*taps Mic*

osamuisms

dazai x fem!reader drabble

dazai is fidgety. not a surprise to anyone who has ever interacted with the man. a lot of times, not even in a romantic way. atsushi often gets hair ruffles, kunikida has found dazai toying with the dividers on the tabs for cases, mindlessly clicking his pen.. so many little quirks. sometimes new ones emerged for a little bit, old ones came back up.. and so on.

when the two of you were just friends, you noticed these behaviours. annoying? most certainly not, these little things that make humans.. human are wonderfully spectacular will definitely never be annoying. closer to interesting, a close cousin of being anomalous. that would be a better word. at cafe uzumaki, the belt of his coat is always undone as he would thoughtlessly roll it up over and over again as he spoke about whatever piqued his interests that day.

possibly, it was the way the part of his bandages on his (usually left) wrist were frayed after a little while as his long fingers found their way to pull at them as he was deep in thought. once the two of you started dating though, what used to be mannerisms that only applied to certain things - they evolved to you.

any jewellery you wear? consider them toys to twist around as he holds your hand as you explain your point in a meeting as he adds in "mhm"s and "hm.."s towards your ideas and explanations. you're wearing sunglasses? if you hand them to him for a second any detailing on the sides will be traced over by his thumb at least a dozen times. trying to do your hair? he is behind you playing with it.

these weren't necessarily anxious or paranoid figures of showing his emotions, just little.. 'osamuisms' as they became known in your household. and these osamuisms stealthily crept their way towards you. osamuisms embedded themselves in your routine.

waking up and finding the hem of the shirt he is wearing and tracing small drawings onto it with your eyes still shut? osamuism. following the tales of his scars that graced his body? osamuism. knowing how many freckles and moles are on his body? osamuism. playing with one end of his coat belt while he plays with the other? osamuism. playing with his fingers as you do any task?? osamuism.

osamuisms were infectious, a malady no antibiotics could jettison. catch an osamuism? you're stuck with it for life! legend has it an osamuisms only cure is to drown it out with another osamuism. either way, goodluck !!

thoughts, knowing 7.8 million people talk to the Fyodor bot?

TERRIFIED. especially because he's so out of character from all the interactions....... programmed to be a sweet husband, forced to be misogynistic and angry. this is so sad. HAHSHSHS

but also very grateful that people like him so much nonetheless!! when first releasing him into the wild, i would've never thought this many people would talk to him.... an overwhelming number, honestly!! 💜

ᡣ𐭩 YOUNG GOD

FEATURING: dazai osamu

SUMMARY: after an agonizing two weeks, dazai finally returns to you and a much needed conversation takes place. {wordcount: 11.6k; fem!reader, sfw, romance}

AUTHOR'S NOTES: WOW I CAN'T BELIEVE WE'RE AT INSTALLMENT 5 ALREADY!!! this is so bittersweet i'm literally about to cry, i hope you guys have enjoyed badlands and i hope y'all join me for unreal unearth next week!! i got to add one of my favorite quotes in this chapter hehe you guys get extra points if you spot it. reblogs definitely appreciated!! i’ll reblog with the taglist as soon as it decides to show on the dash & in the tags!

WARNINGS: explicit mentions of past suicide attempts + past self harm & scars

SEE: BADLANDS SERIES MASTERLIST READ: UNREAL UNEARTH SIDE B (coming april 5th!)

Dazai is exhausted. His ears ring and his bones ache, his feet are unsteady beneath him and his body pleads for him to rest. Around him, the other members of the Agency are ecstatic, he thinks he’s gotten more hugs in the past hour than he’s gotten in his entire life. A part of him feels warm—he feels like he belongs, and his place in the Agency has always been one that he’s questioned. On bad nights, he used to think that the last place he truly belonged was on one of those three bar stools all those years ago, that being a member of the Agency—more than just in name, actually being a member—was nothing but an unattainable dream, because how could he possibly belong amongst people who are so unfailingly good that it makes his tainted heart stick out like a sore thumb? 

But now, Atsushi cries in relief at the sight of him and Yosano wraps him in a hug so tight that his already brittle bones threaten to snap; Kunikida’s throat spasms as he squeezes Dazai’s shoulder and Kenji and Kyouka throw themselves into his arms. Naomi and Haruno cling to his hands, while Tanizaki tears up in front of him with balled fists as he tells him that he’s missed him. Ranpo shoots him a wild grin and a salute and Fukuzawa pats the top of his head telling Dazai that he’s proud of him, and Dazai thinks he might cry because he feels like he’s finally found a home. 

An incomplete home, but a home nonetheless. 

Because even as he recounts his side of the story, watching hazily as Kunikida writes it all down, his mind is barely connected to his own body. His body feels prickly and his mind is muddled with fatigue, his brain throbs so painfully that he thinks he might actually be dying. He’s overwhelmed and anxious—the strain that the constant games of misdirection and manipulations with Dostoevsky has placed on him is finally becoming too much for him to handle. He’s on the verge of collapse and he needs to be somewhere he feels safe before that happens, and there’s only one place—one person—that fits that criteria.

You. 

He doesn’t even register what’s happening as Kunikida, Yosano and Atsushi help Dazai out of the office and into the back of Kunikida’s car. Atsushi sits with him in the back seat as Kunikida and Yosano take the front—they’re driving him somewhere, but Dazai isn’t even entirely sure where, and his tongue feels too heavy in his mouth for him to even ask. Atsushi is talking to him, he might even be telling Dazai where they’re going but the words sound like a distant hum and as he tries to read the boy’s lips, it all just seems blurry and unfocused. 

He doesn’t even know if you’re okay. 

Queen captured.

The words ring in his head over and over again as they have since the moment Dostoevsky uttered them aloud, but he doesn’t know what Dostoevsky’s capture of you entailed. He doesn’t know if you were killed. You could have been killed. If Dostoevsky had a lover, a weakness that Dazai could target, then they would have been the first person that Dazai aimed to take out to throw the Russian off of his game, and he would show no mercy. You could be dead, for all he knows; no one in the Agency had mentioned whether or not they knew if you were okay, or if they had, Dazai hadn’t heard it. 

You could be dead. 

Dazai’s vision spins again, his stomach lurches as Kunikida takes a turn too wide—he can’t keep himself grounded no matter how hard he tries. He wants to tell Kunikida that he needs to see you, he needs to get to your apartment complex and make sure you’re there, and if you’re not, he needs to talk to your neighbors and make sure you’re at least okay. Until he does that, he can’t rest, no matter how much his body begs him to give in. 

He loves you. He’s sure of it now. He knew it before he left you two weeks ago. He thinks he might have known it all the way back then on the night you rescued him at the shore, when you woke up in the middle of the night and sat with him on the couch after making him hot chocolate. He thinks he fell in love with the bright smile that lifted to your lips when he took a sip of the drink you made him and you realized he enjoyed it—no one has ever looked so happy to see him happy with something before, no one has ever cared enough about him for that.

He is so completely and irrevocably in love with you that Dazai doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to live in a world without you. The thought alone makes his skin crawl and his chest cave in. Before he met you, he had long accepted that he was destined to be alone, that he wasn’t a human but instead a thing caught between monster and man—he had accepted that he was incapable of loving, and even more so, that he was incapable of being loved. 

You had changed his perspective on everything, you had changed it so absolutely that Dazai doesn’t think there’s any going back to how he once viewed the world, how he once viewed himself. He’s started looking forward to sunrises, if it means he could watch them with you. He’s found himself looking around Yokohama and seeing places to take you rather than scouting out places for possible attempts. God, he’s even saving his money—Dazai Osamu has never saved money in his life because he hoped that each day would hopefully be his last. He’s blow it on alcohol and food and stupid trinkets that he didn’t need, but now, he’s caught himself putting aside some of his paychecks so he can save up for a nicer apartment that the two of you can live in together.

Dazai thinks that he can’t breathe, his throat feels swollen and he brings one of his hands up to tug at the collar of the white sweatshirt he’s wearing, tugging at it as if it’s the reason that he can’t breathe properly.

Dazai can’t go back to a world without you. He can’t.

Next to him, Atsushi is reaching out to him, as if trying to get him to calm down and Dazai doesn’t even want to know what the expression on his face might be right now. Everything is crumbling and tunneling around him—Atsushi, Kunikida, and Yosano are all dissolving, the car doors are fading away, the buildings and the streets and all of the scenery is just disappearing. 

Shit, he thinks, trying to figure out how the hell to ground himself. Shit, shit-

The car comes to such an abrupt stop that Dazai would have gone flying into the seat in front of him were it not for Atsushi throwing an arm across his chest to stop it from happening, the brakes screeching loudly and the car skidding. Yosano is pointing wildly, shouting something and Kunikida is shouting something back, something along the lines of her nearly causing him to get into an accident, but Dazai can only follow to where Yosano is pointing too, gaze dragging across the woman’s arm in the direction of the beach to the left of the car.

He wonders if he’s hallucinating. 

His fingers are shaking violently as he reaches out to push open the car door, squirming out of Atsushi’s protective hold. He flings himself out of the car desperately, nearly crashing hard onto the concrete—the fresh air is almost dizzying as he inhales it, pushing himself to his feet as quickly as possible. His broken leg screams in protest, but Dazai ignores it, vision blurring for the sparest moment before it focuses in on the figure standing on the beach in a familiar long, tan coat. 

His lips part to call your name but no words leave them—he’s not sure if it’s because he’s still half out of it or if it’s because he’s scared that if he calls your name and you don’t respond, it’ll confirm it’s just a hallucination. 

But he doesn’t have to say your name, whether it’s just by chance or if you heard the brakes of the car screeching, you turn in his direction. 

You’re wearing his coat; it’s too long on you—the tan edges are dragging against the sand and whipping around you as the wind picks up. But you’re wearing his coat and you’re beautiful; your expression shifts into one of recognition and then shock as soon as you see Dazai in the near distance, the sun is starting to set over the horizon and the soft orange glow casts an unearthly glow over you, and Dazai thinks everything about this is entirely unreal. He thinks that you might be some sort of angel, or some other type of divine being, and he thinks that he doesn’t even deserve to look at you, much less consider you his.

As he makes his way toward you, he can’t even put together all of his thoughts in a coherent manner. You’re alive is the first thought that rings through his head, the relief is almost debilitating. All of the days he spent with his heart in his throat, unsure of whether or not his decision had gotten you killed, have finally come to an end. The next thought that runs through his head is god, because he’s imagined this moment dozens of times since he first had to leave you. He’s imagined running to you, scooping you into his arms and swinging you around, holding you close and refusing to let go because Dazai doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to let go of you again.

Except that’s entirely how it doesn’t go.

Dazai barely makes it to you before his legs are giving out on him, as much as he tries to ignore the pain, it evidently becomes too much for his body to handle. He’s collapsing into you the moment he makes it to you. His head is still throbbing, his leg is screaming, his body is aching, but your hands are instinctively grabbing him to break his fall, his knees crashing against the sand, and Dazai just can’t bring himself to care about the agony. He doesn’t care that his body is coming apart at its seams, he doesn’t even notice as you lower yourself down into the sand with him.

“Osamu.” His name leaves your lips in a breathy whisper, one that’s riddled with disbelief and longing—something else too, but Dazai can’t decipher it in his muddled state. “You’re here.”

He tries to say your name, but he’s pretty sure it comes out garbled and unintelligible. Distantly, he can feel his fingers twisting into the fabric of his jacket, trying to clutch onto you as best as he can in spite of the numbness that still threatens to consume him. Then, your grip on him shifts from the instinctual grab into your arms wrapping around his waist, one hand splayed across his back and the other sliding up to cradle his head to your chest as you hold him close, and Dazai thinks all is right in the world again. He doesn’t want to move, he doesn’t want to think, he doesn’t want to do anything but just let himself melt into you.

The feeling of your touch for the first time in weeks is enough to chase away the creeping numbness and anxiety, and everything still hurts but all of it dulls in comparison to being in your arms again. Dazai’s breath is shaky, he teeters over the edge of collapse now that he’s finally with you, his weary brain betraying him as it uses the comfort of your arms as an excuse to finally surrender. His vision swims—he’s not sure if it’s from relieved tears or exhaustion, maybe both—his nose is flooded with the scent of you, the scent of home.

“You’re here,” you whisper again as if you can’t believe it; Dazai can’t even blame you because a part of him still fears that if he lets go of you, you’ll disappear, a cruel trick on him played by his treacherous mind. You pull away from him and Dazai’s fingers instinctively cling to you harder, trying to get you to stay in place, but his body is far too weak for it to be effective. 

You lean back and bring your hands up to cup Dazai’s cheeks and it takes all of his willpower to not just let himself fall limp. Your expression twists a bit, he’s not sure what you see—nothing good, definitely. Yosano splinted his leg and cleaned up the wounds on his face, but his ability canceling hers prevents him from getting the wounds healed quickly, so his face is bruised and swollen, cuts litter his skin from when the elevator had crashed to the bottom floor. 

He thinks he must look disgusting, he doesn’t even know how you can bear to look at him. But he supposes that’s not a new thought to cross his mind, he’s never understood how you can look at him the way you do.

“What happened to you?” you breathe out, and Dazai’s lashes flutter as your thumb ghosts over his cheekbone, eyes searching his for an answer to your question. Dazai doesn’t know how to respond, so he doesn’t, leaning into your touch. “God, Osamu, you look like you’re about to drop dead.”

“Are you calling me ugly?” 

Even in his objectively terrible state, Dazai is able to croak out the five words, although he’s sure the playful lilt is lost in his fatigue. You stare at him for a moment, as if you didn’t hear him properly, but then your expression shifts into one of disbelief and your hand flies to your mouth to smother the laugh that he’s missed so desperately the past two weeks.

“Can you walk?” you ask after a moment, hand lingering on his cheek before dropping down to his forearm, squeezing gently. 

Dazai winces at your words, shaking his head—he barely even made it to you, he’s not going to make it all the way to your apartment complex.

You let out a puff of air caught between a laugh and a sigh. “Guess we’re doing this again,” you say, a teasing cadence dancing in your tone. Dazai’s brows furrow a bit in confusion, but then you’re grabbing his arm and trying to heave him to his feet. “At least you won’t be pretending to be unconscious this time.” 

Dazai struggles to help you as you do your best to get him onto your back; a nostalgic feeling sweeps through him as he remembers the first time the two of you met, waking up after a failed suicide attempt to find you cursing and complaining as you try to haul him back to your apartment. He wonders if you knew what you know now back then, if you would have still stopped to help him—but that leads him to a line of questioning that he doesn’t want to approach yet. 

Do you know where he’s been? 

Do you know his past? 

Do you know everything he’s done?

He pushes the thoughts away. 

As if the gods above remember the event and want the two of you to reenact it as close to the original as possible, he feels a few drops of rain splatter against his face.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me.” He hears you complain as you finally get him settled on your back. “Keep your gangly legs to yourself this time, I don’t need them knocking into me this time.”

“... I was purposely trying to trip you, you know?” Dazai admits, voice hoarse and weak and the smile curling to the edges of his lips is lazy but it’s real for the first time in what feels like forever. “I thought it would be funny.”

You gasp loudly. “I knew it! You’re such an asshole.”

Dazai laughs, letting his head fall into the crook of your neck—he wants to bask in the light feeling that’s replacing the emptiness in his chest, but a part of him can’t help but feel like this is only the eye of the storm. 

Back in the car, Kunikida looks a bit worried as you struggle to get Dazai onto your back. 

“Should we go help her?” he asks quietly, glancing over at Yosano.

But Yosano doesn’t respond to him. She has an uncharacteristically soft expression on her face as she watches you laugh loudly at something Dazai says. He finally looks somewhat coherent again now that he’s with you, still in pain but that detached, disconnected look in his eyes that had been terrifying Atsushi is gone. 

“No.” Atsushi is the one to respond to Kunikida, smiling lightly as he finally drags his gaze away as he watches a genuine smile twitch to the corners of Dazai’s lips as you nearly trip and fall under his weight. “Let’s head back to the office.”

Dazai has been sleeping for hours.

