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Oda noticed the intrusion before he even crossed the threshold.
There was a presence in his apartment where there should not have been one. A second rhythm in the room. A familiar wrongness. He stopped with one foot still inside the doorway, hand on the doorframe, attention already fixed toward the dark living room before his eyes caught up. The presence felt heavy rather than alert, slumped into the space instead of threaded through it.
The recognition came fully formed, without surprise or alarm. Oda had learned a long time ago to trust that instinct—the quiet certainty that settled before thought. He closed the door softly behind him and stood still for a moment, listening, letting the shape of the room resolve around that knowledge. There was no attempt at concealment. No deliberate positioning. That alone said enough. He set his bag down and stepped forward.
Dazai was sprawled face-down across the couch, half twisted, one arm folded under his chest and the other hanging toward the floor. His shoes were still on. His coat was still on, collar bunched awkwardly under his cheek. The position was all wrong—too careless, too unfinished. It was the posture of someone who hadn’t chosen to lie down so much as failed to remain upright, gravity having made the decision for him. Cumulative failure rather than collapse—too many hours stacked badly, too many small negotiations with the body lost one by one.
Oda took in the details in a single glance, the way he always did—angle of limbs, distribution of weight, the unnatural stillness of someone cursed to never be still unless forced. The stillness was the tell. Dazai’s body, when awake, was restless even at rest; when it suffocated itself like this, it meant nothing was left to spend.
He didn’t say Dazai’s name. There was no need to announce himself. If Dazai was awake, he would already know. If he wasn’t—
Oda stepped closer. The first thing he checked was breathing. Subtle, shallow rise and fall, almost lost against the couch cushions. Too soft and even to be feigned. Too unguarded. The kind of breathing that only happened when vigilance had finally dropped out of the equation, and so for Dazai, never happened.
Sleeping.
Dazai sleeping through a door opening, through footsteps, through another presence entering the room—it wasn’t normal. Dazai didn’t sleep like this. Not in the open. Not without ceremony or commentary or at least the pretense of boredom. If he was unconscious enough to collapse face-down and defenseless on Oda’s couch, then something had gone wrong long before he arrived.
Oda had seen Dazai exhausted before, stretched thin and running on something sharp and unsustainable, but this was different. This was the kind of fatigue that hollowed a body out from the inside and left nothing in reserve. Not the adrenaline crash after violence. Not the strategic stillness of feigned rest. This was attrition—the slow kind that didn’t announce itself until the system simply stopped compensating.
Gaze moving deliberately, Oda catalogued without judgment. There was dried blood along the edge of Dazai’s sleeve, darkened to a rusty brown. More on the hem of the coat. The side of his neck, the shell of his ear. It wasn’t fresh. Whatever had happened had already finished happening. Oda couldn’t tell how much of it belonged to Dazai and how much belonged to someone else, and neither did he try to guess. In the end, it wouldn’t change anything.
Blood was a familiar language. Dried blood even more so—evidence of a story already concluded, consequences already absorbed. If it needed addressing, it would still be there when Dazai woke.
Dazai’s hair was mussed flat on one side, his face turned just enough that Oda could see the slackness around his mouth. Exhaustion, laid bare in a way Dazai rarely allowed. The usual sharpness was gone, stripped away not by choice but by necessity. There was no performance here, no angle to read between the lines. Just a body that had reached its limit and stopped negotiating.
He looked younger like this, in the way children looked when they fell asleep somewhere they weren’t meant to, bodies giving up before pride did. Oda had seen that look in territory wars, in safehouses, in the aftermath of jobs that went on too long. It wasn’t innocence. It was depletion.
With a quiet exhale, Oda adjusted his stance so the floor wouldn’t creak. The sound felt too loud in the stillness anyway, as if even that small disturbance might crack something fragile and temporary. He turned back toward the kitchen and went about his routine as if finding a collapsed teenaged mafia executive on his couch was only a minor deviation.
He filled the kettle. He washed his hands. He moved with care, mindful of sound, but he didn’t rush. Routine had always been Oda’s way of anchoring a space, of letting time continue even when something inside it had stalled. The kettle clicked softly against the stove. Water ran, then stopped. Each action deliberate, unhurried, chosen because it didn’t require commentary.
