up to speed, which Chuuya thinks is fair; the executives he intends to keep are allowed to know about the current level of fuckery that they're all managing to pull off. Most of them already do, anyway.

"Chuuya," Dazai says, once they're alone and on the last cups of sake in the newest bottle.

"Mmm?" Chuuya feels pleasantly warm from the alcohol, and warmer still from the fact that he's managing to come into his own as the Boss. Managing a plan of this caliber that both Dazai and Kouyou approve of – it's a pretty nice feather in his cap, he thinks, even if feathers on hats is something he considers terribly gauche.

"I'm going to follow you home," Dazai offers. A statement, not a question: he doesn't ask if he's allowed.

"You could get a hotel," Chuuya returns. A suggestion, not a command.

"I could," Dazai agrees, and then, very cautiously: "We could play a video game."

Chuuya blinks, and then bursts into laughter. Dazai stares at him, then crosses his arms. He looks like a sulky toddler that Chuuya doubts he ever was.

"Are we really just reliving being fifteen again?" Chuuya asks.

"No," Dazai says, too quickly. "Not exactly. But–"

"But?"

"--I don't know how else to work with Chuuya," Dazai says, slowly, like the words are costing him a great deal. "But we did it… back then, right?"

"Yeah," Chuuya says, slowly. "We did."

"I'm not the Boss," Dazai says, carefully, "and I achieved everything I wanted to, and then I died."

The way he speaks indicates a degree of finality, like he still considers himself dead. Chuuya can only imagine what it must feel like, for Dazai, who spent so long forcing himself forward on a path he was only walking for the sake of other people, to finally be released from the world and then get dragged back, kicking and screaming.

"And now you're back," Chuuya says.

Dazai looks at Chuuya for a long moment, then looks away. "I know how to be the Boss, and I know how to be the Dazai from that other world, but neither of those are helpful here. There's only one other thing I know how to be."

"A pain in my ass?" Chuuya guesses, and Dazai shoots him a darkly offended look. "Is it honest?"

"Is it– what?" Dazai asks, caught off guard.

"Acting like we're partners and kids again," Chuuya says. "I don't want you to just pretend to be some other Dazai. Just be… whatever the hell you are."

Dazai looks faintly dumbstruck. "I don't know what that is."

"Stop me if I get something wrong," Chuuya drawls. "You like sake, but you'll drink just about any alcohol in a pinch. You lie to other people all the time, and sometimes you manage to convince yourself it's true. You pretend to be worse than you are–"

"--Stop–"

Chuuya ignores Dazai entirely, plowing on: "--because if other people believe you're that bad, then you are that bad, and no one will care when you shuffle off the mortal plane. That worked like shit, by the way."

"Stop," Dazai implores, again.

"You like video games and hate losing, you get bored easily, you never bother to get nice things for yourself because you don't feel like you deserve them or you feel like you're not human or–"

"Stop!" Dazai says, standing up. His hands accompany the exclamation, slamming down on the table hard enough to rattle the empty sake cups. There's no smile on his face. He looks completely blank.

Chuuya watches him for a long moment. Dazai is almost completely still: Chuuya can't even see him breathing, even though he must be. Dazai isn't looking at Chuuya. He's staring down at the table, gaze vacant and cold. He looks like the Boss again.

"You know who else isn't human?" Chuuya offers. Dazai's head slowly raises, and his gaze is like a barrage of needles layering themselves into Chuuya's skin. Surface level injuries, scars on scars on scars.

"You don't know any of that," Dazai says, his words flat and toneless.

"I had a long time to think about you when you died," Chuuya says, "and when you came back. A lot of things made more sense. The other guy – he was doing better than you."

Dazai remains silent. He keeps looking at Chuuya, like he might be able to tear Chuuya open and find out what makes him tick, like he might fling them both out of the window and let them slam into the concrete and go out the same way again.

"I want to use Corruption again," Chuuya says, "and I need you to do that. I need executives I can trust, too. Can I trust you?"

"You shouldn't."

"Not what I asked."

"You shouldn't," Dazai repeats.