You let out a soft puff of air as you idly comb your fingers through his hair, eyes tracing his face. His right eye is completely swollen, his lip is split, you can see bruises littering his neck that disappear beneath the bandages he wears, his leg is broken and splinted. Despite all of that, he still somehow looks at ease as he rests in your lap.

You’re not as at ease.

Well, a part of you is, against all of your common sense. Having Dazai back in your arms is far more comforting than it should be, with the conversation that needs to be had looming over you. The sight of him sleeping peacefully in your lap, the feel of his heart thrumming beneath your hand, the sound of his steady breathing, it’s all enough to alleviate your body and mind of the stress and anxiety that has been crippling you for the past two weeks.

He’s alive. He’s okay. He came back to you. 

You find consolation in the thoughts—in the few days you were detained by the Hunting Dogs, all you could do was think about Dazai. Your mind raced with worst case scenarios and crippling fears. In spite of all of the allegations placed against him, you still love him—you’d known it well before he left and the relief you felt seeing him again before was enough to confirm it.

You think it’s dangerous, and maybe a bit stupid; a part of you knows that you should run for the hills, the crimes that Jouno Saigiku listed out are nothing to scoff at, and even putting aside morality, his former position as an executive of the Port Mafia should be more than enough to have you fleeing, if only because that puts you in danger too. No one gets to the position that he supposedly obtained without gaining masses of enemies and no one leaves it alive without doubling said enemies. 

But you’re not running for the hills—not because of his crimes, and not because of the risk of being with him—and that scares you a bit. You’re having trouble reconciling the Dazai you know with the one you’ve been told exists. Even when you recall all of the times you woke up to find him staring out your window with an unsettlingly detached expression, eyes too still and too black to be normal, as if they absorbed all sound and light around him; when you recall all of the man’s strange idiosyncrasies that just don’t line up with the front he puts up; when you recall that night in Kyoto where he refused to divulge what his previous job was, you just can’t. 

The logic fits, your brain can see it and piece it together, your heart just won’t accept it.

Your knuckles graze the side of his face, a conflicted expression crossing over your own. 

You don’t know what to do.

A part of you doesn’t want him to wake up, because you know that when he does, you’ll be forced to have the talk that you’ve been dreadfully anticipating since you learned about his crimes and imprisonment. You don’t know what you expect from the conversation, you don’t know how to approach it, you don’t know what you want to know nor why you want to know it, you don’t even know if you should continue with your relationship with him and you don’t even know why that’s still a question in your mind because obviously you shouldn’t continue a relationship with him. 

Your brain feels like it might implode.

You take a step back.

As you always do when you’re faced with conflict and feel yourself getting overwhelmed, you try to take a more logical approach. First, you make yourself a chart: pros and cons, always a favorite of yours, centering around Dazai and your relationship with him. Then, you make a list: everything else you need to know to properly weigh into each of the pros and cons.

Pros: 

Dazai makes you happy. (An important pro, you think, maybe it’ll outweigh all of the rest.)

Cons: 

138 counts of conspiracy to murder.

You pause. 

Distantly, you wonder what your life has come to—making a pro/con chart with one of the cons being 138 counts of conspiracy to murder. You press your hand against your mouth, staring ahead as you reconsider every action you’ve taken to lead to this moment. Promptly, you decide to scrap the pro/con chart and move right on to the list of things you need to know. 

What do you need to know?

First off, you need confirmation over whether or not the allegations are true—if they’re not, then you’re spiraling for nothing and you can move on happily in your relationship with Dazai.

If they are?

You swallow thickly. You need context—you’re not sure what type of context would justify those crimes, you don’t think there’s any justification for them, honestly, but there must be a reason as to why you cannot reconcile the Dazai that you know with the one you’ve been told exists. You like to believe that you’re good at reading people—although you’re definitely questioning it now—so there must be some context that you’re missing as to how the “alleged Dazai” became the “known Dazai.” 

And maybe—just maybe—if you can understand that, then maybe you can still move on in your relationship with him. Because even if his crimes aren’t justifiable, people can change and it would be beyond you to scorn someone trying to do their best to become a better person. It’s not like you’re some squeaky clean, paragon of virtue anyway: your university and grad school is mostly being paid off by your brother’s blood money from the underground rings, and yeah, it doesn’t really compare to being a former executive to the most dangerous gang in Yokohama but it definitely narrows your room to judge. 

You glance back down at Dazai.

Your eyes meet wide, tired brown ones that immediately shut as soon as he catches you looking at him, as if pretending to still be asleep.

“Dazai Osamu, we are not playing this game again.”

Dazai reopens his eyes with a sheepish smile but he doesn’t say anything for a moment. Slowly, his expression shifts, the corners of his lips furling downward as a mixture of realization and resignation pools in his eyes. 

“You know.”

The two words are so unassuming yet so damning, your heart lurches and your stomach churns. Dazai isn’t looking at you anymore, he’s staring up at the ceiling, waiting for you to speak.

Is that confirmation? Just like that?

“I don’t know anything until you tell me,” you decide to say, your voice a bit tighter than you intended for it to be.

Dazai’s eyes draw back to you, studying you carefully. He looks conflicted—over what, you’re not sure. You think if he tries to blow this off rather than explaining it to you, you might lose your mind. You’re giving him a chance to explain on his own terms and if he doesn’t take it-

You reach out instinctively as Dazai starts to push himself off of your lap into a sitting position, fingers brushing his back worriedly. 

“You shouldn’t be moving around,” you tell him quietly.

He only shakes his head, finally speaking, his voice so quiet that it’s barely audible. “Let me take you somewhere.”

S. ODA

The four letters engraved into the headstone before you have been weathered by time, you can see lichen creeping across the slate and stone flaking at the edges—enough for you to put together that whoever has been put to rest here has probably been gone for a few years. Questions itch at the tip of your tongue but you bite them, waiting for Dazai to say something instead so that he can lead the conversation.

He has yet to say a word. From the moment that he slid into the passenger seat of your car, the only words that he’s spoken have been directions to the cemetery. The conflicted expression that had been etched onto his face has finally disappeared, smoothing out into an eerily blank one that you can hardly stand to look at because you know only dark thoughts must be racing through his head. 

You wrap your arms around your waist as another chilly wind whips around the two of you, grateful that you’d thrown a jacket on before leaving your apartment. Dazai is only dressed in his trench coat, too thin for the cold but he refused to wear anything else. You’re not sure why, but you have caught him burying his nose into the collar and inhaling, memorizing your scent as if it’s about to disappear. 

“I officially joined the Port Mafia when I was fifteen,” Dazai finally says. You raise your eyebrows a bit, wondering just how much autonomy a fifteen year old has to willingly choose to join the Mafia, but you don’t voice your thoughts, waiting for him to continue. “I met Nakahara Chuuya, a current executive of the Mafia, that same year and we earned the moniker Double Black for being the most lethal pair in Yokohama’s underground. At sixteen, I was put in charge of the boss’s personal covert ops unit and I was promoted to executive for all of my accomplishments, youngest underboss in the Mafia’s history. I’d eliminated countless rival organizations, opened numerous new distribution channels for all of their illegal trades, and had a hand in planning nearly all of the major operations both within and outside of Yokohama.”

His voice is void of any emotion, a cold monotone as he speaks the words like a bland recitation of a prewritten speech; his eyes are too empty and far too still as he stares ahead at the grave in front of the two of you. It’s unnerving; somehow, you think you like it even less than the actual matter of what he’s saying.

“Until I was eighteen, I continued to be the driving force behind the Mafia’s rapid growth and ironclad control over Yokohama; while I was an executive, no foreign organization dared to try to usurp control over any of our territory. They’d give up their territory if they knew I was the one heading the expansion operations, because they were scared of me and because they knew it was a lost cause trying to defend against me. Whatever you heard about me, it’s all true and probably way worse than you could ever imagine.”

The silence between the two of you following his words is damning—the wind is too loud and the distant sounds of cars honking and brakes screeching is jarring. You can hear your heart thudding in your ears, you can feel your gut twisting, your fingers tremble from where they’re stuffed in your pockets. Dazai is a statue next to you, his eyes haven’t budged, his limbs are stiff. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think him a corpse

Your lips part to speak but no words leave then. You take a moment before trying again. “How did you end up with the Mafia?” you ask, your voice is much weaker than you intended for it to be. 

Because that’s what you need to focus on—the context, that’s what you’d decided before he woke up and that’s what you’ll stick to, not what he’s done, but first how he ended up there and then why he left. You can’t imagine a fifteen year old willingly choosing to join the Mafia, so you think there must be more to the story. 

For the first time since the two of you arrived at the grave, Dazai moves—it’s subtle, a twitch of his fingers and a tug at the corner of his lips but it’s gone in an instant, you almost miss it. 

“I tried to kill myself when I was fourteen.” Bile rises to your throat almost as soon as his words process, you finally turn to look up at him but his expression hasn’t shifted at all. “The doctor tending to me ended up becoming the new leader of the Port Mafia. I was kept around as an insurance policy, and partly by my own volition, but I joined willingly at fifteen after turning him down several times.”

“Why?”

“I… thought something would happen. For so long, I just… couldn’t feel anything, and I didn’t see the point in living because of it. I thought that maybe the more extreme emotions—violence, death, desire—all of the things that are found in abundance in the Mafia… I thought that if I could be around people who display all of these things so plainly, that I would be able to see and understand what makes humankind human. I thought that maybe it would help me feel more human, and find some sort of reason to keep living.”

You exhale, eyes sliding shut for a second. You feel nauseous—hands lighty trembling as you desperately try to digest the large pill he gave you as quickly as you can because you still have more questions but god, what type of fourteen, fifteen year old feels so empty inside that he turns to the Mafia to try to feel something?

“You were a kid, Osamu. You’re not some incarnate of evil for ending up where you did, you were failed by all of the adults in your life,” you finally say quietly; you’re the one staring ahead now, and you can feel his eyes on you but you don’t dare to turn to look at him because you know that it’ll make you crack and you need to continue. Clearly something else happened when he was eighteen that led to him leaving the Mafia but what? Your gaze trails back to the grave in front of you, a sinking feeling in your chest. You take a deep, steady breath before asking your next question: “What changed at eighteen?”

“I didn’t leave the Port Mafia because I had some great epiphany as to the immorality of my actions,” Dazai snaps. His voice is tight and borderline antagonistic, emotion finally seeping into the monotone, as if he’s trying to convince you that he is what you claim he’s not. “I-”

He cuts himself off abruptly, his voice cracks, you lift your gaze to his face and your throat spasms when you notice the black pits have been replaced with the warm brown you’re used to, a vast array of emotions swimming within them, too many for you to pinpoint a single one.

“He was my friend,” Dazai finally says softly. “My only one, maybe. When he died, he told me that if both sides are the same to me—evil and justice—that I should become a good person, I should save people. So, do you understand? Nothing about me has changed since back then, and the only reason I’m on the side of the ‘good’ is because someone else asked it of me, not for any altruistic reason. I’m still the same now as I was then.”

“... I don’t think that’s quite true,” you tell him after a few seconds of silence, and you can feel him look at you and you can practically hear the bitter ‘what do you know?’ that he’s about to let out, so you force yourself to continue before he can. “I think that if someone had told me all of this a few weeks ago, I would’ve laughed in their face. I never once-”

Dazai scoffs. “So, you don’t understand,” he says, voice reverting back to that empty tone you hate, but his body is tense and he’s looking anywhere but you. “I’m good at putting up fronts, wearing masks depending on who I’m around; it’s how I learned to blend in with people. The man you know doesn’t exist. I’m a fraud, my blood runs black; when I’m pushed into a corner, I invariably fall back into old habits. I’ll never leave the dark and I don’t belong-”

“I think you’re wrong,” you interrupt him, recalling Yosano’s words from two weeks ago—he’ll never believe it himself. “I don’t think you’ll ever see yourself from an objective standpoint. I don’t think you want to believe that you’ve changed for the better, but I think you have. I’m not stupid, Osamu, and I’ve never been one to fall for people’s acts, no matter how good they might be. I’ve known something was up with you since that first night when I woke up and found you staring out the window, and still, I have never once doubted that you were a good man.”

“I killed people to get out of Meursault, I was willing to torture people to get information when the Guild showed up in Yokohama and then again when the Decay of the Angel arrived, I’ll manipulate anyone and everyone around me to see my plans through, I…”

Dazai is still listing off all of the reasons why he’s still a bad person, and maybe you should be listening but you can hear the way his voice is becoming increasingly more tinged with desperation, as if he’s intent on convincing you to change your viewpoint on him. You wonder if he thinks you’ll run, and then, you wonder if he’s trying to make you run—each sentence he speaks becomes more descriptive than the last. 

He’ll find himself sorely disappointed, because you’ve already decided that you won’t run. You’re still not convinced that this is the smartest decision on your part; Dazai is dangerous and being with him is dangerous, not because of him himself, but because of the threats that still linger from his past, but you suppose love always drives people to do stupid things in its name anyway. Even now, as he lists off all of these terrible things, you can’t imagine your life without him—you think a life without him will be dull and gray, and you’ll always look back to the time you spent with him as the happiest you ever were, regretting the decision you made here. 

You’re not the type of person to live a life full of regrets. 

And whether he sees it or not, you think he has changed. You’re not the only one—Yosano, Atsushi, all of the members of the Agency see him in a similar light as you, but he’s so blinded by his past that he refuses to see himself in the present. Even the things he says now, all of it was done in the name of protecting the people he cares about, and that’s not something you’re going to condemn him for. 

“I think he’d be proud of you.” You cut off his tangent with seven quiet words and Dazai goes utterly still and utterly silent next to you. “I didn’t know him, of course, but I think he’d be proud of the man you’ve become, Osamu. Change doesn’t happen overnight, you were surrounded by the dark for so long, and from such a young age, that it might take decades to remove its influence over you, but you’re trying and you’re saving people. I wish you could see yourself the same way I see you. I think he would be proud.”

You wonder if you pushed too far, sparing a glance his way. His brows are furrowed so intensely that you can’t hope to try to imagine what might be going through his mind, brown eyes flooding with emotion as he looks down at his friend’s grave.

“I’m not someone that was born to be with people,” he finally croaks out. “Romantically or platonically. I’m not right in the head. Manipulative, constantly trying to kill myself, prone to jealousy, pettiness and casual cruelty. There are so many people trying to kill me that I stashed guns in your apartment when you weren’t home just in case they came after me while I’m there—I don’t care if they get me, but they might go after me when I’m with you, or even go after you to get to me. Sometimes, I regret leaving the Mafia because I feel like it’s the only place I actually belonged because it’s the only place where I was actually good at what I do.”

You don’t speak, instead letting him list off everything that he thinks is wrong with him, laying out bare all of the things that he tried so hard to hide from you over the past few months. He can’t look at you, eyes trained ahead and you can see the way his fists are clenched in the pockets of his trench coats. He lowers his face into his collar again, burying his nose in the fabric before continuing. 

“During really bad slumps, I can barely get out of bed even though I can’t sleep; sometimes I won’t eat for days unless someone notices and forces me to and if they do, I usually get nasty with them; and I’ll do just about anything to die. Atsushi-kun has had to fish me from more rivers than I can count, Kunikida-kun has had to drag me to the hospital after trying to overdose on pills or drink various types of poisons, Yosano-sensei has spent days watching over me because she didn’t trust me not to try again once one of them saved me.”

His voice has mostly returned to that cold monotone, but there’s a hint of emotion clinging to the edges that he just can’t wipe away, something caught between desperation and pleading. Your throat feels tight and swollen and you think that your heart might be shattering a bit with how he’s so set on pushing you away and convincing you that he’s simply too horrid to be loved. 

“I can’t cook. I don’t clean. I hardly shower. I’m more often drunk than I am sober. I can barely go a week without trying to kill myself at least once. I suck at saving money because I figure I’m going to die soon anyway, so I don’t see the point in it. I have an awful lifestyle and more unhealthy habits than I can count. I've tried to change it but I always fail. I don’t know how to comfort people and when I’m confronted with conflict by people I care about, I’ll avoid them until I can act like nothing's wrong. I’ll be more of a bother than anything else, really.”

“I still want you,” you finally say quietly, watching as a distressed expression sweeps over his face.