If Dazai had come here and fallen asleep without even holding a gun, then whatever had kept him awake before had finally lost. And because it was as rare and fleeting as the light in that void-like eye of his, Oda was willing to let that victory stand.
He took his coat off in the entryway and hung it where it always went. The fabric brushed softly against the wall, the sound lingering longer than it should’ve in the dense quiet. Dazai didn’t stir. He lay exactly as he had fallen, face turned into the cushion, body slack in a way that looked less like rest and more like abandonment. There was no twitch of fingers, no shift of weight, no subconscious correction for discomfort, even feigned. Even the shallow rise and fall of his spine remained unchanged, steady and indifferent.
It struck Oda, distantly, that Dazai looked more like a body than a person asleep. Like something set down and forgotten. A weight without intention.
Oda washed his hands at the sink. He dried them slowly, listening.
Still nothing.
Dazai reacted eerily attuned to sound even in sleep. A change in someone’s breathing. A twitch. A tightening of shoulders. Barely a wisp of movement, and Dazai would blink awake, gaze already trained on the culprit of the sound. Now, Dazai did not. The exhaustion had stripped him down to something purely mechanical, respiration continuing because it had to, not because the mind was participating.
If Dazai had slept here, it was because he had reached the point where location no longer had the privilege to matter. That was Oda’s internal metric for these things. He had learned it long before Dazai entered his life: when someone stopped choosing where they rested, it meant they had already spent whatever margin of safety they’d been carrying. The body made the call. The rest was logistics.
The kettle began to warm. Oda leaned against the counter and let the time pass. He didn’t look at the couch for a moment, then did, checking again for movement. There was none.
Dazai’s breathing hadn’t changed pace. His posture hadn’t shifted. The coat still pulled across his shoulders, fabric creased where it dug into the couch. It couldn’t have been comfortable. It never seem to matter.
Oda thought, briefly, of a stray black cat with a nicked ear he used to see near one of the old safehouses when he’d been younger himself—half-feral, clever, always gone before anyone got too close. It would disappear for weeks at a time and then, without warning, turn up asleep in the warmest place it could find, limbs slack, guard completely down. Not because it trusted the place, but because it couldn’t stay awake any longer.
The kettle clicked as it reached temperature. Oda poured the water, steam curling briefly through the air before dissipating. The sound was sharp in the stillness, louder than it had any right to be. Oda carried the cup to the table and set it down. He sat, then stood again, adjusting his chair so it wouldn’t scrape. He glanced at the clock without really registering the time. It didn’t matter how late it was. What mattered was how long Dazai had been awake before now, and there was never any reliable way to measure that.
He found himself watching the rise and fall of Dazai’s spine again, slower than before, or perhaps just more noticeable now that everything else had gone quiet. The exhaustion had rearranged him—taken the usual sharpness out of his lanky limbs, softened the line of his spine. Even unconscious, Dazai usually held himself with tension, like a coiled wire waiting to spring.
There was none of that here.
Oda finished his tea. The cup cooled gradually beneath his hands. When he finally stood and moved back toward the couch, he did so with the same deliberate slowness as before, attention fixed on Dazai’s form for any sign of change. Still there was nothing.
Only a boy-shaped absence, collapsed into the furniture, sleeping with the absolute conviction of someone who had nothing left to give consciousness.
Oda had just reached the edge of the couch when he heard a low, muffled noise pressed into the cushion, barely more than breath shaped by obstruction. A small, strained exhale that caught halfway out, like something had tugged uncomfortably at the edge of a dream and failed to surface.
Oda froze.
Dazai’s fingers flexed once against the upholstery, slow and clumsy, the motion lacking any of the precision he usually carried even in sleep. Half-obscured by bandages and his own sleep-disheveled hair, Dazai’s face shifted, cheek dragging faintly along the fabric as he rubbed his nose against the cushion with a distracted, half-conscious insistence—an unconscious attempt to burrow, to block out sensation rather than respond to it.
The sound came again, softer this time. Thinner. A breath that hitched and dissolved before it could become anything coherent.
It was… wrong. Deeply incongruent.