"I should have taken this collar off years ago," Chuuya says. "I should have left the Port Mafia. I should have followed you when you disappeared and came back fucked up. I should have investigated deeper into what happened. I should have done a lot of things."

Dazai's gaze falls, staring at the collar, lips pressed into a thin line. Slowly, Dazai moves, stepping out from around the table and moving over. His gaze is a storm: Chuuya allows himself to be drawn into it, heedless of the danger. This needs to happen. Push past the event horizon and freefall into the black hole: subsumed, both of them, into the other.

When Dazai reaches out, fingers steady as they brush the leather of the collar, Chuuya waits one breath – two – and then tilts his head. The collar isn't the same one, of course; that was years ago, and Chuuya's been on the frontlines too often for it to have held up. He's still got it, in a drawer in his apartment. It's still the same message, though.

It's never changed, even when Chuuya didn't know what it was.

"Were you waiting?" Dazai asks, slowly. "For me?"

Chuuya thinks it over. "I guess I was," he says, eventually. "For you to convince me you had a good reason for changing into even more of an asshole, or for me to kill you if the reason sucked."

Dazai doesn't move for a long second. Frozen, in stasis. "And?"

"It'd have been a better reason if you'd told me from the beginning," Chuuya grouses, because he feels out of his depth in this situation. They're balancing on something, tipping backwards into freefall, and Chuuya doesn't know what's going to happen, so he hedges his bets on acting as normal as he can.

"Would you keep waiting for me?" Dazai asks, his voice quiet, a thready quality to it that fails to belie the urgency.

Chuuya frowns a little. He looks up at Dazai, still hovering over him like a statue, fingertips still achingly soft on Chuuya's neck. "Do I need to?" Chuuya asks, letting his hand raise up. Dazai is too far away, when Chuuya is sitting, but he moves closer like he's pulled, and Chuuya runs a thumb over Dazai's cheekbone that used to be hidden by bandages.

"No," Dazai says, reaching his other hand up to cover Chuuya's. It's tentative, at first, and then, when Chuuya separates his fingers, Dazai takes the opportunity to slide his through, holding on like he's going to fall forever if he doesn't.

Then: it's like Dazai has his strings cut entirely. He sinks down, slowly and then all at once, crumpling onto his knees and then folding his legs underneath him. Chuuya doesn't move, startled, as Dazai just rests his head on Chuuya's calf for a long moment, one hand still gripping Chuuya's and the other having drifted down from Chuuya's collar and hovering somewhere along his arm now.

"You still shouldn't trust me," Dazai murmurs, into Chuuya's pants.

"Too bad," Chuuya says, and acts on impulse, threading his fingers through Dazai's hair. "I never stopped."

Dazai makes a noise a little like a wheezing laugh.

He doesn't move for a long time.

-

Chuuya doesn't want to stay in the Port Mafia building to sleep, even though Dazai wheedles a little about not wanting to sneak out. In the end, Chuuya just finds an old hoodie of his and walks a ridiculously sulky Dazai out to his motorcycle.

Dazai pulls up short and stares at it.

"Gonna tell me it's too dangerous for your suicidal self?" Chuuya asks, tossing him a helmet.

Dazai frowns. "If you get into an accident, you won't be able to use your ability to save yourself."

And it's– nearly the same thing the other one had said. Phrased differently, sure, but it's –

"Us," Chuuya responds.

"What?"

"To save us," Chuuya says. "Not just myself."

Dazai looks bewildered.

"Anyway, I've never gotten into an accident I didn't have intentionally," Chuuya says, "so get on."

"You can't have an accident intentionally. That's the whole point of an accident. That they're accidental," Dazai grouses, but gets on the back of Chuuya's bike. Chuuya shifts the bike into gear, pauses, and then sighs.

"You have to actually hold on, idiot," Chuuya says, and grabs Dazai's hands from where they'd been hesitating on either side of the seat. He puts them around his waist, and Dazai seems absolutely frozen for a moment. Huh, Chuuya thinks. He guesses the other one really did never ride on Chuuya's bike.