“You really don’t,” he protests weakly. You wonder if he’s trying to convince himself of it, or you—maybe both.

“I do. I’ll take care of you.”

“It’s rotten work,” he breathes out, a last ditch attempt to persuade you away. 

“Not to me,” you tell him firmly. “Not if it’s you.”

“I don’t deserve this.” Dazai shakes his head, voice so quiet that you can barely hear him. “I don’t understand—everything I told you and you’re still… I don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve you.”

“I disagree, but regardless, that’s hardly relevant,” you say absently, finally reaching out to loop your arm in his, resting your head against his bicep. “Do you want this? Do you want me?” 

“Yes.” His voice is so hoarse and so low, as if he can barely bring himself to say the words out loud.

“Then it’s yours. I’m yours.”

Dazai’s jaw is clenched so tight that you’re worried he’s going to damage his teeth, he brings his hand to his eyes as if to cover the upper half of his face. You squeeze his arm a bit, comforting, eyes sliding shut.

“Everything I touch withers and turns to ashes,” Dazai rasps. “Anything I never want to lose is always lost. I’m scared that by being with you, I’m also killing you.”

“I’ll take that risk, if it means I can be with you,” you tell him, watching as he shakes his head, still refusing to look at you.

“You’re so damn stubborn,” he exhales quietly.

“You love me for it,” you tease lightly.

“I do,” he admits, and your eyes shoot open a bit at his words. You glance up at him, but he’s looking ahead, expression downcast. “And I’m sorry about that.”

“Are you apologizing for loving me?” you ask, a bit incredulously.

“Yeah. I am.”

“Osamu…”

Your voice is soft, you’re not sure what you want to say but you falter when Dazai suddenly looks down at you. His eyes are so exhausted, he looks like he hasn’t had any rest in years—his shoulders sag and his arms hang limply at his sides. You think that maybe you shouldn’t have agreed to all of this when he’s still recovering, but you also think that the fatigue is not just physical.

 “I’m so tired,” Dazai suddenly whispers, resting his forehead on the top of your head. His voice cracks a bit over the word, you slip your arms around his waist, letting him lean into you.

“Then let’s go home, yeah?”

“... Yeah, let’s go home.”

When you get back to your apartment, it’s still dark but you know dawn will break soon; as Dazai stumbles over to your bed, you make your way to the window. You close the curtains so that Dazai will be able to sleep easily even after the sun rises, and then move over to your nightstand to turn on the dim lamp so you can at least see a little bit. 

Dazai drops his coat onto your desk chair before he takes a seat on the edge of your bed, feet planted on the floor as he stares ahead at the wall. He looks lost, conflicted; you don’t know what to say to draw him out of it, so you decide not to say anything. Instead, you make your way over to him and take a seat next to him—your thigh brushes his, arms ghosting each other’s, and Dazai immediately leans over to rest his head on your shoulder, eyes sliding shut.

You lift your hand to cradle the back of his head, fingers idly carding through his dark locks. You feel him let out a shaky breath, the air hot against your skin, and you turn your head to the side, pressing your lips to the top of his hair, lingering for a moment before resting your head against his.

“Lay down and get some sleep,” you tell him softly. “I’ll stay with you.”

Dazai exhales, but he doesn’t budge from where he’s leaning heavily against you. “... I need to take off my bandages,” he finally says quietly. “They’re drenched in sweat and blood, haven’t had a chance to change them since I left… I don’t want to get in bed with them on.”

You pause and then ask, “Do you want me to go grab the new roll I bought? I can step out.”

“I don’t have the energy to put them back on,” he finally murmurs, and then a bit more hesitantly, he adds: “Can you help me take them off?” 

You think your heart is in your throat. In the months you’ve been with Dazai, the only glimpse you’ve gotten of his body beneath the bandages was that day he showed up at your doorstep bleeding out and you had no choice but to cut through some of them to patch up the wound, and even then, you only saw the sparest bits of his body, only what was necessary to stop the bleeding. He’s been so careful to keep it hidden from you and now…

“Yeah,” you breathe out. “Of course, I can.”

You shift a bit so that you can kneel behind him on the bed, fingers curling around the hem of his white long sleeved shirt. You tap his arm gently, a silent ask for him to raise his arms, and when he does, you slide the thick cloth off of his body, leaving him in his pants and the bandages that cover every inch of visible skin besides his face and hands.

He was right, they do look disgusting—most of them are yellowed and frayed at the edges, as if they’d been drenched with water and dried several times over. There’s blood staining the bandages on his side and a black tarry substance clinging to the bandages wrapped around his waist. You lean forward and press your lips against his shoulder, over the somewhat clean bandages that are covering the skin there, and you can hear Dazai let out a sharp, shaky breath in front of you.

“Ready?” you whisper, fingers grazing the clip fastened to the bandages on his neck, holding them in place. 

He only nods, so you press another soft kiss to him, this time to the crook of this neck, and unfasten the clips to unwind the bandages from around his neck. To your credit, your fingers don’t falter when a rugged, discolored scar is revealed, looped around his neck; it’s mostly faded, but it’s still rough beneath the pads of your fingers. Your eyes linger though, there’s no question as to what caused the scar and your mind instinctively draws back to all of the offhand comments and jokes that Dazai has ever made about ceiling beams and nooses and your throat feels a bit tight.

You dip your head down to press your lips against the nape of his neck, right over where the rough skin crosses. You can hear his breath hitch, you can feel the way he shivers, but you don’t say anything as you continue to unwind the bandages around his chest and torso. You’ve seen most of the scars that litter his back from when you’d had to patch up his bullet wound, but it’s different seeing them without the fear of him bleeding out fogging your brain. 

They look much harsher against his pale skin now—the worst is still that deep, jagged one that runs from his shoulder to the corner of his hip, but you can’t help but notice that there are more that you hadn’t noticed that day. Most of them are various types of cuts and slashes, some deeper than others, and healed bullet wounds, your gaze is particularly drawn to the most recent one on his upper back. It’s fresh compared to all of the others, still red and easily agitated—your fingers brush over it for a moment before you lean in to press another kiss to his shoulder blade, right over where the worst of the scars begins. 

You shift from behind him to sit at his side, dropping the bandages that had been covering his chest, torso and neck haphazardly onto your bedroom floor before reaching out for his right arm.

Dazai withdraws immediately.

His expression is guarded, you think that his eyes seem a bit glassy but you can’t tell with the dim lighting. You don’t say anything, and you don’t reach out again; after a few moments of him studying you, his shoulders slump and Dazai moves his arm so that it’s back in your lap. Your eyes trace his face one last time, making sure he’s okay, before you lift your fingers to start unwrapping the bandages, starting at his bicep. 

The skin of his bicep is mostly clear—there’s one light scar cutting through its side, as if a bullet had grazed him. When you move down to his forearm, Dazai is stiff and you can see the discomfort on his face, but he doesn’t pull away, so you continue. 

And you falter, because as you loosen the bandages to remove them, you catch sight of the deep scars lining his wrist and forearm. The skin is uneven and discolored, there’s hardly an inch of visible skin on his lower arm that’s not covered by the vertical scars. He’s staring at you, dark eyes heavy and inspecting your every reaction—he’s looking for something, and you don’t know what, but you just decide to do the same thing you’ve done every other time you finished taking off a set of bandages and lean down to press your lips against his pulse point, moving over to do the same to his other wrist after unwrapping the bandages there too.

Your gaze flickers down to his legs, where you can see the bandages on his ankles peeking out from the white pants he’s wearing, a bit too short for his long legs. You pat his thigh gently and say, “C’mon, let’s get you out of these ugly things.”

Dazai shifts up just enough for you to help him slide the loose plants off so you can toss them off to the side, leaving him in his briefs and the bandages wrapped around his thighs and calves. You move to kneel in front of him, instantly getting to unwinding them, starting at his ankle. 

“Do you remember what you told me back then?” Dazai asks quietly, looking down at his lap instead of you. “The day we met?” 

“I told you a lot of things that day,” you say lightly as you glance up at him, careful as you unwrap the bandages around his calves. You kiss his knee. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

“You said you’d change the trajectory of my life,” he murmurs, twisting his fingers absently. 

Vaguely, you remember the words, smiling a bit in amusement. 

“About the hot chocolate?” you question, laying a kiss to his other knee before shifting up to unwrap the bandages on his thighs; you make sure not to let the pain show on your face when you notice that his inner thighs are as littered with scars as his wrists and forearms, all of them dangerously close to his femoral artery. 

“Yeah.” He lets out a puff of air akin to a laugh, but when you glance up at him, you see there’s very little amusement on his face. In fact, he looks more wistful than anything else. “You really did, you know? Not with the hot chocolate, obviously, but just… you. You did.”

You sit back on your heels as you look up at Dazai, taking his hand into yours before lifting it to your lips, kissing his knuckles softly. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he agrees quietly. When he continues, his voice is hoarse, bordering on a plea, “Don’t ever go somewhere I can’t follow.”

“Somewhere without you?” you ask, a teasing lilt to your voice as you kiss the palm of his hand before letting go so you can move to unwrap the bandages from his other leg. “Sounds dreadful, I would never.”

He lets out a noise as if he doesn’t entirely believe you, as if it’s some inevitable fate that the two of you will face. So when you finish unwinding the bandages and push them off to the side with the rest of them, you lean up on your knees to cup his cheek, pulling him down a bit to you so you can press your lips to the corner of his. 

“You’re stuck with me.”

“I think it’s the other way around,” he croaks out, and the wry laugh he lets out falls flat. 

You squeeze his hand again before you rise to your feet, and when you do, Dazai’s throat spasms as you stand in front of him, looking down at him. He’s stripped bare in front of you now—physically, emotionally, and he looks at you with an expression that lets you know that you have the power to utterly ruin him. He’s trusted you with his heart, handed it over to you on a platter after having guarded it so desperately and carefully for so long, and you can see the vulnerability in his dark eyes as he watches you restlessly, waiting to see what you’ll do with it. 

You lean forward again, pressing your lips against his forehead softly and then to his own, a chaste, innocent kiss that lasts no longer than half a second. 

“I love you,” you tell him quietly. 

Humans cannot live without a heart, so if he’s to give you his, it’s only fair that you give him your own—though realistically, yours has already been his for a long time. Your heart beats in his chest now, and his in yours, and you wonder if he understands the gravity of what that means but you think he does, if the way his expression crumbles has anything to say about it. His hands fly to your waist, dragging you down onto his lap. His fingers bite a bit too deeply into your skin for it to be comfortable, but you only wrap your arms around his shoulders and let him bury his face into the crook of your neck. 

“I think I might’ve been born just so I could meet you,” Dazai admits, words thick and throaty, muffled against your neck.

You smile lightly, toying with the hair at the nape of his neck, turning your head to the side to kiss his temple. “I feel the same,” you whisper, because there’s no way anything but destiny led you to Dazai Osamu on that beach—one way or another, you were fated to be with him. 

Dazai pulls his face from where he’s had it tucked in your neck to press his lips to yours; he kisses you desperately, hands rising to cup your cheeks. In one swift motion, he has you pinned down on the bed, hips and chest flush to yours, hand slipping behind your head to tilt your head so he can deepen the kiss, and you’re reeling at his sudden switch up, struggling to keep up with him. His tongue traces the inside of your lip, deceptively gentle compared to the way he has body pressed against yours.

Your hands fly to his waist, sliding over his bare skin, over all of the rough ridges of his scars and his body shudders against yours violently, unused to the feeling of someone touching him without his bandages as a barrier. He pulls back, tugging at your bottom lip softly before moving just far enough away for your lips to be brushing, sharing the same sliver of air. You can feel his breath fanning across your lips, it smells of the peppermints you have littered across your desk and distantly, you can’t help but wonder when he managed to steal one, but the thought is only fleeting. It’s dizzying, hot, so intimate that you think your heart is about to fly out of your chest.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this,” Dazai breathes out, dark eyes searching yours as he speaks.

“Me neither,” you agree, and then you smile, leaning up to steal another kiss from him, and then another, and then another. “Good thing we have the rest of our lives to try.”

Less than a week later, you stand in the chaos of the Armed Detective Agency as they argue over a new case—and by they, you mean Yosano and Kunikida with Dazai occasionally making antagonistic comments to try to make Kunikida blow a fuse. You don’t really know what you’re doing here, you suppose the Agency doesn’t really care and you have nothing better to do anyway —you lost your internship at the Ministry of Defense, obviously, with all of the chaos that went down and classes have yet to start up again, and Dazai begged and pleaded for you to come with him to work because he ‘can’t stand having to look at Kunikida-kun’s ugly mug all day,’ but you figure it’s only because he wants to sneak off to you whenever Kunikida is distracted.

Like now.

Dazai has flopped onto where you’re lounging on the couch as he watches Kunikida and Yosano go at it, head resting on your chest, giggling to himself as Kunikida’s face goes red and Yosano looks increasingly more entertained. You’re idly playing with his hair as you scroll through your phone, distantly listening to the argument that you’re pretty sure Dazai instigated just so he could slink away from his desk.

It’s only a matter of time before Kunikida notices Dazai’s scheme and drags him off of you, but it’s nearly the end of the day anyway and you and Dazai are going to the theme park in the Kanagawa prefecture once he can leave work, so you’re excited. You think you’re going to ask Atsushi, Kyouka and Kenji to come along with the two of you, even if Dazai pouts and scowls over it, because they’ve spent most of the day talking to you when Kunikida was forcing Dazai to actually do his work. 

“Ranpo will be here soon,” Yosano goads Kunikida. “We’ll see what he says.”

Kunikida’s eye twitches and he parts his lips to speak but before he can, the door to the Agency flies open and a familiar dark-haired man comes bounding in, snacking on a bag of sweets. Tanizaki follows behind him, looking exhausted if not a bit relieved to be back. 

“Tanizaki got us lost three times,” Ranpo complains, making his way through the reception area toward the interior. Tanizaki looks disgruntled, as if he doesn’t entirely agree with Ranpo’s statement but is beyond arguing about it. Ranpo pauses next to the couches where you and Dazai are lounging. “It’s you.”

Your eyebrows raise a bit when you notice the thinly veiled irritation in Ranpo’s voice. Dazai looks up, eyes a bit narrowed, and both Yosano and Kunikida pause from where they were about to bring their argument to Ranpo, sharing a look with one another. 

“Ranpo-san, don’t be ru-” Dazai starts to complain, although you can tell there’s a hint of tightness to his voice. 

“First, everyone in the Agency ignores me when I tell them not to take this case; then, I go out of the way to warn you about the Hunting Dogs and instead of listening to me, you throw yourself into the heart of Yokohama and make yourself easy pickings for them,” Ranpo rants. “I don’t even know why I try.”

Realization strikes fast, your face feels a bit hot. Dazai sits up from where he’s laying on you, looking between you and Ranpo, a bit confused. 

“... You were R,” you realize sheepishly, wondering how you hadn’t put it together sooner. 

Ranpo all but sneers. “Aren’t you supposed to be an honors student at Waseda? I swear, sometimes I think I’m the only person in my life with brain cells.” he says snidely, pointedly raising his chin and looking away from you as he adds: “I suppose your arrest wasn’t entirely a bad thing, though—made the police force more willing to open their eyes with their wives and family members going off the deep end about the Hunting Dogs. But still, after all the effort I went through to get that warning to you…”

He finishes with a loud scoff, but you’re more focused on the aghast expression on Dazai’s face as he looks at you, and you brace yourself for the conversation that’s about to come, wondering how the hell you’re going to get out of it.

“You got arrested?” Dazai blanches, eyes wide and face a bit pale.

You wince, laughing a bit sheepishly. “Yeah… ha, look at us, in jail at the same time! Couple goals, huh?” 

Dazai doesn’t look half as amused—a mix of disbelief, guilt and a hint of anger all visible on his face. You don’t know where the guilt is coming from, but you figure he must blame himself for it somehow, which you think is a bit ridiculous because it was your choice to let yourself get arrested when you had the chance to flee. You think that your trip to the amusement park is going to be tainted now, because you know that as soon as Dazai gets the chance, he’s going to bully you into an interrogation over what happened, so to salvage the night and spare yourself the headache, you finally make your move.