Dazai didn’t make noise like that. Even when injured. Even when drugged. Even when pretending to be weaker than he was. The mafia poster child version of him was loud by choice—complaints sharpened into jokes, pain turned performative, distress worn like a costume he could take off at will. The spectral image of the Black Wraith was something darker entirely.
This was neither.
This was small. Unpolished. The kind of sound people made before they learned how to weaponize it. Oda watched as Dazai’s brow furrowed faintly in something close to irritation—an animal response to discomfort that didn’t rise high enough to trigger awareness. His breathing stuttered once, then settled again, slower than before.
Still asleep.
Deeply so.
Oda felt the absence of vigilance more sharply now. Dazai hadn’t reacted to the proximity, hadn’t startled at the shift in air, hadn’t recalibrated himself even unconsciously. The fatigue had him pinned in place, stripped of the instincts that usually kept him half-awake no matter how long he had gone without rest.
For a moment, Oda found himself seeing not the youngest executive in history of the Port Mafia, not the lethal strategist, not the suicidal liability everyone else tiptoed around—but the shape underneath all of that. Sixteen years old and worn down past the point where performance could hold. Too tired to be clever. Too tired to be dangerous. Too tired to remember to be anything other than what he was when no one was looking. Not even himself.
The thought sat heavy and unresolved. Oda didn’t like it, exactly.
Dazai’s face went slack again, the brief tension draining out of him as if whatever had surfaced receded back under. His nose pressed into the cushion once more, then stilled, and the quiet returned, deeper than before. Oda remained where he was for a few seconds longer, watching for any sign that the sound had been the edge of waking, but there was only that same steady, indifferent breathing. That same body-shaped stillness. He stood there for another moment, watching the couch, then made the decision without ceremony.
The shoes had to come off.
Oda knelt beside the couch, careful about where his weight went, one knee on the floor, the other braced. Up close, the exhaustion was even more apparent. Dazai’s legs were heavy where they rested against the cushions, unresponsive to gravity in a way that suggested he hadn’t shifted them since he collapsed. The leather of his shoes was scuffed and dull, laces loosened unevenly like they’d been tugged at once and then abandoned. Oda reached out and wrapped his fingers around the heel of one shoe and tugged, gently.
The reaction was immediate and violent.
Dazai jolted awake with a sharp, startled intake of breath, whole body seizing at once as if yanked out of freefall. His hand came up reflexively, fingers clawing at the couch cushion, shoulders tensing hard enough to jolt his coat further out of place.
Oda froze, hand still at Dazai’s ankle, pressure unchanged. Dazai’s eye was open now—wide, unfocused for a split second, pupil blown as he dragged in another breath like he’d surfaced somewhere he hadn’t meant to be. His gaze skidded around the room, uncharacteristically disoriented, searching for threat before it landed on Oda.
Recognition clicked.
But it wasn’t relief. Not ease. Just immediate, incandescent embarrassment.
Dazai made a small, meek sound in the back of his throat—cut off almost as soon as it escaped—and turned his face back into the couch with abrupt determination, pressing his forehead into the cushion as if he could push himself out of sight by force of will alone.
“—Don’t,” he muttered, voice muffled and rough, the word barely audible and not directed at anything in particular. His body didn’t follow the protest. He stayed where he was, limbs sluggish, movements delayed by a half-second too long, like the connection between intention and muscle had frayed. Even his breathing lagged behind the adrenaline, shallow and uneven.
Oda removed his hand from the shoe and straightened slightly, giving Dazai space without standing up. “I was taking your shoes off,” he said.
Dazai’s fingers curled into the fabric of the couch, knuckles pale, then loosened again. He rubbed his nose against the cushion, the movement small and almost automatic, before going still again. “…I know,” he said finally, voice still thick with sleep. “I just—”
The sentence didn’t finish. Dazai went quiet instead, face still buried, narrow shoulders rising and falling in that same sluggish rhythm. Whatever instinct had dragged him awake seemed to falter halfway through its follow-through, leaving him caught between vigilance and collapse.
Oda watched him for a moment longer. “You’re barely awake,” he said.
Dazai made a sound that might have been agreement, or might have been resignation. His grip on the couch tightened once more, then loosened again, like he was deciding whether staying awake was worth the effort.