Always nice to get one up on his alternate reality self, Chuuya thinks, and speeds off.

It only takes a second for Dazai's hold to go from light to clamped onto Chuuya's back like a koala.

"C'mon," Chuuya says, taking a corner a little faster than is strictly necessary, yelling so he can be heard over the wind. "It's fun!"

Dazai thunks his helmeted head against Chuuya's shoulderblade, any reply lost. When they finally pull in to park, Chuuya has to reach down again, carefully unlatching Dazai's hands like they're a seatbelt.

"No," Dazai says, once the helmet is off and his hair looks charmingly disheveled. "Not fun. Opposite of fun."

"It's like a rollercoaster," Chuuya says.

"I haven't been on one of those," Dazai says, frowning. Chuuya takes the helmet back and then stares at Dazai for a minute.

"Seriously?"

"I work a lot," Dazai says, in a huff. "The only fun things I ever did were with–"

Dazai doesn't finish the sentence. He just looks at Chuuya, and Chuuya fills in the blanks.

"Damn. That sucks," Chuuya offers, airily, heading inside. "Guess I've gotta take you to a theme park now."

"I will throw up," Dazai says, warningly.

"Rite of passage," Chuuya shoots back. "Shirase vomited on Yuan's shoes the first time we scrounged up enough money for tickets. He rode it two more times anyway."

Dazai looks at Chuuya like he's grown several extra heads. "How is that fun?"

"I'unno. How's it fun to get so drunk you vomit?" Chuuya shoots back.

"That's not fun. That's an unfortunate side effect of poisoning yourself," Dazai says, patiently, like this is very obvious. "It's just that the poisoning part is very fun, and sometimes people miscalculate. I would never waste alcohol by throwing it up."

Dazai pauses, and then: "Probably. Mostly."

"Probably?" Chuuya laughs, shooting Dazai a look.

"Well, my alcohol tolerance is different– stop laughing– now that I've– stop laughing, Chuuya–"

Chuuya does not stop laughing, and so Dazai tackles him right there in the entryway with a complete disregard for Chuuya's careful shoe organization system. Chuuya goes down still laughing, but it turns to a gasping wheeze when he takes an elbow to the gut. Dazai still weighs approximately nothing, so Chuuya just propels himself up and flips them over, sitting on top of Dazai, triumphant.

"You deserve to be laughed at," Chuuya tells him, imperiously.

"Uh… huh," Dazai says, faintly. It's suspiciously faint, actually, and Chuuya peers down at him in the dim light – Chuuya never leaves any lights on when he leaves, but –

"Are you bl–" Chuuya starts, and Dazai punches him in the stomach. Chuuya recoils slightly, and Dazai uses the opportunity to slither out from underneath Chuuya and clamber back to his feet. He gets two steps into the apartment when Chuuya manages to bellow: "Take your damn shoes off, slug!"

Dazai throws both shoes at Chuuya and misses both times.

-

Honestly, now that Chuuya has to confront things, he doesn't know Dazai didn't die years ago. He understands entirely why the other Chuuya had to take care of Dazai, because in a single night Dazai has insisted that he doesn't need dinner and then tried to use hand soap to wash his hair, so Chuuya had to make pasta with cheap canned crab and then also wash his damn hair for him, and now Dazai looks very smug sitting on Chuuya's bed in Chuuya's pyjamas.

"You don't get the bed to yourself," Chuuya says.

"It's Chuuya's bed," Dazai replies. He slithers down into it, regardless, and for a moment the blankets completely encompass him before his head pops back out. He looks very cozy.

"If you put your cold feet on me," Chuuya warns, getting under the blankets.

Dazai immediately puts his cold feet on Chuuya, and Chuuya smacks him with a pillow, several times, until Dazai is laughing and burrowing underneath his own pillows for safety.

Dazai is – laughing. Chuuya stops hitting him, standing there frozen with the pillow still in his hands, and Dazai peeks out from underneath his own pillow, a smile still on his lips.

"How did you ever fool anyone into taking you seriously as the Boss?" Chuuya demands, trying to put as much insult in his voice as possible to cover for the fact that it's kind of a genuine question.