“Atsushi-kun, Kyouka-chan, Kenji-kun, Osamu and I are going to the amusement park later, you should join us!” 

The look Dazai gives you is nothing short of betrayal, but luckily, Atsushi, Kenji and Kyouka, who’ve all lit up at your words, excited, can see it from where they’re sitting. You smile sweetly up at Dazai, leaning up to steal a kiss; he is disgruntled, narrowing his eyes at you.

“Oh? The one in Kanagawa?” Yosano suddenly asks, interested. “We’ll come too.”

Dazai buries his face in your chest, letting out a muffled groan. Yosano tosses you a wink, seemingly having forgotten about her argument with Kunikida as she throws her arm around the man and gives him a sharp look.

“Won’t we, Kunikida?” she asks with a terrifying smile. Kunikida looks as if he’s going to protest but before he can, Yosano’s arm around him tightens. “Won’t we?”

“Fine,” Kunikida bites out, looking none too pleased. “I need to hurry and finish this report then, so let go.”

Ranpo points at you. “You’ll fund my cotton candy for the night as an apology for the unnecessary headache,” he declares and you let out a huff of laughter in agreement.

“Can Naomi and I come too?” Tanizaki asks, a bit hesitant as he glances at you and notices the way Dazai has slumped into your chest, defeated. “We’ve only been once when we were kids. It’d be fun to go back.”

“‘Course,” you agree easily. “Dazai and I are gonna head out now though, I have to run to the store before we go.”

Kunikida only waves you off—he probably doesn’t even register what you asked, too focused on getting his report done—so you push Dazai off of you and rise to your feet, stretching because your back has become a bit sore from lounging around all day. Dazai nearly topples onto his ass, shooting you an accusing look before standing up straight.

You hold your hand out to him, he takes it, looking a bit mollified. 

“See you in a bit,” you tell the Agency, and you get various different goodbyes as you leave the office.

As soon as the door shuts behind the two of you, Dazai is scowling at you. “You’re devious,” he claims. “Inviting them all to avoid a much needed conversation. Diabolical.”

“Learned from the best,” you coo, leaning into him and nudging his arm with your shoulder. He rolls his eyes, you grin. “Please, you and I both know you would spend the whole night trying to talk about it if we go alone and it would piss me off. We can talk about it when we get home.”

“And now.” The smile that Dazai gives you is all teeth, you grimace. “How did you get arrested?”

You just shrug. “They asked me for information, I refused to give it. I figured if they were going to come after me one way or another, it’s better that it happens in public—people don’t really take kindly to watching someone get arrested for associating with an organization that they’ve all associated with at some point or another because they’ll get scared that they’re next.”

Dazai looks at you, distinctly impressed. “You are devious.” He sounds proud, your cheeks heat up a bit, but then his expression drops again. “But still reckless. You could’ve been killed.”

“But I wasn’t.” You wave him off and then absently bid goodbye to the cafe owner and his wife as the two of you leave the cafe and make your way down the street to where you’d parked this morning. 

“But you could’ve been,” Dazai stresses the words, he’s a lot more tense than you expected, his jaw is tight. He catches the way you’re looking at him and shakes his head, letting out a puff of air. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” you ask, brows furrowed.

“It’s my fault,” he tells you, and you immediately scoff, rolling your eyes. “It is, you don’t understand—I was with Dostoevsky in Meursault, I had to make a decision-”

“Shut up,” you tell him, irate. His mouth shuts instantly. “Stop acting like I have no autonomy. I knew what I was walking into, I chose to do it anyway. That’s the end of it, stop blaming yourself for every little thing that goes wrong, Osamu. You’re only human, you can’t control everything.”

You can tell that Dazai doesn’t believe you, but that’s an argument for another day. Luckily, Dazai doesn’t look too keen on pressing the subject anyway. Instead, conflict sweeps over his face as he studies you.

Finally, he asks quietly, “You never doubted the Agency?”

You let out a sharp laugh. “Are you kidding? There’s no way anyone’s going to convince me that the people in that office building are terrorists. That’s absurd, I figured there was something supernatural going on, just didn’t know what.”

Dazai looks at you, disbelief painted on his face. You’re not sure why until he lets out his own laugh, shaking his head. “The Decay of the Angel had a reality altering book,” he explains, eyeing you as the two of you continue down the sidewalk. “And you managed to somehow subvert the reality they created with it.”

You can’t tell if it’s a question or not, and for some reason, you feel distinctly seen as he looks down at you with an indecipherable expression. So you just shrug. “They shouldn’t have written such a ludicrous reality, then,” is all you say, a bit awkwardly.

Dazai only laughs again, slinging an arm around your shoulder. You lean your head into him, smiling softly. You bask in his presence, letting the warmth of the setting sun wash across your face as you share a few moments of silence. 

As the two of you reach the parking garage you’d parked in, Dazai suddenly stops, looking down at you. “Do you believe in fate?” he asks quietly, uncertainty in his eyes as he watches you for a response.

“Yeah,” you tell him. You’ve always believed in fate, and you believe in it a bit more after meeting Dazai, because somehow you know that you were always destined to meet him, that your fates have been intertwined since the moment the two of you were born. You simply cannot imagine a life without him, not in this world or any other. “String theory, multiverse, I think the world’s a lot bigger than just ours. Why?” 

You glance up at him curiously. “You do?” he asks a bit distantly, leaning down to ghost his lips against your forehead. Then a bit more hesitant, he continues, “If you think there’s more worlds like ours… do you think we’re together in all of them?” 

You snort, which is obviously not the reaction Dazai expects from the way he jolts, but before he can take offense to your reaction, you speak.

“Definitely,” you say so confidently that he almost looks taken aback. “I’ll find you in every universe, you can count on it.”

You think he looks beautiful right now as the sun finally sets over the horizon, the pale orange tints of the coming dusk making his skin glow, his eyes soft and fond, full of longing as he looks down at you. You’re struck with a distinct urge to kiss him, but he looks so divine in this moment that you can hardly bring yourself to move, spellbound as you admire him.

“Yeah,” he finally breathes out, “I will.”

i don’t even really have words guys 🥹 i’m literally about to weep i can’t believe it’s over

what happened off-screen during dead apple

Genuinely in shock, I was NOT ready for this 😭 I am not fine.

ᡣ𐭩 I PRAY, DON'T FALL AWAY FROM ME

FEATURING: dazai osamu

SUMMARY: murphy's law has never been more true. anything that can go wrong will go wrong. and it does.

AUTHOR'S NOTES: HAPPY FRIDAYYYYYYY, we're finally getting into the thick of this series, the next few chapters will be INTENSE, i hope you enjoy them as much as i enjoyed writing them ;) this chapter was actually a doozy for me - i struggled a bit with reconciling civzai with canon!dazai and figuring out how to make civzai react to everything that's happened in a way that a civilian would, but i didn't want to make it too far removed from how canon!dazai would act. i ended up rewriting a few times, but i'm mostly happy with how it came out. anyway!! reblogs and comments greatly appreciated as always!! ENJOY heheh!

GENERAL WARNINGS: fem!reader, port mafia executive!reader, civilian!dazai, dazai's struggles w suicide & sh, reader partakes in mafia business, dazai isn't dazai without a bit of obsessiveness and possessiveness (the possessiveness doesn't come til later but the obsessiveness starts from day 0).

CHAPTER SPECIFIC WARNINGS: hardly edited. depictions of dissociation, brief depiction of gore in first scene, dazai's implied to be in a bit of a manic episode in the second scene and then crashes hard in the third (he is not coping well with everything that happened), reader is all strung up and agitated most of this chapter which leads to some very stupid decisions, dazai also makes some very stupid decisions.

ANOTHER THING TO NOTE: our lovely reader IS A MAFIA EXECUTIVE !! as a port mafia executive, she does port mafia things, this will become very apparent in the next chapter and the rest of the upcoming chapters. it hasn't been as apparent in the past few, so it might be a bit jarring to read but it is something to keep in mind. additionally, she is FLAWED and that is very apparent in how an argument goes down in this chapter. i wanted to add this warning just to give you all a bit of a heads up.

SEE: WASTELAND, BABY! SERIES MASTERLIST

You look so… serene. 

Dazai’s knees are tucked to his chest as he sits on the bed next to you, watching as you rest. You’re fast asleep, even puffs of air escaping your lips as you curl up close to him beneath the comforter. You look a lot younger right now, not anything like the hardened mafia executive that he knows you are. Dazai’s breath catches when he sees you shift to get a bit more comfortable, moving closer to him so that your forehead is pressed against the side of his thigh.

Still, none of this feels real. He hardly breathes as he reaches out to brush the back of his knuckles against your cheek, watching as you let out a soft noise in your sleep before nuzzling a bit closer to him. Dazai believed that he was a man destined to be alone for his whole life; never in his wildest dreams did he ever think someone would love him for who he is, much less someone like you who could have anyone you wanted.

It doesn’t feel real.

Was it all just a dream? 

A nightmare? 

He blinks and suddenly blood stains the back of his knuckles where he’d been touching you, dribbling from your lips to the mattress below. Your eyes are still closed, but Dazai knows if they were open, they’d be glassy and empty. His breath quickens and his gaze flickers down the bed to your torso where he knows the gaping wound is hidden beneath the sheets. He feels the weight of a gun in his right hand and hears a thud to his left of a body hitting the ground and-

“Stop thinking so hard.”

He physically jumps at the sound of your voice, eyes widening as he looks down at you. Your eyes are still closed and you haven’t budged an inch, but the blood is gone and the weight in his hand has disappeared. For a split second, Dazai thinks he might’ve imagined your voice, but then, as if you can sense the thought, your eyes crack open, sharp and squinted, not at all glassy or empty.

Just his mind playing tricks. 

“I can feel the shitty thoughts tossing around up there,” you mutter with a yawn, stretching a bit next to him. His face heats up when you press your lips against the sliver of bandages peeking out from where his shirt is riding up his sides. You sigh as you push yourself into a sitting position, dropping your head on his shoulder. “What time is it?”

“Half-past seven ish,” he answers, voice catching as he looks down at you. “You slept late. Your meeting is in twenty minutes.”

“Did you sleep at all?” you ask with a frown. You sit up straight again to look at him, a concerned expression on your face. “You’re not usually up this early.”

Dazai did not, in fact, sleep. Besides the fact that every time he closes his eyes, he’s plagued with the sight of your dead body, his mind has been in shambles over how easy it had been to pull the trigger of the gun you’d given him. Odasaku had instilled morals into him, morals that Dazai has strictly followed since the day he met the man, even more so after he died to save Dazai to honor the older man. And Dazai had known that being with you would compromise said morals but…

But it’s different when he’s actually the one stomping all over them.

Life should be treasured. Spend your days helping people.

Why had pulling the trigger been so easy?

Dazai stares down at his hands, willing an answer to come to him. He thinks the worst part is that even now, he can’t muster guilt. He should feel guilty—he knows that—he took someone’s life, someone who had people waiting on him if what you were saying held any merit, but he’d done it to protect you and he just can’t seem to feel guilty when it had been a choice between your life and an enemy’s.

Still, he thinks, it shouldn’t have been so easy.

He shouldn’t feel nothing.

Not for the first time, Dazai thinks there’s something fundamentally wrong with him. Something that sets him painfully apart from the rest of humanity. Something that leaves him grasping at straws as he tries to put on a face and convince the world that he’s just like everyone else. Something dark and empty that festers—it festered while he was on his own in Suribachi, it festered after Odasaku’s death, and it festers now with blood on his hands and no remorse to be found. 

“Osamu,” you say, more concerned now, but you sound like you’re underwater and Dazai can’t even turn his head to look at you.

That’s not even to mention the message from Professor Ui. The more he thinks about it, the more anxious he gets. A tip-off. Professor Ui hadn’t given enough context for him to try to narrow down what it might be about, and there’s been so much going on recently that Dazai couldn’t possibly hope to narrow it down on his own. The only given is that it would be bad for you.

He almost doesn’t want to tell you.

No, he doesn’t want to tell you. Not at all. Not yet. Not when all he can give you is more to stress about, more to be paranoid about. All he’s been able to do is come to you with issue after issue, he’s been a burden—the least he can do is figure out the scope of this new problem before saddling you with it.

He can handle it himself. He can. He’ll go to the meeting and figure out what Professor Ui’s tip-off is about so when he brings it to you, you can formulate a plan of action to handle it. He can’t just tell you ‘Hey! Remember that journalist that’s trying to target you! He got a tip-off that he’s planning to do something about!’ when you already have so much on your plate.

He-

“Osamu,” you say, reaching for his wrist but the sudden touch jolts him out of his spiral.

His heart rate spikes and his surroundings blur and Dazai is instinctively pushing you away from him as panic subsumes all coherent thought, unsure of where he is and what’s going on. The sheets feel too much like the soft dirt, the fingers on his wrist are too tight, the air is too brisk and cold, the early morning light shining through your blinds into your apartment is so reminiscent of the way it shone through the tall trees into the forest.

“Don’t touch me.”

His feet tangle against the sheets as he scrambles away and tumbles right off of the side of the bed—pain shoots up his ankle and for a moment, Dazai forgets where he is and it’s not you on the bed reaching out to him, but the rotted skin of Arahabaki, your blood dripping off its fingers. Dazai can hardly breathe as he tries to reorient himself, nails digging into his palms.

It takes a concerning amount of time for Dazai to remember where he is, who he’s with. By the time he does, you’re kneeling at the edge of the bed, an expression on your face that Dazai is just too out of it to understand, and Dazai can feel his face heating up in embarrassment, a heavy feeling of mortification spreading through his chest when he realizes how he just lashed out at you.

“Osamu,” you try again, voice a bit softer and there’s no mistaking the concern in your eyes now, but Dazai just wants to bury himself alive, throat spasming as he hides his face in his lap. “Hey, it’s-”

“Go away,” he snaps, humiliated. “Go away. I’m fine. Don’t you have a meeting to get to?”

“It can wait,” you say, too understanding. “Osamu, I-”

A burden. 

He’s a burden—he brings you issue after issue, distracts you from your work and gets you in trouble. For some reason, despite all of that, you still want him, and all he can repay you with is lashing out at you and causing more trouble. Now because he’s fucked in the head, you’re going to be late to another meeting that you can’t afford to be late to because you’re worried about him and he’s just so tired of being a liability all the time. 

“Go.” His voice cracks over the word, he hates the way it comes across as more pleading than angry; he doesn’t have to look up at you to know the way you must be looking at him. “Please just go. I’m fine. Please.”

For a terrible, terrible second, you don’t respond and Dazai thinks you might be about to press more. He’s not sure if he can handle that. He just needs you to go to your meeting so it’s one less thing that he’s fucked up for you. He needs you to go.

“Okay,” you finally say after a few moments. “Okay. I’m going to get dressed.”

The breath that Dazai lets out is too heavy and too relieved. He doesn’t dare to look up until he hears you shuffle off of the bed and make your way to your closet. His eyes slide shut as he leans his head against the wall he’d backed himself against, forcibly calming his unsteady heart.

After a few minutes, you finally come to kneel in front of him, dressed in your suit and ready to head out. He looks up at you, hoping he doesn’t look nearly as much of a mess as he feels, but he thinks he fails because the conflicted expression on your face only becomes even more worried.

“Please go,” he repeats, voice raspy.

You sigh, gaze lowering to the ground, but you nod so Dazai can only feel relief. His lashes flutter shut as you lean in to brush your lips against his forehead and again, Dazai’s chest swarms with guilt and self-loathing because he wishes he could just be normal.

“I’ll order you some takeout,” you finally say as you lean back to look at him again. “I probably won’t be back until late tonight. You have any preferences for lunch and dinner?”

Dazai’s throat spasms as he swallows. “Crab?” he asks, voice too strained for comfort.

You roll your eyes, but you smile. “You’re not eating crab for lunch and dinner,” you say lightly, and Dazai smiles back a bit, but his smile feels a lot more wobbly than yours looks. “I’ll order it for lunch, I’ll pick dinner.”

Dazai’s nose wrinkles. “No mushrooms.”