Oda shifted his weight back onto his heel.“I’ll finish,” he added, already reaching again for the shoe.
Dazai didn’t interfere this time. He stayed folded into the couch, face only now half-hidden in the cushion, eye open but unfocused as Oda worked. His legs went slack as soon as the weight was gone, knees drawing up toward his chest without instruction, a defensive curl that happened before thought caught up to it.
When Oda straightened, shoes in hand, Dazai rolled onto his side with a faint rustle of fabric. The coat swallowed him as he moved, collar riding up to his chin, sleeves bunching around his shoulders. He looked absurdly overdressed for sleep and yet unwilling—or unable—to fix it. He watched Oda with bleary concentration, not tracking him so much as keeping him in view, gaze heavy-lidded and glassy, blinking slow enough that Oda wondered if he might drop off again mid-blink. There was no smirk. No commentary. Just that dull, doe-eyed attention that came from being too exhausted to decide what expression to wear.
Oda carried the shoes to the entryway and set them neatly in the genkan, toes aligned the way he always did. When he turned back, Dazai was still watching him, chin tucked down into the coat, gaze following with mild effort.
For a moment, Oda found himself wondering where Dazai had been before this, another entry in the mental outline of unanswered questions. He could picture the general shape of it well enough: long hours, endless responsibilities, bad decisions, things that bled and didn’t get cleaned up right away.
He didn’t ask.
If he asked, Dazai would lie. Or joke. Or give him something true in a way that avoided the point entirely. And tonight, Oda wasn’t interested in pulling on that thread.
“You should go back to sleep,” he said instead.
Dazai’s cheeks flushed immediately, color rising sharp and unguarded. He scowled faintly, the expression undercut by the way his eyes kept slipping half-closed.
“I can’t,” he muttered. “Not now.”
Oda waited.
“…You’re watching,” Dazai added, grumpier, like that explained everything.
Oda blinked. “I’ve been watching you for fifteen minutes.”
The silence that followed was brief but profound. Dazai stared at him, processing sluggishly, then made a small, offended sound and turned his face back into the couch with a huff. The movement lacked any real force, sulky in the way only a teenager could be. He stayed curled up, knees tucked in, shoulders hunched, still very much awake in the way people were when they were too tired to fall asleep on command.
Oda didn’t move closer. He didn’t step away. He stayed where he was, arms loose at his sides, posture neutral. Watching, yes—but not intruding. Just existing in the same space, letting the moment stretch without pressure.
At some point the quiet shifted, thinning out as the night wore on. The city outside softened into something duller and more distant, sounds spreading farther apart. Inside, nothing changed except the slow inevitability of Dazai’s breathing evening out again. His eyelids fluttered once, twice, lashes resting against skin gone faintly flushed with fatigue. Oda remained standing there a while longer, listening to the apartment settle back into itself, until the ghostly weight on the couch shifted imperceptibly and Dazai slipped sideways into something farther away.
Oda watched him for another minute, then turned back toward the kitchen. He washed the mug and set it in the rack to dry. Wiped the counter. Straightened the chair he hadn’t really used. The apartment returned to its normal order in small, unremarkable increments. Time passed without marking itself. Minutes. Then more.
When Oda glanced back at the couch, Dazai hadn’t moved. Hadn’t flinched. Hadn’t shown any more signs of dragging himself from sleep. Still drowning in his coat; still folded wrong.
Sleep like this wasn’t recovery; it was triage. The body dragged through several hells and doing the bare minimum required to keep going through more, buying time it would spend immediately the next time it was asked to.
Sliding a worn volume off the bookshelf and thmbing it open to a familiar page, Oda sat down at the table again and waited it out, listening to the quiet and committing it to memory—not because it was peaceful, but because it was rare. By morning, Dazai would be sharp and evasive again. Smiling. Intolerable.
But for a stolen moment of temporary armistice with his own self-destruction, Dazai’s exhaustion allowed him to stay where he was. Curled wrong. Coat still twisted around him, breathing shallow and stubborn, like his body had decided this was the least effort possible and refused to negotiate further. Whatever had dropped him there had done so completely.
Oda turned the page, and for the time being, the fragile hush of the room asked nothing more of them.