"I avoided most people and made you very angry all the time," Dazai answers, innocently, as though this is obvious and he has done nothing wrong. Chuuya hits him again.

Dazai waits until Chuuya turns out the light to ask: "Do you really want me to stay in the Port Mafia?"

"Yeah," Chuuya says, instantly. "Why? Do you want to go to the Agency? The other one seemed pretty attached to doing good, or whatever."

"I think it's a little late for that," Dazai says. "I don't think they would take me even if I asked."

"Would you want them to?" Chuuya asks, carefully.

"...no," Dazai says, after a long moment. "I wouldn't mind helping with the alliance, though. They're different, but–"

"But they were still friends of the other one, and you remember it all," Chuuya finishes. "Right?"

Dazai's hand creeps down, again, intent on seeking out Chuuya's, and Chuuya lets him have it. If it makes him happy, then whatever; Chuuya's honestly just glad they're getting anywhere with anything in a way that doesn't involve murder or broken bones. Many. Many broken bones. Dazai still has a few, after all.

"They're happy," Dazai says, quietly. "I'd like to see it."

Chuuya's quiet for a long time, because there's an anger, there, that Dazai cares more about their happiness than he ever did about Chuuya's– but that's not quite right, either, is it? Dazai is held together by all of his own negative thoughts, desperately trying to be hated as much as he hates himself. In Dazai's mind, making Chuuya hate him probably was what Dazai thought would hurt Chuuya the least.

"People here are happy, too. Nakajima. Gin's coming back," Chuuya offers.

"Oh, no," Dazai says, softly and very suddenly.

"What?"

"I'm going to have to face Atsushi-kun," Dazai says, sounding very much like he's in despair.

"Yeah. And?"

"He's not like you, Chuuya! He won't just punch me and call it even!"

"You'll recall," Chuuya says, more than a little annoyed, "that I actually did not punch you to call it even."

"Does that mean Chuuya hasn't gotten his revenge yet?"

Chuuya grins, even though Dazai can't see it in the darkness. "Maybe I'll just keep getting revenge, over and over."

Dazai emits a quiet and long-drawn out nooo of despair in response to this. It's childish and stupid and it's a side of Dazai he never thought he'd see again.

"You know I thought you'd just been pretending, when we were kids?" Chuuya says. Dazai doesn't reply, so Chuuya continues. "After you changed, I figured… that was the real you, and the you that I'd met at fifteen – that was you faking, for whatever reason. It turns out you really are a childish dumbass."

"Takes one to know one," Dazai replies, which does him no favors in the maturity department, but he tightens his grip on Chuuya's hand. "I wanted you to think that. I wanted… me to think that, too."

"Easier to do everything if you were someone else?" Chuuya guesses. "That's why you kept Mori-san's coat, huh?"

"He told me to just pretend to be what other people thought he was," Dazai says, which is an incredibly convoluted piece of advice so of course that's the one that Dazai followed. "Everything he did was for the sake of the city… No one cared about that, though."

"I did," Chuuya says, quietly. It's why it had hurt so much, when he'd thought Dazai had killed Mori. Mori, who had been a real leader, who had been trying to keep Yokohama safe by utilizing the underworld – and then Dazai, who barely kept the status quo the entire time he was in charge.

"That's why you'll be a good Boss," Dazai says. "You always care."

"That's why you'll make a good executive for me," Chuuya shoots back. "You'll make sure I don't get too caught up in caring."

"You already care too much," Dazai replies.

"About things in general? Maybe," Chuuya says. "About you? No."

Dazai is quiet for a long moment. "It shouldn't be this easy."

Chuuya isn't sure what he's talking about, exactly, but that doesn't particularly matter; Chuuya understands the broad strokes well enough, after spending a decent amount of time with the other Dazai and lining up all the differences and similarities. "I think it was always meant to be this easy. You just make things hard for no reason."

Dazai frowns loudly enough that Chuuya knows he's frowning even if he can't see, and then Dazai huffs and burrows his way underneath Chuuya's shoulder, so Chuuya rolls over and Dazai wraps around him entirely, like a person-shaped blanket.