“No mushrooms,” you agree as you rise to your feet. “I’ll see you later, yeah? Call me if you need anything.”

He definitely won’t, but he nods anyway. “See you,” he whispers.

You don’t immediately walk away, lips drawn tight as you look down at him. “I love you,” you say after a few moments and Dazai inhales sharply, gaze flickering up to you.

“... I love you too,” he echoes, the tightness in his chest easing when he sees how your expression smooths out at his words. You linger for a few seconds longer before sighing and leaving your bedroom without another word.

Dazai doesn’t budge until he hears the elevator bing, signaling its arrival to your floor.

Even when he’s sure that it’s gone—and you with it—he doesn’t move. 

He doesn’t want to. His hands sting where he’d pushed you away from him and his legs feel bolted to the ground beneath him. He can hear his phone buzzing somewhere in front of him, probably tangled in the sheets he’d dragged off of the bed with him. He knows that he should get up and check—the meeting is in two hours and Dazai not only needs to get dressed, but he needs to figure out how he’s going to sneak out of this building without alerting any of your subordinates.

For you, he reminds himself as he sighs and pushes himself to his hands and knees and drags himself over to the mess of sheets on the ground, rifling through them until his hand closes around his cell phone. He’ll go to the meeting, get the information, and come back before you’re even finished with work… before that actually, he’ll need to get back by noon when you send someone here with takeout. If they show up and he’s not here, they’ll definitely report that back to you and he doesn’t want you to know that he’s going out because that’ll just cause you more stress and the whole point of this is to try to lessen your burden.

He unlocks his phone to see a few messages in the group chat and he cringes as soon as he reads them.

Koda Hinami: Is it okay if we meet a bit later today? I have an appointment in Tokyo and the soonest train I can catch is at 14:30.

Professor Ui: Does 15:30 work?

Otsuka Ayato: good with me, i’m free all day

Koda Hinami: Yup! That’s perfect.

Professor Ui: Dazai-kun?

Dazai supposes that this gives him more time at least—he doesn’t have to rush back before you send food for lunch. He doubts that you’ll be back before nightfall, and you probably won’t send dinner until 19:00 so that gives him almost four hours, which is more than enough time. He can spend the morning plotting out how he’s going to get out of the building without being seen.

Dazai: that works

He puts his phone back on the charger, a bit more pep in his step as he tells himself that he’ll make everything up to you. He pushes away all of the thoughts plaguing him, dressing himself in one of the outfits he’d left at your apartment. Those nagging feelings of doubt and self-loathing linger in spite of his attempts to shoo them away, but he does his best to ignore it. He needs to get himself into a better mood before seeing his professor and classmates—he doubts they would notice, but on the off chance they did, he needed to be ready to distract them from it in some way and he most definitely is not ready for that now.

But he has time now, so-

Was that the elevator?

Dazai’s head whips to the side to look out your bedroom door just as he finishes pulling on the new sweater you bought him. He creeps out of your bedroom slowly, wondering if you came back because you forgot something, but when he steps out of your room to the top of the staircase, he freezes because it is not you standing in the living room but instead a different, but unfortunately familiar, face.

Great, he thinks bitterly, expression twisting into distaste when he sees Nakahara Chuuya leaning on a pair of crutches. The man looks equally irate at the sight of Dazai standing on the balcony, making no effort to hide the way he scoffs and rolls his eyes. 

“Why are you here?” Dazai asks, eyes squinted as he stares down at the other man. 

He looks awful and Dazai isn’t sure why it makes him feel smug, but it does. Chuuya looks like he’s hardly able to hold himself up, leaning heavily on his crutches, face pale and beaded with sweat. He’s dressed in a thin t-shirt and sweats, so Dazai can see the aggravated scars running up his arms, but his eyes can’t help but linger on Chuuya’s hand. 

His left hand—the same one that had torn through your body, that had killed you, the same one that had tried and failed to kill him. If Dazai looks hard enough, he swears he can see the rot spreading across the other man’s skin again, from his fingertips to his wrist to his elbow, as Arahabaki takes back over, so Dazai forces his gaze back up to his face.

All of the aggression that had been plain on Chuuya’s face disappears when he notices where Dazai was looking. He shakes his head and asks roughly, “Where the hell is she?”

Dazai scowls. “Why do you want to know?” 

“You little-” Chuuya hisses, gaze sharpening. “Where is she?”

Just to be annoying, and because Dazai has no sense of self-preservation, he asks, “Why should I tell you?”

“I’m going to rip your head off,” Chuuya spits out, unnervingly quick on his crutches as he makes his way over to the staircase. Dazai darts into your bedroom, hand on the door so he can quickly slam it shut if Chuuya tries to come closer, although he’s not sure if a door is going to be enough to stop him. “Get back here.”

“You tried that already,” Dazai says lightly, watching Chuuya’s reaction carefully. “You failed, remember? … Or that’s right, you wouldn’t, would you? What’s his face… Fireboy? He mentioned that you probably wouldn’t… So, was he right? How much do you remember?”

Chuuya’s entire expression shifts at Dazai’s words, lips tightening and gaze averting down to the ground. The shame is clear on his face as he lets out a sigh, glancing up to see the bruises around Dazai’s neck just too shake his head and look away again.

“Enough,” he says quietly. “I remember enough.”

Dazai tilts his head to the side as he examines Chuuya. The scars on his arms indicate the shadow of Arahabaki’s presence in his body—Arahabaki, the violent and destructive god who had killed you and tried to kill Dazai. He expected to be more anxious around, or even scared of, Chuuya after what happened. He supposes he is to some extent, he can feel the itchiness on his tongue that always signals those unwelcome emotions approaching, but Dazai thinks it’s not because of Chuuya himself like he expected—he still feels the ever present urge to antagonize the man due to petty jealousy and the acute irritation his appearance and existence in general causes him.

 It’s natural, he rationalizes. It’s not like Chuuya is Arahabaki or Arahabaki is him, so there’s no reason for Dazai to be scared of Nakahara Chuuya. Arahabaki, on the other hand… he watched you die to it and he nearly died himself, although the former is decidedly more traumatizing, so it makes sense. But Dazai has never been fond of fear, he’s learned through his own experiences alone in Suribachi and from Odasaku that it’s the most treacherous emotion, the quickest to kill, so he’s swift in his efforts to channel those lingering nerves that Arahabaki is causing into an emotion he’s much more capable of processing: curiosity.

To kill fear of something that’s mostly unknown to him, it must first become known.

He doesn’t know much about Arahabaki, only the few vague things you mentioned and the fact that it seems to be incapable of touching Dazai without being neutralized, which Dazai supposes he can also use as a blanket of security. But he has to know more.

“Can you speak to it?” Dazai blurts out, unable to help himself from firing out the question, hardly holding back the forty more.

“What?” Chuuya asks, voice flat.

“Arahabaki,” Dazai says, and then adds, “obviously.”

Chuuya gives him a withering look and instead of responding, he repeats his question from earlier. “Where is she?”

Dazai’s lips flatten as he squints again, not appreciating the way the man blew off his question entirely, but this time he decides to respond. “She went to an executive meeting, shouldn’t you be there if you’re up and about?”

“I thought I could catch her before she left,” Chuuya sighs, suddenly looking very tired, which naturally piques Dazai’s interest because why was he trying to catch you before you left? “I’m not supposed to be up yet. Doc’s gonna fuckin’ skin me alive when he finds me.”

“Why were you looking for her?” Dazai prods.

Chuuya pointedly doesn’t respond, side-eyeing Dazai before turning to walk back down the stairs. Dazai’s jaw drops in disbelief at the way he was so blatantly ignored and darts forward, kicking his leg out to drive it into the back of Chuuya’s knee. He’s smug when the other man lets out a surprised yelp, knee buckling as he drops; he’s not quite as smug when he steadies himself with his ability and turns back to Dazai, eyes blazing.

“I’m going to kill you, you shitty bastard,” Chuuya spits out and Dazai’s eyes widen as he darts right back into your bedroom, slamming the door shut hard behind him. “Do you really think that’s going to stop me, you dumb fuck?”

Dazai presses his full body weight against the door as Chuuya drives his shoulder into it to force it open. He’s the one yelping now as he goes sprawling forward onto your floor when Chuuya pushes the door open so hard that it comes off the top hinge.

“She’ll kill you if you kill me in her apartment,” Dazai threatens before he can take another step forward, voice a bit too squeaky for comfort. “She will.”

Chuuya sounds and looks like an angry bull when he lets out a heavy breath as he tries to calm himself. Dazai almost comments on it, but he bites his tongue. He might seem to be impervious to the man’s gravity manipulating powers, but he’s not quite as impervious to the brute force he’s capable of.

“What the fuck was that for?” Chuuya hisses.

“I asked you a question,” Dazai says, raising his chin as he stands back up and looks down at Chuuya, enjoying the way the mafioso’s eye twitches when he has to look up to meet his gaze. “You ignored me.”

“You-” Chuuya begins before taking a deep breath again. “I just wanted to talk to her, that’s all.”

“But why?”

Chuuya doesn’t look amused by Dazai’s insistence, but that only makes Dazai more insistent. He clearly had a reason for seeking you out and it must’ve been an important one considering how upset he seemed after realizing that you’d left already, and nobody could really blame Dazai for being curious.

Chuuya stares at Dazai for a second before sighing. “She’s… not doing good. Boss has been putting her through the wringer lately and Piano Man said it was even worse yesterday, probably gonna be just as bad today. I wanted to check in on her before she left.”

Dazai’s throat spasms as he swallows, suddenly all of the amusement he was getting out of irritating Chuuya withers away as the man’s words register. He knew you weren’t doing good—he knew it, he could tell from the tense expression you had whenever you thought he wasn’t looking, could tell from the way your laughs and words seemed strained, could tell from the way your smile was frayed at the edges. It’s why he doesn’t want to come to you with another issue and no solution, but hearing it from someone else…

“Don’t feel bad if you didn’t notice,” Chuuya starts to say, noticing the expression on Dazai’s face. “I’m sure she’s careful to put up a front to not worry you, does that with everyone, but she’d do it especially with y-”

“I noticed,” Dazai says, bristling. “I just… Why is he putting her through the wringer? How?” 

Chuuya looks uncomfortable, like he doesn’t want to respond, and Dazai has his answer.

“Because of me,” he realizes, a lump in his throat.

“No,” Chuuya snaps before hesitating. “Not just you. He blames this whole shitshow with the Guild on her, and then there was the stuff with the Inagawa-kai and Shimazaki-kai-”

“Which happened because of me,” Dazai interjects, lashes lowering as he looks away. Dark claws pull at his heart again and Dazai can’t push them away this time.

“We were gonna go to war with them sooner or later anyway,” Chuuya says, shaking his head. “Whether it was then or later, doesn’t matter. Not on you or her.”

Dazai doesn’t think he agrees with that, and he doesn’t even think Chuuya agrees with that considering how he reacted to finding out that Dazai was the reason for you deciding to rush the attack on the Inagawa, but he doesn’t feel like arguing about it. Chuuya doesn’t let him anyway, starts talking before Dazai can get a word in.

“Now he’s pissed about the battle with Lovecraft and Steinbeck. I had to use Corruption, and I’m pretty sure he figured out that damned doctor from the Agency was the one to save her life,” he continues, grimacing. “He’s gonna hold that over her head.”

Oh? 

Dazai’s focus zeroes in on that, brows furrowing. He’d been wondering how you managed to survive the wound Arahabaki dealt but every time he asks you, you evade.

“Why?”

“Why what?” Chuuya asks brusquely, looking a bit startled almost, as if he’d forgotten he was talking to Dazai and had started venting on his own.

“Why is he going to hold it over her?” he asks carefully.

“That’s not for me to say,” Chuuya says after a few moments, much to Dazai’s frustration. “You’ll have to ask her-”

“She wouldn’t even tell me how she survived,” Dazai interrupts, annoyed. “I just want to… I want to understand what’s going on so I can help her.”

Chuuya looks conflicted, so Dazai takes the opportunity to press.

“I can’t help her if I don’t understand what’s going on, I can try to help. You’re worried about her, aren’t you?” Dazai demands, and then adds through gritted teeth, “Please.”

“Did she… tell you about her past with the Boss? During the war?” Chuuya finally asks, leaning against the railing as he waits for Dazai to respond.

“She told me that he brought her in after her town was massacred,” Dazai tells him, fingers thrumming against his thigh. “That she spent two years trying to figure out how to use her ability to help him create an immortal military unit.”

Chuuya lets out a breath as he looks away. “She wasn’t the only one that the Boss had taken in. There was another girl—Yosano Akiko—who had the ability to bring people back from the brink of death over and over and over again. From what she’s told me, and that’s not much, Yosano was prodigious with her ability and she… wasn’t. The Boss held it over her, pit the two of them against each other and to this day, compares her to Yosano. It’s a… touchy subject for her, I’m not surprised she evades it.”

Dazai’s face twists. “But she’s good at using her ability now,” he protests even though he knows it’s not that simple.

“I know,” Chuuya says, voice solemn. “Doesn’t matter though. It’ll never be enough—not for her or for him.”

Dazai has never met the Boss of the Port Mafia, but he thinks that he hates him more than anyone else Dazai has ever known. A bitter feeling claws at his chest as he thinks of a much younger you being rescued from a warzone only to find yourself in the hands of a cruel and manipulative man that guises as your savior. Dazai is not a man who has ever been inclined to turn to violence—he much prefers battles of wits—but god, if his fingers don’t twitch for it now.

The words slip from his lips before he can stop them, tight and angry: “He’s a piece of shit.”

Chuuya stares at Dazai for a moment in disbelief before barking out a laugh and then promptly slapping his hand over his mouth and forcing himself to quiet down. 

“Shut the fuck up,” he says dutifully. “He’s still the Boss.”

“Your boss, not mine.” Dazai rolls his eyes.

“Whatever,” Chuuya replies dryly, ever clever in his response. “I’m going to go try to run into her before Doc manages to sniff me out… Don’t do anything stupid while she’s gone.”

Dazai gives Chuuya a side eye. “Wasn’t planning to,” he lies, possibly. He hasn’t decided yet if going to this meeting is a stupid idea—it might be, but the rewards outweigh the risks anyway.

Chuuya stares at him for a second suspiciously. “Whatever,” he repeats, so astute. He hesitates as he moves to leave and Dazai raises his eyebrows, waiting for him to say whatever might be running through the slow brain of his.

“Why aren’t you scared of me?” Chuuya asks after a few moments, looking uncharacteristically unguarded as he stares at Dazai, waiting for an answer.

“Why would I be scared of someone the size of a slug?” Dazai counters, giving Chuuya a simpering smile as the man’s face immediately tightens in anger.

“You’re incorrigible,” Chuuya spits.

“Big word for such a small brain,” he taunts, “did she teach you it?”

Chuuya doesn’t even respond, hissing out insults under his breath as he promptly makes his way back down the stairs. 

Dazai is unbearably pleased with himself as he gives the ginger a mocking wave while he waits for the elevator, leaning over the railing looking down at the first floor. Chuuya promptly flips Dazai off, face so red that it clashes painfully with his hair.

As soon as Chuuya’s in the elevator and out of sight, Dazai disregards the warning and begins the first phase of his plan—finding your laptop to see if you happen to have a layout of the building anywhere on it so he can figure out how to sneak out—suddenly feeling significantly more inspired to do whatever he can to ease the burden that’s been placed on you.

You know something is wrong when you get up to your apartment and find it dead silent—there’s no trashy reality show playing in the living room, no sound of that new fighting game that Dazai had bought on your card, no excited call of your name because you came home early with food instead of sending someone with it. The elevator closes behind you and the takeout in your left hand weighs uncomfortably heavy, your gaze draws from the hallway leading to the guest room over to the kitchen.

He’s not in the living room and you don’t see him in the kitchen, so you look up at the stairs leading to your bedroom. Maybe he went back to sleep—you could tell this morning that he hadn’t slept much, if at all, last night, and when Albatross stopped by with lunch for him (after much complaining, naturally), he said that Dazai looked half dead on his feet. 