"Fine," Dazai says.

"Goodnight, bandage freak," Chuuya offers.

"Goodnight, tiny slug."

"Most slugs are small."

"Shut up."

-

Dazai sleeps, which surprises Chuuya. It surprises him more when Chuuya wakes up first, to Dazai twisting in bed, brow furrowed. His mouth keeps opening, but there's no sound; Chuuya wonders what he must be saying in the dream.

"Hey," Chuuya says. Dazai does not react, which is par for the course, but when Chuuya moves to get out of bed, Dazai's grip on Chuuya's hand – he hadn't even noticed – slips out and Dazai jerks awake, sitting bolt upright. Dazai is reaching for a weapon that isn't underneath his pillow, eyes taking in the room in a burst of action before he finally looks at Chuuya.

"You're at my place," Chuuya says.

"Oh." Dazai's voice is a little faint, and he looks back around, as if to make sure that it is, in fact, the same place he fell asleep in. Some tension slips out of his frame, and he runs a hand through his hair. "You don't keep weapons near you at night?"

"Dazai," Chuuya says, "I am the weapon."

There's not a whole lot that could catch Chuuya so completely off guard that he wouldn't be able to react with his ability before it could do him any significant damage. Well, unless Dazai was involved. Dazai is the only person Chuuya's ever even heard of whose power is negation.

In fairness, Chuuya is the only person he's ever heard of who houses a god, so they make a completely normal pair.

"Coffee," Dazai says, sounding a little bland. It's a command, and Chuuya considers getting annoyed about it before he lets it slide. He goes out into the kitchen to make coffee, as requested, and watches the water drift through the grounds idly. It gives Dazai a few minutes to collect himself from whatever he was dreaming about. Dazai eventually drifts out, peering at the coffee.

"Chuuya, why is everything you have so fancy?"

"It's just a pourover," Chuuya says. "They're not even expensive. My first one was like five hundred yen from a department store."

"Time consuming," Dazai says, critically.

"It tastes better," Chuuya shoots back. "Some of us care about quality because we don't drown it in sugar."

Dazai takes the cup of black coffee Chuuya offers him, sniffs it, frowns as deeply as possible, and then immediately shuffles over to add both sugar and cream until it's considerably lighter. Chuuya sips his own coffee, black, because putting cream in genuine Kona is akin to chugging a Domaine d'Auvenay just to get wasted, but he's not picking that fight.

Dazai sits down in one of Chuuya's kitchen chairs and drinks his coffee. He sips it, crinkles his nose a little, and then chugs half the cup in one go, and Chuuya sighs internally.

"Do you always sleep that tense?" Chuuya asks.

Dazai looks at him, gaze carefully blank, clearly deliberating on what he should tell Chuuya and how much. His gaze drifts away, in the way that it always does when he's thinking too abstractly, and Chuuya leans against the kitchen counter.

"No," Dazai says. "It's usually worse. I don't like sleeping."

"...huh," Chuuya says, because that wasn't what he expected. Chuuya doesn't dream – never has, never will, unless something manages to yank Arahabaki out of him, he figures – but he can only imagine how bad Dazai's subconscious must be, with two different lifetimes of trauma stacked on top of each other. "I guess you never slept much as the Boss."

"I work very efficiently regardless of my sleep schedule," Dazai says, blandly.

"You slept better with me?" Chuuya asks.

Dazai looks at him almost quizzically. "Yes."

"Cool. Then just sleep here a couple times a week," Chuuya says. "You might work efficiently on bad sleep, but you'll probably work even better if you're actually rested."

Dazai frowns. "Stay here regularly?"

"Well, I'm not staying over at your place," Chuuya offers. "You don't even have a full set of dishes."

Dazai thinks about this. He drinks his coffee, glancing at Chuuya and then away again. Chuuya can't guess what exactly is going through his head, so he doesn't try.

"...because we're partners?" Dazai finally says, venturing the words very carefully, like he's a child giving an answer he doesn't have confidence in to an overbearing teacher.