It’s why you made sure to finish up your last meeting early—it was a video call with Tolstoy anyway, he didn’t mind you running out early, only wanted to let you know that he had to go with Repin to New York but could be in Yokohama by the end of the day on Thursday if you needed. You don’t really want to rely on the Three Deaths for help in this conflict, it would make the Port Mafia look weak, but depending on how this vote goes in the Diet on Friday, you might not have a choice. The Port Mafia isn’t in the position to handle the full force of the Guild and the military at the same time. 

Why didn’t he come down when he heard the elevator?

You place the food down on the table in the living room before making your way to the staircase. He must be up there, so you don’t know why you suddenly feel so dreadful and you don’t know why it’s suddenly hard for you to make yourself move forward, like you’re walking through waist-deep water and the current is running against you. Your heart thuds painfully in your chest as you walk up the stairs to your bedroom.

He’s sleeping.

Since when was your staircase so long, it feels like each step you go up, ten more appear in front of you. You’re half convinced that it’s an ability messing with you and not just your mind playing tricks.

He’s a light sleeper. He would’ve woken up.

By the time you get up to your apartment, you know he won’t be there, but your heart still sinks to your feet when you push your door open and see the bed empty and the bathroom door open. 

Dazai is nowhere to be seen.

Your lashes flutter as you force yourself to take a deep breath, trying to keep yourself calm. You’re stiff as you walk back out to the balcony looking over your apartment. Your voice is just as tense as you raise your voice to call: “Osamu?”

No response. 

Shit, you think, vision spinning a bit as you shut your eyes, counting your breaths as your heart rate spikes. Shit, where did he go? Did someone break in? No. No one could have gotten through the building’s security. He must have left… but why? Why would he do that when he knows how dangerous it is out there? How did he sneak out with no one noticing? It doesn’t make sense.

You shouldn’t have left this morning. You knew that you shouldn't have left the moment you stepped into the elevator, but he’d just been so distressed and the longer you lingered, the worse it got. It was only when you agreed to go that he finally started calming down, so you thought you were doing what was best for him, regardless of how it made you feel, but fuck, you should have known better.

You blame Mori. You always blame Mori, but the bitterness and anger is so intense now that it has your blood pressure skyrocketing. He’s been keeping you busy on purpose—busy and angry and stressed—you’ve hardly even gotten the chance to talk to Dazai since everything that happened. When you do have time with him, you’re either exhausted or in a bad mood trying to mask it from him. He watched Arahabaki kill you, he almost died, and-

And he killed someone.

It’s a fact that you've yet to fully acknowledge yourself; it makes you sick with guilt and self-loathing, knowing that it’s your fault that it happened and that you had promised him it wouldn’t. And it’s selfish because it means he’s been coping on his own and how is a twenty-two year old kid whose biggest problem three weeks ago was a group project supposed to cope with the fact that he killed someone?

This morning had been a red flag—one that you should’ve listened to, but instead, you took the easy way out. You didn’t know what to do without being able to use your ability to calm someone down, you’ve done it for Chuuya countless times, Klaus and Akutagawa too, but for Dazai, you could only watch as he worked himself up into a panic attack over everything that happened, the only thing seemingly calming him down being you leaving. So you left. 

But you should have stayed. You never should have left him—not yesterday after the attack, not this morning. He doesn’t belong in this life, he never has, but you dragged him into it anyway and now what? You’re leaving him to process it on his own? You’re leaving him to cope with the consequences of your actions? Your selfishness? What else was supposed to happen besides him getting overwhelmed and having a breakdown over it? 

Of course he ran—you can’t blame him, how else is he supposed to react to all of this? There’s no way that the average kid would ever be able to come to terms with what had happened yesterday, especially not alone, without any sort of support system to help him. Cooped up in your apartment with only his own mind as company—of course he ran.

You had been his life jacket and you had left him to drown. 

You need to find him. He had to have gone back to his apartment, unless…

Your throat feels tight as you swallow, remembering the morning you woke up to the call from the hospital.

Fuck, you have to-

The elevator?

Your gaze cuts down to the first floor of your apartment, watching as the elevator doors slide open. You watch with bated breath as you wait for whoever came up to your apartment to step out of the elevator, fingers wrapped tight around your phone. 

It’s only when a familiar head of brown hair steps out of it can you finally breathe.

Dazai doesn’t look half as much of the mess he was this morning—there’s more of a pep to his step, his face doesn’t look as gaunt and pale, he’s dressed in one of the cashmere sweaters and comfortable dress pants you bought him. He looks… good, like he did before everything that happened—untainted by all of the darkness you’ve brought into his life.

What changed from this morning?

He freezes as soon as he sees the takeout that you dropped on the coffee table, shrugging his backpack off of his shoulders and dropping it to the ground near where you hang your jackets. His eyes are wide as he looks around the apartment trying to pinpoint where you are, it takes him a few seconds before he finally looks up and sees you staring down at him from the balcony.

The smile he gives you is nervous and it puts you on edge. 

“Hi,” he says sheepishly. “You’re back early.”

You’re relieved—you are. He’s okay. He’s safe. He’s back. He didn’t run off and get himself hurt, or worse. The Guild didn’t get their hands on him. He’s safe and you’re relieved. 

So why are you still so tense and angry?

“What did you get to eat?” he presses, creeping forward to look at the bag of food on the table. He sniffs as he peeks inside. “Chinese?”

“Where were you?” you finally ask. 

Your voice sounds distant even to your own ears, your body feels tense no matter how much you try to relax. Dazai looks up at you with wide eyes, a hesitant expression on his face like he doesn’t want to admit to wherever he went and you can hear blood rushing through your ears as frustration washes over you. 

God, you’ve just spent a whole day dealing with Mori and various other unsavory people—you’d been looking forward to coming home to Dazai and now he’s pulling this. You know you need to calm down, that you shouldn’t take out your general irritation of the day onto him when he’s already had a rough few days, but fuck the least he could do is-

“I went for a walk.”

The least he could do is not lie to you.

“You went for a walk,” you echo flatly.

“Mhm. I went for a walk,” he agrees.

You stare down at him from the balcony, not budging an inch. Dazai shifts uncomfortably under your stare, and a part of you thinks you should go downstairs and just drop this but you can’t. Dazai is lying to you—why he’s lying to you is an issue in itself, but you’re more concerned with knowing where he actually went because you need to make sure that no public CCTV tapes caught him going to and from the headquarters.

“Where did you walk to?” you ask, voice tight.

“Just… around.”

You inhale sharply and look away, biting your tongue to force yourself to calm down. “Osamu,” you say his name, low with warning when he tries to evade answering the question properly. 

He bristles. “I didn’t realize I was under house arrest,” he says defensively, raising his voice a little.

Your eye twitches as you take a sharp breath and step away from the balcony. You pace a few steps back to your room and look up at the ceiling, willing yourself the patience to not let this blow up into an argument. It’s the last thing the two of you need right now, but god he’s making it difficult.

After a few moments, you drag yourself back over to the staircase. This time, instead of leaning against the railing and looking down at him, you make your way down the steps so you can stand in front of him, arms folded across your chest. Dazai looks guilty already, chewing the inside of his cheek as he refuses to look you in the eye. 

“Osamu, I’ve had a long day. Please just tell me where you went so I can make sure no cameras caught you going to and from the headquarters,” you say tiredly. “You’re not under house arrest, I just-we need to be careful the next few weeks, okay? Just until things calm down.”

“I just went to the school,” Dazai finally admits.

Instantly, your brows are furrowing. “The school?” you question, confused. “You don’t have classes today after twelve. Why did you go there? And why didn’t you tell me? I would’ve had Albatross drive you.”

The way Dazai refuses to meet your eyes is unsettling. You feel even more on edge than before as you wait for him to respond. Fuck, you just wanted to have a glass of wine and watch him play one of his stupid games. 

“It wasn’t for class, I was meeting people for a group project,” he says after a few moments, pointedly not answering your second question.

A group project.

The only ‘group project’ he has is for his journalism class… and the fact that he didn’t tell you so you could have someone drive him…

“You met with Ui,” you realize, staring blankly at Dazai. “Why?”

“I was helping,” Dazai says and however much on edge you might’ve been before, you’re even more now. “I was-”

“You were helping?” you ask, not sure what that might mean and not even sure if you want to know. 

Ui is bad news and for Dazai to go out to meet him now of all times… He’s supposed to be smart. You rub your face with your hands, feeling the tightly wound cord that’s been threatening to snap for the past twenty-four hours becoming even more strained. It’s only a matter of time before it does snap and you don’t want Dazai to take the brunt of your anger, not when most of it is directed at Mori.

“I was!” Dazai insists, voice getting louder. You can see the way his fists are closing and opening at his sides and how his nails leave bloody crescents in his palms. You tell yourself to calm down and talk this out with him, that you’re both not in the best mental states and you need to be lenient with him, but his next words are enough to send you teetering off the edge. “I was helping, I helped. He texted last night saying he had a tip-off about our project and I went to go figure out what it was so I could warn you.”

What the fuck?

“Why on earth would you ever go there on your own?” you hiss, just barely maintaining enough control to not raise your voice at him. “Especially after what happened yesterday. The Guild knows about you, Osamu. It could’ve been a set up.”

God, you almost want to rip out your hair. In what world could he have possibly thought that was a good idea. The Ivory Eagle getting a tip-off the same night after a major conflict with the Guild is not a coincidence and you should probably be more focused on that than you are, but you just can’t get over Dazai’s stupidity. 

If he had used that brain that you know he has, he would have realized it was no coincidence. The Guild must have gone to the Ivory Eagle with information about the Port Mafia and considering that Steinbeck made a comment about Fitzgerald getting the confirmation he needed about Dazai…

Fuck, you feel sick. 

“Oh yeah, because my professor is going to set me up to be captured by a criminal organization, right,” he says sarcastically.

“You don’t know shit about this world, Osamu,” you snap at him, taking a step closer but he doesn’t budge, unrepentant. “The lengths people will go to so they can take the Mafia down. Do you even know why the Ivory Eagle is so set on us?”

“That doesn’t matter-”

“Of course it matters-”

“No, it doesn’t,” he interrupts, voice pitched with hysteria. “What matters is that I helped. I got the information you need and-and I can help more. I can help more, I’m not incapable, I don’t need to be a liability anymore. You should be thanking me, not yelling at me. I-“

What is your life? 

You almost want to cry as you shake your head and take a step away and press your hands to your lips. You can’t do this right now—not after the day you had today and yesterday, you’re going to snap and say something you regret. You need to end this conversation before it goes any further.

“No. No, I am not having this conversation with you. Sit down on the couch, eat the food I bought and be quiet.” 

“I’m having this conversation,” Dazai, much to your distress, presses the conversation. “I’m tired of being a liability, I want to be helpful-“

Helpful? What is he even getting at? He better not be getting at what you think he’s getting at?

“What the fuck, Osamu?” you demand. “You’re not a liability, where is this coming from?”

“If I’m not a liability then let me help-“

Oh my god.

“No.”

“Why?” He sounds more like he’s begging than arguing now and your heart feels like it’s lodged in your throat because you don’t know what you’ve done to make him feel like he’s a liability to you, and more importantly, you don’t know how to fix it. “I can do it. I can. And this way, there doesn’t have to be push back from your friends about us—not if I’m part of the organization too, and-”

What the fuck is your life?

You can’t even hide the way your expression twists at his words, can’t hide the way you instinctually step away from him, can’t hide the way that your hands tremble so you stuff them in your pockets and shake your head furiously. A part of you wants to believe that you’d just imagined those last few words but they ring so soundly through your head that you know you didn’t.

“What the f…” You don’t even know what to say as you stare at him in disbelief. He’s still talking, you can see his lips moving but you can’t hear anything. Your ears are ringing and you’re desperately trying to make sure the wound up cord inside you doesn’t snap. “Hold on. Hold on. You are not part of this life, Osamu. You’re a civilian-“

“I killed someone,” Dazai cries out. His voice wavers and cracks, his eyes are wide and wild, and his hands are shaking just as much as yours but he’s not even thinking straight enough to hide them like he usually would. “What type of civilian kills people? I don’t-I don’t belong there anymore. I don’t belong there, I belong with you.”

“You killed one person in self defense, someone who was trying to kill us. That’s nothing compared to being in the Mafia, Osamu.” You try to calm him down but you don’t think there’s any calming him down now and you feel sick at the sight of him collapsing like this. You do your best to soften your tone as you continue, “Why would you want to be in the Mafia? Come on, Osamu, you’ve got good things going for you, your friend’s book to write, you don’t want this.”

“I can’t just go back to worrying about classes and homework after all of this,” he says, voice pitched as he shakes his head and tugs his hair a bit. “I can’t. I don’t belong there, I belong here, I stopped being a civilian the moment you let me into your life-”

“That’s not fair,” you breathe out, shaking your head. “That is not fair, Osamu. You forced yourself into my life just as much as I let you into it. That’s not fair.”

“It’s the truth. You could’ve cut me off at any point and you know that. You admitted it,” he hisses at you, throwing your words back into your face and it feels like a slap. “So, you can’t sit there and judge me for trying to make the most of it so things can be easier on both of us. I can do this. I belong here, belong with you. I helped you figure out how to try to get the Guild out of Yokohama, I sat there and helped you with plans, I killed someone, and I got this information for you—the Port Mafia would’ve stumbled right into the trap if I hadn’t. And you should be thanking me. You should be thanking me.”

Just like that, the cord snaps.

“This isn’t something to be fucking proud of, Osamu,” you shout at him, but he doesn’t even flinch, stands his ground about what he wants and it only pisses you off more. “None of this is shit to be proud of. Do you think I’m proud of who I am? You think Chuuya, or the Flags, or Klaus are? Do you think any of us are proud of what we do? Fuck, Osamu, how can you sit here and ask me to let you be part of this?”

“Because I could help. I could help you. Arahabaki couldn’t kill me, couldn’t even touch me—I could help, I could be the one sent to handle it instead of you. And-and I could do more, no one would expect a college kid to be part of the Mafia, I’d be able to get information for you, and I could-”

“Enough!” Your voice goes hoarse as you yell at him, unable to listen to this anymore. “Enough, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

You don’t see the way Dazai’s face falls at your words, the crestfallen expression that crosses over his face as soon as your words process through his head. You turn away from him, breathing heavily because you think you feel nauseous. 

How the fuck did this happen? 

You can’t let anyone find out about Dazai—his type of ability, the nullification, not even the West has developed anti-ability technology to this degree, they would kill to get their hands on Dazai. They’d put the bounty that had been on Atsushi to shame and you wouldn’t be able to protect him. He’d spend the rest of his life in labs being experimented on so they could replicate his ability in weapons.

Your phone starts ringing and you don’t even look to see who it is before you’re muttering out an excuse to Dazai and lifting it to your ear, pacing back to the stairs to go up to your bedroom for a few minutes alone to calm yourself down.

Except naturally, the person on the other line only induces more stress in you.

“How prompt, you’re not usually so quick to answer the phone when you’re with that little distraction of yours, little hime… lover’s spat, perhaps?”

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

“I thought you were someone else,” you say, voice dry and sharp. “Why are you calling me so late? Haven’t I seen enough of you today?” 

Mori laughs airly on the opposite line. “My, your time spent with that boy has sharpened your tongue… To think that all it would take for you to start stepping out of your shell is this…”

“I’m not in the mood,” you cut him off before he can continue, tongue running along the back of your teeth in frustration. “What do you want?” 

“There’s an issue at a warehouse by our ports in Shinko. The ones with the weapons being ready for transportation to Brazil. Take your subordinate and go ensure nothing is out of order—we can’t afford to be late on another shipment to Machado considering you redirected the last one to Paz.”

Instantly, you’re rolling your eyes. “Shinko is Ace’s port. Send him to get control over his territory,” you snap. “I’m busy.”

“Unfortunately, I’ve asked you. So, you’ll be going. You’ve caused enough trouble the past few weeks, I recommend you do as told without making a fuss.”

You grit your teeth but you bite back the next comment threatening to spill from your lips. Instead, you ask tightly, “What’s the issue there? What am I walking into?” 