Chuuya carefully does not react to Dazai using the word, because he knows it would give too much away. It's like a weight is lifted, though – partners, and as simple as that.

"Yeah," Chuuya says. "Because we're partners." A beat, and then: "And because I'm your boss now."

"Ew," Dazai says. "I'm going to resign."

"Denied."

"You can't deny a resignation."

"I can do what I want," Chuuya says, "because I'm the Boss of the Port Mafia."

The argument this inspires does not get resolved before they have to leave.

-

The plan to destroy Ace goes off without a hitch, which is reassuring to Chuuya; it turns out that he and Dazai can work together. They bicker like kids again, and Dazai eggs Chuuya on before he uses Corruption, but he stays in it just long enough that his body is only sort of destroyed from the inside out.

Ace's ship sinks: Chuuya is cemented as horrendously powerful for being able to use gravity bombs, and no one is any the wiser about his recovery time. While it's not the most desirable thing for his ability to be publicized, it does help, and no one knows about the fine line between his ability and Corruption; no one knows how vital it was that Dazai be present.

There's an enterprising enough kid on the boat that Chuuya puts in charge of overseeing all of Ace's old operations, then he gives an even enough deal to the rest: you can stay with the Mafia, or you can leave Yokohama with money to relocate.

Most of them stay. Murdering Ace does a lot for loyalty.

Dazai looks at Chuuya oddly, after all of it, though – Chuuya spends exactly one day resting and Dazai uses that one day to manage to dirty every single dish in Chuuya's kitchen heating up canned soup. Chuuya does not eat the soup. He orders in, and Dazai makes sniping comments and sits on the floor next to the couch while Chuuya sprawls out on it, and they watch an old detective movie and critique how obvious it is before it happens. They both solve it in the first half hour.

Then:

They go to the Agency.

It's interesting, now that Chuuya can see Dazai's nervous tics. He'd never been around Dazai long enough to see them, when Dazai was the Boss, and when Dazai was the Boss he'd so effectively killed all his emotions Chuuya doubts he ever actually felt truly nervous. Now, though, Dazai is curving his fingers, rubbing against the bandages at his palm just enough to make the edges fray out.

"It's fine," Chuuya says. "I called first. They know you're coming. They also know the whole deal. The other you drew shit on the glasses guy's vest and everything."

"Oh, I would do that," Dazai says, as if agreeing with the choices his other self had made.

Chuuya walks into the Agency first. He's dressed down, of course; he doesn't need all the protective layers of the Boss' clothing to signify himself, and he wants to be recognizable from a distance, so he's trimmed down to his regular vest, hat, and collar look – with his hair he should be easy enough to spot going to the Agency, sending exactly the right signals to all the right people.

"Hey," Chuuya offers, when he walks in, and the Agency goes dead silent.

"Hi," Atsushi offers, cheerfully. He's peering over at something Akutagawa is writing, a red pen in his hand while Akutagawa scowls at the paperwork like it's personally offended him. Akutagawa's head whips around when Chuuya walks in, and then his gaze settles, furious but unmoving, on Dazai.

"Hey," Oda offers. He stands up, letting his hand fall briefly – placatingly – on Akutagawa's head before he moves over to Chuuya and Dazai. "Glad you could make it."

Dazai looks like he can't decide what facial expression he should be making.

"You look like you're having a stroke," Chuuya informs him.

"I might be. What does a stroke feel like?" Dazai says.

"I don't know. I've never had one," Chuuya replies.

"You're not having a stroke," Yosano offers, from where she's perched on Ranpo's desk, and Ranpo nods as if to back this sentiment up.

"Shachou's waiting," Ranpo informs them from around a lollipop that he neglects to take out of his mouth, which makes the worlds only half intelligible.

"Sure. Try not to make this guy cry," Chuuya says, gesturing at Dazai. Dazai's gaze whips over to Chuuya as Chuuya heads into Fukuzawa's office, and the clear betrayal in Dazai's expression is kind of funny, given that Chuuya is doing absolutely nothing wrong when it's taken into context.

Dazai still looks like a fish out of water as Kunikida walks up to him and starts talking about protocol and rules and law-abiding behavior and schedules.

-

Atsushi catches a ride back with them, and Dazai remains stoic the entire way to the Port Mafia and then the entire way to Chuuya's place. Chuuya pours them both a glass of wine, and then Chuuya leans against his counter again, watching the way Dazai drinks the wine with absolutely no histrionics or reactions, which is highly unusual.

Finally, Dazai seems to notice what he's drinking and where he is. He frowns at the wine glass for a minute, setting it aside, and then looks at Chuuya.

"I've committed even more crimes than the one that joined the Agency," Dazai says, slowly. "I did everything for selfish reasons, and I didn't care whose life I ruined along the way."

Chuuya hums, because that's not inaccurate.

"So why – all of you – just – they didn't even know him," Dazai says, sounding a little helpless. "There's no reason that you should all just – accept things."

"Dazai, I'm the new Boss of the Port Mafia," Chuuya says, "who just exploded a ship with people still on it. Mori-san was the Boss before either of us, and he was in the military, so he's probably got a body count way higher than either of us do."

"Yes," Dazai says, sounding impatient, like he's waiting for Chuuya to get to the point.

"That doesn't mean we can't still do good things when we want to," Chuuya says.

Dazai frowns very deeply at this. He slowly tilts the wine glass in a circle, looking into the liquid. He stops, the glass reflecting his face for a brief moment before he sets it aside.

"It shouldn't be this easy," Dazai says, not for the first time.

Chuuya considers this. Nods. Sets down his wine glass. "C'mere."

Dazai cautiously stands up and moves over to Chuuya, who promptly punches him in the side. He avoids any of the wounds he knows Dazai has sustained recently, but Dazai still lets out a gratifying oof and doubles over. Dazai's head thunks against Chuuya's shoulder, and Dazai shakes for a moment, soundlessly laughing as he tries to get the breath knocked back into him.

"How about," Chuuya says, "whenever you're feeling too fucked up about it, I just punch you? I've got a lot of beating you up backed up from the past few years."

"Gloves on?" Dazai asks.

"I'm not trying to kill you," Chuuya says, and Dazai's shoulders shake again.

"I'm always feeling fucked up," Dazai offers, quietly. He straightens again, but keeps an arm wrapped around his midsection. "That's kind of my thing, you know."

"Yeah, well, you can't die on me again, so," Chuuya says.

Dazai looks like he's trying to find the words for something, and then finally: "Did you really grieve for me?"

"Yeah," Chuuya says, honest and easy, with a shrug of the shoulder. "I did. For a lot of reasons."

Dazai considers this for a long moment. "Did you grieve – him? When it was me that came back?"

"No," Chuuya says, just as easily. "I know you think he's better, or whatever, but you're my Dazai. You're the one that belongs here."

"Your Dazai," Dazai echoes. He reaches up; touches Chuuya's collar again, consideringly. "My Chuuya."

"Yeah. That's how it works," Chuuya says.

Dazai nods, faintly, and then – quick enough that it seems like he's doing it without thinking it through all the way – he leans in, pressing his lips against Chuuya's.

Fucking finally, Chuuya thinks, automatically moving closer, letting the kiss deepen. It's an awkward angle and Dazai's clearly out of practice – honestly, Chuuya is too – but that doesn't matter when they've both been dancing around this for so long.

"Okay," Dazai says, finally. "But can you punch me in the hand so I don't have to do any paperwork?"

"Absolutely not," Chuuya says, and thinks that the other Dazai would be glad to know that they're figuring things out.

Notes:

written for the soukoku reverse big bang as a collab with the lovely caelang, who you can find on tumblr here! i had SO much fun writing this and the illustration for it is simply SO gorgeous. this will be a total of three chapters (one of the main story, then an epilogue for both sides of the story), so here's the first (lengthy) installment!

i hope you all enjoy this art & fic as much as we enjoyed making it!

you can find me on blusky or tumblr, crying about bungou.