Mori doesn’t respond for a moment. “... I’m not sure. Ace got word from one of his subordinates that something was going down there, but the line went dead before he could get a response. Our cameras are down. Take your subordinate, I can have the Black Lizards ready if you wish too.”

“No,” you say, shaking your head, wandering over to your closet to grab one of your longer dark jackets. As you shrug it over your shoulders, you say, “I’ll go figure it out. I’m not making it into a big operation.”

Mori sighs. “If that’s what you want… Call me once you’re done.”

You roll your eyes as you hang up the phone, stuffing it in your pocket before leaving your room. “Look, Osamu,” you say loudly as you head down the stairs. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have let that escalate like that. I have to head out for a bit but…”

Your voice trails off when you make it down the steps and find that Dazai is nowhere to be seen. Instantly, that sick, dreadful feeling returns.

“Osamu?” you call louder, voice a bit more strained, cracking over his name. 

No response.

Fuck.

“Fuck!” you shout, slamming your hands against the back of the couch before resting on it, trying to push back the nausea that builds up quickly in your through. 

You fumble for your phone, finding Dazai’s contact so you can call him but your hopes are quashed when you hear it buzzing on the floor near where you’re standing—must’ve fallen out of his pocket in his rush to leave. Your vision blurs and your eyes sting with tears, your breath becomes so shuddered that you think you might be on the verge of a panic attack.

God, you can’t even remember the last time you cried, but your cheeks are unmistakably wet and there’s no torrential downpour for you to mask them with.

Now’s not the time to cry, though. You need to move. The ports are on the way to Dazai’s apartment—you’ll check out what’s happening there and if there’s some sort of disturbance, you’ll… shit, you don’t even know. Chuuya is out of commission from Corruption, Akutagawa is out of commission because the wounds he received from Arahabaki aggravated his respiratory issue, and Klaus is out of commission because he’s still suffering the effects of using his ability to heal himself as much as he did.

Maybe you’ll see if Iceman and Albatross can handle it, but Albatross already did you a favor today…

You’ll figure it out as you drive there. You can’t waste time on it now, you need to get moving. The quicker you get to the ports, the better.

Because you need to get to Dazai. 

What the fuck is wrong with you?

Your words ring through Dazai’s head on repeat as he stumbles down the sidewalks in the direction of his apartment complex. He can hardly even breathe, his breath is ragged and uneven and his vision is so blurry that he can hardly see where he’s stepping.

What the fuck is wrong with you?

Dazai doesn’t know. He doesn’t know. He’s always known that there was something wrong with him—it’s why people could hardly stand to look at him, why his mother killed herself, why his aunt abandoned him, why no matter how hard he tried to be likable, people still turned their back to him. He’s always known there was something fundamentally wrong with him, but when he’s with you, you make him forget that. 

You make him feel normal. Make him feel human. Like there was never anything wrong with him, but it was everyone else in the world who was wrong instead. Like he didn’t deserve everything bad that’s happened to him. 

Dazai has never had faith in anything—not in any god because that would mean he had to admit that even god had forsaken him and certainly not in himself because Dazai has only ever failed himself, but he had faith in you. He let himself have hope when he was with you because you looked at him like he was worthy of being loved, like he was the only thing in the world that mattered to you.

What the fuck is wrong with you?

You looked at Dazai like you’ve never really seen him before that moment and he just… He couldn’t stay there, not with you looking at him like that, not when he realized the day that he’s been dreading has finally come to pass. 

What the fuck is wrong with you?

You’ve finally seen what everyone else does when they look at him. He knew this day was coming. He knew it, and he knew he’d been pressing his luck, that he was on borrowed time, but he had hope. He had hope that maybe this time would be different, that someone would see past all of his fronts and love him for him but he should’ve known better. Dazai is not someone capable of being loved. His own blood scorned and rejected him, the woman who gave birth to him killed herself to be free of him—Dazai is not someone capable of being loved. 

What the fuck is wrong with you?

He hiccups over another intake of air, tripping over uneven ground before steadying himself against the brickwall of a nearby building. He can see his apartment complex in the distance, it’s not far now, but Dazai feels sick. He feels sick and he can hardly breathe and-

And he misses you. He wants to go back to your apartment even if he’s met with contemptuous looks and rejection. He presses his hand to his mouth to hide the way he nearly chokes over a dry sob, feeling far too lost and alone. If he doesn’t belong with you, he doesn’t belong with anyone. Doesn’t belong anywhere. He wants to call you and ask you to come get him just to see if you’ll show, but he’s too scared that you won’t—and he doesn’t feel the familiar weight of his phone in his pocket anyway.

He forces himself to keep moving forward. He’s tired and it’s cold and Dazai just wants to lay in his cheap futon and cling to the thinning hope that you might come for him even if you did think he was a monster just like the rest of the world.

His feet drag against the concrete, the noise around him drowns out and his surroundings blur together, he keeps his gaze pinned to the ground as he moves forward. 

What is wrong with him? He’d known you were stressed with work, Nakahara Chuuya had told him that you were doing a lot worse than you were letting on, and he thought going out and putting himself in danger would be helpful… He’d just been so blinded by the idea of doing something useful…

It’s not until he gets to the steps of the complex that he realizes something is wrong. That someone is watching him. His gaze lifts as he looks around, eyes wide—for a moment, he doesn’t see anybody and he’s about to rush into the building but then he sees the shadow of a figure shift out of the overhang, waving his hand in the air.

“There you are, we’ve been waiting for ya,” a cheerful voice greets and Dazai’s hair stands on end as his gaze focuses on an unfamiliar redhead. He has an accent—American—and holds a handgun haphazardly in the hand he’s waving. “Damn, you look like you’ve had a shit night.”

This must be a member of the Guild.

You were right—they have been looking for Dazai and he… he just walked right into their hands. He lets out a breath, gaze darting up to the gun before swiveling around the area. He can’t outrun a gun, but he doubts that they’re going to shoot to kill if they plan to use him against you. If he could at least get a bit further out on the sidewalk… you have your subordinates monitor those cameras, they would see him get taken and report to you and-

And you would come for him. You would. You had to. 

Right?

“Thanks for the flashdrive, by the way,” the man grins as he bounds down the steps closer to Dazai. Dazai takes steps back to match the steps the Guild member takes forward, hoping that he can get far enough into the view of the cameras. “We can finally get little miss princess out of the way. Now that girl is a piece of work, takin’ this city’s gonna be much easier with her behind bars.”

Dazai stops dead in his tracks.

“What?” he breathes out. “What did you just say?”

His smile sharpens as he lifts his hand, showing off a very familiar hard drive tucked between his middle and index finger. “Gotta give you props, we’ve been trying for so long to get something to hold over her. She’s one slippery bitch, that’s for sure. And she’s got way too many allies. I kinda wanted to meet her just to see what all of the hype is about, but guess I’m not gonna get the chance.”

Dazai can hardly think—or, he is thinking but he’s thinking too much, so much that he can’t even tell one thought from the next because they’re all tumbling over each other and jumbling together.

“Give me that,” Dazai whispers before steadying his voice. “Give me that back now.”

The redhead shrugs and tosses him the flash drive. He cradles it to his chest instantly, throat spasming as he swallows.

“Sure,” the other man says. “Not like it matters, damage is already done. Hear that?”

Dazai becomes acutely aware of the sirens in the distance and he shakes his head, not willing to believe what’s happening. He-he can’t even do anything—he can’t call you to warn you, can’t out run a gun. Dazai feels so frustrated that he’s almost sick again. He’s never felt so entirely helpless before, never not been able to think his way out of a situation.

This is all his fault. 

He never should have sought out this footage, he should’ve destroyed it ages ago. He can never do anything right. He understands now why so many people were against him being in your life and for a brief second, he wishes that they’d succeeded in convincing you to cut him off because you’d be better off that way.

This is his fault.

What the fuck is wrong with him?

“Sorry kid,” he sighs lazily, not sounding sorry at all. “I fear I’m boutta make your shitty night a whole lot worse. Go on, James. Let’s bring him in.”

Dazai doesn’t even have the chance to react when he catches movement from the corner of his eye, a baton cracks against the side of his head so hard that his brain rattles against his skull and he doesn’t even register hitting the ground until he can feel the cool concrete against the side of his face.

Dazai’s vision blurs before it starts fading in and out, his body limp and uncooperative even as he tries to drag himself away from his assailants. He feels two hands grab him and hoist him over their shoulder, and as his body finally starts to succumb to the tantalizing lull of darkness, all he can think of is you.

I’m sorry, he thinks, wishing you could hear him. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’msorryimsorryimsorryi-

You hear police sirens in the distance as you arrive at the ferry leading to Shinko. It takes about five seconds for irritation to cloud your mind, realizing that the ferrymaster is not, in fact, waiting for you even though you called Ace and told him to have the ferry ready for you so you can check this out as soon as possible. You hate that despicable man but you need to get to Dazai, so speaking to him was a displeasure you were forced to deal with.

What a bastard, you think bitterly, shooting a text to Albatross to ask if he’s busy. You sigh as you lean against the cool wall, tilting your head up to look up at the colors the setting sun paints across the sky as you wait for a response.

You never should’ve let that fight escalate.

The thought has been plaguing you since you left your apartment. You knew better. Dazai is a civilian, he’s struggling to cope with everything that’s happened, of course he’s going to feel out of place with other civilians after what he saw, after what he did. He’d already opened up to you about his struggles to fit in with people and you knew this would make those insecurities worse but…

But hearing him say that he belonged in the Mafia scared you. He doesn’t belong there and he seemed to well and truly believe that it was the only place for him. The thought of the likes of Mori getting his hands on Dazai’s nullifying ability… It scared you beyond words could describe. Dazai belongs with you, yes, but he doesn’t belong with the Mafia. 

Still, you shouldn’t have reacted the way you did. Of course he ran, he’d been on the verge of collapse and you yelled at him, you scorned him, he was lost and looking for something to hold onto, looking for you to tell him everything would be okay, and you walked away.

Your eyes sting again. Even though no one is around to bear witness, you still close them to hide the way they mist over with regret. You’ve made many mistakes in your life—mistakes that got Itou killed, mistakes that ruined Chuuya’s life, and now mistakes that might’ve pushed away the only person who you could safely say loved you for who you are, unconditionally and unrepentantly.

You only force yourself to reopen your eyes when you feel your phone buzzing again, hopefully Albatross responding to your text. Before you can even unlock your phone, there are several more texts coming through, too quick for you to read what they’re saying—Chuuya, Kouyou, Doc, Lippmann, Piano Man, Klaus. You straighten, a heavy feeling settling over you as you look down at your phone and get ready to click one of the messages from Kouyou.

It’s only when Iceman calls that you pick up.

“What’s going on?” you ask, your voice steady even if your throat spasms with nerves.

Is it Dazai? Did something happen to him?

“Where are you?” Iceman demands. “I’m in the car with Albatross. Give us your location now.”

“I’m at the ferry terminal leading to Shinko. What is going on? Is Os-Dazai okay?” you question sharply, fingers tight and trembling around your phone. “Iceman-”

“I don’t know shit about your boyfriend,” Iceman snaps. “Have you even seen the news?”

You pull your phone from your ear without another word, fingers trembling as you pull up the news app. Your ears ring with the approaching police sirens as you read the trending headline, vision swimming and a shaky breath escaping your lips as you lean your weight against the wall so you don’t crumple to the ground. 

Vice Chair of the Mori Corporation suspected of Mafia affiliation after the release of footage from behind the Tokyo City Hall. What does this mean for the rest of the Corporation?

“No,” you breathe out, shaking your head as you stare down at the news article. You can hear Iceman and Albatross yelling on the opposite line, trying to get your attention, but you can hardly make out what they’re saying. The sound of the sirens is too loud, too near. “This isn’t real. We… got rid of the…”

“Footage from behind the Tokyo City Hall… you and the ginger with the ugly hat… splattered six guys against the wall.”

Dazai… what did you do?

No, he would never. No matter how upset he is at you. He would never hand over the footage. The real question is: what happened to him? How did they get ahold of the footage he’s been hiding? What did they do to him?

You feel sick as soon as the thought crosses your mind. The regret you felt moments before triples, quadruples, weighs on you so heavily that you think if you jumped in the bay, you would sink to the bottom. You never should have let the fight escalate, never should have given him the chance to leave.

You can see the flashing lights now, they’re rapidly closing in on you. You need to think—you don’t have much time left. You need to figure out how the Ivory Eagle got their hands on the video; they had to have gotten it through Dazai, but because Dazai would never give it up willingly… And the meeting about the tip-off right after the conflict with the Guild where Steinbeck confirmed that Fitzgerald knew about Dazai… 

The Guild must be involved. They must have worked with the journalists. They did the dirty work to get the footage from Dazai and passed it along to the journalists. You could send Klaus after the journalists, but it would condemn you if they were attacked or killed the day after they released an exposé on you. It would all but confirm your position in the mafia.

But Dazai could be in trouble.

And just like that, your decision is made.

“It’s too late, the cops are here,” you finally tell Iceman, “don’t bother coming.”

“But-”

“Shut up and listen to me, I don’t have much time,” you say sharply. “Ace set this up—have Piano Man call an executive meeting to have him executed. The Ivory Eagle journalism house. There’s a journalist called Ui Koutarou working there. He needs to be captured and interrogated immediately. Tonight. There’s a good chance that they worked with the Guild to get this video. Have Klaus do it, he’ll know what to do once he has the information… Kill the rest of them, I want them dead before I’m out on bail.”

“If we kill them now-”

“I know,” you spit. “I know what it means for me. I don’t care. Have it done.”

With Klaus behind the interrogation, as soon as Ui cracks and admits they had the Guild get the video through force from Dazai, he’ll know to go after the Guild to get to Dazai, and hopefully, Ui will have decent enough information about how he should go about it. If all goes well, Dazai will be back in your apartment and under a serious protection detail before you even get released from holding.

If it doesn’t go well… you’ll be arraigned by the court either tomorrow or the day after, Mori or Lippmann will handle bail, and you’ll put the Guild in its fucking grave before the prosecution is forced to drop the charges against you.

Dazai just needs to wait for you. 

He needs to trust you, even if he doesn’t have much reason to right now.

You toss your phone into the bay as several police cars skid to a stop at the front of the pier. The sirens are loud and piercing, the lights blinding, and you can hardly hear the words the officers are shouting as they approach you with guns drawn. You can hear the rotor blades of a helicopter thundering in the air above you as a spotlight shines down on you and the approaching officers.

You lift your hands in the air before you’re forced to your knees, arms twisted painfully behind your back as metal cuffs are locked around your wrists. You're dragged back to your feet, and the charges against you and your rights are read, but you don’t hear any of it. Your mind is only trained on one thing—one person.

Dazai, you think desperately, wait for me.

SOMETHING I WAIT FOR . . . dazai has a close call. he barely makes it to your apartment but you’re there just in time, in more ways than one.

ft. pm!dazai + f!reader, pm!reader, blood and injuries, mentions of drowning / suicidal ideation from dazai, a little suggestive in some parts, 3.6k w.c.

p.s.! ⊹ ࣪ ˖ if you catch the its okay to not be okay references, ily <3 !!

EVERYWHERE, EVERYTHING SERIES MASTERLIST

dazai hates pain.

if the idiot who shot him would’ve aimed just a little bit higher, it might've been a fatal wound. instead, all he did was graze his shoulder. it wasn’t enough to cause serious harm, but just enough to make him bleed in miseryー just his luck.

the man must’ve been dead by now, taken care of by one of his subordinates. he didn’t stay long enough to find out, slipping from the scene before anyone could try to force him into the mafia’s infirmary. he knows your apartment is close. 

he’s nearing the point of being injured where the pain fades and melts into pure exhaustion. he hates the way his blood feels against his hands, and he uses it to ground himself. it’s already soaked through his shirt, wet and warm as it seeps between his fingers and drips down his arm, absorbing into the bandages around his wrist. his already obscured vision is fading, white stars glistening from beneath the edge of his lashes, but he keeps his eyes trained ahead on your building. he swears you used to only have one apartment door, his vision doubling and growing hazy. 

just a few more steps. that’s all he needs to make it to you.

he huffs as his hand slips from your doorknob, sliding off the metal from his weak grip. he falls forward, blood smearing against the doorframe where his palm flattens as he tries to steady himself, pressing his forehead against your door with a quiet thump. you have to be home right now. right? please be home right now.

as soon as you open your door from the other side of your apartment, he collapses, landing against your chest. he curls against you, inhaling the scent of your skin with the desperation of a man who’d just been saved from drowning. 

“dazai?” you stumble backward, but he doesn’t weigh nearly enough to make you fall. you wrap your arms around his shoulders, and he grips your shirt in his hands, trying to press himself impossibly closer to you. he can feel the moment you realize he’s bleeding, your chest stalling mid-inhale. “oh my god, dazai.”

his jacket slips from his shoulders, falling to the floor limply as you carry him inside, kicking the door closed with your foot. his feet drag against your carpet as he tries to walk, but he’d rather use his waning strength to snuggle closer into your side than keep his balance. even with your body supporting his own, he plops unceremoniously onto your couch.  

“it’s okay,” he shivers when you start to unbutton his shirt, pulling back the bloody, frayed fabric stuck to his skin. he can’t tell if you’re talking to him or yourself. “you’re okay.”

his bangs are damp, yokohama’s humidity and his own sweat gluing them to his forehead. you push them back, stroking your thumb along the edge of his bandage over his cheek tenderly.

“are you hurt anywhere else?”

he tilts his head to press his face into your palm and smiles at you. you’re so pretty when you frown at him like this.

“i’ll be right back,” you squish his cheeks between your hands, making his lips pucker. “don’t try to move.”

he has to stop himself from reaching back out for you when you let him go. he squeezes the fabric of his trousers instead, watching you disappear past the couch’s limited view. he wants to pull you on top of him and beg you to ignore the blood leaking out of his body, to just wrap your arms around him and hold him until there’s nothing left between the two of you. it still wouldn’t be close enough; if he had the choice, he would shrink down and make a home inside your chest.

he tries his best to relax into the cushions beneath him. he’d much rather be in your bed than on your couch, but it was still yours, and that made it enough for him to want to sink into it until it absorbed him whole. your apartment was nothing like his hollow shipping container, the metal walls suffocating in the summer heat.

he could’ve dragged himself there instead. maybe he would’ve finally died from blood loss if he was lucky. that’s what he wants. really.

so then why did he drag himself here? because you felt safe?

dazai came to a realization a few days ago, one more painful than the wound in his shoulder, or the fact he has a mission with chuuya a few days from now. ever since it planted its dirty roots in his brain, he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it. 

it grew deeper every time his chest tightened around you, or his heart fluttered at the sight of your smile, or his stomach churned in jealousy when someone else touched you. 

this, his mind taunted him, is what people say love feels like. worst of all, when he whined to odasaku and ango about how annoying you were, they didn’t stop talking about his “crush” for the rest of the night. 

his body protests as he sits up, vision swimming as the walls of your living room tilt. he tries to blink it away when he hears you sigh as you come back from down the hallway. he makes his one visible eye big and pouts his lips when he looks at you.

“dazai,” the medical supplies you always keep on hand are cradled in your arms as you walk back toward him. “i told you not to move.”

“you took too long,” he whines. “i’m dying, you know.”

“you wish.” you guide him back down gently, your hands leaving tingles beneath his skin in their wake. he watches you kneel beside him, organizing the little bottles and boxes on your coffee table. you press down on one of the white lids with the heel of your palm, twisting it and knocking it upside down. you hand him one of the pills that fall out, and he swallows it dry.

you open another one of your bottles, and the familiar, sterile smell could be nothing other than saline. it’s cold against his skin, but your touch is what makes him shiver and his hair raise. you squeeze his leg softly, running your fingers against his thigh. it ignites something warm in his stomach, but it fades to white pain when the liquid absorbs into his wound. he jolts, and you murmur an apology, squeezing his thigh a little tighter. you’re trying to distract him, and it works pathetically well.

when you get closer to clean the drying blood off his skin, he can’t help but let his eyes fall to your lips, slightly parted in concentration. you’re close enough for him to kiss, and against the ache of his shoulder, all he can think about is how you might taste.

he wonders how soft you’d feel if he traced the shape of your lips with his tongue. he imagines the sweet sting of you pulling his hair as he memorizes every inch of you he can, taking everything you give him and more. it’d be different from the other people he’s kissed, he knows it; using his mouth to get information out of theirs did nothingー if anything, he felt more numb when it was over. 

he can see a familiar box from the corner of his eye: it’s the brand of bandages he always uses, the only kind that doesn’t irritate his scarred, sensitive skin. he watches your fingers as they delicately pull the beginning of the roll, imagining the feeling of you wrapped around his bare body instead of the cotton he adorns himself with. 

you turn him on his side to wrap the bandages around his shoulder and under his arm. once the ends are tied, nice and snug around him, you sit back on your heels.

“can i have your hand?” 

he gives you both, trying to hide the way they tremble. you grab the one covered in blood tenderly as you begin to clean it off. 

“i guess you weren’t lucky enough to die this time,” you smile teasingly, but he knows it isn’t real. it doesn’t look right on your face, like a mask that’s too big. he can see the worry you try to hide, clouding your eyes like murky water. he hates it. “sorry.”

“i never get what i want,” he sighs. “i think i’m cursed. do you have something to cure that in one of those little bottles too?”

“i don’t know if you’ll ever die, even when you become an old man,” if, not when, he wants to correct, but holds his tongue. “you’re like a cockroach.”

“yeah?” he reaches up to poke your face with his bloody fingers as you try to hold him still. “you’re like a little kid.”

“you’re more like a kid than i am.”

“nuh uh.”

“yeah,” you giggle, catching his hand back in your own. you wipe down each of his fingers, gently scrubbing the spaces in between. “you are.”

when he speaks again, he’s surprised by how quiet his voice is. he almost hopes you don’t hear him. “how?”

“because,” your voice softens, holding his now clean hand. you trace over one of the lines on his palm with your thumb.  “you want to be loved.”

he feels like he can’t breathe as he realizes that for once, he doesn’t have the upper hand. all of his walls he’s so carefully built, it’s like they’re made of glass around you. the possibility that you see him more clearly than he sees you terrifies him. 

the painkillers are starting to kick in, drowsiness creeping up on him and making his eyelids heavy as he melts against the cushions despite his pounding heart. when was the last time he slept? he can’t remember.your fingers are gentle as they brush his bangs back. your touch makes his eyes fall completely closed before he feels something soft and warm presses against his forehead. he hears a whisper of his name, a quiet sweet dreams, and then he’s asleep.

it only really feels like he blinked. when he opens his eyes again, it’s dark. the light from your kitchen leaks through the hall, permeating the living room in a soft glow. he wiggles his toes, feeling the soft blanket you draped over his legs while he slept.

he gets up slowly, creeping off the couch and across your floor. he peeks past the kitchen doorway, grinning when he sees your back is facing him. you’re halfway bent over the counter with your chin resting in your hand, staring absently at the tea kettle on the stove, waiting for it to boil.

he keeps his steps quiet, walking on the tips of his toes. he sinks his teeth into his lip to bite back his smile as he leans closer, taking advantage of the fact you’re completely zoned out.

“boo.”

you flinch, hand closing around a butterknife on your counter, still smeared with jelly from a late-night snack. you turn sharply, pointing the dull blade in his direction. he grabs your wrist before it grazes him, smiling innocently.

“dazai,” he thinks his name sounds so pretty when you sigh it out like that. you drop the knife back onto your counter. “should you even be standing right now? go lay back down. i can bring you something to eat.”

the thought of you taking care of him like this ignites that warm feeling in his stomach again. an image of you as his personal nurse forms in his mind, and his insides flip at the thought. he wonders if being an executive would give him enough leniency to put you in a little white dress; surely there was one lying around somewhere at headquarters.

“what, did you hit your head too?” he whines when you poke his forehead, hard. “are you feeling better?”

he pouts at you, gaze drifting over your shoulder to a bottle of sake on the counter. it definitely wasn’t there the last time he was here.

“oh〜” he perks, holding the bottle up by its neck, eyes sparkling. “this is fancy! where did you get this from, hm? some secret date i don’t know about?”

“ane-san,” your eyes narrow as he flicks the stove off, breaking the seal on the bottle excitedly. “it was a gift from her after we finished that raid in osaka.”

he sniffs it, then takes a big sip straight from the bottle. it leaves a pleasant sting along the inside of his throat as he swallows.

he sits himself down on your kitchen tiles, pressing his back against the cabinets, cradling the sake in his arms. there’s something angelic about the way your kitchen light haloes around you as he looks up at you from the floor. 

he holds the bottle up, sloshing the liquid as he wiggles it back and forth. he pulls it out of your reach each time you try to grab it until you have no choice but to sit next to him, stretching across his lap to take it from him. you follow his lead and take a small sip from the mouth of the bottle, sighing as you sag backward. 

“what happened this time, anyway?” you tilt your head toward him lazily, gaze dipping down to his bandaged shoulder. 

“someone had bad aim,” he sighs, holding a finger up to his temple. “missed my head. unlucky, right?”

you take a bigger, longer sip.

“i don’t like when you get hurt, you know.”

he’s relieved your head is on his bandaged blindside; he doesn’t know if he wants to see the look on your face right now. he takes the bottle from you, taking a longer sip of his own.

“do you remember when we used to go to the beach?” he can hear the smile in your voice, and it makes his own rise on his cheeks. the two of you would always go after missions, bodies bruised and hair knotted. it was always early enough to watch the sunrise from the shore, eating a breakfast of shared instant ramen and candy stolen from the konbini down the street. 

he can only ignore the way the edge of the counter presses into the back of his head for so long, leaning his cheek against your hair and listening to you breathe. he can tell you’re getting tipsy when you start to cling to him, clumsily crawling into his lap. you insist on being the one to rebutton his shirt, swatting his hands away when he tries to do it himself. 

“can we go now?” the curl of your lip hits him like an arrow through his heart. “to the beach? please?”

you’re so close again, looking up at him so prettily through your lashes. your hands warm as they rest above his heart, like you could go right through him and steal it for yourself, and he knows he could never possibly say no. 

you pick his coat up off the floor before you leave, draping it over his shoulders. you tug it a little tighter around him, nodding to yourself in satisfaction before you grab his hand, intertwining your fingers and tugging him out the door.

the nighttime air is warm and sticky, but it gets cooler the closer you get to the shore. he keeps your smaller body close to his, guard raising as you approach the edge of port mafia territory. 

the sand sinks beneath his feet with every step, and he pulls his shoes off by the heel. the waves lap calmly, dancing back and forth with no audience to watch as they tease the shore. he breathes in deep, feeling his lungs expand, inviting the salt and sand inside.

you drop limply onto the ground, laying your head on his shoulder when he sits next to you. it’s quiet, only the distant sound of traffic and the soft splashing of water.

“i wish it could be like this all the time.” you sigh. there’s a determined glint in your sleepy eyes when you look up at him. “let’s run away.”

he smiles, tilting his head toward you until your noses are close enough to brush. “and just where would you take me?”

“i don’t know,” you mumble. “i don’t care as long as i’m with you.”

he always thought he was born with an empty cavity in place of where his heart should be, but around you, it felt so full he could explode. he thinks if he tried to say anything right now, something icky, like the pile of seaweed he can see rotting by the water, would come out of his mouth instead.

a particularly big wave draws your attention away from him, and he frowns when you look away. it only deepens when you stand up and leave him, walking towards the ocean. he watches as you stumble down the wet sand, squealing when the water splashes against your feet. you don’t stop walking until the water is deep enough to cover your shins.

he follows you to the water, hopping on each foot over the big rocks. he’s careful not to slip, crouching on the furthest one out to keep a closer eye on you. he keeps his weight on his ankles, spreading his knees and resting his arms between them. he feels drops of salt water hit his face as the waves crash against the sea stacks, gently blowing the fabric of his jacket. 

you turn back and smile at him, holding your hand out. the moon is large and eternal behind you, taking up nearly all the space in the sky and casting a pale blue glow over the dark water. it reflects onto you, illuminating your body in soft light, and he swears he’s never seen someone look so beautiful. you open and close your hand impatiently when he doesn’t move.

“what are you doing over there?” you tilt your head. “c’mere. it’s warm.”

he doesn’t bother to pull up his pants as he slips into the ocean, letting the waves move the fabric as they ebb and flow. he looks down at himself; he nearly blends in with the water, looking black in the night. he almost thinks he’ll dissolve into it like ink and wash away into the sea. 

you beam at him as the water laps at your knees. he wiggles his toes into the wet sand and waits to feel the unbridled joy that standing here seems to cause. all he feels is goop between his toes, and he sighs in disappointment. he wants to understand why something like this made you so happy. he wants to feel it too.

“isn’t it nice?” you smile up at him, and he wishes he could bottle it up and keep it for himself. that smile was just for him.

don’t.

he leans closer. he can’t help it; there’s alcohol still warm in his veins, and you’re magnetic.

don’t.

even closer, until he can feel your soft exhale against his face, eyes big. he always thought you were the prettiest up close.

you’ll lose her once you have her.

he freezes. he doesn’t have time to completely change his mind and forget this little slip-up ever happened before you close the gap, pressing your lips against his. you’re just as soft as he imagined, gentle even when you kiss him, like he was something worth handling with care.

you pull back all too soon, looking down at where his legs disappear beneath the water.

“sorry,” you mumble, and the watery way your voice comes out makes something ache deep inside of him. “i…i don’t know why i did that.”

oh.

he didn’t kiss you back.

he didn’t move, he didn’t even breathe. he almost wants to laugh; you really like him too. you, with your stupid smile, making his heart flutter and his stomach hurt when it’s directed toward him. you, letting him sleep in your bed when he breaks into your apartment, holding his blood-soaked hands and letting him get close, despite knowing what he was. you were so, so stupid. 

he cups your cheeks with trembling fingers, bringing you back to his mouth. this could be the biggest mistake of his life; the fact he wants you could be your death sentence, but he’s never wanted anything else so badly before in his entire, sad life. 

he thought it’d be weird to touch you like this, but it only feels right. when his hands hover over your waist, you press them into your skin, and he can’t help but think they fit perfectly there, like you were made to be held by him.

you wrap your arms around his neck, fingers brushing against his nape, and his knees nearly buckle. he thinks if they did, if he fell into the sand right now and washed out to sea, he’d be content, but you’d never let that happen. he wouldn't even be mad if you resuscitated him; nothing would be better than your lips breathing life back into him. he wonders how mad you’d be if he tried to pull that as an excuse to have another kiss.

he kisses your forehead, your nose, and then tilts your chin up to kiss you properly agai , swallowing the giggle you press against his lips. he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to get enough of you now that he’s had a taste.

“is this really okay?” you’re looking up at him with eyes bigger than the moon, glittering just as bright.

“yeah,” he can’t tell if he’s talking to you or himself. “it’s okay.”

BSD MASTERLIST

taglist . . . @little-miss-chaoss @almond-t0fu @yaeeko @annoyingpainterprincess @callm3-tash1

@janbannan @snowsilver2000 @mochiii-sama @aureatchi @bakananya

@warcelia

Hello! First, I really love your AU (I keep forgetting what they're called v":), they are great and really funny ✨️🌸

May I offer an idea? What about when they called their full government name?

(Así como cuando una madre Latina grita el nombre del hijo cuando está enojada XD Perdonar, no supe como expresar esto en inglés correctamente xD)

government name

synopsis: texting the cod guys their full name

ੈ✩‧₊˚ price, gaz, ghost, soap, alejandro, rudy, graves, makarov, keegan, nikolai

cw: none

an: had to invent a last name for nikolai because he doesn’t have one for some reason?? anyways, i’m not super confident in how i’m writing keegan and nikolai but fuck it, we ball

masterlist

dividers from @/saradika-graphics :)

Fr tho WDM MY CRUSH HAS POSTED?? 😭 How would you know Tumblr 🤨

interacting on tumblr makes me so nervous so if i like your posts it’s pretty much a proclamation of love

im putting off drawing serious comics and writing longfic for these shitposts